MY DAY AS A TREE

It happened, as I always knew it would. My daughter, aged 15, finally
asked me about my experiences with drugs. Honesty, I'd long ago
concluded, was the best and only policy. I told her I'd experimented
with cannabis, cocaine, mescaline and LSD. I didn't denounce drugs nor
the urge to take them. But nor did I glamorise them. I just told her
the truth. For instance, I told her that as a student in 1973, under
the influence of microdot LSD, I believed I was a tree. I told her the
experience was both ecstatic and disturbing (fear of being pruned).

I made it clear that all this was a long time ago. Also - and let me
be even more clear - yes, I'd experimented with drugs but, no, I'd
never taken them. Experimenting's different and, let's face it,
superior. Experimenting's what scientists do - highly intelligent men
and women who often wear glasses. My experiments were designed to test
out the hypothesis that drugs were, for me, a youthful phase that
would pass. Yes, I carried out more than one experiment. But so do
scientists. I experimented while listening to Pink Floyd's Dark Side
of the Moon, especially the bit where that woman wails, which seemed
to go on for 17 hours. I experimented in club lavatories (night, not
golf). I experimented in a car while my friend Paul, who was also
experimenting, drove us round Highbury Corner roundabout four or five
times, because the drug was impairing his ability to plump for an exit
in order to travel in an easterly direction down St Paul's Road (note:
you want the St Paul's Road e! xit).

And, of course, I was right. Drugs were just a phase. As Michael
Portillo said about gay sex, "I am happily married - all that is
behind me now", which was not a reference to a queue of chaps lining
up to experiment with the bottom of the chap in front. That kind of
innuendo only occurs to the immature and unhappily unmarried.

There's a serious point here. But I don't know what it is. Nor do I
have to - I'm not standing for office. Portillo was seeking his
party's nomination for a byelection in Kensington and Chelsea. I'm
not. Tree, maybe; but I never discovered a drug strong enough to turn
me into a Conservative MP.

Politicians and celebrities have, supposedly, an obligation to be role
models. But what makes you a celebrity is precisely that which doesn't
make you a role model. You're young, you're skinny, you're gorgeous,
you're vain, you're selfish. You're greedy for fame, not food. Where
do you go? A modelling agency. You don't go to a role modelling
agency, where jolly girls who cycle to harp lessons are found jobs
with Greenpeace.

As a responsible father of one, I'd urge all heroes of the young to
give up drugs. But that's the problem: to give up drugs, you have to
take them first. Lots of them. We want the cracked voice of experience
telling us what not to do. Who listens to a monk banging on about the
dangers of unprotected sex? On the other hand, if he wants to tell us
how the manufacture of Green Chartreuse made him violent and abusive
to his fellow monks - well, go for for it, Brother.

A long time ago, authority figures just told you not to do stuff,
without telling you in God-it-was-awful detail that they used to do it
themselves till they realised it was wrong, wrong, wrong. Oh yes.
Hypocrisy's not what it used to be.

You'd be on a beach in the early 60s and your dad would shout: "Don't
throw stones!" That was it. Now it's: "Don't throw stones. I threw
stones when I was your age, because my dad left my mum when I was four
and I hardly ever saw him. I was looking for love, basically, and by
throwing stones I was trying to make my mark on, you know, it was kind
of, like, there was a huge beach of paternal love out there and I
wanted that beach to know I still existed. You could call it a cry for
help, I suppose and - hey! Don't throw stones at me! I'm telling you
about myself!"

Note:
Jon Canter's book, A Short Gentleman, has just been published