ANNIVERSARY OF A NEAR-REVOLUTION

Tomorrow, May 23rd, marks the 40th anniversary of the eruption of serious political revolt in Europe, with riot police charging student demonstrators in the Boulevard St Michel in Paris. Three months later Chicago police battered demonstrators outside the Democratic Party Convention, and two months after that came “the battle of Grosvenor Square”, London, as the police attacked the demonstrators outside the US embassy. I was one of the demonstrators in London, and remember seeing newspaper photographers taking pictures of one policeman being kicked by one demonstrator while yards away four or five policemen were beating the shit out of some half-naked hapless youth backed up against a police van, his head bleeding. "Why don't you take a picture of that?!" I yelled. The response was just a cynical smirk. Then the police on horseback ordered us all into one little corner of the square, and when they'd got us crammed in there, they charged us. I'd been a bit of an innocent about Britain's wonderful police before that.

By 1970 I was living in a cottage in a North Devon village with a very young family, and starting to write Song & Dance Man. When the general election came around, stuck in this deeply conservative rural constituency, we put two posters in the window. One, a favourite harking back to the glories of 1968, printed in black and white, declaimed PARIS LONDON ROME BERLIN - WE SHALL FIGHT AND WE SHALL WIN. The other was home-made, and showed the landowning Tory farmer candidate, with the slogan WOULD YOU BUY A SECOND-HAND COW FROM THIS MAN? In the event, he was beaten by the narrowest possible margin - about 15 votes, I believe - by the Liberal candidate, party leader Jeremy Thorpe, shortly afterwards to be mired in sleaze.

Heady days...