Anecdote – Wedding Number One – The Buddhist Ceremony. (There are some photos in the photo gallery – sixties photos)

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Anecdote – Wedding Number One – The Buddhist Ceremony. (There are some photos in the photo gallery – sixties photos)

Wedding Number One.
Wedding number one was A Buddhist wedding in the Temple at Sheen, Richmond. In true sixties fashion we had been going along there regularly to meditate. It was very pleasant. We had a friend called Gary Turp, who I haven’t seen for forty years, who was very into the Incredible String Band and Buddhism. He got us interested. I enjoyed it and learnt a lot.
We also made friends with a very wise monk by the name of Vorasak Candamitto. He was one of the happiest people I’ve ever met – must say something.
So we organised for a wedding ceremony and received a verbal okay.
Then we had to decide who to invite. We couldn’t fit all our friends in so we decided this was one for the relatives. It left them a little bemused so that was also okay.
On the day Liz and I got into our wedding gear. Liz had made it all. She had a dress in yellow, orange and red check which looked rather nice. She made me a top out of the same material so that we matched. She also made me this trousers of red velvet. We looked very colourful in our orange and red.
We arrived at the temple still not quite sure what, if anything was going to happen. The relatives all trooped in and we were shown to the front where we sat on cushions.
Much to our surprise the whole place was decorated with red and orange with lots of red and orange tulips. We matched!
Then a dozen monks came in. I did not know there were that many!
The ceremony was wonderful. The monks chanted and made this incredible sonorous sound. We lit candles and incense and got splashed with water. The monks chanting was intended to create Loving Kindness which was focused on that water. When the congregation and ourselves were splashed they were spreading the Loving Kindness around. I’m all in favour of Loving Kindness. We recited some words in Sanskrit. I’m not sure what we said. We could have been signing up to some Thai cult. It was probably about staying true to the path of goodness.
Then it was over.
The temple had arranged for someone to take a few photos and we ended up with three hazy black and white prints.
It wasn’t the usual wedding.
Liz’s parents boycotted it. I don’t think they approved of me.
I’m not sure what the relatives made of it. Some of them were very staid. We probably blew a few minds and sent a few tongues wagging.
One point of contention seemed to focus around whether we were actually married or not? Was it recognised?
Well that didn’t matter to us. But it seemed to matter to some. Particularly as Wedding two – The Registry Office – was not until the following week.
Were we living in sin for the week?
Well as we had been doing for a year we thought that was quite amusing. How times change.

Anecdote – Our three weddings

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Anecdote – Our three weddings

Our three weddings.

Marriage was not something either of us believed in – so we had three.

We believed that the only real commitment was our love for each other. We had no need for a wedding.

However, we were aware that our parents did not quite share the same view. As Liz’s parents were not talking to me we thought a marriage might break the ice, build the bridges, douse the fire, patch things up and a host of other clichés.

Needless to say it failed spectacularly on the friendly repair side.

I can’t think why?

So we organised a Buddhist wedding, a registry office wedding and a Pagan Wedding in Windsor Park complete with Maypole on May 1st. It seemed a bit of a laugh, an excuse to bring all our friends together and a way of appeasing parents and relatives.

Two out of three’s not bad!

The Bunker – A chilling story

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The Bunker

Out in the countryside, in a small village in East Yorkshire, is a building in the middle of a large field. It is all that is visible of a huge underground complex that is now redundant but lives on as testament to the folly of mankind. It is a monument to our baser characteristics; an epitaph to madness.
For it is truly MAD. It is a multibillion-pound remnant of our policy of Mutually Assured Destruction.
This bunker was a relic of the cold war; a time of terror, when nuclear holocaust was a real possibility and everyone knew that we had a number of nuclear missiles aimed at us. All it took was a slip up, a mistake, or a moment of political brinkmanship.
How had it come to this? What drives people to set up nations, devise horrific weapons and go to war? There is some basic flaw in the human psyche that creates this cycle of violence. As if violence can ever be an answer to anything; as if nuclear war is a sane possibility.
Dug deep into the bedrock and covered with millions of tons of soil is a complex that was once top secret and housed a small village, a contingent of civil servants and armed forces, who were carefully selected to live underground while the rest of us sizzled, fried and dissolved in a nuclear hurricane. Behind walls of concrete 15 metres thick, protected by massive steel blast doors, these people had the task of staying safe, monitoring events, and planning. They were a regional command centre. When it was all over, and it was safe to emerge, the plan was that they would come out, organise the survivors, and re-establish government control.
For that is what was important – that the government should be in control.
All across the country there were a sinister network of these command bunkers. Probably under Whitehall there is a massive central complex capable of withstanding direct hit after direct hit.
Across continents there are similar complexes run by other regimes. Countless billions poured into unproductive stupidities all because man’s nature is so violent, so greedy and power-seeking.
Entry into the bunker is via a small room with a cheery lady who offers tea and cake. Then the journey begins; a journey back in time to not so long ago; a journey into a state of mind.
A steel blast door opens into a long corridor, lit by standard government lamps at regular intervals, painted in regulation military paint, uniformly cream, it descends steadily into the earth. It feels cold and dank, a descent into a secret world.
At the end of this long corridor is another great steel blast door.
Then we are in the complex. Coming off the corridor on both sides are a series of rooms and a stairwell leading further down. There is a massive water tank holding millions of gallons of drinking water. There are storerooms full of food. There is an operation room with chilling charts showing likely blast zones and fall-out paths. Huge swathes of the country pocked with circles and cones indicating horrendous blasts and huge areas of radiation. The patterns were merely images on a map. The reality was melted flesh, horror and death. All the major cities. Millions of real lives.
There is a big whiteboard on which are to be recorded details of the actual situation outside – casualties, blast zones, fall-out levels.
There are rooms equipped with computers and telephones. Here one has to do a double take. The phones are the old black bakelite and the computers were old vintage 1970s machines. The type that ran so slow that you had to wait for it to catch up with your typing. The type which had a memory that had difficulty storing a photo.
They were preparing to run a nuclear war using old land lines, computers with less computing power than the average washing machine and a whiteboard to record casualties (in 100s of thousands). It seemed absurd. How had they believed that this was possible? Their equipment was so rudimentary. Just forty years on and it looked so primitive. It felt like something out of the Second World War – yet this was a scenario for the third.
These people, on all sides, were actually contemplating the reality of this; were actually planning it out; had spent billions setting this up, and really thought they could control it, survive it and rebuild afterwards.
I stood in the control room and studied the scene of insanity.
I went on, past the dormitories with their rows of beds and blankets, past the offices with their important desks and arrived at the entertainment’s rooms – set up like a pub, with beer, spirits, a juke box, pinball machine and darts board. It seems that while we were outside in a blizzard of radioactive ash the personnel below would be dancing to Elvis Costello, Stranglers and Ian Dury, and downing pints; might even have a competition going on the old darts board.
The final displays were of the Greenham Common protests. It seemed like an oasis of sanity amidst the madness of MAD.
The bunker was now a museum piece. It had become obsolete. The average schoolkid carried around more computing power and organisational possibility in their mobile phone than had been available in the whole network of regional complexes that had been set up to run a nuclear war. This place was utterly redundant.
I went back up to the surface, took a deep breath of fresh air, bought a cup of tea and a slice of cake of the genial lady in the entrance, and wondered where the next generation of bunkers were situated and what music they had on their juke boxes and how soon their equipment might look antiquated.

Anecdote – Two Lesbians, a baby and our breakfast

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Anecdote – Two Lesbians, a baby and our breakfast

Two lesbians, a baby and our breakfast

During my first year at college I managed to get digs in a house run by two lesbians. We did not know they were lesbians at the time because we were young and innocent and they threw us off the scent by having a baby.

There were two bedrooms and a sitting room. Me and Pete Smith shared one bedroom and Pete Smith and Ronnie Smith shared the other. Yes – three Smiths and me and two of them called Pete. It made for interest if there was mail for a P Smith – or even an R Smith if the writing was scruffy.

The beauty of our digs was that it included breakfast. That was good because all my money was going on gigs, LPs and petrol for the motorbike. Eating was a novelty.

We discovered the lesbian nature of our landladies when doing a stint of babysitting. They had a whole library of lesbian books with sections underlined – ‘It is better to be a eunuch than a man’ I remember. Anyway – the penny dropped. It explained why one of them always wore dresses and the other had short hair and wore men’s suits and a trilby. You might have thought we would have been more perceptive but we’d all had a cosseted existence.

One day we got up and waited for our breakfast to materialise but there were no smells of bacon, sausage and eggs and we went hungry.

Our two ladies had fallen out. One of them was pregnant again. We surmised (being highly intelligent) that there could be some infidelity on the cards.

Breakfast did resume the next day and it was noted that there was a frosty atmosphere between the two ladies.

It always seemed strange to me that it was the more masculine of the couple who was the one who had become pregnant. She obviously wasn’t quite as manly as we had thought.

Anecdote – Close to death – the motorbike and luck

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Anecdote – Close to death – the motorbike and luck

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Close to death – the motorbike and luck

I bet there isn’t one of us who has not a tale or two about death. We delight in in telling our tales. I think they exhilarate us and make us feel more alive. I’ve had a few encounters. This is one of them.

I was chugging along on my trusty AJS 350cc, minding my own business. A 350 AJS is a nice sturdy workhorse of a bike. It’s not nippy or fast. I’d describe it more as homely and steady.

I  was heading down a three lane road with a fifty MPH speed limit behind a car which was following a bus. We were all doing a steady 50 mph.

I was in no hurry.

The car in front was. He decided 50 mph was far too slow.

The car pulled out into the middle lane to overtake the bus. Coming towards us was a big lorry. A car simultaneously pulled out to overtake the lorry. The two cars were heading towards each other in that middle lane.

Casually my eyes watched and my brain calculated. I could see that neither of the cars were able to accelerate fast enough to overtake and pull back in. One of the cars would have to slow and cancel the manoeuvre.

Neither did.

It was as if I was watching a film. I seemed dissociated from reality. The cars crawled up alongside the bus and truck respectively and headed for a head-on crash. I was a spectator.

At the very last minute both cars attempted to cut in but neither was sufficiently past and clipped each other and the vehicle they were overtaking. This caused the cars to spin and the bus and truck to swerve. What had been an orderly line of traffic was instantly transformed into chaos. The road ahead was full of spinning cars and veering truck and bus. I was heading straight for it at 50 mph with nowhere to go.

Without thinking I laid the bike down and avoided the spinning car coming straight at me, I pulled the bike back up like a speedway rider and opened the throttle to go in front of the truck bearing down at me, I swerved the other way behind the bus that was heading across the lane almost broadside, and pulled the bike back down, with throttle wide, to accelerate round the other car that was spinning and heading for my side.

It must have taken a couple of seconds but it seemed like minutes. One minute the road in front was a mass of spinning metal and the next I was through into clear road and order.

Everything had been pure instinct and reaction. Somehow I had picked a path through.

I looked in my mirror. Behind me cars were slamming into the wreckage. It was a mammoth pile-up. If I had clipped one of those vehicles I would have been under that mess.

It only takes an instant to transform the ordinary into death.

Anecdote – The Queen Mother and I.

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Anecdote – The Queen Mother and I.

AppleMark

The Queen Mother and I

I completed my Biology degree in 1971. Somehow I managed to achieve an honours degree despite not being the most diligent of students. The college insisted on putting lectures in the morning and I was usually up all night at various gigs or talking madly about the state of the universe.
I must have found some time to absorb a bit of biology on the way.
As my degree was a London University degree they had a big award ceremony. This was to take place in the Royal Albert Hall with the Queen Mother giving out the awards.
Being something of a rebel with waist length hair and attitude, a dislike of the establishment and distaste for all forms of elitism, I was not that enamored.
Indeed the whole ceremony smacked of everything I stood against – elitism, monarchy, the establishment. The Albert Hall was OK though. I’d seen Country Joe and the Fish, Roy Harper and Hendrix there.
My Mum and Dad urged me to go but I declined. It wasn’t my thing. It was only years later that I fully appreciated how selfish I’d been.
I was the first person in my family to achieve a degree. To my Mum and Dad it was a really big thing. My achievements made them proud. They had sacrificed a lot for me to be educated and I had treated it all so lightly. For them to have had a photo of me receiving my degree, in cap and gown, from the Queen Mother would have been something huge.
So much for principles.
I still feel immensely guilty to this day.

My First Day at Secondary School

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My First Day at Secondary School

To start with, having failed the 11+, I was destined to go to a Secondary Modern with an extremely poor reputation. It sounded a bit like Iraq at the height of its troubles.

With a good start to my secondary school education in mind my parents, in their great wisdom, decided to go on holiday at the beginning of September. That meant I missed the first week of my new school. After all, the start of one’s secondary education was no big deal, was it?

What a fortunate occurrence.

When we came back from holiday my friend Mutt (Charlie Mutton) came round and said I was enrolled in his class. Well, Charlie was at an altogether better school – a bilateral (early comprehensive) which catered for all abilities and had a far better reputation.

Immediately my Mum tuned in. That Saturday afternoon I was forcibly taken into town to purchase a new uniform. On the Monday I was off to my new school – the one Mutt was in. By some clerical glitch I had been enrolled at two schools!

What a farce.

But not quite as much of a farce as my first day.

That Monday morning I was dressed in my new uniform – cap, blazer, shirt, tie, shorts, knee-length socks and shiny black shoes. Boy did I look neat. My Mum lovingly licked her fingers and patted my hair down.

I looked pristine.

Mutt took me in.

Rather sheepishly I edged into my form room. There was only one space and it was right at the back. It involved me edging around the other boys. My form room was in the Technical Drawing Room. The tables were arranged in a line round the edge of the room.

Our kind Form Tutor, Mr Cox, had provided homemade pencil sharpening devices for his Technical Drawing classes. They consisted of a piece of sandpaper glued to a board. These were hung on nails all around the form room. Unfortunately the nails were at shoulder height. My first experience, while edging about the other seated boys, was to snag my new blazer on a protruding nail and rip a segment out of it. For the rest of the day I had a triangular flap of material dangling down from my shoulder.

One minute in and no longer pristine.

It didn’t stop there.

Our first lesson was Art. As a Year 1 class we had Art on the stage. It was quite a way from the Art Block. My teacher asked for volunteers to get the materials needed from the Art Block. Foolishly I volunteered.

Four of us went over to collect the paints, brushes and paper.

The paint was Tempora powder paint. Our teacher had had the brilliant idea of putting it in baking trays. You know – the ones with wells. Each different colour was piled up in a separate well.

I carried about eight of these trays piled one upon the other.

We carefully made our way out of the Art Block, down the road, to the door into the building with the assembly hall and stage.

I carefully mounted the steps and even more carefully negotiated the tricky door. With confidence and vigour I set off towards the short flight of steps that led to the stage. Unfortunately I was not used to mats in sunken door wells. As I strode forward my foot caught the rim of the well and I tripped.

I went flying and fell flat on my face. The eight trays of powder paint headed for the ceiling. Gravity intervened. They headed back to earth. The ground intervened. There was a resulting crash that closely resembled an explosion.

The powder paint, being light, flew up into the air in a great, thick cloud. Gravity intervened. The powder began to settle.

From my perspective there was a loud despairing scream (me) closely followed by a massive clattering (the trays), then I was enveloped by a huge cloud. It felt as if I was a magnet for this cloud. By the time I picked myself up it appeared to have settled all over me.

The noise attracted the whole class, who, along with my Art teacher, rushed down the stairs to see what had caused the commotion.

I slowly stood up, covered from head to toe in paint dust. I registered everyone staring at me in horror and I started to cry.

As the tears rolled down my cheeks they transformed into rainbows.

Conker Season

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Conker Season

We are in the conker season. Back when I was a boy this would have been a time of great competitive activity.

Conkers was a boys’ game! Girls did not participate. It was considered a macho sport. Boys delighted in being loud and aggressive. There was a violent element to it!

First there was the collecting. Every conker tree around was beset by hordes of kids throwing sticks up at the clumps of conkers. Whenever a clump of prickly fruits was hit they would come showering down accompanied by yells of triumph. The victor would rush to collect his spoils, stamping on the prickly cases to release the shiny brown nuts inside – the glorious conkers.

Every morning the ground underneath the trees would be inspected to glean any that had fallen in the night.

Every boy had a collection of conkers at home from which he selected the biggest, hardest and heaviest in the hopes that they would be winners.

The second stage was the preparation. Everybody had their own secret preparation. Some soaked them in vinegar and swore that it made the skin tough and leathery. Some slowly heated them in the oven until they were hard as rocks. It was suspected that some tried to cheat by injecting in glue or cement!

The third stage was the piercing. It sounds easy but in fact was a crucial art. The skin had to be pierced with a skewer and carefully bored through and out the other side. Care had to be taken not to split the shell or the kernel inside. One had to retain the intrinsic strength of the nut. Choosing the angle and place to drill through was also a matter for debate. It was an art. Piercing introduced weakness. If the shell of the fruit was split the fissure would open up in contest and your conker would be split in two. Piercing could take place before or after preparation. It was all part of the philosophy and technique.

The fourth stage was the stringing – using a skewer to push the string through without damaging the conker, then tying the knot. Everyone tried to create a big knot so that it did not slip through the conker when it was struck. The theory was that a big knot helped absorb the force of the impact.

Armed with a bunch of conkers we would begin the fray. The playgrounds were alive with the shouts of glee and despair as conkers were smashed together.

Boys were rushing around challenging each other. The challenger had first three hits.

The challenged held up his conker at strings length. It was important to wrap the string around a finger so that the impact did not smash the conker out of your hand and down onto the concrete where it could be damaged. People always gathered round to watch. They acted as referees – always eager to pass comment as loudly as they could. If the challenged flinched, or moved the conker, the challenger received an extra hit and the crowd jeered their disdain. The art was to hold it softly so that the impact was absorbed and show no fear.

The challenger wrapped the string around his fingers, took aim and tried to strike the conker as squarely as possible, attempting to get as much downforce as they could. A short string made for more accuracy but less force. A long string meant you often missed but when you hit it could be fatal for the conker struck. The danger to the challenged was that you could whack them on the hand. But that was all part of the game. Some boys delighted in hitting you and if you flinched or cried out everyone jeered and you lost face. You were expected to take your painful knocks without making a fuss.

If the conker of the challenged survived it was their turn to have three hits against the challenger. If the strings became entangled the first person to shout out ‘Strings’ received an extra hit. Thus it alternated until one or other of the conkers was smashed to pieces.

If your conker was the winner it was a oner. If it had defeated two others it was a twoer. I once had a monster conker that was a twentyfiver.

Towards the end of break the whole playground was littered in bits of smashed conkers. The caretaker was never too happy.

By the end of conker season it was time to move on. There were guys to be made, penny for the guy to be carried out, bonfires to be built and fireworks to be bought. Conkers were soon forgotten. The season was short.

Today I picked up a bunch of conkers to teach my grandchildren the art. There were no children throwing sticks up at the trees or stamping on the prickly cases, no shouts of glee from the playgrounds or smashed conkers littering the floor.

It seems the ancient art of conkers is sadly sliding into history.

Anecdote – The motor-biker and the cat.

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Anecdote – The motor-biker and the cat.

When I was a young man living in London I had very long hair and used to go in to work on my motorbike, complete with leather boots and leather jacket. I had a great 350cc Enfield with ape-hangers and used to love weaving in and out of the traffic jams and breezing along with my hair flying loose behind me.

I had a job in a college, while I did my research, where I had been put in charge of the Animal House. I used to love animals. I took care of them. The downside was that I also had to kill them when they were needed for experiments. But I figured I could at least give them a happy life while they were alive.

One morning, making my way through the rush-hour, I saw a cat dash out in the road and get hit by a car. The back wheel went right over its head.

I pulled in and went over to it. It was mewing horribly and trying to drag itself to the pavement. Its back was broken and its rear completely limp. There was blood coming from its ears and it was obvious to me that it was distressed, in agony and did not have long for this universe. Making a quick judgement I quickly dispatched it on the kerb.

It was only then that I looked up to find a whole bus queue looking aghast at me. They had just witnessed a Hell’s Angel dash a poor cat’s brains out in front of them.

I quickly got back on my bike and drove away.

What would you have done?

Anecdote – Bede and the spontaneous party

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Anecdote – Bede and the spontaneous party

Bede and the Party

Bede is a good friend; I ended up sharing a flat with him in 1970.

The first time I remember meeting him was at his twenty first birthday party. He was completely naked running about all over the place. It was a strange party.

I had a car. It was an old Ford Popular sit-up and beg car that I’d painted. I’d used all the bright gloss paint I could lay my hands on. The grill was orange, body pink, lamps yellow, wheels orange with a blue stripe down the middle and various green trim. You could see it coming. It was my magic bus. It proved very popular with the police. They loved pulling me over and trying to find a problem with it. I had to regularly take my documents in to the police station. I was on every page in the book.

A stone had shattered the windscreen and, as I didn’t have the money to replace it, I solved the problem by knocking the glass out. It made for a breezy ride but was good in summer.

I’d been out to a gig with Bede and after we were heading home in my rainbow car when Bede saw that the pubs were emptying. He told me to pull over.

Bede climbed out through the broken windscreen and stood on the roof. He announced that there was a party about to happen round at his place. It seemed to go down well.

By the time we got there people had started arriving. The only trouble was that Bede was not really set up for a party. There was no sound system, no drink, no food, but we had lots of people.

Soon the flat was heaving. They were very amenable. Bede and I randomly read extracts of books to great cheers. Before long spliffs started circulating, booze magically appeared, a sound system materialised and some good music started up.

It went on all night and developed into one of the best. The only downside was that someone stole a couple of Bede’s shirts!

Crazy times.