Eye - 10 February 2017
From completely loopy Friends to ingeniose Quakerism
Completely loopy
Some familiar names appear in unexpected pages, as Melvyn Freake, of Wanstead Meeting, recently told Eye.
However, the Bryant and May that appear in the thriller White Corridor, by Christopher Fowler, are not match-producing Friends William and Francis but octogenarian sleuths Arthur and John. These ‘golden age detectives in a modern world’ are founder members of the London Peculiar Crimes Unit and, in the course of their investigations, Friends make the odd cameo appearance.
In White Corridor the detective duo come across a website called Panic Site, set up by the Insomnia Squad, whose users are described as: ‘…all completely loopy, if not actually dangerous… obsessives, perhaps, but occasionally quite brilliant… [this] group of rogue intellectuals stayed online through the night to argue about anything from Quakerism to corn deities, before returning bleary-eyed to their jobs in the capital’s museums and art galleries.’
Interest thoroughly piqued, Eye rolled its sleeves up to investigate further and unearthed another of Christopher Fowler’s Bryant and May books featuring Friends. In the thirteenth of the series, entitled Strange Tide, during what appears to be Arthur Bryant’s hallucination of Blitz-era London, he wanders towards Euston from a recently-bombed Leicester Square:
‘As he approached Euston Road, he saw the chaos that had been caused by the raid there. The area was blacked out, of course, but fires burned on either side, marking the sites of bombs. The building next to the Quakers’ Society had collapsed into a pile of bricks, as if a petulant child had kicked it over. A group of well-upholstered ladies were standing in the little Quakers’ garden beside it, waiting for instructions.
‘“I say, I don’t suppose you have a ladder about, do you?” called one of them, patting the dust from her sleeves. “Only the front door got blown in, so we’ll have to use the upstairs window.”
‘“Has anyone said whether it’s safe to go back inside?” asked another…
‘“I don’t see why not,” said a third. “We’ll be safer with the Quakers than over at the station.”
‘“We have to get back in because the Reverend Peabody is still inside and he’s stuck in a folding chair,” the first added.’
A PAT-icular question
Eye suspects that team work and safe electrical equipment are things its trusty readers are fans of, but rarely do the two inspire an Eye story!
A trustee of Southern Marches Area Meeting recently posed the question: ‘How many Friends does it take to conduct a PAT test?’
He went on: ‘The trustees have recently asked Local Meetings to conduct PAT tests for all portable appliances in their Meeting houses. This photograph was taken by one of the trustees as members of the Pales Development Group tried to comply with this request in preparation for the Pales Triennial Celebrations.
‘The answer is three (or four); the Area Meeting clerk, the webmaster and a trustee (and the photographer)! Can any reader better this total?’
The gauntlet has been thrown Friends…
Ingeniose Quakerism
Biographies from the late 1600s have provided Howard W Hilton, of Chester Meeting, with food for thought.
While reading John Aubrey’s Brief Lives – a collection of short biographies of figures such as William Shakespeare, Walter Raleigh and Francis Bacon – Howard happened across a quote and wonders ‘might it eventually come to pass?’
‘Sir William Davenant confessed to Aubrey that “his private opinion was that Religion, at last, e.g. a hundred years hence, would come to a Settlement, and that in a kind of ingeniose Quakerism”.’
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