The last surviving airman to have piloted a plane during the Battle of Britain died on Monday at the age of 105. You can't get more British than a Battle of Britain pilot only- as it happens- John Hemingway was Irish. His mates, inevitably, called him Paddy. Britain and Ireland have had their differences but in spite of all that we love one another dearly.

 "Quakerism is queer and vibrant and colourful" says the lead story in "The Friend" and my first thought was, "By God, that would be good." But I've been reflecting this morning and reviewing the Quakers I know- here and elsewhere along the South Coast- and surprising myself with the number of us who are poets, painters, musicians or practitioners of other crafts. Three of us at Eastbourne used to be Wiccans, M over there in the corner followed the hippy trail to Katmandu, M ran an international talent agency and knew Kubrick and knows Elton John- and the visiting attender from Brighton, whom I met for the first time yesterday, was active on the London folk scene in the late 60s.

We look like a bunch of coffin-dodgers but actually we're pretty funky.

Still we could do with the younger generation showing up.

And actually we had three young(er) women come through the door yesterday and give every indication that they'll be coming again.  Hooray! Quakerism is a sweet idea and it would be nice if it carried on for a little bit longer.

 There were six of us talking at cross purposes with raised voices. D started it. He's a bag of nerves, afraid of his own shadow and with a propensity to project that shadow onto other people, but if I'm honest I must admit that a Situation like this has many makers- and I was one of them. The Quakerly thing would have been to say, "Let's sit down and work through the issues calmly, speaking one at a time"- but the Quaker way calls for superhuman levels of patience and forebearance and we're only human....

I think, to comfort myself, of the Pauline epistles and the Book of Revelation. Seems like those early Christians weren't so very Quakerly either. Paul certainly had a gob on him- and John the Divine was even worse.

The upshot was that D and his partner departed in clouds of dust and probably won't come back. They were tricky people to deal with, but gifted with it- and it's a terrible pity. 

He's a musician. I watched one of his YouTube vids yesterday. You won't have heard of him but, yes, he's gifted....

 YouTube has sussed that I like folk music and has been introducing me to a new generation of artists.

I'm particularly taken with The Longest Johns- a group of tall young men who frequently sing a capella- and with Julie (I can't find her second name) whose channel is called Eat, Bake, Sing.

What is a folk song? By this stage I'd say it's anything that can be sung in a pub with a pint of beer to hand, but even that may be over-prescriptive. The Longest Johns have a repertoire that includes covers of Marty Robins and the Wurzels. I think Nessun Dorma is probably not a folk song (too difficult) and neither is the latest KPop confection- but perhaps there are those who'd be prepared to argue....

The Longest Johns have inventive videos. They put on helmets and go down a working pit to sing their thumpingly good version of Byker Hill. Julie films herself on her phone singing in the great outdoors. She gives us John Barleycorn sitting on the edge of a barley field with cars going past- and if she wants a bit of reverb she goes and stands under a railway arch. In at least one vid she's carrying her youngest child in a sling and the baby joins in. I think this home-made approach is very, very folk. 

Both Julie and the Long Johns have versions of Peter Bellamy's setting of Kipling's A Tree Song (better known as Oak and Ash and Thorn) Lots of artists cover it and from what I'd seen it's become Bellamy's greatest hit. It's a shame he succumbed to melancholia so early and is no longer around to see how his work persists in the tradition. Peace be to his troubled spirit!

 Lots of fighting in my dreams- confused, meaningless fighting and cruelty.

This is a time of breakdown. 

So much noise. Let's not add to it.

But hold to whatever truth we possess and be as quiet and as still as possible.

Protective but not defensive: so many "truths" are falling down. Maybe ours will be among them....

No attachment then to things that are passing away. 

Steer clear of quarrels and don't pick them.

No name-calling. It will just make it harder to work with those we've disrespected when the time for rebuilding comes.

As it will. 

Only speak from love

Only act from love.....

 YouTube keeps showing me clips of showdowns. It knows I like them. Only I don't....

The participants may be dressed as cowboys or as gangsters or as knights in armour or even as high school kids- but the action always follows the same script. There's a bad guy or guys. They're mean and taunting and altogether horrible and then there's the good guy who is clearly the underdog and didn't ask for any of this. Everything is going the bad guy's way and then the good guy pulls a nifty move that proves him/her to be the fastest gun in the west/ the master/mistress of some spectacular martial art and the bad guys go the way of all flesh. Justice has been served. 

Gotta love the reversal, but suppose the good guy hadn't had that totally remarkable skill. Why he/she would have been pasted all over the floor by now with bits sticking to the ceiling and dripping. The moral isn't that good always wins out but that in a mean old world you've got to be meaner than the opposition and the only way to defeat violence is with still more excellent violence. And I'm not having it. I reject it. I don't think we'll make a better world until we get over this foolishness.....

At the end of Wish Rd- an unprepossessing back street where the gentry who originally inhabited Eastbourne kept their horses and servants- is a sign pointing in the general direction of the Meeting House- which says- simply- FRIENDS. Most passers-by who bother to read it are  mystified. If it said QUAKERS they might get the drift- not that most people have any idea what Quakers are beyond having something to do with oats.....

But Quakers is a nickname. One of those nicknames- like Queer- that the stigmatised picked up and wore as a badge of pride. It says nothing about us worth knowing. We don't quake- unless it's from infirmity- and our proper name- our official name- is The Society of Friends. 

And we do aspire to be friendly, kind, empathetic. Our "worship"- which mostly consists of sitting silently in a room- is about setting aside the pettiness and snippiness of everyday existence- and going deep into a shared experience of Love.  All our "testmonies"- our in-house name for commitment to simplicity, peace, integrity, community and equality- arise out of this. We go to the wellspring and bring back water to share with one another and the world. 

When you reduce Quakerism to its essentials it's simply this- a group of friends aspiring to be kind who seek the strength to be so in Silence. 

 I had a dream in which everyone was wearing some sort of armour and I think it was about a king, but I've forgotten everything else about it. I think it came out of my reading Carlyle's French Revolution last thing at night- the early chapters, that is-  in which Carlyle tears Louis XV into little tiny pieces. 

Was Louis really a pointless and useless as Carlyle makes out? I checked in with Wikipedia this morning and came away with a not unattractive image of a man who was intelligent, amiable and riddled with self doubt. The portraits show him as middling handsome, a bit like Stanley Tucci- and very French. Had gitanes been invented iin the 18th century he'd have smoked them. He liked sex- perhaps overmuch for his reputation- but said, winningly- that his girls were the only people he could trust to tell him the truth- because they were the only people who really loved him. Poor Louis. Being a king of France in the 18th century must have been a tough gig. He housed his girls in a house called Le Parc aux Certs- the Deer Park- which was poetic of him.

I no longer believe in History, only in histories- and if it suits Carlyle's artistic purpose to monster Louis I'm not greatly bothered. Carlyle is not much loved or read these days, but his French Revolution is one of the great books of the 19th century- a philosophical, prose-poetical epic that one goes to for the same reason one goes to Shakespeare's history plays- because it's quite simply tremendous. Oh the energy! 

 Chalk Farm Nursery in Willingdon huddles against the bulk of the South Downs. There's a white scar on the hill from which chalk has been extracted- hence the farm's name. It's a beautiful location. We were there to buy a climbing rose. 

Chalk Farm is a real farm. Beyond the fence are fields- and in the fields are sheep. I wonder if there's a footpath up to the top of the hill?

"Remember when we were here last and the lambs were making the most terrible din," said Ailz. "That was because they'd been separated from their mothers to be fattened up for slaughter...." 

Farms are industry and industry is heartless. All those poets who wrote about pretty baa-lambs, did they think about what was really going on?

 Politicians mostly play the game. They play it competently or incompetently, ethically or unethically- but they recognise the guidelines and more or less keep inside them. Once in a while though a politician comes along who doesn't give a damn for the rules....

And has whatever it takes to carry all before them (at least for a while)

Such people are extraordinary. They change the world. In the past two or three centuries we have seen....

Napoleon

Hitler

Gandhi

Mao

And now there's Trump. 

Does Trump really belong in that category or does he seem larger than he is because of a trick of perspective? 

I guess that depends on how long he lasts.....