Laughing All The Way to The Prank

THEY WERE the nice one, top one, sorted! merchants of their generation. A ragbag collection of writers, musicians and artists who decided it would be a beezer jape to buy an old school bus and travel round the States with a garbage can full of orange-flavoured Kool-Aid.
Actually, make that orange and LSD-flavoured Kool-Aid. This was the curious twilight period between acid being freely available in the US of A, and the FBI deciding it was part of a pinko commie plot to undermine the fabric of western society.
Now, courtesy of a big wad of cash from Channel 4, the Merry Pranksters are back on the road and bringing their psychedelic wonder-wagon, Further, to these very shores.
Riding up front will be One Flew Over The Cuckoo s Nest author Ken Kesey, and the hack who hallucinated the whole thing up in the first place, Ken Babbs.
A bunch of sad old hippies reliving their youth? Nope, these are men and women with a mission.
Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters drive around the not so United Kingdom in search of Arthur s not so round table, Excalibur, the Lady of the Lake and the spirit of Merlin himself, reads an official communiqui. Hell, we ll even consider tea with Margaret Thatcher.
Arriving in Felixstowe on August 5th, Further will proceed in a disorderly fashion to Brighton, Stonehenge, Cornwall, London, Bristol, Swansea and Liverpool before making a midnight escape on the ferry. It s time to look for Leprechauns with four-leaf clovers who can reveal treasures or maybe even Merlin himself.
Once in the Emerald Isle, Kesey & Co. will be following this itinerary:
August 22nd Dublin. Guided by the light of Joan of Arc and thousands of Christians and Protestants, the bus full of Pranksters seeking wisdom and forbearance will arrive for an evening of fun and frivolity at the Vicar St. theatre.
August 23rd Belfast. Another gig for the Irish, and we re not talkin about the ones from Notre Dame, at the Belfast Market Hall which should certainly set the stage for an exciting journey through Northern Ireland. Peace, brothers in Belfast . . .sisters, too. We just want to revel in your energies and look for the spirit.
Everything s still basically the same as it used to be, reflects Kesey, who despite a recent stroke remains the most animated of 64-year-olds. Fire hurts you when it burns you. If you fall in water you drown, rocks bruise you, wolves bite you, you go through a certain bunch of things that are the same. The job of the shamen/mystic I think is to pull things away from the Freudian mind. Let s quit examining ourselves and trying to make ourselves psychologically perfect. We aren t and never will be.
You can swap flashbacks with the Pranksters on August 22nd when they pay a lunchtime visit to Tower Records in Wicklow Street. If you ve religious reasons for not getting up that early on Sundays, fear not, cos you ll be able to follow their exploits at:
www.intrepidtrips.com