The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘death’ Category

I’ve always had a very unhealthy obses­sion with death, mainly my own.

I’ve imag­ined my own death count­less times, in count­less ways.

I’ve pic­tured myself pass­ing qui­etly in a ster­ile white hos­pi­tal room, alone, at a very old age, in the dark.

I’ve seen myself col­lapse in the street, clutch­ing my chest, sud­denly and with­out warning.

I’ve thought about all man­ner of vio­lent death too, from a hor­ri­ble car crash, to being bru­tally beaten sense­less by a gang of teenage thugs.

I’ve thought about this a lot, too much, to the point of it being eas­ily labelled a decades’ old obsession.

Its not really death that I fear, its the process of dying and my mor­bid curios­ity at how I will go, when­ever that time comes.

Will it be painful?

Will I suffer?

Will I linger?

Will it take long?

Is it going to hap­pen soon?

The roots of my fear of death were planted by my father. He was an older dad, I was the child of a sec­ond mar­riage who came late in his life. He talked about dying all the time and how he just wanted to live long enough to see me and my brother right in the world.

As a child, hear­ing this mantra of his fre­quently, I wor­ried about his death a lot. I was close with my father when I was a child, his talk of death scared me and dug deep into my sub-conscious, where it remains to this day.

As it turned out, he lived a pretty long life, but had an unpleas­antly long and drawn out death. From his diag­no­sis to his pass­ing, it took about a year, with his health declin­ing steadily in between. The last cou­ple of months were par­tic­u­larly bad, with his decline ever more steep and his hopes dashed with each treat­ment option fail­ing. His final days were spent heav­ily med­icated, but he was at home, in his own bed when he drew his last breath.

As deaths go, I’d give it a 6, he loses points for the dura­tion of suf­fer­ing, but gains some for being able to choose to be at home. Also, he scores well on the life to death ratio, he lived to be 84 and was sick for only a year.

You can’t really do a score­card for death, each one is unique.

There’s an old joke about a guy who, when asked how he’d like to die, said “when I’m 100 years old I’d like to be shot by a jeal­ous hus­band”. That sounds like an OK way to go, as long as you’re a sprightly 100.

My mother’s death, unlike my father’s, was rel­a­tively quick, hap­pen­ing over about 48 hour period, from becom­ing ill to slip­ping qui­etly away.

Where my mother loses out is in the qual­ity of life stakes, she had a mas­sive stroke about 7 years before, which left her severely impaired.

She couldn’t walk, had a lot of trou­ble talk­ing too, and her coor­di­na­tion was par­tic­u­larly poor. For the 7 years she sur­vived after the stroke, she was depen­dent upon help for absolutely every­thing, like dress­ing, wash­ing, eat­ing and going to the toi­let. Its no way for any­one to live, or rather exist.

When my mother had the stroke and was being treated in the hos­pi­tal, my father was given a choice of whether or not to put her on life support.

He had been told it was a very bad stroke and her recov­ery would be prob­lem­atic and never com­plete. He was also aware my mother had a liv­ing will, which pretty much said, if she was ever in this posi­tion, not to take dras­tic mea­sures to keep her alive if the prog­no­sis for recov­ery was grim.

My father ignored my mother’s wishes and said yes to the life sup­port. He couldn’t bare to think of life with­out my her nor could he imag­ine her not mak­ing a full recov­ery. Nature would have killed my mother off then and there, peace­fully, in her sleep, but instead my father chose to use every mir­a­cle machine known to mod­ern med­i­cine to sus­tain my mother’s life.

His mantra to all hos­pi­tal staff became this: “She walked into this hos­pi­tal on her own and she’s damn well going to walk back out”.

How wrong he was.

My father could have spared my mother seven years of a hor­ri­ble exis­tence, but he was self­ish. He paid for this deci­sion him­self as his life got much harder when my mother was finally allowed to go home after sev­eral months in the hos­pi­tal and a rehab facility.

My mother could only get around in a wheel­chair and had sev­eral med­ical appoint­ments a week that my father had to trans­port her to, unaided. He was in his 80s.

He refused all assis­tance at first, and not until he was over­whelmed, did he relent and hire some home help.

My father’s own death obses­sion kicked into over­drive and his new catch­phrase became this: “What would hap­pen to my wife if some­thing hap­pened to me?” This thought ran through his head con­stantly, it kept him up at night, he men­tioned it every time he spoke to me. His fear of his own death now had a tan­gi­ble focus, my mother’s fate.

What you think about can become real, as it wasn’t too long after this that they found a large, malig­nant and inop­er­a­ble tumour in his blad­der. Thus began his one year decline into death.

The “what to do about my mother” ques­tion became inter­twined with the “beat­ing this can­cer” goal. “If I can just beat this can­cer,” thought my father. “then I can con­tinue to care for my wife.” It took him a few months to realise he couldn’t and the part time home help turned into a full time, live in carer for both of them.

When my father died, my mother con­tin­ued to live in their house, with the live in carer. As it turned out, she would have had enough money to con­tinue liv­ing this way, which was what I wanted for her, but her fear helped her decide to move into a care home. It was a good one, but expen­sive, more expen­sive than stay­ing in her home, but it was my mother’s choice.

My mother spent the last five plus years of her life in that care home, before slip­ping into a coma and dying in a hos­pi­tal bed, alone and uncon­scious. She should have died many years before, her life was no richer for those last, post-stroke years of hard­ship and suffering.

We all have to face death in all its var­ied forms and per­mu­ta­tions. Death and dying come in many assorted flavours.

I lost four friends and many more col­leagues, who all died while doing what we do, cov­er­ing the news. I’ve been a jour­nal­ist for over 20 years and when I was younger and more fool­ish, put myself in harm’s way too.

I’ve spent time in war zones and other dan­ger­ous places and the peo­ple I work with still do, every day, to tell you about peo­ple and places many peo­ple don’t give a shit about. Hey ho.

My four friends who all per­ished while work­ing abroad, had quick, yet vio­lent deaths. I’m not going get into any great detail here, Three of them were chased by armed men or rebels before being gunned down, one was killed by a stray, unex­pected mor­tar shell. Each death effected me per­son­ally and pro­fes­sion­ally in quite pro­found ways.

All four of them were rel­a­tively young, some left behind part­ners and chil­dren. Each one was a decent, thought­ful and respected col­league and journalist.

One of these deaths was par­tic­u­larly hard on me because I was on duty when the news broke. I was work­ing on a news desk, the cen­tral point of con­tact for every­one in my organ­i­sa­tion. A lot of the tele­phone calls I received were from dis­traught peo­ple all over the world, wak­ing up to the news of the death of a close friend. Many were in tears, many wanted me to tell them that the news got it wrong.

I wish I could have.

When death comes to the young and good, its par­tic­u­larly hard on those left behind, try­ing to make sense of out it, try­ing to under­stand it.

I’ll tell you some­thing right now, there is no sense in any sense­less death, there is no under­stand­ing. Shit hap­pens, you just deal with it as best you can.

After that spate of deaths, my indus­try tried to improve on safety. More hos­tile envi­ron­ment train­ing was brought in, safety advi­sors in dan­ger­ous places are deployed reg­u­larly now, but jour­nal­ists still con­tinue to be killed in the line of duty.

Los­ing friends makes you think about your own mor­tal­ity, not that I needed any help.

There are two other friends I lost, both of their deaths remark­ably similar.

They were both about the same age, both had sim­i­lar inter­ests and lifestyles. One was a musi­cian, the other a journalist.

Both of my friends were 50 years old when they died, both had mas­sive heart attacks. One was found in his flat, sit­ting in his favourite chair, the other was at home with his part­ner and fell over dead as he got up from the sofa. Both died fairly instantly and may not have had much time to work out what was happening.

Both used via­gra and cocaine reg­u­larly and drank heav­ily too. You don’t need to be a doc­tor to work out that’s a bad combination.

As I get older, my death obses­sion seems to have more things to fuel it.

Peo­ple my age (I’m push­ing 50) die from all sorts of things, nat­ural and oth­er­wise. I think about my health more often. I don’t actu­ally do much about it, but I think about it…does that count for anything?

I get my cho­les­terol and glu­cose checked reg­u­larly, along with my blood pres­sure. All are good, espe­cially my cho­les­terol, which was 3.1 at my most recent test. I don’t look like I should have low cho­les­terol, but I do. Go figure.

None of that means I’m immune from whatever’s lurk­ing out there, wait­ing to pounce on me. I don’t drink at all, but I do smoke, cig­a­rettes and weed. I don’t exer­cise, I don’t watch my diet and I work only nights. Not exactly the regime you’d pay a thou­sand quid a day for at a health farm.

If you would pay a grand a day to live my lifestyle, get in touch, I’d be happy to sort you out, as long as you are happy always being high and mas­tur­bat­ing sev­eral times a day, but not in pub­lic, because that’s just gross.

Will it be a heart attack that gets me? My father had one of those.

How about a stroke? My mother’s got that covered.

Can­cer? It got most of my aunts and uncles on my mother’s side.

Car acci­dent? I think about it every time I get behind the wheel. Will this be my last jour­ney? Is there a drunk dri­ver or over­tired lorry dri­ver out there with with me in his sights?

How about some freak acci­dent, like a plum­met­ing jet engine a’la Donny Darko? A stray bul­let from some silly gang related shoot­ing on my north Lon­don ghetto street? That could hap­pen too.

Ter­ror­ism, viral pan­demic, earth­quake, tor­nado, take your pick, the news is full of so many lethal things.

There are so many ways I could die and not know­ing how its going to turn out for me is a gen­uine obsession.

But would I really want to know how I’m going to die?

Wouldn’t it be the ulti­mate spoiler?

If there was a box I could click online that would reveal the details of my death, would I click it?

Would I really want to know the big three facts about my inevitable death; when? where? how?

Hell, yes! I would def­i­nitely click that box. And then I am sure I would regret it.

What would I do if I did knew the details of my death?

I’d try to cheat it, if I could. If I knew a bus was going to hit me on the high street next Fri­day, I’d damn make sure I was some­place else.

But what if I couldn’t cheat it, some hor­ri­ble dis­ease or med­ical cat­a­stro­phe that couldn’t be avoided. What would I do with that knowl­edge, that my own body was a tick­ing time bomb, wait­ing to go off on a cer­tain date?

Would I get my affairs in order, what­ever that means?

Would I make a bucket list and try to cram what­ever time I had left on doing things I sud­denly felt were important?

Or would I just sit qui­etly, await­ing des­tiny, safe with the knowl­edge that my fate was well and truly sealed?

Who knows? I’ll never find out.

There is no real way to know when you’re going to die. Some peo­ple do find out the “how” from their doc­tors, along with a rough timescale, but I think that’s about as close as it gets. In that sit­u­a­tion, I’d have no choice but to know.

Whether or not know­ing would be help­ful, well, who’s to say?

What­ever does get me, is out there some­where right now, in the world or inside my body. Whether its today, tomor­row, next week, next year or next cen­tury is anybody’s guess. Who knows what mir­a­cles sci­ence might pro­vide in the next decades?

There are two things I’ve always thought would hap­pen to help peo­ple cheat death.

One is my view that age­ing is sim­ply a genetic dis­or­der that even­tu­ally will be cor­rected with gene ther­apy. I think they are close to this dis­cov­ery, iso­lat­ing what it is in our DNA that makes our bod­ies age and then fig­ur­ing out how to manip­u­late it and switch it off. It may sound like sci-fi, but its not and it will have all sorts of eth­i­cal and prac­ti­cal impli­ca­tions for the future of our planet.

Per­haps only the super rich will ben­e­fit from this dis­cov­ery, maybe it will be avail­able to any­one and every­one. Maybe it will be manda­tory. Maybe it will be kept a secret.

While not deliv­er­ing real immor­tal­ity, it cer­tainly would be a mas­sive step in that direc­tion, as long as you’re not hit by that bus on the high street.

The sec­ond sci­en­tific inno­va­tion that I think will even­tu­ally come, will be the abil­ity to import (ingest? upload? scan? pick a verb) the entire con­tents of a human brain into a com­puter. Once you can do that, you could effec­tively recre­ate a person’s con­scious­ness and con­struct a vir­tual world for them to exist inside. As long as you had a sus­tain­able power source, this the­o­ret­i­cally could deliver immor­tal­ity for all.

Imag­ine being able to con­tinue your exis­tence in a per­fect dig­i­tal world, freed of the con­straints of your flesh. For all inten­sive pur­poses, this dig­i­tal world would be as real as our world and your sense of self, your iden­tity, who you are, would be the same too. You would be reunited with your friends, your rel­a­tives, your loved ones, to spend eter­nity together in the most won­der­ful place imaginable.

That sounds a lot like heaven in the tra­di­tional sense, with one key dif­fer­ence. The heaven of our ances­tors was an imag­i­nary idea, this heaven I pro­pose would be built by man and could one day really exist.

Do I think I’ll see these inno­va­tions in my life­time? That’s the tril­lion dol­lar question.

I think the genetic dis­cov­ery is not that far off, but its use in prac­tise much fur­ther. Its unlikely in my socio-economic class that I will have access to it, if it is in my time.

The dig­i­tal after­life is harder to pre­dict, as guess­ing at the future capa­bil­i­ties of com­puter equip­ment and the rate of change is slightly more com­plex than Moore’s Law would have you believe. Advances in quan­tum com­put­ing are mak­ing the news and once the real break­through hap­pens, we very well may end up with more afford­able com­puter power than any­one can cur­rently imagine.

The sin­gu­lar­ity, anyone?

Once the con­tents of a human brain can be uploaded into a com­puter of unimag­in­able power, a mul­ti­verse of pos­si­bil­i­ties awaits. If I can live long enough to see that hap­pen, I will be very lucky indeed.

I don’t hold out much hope.

I’ve always thought these amaz­ing inno­va­tions would come the day after I die.

So it goes, as Von­negut used to say.

That leaves me with a death obses­sion that won’t be resolved until its my time to shake off this mor­tal coil.

At least I have a pas­time. They say hav­ing a hobby adds years to your life.

(The fol­low­ing is not an April Fools spoof post. That sort of child­ish behav­iour is well behind me)

Like hello and what­not. And ting. See, I’m down with the kids, innit.

For a change, I have a legit­i­mate excuse for not post­ing any­thing here, my iMac died, twice.

I’ll spare you the tech bull­shit and briefly sum up; the hard drive died, it went off to be repaired, it came back, the hard drive died again 8 hours later. It went back for a 2nd repair, this time the drive was wiped, but still work­ing. It came back, the restore process was a mess, it took 3 days of fix­ing to get it back work­ing properly.

Deal­ing with Apple and their autho­rised repair cen­tre was straight­for­ward and easy, and here’s a help­ful tip: Always get the Apple Care on your Macs. Always. One seri­ous prob­lem or repair, it will more than pay for itself. With the prob­lems I’ve had, it has saved me a fortune.

My cur­rent iMac is my third in the last 6 years, an 18 month old, 27” quad core LED screened beast and hadn’t given me any trou­ble till now, but when it died, it really died, while I was using it. I watched as icons dropped off my desk­top, ques­tion marks appeared on the appli­ca­tion icons in the dock, and run­ning apps froze. I tried to restart my machine and when I did, the boot up screen showed noth­ing but a file folder icon with a ques­tion mark on it.

This is a bad thing.

A very bad thing.

I hope you never, ever see the dreaded, hor­ri­ble, ques­tion mark-file folder boot screen icon and may god have mercy on your soul if you don’t have Apple Care.

I phoned Apple, who con­firmed what I sus­pected, most likely the inter­nal drive had failed. They asked if I had a back-up. I did, but it was 2 weeks old.

My bad, I only con­nected my Time Machine drive when the reminder came up, every 10 days — I had ignored it a few days before. Very stu­pid and les­son learned, my Time Machine drive is now always on and always connected.

This all hap­pened on a Sat­ur­day and I had to wait until Mon­day for the repair shop to phone to arrange col­lec­tion. They could have done it on the same day, ie the Mon­day, but it wasn’t pos­si­ble on my part.

Long story short, they swapped out the dead drive for a new one, rein­stalled the OS and tested every­thing. It was deliv­ered back to me early the next week.

I was very happy to have it back and set about restor­ing every­thing from my Time Machine drive, which I was able to do, and I then began to fill in the gaps between my last back-up and the day of the crash, ie about a 2 week period of loss.

I was able to retrieve some recently pur­chased music via iTunes Home Share from another Mac of mine and I emailed myself all of the pho­tos I last imported from my iPhone, then reim­ported them into iPhoto. I keep a lot of my cur­rent doc­u­ments on iDisk, so they were eas­ily obtained as well. I didn’t lose any impor­tant data, I was lucky.

I pur­chased two appli­ca­tions from the Mac App Store that I had to rein­stall, though tech­ni­cally one of them was being installed at the time of the first hard drive crash. Can you guess where this is going?

When my hard drive died the first time, I was installing Xcode 4 from the Mac App Store. Its a hefty 4.5gb down­load and it was tak­ing ages. The first thing I noticed as my sys­tem came apart at the seams was that the instal­la­tion appeared to stall.

I was only installing it so I could acti­vate the new mul­ti­touch ges­tures on my iPad, which requires Xcode 4 to put the device into devel­oper mode. That’s it, a very lame reason.

I started to rein­stall Xcode 4 on my repaired iMac, only this time, instead of doing the Mac App Store magic, it down­loaded the installer pack­age to my Appli­ca­tions Folder. I ran the installer and watched as it froze at about the same point it did before…and then my fold­ers and icons started van­ish­ing from my desktop.

Every­thing stopped work­ing, I restarted the machine and low and behold, I was star­ing at the ques­tion mark-file folder boot icon again.

Apple arranged to have it col­lected again the fol­low­ing day, as a pri­or­ity repair. Once the engi­neer had an ini­tial look, he phoned me and said he was able to rein­stall the OS and could see that the user data was gone. He said he would test the hard­ware and let me know the results, but on ini­tial inspec­tion, every­thing seemed fine.

Indeed it was, and after full and exten­sive test­ing, the machine was returned to me and this is where the real fun began.

I restored from my backup and this time it wasn’t as smooth. There must have been rem­nants of the pre­vi­ous restora­tion, because my Home Folder and login name changed, with a num­ber ”1” added to them, the sys­tem cre­ated a new iden­tity for me, con­structed from all my old files. I didn’t lose any data, what I lost were per­mis­sions and privileges.

There’s a rel­a­tively easy fix for this, via Disk Util­ity and the Repair Per­mis­sions com­mand, but that can only get you so far if you are booted up from the inter­nal drive. To really fix it, plus run the Repair Disk com­mand, you need to boot from the OS X instal­la­tion DVD. Boot­ing from that DVD is a very basic part of trou­bleshoot­ing and guess what, I couldn’t do it.

I tried every pos­si­ble way to boot from the DVD, I even spent nearly an hour on the phone with Apple try­ing to trou­bleshoot it. I just wasn’t able to get it to work. I could read the DVD, have the sys­tem recog­nise it as a bootable drive, I could even start the soft­ware on it to the point where it needs to restart and then zip, noth­ing, the DVD would spin for a bit, then stop, while I got no fur­ther than the Apple Logo boot screen.

I cloned the install disk to a flash drive, that didn’t work either. With help from Apple, I booted the iMac into tar­get disk mode, con­nected it to my lap­top via FireWire, but Repair Per­mis­sions was greyed out. I was able to run Repair Disk though.

The Apple guy (who was great, patient and very help­ful) said that I had 2 choices, send it off for another repair or he could send me a replace­ment installer DVD. His view was that if my install DVD was cor­rupted, that could be why it kept hang­ing when try­ing to boot and he also spec­u­lated that the same cor­rupt nugget of data was stop­ping the flash drive in the same place in the process. It made sense, was I decided to try the new DVD option, even though it would take a week to receive it in the post. Bet­ter that than box­ing it up again and hav­ing it gone for another week.

I thanked the Apple guy and felt dejected. And then I had another idea, I used SuperDuper to clone my entire inter­nal drive to an exter­nal, bootable, FireWire drive. It took 4 hours to copy over nearly 400gb of data, but in the end I was able to boot up my iMac using the FireWIre drive.

So my iMac is work­ing, my inter­nal drive is not mounted, I dove straight for Disk Util­ity. Repair Per­mis­sions was not greyed out, so I clicked on it and let it do its magic. This time, it ran for lit­er­ally ages and I could see it repair­ing count­less files and fold­ers. At the end of the process, I rebooted back to the inter­nal drive and waited to see if I could access every­thing with admin­is­tra­tor privileges.

I could. It worked. Happy days.

I still don’t know why I couldn’t boot from the DVD, but could read the DVD oth­er­wise and won’t know until the replace­ment DVD appears. If I can’t boot from it, it will have to go off for a 3rd repair, but if I can boot from it, I’m laughing.

But what about the ini­tial prob­lem and the sub­se­quent sec­ond prob­lem, both iden­ti­cal from my point of view?

I think in the first instance, they might have replaced my hard drive for no rea­son, on the basis that the paper­work instructed them to do so, rather than test­ing it to see if it would work again with a rein­stall. I don’t know this for sure, but I think its likely that the drive was only wiped.

The more thor­ough test­ing dur­ing the sec­ond repair revealed the drive was wiped and since the symp­toms of both crashes were the same, I am guess­ing every­thing else was the same too, but again its only a guess.

So what caused both problems?

The only com­mon vari­able in both sce­nar­ios is the instal­la­tion of Xcode 4 from the Mac App Store. It can’t be a coin­ci­dence that it was being installed both times the hard drive went ka-blooey.

I men­tioned this to the help­ful Apple guy, who said he’d never heard of such a thing. I’ve searched on Google, I can’t find any­one else who has had a sim­i­lar prob­lem, but some­times things con­flict, soft­ware anom­alies hap­pen and they are not widespread.

Could I repro­duce this a third time? I don’t know and I’m not going to find out by try­ing to install Xcode 4 again. I don’t even want a 3 quid refund from Apple.

I just want my com­puter back…and I think I have it back now, but I’m not con­vinced just yet.

My iMac is the cen­tre of my life. That may seem like an over­state­ment, but actu­ally its not.

To say I have been a bit depressed by all this, now that would be an under­state­ment. I’ve lost sleep, hon­est to god, lost sleep from the stress of all of this.

If you don’t relate to tech and a dig­i­tal lifestyle, I’ll try to put it in a per­spec­tive you might appreciate:

The most expen­sive thing I own is my house.

The sec­ond most expen­sive thing I own is my car.

The third most expen­sive thing I own is my iMac.

The third most expen­sive thing I own died.

The third most expen­sive thing I own was put in a box and taken away by a stranger, twice.

The third most expen­sive thing I own spent the bet­ter part of 2 and 1/2 weeks, away from me.

The third most expen­sive thing I own was my only access to a life time’s worth of pho­tos, all irreplaceable.

You get the idea.

My iMac is my work­sta­tion, my pow­er­house for dig­i­tal heavy lift­ing, the cen­tre­piece of all my high tech kit and it was out of the pic­ture for nearly 3 weeks.

No joke, I had the same sick in the pit of my stom­ach feel­ing I’ve had when some­one close to me has died.

Now that I have solved the major issues with my iMac, I’m try­ing to con­vince myself its back for good. Its a trust issue thing and clearly my toys and I enjoy an unnat­u­rally close relationship.

And I said I wasn’t get too tech­ni­cal. Oooops

Update: Found THIS THREAD on the Apple Sup­port Dis­cus­sion Board, with many peo­ple who had exactly the same prob­lems with Xcode 4 instal­la­tion wip­ing their drive.

(If you’ve found this page because you sus­pect you’ve had prob­lems result­ing from try­ing to install Xcode 4 via the Mac App Store, I really want to hear from you. Please email me, my address is northlondonhippy@gmail.com)

Like hello and whatnot.

Another year has flown by and I’m already cel­e­brat­ing my anniver­sary of being the northlon­don­hippy, again.

And by cel­e­brat­ing, of course I mean writ­ing this.

Whoopeeee…

Seven years ago today I started my orig­i­nal web­site on Blog­ger. Its still there, though I moved every­thing to this, my own hosted web­site a few years ago.

Go me!

Back at the begin­ning, I posted quite fre­quently, mainly because I had noth­ing bet­ter to do.

Blog­ging sprouted from a rel­a­tively brief period of unem­ploy­ment , it gave me some­thing to do with my time, when I wasn’t get­ting high or gob­bling magic mush­rooms, which were legal at the time.

You didn’t think I was going to get through this with­out a men­tion of shrooms, did you? Shrooms played an impor­tant part in the early days and I was a reg­u­lar con­sumer of them. Since the gov­ern­ment tight­ened up the reg­u­la­tions, I’ve been with­out them. I miss them, a lot. Shroom ref­er­ence ends.

Flash for­ward to seven years into the future, to this very day and you’ll see that I hardly post any­thing, any more. There’s prob­a­bly more posts about my lack of posts, than any other subject.

I don’t even attempt to make excuses any more, I’ve just accepted that my par­tic­i­pa­tion here is spo­radic and ran­dom. I pop up when­ever I feel like it, I just don’t feel like it very often.

That’s not strictly true, as I seem to con­tinue to main­tain a run­ning list of top­ics I want to cover, I just don’t seem to get around to doing it. Then, what­ever the topic might be, becomes less inter­est­ing to me, or less rel­e­vant and I delete it from my list and it just never gets written.

I’m back to mak­ing excuses again. Sorry, I’ll stop now.

It would be eas­ier if I could just beam my thoughts directly to the inter­net, I think that’s com­ing as a fea­ture this sum­mer in the iPhone 5, but don’t quote me on that. I wouldn’t want to be start­ing that sort of a rumour.

I know I bang on about Twit­ter a lot, but I do spend a lot more time there than I do on my own web­site. If you did want to bathe in the weird thoughts flow­ing through my head on a daily basis, that remains the best place to do it. Though again, my par­tic­i­pa­tion is ran­dom and spo­radic. I con­sume far more than I con­tribute to Twit­ter, but I do suf­fer from infor­ma­tion glut­tony and tech addiction.

That’s prob­a­bly one of the biggest changes to my life in the last seven years, the amount of tech­nol­ogy in it. I’ve always liked tech and toys, but here in the future, they are more per­va­sive and use­ful than ever before and I find that I am always con­nected, always con­sum­ing media.

A typ­i­cal day starts with me pick­ing my iPhone up from the bed­side table, switch­ing off air­plane mode and let­ting it check my email. I put it in air­plane mode when I go to bed, so it doesn’t ding or buzz with new mes­sages, but I leave it on because it is also my back up alarm clock.

I come down­stairs and fire up my iMac, which is the hub of my tech­no­log­i­cal exis­tence. The hard drive in it died last week and its being repaired this very sec­ond. Don’t worry, I have a TimeMa­chine back up, so I don’t think I’ve lost very much at all, but I am miss­ing my 27” beast very much.

I’ve been using my lifeboat com­puter in the mean­time, an orig­i­nal black Mac­Book that I think is nearly 5 years old. While I’m thank­ful that I’ve got it to use now, its painfully slow, its got about 25% of the screen space of my iMac and the view­ing angle of the LCD screen is not very good. Five years is a very long time in tech termss and my Mac­Book is def­i­nitely show­ing its age. Its bet­ter than noth­ing, loads better!

Any­way, my nor­mal rou­tine with the iMac is to switch it on as soon as I wake up, read the papers online, along with a few other web­sites, check my RSS feed reader, keep an eye on Twit­ter, do some work on some other web­sites I work on, deal with pro­fes­sional and per­sonal emails, sync and charge my iPhone and con­trol my Mac Mini.

My Mac Mini is around 4 and a 1/2 years old and is also show­ing its age. I use it as my media hub, its con­nected to my flatscreen tv and my A/V amp. I use it to play music (streamed around my house to two Air­Port Express units, one in the kitchen, one in my bed­room), I also stream online radio sta­tions the same way. I use the BBC’s iPlayer ser­vice, I down­load and play­back videos from Bit Tor­rent, I use it to screen XVID films friends give me, or even just to play­back videos I’ve shot myself. It gets used a lot. I mostly con­trol the Mac Mini with a remote con­trol, or I use OS X Screen Shar­ing to remotely use con­trol it from the iMac.

My iMac is a pow­er­ful com­puter, I use it to edit video and I mainly use iMovie. I also record my own music, using Logic Pro and a host of exter­nal toys and musi­cal instru­ments that con­nect to my iMac with ease

Once I’ve done every­thing I have to do on the iMac, I might move over to the sofa with my iPad. I surf, use Twit­ter, keep up with my RSS feed, all in a relaxed, com­fort­able way, but that’s not all I’ve done with it. I’ve also used it to edit video, write blog posts and record music. Some of the music pro­duc­tion apps I have are truly amaz­ing, espe­cially Apple’s new Garage­Band app. Its easy to lose hours of your day just play­ing around with it. I’m also a secret Angry Birds HD addict, but shhhh, don’t tell anyone.

My iPhone is always with me and I use it for so many things, its really a Swiss Army Knife of a gad­get. Its my cal­en­dar, my con­tact book, my mobile Twit­ter machine, RSS reader, inter­net browser, still cam­era, video cam­era, music player, film and video player, nav­i­ga­tion device, com­pass, photo edi­tor, video edi­tor, news por­tal, note taker, audio recorder, gam­ing device, clock, weather cen­tre, torch, hand­held track­pad for my Macs, email client, ref­er­ence library, text mes­sage device, oh and its a tele­phone and video­phone too! It does even more than that, I’m just run­ning out of steam think­ing of it all.

My point to all this tech his­tory is that none of this was pos­si­ble 7 years ago, 2 of the devices I just men­tioned couldn’t have even been imag­ined then.

In 2005, I had a run­ning joke here about my brand new all dig­i­tal lifestyle, right around the time I bought my first iMac. Its no joke today, my life truly is all dig­i­tal. So’s yours. So is everyone’s.

They like to describe all this as “dis­rup­tive tech­nol­ogy” and that’s a pretty accu­rate term, as long as you don’t see dis­rup­tion as a nec­es­sar­ily bad thing. I don’t buy CDs any more, I don’t go to record stores any more, because that indus­try has been dis­rupted by the ease and avail­abil­ity of music down­loads. If you own a chain of music stores, you’re not going to like this sort of dis­rup­tion, but if you are a keen media con­sumer, you’re prob­a­bly pretty happy about it.

Tech­nol­ogy isn’t the only thing that’s dis­rupted my life in the last seven years, there’s also been some ill­ness and some death. When it comes to dis­rup­tion, noth­ing else comes close.

Both of my par­ents passed away since I started this web­site. My father was already ill when I started it, and his can­cer fea­tured fre­quently back in the day. Some­where, in the archive, is a post called “Dad’s piss­ing blood again” and I’m sur­prised it didn’t win any awards. He died before this blog was a year old.

My mother crossed over to the great beyond at Christ­mas, two years ago. Noth­ing fills you with the hol­i­day spirit like a bereave­ment on Xmas eve, and that applies to the future too, Xmas will now and for­ever be a reminder of her death.

While my mother had health prob­lems for years, her sud­den death was unex­pected. My father died slowly over the course of a year and we pretty much knew when his death was com­ing to the day. I last spoke to him two days before he died and I got to say good­bye. I didn’t have that chance with my mother.

I’ve become old in the last seven years, at least in my head I have. In my head I’m not 48, I’m “push­ing 50”. One of those posts I haven’t writ­ten is enti­tled “My unhealthy obses­sion with death” and I will get around to writ­ing it, mainly because I’m hop­ing that spit­ting out a life time of death obses­sion might help me move past it. Or not. Who knows.

Blog­ging is like ther­apy for me some­times, its a good way to try to work shit out.

I don’t really think I will ever work out my weird obses­sion with death, specif­i­cally my own. I’ve imag­ined my moment of death so many times, in so many ways, yet I know that none of it has prob­a­bly come close to what­ever hor­ri­ble fate awaits me, as it awaits us all.

Keep an eye out for my death post, it will be a cheery lit­tle num­ber, guar­an­teed to lift your spir­its and make you want to do a happy dance down the street.

The truth is that I feel expend­able, dis­pos­able and irrel­e­vant because I am get­ting old. Maybe that’s nor­mal. Maybe there’s no such thing as normal.

I can feel my body break­ing down, I dis­cover some new ache or pain on a daily basis. My joints creak, my mus­cles throb, my bones ache and I’ve been diag­nosed with a long term health prob­lem that requires daily med­ica­tion for the rest of my life.

Mid­dle age is a joy.

Mid­dle age is stu­pidly named. Either you are young or you’re old. I’m old. Phys­i­cally I am, but in my head I’m still 18 years old and full of all the hopes, ideas and dreams I had at that age. Sad, eh?

I’m the same per­son I was back then, I might move a bit slower and have loads more knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence, but I’m still me.

And I still smoke weed.

That was one of my goals when I started blog­ging, to fur­ther the cannabis cause. I’ve been smok­ing weed every day, for a cou­ple of months shy of 30 years. I would qual­ify my use as a com­bi­na­tion of recre­ational and med­i­c­i­nal, though its cer­tainly more med­i­c­i­nal these days.

Weed should be legal and the fact that its not shows just how mixed up our cur­rent drug pol­icy has become. Cannabis can be so ben­e­fi­cial in so many ways.

Right now, in these dif­fi­cult and depress­ing eco­nomic times, cannabis is a cash crop our lead­ers should not be ignor­ing. A licensed, reg­u­lated and more impor­tantly taxed cannabis mar­ket would be a much needed boon to the econ­omy. Instead they would rather close schools, hos­pi­tals and libraries and let crim­i­nals con­trol the mar­ket. Its as fool­ish and short­sighted as it sounds.

I’m not going to bang on about it too much now, my posi­tion is clear.

I may not be as pro­lific as I once was, but there’s a giant archive of nearly 750 posts to explore. You might learn to love me, you might come to hate me, but I’m sure you can waste plenty of time here, if you desire.

So that’s it, my weird and ram­bling reflec­tion of the last seven years of liv­ing my life online, just for you. I’m always here, just a few mouse clicks away. Come hang out with me, any time.

If the first seven years are any­thing to go by, the next seven ought to be a real gas, man! Groovy!

There are many big prob­lems in our lit­tle world here that could all be solved with some sim­ple, ratio­nal think­ing and com­mon sense.

Let’s start with a big one, admit­ting to our­selves just how prim­i­tive a species we are, even though we have iPods and Microwave Ovens and other mod­ern won­ders of tech­nol­ogy. We still remain quite prim­i­tive and rel­a­tively igno­rant of so very much regard­ing the uni­verse and our place in it.

We are extra­or­di­nar­ily prim­i­tive, more so than any­one would ever like to think. We are still a tribal race, unable to take a long term or global view of the true nature of our exis­tence or the context.

We still cling to an “us ver­sus them” men­tal­ity, we view peo­ple like us, liv­ing in the same place as more impor­tant than oth­ers, we fos­ter rival­ries and dis­sent between races and nations, rather than encour­ag­ing stronger ties based upon our similarities.

We are all the same, we are all earth­lings first and fore­most, every indi­vid­ual on this planet should have an equal worth, with the oper­a­tive word being “should”, because the real­ity is noth­ing like that.

We value dif­fer­ent peo­ple, dif­fer­ent races, dif­fer­ent classes, dif­fer­ent nation­al­i­ties as all hav­ing dif­fer­ent and unequal worth in our so called mod­ern soci­ety. We remain incred­i­bly self­ish when only self­less­ness will redeem the human race.

Imag­ine some space aliens arrived, imag­ine them any way you like, as long as they seem real and some­what ordi­nary, because chances are intel­li­gent life in the uni­verse would be both of those things, ordi­nary and most likely real.

Imag­ine they didn’t read the fine print in their Travel Guide to the Uni­verse which car­ried the caveat to our small blue planet, advis­ing against any direct con­tact when vis­it­ing, because of our unevolved and prim­i­tive nature. They missed that bit and landed their space craft in the cen­tre of a big city, expect­ing to be warmly wel­comed by the friendly res­i­dents of our world.

Imag­ine the many sur­prises in store for these space vis­i­tors as they dis­cov­ered our planet was not uni­fied, we still believed we were the only species in the uni­verse, cre­ated by an invis­i­ble, yet all see­ing, all know­ing space god, fight­ing each other for land and oil and reli­gious dif­fer­ences. Oh, how they would laugh and mock us, see­ing us as no more than insects scur­ry­ing around in the dirt.

They wouldn’t be too far off in their brief assess­ment of our world.

I keep com­ing back to the word “prim­i­tive”, because it truly applies. Our knowl­edge of the uni­verse, of our world and our­selves is so blink­ered, nar­row and incom­plete and yet we exist in a giant state of total denial. We have no col­lec­tive self aware­ness of this fact and most would scorn me for me sug­gest­ing it.

Some­times the bit­ter truth hurts.

If we want to have any hope of sur­viv­ing what lies ahead for us as a species, the start­ing point needs to be a giant col­lec­tive real­i­sa­tion of just how imma­ture we are as race, and that we con­tinue to evolve both bio­log­i­cally and socially.

Fol­low­ing that first real­i­sa­tion, must come another big real­i­sa­tion, that our knowl­edge of uni­verse is minus­cule and we know next to noth­ing about the true nature of mat­ter, space and time.

If we ever did truly under­stand the true nature of mat­ter, space and time, then most likely we could manip­u­late all three and make them bend to our will with ease.

We are eons from that point, but that doesn’t make it out of the realm of pos­si­bil­ity, it just depends upon how long we last as a species.

I’ll give you an easy exam­ple of what I am talk­ing about; the Large Hadron Col­lider (LHC) in Switzer­land, which cost a gazil­lion dol­lars (or pounds or euros, or what­ever cur­rency you pre­fer) and is the largest sci­en­tific exper­i­ment ever con­structed, is try­ing to find an invis­i­ble par­ti­cle which the­o­ret­i­cally gives mass to matter.

If that’s gob­bly­gook, I’ll try to explain it, though many of these ideas often feel unex­plain­able to our tiny, meat com­puter brains.

Our under­stand­ing of sub­atomic the­ory is so (and here’s that word again), prim­i­tive, that we can’t see what gives mass to mat­ter, because at the micro­scopic lev­els we can phys­i­cally observe, most of the struc­ture of an atom con­sists of empty space. Sci­en­tists the­o­rise that there must be addi­tional, invis­i­ble par­ti­cles that are part of the sub­atomic archi­tec­ture which give mat­ter mass. I hope I am get­ting this right, I am not an actual physi­cist, but I do play the home game a lot.

To me, this seems like quite fun­da­men­tal stuff that we are only guess­ing at, schol­arly straws at which we can only merely gen­tly grasp.

We are a long way away from any deep, mean­ing­ful under­stand­ing of any­thing big or important.

We still have no idea of the true ori­gin of our uni­verse. Again, we can and do only guess and then only to a point. Most the­o­ries start at some incom­pre­hen­si­ble sin­gu­lar­ity that some­how erupted into the Big Bang and many only start one sec­ond after the Big Bang happened.

I’m not deny­ing the Big Bang, on the con­trary, there is plenty of evi­dence to sup­port it as a the­ory, but many the­o­ries are incom­plete, or depend upon things like cos­mic infla­tion and expand­ing the­ory to fill in their quite con­sid­er­able gaps.

The term “sin­gu­lar­ity” is thrown around quite a bit in sci­ence and yet to me, it seems to mean some­thing that can’t be explained, or under­stood, so let’s just set it aside and take it as read that it exists and is a point on which we can build spec­u­la­tive theories.

Take Black Holes, which are pretty much the­o­ret­i­cal mind­fucks anyway.

There is a phys­i­cal point to a Black Hole that sci­en­tists refer to as the sin­gu­lar­ity, where all that is known about time, space and mat­ter doesn’t apply. Its just an easy way to admit our igno­rance in a schol­arly way.

The same is true for the the­ory sur­round­ing the day when our com­put­ers become smarter than we are and can autonomously design and con­struct ever smarter and bet­ter machines than them­selves. The­o­rists refer to this as the sin­gu­lar­ity as well because they don’t know what the impact will be on our world. Unless you’re James Cameron and you can envis­age a Skynet like com­puter decid­ing we are bad for the planet and seek­ing to wipe us off the face of the earth.

Wouldn’t it be pru­dent to bet­ter our­selves as a species and a race, so when that day arrives, the machines see us more of a ben­e­fit wor­thy of keep­ing around and allow­ing to flourish?

I’m just sayin’…

Per­haps we need to label more things that we don’t get with the word “sin­gu­lar­ity” and increase its com­mon usage and under­stand­ing. For exam­ple, when men col­lec­tively com­plain that they don’t under­stand a woman’s mind, instead of labelling it a mys­tery, you could say its a singularity.

Or these kids today, they are a total sin­gu­lar­ity to me. You get the idea.

Let’s take reli­gion. No, seri­ously, let’s take it some­where and dump it and leave it in the past, where it belongs.

Reli­gion is a prime exam­ple of our prim­i­tive nature that we des­per­ately cling to like a com­fort blan­ket. Reli­gion is a prim­i­tive way of deal­ing with sin­gu­lar­i­ties, by fill­ing in the blanks in our rudi­men­tary knowl­edge of the uni­verse by con­sign­ing every­thing we don’t under­stand to a benevolent/vengeful space god.

Reli­gion is the epit­ome of our prim­i­tive­ness, it is the best exam­ple of how unde­vel­oped we are, because we still allow it to colour how we treat each other and dic­tate our moral code.

When we finally tran­scend reli­gion, as we need to do if we want any hope for a bet­ter future for our species, we will need to base our moral code on more human­ist ideals.

I try to be a good per­son, not because I want or hope for a bet­ter place in the after­life, but because being good and doing good is some­thing that mat­ters to me. I care about my fel­low man and woman. We all need to find that spirit of kind­ness in our own hearts, from a gen­uine belief in the bet­ter­ment of our world.

What we don’t need to do is base our moral­ity on the fear of a non-existent god who will pun­ish us for our bad deeds.

Mur­der is wrong, not because it is in the Ten Com­mand­ments, but because it is immoral to unjustly take another’s life. We should under­stand that at an innate level, in our bones we should all know that killing is wrong.

And we do all know that, but we find ever more cre­ative ways to jus­tify killing on an indus­trial scale, all over the place. We kill with weapons just as much as we kill with our own self­ish­ness and greed. There should be enough of every­thing to go around for every­one, no one should starve or lack fresh, clean drink­ing water, yet we all know that is not the case.

We don’t view the world as one big extended fam­ily, we high­light our dif­fer­ences, rather than stress­ing our sim­i­lar­i­ties. Its actu­ally amaz­ing if you think of what we all on this planet have in com­mon, yet you never hear any­one talk about it.

We all want a bet­ter world, the dif­fer­ences lie in how we all think we get there.

We need to move to a post-tribal mind­set, we need to view things glob­ally, rather than locally.

We need to care more about what’s hap­pen­ing to every­one, not just the peo­ple who are exactly like us.

We need to move to a point beyond reli­gion, where sci­ence explains as much as it can, while actively pur­su­ing answers to the things that remain unknown.

We need to put indi­vid­u­als first and agree at every level that we are all truly equal on this earth.

We need to act respon­si­bly and think in terms, not of years or decades, but mil­len­nia, because if we want to have any hope of sur­viv­ing, we need to be that for­ward thinking.

I know I’ve been knock­ing us for being prim­i­tive, but I don’t want to take away any of our already con­sid­er­able achieve­ments. We’ve worked out some impres­sive things, but we’ve only really scratched the sur­face of what there is to be known in the uni­verse. I’m glad I have a microwave oven and flat screen tv, but we can go so much fur­ther and at an expo­nen­tial rate.

I dream of a time in a time in a few thou­sand years, where we are the mas­ters of all time, space and mat­ter, where all the mys­ter­ies of the uni­verse are finally revealed and under­stood by one and all.

I like to think of the many devel­op­ments I’ve seen in my short lifes­pan, and how many more I will see in my remain­ing years.

I’ve joked before that they will dis­cover the key to eter­nal youth and longevity the day after I die. But in the back of my mind is the tiny hope that I will find a way to cheat death, even if it is only in machine form, so my con­scious­ness can carry on learn­ing about and observ­ing the human con­di­tion. Our best days still lie ahead of us and it dri­ves me nuts that I won’t be here to see it all.

Some­one reminded me recently that I used to be the northlondonhippy.

Tech­ni­cally, I am still the northlon­don­hippy, I just don’t seem to prac­tise much or preach, not like I used to anyway.

I logged into my own web­site to do a bit of main­te­nance and thought I should just say “hey”.

Hey.

Blah blah lame excuse for not post­ing, sar­cas­tic, self-deprecating joke about being use­less here. (attn subs: you think of a gag this time, you think its so fuck­ing easy.)

I haven’t even been on Twit­ter much, well not post­ing those tweet-things anyway.

I feel like I am fad­ing away, drift­ing ever fur­ther into irrel­e­vance and obscurity.

Was I any­thing other than irrel­e­vant? Did I ever actu­ally exit obscurity?

I think we both know the answer to both of those questions.

That’s how I think of my posts, in terms of the two of us; you and me.

Yes, you.

Peo­ple rarely read together any more, so I know you’re read­ing this alone. There may be some­one else in the room, many some­ones per­haps, but you are the only one read­ing this.

You’re prob­a­bly the only one read­ing this in your town, city or pos­si­bly even your coun­try, if you live out­side of the UK or the USA.

Think about that, I’m your lit­tle secret, that no one in any rea­son­able prox­im­ity shares with you.

If you think I came home from a drain­ing night­shift, or rather a cou­ple of weeks of drain­ing night­shifts and had a big, fat spliff, you would be cor­rect. If you think my deep self-loathing and abject fear are reach­ing a crescendo at this very moment, you would right again.

See, you know me as well I as know you. We’re like BFF’s, only you don’t have to buy me a card with a pic­ture of a cute kit­ten and a cap­tion that says “hang in there, baby!”

If you did, I would prob­a­bly have to dis­em­bowel you and that might put a damp­ener on the whole BFF thing.

Let’s just be BFF’s that know each other on the inter­net. They’re the best kind anyway.

You could always just fol­low me on Twit­ter and get this sort of ram­bling non­sense and dark bull­shit in smaller doses. Go on, I don’t charge much, its @nthlondonhippy — because there wasn’t space for all the vowels.

PS
Birth­day last month, blah blah blah, age­ing, get­ting closer to death, blah blah blah. Now aren’t you glad I didn’t post much in January?

I bet hav­ing a recipe as my top post con­fused a lot of my new vis­i­tors and that was the case until I posted this par­tic­u­larly unplanned foray into shar­ing my thoughts.

This is not a food blog. A recipe is some­thing out of the ordi­nary. Nor­mal ser­vice has now resumed.

As I sit here, typ­ing away, we are around 9 hours from the expected Apple Tablet announce­ment. Its pretty big news so I expect you’ve already heard all about it. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go on about it too much.

I’ve got 2 pre­dic­tions, one is an easy one that’s prob­a­bly true, the other is a long shot.

Pre­dic­tion one: It will be a pre­mium prod­uct with a pre­mium price for early adopters. Yes, I mean it will be very expen­sive, but will be cheaper in a year.

Pre­dic­tion two: It will be called ‘iBook”, which used to be the name of one of their best sell­ing lap­tops. They already own it, so it would be an easy yet inven­tive choice. I am far less cer­tain of this one and will be pleas­antly sur­prised if I am right. I’ll also brag a lot about it too.

I’ve wanted some­thing like what’s expected today for years. Yes, I will buy one as soon as they are avail­able though I am guess­ing it will be like the orig­i­nal iPhone, sold is the USA exclu­sively for 6 months, then launched in the UK. That will be frustrating!

Today isn’t just tablet day. Had my mother still been alive, today would have been her 80th birth­day, but she missed it by around 13 months. I miss her, a lot.

At least Apple were nice enough to sched­ule their announce­ment on the same date as my mother’s birth­day, its a wel­come distraction.

So roll on 18:00gmt, when the big show starts in Cal­i­for­nia. I’ll be online, fol­low­ing the announce­ment live as best I can and I’ll be tweet­ing my impres­sions as well. That is, assum­ing the entire inter­net doesn’t come crash­ing down to a screech­ing halt under the weight of all that Apple Tablet hype.

Oh yes, that’s my last pre­dic­tion, Twit­ter is going to crash like Oceanic Air 815 as soon as Steve Jobs takes the stage. Maybe I should just plan on tweet­ing again tomorrow.

Happy New Year fuckers!

I hope you’ve all bought new cal­en­dars and you aren’t still writ­ing 2009 on your cheques.

Do peo­ple still write cheques?

I do, some­times, but that really doesn’t have any­thing to do with any­thing, so I’ll swiftly avoid the diver­sion in that dead end direction.

Instead, I’ve come to share the lat­est news from the land of your favourite north London-based hippy. Its actu­ally kind of big news.

Dig this, I sub­mit­ted “the offi­cial northlon­don­hippy iPhone app” to Apple yes­ter­day, it should be avail­able on the iTunes store very soon for your mobile surf­ing pleasure.

This isn’t one of my lit­tle funny wind-ups, its an hon­est to god, actual app that runs natively on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

How cool is that?

On the hippy’s cool-o-meter, its off the fuck­ing scale of cool­ness into a brand new realm of cool that has yet to be dis­cov­ered by nor­mal folk. Once the app is avail­able, that new realm of cool will be yours for the taking.

The app deliv­ers in an iPhone friendly for­mat, all of my inter­net con­tent. If I pub­lish some­thing, it will mag­i­cally pop up on the app. You will receive my lat­est posts from this web­site, as well as hav­ing easy access to my busy Twit­ter feed. I’ve also included my Twit­Pics and YouTube videos, which are all eas­ily acces­si­ble inside the app.

How much would you pay for a northlon­don­hippy iPhone app?

Really? I kind of expected that, which is why it will be avail­able to down­load for FREE. That’s a price I’m sure you can afford.

My aim is to make this app the num­ber one northlon­don­hippy iPhone app in the world. I don’t think it will be very hard to do, as it will be the only northlon­don­hippy app avail­able, at least offi­cially. I’m sure all the other kids will be cre­at­ing their own ver­sions to com­pete with mine.

Ah-hem.

I don’t want any of you to think I went off and learned how to write code for an iPhone, because I didn’t. I used a web­site called www.appmakr.com which auto­mated the process to such a degree that even a moron like me could do it. If you need an app made for the iPhone from RSS feeds, you could do a lot worse than try this site out.

I will of course, reserve final judge­ment on App­Makr until I see my fin­ished app on my own iPhone, but so far I am very happy with the ser­vice they pro­vide. You will be too once you are rock­ing my app on your mutha­fuckin’ iPhone.

Keep watch­ing for my announce­ment con­firm­ing that my app is live on iTunes. Until then, you can join me on some ten­ter­hooks as I try to patiently wait for Apple’s approval process peo­ple to what­ever voodoo that they do.

While I am quite pleased about my app, I am less excited about my birth­day this month. Is there a law that says you have to have birth­days? Can we get it repealed?

Some years I am not too both­ered about being another year older, but this year is not one of them.

I sup­pose a lot has to do with the awk­ward­ness of my impend­ing age…forty-fucking-seven. Its an odd num­ber in more ways then one. Mainly, it marks my decent into my “late forties”.

I don’t like the word “late”, it makes me think of death. I think about death enough already, I don’t need stu­pid words tacked on to my age to remind me that the mor­tal coil is get­ting dis­tinctly shorter every year.

My bones tell me, my mus­cles tell me, my world weary expres­sion tells me, all pretty much on a daily basis. I am plumb­ing the depths of mid­dle age.

I’ve been con­tem­plat­ing hav­ing my very own mid-life cri­sis, but I can’t seem to set­tle on what form it will take. On the menu are:

- a grown-up gap year to trek through the Andes
– a hair trans­plant
– 3 months of Swiss shin stretch­ing
– a small, red, con­vert­ible sports car
– a sex­u­ally expe­ri­enced 19 year old girl on the side
– a men­tal breakdown

I reckon to make it a proper mid-life cri­sis, I need to chose at least 3 things off that list, then pur­sue them with gusto.

Trekking any­where is out, because it sounds too much like hard work.

A hair trans­plant just sounds messy and expen­sive and for what? To look like Elton John? No thanks.

If I was going to have my shins stretched, I should have done it 20–30 years ago, but it didn’t exist back then. I don’t think I am going to live long enough to make the pain & suf­fer­ing worth it. You only gain a cou­ple of inches in height any­way, so screw it, I’d still be short.

The lit­tle red con­vert­ible sports car is cliche and I don’t really like red as a colour for a car. Unfor­tu­nately, because of my age, red is the only colour a car dealer will sell me, at least for a 2 door rag­top. I’ve checked, its a car dealer bylaw, right their in their charter.

Does it all make sense now? That’s why you only ever see bald, fat middle-aged guys in red Fer­raris (or Corvettes if you are state­side). And all this time, you thought they were choos­ing the colour. Now you know, its the law.

The nine­teen year old girl seems on the sur­face to be an easy option and if I was a mem­ber of the Rolling Stones they would be queu­ing up at my door, but I’m not, so they’re not. Besides, 19 year olds haven’t lived enough to be inter­est­ing, so unless I can cram a 50 year old’s brain into their 19 year old body, I don’t see much point. And if I am hon­est, the only way I am going to get a hot lit­tle 19 year old is to rent one for an hour. I cer­tainly couldn’t afford the care and feed­ing of one full time and I am a hippy on a bud­get, so this is out too.

A men­tal break­down? Don’t I mainly have them on the inter­net or as it is oth­er­wise known, a run­ning blog.

This web­site is my ther­apy, which I guess makes all of you my shrinks. Every time I ask a ques­tion, you just have to say “well, what do you think?” Go on, its easy and I just saved you seven tedious years of uni­ver­sity and med­ical training.

Email me for your cer­tifi­cate or degree from the Uni­ver­sity of North Lon­don (hippy). That and a pound will get you a ride on a bus.

Weird things hap­pen around the hol­i­days, often unex­pected and not always pleasant.

I don’t know what got me on the sub­ject in my head, I was think­ing about duck and before I knew it, my crazy brain started remem­ber­ing weird shit from my childhood.

The duck con­nec­tion: I am cook­ing a small three-bird roast for xmas dinner.

For those of you who’ve never heard of such a con­coc­tion, it is quite sim­ply, a whole bone­less duck, stuffed with a whole bone­less turkey, then inside the turkey is an entire, bone­less pheas­ant. Larger ver­sions start with a goose, but I’m not serv­ing enough peo­ple to make that sensible.

I’m not sure how the farm­ers get the birds to grow inside the other birds with­out bones, but get­ting the feath­ers off must be a bitch. I guess it has to do with genetic engi­neer­ing, by I digress. I want to talk about duck.

When I was very young, an elderly rel­a­tive lived with us for many years, my Aunt Ger­tie, short for Gertrude. She lived to be 95, died in the mid 1970s and was part of the fos­ter fam­ily that raised my orphaned father.

Yeah, I know, get out the violins.

Aunt Ger­tie lived in our house for four or five years, until her per­sonal care became too much for my mother. Up to that point, her pres­ence meant we didn’t do very much out­side of the house, as she needed fairly con­stant super­vi­sion, even more so when she started falling down frequently.

After my par­ents took the dif­fi­cult deci­sion to place Aunt Ger­tie into a rest home, things changed for us and we had some free­dom again. The very first night she was gone, my father took the fam­ily out to a fancy restau­rant for din­ner. This would have been around autumn 1972, so I would have been nearly 9 years old.

Now, here’s the fowl con­nec­tion, that night in the nice restau­rant, I ordered Duck l’Orange for the first time in my life and it was the most amaz­ing thing I’d ever eaten. It was a half duck, still on the bone and the wait staff actu­ally helped me strip the deli­cious meat from the bone.

Its a fairly vivid mem­ory, and I can still remem­ber the four of us, me, my par­ents and my younger brother all feel­ing slightly guilty that we were able to enjoy such a fine meal, only because Ger­tie was in a care home.

Aunt Ger­tie lived for sev­eral years in that care home, slowly, grad­u­ally los­ing her mind. Up to that point, she was scar­ily sharp and didn’t miss any­thing and it was only in the last year or two that she started to become con­fused about things. She passed away just a cou­ple of weeks before xmas, at the same time my half-brother’s wife was deliv­er­ing her first child in the same hospital.

The last time I saw Ger­tie in the hos­pi­tal was about 10 min­utes before I saw my nephew for the first time. Even at the age of nearly twelve, I realised there was a weird con­nec­tion between new life and death.

Ger­tie died the next day, two weeks before xmas.

But that wasn’t the only death to darken a fam­ily xmas, a year or two before, my father’s fos­ter brother, my Uncle Jack, died unex­pect­edly on xmas. I was prob­a­bly around 10 years old.

I always liked Uncle Jack, he was very much an out­doors­man, he liked to fish and hunt, which are the sort of cool things that impress a young lad like me. He died on xmas eve, my father woke up to the news on xmas day.

Again, I have vivid mem­o­ries of that morn­ing. My brother and I burst down­stairs, ready to attack a pile of presents left by santa, with enthu­si­asm, but our mother’s face told a dif­fer­ent story.

We both imme­di­ately knew some­thing was wrong before she told us about Uncle Jack. She explained how upset my father was, he had not come out of their bed­room yet. I’m sure it was silly early in the morn­ing, my brother and I were both chil­dren and prob­a­bly didn’t sleep a wink the night before.

It was one of the few times I saw my father with real tears in his eyes. He was a strong, impos­ing man, think Hem­ming­way with­out the booze and it shocked me. My dad wasn’t sup­posed to cry, ever!

It was a very low key xmas that year.

All of this is remind­ing me of the scene in the movie Grem­lins, when Phoebe Cates char­ac­ter explains why she hates xmas and tells the story of her father dress­ing up like santa and get­ting caught in the chim­ney. They find him still there, dead, a cou­ple weeks later. Talk about a hol­i­day downer, I bet the stench would put you off your dinner.

Last xmas was eas­ily one of the worst of my life, my beloved mother passed away unexpectedly.

I was at work, ready for a long hol­i­day run of night­shifts when I got the bad news. I found out at 6am on xmas eve that she died.

The thing about deaths around the hol­i­days is that it doesn’t just bring down the rel­a­tives of the deceased, it has an effect on those around you too. It dis­tracts oth­ers away from their enjoy­ment of the sea­son. My sud­den, griev­ing absence from work had an impact on many peo­ple and that upset me even more.

Last year’s xmas was very depress­ing. That’s an under­state­ment, it was dev­as­tat­ing. You get the idea.

When you sit down for your big turkey (or 3 bird roast!) din­ner on xmas day, spare a thought for all the peo­ple whose hol­i­days have been blighted by unex­pected bad news and whose future hol­i­days may be coloured by these events.

More impor­tantly, I sin­cerely hope its not you and yours who is the recip­i­ent of any­thing unto­ward. How­ever, if it is you who draws the short draw and catches some­thing unpleas­ant, know that you’re not alone, it can hap­pen to anyone.

And if it is your turn, just remem­ber that it will get bet­ter and I hope you have plenty more fes­tive sea­sons await­ing you that might in some ways, make up for it.

From every­one here at the northlon­don­hippy, we wish you noth­ing but the very best of the holidays.

Oh wait, its just me here on my own, but the sen­ti­ment very much remains the same!

The Cli­mate Change Sum­mit opens up in Copen­hagen on Mon­day, where a bunch of world lead­ers will add to the prob­lem by pro­duc­ing a lot of hot air, but prob­a­bly no viable solu­tion to this very real problem.

Yep, I believe the cli­mate is chang­ing. I can see it and feel it and have done for a while now. Here in the UK, the win­ters seem milder and though last sum­mer wasn’t one of the hottest on record, it was hot enough. I’ve seen what’s hap­pen­ing to the polar ice caps, not first hand, but com­puter graph­ics aren’t that good, so the footage has to be real.

Is it just a nor­mal cycle? Maybe. Is human activ­ity con­tribut­ing or accel­er­at­ing the process? How could it not? We live in a closed ecosys­tem, our atmos­phere is sealed tight against the vac­uum of space. The more green­house gasses we pump into this sealed bub­ble, the hot­ter it will get.

I don’t want to be a hyp­ocrite, I want to do my part to help pre­vent cli­mate change. I use low energy light bulbs, which aren’t as bright as the old incan­des­cent style. I recy­cle as much as I can, which is messy and time con­sum­ing. And I don’t take unnec­es­sary car jour­neys, which means rid­ing the bus and tube with unwashed strangers.

I know its not much, but its some­thing. I’d like to do more.

That got me think­ing, what more could I do to help slow down cli­mate change? Then it hit me, there’s some­thing we all could do that would have an instant, imme­di­ate and mea­sur­able effect on the amount of green­house gasses released into the environment.

All liv­ing things exhale car­bon diox­ide, or CO2 as its known. Humans are the only liv­ing crea­tures to under­stand this and to be able to adjust their own output.

I’m propos­ing that every human being who is phys­i­cally able, should hold their breath for at least one minute per day. You could do it all in one go, or you can do two 30 sec­ond peri­ods. You could even go longer if you like, but I can’t be held liable if you pass out, fall down and hit your head. I only sug­gested a minute a day.

If every­one held their breath for one minute daily, that would have a huge impact on the amount of CO2 released into the atmos­phere annu­ally. These things add up quickly and if I were a sci­en­tist I could esti­mate how much CO2 would be saved, but I’m not, so I can’t. So we’ll stick to “a lot.”

Look man, if we don’t do some­thing and pretty god­damn soon, breath­ing won’t be an issue that most of us will need to worry about any more.

So I’ll be hold­ing my breath, and not just for one minute every day. I’ll be hold­ing it while our lead­ers meet this month to work out whether they can save the human race. If they do come up with a solu­tion, I’ll cer­tainly be sur­prised, but I’ll also finally be able to exhale.

You don’t want me to turn blue, do you?

Memo to self: Must try harder!

I don’t really write myself memos, that would be stu­pid and prob­a­bly a bit too neu­rotic and tight-assed even for me, but that doesn’t take away from the message.

To be fair on myself, I had a very busy Octo­ber, work­ing more last month than I have in a very long time, nearly 18 months. That’s a year and half to nor­mal people.

This is going to be one of those ram­bling posts with no set agenda or dom­i­nant topic. Its the blog­ging equiv­a­lent of singing scat. Be bop be bop wow.

I prob­a­bly shouldn’t use the word “scat” on my web­site, as it does have other mean­ings out­side of the world of jizz, I mean jazz. Too late, so let’s just for­get about it.

I’ve got a few days off, which is always wel­come and I am hop­ing to receive my very own Eigen­harp Pico. When I ordered it a cou­ple of weeks ago, they said it should ship out today!

What’s an Eigen­harp? Its a brand new elec­tronic musi­cal instru­ment, its avail­able in 2 mod­els, the Alpha, which is the pro­fes­sional, full sized ver­sion which is pricey as fuck and the Pico, its more afford­able baby brother.

Rather than have me try to explain all this to you, why don’t you CLICK HERE and check it out for your­self. Once you get there, go to The Road­show sec­tion and watch the short You Tube video. But be care­ful, you will end up want­ing one yourself.

http://www.eigenlabs.com/

I have no idea what exactly I am going to do with an Eigen­harp Pico, but I am plan­ning on using it when I finally record the northlon­don­hippy album. I know, I know, I’ve threat­ened to do this before, but I feel ready to invest the time, effort, blood, sweat and tears to do it now.

I’ve upgraded to the lat­est ver­sion of Logic Stu­dio, I’ve updated the dri­vers for my Roland UA-25 inter­face, I’ve got a decent micro­phone, a midi key­board, a Fender Tele­caster and soon my Pico. Now, if I can find some tal­ent some­where inside me, I’ll be laughing.

And don’t worry, my plan remains the same…to record 10 songs which you can down­load for free, burn onto CD, put on your iPhone or iPod and just groove out with the hippy.

To give it the full title, it will be called:

“the northlon­don­hippy & the seven deadly sins: 10 songs about sex & death”

The seven deadly sins are my make believe band. I don’t really have a band, but if I did that’s what they would be called. And they would rock hard and be tight as fuck, but mainly they would do every­thing they could to make me look good.

I’ll prob­a­bly never really have a band.

“10 songs about sex & death” is rather self-explanatory as ulti­mately they are the only 2 things in life that really mat­ter. All the rest is just to kill time in-between.

I reckon I’ve got at least one album in me, but then I think most peo­ple do if they knew how to tap into it. Its the same with nov­els, screen­plays, what­ever. If I can tap into it, it should be fun.

And I’ll say it again, if I get one mil­lion down­loads, I’m book­ing Wem­b­ley for a con­cert. Not the Sta­dium, but the Arena. I’m not com­pletely crazy.

I won’t get a mil­lion down­loads in a mil­lion years, so I think I’m safe. And let’s face it, if a com­plete nobody like me can rack up 1 mil­lion down­loads, then some­one will wanna spon­sor and pro­mote my big Wem­b­ley gig.

Tick­ets won’t be free, but they’ll be afford­able. The real money will come from the con­ces­sion stands, tee-shirts and northlon­don­hippy sou­venirs, as long as my fac­to­ries in China can keep up with demand. If they can’t, I’ll just have another school closed and bring in more chil­dren. They work for candy.

Do you keep up with my musi­cal tastes on Last.FM? You should, because every song I play, at home or on the move, is scrob­bled to my account there. User­name is: n_londonhippy

I used to have a Last.FM wid­get here on my web­site, but it broke after a recent Word­Press update. I will get it replaced as soon as there’s a work­ing ver­sion of the plug-in again.

You might have caught that cannabis has been back in the head­lines here in the UK as the government’s chief advi­sory on drugs pol­icy was sacked for telling the truth. Well, a truth that com­pletely con­tra­dicts the gov­ern­ments own policies.

I’m not going to re-hash (see what I did there?) the whole thing now, because it hasn’t reached its con­clu­sion yet. I expect there will be some move­ment tomor­row, as the Home Sec­re­tary who sacked the chief advi­sor is meet­ing with the rem­nants of the advi­sory board to dis­cuss its future.

In a nut­shell, since 1971, the Advi­sory Coun­cil on the Mis­use of Drugs has been advis­ing the UK gov­ern­ment on drugs pol­icy. No sit­ting gov­ern­ment has ever ignored the ACMD’s advice, until a cou­ple of years ago when they returned weed to Class B from Class C, against the rec­om­men­da­tion of the panel.

The only thing that changed by rein­stat­ing cannabis’s Class B sta­tus is the penalty for pos­ses­sion, which at that level is 5 years in the slam­mer for even a small amount. That’s madcrazybatshitstupid.

Polls have shown that the major­ity of peo­ple think a 5 year sen­tence for sim­ple cannabis pos­ses­sion is too much, but the same polls also say the pub­lic wanted to see cannabis returned to Class B. Guess why? Because no one explained that Class B meant 5 years. If you don’t give them all the facts, then how can your poll be accurate?

The head of the ACMD, a smart and emi­nently qual­i­fied gen­tle­man by the name of Pro­fes­sor David Nutt has refused to par­rot the govt’s lies. He has also been quite vocal in point­ing out the many flaws in the cur­rent anti­quated drug laws. Since he was sacked, he went from vocal to angry and he’s been extremely forth­right in his rather accu­rate crit­i­cisms of the government.

Two other mem­bers of the ACMD quit in protest over Nutt’s sack­ing and the rest of the mem­bers may very well do the same, if the Home Sec­re­tary can’t sort this all out. My guess is he can’t, and the British government’s drug pol­icy will descend even fur­ther into chaos.

As you can imag­ine, I’ve been fol­low­ing this one quite closely and if you fol­low me on Twit­ter, I’ve tweeted dozens of links to news sto­ries per­tain­ing to all this.

Do I think this will lead to a break through in drugs pol­icy? Nope, but I’m usu­ally a pes­simist any­way. What I do think is its brought the debate back to the fore and that’s never a bad thing. And if more peo­ple in this coun­try wake up to the truth about weed, that’s not a bad thing either.

Even­tu­ally the drug laws will change, I just hope I live long enough to see it happen.

Like I said, I’m plan­ning to do a lot more on this rather com­plex story after tomor­row. I just want to see how it all plays out.

I think I’ve ram­bled enough now, if you’ve made it this far, well done you. You are clearly some­one of excel­lent taste, a supe­rior intel­lect and noth­ing bet­ter to do to do with your free time. I think I’ll join you on that third one, its time to go veg­e­tate in front of some fine tele­vi­sual enter­tain­ment. Fam­ily Guy here I come.