Leaving London, in search of a dream 1971/74 and 1975 /79

  Blaencwm, bookshelves, bric-a-brac and some homemade elderflower wine ( picture courtesy of Miriam Mills) Coincidentally, we had developed new friends from within the medical profession locally. I went once to the local dentists for a check-up and when I walked in to the surgery the locum threw his arms around me and said “at last, some proper Welsh hippies” . His name was Roger and he had bought a place not far away and was settling in, in the hope of finding a mythical Alternative. We went for dinner a few times and he would always bring his visiting friends to visit us. He built his house with no internal walls, bath, shower and toilet in the corner of the sitting room, just clear glass screens between the bedrooms, he wanted to challenge everything he perceived as normal. We had a locum lady GP too, briefly, who spent hours talking to me about remote locations for living a quiet and reclusive life. Loads of fascinating people came and went. I grew a little Marijuana in a sp...

  Meigan fayre was very special. They held more of them, bigger crowds, more music, better stages, but this first one was really a fabulous achievement, not a rock festival but an arts event, driven by the best of motives, offering hope and brotherhood at a time of immense change in the world. It brought together free spirits, thinkers, dancers and activists.  Not so much a microcosm of that first free Glastonbury festival which inspired so much, but more like the Beckenham arts festivals that Bowie helped put on, where I first met him, pre superstardom. You don’t find these events often nowadays, especially not free, every little festival thinks it needs big name headliners and are   basically business enterprises. Many of those who came to visit me ended up staying in the area, others came for some respite, short stays and some for recuperation from the rigours of city life. Miriam would visit off and on as would others of my closest old friends. Two of my sisters v...

 We had a lot of new friends now, John and Ase eventually bought a huge derelict shell of a place with some outbuildings and moved onto the site nearby to make it habitable, nice picture of them showing the scale of the venture. We visited a lot once they had one end of the house habitable. Janet and Gosh David moved into a little place they rented in the middle of a forest, with no real access apart from a long walk through the woods and my new soul brother, Andrew, would stay with us and help me with building and plumbing, depping on the market stall and taking over where Janet had left off as regular guest. People I can only vaguely remember, like Christoph, who taught me to weld copper pipe fittings and a lovely couple of guys who didn’t fit the Hippie mould but had a retreat where they rested and made props for film sets. Russ and Jan, who I’ve mentioned, used to invite us over and we’d eat, listen to music and talk. Russ gave me some addresses of people who imported essential...

  The cottage was very basic, 4ft thick stone walls, a bare timber beam ceiling between the ground floor and bedrooms, which were just about 18 inches of stone wall and the remaining low headroom in the roof space. We filled the place with book cases full of  our favourite books, artefacts and bric a brac. We furnished the place with stuff that was thrown out by local people, the majority of rural Welsh folk were getting rid of all their old classic furniture, dressers and well made, post war stuff and replacing it with modern G plan and more mass produced furniture, in the same way they were abandoning their old stone cottages and farm houses and building sterile bungalows. The local dump, an open landfill site, was about 2 miles away and was a rich source of building materials, timber, furniture, glassware, cooking utensils and much more. I would generally do a weekly or fortnightly trip in the car and come back with all manner of treasures. Our other main source of...

Alongside running the market stall in Carmarthen, I sold candles to “head shops” in Tenby, Aberystwyth, Manchester and London. We’d picked these contacts up just by word of mouth from people who’d visited the market. It became a regular round trip from the first Christmas onwards. It allowed me to sell everything we made and pick up Indian jewellery and wholefoods in London , to take back and sell in Carmarthen. I had good friends who would put us up in Ladbroke Grove as well as the odd visit to Croydon for Hill’s family events. A couple of other friends who lived in the ‘Potteries’ near Manchester were a regular stop up there too. We had a lovely support network of both old and new friends, many of whom are still in touch today. On the mountain, our closest neighbours were a reclusive old man who had a similarly dilapidated old cottage and a Pony Trekking Centre run by a guy who published books on “Talking to Horses” and preached kindness to animals, though the state of his stables a...

I’ve had to reflect a bit on the 19-year-old me. While I was able to talk you down from an intense acid trip, tell stories from the Bhagavad Gita, recite poems from Kahlil Gibran, interpret your reading of the I Ching, or prescribe you the correct Bach flower remedy, I had only basic practical skills. I could wire up an amplifier, change a plug or replace a piece of fuse wire. We were jointly about 95% cerebral and looked at the cottage as place in another universe, on a parallel plane. Bleancwm (the house at the head of the valley) was going to present some challenges. Summer was magnificent. Nothing seemed a problem. We found a valley by a stream where we could walk and sunbathe naked, read uninterrupted, and indoors we could sit cross legged in silence for hours. We had the electricity connected, so we had light bulbs and plugs for a record player. We never had TV, and the nearest phone was in a box about 2 miles away. The local shop had a van which came round once a fortnight, ther...

With the cottage contract going through, back in Balham we had some preparing to do . We didn’t drink alcohol very much in those days, occasional half pints to be sociable meeting people etc . I tended to work with the old adage that people who drank would probably start a fight, but people who smoked a bit of weed occasionally were more likely to start a band or a painting. The local pub was a place that I’d go to from time to time, I think it was called the Railway Tavern but I could be mistaken. There was a young West Indian guy we met called Leroy ( I know , I know ) who hung out there and would drink with us , preach Rastafari and bring us the occasional smoke, not very secretively. Balham was a predominantly Indian, West Indian and Polish , young white folk blended into the minority Irish population and we always felt welcome and safe, flats were cheap by comparison with other spots in London and the busses and trains were great. It was a lovely multicultural area, which in tho...

After my mother told me that my father had died, we had coffee in a nearby café and I took the underground back to Balham. The lunchtime edition of the papers had front page stories about ‘75 Britons killed in air crash’, there were even some photos. I didn’t buy one. The next couple of weeks were a bit of a blur. The flat was crowded with people, not much space for reflection or grief. My sister had dealt with all the gory stuff, identifying fathers’ belongings and voice on the black box recorder, dental records for I.D. I came from a dysfunctional family, most of my life my parents had lived in the same house in separate parts, my mother, with what I can only describe as a bed sit downstairs, and my father shared a bedroom with me and had use of the front room downstairs, when he was home. We all shared the kitchen, my three sisters and the separate parents, until my eldest sister moved out and mother moved the rest of us out to Flat in East Croydon when I was about 12 or 13. I move...

  My little flat in Balham was small, just one room really with a bathroom across the hall . There was a dividing folding wooden door that separated the kitchen area from the sleeping area, we’d close it if we had friends staying over. Brian lived with us for a while utilising the divided room, but the noise of the hamster (I’ve no idea how we ended up with hamster in a cage, its name was Baggins), running around on its squeaky wheel eventually forced him to find his own place. I worked odd jobs, it was easy in those days, get an evening paper phone up a factory, department store or a council department from its advert, get an interview the next day, work a month or so to pay the rent and change whenever you fancied. I made candles in the Kitchen to sell and my girlfriend made shoulder bags from off cuts of velvet and frayed curtain cord, we sold stuff into Miss Selfridge and boutiques on the Kings Road, in between jobs. The goal was to get out, either travel or get a place so fa...