Holiday Pleasures

After an indifferent summer, autumn is proving to be a beautiful season of rich colour and gentle weather. Or perhaps it just looks better because I had a week away from work, my first full week's holiday since spring.

The beginning of term brought the usual mix of relief that the hectic preparations were completed in time, terror at the prospect of delivering a heavy MA course on Religion and Ethics to new students, and enjoyment as the influx of new and old students reawakened the pleasure of teaching after a summer of paperwork and administration. But it also renewed the exhaustion that had been barely kept at bay over the late summer, so between lectures and tutorials I spent the week before half-term clearing my desk and warning students and colleagues that I would be unavailable.

Given that I'm usually off over the weekend, my holiday started at 9am on the Monday morning of half term. At 9.30, the phone rang. It was a colleague from the office requiring computer support. I don't suppose people mean to spoil things... Once that was dealt with, I was free to take off for a few days with my lover - good food, lots of wine, and gentle and loving companionship, without my work or domestic drudgery to spoil the joy.

My final treat to myself was a day's walking in the Peak District. I'd originally planned a couple of nights B&B in the Lake District, but even late into autumn, last minute vacancies are hard to find. So I packed up a flask of home-made soup and a hunk of freshly-baked bread and took off moderately early with a book in my pocket to my favourite spot. The walk was undemanding, but energetic enough to feel refreshing. A steady, but not stiff, breeze, dappled sunshine between scuttling clouds, and enough warmth to shed my jumper as soon as I was moving made it a perfect day to blow away cobwebs. There were few walkers, and those there were passed with a brief "G'morning" as they strode purposefully past, leaving me peace to collect my thoughts and savour the pleasure of the previous few days.

The soup was still blistering hot and the bread cosily warm when I climbed off the path and down to the brook's edge for lunch, sitting in full sun hidden from the path, and reading George Elliot's Scenes from Clerical Life as the water gurgled over the rocks at my feet. After an hour or so, I decided that a good lunch deserved a good pint to follow, so I took a detour from the walk towards an indifferent but conveniently situated pub. Most of their clientele at this time of year are parvenu foodies from South Sheffield drinking pinot grigio spritzers with their pan-fried venison, so I took my pint outside and enjoyed the twittering of birds in preference to the twittering inside the bar.

One of the pleasures of autumn walking is that the length of the day determines the length of the walk. The sinking sun coincided nicely with that achy tiredness in the legs that signals time to head back home. Oh, for more weeks thus occupied...

But returning to work has its pleasures too. Students take wing with their assignment plans and astonish me with their insight and creativity. An old friend visits to teach a session and stays over, giving us each the chance to unburden our cares and joys in the company of someone who understands. The tentative relationships formed with new students become warm and productive friendships as we work together. A rare opportunity to engage with post-16 education adds a new dimension to the work. I remember that I really like my job.

And so the cycle of the year goes on. All Saints, Remembrance and then before we know it, Advent, the start of a new church year: the fast before the feast to come. I love autumn.

Work and play

Everyone knows that outside term time, academics enjoy unhurried leisure. I'm trying to figure out where I'm going wrong. The end of August was hectic as I tried in vain to clear my desk before a week's enforced absence following surgery on 31st. Students in the final stages of essay writing needed comfort and encouragement, and the pre-term paperwork was starting to need some urgent attention. But then for a whole, glorious week, I slept 18 hours out of 24 and moped uselessly around the house in between as the stitches healed and the pain eased. I managed to complete a journal paper but gave up trying even to read much as I fell asleep over anything in print. A week of half-time work followed, which at least gave me the chance to start making inroads into the pile of paperwork on my desk, but the counterweight to that was the arrival of essays to mark and a continuing tendency to doze off after lunch for up to four hours without troubling my nighttime sleep at all.

Part of the problem was a long-planned change to our office email and web site. Re-arranging the email was easy, but setting it up and helping staff to get the hang of it was more stressful, and the detailed work on the web pages required more undisturbed concentration than I had available. I regret to say I became rather ill-tempered as the process wore on, but at least it is done now, and staff in general seem to prefer the web-based interface for email.

Staff absences since have padded out my job description to include temporarily premises management, office clerical work and general dogsbodying, all tasks which I shall be glad to relinquish when various members of staff trickle back in after the weekend. The prospect of the arrival of taught students for induction and a new batch of research students on Monday has already lifted my spirits if not my productivity.
Meanwhile at home, second-youngest son has found a job which pays well and fits around A level studies, and he has already proved himself to his employers as a reliable and serious worker. Both he and youngest son have tackled their schoolwork with more determination this term than previously as well, so we have a studious and productive household at present. In the same spirit of the learning, I'm exploring further possibilities for my own study as well, and am considering a part-time Master's degree in Canon Law from next September, if they'll have me.

However, play rather than work has caused a headache as well. Just as I was going out, I said the the boys "Please don't kick the ball towards the house. Sooner or later, someone is going to break a window." Minutes later, the prophecy was fulfilled, and we're still waiting for the new glass.

Following on from my last blog entry, we have just acquired a Sheffield Monopoly. The boys were delighted to discover that Bramall Lane is worth more than Hillsborough. Do I detect a little local point-scoring?

One of the real pleasures of my research field is the opportunities it offers to make work playful, and play academically, if not financially, profitable. Expanding my explorations in cyberspace to social networking has nudged me to join Facebook, where to my surprise I have discovered colleagues, friends, family and students all quite happy to exchange silliness as well as sense. My excuse is that I am working on some Key Stage 5 RE resources and need a more comprehensive overview of all things cyber - so it is work, honest! And it does my ego no harm at all to discover from a Facebook quiz that one reasonably good acquaintance thinks I'm SIX years younger than I am.

I was also lucky enough to steal a day with my lover. The Met Office promised bright periods and low temperatures, but it turned out to be warm and unflinchingly sunny, with just a whiff of autumn freshness. We walked along the towpaths and out into open fields, lunched by the locks and poked around village churches, ending up on the bank of the canal lazily watching boats chugging by as the evening chill descended - a warm, happy day of sheer joy and the most relaxing kind of play.

'Tis a Gift to be Simple

Just when I was starting to think that information technology had finally taken over, I've been reminded this week that there's mileage in simple, old-fashioned entertainment. The first clue was the displacement of a stack of dusty board games in the hallway - fourth son and friends had been playing Monopoly and the Game of Life. I thought this might be a one-off, but the Monopoly was out again this evening and there were several long discussions about whose house rules applied.Meanwhile, last Monday, my beloved uncle drew my attention to an article in the Guardian on the subject: it seems that board games may be making a modest come-back. He has just taken up Mahjong, a game that is deliciously sensual with its heavy, decorated playing tiles that click as they move around on the table. I've always loved Scrabble, and not the online variety, but the get-the-dictionary-out, pour-the-wine, score-on-the-back-of-envelopes game that can turn lovers into enemies with a Q on the triple word score. Cribbage is a delicious combination of luck and skill and doesn't require a wide circle of friends, and the most miserable of wet afternoons can be riotous fun if you play Canasta for blood.

However, I still like being able to play games on my phone, and in preparation for a train journey downloaded the latest Harry Potter offering at enormous cost. Unfortunately, the text is so tiny, I can't read it. As son number four pointed out, holding a magnifying glass over the screen of my dead sexy mobile phone as I zap baddies "kinda spoils the cool look".

All of which suggests a leisurely August - something that I haven't really had. Staff summer holidays at our institution and our partner university have made getting collaborative things done close to impossible. I decided to go in person last week to see if physical presence might be more effective than unanswered emails and ringing out phone calls. Alas, no. Two of the people I'd hoped to see were in meetings all day; another called to say he wouldn't be coming in. And yet another gave brief answers to my questions but was "too busy with other things to deal with that now".

But I refused to consider the day wasted. I met a friend for a drink, mooched around the SPCK bookshop, read for hours, and then went to Evensong in the Minster. It's a service I used to go to frequently when I was younger, but rarely manage now. Sheffield Cathedral choir isn't really in the same league as the cathedral choirs I remember (or perhaps the building doesn't have the ringing acoustics), and fewer and fewer clergy know how to conduct evensong with impassive reverence. The boys and clerks were away for the summer, but a passable visiting choir made a fair stab at a traditional setting. Visiting choirs rarely sing with the resonances of the building, in my experience: they sing too tightly and don't allow the music to ring. It was a large congregation, for a midweek evensong, made up mostly of tourists, but the service was dignified and gentle. To my great delight, the organist ended with a piece that means a great deal to me, Lang's Tuba Tune, played with energy and precision. I almost danced back to the station with delight.

Youngest son has now arrived back from his visit to his Dad's (up at 6.45 on a Bank Holiday Saturday to go and fetch him!). When I come home from work each evening there's a different configuration of sons and friends, and some evenings they both sleep over elsewhere. This makes planning and preparing meals a bit of a lottery: one never knows how many people - if any - will sit down to eat until perhaps half an hour beforehand. And some of my best recipes take an hour to cook...

If work has been busy, personal affairs have been less to the fore. A delicious walk in the park, hand in hand, with my lover, a convivial meal with friends, and a meal to celebrate some pretty good GCSE successes: these have been the sum of my social activities in August. Instead, I come in from work more tired each day than the day before, and drift through domestic chores and paperwork until bedtime. It's becoming clear that a summer without a proper break from work is unhealthy. I shall treat myself to a week off at half-term and go away somewhere, perhaps with the tent. There's nothing like bacon and eggs cooked on a primus for restoring one's appreciation for life. And for entertainment, there's always the Guardian crossword.

Flanders and Swann were right...

July: end of term, summer holidays, sunshine and leisure... er, no. The beginning of July was busier even than the end of term normally is, as we tried to make up the teaching sessions we missed when Sheffield was flooded. With half the staff away at Methodist Conference, this required more than the usual amount of juggling, but with the generous co-operation of students and a bit of creative time management, everyone had all the teaching time they were supposed to have and we're now into a rash of tutorials as students prepare their module essays.

I did manage to steal a little time off for a short city break with my lover, and the restorative effect of good food, museums and libraries, and gentle, attentive company made me feel human again. The effect was marginally compromised by the almighty hangover I came home with, but even that was a reminder of a lovely time away.

The Urban and Contextual Theology Summer School started the day I returned, and it was the best I remember. Practitioners and academics spent two days sharing papers describing and exploring experience and theology. I've been working on the concept of sacrament in cyberspace, so I floated some early thinking and was rewarded with some useful new directions to investigate. These summer schools are also very congenial affairs, and two of the delegates and I went out on the Thursday evening. We were an odd assortment - a Roman Catholic priest in mufti, a black Anglican vicar in full clericals and I, strolling through the cemetery on a summer's evening, being hailed by a young black man who waved at us and called "Jesus saves, brother" as we passed by on the way to the pub and the Indian restaurant across the road.

With both boys now off school, their social lives have become more noticeable, and I often come home to assorted teenagers draped over the furniture or clustered round the computers. It's pleasure to see how the odd bunch of kids they all were is turning into such a nice group of young men, keeping their friendships intact through changes of schools and circumstances.

But sunshine? Not a chance! Flanders and Swann's description seems about right:

"In July the sun is hot
Is it shining? No, it's not"

July has been the wettest on record, I believe. The slightly overgrown garden of June turned into a tropical jungle in weather that varied only between heavy rain and drizzle. Bindweed took over one corner of the garden and crept along the back of the house, and knee-high grass had to be trampled down when the boys wanted to play swingball. The usual summer visitors, birds, butterflies and ladybirds, were replaced by slugs, snails and earthworms, so that the garden started to feel like some kind of dank, moisture-ridden underworld.

But at last it feels as if summer is in the air. We've had several days together that have been sunny and warm. Fourth son and I have spent two days hacking away the misbegotten greenery, cutting grass and turning the jungle into a garden again. Five sacks of garden waste and two rubble bags of rotten wood have gone from the garden to the council recycling site, and the butterflies are flitting around the windflowers. This evening, we're having a barbecue to celebrate.

The forecast for tomorrow is rain. Fleeting joys...

[Art gallery photograph from:
http://x642.freefoto.com/images/37/08/37_08_89---Manchester-Art-Gallery--Mosley-Street--Manchester_web.jpg?&k=Manchester+Art+Gallery%2C+Mosley+Street%2C+Manchester]

No man is an island...

...but parts of Sheffield were this week! To understand what happened, you need to go back 10 days to Thursday 14th and Friday 15th June June. Steady rain overnight raised water levels and by morning there were areas of localised flooding. I was on my way back from the other side of the Pennines, and the journey that normally takes around an hour and a half took over four hours, of which the last 90 minutes were spent trying to find a route from the M1 to home. The obvious route - via Chapeltown - looked OK, and there were cars coming in the opposite direction, which seemed like a good sign. But when I reached the dip in the road, I too had to turn back and retrace the route I had just travelled. Ecclesfield proved equally impassible, so eventually, I pulled over and plotted out a route that I knew would keep me on hillsides.

Now fast forward to the afternoon of Monday 25th June. We'd had warnings of severe weather from the Met Office, so the persistent, torrential rain was hardly unexpected. It was a little crazy at work. Despite being close to the top of a hill, we have an intermittent spring in the cellar library which produced around two inches of water. Meanwhile, the builders were halfway through re-roofing, and the beautiful new roof had neither ridge tiles nor flashing, so water was pouring through into the upper rooms and down the chimney breasts. Genesis 7 was working in reverse - the waters below the firmament were rising up, and the waters above the firmament were pouring down, and the firmament between was shrinking rapidly. Then the lights went out... but it was only a brief power cut, not the end of Creation as we know it.

Being so far up the hill, we didn't realise till quite late that the city was coming to a standstill. By evening, Sheffield's seven hills had become seven islands as the five rivers, already swollen from the previous rain, all burst their banks. The sudden rise in water levels was catastrophic, and low-lying parts of the city were under five to eight feet of water. The one student who hadn't managed to get away, and one of the tutors, had to resign themselves to staying with staff members, and the secretary finally gave up after travelling about 750 yards in two hours, and spent the night at the director's house. Actually, I quite enjoyed the company of the unexpected guest, and youngest son wasn't at all sorry to have an unplanned day off school. We learnt the next day that that one of the chaplains had to spend the night in a flood shelter in town.

Sitting here in the highest house in this part of the city, we were quite untouched by it at home. The children were already in when the rivers burst their banks, and it wasn't until I turned on the TV the next morning that I appreciated how lucky we were. Two people were killed locally when they were washed away, including a 14 year old child, and people were trapped on the upper floors of buildings or had to abandon their homes. We have even been spared the cycling power cuts as the electricity suppliers try to patch in areas affected by flooded sub-stations. I have followed events on Sheffield Forum and the BBC, feeling oddly detached. Sheffield Forum has come into its own, keeping people informed about emergency services, road closures, power supplies and school closures, and in addition acting as a hub for neighbourly help as those unaffected offer goods, services and a helping hand to the victims. It has also been a good source of amusement:Sheffield Wednesday's ground at Hillsborough turned into a swimming pool.

Today, Thursday, the roads are mostly open again and superficially there is an air of normality. But it will be a very long time before the damage is put right.

Between the two storms, I had surprise visitors when my cousin called to ask if we could put him, his wife and stepdaughter up for the night after his brakes failed on the A57. It was one of those quite unexpected delights that occasionally happen to break through the stress of day-to-day tedium. We walked down to the pub for some locally brewed real ale, and then had a really good meal in a local Indian restaurant, returning for another couple of drinks before heading home. It's a few years since we've really spent any time together, and I've not had the chance to get to know his wife before: we discovered much in common, and I hope we'll manage to keep in touch properly now.

Two days later, I delivered two lectures to the Cliff College Postgraduate Alumni Association. The other speaker was my undergraduate dissertation supervisor, whom I haven't seen since 1998, so it was a privilege to share the platform with him, though also quite terrifying. We discovered that our areas of interest overlap considerably, and there's probably scope for some joint work which would be good both for us as academics, and for our respective institutions between whom there has historically been some rivalry.

Tomorrow is St Peter's Day, and I'm looking forward to the arrival of another very welcome guest. June has brought water and guests in abundance - I wonder what July holds in store?

[The Wicker photo: http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/42424000/jpg/_42424522_wicker_sheff_getty_220.jpg]

Sporting ups and downs

An email from my public reminds me that it's well over a month since I last wrote, and I've been consulting my diary to see what excitements have pushed the passing of time so far from my mind. It's a little disappointing to discover that little more than normal domesticity and work have been the main occupations, and the most pressing and time-consuming task has been marking module essays and dissertations, and completing the mountain of paperwork to go with them. Actually, it was a good crop of results - five of my six MA students got a merit, and one of my dissertation students crowned her studies with a distinction.

Then on 14th May we had a lunch gathering at UTU to say goodbye to Janet, who has been Support Services Manager for 7 years. This photo shows the UTU holy trinity of Janet, Judith (the secretary) and Christine (the director). The blonde lady hiding in the background is Janet's replacement, Kate.The following day I managed to escape to spend a night away in a cute village B&B and a day with my lover sharing a date that for various reasons matters to us both. Getting back to teach for 6.30 should have been an easy trip, but a massive accident on the M1 added an hour and a half to the journey. Advance planning meant that I'd left the teaching materials ready, and the last half hour was punctuated by phone calls (bluetooth, of course) to the resident student giving instructions in case I was unable to be there on time. However, my guardian angel pulled out the stops, and I walked into UTU with two minutes to spare.

One highlight of the last few weeks was a Keith James concert at the Boardwalk with a dear friend and his colleague. I was introduced to the music of Nick Drake some years ago, and Keith does a marvellous job of making Drake's music his own without ever dishonouring it. I've seen two of his Nick Drake tribute concerts before, and this one was a very welcome break from a very stressed week.

The corresponding low came the following weekend, when youngest son and eldest son, both Sheffield United fans by birth and breeding, went to the last match of the season together. The fate of the club was in the balance: they needed at least a draw to be certain of avoiding relegation. If they lost, it would then depend on the result of the match between West Ham and Manchester United. In the event, Sheffield United lost and West Ham won. There was a palpable air of mourning as the two lads and Dan's girlfriend arrived back, and no amount of sympathy could lift their mood. I discovered then that "it's only a game" is not a helpful comment for a mother to make under such circumstances.

After an overnight in a hotel with my lover (champagne and strawberries - who says romance is dead?), my own interest in sport was better served by a day out at the National Schools Regatta just outside Nottingham, where a team from my old school were rowing. It was the best kind of outdoor fun - lots to watch, good sportsmanship and passion on the water and on the banks. I met up with an old friend who was coaching one of his school's teams, and both his team and the girls from my old school won first their heats, then their semis, then their finals. In between, we swigged champagne in his school's hospitality tent, and had some time together for a walk and chat.

Second youngest son has already finished his GCSEs in Egypt, and returns to the maternal hearth on Wednesday. Although it's only just past half term, it's already feeling as if we're winding down towards summer. On warm days I can teach in the UTU garden in the evenings, and there's already an end-of-year feeling in the air. Summer promises to be rather good this year, I think.

This Joyful Eastertide...

My study, where I'm sitting now, overlooks a Victorian cemetery. The rest of the area is everything one would expect of a blighted northern industrial city, with more than its share of poverty and marginalisation. Regeneration has helped a little, and the glorious mix of people who live here bring a richness that few outside commentators recognise, but there is little of beauty. Even the park is shabby and poorly maintained except for the annual burst of excitement provided by the multicultural festival.

But right in the middle of the area is a 37-acre Victorian cemetery. It was laid out before the dense housing sprang up around it to accommodate steel workers from the Don Valley below, preserving a little bit of countryside for the comfort of the dead and incidentally providing pleasure to the living. A mixed canopy of mature trees throws dappled shade on to the network of paths in the lower parts, where dog walkers and joggers pass each morning, and lovers stroll hand in hand in the evenings. Higher on the hillside, panoramic views of the changing city open up. Wild animals and birds have never left: at 4am on a summer morning, the dawn chorus might wake the dead, and after dark, nightingales and nightjars compete with owls to make sure that if the dead rest in peace, the living must learn to live with the sounds of nature.

Immediately below my window is a flowering cherry. Most of the year, it is an unassuming little thing, but as the weather starts to warm up, the dusting of new greenery gives way to a brooding dark red. And then one morning this modest, moody little tree explodes into a pink, extravagant candy floss of blossom, and for perhaps a week it outshines every other tree, before shaking off its spring fever and reverting to genteel quietness for another year. It's a wasteful, unnecessary adventure: it doesn't even produce cherries. But its sheer profligacy of flower just for show, just for the joy of being lovely, just for a few days every year, makes it my favourite tree in the whole cemetery.

Already the buzz of a new term is brightened by the prospect of teaching my two favourite courses. It's been a cheerful Easter in all sorts of ways. After years of refereeing open warfare between the two youngest sons, I was astonished and delighted to watch them discovering the good in one another and becoming friends. One day I came home from work and caught sight of the two of them through the window, heads together over a computer game, and my rarely exercised maternal pride did a happy somersault.

By Easter weekend, maternal joy notwithstanding, the stress of a long term was starting to take its toll, so on the Thursday of Easter week, I took a day out and went off into Derbyshire. There's a large flat rock where my lover and I laid a very old sorrow to rest, and it is, for me, a place of peace. After walking long enough to build up an appetite, I sat on the rock, took out a book, and enjoyed a sandwich, an apple and a can of beer as I read for hours in the warm sun. It was the kind of day where the quiet and the stillness exert a power to recharge and refresh even the most ragged soul, and I came home peaceful and relaxed.


And as if that wasn't all joy enough for the season, I had a delicious 24 hours with my lover as well... I am a happy woman.

Rarefied air, real ale and a romantic afternoon

Another term over, and lots of time to relax...? Not a bit of it! The last students had barely left the building when I set off for the Society for the Study of Theology annual conference at Girton. The rarefied air of academic theology always makes me feel rather suffocated, though I'm always glad I've been.

There seem to be two kinds of conferences. There are those which are a long-awaited and much desired opportunity for people to share their ideas with one another through papers, workshops and conversation. They are usually businesslike, hardworking, and a thorough joy to be part of because they develop a sense of teamwork among participants right from the start.

Then there are the conferences which showcase the brilliance of the brightest stars in the firmament, leaving the majority of attenders in semi-darkness. Attending them is about trying to learn to appreciate the "splendour of light" without being dazzled. I have been astonished at the erudition, scholarship and sometimes genius of the plenary speakers, but deeply depressed that so little of it bears on the messy business of living. The gap between ivory-towers academic theology and applied and practical theology in community is nowhere more obviously a chasm than in such a forum, and I feel helpless with frustration that it falls to people like me to try and capture and distill the genius of the academy to resource my students and my own theology.

But parts of it were so satisfying, and so encouraging, that I continue to believe it's a positive experience. Short papers presented by people who are still doing, or have recently completed, doctoral research showcase the most diverse overview of the best of the theological landscape, and the shorter conversations around those are inspiring and provoke engagement.

There were other compensations. I took one evening off to spend with my much beloved Uncle rediscovering my all-time favourite beer (Woodforde's Wherry) over a meal and live music at the Bluebell Inn, with the unexpected bonus that my cousin, whom I haven't seen for years, and his wife joined us. So we went back to their house (quite stunning) for coffee before I went back to Girton just after midnight. It was a merry evening of family pleasure.

The last full day of the conference had an afternoon free for sightseeing, so my lover and I returned to the village of his childhood to lunch, walk and talk by the water. The warm spring sunshine, gentle romance, and conversation that swung from silly to serious from moment to moment all combined to make it a magical afternoon, and it was with reluctance that we parted and I dragged myself away to tackle another plenary session at 5pm.

Before leaving Cambridge, I called in to see my ex sister-in-law and then had lunch with my ex mother-in-law. It's a testimony to their generousity that we remain friends after the marriage that brought us into the same family is long over.

Tomorrow second-youngest son arrives home for Easter so I'm up at sparrrowsfart to be at the airport for 8.30am. Then we're into Holy Week, of course, and the existential journey towards death and resurrection begins once again. The cycling seasons of the liturgical year, the changing colours and moods and music, all seem this year to be in their proper place in the cosmos. It's been a long time since it's felt that way...

Jollifications

One advantage of being too busy is that time whizzes past. It's been a time of exhausting work interspersed with episodes of real fun.

First there was the installation of Dr John Sentamu, Archbishop of York as the chancellor of the new University. Despite a ridiculously early start (on the road by 7) we had great fun dressing up in full academicals and parading through the streets of York from the guildhall to the Minster. Note to self - the Guildhall does not have enough women's toilets for that kind of gathering! It was a pleasant service, including a less than full-power rendition of Parry's "I was Glad", and then we had lunch at the NT tea room before repairing to the University for champagne and a lavish afternoon tea. This mean that I had to go for a brisk walk round York to work off the champagne before picking up my car from the park-and-ride.

Then there was a real-life meet of the uk.religion.christian newsgroup in which I did my PhD research. It was one of those delightfully civilised days when we had the perfect balance between congenial sociability and some vigorous theological debate. One poster from Greece managed to be there - I suspect that is probably the furthest anyone has come for a meet. Mark (the new moderator) and his wife Emma and baby Ellie were there, so I was able to hand over the moderator's hat to him.

And then this weekend I set off at sparrowsfart yesterday (this involved hiring a car when I discovered that mine had *two* flat tyres - grrr) to stay with the love of my life before racing back this morning to be at home for callers. My dearest uncle and his partner arrived in time for lunch, and eldest son and girlfriend arrived mid-afternoon. In between, phone calls from the other three non-resident offspring suitably reassured me that however little I care for Mother's Day, they still respect he social niceties.

Part of the reason it's been even busier than usual at work is the imminent departure of the person who holds the whole thing together as administrator. Finding a replacement has consumed a lot of corporate time and energy, though thankfully, not too much of mine. The highlight of the process so far has been the inadvertent feeding of an applicant's cv through the shredder, and the subsequent process of reassembling it.
It's now nearly the end of term, and I can tackle the mountain of paperwork over Easter. I may also treat myself to couple of days off to catch up on sleep and to enjoy the pleasure of being really, really happy.

Penitence and prevariction

Ash Wednesday is, oddly, one of my favourite days in the Christian calendar. As a way of setting regrets aside in a formal liturgical setting, it takes some beating. I don't need a season to do penitence - introverts are quite good at that - but to make Lent a season of preparation for Easter requires one to examine one's regrets and then leave them behind. As usual, the choice of music was at best mixed, but one can forgive much when Hyfrydol is the offertory hymn. However, one cannot forgive "Forty Days and Forty Nights" to the tune of "Scarlet Ribbons".

I *should* be writing. Well, I am, of course, but what I should be writing is a sample chapter of my book for which a very nice editor is waiting. Once again, I have a whole list of good excuses, but the fact is that about 6 hours' writing is required, so some time over the weekend, I need to get my nose to the grindstone.

I do have some good reasons why it isn't already finished. I had planned to spend last weekend on it, but then was distracted by third son, he of the late lamented golden curls. He'd had an accident trampolining, and it looked as if his ankle was broken. Eventually, his Dad took him for an x-ray, and it was one of those good-news-bad-news scripts: the good news is that the ankle is only sprained. The bad news is that we've found what looks like a tumour on the x-ray. Emails and MSN messages flew back and forth between here and Egypt, and he had an MRI scan a couple of days later, which suggest that it's merely a slightly abnormal, and rather harmless, growth of bone, though it still needs checking out.

The fun event of the month was only daughter's 21st, which very conveniently fell during her reading week, so she came up to Sheffield, and we all went out for a meal. After much food, wine and merriment, I took youngest son home, leaving the older siblings and friends to paint the town red. Finding an appropriate gift had me stumped for a while, but as she asked for something to keep, I had a ring inherited from her great great grandmother, who had the same name, resized to fit, and bought a pair of earrings to match.

Work, of course, always provides a good reason for not doing other things. This week I was examining some undergrads on liturgy, which proved to be enormous fun for them and for me, including as it did glove puppets, generous quantities of food and some rather surreal game playing. Some urgent additions to the webpage took a whole afternoon writing html in Notepad: I shall be very glad when that chore is parcelled out to someone else, though it does make for better written html than proprietory packages.

This week also saw the return home of limping third son. The stress of worrying about his leg and 9 hours on the road fetching him from Heathrow made work impossible that day, so today I took a break from the stress and the guilt and dragged a friend out to Burbage for a long walk in the wind and drizzle to blow the cobwebs away. It was a good day, and I'll sleep well, waking fresh tomorrow to write that chapter...

Sons and Lovers (not DHL, though)

Christmas is now history, and Epiphany with the family celebration, is also behind us for another year. Mr Scrabble briefly reappeared between the two bearing his scrabble set and broken heart. His married lady friend didn't tell her husband - but he found out anyway. It was all going so well. She was really, really going to leave as soon as Christmas was over. Until Boxing day, that is, when she told him it was over (again). I feel very sorry for him - he was so very unhappy - but I don't suppose for a moment it's really the end of the saga. Perhaps he'll now find someone who can brighten his life again, but it won't be me, and at last I'm now able to look back on the whole affair with a sense of proportion.

A bout of illness in early January left me rather debilitated for a couple of weeks, and all of a sudden, we're well into term and time is once more whistling past. I'm spending every spare moment marking essays from last term. A pattern of normality, busy but routine, has replaced the welcome disruption of the holiday season. Last week was a bit busier even than usual, with a satisfying conference in Cambridge providing additional excitement at the expense of a very early morning and seven hours on trains.

Youngest son has just gone off to Leeds to do his work experience for a fortnight with a major engineering company. It's quite a shock to think of him wearing a shirt and tie every day, going to work and finding his feet in a new environment, but even the baby of the family has finally grown up and I find myself looking on him with a pride I rarely experience when I'm trying to get him to wash up or feed the snake. Of course, by mid-February, he'll be back leaving socks in the sitting room and collecting all the mugs in his room, but I'm holding on to this feeling while it lasts.

One outworking of the relationship I have with technology is that I do a lot of parenting that way. Second youngest son lives at present with his father in Egypt, and we usually communicate using MSN. It's not very different from the way we communicate when he's home if I'm honest:
Me: Hi there.
Him: Hey
Me: Good day at school?
Him: OK
Me: Any homework?
Him: Maths and Geog.
Me: Well, you'd better get on then. Need any help?
Him: No, I'm fine.

So when I received a phone call via Skype, it meant there was something unusual. When he asked for advice, I had to sit down to recover from the shock. It turns out that the school took exception to the fact that he'd bleached his hair over the Christmas holiday, and had excluded him until he cut the offending yellow curls off. His father had no objection to his new look. Son was incensed at the injustice: nothing in the school rules forbids dyeing hair, and in fact one of the girls had her hair dyed black over the holiday and it passed without comment. The problem was that if he stood his ground, the school had said it would not allow him to complete his GCSE course if he were absent from school for more than two weeks.

After pointing out that he knew the school was, to put it mildly, rabidly conservative, so he shouldn't have been surprised, I offered two alternatives. I'd back him absolutely if he felt that he needed to stand by his principles. But anything worth fighting for has a cost, and the cost to him would be high. He would have to return to the UK and start the GCSE course again in year 10 in September, putting him back two full school years. If he chose to do that, I would support, indeed applaud, his decision. Alternatively, he could consider the fact that the school has all the power, and that even the moral victory of standing by his principles would make no difference to the school or anyone else. A tactical withdrawal in the face of overwhelming force is not a failure, but a sign of strength if combined with strategic planning to ensure a positive outcome. The deicision, of course, was his to make. As his Mum, I would honour whichever choice he made.

So he had his hair cut off. Of course, in a conservative school in England, a child with a very short crewcut might well be excluded for looking like a skinhead, but different cultural values operate!

What really concerns me is the example the school sets to its students by doing things this way. It sends out all the wrong messages: what you look like is more important than who you are; boys and girls are subject to different rules and values; maintaining an arbitrary rule is more important than educational achievement; might is right. I've worked so hard to encourage values of justice, equality and character into all my children, and a school which accepts £15,000 per year should provide the education it is paid to provide.

Meanwhile, an email arrived out of the blue from an Oxford schoolmaster whom I knew many, many years ago when we were both at school and then university: he'd come across my website while looking for theology resources, and I have apparently provided him with an element of street cred with his students who find it hard to imagine someone over forty being geeky enough to explore theology in cyberspace, and even harder to imagine that their chaplain is acquainted with such a person. My kids are used to me knowing more about computers than they do, so I forget that most of my generation are more comfortable with meatspace, hard copy and paper resources. I suspect that at least part of the curiosity value for his students is that "Sir", who is, of course, my age and married with grown-up children, could possibly have an ex-girlfriend in his distant past. I'm just delighted to renew what was always a good friendship, and to find him so much the same - he always was going to be Powlett-Jones from Delderfield's "To Serve Them All My Days"! I think he'd find me more changed - I am reminded of a song from the film "One for the Heart", in which Crystal Gayle sings "Old boyfriends...he fell in love, you see, with someone that I used to be."

eChristmas?

I'm going to start with a tale of Christmas past, which at least partly explains why Christmas present is the way it is. Think w-a-y back to Christmas 1989. At the time, my first ex-husband and I were living in Egypt with the (then) three children, and we decided that it was the chance of a lifetime to spend Christmas in Jerusalem. However, travelling with three children and rucksacs meant that there was little space for bulky or fragile gifts, so we decided to save the gift-giving till after we returned at Epiphany. It was easy to persuade three children under 8 that since Jesus waited till Epiphany for his presents, they could do the same.

Christmas Midnight Mass in Bethlehem, seeing the New Year in listening to the bells clanging from churches of every denomination imaginable in the Old City of Jerusalem: these memories remain vivid. And in early January we headed back to Cairo and our decorated house and presents under the tree, to discover that our Coptic brothers and sisters in faith celebrate their Christmas on 7th January, so we were more in tune with our neighbours than we'd expected.

We've always kept an Advent fast and not started Christmas celebrating until after dark on Christmas Eve. For the rest of our stay in Egypt, we continued to have modest stockings for the children on Christmas morning, but the rest of the gifts remain under the tree until Epiphany. As part of this, we also dropped the b-i-g meal on Christmas day and moved it to 6th January, leaving the first day of Christmas free for people to eat just what they fancied. We've had some odd things over the years: one year the children were delighted to be allowed to have tinned spaghetti hoops. There was the roast honey and charcoal duck one year, and such humble dishes as egg and chips, welsh rarebit and bacon butties have at some seasonal moment tickled someone's fancy. Last year, second youngest son just had to have a M&S Hoisin Duck Wrap from the sandwich counter, which is actually rather hard to get hold of on Christmas Eve.

When we returned to the UK the children opted to continue our rather odd family Christmas instead of reverting to the usual UK pattern, and over the years it has proved to have all sorts of advantages. Their father, working in a Muslim country, rarely came home for Christmas, but could usually take a week off over the New Year so that our family feast could take place at Epiphany. When I was nursing for a while, it was no hardship to volunteer to work Christmas day, freeing staff with families to spend time cooking, a chore I didn't have to do. As they grew older, the children were always happy to work on Christmas day (for a vastly inflated hourly rate) which helped to keep them solvent. Gift buying could be done in the sales. They could spend Christmas day with boyfriends/girlfriends and their families. And after my ex-husband and I separated, they were able to spend Christmas day with him and his new wife celebrating a conventional Christmas without missing out on our big day. The lazy, piggy anything-goes Christmas day that became our pattern is stress free and easy, and over the years I have come to appreciate how rare a stress-free Christmas is among my acquaintances.

This year, youngest son flew off to Egypt early to spend Christmas with his Dad and step-Mum, and second youngest, who would normally have been home, was instead skiing in Sweden. All three of the older children have flown the nest, so I was planning to have a very low-key time, without the usual tree and decorations. However, youngest son was adamant that the house, the cat and I needed to do it properly to keep the cosmos in balance, so on Christmas Eve I baked mince pies, put up decorations and the tree, and trotted off to Midnight Mass as usual before coming back and opening the tin of Quality Street for my first chocolate since before Advent.

I had Christmas day planned: a long lie in, smoked salmon for breakfast, and then an orgy of West Wing, having treated myself to the boxed set of all seven series on dvd, with plenty of good white wine. It went wrong shortly after the lie-in ended. As I waited for the kettle to boil, I had a few chocolates. And a mince pie. Then a couple more chocolates. By the time the coffee was ready, I didn't much feel like smoked salmon. Second son rang to ask how to cook duck and lamb, and the kids and I sent text messages to one another to say "Merry Christmas".

I turned on the TV, loaded a dvd and settled in to watch West Wing. I'd only watched about 20 minutes when I remembered that second youngest son was going to be out on a ski slope directly in front of a webcam, so I turned on the laptop and squinted at the blurred figures hoping to catch a glimpse of him. In fact I got several good shots which I saved. I'm still amazed that I could watch my son skiing on Christmas Day, and then was able to chat to him on MSN the following day and show him the pictures.

While I was doing that, eldest son arrived and we decided to do gin rather than wine. But then we moved on to coffee and tea - well, if one really can have anything, then that includes choosing the ordinary. Later on, an ex-boyfriend arrived, and then in the evening, son number two and daughter also called in, and we revisited the gin as they chatted to their father and I had a long natter with youngest son, both in Egypt, thanks to Skype. By the time everyone left, I'd watched exactly half of one episode of West Wing, eaten no smoked salmon, and drunk no wine. In order to rescue the plan, I went to get the smoked salmon out for supper, but some thick slices of ham caught my eye, so the salmon was relegated to Boxing Day as I tucked into ham and chips on a tray in front of a couple of episodes.

Eldest son, meanwhile, set off to drop his brother and sister off at their respective friends' houses and then headed off up the motorway to Leeds. The traffic came to a standstill at Junction 37 (it later transpired that a fatal car accident had blocked the road). He doesn't have Satnav, but he has the next best thing: a mobile phone with handsfree, and a Mum with a computer. As we chatted, I took a quick look at Multimap and suggested an alternative route and he headed off home.

And so to bed, and one last thing to do. I picked up the Queen's Christmas message podcast, and fell asleep listening. Something about children, I think...

And of course, this blog is technology-driven - and this photo was taken with my phone. What with SMS, dvds, a webcam, Skype, all-singing all-dancing mobile phones, Multimap, podcasting and Blogger, it's been a technology enabled Christmas. iGod bless us every one!


(Photos: Jerusalem - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/7c/West_wing_cast.jpg/200px-West_wing_cast.jpg
and West Wing - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/Israel-Jerusalem_Old_City.jpg)

To everything there is a season.

Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

I've always thought this the perfect Bible reading for Advent Sunday, though I have never yet heard it used that way. The end of the old church year and the start of the new one has marked two major "times" in my life, the one by choice and the other by coincidence.

Way back in 1998 I started to research the activities of the Usenet group uk.religion.christian, and shortly after I started, the then moderator asked if I'd like to take over the post. Once I had addressed the methodological issues this introduced into my research, I agreed to become moderator in 1999.
I didn't actually meet the outgoing mod until later that year when we staged an impromptu "handover ceremony" at one of the occasional real-life meetings of some group members. A year to the day after the handover, he and I were married.

Seven and a half years later, my research having finished, the PhD secured and with the pressures of full time work and new research pressing on me, I started talking about finding a successor way back in Spring, and after much careful consideration, a suitable candidate proved both willing and available, though not till Autumn because of other commitments. So we fixed Advent Sunday as a good date for the start of a new chapter in the life of the group.

Meanwhile, the machinations of the legal system mean that by coincidence I received through the post my divorce decree absolute just two days before I handed over to the next mod: my marriage lasted two days fewer than my term as moderator. There is a wretched sense of failure that comes with the end of a marriage, so that I could take little pleasure in contemplating my period as moderator as a job well done, though it was that, I believe.

The traumas of the weekend were numbed by illness as a vicious fluey cold made my joints hurt, my head ache with fever and confused my brain so that I remember little of Friday afternoon or evening at all. Perhaps physical collapse, and the disengagement from reality that conferred, was the merciful anaesthetic I needed to survive the weekend. I spent much of Saturday asleep or fitfully dozing, so that by Sunday I was recovered enough to tackle the Advent Sunday rituals of cardmaking, mince-pie production and setting up Advent candles. I also went to church for the first time in months, though I'm not sure I'm ready for regular attendance again yet, if ever.

Work, meanwhile, has produced highs and lows. Donning my red togs and processing around York Minster as three of our students graduated with MAs (two merits and a distinction with the University Postgraduate Prize) basking the in the reflected glory of their achievement was a delightful outcome of the learning partnership with three lovely people. My current cohort of undergraduates are blossoming as novice ethicists, and I'm hugely enjoying supervising research degree students (including our recent distinction MA graduate) in addition to some fun work with MA students working on research modules, dissertations and Liberation Theologies.

On the down side, the realities of the approaching term are starting to haunt my sleep. The colleague who works most closely with me on undergrad and postgrad taught degrees is taking a term's study leave to complete her doctorate, so that with only a little additional tutoring assistance, I have to manage, deliver, tutor and mark all the postgrad and undergrad taught, practical and research modules between January and Easter. None of the content is new, though I always do a complete revision whenever I dust off an old module, but the sheer volume of teaching means I shall be somewhat busier even than usual, and I'm rarely under-occupied now. The most recent blow has been a suggestion from the University that we might reconsider the module to be delivered at Level 1, occasioning a rapid review of the programme and the possibility that I may have to write 10 two-hour lectures on the Old Testament between now and January. It's going to be a term that will demand huge amounts of planning and self discipline if I'm to keep all the balls in the air.

So as a new church year starts, it's especially appropriate for lots of reasons to be keeping a disciplinary and penitential fast. I like keeping Advent this way: it makes it a thoughtful and frugal time of preparation in the midst of all the excess of secular Christmastide, keeping me surrounded by a pool of quiet, unadorned calmness with space in my life and my head to consider what is to come.

(Tree image from http://static.flickr.com/51/112367618_552587d7ea.jpg?v=0)

Isn't it nice when...

...one's labours bear fruit?

The Vancouver conference was one such. Amidst the chaos of a messy summer, I slogged away at my paper which was itself a fruit from a seed planted many years ago by the late David Lochhead's writings. I was still polishing it the day before I left, and by the time I got to the David Lochhead Memorial Symposium, I had it at my fingertips. I was surrounded by people whose names I know, and whose work I admire, people who had known and worked with Lochhead and in whose company I was overawed. It was especially wonderful to meet David's wife, herself a fine theologian and philosopher, and a formidably intelligent and delightful woman.

The conference was very much a working meeting, and the second day included seven substantial papers, or which mine was the last. People were tired and had worked very hard all day, and I was certain that the bad luck of having the last slot would make it impossible to get across the excitement of my findings. Leaving my pages on the desk, I delivered the paper substantially without the notes, engaging with the audience and using the slides to deliver the factual content as well as illustrations. It worked, and how! They laughed, engaged, sat up in their chairs and joined in, and it was all over in a blur of merriment. Delegate after delegate mentioned how much they enjoyed it, and as a direct result of the performance (for such is any conference presentation), there may be the possibility of future collaboration with some of the people there. If you want to see for yourself how it went, the conference archive is at http://www.virtualtheology.info , where you'll find the text of several of the papers and podcasts of all of them as well as a slide show of the event. Dr Gary Kush put a huge amount of effort into recording the conference and making it available online, and his own paper on accounting and QA in developing online courses has already provided some invaluable insights for work I'm doing here in the UK.

Meanwhile, over the summer and at the start of term, I put into place a more rigorous academic tracking system at work. Our modular courses have given us a few headaches because we don't always have records of students' modules, results or plans. This term, after producing some appropriate paperwork, I interviewed every student before the start of term and made sure that all our records were up to date. I'm accustomed to being on the receiving end of some tart comments from the administrator at the university, so when she rang to discuss students' records, I waited for it to start. She asked me if I knew what students had done, and what they were planning for the next year... and I was able to answer confidently for every student. For once, I knew more than she did. I corrected a number of errors on the university's records and gave a full account for every student registered with us. For the first time since I started, I had all the information I needed at my fingertips. That particular fruit was sweet indeed.

Finally, back to my research. Seven years of postgrad research and 18 months of undergrad project work before that has given me some accumulated expertise in my field. As a result of my discussions in Canada, I decided to set up some work with my students that used the insights gained to develop new ways of delivering courses.

I have a trial running now using a combination of web-based virtual learning environment (VLE), MSN and web resources, and on Friday my boss asked if I'd like to explore the possibility of developing this in a more focused way to draw in some church funding. Whilst this kind of diversified approach to delivery is qute widespread in the US and Canada, it is less so here in the UK, and my experience and expertise have now become valauable assets to develop and exploit. It's all good for my ego and career, and it's something I love doing: combining my role as educator with innovation in pedagogy and technology. It feels as if all that work is finally paying off, not only financially, but because I'm doing what I enjoy most as part of my job.

Tomorrow is bonfire night, and I stop being an educator and tutor for 24 hours to be Mum. We have sausages and buns in abundance, parkin for afterwards, and an awesome load of fireworks including some pretty big rockets. We've always had our own fireworks in the garden, and traditionally the catherine wheels always either fail or set fire to something. For the last three years, it's also been tinged with sadness for me: the baby I lost to miscarriage was due on 5th November that year, and I now always light a sparkler to remember the child who would have been celebrating her third birthday this year.


(photos linked from:
Vancouver School of Theology - http://www.vst.edu/about/images/IonaAbout.jpg
Sparkler - http://www.chemistryland.com/CHM107Lab/SafetyTutorial1/sparkler.jpg)