Thursday 30 December 2010

With my marriage I inherited a mother in law who thought her daughter could have done better, a father in law who I thought could have done better and a foot on the property ladder. I also produced four beautiful children proving that every cloud does indeed have a silver lining. During this period I left the ball bearing factory moved to Hastings and had my short stint in the warehouse of a plastics firm. Hastings I discovered was a strange town populated it seemed by old women and very few old men, a worrying concept for the future. It was the type of town that didn't bury there dead but sat them along the seafront in deck chairs. I can not understand why William the conqueror did not turn around and go straight back home when he landed there ,I did. I went back to Essex, back to the ball bearing factory and back to being single. I got divorced.

Wednesday 1 December 2010

When 1967 and the summer of love came around I had morphed into a miner league hippy. I was wearing flared trousers ,tie dyed shirt,long hair, beard and beads. Sex drugs and rock and roll were the order of the day (I suppose two out of three can't be bad). If you were not involved in a war, protesting on a university campus or taking part in anti war marches everything was peace and love. It was about this time that I discovered Buddhism and Tibet. I read the book Ten years in Tibet and was instantly hooked on this magical mystical country. Tibet was to become another one of those places I would never get to see in later life. I told you there would be more. I also read a book by a genuine Tibetan lama called Tuesday Lopsam Rampa who turned out to be a genuine plummer from Wales with a really good imagination. It is widely accepted that at this time it only took the opening bars of a Jimi Hendricks song and young girls would throw off there clothes and dance naked in the morning dew.(wrong place wrong time again). It did happen I'm told but usually at one of the big festivals that were springing up everywhere. I didn't go to these gatherings of beautiful people to celebrate the dawning of a new age where peace and love would rule the world. I got married.