At That Moment, The Urge

This Is How The Entire Course Of A Life Can Be Changed - By Doing Nothing.

I'm Not Against Religion In The Sense That I Feel I Can't Tolerate It, But I Think Written Into The Rubric Of Religion Is The Certainty Of Its Own Truth. And Since There Are 6,000 Religions Currently On The Face Of The Earth, They Can't All Be Right. And Only The Secular Spirit Can Guarantee Those Freedoms And It's The Secular Spirit That They Contest.

We Knew So Little About Eachother. We Lay Mostly Submerged, Like Ice Floes With Our Visible Social Selves Projecting Only Cool And White. Here Was A Rare Sight Below The Waves, Of A Man's Privacy And Turmoil, Of His Dignity Upended By The Overpowering Necessity Of Pure Fantasy, Pure Thought, By The Irreducible Human Element - Mind.

Four Or Five Years - Nothing At All. But No One Over Thirty Could Understand This Peculiarly Weighted And Condensed Time, From Late Teens To Early Twenties, A Stretch Of Life That Needed A Name, From School Leaver To Salaried Professional, With A University And Affairs And Death And Choices In Between. I Had Forgotten How Recent My Childhood Was, How Long And Inescapable It Once Seemed. How Grown Up And How Unchanged I Was.

London In The '70s Was A Pretty Catastrophic Dump, I Can Tell You. We Had Every Kind Of Industrial Trouble; We Had Severe Energy Problems; We Were Under Constant Terrorist Attack From Irish Terrorist Groups Who Had Started A Bombing Campaign In English Cities; Politics Were Fantastically Polarized Between Left And Right.