The land of paradox.

(From Bath Chronicle)

This week I received an invitation to go to New York in September to give a lecture, and it set me thinking about the last time I was there in the very early '70s. I was still in my teens and probably as naive about some things as you can get.

I had gone to work in their summer camp programme taking children from inner city New York upstate to the national parks, where we lived as native American Indians. For me, on one level, it was a great adventure, having arrived there as a virtually blank sheet of paper with little or no idea of what I wanted to do with my life. But it was the social and political backdrop of that time that I …