Retrieving my van from the dripping wood where I’d left it to go to Czechoslovakia, I returned to Latimer Road in west London, the house in which I’d lived before my detour to Glastonbury and snare in a ménage à trois. It was a time of parties and protests, MDMA and Reclaim The Streets, me and my split screen camper with its twenty-one windows and a roof that slid back, a miniature sink and tiny plug under the bed, I named her Hera. In Hera I drove to derelict buildings behind Kings Cross taken over by techno, to squatted land in Wandsworth turned into a riverside farm. A girl who’d been sectioned in Hackney Marsh got us on a mission to that place of stopped clocks to rescue her. We danced to a broken strip light in the lift and spirited her out hidden under a blanket in the back. On Battersea Bridge we held up traffic and graffitied the tarmac, put on a party ‘til the police shut us down. We took a lot of psychedelics. We laughed. Our friends had a club called Return To The Source, a psychedelic trance night born of Space Tribe that came to life at The Rocket in Holloway and south of the river at The Brixton Academy. We decorated and danced, London was turned beautiful in the morning light. At the New Year’s Eve party in Brixton I was deep in the wild when the bodies parted on the dance floor like the Red Sea and at the end of this pulsing human tunnel stood the man whose back I had leaned against in the Moroccan tent at the Harvest Fair that summer when two hundred people had taken off on a psilocybin space ship and spun around the universe. He saw me and I saw him. He was six foot seven and had the face of an angel. We laughed and hugged and recognised, let go and got on with the night. I wore spandex flairs covered in moon and stars bought from Anjuna market. My hair was still short but I would make it shorter. It was our second coinciding, there’d be a third before he and I decided there was something, before I set off on a personal mission to get him, shaving my head again. Pursuing him felt like a challenge I couldn’t turn away from, a man with the face of an angel who’d been celibate for seven years. A red rag to my injured bull. He told me he had a thing for Sinéad O’Conner.
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It feels like a whole different world now but what a joy to’ve lived some of that. Thanks for bringing it alive again.
The noise was deafening at the ghost party