The northlondonhippy

Archive for January 8th, 2008

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!