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I have vague recollections of a song that was sung when I was at school all about the month of May, I can hum the tune (badly I suspect), but can’t remember many of the words, except it included a line about being the month of ‘rejoicing’.  This May has been a good month for me, so perhaps the tune is appropriate.  Busy as ever, though, with various research projects being particularly active, including the ‘Connected Communities’ work, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I also became involved in a small local research project to evaluate an initiative providing hot meals in schools for older people, as part of the Excellent Ageing project in Lincolnshire.

On a different note, with a team of colleagues I started on the Global Corporate Challenge on 19th May.  This is a pedometer based walking challenge where we are engaged in a virtual team walk around the world for 16 weeks; wearing a pedometer each day and entering our own daily step count on-line each day.  It is fascinating how wearing a pedometer makes me not only realise  how sedentry my job can be, but also gives me the motivation to take the stairs rather than the lift and to get out jogging and walking more than I had been.  It’ll be interesting to watch progress over the coming weeks. 

Then at the end of the month, I had a short family break away in West Wales, whilst the weather was somewhat unpredictable, it was great to spend time with my family, just enjoying each other’s company and time together.

I was fortunate this month to spend a few days in Glasgow at a training event on NVivo Qualitative Data Analysis Software.  I have been a user of this software for some years, but there is always more to learn.  This was a very useful couple of days where I not only learnt more about the capability of the software, but gathered ideas about different ways that it can be used and had the pleasure to meet a number of new colleagues.  Another high point in the month was the news of success, with colleagues, on a bid to the Arts and Humanities Research Council to undertake a scoping review under their ‘Connected Communities’ call. Our review will explore the notion of ‘community’ and what it means in the lives of children and young people who are looked after by Local Authorities – there is lots of work to do now on this, but it is an exciting project.  My weekends and evenings this month have been largely filled up with working on the indexing for my book on Interprofessional Collaboration in Social Work Practice for Sage Publications. I chose to develop the index myself as a learning opportunity, this being the first time I have undertaken such a task.  I have been surprised how time consuming and difficult this has been – I just hope it turns out to be an index that is helpful and useful to readers.