The esteemed Victoria and Albert Museum, no less, unless you just call it the V&A, which is much less, is having an exhibition of memorabilia from ‘the 60s’. An homage to flower power, but not exclusively a hippy show. There’s other stuff too. The ‘actual’ chair that Christine Keeler posed naked upon back in the Profumo scandal days. But really the tone of the exhibition is stated clearly on the tickets with: “warning! may contain sex and drugs and rock’n’roll”.

I was alive in the 60s but sadly, was too young to make much use of anything there other than the rock’n’roll. So I waited for the early 70s before embracing the rest as the freedom ‘invented’ in the 60s was still alive and well and thriving for us coming of age baby-boomers.

And embrace we did.

I didn’t know any drug addicts back then. But I didn’t know many people who didn’t ‘do drugs’ of some description either. Ok, maybe I exaggerate but low level druggage was fairly ubiquitous in London. Possibly because all the good music was created by people under some serious influences, so to really appreciate it you had to get onto their level. Had to. Compulsory. No-one undrugged was ever going to appreciate Pink Floyd’s ‘Ummagumma’ album, were they?

And when first Jim Morrison, then Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Bryan Jones and Keith Moon departed early from their mortal coils, thier deaths inspired if not perpetrated by drugs, for some reason this did not reflect badly on the use of recreational drugs. Perhaps we were all too stoned to make the connection.

And then there was sex. Ahhhhh, sex. It obviously wasn’t that the act itself had changed, more the attitude towards it. And mainly from a woman’s perspective. The prevailing understanding up to the 60s was sex was something men wanted and women somehow reluctantly ‘gave’ if they had to. Then that wonderful decade liberated women by telling them they could want sex too. Not necessarily with lurve, just the physical, the animal, the sensory enjoyment. That’s what we told them anyway. That we were setting them free. In just 32 seconds flat. Liberation may come easier, but never more quickly.

I’ll check out the V&A, if I can find a day without football. Them’s rare this time of year.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx