The northlondonhippy

Archive for May, 2008

I haven’t really weighed in on the upcom­ing US pres­i­den­tial elec­tions yet and I thought it was about time I did.

I think I was wait­ing for the field to nar­row to the final two can­di­dates and like most of the world and media (of which I play a small role), thought it would have been resolved by now. It just goes to show you what the media knows…sweet FA.

Except me, of course with my crys­tal balls and amaz­ing pre­dic­tive pow­ers of foresight.

I’ve always joked that news­rooms should replace their for­ward plan­ning desks with psy­chics any­way. Just imag­ine if some­one could tell you where to put a TV cam­era for the next big plane crash or polit­i­cal assas­si­na­tion. Talk about a world exclusive!

And speak­ing of polit­i­cal assas­si­na­tions, why are peo­ple so obsessed with some­one bump­ing off Barak Obama. You know, some wacko doesn’t have to kill the black can­di­date. It’s not a rule, or even a sug­gested guide­line. It’s actu­ally rep­re­hen­si­ble to sug­gest it, but the sug­ges­tion is out there, far more than you might expect.

My friends over at ANORAK NEWS, have been chart­ing the OBAMA DEATH CULT, thanks to pub­lic com­ments by for­mer Repub­li­can can­di­date Mike Huck­abee and now HILLARY CLINTON.

These are just the two most recent and high pro­file exam­ples, but there are more.

Why is every­one so afraid of an Obama presidency?

I think the answer to that is quite com­plex and any­one who says its just down to racism, is miss­ing the point. I’m not going to deny there is a racist ele­ment to it, because it is cer­tainly a com­po­nent and for some, the only rea­son, but there’s more to it than that.

Obama rep­re­sents change and a break from the past. He is, if noth­ing else, cre­at­ing an illu­sion, that he will take Amer­ica in a dif­fer­ent and more pro­gres­sive and dare I say, lib­eral direc­tion. Whether or not that is true, remains to be seen, but he is cer­tainly mar­ket­ing him­self that way.

So many peo­ple wouldn’t be talk­ing about some nut killing Obama, if they weren’t afraid of him.

I have a silly the­ory that he might be the anti-christ, but of course I don’t believe in that non­sense any more than I believe in the real one. It always gets a laugh though, except from com­mit­ted Chris­tians (and shouldn’t they all be?), who give me know­ing glances and a cou­ple of leaflets from their church.

When­ever I lis­ten to Obama speak, I actu­ally like what I hear. I realise that’s a politician’s job, but he does do it well. When he says he would talk directly with his ene­mies, I applaud him, when he says he’ll pull all the troops out of Iraq as quickly and safely as pos­si­ble, I com­mend him and when he says he’ll allow the use of med­ical mar­i­juana, I’d kiss him.

But would I vote for him? If he ends up being the demo­c­ra­tic can­di­date, of course I would, but it doesn’t mat­ter, because I am not a voter. Any­thing is bet­ter than another four years of McBush.

But back to the “kill Obama” sideshow…I found this clip from Fox News espe­cially dis­turb­ing. Actu­ally it really fucked me off. See what you think…

There’s about one week left to enter my rock­ing Bub­bler con­test. You can really win a brand new Bush­mas­ter Bub­bler, plus other cool prizes. You want some cool shit from the hippy, don’t you? Click here, click now!

I took deliv­ery of a Playsta­tion 3 this week, along with a copy of Grand Theft Auto 4 (GTA 4). I’ve aban­doned north Lon­don and am now a res­i­dent of Lib­erty City. Just call me the lib­er­tyc­i­ty­hippy from now on.

I’ve never been much of a gamer, the last con­sole I owned was a Nin­tendo NES, back in the early 80s. I haven’t really played any com­puter games since then.

I debated buy­ing a PS3 for a while as I think hav­ing one is the equiv­a­lent of giv­ing up on real­ity, though tech­ni­cally I gave up on it a cou­ple of decades ago. I’ve got friends who have been telling me how cool they are for a while and with the release of GTA 4, I thought it was time to take the plunge.

I very nearly bought a PS2 and GTA San Andreas, but con­vinced myself my free time would be bet­ter spent pur­su­ing ran­dom acts of cre­ativ­ity. I’m feel­ing far less cre­ative at the moment and rather than try­ing to extract blood from a stone, I’ve elected to spend my leisure time in a vir­tual world where I can steal cars, shag whores and kill peo­ple. That’s bet­ter than explor­ing the same activ­i­ties in real­ity around north Lon­don, I guess.

Video games are time ban­dits and they will eat up your free time quite effec­tively and if you’re as crap at play­ing them as I am, they will take up even more of your time.

I thought long and hard about this pur­chase, see­ing it as a mini-surrender to hav­ing a life. In some ways, this is me giv­ing up, just a lit­tle. Not for­ever, not even until I fin­ish GTA 4 (which at the rate I am going will take years), but just enough to clear some of the cob­webs out of my skull. It was either this or some LSD and find­ing qual­ity acid these days seems like too much of a strug­gle, so I am now a gamer.

Set­ting up the PS3 was a breeze, I’ve con­nected it directly to my Bravia’s only HDMI input and I have the out­put set to 1080i, which is the best res­o­lu­tion my tv can deliver. The audio also goes via the TV and is then fed back to my ampli­fier via a stereo cable – not ideal, but ser­vice­able. I only have 2.1 audio, so its not like I am miss­ing out on the 5.1 sur­round sound – I don’t have enough speak­ers to ben­e­fit from it.

I was also able to get the PS3 straight onto my home wi-fi net­work, which means online game play and updates are already within my grasp. I’ve actu­ally run some updates already and my oper­at­ing sys­tem is bang up to date.

I bought 2 games with the con­sole, the affor­men­tioned GTA 4 and Gran Tur­simo 5 – The Pro­logue, on the rec­om­men­da­tion of a mate.

Gran Tur­ismo is pos­i­tively stun­ning, espe­cially the back­grounds. I’ve been doing laps around a track in Lon­don and it is pin sharp and photo-realistic. If you’ve seen it, you’ll know what I mean, it is pos­i­tively jaw-droppingly good! I’m still crap at con­trol­ling the car, though and I def­i­nitely need lots of practise.

GT5 is a taster of the full ver­sion of the game, which is due to be released next year and only cost me 17 quid, which I thought was a real bargain.

GTA 4 is unbe­liev­ably involved and has a scope and scale which is mind bog­gling. The game­play takes place in an expan­sive and extremely real­is­tic realm, which is mas­sive and has a level of detail which would thrill most fea­ture film mak­ers. I can’t get over how good it all looks.

The main rea­son I really bought all this is I’ve felt for a while that I was miss­ing out on a sig­nif­i­cant part of home enter­tain­ment by not hav­ing a games con­sole. Video games are big busi­ness, mak­ing as much or more annu­ally than most fea­ture films. I think I read GTA 4 took over 50 mil­lion dol­lars in its first week of release, mak­ing it the best sell­ing game of all time.

GTA 4 cost nearly 40 quid, which may sound expen­sive, but if you fac­tor in the num­ber of hours I’ll be play­ing it and the shear size of the play­ing field, you can see why they are that expen­sive. The amount of time and man-hours that go into devel­op­ing such a game is immense and they have to make it back somehow.

I also think there’s prob­a­bly work to be had in the world of gam­ing, for a middle-aged, make-believe hippy from north Lon­don. Some­one has to write the sto­ry­lines and cre­ate the char­ac­ters – I could do that! I would love to do that! Games prob­a­bly reach more peo­ple than films, so it’s a big audi­ence to sat­isfy and sat­isfy them, I would!

So who out there has any con­tacts with the major gam­ing devel­op­ers? Wanna hook me up with a highly paid, emo­tion­ally sat­is­fy­ing posi­tion com­ing up with con­cepts and sto­ries for future games? I promise you that given the chance, I could come up with the most com­pelling games imaginable!

Like how about this…a northlon­don­hippy videogame! You would get to be me, in an RPG sort of way. You could hang out in my vir­tual lair, roll and smoke vir­tual spliffs, watch TV and play PS3 games, as me. And then their would be mis­sions, like scor­ing weed on a Fri­day night, but still hav­ing time to get home and order a nice Japan­ese take-away, before the restau­rant closes.

You’d pay 40 quid for that, wouldn’t you?

There’s a brand new Bush­mas­ter bub­bler sit­ting here, with your name on it. Well, maybe…but you won’t have a chance if you don’t enter my contest!

I’ve been dig­ging the Canna Zine for a while now and I thought its about time I gave it some proper attention.

Canna Zine is “the only Pro-Reform (of cannabis laws) news agency in Europe” and an excel­lent resource for infor­ma­tion on my beloved weed. They stay up to date with the lat­est news on weed, plus they give a lot of time and atten­tion to other pro-reform groups.

I should men­tion that I am now listed as a cannabis resource in the UK in the Canna Zine direc­tory, but that is more a state­ment of sup­port from me to them, than any sort of endorse­ment of what­ever it is I do here. I’m pleased they accepted my sub­mis­sion and I’m proud to be asso­ci­ated with a web­site that is striv­ing to fur­ther a sen­si­ble, sci­ence and fact-based approach to cannabis.

This is espe­cially impor­tant now as it looks very likely that Gor­don (GGG!) Brown and his merry band of glee-thieves will be reclas­si­fy­ing weed early next year. I say “likely” because the move has yet to be rub­ber stamped by par­lia­ment. Yes, I know its a for­mal­ity, but I still hold a small glim­mer of hope that com­mon sense, logic and decency will pre­vail and my beloved weed will remain in Class C…until it is first decrim­i­nalised, then full legalised, reg­u­lated, and taxed.

A hippy can dream. And I do. Still way too much.

(The bub­bler con­test is still open. Don’t you want to win a really cool bub­bler? Of course you do!)

Some­times, polit­i­cal dis­course can be fur­thered by the most unlikely of sources. And they can make me laugh.

Famed Lon­don tourist attrac­tion, Madame Tus­sauds, announced today that the would NOT be mak­ing a wax fig­ure of cur­rent British Prime Min­is­ter (and national embar­rass­ment) Gor­don Brown fol­low­ing a sur­vey of their visitors.

It seems 84% of respon­dents to their sur­vey do not think Gordo B belongs in their wax­work museum. “Over­whelm­ingly” against is how the result is described IN THIS BBC REPORT on the results of the sur­vey. This would make GB the first prime min­is­ter in 150 years to not be cast in wax.

Isn’t it time the Labour Party got its col­lec­tive act together and ousted this idiot out of Down­ing Street. The sooner he is replaced, the bet­ter for not just the party, but the nation as a whole! I might nick­name him Nar­gus, because he is a nat­ural dis­as­ter too!

Is any­one sur­prised that this awk­ward, un-elected, un-likeable, unbe­liev­ably obtuse, abor­tion of a politi­cian is unwanted by tourists? He’s not wanted by his party or the elec­torate either, but they haven’t been given the chance to vote on his premiership.

It’s good to know that democ­racy is alive and well, some­where, even if its only avail­able at an over­priced tourist trap. Trust me, its bet­ter than nothing!

(GGG! = Gordon’s Gotta Go!)

You can still win my bub­bler. Go on, take a chance, its not like it costs you anything!

I’ve just fin­ished a mam­moth run of work. I col­lapsed in a heap yes­ter­day and stayed that way for around 12 hours until one of my kit­tens woke me up around 4:30am this morn­ing. Hey ho.

My kit­tens are now 10 months old and the lit­tle boy is already huge. He is going to be a giant, mon­ster cat when he is fully grown. He was the one who woke me this morn­ing, by sit­ting on my chest and star­ing me awake. His lit­tle sis­ter was lay­ing on my legs at the same time, sort of rolling around, also try­ing to get my attention.

And that’s really all they wanted; atten­tion. There was plenty of food and water for them, they didn’t need me for that. They sim­ply required me to pay them atten­tion. That didn’t take very long.

Once up, I had to feed the older cats, a 3 year old and a 16 year old. The 3 year just needed me to pre­tend to feed her, so that she would think it was time for her to eat. Yes, she is slightly neu­rotic, but that’s OK.

The 16 year old, our old­est cat needs tinned food these days, as the dry stuff is a bit too hard for her to chew. She’s nearly com­pletely blind from cataracts, but still gets around the house very well. That’s not true out­side though and as of a cou­ple of days ago, I can no longer let her go out. She went under the fence into my neighbour’s yard and couldn’t find her way back — I had to go and res­cue her and she was car­ried home in my arms. She’s still quite feisty and is doing quite well con­sid­er­ing her age.

After sort­ing out the cats, I parked myself in front of my iMac and did some surf­ing. Between my RSS feeds and sites I visit reg­u­larly, I prob­a­bly vis­ited at least 30 of them before 6am.

I also down­loaded the lat­est episode of Lost. Yes, I know I could wait a few days and catch it on Sky One, but why would I do that? Then I would miss out on all the cool stuff on the inter­net that fol­lows, which is released at the Amer­i­can ABC pace.

I’m really into Lost, I think it is eas­ily one of the best pro­grammes on the box. It’s so com­plex and lay­ered and mostly it does my head in, but I know they are tak­ing it some­where. I am really look­ing for­ward to watch­ing the last 2 sea­sons play out, espe­cially as there are only 3 more hours of it left this series, before another ago­nis­ing 10 month wait for more.

I’ve also been watch­ing Mad Men, which I missed when it first aired and was eas­ily down­load­able, but thanks to BBC4, I’ve been able to see the entire series. Wow, its good and Don Draper has got to be the ulti­mate in cap­i­tal­ist anti-heroes. I’ve always liked anti-heroes and secretly like to think I’m one myself. You’re all root­ing for me, even though you know you shouldn’t.

After hang­ing out with the Losties, I made myself my first proper cof­fee of the day with my Vivi. I haven’t used it over a week, because of my erratic work sched­ule and sleep pat­tern, but I haven’t gone with­out excel­lent coffee.

My sec­ondary method of brew­ing fresh cof­fee is now a device called an Aero­Press.

It’s quick and easy to use and it cleans up in sec­onds. What’s not to love?

The cool thing for me about my Aero­Press is that I can use the exact same cof­fee I use in the Vivi, ground the exact same way, so no mess­ing around with the set­ting my grinder. The Aero­Press makes what I would describe as some­thing sim­i­lar to espresso, in strength and vol­ume, but not in tex­ture or com­plex­ity. That’s ok, because the Aero­Press costs sig­nif­i­cantly less than a proper pro-sumer espresso machine.

You can pick up an Aero­Press for as lit­tle as under 20 quid (email me if you want the site sell­ing them that low, they also sell the best freshly roasted beans in the UK) and it will make amaz­ing cof­fee for you too.

By far, the most impor­tant thing you need for mak­ing great cof­fee is freshly roasted, freshly ground beans. When I first started look­ing into cof­fee, this was the most dif­fi­cult thing to get my head around, mainly because of the cost of a decent grinder capa­ble of pro­duc­ing the qual­ity you need for a good espresso machine. Some peo­ple even say the espresso machine is an acces­sory for the grinder and that didn’t really make sense to me until I used my set-up for a while.

An espresso machine basi­cally has an on/off switch; you turn the pump on to force water through the ground cof­fee (at the right pres­sure and tem­per­a­ture) and then you switch it off when you’ve reached the required vol­ume or level of extrac­tion. That’s all the con­trol you really have, on and off. The grinder is what actu­ally gives you any say in how your cof­fee is pro­duced, the coarser the grinder, the faster the pour, the finer the grind, the slower the pour. You aim to pro­duce a dou­ble espresso in around 30 sec­onds, with the colour of the cof­fee stream going tan around that time as well.

Ok, this is tedious to you if you have no inter­est in cof­fee, but as you can prob­a­bly tell, I’ve really got into this in a big way. I’m drink­ing my 2nd cof­fee of the day right now and its every bit as good as my first. Con­sis­tency is what you aim for in mak­ing good cof­fee and I can pretty much repro­duce the same result over and over. That job in Star­bucks is look­ing more and more likely!

It’s just gone 8am, here in north Lon­don, the sun is shin­ing and its expected to be another warm day. I’ve been awake for 3 and 1/2 hours and I’ve pretty much told you every­thing I’ve already done. I’ve replied to a few emails and now I’ve writ­ten this post. You are fully and com­pletely up to date.

All that’s left to do now, is post this on my web­site and you’ll know that’s hap­pened because you’re read­ing it. I’ve got noth­ing left to share with you for now.

(Did you want a bub­bler? Funny, because I’m giv­ing one away, along with a shit­load of other prizes. Go on, click this link to find out more)

I’m start­ing a new cam­paign today and I’m going to need help from all of you. It is my desire to see Gor­don Brown removed from Num­ber 10. Brown’s been Prime Min­is­ter long enough. Too long!

Gordon’s gotta go!

GGG!

Gordon’s
Gotta
Go!

Gor­don Brown is by far the worst Prime Min­is­ter the United King­dom has ever had, bar none. Even war-monger Blair had a bit of charm and charisma; Brown is a charisma-free zone.

I could actu­ally cope with Gor­don Brown’s stiff and unpleas­ant demeanour, if it weren’t for his total lack of vision and point­less poli­cies and you know where this is going…

Reclas­si­fi­ca­tion…

Yep, I’m a one-issue kinda guy.

The Advi­sory Coun­cil on the Mis­use of Drugs (ACMD) is the inde­pen­dent body which advises the gov­ern­ment on drugs pol­icy. No gov­ern­ment has ever ignored their rec­om­men­da­tions since the board was formed. Ol’ Gordo is prepar­ing to ignore their advice and reclas­sify cannabis to Class B from its cur­rent sta­tus of Class C.

The ACMD have reviewed cannabis pol­icy three times in the last sev­eral years; the first time Tony Blair and David Blun­kett fol­lowed their advice and put weed into Class C. See, Blair wasn’t all bad. There was this and North­ern Ire­land, the rest, well that was all pretty bad.

The sec­ond time the ACMD recently reviewed cannabis, they again reached the same con­clu­sion. This was done in the heat of the polit­i­cal firestorm that fol­lowed the orig­i­nal declas­si­fi­ca­tion deci­sion and it only reaf­firmed the move and the gov­ern­ment left it alone.

The third review of cannabis was requested by Brown, in light of the “new evi­dence” of the dan­gers of cannabis.

The truth is, there is no new evi­dence, there are just con­flict­ing stud­ies which don’t come to any real con­clu­sions regard­ing links between men­tal health prob­lems and cannabis use. That hasn’t stopped the media from try­ing to whip up a Down­ing Street inspired shit storm of hys­ter­i­cal spin, paint­ing cannabis as the devil’s weed. It was reefer mad­ness mark II, only these days, most of us know much better.

The ACMD reached the same con­clu­sion on their third review, that cannabis should remain in Class C — the report was deliv­ered to Gor­don this week. The con­tents of the report were leaked to the press sev­eral weeks ago though they have yet to be made offi­cially pub­lic. Their deci­sion, along with Gordon’s over­rul­ing of it is expected to come some­time after yesterday’s local elections.

Now, here’s the cool bit. If Gor­don Brown ignores the advice of the ACMD, the mem­bers of the ACMD are pre­pared to pub­licly resign in dis­gust. That’s how seri­ous this is.

On top of that, the Asso­ci­a­tion of Chief Police Offi­cers (ACPO) are report­edly pre­pared to reassert the cur­rent guid­ance on cannabis pos­ses­sion, if Gor­don does reclas­sify to Class B. In other words, they will con­tinue to oper­ate as if it was Class C.

Just a quick expla­na­tion on the dif­fer­ences between the Class B and Class C — the penal­ties are exactly the same for pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion under both. The end user ends up worse off under B.

Where they dif­fer is when it comes to per­sonal pos­ses­sion — under Class C, you should be cau­tioned and have the weed con­fis­cated. Under Class C, you can still do time, up to 2 years in prison. Under Class B, there is tech­ni­cally no con­fis­cate and cau­tion option, the penalty for pos­ses­sion is 5 years in the big house.

Any­one with a brain knows that the clas­si­fi­ca­tion of a drug has lit­tle to do with how peo­ple view it. Cocaine is Class A, car­ry­ing the stiffest penal­ties for pos­ses­sion, but peo­ple still take it. A lot of peo­ple, actually.

Since cannabis was declas­si­fied, usage has gone down. Since cannabis was declas­si­fied, far fewer peo­ple are unnec­es­sar­ily impris­oned for a vic­tim­less crime. Since cannabis was declas­si­fied, we’ve had a drug pol­icy in this coun­try that was on the verge of sen­si­ble (with sen­si­ble being com­pletely decrim­i­nalised or even bet­ter legalised, taxed and sold like liquor).

Gordon’s rea­son for all of this is the same rea­son he uses for every­thing he does. Gor­don knows best.

Like fuck he does!

To say that Gordon’s drug pol­icy is cre­at­ing a com­plete mud­dle would be an under­state­ment, like say­ing an ocean is slightly damp. It’s becom­ing an unmit­i­gated dis­as­ter full of lies, hys­te­ria, mis­steps, mis­in­for­ma­tion and decided lack of con­sis­tency or honesty.

In other words, for fuck’s sake, what a twat!

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a politi­cian so out of step with his coun­try. He hasn’t a clue what gen­uine peo­ple are like. He can’t relate to any of us, because he is a com­plete social outsider.

Imag­ine, if you can, meet­ing Gor­don in your local for a drink. He’d order a pint of what­ever you’re hav­ing, but then hardly touch it. He’d try to talk to you about fis­cal respon­si­bil­ity and moral author­ity, when you would rather talk about the foot­ball or how cool that new Iron Man movie looks. He would stand uncom­fort­ably in the crowd, mak­ings oth­ers feel uneasy, yet you would def­i­nitely get the sense he thought he was bet­ter than you, though you wouldn’t in a month of Sun­days ever guess how he jus­ti­fies it in his head.

Yes, Gor­don, you are socially awk­ward and that was fine when you were the Chan­cel­lor and every­one thought you were doing a good job. No one thinks that now! The econ­omy is up the spout, it’s screwed, its fucked and Gor­don is to blame.

I’m pay­ing £1.10 a litre for petrol. That’s really bad! (And for my Amer­i­can read­ers, I reckon that’s about 8 bucks a gal­lon and you didn’t read that wrong!)

The cost of food is sky­rock­et­ing too. But that’s not what is upset­ting peo­ple at the moment, its the decline in house prices.

The econ­omy here in Blighty has been falsely inflated due to the hous­ing mar­ket. House prices were mak­ing wild gains, but that’s stopped now. Peo­ple can’t trade up every year or two because their homes aren’t increas­ing any more. In some cases, they are decreas­ing and a term from a long time ago is creep­ing back:

Neg­a­tive equity.

That’s a fancy pants way of say­ing your home is worth less than the amount you owe on your mort­gage. It’s wank speak, really and it only mat­ters if you are sell­ing your house. If your house is not on the mar­ket, then it doesn’t really mat­ter, but it might be the rea­son you can’t put your house for sale.

What would you do if you had a 100K loan and your house was only worth 75K. Where would you come up with that extra 25K to pay off the bank, plus inter­est? You wouldn’t, you’d just keep pay­ing your mort­gage and thank­ing god you have a roof over your head.

No one I know is get­ting rich or even get­ting ahead just by work­ing. The peo­ple I know who have seri­ous money in the bank, or have leap-frogged the rest of us on the prop­erty lad­der have done so by mak­ing vastly inflated prof­its on prop­erty trad­ing. That’s what has really been dri­ving the economy.

Guess what? The econ­omy is run­ning out of steam and is grind­ing to a halt, thanks in a large part to the cur­rent hous­ing mar­ket crash (or should I say crunch so I don’t panic anyone?).

And Gor­don is to blame!

As I write this, the local elec­tion results are drib­bling slowly out of my tele­vi­sion. The topline is a sim­ple one, it’s the Labour party’s worst show­ing in 40 years. They’ve come in third, after the Tories and the Lib Dems.

And Gor­don is to blame.

Brown is a polit­i­cal liability.

Oh who am I kid­ding, he is a lia­bil­ity in every con­ceiv­able way.

I don’t think I’ve ever dis­liked a politi­cian as much as I dis­like Gor­don Brown.

I have this fan­tasy that this after­noon, after all the elec­tion results are tab­u­lated, cer­ti­fied and released and the true pic­ture of the Labour mas­sacre is con­firmed, that a small group of very senior Labour types swing by Num­ber 10 for a pri­vate chat with Brown.

In this chat, they ask him to resign asap, right then and there. When he refuses, they tell him if he doesn’t resign his posi­tion as Prime Min­is­ter, they will invoke a spe­cial extra­or­di­nary ses­sion of Par­lia­ment and call for a vote of no con­fi­dence in his leadership.

In other words, Gor­don can do this the easy way or he can do it the hard way and its his choice.

Gor­don is con­fronted with this dif­fi­cult deci­sion and he chooses to resign to make it seem like it was his idea. He returns to the back bench where we hardly ever hear from him again.

Or I’ve got another sce­nario, which I just thought of, just now. He could return to Num­ber 11 and be the Chan­cel­lor of the Exche­quer again, because of the dire eco­nomic out­look, the depart­ment needs his exper­tise again!

Basi­cally, any­thing that ends his pre­mier­ship before he can fuck up any­thing else is good with me.

I’ve even got a catch phrase for you. You can use it as a greet­ing, when you meet peo­ple. Bet­ter yet, you can use it to sign off let­ters and emails. Maybe I should get tee-shirts printed. How can we lose when we have my win­ning slo­gan? Go on, chant along with me!

GGG!

Gordon’s gotta go!

GGG!

GORDON’S GOTTA GO!

GGG!

GORDON’S
GOTTA
GO!

Three G’s means Gordon’s not for me!

GGG!

Gordon’s gotta go!

GGG!

Are you all with me?

(While we’re on the sub­ject of weed, check out the northlondonhippy’s cannabis truth series.)