The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘aging’ Category

The entire month of April slipped quickly and effort­lessly through my fin­gers. I say “effort­lessly” because that is pre­cisely how much effort I’ve put into my site this month and for that I am ashamed.

You shouldn’t have to pay the price for this and you won’t, which is why I am extend­ing the dead­line on my “bub­bler con­test” until the 1st of June, so there is still plenty more time to enter. And don’t worry if you’ve already entered, your email still counts very much so and you will con­tinue to have an equal chance with every­one else.

I’ve had loads of emails with ques­tions about the con­test, which I will answer here in a mini-FAQ:

Is the con­test for real? YES

What’s in it for you? SELF PROMOTION

Do I just send you an email to enter? YES

Will you really post me the bub­bler if I win? YES

How will you choose the win­ners? LITTLE PIECES OF PAPER WITH YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS WILL BE PUT IN A BOWL AND I WILL WITHDRAW 16 OF THEM, ONE FOR EACH PRIZE, FROM 1ST ON DOWN.

Will you announce the win­ners? JUST THEIR INITIALS AND WILL CONTACT EACH ONE INDIVIDUALLY TO ASK FOR THEIR MAILING ADDRESS

And that’s it for now. Get entering!

While I’m here, a quick update on why I haven’t been here. I’ve been work­ing too much, I’ve been dis­tracted by other things, most notably a book which I will review at some point here, because it deserves to be read and I’ve been sort­ing out the usual bull­shit at my north Lon­don lair.

My SKY+ box died a cou­ple of weeks ago and I thought it was gone for good, but I was able to give it a mas­ter reset and get­ting it going again…for about 2 more weeks before it well and truly went to that great gad­get shop in the SKY. It was around 5–6 years old, an orig­i­nal V1 Pace box and I’m sur­prised it lasted as long as it did.

I booked a call out with SKY, which costs £65 and included a replace­ment box and I really didn’t have a choice. Well, I did, I could have used this as an oppor­tu­nity to upgrade to SKY HD, but I’m still not con­vinced its worth the extra dosh with so lit­tle proper HD con­tent available.

The SKY engi­neer was cool and it took him all of ten min­utes to swap the boxes and pair the new one up with my card. The box he installed is a PACE V3, with an 80gb hard drive, though I think that some of it is par­ti­tioned for SKY Any­time, which is where SKY choose pro­grammes they think are the best of the week and record them to your hard drive in the back­ground. It can be dis­abled if you don’t like it, but I thought I would give it a go and see what its like. I’m not con­vinced if you switch it off that it will free up the other half of the hard drive for my record­ings, but its worth look­ing into if the SKY selected shows are crap.

The new box is about a third the size of my old one, its really dinky. It’s also a bit nois­ier than the old one, either because of the fan or the hard drive and I’m not cer­tain which. It seems to work well so far and isn’t much dif­fer­ent from the old one, except for the afore­men­tioned ANYTIME feature.

It’s not just a device that died, but I found out last night that one of my mother’s sis­ters, my favourite aunt passed away over the week­end. She was nearly 84 and it sounds like she was sur­rounded by loved ones and went peace­fully. What­ever the fuck that means.

I don’t like many of my rel­a­tives, and to be hon­est I down­right despise quite a few of them, but not this par­tic­u­lar aunt. She was really spe­cial and yes, I know peo­ple always say nice things about the dead, but I would have said the same last week, when she was among the liv­ing. She was con­sis­tently kind, gen­er­ous and lov­ing and was beloved by many, myself and my younger brother among them.

I hadn’t seen her in years, as is true of 99% of my fam­ily and its prob­a­bly been 4–5 years since I spoke to her on the tele­phone. I would have liked to chat with her, but she’d become quite deaf and the tele­phone wasn’t really an option.

One of my ear­li­est child­hood mem­o­ries, which is vague and hazy as I would expect of a minor event prior to my 3rd birth­day, over 40 years ago to be, is of my aunt vis­it­ing us in a house we lived in, in 1965. She took me for a walk up to a nearby super­mar­ket and I can just remem­ber being excited by this unusual out­ing with an aunt that I loved and trusted. It’s just a small mem­ory, but I still carry it around with me to this day.

Good bye my dear, sweet aunt, you will always be remem­bered fondly by the many peo­ple whose lives you touched, includ­ing mine.

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!

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!

Happy fuck­ing xmas, fuckers!

I hope you all stuffed your faces and got got every­thing on your wish list; not lim­ited to, but prob­a­bly includ­ing: an iPhone, an iPod Touch, an iPod nano, a Mac­Book, a PSP, a PS3 and if you are seri­ously lucky, a Wii and if you are super lucky, nat­u­rally you found an nlh deluxe under your tree!

I’ve had a fairly nor­mal xmas, well nor­mal for me, because I’ve worked right through the hol­i­days and I ain’t fin­ished yet! I worked xmas eve, xmas day and I am work­ing tonight, box­ing day too.

Appar­ently, loads of peo­ple have to work over xmas, only I didn’t “have” to. I chose to and given the chance, I will prob­a­bly choose to again next year.

Next year is a long way, away. Who knows what the next 12 months may bring? Do you? If you answered yes, then email me with some horse rac­ing results for next week, or bet­ter yet the lot­tery num­bers for the next giant rollover. Please?

The first xmas I ever sold was 18 years ago. I was offered the chance to do a shift in a news­room in NYC for dou­ble pay, 400 cool dollaroonies.

Did I just type “dol­la­roonies”? I must be stoned.

I am.

I remem­ber ring­ing up my mother and inform­ing her that I was going to be a newswhore for xmas and I’d be miss­ing the usual fam­ily gath­er­ing. That was 1989. She was less than impressed, but ka-ching! That was a lot of money! It still is!

As a kid grow­ing up, xmas was a big deal and in my (now estranged) extended fam­ily, there was much cel­e­brat­ing to do with both my mother’s and father’s side of the family.

As I got older and we fell out with var­i­ous branches of our fam­ily tree, xmas’s were down­scaled, but still big events in my imme­di­ate family.

I liked it mainly for the gifts.

Xmas stopped being fun when I stopped get­ting bicycles.

The last xmas I shared with my par­ents was 1991 and every year since, I’ve either worked or just not gone. My dad died in Sept 2004, my mother is very dis­abled and has been con­fined to a bed, fol­low­ing a stroke in 2003 and now lives in a nurs­ing home. That’s 13 xmas’s avoided.

I tried to write about all of this last year and I couldn’t fin­ish it. I went into far more detail and skip­ping down mem­ory lane was dif­fi­cult, if not impos­si­ble and I gave up. I still have what I wrote, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to read it again. Hey ho.

For most peo­ple, I think the hol­i­days are pure stress. All you need to do is visit your local high street or shop­ping dis­trict and watch how cunty every­one is to each other to see proof of this. Expec­ta­tions have to be met at all costs, even if it means elbow­ing some old lady out of the way, so you can get the last copy of Nigella Express.

Xmas for me, has come to mean my fam­ily, my imme­di­ate fam­ily. When I think about xmas, I think about the four of us, my par­ents, my younger brother and me.

I can remem­ber spend­ing many xmas eve’s unable to sleep, because I was so excited; adren­a­line cours­ing though my veins, mak­ing it impos­si­ble to rest.

I can remem­ber the smell of my mother’s home-baked xmas cookies.

I can remem­ber my dad swear­ing when he thought I couldn’t hear him, as he tried valiantly to assem­ble some crappy toy that wouldn’t sur­vive in one piece for more than a week.

And I can remem­ber my younger brother, just as excited as me, check­ing to see if our par­ents were awake at ridicu­lously early times, because we weren’t allowed to go down­stairs until they were ready to accom­pany us for the rit­ual rip­ping of the wrap­ping paper.

I can remem­ber more, much more, but it all just depresses me now because I’ll never have those times with my fam­ily again. I can’t.

These days, I don’t get excited about xmas, instead I count the sec­onds until it’s the 2nd of Jan­u­ary. Then its all over and I can exhale.

Though when I think about that first xmas I sold, back in 1989, for 400 dol­la­roonies, I wish I could give them a refund. Four hun­dred bucks for one more xmas with my fam­ily would be the bar­gain of the millennium!

I hope wher­ever you are, all your hol­i­day dreams came true and you spent it with peo­ple far less mis­er­able than me. Maybe hav­ing me trapped behind a desk over the hol­i­days is good for every­one, not just me. We’ll never know…

I grant you per­mis­sion to prod my neck or clasp my wrist. Indeed, I do still pos­sess a pulse for I remain alive and nearly well.

I haven’t been ill, not really. I’ve been suf­fer­ing from a mal­ady known as overwork-itis and I am the cause of this afflic­tion. I’ve worked 10 out of the last 13 nights, with tonight being my final night — num­ber 11. Go me. After that, I’m off for a cou­ple of weeks to catch my breath and catch up with you guys.

So much for my 100 post thing, you might pos­si­bly be think­ing. Well, I am here to tell ya that 100 days hasn’t passed yet. I can still catch up. How do you know I won’t snort a shit load of crys­tal meth and stay up for 6 days and nights, doing noth­ing but blogging?

You know this, because I’m telling you, I shan’t be ingest­ing any hor­ri­ble, crappy, man-made shite! This hippy don’t do class A drugs no more, anyway!

But I can still catch up. I haven’t counted to see how behind I am, but I’m sure its not an insur­mount­able num­ber. This hippy is a hippy that can do! And does! And will…!

Fuck, I might start buy­ing into my own hype. Naw, I’m far to cyn­i­cal and clever for that. Besides, its not like I’m actu­ally sell­ing any­thing. Every­thing I do, I do for you, for free! When’s the last time you got an invoice from this hippy?

I wouldn’t know how to charge for this shit, any­way. Just send me your credit card num­bers (and don’t for­get the 3 digit sig­na­ture strip num­ber too) and I’ll buy myself some­thing pretty, on you.

Wouldn’t you like to buy me some­thing pretty? Like a Porsche? Noth­ing says you love me like a finely engi­neered Ger­man sports car. And I’m going to be 45 years old in Jan­u­ary, don’t you think I’m ready for a mid-life-crisis mobile?

And speak­ing of gifts, I’m sure I’m not the only one who you’re shop­ping for because it’s Christ­mas soon. That means this hippy’s hol­i­day shop­ping guide will be com­ing soon too. As a fer­vent con­sumer of every­thing, I am well-placed to help you choose gifts for peo­ple I’ve never met…as long as they are cool peo­ple, but if you’re read­ing my blog, you must be cool and every­one you know is cool too. It’s sim­ple math, really.

Are you dig­ging it? Groovy!

I can’t believe that Tony Blair’s been Prime Min­is­ter for over ten years.

Of course, I do believe it; I’m not in denial or any­thing. If I am in denial about any­thing, it would be just how quickly time passes. Ten years, it seems, can dis­ap­pear in the blink of an eye. He’s step­ping down today, but if you get so much of any news today, it would be hard to miss. We don’t get a new Prime Min­is­ter that often, these days!
It does feel like it was only yes­ter­day that Blair won his first elec­tion. I was work­ing in a tv news­room, all night, that night, right through to the morning.

I remem­ber watch­ing a live feed from, I think it was the South Bank, where Tony was hav­ing his vic­tory cel­e­bra­tions. The crowd was as big, as it was jubi­lant. He got a wel­come nor­mally reserved for sport­ing heroes and rock stars.

I can remem­ber that song, too; his cam­paign theme song – D-REAM – Things can only get better…

They didn’t; at least, not from where I’m sitting.

Crime rates are up, taxes are up, the NHS is worse, most gov­ern­ment ser­vices are lack­ing, civil rights eroded, house prices sky­rock­et­ing, and we’re still knee-deep in a point­less war that seems to have no end in sight.

Job well done, Mr. B!

Good luck solv­ing all the prob­lems in the MidEast next. With your track record, I’m sure it will be sorted within weeks of your appoint­ment as the new “peace envoy” to the region.

It’s easy to be crit­i­cal with hindsight.

But back in 1997, we were all just so happy to put the Iron Lady and then the Grey Man behind us, that we would have cel­e­brated any­one else’s elec­tion. Tony was that anyone.

The day after the elec­tion, I remem­ber it seemed like the mood in the entire coun­try just lifted. Strangers smiled at you on the streets, chil­dren held doors open for old ladies and that hot chick a few houses down the road from me finally relented and gave me a world class BJ.

OK, I made that last bit up, but that’s how it felt; like all of your dreams were pos­si­ble and maybe that next knock on the front door might really be that hotty from 2 doors down, offer­ing to plea­sure me in return for a bor­rowed cup of sugar.

Now, that’s what I call neighbourly!

If I knew then, what I know now…

I wouldn’t have been so happy.

None of us would have even come close.

And what really bugs me about Tony Blair is that he’s not stu­pid. And I think his inten­tions to do “good” were genuine.

He just cocked it up. He got it wrong. Or worse, he allowed com­mer­cial and polit­i­cal com­pro­mises to dom­i­nate his policy.

Do you really think sit­ting at the big table with George W doesn’t come with a price?

Do you really think any alleged exchange of cash for peer­ages, didn’t include some strings that might lead back to some pos­si­ble, dodgier busi­ness deals?

I don’t think we’ve really scratched the sur­face on any of this just yet. There’s plenty of dig­ging yet to be done. It will be. Dirt always finds a way out.

Ten years is a long time. Let’s see what Tony’s up to in ten more years.

Will be seen as an elder states­man, con­tin­u­ing to per­form on the world’s polit­i­cal stage?

Will he still be on the lec­ture cir­cuit, com­mand­ing large speak­ing fees and pub­lish­ing bor­ing, yet wor­thy books?

Or will he be locked in Slo­bo­dan Milosevic’s old cell at the War Crimes Tri­bunal in The Hague, await­ing trial over his role in the Iraq war?

Or a cell in Bel­marsh, await­ing trial for some as of yet dis­cover cor­rup­tion allegation?

I wouldn’t want to spec­u­late, espe­cially as I got it so very wrong ten years ago. Let’s just say if I were Mr. Blair, I’d avoid any stopovers in Hol­land for a while and get a good lawyer!

Oh wait, he’s got his wife! She could be his mouth­piece, although from what I hear, she ain’t cheap either! He can afford it.

See ya, Tony! Your ten years sure went quick! Time really does fly when you’re watch­ing soci­ety crum­ble before your eyes!

After yesterday’s decon­struc­tion of all things moral and true in our uni­verse and our lack of sta­tion within it; I thought I would con­tinue in this same philo­soph­i­cal vein with some thoughts on time.

I can feel mine, run­ning out.

It’s been doing that since the day I was born; only recently I think I’ve actu­ally become able to per­ceive the tick-tock of nature run­ning its course.

It is nat­ural, in our uni­verse, in our four-dimensional world that we per­ceive time pass­ing. Time is impor­tant to us.

But I’m talk­ing about some­thing dif­fer­ent, some­thing more per­sonal. I’m talk­ing about my own lifes­pan; maybe what I really mean is I can tell I’m aging.

Oh blah, blah, blah, the hippy is get­ting old. Show me some­one who isn’t and you will be show­ing me a dead man; death is the only known alter­na­tive to aging.

Until they admit aging is just some kink in our genetic code that they will one day be able to re-sequence right out of your DNA, if you can afford it.

Trust me, you won’t be able to afford it. Nei­ther will I.

Time is change; I like change, but when my time runs out; I’ll miss all the changes.

I think that’s what irks me most about hav­ing a finite lifes­pan; I won’t be able to see how it all turns out. I want to know what’s going to hap­pen on the day after my death.

Even bet­ter, how about 100 years after, or a thou­sand, or even ten thou­sand! My curios­ity about the future dri­ves me crazy.

I’m not say­ing the future is going to be all shiny and golden, I actu­ally have a sneak­ing sus­pi­cion that it’s going to be quite bleak and in my life time, but I do so very much want to know how it wraps up.

And it is all going to wrap up some­day, when our sun goes super-nova if not before. I don’t think our species will last that long on this planet and I’d be a fool to reject the notion of inter­plan­e­tary immigration!

I’d be a fool to reject any future devel­op­ments in sci­ence and technology.

There’s just so much we don’t know about so many things, even now in our “mod­ern age”, or “our infancy as sen­tient beings” in hippytruthspeak.

There are things that we’ve yet to dis­cover that I promise you will turn our under­stand­ing of so many things, so upside-down, that you won’t know if you’re com­ing or going. I’m talk­ing about giant changes in our per­cep­tions of the vast­ness of the uni­verse to the tini­est of tiny sub-atomic particles.

And no, I don’t know any­thing about what these giant strides in our knowl­edge are; if I did I would be writ­ing for impor­tant and respected sci­en­tific jour­nals and not just shit in some blog on the internet!

And by shit, of course I mean highly enter­tain­ing, thought pro­vok­ing mas­ter­pieces that bring joy to dozens, I mean mil­lions, of course!

When I was a kid, the small­est par­ti­cles known to man were the three bits of the atom, which if my mem­ory is cor­rect are, pro­tons, neu­trons and electrons.

And then the started smack­ing atoms together in par­ti­cle accel­er­a­tors and well, wouldn’t you know it, they found quarks. And I think they may have even found even smaller bits than quarks, though I will not deny my knowl­edge of cutting-edge physics is shall we say, rather limited.

Who knows what those crazy boffins will come up with next?

Let’s go back to time.

Imag­ine, if you can, that time, which is known as the fourth-dimension, actu­ally had a dimen­sion in space. The tiny meat-based com­puter in your head will have trou­ble with this con­cept, as mine does, but stay with me.

Imag­ine if this fourth dimen­sion could be mea­sured in space and mapped; as if you could phys­i­cally per­ceive it, almost touch it. Think of it as a free flow­ing river and all we’ve been doing since we started mea­sur­ing time, is gaug­ing the cur­rent of this river.

We know the speed of the time river, or rather, we per­ceive it in our lim­ited way and we know the direc­tion. That one’s a given as we per­ceive time as mov­ing forward.

Now sup­pose you dis­cov­ered this river exist­ing in a part of space that our senses can’t per­ceive, but is just as tan­gi­ble as the other dimensions.

You can pick on a pen­cil and thrust it for­ward and back, up and down, or side to side; which cov­ers all three dimen­sions, but what if you could thrust it into a fourth that exists in space, but is not vis­i­ble to you in any way.

Am I really doing your head in? Sorry, I’m nearly there.

Take the leap that some­how, some sci­en­tist has found this time river in space and he decides to build a pod to launch him­self into it.

Now, I know you’re get­ting it.

This pod could sim­ply let the cur­rent carry it for­ward, which would be the most likely out­come, or per­haps this sci­en­tist man­aged to power the pod in such a way that it could over­come the force of the river and travel in the oppo­site direc­tion. What has this sci­en­tist invented?

Time travel.

I’m not say­ing that this is likely, or even plau­si­ble, but it is pos­si­ble and it’s pos­si­ble because of our igno­rance of time…and every­thing else that we know jack shit about.

That would be nearly every­thing that mat­ters in the uni­verse. Oh, I cov­ered that yesterday.

I don’t know that I would want to travel back in time, but for­ward cer­tainly appeals to me, but again that’s down to my curios­ity about the future.

I take that back, in a sense, as lately I’ve been feel­ing unusu­ally nos­tal­gic about the past, specif­i­cally my fam­ily. I’m not say­ing my child­hood was per­fect, whose is? But if I could go back for say a day, I would.

The ques­tion is what day?

Would I choose some­thing cheesy like that one birth­day when my par­ents sur­prised me with a brand new bike; or maybe I could go all smaltzy and pick one of the rare occa­sions when my father told me he loved me.

Or maybe just go the obvi­ous route and select the day I smoked my first joint and got high.

It wouldn’t be any of those; it would actu­ally be a day that I think is going to make my younger brother laugh when he reads it. It’s not even a spe­cific day and even more sur­pris­ing, it’s not even a day I would have thought at the time would mean so much to me now.

I’m not even sure of the year, but I would ven­ture a guess to say the late 1970s, in the sum­mer. My father had a boat and rather than take an annual hol­i­day, he would use his leave a cou­ple of days here or there, every week for the entire sum­mer. Mainly he took off Mon­days and/or Fri­days so we could go out deep-sea fish­ing on the boat.

Ok, I had a slightly priv­i­leged child­hood, but noth­ing com­pared to the super-rich of today. Trust me, I’ve more than redressed the bal­ance as an adult.

We’d all go out on the boat for the day, my father, my mother, my younger brother and yours truly, your favourite northlondon-based hippy.

My father would make sand­wiches and pack a cooler with soft drinks and we would cast off early then spend the day at sea; maybe catch­ing fish, maybe not; argu­ing, laugh­ing but mainly just enjoy­ing being a family.

It was all just so sim­ple, so care­free. I can tell you right now, that I doubt I’ll ever expe­ri­ence that feel­ing again for as long as I may live.

To gen­uinely have no wor­ries, no respon­si­bil­i­ties, to know that every­thing was all right and as far as you could tell it would always be that way is a feel­ing that only really good drugs can reproduce.

And even then, they wear off, you come down and you’re right back where you started.

I miss my fam­ily so much some­times it hurts, but the only way I could ever get back to that moment, that feel­ing, is if some­one really does invent a time machine and I can order one from the inter­net on my Visa card and that just ain’t gonna happen.

And if you told me on one of those fish­ing trips that I would be sit­ting in front my a com­puter in my north Lon­don lair nearly thirty fuck­ing years later, bawl­ing my cunt­ing eyes out as I share my deep­est thoughts with any­one who hap­pens to stum­ble on my blog online on the inter­net, do you know what I would have said?

What’s the internet?

Ok, besides that, I would have told you that you were talk­ing crazy! I believe I actu­ally did actu­ally say that, to my mother, on the many occa­sions when she told there would come a time when I would feel this way and I rejected the very thought.

And now, I can’t even tell her that she was right because I haven’t spo­ken to her in around three months for no good rea­son except that I talk a really good game, but I’m a piece of shit too.

I never said I was perfect.

Ok, I did actu­ally, many times.

I was lying.

Let’s get back on track, wipe those manly tears from my eyes and return to the sub­ject at hand.

If you told me 30 years ago that I would have this amaz­ing device in front of me that could edit video, audio, text, and pho­tos as well as being con­nected to the rest of the world, I wouldn’t have believed you.

And if you told me way back then that any­one with one of these magic devices could pub­lish any­thing they wanted in such a way that any­one else with one of these amaz­ing boxes, any­where in the world could read it, I would have thought it was the stuff of sci­ence fiction.

And that’s only hap­pened in the last thirty years!

Just imag­ine what’s amaz­ing treats are in store for the peo­ple still here in the future.

Imag­ine being able to travel through time, or the­o­ret­i­cally liv­ing for­ever, if you don’t get run over by a bus or shot by a jeal­ous husband!

And that’s at the root of this hippy’s dis­pute with time. Mine is going to run out before a lot of really cool shit hap­pens and that makes me very sad.

If I could live long enough, maybe there would be a way for me to make it back on that boat, even if it was just for five min­utes. It’s a jour­ney I would will­ingly take, if I could.

Is your life as fucked up as mine? Are your thoughts as twisted? Email me let me know your secret for not going com­pletely insane!

As ever, I remain your ever faith­ful, ever loyal, ever twisted, northlondonhippy!

Yo groovers, what’s shakin’?

I’m not so much shak­ing as trem­bling, but I’m old and it’s prob­a­bly just the onset of some debil­i­tat­ing and degen­er­a­tive brain wast­ing disease.

Ah, the joys of aging!

I’ve been think­ing about grow­ing old recently; obsess­ing about it is prob­a­bly a more accu­rate descrip­tion. It makes a change from obsess­ing about my own death and the deaths of those close to me though!

It’s good to shift gears occasionally!

I’m 43, but I’m quite a youth­ful 43, what­ever that means. I’m spry, agile and pos­sess all of my phys­i­cal fac­ul­ties. I’m not par­tic­u­larly fit in a cardio-vascular sort of way, but I’m as strong as an ox, only I prob­a­bly smell better.

Lately, though, and I’ll whis­per this because its not some­thing I’d want to say too loudly, but lately, I’ve been hav­ing odd aches and pains in my mus­cles and joints. My knees hurt some­times, when I squat down to do some things, like wipe a mess off the floor or even tie my shoes. The only way to relieve the pain is to stand back up again.

And yes, my shoes have laces; I’m not so old that I’ve switched to loafers, just yet.

I’ve got hairs grow­ing out of my ear­lobes. They’re really long, coarse, white hairs that hurt when I pull them out. I’ve got flecks of grey in my beard, but because I keep it trimmed quite short, they’re not notice­able. I’ve got the odd white hairs on my head too, but there’s so few of them, I could count them on one hand.

The point is, my body is chang­ing. It may not be as fast as other peo­ple, but the years are grad­u­ally tak­ing their toll on me, as they will on all of us.

And there’s sweet fuck all I can do about it! Fuckers!

In seven years, I’ll be fifty years old. Fuck! Fifty! Seven years is noth­ing, it’s a blink of a fuck­ing eye!

In my mind, I still feel 15; only I can drive my car and buy liquor. Oh and I have a mort­gage. And a respon­si­ble job. And a seri­ous cannabis habit.

And peo­ple say all of those things don’t go well together! Well bull­shit to that; I’m liv­ing proof you can be a highly func­tion­ing, dope-smoking, mem­ber of society!

I even pay my taxes! I’m a well-behaved hippy.

But here’s the thing: I was born too soon.

Aging is a dis­ease, a genetic aber­ra­tion; a defect in our cod­ing; noth­ing more. At some point a lit­tle tiny bit of one of our lit­tle tiny strands of DNA goes POP and sud­denly your body starts to break down.

We call it aging and because we all do it, we don’t see it as a dis­ease, but it is. Soon, sci­ence will dis­cover the cure. We don’t all have to die.

Think I’m crazy? Think again.

Those wacky boffins have already mapped the entire human genome. Very soon, they’ll have a bet­ter under­stand­ing of what each gene does to the point where they will be able to iso­late the bits that con­trol aging.

And do you know what they fig­ure out how to do then?

They’ll learn how to switch-off the aging process. Effec­tively you’ll immortal.

Of course there will be other things that could get you, like can­cer, heart dis­ease and plane crashes, but the first two will prob­a­bly be genet­i­cally cured too. So watch out for those dodgy 747’s that do the long haul routes!

Genetic sci­ence is going to be able to fix every­thing that’s wrong with you at some point in the not too dis­tant future; includ­ing the most com­mon dis­ease known on the planet: aging.

I’m just sorry I was born a bit too late to take advan­tage of this liv­ing for­ever lark. I reckon I’d be good at it. Oh well.

At least my writ­ing will live on eter­nally, after I’m gone.

Maybe the world will catch on to me then and every­one will know that I really was (am?) the first true genius of the twenty-first century!