The LTYC in full swing.

Haha.

No.

This was actually taken before people came.

Over the 3 sessions there were 6 people, then 15, then 0.

Anyway the numbers don’t matter as much as the fact that everyone who came laughed their heads off.

I don’t want to sound full of myself, but I’d put money that we laughed more than the audience of whoever’s winning Edinburgh’s ‘best comedy show’ this year.

Seriously.

Laughter Yoga was invented by Dr Madan Kataria in the 90s.

He was studying the many and profound health benefits that occur when people laugh with people.

He had his first brainwave – this is all a bit dry and academic.

And he got his friends together in a park, to tell each other jokes.

Then, they ran out of jokes.

Soon, he had a second brain wave.

They started to play at laughing.

They would do silly games together, like ‘laugh like an old person’, and soon enough the laughter would be rolling around.

Good one.

That was how ‘Laughter Yoga’ was born.

We’re saddled with the name now. It doesn’t give a good idea of what it is, because it isn’t anything like conventional yoga.

I think that’s why I decided to call this thing, the Laughter Therapy Yoga Club.

Although that is, if possible, even more confusing, as it doesn’t have any therapy in it, either.

Oh woops I fucked it up.

Anyway.

The news is this.

This Sunday will be the 2^nd meeting of the LTYC on Hampstead Heath.

The LTYC meets by the bandstand near Parliament Hill café, at 11.03 sharp.

If you want to come you are very welcome and you will feel very happy.

(The LTYC will be meeting every Sunday apart from when I’m not in London, occasionally. Please message me if you want to come, tomapopiolek@gmail.com).

Q: I haven’t done Laughter Yoga before, and it sounds weird. Will I feel like a bellend?

A: Yes. It is possible that you will feel like a bellend.

Q: Oh. I was hoping to get a bit more reassurance than that.

A: Oh right. Yes, well that won’t last very long.

You’ll get into it soon enough, because you’ll be moving around et cetera.

Plus, you know, we’re all extremely conditioned by society to behave in ‘normal’ ways, when we’re all obviously a bit mental. And that’s actually really bad for your mental health to pretend that you’re not mental. It will drive you up the wall.

A: OK thanks, that’s really helpful.

I’ll have a think about it.

I have here prepared a few pictures to describe my experience.

Here is a picture of my luxurious 4-person accomodation.

Here is a very accurate pie chart describing what I ate.

Here you can see me and my brother doing some smiling.

At one point I uploaded a series of videos onto my Instagram wearing a blue pillow-case over my face, talking from the perspective of the crazy voices in my head.

Don’t worry about that too much.

Here I was hitch hiking near to the east coast of Scotland.

If possible you should try to hitch hike in service stations for a number of reasons. People are more likely to take you. They are also more likely to be going on longer journeys. And if it’s going badly then you can go and buy some chocolate.

However, at this point I was trying to get out of bumfuck Narnia and so I had to walk to the motorway.

I had a very lovely time in Edinburgh and no one assaulted me or laughed at me for being English.

There were a few challenging moments, such as when I accidentally didn’t talk to anyone for three days and forgot how to have a conversation.

However, I soon met my friend Luke who was doing a show called Comedian’s Comedian, (very funny and moving) and I played a small role in it where I try to get into the show and he tells me to get out.

Other things that happened included laughing at things people said, such as Pierre Novellie. I’d never heard of him before, but I would highly recommend his type of autism.

On a different occasion, I became exhausted and paranoid and I had to listen to Always Look on the Bright Side of Life by Monty Python seven times in a row.

Mortonhall Caravan Park, where I stayed, scores a whopping 4.2 stars on Google reviews.

At the camp site there was a big, soulless shower block that was playing music in it day and night.

And one of the songs that came on regularly was Concerning Hobbits, from The Lord of the Rings soundtrack.

Now I have to tell you that the eminent guitarist Finn Petcher, a long time ago he said to me that what he did sometimes, after he had done a big clean of his bedroom, is that he played this song through his speakers. And he lay down on his bed in a celebratory mood, with his room clean, and he thought about how cool life is.

And personally I have somewhat adopted this ritual, whereby I will sometimes do this after I have cleaned my bedroom.

I tried to hitch hike back to London.

I got three lifts in the end.

From Edinburgh down to Middlesborough.

In Middlesborough, I gave up and got on the train, because I’m a big old softy now.

Middlesborough train station. A respectable 3.9 stars on Google Reviews.

So I got the train to York, and in York I changed onto the train for Kings Cross.

When I got onto that train, the first thing I heard was an announcement that this train had started its journey in Edinburgh!

I had spent most of the day hitch hiking, when I could have just put my feet up for eight hours, and then gone to the train station.

I would have been on the same train.

My first lift was from a guy called ****.

He told me how he’d left Sudan, got across the sea in a boat. He climbed underneath a lorry somewhere in Greece and he lay on its front axel for two days, while it travelled on a ferry.

It wasn’t until the lorry had left the port behind, and driven into the middle of an Italian town, that he felt safe to climb out from his hiding place.

He popped out, covered in grease, and said that it scared the driver very much.

The next lift was Ewan who was a born-again Christian armed police who guarded a nuclear power station and was trying to navigate a painful divorce.

And then my third lift was Nicola and Andy, who were a cool, well put-together couple from near Ipswich, who had just been at a funeral. They took me over an hour down the road to Middlesbrough train station.

Da da derr da der da derr...

Da da da da da, da derrr, dadada.

(This is the music of Concerning Hobbits. Feel free if you like to have it play in your head, to create a compelling emotional backdrop to the end of this article.)

Edinburgh Fringe was great, 10 out of 10, would go again.

I didn’t do any stand-up but it was really fun to be in Luke’s show and I also ran a Laughter Club a few times.

Also, I saw Mark Silcox three times who reprogrammed my idea of what stand-up comedy is and possibly my brain as well.

I felt like I had to hitch hike back.

I guess...

I’d seen a video on Instagram of a woman who was saying how women don’t like men at the moment, and it had thousands of likes and the inevitable hundreds of comments and arguments beneath it. And I felt the whole thing in my stomach somehow.

And I’m aware of Gaza even if I don’t read about it. And I’m aware that the news-cycle is like a speeding up horror show and...

The first time I went hitch hiking, when I was 20, I learned more in that week, than I had done in my fifteen years in the school system.

Or at least, I valued it more.

Because I learned that you can stand on a road, in the middle of nowhere, and some complete stranger, who owes you precisely nothing, will help you out.

On another occasion, hitch hiking through France, one of my lifts was a martial artist who took me to his home south of Paris.

I hanged out with his family. They fed me, and then I slept in their garden.

And in the morning he dropped me in a good spot to get another ride.

And at some point that morning he said to me.

Les gens sont gentils.

People are kind.

Da da da da da, da da derrr, dadada.

Da da derr der...

I guess I wanted to hitch, because I wanted to touch base with the real world, again.

To feel that people are kind.

Because even though it feels sometimes like the world has gone mad...

It’s also pretty fucking cool to be alive.

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The stand-up comedian Stewart Lee stands in a Pueblo village.

He has come on a special day.

He is about to be a participant in an ancient and mysterious ritual.

From up the hill, there is a cry.

He looks up to see seven figures watching over the village.

Pueblo clowns.

He later described how just the sight of them evoked fear in him.

And then the clowns descended on the village.

They picked children up, took them away from their parents, and threw them in the river.

They threw a couple of adults in as well.

They seem to make a lot of use, in fact, of this river.

And did other social terrorism.

They run amok.

Stewart Lee said he couldn't look them in the eyes.

Last night, on the eve of setting off for the Edinburgh Fringe, I went to the Top Secret Comedy Club, which is one of the busiest rooms in London, doing multiple shows a night.

I saw some very strong comedians.

They had definite personas. They were larger than life, funny, likeable. What they were saying wasn’t obvious, or simple. They had punch lines.

The MC was also highly skilled. She asked people what they do, took the piss out of a few of them in a quick-witted, unarguable kind of way. But not too much. She was encouraging, welcoming, and those things too.

The room was ‘warm’.

The laughter, loud and frequent.

Now... I hesitate to write this, because I don’t want to be something I never wanted to be. A critic.

And also I can’t do, yet, what all of them did. Go out in front of 150 people and do ten to fifteen minutes of legitimately good, cohesive stand-up comedy.

But... I’m here, now. Which is to say, I'll finish the thought.

Alright, I went by myself. And alright, I wasn’t drinking.

But the whole thing left me cold. Decidedly unthrilled.

Which is not to say I don’t think they were brilliant performers.

I’m just saying, you know...

Hearing about the Pueblo clowns, throwing children into a river, even hearing about that, is somehow more exciting than anything that happened last night.

Comoide

Komos - street festival linked to Dionysus

Oide - song

Dionysus was the god of wine, theatre, ritual madness and ecstasy.

The Dionysian mystery cult probably involved ergot, which is like natural LSD.

While celebrating, the men would often parade great statues of penises around.

Meanwhile, the women sometimes disappeared into the mountains to sing ecstatic songs.

Not that it was all ‘good’. Or all safe.

Sometimes they tore ritual animals apart and ate the uncooked flesh.

And, let’s be honest. They had orgies as well.

In fact, that word, orgy, is literally directly from the Greek word that was used to describe these celebrations.

So, all I’m saying, really... is that I found the Top Secret Comedy Club a bit boring, compared with the Dionysian mystery rites.

I’m rambling, perhaps, a little.

I hope you will keep reading me, as I ramble a little more, sitting on this train up to Edinburgh.

I am on my way to the Fringe.

I am not guaranteed any kind of set, anywhere.

However, I also may have a room in which to do an hour-long show.

Because Luke from the café I go to, he rented a performance room but he might not need it the whole time. So, he might give it to me, and... apparently, an Edinburgh show is an hour.

I learned this might happen a couple of days ago and got very excited and made a poster for this hour-long show I might be doing.

The show, of course, I haven't written yet. But the quotes are real.

An hour? Can I really do an hour?

I think so.

Maybe.

As long as I don’t try to write any jokes.

I’ve got a bit obsessed with Johnny Vegas the last couple of days.

Ever since I watched Johnny Vegas: Who’s Ready for Ice Cream?

Which is a mock-umentary about him doing the Edinburgh Fringe, and getting bullied by his angry ice-cream van man sponsor.

And then going on stage and creating electric chaos.

The last few days I’ve been on a Johnny Vegas YouTube journey, and it’s blaringly obvious to me, actually, why it is I like him. Why I find some of these videos of him going madly off-script on awards ceremonies and panel shows so exciting.

It’s because I have absolutely no idea what he's going to say next.

No idea what’s going to happen next.

Just being, even by video, in the presence of chaos, is pretty wonderful.

Any night of the week, I’d buy a ticket for that.

Two things that have happened to me recently.

One was, I had a panic attack at the shopping centre at Swiss Cottage.

OK. Panic attack is a strong phrase. And maybe others have had bigger ones etc. But I certainly felt panicked. Anxious to the point I had to physically sit down on a step and soothe myself back. Very short breaths and my mind screaming out and bewildered by cyclical thoughts.

Second one. I performed stand-up comedy in front of 30 people on Hampstead Heath and took my trousers off.

Near the beginning of my set, I took my trousers off.

I was wearing pants underneath, of course. I had made sure they were a good pair. The whole thing was premeditated.

The audience was pretty surprised, though.

Soon after this, when I had continued talking for a bit, and obviously had no intention of putting them back on, Anna shouted out, “You’re scaring me now.”

So what I did was I backed away and then I came back, still without my trousers on, and she laughed.

I can’t be totally sure this doesn’t sound weird, over text.

But what I’m trying to get across, was that people were laughing a lot. And I have to say, that it is probably my proudest professional achievement, to date.

So... The point I’m making is that anxiety is strange. There I was, in Swiss Cottage shopping centre, anonymous in a crowd, and I felt overwhelmed by social anxiety.

And there I was. Trouserless. In front of a crowd of people, all looking at me. Not even really knowing what I was going to say next. And I felt completely calm and relaxed.

I felt like I was a little kid.

I’m at the bar of a campsite outside Edinburgh now.

Feeling at the moment like God is in his heaven, I think the phrase is.

P. G. Wodehouse used it anyway, to imply that all is right with the world.

As far as stand-up comedy is concerned, I am totally a beginner.

I don’t have a character in the way that the man Michael Pennington has Johnny Vegas.

I’m learning about the clown in me, though.

For example, I know he likes to be in his pants, sometimes.

But… I'm a beginner.

And nothing I’ve written here, is going to help me, next time I’m up there in front of the microphone.

Next time, I might bomb, for all I know.

Sometimes, people ask me if I still get scared doing stand up.

And I say yeah, and laugh.

It’s pretty scary.

Before I go on stage though, is also a beautiful feeling, too.

After all…

That’s what I want, isn’t it?

To talk to Dionysus.

Oh my gosh, I just see sparks and beyond them is a dark crowd waiting.

London.

My turn to speak the mic-stand like a black bone that wanna kill me.

London.

Turned out forty people.

And here we are together.

Waiting.

And my turn to speak into the black silent sea I am alone.

And as my mouth open now. I still. Don’t know.

Whether to put these tears now into words.

In Kenya and other places people sometimes pay professional weepers to cry at their funerals.

They do this because once some people get to the place of freely flowing tears, then others can arrive there more easily.

And like that grief pours out of them all together like a wave.

And crying like that was common with all us human beings before the Industrial Revolution or the British Empire or Sigmund Freud, or whatever it was that made us all crazy and not cry together like we used to.

Laughter works in the same way too because it joins people up into it and then those reverberations between us… well, that’s love, isn’t it.

My friend Paulina was a facilitator at a Vipassana meditation retreat, which observes strict silence between long periods of meditation.

And she was told… at meal times, if one person starts laughing for some reason, one of the facilitators must quickly and loudly tell them to stop.

Because if they don’t, what’s happened a few times in the past is that the laughter catches between everyone, and it really starts to roll and roll between them, and no one can stop it for ages, and then all the magic meditation Vipassana juice gets lost or something like that.

(Although I would probably choose the laughter.)

((Anyway, by way of tangent to the tangent, I think what I am trying to get across is the idea of expressive tears.

And how I had all these tears that I could feel in my belly most of that day and I hadn’t gone to a Kenyan funeral so I was just feeling them all uncried in my belly which was a bit of a problem because I was literally on a stage about to perform stand-up comedy.))

OK I’ll fill you in on some of the facts and then I’m going to go back to doing some more impressionistic poetic prose and it’s all going to tie together smoothly and mean something and hopefully you’re going to think, wow Tom still knows how to do a banging Substack article.

The facts are as follows. I’d very recently returned from Buddhafield festival and I was feeling confused and upset about why people in London weren’t running up to each other with delight, cuddling one other and smiling at random people and playfighting and taking care of each other and having the time of their lives.

It was very confusing.

The day after Buddhafield I moved in to a new house and the guy who owns it threw a massive wobble about me staying there so I felt convinced that I was going to have to move out maybe the next day or something (situation since reconciled and averted).

On the same day as that I fell out with the comedian who has been paying me to book her gigs etc. because she cancelled a load of work at the last minute because she didn’t need it doing anymore, and I said that’s a bit disappointing I’d rather have more notice and she sent me a fiery message back trying to make out like I’d done something wrong but I didn’t want to argue with her, even though I was angry, by text message. Because I’m not 19 years old.

So I basically got back from paradise to find that my job had blown up, and my house was in jeopardy.

So, I was just feeling like oh my God, this is crazy how we have made this world where we don’t know how to take care of each other and treat each other properly, and why does no one want to hug me on the District Line?

And then that evening I was on stage doing stand-up comedy, except for this, my 51st gig… this was the only gig I have done so far, where when I started it I felt like what I really wanted to do was cry.

The comedian who I’d fallen out with was also at the gig. She was out there beyond the reach of the white lights that were shining in my face, probably willing me to fail.

And fail I did.

At least by my own admittedly high standards.

The feelings from this unresolved conflict were bubbling around me mainly unformed into sensible words.

I had spent time with a friend that day and she suggested that I actually break down the situation on stage. Maybe read the messages out.

Address the elephant in the room.

I thought that was a pretty funny idea and I did think about doing it but it also felt like it could potentially be unprofessional.

So instead I just… I just tried.

Soldiered through a few different things. Moved on quickly.

Felt disembodied.

Felt the unshed tears in my stomach.

But none of it really worked and I didn’t want to be there.

So it was kind of a hard experience, to not hear people laughing much, because normally (did I mention this?) I’m really good at stand up comedy.

Not on stage now no I’m in my bedroom on my own and with my thoughts.

One of Jayaraja’s favourite stories.

Heard him say it many times.

Nelson Mandela leaving jail.

27 years in prison and he walked out calm and proud.

You can see it, how he walked.

And Jayaraja’s lesson there, is no one can take your self-respect away from you.

Because that is for you alone.

So now I’m in my bedroom, with my thoughts.

And not on stage thank God.

Some half-spun thoughts on shame and pride. And comedy and sad clowns and all of this.

Oh yes.

A memory that comes and makes me smile.

Jeremy, at Buddhafield, telling me a story.

A clown he saw perform there.

His name was…

Can’t Understand Nothing Twatface.

He was dressed only in pants and sunglasses.

And he kept talking about how this gig was really important to him and he had to make it work but he was worried it wasn’t going to work.

And he kept talking about how sad he was.

In his pants.

I wish I’d seen that.

A smile is on my face now at the thought of that.

And…

Well. What are you going to do?

We are like tiny little flames in the big dark.

We are little funny animals getting older kind of quick.

So what are you going to do?

Not laugh, or cry, or get it wrong?

And…

Dignity…

Dignity is an interesting word.

Yesterday, at that gig, I felt on some level like I was losing some.

But if that is the case… then why do I like myself so much right now?

And also…

(This isn’t really poetic prose, is it?

But I’ve just got things to say, right now.)

Maya Angelou.

Still, I rise.

“I dance

like I’ve got diamonds

at the meeting

of my thighs.”

I didn’t remember it like that, in fact.

I remembered it being something like gold in my stomach.

But diamonds works for me, as well.

And I’ve got gold in my stomach too.

I can feel it.

Can you feel it?

We are here, sweet honey love.

And next time (’cause I’m still alive), then I might just wear my pants.

In retrospect, that was a mistake.

That should have been my first thought, in fact.

This isn’t going to work.

I admit that I should have thought of that.

But I didn’t, because my gigs recently have been joyful.

And in my experience of singing Radhe Govinda with audiences, it can’t go wrong.

Because when it does go wrong, that’s actually kind of what I want.

I love how the collective nervousness to start singing together, quickly, palpably, turns into a shared release.

How stress lifts away from us.

And smiles and laughter start breaking out.

And after that… anything that I want to say, I’m surfing the wave of a much higher collective vibration.

Because people are physically relaxed enough to actually laugh.

Which is one of the main things, when you’re doing comedy.

Ha ha ha ha.

That sound.

But a lot of the open mic comedy gigs, there’s more tension than release.

In fact, going to a comedy night, is often one of the least funny ways to spend an evening.

Aha, I thought.

I’ll tackle that head on.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last month or so.

Getting people to chant Aum together.

Doing breathing exercises, and singing.

I’ve basically been running a workshop that no one signed up for.

And the inappropriateness of that, and people’s nervousness around it, but actual deep desire to join in, to make sound, and to be together, everyone having a laugh… that’s basically the whole set-up for the show.

Oh my God, I thought.

I’m a genius.

In Chelmsford, though, of the many things that were shouted at me while I was on stage, I don’t remember anyone calling me a genius.

Someone called me gay.

But not a genius.

Actually, I think multiple people called me gay.

And I failed to stand up for LGBTQ+ rights, I’m sorry to say.

Because by this point, the tide had turned on me.

I was the focal point of a pack of hungry animals.

What felt like stupid animals, too.

Like angry, drunk cows.

Except cows are actually very intelligent.

Way more intelligent, I think, than anyone from Chelmsford.

Anyway, I finished by saying thank you for your time. I’m alright with everything that I’ve done here.

I still feel like that, actually.

Even if no one else does.

I managed to take a photo of one of the women.

The moment that it went wrong was the very beginning.

I walked into the middle of the beer garden, away from the so-called stage, and tried to get everyone to start humming.

Except they were so quiet.

No one wanted to hum.

There was this tiny hum that faded into a despairing, pissed-off silence.

I kept going with it a little, but the ice was freezing over faster than it was breaking.

There’s an idea in comedy writing that there can be a bail-out point for routines, where the comedian will quickly, smoothly move on from something if it’s not getting a good response.

What I was trying to do, though, was to get everyone to sing.

The whole joke of it is that it is against their better judgment to join in.

So my whole set is based around the fact that this is a hill that I’m prepared to die on.

And I died on it.

I died on the hill.

I was killed on it, actually.

Because by the time I was actually encouraging them to sing Radhe Govinda, the heckles started coming in thick and fast.

I did stay up there, trying to talk to them.

It didn’t go very well.

But what’s interesting about the whole experience (and I think I said that phrase on stage,

This is really interesting… )

What’s interesting is that for well over an hour the whole beer garden had sat largely in a tense silence as joke after joke failed to land.

And what happened when I went on was quite different.

I actually pissed them off.

They started shouting at me.

They hated it.

There’s an anger to it, if I’m being honest.

As much as I’ve been getting everyone going with the Aums and the Radhe Govindas and the breathing exercises.

As much as I’m trying to chill everyone out and warm everyone up, and as much as I really want everyone to have a good time.

Underneath that, there’s a burning anger.

Of not having a voice.

Sitting in abject terror in English lessons painfully waiting for my turn to read, because I knew my voice would half-fail me, would croak, stumble, and whisper as my face turned red.

Somehow appalled by the sound emanating from my own body, scared that at any moment it could completely disappear, leaving public humiliation in the silence that followed.

And everywhere I went, and anyone I talked to, my voice felt like I was constantly trying to pull it up, through layers of rock-hard lung and chest muscles.

Desperately trying to grasp my voice.

And when I had it, aware that it could fall through my fingers again, at any moment.

A kind of physical shyness.

An intense adolescent awkwardness that only started to lose its grip in my early 30s.

I wasn’t born awkward.

I became awkward, because of trauma, and not being able to speak about what was important to me.

So…

That’s what happened there.

But, the point I’m trying to make…

is that…

underneath the Aums, and the Radhe Govindas…

All I want to do, really, is stand up in English class, and speak from my heart...

Look, are any of you girls actually going to go out with me, or what?

I just want to stand in front of a group of people, and cause as much chaos as my fragile little ego can handle.

And last night, thank God, I did.

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That’s right. Because everyone was talking about it ever since Goodwife Rivet fell ill, and so John went over the Stour and saw this woman called Hovey, who’s a cunning woman, and she did some kind of spell and between them they worked out that it was Elizabeth Clarke.

Yes, the old woman with one leg, she lives up the hill… that it was her.

Because also, it turns out, that her mother was hanged for witchcraft. And it runs in families, you know.

So anyway there were four of them, and they watched her for three nights in a row, waiting for her familiars to turn up.

And then on the third night, that young man, Matthew Hopkins, the son of the preacher from Cambridge, he turned up.

And somehow or other, that’s when she ended up confessing to it.

To sleeping with the Devil.

And she had the familiars as well. They all appeared out of nowhere when she called them.

There was… there was one like a greyhound, but with longer legs.

And there were a couple more… I can’t remember what they said… And then there was one that looked like a rabbit.

Anyway. She confessed to it. And she said a couple of names, as well.

Anne West, and her daughter, Rebecca!

They were in a coven, together.

Can you believe it? Yes, up in the woods by Mistley. That’s where they went to cast their spells.

And now they’re all being kept in the prison in Colchester.

And there’s going to be a trial, this summer.

So we are blessed that they’re in prison now.

And God willing they all hang.

Gossip in Manningtree, Essex

End of March, 1645

180 years before the first police force, if you wanted something doing, you had to do it yourself.

And that’s what Matthew Hopkins did.

He went up to Colchester castle, where now over a dozen women were being kept, accused of witchcraft.

(Clarke’s confession had sparked off a series of accusations around the area, and long-held suspicions were now seeing the light of day.)

He took Rebecca West, still a girl, away from the others, and promised her freedom if she recounted a full confession.

And that’s the way it went.

In the end, Rebecca went free.

And her mother, Anne, along with Elizabeth Clarke, and many more, were hanged at Chelmsford.

Rose Hollybread and three others died in Colchester castle, awaiting trial.

And Matthew Hopkins, having collected and recorded the evidence that was used at the trial, set off north, to Ipswich and Suffolk.

Only 24 years old, he had plenty of energy.

He had also found what he wanted to do with his life…

And this was his first job.

The first act in a career that was absolutely central to, that facilitated and largely enacted, the greatest witch hunt in English history.

In East Anglia, between 1645 and 1647.

In which over a hundred people, the vast majority of them women, were hanged.

He even invented a moniker for himself.

The Witch-Finder General.

Wrong side of history pal.

The thing that is leaping out to be said about these witch hunts, and I’m not a historian at all, but I’ve read a few books about it, and what everyone seems to agree on, is…

England was fucked.

Mid-Civil War.

Proportionately, one of the deadliest conflicts in the country’s history.

4% of the population died because of it.

Which doesn’t sound like a lot maybe, but that is double the percentage of the First World War.

Plus, enemies were literally living alongside each other.

Cavalier and Roundhead sympathisers and indeed combatants lived as neighbours, often not sure about each other’s true loyalties, for years on end.

The war also went on for nine years (1642-1651).

On top of this, plague and starvation were already widespread. But they were made worse by the troops moving around, and requisitioning food.

Meanwhile, this all took place during the Little Ice Age. So it was cold, the weather was all over the place, and crops were frequently failing.

As if it that wasn’t enough, the Puritans were in charge.

Public celebrations such as May Day, feast days, and even wakes, were heavily restricted.

Christmas Day became a day of fasting.

There’s no record of anyone laughing during the whole of the 1640s.

One thing that jumped out at me when I was reading about the witch hunts… I had assumed that these women knew that they were innocent of the charges against them…

Of course, I thought, even if they confessed, they were under incredible duress, and were just saying they were witches to get it over and done with.

But some of the accounts hint at a more complex reality.

Such as Margaret Moore, who wept tears of remorse that she had murdered Thomas Nix by magic.

Or others who, before they had ever been accused, and to people’s surprise, sought out the Witchfinders to confess that they had been in communion with the Devil.

Occasionally, they walked up to the hangman’s noose, themselves.

These accounts often have a kind of hallucinatory, or even psychotic, feel to them.

Groups of people regularly became convinced that ordinary animals were, in fact, unnaturally-shaped, monstrous spawn of the Devil.

In short…

The witch hunts of East Anglia, in the end, were nothing less than a kind of collective madness.

There is a fairly faithful template to the story of the witch.

- An old widow begs for charity and is rebuffed.

- She is heard cursing the one who has denied her.

- Soon their child or animal falls sick and dies.

- The old woman is blamed for their death.

This happens time and time again.

But why widows? Why old women?

I think partly because…

Often widows didn’t have an income. They were dependent on charity.

And so they were the most vulnerable members of the society.

And when push came to shove, as you can imagine, it did, almost every day, in these dark times… when push came to shove… the elderly, and the isolated, were the ones who got fed last.

And you can imagine, as starvation nagged at people’s stomachs, it didn’t take much for curses to start flying around.

And it wasn’t really a stretch for someone to start thinking that those curses were the cause of some of their woes.

Even without plague, war, and hunger, isolation can take its toll on people…

My Nan lived out the last few years of her life by herself, in Manningtree, as it happens.

And… seeing how difficult she was to get along with, sometimes, during those last couple of years… this sounds so bad… but I kind of understand how someone might want to kill her.

I have two questions.

1. Why am I thinking about the witch hunts of the 1640s?

2. Why do I find it relaxing?

The answer to the first question is simple, I think.

I have come to stay temporarily at my mum’s house, down the road from where these events happened, and that has reminded me of this history.

The answer to the second question… why I find it relaxing…

Historical perspective.

If I read the news, I start to think that we are on the brink of Armageddon.

But to people in the 1640s, they too thought they were facing Armageddon (I mean, literally, so many people at this time were completely convinced that the world was ending (as have been many in pretty much every generation of people who have ever lived)).

So that’s simple enough, too, I guess.

But there’s something else I want to say, as well.

Something that’s got a few layers.

Because, you know… I’m really deep.

Cut to…

Me and Tom Sizer are on sitting on the side of a hill, in Wales.

We’ve been hitting it pretty hard the last couple of days.

We had just intersected with a big group of other festival-goers we’d seen around, and we’d had this 5 or 10 minute interaction with them.

But during it, I had been feeling shy and my voice had felt blocked, and I’d been quite quiet in the conversation.

This used to happen all the time. It still does sometimes now, too, to be fair.

So anyway, we’re looking out at this hill and we’re sharing a moment of stillness.

And then he started to tell me a story by Anton Chekhov.

I’m pretty sure he said it was Chekhov.

But I haven’t managed to track it down.

(If anyone has heard this story, please let me know.)

Anyway. Here is a rough outline of the story, as I remember it, spoken seven years ago, on a hill in Wales.

A baby is born.

As his mother is holding him, welcoming him into the world, the boy’s guardian angel, comes down, and says to her,

You may have one wish for this boy’s future.

And she thinks about it, and finally says,

I wish that he is the most beautiful. That everyone sees him as amazingly beautiful, and that everyone he meets immediately loves him.

And the angel tries to warn her against this, but she is convinced, that if her baby is seen as beautiful, and if everyone he meets immediately loves him, then he will be safe, and live a most fantastic life.

And so the baby grows into a boy, and the boy grows into a man.

And the wish is fulfilled.

He is beautiful. He is loved.

He is loved so much that…

Now, this is where, with seven years in between, I have forgotten the details of the story.

But we can easily imagine how such a thing would be horrendous.

How people would be so entranced by him, how everyone would want him, that he would grow up without knowing anything of actual friendship.

How people would constantly want him for his beauty, for this superficial attraction.

And how he would come, in fact, to use people, for their money, or influence, or for sex… as they would try to use him, because of this powerful feeling of superficial attraction.

And we can imagine how his life quickly became incredibly sad. A tragedy, in fact, in which no one actually loved him, and he did not love them.

How manipulation, misuse, and anger, were not far behind, this overpowering, universal attraction of his.

And so he lived his life, increasingly alone and increasingly unwell. Never staying anywhere for long.

Never really knowing anybody.

And then, when he was an old man, and he was nearing the end of his life, it happened that his guardian angel visited him again.

And the angel told him of how, when he was a baby, his mother – now dead – had made a wish for him, that he would be the most beautiful, and that everyone he met would immediately love him.

And then the angel said to him,

And now I will grant you another wish. This time of your own choice.

The man did not think about it for very long.

Take back my mother’s wish.

He said.

And then the angel smiled, and did exactly that.

And from then on, though he was an old man, and he had no friends, at first, he started to live his life again.

Free from being loved in such a way.

And those were, by far, the happiest days of his life.

Tom Sizer told me that.

On a hill in Wales.

And he said something else to me, too, on another occasion.

He said that when he sensed that someone didn’t like him, but he didn’t know, then in that awkwardness and vulnerability of not knowing where he stood with someone, then sometimes he found himself saying something, or behaving in a way, that he thought they might find challenging.

In other words, he didn’t mind being disliked.

It was distance and uncertainty, that he couldn’t deal with.

Now, I should probably qualify that a bit.

He wasn’t mean, but he could be controversial.

And I can’t believe that someone who actually knew him wouldn’t have warmed to him.

But occasionally people who didn’t know him, had a reaction to him.

Because he said things.

He was a gobby person.

He didn’t exactly blend in.

And I remember, on another occasion again, I read this bit of prose he had written, about his childhood.

And it told a story about how, when he was a child, he had said something disrespectful around some adults, and of them had looked at him and said,

You’re a gobshite aren’t you?

And his conclusion to this story, right, was that he was a gobshite.

And he was happy to remain one.

The other night, at men’s group, Jerry suggested something to me. He said… imagine, that spiritual idea, that your two souls sat down and talked, before you were born, and you agreed what you were going to teach each other…

Well what was it, that he came to teach you?

And I thought about it a little while, and I said,

He taught me how to be a comedian.

But actually I don’t think that’s right.

I think what he came to teach me was something else.

Something that might have just as much joy.

It’s OK, if some people don’t like me.

It’s OK to fall out with people.

And that is the feeling of relaxation, as I’ve been thinking about the witch hunts, these last couple of days…

Ironically, they somehow represent an antidote to madness.

Because in between the hyperinflated news-story insanity of tyrants, sex-abuse and wars…

And the shiny Instagram schmalz of random muppets giving me life advice…

There is an earthy truth beneath these psychotic techni-colour bubbles.

Sometimes people don’t get on with each other.

And honestly, it’s taking me a really long time to learn that one.

Because… probably something to do with my childhood.

It normally is, isn’t it?

That I find conflict, and drama, affects me deeply.

But I suppose we all have our own relationships with social anxiety.

We’re all somewhere on the infinite, multidimensional scale.

Because… other people aren’t safe, sometimes.

Ask Elizabeth Clarke, or Anne West.

And at the same time, we all need each other.

And within this crazy smorgasbord of endlessly fascinating social relations…

I’m a sensitive boy with lots of feelings.

Sometimes.

And sometimes I don’t give a damn.

It’s all on a scale, isn’t it?

It’s all constantly shifting anyway.

So… I’m going to bypass the part where I try to say something clever about authenticity.

Because I’m not sure I have anything clever to say.

All I know is…

I was thinking about the witch hunts.

I felt peaceful.

I hijacked my own essay to talk about some memories of Tom Sizer.

And I feel pretty good about that.

All I know is…

I talk to him a lot.

And he talks back.

(He’s dead, by the way.)

And that is literally one of the greatest gifts I own.

The bright lights of Colchester.

He often referred to Colchester as the bright lights.

As if it was a great, glamorous city.

That’s one of the things I loved about him. That he managed to see the funny side of everything.

I’ve been based here for thirteen days now.

I’ve gone relatively mad, in my own, partial, isolation.

And I’ve now watched every appearance of Peter Kay on Parkinson (this, by the way, is my favourite one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV7QanPKFyI&t=81s ).

But “time has come, today”.

The time has come to go back to the big city, to find my fame and fortune.

Honestly, I’m feeling super stoked, that I don’t live in the 1640s.

So I’m going to have a cup of tea, and then I’m moving back to London.

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This cryptic title refers to the fact that the average life-span has something like 4000 weeks, which amounts to just shy of 80 years.

From 15^th October 2025, to 1^st June 2026, I lived in a Hare Krishna ashram in Soho, London.

33 weeks.

Sometimes I wonder… What on earth do people think of us?

Sometimes, they tell us.

I remember once, we came into Covent Garden making a song and dance as normal and I saw a magician freaking out.

He turned his speaker up loudly, blasting out electronic music to try to interrupt us.

(We do generally stop singing around people doing street performances… This magician wasn’t doing a show at that moment.

He was on his break.

He hated us in his spare time.)

I went over to him and said Are you alright mate?

We’re going to go in a few minutes.

He wasn’t alright though, and he told me about it.

The fucking Hare Krishnas are a load of fucking ex-drug addicts, ex-convicts, trying to fucking convert everyone to their religion.

I thought blimey. That’s not a very good review.

I wasn’t sure what to say, but it turned out that he didn’t really want to engage me in the art of conversation.

He turned away, muttering to himself, and started to stare at his own speaker as if he wanted to murder it.

So I left him to his meditation, and I rejoined the parade.

After all, he had to get ready to entertain a load of children.

What follows is a series of thoughts I want to share, inspired by my experience in the ashram.

They are loosely, I suppose, some ideas I may have got into with the magician, had he wanted to have a long, deep conversation about the religious group that I have, much to my own surprise, made such an important part of my life.

But they are not contained to that one hypothetical scenario either.

They are reflections that I have had, that I feel very much drawn to share with you.

They are also, on some level, attempts to respond, perhaps, to certain judgments or pre-conceptions that some people may have about the Hare Krishnas.

To lessen, I hope, the inevitable misconkrishnacations, that come with being such a loud, and strange, group.

This turned out, surprisingly, to be by far the longest Substack I have written.

I hope you bear with it. I hope you enjoy.

Tom

1. Spiritual world

Hare Krishnas believe in the spiritual world, and the material world.

The material world, or maya, is full of suffering.

And we can come in contact with the spiritual world through devotional singing.

Now, speaking as a recovering atheist, my antenna for superstition of course goes completely haywire whenever someone claims something like this.

But, I want to briefly explore whether it is really as far-fetched as it may sound.

The fact is that almost all cultures have had a version of that. Worldwide, shamans have visited ‘the other world’ for tens of thousands of years (see, cave art).

The ancient Celts believed in reincarnation.

The Persians had the Chinvat Bridge, where the soul passes through to get into the afterlife.

I could go on and on and on, and obviously all these stories are different. But actually isn’t the most striking thing… the similarities?

That we are souls and there are other realities than this one.

Now, obviously, an idea in the zeitgeist, since around René Descartes’ dream (1619), in which an angel told him that

the conquest of nature is to be achieved through measures and numbers…

… an idea in the zeitgeist is that these other world ideas are just superstitious nonsense and that everything is actually made of atoms anyway mate so why don’t you just put a sock in it and watch Bridgerton it’s actually really clever and interesting.

But that whole it’s just a load of superstition thing starts to break down a bit because people actually go to these other places, first of all.

I mean, if you look into DMT experiences, and Near Death Experience reports…

ANYWAY. I don’t want to have some kind of philosophical debate what I really want to say about this is…

First of all, that I found Bridgerton really disappointing after the first season.

And secondly, that with the Hare Krishnas, this other world idea, is useful down here.

This is when the pedal hits the metal, really.

Where the rubber meets the road.

And other driving metaphors.

Because with the Hare Krishnas, opening lines of communication with the other world, it is not an esoteric exercise.

One thing we talk about a lot is taste.

How if we develop a taste for the spiritual world, we slowly let go of our taste for material gratification.

In other words, if you spend an evening singing mantras with people, you don’t want to get wasted, or eat a load of chocolate.

Because the mantra has so much more release, joy, every emotion sometimes… it has so much more in it, that other pleasures don’t really cut it anymore (at least for a little while).

So you get the taste for the higher thing, and slowly, and with many steps forwards and backwards, but definitely, the need for sense gratification gets weaker…

The magician in Covent Garden was right in one way. There are a fair few ex-drug addicts in the Hare Krishnas. Including myself. (Though maybe not proportionately more than the general population.)

Drug addicts as far as I can work out are generally sensitive souls and the drugs help them cope with what would otherwise be unbearable sensitivity.

But the point I’m making is… it actually works.

Whatever we all think about what’s going on big-picture with the universe.

It actually works. Singing Hare Krishna.

It works time and time and time again with people.

You see the pain leaving them.

2. Oh my God that was such a long first point.

This point is about theoretical physics.

The second point I’m going to make, and then I’m really going to leave the whole philosophical aspect behind, is the argument of fine-tuning.

I found out about this when I was doing some research for a debate in the ashram, and it legitimately blew my tiny mind.

I had to go and sit down for quite some time, and have a good, old-fashioned think about life, the universe, and everything.

The argument of fine-tuning points to the fact that there are a load of physical constants in this universe and they are all set within an extremely narrow range.

If any of these constants differed by a tiny fraction, this universe could simply not sustain life.

If the Strong Nuclear Force was a few percent weaker, then the universe would only be made up of hydrogen.

Or the Cosmological Constant (Λ) ≈ 10⁻¹²² (Planck units). This describes how fast the cosmos is expanding. It is in other words

0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

and if one of those zeros wasn’t there, or if there was one more… if there was a tiny tweak to that number… then galaxies would not have formed.

Which would have been rubbish.

And so there’s a load of constants in physics, and they are all set, or finely tuned, to such a degree that the argument that the Big Bang and then blah blah blah random stuff happened, starts feeling like a stretch (to me).

And also, to top-level physicists, who view this as a genuine mystery.

One possible counter-argument is the multiverse, in which there are untold universes expanding at different rates… universes in which electrons haven’t worked out how close to be to protons, etc, to create complex molecules.

But there’d probably have to be more universes than there are atoms in this universe (!!!) to create a universe that could support life.

If it was simply a case of random chance.

Within such a context, it doesn’t feel ridiculous to think that there is Someone who actually made this whole crazy mess.

It doesn’t feel far-fetched to suggest that even through the eyes of physics, belief in God is actually, kind of, logical.

3. George Harrison

You may have heard already. George was a tambourine-shaker.

And, I learned the other day, not only did he pay for the big Hare Krishna estate in Watford… he also put up 5 million pounds to get Life of Brian made.

So I think he is officially my favourite person.

But I bring up George Harrison with a particular thing he said in mind, about John Lennon and the Hare Krishna mantra.

I remember we sang it for days, John and I, with ukulele banjos, sailing through the Greek Islands chanting Hare Krsna. Like six hours we sang, because we couldn’t stop once we got going. As soon as we stopped, it was like the lights went out.

It went on to the point where our jaws were aching, singing the mantra over and over and over and over and over. We felt exalted; it was a very happy time for us.

Isn’t that cool?

I think it’s cool.

I think, actually, it might be the coolest thing I ever heard about.

4. Prasadam

Prasadam means mercy, technically.

But it is almost always used in the context of food.

We eat prasadam, once it has first been offered to Krishna.

Hare Krishnas love prasadam. Love making it, serving it, eating it together.

Founder of the Hare Krishnas, Prabhupada, called it the ‘kitchen religion’.

The Hare Krishnas give out over 1 million free meals every day, worldwide.

And in 2022, they served their 8 billionth free meal.

5. The Name

But for me, in the end, it’s all about the Holy Name.

In July 2023 I was at St Paul’s carnival in Bristol and I was with a little crew of dear friends and the whole thing there is drink and drugs fuelled and massive rigs playing drum n bass.

Anyway I lost my friends at some point and there was no phone reception and after a while I was kind of looking around at all this stuff going on and I just thought… is this actually fun? And the conclusion I came to is, no I don’t think this is fun unless you get pissed.

So I got the train back to London, and the next day there was an event called All Love, which is a 12 hour kirtan.

Kirtan is call-and-response chanting.

The kirtan leader sings out some names for God, like

Radhe Radhe Govinda

Radhe…

or

Sita Ram Sita Ram Sita Ram Sita Ram

and the ‘audience’ sings it back.

I’d never been to a kirtan before but it sounded like a laugh.

So I went… and, to cut a long story short…

Radhika Das finished the day off with 30 minutes of the Hare Krsna mantra that absolutely banged.

But before he did that, he said a few words on how singing mantras… it’s like cleaning out the dust in your heart.

And that always stayed with me.

Because that’s what it feels like.

And after the last kirtan, we lay down in a group meditation.

And… I don’t know how to describe the feeling of lying there, but I guess it was like, coming home.

At last.

I have come home.

And I don’t think I’d felt that good, since I was a little kid.

I remember lying there and thinking, this feels better than the peak of my most profound ayahuasca moment.

And I don’t need to throw up in a bucket, or get anxious that I’m going to shit myself, or hallucinate for about six hours, either.

All I gota do is sing.

And since then, I’ve never really looked back.

6. The Last Supper

So I left the ashram yesterday.

I am now a free-wheeling Hare Krishna.

And on Saturday evening, we had a goodbye dinner.

My friend Rhys had joined the same week as I had, and it so happened that we were both set to leave on the same day.

And so Arjuna arranged a dinner for us. He made a feast and invited some of the boys around.

And, inevitably, as I was finishing off my main course, and some people were already on the dessert, Ojasvi broke over the chit chat and said, So I’d like to make an announcement…

And he then proceeded to say, as we all knew, how Rhys and I were leaving.

And he then looked at me and for about five minutes he talked about our friendship and what he was grateful to me for and everything he liked about me.

And then he turned to Rhys and he did the same.

And then… and then, it just went around the table.

And everyone had a turn. Talking really openly and honestly about their relationship with me, with Rhys, and everything they were going to miss about us.

And then it was Rhys’s turn… and he went around the table, and glorified them all back.

And then I wrapped it up with my own appreciations.

And… that’s what happened.

We were there for, I think, an hour and a half, or more.

Just straight up glorifying the hell out of each other.

It’s making me want to cry, to remember it.

One final thought.

I’m not quite sure how to say it…

But it’s something to do with eating.

In a metaphorical way.

It was three or four days ago we sat around that table and put some words on our love for each other…

And I still feel full.

I’m full from their words.

Do you know what I mean?

I think you know what I mean.

And I’ve often thought that about the music, the kirtans, in fact.

With a slightly different metaphor.

To me, chanting in kirtan always felt like drinking something.

It felt like it, quenching a thirst I didn’t even know I had.

Love and music.

Food and drink.

That’s what those things are.

And I hope I don’t sound judgmental, but sometimes I look around at the people in London, and I think, a lot of these people are starving.

For something that you don’t put in your mouth.

(And sometimes, of course, me too.)

Do you know what I mean?

I see people stressed. Distressed.

Sometimes, raving.

See that on Oxford Street a lot.

People just shouting out to no one.

So we cross the road.

But the fact is, that all of us are hungry.

All of us need to eat.

And I tell you what…

The thing about the temple is…

We know where the food at.

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And I’ve never really experienced that before in poems, art, music, novels.

I’ve never experienced it like that the onward swirling rush of thought actually set down into something.

Now if you’ve read it you’ll know Notes from Underground is the neurotic monologue of a narrator who is stuck in his apartment thinking endlessly about his life until he is really in a lot of mental anguish because he can’t stop replaying it and rehashing it and trying to figure it out.

Now what I don’t mean is, I don’t mean that I am in the same situation or have the same level of anguish or that I am locked into a silent war of attrition with my own butler in St Petersburg in the 1860s, which is good.

None of that happens to be true for me at the moment I just mean that the same quality of explosive and runaway energy fills my thoughts on a moment-by-moment basis and I don’t think I’ve seen that done before so it’s actually really cool.

Fyodor Dostoevsky. Probably not that fun at parties.

Anyway all I want to say about it is really quite simple, which is just that... as I sit and think about it now, what it actually is to think, then I think seven thoughts occur to me at once.

First of all is Eckhart Tolle - do you know Eckhart Tolle? - Eckhart Tolle coming before my mind saying Stay in the present moment...

The opposite of over-the-top thinking is presence isn’t it, and Eckhart Tolle is supposedly present like a samurai, because he had an enlightenment experience where he detached from the voice in his head and he’s now perfectly happy just looking at lampshades and stuff.

But look, for the rest of us we’ve got these huge booming mind machines banging out thoughts like it’s the industrial revolution and we’ve got to listen to all the thoughts haven’t we? And there’s nothing that Eckhart Tolle can do about it no matter how slowly he talks.

And secondly, the second thing is... Marc-André Leclerc who is the star of the documentary The Alpinist. He is a world-class free-solo climber and when he talks about being up the side of a mountain without a rope... it’s like he’s teaching a class on the essence of zen, and I think... I think that because he free-soloed so often he was vibrating at a high frequency of life and he became a really lovely boy.

An improvised solo climb up Torre Egger without a rope in winter mate fair enough.

But what are we meant to do if we’re not Eckhart Tolle and we decide to go for the I’m-not-climbing-Torre-Egger-without-a-rope option?

What are we meant to do just keep thinking things forever what the fuck?

But hang on because thirdly is a memory of being with my girlfriend back then and her dad and we’re talking about how ayahuasca peels back the layers of your mind and her dad says, Oh yeah I think I know what you mean because sometimes when I’m a bit locked in my mind or a bit down then I go for a bike ride and then I feel completely different.

And we thought this was pretty funny because drinking ayahuasca is a kind of different experience to going for a bike ride but now I think about it I’m not so sure as I was. Both experiences you take yourself with you don’t you, ultimately, and both experiences you change your consciousness so... so, that’s interesting, I think, but hold that thought, because first of all I need to tell you about my fourth thought for a minute...

Fourthly, right, is Jayadev who does healing sessions and he did a healing session with me where I was put into a trance. Anyway I told him, sometimes I have ten thousand thoughts in my head and I can’t actually translate them into my tongue, into speech and he said OK we’re going to try to unblock that a bit but he also said, that actually you know... I can’t remember exactly his words, but he was talking about, there’s all these thoughts in your head but there’s also what your heart’s doing so if you can speak from your heart you will be more fluent because your heart probably knows what it wants to say it’s just your head is a bit loud.

Fifthly... fifthly, I suppose is simply jappa meditation which is where you hold your prayer beads and you repeatedly chant out loud a mantra and what that does, or what it can feel like, is changing channel so it’s not that your mind stops or something, it’s just you’re on a higher or a deeper channel.

Sixthly, is how the Bhagavad Gita put a big thought in my head when Arjuna said

For the mind is restless, turbulent, obstinate and very strong, O Krishna, and to subdue it, I think, is more difficult than controlling the wind.

I loved reading that because I thought... I can give up now, on not overthinking, because if masterful yogis in ancient India are saying that the mind is more difficult to control than the wind than what chance have I got to do that? So it was really great to read that because I thought fuck it I might as well give up on that.

And actually the truth is that I’ve always overthought everything and I’m going to continue overthinking everything as long as I’m alive and there’s something that’s actually quite funny about that.

Seventhly and lastly what comes to mind is that quote from Blaise Pascal, seventeenth century:

All of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

And I love that quote it feels not also pithy but also like it might actually be true and so anyway those are just some thoughts I had right off the bat when I was thinking about Dostoevsky.

And now having thought them all, the main thing I think that I think is phew.

Phew.

Oh my God.

My mind and me have been on a wild ride for quite some years now basically being totally mental all the time.

But the thing is that I think I used to think of it like a mountain that I needed to climb. Like Torre Egger.

Or even like a shit mountain, like Scafell Pike.

I felt that my mind was something to overcome to achieve some kind of mythic state of peace or even enlightenment. I think that’s honestly what I was after even if it sounds a bit whatever.

And so I spent a lot of time trying to do that and I did therapy group therapy meditation retreats jappa meditation plant medicines vision quests talking circles and more plant medicines and then some trances.

And it was all really really great but the thing is I’ve done all of that stuff a lot now and I’m still mental.

So that’s good because now I can say, fuck it. I had a really good go at enlightenment and stuff and now I can give up on achieving inner peace which is a really peaceful place to come to.

So listen I hope this is all making sense so far and at the end of the day, you know, maybe the most important spiritual and psychological issue of our times is can you actually go into the Tesco Express on Dean Street and maintain your sense of calm and love of humanity?

So listen those are just some thoughts I’m having right now and I’ve got to go to sleep soon but I think what I’m saying really is that I’ve been lacking in feminine wisdom to be honest, that I don’t need to man up I need to soften up, and maybe go and get some people presents and smell the flowers and offer my thoughts up to the sun.

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I was about three days into a talking circle in the wild valley called Spirit Horse, when my friend Steve told a story that went something like this.

In a tribe in the Amazon, there’s a ritual in which a boy becomes a man.

In the last part of the ritual, he is taken blindfolded into the jungle.

When the blindfold is taken off, he finds himself surrounded by the old men of the tribe.

So he looks at them, expecting, perhaps, to hear some kind of profound and secret knowledge.

But this is not what happens.

Instead, the old men burst out laughing at the look of expectation on his face.

And then, taking their time, each one tells him about their life.

About everything they messed up. The mistakes they made. The times they were beaten, or embarrassed. The times they were most heartbroken and lost.

And that is how he learns how to be a man.

Not because he figures out, by osmosis, what to do and not to do.

But simply by seeing them, who went through all these things.

Still sitting there.

Able to talk about it.

Laughing at what went wrong.

II – The Internet

Steve said that a few years ago, but I think about it now because this week I watched Louis Theroux’s new film, Inside the Manosphere.

The Manosphere.

Andrew Tate et cetera.

Lone wolf, status-maxxing, “Men Going Their Own Way” red-pillers.

Sports-car driving, wealth-flaunting, misogynists saying ignorant things online to get attention.

The film certainly affected me.

This insane online space that I’m legitimately barely aware of.

A shibboleth so extreme that no one I actually know could agree with.

But, shibboleth nonetheless.

Some people are definitely on the inside of it.

Some people think it’s a good thing.

And… look, I’m not going to be really mean about it, because I’m not sure what the point would be.

All I want to say, is to offer up this contrast to you.

Between the boy in the jungle and the boy on the internet.

The blindfold and the live stream.

Both following the same impulse.

They want to grow up.

Learn how to be ‘a man’.

The old men tell their life stories. And so do the influencers of the Manosphere.

… Isn’t that mad?

How “failure” can be so inspiring.

And how “success” can make you look like a total fucking twat.

III – The Poet

How about some mature masculinity in the public eye?

There’s not an excess of it going around.

But for me, that brings to mind Leonard Cohen leaving the monastery.

In the 90s, Leonard Cohen took a break from music, and for five years he lived as a Buddhist monk at a monastery in California.

He woke up at 3 AM, and spent much of his time cooking and cleaning.

Most of the time in silence.

When he left the monastery, he discovered that his manager had completely mismanaged his five million dollar estate.

All his money had disappeared.

Five million dollars.

Imagine getting that phone call.

He later said of the incident,

I was perfectly happy when I was broke before.

And he went back to work.

Looks like all the Buddhism worked.

I suppose he’d been practising losing for a long time, hadn’t he?

After all, he wrote some of the greatest love songs ever.

And I don’t think he wrote any of them, when the women were still around.

IV - The Start

I guess I just needed some inspiration.

Not only in the context of a news-cycle, that increasingly exposes us to individuals hell-bent on “winning” or, appearing to win.

But mainly because I’m leaving home.

My monastery.

My beloved Hare Krishna ashram near the British Museum.

I have been here for seven months.

I calculate I have chanted and sung the maha-mantra between 4 and 500,000 times.

Hare Kr̥ṣṇa Hare Kr̥ṣṇa

Kr̥ṣṇa Kr̥ṣṇa Hare Hare

Hare Rāma Hare Rāma

Rāma Rāma Hare Hare

I am happy to report, that it works.

As a way to uplift our consciousness.

I am also happy to report that I am not going to be a monk.

That the sun is shining.

That my ancestors are smiling on me.

I am happy to report that the Great Spirit still has a room in my heart.

And Mother Earth doesn’t look like she’s running out of mercy, any time soon.

No I didn’t.

Yes, I did.

No I didn’t.

But it felt like I did.

I went outside the gig, sat down by the river in Woolwich.

The sky was pink and the wind was blowing.

Summer’s almost here.

No it isn’t.

Yes, it is.

By died I mean I died on stage. (I didn’t.)

In stand up comedy, dying means no one laughs.

Means you go to silence.

In fact it was a long way from silence there were laughs going on they just didn’t catch enough to keep going.

The laughs didn’t roll.

Like they do when it’s good.

The people were laughing.

They just didn’t laugh enough.

Unbelievable, right?

But anyway what I mean when I say I died (even though I didn’t) is... it’s less about the volume of laughter it’s more about how it felt in me.

What I mean is... I had the feeling of treading water on stage, fast. Just trying to stay afloat.

Missing the groove.

And the room’s got a load of tension in it that hasn’t popped and then you still got to get your jokes out but because it’s not relaxed, I’m not relaxed, then somehow I’m saying things and it’s not quite right... my timing, my tone, my word order.

My mind is whirring double-quick but my mind and my mouth aren’t joined up like when it’s good.

So that all just happened for ten minutes (I think. It was meant to be ten minutes. Time’s weird though on stage).

And now I’m sitting down with the pink sky and the wind and I’m thinking... I don’t think I died. But my body feels like I did anyway.

It’s pretty much sick stiff with this grey, disembodied anxiety and I just sit there trying to cope with sitting down and not talking to anyone.

Which seems, at the time, like I’ve got my work cut out just to do that.

And then something wonderful happens which is this bloke who I somehow immediately like he comes up to me and starts praising my set for some time.

And normally when people say stuff like that then it’s kind of quite nice I guess and I feel an awkward warm flash in my chest but this is different. This guy just comes in and picks up that ball of worry in my stomach and somehow simply by liking what I did, it pulls out the big grey ball of worry out of me onto the pavement between us.

Not out of mind.

But out of me.

He went back into the gig.

And then he perfomed in the second half and he did one of the funniest comedy sets I’ve ever seen.

Anyway there’s so many things to say about it all isn’t there.

So many considerations.

One easy thing off the bat, and I’ll try not to be long here, but one thing that is definitely relevant is the seating arrangements.

I always notice that. If they’re packed into rows with their mates, they’ll generally laugh much more. And if they’re really spread out, it’s horrible.

The laughter doesn’t catch.

No one taught me that but I definitely think it’s true.

If the seating’s good, people will laugh just ‘cause they need to to self-regulate (or, actually, co-regulate), being surrounded by human beings.

And if you get a really spread-out room with people on different tables and gaps between them then Richard Pryor probably couldn’t get them all to laugh at the same time.

‘Cause the laughs don’t catch.

Actually, he probably could.

No, he... I actually don’t fucking know.

They were sitting in a single file semi-circles with me standing in the middle of them.

It wasn’t the worst but it was pretty bad because you’ve got to have your back to lots of people but most of all because they’re all spread out so the laughter doesn’t roll.

It’s not automatically warm.

Or, if I wanted to say it in a way which is a bit less a poor workman blames his tools, I could say I’m not advanced enough for the single-file semi-circle yet.

Anyway I went on first. I chose not to use the mic because I think they could all hear me without it but then I felt naked and I stood there in the middle of them and I trod water for ten minutes.

Got a few good laughs I promise.

Yes, I did.

Yes I did.

Anyway I’m getting to the interesting bit soon.

Are you interested?

Are you bored?

How are you feeling?

I don’t care.

(Yes, I do.)

OK so here’s the interesting bit.

Are you ready?

What I realised on Thursday night...

When stand-up is stand-up, by which I mean, when stand-up is one of the most thrilling things in the world...

It’s because there’s this quality of contact between the comedian and the audience...

A broad, powerful feeling of contact.

And you feel like anything might be about to happen, but it’s safe.

It’s safely dangerous.

The comedian won’t crumble.

And the contact between them and the audience. It’s... alive. It’s real. Challenging.

Confrontational.

I think, in some way, it actually has to be confronting.

And by that I don’t mean a high-status American stand-up shouting swear words at the front row.

That sounds awful.

It doesn’t have to be like that.

Anyway Nicky came on (Nicky’s the guy who praised me and took the grey anxiety out my body) and about fifteen minutes later he went off and in between... I don’t think I’ve laughed that much in weeks.

And he had jokes he’d written.

Of course he did.

But it was the other way around. It wasn’t... he did his jokes and he talked to people in between.

No.

He came out swinging.

Constantly qualifying and altering what he’d said and overqualifying it and contradicting himself.

This is like this.

No, it’s not.

At least, that’s what your wife said.

Subject matter: risqué in the extreme.

Singling audience members out.

Staring them down.

He put screwed up images and ideas in all our heads and then disclaimed ownership of them and made out we were all perverts.

Stuff like that.

You couldn’t relax.

He had us on the ropes the whole time.

No quarter given.

And yet somehow, in another sense, he was the butt of every joke.

He was the one overexposing himself.

He wasn’t trying to get anything out of us.

I think it was one of the best things I’ve ever seen.

I can break it down a bit more, I think.

In my set I did material which I’ve done before that’s got big laughs but at this gig, the most important guiding factor was that I didn’t feel fully in my body. I didn’t feel in control.

I didn’t feel like I could go on the attack.

At least a part of me felt exposed and defensive.

And that over-rides everything and so you build the tension up by introducing these different elements but you can’t pop it like you need to because to pop it you need to fucking kick it in the balls. And you can’t do that if you’re feeling even a bit like you’re on the back foot.

Stewart Lee does this thing which is just so classic where he starts bullying the audience by saying that they’re not getting the joke. Or he’ll suggest that a certain section of the audience are slow, or not putting in enough effort. And if they just tried a bit harder, they’d actually find him really funny.

That’s... safely dangerous.

That’s broad contact.

One person putting hundreds of other people on the spot, is inherently funny.

Likewise with my set (I feel totally fine and unabashed about comparing my 30 comedy gigs with Stewart Lee’s 30+ years of determined touring) there’s a few moments where I’ve kind of built that in.

The first one I’ve been having fun with for a few gigs now. I start talking about how I don’t understand what you’re actually meant to say when you’re ‘talking dirty’.

And then I put it on the audience and I say

What do you say?

What do you say?!

And then I just let it hang.

And it always gets a laugh ‘cause no one is genuinely going to shout out what they say in the bedroom at a stand up comedy gig.

And it doesn’t have to be a one-liner. It’s not one line. It’s a mini-game. I can play with their fear of revealing themselves like that in this space. It’s not witty. I don’t even have to memorise the words of it, really. It’s a chess move. I’m on the attack, but everyone is actually safe.

And then the other one that’s a bit like that that I did this time is I talk about a problem I’m having at the moment (not in the bedroom) that’s kind of funny in itself, but then I say....

Anyway. It’s not your problem.

Don’t worry about it.

I’ll work it out.

And right now that one’s just a little moment but I like it a lot because...

It’s just stupid, isn’t it?

The assumption that someone’s actually going to suggest a solution to a problem you’re having in your life, or give you any sympathy, while you’re mid-performance.

And so it’s like, why would I even say that?

Don’t worry about it.

In a way, I’m forcing them to worry about it.

Or at least imagine worrying about it.

When I’m actually meant to be entertaining them.

It’s completely inappropriate.

And that’s exactly how I want to be.

So, more things like that.

That’s what I want to work on.

I’ll have a think.

Maybe I’ll let you know.

Anyway.

That was interesting. Wasn’t it?

Wasn’t it?!

Yes it was.

But listen.

How nerdy is all this?

For some reason I always remember Stephen Fry writing in one of his books that the study of what and how things are funny, is incredibly boring and dry.

And I’m sure it might be sometimes, maybe.

But to be honest I actually just love thinking and talking about stand-up comedy like this.

I love it.

Do you love it?

Do you?!

Stand-up comedy...

I know how to do this.

No I don’t.

Yes, I do.

I really really am glad you are doing this.

Because if you weren’t, I would simply be talking to myself.

And as it is, I feel for the first time in my life that I am a writer.

I have written often compulsively for over 20 years, to the detriment sometimes of social life and worldly ambition.

But now, in the year since I started this Substack, what I always wanted to be since I was small… which was to be a writer… it feels like I have achieved it.

And genuinely, that moves me closer to being ready to die happy.

So thank you so much.

I love writing these things every few weeks, when inspiration comes to me. Some of them come out easier than others. They all have little journeys where I knock them about a bit until I like them.

There’s so much I love about this whole process and the inevitable thing that happens when I do something creative, which is to come somehow to a hump in the road, a way that it doesn’t work, something to work out.. This feels manageable because of how short each one is, and how unlimitedly I can express myself with pure words.

I have 54 subscribes and I’m getting 150 or 200 views each time (who are all these other people? Why won’t these rascals come out and subscribe?!)

That’s obviously very small fry but to me those are magic numbers. I can’t quite believe that 200 people are reading some of my intimate thoughts. That’s so many people. If I had to be in a room with all those actual people, I doubt that I’d announce all this stuff on a loudspeaker.

Not without some second-thinking I’m putting an option to donate money on my page. The main option, ‘being really cool’ is 5 pounds a month.

Everything will still be free but it’s there if you feel like you want to do it.

I was inspired to do this by Blindboy, who has a mad podcast on mental health, Irish mythology and hot takes. He makes a living through many people donating a small amount each month.

At the moment, I am living in an ashram and doing full time service for the temple. So I have few outgoings but I am earning no money.

So I’m just kind of putting it there as an option because, if I could somehow one day make a living from doing this, that would pretty much be my dream come true.

If you ever feel like liking, commenting, re-stacking, or sharing any of my posts, that is also incredibly supportive.

With gratitude,

Tom

You can stop saying serve, for a start,

I think.

You bloody do-gooder.

The S word.

Met in me by a held-in flinch.

By a sound in my small intestine like a man shouting on the other side of a plasterboard wall.

Or two cows having an argument in the near distance.

Service.

These days I hear it about one hundred times a day.

That’s how it is with the Hare Krishnas.

They all seem completely unaware how weird and inappropriate it is.

But what am I going to do?

Organise a meeting with the temple president?

You lot need to give this whole service nonsense a rest.

It sounds like something Wormtail would say when he’s talking to Voldemort.

Or a rat trying to sell me Bitcoin.

First of all, it’s French.

Which is fine. Obviously.

But what I mean is...

In English, French words tend to be professional, formal, sophisticated.

And Old English words are homely and rough and immediate.

For example...

Admire (F) is like like (OE).

Content (F) is like happy (OE).

And embarrassment (F) is like shame (OE).

We kind of have a double language like that.

So even though these words mean similar things, they feel very different.

French words are generally the ones you use if you want to sound sophisticated.

And Old English ones are more for the kitchen (OE) table (F).

Table is French by the way because the commoners didn’t have tables.

They ate off a board (OE), or a piece of bread (OE).

Or a plate (F), but as you can tell from its etymology, plates are basically for posh wankers.

All of this is because for over three hundred years the upper classes spoke French, and the lower classes spoke increasingly Frenchified versions of the native, Germanic language.

So service is meant to mean a selfless act of love.

But the problem is, that it’s French.

And so it doesn’t work. Because what it’s describing is self-sacrifice, but it retains in it all those power dynamics.

It feels like its got centuries of agrarian serf labour in it.

And though it’s meant to mean

a selfless act of love,

when I hear it, I think...

don’t pretend you care about the common folk, you pretentious French prick.

And I want to join Robin Hood in the forest and take all your money.

Service.

You know it just means slave, right?

Servus in Latin was a slave.

And do you know what sometimes happened when a rich Roman died unexpectedly?

They killed all their slaves.

That’s right.

Just to make sure that no slave ever conspired to kill their master.

So... screw service.

And screw the Romans too.

I always liked the rebels.

Robin Hood.

Boudica.

Vercingetorix.

Vercingetorix was the Celtic chief who united a load of other chiefs to make a last stand against Julius Caesar.

He got all of them together in a forest and he did a big speech there and he said something like

Freedom, or death.

Like fuck am I serving you.

OK, hang on, though.

I am veering off the point.

I am also, potentially, co-opting ancient history as a way of talking about my emotions.

So... let’s bring it back, a bit.

Why do the Hare Krishnas say service so much?

This is because it’s kind of the whole point, or at least one of the main points, of the Bhagavad Gita, and the other Vedic literature.

But those books were written in Sanskrit.

And the Sanskrit word is seva.

Sayy-vahhh.

As in savour your food.

First of all, it sounds better, doesn’t it, than service?

ayy-ahhh more like sounds our bodies make when we share a hug with someone we love.

More than errr-vis.

Like hurrrt and worrrm and errrm.

So that’s a good start.

But also seva doesn’t have the same context as the word service.

There isn’t the same bitter taste of power and slavery in it.

In fact, seva actually has a different meaning.

Because service means doing something for someone.

Like... this restaurant is table service

or

someone’s coming round to service the boiler.

But seva means doing something for God.

As in cooking food for people, and remembering God as you’re doing it.

And there’s another word in Sanskrit, which is closely related.

Bhakti.

Which means devotion.

Seva is work done with devotion.

And devotion... devotion is a beautiful word, isn’t it?

I think it’s one of the most beautiful words we’ve got.

Robert Johnson, the Jungian psychologist, wrote this about Sanskrit, words, and love.

The first difficulty we meet in discussing anything concerning our feelings is that we have no adequate vocabulary to use... Sanskrit has ninety-six words for love; ancient Persian has eighty, Greek three, and English only one... Eskimos have thirty words for snow, because it is a life-and death matter to them... An Eskimo probably would die of clumsiness if he had only one word for snow; we are close to dying of loneliness because we have only one word for love.

Love all that.

I रमते it.

रमते ramate – love, enjoy deeply, find joy in.

But, OK, doesn’t English actually have quite a few words for love?

We can also express रमत . We just say... find joy in.

And don’t we have... compassion, and tenderness, and... we can say head over heels, can’t we, and... got a crush on...

And... cherish?!

Actually, I don’t think anyone ever says cherish.

OK. Maybe he has a point. Maybe Sanskrit has got more than us.

It does seem to have a remarkable capacity to describe different kinds of love-relationships.

Like

मातृस्नेह mātṛ-sneha - motherly love, believed to be the highest, most unconditional form of love in this world.

विरह viraha - love-in-separation

विश्रान्ति viśrānti - restfulness in love

मन्मथ manmatha - mind-churning, romantic love.

So... OK, so...

See, this is why I can’t be trusted to write anything more than about 900 words.

Because I started talking about the word service and now I’m not that far away from ordering a couple of books on comparative linguistics to find out how different cultures process their emotions.

So... I need to start wrapping this up.

For the benefit of my general well-being.

And I’ve only got about 250 hundred or so words left, I think.

And yes, I think the best thing to do...

Would be to try to say something good about love.

Ananta Kripa is a monk.

He spends much of his time wandering up to people on Oxford Street and trying to give them the Bhagavad Gita.

I’ve seen him do it. He’s very good at it.

He simply goes up to them and starts talking about this and that. And if they blank him he just laughs about it and immediately moves on.

It’s kind of amazing actually, how he can enjoy doing that.

How he can remain so immune to rejection.

Most people, of course, probably think he’s crazy.

If they got to know him, I imagine they’d think that he’s crazier than they first suspected.

He doesn’t have any money.

He doesn’t even have a bank account.

He doesn’t have... actually I don’t think he has anything much, really.

He definitely doesn’t have any personal space.

He lives in the temple in a dormitory with about 12 other monks.

Gets up often at 3 o clock in the morning.

And he loves his life.

He’s a powerful character.

Sounds like he has quite a backstory, too. Though I only know little bits of it.

I always like to see Ananta Kripa.

Even if we see each other around but don’t have the time to talk that day... Sometimes you don’t need to talk, to feel like you’re friends.

But, today we talked quite a bit and...

I feel like... how do I say this...

There is a lightness around him...

Like he’s not holding on too much to things. To people, or situations or... anything, much.

And often he doesn’t say that much and often he does say a lot but when he does it’s often filled with heartfelt praise for people around him.

And he’s got that monk thing going on where whenever anyone says anything nice about him he’ll just laugh and say,

No you must be mistaken. I’m an idiot.

Or something like that.

He’s a funny guy. Ananta Kripa.

I like him.

I think he’s plugged in to the big picture somehow.

Do you know what I mean?

That we are so small between the stars (L Cohen).

And so the inevitable suffering and drama of being a human being is... lighter. I think.

And so he needs less.

Or he needs it, perhaps, from further away.

At least than I do, right now.

And Ananta Kripa says serve and service about the normal amount for a Hare Krishna monk.

Which is, a lot.

He’ll drop it on you when you’ve got your guard down.

Say something like,

You are doing a great service to Krishna the way you are serving that rice.

Stuff like that.

And...

There is no silent sound of protest in my body.

No man shouting on the other side of a plasterboard wall.

No cows arguing.

In fact, I’ve got to tell you. (But don’t tell anyone I said this...)

I actually quite like it, when he says it.

I can bring myself to allow, or forgive, the troubling past of service.

Given how we are, after all, a few words short for love.

And given how good I feel when I remember...

that I’m nothing but a mote of dust.

Why did I join this cult?

I’m in the middle of a crowd of people.

It’s 7 a.m. in the temple room.

I’ve been awake for a few hours.

Not enough sleep. Again.

I’m already behind on the two and a half hours of solo jappa meditation I’ve committed to do every day, because I fell asleep after my alarm.

The crowd is singing a celebration of Prabhupada, who brought Krishna consciousness to the world.

But today I’m not feeling it.

Today my nervous system is muttering swear words up my spine.

My friend starts dancing in front of me.

I get the sudden, mad urge to punch him in the head.

Or maybe just push my hand into his face, or something.

I don’t think we’re meant to do that though.

Monk on monk violence.

Not really what it’s all about.

Instead, I turn away and go and sit in front of the deities, where it’s a bit less crowded.

I bow down.

Talk out loud.

I’m trying to develop a relationship with them.

Say thanks as well as please.

Today though it’s more please.

Please protect me today.

I have a little sweet moment of peace.

It’s broken when an actual child steps on my head.

I stand up.

Sometimes so many parts of me are triggered by absolutely everything about the Hare Krishnas.

The deities...

Radha... Krishna... dressed up in their beautiful flowing dresses.

Not understood as statues or representations, but the real, personal presence of God.

When the curtains open, and they appear... my body tenses with cynicism.

Today, at least, it does.

Today I don’t get it.

And... and, saying things all together.

As one.

There are ten offences to be avoided while chanting.

One... blaspheming the devotees who have given their lives to the spreading the Holy Name of the Lord...

Two...

Offence.

The word itself makes me want to disrupt something.

Break some furniture.

Offence.

Somewhere deep down.

Doctors telling me to stay in bed.

That I’m not ready to walk yet.

Don’t tell me what to fucking do.

That sentiment got me out of hospital when I was a kid.

Or so I thought.

And here I am.

Bowing when we all bow.

Parroting the same words.

Standing in line.

Today... Today...

You know one thing I’ve learned, I’m trying to learn, is to work with these feelings... not to cover them up.

And today… I don’t believe in nothing.

I leave the temple to wander round empty wet Sunday Soho.

Feeling... I’m feeling okay.

But I think I need to sleep.

How did I end up here?

My dad was one of those quite rare people who actively didn’t believe in God... who described himself as an atheist.

Although in the official records I think he’s still down somewhere as a Jedi Knight.

That’s what he put on the census when we were kids, saying it that wasn’t any of the government’s business what he believed.

I think that all my family apart from maybe my mum are Jedi Knights, because we thought this was very funny.

I’m sure he would have agreed with that thing Ricky Gervais said about religious people.

Basically, you deny one less god than I do. You don’t believe in 2,999 gods. And I don’t believe in just one more.

And... I mean, it’s a valid point.

Logically.

But I’m here anyway.

Living at the temple anyway.

My great grandmother Leokadia Popiolek was the last person in my family to be religious.

She was a Polish immigrant to France, who never went to school.

She forgot some of her Polish and never fully learned French. She spoke for the rest of her life in a combination of the two.

Her own language.

Smoked loads of cigarettes and gossiped with her girlfriends.

And every Sunday, she walked miles to go to church.

After her there hasn’t been anyone.

Atheism was always... well, in my house, it always meant... education, I guess. I guess it meant an interest in science, and the world.

But more than that, I think, it stood for... not fitting in.

Not going along with things.

For questioning authority.

Do not trust the Church.

Do not tell me what to do.

I’ve wondered occasionally whether part of the reason that becoming a Hare Krishna feels so right is because it’s so opposite to my dad.

That’s sometimes the way with sons and fathers, isn’t it?

We go the other way.

Not to piss him off, exactly.

I wouldn’t put it like that.

More like, that Carl Jung thing...

The child is destined to live the unlived life of the parent.

I’ve wondered about that sometimes.

Whether, in an unconscious way, that’s why I’m here.

But why I’m here...

There’s not been one big moment.

There’s been lots of moments.

And why I’m here, I might give a different answer to that each day. And not trust the answer all the way either.

This family stuff, this background... it’s not really what I want to write about anyway.

It’s not going to resolve my cognitive dissonance.

It’s just part of the cause of it.

So then.

What can resolve it?

Well I know that sometimes it’s resolved.

In some moments.

It all makes sense.

And... OK...

Bhakti Tirtha Swami’s last kirtan.

There’s a video of it online.

It’s a few days before his death. His body is giving up after a long battle with cancer.

His leg has been amputated.

He’s lying down.

He’s literally on his death bed. He must be in so much pain.

And he’s belting out Jai Jai Radhe.

And there’s maybe a hundred people singing it back.

His voice breaks with emotion.

There are tears on his face.

But his song does not falter.

And what is coming off him looks much more like ecstasy than sadness.

And his face is... he is glowing.

And... William Blake, apparently, was like that too.

He lay on his death bed, and he drew a portrait of his wife Catherine, and told her she had always been an angel to him.

And then he started singing hymns and improvising lyrics.

He died singing of the things he saw in heaven.

Bhakti Tirtha Swami... he...

I mean, I think you should watch it.

I think that would be good.

It might be one of the best things on the internet.

Jai Jai Radhe

Jai Jai Shyam

Jai Jai Jai Vrindavan Dham

Hours away from death.

Singing hallulejah.

I tell you what...

My doubt... my cognitive dissonance... it all melts away in the face of grace like that.

At least for a while.

It is such a relief, sometimes, to be wrong.

And in that space, of letting go, there is space for everything.

And, I tell you what...

I believe him.

It’s nice doing something normal.

Something that is not going down Oxford Street with a tambourine, from time to time.

I thought Hamnet was solid.

After I’d seen it, I found myself looking through the newspaper reviews.

In the Guardian, the cinematography was described as ‘pellucid’.

Pe... what?

I had to look up what it means.

Turns out it just means, clear or transparent.

Pellucid.

That’s ridiculous.

That’s a ridiculous word.

This is journalism for French aristocrats.

Pellucid?

What on earth were they thinking?

Nobody wants to see that kind of nonsense when they’re eating their cereal in the morning.

I didn’t spend too long reading reviews.

First of all, I wasn’t prepared to sit there and be outwitted by a Guardian journalist.

And secondly, I’m actually not that interested in what people think about stuff.

Do you know what I mean?

And even though people will of course keep writing reviews, I don’t see how they do anyone much good.

P. G. Wodehouse said

A certain critic - for such men, I regret to say, do exist...

That’s how I feel about reviews.

But nevertheless, I seem to be writing one, right now.

I liked the bit in the playhouse at the end.

When you can see the faces in the crowd. And many of them are crying.

I read somewhere, and it always stayed with me... that at this time audiences often cried communally.

Akin to how, when Diana died, strangers wept together.

It’s something I love about the Elizabethans.

How emotional they were.

Ian Hislop wrote that

When the Dutch scholar Erasmus came to London at the turn of the 16^th century he wrote home in amazement, describing how the English spend the whole time kissing each other. “Wherever you move there is nothing but kisses,” he noted.

Italian visitors in the Elizabethan period remarked upon how emotional everyone was and how we lacked self-control. And it was the French who had words like “sang-froid” and “insouciance” to describe qualities that the British did not yet appear to possess.

In the 18^th century the word “sentimental” was not pejorative in this country. It was a term of praise for a person of taste and refinement who displayed their emotions openly.

So, I liked the crying.

But I’d have preferred to see the audience a bit more rowdy.

Most of them had almost certainly just been to see some blood sports.

Along the South Bank, there was bear- and bull-baiting (in which they were pitched against a pack of mastiff dogs). Then there was also your standard dog fighting and cock fighting, of course.

And then there was occasionally something really fancy.

Like a monkey strapped to a horse which was being attacked by starving dogs.

Just to see what would happen.

Before we judge them too harshly...

OK maybe we should judge them harshly.

But also... this was... how things were.

A bit like watching Netflix, I guess.

So, the crowd had been screaming at wild animals to tear each other apart.

Then they pile into the playhouse.

Most of them are drinking, and a lot of them are drunk.

The actors have to sound horns, sometimes fire cannons, to get their attention.

‘Hearing a play’, as they said, was more like going to a night club, or a football match, than a modern theatre.

The crowd often threw things at the actors... ‘stones, oranges, apples, nuts, flew about most liberally’.

And it was the fashion for young people to go there looking for sex.

Whether this happened in the playhouse, or elsewhere, is not entirely clear.

In Hamlet, Shakespeare goads the groundlings (the standing section in front of the stage).

... to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumbshows and noise.

So there was, in a way, a kind of conflict between the actors and the audience.

And this massive, exciting tension running through everything.

As the crowd shouted, heckled, threw things.

As they smoked, drank and played cards.

That’s the picture presented by modern historians.

That it wasn’t the sleepy Shakespeare that we’ve all gone to see.

Silently straining our ears and minds to try to grasp what the hell is going on.

Laughing in parts that might, or might not, be funny.

It wasn’t like that at all.

And I know this, as well, from personal experience.

Ten years ago, I was watching As You Like It at the Globe.

Close to the end, Orlando asks Rosalind if he will be his wife.

Except he doesn’t ask, really.

He says it.

And the actor says it in a way, with his chest out... in a very alpha-male kind of way.

And a woman behind me shouted out...

Don’t do it!

The actor was visibly thrown.

It was the biggest laugh of the evening.

And it felt like, in that intimate theatre, which is built in the round and everyone is half on top of each other... where 2,000 people can more or less see the whites of each other’s eyes...

It felt electric.

It felt like... anything might happen next.

And for a few moments we were watching Shakespeare, for real.

I’m not saying that to say... oh no this is not historical oh my God.

I’m saying all that stuff about the monkey on a horse et cetera... because, well, first of all someone’s got to mention that thing about a monkey on a horse, and no one seems to be talking about it.

And secondly, because the atmosphere of the Globe is important to this review.

Though it’s not clear to me whether it is going to work out neatly, or be a mess.

But even if it turns out to be a mess... I promise I will not describe a single thing as pellucid.

Do you know how Hip Hop started?

One December evening in the Bronx, 1971, a guy known as Karate Charlie walked in to the house of Gwendolyn.

Charlie was the warlord of the gang called the Ghetto Brothers.

Gwendolyn was the mother of Black Benji.

Black Benji had been a member of the Ghetto Brothers. Until he had been killed, a few days ago.

He had been killed as he attempted to stop two other gangs from fighting.

And Karate Charlie is ready to unleash a big war. ‘To bathe the Bronx in blood’, as he said later.

He stood before Gwendolyn ‘like a proud cock’, and told her that he had the army ready to avenge her son.

And she said to him,

My son died for peace.

And it stopped him in his tracks.

And then... he stood the Ghetto Brothers down.

And they gathered the heads of all the gangs on December 7^th, 1971, at the Hoe Avenue peace meeting.

And they talked.

And instead of the biggest war the Bronx had ever seen, there started an unprecedented period of peace.

People started to go into each other’s territories.

They started talking, and making music.

In this peace, Hip Hop began.

From a mother’s love.

I used to love learning about when Hip Hop first started.

I loved the music, and I loved... I just loved the attitude. I loved everything about it.

Before Hip Hop, the Bronx was...

The Bronx was fucked.

In the 50s and 60s New York City built the Cross Bronx Expressway through the South Bronx.

This displaced about 60,000 people.

Property values collapsed.

The middle class left the area.

Landlords stopped maintaining buildings.

In fact, what happened was, landlords started setting their buildings on fire, because they could claim on the insurance.

So the Bronx was on fire.

There were no jobs.

City services disappeared.

It sounds crazy.

In the documentary Rubble Kings, there’s footage of a policeman saying...

We had a report that the police have located a carcass in the street on 172nd and Bryant...

It turned out to be the stripped carcass of a gorilla.
It was headless, and the fur was removed.

And then he laughs. Says,

South Bronx.

And shakes his head.

Pretty much everyone, it seems, was in a gang.

Black Spades. Nomads. Turks. Savage Skulls. Tomahawks. Ghetto Brothers.

Each gang had a territory. Which they guarded with violence.

They were outlaws.

So that’s how it was and then...

And then, the Hoe Avenue peace meeting.

And then... in the peace that came...

All that energy, got put towards life, instead.

And hip, hop... the hippie, the hippie to the hip hip hop and you don’t stop the rocking...

They put speakers in the park.

And they put cardboard on the street.

The South Bank and the South Bronx.

Both on the outskirts of their cities.

Both purposely annexed from them.

The powers-that-be built the Cross Bronx Expressway.

Then left it to descend into a slum.

The South Bank...

In Shakespeare’s day, it was a little neighbourhood at the end of London Bridge.

Or ‘the bridge’, as it was called. Because it was the only one of them.

And at the southern end of the bridge, there was a massive gate, which was locked and guarded at night. A gate which was covered with human heads, on spikes.

A couple of times in its history, London had locked that gate when threatened. And let the citizens of South Bank fend for themselves.

They did that with the Normans, and in the Peasant’s Revolt.

Violence was permitted there.

On the poor side of the river.

Where the brothels and the prisons were. Where the leper colony was.

And the playhouses.

The South Bank was definitely a slum.

Maybe even more dangerous than the South Bronx in the 1970s.

The estimated life expectancy for a man living there was twenty six years old.

OK there were plagues of course, but there was also quite a lot of murder, too.

Most men walked around armed with swords. And they were highly sensitive about their honour.

And they were also drunk most of the time.

My favourite thing about Shakespeare was that he made no attempt to save his plays for posterity.

He had no idea he would be remembered for them.

His sonnets, maybe he hoped they would last.

But plays.

Plays were low culture.

They were something you went to in between seeing dogs fight with bears.

When he died, some of his plays were cheaply and poorly printed on little pamphlets, not even by him.

It was 7 years later, that two of his fellow actors actually set them all down in a book, called the First Folio.

So what I’m getting at, right – is this making sense? - are the parallels between Shakespeare and Hip Hop.

Both burst into life during a few short years.

Both were very much located in specific neighbourhoods, that were incredibly violent and poor.

Both considered, at the time, to be low culture.

Or even not to be ‘culture’ at all.

Both were new, highly energetic, oral.

Both got turned into worldwide phenomenons, industries, worth billions of pounds.

But the actual people, William Shakespeare, Henry Condell, Will Kemp, Richard Burbage...

Grandmaster Caz, Kool Herc, Melle Mel, Crazy Legs...

Didn’t have any idea that they would be remembered.

I mean, to be honest, almost none of them are remembered.

But what they did is still here.

And... I don’t think they’d be too bothered, anyway.

I don’t think being remembered was near the top of their priorities.

Because those parties in the Bronx when peace first came, and those plays at the Globe...

They sound off the fucking chain.

This all makes me think of the story of the water of life.

Which was apparently one of Carl Jung’s favourites…

The water of life flowed up through the earth, clear and pure.

Slowly people began to claim ownership, put fences up, make laws as to who could come to the well.

The water of life was offended, and grew angry.

It stopped flowing, and came up in another place.

The people were so engrossed that they did not notice the water had vanished...

They continued to sell non-existent water.

And then, some dissatisfied people, they searched with courage, and they found where the water of life was flowing now.

Until the property owners, of course, caught up with them, before long.

It makes me think, too, of Alan Moore. The magician and writer from Northampton.

He said

In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die.

I mean that says it all, doesn’t it, Alan Moore.

That says it all.

But most of all, it makes me think of circles.

That’s what the Globe theatre is. Right?

It’s a circle.

And that’s how Hip Hop happens too, is in a circle.

Is in the cypher.

The other night I went to the London screening of the documentary May Day, by Mai Hua and Jerry Hyde.

I’d have definitely gone anyway, because it’s exactly the kind of thing I’m into... but I was also going, because I’m in it.

And, look... it’s a beautiful thing.

Not be easily summed up or categorised.

It’s like going on a retreat, in a film.

The film about a retreat.

A glorious, painful, expansive retreat for 2 weeks in wild nature, in a round house, with 12 strangers, and a load of rituals, and a vision quest, and a sauna, and music, and many, many talking circles.

When the film finished, I went on the stage with Jerry and Mai and some of the helpers, and another participant, Nesta.

And we answered questions from the audience.

And I managed to say a couple things, using English words, in full sentences, which was pretty cool.

But one of the questions was, it was along the lines of... OK so there’s all these rituals in the film. And they together enact something that actually works.

Something that’s deep enough to be medicine for a sick society.

So the question is, how to implement that, or how to take that, beyond the 12 participants in the film, so that as many people as possible can benefit?

At least, the question was something like that.

Adrenaline suppresses memory, so I am probably changing, you know... all the words and stuff.

But apart from all the words being different, the question, I think, was something like that.

And anyway, that is probably the most important question that this film asks, I think.

How do we do this, more?

And I didn’t answer it at the time, because thankfully Mai was speaking powerfully about the need to spread this work... but I think now, I’d have some kind of answer...

It would be something like...

Don’t worry…

We have been doing this for a very long time.

And we don’t need a plan, or... a technique, or...

We don’t need anything, actually.

Apart from maybe some circles.

Because it turns out (and I don’t think anyone was expecting this), but it turns out...

That we might just know what we’re doing, after all.

You can watch May Day at

https://www.maydaythemovie.com/

My life has been a dance between power and love.

First power, power, power, power.

Then love, love, love, love.

At this point, he’s near the end of his life. An old man. A stroke victim, he struggles to talk. But he looks blissful.

I always remember that he said that.

And I think what struck me about it was that Ram Dass was admitting how strong a drive power had been to him.

Ram Dass.

Founding father of the LSD hippy movement.

Who went to India in the 60s to search for the meaning of life and who brought back stories of guru, awakening and all the rest of it.

Who set up the Seva foundation, which is still doing humanitarian work around the world.

Who worked with countless dying people to help guide them towards peace.

Shit, I thought.

If Ram Dass was doing that dance, between love and power.

The rest of us are as well.

Which makes sense, of course.

As Jason Statham says in Revolver

We’re just monkeys wrapped in suits. Begging for the approval of others.

And Shakespeare, who, some might say, is just as an accomplished writer as Guy Ritchie, wrote something like that too.

But man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d,
His glassy essence,- like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.

Love, and power.

There’s an old argument in anthropology about our nature.

There’s the Thomas Hobbes camp and the Jean-Jacques Rosseau camp.

Hobbes argued that ‘primitive’ societies were competitive, full of conflict.

Rosseau that we were naturally peaceful, gentle. Before hierarchies / dominance system were invented.

The question is: what is our ‘nature’?

Woodstock or Wall Street?

We can look at our little monkey faces for clues.

Compared with our monkey ancestors, our faces have changed quite a bit.

The eyes got larger, with larger whites.

The brow ridge disappeared.

The eyebrows became expressive.

The face got chubby.

And the lips got bigger / mouth more expressive.

We also started to visibly flush when feeling certain emotions.

In other words, every feature promotes communication. Openness. Connection.

And just basically being gorgeous.

Rutger Bregman, in his book Humankind, calls this ‘survival of the friendliest’.

He wasn’t the first to argue that. But it is a lovely book.

And now, in 2025, we all have those kind of faces.

Whether we are friendly or not.

Like Kim Jong Un.

Who could be dangerous.

Even if he does look cute.

Survival of the friendliest makes sense to me.

Look at the tube.

It’s not known for being a place to meet new people.

But if you think about it for a minute, the level of trust at Kings Cross station, in rush hour, is beyond amazing.

Thousands of strangers moving together in relative harmony.

You couldn’t get chimpanzees or bonobos to do that.

It would be an absolute fucking nightmare.

OK where am I going with all this...

Love... power... something about hierarchies...

I think I’m saying...

Look, I do have a point, okay.

There’s going to be a point at the end.

I heard Ram Dass tell a story once, deep in one of his cosmic talks on YouTube.

It was in the 60s, and he was in the Himalayas with his guru, Neem Karoli Baba. And some Westerners, and some Indians.

He called Neem Karoli Baba, Maharaji.

And Ram Dass had fallen in love with Maharaji, because he was a saint.

And Maharaji gave him an instruction.

Love everyone, and tell the truth.

And Ram Dass was living there, and hanging out, and meditating, and working a bit probably. I imagine washing up and cooking and stuff like that.

But you can also imagine it was quite intense, everyone living together in a spiritual community with Maharaji at its centre.

And Ram Dass was getting incredibly wound up with all sorts of stuff, and sometimes feeling very angry and jealous towards other people in the community.

And one day, something... I can’t remember now... something quite trivial sparked him off. And he broke down in tears.

And he said to Maharaji

You told me to love everyone and tell the truth.

But the truth is I don’t love everyone!

And Maharaji started to laugh.

As if to say, I think...

Now we’re getting somewhere.

I moved in with the Hare Krishnas six weeks ago.

I haven’t broken down in tears yet, but I’ve felt close a couple of times.

Temple life.

We sleep together. Eat together. Pray together. Work together.

It’s pretty sweet.

It’s pretty radical.

But there’s also a reason that I relayed that Ram Dass story.

Because, that’s how I feel too.

And it’s interesting, watching all my complexes arise.

Things that have been stored in my body, being released now in liquid pain.

My outsider thing.

My problem with authority thing.

They happen when they happen.

When some small thing triggers them.

But there’s too many things to trace, or make sense of.

Too much things.

Too big and too fluid to say them.

A load of human monkeys in a room.

Love and power in the air like an electric storm.

I can’t do a weather report on it.

I can’t trace every drop of rain.

I meet Dhirodatta in the restaurant.

He says,

Let me get you some food.

He comes back with a plate of sabji and paneer. He’s sprinkled small crackers over it in this really careful, intentional way that I find pretty moving.

God, these monks are good.

We start talking and it takes me a while to warm up to what is actually troubling me.

As, I’ve found, it generally does between men.

That’s if we ever get there at all.

I hit him with the two things.

Problem with authority.

Outsider.

It was helpful just to say it.

But as he responded to me, I was thinking.

Shit, this might actually be one of those times when someone says something that helps.

And he said... along the lines of...

It’s like... you come in to a place like this, it’s pretty normal to be full of judgements.

And actually, the emotion behind those judgements, at their root, it’s a form of envy.

It’s... not feeling like you’re in the in-crowd, or not belonging.

If you actually break it right down.

Because the judgments... They’re not logical.

They have a strong emotion.

And that is... envy.

In the end.

(I’m massively paraphrasing this.)

But the thing is, there’s nothing... to be done differently.

There’s nothing to work out particularly.

Or communicated.

You don’t need to do anything.

It’s just a form of fear.

And people feel your fear, and they feel afraid of you.

I was nodding, and listening.

Fair play, I thought.

That’s actually pretty wise.

I can see why this guy’s a monk.

And then he gave me a prayer, for when I feel like this.

He said, try this one out...

Please Krsna...

Please.

Let me love the devotees.

I dreamed Pa was weeping.

We are not this body

he said.

Is bliss a clue to truth?

I like that thing near death experience survivors talk about.

How as they are slipping away, they see loved ones all around them.

How the dead come to meet them.

I like that inscription found on a Roman tomb.

There is no boat in Hades, no ferryman Charon, no keeper Aeacus, no dog Cerberus.

All we who are dead below have become bones and ashes, but nothing else.

Hit me hard when I first read that.

Didn’t realise there were atheists 2,000 years ago.

That’s far out.

Anyway.

What am I going on about death for?

It’s a bit morbid, isn’t it?

Why don’t I just do a joke about Keir Starmer, or something?

Or give my unsolicited opinion about AI?

Erm... well, I could do that, I suppose, but... I don’t want to.

Because I think those things are a bit boring.

Sorry.

I do.

They are.

And death isn’t.

It’s not though, is it?

Death isn’t boring.

That’s something that it’s got going for it, at least.

Anyway.

What have I got to contribute apart from uncertainty?

Uncertainty and maybe fear.

I think if a doctor gave me some bad news... I’d feel afraid.

If I have to go to anything for the first time by myself, I often feel nervous.

The first time I went to my book club, I felt nervous.

And to be honest that’s a pretty manageable situation compared with dying.

I know that everyone feels like there’s a lot riding on this book club, but actually, the cessation and ultimate complete disintegration of our physical bodies makes it seem relatively unimportant.

The book club, really, well... it’s a complete walk in the park, isn’t it, compared with death.

That is a whole other thing, isn’t it?

That is a big trip.

That’s why they put gifts on the boat.

Uncertainty and fear and a change of heart.

I went to see Sizer’s body in the pandemic.

He wasn’t in it.

He had left.

I thought I’d never see him again.

Now, I’m not so sure.

I saw that Griefwalker film the other night.

Follows the death doula Stephen Jenkinson.

He says

There’s no atheist in a foxhole.

Interviewer says

You mean, when you think you’re about to die, you believe in God?

He says

In other words, you believe in something.

And it’s usually something big.

It’s usually something big.

That’s all I’ve got for you I’m afraid.

Uncertainty, fear and a change of heart.

I have no drum to bang, or thing to preach.

I have no point, no argument to make.

No advice and no conviction.

Just pure memento mori I suppose.

Skull on the desk kind of thing.

On a dark, November, Sunday morning.

In a café on Drury Lane.

I better go tell someone they’re beautiful, today.

I started life as a full-time Hare Krishna devotee.

And this morning I wondered, if I was to give a class at the temple, what I would say.

And somehow that format just allowed me to release some things I’ve been thinking about.

So here they be.

Krishna and his girlfriend, Hare / Radharani. Oooo. Krishna’s got a giiirlfriend.

This morning’s class is... I hope it...

I was going to say, I hope it ‘does some good’. But it’s not exactly clear to me what that means.

So I hope it...

Actually, I have no clear hopes for it.

Look. I’m here. And you’re here. And that’s about all we can say about it.

So I’ll try my best to... well, not to go on for a long time.

And that’s about the best that I can promise.

Fallen soul that I am.

So. Anyway.

The mind.

That’s... that’s the topic, I think.

The mind.

It’s been on my mind.

Ha ha ha.

[pause in case of laughter]

It’s like Arjuna says to Krishna in Bhagavad Gita.

The mind is restless, turbulent, obstinate, and very strong, O Krishna, and to subdue it, I think, is more difficult than controlling the wind.

Wow. Isn’t that amazing?

My mind is like the wind.

My mind is full of... people. And memories. And speech.

Endless speech.

Always talking away.

You know that bit in Alan Partridge?

When he’s role-playing a made-up conversation out loud and someone says to him

When did this happen?

And he says

Oh, it didn’t.

It’s just a generic, annoying man that lives inside my mind.

That’s about right, isn’t it? At least, for me.

My mind is like a fire.

Full of light. Flickering.

Projecting.

And... right, so Arjuna’s mind is like that too, it seems. Five thousand years ago. Which is amazing, isn’t it?

Yes, it is.

It’s pretty amazing.

But what I want to say, I think... is that, that’s something that’s changed since I moved in to the temple.

That I see a bit more clearly.

That that’s what the mind does.

It desires. It fears. It pushes, it pulls. It adds up, deduces, takes away... gets the wrong end of the stick.

It makes patterns. Makes new patterns. It sizes up.

It fears.

You know?

It does all these things.

And it doesn’t stop doing them.

It’s almost as if we have a five million watt computer constantly trying to process the world around us, and looking out for danger, and for food and potential mating opportunities, perched at the top of our spine.

Actually that’s... that’s pretty much exactly what we have.

Which is cool. Because, you know.

Food and sex are really nice.

And it’s good, as well, not to die and stuff.

But also... it’s not very peaceful sometimes.

So that’s something that’s changed a bit since I came in the temple, I think... is a movement towards... away from... the hallucination that my mind creates, and...

Experiencing it I hope a bit more like a flickering fire that’s going on, all the time...

But that is okay.

It’s okay, you know?

At least...

Erm...

It’s less... it’s less big.

And it’s like, you know, Prabhupada said

You get up in the morning, and you smash the mind.

He said something like that.

And what he meant of course is - practise.

Chant and sing like we do.

And... I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I’m saying anything new, but, that’s what I’ve noticed about bhakti yoga... what I love about it is, it’s so simple.

Like… I cook food for a load of people and of course, my mind is still buzzing away.

But it doesn’t hurt me, you know?

Because I’ve got honey in the heart.

I’ve got honey in my heart.

And I like that...

I like that I don’t have to struggle to control the wind.

Do you know what I mean?

It’s like finding peace, by proxy.

So that’s... that’s what I wanted to say about that.

But there’s one more thing, right, that I noticed, when I was reading.

Which is I think a different topic, but it’s the bit in the Srimad Bhagavatam (1.13.46), and it goes like

This gross material body made of five elements is already under the control of eternal time (kāla), action (karma) and the modes of material nature (guṇa). How, then, can it, being already in the jaws of the serpent, protect others?

And I just wanted to mention it, because it really made me stop, when I read that.

And I know it’s just the morning now and it’s like, What are you bringing up death for? I just want to try to have a nice day.

But I just wanted to mention it.

Because actually it feels to me that in this verse, is... is... is the end of anxiety, actually.

And I’m not saying I’m there at all. I’m a million miles away.

But that’s my sense.

And I keep thinking about it.

That our heads are in the jaws of the serpent.

Old age, disease and death.

And... and that’s the reality.

And the reality is that we can’t protect each other from these things.

And erm... I think it’s changing...

How I experience myself, and other people, is changing.

A little.

Just a little bit.

It’s... a bit less attached.

And I think that’s a good thing.

If I can use such a simplistic, binary word.

It feels like, freedom is this way. Kind of thing.

And also... meditating on that verse is encouraging me, actually.

When occasionally I feel a bit neurotic, or self-conscious, when we dance around Soho... To remember...

That our heads are in the jaws of the serpent.

And... if you think about that, actually, it’s pretty obvious...

That we’re on the right track here.

We’re barking up the right tree.

Because if we’ve got to go out, then we might as well go out dancing.

When I was younger I always felt discomfort with the world.

And music was my way of becoming comfortable.

I wonder...

When have I felt truly comfortable? On every level?

I don’t think it’s sitting down. Watching TV. Or that kind of thing.

It’s more like... when I’m laughing, or sometimes when I’m on stage.

Or the time when I saw some workers ripping out the insides of a shop, and I asked them if I could kick a door in.

And as that group of guys cheered me on as I kicked a door to pieces... I felt truly comfortable, and at peace with the world.

So I resonate with what Antarma said.

Real comfort is movement.

Is sound.

Because down here, things move.

They rock.

Like babies in the womb.

And the stars in the sky.

And like lovers in their bed.

I reckon this geezer knows a thing or two about all that.

Joe looks at me over the fire. Says

Tom do you want to do something?

Yes, I do.

I’ve mostly forgotten that this might happen. Been lost in the music.

And now my legs are taking me across the roundhouse to join him and Noel. And I’m thinking... I don’t remember exactly what... but I’m aware that whatever I’m about to do will be with two of the best musicians around.

We sit in a line on one side of the fire.

Joe has been doing his spirit songs on the guitar. His words to me are like receiving treasure in the heart.

And then there’s Noel. Whose trumpet soars through my chest and I never know where it’s heading.

Most of the village is here to listen.

And… I feel sad.

The sadness has been on me, as they say in Ireland.

Sadness has been on me like the sea.

Sad for what?

Ah well. Not sure there’s one answer to it.

Sometimes it’s sad in this world where we all come to die.

And I’ve been feeling it maybe five times so much, or at least more clear, because I’m not in the city now.

I’m in Spirit Horse wild valley and the talking stick has been going around for four days.

But we’re here... and Joe is looking at me, and he’s bouncing some strings together.

And I begin to speak...

And what about my mother tongue that has no words?

I went down tequila road to try to speak it.

//

I went down tequila road,

I carried all my loves back home,

Where I don’t have them....

I haven’t performed poetry in... maybe a year or something... I can’t remember.

And the thing is, I’m not an actor.

So these words that I wrote, in 2022, I’ve got to mean them.

I’ve got to mean them right now, even though I wrote them back then.

I can’t perform them.

I can’t perform in this performance, because it wouldn’t work.

Do you know what I mean?

But the words take me in. They bring me in it like they’re meant to.

And Joe’s strings are moving in me, and shaking my words out.

And Noel’s trumpet comes in between and after, carrying us higher.

And soon enough, it’s not just my mouth that’s speaking.

My spine starts leaning in.

And then I start to rock.

I’ve been back a week now.

I miss the roundhouse. I miss sleeping on the floor around the fire with my men’s group.

The sounds as we stir awake again.

The tears and laughter.

Back in the city now.

And most days this week I’ve felt half-crazy.

There’s not enough space.

I’m a human being. I need to cry, laugh, sing, and howl sometimes.

But there’s not enough space.

And not only is there concrete all round, right, but I’m meant to wear shoes, apparently.

So I’m double screwed.

Because my feelings haven’t got anywhere to move to. They struggle to leave my body. They turn into agitation.

And not only that... I was trained, wasn’t I. Weren’t we all?

By school. To sit still and hide our feelings. Not to cry or be ourselves.

Those god dam...

Oooooooossshhh.

Hush, Tom.

Breathe.

Breeeaathe.

...

I still love you London.

But I’m gona need a mic.

Photo by Jerry Hyde

Lyrics in title by Lowkey

And I’m about to leave camp.

And go into the darkness by myself.

That’s how I remember the moments before general anaesthetic put me out for my second brain surgery.

And I guess that's how I'd describe what it felt like.

But even so... some moments are beyond words aren’t they.

He’s dead now sadly.

But down here the love goes on doesn’t it passing between us like fire across bits of wood.

If I was to tell you how I was feeling then, in those crazy weeks and years, I’m not sure how much I’d use that word.

Fear.

I could tell you loads about how I was feeling and I’m not sure that word would be there much.

I mean, obviously I was scared. I’m not stupid.

But... OK...

How about this?

A couple of days before I went in, Ozy and Finn and Will and I went to Kelvedon to see New Town Kings.

England were playing Portugal in the World Cup quarter finals and it went to penalties. So, they delayed the gig and put a small TV in the middle of the pub and we all put chairs around it and watched England lose.

Felt like it was the end of the world.

And then ten minutes later all eight or nine of New Town Kings were slowly getting on to the stage looking half-devastated and pretty determined.

Even that guy who played the bongos was there though I can’t remember if anyone could ever hear him.

And then the sounds were starting up. The drums and the bass and the brass. Unapologetic bassy Colchester ska.

Good time music.

Forty five minutes later they’d turned that place around. I’m skanking at the back of the crowd singing along to Blah Blah Blah.

Dancing because the world might be ending soon but I was feeling it.

Or when I was eleven.

The weekend before my first surgery I went to the zoo with my family.

And I don’t remember much what anyone said now but I remember how I was feeling. And it wasn’t scared.

It had nothing to do with fear.

It felt like my heart was bursting with love and they all had golden light pouring out of their heads.

But obviously it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows either like I remember I kept waking up in the night because I had so much pressure in my head ‘cause the brain tumour was the size of a large apple. And all the brain fluid got trapped in my head when I lay down to sleep because my brain had swollen up and that gave me recurring nightmares.

So one night I woke up like that and I just sat in front of the TV by myself watching Only Fools and Horses on VHS and rocking back and forth unable to process the thought of dying.

But somehow I did.

I did process it and resolve it I reckon on most of the levels and when they rolled me down to the surgery with my dad holding my hand, just before they put me to sleep, I was wide awake.

And now... I’m a 34 year old man.

And it’s strange to think what I feel afraid of these days.

Weddings. Friend’s birthday dinners. WhatsApp messages. Overexposing myself on Substack.

This kind of thing.

Sometimes it feels like a block of ice in the middle of my body.

And it’s more like fear, more obviously fear, I think, than what I felt when I should technically have been afraid.

If that makes any sense.

No.

It doesn’t, does it?

It doesn’t make sense.

I shouldn’t be afraid of any of this stuff.

And this feels like the point in the conversation when someone would normally pipe up with some special type of bodywork or therapy or something that’s really helped them.

But luckily this isn’t a conversation.

I’m writing this and it’s all about me so no one can do that.

Which is great.

But yeah... it’s a bit weird and mysterious how it works like that and the small things I now feel afraid of.

Probably Gabor Maté could jump in with some stuff about trauma at this point – but he’s not here either.

(Actually it’d be pretty cool if he was here.)

But more to the point, and fortunately for me... I’m not looking for an answer.

What I’m looking for... if you twisted my arm... what I really want... is to be fearless.

And that’s a pretty big word to drop in the middle of a Substack article isn’t it.

And you have every right to say that’s totally stupid. You’re an eejit.

And yeah maybe I am but bear with me a moment please.

Because this writing I’m writing to you now...

I’m not here to be sensible or reasonable about things.

I’m not here to fuck spiders.

The town was called Moissac. Not far from Toulouse.

We’ve been chanting Hare Krishna for an hour and a half and we come around the corner and there’s a big group of people hanging outside the houses and they start wooping.

Yes yes it’s the Hare Krishna boys eight of us dancing down the street towards them we’ve got a drum and a mic and the names of God.

Woop woop they’re bringing some energy in so we get up with them. Three generations here. All the men have beards and loads of tattoos. They’re all smoking and they’re all drunk.

Least that’s how I remember them.

I pull one of the guys to spin around with me and for a moment it’s not clear if he’s going to resist but he goes with it.

Xander quietens the drum right down which isn’t like him but they’re all shouting quite a bit.

Romani Gypsy beat.

They keep saying and one big old bloke is in the middle of the circle and he wants a certain kind of beat it seems so he can sing a song.

They’re all shouting quite a bit and they don’t seem to speak much French at least I can’t understand what the hell they’re saying.

Anyway he doesn’t end up singing his song and about five minutes later after some more milling around we’re like OK cool. Places to go, Hare Krishnas to sing. So we start it up and roll out of there.

Didn’t feel really like it was ever close to being a fight but I’m not 100 per cent sure it wasn’t either.

Go down to the market and sing for a while and then loop back up to find the car.

We turn down a tiny street between two sets of high apartment blocks.

The sound’s echoing upwards and Olly and I are kicking our legs out. Feeling it.

Feeling the love.

Then we get around that same corner once more and I see the kids who have been playing in the street come running so excited to hear the music and dance.

My hands are up in the air.

śrī-kṛṣṇa-caitanya prabhu nityānanda

śrī-advaita gadādhara śrīvāsādi-gaura-bhakta-vṛnda

I know I was afraid really before my brain surgeries. Of course I was.

But it’s not necessarily how I’d describe it, either. Do you know what I mean?

I mean. I felt so alive. Because one day very soon I might not be.

And that’s got a lot of emotions in it, right.

And like, obviously I’m not trying to pretend anything now. Trying to be tough or whatever.

But at the time I was. Definitely.

And at the time, as well... I was... a part of me was glad.

A part of me was glad.

Not most of me, of course.

But a not-insignificant part of me. Was so fucking excited.

Because that’s the time of life isn’t it.

Well, it’s a bit young really.

But a few years after eleven.

That’s when the boys would go off in the forest or whatever and have to do some kind of painful or terrifying initiation.

Fucking good.

Some part of me was shouting.

Now I get to be tough.

Now I get to become a man.

Didn’t know of course that the after-effects would include massive emotional disturbance, difficulty putting my thoughts into words, and poor co-ordination.

Not things generally associated with mature masculinity.

But that’s another story.

This story is... about fear.

And fear...

You know. It’s funny.

Sian said to me once that dancing and singing in the streets like we do is brave.

It felt really nice.

But I was a bit startled by that word all the same.

I’d never thought of it as being brave.

Because out of all the things I do... work, socialising, admin, etc... it gives me the least anxiety.

When I’ve got my hands in the air and I’m praising the Lord... anxiety simply does not exist.

And when I came around the corner and those kids came running towards us, shouting with joy, it was just so obvious...

Who I am.

That I’m right where I'm meant to be.

And I’ve never felt so unafraid in my whole life.