By Richard Walker
Last September, we were just taking our seats in the New Theatre, Oxford to see Patti Smith when my phone beeped. It was a timely reminder to turn it off. Which I did and then forgot about it in the anticipation and enjoyment of listening to a poet and rock ‘n’ roll performer who Bob Dylan asked to accept his Nobel Prize for Literature. Patti sang ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ a second time after she broke down not long into the first performance. After her heartwarming show, we strolled between the Sheldonian Theatre and Blackwells/Weston Library under the Bridge of Sighs heading down Queen’s Lane. A street I love, especially at night, for its peace and lamps flickering on the mellow stone of All Souls.
Later that night I woke and saw an unanswered message on What’s App. A bad habit, I know, but I was tempted to read it. I wished I hadn’t. It kept me awake too long wondering what to do about it. I discussed it over breakfast with my companion. I was invited to speak in an Oxford Union debate proposing the abolition of the monarchy. I am a life member of the Union but have never been actively involved either as an undergrad, or since. I have no idea where or how my name came up. I was initially reluctant. It would take two days out of my writing schedule and I’d promised Jonathan he would have the near final draft of Highlife & my other lives by the end of the month.
Before she left, my friend had encouraged me to accept the invite in the interest of promoting Highlife. As well as drafting the speech I got some business cards made to give out. I used the colours of the Ghanaian flag: red, gold and green horizontal stripes, and replaced the black star on the gold stripe with HIGHLIFE & My Other Lives.
During the drinks and dinner before the debate I gave out my card on every possible occasion and ensured the President of the Union announced the forthcoming publication of the book in May 2025. There will never be a way of knowing whether this was a waste of time. But it gave a focus to some of the conversations I had and amused a few people, especially my son, who pointed out the card looked like I was selling Ganja and, as my personal details were on the back of the card, I’d be getting emails and phone calls asking what half a kilo cost. The debate itself was something of a farce, speakers from the floor intervening and being allowed to ramble on endlessly. A woman passing out – too much alcohol suspected – which interrupted proceedings for ten minutes and, most bizarre of all, was the proposer of the motion to abolish the monarchy was a senior member of the Churchill family who stood up and made it clear he believed no such thing. So he deliberately shot us in the foot before we’d started. The entire evening which was enjoyable enough confirmed what I already knew. That the Union like many other institutions in Oxford and way beyond is socially and politically conservative. But like in many places across the world where there is conservatism there is often a small but powerful strain of resistance and opposition. I remembered the soldier-poet-novelist-scholar, Robert Graves, his shock of white hair gleaming against the dark wood panelling of the Union in the early 1970s, giving a talk which he prefaced by looking round the audience and declaiming, ‘You’re all taking the wrong drugs! Try psilocybin, much better for you than LSD.’
I imagine some people considering whether to buy or read Highlife might think it has some connection with drugs. It has its share of them in my early life given I grew up in the late sixties and first half of the seventies. But they are largely incidental. The book is named after the music of Ghana which is called Highlife. After I’d attended two years of primary school in Guildford, Surrey, my father, right near the end of his military career announced he’d been offered a job in Ghana as a military advisor to Kwame Nkrumah’s post-independence Ghanaian army. The rest is history and how different mine would have been had I stayed in Guildford. Listening and dancing to Highlife music as a child with my parents and their Ghanaian and international friends was an explosive excitement unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. Naturally, it influenced my taste in music for a long time but also quietly and steadily, now I look back, it percolated into many other corners of my life, my outlook and the way I perceived, experienced and wanted to live in the world. It was the foundation stone of a philosophy embodied in driving rhythm, melody, dance, energy, excitement, joy and sharing. It was spiritual and took me to another world beyond my body even though it was an intensely physical experience too.
Another dimension of Highlife which readers might think my book features is the sense of ‘living the highlife.’ And they wouldn’t be wrong. Before studying at Oxford I lived in San Francisco, and afterwards, Toronto, Spain, Kuwait and Yorkshire prior to joining the British Council. And whilst fascinating and exciting in their different ways none of them could really count as ‘living the highlife’. Though I guess working as an assistant to a top DJ in SF at in 1971, living in his basement apartment with my own bathroom, kitchen and a huge waterbed and a constant supply of gigs, bars and women who looked like Joni Mitchell was getting there for an eighteen year old pre-Oxford. And I can’t complain about the year in Tenerife escaping a Pennine winter. We lived in a select apartment block built into a cliff face with a swimming pool below our balcony and a view over the Atlantic swell fifty metres away towards north Africa. That wasn’t too shabby either.
But once I’d signed up in 1983 to the quaintly named Overseas Careers Service of the British Council life took a material turn distinctly for the better. Yes, there was the dead body outside our compound in Lagos and snakes swimming alongside our car in the Bangkok floods. But far outweighing such incidents was seeing Fela Kuti at The Shrine, or entertaining William Golding and Ann in our beautiful Bangkok apartment with teak floors and balcony; hosting the first public (and global) reading by Arundhati Roy from The God of Small Things in New Delhi; a private audience with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in the High Commissioner’s Lutyens residence; eating my granola every morning in our penthouse apartment in central Athens with a view of the Acropolis before walking to the office. And buying a plot of land by a turtle beach in the Peloponnese and creating a wonderful house and garden in an olive grove. That’s all been a ‘highlife’ of sorts.
Highlife, & my other lives is being published by Amaurea Press on 22 May 2025, and is available for pre-order from Amazon, Waterstones, and all good bookshops.
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