Culture Articles
Ghost town
In 1981 I was a postgraduate student at the University of Warwick, living in Earlsdon, one of Coventry’s satellite villages, and periodically attending the lovely, modern Quaker Meeting on Hill Street. I was aware, through that spring and summer, of rising tensions between skinhead and Asian youths. There was an...
What the Youngest Angel Said
Oh how could I forget that amazing night? There were hundreds of us. It was my first flight. We sang to some shepherds just before dawn, Then flew on to the place where the child was born.
Set all the birds free
UA Fanthorpe, our modern English Quaker poet and ‘national treasure’, was, with her partner Rosie Bailey, a patron of Quaker Concern for Animals from 2006 until her death in April 2009. Christmas Poems (2002), which she and Rosie began sending to friends as Christmas cards in 1974, features numerous animals.
The Forty Rules of Love
The Forty Rules of Love is a fictionalised account of the encounter in the year 1244 between the Dervish, Shams of Tabriz, and the Turkish theologian Jalaluddin Rumi in Konya. The account is woven around the story of Ella Rubinstein, wife of David, a successful Massachusetts dentist, who comes to realise...
Bedside Beelzebub
*Niets is kostbaarder dan de tijd, Want hij is de prijs van de eeuwigheid. *Netherlands proverb: Nothing is more precious than time, For it is the price of eternity. Rapt in scarlet silence soft The digit-demon lurks. I hear no honest tick from his Deep necromantic works. Electron-imps cavort about ...
A speaking silence
Delight first, followed by analysis. A speaking silence: Quaker poets of today is a grand subtitle to a collection that is the first of its kind in Britain for more than a century. The anthology, which is edited by RV Bailey and Stevie Krayer, gives Friends a timely opportunity to...
Remembrance today
Autumn rushes ever onwards. The weather has changed. The leaves that gave such a brilliant display of colour only a few days ago are now cascading down like the poppies at the Festival of Remembrance in the Albert Hall. Remembrance Sunday has gone with its solemnity, ceremony and massed crowds...
The burning question
…avoiding unacceptable risks of catastrophic climate change means burning less than half of the oil, coal and gas in currently commercial reserves – and a much smaller fraction of all the fossil fuels under the ground. This warning is from the first paragraph of The Burning Question: We can’t...
Messages out of the blue
In the Friend of 23 August Judy Kirby wrote ‘Quakers like to think of James Turrell, the installation artist, as theirs’. It often seems like that. James Turrell and his work have become increasingly well known in the UK in the past few years and 2013 shows a positive effulgence of his...
How it began
On 11 July 2000 the prison vicar broke the dreadful news to me: ‘Your brother Daniel has died. He took his own life.’ I sat in the office in pure silence, trying to absorb what I was told. ‘You’ve got it wrong,’ I said. ‘I’m waiting to see Daniel when...