Bad Quaker
May. 4th, 2026 08:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphilo Friends House- described in the literature as "The Home of British Quakerism"- is grand- in a style I think of, perhaps unfairly, as Mussolini classical. It is by no means the grandest building on Euston Road- but it fits in. Compared to Gilbert Scott's vainglorious St Pancras Hotel a few blocks to the west it's a modest little thing- but Quakers shouldn't fit it. Historically they were always the grit in the corner of the eye that made society blink. I look at that facade, I walk those long corridors, I admire the huge circular Meeting Room and think "This is how and where we went wrong".
Friends House makes it's money by hiring itself out for corporate events. No, no, no, no, no!
I am a bad Quaker. I refer to the table in the centre of the Meeting Room as "the altar", and call Advices and Queries "The little red book".
But then G.K. Chesterton once said that a religion that can't laugh at itself isn't worth having.....
David and Jane- who fell out with us for giving shelf room to secular media (we were storing it for Terry in Thailand)- including art books with nudes in them (O God how awful) and the CD of a movie they reckoned was "pornography" (it isn't)- are still very hot against the Eastbourne Meeting. They encountered John the other day and informed him we were "toxic". I was upset when I heard this but now I'm thinking I should embrace it.
Eastbourne Quakers- spreading toxicity for over seventy years- how's that for a slogan?
Friends House makes it's money by hiring itself out for corporate events. No, no, no, no, no!
I am a bad Quaker. I refer to the table in the centre of the Meeting Room as "the altar", and call Advices and Queries "The little red book".
But then G.K. Chesterton once said that a religion that can't laugh at itself isn't worth having.....
David and Jane- who fell out with us for giving shelf room to secular media (we were storing it for Terry in Thailand)- including art books with nudes in them (O God how awful) and the CD of a movie they reckoned was "pornography" (it isn't)- are still very hot against the Eastbourne Meeting. They encountered John the other day and informed him we were "toxic". I was upset when I heard this but now I'm thinking I should embrace it.
Eastbourne Quakers- spreading toxicity for over seventy years- how's that for a slogan?
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Date: 2026-05-04 04:38 pm (UTC)