lblanchard | Reading

Something one of the people at the Zoom Meeting said last night.

"The first Quakers were rule breakers"

I think we should put that in the present tense and think about it.

"Quakers are rule breakers"

The first Quakers were awkward buggers with a shared vision who met in one another's houses and the open air. Since their time we've burdened ourselves with traditions and rule books and structures of governance.

And it's these secondary things that are threatened by the unpleasantness that occured at the Area meeting the Sunday before last.

Traditions and rule books and structures of governance are breaking down across the world. It's the distinguishing mark of our times. Did we think we'd be exempt?

And if traditions and rule books and structures of governance are all we have left we will be beaten into dust and serve us right.....

poliphilo

I have received an invitation to a Zoom Meeting which includes the words "strong feelings" and "complex issues"- and I think "O, bugger!"

Strong feelings and complex issues usually proceed from ego. Ego is a game we get to play while we're slumming it on planet Earth. It consists of putting on a mask and making like the mask is who we really are. The game consists of people exchanging sallies like, "My mask is prettier than yours" and "how come your mask has gold leaf on it and mine hasn't?" and "How dare you laugh at my mask!" After a while (many incarnations perhaps) it gets to be tiresome.

I've been thinking about Oscar Wilde recently. He's worth listening to on the subject of masks....

poliphilo

Windy, rainy morning. I haven't been outside yet but I think the rain may be edging towards sleet. One has to make a special effort to be cheerful in weather like this.

And that's what Christmas is about. At least in essence. Under the crust of money-making and schmaltz it's about making a special effort to be cheerful. Sometimes it comes across as fake- but at least we're trying.

Glossy green holly leaves, bright red holly berries, candles, mince pies, carols, the magi in their stiff, bejewelled copes bringing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh......

poliphilo

Picture Diary 109

1. Have a strawberry

2. The party faithful

3. Sunset

4. Two Women

5. Satori

6. The President is leaving office

poliphilo

The larger and livelier a group becomes the more likely it is that trouble will arise and cliques will form. We get around 15-25 people attending worship at our Meeting House on a Sunday and around 10 on a Thursday. People drop in, people drop out. I make it my business to know the names and a little of the background of everyone who shows up but sometimes memory fails. We're at a level where unity becomes hard to maintain- and I'm aware of hairline cracks that could become fissures.

At area level- where Quakers from Meetings spread across half of Sussex from Seaford to Rye try to find common ground- there is undisguised disharmony. Ailz is at a get together this afternoon which will be dealing with the bugger-up that occured last Sunday. She says our visit to Bunhill Fields has helped her put things in perspective. When you're walking across the unmarked graves of nearly 100 people who died for their faith in the ghastly prisons of 17th century London the dissension and hurt we're experiencing seems not so very important.....

poliphilo

Bunhill Fields is the Westminster Abbey of English nonconformity. There are some very famous people buried here.

The Victorians honoured John Bunyan with a catafalque and recumbent effigy.

Daniel Defoe gets an obelisk-. Again it's Victorian.

Just to the right of the obelisk is one of Blake's two gravestones. It says that he and his wife Catherine are buried nearby.

Two gravestones?

Yes. A while after that first stone had been erected someone did some research and believed they had found the exact spot. Hence this- which is 20th century...

"I give you the end of a golden string
Only wind it into a ball
It will lead you in at Heaven's gate
Built in Jerusalem's wall."

poliphilo

Ailz, Margaret and I drove up to London to visit Bunhill Fields. On our way East along the M25 we passed through a snow storm.

Bunhill Fields is a burial ground for noncomformists, situated east of the city and north of the river in what once was open country. It was open for burials between the mid seventeenth and the mid nineteenth centuries- and is estimated to contain 123,000 bodies. Among those buried here are John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, William Blake and- across what is now a road in a section called Quaker Gardens- 12,000 Quakers, including the Society's founder, George Fox. Adjacent to Quaker Fields is a Meeting House- where we attended mid-morning worshp and were given lunch.

Bunhill is supposedly a contraction of Bone Hill, a name the area acquired in the mid 17th century when it was used as a dumping ground for the bones that had piled up in the charnel house at St Paul's cathedral.

This is Quaker Gardens, now a small park- with play area. The building in the second picture is the Meeting House- or what's left of it. I gather it used to be bigger and grander but- just like our Meeting House in Eastbourne- it took a bomb in WWII.

And This is Bunhill Fields

Bunhill Fields has an atmosphere, not eerie, a little melancholy perhaps, but peaceful. As Larkin said of churchyards in general it is "serious earth". If the areas that are railed off appear neglected, it's because they're maintained as a nature reserve. It's a pity you can't stroll among the graves but it would be a greater pity if you trampled the plants, scared the squirrels and trod on the slow worms......

poliphilo

The Romanovs, my dream told me, preferred to use digital photography.

And then the scene shifted to a little rocky bay in the Med, with the Romanovs and a cockapoo puppy swimming about under the crystal clear water. Something came powering in from the open sea which I intitially mistook for a shark, but which turned out to be a white man in blackface. I pounced on him and playfully held his head under the water as if meaning to drown him....

poliphilo

The Quaker drama continues- and at two o'clock this morning I was turning over in my head all the histrionic things I could do to contribute to the mayhem. Lord, but I was going to cut a figure! But two o'clock is the wolf hour- when one is at one's lowest and stupidest- and one shouldn't take anything one thinks too seriously. So I told myself "Silence, silence silence, void, void, void"- and went back to sleep.

There's a Meeting scheduled for Saturday which is open to all those who were upset by the drama. I'm thinking of it as "Philippi" because that's what comes after the death of Caesar.

poliphilo

Picture Diary 108

1. A new kind of apple tree

2. The first snow

3. Homunculus

4. Incarnation

5 The golden birds

6. Robin

poliphilo

Our weather has been coming up from Spain but there's been a switcheroo and now it's coming down from the arctic- or so I'm told. Yesterday was warm (for the time of year) and damp and misty, today we have clear skies and there's a nip in the air.

There was ugliness at the Quaker Area Meeting yesterday. I won't go into details but the Area Clerk was pushed into resigning and those who had brought about their fall were inclined to crow about it. I was reminded of that scene in Julius Caesar where Brutus stands up at Caesar's funeral and lectures a shocked populace on how justified and virtuous it was of him to murder his friend. The chief crower was told (but in slightly more Quakerly terms) to shut the fuck up- and consequently left the meeting in a snit.

Friends are not supposed to carry on like this but (who knew?) they are actually just people....

The Meeting was held in the Lewes Meeting House- which is one of the old ones- with 1784 written over the door. The Meeting room is classic Quaker- a shoe box with big windows set high in the wall so Friends wouldn't be distracted by the passing scene- and a balcony at one end. There is new development round the back of the building, recently completed- which is modern, chaste and in keeping. There is also a sweet little front garden with gravestones. Wish I'd taken my camera.....

poliphilo

Terrible hacking noise.

It sounds like the cat is coughing his heart and lungs out.

I get up and look round.

Turns out Ailz, working from another room, has just activated the printer....

poliphilo

Thinking about the US President this morning- and how hard it is to get such people to let go their hold on power- a lttle chant came into my head.

It goes like this "Da-da-da, Saviour of his country, President for life."

The "Da-da-da" stands in for a name I couldn't call to mind.

It's a dispiriting chant, the mantra of a people under the lash.

It would fit the American President I thought or- at least- it would fit his aspirations. And if you replaced the "Da-da-da" with his first name as well as his surname it would scan....

As I thought about it and was writing the first draft of this post the fog cleared and I realised the "Da-da-da" stood for Duvalier. And that I most probably came across the chant in the film version of Graham Greene's The Comedians. Whether it was composed for the movie or is something that was actually intoned on the streets of Port au Prince is something I don't know. And wikipedia isn't enlightening me.

The Duvaliers- father and son- ruled Haiti between 1957 and 1986. the older Duvalier had been a Doctor- so they were known as Papa Doc and Baby Doc. They were horrors. Greene said he'd been travelling all his life in search of a Hell on earth- and he'd found it in Haiti under Papa Doc.....

poliphilo

The Epstein stuff is coming through in spurts. The pipework coughs and rattles and spits. How much will it take before the sink overflows and a President has to step away?

It's hard to remove a democratically elected leader- at least if you're playing by the rules. Remember Nixon- and how tenaciously he clung on?

poliphilo

Storm Claudia- which is currently sweeping across Europe- seems to be going round us- which is something storms often do. It's a dark day and damp- but that's it.

I had a childhood friend called Claudia. She had an older sister called Clarissa (Kissa for short) who was the one I was in love with. Claudia was mad about ponies- not a taste I share.

Their mother was an old mate of my mother's and they lived near us in Croydon. Last I heard of them Clarissa was in a relationshp with a ex-Anglican clergyman- which is what I am- and her parents disapproved. I may not have bothered to ask about Claudia- shame on me....

This latest information is decades old. The two mothers were still alive at the time and still in occasional contact. I remember their mother writing my mother a brave letter saying she had cancer and this was "over and out"

I came across a photo of Kissa and me- on a beach somewhere. We look like we were having fun. She was a little older than me. She was a slim dark-haired girl, maybe 7 years old. I was a little very blond boy, maybe 5.....

poliphilo

"My husband," Ailz admits to saying, "Does all the washing-up; he does it badly. He also used to do all the housework but he did that badly too- so we got a cleaner."

I have two comments.

1. I'm an Aquarian. Aquarians have their heads in the clouds.

2. Is a line from G.K. Chesterton (who, incidentally the Church is thinking of making a saint) "If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing badly."

poliphilo

Terry (the old rascal) our friend with a little "F" and a capital "F" (meaning he's a Quaker) has taken himself off to Thailand- where the care home staff are young and comely- which matters a lot to him. Teresa- who has been sort of caring for him (I don't know if he's been paying her) is left dealing with the stuff- material and immaterial- that he has left behind. We said we'd take a couple of bags full of clothes and stash them in our attic along with the ones we took in the last time he went abroad. When I show up to collect them they have transmuted into four. Teresa and I commiserate with one another. She has been given power of attorney. "How's that going to work between here and Thailand?"I ask. She turns her mouth down and shrugs.

Terry says he'll be back in the Spring. He's a sick man and very forgetful so I doubt it. In her final phone conversation with him before he flew Ailz says- more in hope than expectation- "Have a great time and don't die..."

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lblanchard

November 2025

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Page generated Nov. 26th, 2025 06:14 am

The News from South Philly

and other points of interest

Reading

Rule Breakers

Masks

Mini Sermon

Picture Diary 109

Holding Things Together

Bunhill Fields 2

Bunhill Fields 1

Swimming With Romanovs

Philippi

Picture Diary 108

Area Meeting

Hack, Hack, Hack.....

Da-da-da

Cough, Rattle, Spit

Claudia (And Kissa)

My Response

Goodbye, Tezza

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November 2025

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