qualitation

Oh Lordy! I’ve only been doing this blog thing for less than a month, and I’ve already managed to let it slip to over a week’s gap between entries. It’s going the same way as every diary I’ve tried to write, and is a testament to my poor self-discipline and terminal tendency to procrastinate. Oh, woe.
Well, at least I got to it in the end. Another beautiful day in Cardiff – the sky is filled with grey, cloying dampness hovering beneath the burnt malt clouds of the Brains beer factory. I sit in my carriage awaiting departure, gazing out over the splattered heaps of human excrement and toilet paper strewing the tracks that draw away in chthonic perspective towards the AIG insurance building. “Platform dawee avee nah possannid a Llindaw Paddington” says the automatic announcer, a weak-sounding but never bored Welsh robot. I glare at the people as they board the train, hopeful that they will be deterred from sitting opposite me on my table, knowing that if they do it will only be a matter of time before they bring out the misanthrope in me by having half a conversation on their mobile about the team dropping the ball on this one, or Janet not getting back to me yet on that one. And lo, we have departed.
This morning I had an argument with a gypsy woman and won. Well, argument is too strong a word. Altercation. And won is too strong a word. Didn’t lose would be putting it better. At the front of the queue at the station to buy my ticket, and in a ‘queue code red’ situation – wherein one of the ticket windows has a ‘training in progress’ sign over it, the second has a very nice but very slow old couple discussing all available options for travel that fortnight with the helpful young man behind the window, and the third has a very welcome but very confused group of Japanese tourists trying to get to Osaka via Aberdeen – a gypsy (OK, telling someone is a gypsy from first impressions isn’t an exact science, but she was Irish, had bright floral leggings, gold jewellery and was shouting at her five children and station staff and passersby; have I used a wrong term? Well cancel my New Internationalist subscription) started having a go at the window staff to let her buy her ticket and then tried to barge in front of the long commuter queue, saying as a statement rather than a question “I can go in front, yeah?” Well anyway, if there is one holy principle, one non-negotiable piece of etiquette, one reason in the world why being English is Noble and Worthy, then it is because of an appreciation of the sanctity of the queue. So I told her. No you can’t. Look, my train’s in ten minutes, she said. I don’t care, I said, and anyway, mine’s in five. I’m getting my ticket, she said. That’s a NO, I said, very fiercely, as fiercely as Christopher Robin in a very bad mood or Mark Corrigan at a meeting. And I stood my ground, and by god I bought my ticket first. And that was the story of how I didn’t lose an altercation with a sort-of gypsy. Period.
Just recently, I have been managing to sort my methodology out a bit. I think. Proper science people are quite right in many of their criticisms of qualitation I believe - qualitative methodology is incredibly slippery and dressed up in so much pseudo-intellectualism that it is very hard to know what is just verbiage and what is sound analysis. Whilst I rather like qualitative approaches in principle, trying to interact with the literature has been a real pain because of this – and such is the bane of my PhD. But I want myself to be sure I am doing something systematic and justifiable and grounded - wise men build their house upon the rocks, or the house comes tumbling down. Surely everyone knows that? Especially with regard to discursive work though, there are a lot of foundations plonked down in some very splodgy swamps, with tin foil facades and plastic chimney pots. And I’m not going to move in there, really I’m not, even at those rates.
Because of this I’ve been trying very hard to find some more concrete approaches. As a result of this, the writings of the political environmentalist (or is that environmental political analyst? Or enviro-political anal mentalist?) Dryzek along with the philosopher Toulmin are my current crutches. Dryzek at least has a method for his discourse analysis, as does Toulmin for his analysis of informal reasoning, and that’s a start.
Away from the world of invented abstractions (there’s a third world, the world of objective contents of thoughts, says Karl Popper – though I learned that from an Orb sample) there’s been bluebells a-plenty carpeting the woods this year. Was pleased to find two nearby RSPB reserves at the weekend where there were lovely tits flitting in and out of their little homes and the echoey thrums of woodpeckers, and sun-dappled cathedrals of green and that sort of thing, and most of all bluebells everywhere. Everywhere, I tell you. Went to Bournemouth too and got wistful about how nice it used to be living by the sea.
Sadly, I continue to be disappointed by curry restaurants. He Was Disappointed By Curry Restaurants shall be my epitaph. I very much like the ambience and bustle of the Raj in the old town, but why can most curry places do little more than put five lumps of chicken in a standard food-blended sauce that they’ve poured from a big tub of sauce (probably) and hope you think it’s a meal? I don’t want to do a Michael Winner here, but (that’s a discursive ‘but’ used to assert that I am not Michael Winner) come on curry restaurants: SORT IT AAT!
The current news story, aside from Pakistan’s continuing collapse into a theocratic nuclear-armed state, but who cares about that, has been the wonderful schadenfreude that is MP’s expenses. These mother fuckers have been getting away with murder: claiming expenses for cleaning out their moats, having pipes put under their swimming pools, getting new hymens installed in their housekeepers, furnishing homes they don’t even live in and then selling them and pocketing the profits. But what’s so great about it all, is that for a government so hell-bent on creating a surveillance society where if-you’ve-done-nothing-wrong-you’ve-nothing-to-worry-about they’re all on the ropes and squirming and writhing and screwed because of their own technically rule-obeying affairs being opened up to vastly uncomfortable scrutiny. Ha! Poetic justice innit.
I made an excellent joke the other day, though the few people who have heard it seem to not appreciate it as much as they should. Q: What do you call the lead singer of the Eurythmics in a fruit bowl… No? … Not sure? A: Annie Lemonx. Brilliant. And no, Annie Lemon is not a close enough answer, it has to have an x on the end.
I’m just writing words for the sake of it now, a reversion to an adolescent texter unable to function without seeing his stream of consciousness reflected back at him without vowels in it. Cheerio world.