HIPPY ME

I do have a tendency to bellow “hippy” in what might seem like a derisive or derogatory way whenever folk demonstrating some or all of their traits appear upon my television screen (“We’re going over to the River Cottage Cookery Yurt” being a good recent example that needed a good shouting at...). I don’t think that it’s ill-meant (my abusive comments are always given with love of course…) because they are generally quite loving and gentle folk who might sometimes seem a little naïve or idealistic in the hurly-burly of the modern world to these cynical old eyes, but they do seem to see much of the good in the world and approach life with a sense that it ought to be lived with an emphasis on the “living” part.

Ultimately, this probably means that I’m jealous as hell of anyone who can make any kind of life choice that means that they can be simply pigeonholed and have enough about them not to give a flying fart as to what the rest of us might think as we toddle around judging everything and everyone on appearances.

Interestingly we have a few people living nearby who might be labelled “hippies” by mean-spirited individuals like myself and are, of course, all lovely people, if a little eccentric-seeming to the mad folk who pile into their cars each morning for the commuter run to purgatory and back. In fact, it may have been some of them moving in a couple of years ago which led me to resurrect the term “hippy” for my own use in private conversation, although I like to persuade myself that I’m merely using it for “comedy effect” and I would never, ever use it to anyone’s face…

Perhaps that’s the only reason I go to California so much… So that I can point at hippies and shout “hippy!” in their general direction...?

I don’t actually do that, by the way… It’s the occasional mutter under my breath at most…

I do need to stop myself from doing this, though, not least because, sadly, I suspect many people living in Germany during the 1920s thought that they were using their “funny little abusive terms” in much the same way when their madness first started.

Anyway, it’s not a nice thing to do, however light-heartedly meant, and I’m not exactly living outside a glass house when it comes to such matters anyway, as the following tale might explain.

It’s funny what digging around in your past can dredge up. In this case I was quite literally “digging around” in an old box of photographs when I came across an envelope containing a set of photographs taken during a time of my life that I’d almost completely forgotten about.

A few years ago, for various reasons, I became a lodger for a year, renting a room in a house where a mother and her three children were living after her relationship with her husband had broken down. There was also another lodger renting another room and so we had a situation that was almost perfect sit-com material: Three unrelated adults and three young children all living mostly separate lives under the same roof.

Oh the larks and jolly japes we had…

No, not really.

It was a difficult year, to be honest, for all sorts of reasons probably best forgotten, but it’s the closest that I’ve ever come in life to experiencing what life as a “parent” might be like, because we all spent so much time in loco parentis that we became an unusual “family unit” of sorts, at least for some of the time and for a little while. I suspect that I didn’t like it all that much, but, with the advantage that your ultimate responsibility was zero and whatever responsibility you did have, you could hand back at the end of the day if things got really tough, we got to enjoy some of the “good bits”, like going to the park or the cinema, whilst I occasionally seethed when the “bad bits” got in the way of my own lifestyle.

You know, “bad bits” like being sent to the shops as soon as I got home from work  because they’d eaten all the bread, when all I really wanted to do was zonk out in front the telly…

Anyway, for various reasons, lots of things didn’t work out well in that year and, in the end,  I decided to move out to my crumbling pile out here in Lesser Blogfordshire, where I have remained, and that year has been somewhat obliterated from my day-to-day memory, and so, accidentally coming across those photographs taken during that year I’ve kind of repressed, a time of my life that I seldom think about any more and about which I’ve forgotten many of the details, came as something of a shock.

As, to be honest, did my hair…

Bloody hippy!

The other thing that surprised me were the several pictures of me managing to look comfortable around a group of young children, and they weren’t looking at me as if I was kind of weird. Sometimes it seems as if I’ve always felt a bit awkward around other people’s children, but those pictures rather knock that theory of me out of the ballpark.

You’ll notice from the picture that I appear to be “lurking around” in a children’s playground in a dark and slightly sinister (or laughably hippyish - take your pick) way. This is because in those days I actually used to enjoy taking those kids to the park to play.

I know, it seems almost unbelievable now that I could ever have been that person, but there I was, hairy of head and face, not owning a home of my own, and happy in the company of small people.

Now that really does seem weird…

Of course I was never really an actual “hippy” - All of that “free love” and “drugs” and stuff kind of passed me by possibly because I’ve always been far, far too repressed to embrace anything that even smacked of an “alternative lifestyle”, but for a while I did go around looking like one…

Small children use to sneak up behind me, point at me and shout “Hippy!” before running away laughing. Okay, so it only actually happened once, but that sort of thing kind of stays with you…

Perhaps that’s why I cut my hair. Despite all my claims to embrace the “artistic” lifestyle, it seems that all I’ve ever really wanted to do was to “fit in” it would seem, and live a “normal” life and not draw attention to myself.

In the end, what I really needed was to conform, despite an entire lifetime of failing to do so, which is why I’m so terribly jealous of the nonconformists and this is also a terribly boring thing to realise about yourself, especially when you started out with such high hopes of living a “different” life and not spending your entire career sitting in an office…

Where did it start to go wrong, I wonder…?