One evening, Ilze and I went to a dinner hosted by one of her colleagues who taught at the school in Didcot. There were two or three other couples present, including John and Fanny Stein. John at that time was a general medical practitioner about to become a Fellow of Magdalen, while Fanny was a housewife. About halfway through the dinner, I discovered that Fanny’s maiden name was Hill and that she was the daughter of Christopher Hill, David Lindsay Keir’s successor as Master of Balliol. Fanny and I struck up a strong friendship. We fancied each other like mad, but newly-entered marital obligations prevailed, and we didn’t have an affair with each other until long after.
Shortly after my first meeting with Fanny, I ran into Christopher Hill at a function held in the Balliol students’ bar. We hardly knew each other but quickly became engaged in earnest conversation, which we both wished to continue when the function drew to a close. The Master asked if I would be prepared to buy a bottle of whisky on my account at the students’ bar and bring it up to his lodgings, where he would immediately reimburse me and continue our discussions. I was delighted to do this. We got on remarkably well, and by the end of the evening Christopher had accepted my invitation to have dinner in Garsington.
Ilze was very nervous at the prospect of entertaining such distinguished guests and had no idea what kind of meal to prepare. During the previous year in London, I had befriended the chef of the local Indian restaurant and had become reasonably proficient at cooking curries. Christopher had mentioned to me how much he had enjoyed Indian cuisine while he was in India. I agreed to cook the food, which Christopher and his wife, Bridget, gratefully devoured.
Christopher had tremendous sympathy both with revolutionaries and with those who wished to smoke marijuana. He was also a source of an immense amount of information about Garsington. He mentioned that Russell Meiggs (my long-haired hero) lived only a hundred yards away from us (I had never seen him in the village) and that across an adjacent field, tucked in a hollow, was Garsington Manor, the one-time residence of the Morrell brewery heiress, Lady Ottoline Morrell, whom Christopher referred to as Lady Utterly Immoral. Apparently, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey, etc. had all been frequent guests at the manor. Weeks afterwards, after a night tripping out on the first LSD I had taken for years, I embarrassed myself by knocking on the door of Garsington Manor and asking the occupants if Aldous Huxley could come out to play.
There were isolated pockets of marijuana smokers, mainly postgraduates. One of these was at our cottage in Garsington. One regular visitor was Graham Plinston, now completing his final undergraduate year. He was always keen to play a game of Go and always brought with him a few ounces of excellent hashish. I would sometimes buy more than I needed and sell off the surplus at enough profit to pay for my own absurdly heavy consumption, which was about twenty joints a day. Bill Jefferson was close behind.
I got down to my philosophy reading. A common difficulty encountered by those beginning to study philosophy is that whatever is read appears totally convincing at the time of reading. Smoking marijuana forced me to stop, examine, scrutinise, and criticise each step before proceeding. It assisted me not only in pinpointing the weaknesses of certain philosophical theories, but also in articulating alternative philosophical viewpoints.
As part of the course, I was asked to deliver a paper to learned men assembled in an ancient seminar room at All Souls College. My assigned topic was the difference in views of space and time held by Isaac Newton and Leibniz. Newton seemed to hold that solid things existed through absolute time in absolute space, which could be considered as God’s sensorium, sniffing out trouble everywhere. Leibniz, in many ways a precursor of Einstein, was a lot more hip and a lot more baffling. He seemed to maintain that space and time were shifting around out of control and that each bit of stuff had everything else in the universe as part of it. Writing about it was difficult, but I muddled through.
I became interested in confirmation theory: what evidence do scientists need to end up believing the things they do? A paradox arises when considering hypotheses of the general form ‘All X are Y’, for example, ‘All ravens are black’, together with what sort of evidence would tend to make them believable. One could begin by looking at a raven to see if it is black. If it is black, then this observation confirms the hypothesis to a limited extent. If one looked at thousands of ravens, and they were all black, then these observations would further confirm the hypothesis. ‘All X are Y’ is logically equivalent to ‘All non-Y are non-X.’ The two propositions ‘All ravens are black’ and ‘All non-black things are non-ravens’ state the same fact. Therefore, observations of non-black non-ravens would confirm the hypothesis ‘All ravens are black’ just as much as they would ‘All non-black things are non-ravens.’ This leads to the counter-intuitive conclusion that observations of such things as red noses, white swans, etc. confirm the statement ‘All ravens are black.’ Everyone knows, of course, that they do not.
Bill Jefferson was an English literature student from Yorkshire, and he would sometimes organise poetry readings. He organised one at some college in Oxford, and brought two of the poets, Christopher Logue and Brian Patten, together with some of their entourages, back to the cottage in Garsington. A second, more informal, poetry reading took place, followed by a mammoth drinking and smoking session lasting at least a day. This, however, was quite a rare occurrence, and the cottage in Garsington never achieved the status of my previous accommodations in terms of hosting debauchery and culture.
The preponderance of student revolutionaries dominating the quadrangles and bars, the lack of both fellow marijuana smokers and fellow philosophers of science, and the paucity of books on History and Philosophy of Science in the Balliol library led to my spending less and less time in College and becoming rather disaffected with it. I was visiting Balliol no more than once a week. Ilze was most unhappy with her teaching job in Didcot, and we both thought seriously of leaving Oxford once I’d completed my diploma course. The expectation was for me to continue at Balliol with a B.Phil, or D.Phil, course, but this could easily be done at another university. I decided on the University of Sussex, which in those days was referred to as Balliol by the sea. Brighton looked like fun. Ilze obtained the promise of employment at a convent school in Worthing. My diploma was acquired without too much difficulty, and I was beginning to feel reasonably secure about my ability to pursue an academic career. At the end of the diploma course, Christopher Hill asked if I would be interested in participating in a summer school that Balliol was organising for the benefit of teenage boys who came from deprived backgrounds. I was glad to help, and I really enjoyed my every involvement with the venture. Part of my task was straightforward teaching. Part of it was socialising with the young men with the intention of convincing them that university men were not all stuffed shirts. This was easily achieved by a pub crawl followed by the viewing of a pornographic film at the Scala cinema in Walton Street.
Ilze and I moved to Brighton and found a cheap sea-front flat. Through Christopher Logue, who rented a room in their house, we met Johnny Martin, an anthropology lecturer at the University of Sussex, and his wife Gina. We all had similar interests: marijuana, LSD, rock music, and after-eight philosophy, and we spent much time together.
I hated Sussex University. By this time, I had a firm idea of what a university should be like, and Sussex didn’t come up to it. Every room had a number rather than a name. There was no romance about studying in an office-block library. One couldn’t lie back and think that this was where, in the past, great minds produced great ideas. My supervisor was a Polish logician named Jerzy Giedymin. He was reckoned to be brilliant, but only in areas that no one else could test. I found him very difficult to understand, whatever he was talking about. He made it plain he had no interest in irrelevancies such as confirmation paradoxes. I made it plain I had no interest in studying his irrelevant obsessions. He said I should never have