The common cold and the Da Vinci Code

Sunday evening, and I feel as if my brain is made of fudge: thick and sticky. Although I have nothing more than a head cold, illness is always a source of immense frustration for me because it compromises efficiency. I started the weekend with a couple of lectures to write, one undergrad, one postgrad, and also my NoATE paper and a presentation for a job interview. The postgrad lecture was a doddle, and I've pretty well finished the undergrad one, but although the paper is in my head, I can't seem to make the words make sense on paper. And the job interview presentation will just have to wait until I can think more clearly. And so I get frustrated and miserable and sulk quietly, until a dear friend pops in for coffee bearing chocolate and sympathy and cheers up my evening.

Someone once send me a "Prayer for the Common Cold": it bears repeating here. Oddly enough, when I checked out my email archive, I find that the person who sent it to me is the same friend who called round this evening.

From 'The Prayer Tree' by Michael Leunig

God bless those who suffer from the common cold.
Nature has entered into them;
Has led them aside and gently lain them low
To contemplate life from the wayside;
To consider human frailty;
To receive the deep and dreamy messages of fever.
We give thanks for the insights of this humble perspective.
We give thanks for blessing in disguise.
Amen

Part of the reason I feel so terrible is that I haven't been sleeping very well, and last night decided to use the wakeful time in the wee small hours to finish a chore. I have been reading "The Da Vinci Code", only because I am so often asked my opinion thereof, and so I read for several hours to find out whether the book has any redeeming features. There are a lot of reasons that I was disinclined to like it, and to be fair, it wasn't all that bad as an adventure mystery for the lumpen masses.

But it is not a book for the literati: The characterisation is almost non-existent, and the prose is typical of the genre, devoid of elegance or charm. I found the puzzles very simple, and the solutions over-explained, but I suppose the target audience isn't really Guardian crossword afficionados. Grail mysteries of one kind or another are almost a genre in themselves, and if that were all there were to it, I would pass the book over as trivial but entertaining. What gets my goat is the gross misrepresentation of the development of Christology up to and during Nicea, presenting as fact things that have no basis in truth, and against which there is overwhelming evidence. To suggest that Christology was invented from nowhere by Constantine in 325 ignores 250 years of theology and doctrinal development, and disregards the witness of Paul, the author of Hebrews, Clement of Rome, Igatius, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tatian, Tertullian, Origen, Arius and Athanasius, to name but few.

Life is fun

I've had the kind of week that reminds me why I love my job: students of one sort or another coming out of the woodwork, from visiting American urban ministry people to PhD candidates, Methodist vocational students and new undergrads. I ended up writing my ecclesiology lecture (L1) late the night before, and the session buzzed so I left work yesterday evening late but on quite a high.

I've booked my ticket to London for a report launch: £8 return on a coach. Compared to £60+ on the train, it's a steal. And I booked in for the SST conference yesterday as well, the first time I've done a conference sponsored by my employer. I've yet to write my NoATE paper, but it will be done by the end of the week - I know exactly what I'm going to say, it's just a case of putting it on paper and assembling the Powerpoint slides.

But I do need to do some serious writing. If I can finish off this term's lectures now, I could start putting together a proposal for publishing my thesis - or at least a *very* revised version thereof. My emails to the editor who asked about it before are bouncing, so I don't set too much store by her, but I do have contacts through a colleague with other editors who may be very interested.

Fresh Start and optimism...

This seems like as good a time as any to delete all my old posts and start again. I've finally finished my PhD, stopped feeling sorry for myself, and given up expecting a knight on a white charger any moment.

Actually, it does feel like a time of change. I've been a student of one kind or another for almost exactly 13 years, and in that time I managed an Oxford first in Theology and a PhD. I'm about to draw finally an amicable but definite line under my marriage after two years separation. When I started studying, I was a single parent of 5 children: now I have just one teenager at home. I'm about to start a new stage in my career as a full time academic after years of part time, juggling and contract work.

I'm looking forward to it all with some fear: can I really pull this off? But I'm also excited and hopeful and more contented than I have been for a very long time. I want to document this period in my life as it happens, because I know for certain it will look different with hindsight. I was looking at my teenage diaries yesterday, and as I read them, I knew what it felt like to be 14 again. Bearing witness is so much more important than remembering. Women of my age don't usually explore this kind of stuff in public.