Distant Thunder

I went out to eat with friends this week, a 41^st birthday celebration out in the Peak District.  I was about to refer to them as old friends because that’s how they feel, established.  In reality though I realise none of them were in my life while I was married.

On a tangent here, when did I get unmarried?  It certainly wasn’t something which ended on 15^th November 2005 somehow, more a gradual process.

Anyway, established friends.  One of them was with his wife, who I have met before, but oddly not with him, I met her while I was giving a lift to his son.  It’s a funny time of life (tangent again ...) when you find you can have separate friendships with father and son.  I’m no longer quite sure who I met first.  So I’ve met Mrs J once before, and she seems really nice.  But Mr J started a conversation about what I was up to, and odd words came up to describe me.  He referred to me as free spirit and hippy.  I was perplexed.

I have odd standards against which I measure various things in life.  I measure cycling passions against the standards of training and preparation of Olympians.  I measure transient lifestyles against equally high and extreme standards.

My formative years saw me being brought up in the Quaker religion.  My mum was an Aldermaston Marcher in the 1950s, my dad successfully negotiated his National Service to work instead with the Friends Ambulance  Service.  They stood by their beliefs.  As I grew older in the Quaker religion, I mixed constantly with people who believed in living witness, those who lived in sustainable communities, those who lived in treehouses and squats and all kinds of things to protest against and to hinder efforts of road builders.  People who believed strongly in standing up for what they felt was right.  Hell, my friends had dreadlocks, piercings, tie dyed clothing, and indeed memorably one of them had changed his name by deed poll to Tree. No firstname, no surname, just Tree.  Some earned their livings busking, doing fire eating acts, playing the fiddle, some lived in ancient home converted wagon style vans.  Others fostered for a living.   And it was always obvious to me who were the hanger oners with the “in crowd”.  Those who had pretensions and became weekend hippies with their DMs and tassle fringed skirts.  But for me, acceptance didn’t need me to dress up in any affected manner, and it was fine that I was the square one because like them, I believed in being true to me and not painting a picture of something I wasn’t.  

I knew then and I know now I am not a free spirit, and I am not a hippy.  I have my feet too firmly on the ground, and I have direction too, not an ephemeral blow with the wind drifting.  These are not labels I aspire to.

And we have a finishing word from the Levellers ...