The northlondonhippy

Hello kids. The northlon­don­hippy here. I’ve decided to start a web log and why not? Every­one else seems to have one, why not me…!

Since this is my first post, I should tell you a bit about me. I’m mid­dled aged, well, early 40s, and I live in north London.

Am I really a hippy? Do I wear love beads and san­dals? Am I high all the time? Well, I don’t wear the beads or even own san­dals, but I am a fairly vora­cious dope smoker and have been for nearly 22 years. There’s a whole lotta smokin’ goin’ on.

I’m cur­rently unem­ployed, which also adds to my hippy sta­tus. I’ve worked in the media for about 18 years, mainly in tele­vi­sion. I left my last job in the sum­mer of 2003 and have not hooked up with any­thing new yet.

That’s not strictly true, I was promised a job by a friend of mine, which was due to start last Novem­ber, but that still hasn’t hap­pened yet. Who the fuck knows why?

I had an inter­view about 6 weeks ago for another job. I applied for it on the net, cool huh? It was quite pos­si­bly the lowli­est job I’ve ever come across in the media. Even lower than fetch­ing lattes for some­one like Johnny Vauhn. Noth­ing against the for­mer coke dealer, he’s paid his debt to soci­ety and should be free to have his lattes exactly the way he wants them, who am I to judge? But I wouldn’t want to be the poor dumb fucker who has to get them. And I would ring his pencil-neck if I told me it was too foamy, or cold, or not enough nut­meg! Get your own damn latte! Any­way, I wasn’t offered the job, which is not really a bad thing. C’est la vie.

Right now, I guess the best descrip­tion of me is that I am a “job seeker”, but this means I receive an allowance from the gov­ern­ment, the call it job seeker’s allowance — clever. I will receive £54.65 per week (ris­ing to £55.65 per week on 16 April — yipppeeee) until the begin­ning of Sep­tem­ber. Fuck me, if I am still claim­ing ben­e­fit by then, I am gonna wanna buy a uzi, then go empty some­place crowded before turn­ing the lit­tle Israeli automatic’s bar­rel towards my own head and fir­ing that last bul­let squarly through my brain.

Hardly the thoughts of a true peace lov­ing hippy.

It sucks being unem­ployed and my trou­bles didn’t start there. I had a long dis­pute with my for­mer employ­ers, which meant I got to sit at home for a while before my “res­ig­na­tion.” I’m really not sup­pose to talk about it, but they breached the terms of my com­pro­mise agree­ment 22 days after it was agreed, so fuck ‘em, I can say what I like.

On the plus side, unem­ploy­ment has meant that I’ve got­ten to enjoy lots of good tele­vi­sion I wouldn’t nor­mally have both­ered watch­ing, most notably Buffy the Vam­pire Slayer and it’s spin-off, Angel. I’ve seen all of Buffy now and thanks to the net, I’ve down­loaded every episode from the lat­est series of Angel and I’m up to date. If you think it’s just for kids, think again, the writ­ing and pro­duc­tion val­ues are top-notch.

I watch loads of things, far too many to list. I’m a total news junky. I pre­fer SKY News and usu­ally have that on in the back­ground when I am surf­ing the net. I like the newswall, which I still believe is very inno­v­a­tive (and now widely copied) and think that SKY is the fastest for break­ing news. I used to be a tv news jour­nal­ist, so I know a lit­tle bit about the sub­ject. Who knows, I might be one again some­time soon. And wouldn’t that be great, ’cause the hippy needs some seri­ous bread, man.

I’m a seri­ous film fan as well, though I don’t get to the cin­ema as often as I would like. I’m a big con­sumer of media all around. I’ve got SKY+ here at home, which if you don’t know is a hard-drive based record­ing sys­tem that works with SKY TV — it’s great and I will rave about it more another time. I also down­load films from the net occa­sion­ally. Piracy, shmiracy, if its hurt­ing busi­ness, how did LOTR: ROTK gross a bil­lion bucks when it was one of the most-shared items on the net the week it opened in the­atres? OK, when the box set comes out with all three LOTK films, I’ll buy it, happy?

I’m not big on lis­ten­ing to the radio, not really a big fan of it. I pre­fer music chan­nels, and I lis­ten to Radio One on the shower radio, Vir­gin in the kitchen. Both choices have more to do with the recep­tion I get in each room, than my tastes.

I do read lots of news­pa­pers. Every­day, I read the online edi­tions of The Sun, The Mir­ror, The Times, The Inde­pen­dent, The Guardian, plus Thi­sis­Lon­don, and the BBC. I some­times look at the New York Times and the Wash­ing­ton Post. In gen­eral, I like to stay informed.

Weekly, I read Time Mag­a­zine, Time-Out, and a decent satel­lite tv guide. I also sub­scribe to Pri­vate Eye, which is fort­nightly, and Which? Mag­a­zine, a monthly. Why would a hippy need to read Which?…? I’m actu­ally a cap­i­tal­ist as well as a con­sumer and I like to know what’s best to buy.

I for­got to men­tion the Drudge Report ( DRUDGE ), which I also check out fre­quently. Yes, Matt Drudge is very right wing, and even though I’m not, I respect the niche he’s carved out for him­self. Also, his page is chock full of links to other news resources on the net.

I also read Pop­bitch ( POPBITCH ) quite a bit. I’ve been lurk­ing on there for a cou­ple of years, and have posted pre­vi­ously under a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent guises, one of which was thanked in a mailout, a long time ago. My only claim to fame. I’ve reg­is­tered northlon­don­hippy as a login on PB and when I feel the need to be called a “cunt” I will drop by and say “hi”. Sign-up for their mailout, it’s always worth reading.

I’m also a fan of clueless_joe, who started out post­ing on PB. Here’s a link to his site:
Clueless_joe C_j always makes me laugh.

I like Holy Moly (HOLY MOLY ) as well, but I don’t have a login there, so I can’t read the mes­sage board since they closed it to the pub­lic. Nei­ther can you, but they have some other enter­tain­ing stuff on there, so have a look. They also have a mailout that is worth your valu­able surf­ing time.

I also watch the music chan­nels, I like Q, MTV2, but when I am in the mood for pop, MTV Hits and the Box are pretty good too. The best time for me to watch MTV is when I’ve taken some magic mush­rooms, which you might not real­ize are legal in the UK, if they are fresh. Here’s some links:

From the Guardian (my fav paper, nat­u­rally):
Legal Shrooms in the UK

My favourite online head­shop: Every­one Does It (they also have some good forums asso­ci­ated with them, and you’ll find the orig­i­nal post­ings from the northlondonhippy)

Another good site: MAGIC PLANTS — They also have a great stall in Cam­den, see their web­site for details.

Ok, now that you’ve read a lit­tle about shrooms, I’ll tell you about my expe­ri­ences with them.

The first time I tried them, I threw them up. They were some dry lib­erty caps, picked in the wild and given to me by a col­league (FYI Kids: If they’re dry, they’re class A, stick to fresh!).

The sec­ond time, Mrs Hippy (yes, there is one) and I munched some dry ones that a friend gave us in a restau­rant over din­ner. I think they might have been grown in Ger­many. We didn’t puke, but we did gig­gle our faces off and gen­er­ally found them fun. This led us to a dis­as­ter­ous expe­ri­ence with LSD a month or two later, but I will save that story for another day.

I dis­cov­ered the fresh shrooms online purely by acci­dent. Being a bit short of cash, I thought I would invesi­gate legal and herbal highs, since I hadn’t really ever looked into it. When I did, I dis­cov­ered you could legally pur­chase fresh shrooms and truf­fles (yes, magic truffles!)from a num­ber of web­sites. I placed an order for the truf­fles first.

I was not impressed with them, though I took a low dose, about 15grams. A lit­tle gid­dy­ness, some gig­gles, but god didn’t visit or even whis­per to me. Then I ordered some magic mushrooms.

Specf­i­cally, I ordered 30grams of fresh Psilosybe Cuben­sis and they arrived the fol­low­ing day. This par­tic­u­lar strain is cur­rently the most com­mon being sold in the UK.

Now I should men­tion that I absolutely hate the taste of all mush­rooms, magic or not and the thought of gob­bling down 30 grams of them was mak­ing me retch. So I came up with a clever idea. I threw all the shrooms into my blender, with about a pint of pineap­ple juice (I’ve since learned cran­berry is bet­ter, cranberry-cherry is best!) and whizzed it up. It turned into a nasty-looking smoothy, which I was able to force down quite quickly. It tasted like shit, or more pre­cisely what I imag­ine shit tast­ing like.

After about 20 min­utes, I began to feel some­thing hap­pen­ing. I had a ready-rolled sup­ply of spliffs to enjoy dur­ing the trip as well. Before long, the lights were get­ting brighter, the music was sound­ing bet­ter and the blue car­pet on my liv­ing room floor was alive with move­ment. It was as if I could see each indi­vid­ual fibre of the car­pet, bro­ken down into the dif­fer­ent colours mak­ing up this par­tic­u­lar shade of blue. The smoke and haze from my spliff cre­ated a spi­der­web pat­tern in the air, which seemed to pulse and move in time to the music-videos on my tele­vi­sion. Quite frankly I was mon­ged and mullered for a good 4 or 5 hours. It was like my liv­ing room turned into Dis­ney­land and I had a day pass for all the rides!

It was a very con­trol­lable trip, at no time did I feel over­whelmed by the expe­ri­ence. Since then, I’ve done them a few times and recently bought a grow kit to pro­duce my own. I had a lit­tle sam­ple a cou­ple of days ago and they are indeed the real deal. I’m plan­ning a mas­sive trip this Sun­day and will of course share the resullt after­ward. I would try post­ing while under the influ­ence, but the com­puter would be too dif­fi­cult to deal with in that state.

I used to take harder drugs, mainly char­lie and pills, but I don’t any­more. If you still do, cool, but it got to be too enjoy­able for me, so I stopped it. Now I stick to more nat­ural sub­stances, like shrooms and the ever-present spliff.

If you are going exper­i­ment with magic mush­rooms, do your home­work. Don’t start with a high dose, start out low. If you want some more details, check out the SHROOMERY

Or you could always ask the hippy!

That’s about it for today, wrote more than I expected. My plan is to try to post some­thing daily. I can’t promise that I will, but at least I have good intentions.

Until next time, be cool! And if you can’t be cool, stay home.

Email the hippy!