Your old road is
Rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’. (1)
It was a watershed year in history. The ‘old road’ was coming to an end; there was revolution in the air. Revolutionary bonfires would be lit in Paris, Prague, Los Angeles and many other places; the sparks fell everywhere. Mutually assured nuclear destruction may have kept the peace in the developed world but bloody battles between the superpowers were being fought in Vietnam and would flare up across other continents. There were increasing demands for recognition, rights and self-determination. The world became smaller through technology; culture burst into multi-colour.
My own ‘old road’ was ending too; 1968 was one of my personal watershed years. This diary is all about how this boy from south suburban Birmingham discovered the world, went abroad for the first time, suffered the pangs of unrequited love, became both confused and enlightened by philosophy, and was awe-struck by music, art, drama, films. That year defined me in many ways that I am still trying to understand fifty years later.
I watched the events of May 1968 in Paris on television. I had been there and it was no longer just a news report. In London, colleges were being occupied by students; all I had to do was to get on a bus to join them. I joined a student demonstration in Trafalgar Square. It was supposed to be about cuts in grant funding but with students occupying in Paris and London, there was talk of more than just subsistence allowances.
I was impressed by a student leader from Leeds who was making various radical demands. I was equally impressed by the support he had brought, some ten coachloads from his university. I was disappointed by my fellow students; I saw only one other person from Chelsea College at the demonstration despite the fact that the number 11 bus would get you there in 20 minutes. Jack Straw, the president of Leeds University Union, had brought several hundred on a 400-mile round trip.
My political awakening was just beginning. It had no name but I was becoming anti-war, anti-apartheid, anti-racist and anti-establishment. The latter was possibly the most important at the time. Organised politics meant little and I would not be joining any political party, at least for some time. Certainly not the Labour Party which was part of the establishment. Having been subjected to no particular socialist, liberal or conservative influences during my tender years, I was politically naïve and could best be described as a hippie (student section).
Me in 1968.
Bob Dylan in 1968.
(1) Thanks, Bob. You got the mood right and with such poetry.
50 years ago today 