During this week’s meeting, Quakers spoke about their personal experiences of committed relationships, agreeing that “whereas there was a clear, visible path to celebration and recognition for opposite sex couples” the same was not always true for those in same-sex relationships, a minute released by the church said.

It said: “This open sharing of personal experience has moved us and added to our clear sense that, 22 years after the prospect was first raised… we are being led to treat same-sex committed relationships in the same way as opposite-sex marriages, reaffirming our central insight that marriage is the Lord’s work and we are but witnesses. The question of legal recognition by the state is secondary.”

I may have welled up. A bit. I may have cuddled the cats like a mad idiot and whispered "Yes yes yes yes yes."

liadnan

There is a kind of love called maintenance
Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it

Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget
The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs;

Which answers letters; which knows the way
The money goes; which deals with dentists

And Road Fund Tax and meeting trains,
And postcards to the lonely; which upholds

The permanently rickety elaborate
Structures of living, which is Atlas.

And maintenance is the sensible side of love,
Which knows what time and weather are doing
To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring;
Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers
My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps
My suspect edifice upright in air,
As Atlas did the sky.

I am very tired and slightly hungover, in common with the rest of IT. (Major rollouts and uproarious leaving drinks are perhaps not natural BFFs.)

D(after discovering the perpetrator of practical joke played on us) : We have to get S back!
Pashazade(genuinely confused): Why? Have we.....lost him?