The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘shrooms!’ Category

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!

No doubt you’ve caught the media frenzy sur­round­ing the most recent legal high of choice, mephedrone. Its the lat­est in a long line of legal highs, sold openly and pos­sessed with­out fear of arrest.

Who wouldn’t want a high that was legal? Isn’t that the ulti­mate goal? Sure, booze is legal and will get you absolutely blotto, but so what? Peo­ple want a choice of intoxicants.

I don’t like liquor and if asked, will declare that I no longer drink. Its true, I can’t remem­ber the last time I had even a sip of alco­hol. The hang­overs were just too much to bear. I’m too old for a self-inflicted sore head.

Where does that leave you if you don’t like booze, but you do enjoy alter­ing your state of con­scious­ness? Black mar­ket drugs like weed and coke and smack and MDMA and speed and LSD I guess.

But what if you don’t want to break the law? I’ve already sug­gested vot­ing for lead­ers who would change the laws, but we can’t seem to find any, except for the Lib Dems and if its going to be a hung par­lia­ment any­way, then we should all vote for the Lib Dems so they can have a big­ger share of the even­tual coali­tion government.

But I digress. If you want to get high with­out break­ing the law, you look for some­thing legal.

Until 2005, fresh magic mush­rooms were legal to pur­chase and pos­sess in the UK.

Finally, there was a legal high avail­able that was pro­foundly effec­tive and read­ily avail­able. I shroomed reg­u­larly for a cou­ple of years, every week or two. I was always care­ful, I stayed in a safe, com­fort­able envi­ron­ment (my own home) and had very pleas­ant, enjoy­able times. It was eas­ily one of the best drug expe­ri­ences of my life, I can’t begin to express how much I enjoyed it.

Well, I can and I did, if you read the first cou­ple of years of my out­put here, I rave about shrooms con­tin­u­ally. Taken respon­si­bly and with a rough knowl­edge of the appro­pri­ate dosage, shrooms are rel­a­tively harm­less. You would need to con­sume your own weight in mush­rooms for the dose to be fatally toxic and I haven’t heard about any­one who’s tried.

You could always pick fresh mush­rooms in the wild, pro­vided you knew what you were look­ing for, because the wrong type of mush­room could be fatally toxic at a much lower dosage. But if you were buy­ing them from some­one who could reli­ably tell you the strain, with knowl­edge of where they were farmed and advice on how many to take, you would be much bet­ter off.

And for a few years, we were much bet­ter off, with our safe, easy to buy fresh shrooms. It was bliss.

And then they got very pop­u­lar. And then the media got inter­ested. And then the gov­ern­ment got involved. And then they were banned.

The above para­graph will be repeated again, you will notice, I promise.

And so I did sadly lament the demise of my beloved shrooms because the gov­ern­ment man didn’t want me to have any more fun.

But it was too late, the mar­ket for legal highs had been estab­lished, a decent cus­tomer base still existed. All they needed was another prod­uct, some­thing legal that would fuck you up a bit.

The answer came from New Zealand:

BZP

BZP came as some­thing called party pills, which was a big change from fresh shrooms, it was a man made chem­i­cal of dubi­ous ori­gin. Rumour was it was used for worm­ing pets, but it gave peo­ple a buzz, so we tried it.

It worked. It was quite speedy and a bit spacey, pleas­ant but not over­whelm­ing. There were many brands, legal high forums were brim­ming with reviews to help you choose. Peo­ple were happy to have any­thing that was legal and had an effect.

And then they got very pop­u­lar. And then the media got inter­ested. And then the gov­ern­ment got involved. And then they were banned.

Right around the same time, the first legal mar­i­juana sub­sti­tutes that worked came along, the first was called Spice, which has become a generic term for these drugs. The ingre­di­ents were kept secret, so we didn’t know what the magic herbs we were smok­ing were, but we knew they got us high.

Turns out the herbs weren’t magic, but the JHW-081 they sprayed onto it was. JHW-081 is a syn­thetic cannabi­noid, made in a lab to mimic THC. Sneaky fuck­ers, no won­der it worked.

As if overnight, many dif­fer­ent brands of smok­ing mix­tures came on to the mar­ket, all with a very sim­i­lar weed-like effect. It was legal, but it was also expen­sive, and in some cases pricier than real weed.

Think about that, peo­ple were will­ing to pay more for a legal weed alter­na­tive, than actual weed. That says a lot.

And then they got very pop­u­lar. And then the media got inter­ested. And then the gov­ern­ment got involved. And then they were banned.

In the gloom of my post-legal-shrooms exis­tence, I tried many of these legal highs and a few years ago, I was get­ting these rather delight­ful lit­tle cap­sules shipped in legally from Israel.

They tried to keep the ingre­di­ents a secret, but with a bit of research, I dis­cov­ered it was a chem­i­cal related to cathi­none, which is the active ingre­di­ent in khat, the Africa plant that is used as a stim­u­lant when chewed.

At first, I only ordered a cou­ple and found them quite pleas­ant and quite strong, closer to real MDMA than BZP or the crap that fol­lowed. I ordered a few more, and then a few more.

And then I ordered a lot.

And then I lost a cou­ple of days. No lie, I think my ben­der lasted around 48 hours. Peo­ple were con­cerned, I just dis­ap­peared. It was the most mor­ish drug I’ve ever had and I used to do coke years ago. I kept going until I swal­lowed the last pill I had.

Then I crashed for a cou­ple of days and felt extremely depressed. I was angry with myself for los­ing con­trol, some­thing I rarely if ever do while under the influ­ence of any­thing. I didn’t con­trol this drug, this drug con­trolled me.

It didn’t, ever again. I didn’t touch any more after that. It seemed to tar­get my plea­sure cen­tre with laser-guided pre­ci­sion. No thanks.

Guess what I am 99.9% cer­tain that drug was?

Mephedrone.

Kids, lis­ten to your old uncle hippy, that shit’s not worth it. Its way too mor­ish. It feels absolutely won­der­ful when you’re tak­ing it and you will want to take it end­lessly. You can’t, even­tu­ally the money, or your body will give out and then you will crash. The crash sucks. Its not worth the pleasure.

As much as I don’t like mephedrone, I am merely sug­gest­ing (in strong, unam­bigu­ous terms) that you not take it, I am not sug­gest­ing some knee jerk reac­tionary ban. Actu­ally, I think it makes more sense to keep it legal and out in the open. at least until you have an alter­na­tive to offer.

If the gov­ern­ment can’t offer an alter­na­tive (I sug­gest weed, please), the mar­ket­place will find one. It always does, because we live in a cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety and sup­ply will always try to meet demand.

Oh, and if you’re against sup­ply and demand, even in the illicit mar­ket­place, then you are against the very foun­da­tion of cap­i­tal­ism. So take that all you anti-drug com­mie pinko social­ists! Get on the free mar­ket band­wagon, don’t get in the way of trade!

Ban­ning mephedrone isn’t the answer, unless the ques­tion is: “how can we get another untested, cut­ting edge man-made intox­i­cant into the hands of our chil­dren in the quick­est pos­si­ble time?”

I’ve yet to see one con­clu­sive report of a death being caused directly by mephedrone. I’ve seen lots of bull­shit about it being “linked” to a few untimely deaths, but alco­hol and other drugs have also been in the mix, though that hasn’t been highlighted.

If I drank myself to death right now while eat­ing a banana, you could quite accu­rately state that, until the coroner’s report is issued, my death was linked to eat­ing a banana. I can see the head­lines now, “Ban the Yel­low Scourge”.

Booze kills and kills often, but the alco­hol indus­try spends a lot of money on image and rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment. When you think of liquor, you don’t think of corpses, do you? No, you think of good times, par­ties and women in tight dresses that you know will have sex with you.

Think about how many times you’ve got­ten pissed, puked your insides out and woke up the next day feel­ing like death, swear­ing you’d never ever do that to your­self again. Until next Saturday.

That’s either effec­tive mar­ket­ing or addic­tion. Or both.

The legal high indus­try isn’t organ­ised, they don’t have a cen­tralised body to speak on their behalf and be their pub­lic face. Its the same for ille­gal highs for that mat­ter. Who rep­re­sents them? Who does their spinning?

No one.

Maybe its time they did.

People’s need to get high, to be intox­i­cated, to alter their state, is not new and its not going away any time soon. There will always be a demand for sub­stances, legal or oth­er­wise, that change your mood.

Recent his­tory has shown that when given the choice, peo­ple pre­fer legal sub­stances, even if they cost more and have less pleas­ant effects than their ille­gal rivals.

If the gov­ern­ment left well enough alone with my old friends, magic mush­rooms, none of us would have ever heard of mephedrone and what­ever might follow.

Go on, if you let us all have legal weed, we can leave all is designer drug shit alone. Please?

Its not lost on me that I haven’t posted any­thing here in an absolute age and a half. I’m all too aware of it.

I haven’t been so well for the last cou­ple of weeks. Hey ho.

I’m wait­ing for the results of another blood test, that I had been putting off, but a few days ago, I had a cou­ple of litres sucked out of my arm.

Ok, it seemed like litres, I didn’t look. I don’t like blood, espe­cially my own if its not deep inside my veins.

The rea­son I’ve been putting it off is because my reg­u­lar GP of nearly a dozen years is now on long-term sick leave and get­ting a blood test meant see­ing a brand new doctor.

The new doc­tor and I didn’t get off to a great start. He took my blood pres­sure using some fancy auto­mated gizmo and when he checked the read­ing, the expres­sion on his face told me it wasn’t good.

My mother suf­fered from high blood pres­sure, took med­ica­tion for it and was mon­i­tored reg­u­larly. With that in mind, I’ve always kept a close eye on mine, and thank­fully it has con­sis­tently been low, 110/70 which for an over­sized, middled-aged smoker is pretty damn good.

The elec­tronic gizmo was show­ing 170/110, which is not good. Its about as far from good as you can be, its “call an ambu­lance now” good.

I was incred­u­lous of this read­ing straight away and told him I’m con­sis­tently 110/70, young doc­tor new guy looked like he going to shit him­self. I asked him to take it again with an old style, man­ual sphygmomanometer.

He had to go find one and I was momen­tar­ily left alone, my mind rac­ing to the obvi­ous, yet slim pos­si­bil­ity that some­thing changed with my blood pressure.

It could explain why I was feel­ing so shitty again.

The new doc­tor guy returned with an old-school blood pres­sure cuff, quickly wrapped it around my arm then pumped the squeezey ball for all he was worth. As he let the air out and took the read­ing, his con­cerned expres­sion relaxed into a very slight grin and I knew it was fine.

And that’s all he said, “its fine”. He didn’t even share the cor­rect, final score with me and I think I know why.

It was 110/70, just like I told him it should and would be.

Doc­tors don’t like it when you know more than they do, even if it is some­thing as per­sonal as your own damn blood pres­sure. Espe­cially, younger, inex­pe­ri­enced and inse­cure doc­tors, like this one, who I unin­ten­tion­ally put on his back foot.

It would have been eas­ier if he just got it right the first time, but that’s true of just about every­thing any­one gets wrong, ever.

I told him I had Hashimoto’s and needed to get my thy­roid lev­els checked, though I said “T4 lev­els” just to be snarky and this time it was inten­tional. To be fair, this was right after he told me smok­ing cig­a­rettes was bad for me, like he was the first per­son to share that par­tic­u­lar pearl of wisdom.

“Well, gee whil­lik­ers, doc, they’re bad for you? I did not know that. Next you’re gonna tell me unpro­tected anal sex with crack whores is bad for me! I did not know that, either.”

He asked me what my symp­toms were and I told him: breath­less­ness, like try­ing to catch your breath on a cold day with­out any exer­tion, very occa­sional, but notice­able heart pal­pi­ta­tions, alter­nat­ing sweats and chills, a big lack of energy and worst of all, my back prob­lems have returned.

When I men­tioned my back prob­lem, he looked at me quizzi­cally and I had to explain to him how I was suf­fer­ing from inflam­ma­tion in the joints of my spine, which were light­ing up nerves in my leg, sci­atic really. I had to go to explain that one of the symp­toms of Hashimoto’s is inflamed joints as attrib­uted by my reg­u­lar GP last summer.

All of this started last sum­mer when my back gave out and for around a fort­night I could barely walk. I got over it and haven’t had any real back prob­lems since, just the occa­sional, iso­lated twinge, but noth­ing of any concern.

Until about 2 weeks ago, when I started get­ting severe pain shoot­ing down my right leg, mainly in bed and bad enough to wake me up. I haven’t really slept more than 3 con­tin­u­ous hours since then, though often I wake up, put an ice pack on my back, or take a hor­ri­ble codeine pill or both, and go back to sleep.

I saw my chi­ro­prac­tor three times last week, which improved it slightly. Since then, I’ve worked a cou­ple of nights and its become bad again. Sit­ting in a shitty office chair for 12 hours will do that to you.

And because of the bank hol­i­day week­end, I can’t see my chi­ro­prac­tor again until Tues­day, which is also bad.

Moan, moan, moan, I’m just a big hippy baby.

I left the doctor’s office with a blood test form, with more boxes checked than I ever thought pos­si­ble, hence the litres of blood extracted. He’s run­ning every test imag­in­able, which is cool, but he did it out of fear, not because he thought there was any­thing par­tic­u­larly wrong with me.

He didn’t really answer my ques­tion about the pos­si­bil­ity of my thy­roid lev­els drop­ping again, requir­ing an increase in my daily dose of levothy­rox­ine. I don’t think he knew the answer. I don’t know either, but right now, its my best and only guess.

I was told by my reg­u­lar (and much missed) GP, that once my dosage was adjusted prop­erly, I would “feel like a new per­son”. That hasn’t hap­pened yet and I’ve reached the point where I don’t think I ever will.

Yep, all of this has me down. I am bored with hav­ing health prob­lems, its tedious always being asked with deep con­cern “how are you? no really, how are you?” I know peo­ple mean it and its not that I don’t appre­ci­ate their con­cern, I just don’t like hav­ing to answer it over and over again.

Mainly I’m bored with feel­ing like shit all the time. Its mak­ing me think all sorts of things, like: this is my life now, my best days are behind me, I’ve achieved noth­ing with my life.

All sorts of uplift­ing shit, really!

Just check out the title of this post, “Run­ning out the clock”. That’s kind of a downer, isn’t it? Now that you know the context.

That’s how I feel right now, like I am just run­ning out the clock, on those last few decades/years/months/days/hours/minutes/seconds (delete as appro­pri­ate) that I have left.

It doesn’t mat­ter if its true, I mean of course its true, its true for every­one, but what mat­ters I guess is that its how I feel right now. And I don’t feel like I have decades or years.

I should point out I have no med­ical evi­dence to sug­gest I am going to die any time soon and in actual fact, ratio­nally I don’t believe I am going to die any time soon. I’m still talk­ing about how I feel.

Emo­tion­ally.

Now, this is the part where I’m sup­posed to remind you (and myself) that I’ve always been a sur­vivor and blah blah, I’ve come through this and I’ve come through that, but again that’s not how I feel.

I feel like I haven’t got any fight left in me, but that’s prob­a­bly just the Hashimoto’s talk­ing. I really do feel like my energy is zapped most of the time and doing the sim­plest things takes tremen­dous amounts of effort.

With that in mind, think how daunt­ing any­thing com­plex must seem to me at the moment, like nego­ti­at­ing my way through the NHS to a bet­ter diag­no­sis and treatment.

Either I need a sim­ple adjust­ment to my thy­roid meds or some­thing else is wrong. I can just about cope with another increase in my dosage and the addi­tional tests required, but any­thing more than that and I don’t think I can be bothered.

Happy days.

I liked it bet­ter when I was the king of fun, but if I am going to get nos­tal­gic, I might as well lament over how much I miss my beloved fresh and legal magic mush­rooms and I still curse the gov­ern­ment for ban­ning them.

What’s the con­nec­tion? Right now, I would really ben­e­fit from a decent, old fash­ioned shroom trip. An after­noon shroomed to the gills would do more for me than 10 years of psy­chother­apy ever could. And it would be cheaper, too.

Yep, me again. And no, it’s not the threat­ened review of my brand new, shiny, lick­able and super­fast iMac. It’s com­ing. So is xmas. Xmas will not come first, because as we all know, com­ing first is rude.

As I was thread­ing my way through the rush hour traf­fic this morn­ing, strug­gling to get myself home, I started think­ing how much I could really do with get seri­ously out of my skull.

What I mean is, I could really do with a psy­che­delic trip that got me totally off my face. I need to see some pretty colours!

I’ve done acid a hand­ful of times, the last time around 10 years ago. I also used to enjoy magic mush­rooms, around every week or so. I’ve lost count of the num­ber of shroom trips I’ve had.

Magic mush­rooms grow wild all over the UK and a friend of mine would take an annual pil­grim­age to the West Coun­try every autumn to col­lect them. He was always very gen­er­ous with them and I ended up with a few trips yearly.

Then, in 2003 I dis­cov­ered that fresh magic mush­rooms were avail­able, legally to pur­chase and con­sume. I didn’t believe it at first, that you could really buy them that eas­ily. At first, I thought it was some sort of a scam. How wrong I was!

I first ordered them from EDIT my friends who are now the exclu­sive dis­trib­u­tors of my NLH deluxe bong. They arrived the fol­low­ing day and were exactly as described. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

I started research­ing shrooms, learn­ing about dif­fer­ent strains, poten­cies and dosages. With my friend’s West Coun­try shrooms, I never mea­sured them; they were dried and rel­a­tively easy to con­sume, if not totally disgusting.

Fresh shrooms are even nas­tier, slimy and cold, with the flavour of what I expect the insides of a rot­ting corpse might taste like. Gross!

I started out on 30 grams of Mex­i­can p-cubes, which is a rea­son­able, but not overly strong dose — for me any­way. Over the few years I did them reg­u­larly, I worked my way up to higher doses, peak­ing around 55 grams or so.

The trips were amaz­ing, I got to hang out with the mush­room god. Search for him on my site, if you want to know more. Basi­cally, if you eat enough shrooms, the mush­room god vis­its you and shows you the pretty colours!

Shrooms take a while to hit you. On an empty stom­ach, it would take 60–90 min­utes before feel­ing the first effects, with a peak reached any­where from 2–4 hours and last­ing for 4–6 hours. It pretty much wasted a whole day, but what way to waste it!

Psy­che­delic drugs enhance your per­cep­tion; the sim­ple way to under­stand it is they make the synap­tic nerves in your brain fire faster, giv­ing you more sen­sory input. Your vision sharp­ens, as does your hear­ing which makes music sound amaz­ing. As you get fur­ther into your trip, pat­terns in things swish and swirl, wood grain flows like a river.

On one par­tic­u­larly pleas­ant trip, on some Colom­bian p-cubes, right at the point where I peaked, I saw a burst of rain­bow colours in the air, in a sun-filled room. It was astound­ingly beau­ti­ful and com­pletely unex­pected. Colom­bians are appar­ently known for the colours they pro­duce, but try as I did, I was unable to repeat the experience.

No two trips are exactly alike, which is why I had no chance of repeat­ing my explo­sion of colour by pre­med­i­tat­ing it. Shrooms take you on the jour­ney, though I can’t say I really lost any con­trol. Except once…

For my birth­day a few years back, I had some Hawai­ian shrooms, which are very well known for their ultra-high potency. I had tried them before, elect­ing to exper­i­ment with the rec­om­mended starter dose of 10 grams. They didn’t do that much for me. Then, I did some­thing stu­pid, I dou­bled the dose.

Bad move! I had a seri­ously strong trip which ended with me hid­ing under my duvet with my eyes closed for sev­eral hours, still see­ing a multi-coloured geo­met­ric pat­tern stretched from right in front of me, all the way to infin­ity. I couldn’t see what my eyes were see­ing, I could only “see” what my brain was gen­er­at­ing. Kids, I seri­ously rec­om­mend you do NOT try this at home!

A few months after that, the gov­ern­ment put fresh magic mush­rooms into Class A, which is the same cat­e­gory as coke and smack.…the fuck­ers! In no way are shrooms any­where near as bad for you as heroin or crack. Used respon­si­bly, they are very safe, good fun!

Thanks to the actions of some stu­pid tourists, the Dutch have just banned shrooms as well. So much for tol­er­ant Hol­land! The tourists in ques­tion were all drink­ing as well, but booze had noth­ing to do with their unfor­tu­nate inci­dents. Sure thing! Booze never causes any­one any trou­ble, does it?

I think I read that shroom farm­ing is a 14 mil­lion pound a year busi­ness in Hol­land. That’s an awful lot of money to be just throw­ing away. And peo­ple will still want their shrooms, they will just have to go under­ground for them.

I haven’t had any shrooms since the gov­ern­ment out­lawed them. It’s not because I haven’t had the chance, one can still get them, if one knows where to look — like online! You can still get grow kits from Europe, if you really want some and they’re dead easy to grow. I haven’t had any shrooms because I don’t do Class A drugs and haven’t done since I gave up coke and E’s over 5 years ago.

I still love weed and con­tinue to sam­ple lots of dif­fer­ent legal highs, and as of today, I wouldn’t mind some­thing psy­che­delic. I don’t think I will actively seek any­thing elec­tric, but should I be offered some shrooms or even a blot­ter, I would be sorely tempted to accept the universe’s gen­eros­ity. I could really use a lit­tle break from real­ity right now, I think it would do my men­tal health a world of good.

I spent a good chunk of yes­ter­day off my face on some Funk Pills. It was a Wednes­day, which is just as good as any other day to par­take in some legal highs.

I decided to try Funk’s Twisted (Psy­che­delic Funk) which are sup­posed to be the trippy ones from their line of party pills.

I took the first cap­sule around 3pm on an empty stom­ach, then sat back until the effects began. At around 4pm, just as I was start­ing to come up from the first one, I took a second.

The high was to be expected from some­thing BZP based – I started feel­ing up and happy and some­what euphoric. What I didn’t get was any over­whelm­ing psy­che­delic effects, just a slight sharp­en­ing of my vision.

I think that is my biggest gripe about some of these legal highs, they never deliver the trippy punch that I am seek­ing. As much as every­one wants them to be shroom replace­ments, they’re clearly not. I wish they were!

Shrooms were so much bet­ter than every­thing else you could buy legally, they were the best trippy drug I ever enjoyed. I wish they could come back!

The cur­rent incar­na­tion of legal highs are good, I’m not knock­ing them as I do enjoy the high they pro­duce, but they are dif­fer­ent from other ille­gal highs. While com­par­isons can be made between piper­azines and MDMA, they are very dis­tinc­tive drugs.

At about 6pm yes­ter­day, I took a third pill, which to be hon­est was a bit more than I needed. It was the usual story, I hadn’t come up enough from the first two, though by 6:15pm, I finally did but I was con­cerned I might have over­done it. I did, but only as a per­sonal preference.

The third pill I took was a “Big Grin” also from Funk Pills, which has a dif­fer­ent blend to the Twisted pills and con­se­quently dif­fer­ent effects. The com­bi­na­tion was very pleas­ant; I was quite deeply monged!

I cer­tainly pre­fer the “Big Grin” to the Twisted pills as the high is much more mind-numbing. Trust me, that’s a good thing.

I peaked around 9 or 10pm and by mid­night I was still buzzing. To aid in the come­down, I drank a Dutch hot cocoa (made with a dash of but­ter and some ground hash) and took a Valer­ian. By 2am, I was sound asleep.

Today, I feel some­what lethar­gic and hun­gover, which I don’t nor­mally expe­ri­ence, but I’m attribut­ing it to the increased dose and most likely I didn’t drink enough water; though it seemed like I did at the time. I’m sure I’ll be back to nor­mal by tomor­row, but this should explain the some­what sub­dued tone this entry has taken.

I need a few spliffs and another good night’s sleep and I’ll be right as rain.

Here’s a quick blast from me before I head off for yet another fun-filled night at work.

The Inde­pen­dent news­pa­per here in the UK pub­lished an inter­est­ing arti­cle about the cur­rent pop­u­lar­ity in legal highs. Well duh!

As an early adopter and exper­i­menter with the sub­stances they men­tion, fol­low­ing the ban on shrooms last sum­mer, I’ve been on the cut­ting edge of this stuff for ages!

But do they come to ask me for a com­ment on the world of legal highs?

Do they fuck!

I guess I’m just too expen­sive for them! This hippy don’t come cheap!

It doesn’t mat­ter, I’m still happy to bring you a link to their arti­cle. The main point that mat­tered to me is that the gov­ern­ment has said they see no rea­son to review the sta­tus of any sub­stance cur­rently avail­able. That’s cool.

They also men­tion my friends at EDIT, who really are at the cut­ting edge of the mar­ket. They were big shroom-sellers up until the ban and they were quick to realise that a mar­ket con­tin­ued for legal, recre­ational sub­stances and have brought many great prod­ucts to the UK market.

After this lit­tle run of nights, I’ve got some well-deserved time off. Besides wrap­ping up work on one of my non-hippy related projects, I’m going to be check­ing out some more new prod­ucts to review for you. I’m really look­ing for­ward to get­ting off my face all in the inter­ests of improv­ing your life!

What other north Lon­don based-hippy has done that for you lately?

Go on fuck­ers, one of you can really win my bong! Click here to find out how right now!

Yo.

Yes, I’m back.

Two days in a row! It’s like all your xmas’s have come at once and Santa Claus is really Jesus and he’s tak­ing you to heaven to live with god for eter­nity and have noth­ing but oral sex all the time. Yee-fucking-haw!

Sad bas­tard that I am, I was dip­ping into my hip­p­yarchive for a trip down mem­ory lane. I wish it was a real trip, but the gov­ern­ment man took away my beloved magic mush­rooms last sum­mer, so now I ain’t got noth­ing psy­che­delic to savour and enjoy in the pri­vacy of my north Lon­don lair.

I know I harp on about this shroom ban, but I do for good rea­son! I really dug the lit­tle fuck­ers and I miss them very much!

Way back when shrooms were legal and the post­man was my dealer and he didn’t even know it; I used to indulge in this lit­tle pas­time once every week or so. It was good for me.

When shrooms were legal, they were cheap, easy to get, con­sis­tently potent and if used with intel­li­gence and knowl­edge, very safe. Safer than booze any day of the week, but don’t get me started on the legal drugs!

Yes, some peo­ple can go crazy if they abuse shrooms with­out the required infor­ma­tion and smarts. But some peo­ple go crazy anyway.

Scooobity bee boop!

How many peo­ple get beat up, robbed, killed, preg­nant, infected, you name it, because of a par­tic­u­larly heavy night in the pub?

Really! Don’t get me fuck­ing started!

When you put it into that con­text, the ban on shrooms seems even more ridiculous!

The rea­son I’m feel­ing so nos­tal­gic about my for­mer favourite legal sub­stance is two fold; firstly my 2nd anniver­sary of blog­ging is quickly approaching.

Fuck! Two years of spout­ing absolute rub­bish online and being ignored by the main­stream press, even though I am the one true genius of the 21st century!

Save the cel­e­bra­tions for another day. How about the day? Ok.

And sec­ondly, I was read­ing some of my early entries and damn if I didn’t wax lyri­cal end­lessly about my total enjoy­ment of magic mushrooms.

I miss my funny fun­gus! The mush­room god doesn’t visit me any­more! I’m a man with­out a reli­gion! Shouldn’t the Euro­pean Court of Human Rights be defend­ing my right to wor­ship in the man­ner of my own choosing?

Noth­ing else avail­able comes even close to the amaz­ingly pleas­ant plea­sure of being mon­ged to the gills on some fresh, potent shroomies! It was like a reli­gion to me.

Well, put it this way, it made me feel closer than ever to actu­ally hav­ing any faith in any­thing in the entire known and unknown universe.

And they took it all away from me, just because they felt like it! The fuck­ing cunts!

Grrrrrrr!

Gimme back my fresh and legal shrooms or I am going to hold my breath until I turn blue! Gimme! Gimmmeeeee!

Gim­m­m­m­m­meeeeeeeeeeeee! Now! Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

A very typ­i­cal day for you favourite hippy, I started the week as I mean to fin­ish it, peacefully.

I was up mid-morning, later than usual actu­ally and my first task of the day was pluck­ing a few shrooms from my grow-kit. I’m plan­ning a trip with a friend of mine this week­end, and I’ve got plenty now.

Once I tended my shrooms, I sat down at the PC and did a cost analy­sis of my grow­ing expe­ri­ence to date. Fresh shrooms cost about 40p per grams, depend­ing upon where you pur­chase them. You can get them for less, espe­cially if you know where to look or are buy­ing in bulk, but your basic 30gram por­tion of Mex­i­can p.cubes should cost about 12 quid.

My home grown have cost about 15p per gram, if you include all of my one– off costs. If you sub­tract the costs that will not be repeated, like the prop­a­ga­tor, spray bot­tle, ther­mome­ter, that cost comes down to 7p a gram. Well, I was impressed.

Think about how much drugs cost. I’ve read in the papers that pills are down to a cou­ple of quid each, char­lie is now sup­pose to be fifty a gram. Drugs are expen­sive, and they fuel the black econ­omy. My shrooms only fuel me and they are really cheap.

I like pro­duc­ing my own drugs. I think it’s cool. If I had the space I would have an indoor gar­den to grow weed as well. If we ever move house, I think an indoor growth space should be a require­ment. We’ll have to see what Mrs. hippy thinks about that. With the warm, humid sum­mer we had last year, per­haps I should con­sider a cou­ple of plants outside.

After tend­ing the shrooms, I read the papers online. There wasn’t any­thing too excit­ing or inter­est­ing, a slow news day.

Then it was a quick spin up to my local high street. I went into M&S, which I don’t do very often. I needed a pair of trousers and they seem to have the most choice for the short, fat, middle-aged hippy that wants to cre­ate the illu­sion of respectabil­ity. I bought a decent pair of trousers, with loads of pock­ets for 32 quid, which is not bad because M&S cloth­ing is durable, they will last me a while.

I also picked up a few bits in the food shop, though they are always out of fresh choco­late milk, when­ever I go. My younger brother raves about it reg­u­larly and I would like to try it, see if his praise is justified.

Then it was back home to relax and pre­pare for my inter­view tomor­row morn­ing. I recorded the pro­gramme that I could be work­ing on, it’s not some­thing I nor­mally watch. I’m not going to say much more about it. If the job is staff, it bet­ter pay well, because the show was dire.

I’m going into this inter­view cold. A friend and for­mer col­league rec­om­mended me for this posi­tion; I fol­lowed up with an email. Within an hour, my prospec­tive employer’s assis­tant rang to arrange the inter­view. I didn’t ask her any ques­tions, I fig­ured I could wait to see her boss. Maybe he will be my boss too.

My gut tells me they are des­per­ate, whether it’s free­lance or staff. I could be start­ing fairly soon, in no time at all I could be back to work for real. Or they could hate me and think I am a total twat, stranger things have hap­pened. Who knows? I’ll find out the score when I see this guy in the morning.

I can feel the hippy lifestyle slip­ping away from me as I come closer to secur­ing gain­ful employ­ment. That’s not a bad thing, espe­cially the knock-on effect it will have on my finances, but there is a small part of me that will always want to remain bare­foot and high.

I’ve noticed the time, it’s just gone mid­night, north london-time. I missed out mak­ing an entry on Mon­day and this one doesn’t count, even if I started writ­ing it at 11:50pm, it will be posted on Tues­day. That means I’ll be back later to write some more. It’s late and I want to watch episode 5x4 of The Sopra­nos, which I down­loaded today. Who wants to wait for E4?

It’s Mon­day morn­ing, and I could have used a bit more sleep really, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing the day I have ahead of me today. I’m not unrested, but I could have ben­e­fit­ted from sleep­ing later. I went to bed at about 2am last night, set my alarm for noon, but woke up at 8am. Don’t know why, well maybe I do.

The Israelis killed Sheik Yassin with a mis­sile. He was the spir­i­tual leader of Hamas. He was in jail for many years, but released a few years ago when the peace process in the mideast appeared to be mov­ing for­ward. His death today is going to have a very seri­ous effect on the sta­bil­ity of the region. Expect major retal­i­a­tion and revenge against Israeli for this, they’re say­ing Ariel Sharon per­son­ally approved the oper­a­tion. I’m not going to argue whether they were right to assas­i­nate him or not, it really doesn’t mat­ter. Now that he is dead, there’s going to to be a whole new level of shit there. I’m watch­ing live cov­er­age of a huge his funeral in Gaza right now — show­ing tens of thou­sands of very angry peo­ple. It’s not going to take long before it all kicks off.

I spent the day off my face on magic mush­rooms yes­ter­day. I’ve men­tioned them before as it is a fairly recent hobby of mine. If you check my very first blog entry, there are sev­eral links to sites you may wish to visit for more infor­ma­tion. They have been used by peo­ple for thou­sands of years and have a very strong effect.

I’ve taken acid a cou­ple of times and I have to say I much pre­fer magic mush­rooms. They are nat­ural, eas­ier on your sys­tem and there is no real come­down. From what I have read, you would need to con­sume your own weight in shrooms for them to be toxic, so phys­i­cally they are fairly safe, as long as you know what you are taking.

I’ve never picked them in the wild and wouldn’t know how to spot them any­way. All the shrooms I have had were farmed, either in Hol­land or here in the UK. You can order them on the net, many head­shops sell them, the mar­kets in Cam­den and Por­to­bello road also have stalls which sell them.

I pur­chased a grow kit a few weeks ago to pro­duce my own. It’s amaz­ingly sim­ply, you just take the lid off the take-away style con­tainer, put it some­place slightly warm and spray it with water twice a day. The shrooms grow very quickly, I’m nearly fin­ished with my third flush in as many weeks.

In their fresh and nat­ural state, the mush­rooms are 100% legal, the com­pa­nies who sell them had this point clari­ifed by the Home Office in writ­ing. They become a class “A” sub­stance when you inten­tion­ally dry them, so its best to keep them fresh.

They are also more potent when they are fresh, though you have to con­sume a fair bit to get the really wild effects. I took a rea­son­ably large dose on Sun­day, but at this point I am quite expe­ri­enced and know what to expect.

I always make sure I am in a safe, secure place when I trip on shrooms, phys­i­cally and men­tally. Evy­thing that needs doing around the house gets done before I start. I’ve recently dis­cov­ered that it is more enjoy­able to trip dur­ing day­light hours, as the nat­ural light makes things look bet­ter, so I ingested the shrooms at about 2pm.

As I hate the taste, I threw the shrooms into my blender with some juice and turned it into smoothie. It tasted absolutely foul, but I man­aged to gulp it down quickly. Then I sat down and smoked a spliff.

Peo­ple can some­times feel a bit of nau­sea when they eat shrooms, but this passes quickly and a joint at this stage helps min­i­mize this feel­ing. Within about 15 min­utes, I could feel them begin to kick in. Like any drug expe­ri­ence, it is a bit hard to describe, but I will try.

At first, it is almost a bit speedy, like you just had ten cups of espresso. You start to feel happy, almost euphoric, some­thing def­i­nitely changes in your brain. Within about 30 min­utes, the visual effects begin. It starts with per­ceiv­ing light dif­fer­ently, you may notice a sud­den increase in bright­ness on the edges of your vision, as if some­one was shin­ing a torch at you. Colours increase in bright­ness and inte­sity, your vision becomes sharper and more crisp. At this point, you might also notice things mov­ing or breath­ing slightly. Pat­terns begin to emerge in the tex­tures of fab­ric, my cat’s fur breathes as well.

Now, what’s hap­pen­ing in your brain is that the drug is mak­ing your neural synapses fire a bit quicker, mean­ing your brain is receiv­ing more infor­ma­tion than is really there, its almost a state of hyper-reality. Your mind can race, flit­ting from one topic to another. I find myself try­ing to not think, and just expe­ri­ence what’s going on around me.

Music takes on a dis­tinctly dif­fer­ent qual­ity, sound­ing crisper, fuller with more seper­a­tion between the indi­vid­ual tracks. You may expe­ri­ence sound as a phys­i­cal sen­sa­tion. It it really a lovely feeling.

Once I am peak­ing, I like to lose myself in music video chan­nels. When you dis­cover a new song or video while under the influ­ence of shrooms, it can amaz­ing, yes­ter­day was no excep­tion. I heard sev­eral songs for the first time, which really impressed me.

The first was from a band I’ve never heard of before, called Ras­mus. The song, enti­tled “In The Shad­ows” is a hard-edged, rock-pop song and very catchy. The video is an expen­sive, well directed piece, and is sure to grab your atten­tion. I don’t know any­thing about the band, but keep an eye out, I expect it to sell well.

The next one I dis­cov­ered is the lat­est sin­gle from N.E.R.D, called “She Wants to Move” and it blew my mind. I’ve read about N.E.R.D before, but never really paid atten­tion. This song rocks! It’s got a great fusion of beats, funny, nasty lyrics and some wicked gui­tar. I am down with these guys, I could do busi­ness with them! I’m down­load­ing, I mean pur­chas­ing this one from my local high street retailer today!

The third song that grabbed me is the lat­est offer­ing from Out­kast. I’ve had the Speakerbox/The Love Below for some­time, and I have been hooked on Dre3000’s disc. “Hey Ya” is as close to per­fec­tion as a sin­gle gets. I hadn’t really given Big Boi’s side that much time, but I heard “The Way You Move” prop­erly and was blown away. The horns are very retro, 70s, Earth, Wind and Fire style and it is a very smooth slick sound. It’s another win­nder. Those Out­kast guys are very tal­ented, they first caught my atten­tion with Stanko­nia a cou­ple of years ago. It deserves all the acclaim its received.

The other gen­eral obser­va­tion I came away with yes­ter­day after watch­ing sev­eral straight hours of music videos is that they want every­one to be a cool black guy, pimp daddy. Every video seems to be show­ing me that all the cool black guys have all the fun. This is hard to explain, but if you watch, a com­mon theme emerges from all these videos. They say, “I’m a cool black guy, I’m rich, I know how to dance, I know how to party. All the sexy, hot­ties want to get down with me. If you pay atten­tion, I can show you how, just like this. Break it down!” Watch a bit, you will see what I mean.

Any­way, that was my day on Sun­day, totally mon­ged off my face on strong magic mush­rooms. Its not for every­one, but I surely do like it!

Believe it or not, I have a job inter­view today. A real one, for some free­lance work with a very large cor­po­ra­tion. I’m try­ing not to be ner­vous, but the fact is, this is the first real inter­view I’ve had since I left my last job. Yikes!

It’s going to be infor­mal, I am meet­ing the guy for a cof­fee this after­noon. I’ve been in touch with him for nearly six months, wait­ing for an open­ing. Finally, last week, he told me there was the chance of loads of work with him. I am very encour­aged by this, but not count­ing my chick­ens just yet.

I still don’t know when the job might start, what the hours will be, how many days a month I will get, and how much it will pay. Its a senior posi­tion, so the money should be decent and the hours shouldn’t be too bad. I’m hop­ing that it will be full-time or fairly close to that, as I really need some money.

I’m going to have to wrap this up now, I’ve to go try on my suit and see if it still fits. This hippy doesn’t dress-up very often and its a very long time since I’ve worn it. If it doesn’t fit, I’m going to have to make a quick run up to the high street and hope to find some­thing in my size.

Stay cool, stay groovy, ride the vibe.