The 12 escapees were no threat to Indurain who left it to his Banesto team-mates to keep matters under control.There was more bad news for French cycling yesterday, with the joint team sponsors Chazal-MBK-Koenig announcing their withdrawal after this season. His own apparel is made for him by a friend called Psychedelic Paul. Their current taste runs to fluorescent jackets of the sort you might wear if your hobby were, say, collecting motorway cones after dark.”It’s very safe, very bright, fluorescent gear. I’m not trying to beat the orthodox scholars, but I’m writing the book as someone who’s been to all the places he writes about Basically I’m a pagan. I’m a New Age Pol Pot: it’s the Land! the Land! the Land!”Cope may look the part of New Age Mystic, but he’s odder in the context of his library, full of geological specimens and musty old tomes by tweedy antiquarians. People may not need God, but they do need something.”On a walk last week, he noticed a neolithic holed stone, probably of a sacred nature “I’ve discovered so many things. Sometimes it drives Dorian crazy, but Dorian is in quite a vision state as well, which is probably the reason she can bear to be around me.

I have to speak out: the voices have told me I have to stop fucking around I’m here to build up a trust in the far out, the unknown. It took me a long while to realise I had anything going in the psychic areas. I just thought, ‘Oh, I’d be perfectly normal if it wasn’t for the fact that I was on drugs.’ I realised that a lot of the voices were saying, ‘You have got to work like a bastard.’ So I’ve worked constantly and the vision state has never left me. Then I had a spiritual awakening which led me down this path to the stones You can imagine how I felt – like King Plank, basically.. I was fucked up on drugs.

“I thought, ‘What can I bring to the party that nobody else has? A-ha! LSD and mushrooms!’ But all I do now is walk every day.”Indeed, he walks the Wessex hills and trackways with obsessive energy, managing up to 100 miles a week. “The reason I started doing The Modern Antiquarian was, I came out of punk, when Stonehenge was the ultimate symbol of bollocks. But that was more because of The Modern Antiquarian.” The modern what? The Modern Antiquarian turns out to be Julian’s great project now. It is a book he is writing on archaeology, describing the hundreds of ancient sites he has visited around the British Isles. I was off them until December 1993, and then I took three mushroom trips. Sometimes there are voices, too, with messages such as “To penetrate the diamond, the pituitary gland gets torn on its axis and frees.”Apropos of nothing in particular, I ask if he still takes drugs “They were important to me But in 1985, I stopped taking psychedelic drugs. He describes the experience as looking somewhat like the cover of Deep Purple’s 1971 LP Fireball.

A spinning diamond entered his skull, filling him with light, “like a cosmic petrol pump attendant”. Once he was “astrally projected” from a hotel room in Liverpool. One of his newest songs has the title “WESSEXY.” Another is called “By the Light of the Silbury Moon”.Nursing a mug of tea, he recounts some of his visions. Proudly, he says the house stands within 20 miles of nearly all the 15 prehistoric white horses known to be etched into Britain’s chalk hills.