Tom Hodgkinson recounts the moment his father made a bizarre life-changing announcement

Last weekend I saw Cat Stevens at Glastonbury with my brother. Our Dad used to love the album Teaser and the Firecat and so did we kids. This was the case with lots of the fiftysomethings in the crowd: they remembered the songs from their childhood. And Cat didn’t disappoint: age did not seem to have withered his lovely voice.

Maybe our Dad was attracted to Cat Stevens partly because he was of a similar breed: Cat, or Yusuf, as you know, dropped out of the world 40 years ago in order to pursue a spiritual path, and so did our Dad (though let’s face it, our Dad doesn’t quite have the world-beating talent of Cat Stevens, so let’s not push the comparison too far).

My brother and I remember the day our Dad went weird: I was 13 and Will was 11. Our Dad came home one evening and told us he’d had a religious experience in Westminster Abbey. From that day on, more or less, he renounced career, money, possessions, alcohol, meat, onions, garlic, celery (bizarrely) and sex and drugs (though he’s still partial to a bit of rock’n’roll). He even cast off his Western dress in favour of white robes for a short period.

It was all a bit odd for his family. My brother wrote a very funny book about this period called The House Is Full of Yogis. But actually I’m told that this is a fairly common trajectory for men in India, where it’s called “going sadhu”. The Sanskrit term sadhu means “good man”, and is applied to the four or five million holy men who wander India. Many of these men had “normal” lives once, but when their kids grew up, they decided to don the saffron robes, leave their family, give away their worldly goods and go in search of moksha or liberation, often doing magic tricks and strange stunts in return for a few coins in the begging bowl.

And funnily enough, I think that all of our three headliners at the Idler Festival have something of the sadhu about them. Idler cover star Irvine Welsh told me that writing, for him, was a way of escaping the drudgery of the nine-to-five. Sindhu Vee went from a big job in banking to being a stand-up comedian (plus she’s a fan of the group my Dad joined). And Adam Buxton has resolutely ploughed his own highly entertaining furrow for many years. He may still do a Leonard Cohen and become a full-time Zen monk on Mount Baldy, who can tell?

Our new issue came out on newsstands yesterday and should be arriving any moment in subscribers’ letterboxes. Don’t forget that all our members and subscribers can read the magazine online here.

And I hope to see lots of you at the festival for three days of escape from worldly concerns and the chance to loaf and think.

Says Irvine Welsh of our festival: “No gimmicks, no commerce, just ideas.”

Adam Buxton headlines Friday 7 July; Sindhu Vee headlines Saturday 8, and Irvine Welsh headlines Sunday 9. Book your tickets here. Who knows? Maybe you’ll have a religious experience at Mark Vernon’s talk on spiritual intelligence and find yourself irresistibly compelled to renounce celery.

Live well

Tom

PS: Over the summer we’ll be visiting Wilderness festival for a Sunday morning chin-wag with the avuncular John Lloyd, that’s 6 August, and we’re also off to the Good Life Society Summer Camp on 22 July, where I’ll be giving a lecture on Socrates.

SELECTED COMMENTS

These comments were mailed to us after an earlier version of this piece was sent out as a newsletter. We like to publish a selection and reserve the right to edit them for clarity. Feel free to drop us a line with your thoughts.

Sir: It’s not celery, it’s leeks.
Neville Hodgkinson

Sir: Your post reminded me of the day one of my delivery van drivers couldn’t deliver the bread and cakes etc from Ceres Bakery on Portobello Road so I had to do the delivery. When I got to the health food shop on Bristol Gardens in Maida Vale there was a general sense of shock. Cat Stevens / Yusuf Islam and other newly converted Muslims were celebrating Eid in the traditional way by sacrificing a sheep.  Only they weren’t very good at it and they ended up chasing the bleeding sheep around the gardens at the back of the houses where the inhabitants (mostly squatters) lived.  People were horrified to look out their back windows at a scenario of knife-wielding religious devotees chasing and stabbing the poor sheep, with blood splattering hither and thither.  A lot were vegan or vegetarian at that time, too.  It was about 1974.
Craig Sams

Sir: Regarding your use of the word “weird”-it’s only considered to be strange behaviour by the standards with which we pass judgement on people in modern, capitalist society. By spiritual standards your father is striving to reach a higher spiritual plane-not “weird” at all considering the Hell that life on this planet can be for many of us. Imho.
Rona Topaz