Well as ready as I will be for next supervision

Well this has not been a week of good progress. Good progress would mean that I basically had my chapter on tradition back in draft. It did not sound much to do, just an extra section that gives the references to people who have also written about the tradition and something on Bourdieu. The shock was to realise that the language he was using reflected very accurately a specific theorem. The remains the Bourdieu was quite a skilled user of statistic, but many of his followers have a simplistic understanding of what he was doing. He was choosing statistical techniques because they fitted with what he was researching. That does not make those statistical techniques somehow better than others but it does make his use of techniques better. Well David Cornick returned the compliment and started using "habitus" without referencing Bourdieu.  Now I have the idea I have to go away and think what the implications are. For a start things do not behave as nicely with human culture as you do with probabilistic models.

Progress on the whole has been slow, I did have an extra day on Tuesday as the UCU was on strike again only I seem to have a rare ability to throw migraines on strike days with the result that my brain only started functioning late on in the day. Then on Thursday I was feeling off colour but went into work anyway. The result was that for the first time in a couple of years I have had a head cold. I have had a couple of days when the effect of the cold left me decided feverish. The result is that I have not made the progress that I hoped on the chapter of tradition.

However I have sent the tradition chapter in its very much draft form to my supervisor as I am aware that things are dropping into place in a way that they did not in the final stages in the spring. I want to check with him that these ideas are at last coming on with something that is worthwhile. This chapter is growing and I suspect that it could grow further.

I am beginning to wonder if there is not a book that looks at the way that the Reformed tradition is embodied in the local congregation. This would expand this chapter to fill the space and mean I needed to spend more time reading the tradition. I am getting more confident with handling it and my hand waving is getting less arbitrary. For instance I have replaced a section on falling out in general with a synopsis of the big falling out for the Reformed tradition which is the debate between Predestinarianism and Armininianism which happened at the second Synod of Dort. What it actually did was provide a template for future fallings out within the Reformed tradition! I am at the point of wanting to check how Scotland dealt with Congregational discipline for another part and slowly but slowly I building a much more Empirical model.

Slower Progress but still progress

Snowdrops and Crocuses at my parents last week

Sorry not to write last weekend, I did intend writing but I just did not manage to find the energy when I got back from my parents on Sunday. It was a week when I concentrated on reading. Indeed for the first time since before starting the thesis I sat down with a book, "Religion since 1945: Believing but Without Belonging" by Grace Davies, and managed to digest most of it in one sitting. I should explain as a teenager I read everything including the noticeboards at school so many times I knew the notices by heart. This high level of reading hid a underlying difficulty although several people were aware that I sometimes wrote badly for my obvious depth of reading. In the early years of this century I developed depression. This severely hampered my ability to concentrate. The difficulty that was underlying now meant I found reading for long spells difficult. I developed techniques for dealing. I found I could often make a very careful reading go a long way. I would therefore spot things others would gloss over.

I was already well on the road to recovery when I started my thesis and I have read widely, if perhaps not as much as I would have liked. The difference last week was that I could do it without getting too distracted and even enjoyed it. I do suspect that Grace Davies' book was relatively straight forward but at the same time I enjoyed it.

However what did not happen last weekend was me clearing my head with a walk. I visited my parents, Saturday evening to Sunday evening and we planned to go walking on the Sunday at Lyme Park. The weather was dry but it was COLD and there was a biting wind so we called it off and went for a coffee and cake at their shop.

However after last weeks decent progress this week has been slowly. Some of this is my fault, I started a migraine on Monday, I know this looking back though I was in work, Tuesday it declared itself, however there was teaching in work on Wednesday so as it was "reduced" and I hoped going I went in. Then Thursday about four O'Clock I realised that I still had no concentration at all and things were breaking up again. In other words by going in on Wednesday I had simply allowed it to hang around. So I took Friday off to try and recover. It finally worked but it took a good while on Saturday for me to do the reformulation of the chapter I was suppose to do during the week. I did it and wrote one section on Saturday with reshaping a second.

Today was Annual Church Meeting at my home church. I have not been a serving Elder for most of the time I was doing my PhD but I either had to stand for re-election today or this time next year. My congregation is also going into vacancy. I decided that a three month or so overlap was doable, not least because I am also Table Elder One this year and that makes going to Elders meetings pretty essential. The problem was persuading the congregation they had to vote for this. Elders should be re-elected every five years. I served three to four years and then took a sabbatical for a couple of years when the depression was at it worst. I then came back and did about another three years but because I had been on sabbatical I was not re-elected. I think congregation had decided my thesis was another sabbatical and not that I had finished serving my time and therefore was not standing for re-election. After that I finished the second section of the redraft of the belonging chapter.

Week 20: Slow progress at a chapter change

Maximum number of words: 80,000
Words typed so far:38,006
Words typed this week: 1111
Words lost this week: 0
Total increase: 1111
Days I managed to write this week: 3

As you can see progress has been somewhat slower this week. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly I was changing chapter and I had not had chance to plan it. Now don't get me wrong I do not stick to the plan, but I do like to have some idea where I was going. I also in the writing dealing with the description of perhaps one of the most difficult scenes to get right. The fact is this scene really happened and the only way to be fair on everyone involved is to try an portray it pretty much as it happened. However although very strong emotion is going on in the scene it is all below the surface. So I have to show it rather than tell it and I have to give people a respectful appearance. Everyone in the scene behaved with exceptional integrity. I am not breaking any confidences in portraying it but I still have a duty to be honest. I have never felt so inadequate as a writer.

Another thing is I have not been sure of the theoretical input into this chapter, I think it is coming clear and it is also perhaps becoming clearer therefore what I needed to put in the previous chapter. The stuff for this chapter is stuff on the nature of church as institution and community. Theory on emotional activity within an institution and group and also some stuff on congregational government. So I am slowly getting to know my thesis. I find I really do not know what I know until I write it and the task of writing it is the task of analysis. I am also trying a different approach to writing with first writing some of the scenes, then writing the description and finally writing into that the theoretical work.

Two other things slowed progress, I was also doing the final edits to my first real draft of my previous chapter on location and I had a migraine on Thursday which rumbled on in the background for the next two days. Not pleasant and meant I was really only functioning in the afternoon.

I think I am getting there with the planning, I also have a supervision this week and my supervisor will no doubt give me a kick start, he is very good at that. I know I need to loose words from the chapter but I want to hear his comments before I do.

Week 15: Writing going more fluently, just wish I was as good at cutting words

Maximum number of words: 80,000
Words typed so far:30,445
Words typed this week: 3103
Words lost this week: 581
Total increase: 2422
Days I managed to write this week: 4

It looks a good week and it was writing wise. I am realising the section I am at present writing of my location chapter will take about 4,000 words. I wrote 4,000 this week, there are six and a half thousand in the previous and another section to go for this data chapter. If you look carefully at the triskele you will see the start of filling in the next sub-branch on this branch. I only put one or two pieces on but you can see them.

What is being hidden in these numbers although there is that I actually still need to loose a lot of words. I have now started to find them and know what I am looking for. I had accidentally got into the habit of reminding people rather regularly that it was me that was writing. Now the thesis is written in the first person, that is fairly normal for this sort of thesis but there is no need to have a reminder that it is me every couple of lines and often these reminders are quite verbose. They need cutting and I am going to have to get rid of them! That will mean hunting during the week as the proof reader who offered to do this for me has not got back. Also I note he does not know what to look for now but I do so maybe I should just get on and do it.. The reason it is so little is I had a minor migraine yesterday which meant both the writing and the editing has had to be fitted into today.

The other good news is my NVivo files are ready and being used in anger. So the only thing I have done so far is look for something specific in my diary. I have a lot more work to do on interviews, videos and pictures. I also have two analysis books, these are books where I make notes on the congregations that appear in my thesis. The need to anonymise and present in narrative form means that I have to alter considerably the details and I am not going to remember them all in precisely unless I have notes in a journal about who is who. Even so I seem to have far too many people.