Mind The Gap: A Memoir Of Enquiry

This book is about one person's search for truth and wholeness. The gap referred to in the title is what fuelled that search; the empty space between anticipation and disaster, longing and loss, idealised belief and reality. This journey has involved falling into that gap over and over again, before slowly learning to recognise and even befriend it as an inevitable aspect of life. If I could backtrack through time and hand this memoir to my twenty-year-old self, he might have avoided some big mistakes. Then it would resemble a flat-pack furniture assembly manual, with words replacing the diagrams. Of course, the conscientious flat-pack buyer reads those instructions before assembly. However, for those who designed and built the original item, the instructions were written after it was put together- possibly following much trial and error. One thing has become clear: in the end it is only the universal Allen key of compassion that can fit all life's pieces together.Outwardly this particular story moves from teenage rebellion against working-class tradition, through far-left politics, philosophical exchanges on London's Underground, via various cults offering their versions of psycho-salvation- at a price. Finally there is arrival; a remembering of completeness, of that which has been there all along, whilst rambling through the bucolic heartland of the Wiltshire-Somerset border..