C.J. Stone's Blog, page 18

Subterfuge used to set up our NHS for privatisation

When Theresa May went to the United States to meet Donald Trump, what do you think she had to offer?

Asked whether health services might form part of any future trade deal, she very pointedly refused to answer, saying only that a deal would be in the interests of both countries.

In case you are not aware of it, the NHS is already being prepared for privatisation.

The means is a clever little subterfuge known as the Sustainability & Transformation Plans (STPs). There are currently 44 of these being rolled out throughout the country. Their job is to impose £22 billion worth of budget cuts on an already chronically underfunded service.

“The standard technique of privatisation,” says Noam Chomsky: “defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.”

That’s exactly what is happening to our NHS. The words “sustainability” and “transformation” are euphemisms. “Sustainability” refers to sustaining the rump of the NHS after massive cuts have eaten the heart out of the service.

“Transformation” refers to using clinical commissioning groups as points of access for private health care providers.

The trick here is that the private health companies are allowed to use the NHS logo, so you won’t be able to tell the difference.

Large corporations such as Virgin and Serco already run 10% of our GP services. The STPs will ensure even more departments being farmed out to private companies, which will naturally cherry pick all the easiest and most profitable bits.

People ask how we are to maintain spending on our Health Service in this time of austerity?

What they are not aware of is how much the NHS is being deliberately sabotaged. For most of its history the NHS was cheap to run, with only 6% of costs being eaten up by administration.

Recent reforms have seen those costs rise to 15%. The Health and Social Care Act 2012 removed responsibility for the health of citizens from the Secretary of State for Health.

Ask yourself: if the Secretary of State for Health is not responsible for the health of the nation, then who is?

*************

From The Whitstable Gazette 09/03/17

The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.

Send letters to: The Editor, 5-8 Boorman Way, Estuary View Business Park, Whitstable, Kent CT5 3SE

fax 01227 762415

email  whitstablegazette@thekmgroup.co.uk

Housing Benefit Hill: Sitting Target

The funniest part of the whole venture was the way in which people tried to ignore him. An insectizoid alien goes shopping in a rubber suit, and no one notices

From the Guardian Weekend July 20th 1996





Art

I DON’T know much about art, but I know what makes me laugh. So Picasso painted a picture of a woman with a fish perched on her head, and he called it Woman With A Fish Hat. And that made me laugh.

Mark was in Safeway when I caught up with him. He was buying breakfast cereal. I turned the corner of the aisle, and there he was. The other shoppers were pointedly ignoring him. When they looked, it was surreptitiously, out of the corners of their eyes. I laughed when I saw him, and made some passing comment, but he ignored me. He was in a sort of psychic bubble compounded of concentration, embarrassment and extreme physical discomfort. He was shopping.

He was also dressed in a rubber suit.

Mark’s a performance artist, and this was his performance: going shopping in a rubber suit. He had matt-black foam-rubber pads around the elbows and knees, and a sort of foam-rubber breast-plate, like a pair of pendulous breasts. His stomach was distended and pointed, while a pair of foam-rubber buttocks hung down from his behind. On his head was an oversized, sagging brain-pan like an ant’s head, while a chin-plate jutted like an insect’s mandibles. He looked like a sort of insectizoid alien. And there was a balloon hanging from the back of his head, which was attached to a tube so that when he breathed, this coloured bag would pulse in and out like some obscene extension of his brain.

The performance was called Neighbourhood Watch. The advance publicity gave details of his estimated arrival in each shop and all the items he would buy. The funniest part of the whole venture was the way in which people tried to ignore him. An insectizoid alien goes shopping in a rubber suit, and no one notices.

He was waiting in the queue at the check-out counter. The manager told the girl not to say anything. She did what she was told, checking through all of the items. “That’s £10.20,” she said. “Have you got the 20p?”

She was laughing pleasantly at him as he fished in his purse for the coin. It was all so mundane. Except that he was leaving a trail of sweat behind him as he lugged the heavy shopping bags out of the supermarket.

A couple of kids passed him. “How do you wipe your arse?” they asked.

“With my tongue,” he said.

Later he was in a cafe eating an egg sandwich. A couple walked passed the window, and one said: “Look at that! It’s the buzzy-bee man.”

“No it’s not,” the other said, “it’s an ant.”

A woman asked what he was supposed to be.

“He’s a man in a rubber suit, ” I told her. “Something like that.”

“What’s he promoting? He must be promoting something.” She had a child with her, who was staring through the window at Mark. The woman clipped the boy around the ear. “Come ‘ere,” she said, and dragged him away.

Mark’s wife had brought their daughter down. When she saw him she screamed delightedly and ran with her arms outstretched. “Daddy!” she called, as if everything was normal, as if he always dresses this way. Maybe he does. Who knows what artists get up to in the privacy of their own homes?

Various people had come to see him. Some of them were taking photographs. I overheard one of them observe, “he’s always trying to humiliate himself. We’ll be tarring and feathering him next week,” as Mark tottered of through the town in the fine, misty rain, almost slipping on the wet pavement, dripping with sweat and glowing like a beacon.

Beach

MARK is also a sculptor.

Some years ago the council rebuilt the beach. This is the way of our crazy era, that some people have the madness and the gall to rebuild beaches. They dug up the old beach and then stuck down huge blocks of plastic-netted hard-core, on top of which they laid piles of grit and sand. The old beach used to go up and down a lot between the groynes, and you’d have to clamber about to get along. The new beach is a wide, flat desert, the upper end scattered with a few scrubby plants.

In the process of rebuilding the beach, they replaced all the old groynes. Some of the artists got permission – plus a small commission – to build benches out of the groyne wood so that people could sit down on the new, wide, flat beach. Sit-down art. Art with a posterior motive. And Mark got one of these commissions.

The result was extraordinary. Monstrous. A huge structure like a barricade, so oversized that he had to add a platform to rest your feet on. At one end he fitted a weird diver’s helmet, wormed about by writhing snakes of steel, like a submariner’s nightmare. And at the other end he cut a jagged hole with a chainsaw.

The hole was meant to remind us of the story of the little boy and the dyke. Instead it just looked as if it had a hole in it. But I was down there once and there was a four-year-old boy climbing through the hole. His mother had to stand on the other side to catch him. And once he’d gone through it once, he had to go through it again.

And there’s not a child in this town who hasn’t sat on that bench and, putting his head into the helmet, gone “Whoo!” just to hear the echo. And the kids climbed over it like a climbing frame. And teenagers gathered there in the evenings to conduct their rituals. And adults congregated there on summer nights to polish off bottles of red wine and to chat. It was an altogether popular feature on an otherwise featureless, wide, flat beach.

After the bench was built and placed – near a pub, so you could sit on it and drink beer if you wanted – they built some new houses. A courtyard development overlooking the sea. Very expensive, very exclusive, all with private garages and burglar alarms on the walls. And the people in the new houses didn’t like the bench. Why not? Because it was there. Because children played on it. Because teenagers went there to share cigarettes and to snog on it. Because adults liked to sit there on a summer evening and pass the time. So the residents got up a petition to have the bench removed. And you know what? The bench was removed.

Never mind that thousands of people had enjoyed that bench. And never mind that thousands of kids had put their heads in the helmet and gone “Whoo!” just to hear the echo. The opinions of a few outsiders have overridden the feelings of the town. Property rules, OK?

I wonder what Picasso would make of it. Not a lot. He’s dead.

*************

You can contact Mark Fuller here.

Farewell Angelina by Bob Dylan

Joan Baez does a pretty good impression of Bob Dylan.

There’s a bit in No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese’s essential film about Dylan’s early years: Baez is sitting in her kitchen nursing a mug of coffee. She’s just been talking about her first impressions of Dylan. This was early on, when she was already a famous singer, and he was a raggedy-clothed ragamuffin just starting out. She says that everyone was raving about him, about how he was a genius who wrote all these great songs, but that she refused to listen, being far too self-absorbed. But then she heard him sing and he was as good as everyone said he was.

They started a romance. He used to stay with her in a house in Carmel Valley, because he liked to write there.

That’s when she does the impression.

“What do you think of this?” she says, with a little bit of gruffness added, in imitation of Bob’s voice.

He’s just handed her a set of lyrics. So she tries to figure the lyrics out and comes back with an interpretation.

“Hey, that’s pretty fucking good,” she says, in Bob’s voice again, rocking her head from side to side, lips curling half way between a sneer and a laugh. “See now, a bunch of years from now, all these people, all these assholes, are gonna be writing about all the shit I write. I don’t know where the fuck it comes from. I don’t know what the fuck it’s about, and they’re gonna write what it’s about.” And then she does an impression of his laugh – ha! – dismissively amused, ironically detached from the source of his own genius.

That’s an interesting insight into Dylan’s working method. It’s always been obvious to me that he wrote very fast and that often he wasn’t really thinking about what the words might mean. It’s got more to do with the sounds on the page, with the rhythm and the scan, than with the message. Occasionally they tumble into complete nonsense. But there are whole verses of sheer genius too, words that seem to resonate with your soul, that call out to the poet in you.

The danger with Dylan is in trying to be too specific, trying to say that this line must mean this, and that line must mean that, as if it’s a coded message written in verse form, only waiting for the right key to unlock it.

His lyrics aren’t like that. They are more impressionistic than descriptive, more like dream sequences than a logical progression of ideas, more about the energy and drive needed to put these feelings into words than about what the words mean exactly.

So it is with Farewell Angelina, a song from the Bringing It All Back Home era.

I first heard the Joan Baez version on YouTube last year and was immediately charmed. I listened to it several times in a row, and then over and over again for a number of days.

It’s hard to say what it’s about exactly, if it’s about anything at all.

It may well be a poetic farewell to Baez herself. It was written for the Bringing It All Back Home album, and there is, in fact, a rough recording of it by Dylan from the time. The lyrics are a little different from the version Baez sings. It’s not quite the finished composition, a little cruder, lacking polish, with one extra verse that sounds like almost complete gibberish. It’s not clear why he never finished it himself but gave it to Baez instead, but it’s the fact that he did that might incline you to believe that it was written as a farewell to his old flame.

They were breaking up around this time. Dylan had asked her to join him on his tour of the UK, and then very pointedly failed to invite her onto the stage with him. He was going electric while she was still a folk singer.

The Scorsese film portrays her as this uptight square, looking awkward and lost, while everyone else is having a party. It’s obvious that there were a lot of drugs going about; one or two sequences where it’s clear Bob has just taken a line, as he touches his nose and sniffs and goes off into some eclectic rant.

She was a ‘straight’, more interested in politics than partying, more in tune with demos and sit-ins and changing the world than with show biz. Meanwhile Bob’s career was taking off into the stratosphere and he was surrounded with admirers. He was much too astute to stay involved in politics for long. That was the kiss of death in show biz terms, as Pete Seeger had already shown. Dylan referred to his earlier work as “finger-pointing songs”. It was like a bandwagon he’d stepped onto for a time, but then neatly stepped off once it had served his purpose. So he’d gone from the work-clothed imitation of Woody Guthrie, mythologising his past, to someone who was the epitome of 60s cool, hanging out with the Beatles, wearing Chelsea boots and button down shirts and hoovering up the amphetamines.

Baez had simply not made that leap with him. She was still caught up in the utter seriousness of the political world, thinking about civil rights and the other issues of the day, trying to drag the conversation back to something dull but meaningful.

Dylan’s lyrics had shifted into surrealism by then. This was the era of Mr Tambourine Man, which may or may not be a song about acid. “Take me on a trip upon your magic swirling ship,” certainly sounds like it could be. But it veers off into borderline nonsense too, into strangeness and uncertainty, into words that can be interpreted in a million different ways. That’s part of the appeal, of course. It’s like an astrology column or an I-Ching reading, vague enough to mean almost anything.

So maybe that’s what Farewell Angelina is about. It’s a goodbye song to Joan Baez, laden with his new-found impressionist imagery.

Here are the lyrics:

Farewell Angelina, the bells of the crown

Are being stolen by bandits, I must follow the sound

The triangle tingles and the trumpets play slow

Farewell Angelina, the sky is on fire, and I must go

There’s no need for anger, there’s no need for blame

There’s nothing to prove, everything’s still the same

Just a table standing empty by the edge of the sea

Means farewell Angelina, the sky is trembling, and I must leave

The jack and queen have forsaked the courtyard

Fifty-two gypsies now file past the guards

In the space where the deuce and the ace once ran wild

Farewell Angelina, the sky is falling, I’ll see you in a while

See the cross-eyed pirates sit perched in the sun

Shooting tin cans with a sawed-off shotgun

And the neighbors they clap and they cheer with each blast

But farewell Angelina, the sky’s changing colour and I must leave fast

King Kong, little elves on the rooftops they dance

Valentino-type tangos while the make-up man’s hands

Shut the eyes of the dead not to embarrass anyone

Farewell Angelina, the sky is embarrassed and I must be gone

The machine guns are roaring and the puppets heave rocks

The fiends nail time bombs to the hands of the clocks

Call me any name you like, I will never deny it

But farewell Angelina, the sky is erupting, I must go where it’s quiet

The song is visual as well as aural. He’s painting a picture. The bells are golden, as is the crown, as are the trumpets; the bells tingle along with the triangle, and you are left with an impression of something mystical and golden calling to him, which he feels drawn to follow.

“The bells of the crown” is a beautiful line. It doesn’t mean anything in a literal sense. Have you ever seen bells on a crown? No. But if there were bells on a crown, maybe you’d be compelled to follow them too.

The table standing empty by the edge of the sea is a great image for the end of an affair: a place maybe where the lovers once met, now abandoned and lonely on the shoreline.

But the song could mean farewell to a lot of other things too. His life is changing at this time. His art is changing. The world is changing. And he’s changing too, rolling with the changes, moving on, gathering no moss, like the rolling stone he would later write about. So it’s farewell to Joan Baez, and farewell to folk music, farewell to Pete Seeger and the Newport Folk Festival, farewell to politics, which he never really got on with anyway, and which were just a platform for him, a way to get his name about.

I’ve read interpretations of the song which attempt to explain every line, but I really don’t think you should do this. There’s a cartoon quality to a lot of the images, and I think you’re supposed to visualise them just as they are: cross-eyed pirates, King Kong, little elves, tangos on rooftops and all. Maybe he does have some specific targets for these images but, since he refuses to explain them, we’ll never know. Meanwhile, it’s up to the listener to make what sense of it he can.

What makes this song magical to me is none of that. It’s in the repeated refrain about the sky: the sky is on fire, the sky is trembling, the sky is falling, the sky’s changing colour, the sky is embarrassed, the sky is erupting. It’s like stepping through a portal to another world.

Poetry can do this. It can take us on a journey to another world. It is a world much like our own, but strangely altered. In that world the sky can really be on fire, because we can visualise it as such. Words have that power. They make us see things. So we see the bells of the crown, and the sky that is on fire. We see the ace and deuce and the sky that is falling. We tremble with the sky, we fall with the sky, we change colour with the sky, we are embarrassed with the sky, we erupt with the sky.

It takes us back to early childhood, to the sense of total immersion in the world. We were not separate beings back then. It wasn’t us and the world. We were the world, and the world was us. The earth was us, the sky was us. There was no inside and outside, just the sense of total being, so when we were trembling, the sky was trembling, when we were embarrassed, the sky was embarrassed. We would look to the sky and to the world around us for the changes in ourselves.

This is what Dylan captures so wonderfully in this song, the deep sense of connectedness we had as children but have lost with age. The song allows us a glimpse into that world again. Maybe that’s the sound that calls him away, a sense of something deep in childhood which he’s lost but is looking for again. Who knows? But as a farewell gift to the lover he must forsake, it is about as perfect as we can imagine.

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The Trials of Arthur Revised Edition by CJ Stone and Arthur Pendragon

With an introduction by Prof. Ronald Hutton

King Arthur draws the sword from the Stone
Description

Looks like a tramp. Says he’s a King.

Meet Arthur – Warrior, leader and Druid. An ex-squaddie and biker turned spiritual leader and parliamentary candidate. The bearer of the Sword of Britain. Once voted the tenth most outrageous man in Britain by Loaded magazine, following the incident where he was naked in the Royal Courts of Justice. He is also – some would say – the legendary King Arthur, returned at last, fighting to revive the Wasteland and renew these islands. Don’t believe him? Come with him on adventures and quests, through fields and forests and sacred places, to the mythical Britain behind the facade of our empty consumer culture. Regardless of whether you believe he is who he says he is, one thing is certain: he’s the best Arthur we have.

Reviews

‘Am I alone in thrilling to this noble throwback to the age of Celtic romance? Our Prime Minister is a grinning charmless twerp; our Archbishop of Canterbury has a much spiritual charisma as a raw potato; and the House of Windsor is dullsville. I’d dump the whole pack of them tomorrow and replace them with a single Royal, Spiritual and Political leader – King Arthur.’ AN Wilson, Evening Standard.

‘This is a book about heroism, patriotism, liberty, poetry, martyrdom, history, mythology, personal self-fashioning and other unforeseen consequences of enjoying cider, cigarettes and laughs with a bunch of mates. It is an epic true story of war and religion set in Britain during the Dark Ages at the end of the twentieth century, which manages to remain at once, like its main character, passionately serious, irresistibly compelling, and hilariously good-humoured.’ Professor Ronald Hutton, Bristol University.

‘The Trials of Arthur is the amazing story of one singular man. But it is also the inspiring tale of an unjustly maligned British counterculture. Searching, funny, intelligent and illuminating, it is on one level a rip-roaring read, whimsical and compelling, and on another a haunting elegy to all those people who refuse to accept that they cannot make a difference in a world they know must change.’ Deborah Orr, The Guardian.

‘In a nutshell: soap dodgers, druids, bikers… all manner of life romps through this funny and intelligent true-life tale. It gives a worm’s-eye view of the eco-protest movement.’ Spirit & Destiny.

‘The Trials of Arthur… is the compelling and often hilarious story of how an ex-soldier, ex-builder and always-biker donned a white frock (his words) and changed his name legally and regally to Arthur Pendragon. Trials? He’s had the odd run-in with Her Majesty’s police forces, mainly when protesting against new bypasses. One of the appendices lists 26 court appearances… So is this long-haired, bearded, cider-loving guy with a sword really Arthur Pendragon? His passport and driving license say so. In his passport photo he’s even wearing his crown. But is he really King Arthur? The co-author has his doubts. So, at times, does Arthur himself. And he’s perfectly happy for everyone else to think he’s a raving nutter. If people accept him as King Arthur, then he is King Arthur, king by acclaim, as it used to be. In any case, as the book says, if Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chretien de Troyes, Malory, Spencer and Tennyson can reinvent Arthur for their own purposes, spiritual or political, then so can we; he’s the King Arthur reinvented for today. 9/10. Great story of counter-culture King.’ Fortean Times.

‘The Trials of Arthur is filled with sagas, some hilarious, others sad and poignant, which show that this man is a human being on a mission to uphold “Truth, Honour and Justice”. The authors have been careful not to force their ideals upon the reader and encourage them to make up their own minds about Arthur and his deeds all the way through. However, they illustrate their beliefs in a humorous and dramatic way and, by the end of the book, the reader can’t help but like the man who calls himself King Arthur Uther Pendragon.’ Hampshire Chronicle.

‘For those of you not familiar with Arthur Pendragon, Druid King and Stonehenge defender, you’re in for a treat. Arthur’s story is one that is needed in these days when the people of Britain are being led into conflicts not of their choosing and are suffering at the hands of politicians and bureaucracy. Having faced racism and the worst that British society can offer, it is no small relief to find this patriotic upholder of all the good things about being British. Long live the once and present King! Highly recommended.’ Tania Ahsan, author of The brilliant book of calm.

‘The Trials of Arthur… is the partly ghosted autobiography of an ex-soldier and biker called John Rothwell who reinvented himself as “King Arthur” in the 1980s and became a leading eco-warrior. A larger-than-life eccentric character renowned for frequently being found “tired and emotional” in ditches, he has been in and out of court and jail in his role as a political campaigner against motorway construction and for public access to Stonehenge. If you still think that being a pagan in the 21st century means wearing dreadlocks, living in a tipi and having a mongrel on a string then you will probably enjoy these wacky adventures of a Peter Pan character wandering around in a retro-hippy Never-Never Land.’ The Cauldron.

‘Most people within the UK Pagan/alternative movement will be familiar with the figure of the man who calls himself “King Arthur”. Most will remember him as the crazy guy who got arrested for wearing a sword, regularly found at Stonehenge or eco protests during the nineties. If you ever wondered who he really is, and how or why he came to claim to be Arthur then you should probably read this book. Co-written by Arthur and CJ Stone and told in the style of an epic tale of old it is an interesting and at times highly amusing read. Whether you agree that he is the once and future king, or not, you can’t fail to be impressed by a man who turned his life inside out to make a difference to the world, even though he knew he would be ridiculed for it…. So unbelievable, it might just be true.’ Awen Clement. Kindred Spirit.

Amazon reviews

‘An inspirational biographic account of a very interesting man and lifestyle, you will not want to put it down. I was actually sad when it ended! Great for anyone with an interest in paganism, particularly Druidism, Arthurian mythology, Stonehenge, protest, identity and meaning making.’ Aimee

‘Brilliant Book detailing the return of England’s Ancient Leader, King Arthur in person, hearty and heartfelt account full of derring do and of down to earth Druidry, whether real or no, King Arthur has risen to meet the challenges before him with delight and good humor, recommended.’ Celestial Elf

‘A witty combination of poetry and polemic about Arthur Pendragon, self declared King of the Britons.’ Fraser James

‘It is hard to find such a real revelation of a book as beautifully written and informative as The Trials of Arthur, and not what was expected at all. There are interesting stories about the Druids, bikers, nature, tree protesters and lots of other stuff along the way in a style that is enjoyably lively. King Arthur is, of course, the star of the show and what a wonderfully determined character he is – you just want to keep reading and hear about the next Arthurian saga!’ Touchstone

More Amazon reviews

Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: The Trials of Arthur: Revised Edition

US reviews



Review from Pentacle issue 36 by Jean Dark

Book Review of The Trials of Arthur | Bella Basura’s Site

C J Stone is an established champion and humanistic observer of the underdog, the marginal, the self-imposed outcast. His writing is amusing, well-paced and light in touch, as he describes events that are often quite surreal in clear, unfazed words…


Links

The Big Hand

Publishers of The Trials of Arthur and other arcane and interesting literature.
CJ Stone interview The Big Hand

An interview with CJ Stone about the re-print of Trials.
The Trials of Arthur – eBook

Looks like a tramp. Says hes a King. Meet Arthur Warrior, leader and Druid. An ex-squaddie and biker turned spiritual leader and parliamentary candidate. The bearer of the Sword of Britain. Download the complete ebook here.
Arthur Uther Pendragon – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wikipedia entry, based on this book.
Is Arthur Pendragon the Reincarnation Of King Arthur?

King Arthur is this ex-biker, ex-soldier, ex-builder who had a brainstorm back in the eighties and decided he was King Arthur, after which he donned a white frock and a circlet, and has been causing various kinds of trouble ever since.
Amazon.co.uk: C. J. Stone: Books, Biogs, Audiobooks, Discussions

Visit Amazon.co.uk’s C. J. Stone Page and shop for all C. J. Stone books. Check out pictures, bibliography, biography and community discussions about C. J. Stone
There Is Something About Stonehenge

There’s something about Stonehenge. It’s buried in the soil around here. It’s carved into the stones. It’s marked out in the landscape. It’s in the air you breathe.
Stonehenge Summer Solstice

So – where were we? Ah yes. In a field in Wiltshire just off the A344 about a mile or a mile and a half from Stonehenge, having just escaped death
Prediction magazine: Stonehenge and Civilisation

I took my son to Stonehenge to watch the midsummer sunrise. It was the first time that he had seen the monument close up….




Read more from the Trials of Arthur

From the Trials of Arthur: in memory of Pixi Morgan

From The Trials of Arthur Revised Edition: In Memory of Pixi Morgan, a good friend, died 6th Feb 2016.
In memory of Pixi Morgan | Fierce Writing

It was during this visit to Cardiff that CJ had met Pixi for the first time. He stayed for a few days, and then, on the Saturday night Steve and CJ went to a party at the house where Pixi was staying. He went by a variety of names in those days so yo





Chapter 1: The Turning of the Year: SamhainThis is the first chapter of the revised edition of The Trials of Arthur, available now
CJ Stone: Why I (re)wrote The Trials Of Arthur; The Big Hand




The Trials of Arthur, Available in the UK

The Trials of Arthur: Revised Edition: Amazon.co.uk

Ronald Hutton, Arthur Pendragon, CJ Stone

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The Last of the Hippies by CJ Stone

[image error]The Last of the Hippies

By: CJ Stone.

88,685 words.

Dedication.

For John Pendragon 1946-1998. The last of the hippies.

Blurb

It’s hard to know where the hippie movement begins. It’s even harder to know where it ends. There were hippies before they were ever called hippies. And there were hippies long after the hippie movement was dead. There still are hippies. It’s a generic term really. It means vaguely fluffy and idealistic with a cosmic turn of phrase. It means naïve and optimistic and hopeless with money. It refers to middle-aged pot-fiends who sport dreadlocks and baggy trousers, and who look slightly lost in the world; or to men who’ve reached the age of fifty without ever having gone out to work. The hippie era was a wild, a visionary, a revolutionary time. Especially as you could claim Social Security while you were at it.

The author first saw Timothy Leary on TV in his living room in South Yardley, in the totally unhip British city of Birmingham, when he was sixteen years old. He was impressed. Timothy Leary had probably never even heard of Birmingham, let alone South Yardley, let alone set out to make his views known to a sixteen year old Delivery Boy; and yet here he was, in the author’s living room, telling him to “turn on, tune in and drop out”. That’s when the author became converted. He’d already turned the telly on and tuned it in. Now all he needed to do was to find the drop-out button.

That’s what this book is about. It’s about a generation of lost souls looking for the drop-out button. Part autobiography, part history, part travelogue, it recounts the author’s adventures in that marginal realm: the mythical hippie’s heavenly playground; where LSD is the drug of choice, where evolution is the pastime, where revolution is the rhetoric, and paganism is a religion. It’s a carnival of madness. Join it at your peril.

Acknowledgements.

I would like to say thank you to all of those people without whose help this book could never have been written.

To Julian Loose at Faber’s for commissioning it, and for putting up with my doubts. To Steven Andrews, of course, for being himself (whatever that is). To Jon and Terry from Espionage Films who, although they don’t appear in the book, were there at its inception. To Piers and Gill, for the wine and conversation. To Sue Rowley, for her well-being. To Graham Fowler, for remaining a friend. To Dave Westacott, for remaining a communist. To Nancy and Moffs of Groovy Movies, for the solar equipment (it never worked). To Des Moore for his candour. To Susanna for being a hippie. To Louie for being a closet hippie. To Simon Rogers at the Big Issue, for feeding me work. To Jeanette Page and Deborah Orr at the Guardian Weekend, for their continuing support. To Terryl and Joe Bacon, for the use of their orchard, and for their kindness and generosity. To Karen and Tony, for their back garden and their patience. To Judith Roe, a good friend, and a source of inspiration. To Chris Craig, for distracting me with Karl Marx. To Lissie Freewoman, for distracting me with other things. To the Library of Avalon and the Assembly Rooms at Glastonbury, for the use of their space. To Paul and Nik for the use of the room. To Simon and Bunny, for the lift and the squabbles. To Kevin and Roger of AD3000, for revealing what was hidden. And to everyone I met in the course of writing this book, whether you appear in it or not. It was better than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick.

Contents


Chapter 1: “Dear Pete.”
Chapter 2: “Hippies, Heads and Freaks.”
Chapter 3: “Free Love.”
Chapter 4: “Oops.”
Chapter 5: “Rod The Mod Takes The Plunge.”
Chapter 6: “Druid Time.”


Chapter 7: “Huna Druzz,” or, “Another Failed Love-Quest, An Apple And A Cup Of Coffee.”
Chapter 8: “Enlicenment.”
Chapter 9: “Not An Earth Mother,” or, “Nasturtiums In Barbed Wire.”
Chapter 10: “The Rules Of Sensible Driving.”
Chapter 11: “And Another Thing.”
Chapter 12: “The Pilton Pop Festival.”
Chapter 13: “The Trouble With Hippies.”
Chapter 14: “Des.”
Chapter 15: “Glastonbury.”
Chapter 16: “PS”




Sample chapters from the Last of the Hippies

Andrew Kerr and the Origins of the Glastonbury Festival

An interview with Andrew Kerr, recently deceased. From The Last of the Hippies. “It was the most blessed thing in my life,” says Kerr now. “The chance to live out a dream, a really crazy dream.”
Chapter 12. The Pilton Pop Festival.

Rain. Rain, rain, rain, rattling on the roof of the van, falling in waves, washing down the hillside in muddy streams, gathering in pools: relentless, driving rain, hissing and shifting and blustering about. Rain.



The Bard of Ely’s book covering some of the same material

Amazon.com: Hummadruz and a Life of High Strangeness eBook: Steve Andrews: Kindle Store



Reviews

‘Tony Blair was. Half the Cabinet were. And so was your dad, probably. But these days, original hippies are hard to find. Despite the flares, hennaed hands and cheesecloth revival of recent years, only an ashtray-full of die-hards remain. Now C.J. Stone has endeavoured to expose them – and himself at the same time. A professional drop-out for the latter half of his 45 years, Stone’s new book, Last of the Hippies, traces the movement to its genesis.’ The Times

‘A touching memoir …. Stone writes with intelligence, wit and sensitivity about being a working-class, belated hippie who has been hanging out with assorted no-hopers in places like Cardiff and Birmingham. This is a book written from within the hippie phenomenon by someone looking sceptically out.’ Times Literary Supplement

‘Ambivalence rather than embarrassment is what fuels this engagingly candid memoir … Much as he likes to protest his disillusion, Stone’s commitment to an underfunded life spent in squats, at free festivals and Green Gatherings blazes, or flickers, at least, off every page.’ Sunday Times

‘In a converted ambulance, Stone traverses a refreshingly uncool landscape (Birmingham, Hull) digging out friends from a quarter of a century ago. They are his counter-cultural characters, but now they are living in council houses surrounded buy pictures of crop circles.’ Independent

‘C.J. is surprisingly engaging for a self-confessed hippie. Last of the Hippies is something of a diary of his life from the day he decided to grow his hair (centre parting not optional). You’ve got to love him just for the way he confesses from the off that the prospect of free love was what really sold it to him.’ Big Issue

‘Hippies – a word conjuring up a cool, far-out generation, beads and tin bells jangling around their necks, flowers in their tangled hair, the sweet pungency of joss sticks everywhere. Everyone knows, or knew, one – no one wanted their children to grow up to be one. But Where Are They Now? … Last of the Hippies is a sometimes sad, sometimes funny-whimsical look at a generation.’ Yorkshire Post

On-line reviews

Amazon.co.uk: Customer Reviews: The Last of the Hippies
Books: Talking about degeneration – Arts & Entertainment – The Independent

Shibboleth: my revolting life by Penny Rimbaud A K Press, pounds 6.95, 344pp; The Last of the Hippies by C J Stone Faber & Faber, pounds 9.99, 240pp by George McKay
Turn on, tune in, drop out, . . . then what? – Daily Mail (London) | HighBeam Research

Turn on, tune in, drop out, . . . then what? … find Daily Mail (London) articles. Byline: CHRISTOPHER HUDSON THE LAST OF THE HIPPIES by C. J. Stone (Faber, [pounds sterling]9.99)

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Illustrations by Eldad Druks

druksgraphics – communications, graphics, art and animation since 1997

Housing Benefit Hill & Other Places by CJ Stone

The name “Housing Benefit Hill” is a reference to a line in Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues by Bob Dylan from the Highway 61 Revisited album. “Up on Housing Project Hill it’s either fortune or fame.” It’s one of my favourite songs.

Paperback: 170 pages
Publisher: AK Press (10 Oct 2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 190259343X
ISBN-13: 978-1902593432

Culled from his regular columns in the London Guardian and Britain’s homeless paper, The Big Issue, Stone passionately documents life as experienced “in every run-down council estate in the land, peopled by the forgotten generation of post-Thatcherite Britain: the poor, the ejected, the rejected, the lost.” Not since Orwell has someone written with such vigor, passion, and anger, about the other half. Unlike Orwell, C.J. isn’t just paying a visit, that’s where he’s always lived.

“The last time I spoke to C.J. was a year or two back; he’d given up writing and become a car park attendant. ‘But why?’ I asked him. ‘Because for the time being I’ve had enough of going nowhere he replied.’ Now isn’t that just it?” —Penny Rimbaud, from the preface.

[image error]From the Introduction – abridged by the author

IT’S BEEN a long time since I last saw Housing Benefit Hill. More than two years, in fact. Even then it had changed. There were new gardens in the front of the ground floor maisonettes where there used to be a walkway, and security doors on the entrances to the upstairs. New wood panelling, glossy white, on the top storeys, which gave the buildings something of the air of town houses. Also there was a new close behind, with 55 tightly packed houses owned by a Housing Association. Same old air of desperation and poverty, however. Same kids playing in the street. Same piles of rubbish near the crossing to the little stream under the stunted thorns trees. Same beat-up old cars with flat tyres and smashed windscreens, with broken glass like crystals scattered across the torn seats.

Well not quite the same. The kids I knew had grown up a little. They were no longer the ones on the street. And it was probably last year’s rubbish under the trees, and last year’s broken down cars lined up by the new fence. And the old garages had gone. Most of them had been smashed up in any case. Not many of them were used for keeping cars in. Mostly they’d become dens for the teenagers: the urban equivalent of a lover’s bower, lined with mattresses and old cider bottles.

I still remember the long drag up the slope through the rest of the estate, the cars parked by the verges, the privet hedges, the occasional trees. The place I called Housing Benefit Hill was, in fact, a cul-de-sac off a road that looped up and around a larger estate. Housing Benefit Hill was my name for it. Round about it was known as Corn Beef Island. And on the estate itself it was called Colditz. Why? Because you could never escape.

I first started writing the stories in the early months of 1993. I was unemployed, a single parent with a 13 year old son. I’d come through the break-up of a long-term relationship and was looking for something new. I was attending Job Club at the time. I guess I had always wanted to be a writer. I am one of those people with Incessant Jotting Disorder, a pathological inability to leave well alone. I have never been able to truly feel without having first written it down. It’s as if in writing it I make it real. Otherwise life tends to go by in a blur, making no sense at all.

THE NAME “Housing Benefit Hill” is a reference to a line in Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues by Bob Dylan from the Highway 61 Revisited album. “Up on Housing Project Hill it’s either fortune or fame.” It’s one of my favourite songs. You hear the words, “Housing Project Hill” and you immediately visualise a place. You can see the buildings, and you imagine the people living there. You feel their lives passing by. Sometimes, maybe, you wonder what they are doing now. I knew that I could have the same effect. I could invent a name to give just such an impression. The name would be like a seed implanted in people’s imagination. They would visualise a backdrop to the events, drawing on all the resonances that the words conjured up. I came up with Housing Benefit Hill, and the whole tone of the stories was fixed.

The first story I wrote was Witch Way Out Of Here, followed by Still Life Behind Drawn Curtains later in the year, though they didn’t appear in that order. Still Life Behind Drawn Curtains was chosen as the opening story by the editors at the Guardian Weekend where I‘d sent it, just on the off chance. Even as I was writing it I knew that it was something special, that something special was going to happen. I knew that people would like it. As I was writing, one night in the late summer of that year, I was rocking back and forth thinking, “I’m doing it for you, I’m doing it for you.“ Meaning I was writing it for the people of Housing Benefit Hill.

I still wonder why the Weekend accepted it. It wasn’t as if I was well known. I have to thank Deborah Orr, the Guardian columnist, for that. She was the editor at the time. I think she knew what I was writing about, understood it, and had sympathy. I will always owe her a debt of gratitude.

People used to imagine Housing Benefit Hill as in their own town. Very few people knew where it really was. Some thought Leeds, others London. It didn’t matter. Housing Benefit Hill was everywhere. It was every run-down council estate in the land, peopled by the forgotten generation of post-Thatcherite Britain: the poor, the ejected, the rejected, the lost.

MANY of the stories you will find in these pages were never published at all. Some of them appeared either in the pages of Mixmag, or in the Big Issue. Three of them appeared in the New Statesman. There’s a slight shift of emphasis, depending on the magazine. The New Statesman pieces are more polemical. The Mixmag pieces more dance orientated. Some of the Big Issue pieces were originally intended for the Guardian, but had to be moved, for practical and judicious reasons. In one case I was threatened with being beaten up if I published. Others were stories I prepared towards the end of my tenure at the Guardian, and which I never got round to sending. One of them is an extract from a much longer piece which I’ve cut down especially for this book. In any case, if you remember Housing Benefit Hill (and I find that a lot of people still do) then you’ll find there’s plenty of new material here for you to enjoy.

CJ Stone 2000

Publisher’s blurb

Housing Benefit Hill And Other Places: Collected Columns, 1993-1998

The collected front-line reports from C.J. Stone’s popular Guardian and Big Issue Columns. These bulletins are not cosy or comfortable reading, but they are also not without hope, warmth and solidarity. Life as lived by those written off by Thatcher and now ‘socially excluded’ by Blair, described in C.J. Stone’s unique and entertaining style.

From the Preface by Penny Rimbaud (Crass)

‘As the state sharpens its metaphorical sword, so the pens of writers like CJ become ever more crucial. Have we the ears to hear? It might not have the answers but Housing Benefit Hill sure as hell has the questions, and in a culture where questions are increasingly seen as heresy, that might be one step out of the maze.’

Housing Benefit Hill in Google Books

Housing Benefit Hill



Sample chapters from Housing Benefit Hill

Housing Benefit Hill

Stories first appeared in the Guardian Weekend starting September 11 1993. The final story appeared September 7th 1996. They were collected together in my book, Housing Benefit Hill & Other Places
Housing Benefit Hill: Still life behind drawn curtains

Her ex is 21, seven years her junior. He moved in with her when he was 16. People grow up fast around here. At 16 years old he was already a family man…. ON A SUMMER’S…
Housing Benefit Hill: Invasion of the babysnatchers

She noticed how disturbed some of the other children were, and that there was a certain amount of subdued violence among the staff. She rang the police. This was a mistake… …
Housing Benefit Hill: Roller coaster ride to despair

If he was bad to live with, he was worse now. He was taking her for every penny, and beating her too. She got out an injunction on him. He sneered. “What’s that? A bit of paper.” And then – bitter laugh -…
Housing Benefit Hill: Witch way out of here?

When Vera talks to you, it’s usually to cackle viciously at someone’s stroke of ill-luck. You get the feeling that she’s wished it upon them….
Rubber soul: The Bard of Ely’s Rubber Ducky Song

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Amazon.co.uk: CJ Stone Storefront

Signed copies available. Go to “collectibles”

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Fierce Dancing: Adventures in the Underground by CJ Stone

C.J. Stone, acclaimed columnist for the Guardian and the Big Issue, travels the land and investigates the curious state we’re in.

[image error]Everyone’s Wally.

Extracts from FIERCE DANCING: ADVENTURES IN THE UNDERGROUND

by CJ Stone.

Published by Faber & Faber May 1st 1996 price £6.99.

Abridged by the Author.

It began with a vision. He sat on a rocky outcrop in Ibiza, and, in his mind’s eye, saw the ancient monument of Stonehenge teeming with new life. The festival lasted for ten years, and influenced a generation. This is the Story of Phil “Wally Hope”, his vision, and his tragic death.

The first Stonehenge Free festival was a quiet affair. This was Summer Solstice 1974. Maybe five or six hundred people, and one band: a synthesiser combo called Zorch. The festival over, about 30-40 people stayed on. They were all called Wally. There was Phil Wally, also known as Wally Hope, the organiser. There was Arthur Wally, Chris Wally, Wally Egypt, Wally Moon, Sir Wally Raleigh, and Wally Woof the Dog. Everyone was Wally.

There’s some debate as to where the name Wally came from. Some say the Isle of Wight 1969 where a sound engineer called Wally had gone missing. Others say it was a missing dog at some other festival. By the early ’70s it was the festival joke. Every festival had its Wally-chant, a few moments when the cry “Wally!” would circulate like a mantra.

In any case when Department of the Environment officials went round the Stonehenge site sometime in July 1974, to find out who was living there, they were met by a bunch of Wallies.

They were taken to court in August, and made front page news. They cited God as their witness, and gave their address as “Fort Wally, c/o God, Jesus, Buddha, Garden of Allah, Stonehenge monument, Salisbury Plain.” They were all in fancy dress. Phil himself was resplendent in the full dress uniform of an Officer of the Cypriot National Guard. When the court found against them and ordered them to move, Phil came out and announced to the press: “We won, because we hold Stonehenge in our hearts. We are not squatters, we are men of God. We want to plant a Garden of Eden, where there will be guitars instead of guns and the Sun will be our nuclear bomb” The press loved it. The Wallies returned to Stonehenge, hopped over a fence, and the whole procedure had to begin again. They held on till Christmas Eve. Some of them opened a squat in London Road, Amesbury, which became the focus for more Stonehenge related activities.

[image error]Phil Russell aka ‘Wally Hope’

Portobello Road

Phil went off to Cyprus for the winter. He returned in early spring, ready for the next round of preparations. More letters. More posters. More leaflets. Hours and hours spent making plans, writing, thinking, talking, getting on people’s nerves. He drove a brightly painted Ford Cortina with a rolled up, half-sized tipi on top, and travelled about the country spreading the message. He was a prominent figure in the Underground, hanging round in Portobello Road, dressed in his Hope tee shirt, with his close-cropped blonde hair and his lithe athletic body, like a Sun-worshipping warrior, handing out leaflets and talking to anyone who would listen. It was all very amusing and enjoyable. He didn’t want to cause trouble. He was totally unaware that anyone would mind.

Then in early May 1975, having done all that he could do, he set off to the South coast to await the coming time.

Phil stopped off in the Amesbury squat, on his way to Devon or Cornwall, and the police raided. They were looking for an Army deserter. There was no Army deserter. What they found was a small quantity of Acid in Phil’s pocket. He was taken into custody. And there are no witnesses to what happened next. No longer bolstered up by the support of his Wally friends, Phil’s elliptical self-justifications may well have sounded like madness. “God told me to do it. I’m the Son of the Sun. Acid is a sacrament given to us by God.” By the time he appeared in court he was blocked out by Largactyl, a brain-inhibitor, and completely incoherent.

Phil had been sectioned. The excuse was that he was refusing to wear prison uniform, saying that it brought him out in a rash. He was administered an anti-psychotic drug in large doses. Friends tried to contact him, but were blocked. Later they arranged for a Solicitor to contact him, but his way was blocked too. Eventually they decided they had to visit him.

Only close relatives were entitled to visit, so Gee went down posing as his sister. Phil shuffled round to see her, walking like a zombie. Only weeks before he’d been the picture of health, lithe and tanned and in control of his faculties. Now he was pale and bloated, his tongue swollen and lolling round in his mouth. Gee suggested they sit in the garden. He led the way, walking stiffly, his arms and legs at odds with each other. In the garden, Phil shuffled into the shade. He couldn’t stand the sunlight.

When she got home she announced to the others that they had to get him out. They conceived a plan to help him to escape. They would take him to Holland by boat. But it all depended on his compliance, and when she returned to the mental home to tell him their plan she found him thoroughly institutionalised. Gee was aware that he was about to be destroyed. He said, “No matter what they do, they can never take the little spark of Jesus from my stomach.”

The 1975 festival took place, while Phil was still inside. It was a resounding success. Thousands attended and danced in the sunlight, gloriously hedonistic. There were many bands, appearing on two stages, and the quality of the acts was sometimes very high. There was a collection for the farmer who’s land they were occupying, and a substantial amount of money was raised. The farmer came away satisfied. And there was a massive clear-up afterwards. Everything was done properly, with the best will and organisation imaginable. Phil’s vision brought to life.

And then, two days after the last van had pulled away from the Stonehenge site, Phil was released. He was “cured”. Somehow or another he managed to drive the hundred and fifty or so miles from Salisbury to Epping. It took him two days. He was forced to stop every twenty minutes to sleep. When he arrived at Gee’s House he was in a complete state. He was pale and bloated, shuffling along like an automaton. His face was mask-like, puffy, with no signs of expression. All his well-toned muscles were gone. Gee put him on a diet, with ginseng and other curative herbs, and he did improve slightly. But it soon became apparent that his condition was permanent. Worst of all for this once self-sufficient Son of the Sun, he was afraid of light. He would sit in a darkened room all day, brooding, sobbing, unable to do anything to help himself, a creature of the shadows.

Some of the organisers of the Windsor Free Festival had negotiated with the government for a replacement site. Watchfield, a disused W.W.II airport. This was the only time in history that the government ever co-operated in the organisation of a free festival. Phil wanted to go. The others didn’t think he was up to it. It was August, near the bank holiday. They were trying to hold him back, but he insisted. And as he stepped out of the door there was this tremendous thunderclap, and a downpour, and a bolt of lightning struck the vegetable patch. It was the last time they saw him.

He died at his home, soon after the festival was over, choked on his own vomit on the kitchen floor. The verdict was suicide.

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Illustrations by: Eldad Druks

druksgraphics – communications, graphics, art and animation since 1997

Blurb

It began with a small band of Hippies, clinging to the remnants of their summer festivals. Next came Punk, with its culture of anger and rejection. After that Rave, and everyone just wanted to dance and take drugs again. But when the Criminal Justice Act came along, Auntie Britain was seen as a kindly guardian no longer. Hippie idealism, punk anarchism, rave organization and New Age mysticism, forged in the fiery heart of dance culture, became melded into a new force. DIY culture was born. Or at least that’s what the purveyors of post-rave politics like to claim. But is it true? Does hope really lie in the wearing of nose rings? Can we counteract the forces of repression by making sure that our margarine contains no animal fats? Are tattoos the answer? C.J. Stone, acclaimed columnist for the Guardian and the Big Issue, travels the land and investigates the curious state we’re in.

Reviews of Fierce Dancing

‘Wry, acute, and sometimes hellishly entertaining essays in squalor and rebellion.’ Herald

‘If you think an alternative lifestyle means free-range eggs from the supermarket and lead-free petrol for the company car, read this book. Read it anyway. A paperback original, it costs a fraction of the price of a Glastonbury Festival ticket and will pass the time waiting for your case for obstruction to come up in the Newbury magistrates’ court. It is an abuser’s guide to what might once have counted as the Counter Culture and can now be summarised as A Bunch of Crusties Who Get Up Late. C J Stone (make that C J Stoned, to take account of his mental state while conducting his researches) is the best guide to the Underground since Charon ferried dead souls across the Styx … He’s unbeatable when he walks the walk and talks the talk with some loopy conversationalists. They open up to him over a beer, joint or tab … Stone joins enthusiastically in their road protests, free festivals, anti-Criminal Justice Act demos and pow-wows in tepees. He dances in woods to illicit sound systems … Each chapter has a wonderful life of its own with a terrific cast of characters. Even when he does not go out auditioning for them, his raw material knocks on his door. The man who comes to repair his computer turns out to have encountered an angel in Glastonbury Abbey.’ Independent on Sunday

‘If you are looking for coming cultures of resistance, you’ll find them here … C J Stone has written a painfully honest account of life on the other side of a workaday consumer society. He is an unashamed old hippie – a commune-dweller in the early 1970s, possessor of a Mondragon-type goatee – yet has raved and eckied with the youngest of them in search of continuity between undergrounds then and now.’ New Statesman and Society

‘This book is one of the few records of what life in the counterculture is like, and, more importantly, demonstrates that its supporters did not come from nowhere … brilliantly written … provides a rare historical insight into the unbroken development of alternative culture.’ Q Magazine

‘The book has the ferocity and passion of a clenched fist, yet still manages insights into the human condition, beautifully observed theories on existence, and some laugh out loud moments of humour taken straight from real life situations… The most topical depiction of protest and alternative living you are likely to read this decade. A chapter entitled ‘Beanfield’ is described as ‘the dark heart of the book’, it illustrates police brutality and Establishment intervention on the premise that whatever they can’t control is out of control. It is a heart wrenching chapter … A book like Fierce Dancing should cause revolution … An exhilarating reminder of the state of Britain today.’ City Life

Further extracts from Fierce Dancing

The Battle of the Beanfield

An extract from Fierce Dancing: remembering the anniversary of an infamous day in British history.
TV Cabbage: my first rave

Chapter from Fierce Dancing
An Interview with Rose Simpson of the Incredible String Band

An extract from Fierce Dancing: Adventures in the Underground by CJ Stone



Reviews on-line

Amazon.co.uk: Customer Reviews: Fierce Dancing: Adventures in the Underground




Like anarchists, only not as organised – Books – Arts and Entertainment – The Independent

If you think an alternative lifestyle means free-range eggs from the supermarket and lead-free petrol for the company car, read this book. Read it anyway. A paperback original, it costs a fraction of the price of a Glastonbury Festival ticket and wil
Fierce Dancing: Adventures in the Underground by C.J. Stone – Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs, Lists

Fierce Dancing has 5 ratings and 1 review. Andy said: A much needed history of the free festival movement in the UK. Not as crusty as that last sentence ma…
Fierce Dancing: Adventures in the Underground – C. J. Stone – Google Books

It began with a small band of Hippies, clinging to the remnants of their summer festivals. Next came Punk, with its culture of anger and rejection. After that Rave, and everyone just wanted to dance and take drugs again.
The Fragile Ego

I was there to sell my book to the salesmen and women whose job it was to sell my book to the retailers, whose job it would be to sell my book to the public.

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http://www.cjstone.co.uk/

The Empire of Things by CJ Stone

Politics, paganism and… Vlad the Impaler. Stories from the front-line of the spiritual revolution, a collection of writings from 2003 to the present by CJ Stone.

Introduction

This book has been compiled from stories from a number of different sources: from my column in the Whitstable Times, which ran from 2000 till 2008; from my column in Prediction magazine which ran from 2003 till 2008; from a short-lived column in Kindred Spirit magazine, which appeared in 2009; and from my column in the Whitstable Gazette, which began in 2009 and continues to this day. Other stories appeared in the Independent on Sunday, and in the National Federation of Occupied Pensioners magazine.

Many of the stories, however, have never appeared in print before and have only ever had an on-line existence, where a few of them have enjoyed moderate success. The story called “Vlad the Impaler”, for instance, has had, at the time of writing, approaching 29,000 hits. That’s not bad. Knowing that my entire collection of on-line stories has been seen by over 177,000 people has been a major boost, even if most of those people just stopped by on the way to somewhere else. At least some of them must have spent time with my work. I know that because many of them left comments.

For a while, in fact, if you put “Vlad the Impaler” into your search engine you would have found my story at the top of the page. It was number two after the Wikipedia entry; until Google decided to smash it, that is, and to undermine any possibility of me earning any money on-line, by withdrawing me from their Adsense programme. Which is no bad thing really. The money was never any good anyway. I think, in my entire on-line existence (from 2008 to 2013) I only ever earned about $100. That’s $20 a year, or about 0.1 cents per hour at a rough estimate. I was never going to become rich that way.

And for any of you out there considering a future as an on-line writer: beware. Google have total control. They are judge, jury and executioner. They are proprietor, ad agency and editor. There is no appeal, and once you are cut-off from your source of income, you stay cut off. Such is the new “free” world of the digital age: one global Leviathan controlling all advertising revenue on the World Wide Web. No appeal process. No regulation. No come back. No law.

They did me a favour. I was using my on-line presence as a replacement for real publishing. Looking at my stats, counting up my hits, had become a substitute for seeing my work in any real, physical form. And in a way, that devalued it; not just financially, but spiritually too. There is something about on-line reading that diminishes the work. It appears as nothing more than electronic drizzle. The words pulsate with the frequency of a cursor on a computer screen. Bundling up the work into this form, in order to make a book out of it, removing all the links and the fancy graphics, the jpegs and the YouTube videos, has given the content of this book new weight. It is real at last. I am real.

So you will read a whole host of stories that have appeared nowhere else. Mothers Club in Birmingham. Robin Hood’s Day. Ranters Lane. The Stonehenge stories. LSD Refugees. Requiem for a Dreamer. We’re Here Because We’re Here.

I could go on. Possibly half of these stories are being published for the first time. And I think you’ll find – I’m not being vain here – that a substantial number of them deserve recognition: they deserve their place in history.

Just to mention one: We’re Here Because We’re Here. If I’d only ever written one story in my life, and I could choose which one, it would be We’re Here Because We’re Here.

It was given to me by Warren Hughes, a colleague at the delivery office where I work. He gave me the outline one day, and asked if I would be interested. I think he thought it might amount to a line or two in the local paper. But it was always much more than that to me. It took several weeks before I had enough material to make anything of it, and several more to write it, but, once it was written, I knew I was in the presence of something real.

And then, after that, well what was I to do with it?

I sent it off to a couple of papers, received no reply, and then gave up. It has had a sort of ghostly existence on-line since 2008, and it has made me a number of friends, but it really hasn’t had the recognition it deserves.

Other stories

The same goes for a number of the other stories. Bear Nation, for instance, is a chapter from a book that was never finished. There are several more of those tucked away on my hard-drive. And The Home Front is series of columns I wrote for a newspaper which didn’t exist. It ought to exist. In a parallel universe, maybe, it does exist. But meanwhile, despite the quality of the writing, despite the warmth and good humour in a situation that was actually very painful for me, no newspaper or magazine, in the UK, or anywhere else in the world, has ever published these stories.

And more fool them.

Even amongst the stories which have had a previous incarnation on paper, there are substantial changes. So the story called “Drug Problem or Drug Solutions?” – another one of my on-line hits – is actually made up of a series of columns I wrote for the Whitstable Times. And the first two stories from the collection called “Money” are sets of 350 word columns from the Whitstable Gazette, stitched together to make some sort of sense, I hope. Of the four stories that make up “Tales of Ordinary Magic”, from Kindred Spirit magazine, only three of them were ever published.

The largest group of stories, however, come from my column for Prediction magazine. There are stories from Prediction scattered throughout this book, from the chapter called “Time”, to the chapter called “Therapies”, and I will always be grateful to Tania Ahsan, the editor at the time, for taking me on. It was that 1,000 word column, once a month, for nearly five years, which kept me from going insane: which kept my word count going up and my self-esteem from going down; not to speak of earning me a little pocket money along the way.

As in any collection, there are some inconsistencies here. I’ve tried to create a narrative of sorts. I’ve interspersed story pieces with opinion pieces, in a way which I hope balances them both out. There are more stories than opinions, and what opinions there are, are meant to illustrate the stories. But some of the facts are dated. Some of the columns come from as far back as 2003. So in one of them Gordon Brown is still the Prime Minister, and in another Michael Howard is still refusing to deny that he had ever smoked marijuana. I hope these minor blips don’t detract too much from the overall design.

You can think of it as like a decorated room. Yes, it’s got new carpets and curtains, and a lick of paint on the walls; but the objects on the mantelpiece are vintage now, the clock doesn’t tell the time any more and the pictures of the kids show them when they were young. There’s a certain nostalgic appeal. You can’t throw away old photographs just because the children are grown up. And I can’t throw away my work just because some references are out of date.

The bulk of it, however, remains contemporary. Just to point out the story from which the title is taken: The Empire of Things. It was written in the aftermath of the riots of 2011, but acquired new relevance after the death of Margaret Thatcher. I chose it as the title of this book because I believe it genuinely describes the state of our current world.

The story is made up of snippets collected from facebook in the days following the riots, with added commentary. So that’s how up-to-date it is: a story constructed and informed using facebook. But the theme is very old and the story still holds true. We are being duped by our world, and by the culture which controls it. We are being mislead and misdirected, misinformed and misrepresented. It’s like a magic show. The magician makes a great display on stage to dazzle our senses, while behind the scenes, hidden away and in secret, he’s messing about with the end-result to make sure it comes out to his advantage.

That great dazzling display is the Empire of Things of the title: the shallow and the superficial, the empty materialism of our contemporary world-view.

All I am asking of you in this book is that you take a deeper look, beyond the surface, to what lies elsewhere.

Acknowledgements

My thanks go out to the editors of the various magazines and newspapers who have printed my work since the loss of my Guardian column. To Marion Williamson at Prediction, to John Nurden at the Whitstable Times and to Leo Whitlock at the Whitstable Gazette, but especially to Tania Ahsan, who first took me on at Prediction, and then again at Kindred Spirit, and who has been a constant source of encouragement for me ever since. Thanks Tania. I’d probably have given up years ago if it wasn’t for you.

Thanks also to my family: to my Dad, Eddy, to Joe and Emma, to Helen and Matthew, to Robert and Louise and family, to Julia and Peter and family, but particularly to Sluggy Slimebucket – you know who you are – for time spent at the park and for all the fun with words. Remember: I’m not insulting you, I’m describing you.

Special thanks to Fraser and Angela and Chloe and Isobel for being such a lovely family, to Dave Tong and Mary Gidlow for the friendship and the breaks, to Paul Allen and Robert McDonald for putting up with me, to Ruth Hoskins for the reassurance of touch, to Warren Hughes for We’re Here Because We’re Here, to Dave Hendley, to Julie Wassmer and Kas Kasparian, to Vanessa Winship, to Lois Davis – and finally, to all the guys at the Delivery Office.

At least we took a stand. They won’t forget us in a hurry.

Reviews

“Christopher Stone is the modern equivalent of a wandering bard, using a word processor instead of a harp or a lute, but likewise constantly moving between places, societies, cultures and worlds, making heroic stories of the people whom he meets and observes, usually with a deep compassion as well as real insight. His taste for taverns and the holy-fool innocence with which he reacts to so much of what he encounters, adds to the comparison.”

Professor Ronald Hutton, Bristol University.

“Whether musing with absolute candour about his own ill-spent hippy days, or on the life of an unknown and unheralded British Tommy overlooked for nine decades, Chris Stone is a modern shaman – revealing truths present and past, but not by invoking well-worn myths or personages, but simply by penning his own life and, as in the case of Private Ivor Coles, chanting life into a person just shy of being forgotten in the most profound sense of the word.”

Mike Fay, War Correspondent and artist.

“CJ Stone’s writing is among the most erudite, entertaining and humorous that I have ever come across. It is rare to find such a consistent talent and it is rarer still to find yourself restored to awe at the world through reading alone.”

Tania Ahsan, ex-editor Prediction & Kindred Spirit magazines.

“CJ Stone sees to the heart of things. His writing reminds us that the moral centre of our lives does not vanish when you are distracted by other things, but it remains underneath the froth of our daily routines, resolute and unchanging. Stone’s writing is always vital because he is a natural born storyteller, a raconteur, and a ranter of Albion. Yet more than anything, he is a witness.”

John Higgs, Author.

“Chris Stone is always looking for the hidden depth that is the truth of the telling, and is a testament to what he truly is. A Truth Seeker.”

King Arthur Pendragon, Druid King and political activist.

The Empire of Things available to buy



The Empire of Things: Amazon.co.uk: C. J. Stone: 9781908728364: BooksBuy The Empire of Things by C. J. Stone (ISBN: 9781908728364) from Amazon’s Book Store. Free UK delivery on eligible orders.
https://www.gonzomultimedia.co.uk/product_details/15633/C_J_Stone-The_Empire_of_Things.html




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CJ Stone’s Britain: Western Reunion (Poole)

CJ Stone’s Britain, May 17th 1997 Guardian Weekend

To be honest, it was more awkward than I had imagined. I was in Poole in Dorset, meeting an old pupil of mine. I used to teach English as a foreign language. The ex-pupil’s name is Vera. She’s twenty four now, and has just qualified as a Nurse. When I’d known her she was eighteen. We’d had this brief, innocent romance. It had mainly involved long walks along the beach holding hands, and deep conversations looking into each other’s eyes. I’d been flattered by her attentions, and she was – as she was telling me now – equally flattered that I took her seriously enough to want to listen to her. But it was one of those times in both of our lives when the lure of simple romance overcame what you might want to call the logic of the situation. The truth is – and we were admitting it to each other now – it was really just a fantasy, though a very enjoyable one at the time.

And now, here we were all these years later, sitting in a café in Poole, looking across the table at each other, wondering what to say. I asked her the time, partly for something to ask, but also partly because I was hoping that the pub would be open soon. She didn’t have a watch on, but she leaned across to a man on a nearby table.

“Excuse me, do you have the time?” she asked in her lilting accent.

The man came over to our table. He was fumbling with his watch, and rather than tell us the time, he showed the watch to Vera.

“Kh-are jhu Kh-English?” he asked. That’s about the best I can do represent his accent. He gurgled his vowels. He was obviously Spanish.

“No, I’m German,” she replied.

That was his cue. He literally shoved me aside and sat down opposite Vera, and began telling her this story….

Continue reading here.

CJ Stone’s Britain: Iron in the Soul (Ironville)

CJ Stone’s Britain, Guardian Weekend October 25th, 1997

The centre of the village, where the pub is situated, is a modern shopping precinct set around a square. Most of it is boarded up and scrawled with graffiti. The only places that were still doing trade were: a chip-shop, a bookies, a general store and a butcher’s. And the pub, of course, though that only seems to trade between nine and eleven at night. The whole village seems to be in a state of slow decline, like a recently bereaved widow who has taken to the drink.

I went to the Anvil Club behind the church where I was introduced to Angie, one of the organisers of the festival. A typical Derbyshire lass, I thought, warm hearted and energetic, with a lovely, rich, kindly Derbyshire accent. That was the best thing about the village, that accent. It made you think of warm, buttered toast.

I asked her why Groovy Movies hadn’t turned up. “They told me they would be here today,” I said.

“Yes, I warned them not to come today. Not if they didn’t want their marquee burnt out, that is. Where are you parked, by the way,” she asked. I told her. “Oh no. You’ll have to move it,” she said. “That’s the worst part of town.”

Later on – once it was open – I called into the King Billy to ask if it was OK to stay in their carpark. The manageress was a feisty Bette Lynch look-alike, with a back-combed nest of dyed blonde curls piled up on her head and held crisply in place with about a half a gallon of hair-spray. “Where are you parked?” she asked me.

“In the middle.”

“Oh no. You can’t park there, it’ll bring attention to you. You’ll come back to find the van splashed in orange paint and graffiti. Either that or they’ll take the wheels off. Move it over by the wall. They might not notice you there.”

I have to add at this point, that I am now living in my van. It not only gets me around, it’s also the roof over my head. Well I don’t really want my home splashed in orange paint. Come to think of it, I quite like it with wheels on too. It goes better that way. I took her advice and moved it over by the wall.

Continue reading here.