I have been working towards getting 'Rainbow Fields is Home' (an account of spending the winter of 1984/85 as part of the occupation of the proposed cruise missile site at Molesworth, Cambridgeshire) properly published.

This is the latest version of the front cover, I think it's just about there now. The image is rainbow flags flying at Molesworth on October 20th 1984, the day we had a memorial event for Caroline Taylor - peace activist and friend of many of us, who had died in a road accident just before the occupation began.

Here is the introduction, explaining how the book was written and finally brought to the point of publication:


                  PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 1st 2013


INTRODUCTION TO THE 2013 EDITION

Once it was all over, I got myself back to a quiet field near Glastonbury and, still living in the same tent as I had been using all winter, I spent a month feverishly writing. This book is the result. Twentyeight years later it needed remarkably little editing.

At the time, driven as I was to write it all down, I somehow assumed that I would find a publisher - that I would move seamlessly from writing to publishing, all as part of the same energetic process. It was not to be.

The book is not a novel, nor history, nor politics, nor any other neat category, though it might contain elements of all of these. And I was an unknown writer with too much hair and little or no credibility. Those publishers who did look at it returned my synopsis and sample chapters politely, with slightly more than a standard rejection slip but no desire to take on such an uncertain manuscript.

I visited a printers’ to check out how much it would cost to print it and publish it myself. The answer was at least £2,000 - at 1985 prices - which was impossible.

Eventually I found a way to produce the last chapter as a booklet, using electro-stencils and printing it on a Roneo duplicating machine. Inside the front cover it said, rather hopefully, that the booklet was being sold to raise the funds required to publish the whole story. At £1 each this would have taken a very long time.

However it did lead me to setting up Unique Publications, and to putting out a series of booklets - chronicling the Stonehenge campaigns of the mid-1980s, and then a variety of subjects related to my community activism in Glastonbury.

I hired a photocopier to print them on, and ended up running the town’s photocopy shop (using recycled paper) and establishing a business that, through several metamorphoses, has supported me ever since.

By 1992 I had acquired my first Apple Mac computer, and I could make a neater job of typesetting and page layout. I put together Rainbow Fields, on A4 pages but otherwise looking much the same as it does now, and printed two or three dozen loose-bound copies for distribution to friends and people who might take an interest; but it was never what you could really call ‘published’.

Twenty years further on, short-run print technology has developed to the point where it is possible for a business like mine to produce full-length books. Looking back at it all now, it was indeed the Roneoed publishing of The Last Night of Rainbow Fields Village at Molesworth that has led, by a convoluted and unexpected route, to my having the resources needed to publish Rainbow Fields is Home.

So here it is. It’s not in the style that I would write it in now, and the lifestyle it describes is not what I would choose to live for very long. I’m not the same person now, though a part of me still misses it all. And I think the book is still worth reading. I hope you think so too.

I generally go to a meditation group on Saturday evenings, at a friend’s house in a quiet lane round behind Glastonbury Tor. I like the company, and I get more than I would have imagined from taking up a regular meditation practice.

This week it turned out to be a little different. Everyone arrived as usual; then we’d just settled down when the man next door began vigorous drumming, out in his back garden. He has done this before, but usually he stops after just a few minutes and everything returns to its customary tranquility.

Not so this week. Perhaps because it was only a few days after Beltane, he had a bunch of friends round and they were all enjoying the garden in the evening sun. Quite noisily. The drum stopped after a few minutes, but then began again, and again, and so on for most of the hour that we like to spend in silent space-beyond-the-mind.

It could have been annoying.

It was of course a great opportunity to try including the noises-off in our meditational practice, especially as focusing on the regular rhythmical drumming could be a great way to subsume the insistent chatter of thought processes that so often will not stop, that so commonly gets in the way of reaching the longed-for silent space-beyond- the-mind.

Except that the drumming kept stopping and starting, in different rhythms; and it wasn’t very good.

‘If only’ went the insistent chatter of thought, ‘that guy knew how to drum. But he doesn’t. He’s rubbish.’

And so on, till eventually it did finally stop, with perhaps twenty minutes of our hour to go.

There was a brief silence, and then the saxophone started.

The drumming had not been very good. The saxophone playing was absolutely bloody awful.

‘Oh my God’ went the insistent chatter of thought (more insistently than usual), ‘this is absolutely bloody awful. I could try just focusing on the saxophone playing, including it in my otherwise silent space-beyond-the-mind, subsuming all chatter of thought processes ... but really, I don’t want this included in my consciousness on any level at all. It’s just excruciating.’

And then the dog joined in.

The dog howled at the top of its canine voice, in a cacophonous and unholy duet with saxophone player, who may well have been its owner; a cacophonous and unholy duet that went far beyond any unwanted chatter of thought, beyond even any feelings of a-musical excruciation; beyond anything that it was reasonable to expect, even on a Saturday evening, even in Glastonbury, even so close to Glastonbury Tor.

We laughed. All of us gave in to laughter. And the meditation came to an end, just a few minutes early.