Karma mechanics

Evening Standard | 14 Dec 1990

I’m lying on the floor wearing a healing gem on my solar plexus while trying to tune into a ley line. Ley lines are like a cosmic grid across Britain carrying spiritual power and tend to cross at ancient centres like Stonehenge. But I can see no reason why there shouldnt be one in a South Kensington basement. Naturally, I’ve just dangled a key on a pendulum string, asking it questions.

This is the College of Psychic Studies; a place of noble portraits, inner unfoldment and spiritual advice.

• Caroline’s Life

Karlheinz Stockhausen: King of the tinklybonk

Evening Standard | 7 Sep 1990

Ascetic eccentric who served as a stretcher bearer during the war and has written more than 200 musical works. Long haired, energetic, darling of the avant-garde with a maverick intelligence and six children.

Mystic, wit and wizard of electronic music who designed his house with sloping ceilings and hexagonal rooms, all lit from the outside. Whither Karlheinz Stockhausen, the composer-visionary and media star of the swinging Sixties?

There are four of us listening to my interview with the 62-year-old King Tinklybonk: his two girlfriends (vegetarians and thirtysomething), myself and his guardian angel. He’s also taping us – wanting to turn it into music later.

• Interviews

The night I was ambushed in my car – by a 13-year-old with pigtails

Evening Standard | 14 Jul 1990

It was seven o’clock on Tuesday evening when four children attacked me. I’d never met them before, never set eyes on them. I had just parked my car, a geriatric red Volkswagen Golf, in the King’s Road, by the World’s End estate. I was meeting friends, and was wondering whether I’d get a ticket for parking there. Just then, a young girl with pigtails crossed the road, walked between the rear of my vehicle and the one behind it, and delivered a forceful kick to the back of my car followed by smashing her hand on the rear windscreen.

What on earth did she think she was doing, I asked, as I wound down the window.

• Caroline’s Life

Ted Heath: Sailing past the cynics

Evening Standard | 14 Jul 1990

Edward Heath is known for being pompous and aloof, a bad loser, having an under-active thyroid, sailing, and conducting boats and orchestras respectively.

Could he, in fact, be sensitive, gentle, reflective and shy; a man who uses his intellect as an armour against public expression of feeling?

“People used to say ‘We must do something about your image’. They never got to that point,” he says, in the voice of a tape recorder whose batteries are running low, “because I said, ‘I don’t believe in images – you should be yourself’.” And to the best of his ability, he is.

• Interviews

Richard Harris: Fire on ice…

Evening Standard | 8 Jun 1990

A former wild man and hellraiser turned Bahamian island recluse; erstwhile hard drinker turned hypoglycaemic, once rumbustious and still unpredictable and funny. A man who, they say, cannot go out to buy a packet of cigarettes without causing chaos.

Multi-millionaire actor and poet, gentle and with a face – steel rim bespectacled – that has been described as being like five miles of bad Irish road. Twice bankrupt, twice married, an eccentric who loves the vagabond life… Is this Richard Harris, currently playing Pirandello’s madman Henry IV?

• Interviews

The lentil touch

Evening Standard | 4 Jun 1990

They are crawling around in the dark on all fours making animal noises. Among them Bearded Bernie, a Liverpudlian solicitor, a translator and a girl who cycled here from Barcelona.

The scene: a lovely Greek farmhouse. The aim: to find your partner for the co-listening exercise, hold hands, listen intently to what he says, and then feed him back his words.

Welcome to the Guardian readers’ Butlins.

• Travel: Europe/ Africa