Quaker Meeting House, St Martin's Lane

We have a new hamster. Sparky. Though we all keep calling him Buddy by accident. I had forgotten quite how anxious getting a new hamster makes me. Though probably the first time it coincided with a real low patch when I wasn't sleeping very well and I would wake to hear the poor caged thing running in its wheel. I am slightly phobic about hamster teeth and wee hamster hearts in their thin ribbed bodies. It just never seems much of a life. Though Buddy adapted reasonably well, getting a bit plump and weary, patient with the children's fingers and that crazy perspex ball. Then died young in his sleep, curled in kapok.

Who would of known how different hamsters could be? Or how a name picked so quick can hold so true. Sparky is fast and bright and intent on escape. He stands on the top green plastic platform within the cage and stares me in the eye with wild, brave reproach. He has an us and them attitude. When it is just me and him, the children asleep, I talk to him gently, sing-song like I did when the children were babies and he listens for a while and then skitters away. Though my eldest says sadly 'I don't think he wants to stay in our family' as we watch Sparky attempt to chew a Shawshank Redemption hole in the side of a cardboard box we have put him in to play in. 'He will.' I say. But for once I think I am lying. Exexdh is the only one daring enough to handle him and even then Sparky spins out of his hands like a bat in flight, legs stretched to land. Tonight, I come home from a concert, riding my Boris Bike around the wall of police vans, helicopters overhead, to find out Sparky bit Dad into his nail. Everyone looks grave. He has a beautiful face, big ears very inquisitive but no one wants to touch him. Strangely it is me that puts my hand in the cage, sorts out his food, puts his wheel into position despite my phobias. I corner PSM's ten year old son for advice in the playground, and he says, just let him run over your hand in the cage under the sawdust. Exexdh suggests gloves.

This Quaker meeting house is not open every day but will be open for a meeting on Tuesday lunchtime the sign says as I cycle past on a BB. I am meeting U,OL for a coffee, unexpectedly, on monday morning, and was hoping to visit it afterwards. Though I feel I look like I am stage managing things when I arrive late, pushing the bike, for I can't find a docking bay. As if I have become only the character that I write about. I am in my gold trimmed coat, red tights, with a bike. I have to phone my brother ( also a BB fan ) to find out where to park the bike. Yes, he says. You are in a Boris Bike black hole. But he works out the nearest place to park it and I do.
U,OL and I go to a model shop in Holborn - he wants to find polystyrene for a music case he is making, I want trees as stocking fillers for the boys to decorate a board we have made for battles. The inane detail and precise scale of the miniature world, is beautiful - a minute model of a house being built, a parade of terrace houses, fake moss, intricate trees- all of it fascinating but expensive. Another world that can be made, contained.

I have built this up to be my love story. But it isn't. Or is, because there is a lot of love in it. But I think it is just an old sad story of lives not going quite right, of people making bad choices, of timing just missing. Though part of me still wants a fairy tale ending. I want an easy doorway to open to happiness. To be a heroine to someone. But we have become different people. When we sit and drink our coffee, we are mainly silent. Though when we do talk about things we both nearly cry. Though for different reasons, we don't explain.

On Tuesday I ride up again on the Boris bike. The tarpaulin seems to be coming down around the peace camp in Parliament Square. Though I notice tents have appeared on the pavement by the ministry of defence. I do think I have come along way, as I just walk in to the Meeting House, twisting the tricky handle on the polished door, nodding to a man with a Roy Hattersley mouth, full of teeth and spit, 'yes, for the meeting house' I nod, and walk into the meeting itself. I feel no trepidation only purpose.

I sit on a simple chair in a beautiful proportioned room with a parquet floor. There is in the centre on a table a vase of daffodils under a warm lit light shade, some books placed alongside. When I walk in and sit down there are about eighteen people. And we sit in silence. A few more join. Opening the door, tip toeing in. Opposite where I sit is a huge tall oblong window looking out to bamboo. I am very happy to be there.

On R4 I had caught a scrap about middle aged women becoming increasingly attracted to retreats of silence with an interview with a woman who had gone for 30 days ( I think ) of no talking . She said how easy it was to feel irritation with others despite the silence. Sitting here I ponder it. Really, I think, looking at the beauty of the daffodils, wondering about spring, where they had been flown from, then out over the heads of people on chairs to the bamboo in the grey light outside, looking again at the man with the beard, the corduroy of the jacket infront of me, I can't imagine that. Then a woman in a bright knitted hat creeps in, with a jangly bag, and a cup of tea. A cup of tea! Any minute now I am going to hear slurping noises I think. Any minute now. I glower. Though she must be practised because there are none.

The only ornamentation to this lovely room is a clock. Sometimes 5 minutes of silence goes fast and sometimes slowly.

I think these things too. Can I sit here and not think about God, not about Jesus, what are the rules, I like it here, then a man with a long beard sighs quite heavily, I think about meditation but how that always has noise, a voice saying what to do, I think I would love to live in this room, I could put a kitchen in that corner and a platform for beds. I notice a small amplification system high up by the top recessed windows. Then look at the daffodils. Then the bamboo. A man in a red jumper stands and speaks. He says he went to a meeting recently about William Blake 'Jerusalem', and that they talked about Jesus walking here on this island. My heart sinks slightly that this peace is going to be distorted by nutty talk. He said that nothing was known of Christ's life between being a child and his thirties and it was quite possible he came as a merchant with Joseph of Arimathea. He said he himself, the man in the red jumper ( not Jesus! That would be quite a claim. ) was from Preston in Lancashire and he said that his father said the name came from Priest town and the Phoenicians came there. He said the message was Jerusalem could be built anywhere and within us. And that Salam meant peace. Salam is what I hear the mothers say every morning and every afternoon at the school gates. I thought it was just hello. Peace. It is a lovely thing to say. When he sits. There is still just silence. I see that the woman moves her cup to her face. As if for warmth. Here in this Central London room there is virtually no noise. No clue to lunchtime feet outside.

At the end we shake hands. As announcements are read out. I leave. A kind man in the corduroy signalling that it is ok to go. He waves silently to me as I close the door quietly. I think he means, take what you need.

I look for history about the place but there isn't much. The quakers in Westminster have met weekly since 1655. Even reading these words, I understand for the first time that all churches are connected by people showing up week after week after week. That is what makes the church. They turn up, they come. Former Meeting Houses were in Pall Mall, the Strand and near to Westminster Abbey. This building was bombed in the war and then re built in the 1950s

I read too,
'True silence ... is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.'
William Penn, 1699

'It is important that the waiting in silence and the listening are done as a group. The people taking part are trying to become something more than just a collection of individuals; they want to become aware of being part of a 'we', rather than just a solitary 'I'.'

Also, Patrick Newley's (the soho writer, raconteur and agent to the underbelly of the British entertainment scene) mother became warden of the meeting house in the 70s and he transformed part of it into a theatrical agency and PR office, acting chiefly for drag queens and a crony of the Krays.

Then the next day, the wednesday I go to, 'Towards Silence' John Taverner at St Martin's in the Field. I had picked up a leaflet when I had visited before, this concert part of an inter faith day of quiet within the church. I had wanted to take U,OL, with some plan of taking him to good things, to revive his spirit. But he couldn't come or chose not to. Though also I think later that isn't my job. He has the choice to revive himself.

Then I think about the chattiness of my whole project. The noise of me me me, me - on and on and on. Mainly I like to be very quiet about myself. Private. I have been surprised and mildly horrified by this insistence of telling, of attempting to tell my truth. Quite often, even writing it, I think SHUT UP, SHUT UP, STOP IT. Though strangely it feels like a silent thing, a black hole - this blog. I write, it sits, suspended, almost no where. But people are reading it. I have admittedly started sending it out, to people I know, but before that, I finally found the stats button, and there were readers. I was breathless.

Years ago I went on the tube to dinner at a friend's flat in Elephant and Castle. I think U,OL had just left for Russia and I was bereft. I sat in a nearly empty carriage alone. A mother and son got on and the mother, tall, very black, probably Ethiopian, with high proud cheekbones sat next to me, very close, swaying as if asleep and the child, as if in the same dream, sat on my knee, but not like he knew it was on my knee, but like he thought I was a chair or more exactly that I wasn't there. For some reason, as if they were sleepwalkers, which even now, I almost think they were, I knew I mustn't make a sound, mustn't disturb them in anyway though I think I held the child. So we sat tight together, not making a sound until they got off. Which they did. I remember thinking I must be dead, or not visible to them. I don't know. But I think now, we were just alongside, some strange trust together. And I almost think that is what this is like. A quiet space where I pour all these words. If you read it you are just alongside, with your own concerns that might, even briefly, match.

Anyhow, it is the day of the student demonstrations. The TV on at work is agog for violence. Which unfolds. A police van trashed, a beautiful girl with an old fashioned Anne Frank face talking eloquently for non violence. When I leave work, I think I will be able to go to the concert and then scout round on the way home to see what is going on. I am almost rubbing my hands in anticipation that I will have so much to write about. But as I walk up from Embankment tube against the tide of office workers, and into Trafalgar Square, I can hear chanting and dirty youths, like foot soldiers from an old, old battle, storm through the street, staves made from the spine of placards. They are not like the plush Millbank lot I saw, they have cheap dirty trainers and violent, hardened faces, they shout 'Don't visit London it is shit.' for they presume we are tourists, walking past on the pavements. And their voices are high on the new power of their old rage. Behind their stampede a fire has been lit in the street out of bollards and cardboard and rubbish is strewn. It is something medieval, a fire tossed casually but dangerously into the road. The traffic like a startled horse, nervy from the flames, holds back. And I, I don't know what to do, so I walk into the church, show my solo ticket and sit down, restricted view, behind a pillar for the concert.

It is calm and peaceful, full and plush. Behind, a man talks of icons, the British Museum, religious theologians his Kindle and a chapter in the Brothers Karamazof by Dostoevsky that he has downloaded (just the one chapter), because it is a philosophical debate of how things are. I just love gizmos he says. It is like an interior and exterior experience because all these things that seem fine and good and of wealth to the soul and spirit, seem also to depend on a lot of people not being there. Outside, even when the beautiful high, unaccompanied singing starts, harmonies of voice soaring, everyone intent, we can hear a steady angry chant and the pitch and squeak of the police amplified by megaphones. Blue lights revolve in the big windows of the church. 'Towards silence.' We have been asked not to clap when the concert that includes a tibetan bowl rung like a bell, ends to preserve the conversation with silence. I don't know. I enjoy it but I don't love it though I keep quiet, leaving, as the audience like a congregation flood out into Trafalgar Square, Police vans parked up. Helicopters overhead. Where the fire had been lit, there are more police vans packed like bricks and beyond that protesters that I can't see. I cycle back, nosing my way round the back of the ministry of defense, trying to find a short cut, trying to get a good look around. A policeman stood apart from his gang in a van, nearly lets me cycle down the last bit of Whitehall, but then says, 'Love, they have been breaking glass, You don't want to rip your tyres. A pause. 'Boris's tyres.' We laugh

This is my personal experience of the Tory cuts. At our school the Holiday play schemes no longer exist and probably after christmas the after school care play-centres will be cut. It doesn't work. Doesn't make sense. People who work. Who pay for this childcare. Will not have it. It may be that this childcare is funded, helped along. But no one is having a manicure while their children play Connect 4 in a bright lit school hall. They have jobs. They work really hard. They are trying, really trying, not to be on benefits. When exexdh had no unsupervised access to the children I had 7 minutes to do a 15 minute journey between the tube and the school playcentre after work. I did a soldiers run, jogging to the count of 15 and walking 15, dignity gone, slightly desperate, very tired.

I would never be violent but I am angry.