No person is an Island

A strange, strained morning.
I really thought we'd broken through with our meditation on John Donne's "No man is an island". Of course, I'd had to degender it to "No person is an island". And some of the Beaker People got really quite annoyed at any suggestion that they were "clods" Which, when you think about it, was a self-defeating thing to complain about.
The word "manor", with its suggestions either of residual feudalism or of Mockney irony, had to replaced as well. But that still left us with the gist of Donne's original meaning.

And that was a great meditation lead by Marston Trussell. How he put up a map of the Eurasian landmass (or - as some insisted, to avoid Eurocentricity - Asio-European landmass) and we each picked a country to represent us. And of course we marked in the Channel Tunnel and the Stranraer - Belfast and Isle of Wight ferries, just to make it clear that nobody is an island. Even when, like Lorelei, they choose Iceland as their country.

And so we all felt that sense of interdependence that is so important. And we sang "When I needed a neighbour" and it all felt so good. And I pronounced the final blessing. And we discovered that somebody had shoved a chunk of flower-arranger's oasis foam into the end of Katja's serpent, and the flower arrangement nearest the door turned out to be sabotaged and blasted lily pollen all over the flower arrangers' Sunday best. And another fight broke out and we had to call in the Gurkhas again.

I tell you, this doing things together is no fun. I may have to confine everyone to their rooms again. We live so much better in peace together when we're kept well apart.