Part One

It was on Saturday mornings that the thunk at the letterbox in the hallway denoted the arrival of the latest edition of 'Peace News'. My father would sit transfixed over morning eggs and bacon as he pored over the latest accounts of grisly happenings in Vietnam, Biafra, and elsewhere, not to mention the constant threat of total annihilation by weapons of the nuclear kind.

'Peace News' was a CND-type publication, formerly specifically pacifist. I sometimes looked through the paper myself. It was all important and worthy, no doubt, but the articles invariably seemed a bit grey and crusty; serious in the wrong kind of way. I just couldn't get excited by it all. 

Then, one day, another contributor to the newspaper made an appearance on the scene. Dave Cunliffe of 'Global Tapestry'. It was difficult to find out exactly what Global Tapestry was, but it seemed good and important, and quite far from typical Peace News fayre. Poetic, vegan, and with words of winged inspiration, Dave Cunliffe conjured up a sense of carnival, of defiant joyfulness, as the remedy for the woes of the world. "You want peace? Then start with your own mind, your own life." Cunliffe hailed from Blackburn, an old industrial mill town in Lancashire, and arguably the most unlikely birthplace on planet Earth for the colourful revolution of joy. But there you have it.

One damp and rainy Saturday in 1969 I paid a visit to Chelsea in London, where I succeeded in tracking down 'Gandalf's Garden'. The Tolkienesque hero had given his name to an underground journal (for some reason they preferred to call it 'overground') along with an underground headshop located in the appropriately named World's End.

I knew about Gandalf's Garden through the magazine of the same name that I would buy at local rock music club Friars. Bizarrely (it seemed to me) part-founded by our school chemistry teacher, Friars in Aylesbury gained legendary status for spawning new and exciting rock bands. There were rock history esoterica such as Rare Bird and Blossom Toes; regulars the Edgar Broughton Band, whose highlights were 'Dropout Boogie' and the collective chant of 'Out, demons, out'; and the most famous 'before they were famous', Mott the Hoople. 

'Gandalf's Garden' magazine stood a world apart from political revolutions, guns, and violent protest, as well as from other underground journals of the time IT and Oz. It announced its presence in bright, swirling colours, and carried articles about the lost continent of Mu, ancient mythology, and ..... trepanning. 

The age-old art of trepanning involves making a hole in the top of the skull, thereby increasing brainblood volume. This, according to the interviewee (who had undergone the procedure himself), renders the subject permanently high. All this I found curiously interesting.

I had no personal wish to be trepanned. But the brainblood volume stuff intrigued me. The article claimed that it can also be increased by standing on your head for considerable periods of time. The following winter I spent largely upside-down; the results were very modest.

When I got down to World's End, Chelsea, I immediately located the little shop and hangout named Gandalf's Garden. I approached cautiously, put my hand on the door, and stepped timidly in with a barely-contained mix of excitement and apprehension. The place was decked out in bright yet incomprehensibly peace-inducing colours, cushions and long wall hangings all around. A couple of cool-looking guys with very long wafty hair and in long spiritual-looking robes were floating around silently. Perfume of oriental incense hung heavy in the air, and all combined to suffuse the atmosphere with a kind of stillness and calm that was new and foreign to me.

I didn't stick around very long: there's only so much calm and stillness that a sixteen-year old can take, and other than that there wasn't much to be doing. I issued onto the street outside, and felt a palpable and almost physical jolt as I did so. The bustle of the street was a shock to the system. I'd never been anywhere like Gandalf's Garden before. Once again, most interesting. 

Part Two

Whether Gandalf and Dave Cunliffe were the way to go, I didn't know for sure. They certainly felt right. In the meantime, other things were falling into place. Politics, conventional political systems, for one. I came to realise that they all constituted a dead-end street, a fake carrot of a seduction. I followed up the political alternatives that I knew of, and I drew a blank.

First up was Communism. Marx, Engels. I read up on them all voraciously in a matter of several weeks. This was easily done, since Aylesbury then boasted a fantastic public library. For about a month I was almost convinced, but then the cracks began to show themselves. Marx and his buddies came with a barrow-load of contradictions and inconsistencies, and went in the bin with the British orthodoxies. Most obviously, Engels's idea that the state would wither away over time was palpable nonsense. Who was he kidding? And having a look around at places that seemed to espouse Marxist ideals, like Stalin's Russia and Maoist China with its Cultural Revolution, they really didn't look that great. No signs of the state quietly slipping away there. 

Political anarchism showed more promise. Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon: these were characters I found far more sympathetic, their philosophy more coherent and convincing. But there remained real problems with anarcho-syndicalism and the notion that, with the removal of the bosses, working folk would naturally morph into fantastic people. Most of the adult working people I knew needed much more than the bosses disappearing before they became liberated. They needed a comprehensive overhaul of consciousness.

Over the ensuing years I ran the gamut of groups and organisations devoted to what I considered 'alternative', to creating a better world. Oxford vegetarians, UK vegan youth; Oxford anarchists, tenants and claimants unions and the like; abolition of fox hunting and other cruel 'sports'. I attended a couple of protests and marches, one of which turned very nasty.

Out of all this activity, a feeling-realisation began to unmistakeably emerge. No matter how lofty your ideals, how noble your thoughts and aspirations, if you were not an exceptional specimen of humanity yourself, you might as well forget it. Time and again I would get to know people, only to discover that, in the jargon of the day, their heads were no more together than those of the Establishment. 

I found no personal inspirations, no exemplars, amongst the alternative activities and organisations of the day. Not really. No true blossoming of the human spirit while the the individual remains tied up, bound up, hung up. I was inevitably coming round to the dormouse's way of seeing things: Feed your head; feed your head.