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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.....

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."

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......

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....

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.

Picture Diary 108

1. A new kind of apple tree

2. The first snow

3. Homunculus

4. Incarnation

5 The golden birds

6. Robin

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.....

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....

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.....

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?

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.....

"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."

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..."

We are discussing our plans for the day and I can't help myself and say, "A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!"

Ailz looks blank

"It's one of those things," I explain

"A mnemonic?" she suggests.

"No, one of those things where you write 'em backwards and they're exactly the same."

"A palindrome."

"Yes, I like 'em. Just a pity I can't remember what they're called...."

The challenge with a palindrome is to for it to be as long as possible and still conform to the rules of grammar and make some kind of sense. "A man, a plan" is just about the most convincing I know. It's longish- and one can imagine someone actually exclaiming it in admiration of de Lesseps, the engineer who built the Panama Canal.

The longest I know which isn't complete nonesense is this following astonishing performance by W.H. Auden:

"T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I'd assign it a name: Gnat dirt upset on drab pot toilet."

The Hayes is in Swanwick. Next to Swanwick- less than a mile away- is the even smaller village of Pentrich. I walked there Saturday morning. There's a mediaeval church in Pentrich but we'll save that for another day.

In 1817 Pentrich staged its very own revolution.

It was a poor excuse for a revolution, but one shouldn't mock because people suffered and died.....

A government spy, working for Lord Sidmouth, stirred up the local radicals with lies about a revolution pending in London- and encouraged them to do their bit.

Accordingly, on the night of 9-10 of June a bunch of them armed themselves lightly and set off round the district, shouting for "Reform" and trying to persuade and bully people into joining them Refused entry at one of the bigger houses they broke a window and their leader, Jeremiah Brandreth- an out of work stocking-maker- fired a shot through it, killing a servant. This horrified many of his followers but Brandreth threatened to shoot them too if they deserted- so the increasinly bedraggled and disheartened band carried on their progress through the surrounding villages until they ran into a body of 20 Light Dragoons. The men scattered, 40 were arrested, Brandreth and other leaders initially escaped but were hunted down and made an example of.

The leaders were found guilty of High Treason- the penalty for which was to be hung drawn and quartered. The authorities waived the drawing and quartering (too grisly for the 19th century) but kept the hanging and beheading. This was the last time beheading was carried out at an execution in England. The public were disgusted by the government's over-reaction and by it's ever-so-unEnglish use of an agent provocateur- and literary liberals- notably Percy Shelley and Charles Lamb said uncomplimentary things. Three man went to the scaffold and others were transported to Australia. As a group they became known as the Pentrich martyrs.

The spy- who went by various names, but was known to the revolutionaries as William Oliver- found England too hot to hold him and was hastily shipped out to Cape Colony in South Africa where he avoided lynching, worked as a builder, designed a church and died at 50......

There exists a popular print of Brandreth's head in the hands of the executioner, but this is a family blog so here instead is a pity-inducing portrait of him at his trial

This is where we've been over the past couple of days.

The Hayes Christian Conference Centre, near Alfreton, Derbyshire.

Looks like a Victorian asylum....

But actually it's a Victorian country house- built by and for the man responsibe for London's St Pancras Station. Inside whatever character it may once have had has been exorcised by the application of gallons and gallons of magnolia paint. The Christians bought it in 1910 and visitors down the years have included T.S. Eliot, John Betjeman, C.S. Lewis and numerous German POWs. One of the POWs was Franz von Werra, the great escaper- the only Axis prisoner to get away from his captors and make it back to Germany. Von Werra was persistent in his escape attempts- the one from the Hayes involving him tunneling out below the wire, impersonating a Dutch bomber pilot, getting himself taken to a airfield by his dupes and very nearly managing to steal a Hurricane. When he finally got away it was friom Canada where he'd been dispatched to make escape so very much more difficult. There's a movie about him starring Hardy Kruger called The One That Got Away.

Our room wasn't in the main house but in the labyrinth of characterless mid 20th century buildings round the back. The place can house some 400 people- and we Quakers were doing our thing alongside a community choir from Birmingham, a gathering of Albinos and a noisy bunch of Catholic menfolk. The food was good, the staff were friendly, the service was efficient, but we agreed that the venue wasn't really our style. Still Ailz and jacky thought their course was excellent and I got to wander about, visit an historic village, complete a couple more screens of the game I play on my phone and read most of a chapter of Alan Watts' The Way of Zen.....

We're off to Derbyshire today. Ailz and Jacky (who will be travelling with us) are signed up for a course on clerking a Quaker Meeting- and I'm tagging along as Ailz's carer. I think my role will mainly involve eating meals and looking out the window but one never knows.

We're staying at Swanwick- a Christian Conference centre near Alfreton. That word "Christian" makes me uneasy.....

Odd how words come through in dreams that you have no reason to use in waking life. "Milice" for instance. I had to look it up to check whether it meant what I thought it did.

And it did.

Milice is the French word for militia- and more specifically for the paramilitary group set up in Vichy France to fight the Resistance. They did bad things and- after the Liberation- had bad things done to them. In Louis Malle's film Lacombe Lucien a not very nice, really rather stupid young man joins the Milice because the Resistance won't have him. All he wants is to belong to a gang- and once he does he enjoys the power it gives him. I don't suppose he is untypical....

I take heart from the observation that in my dream the Milice HQ is a ruin....

I dreamed I was in a bus that was going through Oldham. "Hey," I said to my companion, "I've never been in this part of town before." We were travelling up a hill and to the right was a ruined temple complex with very tall Roman pillars. "Ah," they said, "That's the headquarters of the Milice- the military police....."