October Supervision: At Last a chapter my supervisor is structurally happy with

The board announces my train home

Well I thought I was going to break my fine weather when I am in Birmingham rule, it was so windy and wet when I left home at Sheffield, but by the time I got to Birmingham it was dry and this afternoon the sun even came out. The other news is at last Birmingham University has managed to bill me for this years fees correctly. It has been tiresome in the extreme this year and I still have to pay. The amount is not bad but I need to find an old email which tells me how to. I may still well end up ringing them up to pay over the phone. It may well be easier. I was going to do it in person but what looked like the nearest entrance to the office also was right next to a room where exams were happening!

Also the computer network was up so I was able to check my scholar alerts. Let me be honest now I am no longer really following these. That is I am only jumping if something major comes out and in this case it was a book on “Ethnography and Ecclesiology”. Should be right up the line of my thesis.

Supervision was interesting, we did not just cover the topics on agenda, we also for the first time really started talking about what happened after my thesis. The question is pertinent as I am almost ideally placed to a be an amateur expert, but the space of for these in the discourse has been eroded in the last twenty years with the increased division between the academy and the seminary. That means fewer niches for those who cling somewhere between church and academia and that has a knock on effect on people like myself who are driven by passion for a topic rather than wanting a career path. Mind you I might have just git first hint of who my external maybe.

Then we got onto discussing several areas within my chapter. I have not as yet brought up gender within my thesis but there is in this chapter a clear point where it matters. I may decide to gloss because I am not sure I can tackle this without blowing someone anonymity in a way that they would feel unfairly put the spotlight on them. Gender does play a part but usually in the roles people are given. However I can and did break those rules and I was not alone in doing that in either congregations. Hmm it is going to be interesting. It maybe worth checking back over the chapters. I am also going to have to put footnotes because there is a good chance my examiners will not read it from start to finish (or the central chapters in order). This is a pain as the argument flows through the chapter structure as well as the text. They are NOT in random order and when I am explicit about the pattern it should be as if the person realises that it reflects the journey they have been on reading the text.

So next Supervision is December, as my supervisor is very busy end of November. I should at that time have a draft of the final theory chapter and thus be ready to enter writing up! It should be an interesting month as the work is significantly different even from the last two theory chapters and a level more abstract. It also intriguingly uses the fact that I am mathematician, but pushes me into areas of maths I tended to avoid as an undergraduate. Actually more accurately be said strong social pressure was put on me to study as they were outside my direct interest. One because it was in the discipline I tended to avoid except at its most theoretical and the other because it was populist and I felt I wanted to do proper maths. I have read up and though I am no longer mathematically fit enough to do the calculus automatically I can follow the argument and understand what is happening. For those who are not mathematical trained, a skilled mathematician can look at an equation and work out what the next step would be to turn it into a useful form. This is a highly developed form of brain pattern recognition working similar to recognising times tables, numbers that sum to make another and prime factors of a number. If you do not practice it and I haven’t for over twenty years it becomes weak. I can go "Oh Yeah" I remember that when somebody does one, but don't expect me to do it for myself.

I also saw a large rook sitting on its own on the end of one of the platforms at Birmingham New Street on my way home. The sort of thing that gets you murmuring "that is a large rook or is it... but surely you don't get ravens at Birmingham New Street".

So for this coming month, that I keep on writing, I do they other things I need to and that I have this chapter written on time.