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Good morning. I blame it all on the summer of love in 1967 when 100,000 music fans descended on the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco to talk peace, revolution and sexual freedom. We were to have flowers in our hair, to make love, not war; to turn on, tune in and drop out. It was the age of trips to India in search of spiritual enlightenment, of Jesus being rebranded as the first hippie. We live now in the shadow of that time, wondering what new scandals from the seventies will yet come to light. What was it that made society then tolerate behaviour which is completely unacceptable now? I think we need to see the seventies as an age of innocence. In 1972 the bestselling Joy of Sex came out with its beards and abundant body hair. The message was delightful: love brings liberation. Strip off your hang ups with your clothes and return to the Garden of Eden. The fruits of the sexual garden were ripe for tasting; only the repressed or depressed would hold back. The sense of wonder was expressed in the pale pastel colours and swirling patterns of fashion – we were all returning to childhood simplicity where no one said no. I felt it was all my fault when a weird, grizzled clergyman asked me intimate questions about my love life; it would never have crossed my mind to complain. In this free for all anything and everything was open for discussion. There were those who claimed that sexual relationships between adults and children could be harmless and were prepared to argue their case in public, seeing love between adults and children as the natural follow up to the lifting of all kinds of boundaries on adult sexual relationships. But like the original Garden of Eden the innocence of the 1970s turned out to be a myth. We ate of the fruit of the tree whereof we were told we should not eat and the result was far worse than indigestion. We discovered that those who acted on the basis of urgent desire and physical strength were not liberators but predators. The snake in the garden had deceived us once again. The Garden of Eden story speaks to our guilt; the beauty of natural curiosity and desire can be corrupted into a sinful greed for what is not ours with all the human wreckage that follows. But the story also speaks to our hope. Adam and Eve do not receive Paradise on a plate but they are sent out from the garden to work for it. Their fate is hard but it is not without promise. Eden still works as a metaphor for innocence; for the intuition that there is more to life than war and the hard grind for possessions. The seventies were indulgent and naïve, but the human heart still retains a picture of paradise, a dream of peace, love and freedom. And without that we are less than human.