Chapter One: How This World Came To Be

In the beginning, a very long time ago in another part of space, the universe began. It began with all of the matter and energy (which is the same thing) existing within one infinitesimal point in time and space. Now, at that time the things we call time and space didn’t exist yet, so therefore I lied when I said it was a long time ago. It wasn’t a long time ago, it was now. Also, at that time space didn’t exist yet, so therefore it wasn’t a different part of space, it was right here.

Anyway, so all of the matter and energy (which is the same thing) was (or is) here in this eternal moment of space-time-matter-energy-all-in-one-sort-of-thing and always was/is.

As if all of that wasn’t difficult enough to comprehend something else happened. It changed.

Without any external force acting upon it (for there was no external force) the cosmic singularity suddenly decided to explode in all directions for no reason at all, thus setting the precedent that things can happen by themselves without any process of cause and effect.

Once it had happened time began and space came into existence. Thus the beginning of time is an event occurring in time and space (which is the same thing).

The beginning of space is likewise an event occurring in time and space (which is…well, yeah, take that as read).

So then this universe thing begins expanding outwards toward infinity. So then, also for no reason at all, cause and effect suddenly become essential to everything which happens (in spite of the precedent set to the contrary).

Except that the universe isn’t expanding at all. The shape of the universe is a cone. This fact causes the observed phenomenological universe to have the appearance of an expanding dynamic system when, in fact, it is following a linear pathway along the course of the cone shaped universe. In other words the stars and galaxies are moving along a space continuum which has a big end and a small end. As the galaxies move toward the big end they appear to be expanding but they are not. Instead there is merely a bigger space between them. The distance to the edge of the universe never changes because there is no real expansion taking place. The illusion is rather similar to the medieval view of the Earth’s apparent flatness within an apparent geocentricity.

Anyway, the galaxies contain star matter and around some of the stars are planets. The gods made the Planet Earth and the other realms where corporeal life can exist. The gods constructed Earth as a tree of branching futures and a tree of branching pasts. The oblate spheroid is merely how it looks in a limited number of dimensions.

Humans walked the Earth and talked to the gods. The gods gave the humans language and fire so that there could be book burning. The flood came and went and so did the staircase of babel. Humans built roads and temples and libraries and still, outside of time and space, this was/is all in the here and now of the original singularity, the beginning, the end and the current of creation.

Are we expected to believe all this?

Fish swim, birds fly, people talk rubbish. It’s a defining characteristic of the species.

It would be possible to reduce all the stories in the world to a few simple plots. But only by throwing out all the details from those stories. Or, to put it another way, only by throwing out all the interesting bits.

Imagine a scale. Imagine a piano keyboard or a rainbow or a periodic table of the elements. Any scale will do. Imagine some sort of system structured as a scale, with a low end, and high end and a series of graded steps, stages or units in between the two extremes.

Now imagine that one end of the scale represents chaos, gibberish and meaningless flux. The other end of the scale represents logical, linear, cause and effect behaviour of people, places and things. All the strata in between are stepping stones between order and chaos.

Somewhere, at about the fifty percent mark, fifty percent order and fifty percent chaos, exists the narrative we construct about the origins of the universe. And that’s how this world came to be.

(This is a chapter from my book: ‘How I Came To Be’ which is published on the Internet under a Creative Commons 3.0 licence – It may only be copied for non-commercial purposes. Any copies must carry the author attribution (written by Peter-David Smith) and there must be no derivatives. As long as these rules are followed the work may be non-commercially distributed. I would appreciate a message being left here at my blog to inform me when the writings are being used elsewhere. And the same applies to all my blog entries. Thanks).

Chapter Twelve: How I Came To Be A Pedant

Many years ago Benjamin Franklin and then, after him, Noah Webster proposed changes to the spelling of the English Language. The intention was to ‘rationalise’ the spelling. The result, however, has been to create a second, equally irrational system. So we now have two authorities on the spelling of English, and neither of them rational at all. Instead of rationality we have mere conventionalism. Here are some examples of the differences:

Words ending in ‘gue’:

Analogue, Dialogue, Catalogue, Plague, League, Vague. In American English these words become: Analog, Dialog, Catalog, Plague, League, Vague. So some of them are changed and others are left alone, producing a system which is equally as irrational as the original.

Words and phrases using ‘fence’:

Offence, Defence, Garden Fence. In American English these become: Offense, Defense, Garden Fence. Here the change has been applied where it is to a syllable but not applied where it is to a word.

Words ending in ‘re’:

Theatre, Centre, Spectre, Sombre, Sceptre, Mitre, Fibre, Calibre, Metre. In American English these words become:
Theater, Center, Specter, Somber, Scepter, Miter, Fiber, Caliber, Meter. Except that ‘Theatre’ and ‘Theater’ are both used in America, perhaps because of the love for Shakespeare.

Words ending in ‘our’:

Honour, Valour, Colour, Flavour, Humour, Harbour. In American English these become: Honor, Valor, Color, Flavor, Harbor.

Words ending in ‘ise’:

Organise, Rationalise, Conceptualise, Wise, Clockwise, Enterprise, Nationalise, Privatise, Surprise, Disguise, Exercise, Televise, Advise, Merchandise. In American English these words become: Organize, Rationalize, Conceptualize, Wise, Clockwise, Enterprise, Nationalize, Privatize, Surprise, Disguise, Exercise, Televise, Advise, Merchandise. Some changed, some not bothered with. To ‘prise open’ and to ‘win a prize’ in British English are condensed in American English to one spelling ‘prize’.

Another one of these condensations occurs with the words ‘licence’ (noun) and ‘license’ (verb) in British English which become ‘license’ for both instances when used in American English.

Words with different syllables:

British ‘Orientate’ becomes ‘Orient’ in American but British ‘Orientation’ remains unchanged. Logically it would become ‘Oriention’ if the shortening were applied in a comprehensive way. I believe there are other examples of this occasional shortening but I don’t have a full list of them.

Two words from British English have been given entirely new meanings in American. The word ‘Smart’, which means neat, tidy and well dressed has been given in American English the meaning of ‘Intelligent’. The word ‘Dumb’ which means mute, unable to make a sound has been given in American English the meaning of ‘Unintelligent’. Thus two words have been given a pairing of opposite meanings to which they have no particular connection in their original British usage. What does it imply? We must, apparently, put on a suit and talk a lot if we wish to be thought ‘smart’ and not ‘dumb’. Being a quiet, thoughtful, scruffy intellectual I resent this.

When I was a boy I remember seeing American comic books where the spellings ‘All nite’ (for ‘All night’) and ‘The man who walked thru walls’ (for ‘The man who walked through walls’) were used. This was the sort of thing which made English teachers in Britain develop a measure of distinct anti-American feeling. In my secondary school, back in the mid-1960s, there was an English teacher who had grown up in the days of the British Raj in India. He was very old, probably past retirement age but still teaching English. He was the first ethnically Asian person I’d ever had contact with and his attitudes were of that very old fashioned sort found amongst loyal Indian British scholars in those days. He would not allow us to use the the word ‘alright’. If he ever heard us using the word ‘alright’ he used to come down on us like a ton of bricks. ‘I never want to hear you use that word ‘alright’ again,’ he used to say, ‘Never again! There is no such word as ‘alright’ in the English Language! That’s an Americanism!’ It made him visibly angry.

My dad was Canadian and my mother was Irish. They both had International English, which is usually the same as British. The slight differences were in pronunciation. My dad would pronounce the British word ‘aluminium’ in the American way as ‘al-oo–minum’ and words like ‘Worcester’ and ‘Gloucester’ as they were spelled, rather than ‘wooster’ and ‘gloss-ter’ (which is what the English make of them).

When I was a little boy my primary school teachers lectured me against copying my old man’s way of speaking and set me on a path of BBC pronunciations. However to this day I still say the words ‘library’ and ‘strawberry’ as they are spelled and not the ‘li-bree’ and ‘strawbree’ which is preferred by most of the English people.

For the future? What will the English language become? Probably one of many colloquial forms of Planet Earthspeak.

I think one of the great strengths of English is its ability to take in words and phrases from other languages and make them part of the elastic form of English itself. Perhaps the ‘irrationality’ of English is a necessary part of the flexibility and elasticity which makes such accommodations possible?

(This is a chapter from my book: ‘How I Came To Be’ which is published on the Internet under a Creative Commons 3.0 licence – It may only be copied for non-commercial purposes. Any copies must carry the author attribution (written by Peter-David Smith) and there must be no derivatives. As long as these rules are followed the work may be non-commercially distributed. I would appreciate a message being left here at my blog to inform me when the writings are being used elsewhere. And the same applies to all my blog entries. Thanks).

Chapter Thirteen: How I Came To Be Alternative

In the late end of summer in 1971, at the age of 18, I came in on a train from Brighton’s seaside delights, heading westward and inland to the City of Salisbury in Wiltshire. I guess I didn’t have a sufficient respect for Salisbury’s ancient history and architecture, I mean, my attitude was that I was just passing through, heading for Stonehenge.

I was mad keen to see Stonehenge. I mean this was the oldest, strangest most inexplicable thing in the island of Britain and I needed to be there. Right there at a meeting with the cosmic psyche arranged in a circle of stone.

I’d been reading about Stonehenge and Glastonbury for a few years and I was nearly THERE.

Now, you need to understand that this was 1971, so Stonehenge and Glastonbury weren’t associated with music festivals. These places weren’t associated with loud music or drug trips, they had just barely begun to be associated with hippies. This was 1971 and these two places were ancient monuments of religious or archaeological value, old and special and holy, to be revered.

I contemplated approaching Stonehenge with religious awe and respect.

I got into Salisbury in late afternoon and had one hell of a toothache starting. I always ate too many chocolate bars and sweets in those days. Miraculously I didn’t get fat. However, the sugar and caffeine content in the chocolate, tea, coffee, sweets and soft drinks was so high that I lived on the edge of my nerves all the time. I was continually rushing from place to place with ideas about the universe and time and space and whatever careening around inside my brain. The fats were burned up by the constant activity.

The tooth was beginning to make its grievances felt as I stumbled with my bags, bongo drums and sketchpads from the train and down the road to a cafe for more caffeine and sugar. I was in jeans and baseball boots, a black poloneck sweater and a smart-looking Canadian Air Force jacket.

I had a cheese sandwich, played T.Rex’s ‘Get It On’ on the jukebox and took the last of my codeine tablets. In 1971 codeine was in common usage as a stronger alternative to aspirin, eventually the law would change, codeine would be re-classified as too strong to buy over the counter and would become a prescription drug. In 1971 we were still in blissful ignorance though. I was taking what I imagined to be a perfectly harmless toothache remedy and took two tablets.
If only I had realised that I was combining sugar, caffeine and codeine to make a triple energy burn up combination.
Unaware of this I strolled around Salisbury seeing the sights and waiting for dark so I could find some place to crash. I was beginning to get used to the idea of sleeping under the stars.

When the sky had darkened sufficiently I headed out of town on foot to the nearest bit of hillside where I could get some rest. The toothache began to throb. I ignored it.

Up on the hill, under a tree, looking down on the old cathedral city, I tried to sleep. The toothache got worse. I tried to ignore it. The toothache got worse, and worse. I breathed the night air and stared up at the stars. At least it wasn’t raining. The thought if I couldn’t sleep I could at least rest. The toothache got worse. And worse. And worse.
Eventually I drifted in and out of shallow sleep.

I awoke at dawn and tried to write some poetry, then tried to sketch the scenery, both with mediocre results. After a while I climbed down the hillside and walked back into Salisbury. It was too early for the shops so I walked around and around the streets until somewhere would be open.

It took a couple of hours but the shops and cafes eventually began their busy day and I was able to get tea with toast and jam. Then I went out and found a chemist shop for some codeine tablets.

At last the toothache began to subside. I made sure I had enough codeine to last me for a week or so. I also stocked up on a few food and drink supplies to carry with me on my journey. I had a nine mile walk ahead of me to Stonehenge.

The day was fine and the sun was pretty powerfully present in a blue blue sky over Salisbury Plain. I hiked along the road, glad that I had done all those route marches in the ATC, all of them good practice for this trek to the holy place of the Ancient Britons.

I passed by Old Sarum and continued on my way, politely saying no to the occasional offer of a lift from passing cars. I wanted to make this pilgrimage on foot, to savour it as I felt my soul getting closer to the place of the Ley Lines, the place of the Energy.

As the day wore on I got closer and closer. Eventually, I could see the Stones themselves in the distance.

I slowed down. I approached, keeping my eye on the ancient bluestones. There it was, at last. Stonehenge.

When I was ready I walked right up to the wire fence erected to keep the public out. There was a ticket booth but I wasn’t ready for that yet. First I wanted to stand there and gaze through the fence for a while.

The bluestones were as I had seen them in photographs, but the sheer size and physicality of them impressed me very much. On the other side of the wire an American nuclear family group was doing the tourist thing, running all around the stones and taking pictures. The father of the group noticed me standing on the other side of the fence. He came over and hissed conspiratorially at me, ‘Hey! You want tickets?’

I shook my head and carried on staring reverently at the holy stones. Eventually I decided I was ready to go and get a ticket from the booth, then go in and actually touch the great old stones.

It was a very thrilling experience for me and one I will always teeasure. At the time the American guy’s joke seemed crass and annoying but I see the funny side of it now. I don’t suppose he realised he was in a holy place to be treated with respect like a church or a synagogue.

When I actually explored the stones themselves there was feeling of disappointment. It was an interesting place, but not quite as magical as I hoped. I didn’t feel any ancient power rising from the earth or blowing in the wind.

At the end of the day I slept under the stars again on Salisbury Plain and, in the morning, headed for the railway station. It was time to continue my exploration of the land of my birth by making my first journey into the north of England. I caught a train to Manchester.

Now, the furthest north I had ever been, at that stage of my life, was Wolverhampton in the midlands, a depressed looking town in what used to be called the County of Staffordshire. The eldest of my three sisters had moved north to Wolverhampton and we had visited her bit of the family there occasionally. In those days even travelling a mere 100 miles north involved a bit of culture shock so my expedition to the far flung city of Manchester meant journeying into a strange land of mysteries.

I had an address, a contact. I had phoned ahead and I knew I had to find M.A.G.I.C., The Manchester Alternative General Information Centre. M.A.G.I.C. was the Manchester bit of the then growing ‘Alternative Society’ a movement to peacefully change the world by rebuilding all essential services from the grassroots upward. The idea was that if the state doesn’t give you adequate housing you make your own, if they don’t give you adequate transportation systems you make your own, if the government doesn’t provide adequate healthcare you make your own, and so on. Alternative housing, alternative transport, alternative healthcare, alternative education, alternative arts centres, alternative industry, alternative reastaurants, alternative literature, alternative music, alternative fashion, alternative religion, etc. etc. etc. This whole system of alternatives was theoretically connected together by Information Centres to keep everyone informed of what was happening and how the non-violent revolution was progressing. In London B.I.T. (Binary Information Transfer) was the name of a major information centre and M.A.G.I.C. was its Manchester counterpart.

I had the address from International Times and had arranged a ‘crashpad’ with M.A.G.I.C. This means a free or donation based temporary accommodation in someone’s house or flat. Like an alternative hotel or hostel.

British Rail carried me north over fields and towns to eventually deposit me at Manchester Piccadilly Railway Station. From there I found my way through the city to M.A.G.I.C. Information Centre, an old shop premises with a living accommodation behind, filled with paper and printing equipment for the local newsletters.

A young couple in their 20s ran the place. John and Marie. They looked like most hippies, long hair, the man bearded and in jeans, the woman in ankle length Pre-Raphaelite dress. They welcomed me in and told me the rules of the stay. They’d had a bad experience with a previous guest who, they said, had wandered around the place in his underwear leering at Marie. I promised them I would keep my trousers on and do no leering. They seemed satisfied with this assurance and offered me tea and food which I gratefully accepted. I explained that I hoped to stay in Manchester for some time and find work there. They said they’d probably be able to find me another crashpad location where I could stay a bit longer until I was settled.

And that’s how I began to be part of the Alternative Society.

(This is a chapter from my book: ‘How I Came To Be’ which is published on the Internet under a Creative Commons 3.0 licence – It may only be copied for non-commercial purposes. Any copies must carry the author attribution (written by Peter-David Smith) and there must be no derivatives. As long as these rules are followed the work may be non-commercially distributed. I would appreciate a message being left here at my blog to inform me when the writings are being used elsewhere. And the same applies to all my blog entries. Thanks).

Chapter Eight: How I Came To Be A Pilgrim

At 15 I was on an orienteering exercise organised by the Air Training Corps. We had to find our way by maps and compasses along the Pilgrim’s Way near Guildford and Dorking in Surrey.
The day chosen for the exercise was one of the rainiest days I’ve ever seen. The sky was the colour of battleships in anger and the trackway was a mudslide throughout the whole journey. The gods threw lightning bolts and giant buckets of slop at us and we slid down gullies and squelched up slippery slopes.

The corporals who led us were dirty-mouthed boys who told us filthy jokes about husbands coming home to find wives committing adultery and stories of the terrible and always dirty-minded revenge taken upon the wife’s lover by the outraged husband. There was a recurring theme of locking private parts in a toolshed vice and setting fire to the shed.

These same corporals zealously ensured that we younger, more innocent kids knew the words to the dirtiest marching songs. The rhythm of the marching induced a sort of Stockholm Syndrome in us so that we came to accept these dirty songs and jokes as part of the deal when learning to be an airman.

The Pilgrim’s Way is part of an ancient, even prehistoric, track used by the pre-Christian tribespeople of Britain to cross the southern part of the island. It gets its name from the fact that it was adopted in Christian times as a route by which Christian pilgrims could make their way to the shrine of Saint Thomas à Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.

We went there, it seemed, to swim in the mud. We ended up pretty cold, miserable and wretched. We were trying to feel a marvelous sense of achievement but having little success.

For some reason I had worn foot crippling metal devices inside my boots. They were not designed to be crippling, they were actually supposed to correct my fallen arches, but they felt more like they were hard at work making sure I’d never walk again. I masochistically kept the blooming things in the boots and marched on, up to my shins in muck and more muck.

Every now and then we stopped under trees and consulted maps and compasses. Thanks to these devices we always knew exactly where we were: (lost).

Throughout the rest of my life, as I’ve striven for some kind of religious ideal and tried to understand the meaning of our human existence I’ve always been able to reconnect with that feeling of cold, wet, wretchedness struggling along the Pilgrim’s Way up the backside of Surrey.

Religion has always been the central point of my life. But which religion? I started out with Methodist Church Sunday School and then began to be interested in Buddhism. Eventually I was on a quest to discover the truth of all the religions and spiritual philosophies.

When I worked in London as an office boy I began occasionally visiting the Hare Krishna Temple, which, in those days, used to be in Bloomsbury. I chanted and listened to readings from the Bhagavad Gita. I was given Prasadam, which is the delicious spicy food prepared by the devotees and blessed by being offered to the gods.

In Bloomsbury I also found the Atlantis Bookshop which had literature on every kind of occult and spiritual subject, tarot cards, I Ching, Astrology, Yoga, Aleister Crowley, Alice A. Bailey, Rudolf Steiner, Astral Travel and all the rest. In addition to this there was the British Museum close by with artifacts from Ancient Egypt. It was my kind of place and I learned a lot there. I bought many strange books at Atlantis and other occult bookshops I found throughout London, including Crowley’s ‘Magick in Theory and Practice’.

Meanwhile, I was still collecting science fiction books and comics. My head was full of magic, superheroes, gods, angels, fairies, pentagrams, stars and symbols.

When I left home for the first time I began to travel around England, trying to learn as much as I could about the land of my birth. I went to Brighton and slept under the stars, on the beach and in the park. I found the fortune teller’s booth on Brighton Pier and went in to get my palm read.

The palmist was called Eva Petulengro and she published her own magazine of astrological predictions and advice. At the end of the magazine’s editorial she wished everybody ‘Kushti Bok‘ (Romani for ‘Good Luck‘).

Eva Petulengro read the tarot cards for me and also the palm of my hand. She told me I had ‘a book in me‘ and that I was ‘scared of green‘. I had no idea what these comments were supposed to mean, but I took it as very mysterious and interesting anyway. I thanked her and continued on my religious quest across England for truth and meaning in life.

The weather wasn’t too bad and sleeping outdoors was quite pleasant in the late August of 1971. I caught a train westward, to Salisbury, heading for an important centre of psychic energy, Stonehenge.

(This is a chapter from my book: ‘How I Came To Be’ which is published on the Internet under a Creative Commons 3.0 licence – It may only be copied for non-commercial purposes. Any copies must carry the author attribution (written by Peter-David Smith) and there must be no derivatives. As long as these rules are followed the work may be non-commercially distributed. I would appreciate a message being left here at my blog to inform me when the writings are being used elsewhere. And the same applies to all my blog entries. Thanks).

Chapter Nine: How I Came To Be Totally GaGa

Is it really 2054? Am I really 101 years old? It seems incredible that I’ve reached such an age. Of course I stopped smoking back in the 1990′s so that’s been a help, plus I eat a very healthy diet and I used to get plenty of exercise before I was in this chair.
People think I’ve got Alzheimer’s because my memory isn’t always accurate but what they don’t realise is that my memory never was accurate in the first place. When I was in primary school, at the age of 6 or 7, back in Cotswold Road School in Belmont, the teachers used to call me ‘the little absent minded professor’. That was their nickname for me, ‘the little absent minded professor’. They said I was the brightest boy but I kept forgetting things. They called me ‘Professor Brainstawm’ and they gave me a Professor Brainstawm book as a prize for English. Professor Brainstawm had about 50 pairs of glasses on top of his head because he kept forgetting they were there and then he had to get a new pair. Or was it because they were all for looking at different things? At different resolutions? Oh well, something like that…
Of course, since then my memory has taken a few knocks. At the age of about 10 or so I was given an overdose of Nitrous Oxide Gas at the dentists. That could’ve caused brain damage. My parents should have sued both the dentist and the anaesthetist. But they didn’t think of things like that back in those days. Then there was all the brainwashing in the 1970s. Hypnotism and brainwashing. It created some false memories I’m sure.

I used to think, sometimes, that some of my experiences belong to one universe and some to another universe, like different quantum probabilities in history. But how would I remember both of them, the two different versions of an event? Is time like a tree, which branches outward, splitting to the left and to the right? Through one door and the other door? Boy oh boy, can I mix metaphors or what! Or is time converging inward? Two completely different pasts converging to become one present?
Or is the structure of time like both of these models? Both converging and diverging from moment to moment? That would make it like a web, or a net, a network…

I’ve often observed the average person’s lack of ability to think in 4 dimensions.
From childhood onwards I had the ability to cross a road by aiming at where the space between the cars would be when I’d get to it, not to where the space is now. Other people don’t seem to get this.
Sometimes car drivers slow down and then I have to recalculate while walking.
Sometimes, in a busy shopping centre, people try to walk straight through me as though wasn’t there. You’d think I was bloody invisible. They don’t seem to be able to think ahead to see where I’m going to be when I get there. It’s frustrating. I’m surrounded by idiots everywhere I go.

I’ve been thinking in four dimensions ever since I read ‘The Boys’ Book of Space’ back in about 1960 or so.
I remember it said if you wanted to send a spaceship to Mars you would need to aim at where Mars would be several months in the future, not where it is now. There would be no point in aiming at where it is now because by the time you got there it would’ve moved. I understood.

I understood immediately. I was a bright boy. I’ve been thinking in four dimensions ever since. I’ve always tried to explain it others but very few can get it. Or maybe they just don’t bother trying. It’s very frustrating, trying to explain to people who really don’t want to know.

And they’re just as ignorant of history, too. It’s the same difference both ways. They don’t want to see where the next move will be and they don’t want to know where the previous ones were either. Very annoying.

Some people seem to think my long hair is something to do with the 1960s and the hippies. That’s what they think. Giving away their ignorance. Hippies didn’t invent long hair, not by a long chalk. Not by a long chalk.

Long hair has been the normal style for men and women alike throughout most of history.
People who cut their hair short where usually religious fanatics like Oliver Cromwell and his Roundheads or Joan of Arc. They were usually monks or nuns or some kind of religious fanatics. If they weren’t religious fanatics then it was usually illness such a scalp infection or something. Even then they’d probably where a wig.
It is normal for people of both sexes to have long hair. They didn’t start all this short hair stuff until 1914 when the First World War broke out. Then they made all the men cut their beards and hair off to be in the trenchs. Fear of infestation, in the trenchs.

After the war the short hair became a badge of honour. They’d forgotten what peacetime man should look like.

So many people these days are ignorant of history. They’re wearing World War One militaristic style haircuts and they don’t even know it. Very annoying.
Even back in 2018 when we had the Centenary of the Armistice. They still didn’t see how important hair was. Very annoying.

Of course, they don’t really think of hippies in the 1960s anymore. I suppose it was 50 years ago they used to think that. Now, they don’t even remember hippies. I don’t know what they do remember. Big Brother used to be in a book called ’1984′ by George Orwell’. Then people were conned into thinking it was the name of a reality TV show. I don’t know what they think now. I’m out of touch, I suppose.

It’s funny to see the young people walking around looking at their ‘Gridscreens’ and ‘Pinpods’ and their ‘Ghostmedia’ in much the same way I used to walk around looking at a good book when I was young.

People think my memory’s gone but, actually, it’s the one thing which hasn’t gone!

And that’s how I came to be totally GaGa.

(This is a chapter from my book: ‘How I Came To Be’ which is published on the Internet under a Creative Commons 3.0 licence – It may only be copied for non-commercial purposes. Any copies must carry the author attribution (written by Peter-David Smith) and there must be no derivatives. As long as these rules are followed the work may be non-commercially distributed. I would appreciate a message being left here at my blog to inform me when the writings are being used elsewhere. And the same applies to all my blog entries. Thanks).

Chapter Ten: How I Came To Be A Timewarped Beatnik

In my childhood Saturdays were very special. After the weekdays of the getting up early to do a paper round and then run to school to be ritually humiliated in a thousand ways came this special, wonderful Saturday time.

Me and my sister were members of ‘The Sutton Grenadiers’, a film club at the local ‘Granada’ cinema in the nearby town of Sutton. The cinema put on a Saturday Morning Picture Show which began with sweets and prizes and a singsong to the ‘bouncing ball’ on the movie screen. Then the lights would be dimmed and a variety of films would be shown, including adventure films, comedies, shorts, old black and white Laurel and Hardy episodes etc.

We wore little plastic badges with ‘Sutton Grenadiers’ printed on them and it seemed very exciting to be part of something special each week. We were supposed to get a special bag of goodies on our birthday. According to legend the goody bag would contain special sweets and free vouchers to get into the film of your choice. When my birthday came the ‘goody bag’ notification letter didn’t arrive until a couple of days after the event. When I presented the letter to the box office I was told it was too late and I’d missed it. Typical.

There was chalk pit in Sutton. It was across the road from the Granada cinema and down a bit, on Carshalton Road. The chalk pit was a great wonder to me. It was an enormous white hole in the ground, occupying an entire block of the town, bounded by Carshalton Road on the north side and by Sutton Court Road on the south. Mechanical digging machines and men worked away at the bottom of the pit, digging out chalk to be commercially processed for use in schools and what not. It seemed amazing that the neat little English town had a giant hole in the middle and that the hole was white in colour. Other towns in the North of England had black holes in the ground where the men would dig for coal. We had a white pit of chalk. It was like looking down through the Earth’s crust into another world.

There was a little row of shops precariously balanced on the edge of the chalk pit. It was a constant source of wonderment to me that they were allowed to remain there. They always looked about to fall in to the pit.

One of the shops was a little barbershop where my dad would take me to get the militaristic short haircut which was common in those days. Another in the same row was a hobby shop.

At first the hobby shop interested me only slightly. It sold stamp collectors’ stuff, model trains and miniature military replicas. Nothing I could afford. Then I realised the owner of the shop kept a box of secondhand magazines on the floor, next to the counter. This became a box of wonders to me. In it I found American comics going back over several years. I found Fantastic Four from issue number one onwards and early issues of Spiderman and The Incredible Hulk. I found Superman and Superboy and Batman and Green lantern. I also found 1950s comics from E.C. Comics and Charlton. All for pennies and tuppences!

The hobby shop on the edge of the chalk pit became a special part of my life and I visited there very often. I began to build a collection of comics like no other kid’s in the area. I had British Air Ace and Commando Comics and back issues of ‘Flight’ magazine (which were also in the box of wonders and contained pictures of all the interesting aeroplanes of Britain and the world). While the owner of the shop was chatting with customers I sat on the floor choosing which comics and magazines I would buy with my pocket money. Sitting there was a happy, magical time poring over the amazing oddities in the box. Approaching the shop was also a magical experience. Walking along the road by that strange old chalk pit to this funny little shop perched halfway out onto empty space. It didn’t seem to be part of the same universe as all the ‘normal’ things which obey the laws of physics.

The owner of the hobby shop wore a beret and people in Sutton said he was a beatnik. I’d heard this word before and had met art students who were supposed to be beats, according to some. In those days most British people in Surrey seemed very square and there was a whole different way of looking at the world. People didn’t swear very often and when they accidentally let slip a swearword they would usually apologise for it. The preacher at my Sunday School gave us little kids a very serious talk about the evils of swearing and made a very strong case that we should never, ever use the ‘F’-word. He didn’t realise that, at that age, I thought the ‘F’-word was ‘fart’. Men still wore trilby hats or, if they were civil servants, bowler hats. Cars were made in England, which still had a manufacturing industry. Women wore corsets. Many people still imagined smoking was good for you. There was a women’s clothing shop in Sutton High Street called ‘Swanky Modes’ which was not thought of as a ridiculous name. Grocers and greengrocers and chemist shops and ironmongers and fishmongers and butchers all still existed and had not yet been superceded by American style supermarkets.

The idea of beatniks became increasingly interesting to me. They seemed to be featured in lots of TV shows and movies of the early 60s and I liked them. Doctor Strange was the beatnik superhero, a master of mystic arts who lived in Greenwich Village, New York and astral travelled into other dimensions where the laws of reality functioned differently. I liked that idea.

My reading of science fiction began to seriously influence my perception of the world around me. I read some stories in which a person is kidnapped by aliens and placed in a virtual reality environment which they imagine to be be the real world. They continue in the aliens’ fake version of life on Earth until some small clues reveal the deception and ‘reality’ is unmasked as as mere elaborate cage in a virtual reality zoo. I began to wonder how I would know the difference. How could I prove whether I was in the real world or a fake version of it? It became an ongoing puzzle for me.

I tried to work out a way to create an artificial world around an abductee.

My first attempt at imagining such a construction had a treadmill underfoot and movie screens in front, behind, to the left and to the right. Another movie screen above.

The screens would show a fake reality on all sides of the abductee. As the human walked forward the treadmill would create the false impression of covering distance while the screen in front would show an approaching world and the screen behind would show a receding world.

As the years of my childhood went by I worked out various versions, each time attempting to achieve a more believable simulation of reality. At the age of about 14, in 1967, I hit upon the idea of filming the world through a fisheye lens and then projecting the result onto a hemispherical screen. Two of these hemispherical screens would connect together to form a ‘goldfish bowl’ in which the abductee would be trapped. The distortion of the fisheye lens would match the curvature of the two screens so that the illusion of a 3d picture would be created. I wasn’t sure how the treadmill thing would still work but felt there had to be a way. Of course, I didn’t have the equipment to try the experiment in the real world but I could imagine it very clearly. I felt there might be still further refinements which would lead to the creation of a completely believable false world into which an individual abducted by aliens could be placed. I didn’t think I actually had been placed in such a world, but the abstract idea of HOW such a thing might be achieved was of great interest to me.

I had a chemistry set and a microscope which was in the shape of a pen, which clipped into the top pocket of my blazer. I was cruel to ants and blew them up with fireworks placed into the centre of their nests. I was fascinated by their scrabbling afterward to repair the damage and I stopped doing this when finally realised how cruel it was. I wandered through the farmer’s fields studying ants and bees and wasps and leaves and berries and the bark of trees and everything I could find. I explored landscapes in books and in reality and in my head. I used to lie down on the playing field at school during the dinner break and raise my head slightly from the ground, then move my head backwards so that I’d be looking upside-down at the horizon. By this method I was able to see very clearly the curvature of the Earth along the horizon. I could see the sky as a dome.

I dreamed every night of flying through the air, above the treetops, above the houses. Flying like Superman, like Green lantern, like a bird, like a Spitfire pilot.

I wanted to travel. I wanted to see America and other interesting places like Mars and the 5th Dimension. I loved the skyline of Manhattan where the superheroes would swing from building to building fighting evil terrorists bent on global domination. I wanted to see the world.

My dad said he’d seen the world and it was the same all over. I didn’t know what he meant but I knew I wanted to go somewhere anyway. I wasn’t quite sure where.

Years later, in 1971, I was reading hippy underground newspapers and thinking about going ‘on the road.’ In early 1971 I read an article in Gandalf’s Garden which put the case that a person who believes in non-violence should also be vegetarian because meat and leather are the products of violent activity. I had never thought about this before. My philosophy of non-violence had been drawn from Christianity in the first instance, from turning the other cheek. Since then I had read Satish Kumar’s book ‘Non-Violence or Non-Existence’ and was becoming very serious about following Mahatma Gandhi’s way. Now I added vegetarianism to my accumulated philosophy. I also got rid of my buckskin jacket with the Davy Crocket fringes on and stopped wearing leather shoes. Black and white baseball boots with the ‘Empire Made’ sticker became my chosen footwear.

As I approached my 18th birthday I decided it was time to stop being an ‘office boy’ and begin a transition into a grown-up. I waited until less than a week before my 18th birthday and then announced to Jean Dwyer, the office manager, that I was leaving at the end of the week.

I had NO IDEA the trouble this would cause. All normal, grown up, working people understand the value of giving sufficient notice before leaving a job.

But I didn’t.

Nope. I thought it was OK to just up and leave when I felt like it.

So, in spite of all the arguments from the other staff at News Limited, I left after giving less than a week’s notice and I was off ‘on the road’ like a latter day beatnik in the 70s. Leaving behind me the Australian newspapers and the funny old fashioned styles of the City of London, the Barristers hurrying around the Inner Temple in their silk gowns and wigs, the business men in their pinstripes, bowlers and rolled umbrellas, the gorgeous (and also sickly) smells of Covent Garden, the strange black shiny building which housed the Daily Express, the homosexual harassment from one of the Australian journalists who used to keep asking me to go home with him until Mr. Gladwin sacked him for it, the Italian sandwich shops which sold fantastic foods I’d never heard of before (such as Danish pastries and cheesecakes and apple strudels) the bookshops in Charing Cross Road, the the theatres, the cinemas etc. etc. Leaving it all behind to go travelling and explore the rest of England. On the road like a timewarped beatnik, that was my idea. To be like one of those beats in the 1940s and 50s who travelled across America and Europe and Tibet and wherever looking for knowledge and experience.

I crept out of the house one night as it became early morning, leaving a note for my mother, based on the line in the Beatles song ‘She’s leaving Home’. A song which kept running through my head. ‘Silently closing her bedroom door Leaving the note that she hoped would say more She goes downstairs to the kitchen clutching her handkerchief Quietly turning the backdoor key Stepping outside she is free’.

I’ve always been a person who cries a lot and I think this is no bad thing. Leaving home was a big emotional turmoil but it was necessary and it felt good to be free at 18 and off on the open road. Besides, I thought, my sister’s getting to age where she’ll need a room of her own and she’ll be able to have my room. Little did realise my mother would keep my room in untouched condition for my expected eventual return. My sister would still be sleeping in the corner of our mother’s room like the baby of the family for at least another year in spite of my bedroom being vacant next door. Somehow this particular bit of family management didn’t follow any normal logic.

I left the house, carrying my small notebook, sketchbook, pens and bongo drums and walked eastward until dawn, ate some breakfast somewhere between Carshalton and Croyden and then continued on, walking. I was wearing a black polo-neck sweater (for the beatnik look) and blue jeans. I had on a Canadian Air Force officers’ jacket which I’d bought in a military surplus shop. Eventually I caught a train to Brighton, on the south coast. Now I was a real wanderer, I was on my own a whole different town. I decided to sleep under Brighton Pier, or possibly on the beach.

I got down to the beach in the evening and hung around, eating chips. I met an Irish tramp who was really old, like about 30ish. He told me he was on heroin, which I found to be an incredible idea. That somebody in real life in Brighton, England actually took something like heroin. It didn’t seem like it could be real. I bought him some food and cigarettes and gave him the price of a pint. I slept on the beach.

The next day I wandered around Brighton and then slept in a park. At night I was kept awake by foxes screeching to declare their territory. I tried to write poetry, wondering what my territory was. I wondered about the differences between the 1950s, when the beatniks were around, and now, in 1971 when I’m out here in the park, exploring the world. Somehow I felt like a time traveller.

And that’s how I came to be a timewarped beatnik.

(This is a chapter from my book: ‘How I Came To Be’ which is published on the Internet under a Creative Commons 3.0 licence – It may only be copied for non-commercial purposes. Any copies must carry the author attribution (written by Peter-David Smith) and there must be no derivatives. As long as these rules are followed the work may be non-commercially distributed. I would appreciate a message being left here at my blog to inform me when the writings are being used elsewhere. And the same applies to all my blog entries. Thanks).

Chapter Eleven:How I Came To Be A Dangerous Subversive

One year before I left school I decided to become an atheist. This was an unusual decision since I still believed in God.

However, my mind worked in an unusual way. I had reached an age where I was beginning to scientifically test my hypotheses. I set out to spend a year trying to think like an atheist. I figured that if God and my belief were both real then, no matter how hard I would try to think like an atheist, the truth would always find ways to reassert itself. So I tried.

It was a very cheeky thing to do. As an adult I wouldn’t do such a thing. I would think it came under the heading of ‘thou shalt not tempt God’. However, I was still only 14 and I ‘thought as a child’ so I tested the hypothesis.

A year later, as I was leaving school at 15, I resumed my religious belief almost as if nothing had changed. In reality something had changed. I had gained a few different perspectives on things. I had thought seriously about various different religions and philosophies. And I had begun to develop my own individualistic way of working with ideas.

I also tested the hypothesis that fairies, leprechauns or pixies might be found under bluebells. I went walking over the North Downs in Surrey, looking under bluebells for evidence of the wee folk. I figured I couldn’t really disbelieve in something until I’d actually disproved it.

I began to write immature attempts at science fiction and I spent large amounts of time drawing. I drew various comic book superheroes and re-drew some comic pages by artists I admired.

I sent some of my work to DC Comics in New York and they returned the package with a very encouraging letter. They told me I did have talent but needed more experience. They also said they’d be happy to see more of my work anytime. It was one of the most encouraging things anybody had ever said to me.

I left school and went to my new job as an office boy at Rupert Murdoch’s ‘News Ltd of Australia’.

Getting out of school and going to work was a big escape for me. I was so angry since they had decided to prevent any of us from doing art exams. I went out, got an evening paper and started going through the classifieds. Someone needed an office boy at a Fleet Street newspaper office.

I phoned up, got an interview, wore a suit, impressed the office manager and was told I could start on Monday.

This was part of growing up. I had moved on from being a little schoolboy who is told what to do by everybody around him to a young man who begins to make things happen for himself.

I would be paid £8 per week and spend a significant bit of that on bus and train fares while commuting in to the city each day. Nevertheless, it was a start.

I went to school the next day and made an appointment to see the headmaster. I had a letter to hand over to him. In it my mother and father gave their permission for me, in spite of my young age, to leave school and begin work.

The interview was a brief one and I was soon a free man. When Monday morning came I had to make a bus journey to Morden underground station, the southernmost extremity of London’s network of underground train lines, then a lengthy journey on the underground train into London proper.

These trains were dirty, noisy and overcrowded, like many subway systems the world over. They provided ample opportunity to read, though.

I arrived at Charing Cross station (which has been renamed and is known these days as ‘Embankment’) and walked the remaining distance up to Fleet Street and Red Lion Court.

The place where I was to work for the next couple of years was a small office in Keystone House, a very old building with an ancient elevator of the ‘wire cage’ variety which whirred and clanked up between the spirals of the crumbling old staircase to the first, second and third floors.

The ground and first floors belonged to the Keystone Press Agency, the second floor to an advertising agent and the third floor was News Ltd., staffed usually by 7 or 8 people including Mister Peter Gladwin, the London Editor, and author of ‘The Desert in the Heart’ a novel of hard life in an Australian mining town, Mister Gladwin’s secretary Margaret Taylor, office manager Jean Dwyer, 3 or 4 Australian journalists who were semi-permanently based in London and me, the new office boy.

My work included sitting at the reception desk, greeting anyone who came through the door, answering the telephone switchboard (one of the old ‘dollseye’ kind), keeping files of Australian newspapers when they arrived by seamail, making coffee for the journalists and, most important of all, I was to be sent out of the office several times each day on errands of one sort or another.
I would be dispatched in a black London taxicab to addresses in Soho or Hammersmith, Chelsea or Notting Hill Gate collecting packages and press releases or advance copies of manuscripts from authors and publishers, politicians and pundits.

The journalists sent me regularly to the local newsstand to pick up copies of dodgy underground hippy publications like ‘International Times’ and ‘Oz’. I had to collect items from Australia House, South Africa House, The American Embassy, BBC Broadcasting House, ITV Television House etc. etc. On two occasions I had to collect the ‘honours list’ from 10 Downing Street.

In those days Downing Street had not yet been closed off to the general public. Tourists could wander into Downing Street snapping photos of the policeman on the door. It was possible to walk through Downing Street as a shortcut from St. James’s Park to Whitehall. These days, of course, security is much tighter.

The first time I went to 10 Downing Street I approached the policeman on the door, showed my letter of authorisation and gained admittance. Then I had to stand in the little hallway inside ‘Number Ten’ while someone checked the copies of the honours list, had me sign for one of them, and I was outside on Downing Street again with the envelope to take back to the office. The second time, one year later, was the same routine with the exception that the policeman on the door commented that my ‘I am an enemy of the state’ lapel badge was a bit inappropriate. I firmly disagreed but was still admitted to number ten.

My rather odd relationship with the police began from those days. In 1970 when I was still only 16 I was sent to Television House, Kingsway which I approached by way of Fleet Street leading into The Strand, leading into The Aldwych, from there to Kingsway and then to Television House. However, there was a problem. As I walked up Aldwych, reading a science fiction book as usual, navigating by peripheral vision to avoid bumping into objects or passers by, there was a protest march of some sort coming down the Aldwych the other way. I didn’t take much notice of the protest march at first. There were a lot of them in those days and they were always protesting about one thing or another, wanting to stop the war in Vietnam or stop the killing in Northern Ireland or wanting Gay Rights or Women’s Rights or something. I was only 16 years old and had no interest in politics or protests at all. I just wanted to read science fiction books and puzzle over religious ideas.

Suddenly I was interrupted in my progress up The Aldwych and had to take my nose out of the book to see what was happening. A police constable was telling me to go in the road with all the other protesters and to move in the same direction as everyone else.

I was bit shocked. I argued that it was ridiculous for the police to be making members of the public join demonstrations about which we had no knowledge. Absurd to be attempting to force a young boy to join a protest march he wasn’t even interested in. I argued that the police were meant to be policing the protest marches rather than making people join them. I was informed that it wasn’t up to me to tell the police how to do their job.

The argument continued until I was almost about to be arrested. Then a more senior officer came over and listened to the nature of the dispute. I heard the constable refer to me as a ‘trouble maker’. One of the protesters came over and tried to ‘help’. He was under the mistaken impression that I was one of his fellow demonstrators. He got himself into some trouble by intervening.

Eventually I managed to convince the more senior officer that I was an office boy from a Fleet Street news company and had no connection with the protest. He commented that I was ‘too young’ anyway. I was permitted to continue onwards to Kingsway, still, in my slightly autistic geeky way, unaware of what the protest had been about.

Each day I went in and out of the Red Lion Court office building on various errands. If I turned right toward the Pemberton Row and Fetter Lane direction I had to pass under the scaffolding belonging to some builders. As the months went by and my hair got longer I drew more and more comments and wolf whistles from the builders. In those days long hair on a boy was still viewed as unusual and rebellious. I was very puzzled about this because I knew that long hair had been normal for men throughout most of history. I knew that Oliver Cromwell and his ’roundheads’ in the civil war had been notable because they cut their hair short, which was generally a sign of religious fanaticism. I knew that the short hair fashion of the 20th Century had started with World War One in 1914 and lasted for about 50 years, presumably because everybody suffered from a mass collective stress syndrome trauma from the two world wars and were not able to get back to normal peace time styles of appearance until another couple of generations had grown up. I knew these facts of history. Older people seemed to either not know or not care what peace time man should look like.

I commuted back and forth to London each day. Sometimes I went by underground and sometimes by British Rail. Each day I read books on the bus, on the train, in the office and also while walking along the street. I read ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and Orwell’s ’1984′. I saw the movie ’2001′ and bought the soundtrack album. I had a collection of records which included many old 45s and 78s bought for a few pennies each in secondhand shops. I had 2 versions of Dave Brubeck’s ‘Take Five’ and a Bing Crosby 12-inch album which had ‘Pennies from Heaven’ on one side and ‘Rhythm on the Range’ on the other. I had a Glenn Miller boxed set which I’d sent away for specially from the Reader’s Digest. I read more and more of the weird subversive stuff in ‘International Times’. I followed an advertisement in the latter for a cosmic event in Croyden. It turned out to be two blokes sitting in a makeshift geodesic dome on a bit of waste ground and talking about how cosmic it might be other people turned up. No-one else did, though. Just me. And when these two blokes realised I didn’t smoke or drink they were a bit disappointed. I think they were plainclothes policemen.

Another time I bought a ticket for ‘Phun City’, a rock festival at Worthing, in Sussex. I’d read that the Hell’s Angels would be doing the security at the festival site. I travelled to Worthing by train in the morning, found the site and approached a Hell’s Angel standing amongst the debris left over from the revels of the nighttime. I told him I’d heard the Angels were the security guards and presented him with my ticket. He looked rather puzzled and asked what I wanted him to do with it. I replied that I’d sort of expected him to tear it in two and return half of it to me, they way they did in the pictures. He shrugged and did so.

I walked away satisfied and mooched around the festival site for a while until I realised no bands were going to play until the evening. A pity…. A pity since I had a return ticket and would need to be back at my mum’s house for teatime. Dejectedly I trudged back to the railway station.

In August 1970 I had my 17th birthday. My journeys around London continued. I discovered a specialist sci-fi and comics bookshop in Covent Garden. The bookshop was named ‘Dark They Were and Golden Eyed’ after the Ray Bradbury story. I spent an enormous amount of time there, both in my own hours and during my worktime journeys. I discovered authors I hadn’t heard of before, comic books and fanzines of very weird and different styles. I published a comic of my own, written and drawn by me. It was rubbish, but it was a start into identifying myself as a creative person. ‘Dark They Were and Golden Eyed’ or ‘D.T.W.A.G.E.’ was my first experience that there could be such a thing as a comicbook dealership. A job where a person can be his own boss and spend all day, everyday, surrounded by scifi and comics. It seemed like heaven. I made a mental note that a possible alternative career to of comics artist might that of comics dealer. I had over 2000 comics in a cupboard in my bedroom. Some of them really old comics like Fantastic Four No1., Hulk No1. and other silver age stuff. I figured I could use these someday as the basis of a dealership.

I had begun to think about girls a lot. My puberty had been later arriving than most people’s, what with the semi-autistic oddities of my psychological and genetic makeup and inconvenient fact of sharing a bedroom with my sisters until I was 16. By the time I was 17, however, I had a room of my own and was able to indulge in normal fantasies which would’ve been awkward and embarrassing before. I had a fantasy of walking through a lovely park, holding hands with some beautiful girl. Just holding hands and laughing, not much else, possibly a kiss. It was all in soft focus. A beautiful day with gentle music. I think there were trees and…. no, wait a minute, that was the flake advert from telly…. So what was my fantasy? Hmmm…. I’m getting to be too old to remember.

Once, in my journeying around London, I was sent to a movie company in Soho, London’s notorious ‘red light district’ (in those days). On my way through the Soho streets an almost unbelievably ugly woman asked me if I ‘had the time’. I replied that I was sorry but didn’t wear a watch, and gestured toward my wrist, where there was, indeed, no wristwatch.
Immediately, two other policemen joined their transvestite colleague and began to question me in a sarcastic manner. Only when they realised I was an underage boy did they permit me to go without an arrest.

In 1971 I was sent to the offices of ‘OZ’ to collect a press release about the OZ obscenity trial. I was a long haired young man dressed in fake Dickensian style (two piece grey suit, fawn weskit with watchchain, cravat and wing collar). I had adopted a foppish manner of popping ‘parma violets’ into my mouth frequently and, although I didn’t have much facial hair yet, there was a bit of blond hair growing on the end of my chin and it gave the impression of a goatee.
Upon leaving the OZ offices with a press release in an envelope I was actually asked questions about the trial by various reporters who clearly assumed I was something to do with it.

I suppose, at this stage of my life it would’ve been quite conceivable for hidden surveillance officers from something like MI5 or the CIA to have spotted me at various locations such as Downing Street, the American Embassy, The Times, The News of the World, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Express, The BBC, ITV, OZ etc. and to cross reference this with a sighting of me near a protest march of some kind in the Aldwych. Using the old punch card computers of the day it would’ve been possible for my name and description to appear in some report somewhere as a possible subversive element.
So it’s a good thing that didn’t happen. Or did it?

I certainly had begun to believe in a conspiracy theory put about by ‘International Times’, specifically to the effect that the establishment wanted all young people to be brainwashed into becoming mods, rockers, hippies, hell’s angels, teddyboys, skinheads etc. in order to criminalise us all and set us at each other’s throats. Divide and conquer tactics. I had begun to believe that the fashions and the pop music were all there for Big Brother to use when controlling us. I made up my mind to remain unbrainwashed. I had a plan. I would listen to every sort of music and read every sort of book. I would deliberately make my thinking so broad that it wouldn’t fit into their brainwashing box.

I joined a second public library, in the Fleet Street area, in addition to the one where I lived in Surrey. I began to read even more books than before. I also had the Australian newspapers and the New York Times Herald, the Manchester Guardian, Time, Newsweek, the New Statesman, New Society and Punch.

Later in 1971 I was on a routine trip across Fleet Street to The News of the World offices when a police constable of the City of London force asked me a fairly simple question. Had I seen a vehicle of so-and-so description and so-and-so registration go by there? I replied that it was none of his business whether I had seen the vehicle in question or not. This was during my period of extreme arrogance. I was 17, I had never knowingly broken any law, I didn’t drink or smoke, I had never had sex, I was interested only in religion and scifi and I believed the police to be an evil fascist organisation who were anti-religious in nature. I felt very strongly that no help should ever be given to a police officer.

Now, to understand how it was possible to feel so strongly anti-police when I wasn’t even a law breaker it is necessary to look at the events of the time. The underground press was full of accounts of racial attacks by police on people for being black, or Asian, or gay or Irish, or for having long hair, or for nothing at all. These stories were too plentiful to be entirely fiction and seemed, in my mind, to be confirmed by the attitude of the officer who had wanted to arrest me for refusing to join a protest march which was nothing to do with me.

So, when asked to help the police by saying whether I had seen a vehicle of some description go by I stood on the principle that I was not in any way obligated to give help to a racist, fascist organisation, which is what I believed, at that time, the police to be.

I was told I was being arrested and, when I asked the constable what he was arresting me for he said ‘suspicion’. I asked ‘suspicion of what’? He replied, with a sneer, ‘Just suspicion’.

I was put into a police vehicle and driven to a small police station near the ‘Old Bailey’.

I was held in the police station, refusing to answer questions, until they used my library card to trace my employment address. Then my boss, Peter Gladwin, came over to sort the matter out.

They kept me in a cell with the door open and a middle-aged policeman sitting on a chair in the doorway. He kept trying engage me in conversation and to wheedle out of me any information, such as my age. I refused to reply to any of his questions though. He asked me if I thought ‘all this’ was something to do with what was happening in America. I chuckled softly and wondered what he meant by ‘all this’ or ‘what was happening in America’, but I said nothing. He suggested that I would be surprised to learn that people working in that very police station listened to the same kind of music I liked. I chuckled again because there was no way he could possibly know what kind of music I liked, especially the Tchaikovsky and the Glenn Miller.

Peter Gladwin arrived and did some kind of deal with the police to get me released. They wanted me to sign something but I refused. They said they couldn’t release me unless I did sign and I replied that they would have to keep me locked up for ever and ever then.

They realised their bluff was called and released me without signing. I was pleased that the old, hard drinking, hard working newspaperman Peter Gladwin had taken my side of the arguement, defending my right to say nothing, although I was disappointed that he had played their game and done some deal with them behind my back. I didn’t know the details of what he’d said to them.

A few weeks later a representative from the City of London Police came to the News Ltd. offices and made an apology to me. I ungraciously refused to accept. He was nonplussed. No-one had ever refused an apology before.

Obviously I was an arrogant little twit at 17. Nevertheless, what I had been saying about having the right to refuse their questions was still essentially true.

It was a strange, strange world in the Britain of the 1970s. The BBC was still broadcasting blatantly racist tv and radio shows such as ‘The Black and White Minstrel Show’ and ‘I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again’, the cold war was still in full swing, homosexuality had only recently been legalised and was still illegal if the man was under 21. The police were still thinking with the same mental attitude as in the days of beating up ‘poofs’ and were applying that mental attitude when dealing with the return of long haired, pre-WWI, normality. The attitude of lies and of overt racism, bigotry and homophobia would eventually be clearer for all to see in the form of the unsafe convictions of the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six.

When I reached 18 I quit my job at News Ltd. and went travelling around Britain. I had some money saved up and a desire to learn about the country I lived in. Approximately one year after the false arrest a similar thing happened again and I found myself being treated like a dangerous subversive. It began to seem as though someone, somewhere was keeping a file on me, and bear in mind, I still hadn’t broken any laws as far as I know.

(This is a chapter from my book: ‘How I Came To Be’ which is published on the Internet under a Creative Commons 3.0 licence – It may only be copied for non-commercial purposes. Any copies must carry the author attribution (written by Peter-David Smith) and there must be no derivatives. As long as these rules are followed the work may be non-commercially distributed. I would appreciate a message being left here at my blog to inform me when the writings are being used elsewhere. And the same applies to all my blog entries. Thanks).

Chapter Five: How I Came To Bits

They came in with a big ugly raygun and zapped me good.

They took out the bits that did and would.

I began to disintegrate.

They put my sugars in the Tate.

I thought I was evolved.

But instead I was dissolved.

The water flowed out of me and splashed out of the door.

The chemicals crystallised all over the floor.

That’s how I came to bits.

(Copyright Peter-David Smith, Exeter, Devon 2009)

Chapter Seven: How I Came To Be Very Strange

I joined the Air Training Corps in 1966. I was 13. I was a pacifist. Yes.
Yes, I know, it’s a contradiction. I was a teenage pacifist and I was in the Air Cadets of my own free will. We did rifle drill regularly. Marching up and down with Lee Enfield 303s on our shoulders.

The Lee Enfield 303 is a rifle used by the British Army from 1895 onwards until the 1950s. When we drilled with them in 1966 they were an old weapon beyond any other use. They all had a history, though, of usage as the primary British rifle in various conflicts including both world wars.

In 1965 the part of Surrey where my family lived was taken into Greater London. We kids didn’t know it at the time (because it never occurred to the teachers at our lousy school to mention it to us) but we were now, suddenly, Londoners.

So, as a whole bunch of new Londoners unknowing we continued on with our lives, finding activities to mess around at after school. The nearest large town from our village was called Sutton and there was a squadron of the Air Training Corps there. 219 Squadron, with a little hut for our meetings, or ‘parades’ as they were called.

We met twice a week, after school, and drilled. We also learned about unarmed combat and the inner workings of the aircraft engine. We had a bar, where shandy was served as if it was real beer and NCOs told exaggerated stories of their sexual exploits.

My main interest in joining was flight. I loved aeroplanes, superheroes and pretty much anything which flew. I read ‘Air Ace’ comic books, which told tales of the Battle of Britain. At night I dreamed constantly of flying.

After a few weeks in the ATC I felt fairly comfortable with the routine of the meetings every Tuesday and Thursday night. It was different to school. It was a place where I didn’t get beaten up by bullies.

I was still a pacifist, or I thought I was, but I remained childishly unaware of the strange contradiction created by holding pacifist beliefs while a member of a militaristic boys club. I suppose this is another aspect of the Asperger’s Syndrome. My brain was a wiz at maths but could miss the significance of major philosophical issues which were crying out to be addressed.

I had a sort of ‘code of courage’ which was all my own. If a bully at school began to push me around I would stand my ground and take it but not fight back. I would stand there, refuse point blank to be intimidated, and talk to the bully about the virtues of pacifism. I would never run, never hide, and always speak up for pacifism, even when being hit. My courage came from the image of Jesus on the Cross and the early Christian martyrs. Once a teacher called me out to the front of the class to punish me for talking. He made me hold out the palm of my hand as if to be hit. Then he raised a metal 12 inch ruler up as if to strike me with it. He paused for a moment to allow me to feel as if I would be struck on the hand. Then he appeared to recover his composure and to realise that the school rules would no longer allow corporal punishment. He put the ruler aside, sent me back to my place and the lesson continued. But I felt like a hero, because I hadn’t flinched.

I loved stories of World War Two, of Spitfires and Hurricanes shooting down Luftwaffe ME 109s and I never, ever thought it was in any way contradictory to my pacifism. I just didn’t think of it. This seems so bizarre to me now, as I look back all these years later.

I carried on attending meetings, cleaning my rifle with a ‘pull through’ (a bit of rag on a string) and taking part in activities designed to prepare us lads for military service without the slightest twinge of hypocrisy because it simply didn’t cross my mind.

Eventually, after three years of training and a summer camp where I finally got to realise my dream of flight (I got to go up in a Chipmunk training plane and also in glider) I saw the contradiction. The penny dropped. I woke up to the realisation that I would need to go one way or the other. Pacifism or military training. Not both.

A lot things happened that year. It was 1969. I left school and went to my first full time job. Less than a month later, my father went into hospital and died there.

Rewind the tape.

Playback again.

I left school and went to my first full time job. Less than a month later, my father went into hospital and died there.

Rewind the tape.

Playback again.

I left school and went to my first full time job. Less than a month later, my father went into hospital and died there.

Then the LCC, London County Council, which had taken over from Surrey County Council, decided to demolish the street where we lived. The house where I was born and grew up was smashed into rubble and we were re-housed further north, at Morden.

It was a hell of a year. I changed from being a schoolboy to holding down a full time job, then my dad died, then our house was demolished, then Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, then the Beatles broke up. And, oh yes, somewhere in amongst all this confusion I finally realised that I couldn’t carry a gun (albeit a non-firing one) and simultaneously remain a pacifist. I made my decision and left the ATC.

I was stunned by the death of my father. I was still only 15. I only held together thanks to a strict routine of commuting to work each day and reading, reading reading. Between the twin distractions of work and literature I slowly processed through the mixed-up emotions of grief.

My mother and sisters coped without much help from me. I was useless. I would get up each day, eat breakfast and commute into London. I’d go through my daily working routine, then come home in the evening, eat meal and disappear off to my room to read stacks of comics and science fiction books. I don’t think I was any help at all except that it gave my mother one less thing to worry about. The fact that I was settled in a job where I was happy meant something to her and that’s a good thing. ‘The boy’s got a job, anyway’ all the relatives kept saying, ‘The boy’s got a job at least.’ Nevertheless, I was strangely clueless and distant, withdrawing further into my Asperger’s shell.

When I left for work in the morning I walked along the road reading a book. I began to develop my peripheral vision to a greater extent than the average person. I felt as though I had a super-power. I could walk along the entire length of a street without bumping into lamp-posts, pillar boxes or passers by. I navigated around all obstacles by ‘super’ peripheral vision, as if it were Spiderman’s spider-sense or Matt Murdock’s radar ability.

On the bus I read my books. On the train I read my books. At work I read books as much as I could get away with. I lived in a science fiction fantasy world.

As the year’s events continued, my life got more surreal. Apollo Eleven reached the moon. I went to my first stage play performance at the Shaftesbury Theatre in Shaftesbury Lane, west end of London. It was Hair, the hippy rock musical. I began to grow my hair long and read hippy underground newspapers like International Times (known as IT for short), Gandalf’s Garden and Vishtaroon.

I began to wonder about drugs but, since I didn’t smoke tobacco and didn’t drink alcohol (and had no desire to do so either), I decided it was too early to be considering drugs. I read a few books on the subject, though, so I’d be able to make a more informed decision one way or the other when I got older.

My job as an office boy at Rupert Murdoch’s ‘News Ltd of Australia’ involved the following tasks: Making coffee for the journalists, answering the telephone switchboard, keeping copies of Australian newspapers such as The Australian, the Sydney Daily Mirror, the Sydney Sunday Mirror etc., and running errands.

This latter was the most important. I had to collect copies of press releases from places all over London. This meant travelling around one of the greatest cities in the world and specifically calling at places where something interesting was going on. Places where there was something worth releasing a press release about. In the 21st Century these press releases would go out by email, I suppose, but in the years from 1969 to 1971 when I worked in Fleet Street it was necessary to go and collect a press release by hand. So I got to go to Ten Downing Street, the American Embassy, Australia House, South Africa House, The Old Bailey, The Inner Temple, Television House, the BBC’s Broadcasting House and many other newsworthy addresses.

During these years I grew my hair longer and became more eccentric in my style of clothing. I began to dress like a character out of a Charles Dickens novel. I had a suit with a fawn waistcoat. In the waistcoat pocket was a chain attached to, not a pocket watch but the mainspring from an alarm clock. I had altered the collars of many of my shirts to make them resemble wing collars. I wore elasticated bands around the upper part of my shirt sleeves (in the style of a real old Fleet Street journalist). I began to wear badges. It was a bit of a late 60s, early 70s fashion to wear political, humourous or satirical badges on the jacket lapel. I wore two badges. One said ‘peace’ and the other said ‘I am an enemy of the state’.

And I still walked along roads reading books and navigating by unusually powerful peripheral vision. I never bumped into lamp-posts, pillar boxes or passers by. I lived in the world of my books and had power to avoid confrontation with the objects of the real world.

I read every kind of book. Serious, funny, fiction, non-fiction, left-wing, right-wing, centre-wing, comic books, historical, scientific, everything. I also listened to every kind of music I could find, jazz, rock, folk, classical, everything.

I believed that the government and the advertising agencies were conspiring to brainwash us all into being stupid and narrow minded (and thus easier to control). I was determined to thwart their brainwashing by deliberately broadening my mind and intelligence as much as possible.

I travelled back and forth each day, from Surrey to London, from London to Surrey, and all around London, getting to know all the nooks and crannies of the city. Where to find the most interesting secondhand bookshops and unusual architecture.

Inside my head I suppose I was still adjusting to all the strange changes which were taking place. I had left school and got a job, my dad had died and I still had to cope with the grief, I was becoming an adult, going through physical puberty later than most kids my age (I had various genetic abnormalities), the moon landing of my beloved science fiction had become the moon landing of science fact, The Beatles broke up (this was generally considered by everyone to be a much bigger event than would normally be when a band breaks up) and, in 1971, the currency of Great Britain changed from the pound to the new decimal euro pound.

There was an awful lot for a slightly mad boy to adjust to.

And that, I guess, is a major part of how I came to be very strange.

(Copyright Peter-David Smith, Exeter, Devon 2009)

Chapter Six: How I Came To Be A Total Geek

When I was about nine years old, or approximately 1962, a young student teacher came to do her work experience at our little village primary school. She was keen to prove her idea that nine year old children could be taught how computers work. This bright, clever, eager young space cadet had a whole plan worked out to get us all to understand the new technology of the 1960s.

A few words here about the history of computers up to the early sixties:

Mechanical computing had been around since ancient people, perhaps the Babylonians, invented the abacus and it had been developed further in the early 19th Century by Charles Xavier Thomas and others. Charles Babbage designed a computing machine called a ‘difference engine’ in 1822 and another called an ‘analytical engine’ in various versions afterward. Babbage died in 1871 and in 1888 William Seward Burroughs, grandfather of William S. Burroughs the beat generation author received a patent for a simple adding machine. Subsequently, adding machines became quite popular in international business usage but the more complex ‘difference engine’ and ‘analytical engine’ remained mere tinker toys until the Second World War when the first electronic computers were constructed at Bletchley Park in England for the purpose of decrypting German codes.

After World War Two electronic computers began to be developed for business use. By 1951 a British chain of teashops called ‘Lyons’ Corner Houses’ were using a computer called LEO 1. L.E.O.1 stood for: Lyons Electronic Office 1.

From 1956 onward the British government raised funds by selling bonds to the public and these bonds functioned as a lottery where people could win a cash prize each week if their bond number came up in a draw. The number was picked by a machine called ERNIE, which stood for Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment.

So, by the early 1960s we were used to hearing about these various electronic computing devices and we saw representations of them in movies and TV shows. They were large, bulky machines which looked a bit like filing cabinets with tape reels spinning around on the front and punched cards put in and taken out. The holes punched on the cards represented coded information.

So our young student teacher set to work to teach us nine year olds how that system of punch coded computer cards actually worked.

She used a pack of index file cards, a hole punch, a pair of scissors and some knitting needles. Each one of the children in the class had a card to write details on. We each wrote our age, name, eye colour, hair colour, etc. and then took the cards to the teacher to be hole punched along the side of the card and holes were either cut with the scissors or left uncut depending on whether information was ‘YES’ or ‘NO’ in each of the information categories. ‘YES’ we were over nine or ‘NO’ we were under nine. ‘YES’ we had blue eyes or ‘NO’ we didn’t. ‘YES’ we had green eyes or ‘NO’ we didn’t. And so on and so forth. Cut through the hole to make a slot in the edge of the card if it was a ‘YES’ or leave the hole uncut if it was a ‘NO’.
Then the cards were put together in a pack and shuffled. (It felt a bit like a magician’s conjuring trick being performed).

Once the pack was shuffled, the knitting needles were inserted into the holes in the cards and these knitting needles were labelled to indicated which detail of information they represented.

Our simple computing device was now ready to answer questions. When we wanted to know how many children in the class were blue-eyed and under nine years old we simply pulled out the two appropriate knitting needles and gave the cards a little shake. The cards for the blue-eyed eight year olds fell onto the desktop.

And it worked! Amazingly I found I was able to understand the basic principle of a computer though I was only nine years old and no-one would have home computing for another twenty years yet.

When I moved on to secondary school I tried to explain computers to my teachers there but they didn’t get the basic principle of them and they ridiculed me for even attempting to explain it to them. They told me not to read so much science fiction. They said the world I would grow up into wouldn’t have ‘computers’ and ‘robots’ and ‘spaceships’ and ‘genetic engineering’. Oh no, the world I would grow up into would be the ‘real world’ of work and suffering and slaving to pay the rent. the world of fighting in a war for queen and country and raising a family. So, they informed me, I should buck my ideas up and stop thinking all this drivel about computers and robots and whatnot and start to live in the real world. They assured me that computers would never improve my job prospects. I knew they were wrong. And I knew it was only a matter of time before they’d be eating their words. So I kept on reading that sci-fi.

And that’s how I came to be a total geek.

(Copyright Peter-David Smith, Exeter, Devon 2009)