The dog is only a puppy. It whines and whinges. The owner has issues (I see the symptoms; I don't know the underlying cause) and fusses with the dog. This is happening in the silent Meeting and can't be allowed to go on so I do my elder thing and extract them from the Meeting and take them for a walk. They behave perfectly well, but when we get back to the Meeting House there is drama. Tears. "I didn't want to go for a walk" . Other people pitch in- which is as it should be.  In Quakerism everyone is a priest and nobody is. It's one of the fundamentals. Ministry is shared, not vested in a single person.

This matter will be on-going.....

The dog is a cockapoo. My daughter has one of those. They're the most restless, boisterous dog ever invented. I'm told that the breeder who put spaniel and poodle together is on record as saying, "That was my biggest mistake." And yet they're so popular, so fashionable.

I'm not a dog person, but there are dogs I like. The person with the cockapoo previously owned an elderly greyhound. That dog was a love. And Edna has a Romanian street dog called Molly which is bright eyed and altogether delightful.

 I'm fitter than I thought.

I was part of a three man team moving a very heavy couch out of Edna and Miriam's, into a van, across town and into the Meeting House- and I wasn't the one huffing and puffing.

It's nice to surprise oneself.

 As Damian and his assistant were loading the remains of the piano- now partially dismembered- on the back of the van a chap with long hair (musicianly type- I wonder now if he was someone I should have recognised) drove past, stopped and came over to see what we were up to. I told him the lamentable story. "Pity," he said, "I'd have bought it off you." "Pity you didn't come by five minutes earlier," I replied. 

Twenty years and more of not being able to shift the damn thing and just after we've rendered unsaleable we have someone come by who might have been a buyer. Ain't that just life! Thomas Hardy would have called it a "Satire of Circumstance" and worked it up into one of his awkard, cussed, indelible little pomes.....

By the way, Damian says he means to keep some of the fancy carved woodwork and repurpose it as a shelf. 

The piano had been sitting at the Meeting House unplayed and untuned for decades. David who was around twenty years ago said it was a bone of contention even then. We discussed it, we deliberated, but no no-one actually did anything because such is the Quaker way. "It's so heavy," we complained. We mentioned it to our mate Damian and he said, "I'll get it out for you." And he did. It took him all of ten minutes,

One has to be a little sad. It was a good piano. Legend says it was once played by Donald Swan....

 Picture Diary 91

1. The Great Gandalfo



2. Green Lady



3. Skeleton Coast



4. The Parade's Gone By



5. Candy Stripe Sue



6. The Lost Traveller's Dream Under The Hill

 We sat in the front row, holding up a phone to film the talk. Harvey warned us he danced around a lot. And so he does. The rock 'n' roll recording we made will end up on the Eastbourne Quaker website.

Harvey Gillman is one of British Quakerisms strongest voices. He's Jewish, mystical, a bit Zen, gay and very very angry. He goes to the Rye Meeting and we're very lucky to have him in Sussex East. He writes books. He writes poems.

His title was "Spirituality in an Age of Anxiety". He asked us to define spirituality- or, rather, not define it- because that would be theology (perish the thought) but to give him our feelings about it. I said "freedom" and if I hadn't had my turn I might also have said "openness".

He talked about his anger at the state of the world.  "Anger is guilt turned outwards," he suggested, quoting someone or other. I used to be very angry myself and gave it up- because my mantra is that it's fear turned outwards- but guilt is a more complex, more equivocal emotion than fear and now, thanks to him, I'm wondering if I should be angrier....

A thunderstorm passed over us last night. I could feel the air shivering as it came closer and closer. In the event we were only brushed by its skirts but I think other places, further inland, will have really received a hammering.

 The baby starlings- soft fluffy things with very sharp beaks- are out of their nests and telling their parents to feed them now, now, now! What a racket they do make!

The gull stands in the bird bath cooling its feet. 

 Not the first American Pope (Francis was that) but the first from the USA.

He chose his name in homage to Leo XIII- who was known as a reformer, as left-wing as any Pope is ever likely to be- and for promoting the Rosary and the cult of the Virgin Mary.

(Has his election something to do with him being anti-Trump and anti-Vance?}

His record on child sex abuse is questionable.

 Our oldest grandchild, Fabrizio, now in his mid-teens, has been offered an apprenticeship with Tranmere Rovers- on the proviso that he gets GCEs in English and Maths.

Boy done good!

Tranmere Rovers, never an elite club, has a long and not inglorious history. Founded in the 1880s and based in Birkenhead- t'other side of the Mersey from Liverpool- they currently play in Division 2 of the English Football League. This is their crest. The shield is that of the Birkenhead and the boat on the ball references Birkenhead's historic identity as a ship-building town. The motto means something like "Where there is faith there is light and strength"



 I know it's not much of a recommendation but even I have heard of them.

 We took Elisa to the Long Man Inn. "There aren't many other people in this world I'd buy lunch for" said Ailz.

That's three times we've been there in the last fortnight. Crazy!

One of these days when they're not as busy as they were on a Bank Holiday Monday I'll go round and identify all the little Bloomsbury name tags they've got fixed to the backs of the pews out of Berwick church. Maybe take pictures. Yesterday I found Carrington and Lytton Strachey side by side in the area labelled as "Locals Bar".

And so to the hill figure. I've been reading up about it. And to my surprise I find that the most recent theory, based on archaeology, has it pegged as late mediaeval/early modern. If this is so, then most of the more fanciful, neo-pagan ideas about it go out the window. Would people in the 15th century have been carving massive figures of Odin on their pasturelands? I think not.

But if anything the mystery deepens. If it's mediaeval/modern it becomes roughly contemporary with the other big humanoid hill figure- the Cerne Abbas Giant- and both would seem to be associated with monasteries. Cerne Abbas had an abbey and Wilmington had a priory. So what did the monks think they were doing? In neither case are we looking at Catholic iconography.

Nobody knows. Nobody is even coming up with plausible speculations.

So here "he" is. The largest representation of a human figure in Northern Europe, dominatiing his landscape, looking, "naked towards the shires"