The northlondonhippy

So Mrs. Hippy turns to me last night and says, “Don’t you post on your blog any more?”

She was surf­ing the inter­net on her iPod Touch, which she does quite a bit, pre­fer­ring it to using our iMac.

“Of course I do”, I said slightly defen­sively, try­ing to remem­ber when I last posted some­thing here. I had to check.

It was three weeks ago. That’s long, even by my some­what lax stan­dards. So what have I been up to in that time?

I was kind of hop­ing you could tell me.

I haven’t been work­ing that much. I haven’t been doing much of any­thing, if you must know. I think I am per­fect­ing the art of being and noth­ing­ness. I’m not even sure if I exist any more or even ever existed in the first place.

I might not even be fic­tional. I could just be imag­i­nary, liv­ing only in your mind.

You’re star­ing at a blank screen right now, only your mind thinks you are see­ing words writ­ten by some weird make-believe, north London-based hippy. How’s your imag­i­nary grammar?

See, this is what hap­pens when you start the day with a strong cof­fee and a skunky spliff pep­pered with bubble-hash. Every­one should start their day this way.

I spend inor­di­nate amounts of time sim­ply lost in thought. I dis­ap­pear into my own lit­tle Utopia, where I right the world’s wrongs and allow my cre­ativ­ity to flow freely.

I used to do all that in the real world, but at some point, I stopped.

Oh I’ve worked out when it stopped and why. It was when I first got sick with my stu­pid Hashimoto’s Dis­ease a cou­ple of years ago. I didn’t realise it at the time, it prob­a­bly took another year before I twigged that some­thing was actu­ally phys­i­cally wrong with me, but in ret­ro­spect, it all fits.

Between 2004 and 2007, I wrote 2 nov­els and was rea­son­ably pro­lific here on my web­site too. Towards the end of that period, the 2nd book fiz­zled out while I was writ­ing it and remains one chap­ter shy of being com­plete. The first book was pub­lished, but I didn’t do enough to pro­mote it and it lan­guishes on vir­tual shelves, unread.

The first book was nearly com­mis­sioned as a TV series too, but the media is a fickle and fucked up mis­tress. The guy who liked it and could have com­mis­sioned it with a flick of his pen, moved on; his replace­ments were far less enthu­si­as­tic and the pos­si­bil­ity of pro­duc­ing the series faded away.

Rather than con­tinue to plug away try­ing to do some­thing with it, I let it go too. At the time, I just thought I had lost my enthu­si­asm for the project, but in truth, it was prob­a­bly my ill health that robbed me of my fire.

I haven’t done much of any­thing since.

Of course, that’s not strictly true as I still work (mostly) full time and I do post the odd piece here, but my out­put is not even close to the lev­els I reached a few years ago.

I’m still being treated for the Hashimoto’s Dis­ease and my doc­tor is still adjust­ing my med­ica­tion lev­els. If they ever get it right, I should feel bet­ter and be back to my old self. That’s what they tell me, anyway.

In the mean time, I’ll con­tinue to dis­tract myself with my vivid imag­i­na­tion and soft drugs.

Now, aren’t you glad Mrs. Hippy asked if I still post here? Blame her for the 5 min­utes of your life I just wasted, not me.

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