Be sure to wear flowers in your hair

/ Doug Jacquier

This piece was inspired by the weekly photo prompt from the Unicorn Challenge to respond to it with around 250 words.

Reminds me of the 60’s and marching in anti-war demos and showing I wasn’t afraid of my feminine side by letting my girlfriend at the time weave flowers through my fashionably long hair. What it actually achieved was to make me a prominent target for malevolent coppers who found great delight in creating a new crimson part in my hairy ginger abomination with their truncheons

Remember causes and affectations of effect on war-zones now gone five-star? Remember sexual honesty and sleeping with whoever felt like you and confining safe sex to heart condoms?

Remember dope and discovering the ‘real’ you  and waking each time forgetful of the revelation?

Remember music and believing decibels were antidotes to megatons and lyrics could shield you from evil?

Remember social action, sitting in smoke-filled rooms with Nescafe activists and impoverished women with no teeth and less hope?

Remember parents, left on some private shelf in case they portrayed you to anybody that mattered?

Remember party politics and seeing neighbours become politicians only to fall in clay-footed exhaustion at the barriers?

Remember health when it was something other people ought to have and you weren’t smoke-free, mineral water in hand and smiling at God?

Remember money and how it was never going to concern you and then you learnt the golden rule and its defensible limits?

And do you remember when the penny dropped that the personal was the political and you found out you had to change?

And you decided to forget the revolution?

21 thoughts on “Be sure to wear flowers in your hair”

  4. Ouch!
    And all that’s left is the stirring of nostalgia when the old ‘battle songs’ come on.
    Vivid and bitterly accurate description, Doug.
    We might not have changed the world, but we can still serve as a warning…!
    PS The only terrifyiing thing about the photo is the fact that you now wear your hair short!
    Why do men with curly hair wear it short? – the plaintive cry of all straight-haired women!

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  11. Perhaps the world didn’t change as much as was hoped, but I think there were still gains – it wasn’t all a sell out. Reality and maturity were bound to win out eventually. I wasn’t one of the activists – too much of a mouse for that, but in my heart I cheered them on. I like your litany of memories. And it’s never too late to twine a few blossoms here and there.

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    • Thanks, Margaret. Yes, there were gains but we have new potential losses that no-one seems to want to march in the streets for anymore (except Mardi Gras). As for blossoms, my thinning pate would suggest they’d have to be behind my ears. 😉

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