The northlondonhippy

Archive for January, 2008

Richard Made­ley and Judy Finni­gan, or “Richard and Judy” as they are known to their legions of fans in the UK are very pop­u­lar and influ­en­tial celebri­ties in this coun­try. When they rec­om­mend a book or a wine, it becomes a big seller overnight. What they say to the nation, can change the course of the nation. They hold a lot of sway.

For those of you not resid­ing here in Blighty, I should explain a bit. The cou­ple I’m talk­ing about have been fix­tures on our day­time TV screens for many, many years. They are mar­ried and after start­ing out in regional telly, moved on to host­ing a national day­time chat show in the morn­ings on ITV. After many years on ITV and in a well pub­li­cised and expen­sive net­work coup, made a high pro­file jump to Chan­nel 4. That’s where theyre­main, host­ing a pro­gramme that goes out week­days 5pm-6pm.

Nor­mally, I find their views on the con­ser­v­a­tive­side and in some instances extremely so, which meant I was quite sur­prised when some­one I know drew my atten­tion to a recent Richard Madeley’s col­umn in the Daily Express newspaper.

Yes, the Daily Express of all places!

Rather than tease you with this, I’ll just cut to the chase with the salient quotes:

“RICHARD: How awk­ward it is to have to begin the new year defend­ing the appar­ently inde­fen­si­ble… in the form of eccen­tric police chief Richard Brunstrom’s lat­est headline-grabbing “gaffe”. I refer, of course, to his call this week on Radio 4’s Today pro­gramme for the legal­is­ing of drugs.



He may be a ridicu­lous hon­orary druid with an irri­tat­ing pen­chant for speed cam­eras and absurdly sen­si­tive to weak jokes about the Welsh, but he’s doing some­thing rarely seen in our chief constables.

He is think­ing out of the box. That is brave and bold and deserves thought­ful con­sid­er­a­tion, not calumny.”

Please do click this link to the orig­i­nal arti­cle, it starts about 1/2 way down the page.

I was stunned.

I was flabbergasted!

I’m never flabbergasted.

I’m not cer­tain what flab­ber­gasted even means!

Some­times, com­mon sense comes from very unlikely sources and I must say there was no more unlikely source of these sagely words than Richard Madeley.

I’d like to applaud Mr. Madeley’s brav­ery and gen­uine courage for com­ing out in sup­port of Richard Brun­stom and the Police Author­ity in the pur­suit of truth and hon­esty about drugs.

The next time you’re dis­cussing legal­is­ing drugs with some­one, quote Richard. Seri­ously, even to your par­ents. Peo­ple really dig Richard and Judy, if you quote him, they will think twice about their beliefs and per­haps even start to ques­tion them. Try it and you’ll see what I mean, attach­ing his name to the cause will give it a new level of respect.

If Richard Made­ley sup­ports a com­plete re-think on drug pol­icy, per­haps there IS some­thing to it!

If more peo­ple were will­ing to stand up and speak out, per­haps things would be bet­ter for respon­si­ble adults like myself and those of you out there who choose to indulge in the use of unsanc­tioned sub­stances. There are so so SO many of us out there, who lead pro­duc­tive, nor­mal lives, yet enjoy things other than alco­hol and tobacco.

We have too much to lose. That’s the prob­lem, our nor­malcy and respon­si­ble lives don’t meet society’s stereo­types of what a drug user is. If we did step out of the closet and pro­claim proudly that we smoke weed, or snort a bit of char­lie, or neck a few pills every week­end and it wasn’t destroy­ing our lives, peo­ple who dis­ap­proved would find a way of destroy­ing our lives for us.

Next week is the pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion on reclas­si­fy­ing weed. I’m sure peo­ple braver than me will attend and speak out elo­quently on the sub­ject, before they’re ignored com­pletely and the gov­ern­ment just reclas­si­fies it any­way. But that’s not why I’m not going.

I’m not going, because I have too much to lose. As open as I am about my drug use to friends, fam­ily, work col­leagues, strangers I sit next to on the bus, I don’t know how I’d feel about my name and address being on record with this gov­ern­ment in rela­tion to the sta­tus of weed and specif­i­cally my con­stant intake of it.

And with this gov­ern­ment, how long would it take them before they lost the list and it ended up in the hands of, oh I don’t know, the police maybe! Mak­ing cannabis class B means the penal­ties are worse for the end user; what if they decide to ‘round us all up? They’re build­ing an awful lot of new prisons!

Oh and by the way, the penal­ties for pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion of cannabis, ie grow­ing and deal­ing, are exactly the same under class B as class C, so it’s really only those of us who might get caught with a small amount who are see­ing the penal­ties change. Thanks, Gor­don. Thanks, Jacqui.

What’s worse is that it will only drive those of us who wish to speak out, fur­ther under­ground, while allow­ing the crim­i­nal ele­ment to con­tinue rul­ing the trade, with no addi­tional risks. Who really ben­e­fits from this change in status?

That’s an easy ques­tion to answer. Who ben­e­fits from the reclas­si­fi­ca­tion of cannabis?

No one at all.

No, I’m not going to tell you 935 lies. That would be silly and quite frankly, I don’t have the time.

I could, if I so chose, cre­ate pre­cisely 935 care­fully crafted and exceed­ingly believ­able bold­faced lies, but I have no rea­son to do that. I never have rea­son to lie to you at all, ever.

I don’t lie.

And I espe­cially don’t lie when I log in and blog onto my own god­damn website.

Peo­ple who lie, do it for a reason.

Whether it is to obscure the truth to cover some mis­deed or inten­tion or accom­plish some secret goal or fur­ther a pri­vate agenda, lies are moti­vated by something.

Some­times, even gov­ern­ments lie.

OK, gov­ern­ments lie a lot, but it’s not every­day they get caught.

And it’s not every­day they get caught in 935 of them.

There’s that num­ber again: 935.

I didn’t just pull 935 out of my ass, that would be stu­pid and poten­tially painful.

Per­son­ally, I’d be wor­ried by any­one who pulls any­thing out of their ass, but that’s just me. On some sub­jects I am sur­pris­ingly conservative.

But on the sub­ject of inten­tional fab­ri­ca­tion by gov­ern­ments to achieve a heinous and immoral goal, I am one pissed-off, bad-assed moth­er­fucka with an atti­tude and an Uzi.

OK, I don’t have an Uzi. I’d like an Uzi, but my local Uzi shop closed down ages ago and I missed their going out of busi­ness sale.

You’d want an Uzi too if you lived in my north Lon­don ghetto hell. There’s a shoot­ing or a knif­ing around here often enough that I’ve lost track of the num­ber of yel­low police signs solic­it­ing wit­nesses to the lat­est teenaged atrocity.

Yes, I know these teenagers mainly shoot each other, but there’s been a wor­ry­ing trend in middled-aged white guys get­ting kicked to death and I don’t want to be one of them.

Hey, I know the secu­rity ser­vices keep an eye on blogs. Hi guys! I’m on your side and if you’d sup­ply with me a small armoury of weapons, I’d be your bitch. Oh and the promise of a spot in the wit­ness pro­tec­tion pro­gramme after I take out some crack house or Al Qaeda cell sin­gle handledly!

It could happen!

But seri­ously, you guys could recruit me. I’d be a great agent and I’d set­tle for cash. I was only jok­ing about the guns. Well, maybe just a Glock for my trou­ble, please?

Ah-hem.

935 fuck­ing lies! Get to the point.

Here’s the top of the AP report I’ve been refer­ring to since I started:

“A study by two non-profit jour­nal­ism organ­i­sa­tions found that Pres­i­dent Bush and top admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials issued hun­dreds of false state­ments about the national secu­rity threat from Iraq in the two years fol­low­ing the 2001 ter­ror­ist attacks.

The study con­cluded that the state­ments “were part of an orches­trated cam­paign that effec­tively gal­vanised pub­lic opin­ion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decid­edly false pretences.”

The study was posted Tues­day on the Web site of the Cen­ter for Pub­lic Integrity, which worked with the Fund for Inde­pen­dence in Journalism.

The study counted 935 false state­ments in the two-year period.”

Click right here for the source arti­cle in full, please.

As some­one who never believed a word of what they tried to sell us over Iraq, I don’t find this sur­pris­ing. What grabbed me is they were able to doc­u­ment it with this degree of accuracy.

Let’s face it, 935 indi­vid­ual instances of 100% lies being ped­dled as fact to jus­tify a war that was com­pletely unnec­es­sary is aston­ish­ing! It should make our col­lec­tive jaws hit the col­lec­tive floor.

It should be front page news. It should have led news bul­letins around the world.

But did it?

This story hit the wires nearly a week ago. Sorry, my bad for not get­ting around to do some­thing with it until now, but at least I’ve marked it. I’ve brought it to your attention.

Did any­one else? I know a few news­pa­pers men­tioned it, because I read the sto­ries, but I don’t think I saw it on TV.

This is impor­tant shit!

George W (for “won’t you be glad when he’s gone gone GONE!”) Bush and cronies all lied. The Bush regime lies. They are doc­u­mented, unde­ni­able pur­vey­ors of utter false­hoods and fic­tion. They conned us and conned us but good!

I bet Hal­libur­ton and Black­wa­ter and the other war prof­i­teers are gig­gling like school­girls all the way to the prover­bial bank.

And how much has this abor­tion of a war cost us decent, tax-paying mem­bers of mod­ern society?

And how many hun­dreds of thou­sand Iraqi lives were lost? And how many Iraqis dis­placed and maimed?

And how many sol­diers from the coali­tion of the will­ing lost their lives or lost their limbs or lost just a tiny, lit­tle piece of their souls fight­ing for liars and cheats and well, just plain moth­er­fuck­ing cunts?

I’m enraged, I’m incensed. And you should be too! This war was fought in our name, to make us safe.

Do you feel safer know­ing that an entire gen­er­a­tion of peo­ple in the Mid­dle East hate you? Not for your free­dom (because you hardly have any, any­way!), but because of what your lead­ers do to them, in your name.

If you were Iraqi and your entire life was fucked hard, fast and with­out so much as drink bought for you, how would you feel about the peo­ple who fucked you? Would you hate them? Would you want to kill them? Would you be will­ing to give your life to do it?

You’ve lost your job, your home, your sav­ings, your pos­ses­sions and sev­eral close mem­bers of your fam­ily, like your spouse, or par­ents, or chil­dren. Or maybe all of them. You’re liv­ing in some shitty refugee camp in Jor­dan or Syria, where you’re not wanted by your hosts. You’re life is shit and if some­one offered you the option of going to the West and killing the infi­del, you very well might think that was the prefer­able option.

I’m cer­tainly not advo­cat­ing a career as a sui­cide bomber, no sen­si­ble per­son would, but I’m empa­thetic enough to see and feel how some­one in that posi­tion could reach that rather unhappy conclusion.

Geoge Bush Junior did that. He handed the world enough ammo to hate the West for at least a cou­ple more gen­er­a­tions. Thanks, George. Well done! Bet the pri­vate sec­tor can’t wait to get their hands on you!

Less than a year! Yippppeee to that, because anybody’s got to be bet­ter than Bush the lesser.

And who­ever is next to inhabit that big ol’ white house is going to have their work cut out for them, as the bar has been set really high. They’re going to really have to push it if they want to top 935 lies. Let’s just hope their lies are all about the econ­omy or the envi­ron­ment this time, because I am fuck­ing sick of point­less wars that accom­plished absolutely nothing!

I men­tioned recently that I bought a brand new cof­fee mak­ing rig. It’s true.

Before xmas, I decided it was time to get a proper espresso maker. I’d rid myself of my old mon­stros­ity; a com­bi­na­tion steam dri­ven espresso maker and 8-cup drip pot together in one ugly, black plas­tic casing.

I never used the drip pot and the espresso maker churned out drink­able, yet not quite right cap­puc­ci­nos and lattes and I’m a bit of a cof­fee obses­sive, espe­cially now.

I started doing what I usu­ally do when I’m inter­ested in some­thing, I surfed the inter­net and I found three really good websites:

www.coffeegeek.com

www.homebarista.com

www.toomuchcoffee.com

Each site is chock full of extremely use­ful infor­ma­tion about cof­fee, from equip­ment reviews to bean rec­om­men­da­tions and tips and tricks on how to get the best from your cof­fee. I learned loads, but still have lots more to learn. If you look care­fully, you might even find some posts from me on one of the forums.

Grow­ing up, I wasn’t into cof­fee. My par­ents either drank instant, or weak and watery fil­ter cof­fee and all of it decaf.

It wasn’t until the early 80s that I had my first proper cap­puc­cino. From then, I was hooked.

It wasn’t as easy as it is now to get a good cof­fee, this was in the days before there was a Star­bucks on every cor­ner, you had to look around to find places that made them right.

My Ital­ian grand­fa­ther, my mother’s father, who came from just out­side Naples, used to make espresso using a tra­di­tional stove-top, Moka pot and I can remem­ber my par­ents say­ing that it was far too strong and bit­ter for their taste. I never got to try any, even though I wanted to. They said I wouldn’t like it. At that age, they were prob­a­bly right, but I’ll never know. Grandpa’s been in heaven for a very long time.

I’ve owned a cou­ple of steam dri­ven espresso machines, besides the old one I recently binned. I bought my first one in the early 90s and used it for sev­eral years before it gave up the ghost. Another one fol­lowed and that lasted a few more years, but now, I own a proper machine.

It turned out, before I started my manic online infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing exer­cise, I knew less than did­dly squat about coffee.

For starters, the online cof­fee com­mu­nity refers to those steam dri­ven espresso machines as “steam toys” as they don’t make real espresso. By steam dri­ven, what I mean is that the water is heated to the tem­per­a­ture of steam and the steam pres­sure forces the over­heated water through the ground cof­fee. That would make the water far too hot for brew­ing coffee.

Cof­fee should be brewed at just below boil­ing point; steam is water heated to beyond boil­ing point. That’s not good.

Proper espresso machines come in three vari­eties, all of them pro­duce water at “brew tem­per­a­ture” plus steam for froth­ing milk, but each accom­plishes this in dif­fer­ent ways.

The most basic machine is called a sin­gle boiler-dual use machine and it works like this: Inside it is a a sin­gle boiler, with two user con­trol­lable ther­mostats, one heats the water to brew temp, the sec­ond brings it up to steam temp. The catch is, you have to wait for the machine to tran­si­tion from one temp to the next, which can take a minute or so, depend­ing upon the machine. You have to time what you are doing very care­fully to get the most out of this machine. These are the least expen­sive as well and include most Gag­gia home mod­els and the Ran­cilio Sil­via I con­tem­plated buying.

At the other end of the scale are dual boiler machines; one at brew temp and a 2nd at steam temp. With this sort of sys­tem, you can pull shots and steam milk at the same time, with­out any wait­ing or tran­si­tion­ing. Most pro­fes­sional machines work this way.

And in the mid­dle, the third cat­e­gory is what I bought, a heat exchanger (HX) machine. These are clever devices, they use one boiler which only comes up to steam temp, and the brew water is flash heated via a heat exchanger that passes through the boiler. This set up gives you con­tin­u­ous steam and brew capa­bil­ity, but with­out the extra com­pli­ca­tion of 2 boilers.

Have I bored the bejeezus out of you yet?
I’ll stop being tech­ni­cal now.

All of these machines are fairly sim­ple to oper­ate, but it takes a cer­tain amount of knowl­edge and as I am learn­ing, expe­ri­ence to max­imise their potential.

By far the most impor­tant info I picked up from my new found cof­fee web­sites con­cerned beans and grinders. You need a seri­ously good grinder and you need freshly roasted beans.

Decent grinders, like any­thing good, aren’t cheap and my cof­fee expert pals all sug­gest you bud­get 50% of the cost of your espresso machine, for the grinder. Espresso machines can be quite finicky about how finely ground the cof­fee is, too fine and the machine will choke and you’ll get noth­ing out of it and if it is too coarse, your shot will pour too fast and you’ll have a cup of sour tast­ing swill.

Being a com­plete begin­ner at this, it took me a cou­ple of hours of exper­i­men­ta­tion before I got my first drink­able shot from my new kit. Thank­fully, the peo­ple I bought it from sent me a free kilo of roasted beans because I burned through half it on that first day and all but the last 2 shots went down the drain.

A proper espresso, sin­gle (1 oz) or dou­ble (2 oz), should take approx­i­mately 20–25 sec­onds to pour. Using lined shot glasses, marked at the 1 oz level and a stop watch, you aim for this magic tim­ing and amount by adjust­ing the fine­ness of your grind. It took me a while to get a feel for all this, but since then I have used dif­fer­ent beans, which required adjust­ments and have been able to fine-tune the grinder to improve my results. Today, I’ve made myself two cap­puc­ci­nos and the espres­sos that went into them were the best I’ve made so far. They weren’t per­fect, but I’m on my way!

By far, what has made the biggest dif­fer­ence to my cof­fee is fresh beans. I really wish some­one share this key fact with me ages ago. Cof­fee beans need to rest for about 2 days after roast­ing, to allow for the CO2 gasses to be released, don’t ask me why. After that, its fresh for around 2 weeks, before it begins to go stale. Oh and it needs to be ground just prior to brew­ing, as its starts to go off within min­utes of being turned to brown dust.

I didn’t know any of that shit! And its all true!

For the last few years, I’ve been using a cafetière, or press pot or French press, if you pre­fer, but I’ve been putting pre-ground, super­mar­ket bought cof­fee into it. Drink­able, but noth­ing like the cof­fee I’ve been enjoy­ing since I bought the new set-up.

Freshly ground beans are a rev­e­la­tion, with flavours so rich and com­plex that I don’t have the vocab­u­lary or knowl­edge to really express it in any mean­ing­ful way. I can say, with­out ques­tion, that in the last week or so, I’ve had some of the best cof­fee I’ve ever tasted, anywhere!

Even Mrs. H noticed when I switched to the freshly roasted beans, that it tasted bet­ter. The place I’m get­ting them from is an online shop, which roasts them to order and ships them out, the same day. You receive them the next day, well pack­aged, with the date of roast­ing printed on the pack. And it’s not that expen­sive, either.

The espresso machine I bought is an Izzo Vivi, which is made in Italy, and is very shiny and heavy. The orig­i­nal design of this type of machine was patented in 1961 and it has a very dis­tinc­tive group­head, which if you visit cof­fee bars, you would prob­a­bly recog­nise. It’s called an E61 group­head; the group­head is the bit they lock the portafil­ter into, just before brew­ing. Oh and the portafil­ter is the handle-thing which holds the fil­ter bas­ket, filled with ground cof­fee. I bet you know what I mean!

It took me ages to decide on which machine to buy and while my deci­sion was guided and informed by those web­sites I men­tioned, the per­son who helped me the most was the sales­per­son I spoke to at the online com­pany where I bought it.

I spent nearly an hour on the tele­phone with this sales­per­son, ask­ing as many ques­tions as I could, includ­ing “which one do you own?” and “which one has the least returns?” The Izzo Vivi was the answer to both ques­tions and I was sold. It was one of the mod­els I was con­sid­er­ing, any­way, so it wasn’t a com­plete sur­prise. Actu­ally, the one I was lean­ing towards was sig­nif­i­cantly more expen­sive than the Vivi, but my sales­per­son friend said it wasn’t as well con­structed and it was made of infe­rior components.

The Vivi is based on a com­mer­cial design and uses many of the same parts and com­po­nents as its big­ger, pro­fes­sional broth­ers. That means if and when it ever needs repairs, the new bits won’t be that expensive.

The place I bought it from is really cool, they give you a 2-year war­ranty plus they unbox, check and cal­i­brate the machine, before ship­ping it to you. I was very impressed. They also dou­ble box it, which meant it arrived in pris­tine condition.

I also bought my grinder from this com­pany, a Macap M4D, but I won’t bore you with too many details, except to say it is a pro­fes­sional piece of kit and should last for years, as should the espresso machine. They told me with care and main­te­nance, the Vivi should keep going for at least 20 years.

I’m not going to post a link to this com­pany, as I don’t know if they would appre­ci­ate being asso­ci­ated with some drugged up weird-o like myself, but if any­one is inter­ested in find­ing out more, please email me and I’ll gladly pro­vide you with the link; just don’t tell ‘em the hippy sent you! I am very impressed with them and would heartily pro­vide them with my seal of approval and rec­om­men­da­tion. I don’t think I would have bought a machine in this price range, from any­one else.

Like­wise for my source for cof­fee beans; I would love to throw some busi­ness their way, the cof­fee from them has been orgas­mic and the ser­vice has been first class too, but I don’t want to piss them off because of who I am. I’m happy to pro­vide the link pri­vately, should you wish to try some for your­self and they’ll grind it for you, if you wish.

Some com­pa­nies, like my good friends at EDIT are happy to be asso­ci­ated with me, oth­ers might find me a bit too con­tro­ver­sial. That’s fair enough, I know I’m not everyone’s cup of tea, or rather coffee.

In my world, cof­fee is a drug, just like any­thing else that effects your mood or cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem. Caf­feine is a seri­ous stim­u­lant and I am very sen­si­tive to it, always have been. That means I have to stop drink­ing cof­fee fairly early in my day, or sleep will be elu­sive come bed­time. It doesn’t mat­ter, because I really love the stuff, never more than I do now!

My cof­fee jour­ney? The title of the this entry, comes from a phrase I’ve seen often repeated, to new­bies such as myself on cof­fee forums and it refers to the route you take to get the best cof­fee expe­ri­ence imag­in­able. With fresh beans, my new grinder and my new espresso machine, my jour­ney has moved sev­eral light years ahead in a very pos­i­tive direction.

Bot­toms up!

A few days ago, I learned of a pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion that’s to be held on the sub­ject of the “pos­si­ble” reclas­si­fi­ca­tion of cannabis. It takes place in Lon­don on the 5th of February.

This gov­ern­ment has appar­ently decided the out­come of this con­sul­ta­tion and Jacqui Smith has already leaked their deci­sion to put cannabis back into Class B from its cur­rent sta­tus of Class C.

It widely known that the gov­ern­ment has cho­sen this path for one sim­ple rea­son, to appear “tough on drugs.” They iden­ti­fied this issue as one which Tony Blair and David Blun­kett left them vul­ner­a­ble to crit­i­cism that could be eas­ily changed with­out much pub­lic outcry.

They’re cor­rect on that score. How many dope smok­ers do you know that would attend a government-held, pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion on cannabis, and con­fess to reg­u­larly break­ing a law, which is about to become a lot harder on peo­ple who enjoy weed?

Let’s not bull­shit around this…a change in clas­si­fi­ca­tion from C to B means only one thing and that is to fur­ther crim­i­nalise peo­ple who smoke a bit of dope. The penal­ties for pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion of cannabis are exactly the same under class B and C — exactly the same! The dif­fer­ence is on the oth­er­wise law abid­ing cit­i­zen, who par­takes of this plant — the penal­ties for sim­ple pos­ses­sion are sig­nif­i­cantly harsher.

Why would the gov­ern­ment wish to crim­i­nalise so many peo­ple? Could it have to do with build­ing new pris­ons and need­ing peo­ple to fill those places? Dope­heads aren’t dan­ger­ous or vio­lent, you would have a prison pop­u­la­tion that was cheap and easy to manage!

Think that’s a bit “con­spir­acy the­ory” even for me? Ok, have you got a bet­ter explanation?

Just about every think tank, pol­icy group and gen­uine expert feels it should be left class C, decrim­i­nalised or legalised com­pletely. Many cops believe this too, and so do a fair few MPs and min­is­ters, but many are afraid to voice their opin­ions for fear of the wrath of the Mail/Express/Telegraph set.

I con­sid­ered attend­ing that con­sul­ta­tion on the 5th of Feb. I thought long and hard about going, stat­ing my real name and read­ing a selec­tion of entries I’ve writ­ten on this sub­ject so near and dear to my heart. And then I pussied out.

Look, either we all go, or none of us go! That’s right, all 6 mil­lion (esti­mated) reg­u­lar cannabis smok­ers have to reg­is­ter to attend. Every last one of us. I’ll go, if you’ll all go. They can’t put us all in jail, can they? If they try, we can just seek asy­lum in the Netherlands!

Here are a few inter­est­ing and related links:

This is from the can­nazine and talks about the 5th Feb con­sul­ta­tion and how they are ignor­ing the experts in the deci­sion to regrade
Click Me.

This one is from the Inde­pen­dent, it’s the same story, only with some ques­tion­able men­tal health details thrown in to con­fuse the issue
Click Me.

This is from the Times and talks about how the gov­ern­ment should base its poli­cies on sci­ence, not emo­tion. It sites the cannabis “debate” as an exam­ple
Click Me.

And here again is my cannabis truth series, which is worth read­ing if you want to know the real story and not the twisted shit they want you to believe!
Click Me.

Ho hum.

As much as I dig being the northlon­don­hippy and believe me, I do, some­times I strug­gle to force myself to sit down in front of my com­puter to pro­duce high qual­ity, web-based con­tent that both informs and entertains.

In other words, some­times I just can’t be arsed.

I’ve always got ideas and a run­ning list of a dozen top­ics which would daz­zle the aver­age hip­py­fan. Of course, you are above aver­age and require a higher stan­dard from this hippy. Don’t worry, I’ll dis­ap­point you all today.

I’m actu­ally in a rea­son­able mood this week as I took deliv­ery of my fancy new cof­fee set up. I’ll do a proper post on it in the near future, but I am pleased to report that I am already pulling rea­son­able shots and pro­duc­ing quite drink­able cap­puc­ci­nos and lattes.

I’m sure its not help­ing that my birth­day is immi­nent. I think that’s why Jan­u­ary sucks so badly, because right off the back of the stu­pid hol­i­days comes my dumb birthday.

Get­ting old sucks. Yes, highly orig­i­nal and thought pro­vok­ing, wouldn’t you agree?

I don’t really mind get­ting older, not that I have a choice or would pre­fer the alter­na­tive, but that’s because I don’t look my age. How much longer can peo­ple still see me as youth­ful? I’m forty-fucking-five years old for fucks sake!

My birth­day brings out my age­ing obses­sion, but don’t despair, it peaks every year around Jan­u­ary and fades into the back­ground soon after that. Then I can move onto other obses­sions, like my utter fail­ure at life.

Haha.

I don’t really feel like a fail­ure, but it’s amus­ing to make jokes about it.

Con­sid­er­ing all my faults, its amaz­ing I’ve done as well as I have out of life and I thank Satan every day for doing that deal with me back when I was a teenager. Eter­nal souls are over­rated any­way, or at least that’s what my mas­ter, er beast­mas­ter tells me. If only I thought to ask him to make me taller! Being short sucks more than get­ting old, any day!

This is just a quick one for those of you who have been drop­ping by look­ing for the “northlon­don­hippy BB column”.

And how do I know you were look­ing? I know because I am sad and I occa­sion­ally look at my user logs. Don’t worry, I’m not spy­ing on you and I wouldn’t know how to spy on you, online, anyway!

What I do glance at (and I have men­tioned this before) are the search terms used to locate my site. Run­ning quite high at present is “northlon­don­hippy BB col­umn” and its really nice that so many of you remember…but haven’t you all heard of book­mark­ing! Trust me, I’m worth it.

I’m sorry to dis­ap­point my fel­low BB fans, but I haven’t watched any of the cur­rent series, not a sin­gle moment. The for­mat just didn’t grab me.

BB is about the peo­ple in the house, not the voice of Big Brother. The fact that for the most part, we usu­ally don’t get to see the occu­pant of the “voice of god booth” is a good thing.

Mak­ing a fea­ture out of the voice of BB by cast­ing var­i­ous celebri­ties is a lame idea. Chang­ing the for­mat was an ill con­ceived idea, exe­cuted by peo­ple who were too quick to give in to the slight­est whiff of con­tro­versy and pres­sure. It lacks back­bone and con­vic­tion and is a total cop-out. It also cheap­ens the BB brand.

Look at how it has been rel­e­gated to E4, which many peo­ple with­out dig­i­tal tele­vi­sion still don’t receive. And where’s Davina? Even her greedy man­age­ment could smell the rot­ten stink on this one and gave her the win­ter off.

And how about that Der­mot O’Leary? Sure they are let­ting him front this series, which is his last on the pro­gramme, because Der­mie thinks the X-Factor is a bet­ter bet. I believe I read in the news­pa­per that even he has been crit­i­cal of this series and I had to read it twice to make sure my mind wasn’t play­ing tricks on me. Talk about bit­ing the hand that feeds you! Even I don’t pub­licly crit­i­cise my employ­ers like that (though pri­vately is another story).

I’m sure I would be watch­ing if it was just plain ol’ c-list celebrity BB, I’d even be watch­ing if it was a reg­u­lar BB, minus any celebrity com­po­nent, but this cur­rent rub­bish has no appeal to me.

If they’ve lost me as a viewer, they have really fucked it up this time. If I was to guess, I would expect the final deci­sion to shift the for­mat rests with Chan­nel 4 and not Ende­mol, but I have no evi­dence to back up this sup­po­si­tion. C4 han­dled the whole Shilpa Shetty thing badly and I reckon the same suits hijacked this series of BB.

We’re already over a week into 2008 and I haven’t posted a thing. In that case, belated New Year greet­ings and sea­sonal wishes to you. I hope that this brand new year brings you every­thing you’ve ever hoped and dreamed for.

This is a shitty time of year for me, as I am not a fan of the hol­i­day sea­son, cold, grey weather, or my birth­day which is also falls this month. Another year down the drain is all I can think.

I’m going to be 45 this month, which is unde­ni­ably middle-age, or at least how we define it. The real­ity of me actu­ally mak­ing it to 90 is laugh­ably ludi­crous, which makes the term middle-aged a total sham in my case.

I don’t feel 45, not that I even know what 45 should feel like. I still feel 15, which could say more about my stunted emo­tional growth than any­thing else. Age­ing is the phys­i­cal process, matu­rity refers to your men­tal age. Maybe I am 15?

Some­times I think I am obsessed with age­ing and grow­ing old; it’s even a cat­e­gory on my blog. I do think about it too much. It’s the pas­sage of time that really gets me, not the grow­ing old.

My life is finite. I only have so much time and with each day that slips by, I have less. If I am really hop­ing to accom­plish any­thing with my life, I bet­ter get my skates on or come to terms with the real­ity that my dreams will never come true. I’m not sure which one is worse.

The change in the cal­en­dar, com­bined with a mile­stone birth­day is really bum­ming me out. You see, even hip­pies get the blues. Forty-five years of under­achieve­ment and fail­ure can have that effect on even the cheeri­est of souls and trust me fuck­ers, the last thing I am is cheery!

What’s a poor hippy to do?

The usual, just keep plod­ding along, doing what­ever it is I do and dis­tract­ing myself as best I can. If it weren’t for soft drugs and con­sumer pur­chases, my life would be as empty as a void in deep space!

Oh and don’t for­get my exer­cises in cre­ative futil­ity! I am going to record that album of orig­i­nal northlon­don­hippy music!

And I am going to work on my novel. My real novel, the one I have been plan­ning for over a decade. I did knock out 2 other nov­els in the last few years, the sec­ond one will be pub­lished soon I hope. They’re not under my real name, they’re not even under my hippy ban­ner. I don’t really count them, but they were fun to write.

My real novel will actu­ally be done under my REAL NAME. I don’t do any­thing under my real name, so that should tell you how seri­ous I’m tak­ing it. It’s also why I’ve been tak­ing so long with it, I want to get this one 100% right. I want it to be a lit­er­ary mas­ter­work, which per­fectly cap­tures the human condition.

I want a lot of things.

Like right now, what I want is a high-end, pump dri­ven, espresso machine and this has become my lat­est obses­sion. I’ve been hang­ing out on a cou­ple of coffee-obsessive web­sites, Cof­feeGeek and Home­Barista are my two cur­rent favourites. If you’re seri­ous about cof­fee, you should really have a look.

Don’t laugh. The pur­suit of the per­fect espresso is right up this hippy’s street. After all, caf­feine is a drug and we all know I dig drugs and I also adore a good rit­ual as pre­req­ui­site to enjoy­ing any drug. Espresso extrac­tion is a skill and at the hob­bi­est level and beyond, it becomes a religion.

There are some seri­ously seri­ous peo­ple out there mak­ing some amaz­ing cof­fee at home and I want to be one of them. I’ve been doing research online for the last month or so and am now ready to take the plunge.

The first thing I learned is that the grinder you buy is every bit as impor­tant as the espresso machine you choose. And if you’re seri­ous about cof­fee, you will only want beans freshly roasted, they start to go stale after around 2 weeks. You need to spend at least 50% of what you spend on the espresso machine, on a decent grinder.

Pulling the per­fect shot of espresso isn’t sim­ple, it requires knowl­edge, prac­tise and skill, but if you can mas­ter this, you will be rewarded with excep­tional cof­fee every time.

The home espresso scene is nowhere near as big in the UK as it is in north Amer­ica, but there are sev­eral com­pa­nies spe­cial­is­ing in high-end kit. After a lot of research and care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion, I’ve decided to go with the Ran­cilio Sil­via espresso machine, paired with Rancilio’s Rocky grinder — the doser­less model. It has quite a good rep­u­ta­tion with afi­ciona­dos online, but is not an easy machine to mas­ter. I think that’s part of the appeal, that I will have to work hard to get the best results.

That’s what hob­bies are; dis­trac­tions from real­ity. My new found cof­fee obses­sion is a healthy diver­sion from the things that bring me down. Once I have per­fected my extrac­tion tech­nique and I am reg­u­larly fuelled with the finest cap­puc­ci­nos, expertly crafted, I will be buzzing with caf­feine. That in turn should inspire me to spend more of my increas­ing lim­ited free time, writ­ing. Every­one wins!

I’ll be order­ing my new machine hope­fully this week, as soon as they come back in stock fol­low­ing a rush on them for xmas. I’m hop­ing that by next week, I’ll be brew­ing my own, right here in my north Lon­don lair. How fuck­ing cool with that be!

My life might not be per­fect, but at least my cof­fee soon will be!