Guess I still am. A Generic Hippy, that is. You cain't have been a pilot and then later say you wasn't, now can you? At least not with any real meaning to the words.

It was back in the 60s when, with a bunch of friends, I once wheeled a flea infested Worcester armchair along the road through South London's Tooting Bec Common, looking for somewhere to dump the damn thing. How it became infested was anyone's guess.

It was three-thirty in the morning when we stopped at the zebra crossing and a cop car pulled up to let us cross. They gave us a look of stunned bewilderment but then casually drove off after we'd crossed. Just another ordinary day in my life of the time.

I'd once been high (and you don’t have to be stoned to be high) in the middle of a wide patch of grassland near Mitcham also at about 3.30am, shining a powerful torch beam up and watching it pierce and cut into the crystal clear, starry black crisp night sky. One of my pals from the Armchair Brigade was with me on that occasion too, though the armchair thing had happened some time ago. It was something of a surprise when out of the dark two uniformed cops approached and asked what we were doing. When I explained exactly what I was doing as per above, one of them smugly chortled as to how you “can't see the stars with a torch haw haw haw" before arresting us and taking us down to the cop shop for ‘questioning’ on ‘suspicion’.

I can tell you we was both right pissed off. It was nearly two hours before they decided to let us out to walk home to Streatham. But back to the armchair.

We'd stopped beside a bus stop on Tooting Bec Common Road, not far from the hospital entrance, for a breather and also to figure out just what to do with the bloody chair. Everyone had gotten fed up of sitting in it as flea fodder and the decision had been made—it had to go. It was the only one in my room, but I knew I'd make out somehow. Then somebody noticed a night bus approaching down the long road.

"Okay, everybody hide in the bushes except you and you," I said, pointing out two trusted female members of the Armchair Brigade. "Just stand by the chair," I said, as the bus drew up and a middle-aged couple stepped off. They were quite obviously tourists—American too—nobody else moves around the suburbs of London at 3.30am in khaki desert shorts, Hawaiian shirt and an expensive camera around the neck. The woman was a little more conservative in dress—that is, she wore one, beneath a coat.

"'Morning. Care to buy the chair?" I said with a smile. They laughed and stopped to examine us and the chair.

"What're you guy's doing here at three thirty in the morning," said Mr Tourist in his Yonkers twang, as his delicate companion plonked herself in the chair to mutters of 'oh its comfortable Charlie'.

"We're always doing things like this," I said in reply to his question as he ushered his companion out of the chair and tried it himself, telling his companion how right she was.

"Great gag," he drawled, standing. "You doing a rag week thing?" He dipped into a pocket and fished out a 50 pence piece. "Great gag," he repeated, preparing to leave.

"Thank you. Er, sorry, its fifty pence a go. You both sat in the chair," I smiled at his companion.

"Oh. Oh yes. Yes, of course," she said, fumbling some cash from her purse. "Thank you," she said.

We parted friends and as they turned a corner the concealed members of the Brigade resurfaced and we split the night with laughter. We returned home, leaving the chair at the bus stop.

Tooting Bec Common has many mixed memories of this nature. You merely need stand in its environs to soak in the vibes.

Being a guru at the age of just 19 has it drawbacks. A guru before his time has to unlearn everything later. Well, almost everything. Its also a process that many people don't ever have to fathom from experience. Be that lucky or unlucky, I don't know. There was a time when all of my friends were asking inquisitive questions that fitted in well with the advent of the hippy age. They'd seek answers from me—I'd simply appeared among them and for some utterly inexplicable reason they held me in deep awe. Ask The General, they'd say, but it was tough to provide meaningful answers in any encounter lasting less than eternity.

"Let it flow. Go with the flow," I'd say to them. It seemed an easy and a right thing to say. They were words formed through my own reasoning and I felt happy with them. Pretty soon everybody seemed to be saying it as the cool thing. "Let it flow, man." Fame. If I had a close friend, I'd request those words on my epitaph: "Let it flow".

Don't think I'm claiming any rights as founder of the hippy thing in London now. No, I was just one of the initiating crowd who spontaneously erupted as though something had somehow triggered something in the genes. My life's been like that since I did the splits when I fell from the top of the cot I was trying to climb out of to retrieve one of you know those multicolored press a different button ball point pens a neighbour had given to me as a Christmas when I was 18 months old and the adults were out in the garden but I'd dropped the pen you see and was trying to get it when I fell.

It hurt so much I couldn't move for a while then I rolled over and yelled so hard both lungs popped out my open mouth for a short moment before snapping back in. I got the pen back though.

We all walk through a cauldron of myanthropy. Don't bother looking the word up. It once existed in a Latin form but nobody could quite figure out exactly what it meant and eventually the word was forgotten after becoming redundant. In short, it is to follow a pessimistic belief that optimism 'might' work.

Things come by you and they either mean something or they don't. What makes the criteria is, again, anyone's guess. Like the headline in today's copy of the Times, prefacing a centre page article by Brendan Glacken.

‘You're only as good as the work you still haven't done’, it read. Well now, that can lead to an eternity of debate, the thing that all good marriages should rest upon—or at least one of them.

Anyway, all of this has an association with the unexpected. You're either ready for it or you are not. You cannot plan for the unexpected—only be aware that it happens. The rest is a matter of fate. Milo Minderbender knew all about that, though his friend Hoople's cat was simply too encrusted with the snares of time to pay it much mind.

There are some things in life that just cannot be figured. Like why two women who shared my living quarters on separate occasions ran out in the middle of the night completely starkers and had to be rescued. Like how with one of them, after carrying her in a fireman's lift up to the second story maisonette where we lived and she then broke free and tried to jump over the balcony edge to certain injury and a neighbour opened his door besides us to stand and just watch as I struggled to stop her jumping.

Care comes into this equation here. You either do, or you don't. If you don't, you have either had a sorry fuck of a life or you simply have lost your balls along the way.

In case you are wondering, every word in this account happens to be true. If you have trouble believing that, then your life to date has been pretty fucked up. Take, for instance, how everyone sits around restaurants and fast food joints chomping at lumps of dead flesh and thinking that somehow they are getting 'protein' out of it. Unless you seriously think about such things, you are really wasting part of your precious gift of life.

What is the moral to this story? Perhaps there is none. Perhaps you are destined to spend time in your life blogging through the pages of Newsmedianews, who kindly publicised my misfortune in being abducted by four feet high aliens with a tail for a leg and who constantly discharge varying shaped solids from vertical slits in what appears to be their heads.

Who knows. Perhaps it all means something, somewhere.

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Let if flow is kind of summed up in a song called Let It Shine. To play the song and close this note, click the title. To close the note without playing the song, click here.