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Many of us "children of the sixties" grew up on the Beatles and the Liverpool poets. In the "Summer of Love" of 1968, Adrian Henri who, as one of the speakers said at his funeral, "loved love", spoke for all of us: 2
LOVE IS
Love is feeling cold in the back of vans Love is a fan-club with only two fans Love is walking holding painstained hands
Love is
Love is fish and chips on winter nights Love is blankets full of strange delights Love is when you don't put out the light
Love is
Love is the presents in Christmas shops Love is when you're feeling top of the pops Love is what happens when the music stops
Love is
Love is white panties lying all forlorn Love is a pink nightdress still slightly warm Love is when you have to leave at dawn
Love is
Love is you and love is me Love is a prison and love is free Love's what's there when you're away from me
Love is.
It was in another lifetime that I personally began to connect to Adrian in the flesh. The opportunity came up to play an active part in designing and running health promotion activities at the 1984 International Garden Festival, which was intended to kick-start the regeneration of this once great city enduring hard times. Adrian's book, Total art- environments, happenings and performance , 3 was the obvious text, and it was about this time that Adrian and my paths converged. A five month long garden festival, with four and a half million visitors, presented a unique opportunity to use the whole environment to explore health issues in a holistic way.
Extensive discussions took place with the Festival designers about how the whole site could be inseminated with a health perspective. 4 One discussion, for example, was about the tides of the adjacent River Mersey and the observatory opposite; how an interpretation of this might give people insight into a large scale human habitat called Liverpool, its origins and raison d'être. Another discussion centred on using the Festival to explore the gulf between town and country, with its implicit loss of an understanding of the cycles of nature and the seasons that can...