“SAME THING DAY AFTER DAY – TUBE – WORK – DINNER - WORK TUBE – ARMCHAIR - TUBE – WORK – HOW MUCH MORE CAN YOU TAKE – ONE IN FIVE CRACKS UP"

Graffiti (circa 1977) on a wall facing the tube line between Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Park tube stations.
Well, where does this sorry tale of excess & debauchery start then?

Placing it in its proper context, I was brought up in a "traditional" working class family in a traditional northern town – where the liberalism of the 60’s largely passed by unnoticed.
Unless you were deigned to be "officer material" and streamed off to grammar school, you were destined, as my school careers teacher succinctly put it:
"Boy’s, you should aim to be an apprentice (shipyards/chemical works/steel works – take your choice). Failing that you can join the Army. Girls, Mr Barnard (the typing teacher) will ensure you get a job in an office".
I dread to think what they told the poor sods down in the "D stream/remedial class"
However… a couple of exceptional teachers – English art & humanities -encouraged us to "challenge everything"& "get out whilst you can". Which I did – hitch hiked to Devon a week after leaving school & lived on the beach for the summer.
Personally, I blame the Daily Mirror, my dad’s choice of reading, which covered in full scandalous detail, free festivals from the Isle of Wight festival onwards.
And so it was I read all about free festivals & thought, "Yeah, I want to be part of that".

WINDSOR 77 (or possibly 78)
Living in Uxbridge at the time, the local paper (I think) held forth about an army of invading hippies at Windsor (yet again). So I duly trundled off to Windsor for the bank holiday to be met by the massed ranks of the local constabulary & told to" fuck off home sonny ".
So I duly did. I later found out that a valiant few had somehow managed to evade said constabulary & hold a festival of sorts in a lay by.
Better luck next time.

SOMEWHERE IN WALES – MAY 79
Relying on some grubby handout (run off on an old Roneo machine) picked up in some freak shop a friend & I hitch hiked to Wales.
Could we find this festival? Well we got a lift of a guy who was the spitting double (if it wasn't the man himself) of Eric Morecambe, who, in return for smoking most of my fags drove around this mountainside on the borders for an hour or so – in vain I should add, searching for this festival.
We eventually spent the night camped out on a hillside & despondently hitched home to the far north the following day.
I met somebody at Stonehenge later that year that reckoned that three people, a dog & a van turned up in the next valley & had "a jolly nice time camping out for a week".
If my memory serves me right, it was the week before the 79 election & it was cold & wet

SMOKEY BEARS – HYDE PARK MAY 79
Living "up north" at the time, I arranged to meet a friend in London at the demo. Setting off at 6:30 am I hitched down to London by 3.00 ish. Just as the "Smoke In"– bunch of freaks in Hyde Park furtively smoking No: 6’s & coppers hiding in the bushes was drawing to an end.
(I got a good lift off a lorry driver, who introduced me to the delights of Test Match Special, which has stayed with me to this day. Indeed, if it's a nice day, I'll take the day off, get down to my local county ground. Have a quick spliff behind the score board & all set up for a relaxing day doing nothing but mental maths games – crickets a great game if you like maths, as a county match unfurls before me).
Needless to say my friend never turned up but I bumped into Jayne, a radical feminist/anarchist lesbian who was friends of friends & whom I had met once (very briefly) before in a pub back home & another character called Geoff who I also knew very vaguely from the pub.
Jayne, hearing of my dilemma – do I sleep out in a London park (it was a gloriously sunny day) or start the long hitch home, invited Geoff & I back to stay at her squat.
Hence followed an eye opener of an evening. Jayne dragged us off to a party at which I discovered to my astonishment that gay people were, well just like people I met everyday.
We ended up somewhere in Covent Garden (before renovation) attempting to get into some nightclub to be told by the doorman "you (Jayne & friend) can come in, but the two straights (Geoff & I) can’t ".
Geoff, who became a really good friend in the intervening years (& still is 25 years later) & I, hitched back on the following Monday, having sworn a pact not to mention we had been out with Jayne - such things would have brought about an instant & heavy beating in the town we both came from.

TORNESS MAY/JUNE 79
This was a three-day no nukes demo/mass trespass of (the then building site of) Torness power station (Just outside Berwick) but deserves a mention.
After a day of workshops (what to do if arrested) I was having tea for a campfire when this drum like booming sound came out of the darkness. A minute or so later three people came out of the darkness & mist. One bearing a "Lambegh" drum, another with a cart full of firebrands and the third dressed as a ringmaster with a loudhailer inviting us all to "join the company of freaks".
I need to say that they all wore disguises, including face paint – which I had never ever seen before & so, of course I joined in this Hamlyn like procession round the site.
We ended up in a field & watched a display of gymnastics, juggling & fire eating from our three hosts
The last I saw of them was as they escorted us out of the gate & slowly vanished back into the mist…
Later that night, I met up with a really nice group of people from York University & this bloke, one of those people so full of personality, you just can't help liking them on sight, who claimed to be an undercover copper, as he rolled (yet another) joint. We built a campfire on the beach, someone played Ritchie Havens songs on the guitar & we watched the sun come up.

STONEHENGE 1979
A friend & I hitched down from the far north, much to the surprise of people that we would travel that far for an event (then again there was absolutely nothing where we came from).
Stonehenge, in some respects, was an introduction to democracy in action, which has stayed with me all these years. The "co-ordinators" would call a general site meeting & several hundred people would debate what needed to be done – organising the stage, bogs, and liasing with the local police etcetera.
I’m afraid to say that it was rather spoilt by one of the Tipi people threatening to pull out "& if we go, the police will roll over the site" unless we all coughed up a (considerable) sum to finance the stage. What really hacked me off was that I later heard the allegation that some people kept 10% of donations back as a "tithe".
The weather was OK for most of the week, it did rain heavily one night though – our tent got flooded out (ever tried bailing out a tent in the pitch black & you are "stoned immaculate"?).
The Solstice itself was fine & sunny; there was a parade of Wally Smith’s ashes round the site & the ritual storming of the gates to the Stones/people shouting WALLY!!! (The other version was ALBATROSS- usually at 3:00 am & anybodygorranyasid)
There was a "wedding "& a christening in the inner circle led by the (infamous at the time) Rick the Vic. A Church of England vicar who had dropped out & whom (I think, was living with the Tepee people. (He later wrote an article for High Times, which differed significantly to how I remember the festival!)
As it was hot & sunny that day, a few people stripped off, much to the excitement of a few passing Italian tourists, who proceeded to photograph everything that moved.
I remember the "old" naked guy. Somebody told me that he turned up to all the festivals & stripped off regardless of the weather. Equally incongruous was an Asian family who turned up in a camper van & duly opened a shop.
Then there was Rufus, who lived in the basement of Jayne's squat, he who used to wander round naked declaiming "love & peace brothers & sisters".
One night, round 3:00am, there we where all huddled round the campfire, Rufus appeared out of the darkness, declaiming as usual – stark naked.
Rufus was pretty well out of it mentally. Unless he got help, I hate to think whatever happened to him. He once took 30 minutes (in the rain) to roll a joint, which fell apart in a shower of sparks after several draws.
(I later heard he was busted at Stonehenge 80 – some local coppers found him in possession of a joint, whilst he was having a shit in the woods.)
I suppose this is an opportune moment to mention the bogs. As I remember there where the public bogs, where one could get a wash in the morning and the "open air version"– a series of bore holes. A pretty dangerous area to be wandering around in when it got dark…
There is a deep & dark memory of wandering past some hippy, sat on a chair reading the paper… with the seat taken out & a hole dug underneath.
Bands… no real recollection bar:
Keith Christmas & band played an absolutely storming set (Keith has reminded me that halfway through somebody set off a paper hot air balloon painted with a Chinese dragon, in front of the stage. Later on, or perhaps the following year, some one had discovered that if you taped the handles of a plastic carrier bag together, held it over an open fire (so that the bag filled with hot air). The clever bit was to then set the handles on fire. Voila! The bag would rise for a 100 feet in the air (they looked pretty weird from a distance) before exploding into a meltdown of burning plastic – onto the heads of watching stoners below.)
Nik Turner (whom I didn’t recognise with short hair) stood on me as he walked by and Here & Now organised the stage/running order of the bands.
Some band called Looney Q took upon themselves to disregard the set running & where promptly thrown off the stage by a Here & Now cohort. An aged relic from the 60’s took offence to this "fascist dictatorship" & grabbed the stage mike to hold forth at length about this being "the peoples festival" until hauled off – probably to have a heart attack.
An enterprising couple set up "Mr & Mrs Normal’s Tea Party". Which consisted of a bell tent, entrance 25 pence for which you received a spliff & a cup of tea.
It was situated next to one of the minor stages. A local band, whose name I have completely forgotten, were doing extremely bad heavy metal cover versions. The lead singer launched into a word-perfect recitation of the intro to the live version of Lynyrd Skynyrd's Freebird – "what's that song y’all want to hear?" to shouts of "fuck & die" off from assorted (very, very stoned) denizens at the tea party. Needless to say, they carried on regardless & we all headed for relative safety far, far away from the trashing Freebird was receiving.
I’ve forgotten who organised it, but there was a circus tent (?) that also held a stage & would hold "light shows" once it got dark. I have a vague memory of getting too stoned to find our tent & sitting there (at three o’clock in the morning) watching the 1930’s version of King Kong being projected onto the tent wall.
Getting too stoned to move was a regular event. One awful morning I woke up around the remnants of a campfire & realised that a biker gang have moved in during the early hours… The term "Oh dear" springs to mind. Somehow I managed to slide away. I think the gang were preoccupied with waking people up & telling them to "move"– before they drove the bikes over the tents.
Acid was in short supply (at least in that I failed miserably to find any) though as above hash was everywhere & I was stoned all the time. But… somebody brought on site a big supply of Diconal – a pretty powerful painkiller (& "drug of choice" as utilised by one Dr Harold Shipman).
" Word on the street" was that you had to intravenously inject it – which is apparently nonsense; it’s an oral drug (though I suspect you X10 the effect if you inject).
It got so bad, everywhere you went were bodies of people flat out, Here & Now resorted to making regular announcements over the PA to request that users do so in a tent rather than outside. I think people with children -Sid Rawles lot brought a tribe of kids with them -had started to complain about the number of people jacking up in front of the kids.
Well, Stonehenge 79 draws to an end. By this point we were flat broke & starving. We met up with some hippies (who laughed at us urban dwellers unable to cope without a shop) and they treated us to “nettle soup”. The recipe is as follows:
* Mounds of nettles
*Water
* Anything else you can find (including an apple core thrown into the fire but missing the target…)
Boil over an open fire; serve with hand made chapatti’s (wood smoke flavour non optional).

I hung around on the Sunday as Nik Turners Inner City Unit (version 1) played a set (they had played Glastonbury the day before). It was mainly stuff from Xintoday & a version of Brainstorm.
I've heard that the BBC filmed it & it was shown as part of a documentary, though I have never seen it.
I then had to hitch back north. The first lift from outside the gates, decent people had a van & offered every hitchhiker a lift, got pulled on "sus laws", much to the bemusement of a couple of Germans who had travelled over for the festival.
Our driver seemed to think that it was because one of the passengers was an organiser of the "Alternative Miss World" contest (Miss World in drag). I later found out that the film director Derek Jarman was heavily involved. I often wondered if that passenger was Mr Jarman.
I got another lift off some creepy character, who insisted on talking about flagellation - "tell me, (leer, leer) did they, er, beat you at school"? & who promptly dumped me in the middle of absolute nowhere (at dusk). Just to compound things, after walking for a mile or so, another bloke appeared out of the woods & started following me down the road. Thankfully the next passing car stopped & I eventually made it back home for a bath & sleep in a real bed.

SMOKEY BEARS – HYDE PARK MAY 80
Having moved to London by then & cultivating the "bleak, northern industrial look" at the time – about 100+ of "us northerners" where living in a series of squats round Kings X/Islington at the time & it consisted of dressing in black Levi’s, a black donkey jacket, short cropped hair – usually hennaed deep red & a scarf – alternated between a Keyifah /an Om scarf
Bands I remember, on what was a gloriously sunny day, were Peter & the Test Tube Babies, Accident in the East Lancs Lane & Simon Vikenoog . A beat poet of Dutch extraction – who was unceremoniously hauled off the stage - still ranting away with his "stream of consciousness poem", for overrunning his slot. (I looked him up on the net – still around by the looks of it).
Heading the bill was Nik Turners Inner City Unit (version 2)
V2 had a lot harder sound – later dubbed Acidpunk & they finished the set with a storming version of (Watching the) Grass Grow /In the Mood (Nude) with a roadie, dressed in a silver firefighters suit dancing on the stage & instigating a flower fight – chucking boxes of dead daffodils into the moshing audience.
A bunch of bikers either took it upon themselves, or were appointed by the organisers to do the security – which appeared to consist of lining up in front of the stage & hassling anybody they didn't like
At the end, they, the bikers beat up a couple of people just for the hell of it – I have this vivid memory of one of them, who spent the whole day psychotically staring at anybody who walked past, just jumping on somebody & laying into them for apparently "looking at him the wrong way".
It rather spoilt what had been an excellent day.
It was the day Arsenal won the FA Cup, at the time we where all living in this maze of squats round Kings X – the infamous Derby Lodge, which is worthy of another story.
We had scored a whole blotter of "Red Dragon" (Rumour had it that it was pre Operation Julie – recycled by a bent copper) It was enough for two tabs each & we had this big acid party – blood pouring out the walls time! For some idiot reason, a few of us ventured out – big mistake! Round the station as thousands of celebrating footie fans were spilling out onto the street & kicking off into each other.
To compound matters, as we were racing back to the party, "Mad Desi" a truly horrible, racist, psychotic (in the medical sense) character appeared… with a damn big axe. ("Mad Desi" once held 20 odd of us "hostage" in one of the flats, convinced that we were all "police spies". His other favourite trick was to suspend people, by the ankles over the balcony – personally speaking; I trust he’s long gone.)
" Mad Desi" proceeded to attack the windows of his (downstairs flat). I managed to stay relatively calm (by probably denying the incident was real) though one of our party, who had been on the receiving end of the balcony treatment from "Mad Desi"& friends, literally lost it in the worst panic attack I have ever seen.
On a nicer note, at dawn, we ended up on a flat roof making mega soap bubbles with coat hangers & watching them float across the London skyline (& watching little stick figures dancing on the roof of the next tower block).

STONEHENGE 80
A friend from school turned up on my doorstep, having deserted from the Navy! We put him up for a week or so & decided we would smuggle him to Stonehenge, at which point he decided that he would be better off taking his chances handing himself in.
As luck would have it, the day I set off, the dole office decided they had underpaid me & sent me a giro for £100+.
I had arranged to meet people on site, having found the tents & a message that they where in the pub in the local town.
Of course by the time I got to the pub, they had gone.
As you will remember they where two roads leading to Stonehenge – the main road, which took a mile extra, but more cars, or a back road, which was shorter but less traffic.
As it was getting towards dusk, I decided to take the short route. After getting a short distance from town, I saw a car approaching me in the distance. Standing there hopefully, I stuck out my thumb & glory be, the car stopped a short distance up the road. As I ran towards it all the lights flashed on – it was of course a Police patrol car.
I have to say, the DS bloke was pretty nice, after the obligatory search back at the Station, they gave me a cup of tea, a fag, an apology (!) & a lift back to the site. Funny thing was he reckoned that "nobody smokes on my patch, we’ve busted them all "– yeah, tell me another one.
The following day I scored some most excellent acid – orange barrel. As the rush kicked in, all I could do was sit down on the Iron Age hillocks at the back of the site, listen to some Rachmaninov been played at maximum volume from a sound system & watch this magnificent psychedelic sunset. (At one point the line of trees turned into a silhouette of a herd of elephants, which started to run round in this gigantic wheel).
At some point round midnight, having discovered that I could still walk! I came across these little red dots floating around this campfire, closer inspection revealed all these people dancing round a fire & waving joss sticks about.
Later on, we all sat watching satellites/shooting stars/"UFO’S" zipping across the sky whilst I became earnestly involved in conversation with two (tripping) young women, that "yes, the universe really was an inverted pudding bowl, painted black & if you looked closely enough, you could see the strings the stars were attached to".
Just one of those little, spontaneous events, which made Stonehenge so unique.
The last memory I have of that particular trip was standing round a campfire at 8:00 am (ish) some 13 or 14 hours after dropping the tab, still too wrecked to speak, watching blue, red and green squares, circles and triangles appear on peoples faces.
The Solstice, a week or so later, passed without incident – bar somebody grabbing the mic, as literally thousands of cars were entering the site & shouting:
" The revolution has started, Downing St is under attack, Stonehenge has been declared a refugee camp, and the ley lines will protect us …"
A friend of mine later related the story of how he heard the broadcast just as some "Orange Barrel" was peaking. He spent a rather confused night…
Band wise, Inner City Unit played a couple of sets, Nik Turner played flute with a band called Entropy & a couple of Hawkwind bods turned up & played as an ICU/Hawkwind crossover – WindHawks??.
Bar that, ain’t got a clue who I saw, bar Spacemen 3 & the wonderfully monikered "Psycho Hamster meets the Killer Doughnuts from Mars". If memory serves me correctly, the latter played something like an all night, five-hour set, as nobody else would take the stage.
I think I saw Ruts DC do a set, though after being on site for three weeks or so, everything became a little blurry round the edges.
Pertinent to this story is the biker gangs – mainly from the South West, who would turn up in force & colonise a section of the festival for themselves & woe betide anybody wandering into it (see above).
During the latter part of the festival Crass turned up & were listed to do a set on the Saturday night. Rumours started to circulate that the biker gangs where making noises about it being "their festival"& the punks could er, "go away".
There was probably a fair amount of politicking going on between the groups. I remember talking to a guy from Release who where considering leaving before the Saturday night (Can’t remember if they did or not).
At one point, whoever was organising the main stage made an announcement that "we needn’t be worried by Crass, you can easily recognise them, and they are older than us & dressed all in black". I “dined out” as they say for months afterwards with a couple of Crass fans of my acquaintance on the fact that I had chatted to the band round a campfire.
In retrospect, rather foolishly, I scored some "Ying Yang" blotter, on the following Saturday.
I knew it was going to be good when after about an hour, I got that "electric taste" in my mouth & similar to "Fear & Loathing… "The sky suddenly rendered open, on good acid, I always had this thing that the sky was made out of jelly & the horizon was the jelly skin, & all these Pterodactyl type creatures started flowing out of the hole in the sky.
Some friends had accidentally acquired this guy (from Manchester I think) who latched onto them. He was spending the whole day scoring anything & everything in sight. I think his intention was to take his stash back to Manchester.
I bumped into them all, my friends also having decided to take some acid & needless to say, this bloke, who had never, ever done hallucinogenics before had scored some orange barrel… and taken two tabs…
I have some synapses destroyed - memory of stumbling round yelling about the "fuckin bats man, fuckin skies full of them” & one friend shouting, “fucking forget the bat’s man, look what’s over there…" At which point we decided to have a cup of tea.
May I assume many readers will have experienced this – deciding to get together a cup of tea when the initial rush is just peaking on some good acid. Good, then I can leave the ensuing shambles to your imagination
After been chased off the tea stall by some hippy kids shouting what’s "three times six, five times seven", kids having some inbuilt radar to spot what condition we where in by then, we chanced upon a stall selling amyl nitrate at 20p a hit. To his credit, the guy selling the stuff did explain exactly what is & what it did. Did this put the Mancunian off? I think not, indeed he took this MASSIVE snort (getting his moneys worth).
Ever seen anybody get pole axed? This must be the nearest thing to it I have ever seen. Poor sod never knew what hit him.
I met him the next morning, me in some appalling comedown state, (never could handle the day after a good trip all that well) whilst he was still white faced & looking pretty shaken. He reckoned that he spent the rest of the night hiding out under a van, too scared & paranoid to move as all these creatures & slithery things ran around the site.
By that point the acid was really kicking in & I decided that this guy was going to do my head in with antics like that. So I wandered off down to the main stage. ICU where just starting a set, I remember a couple of us climbing up the inside of the Pyramid stage & sitting at the back, looking down on the band. (As Judge Trev Thoms kicked into (who stole the fucking) Gas Money.
The next couple of hours, I think I just wandered around until for some reason I ended back at the main stage, round midnight where a band, I thought it was Crass, but evidently I’m wrong, were playing & a couple of bikers jumped on stage, punched the singer and commenced to smash everything up.
The rest is pretty confused; I can recall seeing people being chased across the field & beaten up – some acquaintances from the Islington gay punk contingent, were pretty badly hurt. I later heard that they, the bikers (to be fair I suppose, a group of them) just set about attacking anybody with short hair who looked vaguely punkish.
I'm not to sure if this played a part, but some enterprising farmer had brought (at least) a tanker full of really potent home made, (cheap; he was selling it by the gallon)- scrumpy on site.
(One of the many disparate groups attending the festival was the squaddies – who would sneak in after dark (I'm sure that the Commanding Officer would have banned them from a 100 yards of us lot). The squaddies took to the scrumpy, well like ducks to water. Quite often round dawn, you would see squaddies frantically trying to wake up comatose mates from round dying campfires.)
Mega freaked by this turn of events with the biker gangs, but hey, I survived tripping in Kings X , in the company of this guy who would fight anybody if they looked at him the wrong way. The dilemma being do I grab my stuff at 1:00 am & beat it (& into the arms of the local constabulary who were gathered on mass outside the perimeter & I guess that DS guy was just waiting for me to foul up) or stay?
As luck would have it, I bumped into a bunch of hippies running a "chill out" session (long before clubland got in on the act), whom recognising my freaked out state called me over & calmed me down by feeding me rice & beans, a joint & a cup of tea – to whom I shall be eternally grateful for their kindness & if they ever read this A BIG COSMIC THANK YOU. Really appreciated.
Round 4:00 or 5:00 am, I found myself back at, what was left of the main stage. Some guy, who deserves the most enormous respect possible, (& again a big thank you mention on the website) had pulled together a scratch band, got the generator working & started playing again.
Whoever he was, he deserves respect for having the courage to get on stage & sound off on "how this was the people’s festival & we don't want no fascists wrecking the place".
Braver man than I (at that time, a veteran of several 1970's anti Nazi rallies & pitched battles with the NF), I have to say.
I remember coming down, sat on the stage as the sun rose, thinking "fucking hell, I've really fucked up this time"
Not all the bikers were like the above. A couple of days before, I wandered past a group of bikers (from South London) as dawn was breaking.
The bikers where prising open , some car batteries with an axe. A biker came over & said "excuse me man…" leading me to assume he was going to say "have you got 10 pence"– you could not travel 10 ft without been stopped by somebody asking for cash/fags/drugs.
However, to my pleasant surprise, he said "would you like a try of this" producing a MASSIVE home made bong – with a double headed pipe to boot, from behind his back.
Turned out they have just arrived (round 5:00 am to avoid the police) complete with several weights of some extremely good quality Red Leb & freebies were the sales pitch.
I was sooooooooo stoned I was hallucinating……………..
But back to the biker gangs beating people up. I managed to grab some sleep & woke up to a drizzle, the bikers had departed en mass & the whole site was a smelly tip – compounded by a comedown hangover. There was a really awful band – White Feathers (?) Playing in the rain at 10:00 am to nobody & a fistfight broke out round a campfire - over who owned a pan. So I grabbed my stuff & hitched back to London.
One of the lifts was from a "geezer" type bloke from "sarf Lundun mate", who had spent a couple of days on site, checking the place out. He held forth on Thatcherite free market principles (& selling various substances & goods at mark up prices to the assorted mass’).
I guess him & his mates moved in pretty quickly once they realised the opportunities.

SMOKEY BEARS – Hyde Park May 1982
It poured down, about 100 people turned up & the PA system was abysmal. Enough said.

KINGS X BENEFIT GIG
Psycho Hamster, having lost the Killer Donuts… resurfaced in late Summer 81. There was a benefit gig (pay what you could afford on the door) held in a deconsecrated church in Islington (half way up Pentonville Rd, on the left if you are travelling up the hill) on behalf of a local squatters group.
I walked past the site a month or two back – it's now a business centre,
Headlining where (as ever) ICU. To make this one more interesting, they rigged up a projector – with 50ft images of Judge Dredd & other 2000AD characters projected onto the back wall.
Needless to say, the police raided us. Apparently they received complaints about the noise from some two miles away! (Well it was 2:00 am) Nik Turner negotiated one more song – a 20-minute version of Amyl Nitrate– which normally ended with a version of the theme from the 60’s TV show Bonanza. This time, it also segued into Johnny Todd - a Liverpudlian folk song, which was adapted as the theme for (the 60’s TV show) Z Cars.

Postscript
For various reasons, I never went back to free festivals after that. However…
A) My partner did her PhD on a longtitudal study on drink, drugs & stress in medical students & house officers. Having read the questionnaires (& shouted call that drug abuse, when I was a teenager etcetera…) I did offer up some of the above as anecdotal evidence for her doctorate, but she refused on ethical grounds!
B) A couple of years ago the Halifax bank used a photo from Stonehenge, with Sid Rawle’s centre stage in the Henge itself, as a billboard ad for mortgages.
Sid Rawles, as quoted in the Guardian, claimed that he had no knowledge of the ads until people started hassling him about how much money he had received from the Halifax.
C) I'm into the concept of book circles (spreading the word about good books) & book kharma in a big way. May I recommend, "The Dark is Rising" by Susan Cooper. The sort of thing us aging acid heads who were at Stonehenge appreciate

A good review can be found at http://www.greenmanreview.com/dark_is_rising.html
And a wonderful website dedicated to Susan Cooper can be also be found at:
http://www.thelostland.com/darkbook.htm
I found my (hardback) copy for 25 pence on a jumble stall & read it over a week or so whilst on holiday.
D) A couple of years back, my partner and I took our daughter & her friends out to a countryside centre for the day. We made wicker & tissue lanterns, ate vegetable stew & chapattis cooked over a campfire and all trooped of into the woods, accompanied by a story teller, at dusk, with lanterns lit.
The spirit of Stonehenge lives on…

Mark N