Gathering

I'm not entirely sure what to make of ex-brethren en masse. Large groups of people are not my favourite habitat, and I can't decide whether being classified as belonging to the group helps or not, but that's just me.

Brethren vary, as people, whatever it may look like to the uninformed observer, but ex-brethren vary more as they have had time to grow away from the previously uniform aspects of life and thought. That applies to appearance, beliefs and behaviour. I'd like to think I could still spot somebody as having the brethren background, but in reality I'd be fooling myself. And, of course, in such variety, there are some I like more than others and some I find more interesting than others, and I expect that applies to all of us - hopefully our opinions on that differ, too.

One key aspect of the brethren past is the difficulty of explaining it to anyone else. It has a shape and a pattern such that it feels as though it makes sense, yet few of those who haven't shared it can grasp more than a succession of details and surface facts. That means that it's a relief for those who share the background to find each other, and somewhat tedious for anyone who doesn't. Many ex-brethren, even those who have successfully moved on in their lives, continue to pick at the whole brethren situation with fidgety mental fingers, and seize on opportunities to compare musings with like-minded others much to the bafflement of outsiders, who wonder why something obviously so negative need be anything other than the past. Any explanation tends to sound like self-pity, and there is very little like self-pity to make a person unsympathetic.

It really is a little like being an expatriate, which was reinforced for me at the weekend by a queue of people wishing for news from "home". I use the word for want of anything better. As I am still a recent leaver by the standards of most, I am in possession of memories that are comparatively fresh, and others hunger for information of some kind it seems: friends and family mostly, or just comparisons with their own experiences and some feel for how things really are now within the barrier of separation. I did my best.

But there is really nothing quite like mixing with people who have that one large factor in common. There is no need for explanation, no need to avoid saying things which make no sense out of the old familiar context, no worries about what anybody might think - at least in that respect. That relaxes a part of my mind that I didn't know was tense.