Take a trip, man.

Just how psychedelic and surreal can life get without the use of dangerous substances? Being towards the end of an analytical phase life can be great when it's ordinary, so long as we have a good family foundation and decent health. Take that away and the default is down, up is a peak and a bonus. You see life as everyday, ordinary and see the good stuff as in your past and only happening now to other people. And so ordinary you look and wish for the psychedelic elements that could mean there are routes outside the norm if you just look hard enough. www.realityshifters.com is another place you can hear such tales, and my coincidences are the nearest I get to reality shifts, and certainly far from exciting, just very strange.

The 60s of course were LSD driven. I managed to avoid it all my life despite a wish to visit such realms, but at least learnt meditation to try and do it safely, with variable results. Judging a tree by its fruit the art and music of the time tells me there is something more and a better source of everything than we have without it. Checkout the art of Peter Max and you'll see a design style (not that he was necessarily taking anything) typical of the era I remember so well, and when that is the second style you meet in life (after the tail end of the beat generation when I was a baby) you assume that's how things are, until something else takes over. Then by 1975 you realise the end of the hippy era is probably there and disco, John Travolta and The Jacksons are the present and future. Cack. From the sublime to the dreckisher (do a google). So now I trawl markets and the internet (too expensive) looking for remnants of my good times, as well as doing what I can to find elements in the present. Michael Caine and Peter Sellers films, all the old programmes on BBC and ITV freeview coming round yet again, and even seeing all the old photos of the time, whatever drove that revolution was real and should be able to be accessed at any time, although the world has done its best to close the door for many years.

So, that is one stream that drives my life, the search for more. For the real magic I've seen at times including in dreams. In music as well, having posted a link to the incredible Guadalajara music by Lionel Salzedo, which along with music from Joe and the Sheep Rustlers (anyone with flu in the 70s will have watched this as it was on for years), John Barry's Florida Fantasy, many old programme tunes and of course my other favourites, Salute To Thames and Moto Perpetuo, the two tunes that began every morning on Thames TV. Paint the whole world with a rainbow, 1972 onwards. How psychedelic is that? I have the pencil box right next to me, picked up recently in a market. Rainbow George Weiss, another advocate of the alternative way of life is another prophet of this route. Easy to google as well and a great guy, having spent some time in his company. Peter Cook, his next door neighbour I occasionally saw shambling around Hampstead, and Dudley Moore. Out of Town with Jack Hargreaves. How, the original series. London in the 60s, it showed me what it could be at its best and am still somehow searching for it all to come back somehow. I could be wasting my time or maybe if I look long enough a new door will open. There's nothing else to do.