The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘religion’ 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.

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.

Have you ever won­dered where you come from and how you got here?

I have and con­tinue to do so, con­stantly. Some­times it dri­ves me kind of nuts.

And I don’t mean me, per­son­ally. I know how I got here. When a man loves a woman, they do the mummy and daddy dance and nine months later there you are, or a lit­tle less than eight months in my case.

No, I’m talk­ing about more than just me, or you or all of us or even our lit­tle blue planet, but all of exis­tence, the known uni­verse and beyond.

Not that much of the uni­verse is really known, very lit­tle in actual fact. Most of what we think we know about what’s out there in deep space is the­ory accepted as fact.

Did you know that we only found the first planet out­side of our solar sys­tem in 1995 and to date, only 407 of them have been iden­ti­fied? Wikipedia knows all.

Don’t you find that sur­pris­ing, when you’ve prob­a­bly been taught that the uni­verse is full of bil­lions of plan­ets. Again, the­ory accepted as fact. Remem­ber, its only 15 years ago since we found that first planet, prob­a­bly about as long as mobile phones have been in wide usage. That’s not very long at all.

The point is, they are using a the­ory to map out these plan­ets. They aren’t really map­ping them so much as pre­dict­ing and describ­ing what and where they think they are, based on sci­en­tific sup­po­si­tion. They haven’t seen a sin­gle one of them through a tele­scope, because one of such power is yet to exist.

I’m not try­ing to call any of this into ques­tion and one day I expect they will prove they’ve found plan­ets out­side of our solar sys­tem, but I am using it to illus­trate some­thing much more fun­da­men­tal; our knowl­edge of exis­tence is infin­i­tes­i­mally small and as a race we remain in our infancy.

If you think the uni­verse was cre­ated by some all know­ing, all pow­er­ful god and you’re ok with that, this piece prob­a­bly isn’t for you.

I wish it was that sim­ple, to just have faith that a high power put me here for some pur­pose, but I can’t buy into any of that.

If it works for you, great. may your life always be just as free of com­plex­ity and curios­ity. I cer­tainly wish mine was sometimes.

But its not, and I try to move beyond my ques­tions by accept­ing that these answers are unob­tain­able, by me, by you, by every human being who has ever existed or will exist and asked these questions.

Intel­lec­tu­ally I under­stand that these ques­tions won’t ever be answered to my sat­is­fac­tion, but I can’t help con­tin­u­ing to crave the answers. Our knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence is far too lim­ited and our brains far too tiny and use­less to come up with any plau­si­ble expla­na­tions for any­thing that matters.

Its not fair that we can ask these ques­tions, but are unable to ever know the answers. And that’s my pre­dic­tion, that for as long as our species exists, peo­ple will con­tinue to seek answers that will never, ever come.

Think about that, no mat­ter how many gen­er­a­tions fol­low ours, for how­ever many mil­len­nia, we won’t get the answers the most fun­da­men­tal ques­tions con­cern­ing the ori­gins and pur­pose of all of existence.

Now I am try­ing to move beyond accep­tance of these things I know I won’t know, to an even more basic view: All of exis­tence is utterly pointless.

I’ve believed for a long time that life is point­less, but then I see most things in a bleak and dreary light, so this shouldn’t sur­prise you. We go about our brief, tiny lives, flit­ting from here to there like insects, but unlike insects we fill our heads with thoughts of grandiose self-importance.

We think because we build, cre­ate, destroy, repro­duce, kill and dom­i­nate our domain that we’re so impor­tant, so wor­thy of every­thing we take for granted that we’ve missed just how insignif­i­cant we are in the scheme of the universe.

And if it turns out we are the most advanced liv­ing crea­tures in the uni­verse, then what does it say about that universe?

That it is just as insignif­i­cant as we are.

The uni­verse is big­ger and more diverse than any­one can ever imag­ine. I don’t think I can come up with a frac­tion small enough to express how much we know about it, but I can try.

We know this much:

1/100000000000000000000000000000000000000000^{100000000000000000000000000}

Even if you don’t under­stand frac­tions, or expo­nen­tial num­bers, I’m sure you can see that is an extremely small num­ber. It a chip off a fleck of dust above zero.

That’s how much we know.

We think we know a lot more.

By choos­ing to believe in the utter point­less­ness of all exis­tence and that any deeper under­stand­ing of all that exists is impos­si­ble with­out accept­ing the unprove­able, can be quite liberating.

If we let go of the unknow­able, then we can con­cen­trate on the things that mat­ter to us per­son­ally. Sure, you still have to play ball with soci­ety, pay your taxes, eat your veg­eta­bles and brush your teeth, but you’re doing all those things for your­self, with­out won­der­ing why you’re here.

Oh, who am I kid­ding, I’ll obsess about this crap for­ever, utter point­less­ness or not.

There’s was an avalanche of media bull­shit this week over a doc­u­men­tary aired on SKY REAL LIVES which showed a man with motor neu­rone dis­ease tak­ing his own life at a Swiss clinic in 2006.

Switzer­land is cur­rently the only coun­try in the world which allows for­eign­ers to visit and par­take in a spot of assisted sui­cide. Go Switzerland!

I say the media was full of bull­shit because most out­lets con­cen­trated on the issue of whether or not you should show the “moment of death” on tele­vi­sion, for fear of “glam­ouris­ing death”.

WTF?

I haven’t seen the entire doc­u­men­tary, but I have seen some clips and how could show­ing a man with an absolutely hor­ri­ble dis­ease end­ing his life in any way glam­ourise death? There were no Hol­ly­wood films stars or strip­pers cheer­ing him on, the room he did it in wasn’t kit­ted out in fur rugs and leather sofas and they didn’t even have a live band.

There was no glam­our at all, but then there was absolutely noth­ing glam­ourous about it.

Tak­ing your own life is a seri­ous deci­sion, cer­tainly the most seri­ous deci­sion any indi­vid­ual can take and it was clear this poor man delib­er­ated for a very long time before mak­ing this final decision.

The debate should not have been about whether or not they should have shown this on tele­vi­sion, but why more coun­tries don’t have sys­tems like they do in Switzerland.

Why is it against the law to pro­vide the ulti­mate relief and end the suf­fer­ing of another human being? We do it for dogs and cats and horses — do they mat­ter more than people?

There are some rather hor­ri­ble mal­adies and afflic­tions out there which are hor­ren­dous and could cause immea­sur­able suf­fer­ing and pain to the per­son affected.

A slow, pro­tracted death is one of my big­ger fears, but that fear is expo­nen­tially exac­er­bated by the fact that I know if I wanted to choose to end the suf­fer­ing, it would not be pos­si­ble because of our archaic view of euthanasia.

The peo­ple most unsur­pris­ingly opposed to euthana­sia tend to be reli­gious nuts who believe only god’s will can decide when your life ends.

What a fuck­ing bunch of fuck­ing bull­shit. If that’s true, then any­one with a gun is god, because they can choose to end anyone’s life with rel­a­tive ease.

I have a real prob­lem tak­ing any­one seri­ously who is deeply reli­gious to the point of it cloud­ing their every thought and opin­ion, espe­cially when those mis­guided views increase the suf­fer­ing and pain of others.

That’s one of religion’s spe­cial­ity though, caus­ing oth­ers to need­lessly suffer.

I’ve recently been in touch with a dis­tant rela­tion of mine, who was in charge of dis­pens­ing a small stipend to myself and all my cousins fol­low­ing the pass­ing of a beloved aunt of mine.

When she wrote to me, her let­ter was pep­pered with all sorts of reli­gious ref­er­ences. I half expected her clos­ing salu­ta­tion to be “Yours in Christ” and was relieved that it wasn’t.

I had to really reign myself in when I replied to her, by keep­ing my sec­u­lar human­ist views at bay, though I couldn’t resist wish­ing her a “happy hol­i­days” in response to her “merry xmas”. Of course, she wrote out the entire word and cap­i­talised it.

I have noth­ing against my dis­tant rel­a­tive, the fact is I don’t really know her, hav­ing maybe met her twice before the age of 13, but its the way in which reli­gious peo­ple think every­one else should be equally reli­gious, and not just that but we should fol­low their reli­gion, because the other ones, even vari­a­tions on Chris­tian­ity, will send you straight to hell.

There is no hell. Hell is other people.

No, hell is being forced to live with a debil­i­tat­ing and ter­mi­nal con­di­tion, need­less suf­fer­ing a long, drawn out death because the law won’t let one be the archi­tect of one’s own fate.

The law is an ass. Or is that asshole?

The idea of my mind, my per­son­al­ity, the inter­nal bits of my brain con­tin­u­ing to func­tion as they do now, while being trapped in my body, wracked with pain, or worse paral­y­sis is a fate worse than death. Com­pared to any of that, death would be a trip to Disneyland.

And for all you reli­gious nuts out there, let me ask you this: If heaven is so god­damn great, why can’t we let the sick peo­ple arrive a lit­tle ear­lier than expected? Surely a just and lov­ing god would wel­come them with open arms.

If there were a god, he wouldn’t make us suffer.

If there were a god, he wouldn’t let us die.

If there were a god, there would be no need for heaven, because heaven would be here on earth and we would all already be angels.

If there were a god, he wouldn’t give a rat’s ass if some­one chose to end their life because of an intol­er­a­ble existence.

If there were a god, I wouldn’t get to post all of this on the inter­net and he’d have a stern word or two for me.

There is no god.

Why not be your own god? Why not deter­mine your own fate?

They say you make your own luck and I believe that’s true. I believe in self-actualisation and the power of an indi­vid­ual to over­come obsta­cles and suc­ceed in anything.

If the obsta­cle you’re encoun­ter­ing is insur­mount­able, then the only path to suc­cess is retreat.

If you’re dying a hor­ri­ble death, the only way to min­imise death’s vic­tory over you is to limit the amount of time you spend dying.

I thought about this a lot when I was ill last sum­mer, espe­cially when I could hardly walk and spent over a week try­ing to sleep sit­ting up on my sofa.

I imag­ined quite vividly that my con­di­tion could have been per­ma­nent and degen­er­a­tive, and what I would do in that situation.

I think you can work out the answer.

Check this out:

It’s over 6 min­utes long, but I promise, it’s worth it.

Don’t have 6 min­utes? Ok, you can read THIS VERSION in 2 mins, from the NY Times.

Per­son­ally, I think this is the first ratio­nal expla­na­tion I’ve ever heard on the nature of exis­tence and it deserves a much wider audi­ence. Please spread the word!

Now that you’ve read the NY Times arti­cle, or watched the video, read the title of this entry again.

Ok, who’s with me?

I have to say, I was more than a bit miffed at being excluded from the Observer Newspaper’s top 50 list of most pow­er­ful blogs. I guess this is just another main­stream media plot to keep my mes­sage from reach­ing a wider audi­ence, but I will not be silenced!

And there’s always next year! Make sure you write your MP or con­gressper­son and point out this hor­ri­ble injustice.

Ah-hem.

The real rea­son I’m here is because the pope clearly must read my blog and he doesn’t like it and he doesn’t like me. Well, matey, the feel­ing is very mutual.

A while back, I con­firmed the exis­tence of my band, “the seven deadly sins” when I announced the upcom­ing release of my album. It seems the pope didn’t like this move and he’s try­ing to sti­fle my cre­ativ­ity by updat­ing the 7 deadly sins for our mod­ern age. I guess god has finally made an appear­ance in the 21st cen­tury and about time!

The new top seven sins accord­ing to the pope are as follows:

1) Envi­ron­men­tal pol­lu­tion
2) Genetic manip­u­la­tion
3) Accu­mu­lat­ing exces­sive wealth
4) Inflict­ing poverty
5) Drug traf­fick­ing and con­sump­tion
6) Morally debat­able exper­i­ments
7) Vio­la­tion of fun­da­men­tal rights of human nature

Ok, there’s one on that list that wouldn’t be there, if it weren’t for his hatred of me and that’s num­ber 5…drug con­sump­tion. The pope’s get­ting his revenge on me with that one, but it’s not the only one…

Genetic manip­u­la­tion! My pub­lished work in recom­bi­nant DNA research is well known and I only missed out on a Nobel sci­ence prize because of some ill con­ceived pub­lic com­ments I made while drunk on power, fame and 151 proof Bacardi!

And yes, I’ve vio­lated the rights of human nature, for accord­ing to the catholic church, that’s an easy one as its their def­i­n­i­tion of sodomy. Oh and before you think I am some sort of ass ban­dit, sodomy at its most basic def­i­n­i­tion includes oral-genital sex­ual con­tact. Guilty!

The pope is out to get me! He knows my lib­eral ideas and secular-humanist val­ues threaten his exis­tence as a silly old white man in a white dress!

But never mind him! What about my band?

The drum­mer, wrath, doesn’t want to change his stage name to “genetic manip­u­la­tion” and sloth, who never makes it to rehearsals, would have to start show­ing up…

I’m sure glad I’m an athe­ist and I don’t believe in any of this non­sense. I mean, come on, eter­nal damna­tion? Give me a fuck­ing break!

Sin is far too much fun, any­way. I don’t see any­one stop­ping, do you?

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!

I’m not really a hippy, but I do play one on the internet.

That con­fes­sion shouldn’t be a huge sur­prise to you, as I’ve said on more than one occa­sion on this very blog that I’m not an actual hippy.

I’m a gen­uine cap­i­tal­ist, not like the peo­ple who run the coun­try. I believe that mar­ket forces should dic­tate what the mar­ket sells; demand should reg­u­late sup­ply. That is one of my biggest argu­ments for legal­is­ing drugs. Peo­ple want them and the black mar­ket steps in where the con­trolled mar­ket fails.

If you’re anti-legalisation, then you’re not a real cap­i­tal­ist and I can’t take you seri­ously over any eco­nomic issue. Are you lis­ten­ing Mr. Brown? And you Tory twats? I hope you all wrote that down!

Gen­uine hip­pies don’t believe in sur­vival of the fittest, they believe in a world where we all help one and other. All you have to do is step out­side your front door for 30 sec­onds and you’ll see how unhippy-like the world truly is in that regard. Peo­ple are cunts and they treat each other like cunts. That, my friends, is a sure thing.

I’m over-generalising, but you get the idea. The more self­ish you are, the bet­ter your chances of sur­vival are. If you put your­self ahead of every­one else, you’re prob­a­bly going to come out on top. Of course, there are excep­tions to this rule as well.

Think about your boss, or bosses in gen­eral. They all tend to share a com­mon belief that they are bet­ter than the peo­ple work­ing below them. This belief doesn’t come from hav­ing the more senior role, I’m sure they all believed they were supe­rior prior to that. If any­thing, that innate belief in supe­ri­or­ity is what got them the job in the first place. But reach­ing that posi­tion of power can come with a price, and the price can be dis­missal from a hot­shot, high pay­ing gig.

I’m not self­ish enough, but then I don’t claim to be the fittest and wor­thy of sur­vival. I wouldn’t last 2 min­utes in the real jun­gle, I don’t have that killer instinct, much as I pre­tend I do. I’m too pseudo-philosophical and too much of a pseudo-intellectual to care about any­thing enough to really fight for it. I’d be chewed up, swal­lowed down and shat out by a big­ger, meaner, scarier ani­mal than me.

And that would be OK. If you believe in the laws of the jun­gle, then you have to accept your fate. I accept mine every day the good lord above sees fit to let me wake up and endure another day.

Like I believe in “the good lord above”! You didn’t buy that shit, did you? There is no god, there’s only hip­pies and occa­sion­ally, once in a gen­er­a­tion, there are hip­py­gods. I am that hip­py­god and have the busi­ness cards to prove it.

Except, I’m not really a hippy. I don’t even own a pair of san­dals, never mind love beads.

What are “love beads” any­way? Could a real hippy let me know? Pre­ferrably one that was older than 6 when the 70s started, I was 6 when 1970 started and I just don’t know what they are.

I bet these peo­ple know. I mean, the peo­ple in THIS REPORT from today’s Inde­pen­dent, which checks up on some for­mer hip­pies to see if they are still liv­ing the dream.

I guess the Indy left me out of that list because they think I am cur­rently a hippy and they prob­a­bly already know I was 6 when the 60’s ended. It still would have been nice for them to phone me, you know, just to say “hi”.

I know you guys at the Indy are com­ing here, hang­ing out, read­ing my shit. I men­tion your rag too much for you not too. I don’t mind if you sniff around my nether regions a bit. I kinda like it, actu­ally, but usu­ally I expect a bit of din­ner or a drink before I let some­one do that sort of thing to me.

Don’t worry, I still dig your Monday-Saturday edi­tions, but you really need to sort those dorks at the IoS out. Their lies, exag­ger­a­tions and mixed mes­sages on cannabis are ludi­crous, hurt­ful and unhelp­ful and they should cease imme­di­ately. You know it makes sense!

I feel the need to post some­thing this morning.

Any­thing!

I feel the need to amuse, inform and entertain.

I feel the need to make my pres­ence felt on the world wide whaddiyacallit.

There’s only one problem…

I’ve got noth­ing to say!

Well, that’s not strictly true, I’ve always got some­thing to say.

Who doesn’t? They say opin­ions are like ass­holes; everybody’s got one.

Or in my world, I refer to a lot of peo­ple as “opin­ions” and if you think about the pre­vi­ous sen­tence, you’ll decode the secret mes­sage that these par­tic­u­lar peo­ple never seem to get!

What I really mean is, I don’t have a topic to drone on about this morn­ing. Yes, it is morn­ing, here in north Lon­don, right now as I am tap­ping away on my key­board, writ­ing this dri­vel just for you!

And it is just for you, my beloved, loyal and truly adored hippyfans.

As my mother used to say, when she would yell at me for some­thing that she had already yelled at me for; “I’m not yelling just to hear myself. I’m shout­ing at you!”

Well, it’s the same when I post some­thing. I’m not post­ing this so I can read it; that’s the intended pur­pose of my thoughts. No, I am post­ing this non­sense to be read, appre­ci­ated and pos­si­bly wor­shipped slightly.

Ok, not wor­shipped slightly, but totally and com­pletely, like the true liv­ing god that I am.

Ah-hem.

Any­way, that can’t be true, because I can’t be god and “a mes­siah for the new mil­len­nium” at the same time can I? I can surely try!

Dou­ble ah-hem, now just leave it, you pseudo-deity.

Actu­ally, it’s cool that I’ve made a god ref­er­ence; because I had a real cre­ative break­through on some­thing I’ve been work­ing on for a very long time. It’s one of those extra lit­tle side projects of mine that I men­tion from time to time and it has noth­ing to do with my real life job or this blog.

Basi­cally, it’s a novel I’ve had per­co­lat­ing in my head for over ten years and here’s where it gets confusing…it’s my semi-fictionalised auto­bi­og­ra­phy. It’s my life lived right in a lot of ways and very much the same as real­ity too.

I told you it was con­fus­ing! No won­der it’s taken me this long to get my head around it.

Any­way, the break­through has to do with the phi­los­o­phy behind the story and one of the themes that will per­vade the narrative.

Ooooooh! Lis­ten to me get all pon­cey and pseudo-intellectual!

Remem­ber, it’s bet­ter to be a pseudo-intellectual than a proper one, because us PI’s have actu­ally touched a girl, smoked a spliff and danced with the devil in the pale moonlight.

Maybe that last bit’s just me.

The theme and phi­los­o­phy of which I speak is the total rejec­tion of the con­cept of god and god’s exis­tence to the point of extreme blasphemy.

If I can’t be god, then no one can!

I’ve never believed in god (and the lack of a cap­i­tal G is infuck­ing­ten­tional), not even as a child. I can remem­ber ques­tion­ing the logic of it all at a very early age and think­ing that it was as ridicu­lous as Santa and the Tooth Fairy (again, cap­i­tals on pur­pose, blas­phemy ain’t just for xmas, it’s for life!).

I’m not say­ing you can’t believe in god, if you want to. It’s your choice and I believe in reli­gious free­dom, espe­cially the free­dom to reject it all.
You can have faith in a “higher power”, if you need to; or per­haps a belief in an order to the uni­verse, if you must.

I might even buy into that one; that there is order to the uni­verse. I just don’t think we will have the slight­est clue as to what that order is as the enor­mity of it as a con­cept is well beyond the capa­bil­i­ties of the tiny lit­tle meat-computers in our head.

So was that last sen­tence, nearly!

And look, if you do believe in god and you really think that there’s a guy in the sky with a long white beard and a longer white robe, run­ning the show down here, then you must absolutely detest him because of all the point­less grief and suf­fer­ing his actions cause us every day of our stink­ing, rot­ten exis­tence on this hell­hole of a planet we call home!

If any­thing, all the bad, the evil, the shit in this world is proof pos­i­tive that there is no god. For if there were a god, then bad things wouldn’t hap­pen to good peo­ple and pets. For if there were a god and he cre­ated us in his image, he sure as shit would treat us all a lot better.

Now, if I were god, life for every­one would be noth­ing but free beer, weed and blowjobs. You’d all have per­fect health and per­fect lives and you could have a lie-in every Sun­day (or Fri­day or Sat­ur­day, or every­day depend­ing upon your present denom­i­na­tion and level of devo­tion) because I wouldn’t want to be wor­shipped in the clas­sic “go to church” sense of the word.

But I’m not god, I’ve never been god and unless my take on the uni­verse is com­pletely wrong, I’ll never be god. And this last sen­tence is proof I’m not insane either!

If you approach it ratio­nally and log­i­cally, there’s only one con­clu­sion that can be reached: God didn’t cre­ate man, man cre­ated god. And man did a shitty job of it too!

And that’s the under­cur­rent of my next novel. Bet it will top the best­seller list in the first print­ing! After all, you will all buy it, won’t you?

In the next cou­ple of weeks, once I wrap up a few other things, I’m going to be ded­i­cat­ing a lot of time to this par­tic­u­lar side project. I’m giv­ing myself a very loose six months to com­plete a first draft of it. Then comes the really hard part…convincing some­one it’s good enough to publish.

And if I fail, there’s always the inter­net. I hear they let you pub­lish any old shit on the web. If they didn’t, then how did this par­tic­u­lar hip­py­post get here?

Hey ho hippyfans!

Sorry for the longer than usual gap in posts. I’d love to blame it on some­thing as excit­ing as a trip to a desert island, or a drug-induced coma, but sadly the truth is more mun­dane than that.

My iMac has been in the shop for the last few days, though thanks to my iBook, I’ve still been online.

So if I’ve still been online, why haven’t I posted?

Sim­ple, I’ve been suf­fer­ing from tech-stress!

In the last 3 weeks, all of my major Apple gad­gets have suf­fered from some sort of prob­lem or issue. They are all resolved now, so my tech-stress lev­els are return­ing to normal.

Before any­one thinks this is going to be some sort of anti-Apple tirade, think again. I have noth­ing but praise for how they have han­dled my tech­ni­cal troubles.

Firstly, my Black 60gb iPod with video devel­oped an odd prob­lem; when I con­nected it to my com­puter, it didn’t show up on the desk­top or in iTunes. The iPod itself worked fine for play­back, but it wouldn’t synch or charge via the dock connector.

Because my iPod is engraved, the only repair option I had was to use Apple’s col­lect and return ser­vice. All of this was under my orig­i­nal war­ranty, so it only cost me in time with­out it, but no dosh at all.

Apple sent UPS to col­lect the iPod, com­plete with all the pack­ag­ing and labels required.

The UPS guy even waited a few min­utes while I boxed it up. The next day it was back with the moth­er­ship in the Nether­lands, the prob­lem was diag­nosed and a new one was shipped out from their fac­tory in Shang­hai the day after that.

If it weren’t for the recent ter­ror alerts, I would have had the replace­ment much quicker, but as it turned out, I was with­out the iPod for 10 days. Not bad.

I’m not sure if the replace­ment is brand new or recon­di­tioned, but it cer­tainly looks and feels new. I was so impressed with the ser­vice I received that I bought the Apple Care plan to cover it for another 2 years. If some­thing else ever goes wrong with it, I know exactly what to expect.

My G5 iMac is around 18 months old and I still love it.

Around a year ago, Apple iden­ti­fied an issue with my model of iMac that involved the Logic Board and power sup­ply and extended the repair period by an addi­tional 2 years on top of their war­ranty. Last week, I realised my com­puter was suf­fer­ing from this known issue.

The fans were run­ning fast, the temp was high and hot and finally, I started get­ting dis­torted video and weird crashes. Last Wednes­day I took it into my local north Lon­don Apple Store.

I had my first ever appoint­ment with a Mac Genius and I was impressed. He checked out my iMac, booked it in for the repairs and even ordered the parts he thought might need replac­ing. It turns out, it didn’t need every­thing he sent but bet­ter safe than sorry.

On Fri­day, the online sta­tus of my repair said it was com­plete, but they didn’t phone me. I was really miss­ing it, so today (Mon­day) I went in to col­lect it. The repair was fin­ished, but they wanted to clean it before I picked it up, so I wan­dered around for half an hour and when I returned, it was boxed up and ready to go.

It’s run­ning cooler, the fans are qui­eter and the video looks great. Also, they did an amaz­ing job of scrub­bing it up, it looks as good as it did when it was new…even the keyboard!

So again, Apple came through for me.

Now, my prob­lem with my iBook is the same one affect­ing 1.8 mil­lion other Apple lap­top own­ers, the great Sony bat­tery recall of 2006. Apple was quick to announce this and even though they haven’t had that many reported cases of over­heat­ing, they’re replac­ing all those bat­ter­ies for free!

As I was using my iBook exten­sively in the last week, while the iMac was back with the moth­er­ship being repaired, I noticed the bat­tery wasn’t hold­ing it’s charge as well as it used to and con­sid­ered order­ing a replace­ment. Now I don’t need to, as I’ve reg­is­tered for the recall and should receive a new bat­tery for it in the next month or so.

Again, I’m pleased with the outcome.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s stress­ful when your essen­tial toys go funny and I’ve been miss­ing my iMac like mad.

I was able to back-up all my impor­tant data; the ele­ments of my all new dig­i­tal lifestyle, before I took it into the shop, but it’s still never easy to part with your computer.

I’m glued to my screen most of the time, when I’m home. If I’m not writ­ing, or surf­ing the net, I’m using it to waste time with music and video. I’m attached, addicted, what­ever you want to call it. I’m glad it’s home, where it belongs.

I want a black Mac­Book and am going to get one at some point in the not too dis­tant future.

I’ve offered Mrs. Hippy the iBook, which is only a year old and pris­tine con­di­tion and if she passes, I’ll sell it at a decent price. I may already know some­one who would grab it, though I would love to see Mrs. H take it. She doesn’t really get my love of all things Apple and I think it would put her on the road to under­stand­ing why they are so damn good.

I also hope to be order­ing a Mac Mini soon as there’s a refresh expected in the next fort­night, if you believe the rumour sites. I always believe the rumours; life is more fun that way.

The Mac Mini will get con­nected to my Sony Bravia and stereo and act as my media server. I’ll move all of my iTunes on to it as well as using it to down­load video from the net. I’ll also be able to receive and record some dig­i­tal ter­res­trial chan­nels on it, which will be extra cool because I can export the pro­grammes for play­back on my iPod.

And then my 2nd Air­port Express, which is cur­rently con­nected to my stereo, for stream­ing music from the iMac, will move into the kitchen, to con­nect to my brand new Log­itech mm50 (black) speak­ers, that I picked up last week. They’re rather wicked and I’m blown away by the sound!

My all-new dig­i­tal lifestyle just keeps get­ting bet­ter and bet­ter and bet­ter! And this ends what amounts to a two-handed geek-speak wank that prob­a­bly put most of you off!

Nor­mal hippy ser­vice will resume soon!