Permission to Submit

Today I have had a supervision again. l know December is a long time ago.However if you have been following this blog you will know l have been anything but inactive. The last few months have seen me rewrite seven chapters of my thesis. Today therefore was tine to review these and indeed the whole thesis and see if it was ready for submission.

The day dawned fair, and I woke early but not ridiculously so. It is funny how if you start early then you run early for a good part of the day. The result was that despite taking a leisurely pace down to the station I just missed the train before the one I planned to get. I did not race to get it choosing to drink a coffee on the platform after all the trains seemed to be running time. The next one left on time, and I found my seat. However l had forgotten that there were rail works around Dronfield and therefore the train took the scenic route around South Sheffield. Now the problem with being late on the hints in if less than 10 min you keep your slot but longer than that and you start to get delayed by other trains. We lost just over ten minutes by the time we got to Derby birth the result that we were over half an hour late into New Street. So I emailed my Supervisor to say l might be late. However, the train came in onto platform 11a and the trains out to the University often go from 11b. l think l must have had close to the shortest change time possible at New Street; I got off one train, ran the distance of about a carriage length then got on the next just before the doors started to beep for leaving. I would guess less than one minute all told. The result was I made up most of the tune I had lost.

The supervision was long. A lot of checking is needed as o need to do things such as reference back through the thesis both when I use ideas I have already talked about and when I muse a reference to an idea by a specific author. l also need to go through and put quote marks around a lot of technical terms used by theorists. There are three pieces that need doing.

• There is an introductory piece in the chapter on the Reformed Tradition that needs largely removing.
• There is a small section on Anthony Cohen that needs putting into the chapter on worship 
• There is a the need to hook through the Belonging chapter to make the connections with earlier chapters clear. 

Then it is proofing, Bibliography and layout. So my plan is to submit the 8th April. I think that gives me five weekends to get it into a final form for examining.

The rest of the time was talking about what next.It is a bigger problem than most people think as l do not fit any of the standard patterns for Phd students as I am in some ways a mature researcher with many years experience from my day job. l certainly have fresh questions that l would like to explore but how? l will need tin to think over the next year when my brain is not totally consumed with academic study.

The daffodils in the photo were tiny about four inches high. That said spring was definitely More advanced in Birmingham than at home. However you can see Old Joe clock tower the in background so definitely Birmingham.

Another Chapter in Second Draft off to my Supervisor

Cherry Blossom

This weekend has been a bank holiday, so of course I stuck the extra day into my writing schedule. The weather has been glorious and with the sunshine the cherry blossom is out in profusion.  Also the Peregrines eggs have hatched in Sheffield and between writing I have watched bits of that. The other advantage of this day was that it meant that I did not feel badly going out for dinner yesterday as I still had today to write. It is funny how writing grows to fill the time you have for it! I was really getting through it on Friday, it slowed on Saturday and today if anything has been slower.

Actually this chapter has been interesting to write. There were three different threads that I have been interweaving in the chapter. On the one level there was the story of a particular Church meeting; the next one that I had to tackle was the actual ways identity was created within the congregation. I think I mainly kept that in but I might have missed something on welcome which might need to go into the last section. There is space for it and yes I know that putting welcome at the end is not quite the right place for it. The final bit was I had to weave together the argument that congregation as community involved both institutional, discursive and emotional systems. Just to make this interesting also to include the way that the whole situation interacts with the tradition so I suppose I am wrong and it is four threads I am plaiting with.

I was struggling with writing this morning, another blog posted on the URC site a link to his latest blog in which he asked whether the URC was depressed.  An interesting question, so many got upset about the analogy and felt it was insulting to mental illness. Now I am quite open about the fact I have (had) depression at a mild to moderate level. I also had the smiling sort. I am not insulted, basically because fairly early on in the journey I had to think what I was experiencing in my local congregation.  The best explanation I can think of is that the communal discourse reflected very strongly many aspects depressive thinking. Now I know depressive thinking is odd, it can be switched on and off and changing mood does seem to do that. However it is also true that changing the thinking can change the mood. That is how CBT works. I have discussed this with a variety of people this and nearly always they see what I am getting at, indeed on at least one occasion I someone asking precisely about this.

The problem however was I was writing the emotional part of the chapter and of course the emotional part of the chapter connects with the blog post. So I was jumping between the two and not really making much sense of either. In the end I had to be disciplined over Facebook and just concentrate on writing.

There is one problem I have not got the right title for the chapter yet. Maybe my supervisor will suggest it!