Holly, "what DO you mean, I'm sitting on your research notes?  This block of paper is just the correct size for me to sit on... and I DID stop walking across the laptop keyboard..."

No, not rest and relaxation, reading and research!

This morning I have begun analysing some of the qualitative information garnered as part of my research... the total number of respondents is copable (phew) and around half of them fit the 'brief' and/or have completed most or all questions.  Just from the demographics and descriptions of conditions people have, there are enough follow-up questions/avenues for someone else to do some really useful work.  Not really sure I will have the time to do justice to what I have gathered, but definitely at least one and possibly more, useful papers waiting to be written once I've played with all the data.  It is hard to explain how happy this makes me - it is a sign that I have pretty much emerged from chemo-brain (still some memory and concentration issues, but much less) and that overall I am around 90% back to where I was BC.  Just enjoying thinking and mulling and spotting links and patterns... things I used to take for granted and now cannot.  That's good news.  For me, anyway.

And reading novels.  The Cleaner of Chartres by Sally Vickers was recommended by Jim Gordon and by someone at church who had followed Jim's suggestion. It is a gentle and easy read, feel good without mush, and enough of a plot to maintain interest... and no overly tidy ending.  As Jim said in his post 'just read it'.  I am currently two-thirds of the way through Born Under a Million Shadows by Andrea Busfield a book that popped up in my Amazon recommendations because of other purchases.  It is a, thus far, gentle story of life in contemporary Afghanistan from the perspective of a muslim boy whose mother keeps house for a collective of westerners.  Thoughtful, and easy to read, like the better known works in this genre it gives a glimspe into another 'worldview' and so opens the way to reflecting on our own.  Next up will be Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, which sounds intriguing and explores questions that I think a lot of us sometimes ask!  Of course, having the concentration to sit and read is no longer a given, so I am delighting in the opportunity my sabbatical gives me to indulge my love of fiction AND to strengthen my concentration 'mucsles'. 

This week I am starting to analyse the answers to my questionnaire on ministers with life-changing medical diagnoses, and will close the online survey at the end of the week.  If you are a minister (or know one) and would like to completed it, please feel free.  I have permission from both BUGB and BUS to conduct this project.  If online is problematic, feel free to print it off and complete longhand and I can let you have a land address on request.

Baptist type ministers can complete it here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/8BPSDRV

Non-Baptist type ministers here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7JLT7B3

It's the same survey, just want to be able to identify the Baptists!!

Just as I was settling down to being looking at the demographic information - really interesting in its own right - I heard the 'thud' of something large being posted through my door... a UK-wide piece of research exploring patient's experiences of autolgous breast reconstructions after radiotherapy.  Via a set of tick boxes, and a large, if not vast, survey pool, two people are investigating this.  So, I set my research aside for an hour or so, ticked a lot of boxes, added a few comments where the boxes didn't quite tally with my experience and stuffed it back into a (pre-paid) envelope to send off.  Glad to be be able to help, if only by adding some honest-and-positive input to the melting pot!

BBC news website tells us that the 'eyes of the world' are on the royal birth.  Poor Duke and Duchess of Cambridge - a good job they will be far too preoccupied with the whole birth business to be aware of that.  But, really?  The eyes of the world?  Somehow I think not.  Western liberal democracy television news programmes, tweeters and bloggers (royalist and republican) maybe, but no, not the eyes of the world; most of the world has far more urgent and acute things to think about.

A quick bit of web searching suggests that in the UK today there will be on average "one born every minute" (about 2000) and that, sadly, on average on of those won't survive birth.  Globally there will be around 370,000 babies born (can't find a neat match to a UK city but a bit bigger than Nottingham).  And, if the click campaign of 2006 is still valid, around 28,800 children (one every three seconds) will die needlessly in poverty today.  It seems to me that the eyes of the world, if the press is correct, are actually averted from things that aren't quite so nice, and shiny and romantic, in favour of some fairytale.

I genuinely hope that the Duchess of Cambridge is safely delivered of a healthy child, and that parenthood proves pleasurable and rewarding to this young couple.  But my eyes are not glued to the goggle box waiting impatiently for the news.

You, God, slipped into our world without a media circus

The eyes of the Roman world were certainly not on a backstreet in Bethlehem

As a peasant woman brough forth her firstborn and laid him in a foodtrough for safety.

You, God, have your eyes on the squalor of poverty and the danger of the non-western world

You come close to the young mother whose birth pangs cannot be relieved with drugs

And whose haemorrhaging has only one, inevitable and disastrous outcome

You, God, have your eyes on the tiny scraps of humanity born in poverty

You come close to the child who attempts to suckle an empty breast

Whose life-breath is fleeting and failing, life snuffed out almost before it begins

You, God, have your eyes on the tenacious mother and determined baby

Refusing to be another statistic, defying the odds and suceeding to live

Who are bearers of hope and tragedy in equal measure, in a world we never see

You, God, have your eyes on every birthing stool and birthing pool,

Every maternity unit, every home, every refuge and transit camp

Every mother, every infant, every midwife, doctor and birthing partner

And You, God, have your eyes on the young couple in London

Anxious and excited, who know, deep within that, for all the technology money can buy,

Life is a fragile and beautiful gift, and upon your grace (named as such ot not) they depend

God who was born Prince of Peace

God who was born peasant of Bethlehem

God who was born refugee (even asylum seeeker)

God who was born into human life

It is your eyes that watch over every labouring mother

Every unborn child;

And it is to your safe keeping we offer them all

Amen