Splinters

Whilst watering the plants in a friend's flat while she is on holiday, I noticed a book lying on a chair: Breaking Open the Head by Daniel Pinchbeck. The only customer report tells us: "This is no new-age thesis or extended 'trip report'. The book is an intellectual and personal inquiry. It is rich with literary references and perspectives from thinkers such as Rudolph Steiner, Carl Jung, and Walter Benjamin, as well as the 'usual suspects' such as Sasha Shulgin and Terrence McKenna. It details the cultural history of psychedelic use and delivers philosophical perspectives on shamanism. It probes the powerful synchronicities between the shamanic view of the cosmos and what modern science is just beginning to suspect: that the universe may be far more complex, more bizarre, and more alive and conscious than our rationalistic, materialistic thinking has allowed us to believe.

Pinchbeck discovers shamanism - and its modern, urban psychedelic equivalent - to be an ambiguous tool. An antidote to Western ennui but simultaneously an apocalyptic wake-up call. The more you probe the shamanic cosmos, Pinchbeck discovers, the more it throws up its visions of 'imminent historical breakdown and unleashed horrors ahead now approaching us at high speed.' Gulp."

Gulp indeed. So long as we get as far as the next football season, OK?

Read more about it on the book's own website. It is the kind of book I imagine young Mr Chris to be reading. But he's probably toking on some toad's innards in the outback somewhere and hallucinating that Pompey is in the Premiership and his old chum Morose is really a happy bunny.