poliphilo

For much of yesterday there was a man sitting nonchalantly on the slope of a neighbouring roof scraping moss off the tiles with a long-handled tool.....

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"Do you believe in Banshees?" asked Damian. "Of course," I said. "I believe in everything"

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Is the US President really so dumb that he overlooked the possibility that his name might appear in the Epstein Files? I think his extraordinary volte-face might have more to do with someone reminding him that it is unwise to annoy the Intelligence Services (for whom Epstein was almost certainly working) and that there was once a man called John F Kennedy.

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The have always been wild-men. In Britain we called them wodwos or woodoses or variations thereof. They live in the wildernesses and as the wildernesses retreat so do they. They thrive in the American and Canadian backwoods-where the polite name is Sasquatch and the nickname is Bigfoot- and you might be surprised at how many people have not only seen and heard them but regularly interact with them.

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I think my job at the Meeting House is to be friendly and welcoming- not something I ever used to be- and yesterday I rather overdid it and frightened a visitor off.

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"Seek to know one another in the things that are eternal" is a sentence that appears in the Quaker handbook called Advice and Queries. John has been puzzling over it and wanted to know what we thought it meant. To me it has the tang of 17th century English and I'm thinking it has been extracted from one of the early, classic texts and shoehorned in among much later matter. I suggested it meant we should relate to one another as spiritual beings and overlook the quirks of personality that can be so annoying and alienating- and that it comes out of the same mystical mindset as Fox's brilliant line about "answering that of God in every man". Others had suggestions too, but I don't believe John was entirely persuaded by any of us.