Consciousness is at the heart of our existence, so it is odd that we find it hard to talk about it without specialist language creeping into the room - whether it be Darwinian, mystical, metaphysical, philosophical, psychological or any other. We non-academics can talk about our health, our gardens, our emotions or our planet and be understood without a single opaque phrase passing our lips, so it is puzzling that we find it difficult to talk about our consciousness in ordinary language. After all it is closer to us than anything else, indeed it is us!

The apparent reason is obvious, but no less confounding: we must be conscious, use our consciousness, to talk about consciousness. It is all inclusive. Talk about consciousness is a manifestation of what it is to be conscious, so to talk about consciousness as a thing, as part of the physical universe, it must somehow get out of itself to point at itself. That said, there may be some useful things we can say when trying to understand just what it is.

More or Less

I am more conscious when I type this than when I am asleep. It is something - a quality? - I can have more or less of; something I can concentrate. But that doesn’t tell us what it actually is. Mystics say that consciousness is life; it is ‘being’ as opposed to non-being; it is the Gnostic knowledge of existence. Human beings have the unique facility to be able to practice simply being, to know it, by concentrating or focussing their attention or consciousness.

The Death of Consciousness

When I die, physically, my consciousness will, somehow or other, have ceased. The slice of consciousness that uses ‘me’ to talk about itself will no longer have a body or a brain through which to see itself in the mirror. So we can say that consciousness is life and total absence of consciousness is death. Mystics talk about death; they say physical death is not an end, but a change. An individual may die, but that is like a particular wave on the sea reaching the shore. The ocean doesn’t cease to exist or to have waves.

Memories of Self

My ability to finish a sentence, let alone a paragraph, has to be a result of qualities of my consciousness like memory and persistence in time. My sense of having a self is entrenched in memories of having a past and an awareness that the self that answers to my name persists in time. But it could be that these qualities are elaborate constructions of my consciousness - another dead end! All mystics tell us consciousness transcends time and space. It is not of the physical of this world, though it is in it. There is the anecdote of the adept sitting to meditate. As he lowers his body he knocks a vase off the shelf now above him. He focuses his consciousness and enjoys the bliss to be found in that concentration. When he has had his fill, he brings his attention out into the world again and catches the vase. Consciousness is inclusional of everything else. In a very important sense it IS everything else and, when working through a human, its self-awareness can be focused.

My ability to recognise your voice on the phone is just one of many sophisticated functions that my brain performs through its consciousness (but it does so unconsciously), and yet both of us would struggle to explain what ‘you’ and ‘I’ are. We can wonder at the cleverness of the mind that operates in our brains while not even beginning to understand the consciousness that powers it. Yes, it is amazing that we can recognise someone by just hearing their voice for a second and that some of us can devise the most unlikely quantum mechanical theories as to the nature of matter, but these things do not make us what we are: human. The capacity to focus our attention is what distinguishes us from chimpanzees, not cleverness. Our consciousness enables us to step into eternity.

Who Knows?

My consciousness knows things ranging from where objects are through the rules of arithmetic to the difference between depression and contentment. My mouse is where I left it when I last used it - I know this on a physical level, such that I don’t have to look for it with my eyes, but simply put my hand straight on it. I know that if I add another mouse I will have ‘two’ mice. When depressed my consciousness knows its environment as a flat place, drained of qualities, but it also forgets there are other ways of seeing the world. When contented my consciousness easily forgets about the deep, dark woods of depression and dances out of itself into the wonders of the created world.

But once again this doesn’t help - all this knowledge is fleeting and does nothing to tell me who I really am or what’s the point of being human. On the other, mystical hand, we do know, in an irreducible God-like way, that peace is only to be found in the centre of our beings, in the practice of being here now. We may not know how, but we know the truth when we see/hear/experience it, and the more we are able to be in the centre of our beings, the more we will be content with simply knowing. ‘Sat’ is a Sanskrit word that means both truth and reality - the truth that pre-exists and out-exists the impermanence of space and time, doesn’t need us to perceive it. With the right practice, we can know it, have gnosis of it, for the intrinsic reality it is.

Telling the Difference

Consciousness has an ability to discriminate, to tell the difference. We have notions of good and bad that we try to apply as we paddle through the sea that consciousness finds itself floating in. We try to do that which we think ‘good’ and not to do ‘bad’ things. (How we know what good and bad are is another matter.) However it does it, consciousness determines how we make our way through the physical. This raises a question at the heart of spirituality: how does something immaterial, unseen, unknown and mysterious act upon the physical in the way it clearly does? Whilst our consciousness is more or less embedded in the material, we have no choice but to try to discriminate, to choose between actions, people, thoughts and everything else, so we can steer our way across the ocean. And we find this choosing so difficult, so frightening, when all we have to go on is our ignorant peering through a glass darkly, pulled this way and that by our appetites for, and love affairs with, the material. When our consciousness is concentrated, when it knows itself, then it is utterly clear that what is good does no harm and what is bad keeps us away from the truth, from reality, where we yearn to be. With that focus there is only the dharma, the right action.

The Ghost in the Machine

Consciousness acts in space and time, it knows where ‘here’ and when ‘now’ are, and yet it is somehow beyond them. There is no kind of microscope that will enable you to see consciousness, but it acts here and now. Without it, houses would not be built, people would not be murdered, babies with their new consciousness would not be created - whatever your view of free will. The busy-ness of all the individual consciousnesses in the world tricks us into thinking we are the doers of our reality. Something that cannot be seen, even with the most powerful microscopes, is running the physical show. How, we haven’t a clue. Mystics remind us that all is one, that we are no more than drops of an ocean’s water, operating under the illusion that our separation from each other and from our surroundings is real. They urge us drops to merge back into the ocean from which we have sprung. What is more, they tell us how to do it.

It Hurts!

Just through looking at you, I know if you are conscious or not, but I can’t be sure if you are in pain, even if you tell me you are. I once heard a story (which I believe to be historically true) of a man who had meditated all his life. In his old age he fell and broke his hip. He was taken to hospital for an essential operation, but absolutely refused to accept any kind of pain relief or anaesthetics because such drugs would dull the bliss he experienced. He persuaded the surgeons to operate without any drugs - he was able to focus his consciousness to such a degree that he could transcend the physiological experience we would normally call ‘pain’. He felt none. No, that’s probably wrong: for him feeling pain, however extreme, was no more noticeable than any other physical experience. He made a full recovery.

Pain is not what it might seem to be. As we grow up, we learn that being separate hurts. There is the physical and emotional pain we encounter as pawns in the pinball machine of life, as we are batted hither and thither. But there is another, a deeper disquiet that is an inescapable condition of imagining ourselves separate. It has many names and shapes: the blues, ennui, weltschmerz, bireh, frustration, depression, loneliness, hopelessness, despondency and on and on, but whatever we call it, we all seek to avoid it, to find comfort. Pain has a purpose: to get us to stop doing what causes the hurt in the first place, whether it is putting our hands in the fire or looking for fulfilment, clarity and love in the business of the world. The blues are a signal that we should look inside our own consciousness for the answer to our isolation. Then it becomes the blessing of solitude.

Creating Reality

Without straying into the opacity of academic philosophy, we can say some interesting things about the relationship between consciousness and the ‘real’ world. If I am made unconscious with an anaesthetic or a blow on the head, the ‘real’ world ceases to exist. You might want me to add “for me” at the end of that last sentence, but that would be redundant. Okay the ‘real’ world would still exist for you, as long as you are conscious, but there is a well-trodden argument (and many convincing psychological experiments) that says ‘reality’ is a creation of our consciousness. Nothing is as it seems to be, or, perhaps, everything can seem to be all sorts of things. Mystics, so-called because they hold the answer to the mysteries, tell us that higher, greater, more concentrated (language starts to fail here) levels of consciousness are more real than the level at which we operate our daily lives. Obvious really! But the felt reality of our worldly lives is so compelling we find it very hard to let it go so we can experience something deeper, more lasting. They call the reality of the world an illusion because it is no more than an impermanent mask. They don’t mean that it is not substantial or that we don’t have to navigate our way through it. They do mean that once we know the deeper reality of consciousness, we will know that our purpose lies within not out there.

Who’s Doing What

Notions that there is some kind of executive, a ‘doer’, at the heart of your or my consciousness seem to be a necessary condition of our existence. What else is it that dies when our bodies stop functioning? How else can we transact with each other? What is it that falls in love with other such doers? But these are notions fraught with difficulty. Any enquiry into what, where or how this executive operates soon come to a crashing halt in dark cul de sacs that no science seems able to convert into motorways. The idea of the self as doer has been changing in shape and importance over the centuries. The Latin term ego is used in English to translate Freud’s German term “das ich”, which literally means “the I”, first coined by him in the 19^th Century. But this was only the latest iteration of a concept that had flowered with the Reformation. The 21^st Century version has the self as Consumer (and destroyer of planets), trying to make itself real through what it owns and achieves. Mystics tell us this is an illusory recipe that leads only to continued addiction to the world. The practice they teach whereby we can focus our consciousness demands the surrender of this consumer self on the way to a realisation, a becoming real, of a true self. This is still an agency, a doer, but one that is one with the one love that does all the doing, a selfless self.

Maybe the things we can say about consciousness are not that useful! Maybe we can’t talk about it with the language of the everyday! Maybe consciousness is, literally, beyond the intellect. Consciousness cannot be known through the intellect, only in the silent stillness of the practice of being. It being silent, there is nothing that can be said.

I am writing a screenplay, Survival of the Coolest. I have been writing drafts of this strange creature for three years. It achieved something, some state of grace, over a year ago when it started to attract some serious talent as collaborators.

“What about your artistic integrity?” my painter sister asked when I told her how I bend to the winds of the “notes” I get from these far more experienced film-makers. But one of the many strange things about writing a screenplay is that it is essentially a collaborative venture made real by the solitary writer - he is the reed pipe for a group. Well, in my case he is.

The strangeness is compounded in this case by the fact that, though a “complete fiction”, my protagonist shares my name and much of my history and ancestry - it is fictional autobiography or autobiographical fiction. As long as I can maintain sufficient distance from fictional William, I’ll be OK, and the opportunities for auto-reflexive play are enormous. Are we not our own best works of art? A story we tell ourselves about the story we’re going to tell?

I have often found myself blind to the weaknesses, inconsistencies and lacks of the screenplay - I just can’t see how it could play better until one of my collaborators gives me a note. It’s not just that thing you get with other forms of writing - put it in the drawer for a week or so and you can come back and read it in much the way a stranger might and immediately spot its clumsinesses. No, because the screenplay is not a work of art in and of itself, but a manual for making one, it is much harder to “read”. It is hard to imagine the finished cinematic experience for which the script is a set of instructions. This is compounded by the frequent challenge to avoid exposition - the “telling” of the story - in favour of “showing” it.

And yet, and yet. How much do the mood, circumstance or experience of the note-givers inform their opinons? After all the movie industry is, according to William Goldman, one where no one knows anything. One has to learn to balance their wisdom against the remote possibility that there might be an agenda behind what they say. The very complexity and uncertainty of the marriage of commerce and creativity that is movie-making spawns a plethora of dogma and doctrine from film schools and self-appointed book-writing gurus. In case of doubt fall back on a nice bit of dogma.

And triple yet. My collaborators have much more experience of the process than I do and these particular guys are not given to dogma. Rarely does the expression “character arc” escape their lips. The blindness of the long distance scriptwriter is actually a kind UNconsciousness. When one of them points out a flaw, one I recognise as soon as they point it out, I often realise that I had seen it myself and subconsciously chosen to ignore the finger wagging at the back of my mind. I am beginning to see that a kind of consciousness, a screenwriting focus, is possible that doesn’t let such worries pass by.

The notes, the really good ones, are not criticisms, but creative ideas, prompts and suggestions. My collaborators are just that, co-creators, not mere whittlers away of the dross. The creative sight of this particular long distance scriptwriter will only be fully restored when the director, actors, designers, producers and all the others from best boy to dolly grip work together to make this blueprint into a living, breathing movie.

Pryor is a sad case, constantly harping on about his famous forbears; almost as though he can’t exist on his own, by and for himself. (Joe Alterego, in his Review of the Life of William Pryor). But what can I do? It is of some significance, positive and negative, to me and to you, my being born into this empire of the mind.

To quote from my own book The Survival of the Coolest:

[My mother’s] parents were Jacques and Gwen Raverat. Jacques was a French painter who died aged just 40 from MS. Gwen was a granddaughter of Charles Darwin and a woodcut artist of some repute. They were on the edge of the Bloomsbury phenomenon, counting Eric Gill, Rupert Brooke, Stanley Spencer, Virginia Woolf, cousin Ralph Vaughan Williams, as well as Andre Gide, among their friends. Towards the end of her life, long after Jacques’ death, Gwen wrote a memoir of her Cambridge childhood, Period Piece, first published in 1951 and still in print. Her grandfather, Charles Darwin, was already akin to a god: Of course, we always felt embarrassed if our grandfather were mentioned, just as we did if God were spoken of. In fact, he was obviously in the same category as God and Father Christmas.

Addiction is a price we all pay for living in freedom, whether it touches our lives directly or not. Not any old idealistic freedom, but the liberty championed by politicians of every hue in the 21st century. A double-bind freedom in which a quarter of the population are free to suffer from some kind of mental illness at some point in their lives. This liberty might seem to be at the other end of the corridor from addiction, but its being hoist as the fundamental good of modern times leaves many staring into an abyss with nothing to be free for, no place to be free, no aspirations to cherish, no sense of who or what it is that has been set free.

In this empty freedom it is impressed upon us that we are free to choose whether to take the stuff, to do the things to which we become addicted. This is where the myth of “addictive substance” arises – how else can we explain that, up to a certain point, we are apparently free to choose what we take or do, but after we have crossed that river, we become slaves. It must be the stuff what done it.

In this mythology, addicts are not free. They are slaves, trapped at the other, the dark end of the passage, in portable prisons built from the stoned highs around which their addictions revolve. But a special kind of medical slave to whom we can give treatment - at best, a get-out-of-jail card, at worst, a furnish-the-jail-with-more-comfort-and- stability prescription. Freedom and addiction may look like opposites, but are in fact polarities that feed on each other.

Liberty is the greatest good, not just for the new Left, but also for the neo-con Right. So great a good is it deemed to be that many governments feel they have no choice but to adopt extreme measures to preserve it for their citizens. To keep the rest of us free, a government can lock up anyone they suspect of being a terrorist for as long as they like, send them to other countries to be persuaded to talk, even invade other countries that don’t have enough democratic freedom, killing hundreds of thousands in the process. We will make you free, whether you want it or not, free from your oppression, free to be whatever you want to be.

It’s hard to challenge such a dogma of liberty: it confuses freedom from oppression with the notional freedom to act that individual selves are thought to have. These two ideas have become interchangeable, but are in fact utterly different. Few would say oppression is a good thing – we all want to be free from it. I am the first to protest when my freedom to do what I want is challenged in the smallest way; my grumpy old man persona leaps to the barricades, keen to exercise its justified anger.

But then the other freedom is thrust upon us. We will make you free to be your self, to enjoy the fruits of capitalism, but we’re going to have to watch you with CCTV cameras that tell you to pick up your litter. You are free to drink whenever you want, to gamble as recklessly as you like, but not to indulge in things we have come to regard as evil; heroin for example. It’s a liberty thoroughly qualified, but only for your own good. It’s a liberty thoroughly confused, a double bind, a conflicted cul de sac, but it’s all we can think of. When you seek refuge from this dead end, becoming addicted can seem an attractive option; at least it does away with choice. The politicians’ liberty has no value in and of itself, because the self that is free, the individual that would assert its rights, is an empty thing.

In parallel with the ascendancy of the self as the prime icon of belief in the last fifty years, so the dogma of liberty has blossomed. With the decline of organised religion, liberty has become as good a value as any to justify capitalist liberal democracy, a value we can shape our lives around. But it also castes a dark shadow, a dank place filled with questions, anxiety and isolation freely stirring the turmoil most people live in. What’s the point of being free if that freedom gives you nothing and leaves you all alone in that nothingness? If existential angst is the overriding experience you are free to go through, then the simplicity, certainty, comfort and even the imprisonment of the addict’s life are going to look attractive.

Thus it is that addiction arises from a confused notion of liberty. Yes, we must be free from oppression, but no, the freedom to be ourselves, free will, is not an absolute good! How can it be when we have no clue as to what it is that is being free? The self is a fragile construct, a story we have to keep on retelling to keep sane. Frequently it collapses under the weight of its own mythology and expectation and we seek other forms of security, stability and comfort, often those found fleetingly in addiction.

It is also interesting to ask what it is to be free from addiction, to be unaddicted? A very different liberty, I think, from those I have touched on so far. Oddly, it has a similar shape to the deluded state the addict achieves in his first few highs – freedom from the burdens, frustrations and delusions of the self. But unaddiction, being unhooked, does not suppress, or even merely cope with the insecurities of the self, but actually envelops them in a state of being that transcends the myths of self. Though it is a construct, the self with all its stories is the source of all addiction. We are free to be addicted until we discover that to be unaddicted is to be truly free.

Albert Einstein, of all people, said: “The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.”   The conference I set up, Unhooked Thinking, explores such philosophical approaches to addiction in the belief that they are at its core.  check out  www.unhookedthinking.com

Yes, I really am one of 32 great great grandsons of the great man. And it was not just one guinea pig. All my Guinea Pigs have been stifled by science’s obsessive adherence to stuff they call “evidence”. You can’t float a guinea pig without evidence to stop it sinking. Conversation with a scientist is impossible without some reference to evidence. It’s about truth. Science says that truth - or “facts” as they like to call it - can only be found in the evidence. Nowhere else.

So, what is this evidence? Where can it be found? By having an hypothesis, designing an experiment to test it and measuring the results. But that’s not how I know things, especially not in any measuring. I don’t hypothesise, experiment and measure; in common with everybody else, I just know things. From my experience. But that’s subjective, they say, and therefore of no possible use and most definitely not true. We need facts, they say.

This matters - to me - when psychology, psychiatry, sociology and other soft sciences attempt, largely through measurement, to tell me they know things about the human condition - and therefore about me - that just don’t fit with my knowledge of myself. They somehow reduce me to a guinea pig in their laboratory, an unconscious creature who has no say in what he does.

But it gets more confounding. Because I agree that any free will I might have is severely limited. One of their dastardly but hugely fascinating experiments was with people undergoing brain surgery. They only get a local anaesthetic - and the brain itself, interestingly, has no feeling. So, while the surgery was going on through a hole cut in the skull, they wired up that part of the brain known to be concerned with moving bits of the body. They asked the person with the hole in their head to say when they were going to do something like lift a finger, measuring the activity in the brain all the time. Significant nano-seconds before the person says and therefore knows they are going to lift their finger, the finger-lifting energy starts. In other words their free will, if they have any, is unconscious.

So you wouldn’t have thought I’d mind being a guinea pig in a psychologist’s lab, what with my will being largely non-existent. But I do, I mind that the truths they think they arrive at are deemed more important than the truths I arrive at, just by living, by attempting to know myself. Take happiness. Because seratonin levels in the brain are higher when people report feeling happy, direct links are made and neurochemicals devised that increase and stabilise the amount of seratonin in the brain. But it’s the wrong happiness, the fleeting, reactive happiness, they are trying to measure and control. And to do it by messing with neurochemicals is obviously (well, to some of us anyway) going to lead to dependency and addiction.

This all stems from a recent incident. I was invited to talk to a group of mostly mature students. The man in charge of the course, and the man who had invited me, sat to one side of the room. Every now and then he would interrupt my fairly inoccuous ramble through my own experience as I drew conclusions left right and centre based only on my own experience. He would interrupt saying, “That is absolute rubbish. Where is your evidence? The facts are quite different.” and other words of orthodoxy. I was shocked, but for the first few such dislocations, I adopted a jocular bantering escape route and carried on. He kept it up. And up I was wound. Till I lost my temper and stormed out, saying to the students, “I am sorry for you, having to put up with this.”

I know, I know, where would we be without the rigour and endeavour of science? We wouldn’t have computers or atom bombs, cars or bio-fuels, leucotomies or hip-replacements. But it’s the arrogance, the assumptions and the ignorance of science that make many scientists such bores. I took my guinea pig for a walk in front of those students and he stifled it. But it’ survived. It’s here crawling through this blog.

My blog is filling with evidence. Science demands evidence at every turn to prove the hypotheses its practitioners make. Both workers in the addiction industry and theorisers as to its nature love the phrase “evidence based”, which somehow gives their ideas respectibility. The evidence in this blog could be used to prove that I have written, that I was once a junky, that I’m in love with language - but it is the evidence I chose to present to the blogosphere. It is evidence for an online impression.

Anyway, the evidence so far would say I am more of a writer than anything else, a writer with a thing about addiction. But that’s not true. I spend (interesting word in this context) more time (from my dwindling time account) on the organisation of Unhooked Thinking, the development of the movie Survival of the Coolest and increasingly the development of MediaStores, than I do writing.

The conference is coming along very nicely. Seeds sown at the first event last year are beginning to blossom. An increasing number of academics, treatment workers, users, psychologists, doctors and families of users are realising that the old ways of talking about addiction, drugs and government policy have completely failed. The RSA Commission on Illegal Drugs, Communities and Public Policy published its report this week.  What a tonic it is!  This eminent group of grown-ups agree with so much of what I’ve been waffling on about and with the guiding spirit behind Unhooked Thinking.  There’s a chance one or more of them will speak at the conference.

The movie has a prestigious British director, a producer and a couple of name actors “attached” as we navigate our way through the treacle that is sometimes described as Development Hell. Some producer recently described the process as having to get a room full of plates spinning on sticks before you can go into production - if one falls off its stick, you usually have to start again. But it’s looking good at the moment.

MediaStores has the completion of Version 2 of our platform within site - we’ll be launching some time in May.  Briefly, MediaStores is a true Web 2, Long Tail  ecommerce business that will democratise the selling of books, film and music. We will enable anyone to build their own online store - either free-standing with its own URL, or attached to an existing web or blog presence - and populate it with their own selection drawn from all books, film and music available in the UK.  The cracker is that they will earn 20% of the recommended retail price of everything sold through their store.  Version One was built last year to do this with only books.  It’s taught us a great deal.  Version Two is a brand new platform being built using the latest technology that is Ruby on Rails.

I’ll write more about all these projects in later blogs

I do actually do some work in my double-glazed log cabin. As well as the writing (see below) I am kept busy by a few other projects:

• Unhooked Thinking, an annual conference about the nature of addiction to be held in Bath’s Guildhall May 9 to 11, 2007.
• MediaStores, an e-commerce business set to revolutionise how media products are sold online - a veritable Long Tail, Web 2.0 business. The real deal, Version 2, launches in May, 2007, but you can look at the Version One Beta that only does books here.
• The Survival of the Coolest the memoir I wrote of the love-affair I had with chemicals - in particular heroin - that changed how I lived in my skin, starting in the sixties.
• Survival of the Coolest, the movie. I am Associate Producer of the project, developing a film from the screenplay I wrote (with great help from Adele Simmons) based on my book of the same name. It has become a magical-realist fiction that is gathering the kind of interest it needs to get made into an actual movie: Gillies MacKinnon as Director, Carl Schoenfeld as Producer, Robert Carlyle and Natalie Press attached in two key roles.
• Virginia Woolf and the Raverats I compiled and edited the complete correspondence between Virginia Woolf and my maternal grandparents, the Raverats, illustrated with my grandfather’s paintings and my grandmother’s wood engravings.

Here is my beginning. And in my beginning were words. And the words were good.

I am a many-headed monster and will divide this be-log accordingly into several parts:

1. I am a founder and the chairman of Eclector Ltd, a Web 2.0, Long Tail business par excellence that will be soft-launching in May this year. A revolution in e-commerce that will make us a nation of shopkeepers once more.

2. I am a poet and writer of numerous articles and essays, two books and a screenplay. Some of which I shall post here. More on that.

3. I am a founder and the director of Unhooked Thinking, the international, multi-disciplinary and iconoclastic conference that enquires into the very nature of addiction. The second, whose theme was Love and Baggage started on May 8th and ran til Friday, May 11th, 2007 in Bath’s Guildhall. And I write about addiction.

4. I was a beat poet in sixties Cambridge, London and Paris and here’s some photos to prove it.

click a photo to see a big version

I was born in 1945 in Farnborough, Hampshire, England, where my father was inventing a new glue to stick Mosquito aeroplanes together. Once Oppenheimer had perfected his atomic bomb, we moved back to Cambridge, to the bosom of the Darwin-Bloomsbury nexus. (My grandmother, Gwen Raverat was a friend of that paragon of Bloomsbury, Virginia Woolf.)

Being the only boy-child with three sisters, I had to succeed and join the ruling class and was packed off to Eton. By my 16th birthday I had escaped and was hanging out with beats, GI’s, Jamaicans, jazz musicians and those that would be the Pink Floyd: the now mythic Syd Barrett with his architectural student friends, as I studied for my A levels at a crammer.

One day I packed up my belongings in a spotted suitcase and went to seek my fortune as a beatnik in Paris. I chewed and retched morning glory seeds for their crude LSD. I hung out with Daevid Allen of Gong, American Beat poets and assorted bohemians.

My visions of myself grew to such an extent that I rushed back to Cambridge to tell family and friends that I was a genius, next to Samuel Beckett. “How interesting!” they said.

I was depressed. I didn’t know that’s what the persistent knot in my belly was called, but it stopped me being fully, fully being. When I drank a whole bottle of Dr Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne, the opium and chloroform it contained answered my lack of definition. The love affair, the intoxication that manifested as poet and ’pataphysician had begun. All my pain was soon subsumed into the pain of being a junky.

But I still managed to pretend to be a student getting into Trinity, Cambridge, to read Moral Sciences, as philosophy was strangely called.

After many cultural and other adventures and happenings (read a free chapter of the book), where I forged my own whirlwind through the more extreme edges of the sixties cultural revolution, I found myself floundering along the sewer of addiction. A sewer used to drain away society’s and my family’s denials, rejections and embarrassments.

Here I skip lightly over the years and the detail of my addictions. Suffice it to say that circumstance supplanted drugs with alcohol for the last few years, but you really will have to read The Survival of the Coolest to discover how far down I went and how I eventually skidded to a low from which change was the only answer. The addiction was no longer useful.

Since that rebirth, I have spent a good deal of time exploring the mythologies of business and busy-ness. I started what became Airlift Book Company, the Green Catalogue, Bath.co.uk and a pioneer Internet music business, Floot.com, but 9/11 put paid to that.

And now, when not out on MediaStores, Unhooked or Survival of the Coolest Movie business I sit in my log cabin on the edges of Bath, having views, writing, improvising cadenzas to the concerto of the living.