Archive for August, 2009

The Big Issue article: memories of Glastonbury

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

I went to Glastonbury this year for the first time in a long time. It’s hard to admit that I sloped off early, particularly because everyone else was having fun. Maybe that’s one reason I felt so isolated. Everyone seemed to be making the experience more intense by looking at each other and identifying with the good time they were having. I couldn’t seem to do that and so I got more and more detached.

I was sixteen in 1987 when I first went to Glastonbury in a battered old Mini with my girlfriend and a bloke who was a titch and was therefore called Titch. We didn’t have a driving licence between us and the Mini overheated all the way down the motorway. We kept pulling into service stations to refill the radiator. When we arrived, with £30 worth of cannabis hidden in the back, it was time to bring out the cannabis and hide the car instead. So we drove it into a field, pushed it up to a hedge and covered it with branches.

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Enough scapegoating. We all need to be better parents.

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

In his latest article for The Guardian, Mark talks about the Baby P case, and the mirror it holds up to all of us in our “dysfunctional society breeding dysfunctional individuals who breed still more”.

Read the full article at www.guardian.co.uk.