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"He loves rugger," she said. "In fact he's going to a match today in Twinkleham..."

"Twickenham," we suggested.

"Yeah, well," she said, "I don't know anything about rugger."

And then, several hours later- after the dinner and the playing with babies and the catching up with news- we took a wrong turning on our way home and, by one of those (probably) meaningless freaks of synchronicity- found ourselves driving through a stretch of London we'd never visited before. First Kew, then Richmond- then down a road where people in bunches that turned into crowds all seemed to be converging on a single place. What was the draw? Why the match between Leicester and Saracens at ~~Twinkleham~~ Twickenham- and somewhere among them, no doubt, was the chap our granddaughter had been telling us about....

George Harrison wrote "It's Sunshine Life For Me' at the beginning of the 70s and gave it to Ringo but I'd never heard it before- and stumbling upon George's own recording of it yesterday morning raised my spirits no end.

It's a bit country, a bit folk, a bit Irish, a bit sea shanty- and the cheeriest thing ever.

1. O, Scotland, Scotland

2. Making Art

3. I can see right up your nose

4 Betwixt and Between

5. Maker of Worlds

We were minding Edna and Miriam's two dogs yesterday.

Two or three minutes before Edna and Miriam drove up to collect them, Molly- the Romanian street dog- started to get excited and jumped up on a chair back to look out the window; she knew they coming....

Yeah, dogs are telepathic. So are a lot of other animals.

So are human beings actually.....

The_Reverend_John_Mason_Neale_and_family_(Sackville_College,_East_Grinstead_-_1855).jpeg

This is the Rev'd John Mason Neale, photographed with his family at Sackville College, an almshouse in East Grinstead of which he was, for a time, the warden.

Neale was a priest, scholar, medievalist and religious reformer, best remembered today as a writer of hymns. Anyone brought up in the Anglican church is likely to have sung some of his compositions.

Neale's practice as a hymnwriter was to dig out mediaeval tunes and either translate their texts into English or furnish them with new words. His best loved hymn is the one about the king who looked out "on the feast of Stephen" and saw a poor man, "gathering winter fuel." The tune can be found in various sources, including the Carmina Burana, but the words and sentiments are entirely Neale's own. They have been deplored as doggerel, but there's something about them that sticks in the mind- maybe it's just that they tell such a good story.....

And when is the Feast of Stephen?

Why today, Dec 26th, Boxing Day.

I'm eating pretzels.

And have been eating stollen and roasted cashews- and drinking Kentucky fried bourbon.

Cancel the "fried".

And Christmas dinner hasn't even happened yet.

We were at the Meeting House earlier. Quakers aren't supposed to celebrate Christmas- but some of us do. There were four of us. Paul had been at the Midnight Mass at St Saviours (because his partner sings in the choir) and was still fuming about the whole carry-on- the chasubles, the slinging about of holy water, the berettas, the celebrant waltzing around with the Dolly that was standing in for baby Jesus, the excess of incense that had the congregation coughing. In his redaction it was greatly entertaining, but perhaps not so entertaining to sit through. He couldn't remember the word "manger" and had to stop himself saying "barbecue" instead.....

Our worship (I don't like that word but I can't think of a better) was silent. I had left the Bible open on the ~~altar~~ central table at Luke 2 and thought Alan might have read from it but he didn't.. Never mind, the silence was charged with Christmas spirit-....

Few of us Quakers grew up in the Society. In our community of 20-30 I am aware of only two. The rest of us have been Anglicans, Catholics, Witches, Jehovah's Witnesses, Plymouth Bretheren. We come into the Society trailing clouds of glory about which we may or may not feel nostalgic. Some have a hankering after evangelical hymns; myself, I crave candles....

Candles and carols.....

Quakers who started out in the Church of England are known as Quanglicans.

When you write"Friend" with a capital "F" it means a fellow Quaker, When you write it with a small "f" it means a personal friend. I think we should be aiming at a state of affairs where all Friends are also friends.

It looks as though two of the people whose status is both F and f will be spending Christmas in hospital. These aren't old people but two of our younger members. One has an infected gall stone, the other we don't know about. In both cases this is a sudden and unexpected development.

It would be good to get to see them, but they are in separate hospitals in the further reaches of the County- and there is lots to do here in Eastbourne....

We were at Edna and Miriam's yesterday. Miriam are I are both Aquarians. We talk esoterica....

Trouble at t'Meeting House: there's a character whose behaviour is annoying- going on disruptive- but who is also in need of pastoral care. Ain't it always the way, that the people who need love the most are also the least lovable?

It seems I'm an elder now. I thought I had to submit to the Area Meeting, but the message that comes down from that level is that a local Meeting chooses its elders and the area Meeting simply notes that they've been chosen. I've slipped into the role without any kind of fuss, without any kind of initiation.

Being an elder means I have a certain authority within the Meeting. I need to own that authority, which is something I didn't manage when the person I'm thinking about was cutting up rough yesterday.

Afterwards I figured out exactly what I should have done.

I have never been comfortable with authority- either when it's being radiated by other people or when I've been required to radiate it myself. I tell Ailz I want a chain of office or a hat- which is a joke, but not entirely. There's a reason why monarchs wear crowns and bishops wear mitres (derived I'm told told from the headgear of the priests of Dagon- the fish god.) Such things reinforce authority, and most people are willing to go along with the masquerade. A Quaker elder has no badge of office- only the name.

We were at the oriental buffet yesterday because Mary is a fussy eater and the buffet serves up some of the few things she's willing to eat.

Mary is vegan but like most of the rest of us has chinks in her armour. Her chink is sweet stuff. My chink is seafood. My other chink is cheese.

It's very trying to eat out and have to stick to the vegan options because they get to be awfully boring. At home one can do interesting things with vegetables, but few restaurants bother.

I find to my surprise- after a lifetime despising it- that I really like cabbage.

Mary wore the Japanese outfit we bought her for Christmas. She had reservations about it but we assured her nothing could be more appropriate- and that the buffet woukld be full of people from the far east. It is sometimes, but yesterday it wasn't.....

Here's Mary being Japanese. Her genes are one quarter Chinese, but Japanese culture is way cooler....

According to Mary, you wear the fancy doodad on the left side of your sash if you're alive and on the right side if you're dead. She's probably right. She watches an awful lot of anime and has taught herself to read ideograms. Or some ideograms, anyway. Not bad for a 12 year old

I think the word "Solstice"- and hear the breathy, hooty sound of rams horns in my head. They are being blown by white bearded chaps (like me, like me!) wearing white robes of and wreaths of oak leaves- no- wrong time of year- wearing white robes and wreaths of holly and mistletoe- while the sun rises over a very special stone or between two very special stones and everybody who has gathered for the occasion makes tribal noises to welcome in the New Year.

(The Solstice is the proper New Year. Those who moved the New Year to January I were being ignorant or obtuse or deliberately destructive of tradition.)

Pour the mead, light the fires, roast the meats, bang and blow and pluck and shake whatever instruments are available.

Dance....

Then drink some mead and dance some more.....

"One of us," says Ailz- looking at me with a penetrating gaze- "is going to have to put up the Christmas tree today...."

Yes, well, the front room is mostly clear of clutter now. I just need to vac in there and it'll be back to something like normal. Time to get in the mood....

Edwin Morgan's "The Computer's First Christmas Card" pops into my head. It makes me happy and festive. The site I've linked to has the text but also a kid performing it- a prodigious feat of memory and verbal control. The poem was first published in 1968- when computers were things that filled rooms and had all the brain power of a budgerigar.....

Time was when whistleblowers got called "traitors", had to run for the shelter of some foreign country, did prison time, had car accidents on little travelled country roads- and all that kind of thing. Now they flit from studio to studio- ex-FBI men, goverment insiders, veterans of secret programmes- or so they say- and no man's hand is raised against them.

I've watched a couple recently of whom I feel deeply suspicious.

I've written before about Mad Jack Fuller (1757-1834)

He was a hard drinking country squire who dotted his estate with follies and had himself buried under a dinky little pyramid in Brightling churchyard.

We were driving round the Sussex Weald the other day and going down one of the few roads we hadn't been down before when I spotted this.

As its tip appeared above the trees I took it for a church- which is what Mad Jack hoped I'd think. In fact it's a free standing cone of masonry, with a circular room at the bottom- and there's a story that goes with it.

At a carouse in London, Mad Jack bet a crony a considerable sum that he could see the spire of Dallington church from his house- only when he got home he found he'd forgotten in his cups that there was a hill in the way. No ptoblem! He wasn't going to be bested by mere topography- and set about rectifying matters by having his builders erect him a spire on the hill top- something that legend says they achieved in a single night. What the legend doesn't say is whether anyone was ever fooled by this stratagem- and whether he lost or won the bet.

They call the thing The Sugar Loaf- because in Mad Jack's day sugar was sold in cones. Incidentally, Jack owned plantations in the West Indies- and sugar was his chief source of income- which may be the true but less amusing reason for the existence of the spire on the hill. And ,yes, he was a slave owner and defended slavery in parliament. On the plus side he was a keen amateur astronomer and one of his other follies is an observatory. He also funded Humphrey Davy.

He would have liked to be known as "Honest Jack" but the public wasn't having it.....

In the next room Ailz and Damian are talking about scrap metal. Lead, says Damian used to have real value, now, because it's toxic, it has none. This, I suppose, is good news for churches and other historical buildings with roofs which won't be worth stealing any longer.

Our gardener, says Ailz, used to collect updiscarded batteries he'd find in fields- big batteries out of tractors and such. He was going to put them on the bonfire- which would have been big fun- but a dealer asked if he had any and gave him several hundred quid for them.

What are you doing? says Ailz.

Writing a post about scrap metal, I say

You've been eavesdropping, she says, Eavesdroppers hear no good about themselves....

Picture Diary 75

1. One can dream

2. Grimalkin

3. The White Room

4. Researcher

Because of the state of the kitchen- which is just about usable but full of workmen during daylight hours- we're eating out more than usual and I'm beginning to tire of restaurant food.

We were at the clerk's last night to watch a movie (The Brand New Testament- a Belgian comedy from 2015) and he was offering unlimited mince pies. They were excellent mince pies and if I'd shown more restraint I'd have slept better afterwards. Milk of Magnesia will suppress one mince pie, but three or four mince pies? Forget it.

This morniing I have two envelopes to take to the Post Office, and that'll be all the Christmas presents for people living at a distance delivered and dispatched. I shall be walking to the Post Office- because (a) it's a sunny day and (b) I need the exercise....

Mike and Su and Sej were coming to see us every other week and then things happened and then other things happened and we haven't seen them in ages. Ailz says it's six months; can it really be so long?

Anyway we now have a car again and that changes things.

And yesterday we met up at Ightham Mote- a few miles from where we used to live with my mother- and even closer to where I spent my teens.

No pix of Sej, I'm afraid. His parents don't like his image being posted on a public forum and I don't think they're wrong. It took him some time to recognise us. It can't have helped that he's used to seeing us in Eastbourne and we were out of context.

Ightham Mote is the near-perfect model of a late medieval moated manor house. Here's the gatehouse

And here's some old German stained glass. 16th century? Yes. I think so. It won't be original to the building. Some recent owner will have imported and installed it. It fills a window in what was once the chapel.

Last time we visited Ightam the old walled garden was being used as a car park. Now they've moved the cars elsewhere and the garden is being restored. Nothing much to see in there at present apart from a couple of charmingly peculiar wooden sculptures. Here's one of them- part art work, part bench and part tribute to a favourite author. Does Green Darkness fictionalise Ightham Mote? I must find out....

I watched Ross Coulthard (who actually knows a great deal about UFOs) talking to a reporter on the ground about how local politicians were going, "We wanna know what this ia about" and the alphabet agencies were going, "Haven't a clue, mate" and the big government people were going, "We don't know anything either but trust us there's no danger,' and the sneaky deep-throaty people from the corridors of power were going "Don't spread this around, but just between you and me it's the Russians, innit* And every so often Coulthard was blowing his top and going "But this is all totally bonkers!" And they were at it for an hour or so...

At one point Coulthard suggested that the agency behind the drones might be non-human and the reporter looked really uncomfortable and said "Oh please, lets just no go there...."

Because the thing is if we do go there- and we're going to have to soon- because the pressure is building up- the materialist paradigm that informs everything from our science to our politics to our education system is going to collapse into a cloud of dust like the scraggy, dessicated, mummified old thing that it is.

So what is it all about?

Well, it's simple: ourselves from another part of the multiverse are coming into our part of it and informing us that the storyline we're pursuing has run its course- and it's been a jolly interesting experiment and they thank us for conducting it- but there's no way we're taking it to its logical conclusion and using those goddam nukes.....

It's like we've been asleep and dreaming and they''re shaking us gently and going, "Time to wake up...."

Those so-called "drones" ( I think they're calling them that to try to neutralise the weirdness) may be monitoring our military facilities to make sure we don't launch any nukes. There are other possible scenarios but that's my favourite and- once you've accepted that "we're not alone"- the most straighforward.

The brass try to get the grunts to keep it under their hats but there have been well-attested incidents in the past where a visitation from UFOs has "coincided" with a missile site unaccountably going off-line. We haven't heard about any shut-downs in relation to the current wave of sightings, but then that's hardly suprising....

Remember the fuss about the Chinese weather balloon that drifted- probably by happenstance- into US air space? Compare that brou-ha-ha with the passivity of the official response to the "drone" incursions. Fighter jets are noticeably not being scrambled to challenge these things. Perhaps because the military know they represent a technology way beyond anything we have- and going after them is pointless...

We've put up a couple of trees up in the Meeting House.

One is very small and sits on a table and has lights. Artificial obviously.

The other is an odd thing I found at the tip shop a year ago. It's a home-made pyramidal object made of interwoven branches and sprayed gold. I don't suppose there's another quite like it anywhere. It stands about two feet high.

Do Quakers celebrate Christmas?

Well, the early Quakers were Puritans and much as I admire them I think they overdid their commitment to not having fun. No music, no dancing, no art, no festivals.

It's the one thing they got wrong.

So there'll be a Meeting for worship on Christmas Day- and I've said I'll open up again on Boxing Day because Boxing Day is a Thursday and it says in our publicity we open every Thursday and I think we should keep our promises even in no-one takes us up on them....

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poliphilo

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Twinkleham

It's Sunshine Life For Me

Picture Diary 76

Telepathic

On The Feast Of Stephen

Idle Thoughts Of A Quanglican Fellow

Big F And Little F

A Little Brief Authority

Being Japanese

Imagining The Solstice

Getting In The Mood

Whistleblowers

Mad Jack's Sugar Loaf

Scrap Metal

Picture Diary 75

I Have Over-Indulged

Ightham Mote

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"Drones"

Quakers And Christmas

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