THE BRITISH INVASION BLOG

 Yesterday I bumped into an old friend on the bike path. I had been thinking of him just then -- we were at university together and worked on the student newspaper in 1969 during the famous Computer Centre Crisis- we both got fired for supporting the black students but more importantly he got arrested and beaten and jailed, and also expelled. Three years later I testified for him in court where he was given a suspended sentence. Ten years later I used to babysit his three-year-old son, while he joined the Maoists and became a junkie. Our paths drifted apart. In 1998 I ran into him by accident but didn't at first recognize him - I mistook him for a panhandler asking for change. Yesterday he popped into my mind as I cycled past the place I had last seen him. I wondered if he was still around or had he left town? What had become of him ? And suddenly up ahead crossing the path, there he was. A man of few words, long ago he wrote a haiku: Moccasins on Concrete I have come to avenge...

Yesterday I tried to go for a bike ride but the wind nearly blew me over so I rode home and sat in the garden and fell asleep in my chair like an old woman which I am. A painful memory surfaced that I wasn't prepared for : meaning I haven't really processed it or what it means. It's part of my long history of saying the wrong thing and suffering the consequences. In June of 2020 during Covid lockdowns I was having a chat with someone calling himself Mick Jagger. I was staying in a trailer park in the Canadian Rockies, with just a bicycle for transportation. The nearest town was Valemount, about 4 km away. I was often alone for the two months I spent there, as my roommate Andrew was working as a treeplanter. This was bear country- pine barrens- near the Keystone pipeline project and a railroad level crossing. It had been exactly a year since I'd emailed Mick from my seat on the Greyhound bus from Boston where I had seen the Stones perform for the second time in a week....

  Going on intuition that you might find this interesting I am of your generation (a few years younger) and remember you well from the days when all my friends were raving Beatles fans. George was my favourite Beatle and Ioved "My Sweet Lord" and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." Later "Layla" was my favorite song, one that sent me into an ecstatic trance whenever I heard it. I grew up in Montreal, Canada and lived near Leonard Cohen in his funky downtown neighborhood in the 1970s to mid nineties. I worked as a freelance journalist and also taught creative writing while writing poetry and fiction. In 1992 my life changed when I traveled to the Caribbean and *almost* met Mick Jagger on his island in the Grenadines.  Afterwards I began hearing from him through the internet and also  some songs in the Voodoo Lounge album that came out in 1994. I can say with relative certainty that "Love is Strong" was inspired by my visit to the "seedy bar...

  A day in the life of a high school girl in 1965 when the Rolling Stones come to town Home for Easter vacation Months of hysterical buildup to the show but Anne is not going She's home with her mother practicing Russian when a station wagon pulls up outside and a young man gets out. Her mother tells her to let him in. The two of them go down to the basement and chat He asks for her hand in marriage.She laughs.He leaves in a hurry. The rear view mirror shatters Her mother cries. Annie runs to her room. Her mother phones Dr Roper ... That night the Stones play the arena. Annie goes to the hospital for treatment - they wipe her memory Behind the hospital, unmarked graves of children lie in the moonlight

It was the 80th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. I was traveling under two names- thats what tipped them off. I wasn't trying to trick people. Ann Diamond was the name I wrote under. Anne McLean was my real name. It never occurred to me that this was a problem. I never concealed the fact that Ann Diamond was just a pseudonym.  I phoned Basil's Bar on Mustique thinking I would leave a message for Mick Jagger, not expecting he would ever get it. It was one of those snap decisions: to let him know I was coming to his island. In case he was really there, which I doubted. So why not just leave a message which likely would never reach him, and which he could just ignore, having never heard of me in his life before. Meanwhile I would have done my best to fulfil my mission. It made perfect sense since my mission  was to bring him a message from a deceased Tibetan lama - oh never mind.   Finding a pay phone near the beach in the dark , dialing the number - that part was...

  For the past 3 years I have been piecing together what happened to me as a child I was not placed in a box and buried in an unmarked grave but my memory was deleted This means I missed the love of my life This makes me act and feel like a narcissist But when you're the victim of a crime you have to focus on what happened to you in the first place The truth matters I can trace it back now to our first meetings I can now recollect a trail of events, a chain of cause and effect Beginning in early childhood when I was taken to hospital and put in an LSD experiment at age 4 then bought for experimentation by Dr Cameron at McGill Every step of the way they drugged or shocked me so I would not know what was happening or remember details  They erased my trail of breadcrumbs with drugs like: Ether LSD And likely electroshock At my first party I met Mike who protected me from the older boys To my mother it appeared he loved me but I was a child and they gave us candies an...

  Long ago and far away before rock and roll a boy came to Canada from an Air Force Base in England and this is not mentioned in the biographies. It was 1956 and he was 13 and came to Montreal that summer on a hot day in early August to attend a children's party that would change the world. In 1959 he got his first British passport with photo showing him at 15 or 16 sporting Tommy Steele hair, which would have allowed him to come to Toronto, an aspiring young Elvis but not yet in a band. Long ago and far away before there was a British invasion I met young Mike Jagger when he came to Montreal and Toronto. And if this happened and it altered the course of my life, it also altered life for a whole generation.  This scrap of memory sheds light on an early period of Jagger's life that no one has written about before.  It also explains how we got caught in the machinery of MKULTRA mind control. My story doesn't end in childhood. It picks up again with the Voodoo Lounge...