I was at the first Glastonbury Festival, 40 years ago. And alas, there's truth in the cliché about not being able to recall such things. Went with Phil Roddis and Dave Lee I seem to think. I was about 20. Dave was with a plump chick who wore glasses, and they spent much of the time groping, as it was called in those pre-correct days, in his tent. The little tent had Sheffield Cats Shelter printed on the sides, because that was where he'd nicked it from.
Phil had lurched off somewhere on acid. I was tripping on mescaline when I fell in the shit ditch, a 5 foot deep trench with a foot of turds floating in piss at the bottom.
I had to take all my vile smelling clothes off and bury them, everything. I washed as best I could in a trickle of water from a sewage pipe. Someone gave me an old blanket, and I cut a hole in the middle and put it over my head. Safety pins appeared from somewhere.
I took up with a Frenchman who carried an impressively large North Vietnamese flag. We shared a gallon of scrumpy, some joints and more acid, then set off, in the middle of the night, for Glastonbury Tor, a few miles away. It was raining and windy. Beneath the tower on top of the Tor was the entrance to Annwn, the Celtic dreamtime. Sometime King Arthur would re-emerge from it. Just before dawn I stood shivering in the dark, listening to the wind batter the glistening black tower. Horses galloping. Drums.
Such mystical notions about Glastonbury and the Isle of Avalon were commonplace at the time, but have barely survived. There was a belief that Christ had visited and built a church. Joseph of Arimathea brought the whitethorn from Jerusalem. Most people at the festival would have read John Mitchell's The View Over Atlantis. I'd recently been passing round a copy of Lewis Spence's Mysteries of Britain.
I recall talking to a group of Anglican monks who had suddlenly turned up at the site one morning. They said they were concerned that the paganism they were witnessing could have dire consequences at such a sacred site. They'd come to warn us. They all had pale translucent skin, and as they moved the scent of frankinsense wafted from their white cassocks.
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I didn't support Germany at last night's match in Bloemfontein, but there are plenty of reasons why I didn't want to see England win. Nor did I expect them to. As I've been telling any fool who'll listen for the past few weeks, England were never more than mediocre.
The mauling by the Germans was a blessing, saving the lads from a more humiliating 7 - 0 pasting from the likes of Argentina.
You have to feel a twinge of sympathy for Rooney, Gerrard and Lampard, now they have to go home and witness on their 50" plasma screens just how ludicrous it was to imagine they ever had a prayer with players like Messi, Juan Veron, and Carlos Tevez.
The present form of English patriotism is not pretty, and encourages the worst elements. The English gutter press is a disgrace, calling the German boys Huns, and going on to accuse them of not being proper Germans because of where their parents were born. Fuckers who peddle this kind of shite deserve no success.
The abject nature of English patriotism is summed up by the singing of the shameful anthem, God Save the Queen. No one prepared to sing such a ridiculous song in public deserves any success. I'm willing to sing Jerusalem, but never that.
It's the remaining streak of imperialism that disfigures English patriotism. This is behind why Sarkozy has to appear deeply troubled by the deaths of 40 French soldiers in Afghanistan, yet there is no British outrage after more than 300 have been killed, and many more wounded. If patriotism is supporting our boys being killed at the rate of one a week, I'm not a patriot.
300 young lives lost and not a single British newspaper nor major political party is campaigning to get the troops out Afghanistan, and out of harms way.
A month ago I put a tenner on a Holland - Argentina final, and a tenner on Argentina to win. Looks like this could be a nice little earner.
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My remarks in support of Helen Thomas drew quite a few comments. I presume the ones in Chinese were both complimentary and supportive. Thanks for that.
I should point out to The Reality Show that Helen Thomas is neither an Arab, a racist, nor a hag. So far as I know she has never, during her many decades as a senior correspondent, used her position to argue, implicitly or otherwise, for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Palestine.
Many years ago, when I began learning Arabic, I witnessed Arab racism first hand, and was taken aback by how entrenched and casual it was. My first teacher was an elderly Yemeni, a decent, good natured and considerate gentleman, for the most part moderate and tolerant in his views, yet cheerfully convinced that the Jews were behind all the world's ills. We became good mates, yet he remained mournfully disappointed in me for showing no interest in becoming a Muslim, for my misguided insistence that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a laughable forgery, and because I was always 'sticking up for the Jews' by making a distinction between Zionism and the Jewish people. He would also become exasperated when I contradicted his claim that the 'bloody tyrant' Winston Churchill was secretly Jewish.
A number of my classmates in those days were young Muslim lads, from Arab, Iranian, or Pakistani backgrounds - would-be militant Islamists, and often bigots of the first kidney. This coupled with a shockingly profound ignorance of their professed religion and its history.
If, as has been claimed by our security services, lads like this were being groomed by fiery preachers linked to the likes of Lashkar-e-Taiba, their indoctrination surely lacked all sophistication. They had no clear idea of the recent history of the continent they were living on, and knew nothing of the Middle East. WWII, Warsaw, the Shoah, 1948, the Nakhba, wouldn't have meant much to them. Their antisemitism was entirely quranic, involving putting to the sword Jews found hiding behind rocks at the end of time. Much of their sexism, racism, prejudice and general bigotry was in this cartoon dimension.
Ignorance, racism and bigotry are remarkably similar in every culture. To experience the Jewish version view some footage of Israeli settler demonstrations, read the Jerusalem Post, or take a look at Pamela Geller's Atlas Shrugs blog, available on the right of your screen.
And yes, I know what sort of fate a person like me might face were I living in one of the Arab regimes that surround Israel. Some who left comments on this blog seem to have the idea that I'm a Liberal, and as such deserving of this and that indignity. I'm not a Liberal, I'm a Communist. My likely fate under the current crop of repressive regimes, from Egypt to Iran, is easy to imagine - no doubt they'd have me shackled to a slimy cellar wall, being continually bum-banged by rotating platoons of the elite,(US trained), presidential guard. Murderous Israeli bigots might be more contemporary, and simply deploy a sniper, (with the latest US laser sighting system), to put one though my head.
Criticism of Zionism and the government of the State of Israel in no way implies apologies for Egypt or Syria, Hamas or Hizbollah, Fatah or the PA.
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"We've shot an amazing number of people," McChrystal recently conceded.
Read The Runnaway General Rolling Stone's profile of the US's Afghanistan warlord HERE,
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I'd guess that when whoever it was rudely stuck a camera in Helen Thomas' face she had recently been listening to an Israeli government spokesperson, explaining their murderous raid on the Mavi Marmara.
It's enough to exasperate anyone, hearing the likes of Mark Regev smoothly claim that the IDF was 'not expecting trouble' when its elite commandoes boarded a boat carrying what they said were hundreds of Hamas supporters, including at least 50 armed mercenaries, and a number of prospective shaheeds.
Helen Thomas is an octogenarian journalist who has covered Israel since before 1948, and what she said was simply an outburst, incited by listening, time after time, to barefaced lies from the Israeli government. Unfortunately, what she said gave AIPAC and the rest of the propaganda machine the timely chance to make out that critics of Israel want to drive Jews into the sea, wipe them off the map. Just like the Israelis say Hamas and Iran does.
But Helen Thomas was talking about Israeli settlers, the ones on the West Bank and in East Jerusalam who are continuing to build settlements on Palestinian land. The settlers who are supported by the Israeli government - the Foreign Secretary, former strip-club bouncer Avigdor Lieberman is one of their leaders. Many settlers are Americans and Europeans, who are motivated by fanatical religious Zionism, and the delusion that that God has given them the right to take, by force if necessary, what does not belong to them. These people have recently taken to gathering in mobs to surround Arab properties, hoping to intimidate the owners into leaving. In Jaffa last week they turned up by the busload from all over Israel to beseige the last remaining Arab neighbourhood, shrieking and chanting racist abuse at the occupants. One woman, living on her own, had them yelling through her letterbox that she should get out of their property, God says so.
Helen Thomas was suggesting that if any of these people ever recover from the delusion of Zionism, they could consider returning to somewhere like North Dakota, and perhaps build a farm there.
No one in their right mind proposes driving Israelis into the sea, not even Hamas and Hizbullah.
The best comment on the flotilla incident came from Ilan Pappé in the Independent on Monday - 'The Deadly Closing of the Israeli Mind', read it HERE
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