Right Ordering

 They have some comparatively modern chairs at the Lewes Meeting House, but they also still have benches. Highly traditional and all that but damn uncomfortable. O, but our ancestors were hardy!

Many of those ancestors are buried in the garden at the front of the building. I was looking at the headstones yesterday with Margaret. The burials date from the late 18th to the early 20th century but all the headstones are exactly the same- same shape and size, same very plain lettering. In the larger world styles in funerary monuments were constantly changing- and a 20th century headstone is wholly unlike an 18th century one- but the Quaker headstone is so lacking in style it's a style classic, beautiful in its simplicity. You couldn't improve on it so why try? Besides Equality is, hand in hand with Simplicity, a Quaker virtue- and it would be reprehensible to attempt to go one up on one's forebears.



We were in Lewes for an Area General Meeting. The Quaker way of doing things- "right ordering"- is slow and laborious and I could wish we'd streamline it. We took a decision- appointed a couple of people to perform a particular job- and then, because someone pointed out that it hadn't been done by the book, we had to do it all over again- with the same result. As always at these  gatherings I look round and note how old everyone is. Was there anyone there under 60? Possibly one, possibly two.  Younger Quakers do exist but they don't have much enthusiasm for sitting on benches ordering things rightly......

This Isn't Supposed To Happen

 They say you never die in dreams, but I came close to it last night.

Gangsters were murdering members of the clergy. A famale priest had already been killed. A male priest demonstrated how to thwart a knifeman by dropping to the ground and curling into a ball. We were told not to be to worried because the gangsters had little enthusiasm for the work and if you dodged them they wouldn't pursue you because they were eager to get away to the golf course.

I was in the back garden (of the house I grew up in) with my mother. The dog started to bark and we realised someone had entered the house from the front. I went to the back door and the hitman met me there. He stood a little above me, lowered his shotgun and gave me both barrels in the stomach at point blank range. "Goodbye" I said to my mother and the world in general. 

The hitman, looking distraught, said something that amounted to "So

This Isn't Supposed To Happen

 They say you never die in dreams, but I came close to it last night.

Gangsters were murdering members of the clergy. A female priest had already been killed. A male priest demonstrated how to thwart a knifeman by dropping to the ground and curling into a ball. We were told not to be to worried because the gangsters had little enthusiasm for the work and if you dodged them they wouldn't pursue you because they were eager to get away to the golf course.

I was in the back garden (of the house I grew up in) with my mother. The dog started to bark and we realised someone had entered the house from the front. I went to the back door and the hitman met me there. He stood a little above me, lowered his shotgun and gave me both barrels in the stomach at point blank range. "Goodbye" I said to my mother and the world in general. 

The hitman, looking distraught, said something that amounted to "So