3The art of trouble

Did I ever use a typewriter? Mother’s milk. Upright manuals, bashed to bits. We typed ‘the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’ to test that every letter was working. Cut and paste meant exactly that—1969

I arrived at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor from London in the summer of 1969, aged 17, hopelessly naive, admitted despite the absence of most of the normally required academic qualifications. They waived me in only because my father had just been appointed a professor at the medical school. He’d had enough of the NHS, even then. A place for me was a perk of his job.

I was initially reluctant to follow my family to Michigan. But I was a teenager and confused. I’d been at Bedales, a progressive coed boarding school in Hampshire, where I was noisy and a terrible student. I subscribed to theEconomiston the school rate, hid in the library, wrote a few pieces for the student chronicle, sneaked off to the Good Intent public house in Petersfield, where they were not fussy about age, and tried to stay awake in lessons. I recently wrote a rude piece about the school for theSpectatorand suspect I am nowpersona non gratathere. I wasn’t interested in A-levels and didn’t get any.

London at the time was supposedly buzzing, decreed to be ‘swinging’ byTimemagazine. It was true that London had a photogenic and groovy counter-culture. Jimi Hendrix played the Albert Hall, the Rolling Stones played a gig in Hyde Park. ButTime’s story was what is known in the trade as a confection, bearing only an incidental relationship to the broader truth. Away from Bárbara Hulanicki’s hip Biba boutique and the anarchic bazaar of Kensington Market, later demolished, the site now a branch of PC World, England was in fact rotting. This was the tag end of Harold Wilson’s Labour government. The winter of discontent, the OPEC oil crisis and IMF bailout soon followed.

It was the height of the Vietnam War and I demonstrated outside the American embassy in Grosvenor Square, immersed myself in silly teenage politics, and hung out with friends at music gigs in grotty clubs in Camden Town. I was very left wing at the time (I got over it, eventually) and ran into Peter Mandelson when he was the commissar behind some demo of the day. He was extremely arch and very bossy. I didn’t like him, indeed took against him instantly. We were to meet again much later, in Brighton, in an incident I will explain later, when I provoked him into a spectacular hissy-fit.

It’s true there were girls with Union Jack mini skirts on the King’s Road in Chelsea, but outside the privileged postcodes London was also a tired city of endless grime. They were still clearing remaining bomb sites. People in Cricklewood were living in prefabs.5There’s a documentary on YouTube, a tour of North London with the suave actor James Mason,6disabusing the Swinging Lo