I grew up on a large housing estate on the outskirts of Glasgow called Castlemilk, built in the mid-50s to relocate people from the over-crowded, insanitary and slum areas of the city centre. The area was poorly designed, lacking in amenities and the buildings were of shoddy standards, cold and damp, so there were many social problems meaning for a child it was a violent and unpredictable environment.

My best friend was my brother Alistair, who was born a year after me. My father taught me we were equals, I was my brother’s keeper and responsible for keeping him out of trouble. If one of us got into trouble we were both punished.

I had a very enjoyable childhood. With Alistair I went exploring, getting into all kinds of exciting adventures and developing skills to avoid or escape serious troubles.

Without any effort I excelled at school, always being top of the class in exams. My grandmother encouraged me in reading and writing, so I read every book I could get my hands on. Together with Alistair, who did the same, I began dreaming of an exciting life as an adventurer, explorer and missionary.

With the encouragement of my teacher and headmaster, I won a scholarship to one of Glasgow’s top public schools, Allan Glen’s High School of Science. Again without much effort I excelled in all subjects and came in the top 3 in exams. In Second year I became the first boy ever to get 100% in Mathematics. It was hard to develop friendships as the other boys came from all over the city and mostly from more middle-class backgrounds.

When Alistair came to the same school 2 years later, we began knocking around as buddies all the time again, spending hours exploring the city after school before coming home. We both performed respectably at the Boys Brigade and were regular attendees at Church and Bible Class but began to develop a secret double-life away from home and school. We got right into Pop Music, idolizing Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Stones and Kinks, and we both took up playing the guitar. We git into the general unrest and rebellion that was sweeping the youth of the mid-60s and came to believe we were part of a revolution that was going to replace the corrupt authoritarian system with a new culture based on love and enjoyment.

Inspired by an American we saw on TV advertising his book, we took to exploring the art of Freeloading, getting into cinemas and theatres free and travelling on public transport without paying. We saw every new film and play released. This was justified as only depriving the corrupt capitalist system of income, we never committed any hind of crime against private individuals.

Encouraged by the Underground press like International Times emanating from the psychedelic drug culture in London we became young revolutionaries. John Lennon used to refer to the Police and their bosses as Pigs, lifting the idea from George Orwell’s Animal Farm. We developed distrust for authority which seemed corrupt and controlled more by capitalists than the public interest. Our headmaster used to belt boys severely if their hair came over their eyebrows or the tips of their ears.

The rebelliousness and constant summons overs the tannoy to report to the Headmaster’s office – for lateness, smoking or wearing the wrong colour of pullover – caused a deterioration in my relationships with teachers, even the ones who had formerly had me among their favourites. My examination results suffered badly, as I was also confused and distracted by my budding sexuality and the many other problems of adolescence. I still got results sufficient for a good place at university.

My Dad ruled out of the question Kings College London or London School of Economics, where there had been anarchist riots in the general protest against apartheid, Vietnam and all that. He wasn’t having me so far away from his control in a known hotbed of trouble. The furthest away he would consider was Keele. When I travelled down for interview, and loved the place, I was asked ‘Why do you want to study English Literature?’Completely unprepared, all I could do was blush and stammer, “Errr, because I like reading?”

Mum and Dad wanted me to stay at home and study at Glasgow. As they still didn’t allow me to smoke cigarettes I knew I would never grow up if I did that.
I went off to Aberdeen to study English Literature and Psychology, and later Sociology. I preceded this by working the summer in a hotel in Guernsey. I shared a room with an Irish hippy who took me under his wing and educated me on many things I should have learned years earlier.

At University I found I had no social skills whatever and hadn’t a clue about making friends. I suffered from loneliness which led me into depression. Towards the end of the first year I had a brief, clumsy affair while drunk with another lonely unattractive misfit. I was embarrassed to be seen with her in public when I was sober so it ended quickly. I was glad to be able to report to Alistair when I saw him I wasn’t a virgin, though I didn’t know it would be another 12 years before I had sex again. (Note: This isn’t really how I told the story to Jacinth)

At the end of first year I tried the forbidden cannabis, which turned out to be really easy to get when I went looking. I spent the whole summer in another hotel in Guernsey, smoking dope nearly every evening, listening to Radio Geronimo. Midway through the summer he turned me on to LSD and I took to that like a duck to water.

My second year at university mostly revolved around cannabis and LSD, and these interests actually did lead to good new friendships though I tended to put off assignments till the last minute as a result. The revelations were more amazing with each trip, till I was having full-blown psychedelic religious experiences that completely revised my view of reality. Mid-way through the year
Alistair got tired of the constant battles with teachers and Mater, so moved up to Aberdeen to join me and apply for Art School.

I had been misled by a book I had received as a prize at school, called “An Introduction To Psychology” which covered the work of Freud, Jung and Adler. I wanted to join in this new area of research which analysed and discovered methods to cure the various forms of insanity. I think I really wanted to discover why my otherwise loving mother could explode unpredictably into a screaming violent hag, since this made me so confused and fearful towards women in general it totally inhibited my natural instinctive desires to get close to them. What I didn’t know was that these areas of research had long since split off into Psychiatry, a sub-section of Medicine and in fact had mostly been abandoned. Psychology had degenerated into basically the action of collecting statistics which could be used by advertisers and employers to get the most out of people. Not quite what I wanted to be doing.

During the third term my American hippy friend Jim managed to get me a few doses of what he claimed was Mescalin, enough for Alistair and I to have 2 trips each. These were the most amazing experiences of my life, that I wouldn’t even begin to try to explain. By the end of the second one I felt I now knew exactly what life was really all about and what I should actually be doing with it. I was suffused with happiness and peace of mind. It seemed my education was really just a conveyor belt to prepare me for a position as a cog in a machine the whole purpose of which was dubious. At that point I decided to get off. I decided to take my exams anyway, just to keep my options open. I was doing alright academically, despite my unhappiness. In Sociology I actually gained High Distinction, probably because I was actually interested in the areas I had chosen to research – media stereotyping of drugs users, communes and alternative societies. When it came to the Psychology I observed a hippy in an afghan coat get up and walk out as soon as he turned over the question paper. When I turned over mine the first thing I saw was a multiple choice question “In which year did Pavlov first publish his paper on the conditioned response of saliva in dogs?” I thought “What relevance does this have to anything”, got up and shuffled my way out to the sunshine.

I dropped out and set out with Alistair to travel the world discovering how to get on with other people, make friends and find the most enjoyable ways to live life.

We spent the summer looking for other beautiful people, taking casual work then camping in the Channel Islands. After a short period trying to sell a new 3-times-weekly hippy newspaper to people sunbathing on the beaches we travelled to Portsmouth to join the Alternative Society that was advertising for new members in the paper. When we found the address, a semi-detached in a middle-class suburb, we were informed by a neighbour the Alternative Society had been evicted for not paying their rent. Huh!

We moved on to Cheltenham and spent a couple of happy months in a basement flat smoking dope, tripping, listening to Pink Floyd, Moody Blues, Fairport Convention and Jimi Hendrix (all distinctly LSD-based acts) and studying Eastern religions. Although Cheltenham was a beautiful place, with headshops and lovely parks, we just couldn’t find any social group to move into. We had gone on to a macrobiotic diet of brown rice with vegetables, muesli and porridge. When we were spotted attempting to shoplift in the only health food shop which stocked most of the ingredients we needed, we were too embarrassed to go in there again. So we moved on again, to Bath.

Bath was beautiful. We stuck our heavy luggage, mostly a big stereo record player and our collection of LPs plus a big tent, in a left luggage office in a public toilet. We spent the first couple of nights with an assorted bunch of beautiful hippies in an open shelter in the Royal Park with spectacular Pre-Raphaelite murals on the walls and ceiling. We slept in sleeping bags around the benches and floors, a bunch of long-hair drop-outs smoking and chatting for hours before sleep came. Unfortunately, both nights a couple of police cars drove up and they interrogated us all in the glare of their headlights. Name, address, date of birth. The girl sharing a sleeping bag on the floor was under-age but in those days long before computer checks they had no way of proving that. Both nights they said, “You’re not allowed to stay here. You van stay here till it’s light but if you’re here tomorrow night you’ll be charged with trespassing.” The second time we realised they really meant it so we all decided to move on next day. When we rose one bright-eyed young hippy asked us if we would like some acid. Seems he was some kind of Johnny Appleseed, wandering around with a load of LSD in his little shoulder-bag, handing out free trips to anyone who looked like they would benefit from being turned on. Alistair and I jumped at the chance.

I’ll always remember gazing at the twinkling stone wall beside the park gates, reading in foot-high letters the message “Dream Free Through Lakes Of Nothing” wondering if it was actually written there or we were just hallucinating. It was a fantastic trip, all the better because Bath has some of the most spectacular Victorian architecture outside London. Unfortunately while we were sitting opposite the old Roman Baths eating ice cream cones and pondering on the wonders of history I reached to scratch a slight itch on my cheek and was stung by a wasp for the first time in my life. My face began to swell up hugely with an agonizing pain. Like a tearful child I had to run into a chemist shop for some potion to stop the reaction before it got bad enough to kill me. Towards sunset we sat outside the Cathedral listening to a performance on the huge pipe-organ of one of Bach’s masterpieces, possibly Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, thoroughly enthralled. It was majestic, like God speaking, one of the most moving, ethereal musical experiences of my life.

As that finished and the sun set, another friendly hippy seeing our luggage at our feet stopped to ask, “Got somewhere to sleep tonight?” When we said we hadn’t he led us along to and round the back of some derelict houses, showed us how to get in and said “You’ll be all right there for a night or two. Just don’t light a fire.” It was a wonderful day.

Next day we began to seriously tackle the task of getting accommodation, but on the first one we visited, which would have been quite suitable, we ran into an unforeseen problem. For the first time we heard the word “deposit”. Whereas in Cheltenham we merely had to pay the first week’s rent, here the landlord wanted an additional amount equivalent to 3 or 4 weeks rent.

We went to view another flat advertised in the same paper. Again a deposit was required and this time the landlord explained the reason why. A month or two earlier had seen the very first Glastonbury Festival (or Fayre). When it finished many of the hippies decided to remain on in this part of the country, where there was more hippy culture, drugs were more easily available and there was plentiful cheap accommodation, large houses that were too costly for one family to run being subdivided into small flats or bedsits. Some of these tenants had upset their landlords by doing a sudden moonlight flit, taking all the furniture with them. As a result, most or all landlords now required a deposit sufficient to cover the value of all the movables in the accommodation.

That was a big problem for us. We still had enough for one week’s rent but no more. So off we went to the Department of Health and Social Security to see what help they could give us. Could they give or lend us enough to cover a deposit? As I recall, rents were about £5 or £6 a week and the deposits we had been asked for £20.

(Interjection: This is clearly NOT how I told the story to Jacinth. At that time I had a deadline of maybe 1 hour maximum, which constrained me to mention only the most important points as rapidly as possible. Now, without that urgency I find I am digressing all over the place and getting into a much deeper level of fine detail and anecdote. It might be more interesting but if I continue at this rate I’ll never get to the most important part of the story I wanted to cover, what happened in 2009 after Jacinth came along. I’ll try to speed up)

Social Security could not help. There was nothing in law which allowed or obliged them to assist with deposits. In fact they could not even give us any benefit for living expenses till we had a fixed address. We came out dejected and lost for direction. In a similar position on Jersey we had been approached by a farmer offering immediate employment as casual labour in his potato-packing plant, with free accommodation in his hayloft. But this was early Autumn and there were no such jobs available.

We were picked up by a friendly socialist who introduced himself as representing the Claimants Union – a trade union for the unemployed. In his hand he had a fat book on Claimants rights, detailing all the regulations on benefits and services Social Security were legally obliged to supply. Taking the details of our situation he flicked and studied here and there through the manual. No they didn’t need to help with deposits (these had been introduced too recently to have been covered by law.) They didn’t need to issue benefit to anyone of no fixed abode. But then he spotted a brilliant solution. The law did require the Department to help anyone destitute in a foreign country. The law said the Department should cover the cost of the cheapest form of transport to their home address.

He came back in with us and did all the talking. “No, they are not in a foreign country” said the Department. “Oh yes they are” said the Socialist. “Their home is in Scotland. They are in another country without means of support. You must cover the cost of their travel home.” (What he didn’t mention was that having done this the Department should impound the person’s passport, only returning it when they repay the loan.) Eventually the Department relented. We had to sign promises that we would go straight to our parents’ address and stay there. We were given second class train tickets to Glasgow and thus ended our first Odyssey.

We hung around the parents’ house a few weeks, lying in our bedrooms listening to records and being visited by those of our acquaintance who had also become hippies. I remember reading the whole New Testament and seeing the whole story made perfect sense if you realised Jesus was a dope dealer and the bread he passed out at the Last Supper was hash. The old dear nagged us constantly to get our hair cut (it was now nipple-length) and go and find jobs. She actually got me to apply for a an apprenticeship in the newly created Educational TV service just being started at Glasgow University. It would have been a great job and I had the qualifications but with my non-existent communication skills I didn’t get past the first interview. The old man was off his work in the Dangerous Drugs Squad, bed-ridden with bronchitis, too seriously ill to reinforce the old ear’s nagging with the back of his hand like he usually did. At one time we had one of the most popular dope dealers in our bedroom. We only hoped he didn’t recognise her voice through the paper-thin wall, or make out what we were talking about. To wind them up – though we thought at the time it was to enlighten them – we kept playing CSNY’s “Teach Your Children Well”. They should pick from our dreams, rather than force on us those of theirs we didn’t want.

When the old man finally got back on his feet the old dear goaded him into action to control us. So he got wound up into his typical tantrum, yelling “Look what you’re doing to your mother”, with us retaliating “We’re not doing anything to her” which was quite true. All we were doing was insisting it was our hair not hers, a flag symbolising our freedom of choice.

So he says, “Right, you can get that bloody hair cut or you can get out of this house!” One of us replied smartly – and I can’t remember which of us, “Can you give us half an hour to pack our bags?” At this the old man lifts his hand ready to dispense justice in the usual manner. But he hasn’t noticed that we’re both now at least half an inch taller than him, physically, and mentally several feet above his head. Boldly Alistair steps forward, like neither of us has ever done before. “You hit me and I’m going to hit you back.” I know this is it, the Revolution, so I step forward with firm chin, nodding agreement. Why not. A healthy 6-foot young man would not let anyone else assault him without retaliation, accepting it as a mute passive victim. The Old Man accepts the reality of the situation. The boys he has raised as pacifists, who would never hit anyone unprovoked are willing to hit him back. “Right, Get out, ya buggers!”

For the next half hour we pack furiously, as though we’ll never be back. In the next room the Old Dear is wailing hysterically, “Oh God, no! Don’t let them go!” over and over again as if it’s the end of her world. We let them have a couple more blasts of “Teach Your Children Well” while we’re packing but, since we’re taking the stereo with us, we leave them with Judy Collins’ “Amazing Grace” playing on endless repeat on the old portable Dansette record-player. By now we’re getting used to lugging an unwieldly assortment of old suitcases and rucksacks through the streets. So we’re off to find a flat to move into instantly.

The first place we saw was totally unsuitable, like Alistair’s accommodation in Aberdeen a poky little room in a dingy council flat, where you are basically guests in another family’s home, with no privacy. We say we’re interested (to keep the option open, just in case) then hurry on to see the next one advertised in tonight’s classifieds. Now we make our first big leap socially upwards. We are offered what would have been the Lounge in the enormous top-floor flat in what was once the most upmarket area of Victorian Glasgow, just off Byres Road in the West End. There are Pre-Raphaelite stained-glass windows in neighbouring houses and decorative coloured tiling on the walls of the close. Our landlords are Doctors who have taken a large house in the suburbs and are renting out the rooms of this house as bedsits to an African Medical Student, two single lady teachers and, we later discover, a couple of speed-freak rocker students who play black sabbath “Paranoid” all the time. It is ideal, beyond our wildest dreams. At a rent of £5 a week it is easily affordable on our Unemployment Benefit, leaving plenty over, enough for food, heating, records, books and dope! Mrs Huddlestone, the busy Doctor, doesn’t even require references or deposit. It being October, she accepts us as students so after a brief 15 minute interview and introduction to the coin-operated bathing and cooking facilities, we hand over a week’s rent and start unpacking in our new home. We even had the use of a coin-operated phone out in the hall, so we could phone up the parents and put their minds at rest that we were not sleeping rough in the cold. Within a couple of weeks we would have them up for a visit where they could only stare gaga at the sheer luxury we were living in, my mother’s sole comment being “At least you’re keeping it very clean.” Of course, we had the use of a huge industrial standard Hoover as well.

The room was enormous. The floor area was as big as the total floor area of my parents 2-story house but our ceiling with decorative floral cornice and centre-piece was at 12 feet compared to their 7 feet. The furniture and soft furnishings were all top of the range Victorian or Edwardian. Huge side-boards, dressing table and wardrobes in polished walnut or mahogany. Enormous Persian-style carpet. Heavy curtains and upholstery all in rich brocade, with the wallpaper all of these dark royal or navy blue with silver and gold streaks throughout. It was like getting a room at Buckingham Palace.

We set about evolving a new lifestyle. The only drawback was that the heating was by coal in a huge ornate fireplace, which meant that one of us had to get out of bed in the cold of morning to get the fire going. But the constantly changing patterns of flame and the range of crackling noises were a wonderful source of entertainment in themselves, all the more wonderful with our stereo speakers blasting out “Meddle” or “Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun” on either side of the fireplace. On the wall opposite was a huge arched mirror maybe 9 feet tall and 9 feet wide, which seemed to double the space in the room.

I am realising now I had many wonderful and ecstatic experiences in that room, the likes of which have become rarer and rarer as time progressed. But I will have to cut this level of detail for now. I’ll happily come back to it if I get the opportunity once I have finished telling the story I set out to tell: what happened to me in 2009 after Jacinth Preston came into my life. Here I was only meaning to tell what I revealed to her that morning we had planned to make my passport application with a false counter-signatory.

We used cannabis and LSD. We studied Buddhism, Taoism, Jungian Psychology, Hindu, Timothy Leary, The Tibetan Book of The Dead, Lama Anagarika Govinda and Alan Watts books on Zen. We read Jack Kerouak, Frendz and OZ. We helped launch and contributed to Glasgow’s underground newspaper. A friend with similar interests moved in from his grandmother’s house in Castlemilk, Michael Murray. We jammed on guitars and drums. We tried to make an income by producing chokers and pouches from coloured suede. We tried to make an income by producing coloured scented candles. We had lots of visitors from the Glasgow student and hippy scene for dope and tripping sessions and even weird re-birthing experiments. We went out to various other hippy flats for sessions or parties using dope and/or LSD. We were part of the most exciting thing happening in Glasgow, the start of a new age of enlightenment. I studied all the works of Herman Hesse and began writing my own synthesis of human wisdom, Michael learned and practised asanas, mantras and mudras, Alistair painted mandalas to convey his view of the “modular” nature of existence. Hey, here’s a picture:
These halcyon days came to an abrupt end shortly after the new year for 2 reasons:
1. Mrs Dr Huddlestone sold the flat to a newly married couple, so we received notice to move out.
2. Both Alistair and I came badly out of an LSD session we shared one night with 4 or 5 others. This leads to a fascinating part of the story I really do want to tell later (totally amazing mix of beauty and horror) but at this point it’s enough to say Alistair and I parted company for about 9 months, off on completely separate trips.

I moved into another flat in a more down-market area, Maryhill, with friends Michael, Alec, Margaret, 2 cats, a dog, and Ali’s possessions, though he spent most of his time down in London with another friend Dave, a fellow-artist on a similarly weird trip, though he had the added flavours of heroin and Zen calligraphy and would send mystical letters composed of grains of whole-grain rice sellotaped to a sheet of writing paper surrounded by Chinese or Japanese black ink brushmark characters and maybe the word “Wha?” or “How No?”. This was when we thought Zen taught how to “stab/shock” the mind into enlightenment! Nope, I’m still getting too sucked-down into detail. I’ll never tell the story at this rate. Oh well, I hereby resolve to make it as concise as possible, but enjoy it as I go, just in case I should conk out before I manage to reach the point where I have managed to tell what I believed, when I started, I really ought to tell:

I want to publicly expose dishonesty and crimes on the part of specific police officers, social workers, lawyers (solicitors, barristers, procurators, clerks, sheriffs) and prison officers, known and unknown to me, plus their superiors and contacts within the various “intelligence” services and networks, plus their agents and tools within the “criminal community”.

I know there is no such thing as a “criminal community”. I refer here to those individuals in the community with criminal records and habitual criminal behaviour, on whom influence may be brought to bear (dropped/reduced charges or bribe money) by police (acting legally or not) so that these individuals may be persuaded to:
- give or create false evidence
- destroy or plant evidence
- secretly inform on an associate
- commit a crime against a designated person with a guarantee of indemnity against being charged for that crime.

For example, the stranger who suddenly appeared in the street in front of my house in Thrushcraig Crescent, Paisley around 7am on Sunday 16th July 2006, threw rocks through 3 of my double-glazed windows and started shouting “Pervert”, “Beastie” and the like, had probably done this because a police officer told him he would not be charged for the criminal damage he had earlier done to windows of a derelict block near the other end of the crescent. So, a drunk rolling home from an all-night session in a bad mood smashes some windows in an empty building awaiting modernisation. The cop on the scene finds an old regular with a long record of similar petty crimes, who could be looking at anything from 24 hours police custody to 3 months according to how he’s been behaving generally lately. So this cop says, “Doofy, you’re fucked for 3 months, coz ye’ve breached yer licence. But listen, I’ve goat an idea. See if ye can jist go up and put in that pervert’s windaes at Number 51, 1 up, I can put it doon in ma report that when we got here, whoever did it had vanished. So, on ye go, number 51, 1 up. Put in the pervert’s windaes!” Then the cops go back to town to wait for my 999 call. (What you Americans call 911)

Yeah, that’s probably what happened. Of course, the cops thought, since they’d caught me with skunkweed a couple of weeks earlier, and they’d watched the videos in my camera and on YouTube (username willsmile), that when they responded to my 999 they were coming into a flat with a room full of cannabis plants. As it happens, one week earlier I had rather sadly disposed of 12 jolly healthy wee plants through the public refuse collection service! Man, this Drugs War is really sick. This little incident killed my mother with shock and caused me to run for my life as a fugitive to Canada.

OK. Back to the story. Hope you’re enjoying it as much as I am.

My wee 1972 commune in Maryhill fizzled out. The candles melted wrongly and made huge puddles of wax on the customers’ fireplaces (though they sure smelt sweet). Michael, Margaret, and Me had our benefit cut off. Alec, who had an office job, got fed up paying the rent and moved out (also because the puppy shat on his pillow after he kicked it.) The landlord was sympathetic to our new age alternative society ideas, but he couldn’t let us stay rent-free. He said he would let us keep the flat if we paid him the £300 that was outstanding on his mortgage, an amazingly generous offer, but there was no way we could find that kind of money. We survived the last week on a £5 note (or was it a £1?) I found on the pavement as we were walking along Sauchiehall Street near Kelvin Hall.

We hit the road. In my mind I was headed for Lhasa and then Kyoto. We hitch-hiked to London about Midsummer and dossed in Wee Kenny Robertson’s flat in Percy Road, Shepherd’s Bush. (Wow man, I gotta interject, isn’t it just amazing telling a story with internet resources? Mind-boggling and lawdy lawdy how my mind loves being boggled. In seconds you can see the place on a map. You can get a satellite view of the very building. You can get pictures and, if you want, history! Oh what a wonderful world the internet gives us. I thank God I’ve lived to see what I see now. Guess I’m one of the few who’s seen this much, otherwise there would be millions of us out in the street or garden right now roaring Hallelujah This is totally frinking amazing alidocious, etc.

So now I’ve got us to London 1972 my Summer of Love. We go to Holland Park. Trannies frowned on. (That’s poptastic transistor radios, ken?) Longhaired bearded white-robed barefoot yogins and yoginis strumming, plucking and fluting round and under some huge ancient but fully alive tree, or lying front down on the grass watching light particles bounce off the daisies. It was absolutely gorgeous. A couple of draws on a joint and you drift off on a wonderland cruise in all senses. It’s all so clear and simple and beautiful. Love is in the air. Love is everywhere.

No sign whatsoever of the Stones “Everywhere I hear the sound of marching charging feet, boy” No, I was in Paradise. That tree over there is the one on the Quintessence album cover. “We’re getting it straight in Notting Hill Gate.” Damn right. Hummmm. Just sink happily into the warm earth under you (beneath the towel and the grass of course)

Man, you know, the only thing wrong with perfect total blissful happiness is you can’t just freeze the frame and stay there forever.

Oh well, I just revisited 3 or 4 of the most perfectly happy hours of my life, one sunny afternoon in mid-July 1972 in Holland Park, just smoked a joint of the dope Kenny’s selling to save for his ticket to California. Some of the people in the field around this tree are in the band Quintessence, I’m sure of that. One guy is walking along with a beautiful Greek Goddess, playing a melody on the flute which has never been heard before because it is just wandering and rambling as he lifts his fingers in random patterns, like a butterfly, of which there is one over there.

Yes it really was, for me, a Summer of Love. I guess every summer could be a Summer of Love for some people but for me 1972 is the year where I saw the whole phenomenon of Life and Humanity as beautiful. I just wanted to roar and scream YES, I LOVE YOU at the whole show. I wonder what would happen (oh yes, I know this is impossible, never gonna happen, but just try to imagine with me what would happen IF) very single person in the world ingested 100 micrograms of LSD 25 at the same time. Eh?

(Of course it takes up to an hour to notice the effects.)

We know the subjective experience is strongly affected by set and setting. What are you expecting and what context are you in? I know it is over-simplification but the truth is bad, evil, guilty people will have a most unpleasant experience. Honest, innocent people have a blissful enlightening experience of love in a quantity they could never have imagined possible.

I think if we all took it at the same time none of us would ever need or want to take it again. What needs sorted out would get sorted out. I think it would flush all the evil, guilt , hatred and psychosis out of the human system. Only the good guys would survive.
Well, that was a nice exercise. It will never happen. Oh I wish it would but hey, who holds the power to allow or stop it? So far it has never been the good guys in charge of this planet.

Oh well, on with the story.

Just in case I don’t make it, I’ll give you the punchline now. If I get to tell the whole story like I want to, I can come back and edit this out:

Jacinth Preston is not the real name of the woman I met. If Jacinth Preston really exists (other than the cute little singer in India on YouTube) the woman I met misappropriated her identity. The woman I met was either an undercover agent or a prostitute/fraudster/con-person whose real name might or might not be Nicole Saunders. After watching the Bourne films a few times (myself a long-time aficionado of Ludlum’s works, which influenced many of my own and my brother Alistair’s joint and several dabblings in the intelligence arena, along with len Deighton) I can see this black woman

Click to view slideshow.
as an agent sent in with a false ID, specifically to set me up for extinction. Not just extinction of the life in this body, but extinction of all my life’s work, my intellectual properties (writings, photos, videos, diaries) and extinction of my reputation. That’s frieghtening but well possible, as you will have to agree if I manage to convey all the evidence to you. It is the possibility that this is the truth that has made me keep my head down for a whole year, doing next to nothing about getting things corrected or reclaiming my property.
However it seems equally possible that she is just a con-woman who took me for a ride, not believing what I told her about my past history with police and MI6 (or SIS, MI5 or whatever they call themselves) In this scenario she just turned the police on me to scare me off from trying to get back the money she conned out of me. In that case the majority of the dirty work against me originates within the Police/Intelligence network. And even there it could be a rogue faction and not straight top-down operation.
Third possibility is she was just a prostitute picked up by G Div and sent in to set me up for them in exchange for dropping some charges against her. While this is a possibility, the sheer cleverness of what she did in my presence seems greater than one would expect from a hooker.
The 4th possibility is that she was telling me the truth, she actually arranged a US passport and identity for me and since I got into trouble she has had to save her own skin by making all evidence vanish and spinning a new web of lies about her actually being Nicole Saunders, serial fraudster.

Ooh, at present I’ve got to say the possibilities that seem most likely are

- that she was an agent from the beginning, specifically sent in with a created identity just to set me up and then get off the scene so she can’t be traced. That would have worked OK if I had died in Bar-L but I survived through some mighty clever Ludlumesque work of my own.

- that the police just used her as an excuse to get me inside where they coulod dispose of all my property and work out any case they wanted against me.

Well, it turns out I haven’t really given the game away by revealing the punchline. So now you can come with me through the rest of the story and let’s see if we can work out which one of these is true.

One thing’s for sure. No intelligence network anywhere is ever gonna turn round to the public and cough “Oops. We offed that innocent guy with dirty tricks.”

However, true to human nature, every intelligence network has got guys at every level saying, “You handled that all wrong. I want your job, and you out!”

Isn’t that true, dear reader?

…………………………………………….o……………………………………..

When I first arrived in London at the end of June 1972, I was sharing 2 rooms in a 3-story house with 7 others. The 2 guys who rented the place had single beds or mattresses while the rest of us slept in sleeping bags on the floors. With some difficulty I managed to get back on unemployment benefit, though I was warned it would be discontinued after 8 weeks if I hadn’t found a job.

With the help of Alternative London by Nicholas Saunders I explored the exploding counter-culture which was drawing to London thousands of drop-outs like myself, stimulated by their drug experiences to find new lifestyles based on peace and love.

I checked out the Divine Light Mission, the Unification Church (Moonies) and went to a lecture by Prayupadh, the founder of the Hare Krishna movement (the free soul food they gave me was delicious. Born-again Christians stopped me in the street or, deciding from accidental eye contact I was a suitable prospect, would jump on a bus to sit next to me to ask if I could hear the voice of Jesus speaking to me inside my heart.

With Michael and Margaret I went exploring some of the macrobiotic restaurants springing up. We bought our own bulk supplies of brown rice and peanut butter on Portobello Road – at the same time taking in an open-air performance by Hawkwind and the Pink Fairies. We tried to rent a beautiful flat in the Ladbroked area of Notting Hill, but it was financially out of our reach. We travelled across London to meet up with some hippies intending to form a commune in a large house, to see if they were amenable to our idea to set up a macrobiotic restaurant on the ground floor.

There seemed no urgency to get deeply involved in any particular activity. I/we just wanted to enjoy our lives in the present use our daily cannabis with the occasional LSD trip and continue to explore the many options open. We explored the National Gallery and Kew Gardens, had a wonderful wombling picnic on Wimbledon Common and were blown away by the psychedelic sequence at the end of the film “2001″.

Through Alternative London we located a wholesale supplier of coloured wooden beads in several sizes. It was satisfying work to arrange these in rainbow sequences on nylon thread or thin leather strips, producing attractive eye-catching bracelets, chokers and necklaces. We tried selling these to hippies and tourists on Oxford Street. Due to constant interruptions from roving policemen, our weak resistance to haggling and the production being so time-consuming, we soon abandoned this project as non-viable. Beautiful people don’t make good bread-heads!

I had been making my way through a pile of Scientology books Alistair had dropped off with me on one of his rare visits to the flat in Glasgow. I was impressed by how Hubbard described mental states and abilities I had glimpsed on LSD or psychedelic experiences with cannabis. He seemed to outline scientifically precise methods by which these states and abilities could be reached and stably maintained without drugs. Friends and acquaintances told me stay away from Scientology which already had a reputation as a weird and dangerous cult – even though our heroes the Incredible String Band swore by it in interviews in Melody Maker. They had moved on to Scientology from dope, acid and Tibetan Buddhism. Robin Williamson said it had helped him overcome his terrible shyness towards women, what I was finding my own most troubling problem in life.

It was approaching the point where my unemployment benefit would be cut off. I applied for a position as a Post Office counter assistant. I was told at the interview that I was over-qualified. They wouldn’t employ me as they were sure I would soon get bored and quit, wasting the time invested in training me. So they turned me down.

I took up employment for Manpower. This was an agency which supplied casual labour by the day, either replacing people who were sick or on holiday, or for a one-off unskilled labouring task. They paid a fixed rate, though you could make a bit extra out of the travelling expenses or whatever bonus the employer might pay you for a job well done. Working 2 or 3 days a week provided enough to cover food and whatever I was paying my hosts for rent. The rest of the week was free for my explorations with cannabis and LSD, always open to that sudden enlightenment which would leave me on a permanent high to live in that state happily ever after. On a sunny day I could lie sunbathing, meditating or tripping in one of London’s beautiful parks. On colder or wet days I could sit in the flat studying or playing Monopoly, entertained by the rich variety of people visiting to score dope off Kenny. Mostly life consisted of digesting and learning from what I had experienced on the last acid trip until I felt it was time to take another one.

Manpower sent me all over London to wonderfully interesting places. Because I was diligent worker who always gave his best without slacking, I always got jobs on the days I wanted.

I hosed down huge ice-cream machines at the Lyons Maid factory. I helped a friendly Australian hippy carry building materials (I only remember long metal pipes) from a lorry to the top floor of a multi-story building that was in contruction. For a whole week I worked on an assembly line producing fake leather binders for specialist installment magazines, being mothered and given cigarettes by the middle-aged woman who passed the products to me to be clamped in a vice – and also controlled the speed at which I had to work.

I helped to construct a marquee in the inner courtyard of an exclusive gentleman’s club in Berkeley Square. I didn’t hear a nightingale sing, but I wasn’t there at midnight.

At BBC’s Broadcasting House I collected paper waste from buckets under desks and took it to the shredding machine. I wheeled a huge collection of reels of tape or film from a storage cupboard to another store inn the basement. This was one job where I hoped someone would spot my talent under the long hair and silent shyness and offer me a permanent job. I too laugh now at the absurdity. I may have been intelligent but I was far from world-wise. I had a cheap meal in the BBC canteen, then went into their library and spent a few hours reading the Wootton Report on cannabis.

Passing through some small park square on my way home I happened to find in a bin the hardest pornography I had ever seen, a paperback novel illustrated by full-page photographs of a man with 2 women. Don’t ask me what I was doing looking in the bin. A couple of days later I felt it was too hot to handle – or be caught with – so I threw it away. I wonder who picked it up out of that bin.

The owner of the monopoly set, who taught me to play and would have long interesting games with us when we were high after he came round to score dope off Kenny, was a middle-class drop-out about 30 who lived on an unlimited allowance from his rich parents. He might even have been the source of the LSD for our little group. One weekend he invited us to a party at his squat in an old Hovis bakery in Swiss Cottage where everyone would be on LSD and cannabis.

The party was on all 4 floors of the building including the basement which had held the bakery and the ground floor which had been the shop. I felt out of place among the lah-de-dah middle-class people who were obviously au fait with the arts of mingling and introducing themselves to each other. It was the most intense trip I had had since the one in January where Alistair went crazy.

I don’t remember many details though I recall being mightily impressed by Creedence Clearwater’s album which I was hearing for the first time. When it finished someone put it on at the beginning again.

At the very peak of the trip I felt I was outside time. The picture changed ever so slowly one frame at a time. I was in direct eye contact with a beautiful woman across the room towards whom I felt intense waves of love and admiration. I felt I was arriving in the state I had been looking for for thousands of years. Her eyes were the only thing I could see clearly while everything else was just whirling patterns of coloured light. It felt like long eons of time were passing and this woman’s eyes were flowing love, admiration and light towards mine. This was what I had been searching for, I was coming home and everything was going to be all right forever.

Someone pulled me out of my reverie by saying “Do you want a cigarette”. I took one automatically from the offered open packet, but then went off on a long introverted guilt-trip. Why had I taken a cigarette on automatic when I hadn’t come to a carefully evaluated choice that I wanted one? I had betrayed my self-determinism as a conscious spiritual being by submitting through habit to what I already knew was a disgusting and health-damaging addiction. I had been on the very threshold of heaven when I allowed the temptation of habit to cause my fall from grace.

I didn’t understand what had happened but I was overwhelmed by feelings of stupidity, guilt and intense loss. I had been in the Garden of Eden and allowed myself to be tempted out of it. I had looked at what I wanted most of all in life and found myself unable to have it. I began to weep uncontrollably. Looking back now I guess the woman, who may have been thinking “That’s an interesting and attractive man”, seeing him light up a fag and start crying, would just have dismissed me as a wierdo mental case. Just another acid casualty.

For a few days I was stuck in this deep sadness feeling there was something terribly wrong with me though I might never find out what. Following Timothy Leary’s advice I took another trip, this time in the park surrounded by happy holiday makers, beautiful plants and cheerful birds. That cheered me up a lot but didn’t quite eliminate the feeling of loss and sadness that there was something wrong with me on a deep subconscious level.

One day exploring around Oxford Street, shortly after a wee joint (which in those days were infrequent and caused powerful effects for hours), I went down Tottenham Court Road with Margaret and Michael. Maybe it was to look at the sunny Goodge Street Donovan had sung about. Maybe it was because I secretly I secretly wanted to check out Scientology, if I could just overcoming the fears caused by its reputation that I might be putting myself into the inescapable clutch of an evil mind-control cult.

My attention was caught by the very same sign in the window of number 68 which had hooked Alistair 5 or 6 months earlier, “JOBS AVAILABLE NOW”. Because we had lingered more than 10 seconds we were picked up by an attractive girl who said “Come on in for a free personality test.” She pretty much
took me by the hand and led me through to the testing room at the back of the building. Margaret and Michael followed.

After answering the barrage of multiple-choice questions I was handed over to an evaluator who would tell me the results of the test. This was a young man with hip blue shades who said “Cool” every few sentences. He drew circles on the high and low points of a graph showing the different aspects of my personality.

“You are highly intelligent, honest and sociable.” He was pointing at a high point on the graph. “You have difficulties with communicating.” He was pointing at a trough. Staring straight at my eyes, while I squirmed in embarrassment, he speculated, “I’d say maybe you find it difficult to communicate with women?” Bingo. I was in awe at the scientific precision of their test. I had to admit he was spot on.

“Cool. We’ve got something that will handle that. You need to do our Communication Course.” He led me through to see the Registrar who said “Cool” and left me in the waiting area at Reception. Margaret and Michael, who were less willing to accept they had anything seriously wrong with them, split saying they’d see me at home.

While I was signing up I told the Registrar, “Cool”, I had already read quite a few of the books. I didn’t tell him I’d also read the Ethics Order declaring Alistair a “Potential Trouble Source Type 3″ which he had received when he had popped down the road to Foyle’s to steal the dictionary they said he needed for the course. He had then openly lifted the selection of books and walked out with them, following his philosophy that property was crime and everything should be shared by everyone.

I had to come back and complete the signing up when I had the £5 for the course. This time, while I waited in Reception, a pretty woman got off a mini-bike at the door and walked in. I instantly recognised her as Sandy Denny, formerly with Fairport Convention, the most beautiful female voice on the English music scene. She was physically gorgeous too. I blushed as she passed me and went upstairs, since that’s all I could do whenever I felt attracted to a woman. That experience helped get me hooked on Scientology.

The Communication Course undeniably gave me immediate benefits, especially because the first exercise made me sit motionless and silent directly opposite another student 3 feet away. Mostly this was with a young hippy chick, Judy, who had been on dope and acid for a few years like myself. I couldn’t help but make enormous gains from this since it was exactly what I need to learn, how to master my intense discomfort and fear in proximity with sexy women.

When I got extremely uncomfortable, such as having my eyes water or blink uncontrollably, the Supervisor called me over to study the written instructions again. After I spent a couple of hours re-reading the same paragraph becoming more and more confused to the point I wasn’t sure I understood the exact meaning of any of the words ( does Hubbard mean poet of the centre?) the supervisor, an ex-hippy, guessed I was smoking dope before coming in every evening. With very clear instructions I must not use any drugs if I wanted to continue, I stopped the dope and LSD cold. I didn’t have anything stronger than aspirin for 14 years from that day.

The other guys in the flat laughed when I refused a joint when I got home. For the next couple of months they teased me in between stoned laughter, telling me I was becoming a staring zombie. They were quite right, but I was experiencing huge improvements in my self-confidence. I could tolerate and enjoy prolonged close contact with women. I could easily start conversations with total strangers. I had quit the endless introverted self-examination and was now exhilarated about keeping my attention on exactly what was right in front of my face.

We all got kicked out of Kenny’s flat when the landlord realised 7 people were living in a space rented out to 2. I moved into a room in a large cheap hotel just off King’s Road in Chelsea with Margaret, Michael, Kenny, the 2 cats and another friend who came down from Glasgow. Alistair joined us. He had spent the summer picking grapes in France the camping in Guernsey on what they had saved. His girl-friend Liz was starting university in Ireland, their relationship had reached a natural end. They parted as friends, keeping their options open. Alistair came to London to find out what I had been up to. Fortunately he had come right out of his craziness and cleaned up his act as a ‘normal’.

I had started temporary work at the Scientology organisation, writing letters telling other people in the files to come in for their courses, to pay for my next course. Over a few weeks I was introduced to the Sea Organisation. I attended a lecture by a chap telling us about OT, a state where a spirit can come out of his body, with super-powers like tele-kinesis, telepathy and total recall of all his previous lifetimes going back millions of years. This guy seemed to be able to read the minds of anyone in the hall but what really impressed was that he apparently switched the lights off and back on again simply by will power.

Alistair, Margaret and Michael came with me on a free outing to Saint Hill Manor in Sussex, the headquarters of Scientology. We were taken with a dozen others by coach, given a brief tour, a lecture by a senior officer and some special group processing that was going to improve our abilities to have money.

The Sea Org was an elite organisation of Scietologists with a private fleet of boats. The members were all OTs or would be very quickly trained up to that level so they were in total control of their minds. They had contracted to serve for a billion years, to save first this planet then all the other inhabited planets in the Universe. This billion years aspect really impressed us, after inexplicable experiences on LSD trips suggesting we had memories from long before we were born. In my case perhaps the explanation of my shyness towards women was something that had happened before this lifetime. No-one else was offering us a billion years of future. Other than Buddhism no-one else even recognised the possibility of life on this plane after your death. Anyway, saving the planet had always seemed the most worthwhile purpose one could follow in life, to Alistair and I. Why, it was really just the Boddhisattva vow we had taken with Michael nearly a year earlier.

Alistair joined up the next day. Not to be outdone, I signed a contract the next day, Michael and Margaret the day following. At the end of the week when our rent was due, we left the other 2 guys in the room and arrived at Saint Hill together on 5th October 1972.

I don’t want to say any more about Scientology at this point. You can now learn more about it in 20 hours on the internet than I learned the whole time I was involved. I no longer believe in or support the subject or the organisation. I do not use Scientology or speak about it except in this memoir or occasionally on an internet notice-board for ex-members for the purpose of catharsis and to discourage others from getting tangled in the web.

For 9 years in the Sea Org I enjoyed the illusion that we were saving the world, the only people actually doing that on a planet ruled by a corrupt conspiracy of financial powers. This gives the confidence one is making the most worthwhile use of one’s life and creating a better future in your succeeding lifetimes. It felt like being on the flight-deck of Starship Enterprise, forcing each other to rush around in a state of contant urgency, believing ourselves to be performing 10 times more efficiently than any other organisation of similar numbers.

On the positive side I learned efficient business practises (never have so few taken so much money off so many people so quickly). I learned book-keeping, accountancy, promotion, marketing, financial management and planning, even all aspects of building construction circa 1979.

In 1980 I finally managed to start a relationship with a very attractive woman from St Louis, with a wonderful Southern drawl. Without any valid reason my Commanding Officer cancelled my day off the evening before my second date. The girl quite rightly lost interest in a relationship that could be so easily manipulated by others. I was gutted since, as you will recall, the basic reason I got into Scientology was to learn how to get on better with women. Conflict between myself and management increased till I was busted from my executive position, held responsible for declining income and accused of running a “Mafia” with my brothers and sister-in-law. I walked out. I continued to run an independent Scientology business nearby while corrupt management kicked out more and more of my friends and former workmates. I finally gave up on the in 1983, at which point I got my brothers out. I thought at first it was just corrupt management I objected to, while the subject itself was still valid. It took another 3 years to collect enough information to get my head forever right out of the subject. This is much easier and faster nowadays thanks to the vast amounts of information shared by former members on the internet. In those days heavy and evil actions were taken to prevent the publication or circulation of true information.

In 1982 I was finally liberated from my sexual inhibitions with the assistance of a lovely Yorkshire woman called Pam, herself leaving Scientology. It turned out to be as simple as her taking the first move. After that I knew naturally exactly what to do. It was a fun relationship that did wonders for my self-respect, rapidly catching up with the various pleasures I had been denied so long. To my own business skills Pam contributed her knowledge of how to wangle investment finance and how to get on to the profitable property ladder. At that point house prices were just about to start a long period of rapid increase. Lenders were offering up to 100% mortgages, which could be easily arranged by a friendly broker or accountant willing to employ some creative imagination in the application. Just as a simple example, if Pam paid £1000 to my building society account which I returned to hers some weeks later this would show up on a computer check as income for each of us, boosting the figures for average and highest balance for each account. As I discovered with my brothers later, having several accounts each and circulating large sums between these not only boosts the figures for these accounts but leads to the institutions offering each of us ever-increasing levels of credit.

………………………………0………………………….

I have to speed up. I keep getting drawn into the level of detail suited to auto-biography, though I note only on occasional points. I enjoy that and I’ll come back to it later, but at this point, due to things wrong in my life right now, it is urgent I get on to the story of what happened when I got involved with Jacinth. I really wanted just to give you the brief skeleton outline of how I came to be at the effect of secret actions by Police and MI6. Here goes, again:

I was happy with Pamela, but she wanted to start having children immediately, as she was 33 and felt time was running out. I felt I was just starting to grow up myself, doing what I should have done at 18 or 19. I wanted to develop in other areas, like my career, till I was happy with my own life before bringing children into it. I knew instinctively I was the sort of person likely to make my children the most important thing in my life, doing everything to give them the best upbringing possible. I was just starting to get into the fascinating world of computing, with the Sinclair ZX 81 she had given me at Christmas. I could see that was the future.

Pam went off with my best friend at the time, John Harris, a fellow tenant in the house. He was keen to have kids and got her happily pregnant immediately. I moved away from Scientology dominated East Grinstead, where it hurt to have former friends of many years pass in the street pointedly looking the other way. With my brother Ewan and false references, I rented an upmarket 3-story house in Tunbridge Wells from which we launched Telly-Centre, a business selling second-hand televisions.

Alistair joined us soon afterwards, sadly having to leave behind his wife and 3 children. Sadly his wife wouldn’t even talk with him about his reasons for leaving the Sea Org. If there ever was any love in the marriage it had long since died. Using superior business techniques and powerful advertising, with repeated leaflets through every door in town, we rapidly made the business successful. Though we started on 2 weeks benefit money and unauthorised overdrafts, within 3 months we were forced to move into shop premises, where we expanded the business to dealing in all items related to televisions, aerials, video-recorders, computers and game machines.

6 months after launching the business we found an accountant so impressed by our trading figures he arranged to get us mortgages, while also teaching us how to get credit cards with constantly increasing limits, by revolving money through our accounts and always paying the full amount due every month. He taught us how to create and improve a good credit record, such as by making sure you are on the electoral roll and never overdrawing or making a late payment. When you apply for a loan, mortgage or higher credit limit, you score many points when a scan of the last 6 months shows your account balance went to a high figure, even if only for a few days. If the 3 of us put all our savings in each of our accounts for a few days, the computer believed we were all rolling in money, even though we would postpone the payment of all bills until receipt of the first red-letter notice.

In January 1984 I bought a house for £32000 haggling 10% off the price. I let out 3 of the 5 rooms, taking enough in rent to cover the mortgage payments and utilities. A month later Alistair bought a house for £30,000 after some magnificent haggling. We moved to a larger shop in a more prominent position so the business just continued to grow.

After 10 years of poverty and denial in Scientology it was fun learning to enjoy the pleasures formerly forbidden, spending money wisely to improve comfort. I bought trendy clothes, got highlights in my hair, and filled my house with comforts and luxuries bought cheaply from the middle-class through small ads and boot fairs. I bought a quality SLR (cheap of course) studied guide-books by the masters like Lord Lichfield, Snowdon and David Bailey. I took lots of pictures. I started a project to compile and put in order all the photographs of my whole life, getting my father to send down from Glasgow all the negatives he had.

I got into video, delighted with the facilities it provided for recording from TV even while I was out, and with the porn Alistair’s girl-friend got through her work, copies of hot tapes smuggled in from Amsterdam.

I had a whole series of relationships, some only one date, with women both older and younger I met through box number classifieds in the local papers. There is something magical about the words “single, own house, car and business”. I also know how to write a good letter, not openly expressing desire for sex but subtly hinting at the possibility of excitement in that department. I told them I was shy but soon warmed up once the ice was broken. That was true and attracted them, but breaking the ice at that point usually involved getting more drunk than was sensible, over-riding my better judgement and waking up beside someone I would be ashamed for my brothers to see me with.

The range of women I met helped me quickly develop clearer ideas of what I was and wasn’t looking for. Single mothers looking for a breadwinner of any shape. Stock-brokers’ and estate agents’ secretaries, women that wanted to be paid glamour models. A couple of nymphos, one of whom fell in love with me. Women in business, either their own or someone else’s. a district nurse with a Teasmaid beside the bed. A social worker in a home for bad girls. A shy intellectual teacher in a famous girls’ boarding school (unfortunately I ran from her because she smoked dope regularly which at that time frightened me!) There was one lassie 8 years younger than me, a homely type I was really fond of, masses of blonde hair, big eyes, big lips, big everywhere. She stopped our relationship just as I was warming to it, because she had cancer. She didn’t want me to fall in love with her then be hurt when she died. (The same thing happened to me again a few years later.)

I didn’t have sex with all of them, maybe 2 out of 5, but I sure got enough to make up for 30 years of celibacy. Sex on the first date, though I never refused the opportunity, tended to reduce my desire for the woman as a partner.It showed me, subconsciously, how easy it would be to lose her to someone else, if it was that easy. Which brings me to other men’s wives. In the mid-80s, before the outbreak of AIDS it seems half the women of Kent were getting into swinging. Either serial short term flings and one-night stands, or just playing around behind their husbands’ backs. Women whose husbands commuted to high-paid jobs in the city, leaving home before 8am and returning after 7pm too tired and worried to pay them much attention, found distinct advantages in separating or getting divorced, keeping the house while he moves out, sucking whatever maintenance or alimony they could (for any kids) then playing around with a series of men like me, who would woo them with social outings, booze and fervent passion (not being used to the same repetitive routine in bed.)

A couple of times I had hubby on the phone when I called for a re-date. “Listen mate, if you call this number again, I’ll fucking kill you.” One woman, with whom I was playing badminton twice a week and driving down to a sandy beach at the weekend with a couple of bottles of bubbly, told me when I was hard at it in her bed that she just separated from her husband, a policeman, against his will, a couple of weeks before she answered my ad. And he was madly jealous, threatening to kill anyone she got involved with. There’s no better contraceptive than that. I got out and never looked back.

Rosie, possibly the most suitable partner out of all I met in that period, was an Oxford graduate chartered accountant living in a big house in the country worth a couple of million including the paddock, horses and stables. It was one relationship where the intellectual aspect was senior to the physical. She was sending me long elegantly written love letters that were a thrill to read. She had an insanely jealous ex-husband who would phone out of the blue threatening to come over and kill any man he found in the house. Every time she changed the number he would somehow find out the new one. He phoned one night after we’d got the children to bed, had a bath together and got suitably half-drunk. That felt just too dangerous to me. This man wasn’t going to ever let her go.

This was in the summer of 85. One of my tenants, a real old Arthur Daley type Jack the Lad, sold a piece of land he’d bought cheap years ago from a fellow Freemason, for a third of a million, because he had designed and got planning permission for a stables and riding school on the property. He was living low profile at my place on benefit, not flaunting his wealth or making any extravagant expenditures, doing charity work by using the minibus from the local Working Men’s Club to take pensioners for day-trips to France and bring back their full allowances of duty free fags, beer, spirits and wine. Before he fiddled the tax man by taking his profit as a suitcase of cash to Rio, he put me in touch with another creative accountant favoured by stockbrokers and the like.

This accountant, living next door to millionaires and our MP, told me he flew out weekly to Zurich with bundles of high denomination banknotes to deposit in numbered bank accounts for his clients. Since we were not quite in the same range, he set up off-shore accounts for us in Jersey, hidden from the tax-man, with £3000 deposits each. Then taking all the figures, receipts and records from our business he produced final accounts that showed in our first two years we made next to no profit. Actually, I drew up the accounts. He checked and adjusted them until even Arthur Daley’s tax inspector would have accepted them.

Now I realised creative accountancy could be used in both directions. It could show your business as far more profitable than it really was, for the purposes of borrowing. As long as the total yearly figures you give for an item are believable, the tax-man does not require to see pieces of paper confirming each individual item of income or expenditure individually. That way, for example, all the rent from our tenants deposited in the bank account could be passed off as income through the business. The recent MPs scandal didn’t surprise me. The “haves” have been fiddling their tax returns since Day 1, while the “have nots” haven’t a clue. There must have been some other reason these particular MPs were singled out. Close analysis would have shown them all at it. These were the kind of people Rosie did accounts for. Millionaires. While I was in business I never passed any receipt for petrol on a filling station floor. No-one ever comes to check your mileometer.

Rosie had a personal friend in a building society to whom she often referred customers. Mortgage applications through this line wouldn’t be scrutinised too closely, as none of her clients had ever defaulted. I took her all our accounts papers and asked her what was the biggest mortgage she could get with these figures. At that point she was trying hard to pull me into a fully committed relationship. She boosted our income (as outlined above), trimmed our outgoings, might have said only 2 of us were partners and the third on a small salary, and produced accounts massively increasing our profits. While showing the business was still expanding rapidly, when in truth the market was drying up, much cheaper TVs and videos flooding the chain stores. She reckoned she could get us mortgages up to £70,000 maybe more, no problem.

Alistair immediately snapped up a bargain, a luxury house in a posh area, worth £80,000 but selling for £72,000. Taking advantage of the vendor’s urgency for a quick sale, when most buyers in that bracket were stuck in chains waiting for their own house to sell, he haggled it down to £65,000, got a mortgage for £60,000 and a Barclayloan for £5000 (for a yacht, of course).

I had a hard job finding a suitable house to buy. Lots of people were getting into the game now, subdividing large houses into bedsits. Freemasons seemed to get first wind of most bargains through their invisible connections, like solicitors executing wills. I would visit houses with Alistair, check there weren’t too many repairs or refurbishments obviously needed, quickly assign rents to each of the rooms and check if the total was viable when compared to likely mortgage repayments, rates, gas, electricity and water bills. If you had to go through one room to get to another, renting them out individually was unfeasible and the house was no use for our purposes.

While I was on holiday in Mallorca I re-read one of the self-help books which had helped us launch the telly business, “The Lazy Man’s Way To Riches” – in between partying and rubbing oil into the back of lovely Judy, from Aberdeen (a holiday romance I have often regretted not following up). Much of the material in Joe’s book is now out-dated, as the world has moved on from mail-order sales through magazine ads, but the basic philosophy of creative visualisation and positive affirmations is still valid. I was sad to hear later the stress of making millions had sent Joe to an early grave. I guess you should pull out when you’ve got enough, and be smart enough to realise when you’ve reached that point.

I decided I’d had enough of the telly business. It had become boring and repetitive, there was no way to expand further other than opening and managing branches in other towns, but where could we find staff suitable to run them the way we would? Anyone bright enough could open their own business on the same lines and keep ALL the profits. Anyway the market was drying up and a time would soon come when sales didn’t pay the rent. The worst thing was that humping huge heavy TV sets around the shop, into and out of our cars, up and downstairs to and from the store-room and workshop was playing havoc with our backs and constantly exposing us to the dangers of serious damaging accidents.

I resolved to sell the business as soon as I got back, ploughing the profits into the property business. The increase in value of my house since I bought it exceeded all I had got out of Telly-Centre in the same period, for only a few hours work per week. I also wanted to launch a new business more fitting with my basic purposes to contribute something of value to society. I had already begun writing a book on blind dating, seeing how inadequate were the facilities available for finding suitable partners. I would complete that when I got back, publish it myself and sell it by mail order. Maybe combining my own experiences with research I could evolve some new way people could be introduced to each other with more chance of finding compatible partners? That would not only be helping a lot of people, but bound to bring me a comfortable income for life. Look at all these millions being pissed against the wall by lonely souls believing if they get pissed enough at a noisy enough disco they’ll somehow go home with a partner suitable to be a life companion. I never saw it work for anybody.

I resolved I’d had enough of casual affairs. I was actually looking for love. Yes, I might continue dating, but I would no longer go past the point where incompatibility was obvious. Not even for easy sex. When I looked back at the woman I had fucked the last few weekends before the holiday I was embarrassed, ashamed of myself. Every time she opened her mouth made it more clear we had nothing in common. All I wanted was to get through my 4 cans of Special Brew and into her bed, then out again as soon as possible. That was the end of casual sex. I had proved I was no longer inhibited, as competent as the next guy. I was lucky none of these woman had got pregnant. What a mess that would have made of my life, and the baby’s! No, from now on I was looking for love and friendship. I was looking for someone I was genuinely attracted to, mentally as well as physically, someone in whom I saw the potential for a lifelong partner. If I got totally desperate for a shag, crazy Susie – who was post-menopausal – was always just a phone-call away and the answer was always “Get yourself round here, you mad bugger!”

When I got home, I launched myself into these resolutions heartily. During the week I spent my days trying to sell the business, while keeping it ticking over. In the evenings I worked on writing my book, which also included writing off for the details of every dating club and introduction agency I could find. At the weekends I would drive to the most interesting live music gig I could find advertised, going on the name of the group, reasoning that any available compatible woman would have similar interests. If I didn’t meet any I still always enjoyed hearing a good rocking band in a smoky sweaty boozer.

One night, 5th October, I thought an act advertised as “Slowhand” might be my long time hero Eric Clapton performing undercover. Back in the early 70s I had read in Rolling Stone that before performing at the Isle of Wight Festival, Bob Dylan had warmed up by performing an impromptu gig with his band in a local country pub. Maybe Eric was going to try out some new material to an audience not attracted by his reputation after a long spell away from public performance.
I drove 10 miles along winding country roads to the Frog and Bucket at Ide Hill.

It wasn’t Clapton. It was Slowhand. They were alright. At closing time I was already drunk but the chap next to me at the bar went out leaving a full pint of lager untouched in front of me. I downed it in a oner and headed for my car. The last I remember was fiddling with the equaliser to get the full volume sound of ZZ Top just right through my 4 speakers. I was woken by a young chap tapping on the window. He and his girlfriend had seen me crash and called 999, I was lucky not to be breathalised. My nose started pouring blood just as the policeman approached me. He said “Looks like he’s already had enough” and let the ambulance take me away.

My beloved blue Austin Princess was wrapped round a tree. Although I had been wearing my seat belt, my ankle was broken (talus bone), 3 ribs were cracked, my nose was broken and my teeth had gone right through my top lip. During the night with agonising pain in my chest I swore to God I would thoroughly clean up my act if he just let me live and not let a rib puncture my lung. Please! Here are the before and after pictures:

That was the start of the most exciting period of my life. My leg was in plaster and I walked on crutches for 3 months.

I completed the hand-written draft of the book, “Successful Blind Dating”. I edited it while typing it up on an IBM golf-ball typewriter with a couple of dodgy letters that were slightly above or below the line. I would laugh at all of it now, I did the last time I saw a copy, but at the time I was proud of it. Written in the positive confident tone of any popular self-help guide (whether or not the confidence is justified) it was the best advice available at the time to anyone entering the murky unknown of trying to find a partner in these rapidly changing times without getting robbed or hurt. Why send £68 to Cupid agency with 200 clients on her cards scattered nationwide when a well-worded £5 ad in the local classifieds can bring 5 responses within a 10 mile radius, you can see their handwriting and read how they describe themselves in their own words?

I published it myself, without an author’s name (hey, who would trust a Scientologist even if he says he’s “ex”) but under the name GOLDWAYS, which I thought a suitably attractive handle to act as an umbrella for all my projected future activities. Goldways Introduction Agency. Goldways Social Club. Goldways Holidays. Goldways Marketing. Goldways Gold dealers. You get it.

I put adverts in every suitable outlet, Dateline’s Singles magazine, Exchange and Mart, Cosmopolitan, Tit-Bits, Razzle, Lady, anywhere with classifieds or small ads. Counted the responses in a card-index system to see which were worth repeating. Some ads had to be booked months in advance. Respondents either sent £10 for the book or an SAE for more details, a 2-page sales letter constructed along lines proven successful over 20 years in the mail order business.

The first 70 copies I produced myself on a second-hand photocopier. What a hassle. It jammed repeatedly and put out pages that were smeared, blank or stuck together with too much toner. A waste of £100, and a lot of time balanced on one crutch.

A woman I had dated, and shagged, told me I could run off copies on the machine she used for her party catering business. When I phoned up to make the final arrangements, the man I asked to put me on to “Jane” said “That’s my wife, you cunt. If you call this number again I’ll kick the shit out of you.” Huh. She told me she was single. Already I could see something vital I’d left out of the book.

I had to get 300 copies run off and collated at the local Quickprint at a cost of £1 each. That was more than I had originally budgeted for but they could still be sold at a profit, though not as much as I had planned. I still had to add the covers and clip binders myself, but I did this as I was filling the orders just before putting them in the envelopes for posting.

At the end of 1984 someone had come into our shop and offered us a video camera and camcorder, a bulky 2-piece unit, but still near top of the range. We bought it for £200. I suggested to my brothers that instead of selling it through the business we should keep it to record our lives as an improvement on photographs. We had seen how valuable photographs become as the years go on. After recording hours of humorous video over Christmas and New Year when our Mum and Dad came down for a holiday and finally admitted their sons were successful businessmen, they agreed. At my suggestion we started video diaries, recording roughly once a month our answers to a clever list of questions. Just as examples, “What have you bought lately?”, “What’s your favourite music?”, “Describe an average day.” “What’s the most important thing in your life right now?” and “Are you satisfied with how well you’re doing what you planned to do?”

It was a big hassle setting up for recording indoors. It involved having 2 150-watt bulbs just a couple of feet away from the face, one in a spotlight. Otherwise the picture was just mucky shadows. I was the only one to continue after one month. I was irregular, sometimes 5 or 6 weeks between recordings, but I kept making diary entries all year. It turned out to be a brilliant tool for examining my life. The questions forced me to keep looking at what was really important in my life. Reviewing all the entries one after the other showed me that I was procrastinating, that I didn’t actually energetically execute the plans I made, that I was settling for less than I wanted and I was stupidly falling back into habitual patterns of behaviour I had resolved to desist from. Noticing this embarrassed me as I felt I was letting myself down.

Now after the accident, I began making diary entries cruelly criticising my failures and weaknesses, making strong resolutions to dramatically improve my execution of my consciously willed purposes and plans. When the camera was off I really did set about these activities with a will, determined to do what I’d said I would do, to the letter.

With a hard push, I finally did sell the business in early December. I nagged our landlord till he signed a new lease that met the vendor’s requirements. I handled our end of the conveyancing, so our profit didn’t all end up in some solicitor’s hands. I pushed the vendor’s solicitor every step of the way, allowing no delays until the money was finally in our hands. Oh, what a happy day! Alistair’s arthritic back was ecstatic the day he finally walked out of that shop for the last time, never to hump a 26-inch TV cabinet upstairs again.

After months of searching I located a house that was worth buying. The figures made sense on paper. A 3-story Victorian townhouse a stone’s throw from the station. If it had been modernised it would have been worth £90,000 like Alistair’s 2nd house now was. However a little old widow who urgently needed to go into care had lived there alone for 30 years with no improvements except installation of gas fires in the 2 room flatlet on the ground floor. The rest of the house had hardly been touched since probably the early 70s. Linoleum or bare floorboards. A couple of sockets in each room, with the same old coin meters as I had inn my first flat in 1972 (the kind you can stop turning with a strong magnet!) I considered how much I’d have to spend to make the rooms habitable, fitting carpets and so on, since I wanted to charge top-whack rent of £70 for each double room (they were huge). I could only be sure it would be profitable if I got it for £72500 max, She was asking £79,500, though her agent said she knew she would have to come down as it had been on the market for 3 months and it was urgent for her to go into care yesterday. She couldn’t even climb the stairs any more.

I offered £70,000 in November, to test the water. The agent responded that she wouldn’t budge, she knew the market value was much more than what she was asking (though we both silently wondered why other speculators hadn’t spotted this and moved in.) I waited a week then suggested £72,500 which is what I actually expected to get it for. She wouldn’t go for it, so I said £75,000 and I’m ready to exchange contracts right away. The agent said he would ask her to think about it and let me know.

Yes, genuine Community Service, out of the goodness of my heart. Just to demonstrate my social value and show how charitable I can be towards friends and people in need. I had an idea this might teach Frank and others that genuine help does not consist of just sitting talking but in doing what is actually needed.

He said he was looking after his mother but the garden had turned into the local tip, with what looked like at least several years litter thrown over the hedge or fallen from the trees.

Of course I have experience, not used since my mother died, that had taught me a big dirty job is not done by daintily picking at it. One launches in with gusto and pushes hard at it until there is a notable improvement.

My method is to select a small area to start with and there set the standard which is going to be met throughout – if for no other reason than to act as a guide to whoever continues the job if one is unable to complete it oneself.

The first effect of our arrival was the shock for Frank’s mother, nephew and niece, indeed the whole neighbourhood at the unusual arrival of a black woman.
So we started with the usual cups of coffee while the introductions were made. After that Jacinth went next door to attend to Frank’s brother and I went out to start on the garden.

I’d love to tell you all that I did – I thoroughly impressed even myself – but let’s just say I battled furiously for over 5 hours, stopping only occasionaly when offered a coffee, to stretch my aching back and fit in a wee discreet spliff.

Frank’s mother came out shortly after I had started and said “You don’t need to clean my garden.” I smiled, said “I know”, and carried on.

I really move incredibly fast when I’m working hard, even though in these latter years it’s not really sane to act like a fit 20-year old. My back was screaming in agony from shortly after I started, but I just used the controlled effects of the cannabis to focus my attention on the work immediately in front of me. Looking too far ahead could lead one to be overwhelmed and inclined to just quit or skimp on quality.

I would eyeball the area I had selected and decide in advance at what stage I would stop for another spliff, then dive right into it.

The garden had been the shame of the neighbourhood till I arrived. Obviously everyone used it to dispose of every thing from fag-ends to bottles and cans.

I separated out wood and paper from glass, metal and plastic. The former I heaped in a pile to be burnt, a safe distance from the walls, trees and bushes. The latter went into large black waste bags. I battered at it like a man on fire, though careful not to hurt my hands with broken glass or thorns.

Once I got the fire going I moved even faster, getting as much more combustible waste on it as possible, though careful not to produce toxic smoke.

I was thrilled to note the effect I was having on the neighbourhood. Women with prams came by to check me out close up, neighbours hung out of windows to see what was going on and kids came from near and far to gawp and admire.

The general impression was that old Mrs Dougan must be something very special to get such VIP treatment. Even a team of council employees couldn’t produce such an improvement so fast.

By the time Frank came out to tell me his mother didn’t want the fire as it might upset the neighbours, there was only a tiny amount of unburnt material left. I had got rid of maybe half a ton by then.

I was amazed at how long Jacinth’s massage was going on. Somehow I managed to time it so I was within sight of completion before it went dark and I had to stop. There were 7 full sacks of plastic, metal, glass, bricks and stones all neatly tied up ready for the next waste collection.

I was really impressed when 2 young friends of Frank’s niece Nicola came over and joined in with her. I hadn’t left much for them, but it was enough for them to be left with the pride they had helped and it wasn’t all done for them. I could see that now the “impossible” part of the job had already been done, it would be easy for them to maintain this new standard in just an hour or two each week.

I’ll leave the report at that. I was filled with pride that I’d turned the worst garden in the neighbourhood into the best and over 100 observers knew that.

I could see Frank’s mother was delighted. Nicola and her friends were just dying to play in the garden now.

I was knackered. I could hardly straighten my aching back. But I knew quite a few people would never forget me or the day I came to visit.

I hobbled to the car and we came back home. On the way Frank revealed his brother was a cocaine addict. He could get out of bed and walk if he wanted to, but he got more benefit to spend on coke by acting paralysed.

We stopped on the way for foodstuffs and the usual wine. When we got back in the car I was telling Frank that when I first went down to London at the age of 20, I used to read Private Eye. A guy who couldn’t get a job could make £100 – a lot of money then – by marrying an immigrant who wanted UK resident status. All you had to do was turn up at the registry office, sign your name and collect the cash. You didn’t even have to see the person again.

From the back seat, Jacinth said softly but clearly “I am looking to marry someone”.

The subject came up again after dinner. Frank was making sexist remarks like “You’re my woman” making it sound like “You’re my dog”.
Jacinth turned to him and asked “What are you going to do, are you going to marry me?”

Frank laughed and said “Why should I? I’m a free man. I’ve already got what I want. I’ve been married 4 times already. It never works.”

Jacinth turned to me with a smile and asked “Would you marry me?” Remember I had been smoking quite a few joints and these had got me into that state of mind where I’m willing to have a life-changing experience or realisation at any moment. I quickly ran it over in my mind. My recent experiences, what prospects I could expect if my life continued as it had been going, the advantages of having a female companion, what I’d learned about this woman.

I answered quite truthfully “Yes, I would.” She turned to Frank as if to ask, “What’s your answer now?” The moment was both tense and humorous.
“Yeah, sure, if that’s what you want”, he said, but it was obvious he didn’t mean it.

I said, not really joking, “I’ll be your best man”, to which Frank replied “If you marry her, I’ll be your best man” but he was flippant and just wanted off the subject.

It had got me thinking. A woman I had liked since I met her, more friendly and cheerful than any other woman I had ever met in Glasgow had asked if I would marry her and I had said yes and meant it. Well, now what? Is it going to happen? It would certainly be more exciting than any other future currently on offer. What had I to lose at this stage? I could go out on a nice high.

Frank had managed to obtain the Lana Turner films on DVD, so we watched “Madame X” together, a pleasant home cinema experience. It turned out to be a sad, moving film that actually drew tears a few times (yeah, marijuana loosens up the emotions and empathy!)

Isn’t it amazing that if someone recommends a powerful movie you assume they must hold the values it conveys – even though there’s no logical basis for that assumption? I thought, “What a compassionate, humane woman this Jacinth must be? Yes, I’d marry her. There doesn’t seem to be any guile or deceit in her.”

Jacinth went off to bed. Frank and I carried on chatting for a while. I found myself telling him, “I think you ought to be more polite towards that woman. She’s very intelligent. If I was you I would stop putting her down and start showing more respect. Remember, she’s got a degree and you don’t. You should be grateful for everything she chooses to share with you. As far as I can see you’re getting a lot more out of her than she’s getting out of you.”

He blinked and spluttered a bit, but I think he recognised I’d given him a valid dressing-down without offending him. He knew by now I was a very honest and sincere man. Also he was still impressed by what I had achieved at his mother’s while he was, as usual, just sitting mouthing ideas about what he “could” or “might” do.

I wanted Frank to get the idea I’m not a guy who just mouths idle dreams I have no intention of pursuing in reality. It was time for him to start thinking about others’ needs and desires (and stop being such a lush).

I outlined to him that it would be cool to get married in Tobago and stay there. Whichever one she marries we can both have white suits and she can have a white dress. The best man can stay for a couple of weeks then fly back here. I wanted his mind to start running with the idea so he would see how unrealistic it was for him to marry her, whereas I had no reason to stay in Scotland but I had the money to emigrate and set up the projected business.

I set out for home as he wobbled through to his bedroom. He shouts, sarcastically, “Hey Jace, Will’s gonna dress us both up in white suits and you in a white dress…”

I stuck my head round the door and, making it clear I was neither drunk nor sarcastic (but a little disappointed she was still going to bed with this oaf), I said clearly “No, you can wear whatever colour you like. I was just telling Frank that after the wedding he can stay a couple of weeks then I’ll drive him to the airport.” With that, I left.

I didn’t see them again for a week and a half. I couldn’t see any point. I was busy with my guitar jamming, getting fittings for my new dentures, editing the contents of my computer to get rid of material related to now abandoned projects and cleaning up material I had in my various YouTube channels and blogs.

I was also looking up information about Tobago and the various ingredients of Pressy’s moisture. I was pretty sure I would be getting involved. I was also quite sure it was only a matter of time before Jacinth tired with Frank’s act and gave him the heave. Surely?

I downloaded my own copies of the Lana Turner films, along with quite a few Eddie Murphy movies I fancied watching.

Towards the end of the week Jacinth started sending me texts. She had 500 bottles of “the product” she said. She wanted to give me a massage and Hopi Ear Candle treatment. She wanted to give me a sample of the cream.

I was ill a lot of the time and tending to stay in bed excessively. I was still getting hostile anonymous phone calls, someone putting on different accents, either telling me it was my probation officer about my missed appointment (I wasn’t on probation), telling me I better pay for that ounce of grass I ordered, or “You done that lassie. You told me when you were drunk. Everybody in your street knows you’re a paedo.” I had 3 suspects, but my strongest hunch was that it was a bent copper. I disconnected the phone from the landline so they only got the answering service.

…………………………………………o………………………………………………

Man, I’ll never get through telling the story If I continue at this rate. Rather than surrender to the temptation to give up, I’ll try to speed up.

Jacinth was sending me more and more texts, telling me there was rapidly increasing demand for her product, we really ought to get going in business together and I would really love living in Tobago. Again she suggested she could marry me to help me get residency. I was sinking back into my depression, tired and aching most of the time, finding myself in bed up to 20 hours at a time.

It had reached the stage I wasn’t answering knocks on my door. Chances are it would either be police come to harasss me further or someone come to carry out their threat to attack me. Although I am not a violent man, I had put a heavy table leg by the front door, just in case. One day when I’d ignored a bout of heavy knocking at the door, just pulling the duvet over my head and going back to my pleasant dreams (a recurring symptom of depression for me) I had a stream of texts from Jacinth, along the lines of “what’s wrong with you?”. I was in such a confused state of mind, I stopped opening these and turned the phone off.

When I finally got up I tried to figure out what was confusing me. I realised I was attracted to this woman and wanted some involvement with her. But I was confused by her involvement with Frank, it just didn’t make sense. Frank might be cranky but he was my friend. I didn’t want him upset. As far as I was concerned, they would have to end their relationship themselves before I would get involved with her. I wouldn’t have Frank saying “you stole my woman”, forever holding me guilty of destroying an otherwise happy relationship.

When I called her to apologise for not answering her texts and discovered it wass her who had been knocking on my door, I explained that my depression and illness had been getting on top of me. She insisted that she come round next day to give me a full body massage along with the Hopi ear candle treatment. I said I could only agree if she let me pay her full professional rate. My business experience told me she could not continue giving away services and product for free. Sure, it would increase popularity and demand but it would soon lead her into financial difficulties where she would have no chance of launching a business.

It felt odd letting her into my flat the next day. Here was an innocent trusting woman putting herself in the clutches of a man whom the police and social services was a dangerous pervert likely to commit some evil crime on her. At least I knew that was not true and never had been. Now I began to recover some of the confidence that had been shattered by their accusations. I’m a true gentleman and my accommodation is clean, colourful and comfortable.

She did the ear candle treatment first, mentioning the candles cost her £10 a pair just to buy. I didn’t really expect much improvement from the treatment though I was open to miracles, as always. I soon found I had a better idea of how the treatment was supposed to work than she did and half-realised she had probably never done it before, but I was feeling better just from having someone want to make me feel better. No-one had actually cared about me since my mother died nearly 3 years earlier.

She gave me the massage on my bed on top of the duvet, with me stripped down to my underpants. There was nothing erotic or sensual about it. She covered everything from the scalp to my toes, jumping over the erogenous zones in the middle. It was the best massage I ever had, on a par with those I used to do for my wife when I was still in love with her.

It was surprising such a slight woman could exert such force deep into my aching muscles. She kept it up for about 4 hours non-stop. My involuntary grunt and sighs of relief showed her which areas to concentrate her efforts on. She was liberally applying scented oils as she went. I was a little surprised that a professional would buy these in tiny bottles from Nature’s Best like any other woman on the street, rather than in more economical bulk purchases.

I was in heaven. No-one had ever applied this much attention and effort to making me feel better physically. Even my ex-wife used to quickly shift over from massage of sore spots to foreplay, so the activity was soon for her benefit more than mine. The muscles in my back and elsewhere gradually relaxed and gave up their long locked-in pain to this caring woman’s powerful ministrations.

In the background she was asking me occasional questions about my past life and how I came to know Frank. I went over the main points. I had been on a mission with my brother to legalise cannabis, till he died. The authorities had derailed this by framing me as a sex offender.

I thought she must be tired out after 4 hours of this.Early on it was clear I was benefitting more from the deep-tissue work than the light surface motions, so she was grinding into sore spots with knuckles, elbows and the heels of her hands. I was in a dreamy reverie by the time she finished.

As I had insisted beforehand, I asked her to charge me her full professional rate. I said, “Get the money off me right now, while I’m feeling so good.” I was just a little surprise when she wrote an invoice charging for 5 hours at £20 plus £18 for the essential oils but I was feeling so much better than I had for years I gave her £130 in cash immediately. I was thinking this could easily be the start of a long relationship with ever increasing amounts of money passing through our hands, from one to the other and to the community at large. She went off and I was on a high for the rest of the day.

Next day I was round at Frank’s. He was well impressed that I had paid her so much, I said that indicated my belief a person has to just make the leap to being professional and cease being an unpaid amateur with hopes and ambitions. Jacinth said it was obvious I needed a woman in my life, in one role or another. What, she suggested, about a housekeeper, to do the cleaning and make me some tasty meals I couldn’t be bothered doing for myself?

I was riding two horses now. On one side I was creating and uploading to Youtube little videos of myself jamming with other miusicians’ recordings so that after my impending death some record would remain to show people what a cheerful fun guy I had been. On the other side I was beginning to create a future for myself in Tobago, once again high every day on genuine ganja, happily spending the rest of my days booming the business of my new best friend, whether or not there was any other form of relationship between us.

She continued to send me texts every day. More and more people wanted to place regular orders for Pressy’s Moisture, delighted with the free samples. I ought to look into this or that aspect of Tobago. Why didn’t I let her be my housekeeper? She could live in my living room, in exchange for cooking my meals and cleaning. By running her business from there she could save money on rent of her flat and the studio she wasn’t using, and it would be easier to get me involved too. In her texts she was also dropping hints that Frank was crazy and wasn’t really in tune with her needs and ambitions.

On the internet, I was doing a lot of research into Tobago, it certainly did seem to offer an attractive laid-back lifestyle, the climate making it a paradise on Earth compared to cold wet miserable Scotland. I read all their government’s publications explaining their laws and regulations about immigration and business.

I was spending a lot of time trying to learn how to edit HD video with my new laptop.

At the weekend, in the absence of my preferred stimulant cannabis, I had a little session at home with Bailey’s and lager, along with Spice and surrogate E’s from my legal highs supplier. I was disappointed that my new dentures were taking much longer to produce than I had expected. Overall it would be about 6 weeks after I lost the last ones.

On the Sunday after a bunch of texts back and forward between Jacinth and myself – “what are you doing?” etc – I sent her one saying “1. I don’t tell lies. 2. I would never hurt you or any of your friends. 3.Yes I would be willing to marry you.” She replied “Talk to you later. I am just going to Church with Frank”

After midnight Frank phoned, drunk as usual, yelling at me, “what’s all this about asking my girl-friend to marry you?” He went on and on as if I had committed some huge crime against him, ignoring when I pointed out it was she who had suggested marrying me, repeatedly, and that I was just accepting the idea after a lot of thought. I said I would have nothing more to do with either of them if that’s what he wanted. Then I disconnected the phone from the wall again (Frank never used mobile).

The following Friday was Good Friday. Frank being a devout Catholic, I sent a text which would be read out to him on his land-line. I pointed out this was a time for celebrating Jesus’s message of love, goodwill and forgiveness, that he was the last person I had called friend, so I wished him all the best, no matter what had come between us.

Next day he phoned me up all friendly and asked me to come with him to a special Easter mass at a local temple. I agreed and dressed up smart. I was surprised to see Jacinth there, as she told me she attended a more lively arm-waving Hallelujah gospel church. Frank sat between us.

The service was the most dismal and irrelevant one I had ever been to. Half of it was in Latin, the rest was all about what miserable sinners we all were. All I could relate to was that the rest of the crowd were lost and lonely, confused in a society becoming more soul-less by the day. In my mind’s eye I flew up above the planet and looked down. I could see that at this point in the year there were millions of people attending services like this, all still hoping for some miracle to put an end to the fear and sadness. When, following the priest’s instructions to us all, I shook hands with the middle-aged woman on my other side and said “God bless you”, I realised from her excitement it was probably the first human contact in her lonely life for many months. It was a line straight out of “Eleanor Rigby”. Considering how much love and happiness I have known in my life, if I could have found a communication line to a loving God I would have demanded that He do something effective to allow these faithful suffering souls to experience even a little of the same.

Afterwards Frank led us all to a lounge bar to begin on the daily wine. Both Jacinth and myself had to admit the service had been more depressing than uplifting. Although Frank insisted great efforts had been made to modernise his church, we both agreed the mysterious gobbledy-gook of the rituals had no relevance to the problems and needs people faced in this current day.

We moved back to Frank’s house for the usual wine and Neil Diamond records. Jacinth soon went off to bed, leaving Frank and I to sit up all night discussing this, that and the other. I kept pointing out as soon as I came off the Sex Offenders Register on 16th March, I just wanted to get out of this sinking country to live somewhere in the sun where genuine cannabis was easily available. Frank kept pushing the idea I should move with him to Mallorca or Spain, although admitting in the same breath he would be unable to leave his ailing mother and family behind.

I pointed out my biggest obstacle was getting a passport, since I would need my identity confirmed by someone respectable who had known me 2 years. Frank insisted I could easily get a priest to do that as they were duty-bound to do such favours. I pointed out this was unreal since my application would be gone through with a fine tooth-comb. It kept coming back to the idea I really needed to get my name cleared by finding an honest lawyer willing to pursue my appeal. Repeated efforts over the previous year had failed to find any such lawyer.

I was inclined to agree with Frank’s suggestion of Amer Anwar. Being a Muslim, he would be less likely to be affected by secret instructions or influences from MI6 coming down Freemason lines. But the process of pursuing an appeal all the way up to the European Court of Justice in the Hague could take 2 or 3 years, it would use up all my savings and I didn’t think I could survive that long, especially with no access to genuine cannabis, on which I had based my whole philosophy since I was 34. I would be dead of loneliness and depression before then. In the end I concluded my best course was to somehow legally get a passport and emigrate, to Tobago or Mallorca, rescuing what remained of my fast-dwindling savings. I would just leave behind my failed ‘mission’ in the UK with all its associated sad memories as a battle well-fought but forever lost, and live out whatever remained of my life high and happy among other living a lifestyle of leisure.

In the dawn we remarked on the anniversary of Jesus’ Resurrection and on how much good and evil had been done over 20 centuries in memory of that miracle.

A couple of days later Jacinth contacted me to say she had to come round to present a business proposition to me. I was already sold on the proposition and had probably done more realistic research into the practical aspects than she had. She said she was fed up with Frank and had had enough of his nonsense. That was the signal I had been waiting for.

When she came round, she said she wasn’t seeing Frank any more, but putting her attention full-time on to handling all the outstanding matters she had to deal with in the UK so she could get back to Tobago and launch full-time production.
She had an agent in Philadelphia who was going to order 500 bottles a month, an agent in Glasgow (her hairdresser) who was going to take 500 a month. Now she had persuaded another old friend, who ran the quartermaster’s store on one of the biggest US air bases in the States, to take 1000 bottles of the miracle cream to sell on the base. With these large confirmed regular orders it would be easy to find other large customers.

What excited me was the idea that my inheritance would be going to a good purpose. Until I died, I would have the opportunity to utilise all my skills and intelligence so the last major activity of my life would be one worthy of respect, giving me satisfaction and pride in my latter days. Someone, herself, would be left with the memory of what an admirable person I had been.

Now she was coming round to my please nearly every day and exchanging lots of texts when she wasn’t there. I wanted to know all the facts and figures about the product so I could get busy creating a realistic business plan, along with creating advertising and marketing material ready for a full launch.

Although there was no sex involved it began to be a social relationship too. She assured me it would be a friendship for life. Telling me the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, the day after I finally reveived my new dentures (oh what joy) she cooked me a delicious massive meal of steak, roast potatoes, 2 veg and gravy, along with an expensive bottle of Bollinger. We watched the 2 Lana Turner movies together and had long conversations late into the night.

Enquiring into her tastes I downloaded and we watched together a whole series of movies she selected, such as the complete works of black director Tyler Perry and comedian Chris Rock. I was learning about black culture from the point of view of a black person. Some of the movies covered the subject of inter-racial relationships. It seems a logical step to believe the person recommending movies or songs holds the values conveyed in them. We had long discussions on love and marriage and our past experiences in these areas. For the first time in years I was enjoying lively conversation with an intellectual peer, all without ever getting intoxicated or drunk.

I continued to learn about the product, with probing questions to show I wouldn’t be throwing my resources into the project till I knew it was well worked out. I was moved at her accounts of the suffering of the clients she was visiting most days and how much her massage relieved their pains.

Using YouTube and other sites, we learned more about the culture of Tobago,and the music she was interested in. I downloaded her favourites Phyllis Hyman and Anita Baker. Wouldn’t you know it, Anita Baker’s greatest songs were “Giving You The Best That I Got” and “You Belong To Me” and wasn’t that latter exactly what I’d told Jacinth I was looking for in a woman soon after I first met her?

The more we found out about each other (though in retrospect I see this was mostly one way) the more it seemed obvious we went well together. We spent one whole evening watching soul music and mass gospel choirs on YouTube, while she phoned members of her large family in the States and Caribbean, telling them how well her business was going and that she would be bringing a new friend back with her.

She began demonstrating an interest in my health, cooking me food she said was much better than what I had been eating and telling me to soak in aromatherapeutic baths using oils she had selected for me. She even gave me a bottle of the magical potion Pressy’s Moisture for daily application to my face, assuring me I would look obviously younger and healthier within days. While I don’t know about that, I do know I was getting high on the beautiful smell of the stuff and because, at last, someone actually cared about me. I had told her sincerely after the massage that never in my whole life had anyone shown so much interest in making me feel good and this was all the more impressive because it didn’t seem to have a sexual motive.

Eventually the last of my doubts were overcome. I felt I was dealing with the best friend I had had since my brother died. This person was truly sane, kind and considerate. She liked cannabis, preferring it to alcohol. There wasn’t a sexual attraction between us and that was OK. At 57 I saw my days of being obsessed with sex as being behind me, friendship and companionship was more important, along with filling my days working enthusiastically on a worthwhile purpose that made full utilisation of my skills and experience. She joked that once I got to Tobago she would easily fix me up with a big momma, though I told her 400lbs was probably just a little too big.

I decided it was time to make my commitment. My projects in the UK were all finished, now it was clearly stupid to invest any more time or money in Frank’s ill-fated hair-brained schemes. If I was going in with Jacinth I would drop everything else I had been doing and devote myself 24/7 to getting us both over to Tobago pronto and pushing the business towards success.

I thought I would be able to see the correct way forward more clearly if we could just get high together on some cannabis. I told her always saw more clearly when I was “irie”. From the stories she had told me from her own experiences I pointed out she was probably the only person in Glasgow other than myself who had a clue what “irie” actually meant.

We went together into Glasgow to see if we could score. I took her to the West End as the most likely place, pointing out in passing that this was the part of town she would have been more likely to find success with her beauty business. I showed her Byres Road and Ashton Lane, the high spots of trendy night-life. The closest thing we would find to a likely contact was a long-haired busker in whose hat I had several times dropped a pile of cash. We had several times had conversations about music and dope, since I had several times done some exciting busking on the same spot.

Since a black woman with a foreign accent was less likely to be suspected as undercover police, she went over to chat with the guy. Sure enough, he and his flatmates were planning to buy some good grass that very evening, after he finished his busking stint. He should be seeing the dealer in an hour or so, so he would call her mobile then to take her order. We waited in Starbucks, chatting and smiling at each other. I really enjoyed being seen in public with this attractive black woman. I had usually enjoyed sporting my cool image around this area and often got into friendly conversations especially when I had been smoking spliffs, but this was much more exciting, to be much more interested in a female companion than what was going on around me.

The guy didn’t call her number and we didn’t have his number to chase it up. We moved down to the other part of town well-known for dope culture, though most smokers usually avoid the booze scene altogether. We checked out the Scotia and Clutha vaults but, seeing no-one who seemed worth trying, we had to abandon the idea, with all the more firm resolve to get to the Caribbean as soon as possible. Jacinth assured me in Tobago there would be at least a half dozen friends would respond to a call immediately with an incredibly cheap deal of top grade bud in the exact same condition it had come off the plant.

I ran through the plan with her again. I would put in all the money I had, plus all my technical resources like computer and video camera, she would put in the formula for Pressy’s Moisture, we would live in and run the business from her house (she had a nice caretaker’s flat downstairs that would be all mine) and we would be full partners in the business. I asked if she envisaged sharing the profits 50-50. She reckoned 70-30 would be fairer, since she had put years into the research. I thought that was fair enough. 30% of a lot is still a lot. In any case I would probably be checking out within a few years and it would all be coming to her at that point. I trusted the woman so much I thought a verbal contract was fine for now, I couldn’t imagine she would ever cheat me, though she assured me we would have the full deed of partnership drawn up by our lawyer in Tobago as soon as we arrived, when we were registering the company. My being able to hand over a large sum of foreign money on arrival would ensure my popularity and assist my application for residency as it would be obvious I wanted to improve the local economy.

Now I was committed I wanted to work on the project full time, nothing being more important than moving to Tobago as fast as possible. I pointed out that rather than have Jacinth waste her precious time (now a resource that I shared with her since that time belonged to our business) travelling to her appointments inefficiently by public transport, it would be much smarter for me to deliver and collect her door-to-door with my car.

True to my own life philosophy I began to use will and address future activities much more positively. Instead of hypothetical “I/we could…” I began stating with determination “I/we will…” knowing from experience such postulates are much more likely realised. With creative visualisation, I began to see myself waking in my pleasant bedroom in Tobago, with the tropical vegetation and sunshine right outside my window, avocado and spliff for breakfast, processing the day’s orders received in the mail, printing labels for the jiffy-bags, getting them down to the post office then getting busy on the next wave of advertisements in magazines. Jacinth’s vision was that she would run a health and beauty clinic in her house, employing local labour trained by herself and catering for celebrities and tourists. I would supervise the production, marketing and sales of the product, nicely high all the time and in my leisure time enjoying some popularity in the local entertainment scene.

Why waste any more time than necessary in the miserable context of Glasgow, being depressed by the reminders of my failed attempts to enliven that culture and help reverse its decline into ruin? I could be waking happy, healthy and optimistic every day without a care for anything that had gone before. Let’s get at it, pronto. I might get off tobacco, become physically fit again and go on to live happily for years. That’s what God wanted, obviously. He had sent this angel, a woman who valued the same things as myself, who believed what I said over the lies that had been projected on me my a corrupt system, to lead me to Heaven. No need to die a sad and lonely martyr, all my good efforts for my fellows suppressed and forgotten. I could go now and take my deserved reward.

Yes, Jacinth Preston, was truly an angel sent by God to rescue me from my suffering and lead me to Heaven.

Why, on the internet, I found out that Jacinth was a semi-precious stone that featured on the hilt of Arthur’s sword Excalibur (according to Tennyson), was on the breast-plate of Jerusalem’s high priest and was to feature as one of the foundation stones in the temple of the New Jerusalem.Its mystical powers increase one’s peace of mind and self-esteem. The wearing of jacinth brings wisdom, honour and riches. This was all too good to be true. Daily I found it hard to believe this was actually happening to me. I was going to escape all the undeserved sadness and misery and live happily the rest of my life in a veritable paradise, where all the aspects of myself which had caused me trouble here would be valued, respected and loved by the happy, smiley people around me.

I began a new blog to record my wonderful experiences between here and there and to compile all the information I gathered about the history, culture and beauties of my new home. I Came Home To Tobago.

I apologise that I so far have not learned how to increase the font size of text, which makes this WordPress blog rather difficult to read on a small laptop or netbook.
For this reason and because I find typing and proofreading so very slow, I may rapidly go over to expressing myself mostly in video instead – again, once I master the learning stages involved in becoming familiar with my new equipment, which has lain idle for many months.

Oh, and clean up the recent ancient hermit image.

Man, the recovery from depression is always so surprisingly rapid!

In October 2008 the Strathclyde Police involved in supervising my probation had persuaded YouTube to delete my entire “RamblingWill” channel because some of the videos apparently depicted or encouraged the use of cannabis. More likely it was because one series of videos showed Police and Social Workers harassing me in my home (if I had not recorded the incident it is likely that, with 4 witnesses against 1, I would have been charged with breach of the peace or similar, accused of being abusive towards them). In the following videos I had outlined how Strathclyde Police had been harassing me since 2002, just after I returned to Scotland to support my elderly mother till she died.

As that was the third time I had been deleted from YouTube I decided I had done all I could for the Legalization of Cannabis. If any others were going to be inspired by my example of defiance, it had already happened. Several other pro-cannabis characters had their YouTube channels closed around the same time, with no explanation or recourse. I decided I had done as much as I could for the cause and in my now weak social position it would be foolish to continue along these lines. I could no longer locate any source of genuine cannabis in Scotland. For years my modus operandi had been simple – obtain and smoke some genuine marijuana, then follow the highest inspiration revealed as a result. I believed I was on some “mission for God” to discover and promote the best course forward for myself and the majority of decent sociable members of the human community. Of course, I have my own definition for “God”.

No need to martyr myself for a cause that seemed already clearly defeated. I had hundreds of hours of video tapes I had made since 1986 in which I had attempted to share what I had learned about cannabis, not so much arguing why prohibition was wrong as demonstrating the benefits of using the stuff in an age of constantly increasing unemployment, poverty and depression. Around me in Glasgow the culture seemed to be trending towards rapidly increasing use of alcohol, heroin and cocaine, with consequent growth in violence, depression, crime and other related social problems. I didn’t want to simply surrender to depression over the realisation I had failed in my chosen career, particularly because I had just come into a sizable inheritance from my mother, for which I had struggled through years of poverty.

Now I wanted to find some business in which to invest that inheritance, which might provide some income to support me for the rest of my life (I was now 57) while also providing the satisfaction that I was doing my best to improve the quality of life for my fellows, particularly the young who were coming into a world that seemed more and more miserable and barren of hope. As far as I could see the War On Drugs was not really about whether the use of these substances was wrong or dangerous. The War was about whether the basic motivation of life should be avoidance of pain or discomfort by doing what you are told you should do and not doing what you are told you must NOT do, or whether one’s life should be basically motivated by discovering and doing what will lead to more pleasure and satisfaction in both the present and future. In simple terms, should life be a prison or a party?

Over the years I had found music a constant source of inspiration. It not only enhanced my higher times but helped me from sinking into terminal depression when my chosen ambitions and purposes seemed thwarted through opposition or lack of support. In several periods I had tried to develop myself as a performing musician, solo or in groups of friends with similar tastes. Now I realized there was little chance of a career in that area. I had developed a few tunes and songs I enjoyed playing, from which I gained some satisfaction, particularly my rock and roll “anthem” Marijuana, with its defiant chorus ” I don’t care if you call it a crime, I’m gonna use it any old time, Marijuana, Marijuana”. I could get high just from playing that, if for no other reason than that since 1995 I had played it hundreds of times while happily out of my box. But venues for live music were rapidly decreasing in number, particularly since the introduction of the ban on smoking in public places. Those venues could choose from a huge number of acts with greater technical and performance skills than mine.

Anyway, I had to concede after a couple of attempts at open mic or jamming evenings that I would now never overcome my stage fright handicap. From birth my mother had unwittingly developed in me, by lack of encouragement, a shyness and absence of self-confidence about public performance of any kind. Although we all have a natural instinct to seek approval and respect from others, she believed that drawing attention to oneself was a sure-fire way of attracting disapproval, criticism and hostility. Whenever I came close to an opportunity to demonstrate publicly what a pleasant, talented or clever individual I was, I was crippled by dumbness, embarrassment and a trembling fear of rejection that would further reduce my confidence. This stage fright could be at least partially suspended by smoking ganja, marijuana, cannabis. I had discovered that since at least the mid-60s most popular musicians had composed, recorded and performed their music while high on the forbidden weed.

My closest friend in Oxford in 1990, Sandi Connell-Hinkes, who tragically killed herself because she could not divorce her husband to be my partner, claimed to be the Virgin in Virgin Records. She said she had helped Richard Branson develop his business and when Virgin recording studios were created in Shipton, Oxfordshire, she became “chief cook, bottle-washer and joint-roller to the stars”. She told me of many acts for which she had provided a steady supply of reefer and her joke motto was “superstars skin up on Fender”. While I don’t know if that was true, her funeral party at Branson’s house in Woodstock saw several known recording acts perform in tribute and I reckon few of the hundreds of guests were not smoking cannabis. I personally helped clear hundreds of roaches off the lawn with the other debris afterward.

With Sandi’s help I discovered a couple of joints suspended my habitual inhibitions, allowed me to put in my best and opened up inspiration so I could embellish or enhance my performance. All the other musicians I played with after that were met through our mutual use of cannabis. All our jamming or practice sessions and performances were preceded by shared pipes or joints of the best weed we could get our hands on. This was assisted by the fact that dealers of the best dope tended to hang around with people in the live music scene. In recent years I think cocaine has largely taken over in this role since genuine marijuana has been forced off the market though, since there is much more secrecy in the use of that drug, I have no direct experience except the few occasions I have declined a free “line”.

Anyway, in early 2009, I couldn’t arrange any more than occasional, usually one-off, deals of less than fully satisfactory grass or hash. I had lost touch with the live music scene and abandoned any hopes of a performing career. Yet, while waiting for better inspiration about what new career direction I could pursue that might take advantage of the enormous variety of experiences I had accumulated over 23 years of exploring and using cannabis, I started experimenting with playing electric guitar embellishment over my favourite records from all the way back to early Beatles. I found I had developed from copying artists I admired like J J Cale and Eric Clapton a minimalist but amusing style that I called the “Chuckle”, since it emphasized cheerful humour more than technical wizardry. I began uploading some of these improvisations to YouTube. They were full of mistakes, since they were no more than improvised jamming. I thought they might amuse or inspire younger musicians, sharing whatever skills in performance and experimentation I had developed over the years. At least they might convey my belief that in playing music the present time enjoyment of the musician is more important than any effort to impress a record-buying public who are faced with choices between an overwhelming variety of past and present well-hyped artists demonstrating technical excellence in hundreds of genres. Music is for pleasure not profit. I avoided any mention or depiction of drug use. Mostly all I could get at the time were legal highs like Spice smoking mix and Party Pills.

While waiting for inspiration on how best to resume my chosen career of sharing truth about cannabis, or replace it with something else equally worthwhile, I got drawn into the idea of assisting Frankie Dougan with his projects. Like me he was a likable eccentric with an unusual life history. He had been a popular DJ in the 1980s hey-day of Disco. The high spots of his career had been long spells as resident record-changer in high-class hotels in Hong Kong and Switzerland, in the days where success for such establishments depended on the DJ’s ability to combine knowledge of current hit records with empathy for the current “audience” in a way that kept the majority of punters happily dancing till closing time and leaving with the intention to come back for more next week. During the 90s changes in music and club culture made redundant the voice-over DJ, hit singles, oldies and goldies. With increased use of Ecstasy and cocaine, would-be dancers preferred a non-stop seamless flow of repetitive beats with no interruptions from the DJ. We didn’t care what the tune was called, the name of the artist or record label. All we wanted was music that most of us found easy or irresistible to dance to, without sudden changes in rhythm that confused us or caused the majority to sit down again. Frankie failed to make the necessary transition to meet the demands of the new wave of customers. He ended up in Spain, where middle-aged package holiday tourists liked to re-live their younger days to the sounds of the 60s and 70s.

When, like myself, Frankie realised that he was too old to continue with what he was doing and the life-style was no longer satisfying, he returned to his native Glasgow to support an aging mother and look around for some other way to occupy his latter years. He got into what he perceived a valuable project, to resurrect and popularise the story of Mary, Queen of Scots. To him she was a national hero on a par with William Wallace, Robert the Bruce and Robert Burns. Frankie wanted to exhume her remains from Westminster Abbey and return them to her native land, with a huge fanfare of ceremony and publicity intended to create a new wave of national pride and patriotism that should ultimately lead to true independence for this underdog “nation”.

I bought into this idea. I was impressed by his fervor and enthusiasm. All the other folks in our age group seemed to have accepted they were redundant and unemployable, settling into a hopeless depression over the bleak prospects facing themselves and the national culture. For the divorced and widowed, social life to break the monotony of watching TV all day seemed to consist of nothing more than boozing into mind numbness with depressed cronies, pretending interest in football and discussing politics they could only complain about without affecting.

Frank had done considerable research. I got the idea that with my skills and experience I might help him put together some video documentary on the subject. He had got several MPs to discuss in the Scottish Parliament the idea of returning Mary’s bones to Scotland, and stimulated some lively debate on the subject in internet forums. Authorities in London told him it was out of the question. I suggested the idea we could just go to London, break in to the Abbey and dig up the remains ourselves. I know that’s absurd but men faced with the idea that their lives have become insignificant clutch at straws.

With my encouragement Frank got down to the task of writing a play about the trial and execution of the sad queen. I myself began doing research into historical records about her life and death. Unfortunately the more I learned, the more I realised the project was a non-starter. Mary was no more a heroine than her nemesis Elizabeth I of England. She despised Scotland and cared nothing for the people. Reading old letters I discovered Elizabeth was probably more intelligent overall, though as crazy as any other person who considers God wants them to rule a nation of brute slaves. Eventually I discovered that Mary’s own expressed wish was that her remains be returned to France, the only place she was ever happy in her otherwise miserable life.

I tried to let Frank down gently and pull out of the project. I didn’t want his feelings so hurt that he lost all purpose in life. I just started seeing him less often. He helped me a few times to get some hash through an old friend but otherwise was leading me into heavier use of alcohol which alarmed me since it was causing me health problems and leading me towards depression. Since I was becoming morbid and talking about death, Frank seemed to get the idea I would leave him what remained of my inheritance. I wanted him to assist me in appealing against the police corruption which had got me convicted as a sex offender, clearing my name and ending the harassment, but he didn’t want to take the risk.

I realise I cannot continue telling the story at this pace. I seem to be wandering too deeply into areas you don’t need to know about. I had wanted to set the scene for the arrival of this woman Jacinth Preston into my life. It would be better to give you a lightning synopsis of my life instead. I would like to give you my past life in more detail and I will do that later if I can.

Since 1986 my life has been mainly about cannabis, using it to explore all areas of life and sharing my discoveries with others. In 2001 I realised the idea of having cannabis legalised was unreal, though its use would probably continue to increase. I returned from Glastonbury to Scotland to support my dying mother, from whom I had been estranged for many years. She dangled my inheritance before me as an incentive. I thought with this I might find a way to convert my experiences into some form of entertainment, in writing and/or video, that might amuse, educate and inspire others, providing me with friends and a social life to keep me happy for the rest of my life. Instead I got stuck in a complicated conflict with the Old Dear. While trying to love and support her I found her constant nagging and criticism whittled away all the confidence and self-respect I had built up over 30 years living in the South of England among people of closer values and interests to my own. Mum managed to arrange so I was stuck in Renfrewshire in the sort of miserable culture I had managed to escape all these years ago. I managed to make occasional contact with cannabis and whilst elevated felt it was right to resume my activities to spread the truth about the subject on the burgeoning internet which seemed to present much greater opportunities for freedom of speech than I had previously found available in the basically state-controlled media of TV and press. I began uploading to the new video-hosting sites, first Ourmedia then YouTube, whose creators were quicker to respond to their users’ requirements (and used cannabis themselves). The local police (possibly controlled by national Intelligence, who had been on my case off and on since 1986) had me harassed by local neds or criminals who were given rumours about me that I was a paedo beastie. One night during a spell where I was under great pressure, depressed about being unable to get out of homelessness, I collapsed in the street while drunk. I was framed of sexual offences, with evidence that I saw was obviously false (when I eventually saw it).

When my mother died I was misled in my confusion into changing my plea to guilty, persuaded the matter would be ended with a light sentence. Instead I found I was put on the Sex Offenders Register, which meant the Police would monitor my every move and had the right to come into my house without warning at any time. Since I was well-known as a campaigner for cannabis, they could be sure there was a fair chance of finding me in possession, thus I could face more charges leading to imprisonment. A woman I had befriended on YouTube, who praised and supported my work, who called herself Euterpe Jones (real name Laura Jean MacDonald) persuaded me to move to Vancouver, where she would help me to appeal and clear my name away from the intense fear isolated friendless in Paisley. The authorities led me to understand that at the same time as my sentencing was reported in the media I would be moved to a homeless hostel in one of the roughest areas of Glasgow specifically for Sex Offenders, where the residents were open to violence and harassment from gangs of local neds. Seeing that murder was now on the cards, I fled as a fugitive to Canada, where I was told I would get support from Marc Emery and his associates who were at that point, September 2006, gathering great support for their political push to legalize marijuana.

I loved Vancouver, a place that was obviously on the up as much as Central Scotland was on the way down. With easily available BC bud, cheaper and stronger than anything in Scotland, I came quickly out of paranoia and began a recovery to my earlier confidence and extroversion (and heroism). I didn’t meet Marc Emery but his associates told me they were unwilling to openly support me or associate with me, in case that gave Vancouver Police an excuse to raid their premises since I was a convicted criminal on the run. Euterpe Jones turned out to be a creep, living as a hermit in a basement on welfare. She had me living in what was basically a cupboard, paying half the rent for the whole flat, which money she used to buy her own weed (and cocaine). It seems she had misread me as some sort of sexual submissive, so she was angry when I refused to submit to her dominance. I had mistakenly told her earlier, before my mother’s death, about my coming inheritance. To pay my rent I began working overnight cleaning restaurants, hard manual work as illegal labour, paid miserly in cash. It tired me so much I spent the rest of the time exhausted, sleeping all the daytime except on my one day off. Euterpe pushed me to get all of my inheritance transferred to a bank account in her name, since I had no ID or credentials to get my own. I began to have images of an unidentified corpse found in an alley or floating in the bay, with this weird nutter living a life of luxury for years and no-one ever investigating.

Fortunately my brother was suspicious and refused to co-operate, at which point Euterpe turned openly nasty. Out of the blue she railed at me when I was in bed, saying I had 15 minutes to get out before she called the police. I didn’t believe that at first, so carried on snoozing. When she turned into a shrieking witch, I grabbed what I could and ran. I had to abandon my video tapes and photographs then, while hiding in the park, realised I had forgotten to pick up my passport, driving license, birth certificate and divorce papers (Euterpe had mentioned a possibility of a fake marriage to get Canadian citizenship, though there was never any sexual attraction after I first saw her). Also in the same overlooked stash was $1000 in cash, which I had saved from my wages as a cleaner to use as a deposit in getting a flat of my own.

Now I was a homeless fugitive with no ID, who couldn’t even make use of the local welfare or charity facilities. I managed to survive for 3 weeks living in a bicycle shed, down at Kitsilano Beach and with other homeless characters in a car park above a video rental store. I made some videos in a 24-hour store with internet facilities and posted them on YouTube, pointing out I was not a Sex Offender but a victim of police harassment because of my activities to legalize cannabis. I had managed to save £300 in UK cash hidden from Euterpe, which converted to $600. I lived frugally, one McDonalds special offer brunch daily, coffees and a few cheap items from the supermarket. My feet were cold, so I changed the trainers I was wearing for leather cowboy boots in a charity shop. These were much more suitable but alas, consistent with my luck of late, the change somehow dislodged the $500 in large denomination notes I had been carrying in one of my woolen socks! Eventually I ended up on hand-out meals and sandwiches at the Mental Patients Association, where I also used the internet facilities to look for accommodation. I found one room available which was incredibly cheap. It was unbelievably suitable, the main tenant being a young rock musician and 420 friendly (IE: a dope-smoker). I told the guy what I looked like – tall man all in black with suitcase and guitar – so it was no problem at all for the Border Patrol and police to pick me up on the way to our arranged meeting. I realised later, when I discovered Brandon Lee was Bruce Lee’s brother, that the advert had been put on Craigslist by dear old Euterpe, frightened I would turn up suddenly at her place since I still had the key.

3 scary weeks in Canadian prison, attacked by other prisoners who somehow heard a rumour I was a kiddy-diddler, flown back under armed guard, 4 months in Greenock Prison, where again I somehow had a reputation as a paedo. I couldn’t get a lawyer to actually defend me, two I wanted were mysteriously scared off. The only one I could get told me I would not get out until I changed my plea to guilty. I did so as I had no choice. Again I found on release it was planned to move me to a homeless hostel for sex offenders, where I would probably be recognised by one of the thugs who had threatened in prison they were going to rip me. Thanks to my inheritance from Mum, I managed to move to Glasgow and rent a comfy wee flat from a Pakistani landlord who didn’t ask too many questions as long as I paid promptly in cash.

For a year I tried to develop a musical group with a young man and his friends, but this was eventually derailed by one of his associates discovering my past and attempting to extort cash. During the winter 2008/2009 I was getting anonymous phone calls threatening violence and murder, with the same old allegations. Meanwhile the police were continuing to harass me through sudden visits at times when I might have been expected to have the smell of marijuana in the house.

Now, at last, we come towards the arrival of Jacinth Preston in my life. During the winter I had been meeting up with Frank a few times a week. We would meet at a cafe or pub in Shawlands, one of the more up-market shopping areas in the South Side of Glasgow, starting on coffee and chatting, just the two of us or with a few other cronies of our acquaintance. It was good to have the human contact and conversation since apart from a couple of internet friends in Canada and Holland, I was alone most of the time, not really suitable for such a social animal as myself.

As time went on, we tended to spend less time on the coffee. We would get the “2 for the price of 1″ meals, me treating Frank since he was dependent on Benefit while I had my inheritance money. Although I was trying to steer away from alcohol, intoxication being the root cause of most of my problems in the past, Frank would suggest getting a bottle of the cheap wine the pub offered as a promotion. Enjoying the relaxation and lively chat that followed, we would get another bottle. My resistance was wearing down and Frank was leading me down the rocky road to alcoholism. When the pub finally closed we would transfer to Frank’s flat, where I would roll joints – if I had the ingredients – Frank would play compilations of his favourite records as a DJ and we would drink cheap white wine till common sense told me to leave and go home, often in the dawn. Usually I had to pay the price of spending the whole next day in bed feeling extremely ill. There were voices in my head telling me I was drifting down the wrong road with Frank, but I had no other direction clear in my life and I liked the company, since it prevented feelings of loneliness. Sometimes I went out on my own, particularly when I had hash (poor quality) or herbal E’s and legal smoking mix. I drifted around central Glasgow among the younger binge set, revving up the excitement at live music gigs, hoping for a chance encounter with some suitable female companion, but mostly just feeling sad that I was obviously too old for that scene and feeling lonely when I didn’t find anyone to even chat with.

A few times when I left the pub with Frank with that alkie craving for more-more, we went exploring local drinking holes that stayed open later, since there was more chance of encountering female company there than just boozing back at Frank’s. One of these had a door near the toilet leading straight into a big local night-club called “Tusk”. We used this to slip into the club free. It was quite an enjoyable experience to be again amongst the flashing lights and pounding music. Nobody seemed to take offense at the old guys dancing wildly towards the end. One night I was with Frankie at the usual pub when another acquaintance managed to get me £100 of hash after a long period of ‘drought’. At first I was nipping out to stand in a nearby doorway for a quick furtive puff through my trusty little pipe. But I made the mistake of carrying on drinking, matching Frank glass for glass. While he was busy chatting up a young Marilyn Monroe lookalike – rumoured to be a cross-dressing male – asking her if she wanted to play Mary, Queen of Scots in his projected film/play, I took a couple of tokes from my pipe, believing I was discretely hiding under cover of the table. To be honest, I was getting back towards my earlier attitude of “I don’t give a fuck about your law, I’m doing nothing wrong!”

Well, when it neared closing time, we decided to go round to the Tusk. We went in through the adjoining pub but were spotted and had to pay. Although we were already drunk, we continued to knock back both beers and spirits at exorbitant prices and my expense of course. I must have been drunk, certainly more drunk than I realised, as I started on an old crazy game of jumping from one drink to another, Southern Comfort to Pernod and blackcurrant and so on!

I split from Frank. Nothing is less likely to pull a bird than two old guys dancing manically with each other. I had stripped off my long leather coat, my jacket and my woolly jumper and was down to my waistcoat and an old green collarless grandpa shirt. I was really buzzing now, rehabilitating my long unused skills as a party animal and fire-starter. I love manic total immersion dancing, as I’m quite good at it and love building up a good sweat and getting the heart racing. I’m getting a bit embarrassed now, telling you this, as I realise I was more crazy and less innocent than I had remembered until now but in the interests of honesty I shall continue.

Although it was unconscious at the time, my attitude was “I’m dying soon. I don’t want to be moping about the great times long ago, now gone and unrecoverable. I want to have the wildest fun I can, just like the great old times and show these younger folks a good example. When you come to a place for dancing, you DANCE and enjoy it.” Over a few weekends of coming here I had realised that most of the folk in the club were probably on E’s. Friday night was the traditional time for taking said drug. The bright eyes and slow consumption of half-pints confirmed it, along with their eagerness to join in with manic dancing as soon as someone set them an example. The excitement and joy level in the joint was rising rapidly. Just like in my hey-days at the parties and festivals of southern England my fellow-dancers learned from me the advantages of turning their backs to those sad characters who stand at the bar nursing their glasses and staring glumly at the dancers. I realised there was a lot of cocaine being used at the club too. There was a steady stream of people going upstairs to the DJs box for a few minutes each. In the toilets there was a queue of people waiting for the cubicles every time I went and no-one but myself using the urinal.

I really had a big head on now, sure I was personally ensuring everyone present had the most exciting night they could remember. I was cruising around the place at speed, alternating bursts of dancing with storming off to a remote bar for another drink, then having a barely concealed toke through my pipe of a piece of so-called “pollen” from the little lump I had broken off my main stash, which was in my jacket pocket. My ill-fitting dentures had been hurting my gums, so to avoid the pain distracting me I had slipped them out and put them in my jacket pocket, along with my credit card. Usually when I went out knowing I might get drunk, I left my wallet at home and carried a limited amount of cash, no more than I would want to lose in the event of the unforeseen like a mugging. This time I had forgotten and thought the credit card would be safer in my jacket.

I was riding on a good high now, better than I could remember for years. Even if the hash wasn’t genuine I was giving myself a great placebo effect, all cares forgotten, all attention on the current happy heartbeat. Suddenly when I went to pay for a drink, I found my wallet wasn’t in my back pocket where it should be. The bubble burst and panic came in. Drunkenness is great fun unless you need to think clearly. I retraced my steps as much as my foggy mind could remember them. Back to the stool where I had been sitting last. Back to the bar where I had last bought a drink. Ask the bar staff if I had left it on the bar. I couldn’t remember whether I had paid for the last one from the wallet or from loose change in my pocket. Back to my coat and jacket to check all the pockets. Back to the place where I’d drank the second last drink. Looking into everyone’s eyes for some giveaway sign. I couldn’t believe anyone could have picked my pocket without me noticing, so I thought I must have put the wallet on the bar while waiting for my change, then forgotten to pick it up by sticking the change straight into my pocket.

Then I lost it. I sat on a stool where I had drunk my last drink, loaded my pipe and sucked a toke, barely covered by my hand. Summoning up the super-powers of the cannabis I got very angry and started ranting loudly. “You don’t steal MY fucking wallet! Not MINE” Absolutely determined, although I didn’t know how, I would get to the bottom of this and get the wallet back. This approach, believe it or not, had worked for me several times in the past, such as the occasion in Glastonbury when some new age traveler had nicked my video camera off a bench beside me, thinking I was an undercover police officer.

Out of the side of my eye, I saw two large bouncers heading straight towards me. Suddenly it was all coming on top. That horrible dread engulfed me. I could hear the cell door clanging behind me. Totally vulnerable again, exactly where my police enemies wanted me, locked up with no-one on the outside to help get me out. Later on I couldn’t decide whether something had been slipped in my last drink or whether it was just a combination of drunkenness and my unwillingness to confront the situation where my anger might get me into even more serious trouble. I just found myself going passive, falling into unconsciousness and slipping off the stool, banging my head on the floor as I went down. My attitude was “I don’t care any more. You decide what happens next”. And they did.

Distantly, through the buzzing in my head, I felt myself being dragged along the floor by my feet. Along through the cocktail bar, across a hallway. My loose-fitting trousers and my underpants were being pulled down to my crotch. I heard some kindly voice saying “at least give him his dignity”. I was in that strange mood of the righteous victim that says this is all wrong and you’ll pay for it. Bump, bump, bump went my arse and head on every one of a long flight of stairs. Across the reception, out the front doors and they dumped my hot sweaty body on the steps, of what used to be a large cinema.

I lay there panting and sweating, at first just relieved it hadn’t gone quite as seriously as it might have done. Somehow there was a vague hope that if I did nothing, everything would get put right again. But as the seconds passed I realised more and more how wrong things were. I was in my underclothes. I had lost my wallet. I had lost my teeth! This was all wrong. There was nothing wrong with cannabis. I should be a local hero, rather than treated as a criminal. The shame and indignity of my position came to me at the same time as the cold hit me. I got to my feet, at first determined to storm back in and create a loud fuss till I got everything back. How dare they abuse me as a drug user when it was common knowledge there were hundreds of people in there using much worse drugs?

Fortunately, my guardian angel stepped in and guided me in a much wiser direction. I still had a lump of dope in my pocket. Top priority was to get out of that vulnerable position. I still had at least £10 cash in my pocket. I strolled across the street and jumped into a taxi. When we had gone about 30 yards, round the corner came an ambulance, lights flashing and siren blaring. As it screeched to a halt outside the Tusk I began shuddering as I suddenly realised the enormity of what I had just escaped. That ambulance was for me. For 2 years I had behaved impeccably as a model citizen, careful to commit no crime apart from the cannabis. I always waited for the correct colour of traffic light. I could have been lying in a hospital bed within a half hour, from where I could be transferred to a police cell, facing charges of assaulting nurses while drunk, just like it says in my record, with no witnesses to confirm my pleas of innocence. With no teeth, looking a repulsive creep! Yes, a narrow escape indeed.

Back home, after a steadying spliff, I phoned the club basically threatening to create a massive stink unless I had all my property returned intact. Unfortunately, I had to deliver my message to the cleaner, who was possibly too offended by my rude tone to even pass on the message.

Next day I had a little chat on Messenger with my friend Max in Holland. Knowing the gist of my previous experiences with the law, and understanding how stupid a drunk can be, he suggested that I had actually been very lucky to get off so lightly. I realised he was right. I had been foolish. If you get high with cannabis, what’s the point of also getting drunk? It can only lead to trouble.

When I went to the club later, I got my wallet back, apparently found in a corner by a cleaner. I had to wait till the Monday to get my coat and other clothing back from the owner of the club. He went on and on about how wrong it was to smoke cannabis in his club. I apologised. He showed no interest when I searched my coat and jacket pockets and found not only about £95 worth of hash was missing but the false teeth were gone as well. How evil and disgusting is that. There’s no profit in taking my teeth, just maliciousness. I never went near the Tusk again and ceased going to Shawlands, except to see my dentist.

My new dentures took nearly 6 weeks to make, during which I could eat only soft food. I couldn’t even break a piece of lettuce without cutting into my gum. The new dentures cost me £720. They didn’t look like my natural teeth since the dentist had no model to go on except my few remaining natural teeth. I was too embarrassed to go out much. Even Frank had to come visit me when he wanted to see me. I was off the wine. The credit card turned out to be in one of the secret pockets in my jacket. Possibly I would have lost that too if it had been in the wallet.

Before the Tusk teeth incident, I got up one night at a jam session and played a couple of numbers. I got applause and gained great satisfaction from this action, but it didn’t really inspire me to attempt more performances as a solo act. After I performed a middle-aged blonde came and leaned on me, telling me drunkenly I was great and should do much more. I could see casual sex might be on offer but I couldn’t make out whether she had a partner, at the pub or at home. Or indeed whether she was sane.

A few weeks later I chanced into the Star Bar at Eglinton Toll to find this woman was the singer, backed by a pretty good band of country musicians. For a couple of weeks I attended her gigs on Fridays and Saturdays, even getting up for a bit of dancing with other members of the predominantly female audience. I declined invitations to get up and sing, embarrassed by the lack of teeth. One Saturday at the end of her gig, when I was congratulating her on a good performance, she told me I should come along on Sunday afternoon to a pub called The Ship in the city centre, saying they had an open mic jam session of mostly country music and we could look into the possibility of performing a couple of numbers together, me accompanying her on guitar.

Sunday afternoon I went into town, went to a stall in the Barras market and bought some herbal E’s along with some legal smoking mix. I took one of the E’s and, once I noticed some effects, drifted along to the Ship. I was a couple of hours late and couldn’t see the woman, though I realised she hadn’t actually said she would be there herself. The Ship was a large bar crowded with people in their 50s and 60s sitting around tables. The music was old-fashioned so, feeling cheerful from the pill, I started dancing around a little on my own, partly to show what I had to offer but more just for the pleasure dancing gives me. Although I had only a couple of pints, I was told by the barmaid when I ordered another the manager had instructed her not to serve me as I had already had enough. Huh! So dancing is an offense now? Or is it the smiling? I took a huff and left, having a more pleasant time in another pub with music of a more modern flavour, confining myself to head-nodding and foot-tapping.

The following Saturday, my female singer friend (who may have been called Rose, but the fact I can’t remember her name speaks volumes in itself) asked me again to the Ship, this time clearly so we could get to know each other better. Although it excited me to have a date for the first time in years, it didn’t impress me when she added “bring plenty of money because I like a few whiskeys when I go out for fun”. Nevertheless I turned up promptly and smiled when I saw her at the bar. When I tried to order drinks I was informed “You were already barred”. My date wasn’t interested in my embarrassment. It didn’t fit in with her plans to come with me to another establishment. She said “Give me a call sometime”. I scribbled my number and said “You give me a call.” I never saw her again.

That was the end of my attempts to make a social life in Glasgow. If that was the best they could offer, I could go without. I had to stop drinking, anyway, as it was creating havoc with my guts and only increasing my gloom about impending death. One day Frank called me to say he had arranged for me to get some dope through the mutual friend who had got me the ill-fated lump of “pollen” I had lost in the Tusk. Although this friend, Bill, was reluctant to supply more after that scandalous affair, he relented when Frank explained how down I was about the whole matter. I had to go along to the pub to put up the cash in front. I carefully stuck to coffee while Frank told us excitedly about this new woman he had met. He had told us he wasn’t looking for a girlfriend, but this woman, who was surprisingly black, had picked him up. She had kept him up half the night talking about all kinds of interesting subjects. Frank said he would collect the dope from Bill next day and drop it off at my place.

I had been spending my time playing long jam sessions improvising electric lead guitar along with my current favourite tracks, mostly George Thoroughgood, JJ Cale, Bob Marley, UB40 and Bob Dylan’s “God Knows”. I became obsessed with the last number, one day repeating it non-stop for about 9 hours till I had blisters on two of my fingers. I recorded these sessions on video so I could replay and analyse them. Reasoning that I never knew if I would get another chance, I uploaded some of these tracks to YouTube, though I didn’t get round to the very best ones. I was really just getting my fingers and improvisation skills into better shape, determined to fit new strings and make much better recordings when I got my new teeth and could afford to smile while playing.

Next day Frank phoned me to say he had my hash. He said his new friend Jacinth was coming round to his place to make dinner and she was bringing enough for me too, so I could pick up my dope when I came for dinner. I had recently bought a new laptop so I could transfer and edit HD video from my new camera. This laptop had a much faster engine and a Blu-Ray drive specifically for processing HD, which my previous laptop had been unable to handle. I gave Frank my old laptop, because his ancient desktop PC had started running very slow and crashing. I went round to his place early as I was still helping him learn how to use it and transfer his data from his old computer. In retrospect I think he wanted to use my hash with Jacinth, since she stated she preferred cannabis to alcohol and he expected the traditional “wee bit” for acting as middle man.

I drove Frank round to Queens Drive to collect Jacinth. We didn’t see which house she came out of, she just appeared out of the shadows a minute after I parked. She slipped into the back seat. I registered a soft spoken rather timid but friendly woman, very black with gleaming eyes and an accent that was difficult to understand. It impressed me that a rather slight woman should so trustingly get into a car with 2 large, rather eccentric older men, especially when the media were depicting Glasgow as a very dangerous place for unaccompanied females. Indeed we were just across the road from the park where a woman had been brutally murdered just 9 months earlier. It occurred to me to wonder if she was in fact a prostitute.

She made us a chicken casserole with rice, using what she said was a Caribbean recipe, heavy on spices with garlic. We had a few glasses of wine and she shared the joints I rolled before and after dinner. I told her I was impressed that a woman felt safe in a flat with 2 men, since most Glaswegian women would carefully avoid such a situation. I liked her very much and warmed to demonstrating what a gentleman I am, probing gently to make sure the conversation ran along lines she was interested in. I got the laptop going and invited her to show us her native Tobago.

I was puzzled by the situation. Why would a couple who were just getting to know each other want the presence of a third party all evening? Occasionally they would touch each other or drop a “darling” or “sweetheart” into the conversation. I kept steering the chat in the direction of finding out more about her, yet Frank kept pulling it back to himself. He kept telling us “this is a good song”, without looking to see what we thought, while it became obvious to me she wasn’t really interested. I began to wonder what she could possibly see in him.

I began to see an unpleasant chauvinist side to Frank that was rather repulsive, embarrassing to me as a male. He talked down to her, ignored what she said, and addressed me as though she wasn’t there. Whenever I managed to get her talking about something she was interested in, Frank would just cut in rudely and go on about what he was interested in, the pictures of Jesus and saints on his wall, what a great “international” DJ he was, how Mary, Queen of Scots was Scotland’s greatest national hero and how we was going to be the second greatest for restoring her to her deserved glory. He was embarrassing me by failing to recognise my signals that she really wasn’t interested, and failing to recognise what she obviously was interested in.

Eventually he got round to letting her tell me about her business idea, which he assured us he was personally going to make sure was successful. Once she got started she became lively and enthusiastic, mostly addressing me, telling me when I knew the whole idea I would want to be a partner in the business. She was sitting beside me on the settee. Frank was on the other side of me in his armchair, the only position he ever sat in the room. Occasionally she would touch me with her long-nailed fingers, on the arm, leg or the back of my hand, as one might do with an old trusted friend.

She was a therapist, she said. A beautician. She had rented a workspace in the city centre salon of a hairdresser. She worked alongside 2 gay male hair stylists, who she mimicked and parodied with camp gestures. She had invented a new cream that rejuvenated skin, using natural ingredients overlooked by the major cosmetics manufacturers. She paid £800 a month to rent this space and so far she was running at a loss. This is where we would come in, helping with advertising. So far she was just attracting customers into the salon to demonstrate the magical powers of this new lotion. It repaired broken cells, removed lines and restored a healthy youthful glow to tired skin. The climate in Scotland was cruel and harsh to female skin. This cream, which she kept referring to as “the product”, would sell itself. She was bringing in clients, giving them a facial massage with “the product” and sending them away with a free sample to apply at home. They would be so amazed by the immediate improvement in skin tone, they would be back for repeat orders bringing all their friends as well. I was well impressed by her enthusiasm and apparently genuine scientific presentation. I told her honestly that even if she was bluffing, I was sure she would be successful, since she had convinced me already.

Eventually she started yawning and went through to Frank’s bedroom. Frank was up for the usual session of wine drinking and discussing his own genius and hobby horses, his attitude being that she would be ready and waiting whenever it suited him to go to bed. I just got up, dressed and left.

Frank had me round again the next evening, “and don’t forget to bring your dope”. We ate what remained of the chicken casserole, again with wine and later Bailey’s Irish cream, though I noticed Jacinth stopped after a couple of glasses. This time I made sure the conversation stayed on lines she was interested in. I got Google Earth on the computer and we flew over Tobago so she could show us where she lived. She told me a street name, which I failed to find, though I didn’t notice this as strange at the time. I was just impressed to find a female relaxed and trusting in my company as I hadn’t met one in 7 years in Scotland, and I told her so.

I told her I was interested in black culture. She enthused about the Carnival in March, the event of the social calendar in Trinidad and Tobago. I found lots of videos on YouTube and yes, the carnival truly was a happy spectacle, enjoyed by black and white alike.

I had recently had a minor operation to remove some skin tucks from my eyelid. I was grateful when she delicately applied the antibiotic cream for me. I found it difficult to do myself since it had to be done with the eye closed. It came out in conversation that I was partly deaf in my left ear which was why I had to keep directing my right ear towards her to hear her clearly. Now she jumped in to say she could cure that with a special treatment using Hopi Indian candles. Very few therapists used this treatment so she was going to specialise in that too. When it transpired I was rundown and tired and suffered from backache she fed her number into my phone telling me I must let her give me a holistic massage. Again she began telling me I must come into business with her. I pointed out I would have to be convinced first of the thoroughness of the business plan.

Frank was getting drunk and boorish. I couldn’t understand why she was going with him. They seemed to have nothing in common. He would rudely interrupt while she was talking, either to say she was talking rubbish or to start ranting about something else only he was interested in, usually how Roman Catholicism was the only true religion or how Mary Queen of Scots needed to be recognised to save Scotland. While she was on the computer finding information to show us about her 2 nephews, eminent scholars in Trinidad and Philadelphia, Frank yelled roughly at the back of her head “Hey, you. Turn round and look at me when I’m talking to you” I winced as I wouldn’t even talk to a dog like that, and he certainly wouldn’t use that tone to any man. I realised that she talked to him timidly, though with anger in her eyes he failed to notice, yet she was open and enthusiastic towards me. While he was out of the room refilling wine glasses, she turned to me saying “What am I going to do with this man?” Then she showed me something on the computer saying “Don’t tell Frank about this”. It was a large pink house on the coast of Tobago, quite impressive. She said “This is the house my mother left me”, pointed to a part of the screen where it said “US$1000 per night” then clicked to another page. She explained it was worth $1 million, it was already booked until October, that’s when she intended to fly out and move in and she wanted to have the business all ready for mass production by then. Was I ready to join as a partner?

I told her I already had run my own successful business, that I had good experience in management and marketing and that I was sure I could help her whether as a partner or not. I just wanted her to run all her ideas past me so I could check them out and make suggestions for improvements where I could. So far she only appeared at Frank’s after 6 pm, she went to bed before midnight, so it was assumed she spendt all day busy at her salon.

I was beginning to warm to the idea of helping someone who seemed worthy of assistance and even starting to consider the idea that I would be a more suitable partner for her than Frank. I was also beginning to enthuse about the idea of getting active on an interesting business project to replace my failed ambitions as a leading figure in the drive to liberate cannabis. We talked more about her product and her past, ignoring Frank’s rude interruptions and demands that we listen to his own genius. It amazed me that I was learning far more about this woman than he was, that he was not even interested in her, yet he expected to keep on shagging her while having no other involvement in her life. I was also noticing what I’d failed to notice for months, that as he gets drunk he turns into a most unpleasant bigoted and selfish creature.

Before I left, Jacinth asked me if I knew how to find and download films from the internet. I proudly revealed that unless it’s a mostly obscure and unpopular film, I can do that easily, and free. The films she wanted were “Madame X” and “Imitation of Life”, both starring Lana Turner. I immediately searched for the torrents on the laptop I had given Frank, found them on the Pirate Bay, and started downloading. They were slow because they each had only 1 or 2 seeds, so they had only partly downloaded when I left. I had to get out as I couldn’t take much more of Frank’s boorishness without getting angry. Frank told me next day that when the films were downloaded they were unable to watch them.

They had me round again the next day. I didn’t know whether it was so I would bring my hash, whether it was to continue presenting the business idea to me or whether one or both of them realised without my presence they might come to hostility over Frank’s chauvinist rudeness. Apart from the first night they met it seems the only time they spent alone together was in bed and there obviously wouldn’t have been much conversation there. We watched some more videos on YouTube about Tobago’s beaches and Carnival. I was rapidly growing to like the place and the people.

When I got home I was prompted to show good manners. I sent her a text telling her I thought she was a very nice person and I had thoroughly enjoyed listening to everything she had said. Although it was unstated I wanted to make it clear that Frank and I were two entirely separate people and I had no compulsion to agree with everything he said or did. I am a well-mannered chap. I nearly always contact my dealer after I get my stash home to thank them. I always thank the host(ess) before leaving a good party.

After 10 hours almost non-stop writing, I feel I must interject some points of concern that are now distracting me: I realise that telling the story in retrospect means both you and myself are getting a clearer understanding of what was actually happening than I had at the time. I am far from a stupid person but my perceptions at the time were obscured by my delight in having friends who gave me fresh hopes for the future at a time when my life and career seemed completely destroyed. My health had been very poor all winter and I was depressed at the idea I might soon die without getting to use the inheritance for which I had struggled through poverty so long.

I had begun to realise Frank had no real interest in me or my ambitions, but did have his eyes on my money. If I died with him as my only friend he might get all that money for his foolish Mary Queen of Scots nonsense. Other acquaintances had told me right from the start this was a crazy obsession of Frank’s and used to quickly move away whenever he got on to the subject. I knew he was crazy when he refused to listen to good sense I had dug up through my own research into the subject. I was just running on a crazy idea of my own that one can only play with the cards one is dealt. In other words, whoever God sends me as friends are who God wants me to help and work with. I must admit this absurd idea has continued to cause me trouble right up to the present.

I had stuck with Frank because I respected his naive Christian faith which caused him to espouse humanitarian causes, at least in speech, to assist the poor, dispossessed and addicted, though I pulled back when I realised he was fomenting anti-Islamic thought, pledging support to all-out war to eliminate the evil scourge of Islamic terrorism. This was confirmed when he was raided at home by Police investigating the idea he was inciting racism after he had some clearly bigoted articles printed in local free newspapers. At the time I had been considering using my inheritance to hire the now famous Amer Anwar to conduct my appeal against my false conviction, feeling that being of Muslim birth he was unlikely to be subject to covert control by Freemasonry, MI6 or other secret agencies, who seemed to have undue influence over all other “”defence” lawyers.

I also failed to notice in my enthusiasm for my new friendship that Jacinth showed no interest in my own life, only what she could get out of me. Frank had mentioned to me early on, while she was cooking that first dinner, “Don’t say anything to her about you know what”.

I had no idea how long it would take to tell even this little part of the story. Any reader might be already bored, yet I don’t know how to tell the story quicker without omitting relevant information. I’m not trying to tell a salable story, my purpose is more catharsis for myself and I want some record of the truth to survive me to counter the lies currently held on public record. There is a temptation now to just abandon this project and go back to the depressing idea that the lies and injustice will never be rectified. My savings have almost run out, I have arranged no other income for myself and it seems state agencies intend to be quite uncooperative about my attempts to arrange the welfare benefits for which I clearly qualify.

These points mentioned, and considering the improvements in my state of mind from have started the impossible task, I shall continue. I want some record of the facts – the most horrible being yet to come – before I make public attempts to have the injustice corrected. As you will see, I have good reason to fear that otherwise I might have my life rudely and covertly terminated as soon as I start to expose the evil and corruption without a strong ally.

Each time Jacinth told me/us about “the product” there was more information and the more believable her story seemed. She told us she wass making regular home visits to various clients, giving full body massage and application of the cream. The stories were detailed and seemed consistent one telling to the next. One lady was the hairdresser who had done her beautiful auburn braided hair attachments – at a cost of £300 as I recall – who was so delighted she wanted to be the UK agent for the product when Jacinth returned to Tobago. Another was a woman who lived a 20-mile train journey from Glasgow, paralyzed from the neck down from an accident 40 years ago, who was in constant pain and benefited greatly from Jacinth’s tender administrations.

Clearly Jacinth was a humanitarian philanthropist, a saint or angel more concerned with bringing relief to the hurting and beauty to the ugly than in making a million – though she was sure she would do that too when her product went into mass production. Another old friend of Jacinth’s, who had a bar in Philadelphia, wanted to be her main US agent and was sure she can quickly shift the product in 500-bottle consignments.

Jacinth told us she spent 16 years in the United States Air Force, 4 tours of 4 years, she had a son Nigel who was 21 and at university in the States, plus a divorced husband, also Nigel, still in the air force. At the end of each 4 year tour of duty she got a bonus of $4000 which she saved up, explaining the $16000 she has been using to live on and finance the research for her business.

After the Air Force, where her job consisted of giving written tests for promotion, mostly to officers above her own rank of sergeant, she considered entering Homeland Security with most of her colleagues. Despite the nature of her former job, she disagreed with the war in Afghanistan, indeed all war, and had been a regular cannabis user for many years, impressing her son’s friends by how youthful and turned on she is for her years.

Ganja is very popular and unrestricted in Tobago, which I am just going to love. Her Rasta hermit friend, Simon, grows the stuff in the woods and will be round with an incredibly cheap deal for me after a simple phone call. Her other friend Harris runs the popular jungle tours as I can see from his impressive website.

When she left the air force she applied for a job on the service which transports convicts from prison to prison by air (Con-Air in the movie) having the necessary high level security clearance, but her son objected because “it’s far too dangerous, Mom”. Instead she took a 4 year Master’s course in Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts on the Veterans Bill, which is where she invented her magic elixir for restoring beauty to the skin. “Every woman is obsessed with her skin”.

She knows all the properties of the over 40 natural ingredients, most of which have been used as remedies since time memorial in the cultures of different continents. She was the first person to think of putting them all together. She recited them all (frankincense, myrrh, tea tree, aloe vera, lemon tree, etc, etc) with their various healing properties. It never occured to me as odd that she had nothing on paper listing these ingredients and their various proportions in the product, though she had had enough for 500 bottles made up by a pharmacist round the corner from my house. This was currently stored in her bathroom waiting for her to bottle by hand.

She was already giving away several free samples a day just to gather rave testimonials and start wild-fire word of mouth promotion. Next week she would be handing 10 bottles in to an up-market beauty salon, with a demonstration to the staff of the correct way to apply it.

After graduating in Chemistry she came to Europe to observe how cosmetics are manufactured and marketed, while finalising her formula. She learned a lot in Switzerland, but found everything too expensive there. At that point I forgot that when I was in Switzerland in 1987 they wouldn’t even let black people in. A black American sharing a compartment with me was nearly sent back to Italy till he convinced them he was traveling straight through to France. I guess it’s easy to con a person who really wants to believe.

Satisfied with her answers to all my questions and starting to get on board I suggested it was time to give “the product” a name we will both feel good about promoting widely. I was already beginning to project powerful press releases for all the women’s magazines from Vogue and Cosmopolitan to Mail on Sunday and helping achieve her ambition of interview and endorsement by the legendary Oprah. She said she wants to call it “Pressy’s Moisture”, since Pressy was her nickname in the USAF. I was a little surprised she wanted me to make world-famous the name of her divorced ex-husband (Preston) but I decided if that’s what she wants, that’s what she’ll get.

I was surprised at how quickly I was becoming a close friend with a black woman – and she was very black indeed – since we had already had more conversation than I’d had with any other woman in Glasgow but my mother and my former dealer. Jacinth said she thought Scotland must be the saddest place in the world. She had come here to finish her research and get the patent because even in the States and the Caribbean there would be much more respect for a product whose label said it was developed and registered in the UK. But she reckoned the place was antiquated, crowded and depressingly sad, stuck in the Victorian age, a culture decaying while the rest of the world is developing. I had to agree with her and began to imagine how much my own health and happiness would improve to get out of this country alive and stay out. When I took off for Canada I thought I was seeing the last of this country and, my mother being dead, there was nothing and no-one here I would ever miss.

At one point she said briefly, while depicting how happy I could be in Tobago, “I would be willing to marry you to get you a Resident’s Permit”, then quickly passed on to some other subject. Another time while I was bemoaning, as little as I could, my health problems and how I hated the loneliness of being on my own all the time when I prefer companionship, she said “My best advice to you would be get yourself a warm caring woman”. I said, “You’re totally right. What I’m looking for is a bright woman who thinks ‘I want you. You’re mine. You belong to me’”. I told her it seemed pointless to keep hanging out in pubs getting slowly drunk, waiting and hoping for some woman smart enough to spot I’m available and worth having, so I’d be very grateful for any advice on how to meet or attract such a woman.

When Frank was discussing religion, pointing out Catholicism was the pure form of Christianity, I was objecting how irrelevant it seemed to have rituals in Latin that the punters couldn’t understand. We then got on to black culture. I said, quite honestly, that the closest thing I had seen to God in my lifetime was Bob Marley. Not only had he done great things to reduce racial tension, he had produced some fantastic poetry that had helped both blacks and whites. For example “When the rain falls, it don’t fall on one man’s house”, which I find incredibly wise. This led to discussion of cannabis and how much it increases humanity and compassion in the world.

This led in turn to discussing the horrible atrocity of slavery, much of which had been for the profit of tobacco, cotton and spice merchants right here in Glasgow. Jacinth then located some information on the internet which revealed that early US President Thomas Jefferson had illegitimate children by at least one of his black slaves and there were now more coloured people than whites in America could claim descent from Jefferson. We also read that although he decried slavery politically, Jefferson was always in debt, he could not run his plantation profitably without his own slaves, so they were not given their freedom till after he died.

Then Jacinth became very enthusiastic to show me Barack Obama. She explained that Oprah Winfrey played a major part in creating his massive popularity and rap millionaire Jay-Z was influential in getting him the support of many show-biz personalities, both black and white. She said Obama had started as a Human Rights lawyer, like Martin Luther King, even representing poor people for no fee where he thought the case was just.

She said he served his apprenticeship after graduation under his future wife Michelle, that she had managed his whole career since then and that she was probably the true power behind his rapid success. Frank, now drunk as usual, was shouting offensive remarks like “Obama’s a fake. He’s just a white man with black skin. He’s just a puppet for the same old white power elite”. Jacinth was clearly shocked by his bigotry and cynicism. She turned to me and said “Barack’s election is the greatest thing that has happened in America since Abraham Lincoln. Every black person in America was absolutely delighted when he won. It’s like the balance is finally being put right. Even in Africa and all round the world, every black person is so proud of him, that a coloured person could finally get to the most powerful position in the world.”

I could see she was totally sincere. I almost had tears in my eyes, realising the truth of what she said. What a relief it must be to a race that was subjugated as inferior human beings through that atrocity all these centuries ago. It began to occur to me that though the injustice might have been in some small measure corrected, true justice would actually require a redistribution of the wealth built on that amassed back in the days of slavery. In truth the lands and profit should really have been shared by all from the start and putting things fully right should involve the restoration of that state now. I had to add that what happened here in Britain had been little less than slavery, a tiny minority ruling class amassing enormous fortunes and power through exploitation of a massive working class, now all in poverty, and that situation actually remains to this very day.

Frank told me he wanted to take Jacinth over to meet his family on Friday, 2 days later, so she could massage his mother’s painfully arthritic legs and give his bed-ridden brother a massage. He asked if I would drive them over in my car. I said yes.

(This story will continue in a new post here)

Golly, Jings, Crikey,

These days I seem to spend all my time learning how to use new software, never fully catching up though thanks to extremely user-friendly help/user guides I grasp stuff lightning fast until I’m so tired I have to go to bed. This is all because I want to believe I am using the best possible communication resources and skills for publishing and getting across my most important material.

At the same time the great injustices and attacks which have almost destroyed my life and health in recent years not only go uncorrected but are being added to each day, with indications of huge additions being added in a couple of weeks. It seems my enemies consider the best way to deal with my complaints is to silence me completely, then bury my name with false disgusting allegations (presented of course as “fact”), so no-one will ever care to look for the truth.

This threat causes almost paralyzing panic, made more frantic when considering the apparent impossibility of exposing and countering corruption and lies developed over 7 years by ‘respectable’ authorities, not just at least 20 police & 10 social workers, but also the Crown’s legal agent, the Procurator-Fiscal. When those pretending to be my ‘defence’ lawyers have been co-operating with them against my interest, and when all of these people can deny my complaints as paranoid imaginings or ‘denial’ of my own criminality, how can I hope  to deal with it alone? How can I find a fully honest lawyer who has the guts to go up against corruption of unknown dimensions? Especially when he/she sees what has been done to me.

For example,  the Procurator Fiscal and the Police officers who arrested me on false charges last May, dropped in September, intend to wipe clean my hard-drives before returning my HD laptop, HD camcorder and 1TB storage hard-drive. There is no law referred to, nothing criminal on any of my hard drives, indeed nothing in any way related to the charges I was arrested on. What I know they object to is the video recordings of the same 2 police harassing me in my home last spring, plus a video I made giving a very clear explanation of the harassment and false incrimination I have been subjected to in Strathclyde since returning to Scotland in 2001. I do believe they also object to the many videos I made on the subject of marijuana since 1986, the majority of them as ‘Will Smile’ in Glastonbury during 2000/2001. The character is cool, clear, intelligent and obviously honest, much more likely to be accepted and believed any younger folk than any spokesman for the London Lie Factory.

Anyway, all I really wanted to note is this rapidly approaching deadline enforces an urgent shift of priority from learning how to use the media on to communicating my important information now using whatever imperfect skills I have.

Errm, maybe one exception. If it doesn’t take more than say 12 hours, I want to learn how to stream video live on the web, so you can watch it on your Windows Media Player. Just to satisfy my ambition of many years, to have my own independent TV channel.

The message is ready to be sent with the following file or link
attachments:
Snapshot_20100411

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]]> http://ramblingwillsmile.wordpress.com/2010/04/13/wow-these-days-within-minutes-of-altering-your-image-the-whole-world-can-see-the-changes-immediately-oh-blessed-information-highway/feed/ 0 ramblingwillsmile http://ramblingwillsmile.wordpress.com/2010/04/02/yesss/ http://ramblingwillsmile.wordpress.com/2010/04/02/yesss/#comments Thu, 01 Apr 2010 23:32:59 +0000 ramblingwillsmile http://ramblingwillsmile.wordpress.com/2010/04/02/yesss ]]> Blogging by phone now. Oh here we go!
]]> http://ramblingwillsmile.wordpress.com/2010/04/02/yesss/feed/ 0 ramblingwillsmile http://ramblingwillsmile.wordpress.com/2010/04/01/using-live-writer-again/ http://ramblingwillsmile.wordpress.com/2010/04/01/using-live-writer-again/#comments Thu, 01 Apr 2010 22:56:11 +0000 ramblingwillsmile http://ramblingwillsmile.wordpress.com/2010/04/01/using-live-writer-again ]]>

Just as well I don’t yet have anyone reading my blog as it is unlikely to be very interesting to many people. Meanwhile I just continue to familiarise myself with the publishing tools and iron out the bugs, so that when I do know what I want to communicate I will already know HOW.