Clashes with infinity!

I suppose it all started as they say, when I was a little boy in junior school at the age of about eight. We were all there, us rag asses, listening to the teacher waffling on about something boring and meaningless to our interests. Then for some reason totally out of context with whatever else he had been saying before he said. "What would happen if you got into a rocket and flew out into space and you had enough petrol to keep going on forever?"

Blimey what an idea thrown into the heads of us bored kids in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon! My hand shot up. "You would come to a brick wall with a big sign on it saying End of the Universe". This got a loud laugh as you can expect. But then the teacher said, "Yes very funny, but what would be on the other side of the wall."

Bang! My head went all funny and in that moment in my own little way I saw the concept of infinity. The idea in my mind of something going on forever and ever in all directions forever and ever. I have no idea what happened next my mind was gone, I was seeing this rocket, trying to imagine it flying into the blackness of space forever and ever. It hurt my head. What effect this had for the rest of the kids or even the teacher I have no idea, but it blew my mind.

For what now seems like a long time afterwards, but then may have only been for a few weeks, I lay in bed at night thinking about this idea of forever. My brain literally hurt from it, I would have to stop myself thinking about it, then later I would see myself getting into this imaginary rocket again and flying on and on into the deepest reaches of space.

At this same time I used to think about death allot too. Not me dying, but my mum and dad. It made me feel very sad to think about them not being here anymore. You know that idea of not seeing someone you love ever again, never. Then one day I suddenly realised that I too would someday die and all of the worrying stopped, I actually felt a sense of relief.

I used to get cheap sci-fi comics when I was about 10, not the silly one's like 'Dan Dare, no, these one's were called, 'Creepy Worlds', and 'Tales of the Uncanny', and stuff like that. They were proper scary and made me think about things, I loved them and their silly stories and tales of other worlds and dimensions.

Then one day in one of the stories I read about things called 'Parallel Universes', these were places that existed at the same time as this one does, but slightly not too, if you get my drift. Well my head went again and off I'd go in my mind thinking about what I now know to be the things Quantum physicists were into. The thing about all of this was I suppose, it was better than school, which to be honest was very boring indeed for a young man such as myself.

This seeking thread has continued through my life and I suppose now as a grown up I could call it a kind of spiritual search. A search for some kind of meaning beyond the mundane web of having to go to school, and later to have to go to work for forty or fifty years, and then die a miserable death. Ahem.

Help was at hand for me because fortunately, or not as the case may be, I left school in the mid-sixties. This was the height of the flower power and the hippy movement, I was Fifteen years old and tales of 'free love' and 'love-ins' were in the newspapers, what were these things I wondered, what was a poor boy supposed to do?

Just to give you an idea of the situation and my ongoing existential dilemma. I was coming up to school leaving age in 1966 and I with the rest of my school leaving friends were taken on a little trip around the local trading estate to see the type of jobs we would be doing when we left school. Watching men welding and drilling holes in bits of metal really sent a chill down my spine, this was definitely not for me I thought. It was the sixties remember and there was a 'whole generation with a new explanation', in my young and naive mind I thought what was more up my street as a career move was becoming a hippy..

Just to put the 'tin hat' on it, as my old friend Fred used to say. One weekend in the 'News of the World' there was a picture in the middle pages of a club in London called the UFO. There were photographs of scantily clad girls with flowers drawn on their faces. Hmmm this looks like the kind of job I want, I was thinking to myself. LSD seemed to be the key to the mystery of infinity and death all rolled into one, and I instantly knew my destiny there and then. But if I knew then what I know now, as they say, I think I would have very definitely thought again and again and again and again and .......................