The summer of love …………. coming to a place near you

 It’s odd how slogans catch on and reappear.

2021

So here on Albany Road is “The Summer of Love”, which has appeared around Chorlton and I guess is linked to Covid and the hope that we have turned a corner.

Now I am an old duffer, born in the first half of the last century and “The Summer of  Love”, means something very different.

It is for me located in 1967, and remains something far removed from covid.

My Wikipedia tells me that “The Summer of Love was a social phenomenon that occurred during the summer of 1967, when as many as 100,000 people, mostly young people sporting hippie fashions of dress and behavior, converged in San Francisco's neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury. 

More broadly, the Summer of Love encompassed the hippie music, hallucinogenic drugs, anti-war, and free-love scene throughout the West Coast of the United States, and as far away as New York City.

Hippies, sometimes called flower children, were an eclectic group. Many were suspicious of the government, rejected consumerist values, and generally opposed the Vietnam War. 

A few were interested in politics; others were concerned more with art (music, painting, poetry in particular) or spiritual and meditative practices”.*

Which is a convoluted way of saying that plenty of young people across the West briefly turned away from the world of their parents into something different.

1966

I was just 17, too young really to be part of it and certainly too young to zip across to Haight-Ashbury, and “Turn on, tune in and drop out”**

Most working class young people from south east London, may have liked the idea, and even bought into some of the clothes and culture, but Well Hall in Eltham was never going to be San Francisco, and studying for A level English, and History and a re-sit in O level General Science marked me off as more conventional.

And in its way 1967 was just part of that bigger transformation that seemed to be going on during the 1960s, and has offered up that label “The Swinging Sixties”.  

It, like The Summer of Love doesn’t always bear deep scrutiny, because while there seemed a sense of expectation that anything was possible, there was still poverty, appalling housing conditions and inequality.

So for every Terrance Stamp and Twiggy, there were plenty of young people who still did mundane jobs, and whose aspiration was a nice house, a happy marriage and two weeks in the sun.

So much of that Summer of Love for me came vicariously in the form of music, newsreels and the poetry of Roger McGough, Adrian Henri and Brian Patten.***

Their poems was funny and relevant many of them still are.

None will stand against the greats but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth reading.

So I have set myself the task of going back to each one in the collection smiling at Roger McGough’s Vinegar

1967

"sometimes

i feel like a priest

in a fish & chips queue

quietly thinking

as the vinegar runs through

how nice it would be

to buy supper for two"

And remembering how I so wanted to be one of the

"Beautiful boys with bright red guitars 

in the spaces between the stars" ***

Even then while I was angered by the Vietnam War, Apartheid and the way the Establishment continued to run things, I could never quite condemn the materialistic approach of my parents and grand parents.  

1970

After all they had lived through two World Wars and a Depression and saw the revolution in consumerism, and health care from the “cradle to the grave” as part of what they were owed, and were determined that my generation should grow up healthy, educated and free from fear.

Of course it never quite worked out like that.  The ever present threat of a Third World War and nuclear devastation  were always just a button away, and even then the gains made in working conditions and a better quality of life could always be taken away, as indeed they were during the following two decades.

And that rampant consumerism and the appropriation of raw materials on the cheap from the developing countries has played its part in global warning, and the continued poverty of some parts of the world.

So that Summer of Love has to be put into a context,**** but that said it was indeed something to have lived through, even if for me it was limited to the Scott Mckenzie hit, some great carefree summer days, and an unfulfilled desire for an Afghan coat.*****

Location; the 1960s

2019

Pictures; The Summer of Love, Chorlton, 2021, various Andrew Simpson's from 1966, 1970 and 2018, and the cover of The Mersey Sound, 1967

*The Summer of Love, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Love

**“Turn on, tune in and drop out”, Timothy Leary, 1966

***The Mersey Sound, Roger McGough, Adrian Henri and Brian Patten, 1967

 ****Remembering the magic of 1967, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2015/01/poems-from-1967.html 

***** "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)"