The downstairs loo at Beckley Park — the country pile of the Feilding family and home to the psychedelic research nonprofit The Beckley Foundation — is, I realise, a good primer for what’s to come. I’m about to have lunch with pioneering drug campaigner Amanda Feilding, 81, and her youngest son Cosmo Feilding-Mellen, 39; between them they run two of the three arms of the Beckley psychedelics empire. Amanda is head of the Foundation which for years has sponsored cutting-edge and exploratory research into psychedelic compounds while Cosmo is CEO of Beckley Psytech, a pharmaceutical company developing novel psychedelic therapies to treat mental ill health (the third arm of the empire, Beckley Waves, is a start-up incubator for the psychedelics industry and headed up by Feilding's oldest son, Rock Feilding-Mellen).
On the walls of the loo there are pictures of Amanda with her beloved Birdie, a pigeon she raised from a fledgling (“we were twin souls,” she tells me at one point, “a pair of lovers, completely inseparable”), alongside a framed genealogy of the Feilding family (they’re descended from Charles II). There’s a stack of New Scientist magazines and a bookshelf which features a mix of drug textbooks (‘Basic Pharmacology: Understanding Drug Actions and Reactions’; ‘Hofmann's Elixir: LSD and the New Eleusis’), books on the nature of consciousness, anthropologies of ancient or mystical religions and a well-thumbed ‘Collected Works of Nietzsche’. (The soap, in case you’re wondering, is from Neil’s Yard).
