My mother wasn’t exactly a hippie.

In May1968, when a seething hive of French students were busy growing their hair and starting a revolution, she was sporting a respectable hairdo complete with metal pins, and trying for a law degree. I believe she even owned a twin-set. Whilst her contemporaries were busy theorising compulsive shagging, she was living with her mother and her mother’s lodgers. I think she stayed at home a lot. She didn’t go out much to meet men; as it happens, home was where she met my dad; he was one of the lodgers.
My mother got married in a thigh-length off-white macramé wedding dress; my dad borrowed a suit for the occasion. The other lodger was a witness; but he’s since been a minister, so it’s ok.

Later, much later, when everyone had cut off their hair, after my dad had grown his and subsequently lost most of it to the practice of politics, after he’d run off with a female fellow socialist with freckles, my mum made a lampshade out of her wedding dress.
Then she met my stepfather.
He wasn’t exactly a hippie either. That is to say, he wouldn’t smoke pot.
However, within one week I was familiar with his own brand of ecological idiosyncrasies.
He held the very green belief that washing powder was evil.
In fact, washing machines were evil. To this day I believe that he doesn’t own one. He would use (cold) water from his well (dug with his own two hands in the garden) into an oversize bucket, shave some economy soap into it, and stir with a large stick. Repeat twice, and hey! His bed sheets were still grey. But ecologically washed.

Shampoo was evil too.
Therefore, rainwater was collected in various receptacles, placed on the balcony.
Some days, twenty years later, the pungent aroma of nettles macerated in rainwater for six days still lingers in my olfactory memory. The green mixture (in a smaller bucket than the one dedicated to clothes-washing) would wait in our kitchen, always at room temperature, before rinsing his proud locks.

I got a slap the day I mentioned acid rain.

I wished my mum had been a hippy, rioted and erected barricades, slept around and got her attraction for dirty long-haired guys out of her system before I was born.

Next time I might tell you about the dried up henna all over the telephone, as well as the Sock Recycling.