May 1968. That's 30 years ago. It's not easy. You're asking someone with greying hair, failing eyesight and an expanding waistline to look back on themselves as a 21year-old. The memory is also a suspect organ.
Yes, it probably was the seminal year of my life. The year that, more than any other, made me what I am today and what I will be on my death bed. I was a Junior Sophomore student in Trinity College - the significance of that is that it was the third year of a four-year course and final examinations for a degree were too far away to start concentrating the mind. It was the Trinity Term, when all the madness started to break out. And it was the year when the 1960s really started to take hold in Dublin, when you grew your hair and cultivated outrageous clothes and started admitting to people that, yes, you were a hippie. It was kind of wonderful.
But analysing what made it wonderful without provoking post-modernist sniggers is quite difficult. By May 1968 we had come to call ourselves "The Counter-Culture". At the time, the important part of the label was the "Counter" bit. We defined ourselves in an adversarial way as being different to and in conflict with "The Establishment". Nothing particularly new in that. Every generation has to do it.
No, looking back it's not the "Counter" bit that's important, but the "Culture" bit. What made our post-adolescent rebellion different to that of most other generations was that it did have a cultural matrix to fall back on. We had new cinema, new politics, new poetry, new fashion, new ideas and, above all, we had a new music. We were amazingly self-sufficient as a generation and quite different from what had gone before.
My father was an undergraduate at Cambridge in the 1930s, arguably the second most exciting decade of the century. But listening to him talk about the political and artistic fervour that surrounded him when he was in his early 20s, I realise that it is secondary - the cultural matrix was less complete, less sustaining. And, for various good reasons, he never quite made to it Spain to fight for International Socialism. And, by June 1968, I did make it to The Bay Area to fight for the rights of the people of Vietnam . . . and to lend my rather insignificant Irish voice to the supporters of Stewart Brand and Eldridge Cleaver, Ken Keasey and Alan Ginsberg.
I was soon to be a graduate and already yearning for my Mrs Robinson. I had seen the information highway over the horizon and identified with Hal in 2001 - A Space Odyssey, I knew, because I had been baton-charged at the 50th anniversary of 1916, that the North was about to explode and I was listening to Daniel CohnBendit and Tariq Ali. Looking back, I was quite a subversive character.
And, though I knew I was part of a tiny minority in John Charles McQuaid's Ireland, I also knew I was part of an international movement that was thriving in San Francisco and Chicago, in Paris and Prague, in Birmingham and London. We were changing the world. We were re-inventing idealism. We were suggesting to the world that they make love not war . . . we were very naive.
And when I use hindsight and the chilled tools of the historian to look back on the period, I have to concede that we did change the world. The naive dynamo whirring at the centre of all the madness threw out endless blue sparks. Many of them fizzled out but a few started brush-fires that are still burning today. Out of the 1960s we got the women's movement, notions of racial equality, the green movement, information technology, the pursuit of gay rights and the mini skirt - it's not a bad legacy. We also got music which my kids still listen to, 30 years later. We got people such as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, who bridged the unbridgeable gap between poetry and popular culture. We got Joan Baez, who added politics into the mix and Ronnie Drew, to show us that folk music wasn't just for nerds. In 1968 Rolling Stone Magazine was born - the first cover picture was a photograph by Linda Eastman, heiress of the Eastman-Kodak empire, who went on to marry Paul McCartney, and shortly afterwards it published an immortal interview with my all-time icon, Janis Joplin. She was asked how her tour was going with the (all-male) Holding Company and answered: "Great, I'm keeping the bass player for Omaha". It's hard to explain how exciting it was without ending up sounding rather silly. And anyway, it all ended in 1973 with the first oil crisis and grim, and accurate, prophesies of recession. Historically, it's just a little glimmer of light between the greyness of post-war austerity and the greyness of post-oil-crisis recession. But, God, it was fun to be there. If you were somewhere else, I'm sorry for you.
Dick Warner is an environmentalist and broadcaster