I was glad to see this message on the board. Thank you Capri Uni for keeping it there when I needed to see it.

I woke up this morning and knew I wanted to post to this thread. I suddenly thought of something my Mother once told me - that will perhaps answer the question someone asked about the Quakers and what its like to be a Quaker, and why the arts with their wide avenues of self expression, sometimes feel blocked to a Quaker mind.

Doubtless you can find some nonsense in the bible to justify banning this and that, but that's not what it feels like.

My mother was 20 years old and a clerk at St Helens town hall in Lancashire, when the war broke out. St Helens is a big town in the north west of England full of industry and a natural target for the German bombers.

And the big town hall, if the enemy bombers could have got an incendiary on that, it would have made a nice big bonfire, which would have lit up the whole district, and they could have picked off all kinds of juicy targets.

So there was my Mother - this young woman, all night on firewatch on the roof of the big town hall during air raids, with a bucket of water, or whatever - ready to put out incendiary bombs.

'What used to bother me' she once said,'was that when you heard the English planes coming over to chase the German ones away - they made a different noise. And I couldn't help it, I was glad to hear them arrive, perhaps that makes me a bad Christian'.

we are not talking about the musings of some seer living on the edges of civilisation in a cave, just a young working class woman.

People talk about 'fundamentalism' -they invariably mean the crowds beating their heads in theatrical displays of grief at Khomeini's funeral, or some hot gospeler in America banging on about the rights of the unborn child....

However, what my Mother talked about there,was the essence of fundamentalism to me. one of Jesus's most difficult commandments, a sin within ones own heart that the rest of the world could never have known one had committed. When you are brought up by someone like that, you don't the geography of hell outlined to you in tedious detail by Dante - every next thought and feeling in your heart contains its possibility.

I found the extravagant gestures of the artist much more appealing a way to spend my life. I preferred Hey Diddley Dee, an actors life for me - to the Sermon on the Mount as a credo.

Actually a folksinger's life.

all the best

al