The Ned Wood Archive

I don’t care what others say

They say we don’t listen anyway

The Chambers Brothers

I keep getting ahead of myself.  I want to tell you all about Annie, but I want to do this in the right order so you know what was happening.  It’s like if I hadn’t got to know Bernie or Chris so well, I wouldn’t have got to know Annie.  It was like, each in their own way, they cleansed my doors of perception, so I could see what was really there.  So I could see real people like Annie and appreciate them.  Of course after they’d wiped the doors clean, Annie came along and threw them wide open so the wind of reality could come rushing through and invigorate the inside.

One thing that happened was that Bernie put L-plates on Chris’ car to show that we were still learning to live.  Chris being Chris kept them there to humour him.  Well, whatever he thought, he never took them off.  Maybe that was why Steve Hillage called his album L.  Learner.  And we were all trying to guess whether it stood for Love or Life or something else.

Another time, Bernie told me his theory of karma.  What prompted it was a couple of Geography students who had wound him up.  Or maybe it was a Geography demonstrator in the cartography practical.  I’d done cartography in my first year and I know for a fact that they wound me up.  Bernie said that good students came back as Geologists; bad ones came back as Geographers.  I told him I’d failed me Geography A level and wondered what I’d come back as.  Chris said I’d be stuck in a loop retaking my Geography A level until I passed.  He said life was an exam.  If you fail, you have to retake.  You keep on travelling through your lives, getting better each time until you eventually succeed and break free of whatever it is that holds you down (don’t ask me, I’m not there yet).  And when you’ve broken free, you have a choice.  You can either be an old Buddhist and enjoy yourself, or you can be a Zen Buddhist and come back anyway to help all of us plebs that haven’t reached enlightenment.  Once I asked Chris if he knew anyone that had reached that stage yet.  He said yes, Helen, because he couldn’t think of anything way she could get better.  Isn’t that sweet.

One of my other Bernie and Chris stories comes from the sit-in that we had back in March.  I hadn’t known them so well then, but I’ve built up a good picture of what happened by piecing my own memories together with tales from Bernie and Helen.

We’d decided to occupy the Admin block as a protest against tuition fees.  Big deal.  It’s funny, but last week some students from University phoned me and said that fees where going up and as an old boy, would I like to contribute to the University fund.  Not the Student’s Union, not some student charity, but the university itself.  Apparently all these students were cold-calling all the former students they could find.  I told them to get their arses in gear and get militant.  I felt pretty righteous about it, even though back when we went into the Admin block I was fairly ambivalent about the sit in.

Anyway, we’d gone in with our sleeping bags and stuff.  I was with the crew from Chamberlain: me, Sonia, Jo, Mark, and so on.  We slept outside the careers office.  Funny, that was the only time I went near the careers office in my time as a student.  In the morning when we left, there were these hairy hippie types outside.  Apparently it was Bernie and Lew and some folk they knew.  They were sat around meditating.  Bernie told me they’d been trying to levitate the admin block.  In fact he claimed that only seconds before we came out, they’d succeeded in raising it five foot off the floor.  I’d not noticed.

I can remember thinking it was a good laugh at the time, but I know that the boys from the Union didn’t – guys like Neil and Rod and Mark and the rest of the folk they hung around with.  They got a bit upset and accused Bernie’s mates of lowering the tone.  And then someone, thinking back, it must have been Chris, pulled up a handful of the daffs that were growing in front of the library and went along the row of union guys, each with their angry young look and supply of left wing newspapers and presented them each with a flower.  I’ll never forget the look on the face of this one guy, who was trying to make a point and waving his rolled up Socialist Worker when Chris calmly placed a bright yellow daffodil in the tube of his paper.