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I like it that Quakers are odd.

My co-clerk would like us to be less odd.

At least that's what I gathered from a somewhat awkward conversation we had yesterday. I could be wrong. But what was that word he used? Not one I'm at all easy with. So uneasy that I'm having a job trying to bring it to mind.

Was it "syllabus"? Not sure, but anyway he was suggesting we should be should be teaching our people about Quakerism in an ordered, structured fashion......

I didn't say "O no", because I want to operate from common ground. But I did say, later on in the conversation- when other people had joined in- that Quakers were mostly people who were "pissed off" with organised religion.

Do I tell enquirers about Quaker history and values? Yes, if they ask. But I'm not a schoolteacher, never have been, don't want to be......

It's been several months- all summer in fact- since I last posted one of these.

Picture Diary 133

1. Mem'ries

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2. Gotta accept what life brings

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3. Do you like the earring?

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4. Male lesbian

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5. Crossing over

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6. If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!

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C.S. Lewis once said that he was familiar with three religious traditions, His favourite was the Norse, his second favourite was the Greek and coming in third was Christianity. However he practised Christianity because he believed it to be true and the others false. I've always thought this was sad, wrong-headed, self-betraying....

Well perhaps I've not always thought it because there was a time- many years ago- when I was reading him- and was more or less on the same path, while not altogether liking it or feeling all that warmly about the Christ. And not all that warmly about Lewis either. He was more or less right, I believed- but there was something about his stuff that rang a little off key- as if his assent to the Christian doctrines he preached was fully intellectual but not wholehearted.

It's tricky to follow and preach a religion you don't altogether love.

If it comes down to a tussle between heart and head one should go with the heart because the heart is wiser.....

"We're enjoying," I said to my daughter by text, "the friendliest weather for months"

We enjoyed it so much we walked down to the front and bought ourselves lunch at The Beach Deck and- something we very rarely do- ate in in the open air with a view of the sea.

Ailz took a picture of me

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I took a picture of Ailz

And here's a picture of the view out to sea.....

We got a new car. It's a Kia, all-electric and orange.

We like our cars to be colourful and cheery. We covered the bordywork of the last one with stickers of daisies. The new one is going to be decorated with butterflies and bees.

I'm not good at remembering where we parked a car- and I've been known- on several occasions- to have tried to let myself into a car that wasn't ours but resembled it. That's a secondary reason for having one that really doesn't look like any other.....

The forecast has it raining most of the day. Well, good! After a summer when it hardly rained at all a rainy day is welcome.

I just scanned the signatures of the people who showed up at my father's memorial service- as they appear in the little notebook I'm now using as co-clerk of Eastbourne Quakers. Turns out I'm heading the list- and that my signature back then- in 2003- was longer and more legible. These days I sign myself with something that is little more than a sqiggle- and the surname is almost entirely missing. I call this progress because, being fanciful, I think it shows I'm loosening my ties to this temporary personality of mine. Does it also indicate less ego? Not so sure of that.....

My father died at the age of 82. His physical health held up until near the end. What killed him was the bouncy family dog knocking him over so that in falling he hit his head againt the big square boiler in the boiler room. At first it seemed no serious damage had been done- but a week later an undetected bleed on the brain finished him off.

82, that's just seven years ahead of where I am now. Of course, if I live as long as my mother I still have over a quarter of a century left to run.....

I'm now co-clerk.

And I thought I'd better start carrying a book to meetings in which I can write notes etc, so I went up to the attic and went through a box of papers and found a neat little, pretty little, hard-bound notebook. I riffled through it and couldn't see that it had ever been used.

Just the ticket.

But when I sat down in the Business Meeting and opened it, pen in hand, I found writing on the first three pages. Heaven only knows how I'd missed this before.

So it turns out that my neat little, pretty little notebook was the one that had been laid out at the back of the church for all the people who attended my father's funeral to sign. Oh......Bugger! But it was too late to swap it for something genuinely virgin- and I'm used to my parents playing little tricks on me.

OK, Dad, so every time I take notes at the Meeting I'm going to be reminded of you- you cunning swine!

There are three Inspector Hornleigh films. My favourite is the middle one because it's utterly daft, beginning with the Inspector and the Sergeant taking a seaside holiday together and then piling impossibility on unlikelihhod. The third reins back a bit- though not too much- because there's actually a war on and it would be politically incorrect to treat German spies as a joke.

According to wikipedia Alaistar Sim refused to make a fourth because he didn't want to become typecast. I suspect he may also have been unhappy with the way his character in the third movie- hitherto a hapless innocent- has been changed into an incompetent skirt-chaser. That way creepiness lies and I can understand and sympathise with him not wanting to go any further down that road.....

I spend a long period every morning in a state between beginning to wake up and beginning to get up. I believe I always have done.

What I'm doing in that time is moving from one "reality" to another.

This morning I had dreams to think about- the emotions were compelling but fading- and waking responsibilities to think about- which from this cloudy in between state seemed- at least to begin with- less engaging than the dreams....

So-called Reality is Dream, so-called Dream is Reality. Both states exist and are seen as continuous and undivided within a larger Reality or Dream which exists within a larger Reality or Dream which exists within a larger Reality or Dream- and so on....

I'm up and I'm down, I'm up and I'm down. I don't remember being like this before but perhaps it's just that in the past I accepted the up and downness as perfectly normal. Only I don't think so.

This morning as I slowly came to I was thinking, "They're making me clerk, o no! I'm not up to the job. I am so sorry for myself"..

Then I woke up thoroughly, got out of bed and- ping- suddenly I'm going "Yeah! Absolutely. I'm gonna be clerk! What an opportunity!"

I suspect the up and downness isn't simply personal but to do with the state of the world. Old things are falling apart, new things are growing- and the mind keeps switching between lamentation and celebration.

And as I write this a scene from The Winter's Tale (my favourite play) pops into my head. Antigonus (a part I played in a school production) has abandoned baby Perdita on the sea shore of Bohemia and has then been eaten by a bear while a storm sinks the ship he sailed in. Tragedy! Tragedy in overplus! All is lost! But then along comes the shepherd, who is comic relief, and he finds Perdita and takes her up for pity. Next thing his son- also comic relief- runs on, gives him all the bad news and he reflects a moment, dismisses it and says, "Heavy matters, heavy matters. Now look thee here, boy. Now bless theyself. Thou mettest with things dying, I with things new born...."

Shakespeare was a prophet.....

Seems like I'm going to be co-clerk of our local Quaker Meeting.

I've been resisting but the descent now seems inevitble. No-one wants the job, including me, but someone has to do it.

Clerks organise. They're not exactly leaders, certainly not a priests. They write agendas, they guide business meetings, they compose minutes. They're the people who receive emails and send them out.

In business meetings they sit facing everybody else and guide but don't chair (a subtle distinction). Anyone else can stand up and make a point but they are supposed to remain neutral, impersonal, above the action, observing, discerning and keeping their opnions to themselves.

Last night, instead of a novel, I had some papers about clerking to read in bed.

It is a role that calls for self restraint. Also pretty thankless. Do I have the required abilities? Some of them but not others.

The good thing is Ithat John, who I will be stepping up alongside, is vastly experienced in all things Quaker. He's been an active Quaker for twenty-five years and I've done four.

*******

Before I read my Quaker stuff I was watching Inspector Hornleigh- a twisty, all but incomprehensible British murder mystery from 1939 featuring Alastair Sim in one of his early roles. Billed above him is the more than adequate character actor Gordon Harker but it's Sim who stands out, playing a simple-minded detective sergeant with theatrical gusto. Oh those eyes!

Every so often, especially when I'm feeling bleak or panicky or befuddled, I pause and say to myself, "You do know you're simply playing this character......"

We have dispensed with the services of our cleaner. Ailz didn't like her. She thought she wasn't terribly good at what she did. There was also evidence, strong but not conclusive, that she was stealing things.

When you do jobs you don't particularly believe in for the money and nothing else you will skive, cut corners and break rules. I know, because I've done it myself. I worked as a cleaner on the trains once and taking liberties made the job bearable- even good fun at times 'cos I got a kick out of being bad. I was also clever and canny and knew what I could get away with. For instance, if a first class carriage was empty one could go and sit in it between stations and read a discarded newspaper with one's feet up instead of- I don't know- polishing taps in The W.C.. The boss- a wide boy who told us "I work hard and I play hard" (nasty little scrote)- thought of me as an ideal employee. If I was ideal Heaven only knows what my colleagues were getting up to.

So I don't judge.....

But also I don't like employing people to do menial work.

Still if we don't have a cleaner we're going to have to do the job ourselves. As a first step we have been buying mops.

Judy and I have been taking about Muranow, the district of Warsaw that used to be the Jewish ghetto.

After the war the authorities bulldozed the remains and used the rubble to make concrete to rebuild the district. Human remains will have been included in that concrete. Judy says Muranow has a lot of ghosts. I assume she means real ghosts and not just memories.

Muranow is a part of a major city. People need to live there. So what do you do when you're rebuilding? Do you fill it with memorials? But no, because you don't want the new residents to feel weird about their home. Or do you start from scratch, make something very unlike what was there before and hope the past will be forgotten?

I'm told the only building that was left standing wasn't anything Jewish but a Catholic Church. One could write an essay about the implications of this.

All old towns have horrors associated with them. Rome, Istanbul, Paris, London- age after age there have been terrible things happen in them. Even our quaint, pretty little county town of Lewes has had things happen in it that you wouldn't know about unless you did the research. There was a big mediaeval battle fought on the nearby hills and afterwards the soldiers of the defeated army were massacred in the streets. In Queen Mary's reign Protestants were burned alive in the town square.....

Early morning. The no longer entirely full moon is high in sky. The clouds that go past it and over it are orange, then yellow, gradually losing colour as the sun rises. The bits of the landscape that aren't in shadow also change colour. This is the last day of August. It no longer feels quite like summer.

We had wind and rain in the night but not the thunderstorm we'd been forecast. I had a dream in which African people were talking a language called Simbutin.

Our dead friend's friend wanted to spend yesterday just as she'd spent the Sunday she spent with us last year: Quaker meeting to begin with, lunch at a dim little pub on Sovereign Harbour, then a walk down the far end of the development to watch boats come in through the lock. She likes to see the lock gates open and close.

She talks continuously. People who live alone often do. I find, though, that she knows a lot about classical music and "The American Songbook"- and this makes me warm to her because I like it when people are knowledgeable about the things they enjoy. The tells me how she been listening to Leonard Bernstein talking about Mahler's symphonies being crammed with Jewish folk tunes....

"Sunny intervals" says the weather forecast.

But that's life, innit? Sunny intervals.

We have the house back. Having eight people to stay was an interval. Not entirely sunny but sunny in parts.

Nothing ever stays the same.

Nothing constant, nothing still
A hammer beats on a distant hill
To syncopate our sense of loss.
The world tree, the bitter cross
Holds on its arms the guttering breath
Of God involved in the change of death.

I wrote that when I was a still a Christian- a clergyman no less. The fact that I remember it (though I've forgotten most of the poem in which it was embedded) means it must still resonate with me. The imagery is Christian, the sentiment universal. God- who is us- has chosen to be involved in change.....

Today we are spending some time with a friend of a deceased friend who is spending the bank holiday weekend at a hotel on Grand Parade. She thinks we're wonderful, we don't like her very much. I'll be doing my best to think sunny thoughts because reality isn't imposed on us, we make it ourselves.

The birthday party was loud. No music. Just loud voices in a small room. I can enjoy that sort of thing for a limited amount of time. Very limited- and this went on for hours.

Odi and the other seven went up to London in the evening and are now going to enjoy and add to the loudness of the Notting Hill carnival.

Wendy and Mary who were at the party stayed overnight. Wendy fixed me eggs for breakfast.

Seems like it's now going to rain all day.

I know I'm not as bouncy as I was a year ago but I'd hoped our annual visitors wouldn't notice. Only Odi did.

Odi has been talking for a while of moving down to Eastbourne in the hazy future to look after us- her sort of parents- in our old age. She's now saying that because of my steep decline she needs to firm things up.

Is my decline really so steep?

Well, my health ain't bad. The blood tests I had done a couple of weeks back have revealed nothing wrong. Except for a little too much cholestrol. The doctor is prescribing statins and I've said "OK" in order to keep him sweet- only I might forget to take them.

But I am slower, weaker, wearier......

Do I mind? No more than I mind any change in my circumstances. It would be nice if things always stayed the same, but boring perhaps.

I see movement out the corner of my eye. I look. For a moment I think it's a mouse or vole sitting on the floor. Then I recognise that it's a feather that has drifted in through the open patio door

It's a pigeon feather.

I see more movement at the door -and, blimey, it's a squirrel. It almost comes in the house then thinks better of it and scurries off.....

Feathers are common round here but squirrels ain't.

I love pigeons, I love squirrels. And all the more because lots of people think them a bloody nuisance.

Both of them showing up at the end of this post- which reveals more personal stuff than I usually do- feels like Dame Nature giving me a nod and a wink.....

There was heavy rain and a thunderstorm last night. I'd thought it was a brief thunderstorm but Ailz says it went on for ages and at one point she got up and shut the bedroom window because the rain was blowing in- something I hadn't registered at all. So clearly I slept through most of it.....

The brown lawn is turning green. I'll need to be mowing it soon.

Mother arguing with sixteen year old daughter.

The issue is whether daughter should do the washing up now in accord with mother's "routine" or later at her own time of choosing

Mother wants Ailz and me to back her up and is shocked that we don't.

We say things like,

"Don't be so bossy".

"Your're on holiday and this is our house so your routine doesn't apply and basically we don't give a fuck whether the washing up is done this evening or not."

and

"Teenagers are supposed to rebel against their parents."

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poliphilo

September 2026

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A Little Awkward

Picture Diary 133

Head And Heart

Friendly Weather

New Car

So How Much Longer Do I Have?

Notebook

Hornleigh

Between Realities

Up And Down

Clerking

A Reminder

Cleaning

All Towns Are Haunted

The Last Days Of Summer

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Rebel, Rebel.....

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