Thrushes... and Quakers...

A song thrush is singing from a tree outside the Old Sunday School, and, remarkably, he seems to sing by day and by night. When I woke up this morning, at dawn, his song was all I could hear. When does he sleep?

Though I don’t know many poems by heart, I have a soft spot for Home thoughts from abroad, by Robert Browning, and these lines in particular:

That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!

I see, in the Guardian, that a lot of Quaker meeting houses are being listed. That’s good, in the sense that a lot of these buildings, though modest, are rather special (I could argue that they are special because they are modest). The listing also suggests, sadly, that Quakerism belongs to the past, and the more characterful buildings need saving before they become unwanted anachronisms.

I’ve used Quakers, in my book, to illustrate my contention that not all religious beliefs - and their consequences - are the same. For example, an extremist Quaker would never be tempted into violence (which isn’t a claim that applies to many other faiths).

A meeting in progress at Swarthmoor, in Ulverston: the only Quaker meeting house donated to the movement by George Fox, who lived nearby in Swarthmoor Hall...