The Hippy Hippy Shake

I was listening to a guy being interviewed on the radio today and I was full of awe for his courage and sense of what’s right. He spends his life sitting in a tree communing with nature and praying for us all to wise up soon to the dangers of environmental damage. Listening to him, though, I suddenly realised I’d make a lousy hippy. Trees are fine but they don’t have satellite telly do they? Or microwaves, or access to eBay. And is it possible to get takeaways delivered?

I guess I’m just spoiled, a product of the abundance we take for granted, and I’m not at all good with what you might call the airy fairy. The downside of being grounded is that you never fly, but the upside is that with the summer solstice arriving this week I didn’t feel the need to make a fool of myself by cramming my mates into a camper van and heading off to Stonehenge to dance around like a dad at a wedding while wearing a smock and herbs in my hair.

But I do sympathise with the tree man. I think times must be hard for hippies in general just now as it seems the rules have changed. Back in the Sixties hippies fought for human rights and were noticed, but now they’re ignored. I found a bunch who seem to do nothing at all but preach about peace and the environment while refusing to buy anything with their own money. They don’t live in a tree but in a place called the House of Commons.

Being a real hippy in this new millennium is much tougher. Sure, you still have to get up before dawn to welcome the sun but now it’s with the new, and ironic, knowledge that it’s burning us up, making polar bears homeless and killing off native species of plants. Not being a morning person would make me fail the selection process anyway, but modern day hippy life is just too complicated for me to join in.

They’ve binned the good stuff, like free love and Janis Joplin, and kept the bad taste bits like the braided hair, the tattooed ankles, the eyebrow piercing and having to grow a long, bushy, beard. Whenever I try growing facial hair, rather than looking like an environment angel I resemble a Hell’s Angel and scare myself half to death when catching a glimpse in shop windows.

The old, Beatles era, hippy culture meant travelling to San Francisco and watching a bit of bra burning before settling down and opening a branch of Interflora, but new millennium hippies have to park up their caravans in crop circles before linking their wind powered tapestry looms to nearby windmills, washing their dungarees in ionised water and then drying them over ley lines, before recycling cat litter as burgers served with organic rice. We’ve just got too much information now and the simplicity has gone.

I’m all for saving the whales, the Welsh, the bees, the birds on Page 3 and the chocolate bean too but it’s all the other things that come with being “other wordly” that sink my boat. I’m too practical and unbending.

While I could wish with all my heart to believe in this fanciful stuff, I’m afraid I don’t have enough imagination to see chakras, auras and Homeopathic medicine as anything other than fantasies for dreamers. And I could just about embrace the notion of wearing rainbow colours all the time to make the world a happier place, but then I do wonder how come Ricky Gervais dresses from head to toe in black and everyone still laughs a lot.

And what about astrology? There was an excuse in the Sixties to believe in the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, but now? Well, here’s an experiment. Think of your birthdate, and the year you first came in to the world, and concentrate hard while I do a reading for you. A bit harder. Send me those thoughts. A bit more. Ok. Got it.

You have a need for other people to like you but you are self critical. You have some personality weaknesses but you compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity and, while disciplined and self controlled on the outside, you can be worried and insecure on the inside. You like a certain amount of change and variety and don’t like being hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.

So, how did I do? Well, that reading was given to one hundred students after they were asked to fill in a personality test in the Nineteen Forties. Each student was given exactly the same reading but told it was uniquely based on their personality test and they were asked to rate it for accuracy. Every single one of them said it was spot on.

So, am I just a well meaning cynic who sympathises from the touch line without getting himself dirty in the game? I hope not. I really do want to save the world for the next generation and I really do want world peace. I simply want to do it from under my duck down duvet rather than perched on an old English oak tree with only the neighbourhood owl to cuddle up to.

Of course, if they bring back the free love bit I might just be persuaded.