The Andy Parvin Story

I left home in my teens and found myself in the swinging London scene at the height of hippydom, when being young constituted a political and social movement. We had to ban the bomb, stop the Viet Nam war, live on sex, drugs, rock and roll, turn on, tune in, drop out, fight for racial equality, women’s lib, the natural world, peace, love and revolution.

A few years later, I set out for the South Seas, on my honeymoon, only my wife left me (not funny). Sitting outside a rattan hut on Kuta Beach in Bali, I wrote a bad, distraught novel, trying and failing to make sense of it all.

Upon my solitary return from Asia, I remember having a plastic bag with some salt tablets and the bad novel. But that’s the end of it. Somewhere between Leeds, Dumfries and London, the plastic bag disappeared. My life wizzed on and decades passed.

I am standing in a darkened room, rubbing my face with my hands. I want to write something about that time long ago. While my head fills with memories, things I could include, my hand opens a filing cabinet, picks up a folder that says ‘Bali Libretto’. And there it is, the bad novel from 23 years ago. …So embarrassing, a jumble of passionate nonsense. I got to work immediately.

The Andy Parvin Story is a whirlpool of a novel, seen through Andy’s naïve eyes.
We zoom into London at the height of the swinging sixties, joining wiry little artist Kit Hogarth, singer-songwriter, hippy impressario Jules Marsden Hunt, the beautiful Beatrice, a spiritual sect called The Woolly Mammoth, Walt Weirdness and Mr Andy Parvin himself, as they build a new hippy paradise.