Leaving a Mark

 I found this hand on the underside of the castle.  Somebody clearly left their mark.  It reminded me of hand prints early peoples made in caves and also the marks on first nation Americans horses.  On a personal level it reminded me of how crap I am at painting and how I always seem to get my hands covered in paint.  It is Thursday writing day today and I felt like I had to mark where I am on my blog first.  This is leaving a hand print under the surface of the work to be found and paid attention too at a later point.

I had a supervision yesterday and in many ways it was productive.  Kate was very encouraging and Laura was very practical.  My writing about my connection to the playground was never really supposed to be part of the PhD writing, it was an effort to write through the blockage of expectation.   Like the sewers of London I felt that years of baby wet wipes had combined with the oils of angst to create a giant fatberger in my head that needed moving.  I just did some writing that I could do, the draining thoughts leaking throw a side tunnel or into the water table of my life.   

Now there is something about taking Kate's positive thoughts and working back into the document and getting it to look more like a PhD chapter.  This will be adding some references but also the Narritive makes this possible in a less abstract way.  Within this chapter I will be able to introduce some play theory, some history of the adventure play movement without going into the fine grain.  I think I can pick and choose some of the relevant bits and cover a bit of stuff from play theory where it meets my lived experience.  I won't have to do a potted history of the adventure play movement but i may talk of Colin ward and changing attitudes towards the child and the city.

I can't really face this today though as I'm feeling a bit stressed with everything about the house move and I need to walk the dog and I need a bit of a break.  I still like my idea about analytical and continental philosophy and I think I may be able to expand on this in my writing. Laura asked me to think about data and I suggested we should talk of it as what I would collect - this felt easier, perhaps I need to write about this as well.  Calling it data creates a territory for research and essentially it is this territory I am resisting