My friend John Windsor, who has died aged 73, was a journalist with the Daily Mail and the Guardian before devoting his energies to transcendental meditation, of which he became a teacher in London and Derbyshire.
Son of Edna (nee Wilgar) and Freddy Windsor, John was born in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, where his father worked for a corset company. John attended the grammar school there, where his liking for practical jokes, alongside the meticulous precision of his illustrated diaries, foreshadowed an ability to balance humour and seriousness.
He graduated with a business degree from Manchester University, then went to study English at Cambridge, which was more to his liking. He was taken on by the student newspaper, Varsity, as a cartoonist, and became editor, promising that “serious comment will vie with zany flippancy”. His journalistic career began as a reporter on the Daily Mail in Manchester. Transferred to Belfast in 1966 as the Troubles were beginning, he had three difficult years; at one point he was trapped on a roof with Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, the civil rights activist, while petrol bombs exploded around them.
His stint in Ulster took its toll, and by the time he was transferred to London he was drinking heavily and was, in his own words, “stressed and belligerent”. He took redundancy, using the proceeds to buy a ramshackle house in Hackney, north London. He later worked as a reporter for the Guardian.
John’s delight in the quirky meant that when his younger brother Peter took up transcendental meditation, which had been made fashionable by the Beatles and their guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, he resolved to test it out. To his surprise he discovered “greater clarity of mind and freedom from stress”. He wrote a feature on TM for the Guardian in 1973, which attracted new adherents, as well as an invitation from the Maharishi to his headquarters in Switzerland. He stayed there for two years and then converted his house in Hackney into a meditation centre.
A compulsive hoarder whose collections included prints, pottery and even barbed wire, he continued his journalism with a weekly column in the Independent called Finds, covering such collectible and affordable items as saucy postcards, spy radios and quill pens.
John’s humour and idiosyncrasies made him a popular TM lecturer: he took morning sessions in a dressing gown so tattered that one class clubbed together to buy him a new one. In 1992, when the Maharishi proposed that his adherents stand for parliament, John garnered 178 votes in the Hackney North and Stoke Newington constituency for the Natural Law party.
He left London for another gaunt house in Southwold, Suffolk, which was soon bulging with collectibles. There he was reunited with his Manchester University sweetheart, Christine Robson.
They moved to Derbyshire in 2000 and married in 2005. She survives him.
