Eye - 01 April 2011

From the Globe to the Gallery to the garden

Bible marathon

According to the Globe theatre, a full reading of the King James I Bible will take about sixty-nine hours in total. Between Palm Sunday and Easter Monday, a group of twenty actors will read all 788,280 words in eight instalments, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the translation. Eye is fascinated by the project but feels that the feat is a little undermined by it not being done as one continuous reading.

In Lincoln a team from St George’s church will attempt to break the world record by completing a full reading in under seventy hours. Interestingly, representatives from Lincoln’s Jewish community will begin by reading the creation story from Genesis in the original Hebrew.

Guards in the Gallery
In the past Quaker children have had a reputation for being dedicated, dutiful and well behaved. Friends may be aware of the story of a Meeting in Bristol, in 1682, that was kept alive by the children when most of the adults were imprisoned (What do they have to say to us? 20 July, 2010). According to Quaker faith & practice 19.35 ‘the children kept up their meetings regularly, and with a remarkable gravity and composure…’

Eye was surprised to hear that this display of composure may not always have been the order of the day. Edrey Allott wrote in to share a very different description of Young Friends in Bristol from the book Children and their books edited by Gillian Avery and Julie Briggs.

It reads: ‘In the later seventeenth century, Quaker Meetings suffered incessantly from disturbances created by the children of their own members playing noisily outside or causing disorder within. At Bristol, for example, two or three of the Friends had to be appointed as guards, one at the door and the others in the gallery where the children sat; when the boys in the front of the gallery became rude and boisterous it was decided to raise the bench to make it high enough for men to sit there as well, hoping thereby the boys may be kept better in order.’

Eye might be mistaken
Eye was convinced that the well loved advice ‘consider it possible that you may be mistaken” was of innocent Quaker lineage. However, Eye must admit to failing to adhere to the message and allow Evelyn Woodcock to set the record straight.

She kindly points out that far from being a Quaker quotation, the phrase originated in the mind of Oliver Cromwell. In a letter to the Church of Scotland in 1651, Cromwell wrote: ‘I beseech you in the bowels of Christ think it possible you may be mistaken.’

Poles and polls
Among the tasty tidbits of information sent for Eye to peck at this week were a number of responses to the sighting of the ‘red pole’ (redpoll) in the garden of Phillip Morris.

Mic Morgan wrote to express puzzlement. He says: ‘I’m sort of intrigued as Poles, communist red or other, have not ever fed from my feeder.’ While Philip Jacob told Eye that, although he hasn’t had any redpoles on his bird feeder, he has got a bird feeder on a brown pole!

Eye would put Margaret Baker at the top of the pecking order this week though. She commented on the ‘ornithological oddity that has alighted on the pages of the Friend.’ Going on to explain, to Eye’s amusement, that in the animal world two species share the name redpoll, but beside the common feature of the russet or red head they could be said to be ‘poles apart’. One is an old East Anglian breed of hornless beef cattle, the other a small bird (acanthis flammea), a mere five inches in length. Eye hopes that Friends may only find the latter redpoll gracing their gardens!

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