Eye - 08 June 2012
Jamie Wrench wipes his brow and offers his impressions of Britain Yearly Meeting
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First, there was the heat. Britain rejoiced in some of the hottest May days ever recorded, to follow the driest winter, the warmest March and the wettest April. I was due to talk about climate change; it seemed unfair to comment, so I didn’t; in any case, ‘told you so’ is not the best way to open your session.
Then there were the queues. You queue to register, to pick up the papers you haven’t got, to get to the water bottle refilling stations, to get into the loos. You queue to enter the Large Meeting House, and you queue to leave it. You queue for coffee, to thank the speaker for his or her brilliant introduction, to buy a copy of the Swarthmore Lecture, to have it signed. But these queues are as nothing compared with The Lunch Queue. It’s not every day you get to witness a run on a restaurant; the queue stretched out of the door, along the corridor and up the stairs. We queued for a tray, to pay, to find a seat. Now I know why Quakers are so good at waiting for the way to become clear! It’s all the practice they get.
One lunchtime, we sought sanctuary at the offices of the Friend, where (after queuing for lemonade and cookies) I was able to queue to speak to the editor. After relieving me of my emergency cookie, he invited me to write my impressions of BYM, hinting that there might be a pint in it for me. He didn’t detail which beverage.
My impressions? A kaleidoscope of sensations. The pressure of time; is it food, or that special interest group, or that display, or that earnest discussion with a Friend you haven’t seen for years? Moments of deep stillness, punctuated by the sound of traffic horns, wailing ambulances and the eco hand dryers in the loos – eighty per cent more efficient, twice as noisy (at last I understand what the recording clerk meant when he said he thought the Society was ready to go Whoosh!). The narrowness of the seats in the body of the Large Meeting House; the uncompromising hardness of the benches in the gallery. And the heat…
No matter where you went, it pursued you, hot, humid, recycled, molten. The whole of London was perspiring, and it seemed the resultant sirocco blew mercilessly into Friends House; and, just for once, we were not the only people wearing shorts and sandals. I felt sorry for the stenographers who were unable to leave their seats, fan their faces or fall asleep as every word was relayed onto the TV screen at the front. And what wonderful, exotic words they sometimes gave us! Where was ‘Thery car dough room’? Who was ‘demo nick’? When did we start seeking the word of God ‘in the science’? We wondered whether we were ‘in clue sieve’, one speaker came from ‘Whore Field Meeting’ and much of our economic woes were blamed on the ‘arse tockrasy’. ‘Wuts’ are such slippery things when you’re trying to keep up with the speaker and you’re hot and bothered.
There was the odd dissonance. The session on equality and economic justice ended, to be followed by the announcement: ‘Friends will be aware that we have the doors open onto the street; we advise you to keep your valuables with you at all times as anyone could wander in…’ That’s right – anyone.
And yet. Out of all this gallimaufry there came, eventually, a still, small, insistent realisation. It’s not about systems, governments, economics. It’s about people. It’s not buildings that waste energy; it’s the people in them. It’s not weapons that kill; it’s the people who pull the trigger. It’s not economic systems that impoverish people; it’s those who run them. If I am prepared to benefit myself at the expense of others, changing the system is unlikely to change very much; and if all I am doing on this world is seeking to protect myself from, or trying to outdo, everyone else, working my hardest to acquire sufficient wealth to be able to buy myself exemption from the general squalor, my life will have been worthless. I may speak with tongues of angels and archangels, but without love, I am as a sounding gong or a tinkling cymbal, and my utterances are just empty words. Or wuts.
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