Well, hopefully that's it!  I have just written the two abstracts (academic and lay) needed for my MPhil submission and sent the final draft to my supervisors.  Tomorrow I will send my 'notification of submission' to the university and then it's just a case of waiting until the permitted date to 'publish and be damned'.

I am clearly amused and impressed by small things these days and, as they used to say in the first company I worked for, 'never mind the quality, feel the width'.  I am secretly pleased that my bibliography runs to six pages (single spaced) as that looks long enough for a submission at this level.  I am also secretly pleased to have nearly 400 footnotes (mostly references)- that makes it seem far cleverer than it is.  And of course I am blatantly happy that I have several diagrams running throughout the submission, demonstrating that you can take the girl out of engineering, but you can't take engineering out of the girl.

Quite pleased that the university is now sufficiently 'green' to allow double sided submission.

Mildly miffed that I'll now submit too late to graduate with my friend who is awaiting her PhD viva just now, but glad that it'll soon be completed anyway.

At 43k words of main text and footnotes (53k overall) it is the size of a modest paperback - I just hope the powers that be are happy with it.

Yesterday's IBRA notes were around the far too familiar story of Zaccheus but here were a couple of useful pointers between the two sets of notes.

Zaccheus was a wealthy man yet he accepted Jesus' self invitation to his home and allowed this rag-tag crew to dine in his rather posh abode.  The questions was posed, how willing would we be to allow slightly grubby itinerants into our houses?

Zaccheus gave away vast quantities of money, at least on this one occasion.  The question was posed, how willing would those of us who have money be to give it away?  How much are we investing for a more comfortable future for ourselves (beyond prudent pension provision) in a world where many are in need?  tricky question to ask in the wealthy West End of Glasgow where most people are pretty comfortably off.

There is nothing to suggest that Zaccheus either stopped being a chief tax-collector or moved to a smaller, more modest house, let along left everything to follow Jesus, but he certainly learned to see his material wealth in a very different way.

An interesting tale to set alongside that of the woman in the Temple who gave 'all she had to live on'.  Presumably Zaccheus was still giving from his plenty?  Maybe he could serve as a 'type' (for those into such language) for middle class professionals today?