The northlondonhippy

Archive for October, 2007

Hey ho hip­py­fans! Sorry I’ve been deny­ing you your hip­py­fix, but I’m crap.

At least I’m honest.

I’m always hon­est. It can be a bit dull at times. Some­times I’m sur­real. Sur­real is more fun.

This is going to be one of those ram­bling posts, so strap your­self in and pre­pare for a lot of ran­dom bullshit.

Ran­dom bull­shit is bet­ter than no bull­shit at all. Or is that sex?I get con­fused sometimes.

I’ve been dis­tracted lately, by all sorts of things, non-hippy related.

Last month was a par­tic­u­larly heavy one for me, work-wise and my old bones just aren’t spring­ing back to life like they used to. Aging is no fuck­ing fun and grow­ing old grace­fully sounds like a soft option. I’m gonna kick and scream as I go!

We got 2 new kit­tens last month. They’re tak­ing up tons of my time. They are adorably cute and extremely cud­dly. They’re also glued to me most of the time, when they are not frol­ick­ing around like tiny mani­acs! They just turned three months old.

See, I have a soft side, even if most of the time I’m a prick.

I’m actu­ally far less of a prick these days and that’s no truer than at work.

I was never a night­mare to work with, but I’ve got quite an explo­sive tem­per and I was never afraid to show it and give peo­ple who worked with me a really hard time. I’m demand­ing as fuck, but more so on myself and recently, less so on my colleagues.

I’m much more detached from what I do these days, its not my entire life. There was a time, a long time, where I lived and breathed what I did.

I don’t any­more. I leave it behind and even when I’m there, I don’t take it as per­son­ally seri­ously as I used to. My job is actu­ally very occa­sion­ally, “life or death”, but seri­ously not that often. When it is, it’s hor­ri­ble and if any­thing was to def­i­nitely put me off my cur­rent pro­fes­sion, it would be los­ing another friend.

I work in tv news and in the last decade, I’ve lost four good mates for no good rea­son except they wanted to show peo­ple what was going on in some coun­try you don’t care about. Ok, you tell me, do you care about Kosovo, Sierra Leone or Saudi Arabia?

And if you add col­leagues and acquain­tances to my death list, well, quite frankly Ive lost count…

Christ I’m a real downer this morn­ing, but some­how I seam­lessly tran­si­tioned from my cute lit­tle kit­tens to a bunch of dead journalists.

See, even though I cre­ate the illu­sion of detach­ment, the churn­ing under­cur­rent is still there. I worry about los­ing more peo­ple for no good reason.

Part of why all this is on my mind is I’ve been in touch with a serv­ing sol­dier in Iraq who con­tacted me via my blog. We’ve exchanged a hand­ful of emails and while I can’t say I really know him, I know him enough that he’s a really decent, very cool guy, who’s actu­ally and prop­erly in harm’s way, as they say. He’s get­ting sent home soon and I want to see him make it back in one piece.

I want to see them all make it back in one piece, every sin­gle sol­dier over there!

They should never have been deployed there in the first place. Stu­pid, fuck­ing, point­less war waged on a foun­da­tion of bold­face lies and pub­lic deceit! And they’re try­ing the same god­damn shit with Iran, right now, and we’re all suck­ing on it like its fuck­ing candy! Don’t get me started!

The rea­son this sol­dier emailed me is he is the first per­son to pur­chase an NLH Deluxe, which means his will be the 2nd one, after mine. How lucky is he? He is truly a gen­tle­man of excel­lent taste!

Over­all, reac­tion to the NLH Deluxe has been over­whelm­ingly favourable and I couldn’t be hap­pier to have finally done it!

One of my more ambi­tious plans is to do a video advert for the NLH Deluxe. I can put it on YouTube and embed it on my site. That could be cool. It has to be per­fect, though. We’ll see.

And thanks EDIT for the nice men­tion in your lat­est newslet­ter — I hope you guys know the love flows in both directions!

And this stu­pid extended postal strike is a bit shite, isn’t it? It can’t be good for busi­ness! Don’t worry, I’m plac­ing an order this week, as soon as the posties are back on their col­lec­tive routes! I bet I’m not the only one wait­ing too. You guys at EDIT are going to be busy towards the end of this week!

My new iMac arrived last week, ship­ping took around 8 days, which ain’t bad if you think that it started out in Shang­hai. I’ve been using it for nearly a week and I’m sure you will be shocked to learn that I love it. What’s not to love? It’s big­ger, faster and shinier than the iMac it replaced! I’m going to post a full review of it later this week. No, really, I am. I am. I AM! Promise!

And I keep my promises. And I rarely make them. So you can bank on me post­ing it before the week is out. Set your RSS read­ers on stun!

I’ve been seri­ously think­ing of chang­ing my cur­rent tagline. I think “a mes­siah for the new mil­len­nium” is get­ting rather stale and tired.

I could go back to my old standby, “he’s the biggest inter­net celebrity you’ve never heard of” but I was think­ing of some­thing more along the lines of, “the northlon­don­hippy — he knows every­thing”, but I thought it might put peo­ple off.

How about, “the northlon­don­hippy — he won’t touch you up!” or “the northlon­don­hippy — he’s no cunt” or “the northlon­don­hippy — a liv­ing god among mere mortals”.

Deci­sion, deci­sions. There’s no time pres­sure, when the right tagline hits me, I’ll know it.

I’m also think­ing of doing some NLH tee-shirts. Not so much to sell, though I would con­sider it, but to give away as pro­mo­tions and prizes. You’d wear one, wouldn’t you? Espe­cially if it was really cool. I wouldn’t do tee-shirts with my name on them unless they were ice-cold-fucking-cool!

I’ve also been try­ing to come up with ideas to moti­vate and focus myself more on this web­site. I feel like my par­tic­i­pa­tion has been less than ade­quate recently.

One thought I had was to do “100 days of hippy posts” where I would vow to post some­thing every day for 100 con­sec­u­tive days. The worry with that is I could end up post­ing a lot of shite. I don’t mean ram­bling shite like the post you are cur­rently read­ing, but proper, mean­ing­less shite meant to make my blog look busier.

Any thoughts? There’s loads of you lurk­ing around at the moment, surely you must have an opin­ion or two? Let me know what you think, about any­thing and everything.

I always wel­come emails and try to respond to them as quickly as I can. Let me know what you would like to see me do with my web­site. Who knows, if I ever get them made, you might get a free NLH tee-shirt! Don’t laugh, peo­ple didn’t believe me when I said I was going to design and sell a cus­tom RooR with my name on it. Who’s laugh­ing now?