The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘tabloids’ Category

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?

Nearly 5 years ago to this very day, I wrote a lit­tle some­thing here on the hippy that is one of my favourite posts ever. Back when I had a top-ten favourite list, this par­tic­u­lar post was fea­tured prominently.

Its called ASS BOMBS

Don’t worry if you can’t be both­ered to re-read it right now, I’ll sum­marise it for you: I spec­u­lated on the lengths future ter­ror­ists would have to go through to sneak explo­sive devices on to planes and the addi­tional secu­rity mea­sures that would have to be put in place to main­tain safety. This wasn’t long Richard Reid tried to blow up his shoes.

I the­o­rised that a ter­ror­ists’ rec­tum would become a com­part­ment for hid­ing plas­tique and air­port secu­rity screen­ers would have to play proc­tol­o­gist to make sure all air trav­ellers were not car­ry­ing any­thing up their bot­toms. Instead of “take off your shoes and remove all metal objects”, their instruc­tion would be to “bend over and spread those cheeks.”

It would cer­tainly put fly­ing into a brand new per­spec­tive. Mak­ing sure you wear clean socks with­out any holes wouldn’t seem so impor­tant any more.

It turns out, I was par­tially right. An alleged Al Qaeda fanatic tried to blow up offi­cials at a meet­ing in Saudi Ara­bia with some TNT shoved up his ass, only the idiot left it stuck up there when it det­o­nated and it only killed the bomber. You’re sup­posed to take it out of your bot­tom before it goes off.

You can read the report here in The Sun news­pa­per, under their clever head­line; “Sui­cide Bum­mer”. Did you see what they did there?

Its unlikely as fuck that Al Qaeda visit my web­site, so they prob­a­bly worked this one out on their own. Now that this fright­en­ing and icky tech­nique is out there, how long before air­ports imple­ment new secu­rity pro­ce­dures? Not long is my guess.

Still, there’s an upside. If you’re going to have to dis­play your ring­piece in air­ports for all to see, anal bleach­ing is set to be the next big growth indus­try. They’ll even have a new slo­gan: “Anal Bleaching…its not just for porn stars any more!”

As many of you who fol­low my blog know, I usu­ally hate other people’s blogs, but recently I’ve dis­cov­ered one I quite like.

You all should check out trannyfattyacid.blogspot.com

I’ve been read­ing this blog for a few weeks now and I’m very impressed with the stan­dard and qual­ity of the mate­r­ial posted there. The author spends a lot of time research­ing his sub­jects and check­ing his facts; more so than most of the news­pa­pers I read daily and you know I read nearly all of ‘em!

What drew me into the TFA blog were his posts about the dis­ap­pear­ance of Madeleine McCann.

I expect there aren’t many peo­ple left on the planet who haven’t heard the tale of the lit­tle British girl who went miss­ing in Por­tu­gal last May. And that’s just about the only fact sur­round­ing this case that any­one can agree on…that this lit­tle girl disappeared.

The cir­cum­stances of Madeleine’s dis­ap­pear­ance, how­ever are entirely another mat­ter and opin­ions and rec­ol­lec­tions dif­fer on this wildly.

The Por­tuguese police believe that lit­tle Maddy died in her par­ents’ hol­i­day apart­ment that night, while her par­ents would like us to believe she was kid­napped by a stranger.

I didn’t like the par­ents from the get-go. I thought their expla­na­tions for leav­ing three very young chil­dren alone in their room every night, while they dined were lame and self-serving. I don’t have kids, but if I did, I would never, ever think of leav­ing them unat­tended, espe­cially in a hotel room, in a strange coun­try! Back in June, this was my opin­ion and I couldn’t under­stand why they hadn’t been charged with will­ful neglect of their children.

As the sum­mer went on, and they were paraded daily for photo-ops in front of the world’s media, vis­it­ing the pope and tour­ing the globe, their holier than thou atti­tude really started to piss me off. Also, I had been con­sid­er­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of their involve­ment, prior to them being named as offi­cial sus­pects in their daugh­ter disappearance.

I debated writ­ing about the case here and had to restrain myself from doing so on sev­eral occa­sions. Its not really appro­pri­ate mate­r­ial for my blog and I doubt any of you would disagree.

Instead, I chan­nelled my inter­est in the case to other online out­lets, specif­i­cally the Mir­ror news­pa­per forums, where up until recently, views and infor­ma­tion on the case were freely shared and expressed. They’ve since cracked down on what peo­ple post and it is far less free than it was a week ago.

One of my dis­cov­er­ies on the Mir­ror Forums was the TFA blog. He writes exten­sively on the McCann case and is far more infor­ma­tive, fac­tu­ally accu­rate and bal­anced on the sub­ject than the national news­pa­pers. I’ve rec­om­mended his blog to a few peo­ple I know and they’ve also liked it, so I decided to big TFA up here on my site.

It’s not often I rec­om­mend blogs, I think this is only the 2nd one I’ve endorsed since I started blog­ging, the first being the rather excel­lent Post Secret blog. I know your surf­ing time is valu­able, but check out TFA’s blog. If you’re inter­ested in Madeleine McCann, it’s an excel­lent place to get the real story that the main­stream media is ignoring.

The ques­tion we should all be ask­ing is: “why is the MSM so unbal­anced when it comes to the McCanns?” I wish I had the answer for you, but I’m in the dark on this one too.

I get con­fused, some­times, by all the dif­fer­ent, con­flict­ing bits of infor­ma­tion offered to me on any given day.

I try to dis­re­gard as much of it as I can, but when it comes to the bat­tle over cannabis, my ears prick up, which is markedly bet­ter than a prick up your ear.

The cur­rent lies being ped­dled about weed must be con­fus­ing to a lot of folks out there. The pow­ers that be are not-so-subtly work­ing hard to shift pub­lic per­cep­tion. They want you to think mar­i­juana is the devil’s weed; that it will turn your chil­dren in psy­chotic killers who are only con­cerned with where their next fix of dope is com­ing from.

This por­trayal couldn’t be any fur­ther from the truth if they tried. Oh wait, they are try­ing and they are not in remote prox­im­ity of even a reflec­tion in a pud­dle of piss of truth.

Yet, the news­pa­per head­lines scream with out­ra­geous anger and hyper­bole over the dan­gers of cannabis.

Head­lines can be wrong. Fre­quently, they are. It’s eas­ier to par­rot some make believe fact, if that fic­ti­tious fact cre­ates fear and moral indignation.

Here’s some­thing you won’t be read­ing in any respectable news­pa­per, any time soon. A recent study car­ried out by a respected Dutch uni­ver­sity, com­pared the teenage brains via MRI scans of two groups of teenagers; group A were reg­u­lar weed smok­ers, group B never touched the stuff.

Guess what? There was no dis­cernible dif­fer­ence in the results, between the two groups. Or as it says in the head­line of the arti­cle I’m quot­ing, “Cannabis not dan­ger­ous for young people”.

Could you imag­ine the front page of the Daily Mail or the Inde­pen­dent on Sun­day splash­ing the same head­line across their front page? Nei­ther can I, but a hippy can dream and this hippy does. Far too much.

This is the first year in the his­tory of Big Brother that I’m not feel­ing with­drawal after the series ended. I wasn’t as attached to the house­mates as I have been in pre­vi­ous years. I wasn’t as attached to the entire pro­gramme. I’m not really sure why.

Sorry I haven’t been quite as pro­lific as I could have been on the topic of BB. I did con­tinue to watch faith­fully though and now that it’s fin­ished, I thought I would share my final thoughts.

For me, Big Brother 8 was the most man­u­fac­tured, self-aware series so far. The for­mat has been around too long for it to be any other way. We all know what to expect, from the view­ers to the con­tes­tants, which means the pro­gram mak­ers have to work that much harder to con­found our col­lec­tive expectations.

This year, there were a lot of con­founded expectations.

“Fake Week” was a prime exam­ple of this as the pro­duc­ers twisted every­thing up into all sorts of point­less frivolity.

Except it wasn’t point­less, was it? It amused us. Ok, it amused me.

A lot this year amused me, it seems like the theme of “fun” really did weave itself through the series. Some of the fun was cruel and if I was on the receiv­ing end of the cru­elty, I would have a dif­fer­ent view of it.

Show­ing the Halfway-Housemates the entirety of nom­i­na­tions was a mas­ter­stroke of nas­ti­ness. Reveal­ing nom­i­na­tions in gen­eral inside the house is cruel, but there was a level of evil in this par­tic­u­lar move that sur­prised even me.

The quiz in the final week was also quite mean, as BB showed each house­mate some­thing both embar­rass­ing and pri­vate as part of the task.

All of this self-referential stuff is send­ing every­one a mes­sage: Noth­ing is off lim­its, inside the house. Any­thing you say or do could poten­tially be used to upset your stand­ing in the house. In future, con­tes­tants might be more care­ful and guarded about what the say in their pri­vate chats or even the diary room!

As much as I don’t want to admit it, Charley was the star of the show this year and it was less enter­tain­ing after her depar­ture. Or rather, there was far less con­flict in the house which I equate with enter­tain­ment. Charley’s prob­lem will be con­vert­ing this into some sort of media career. Good luck to her, but I think she’s a bit of one-trick-pony and they will strug­gle to find suit­able vehi­cles for her.

Chanelle’s depar­ture also left a gap in my view­ing. Aside from being nice to look at, her tantrums were pure com­edy gold. They say she’s made £750,000 already, which is astound­ing. Now that Ziggy’s out too, I expect they will both clean up even more. I sure hope they got a lot of money for their rather embar­rass­ing photo-shoot in the Star on Mon­day. If you didn’t see it, they were both pos­ing together, in their undies, in a hotel bed. Cringe!

Poor Ziggy. I liked him. He isn’t a bad guy; he’s just very neu­rotic. He gen­uinely fan­cied Chanelle, it wasn’t just for the cam­eras. He eas­ily had the rough­est ride of any­one in the house this year and doesn’t deserve our scorn. We should all chip in a fiver each, so we can pay for his long-term Jun­gian analy­sis, which after a cou­ple of decades might get to the root of his neu­ro­sis. Until then, he’ll just have to make do with shag­ging Chanelle and mak­ing money off their celeb-value.

I was glad to see Brian Belo win. He’s the Essex ver­sion of For­rest Gump and peo­ple always go for the thick-o. Except I don’t think Brian is that thick, he’s just not edu­cated well. He’s your typ­i­cal Eng­lish lad and prob­a­bly the world’s biggest BB fan! I think its great that a proper fan won the show, instead of some­one who claimed not to really watch it much. Well done, Brian.

I was actu­ally expect­ing a twinny-win, as Sam and Amanda are just so like­able. They didn’t put a foot wrong in the house which explains why they didn’t have a sin­gle nom­i­na­tion through­out the series.

I was glad to see Tracey go a week before the final and I’m even hap­pier I’ll never have to hear her inane catch­phrases ever again. She was like a char­ac­ter from a bad novel writ­ten about real­ity tv; a poorly sketched car­i­ca­ture con­sist­ing of one shal­low dimen­sion. Yawn.

As for the rest, well they’re all pretty incon­se­quen­tial really. The one I liked the most that I thought should have had more time in the house is Amy. Aside from being a tasty bit of eye candy, Amy seemed bright and gen­uine. She should never have become such a fig­ure of hate within the house and if she had bet­ter taste in men and ignored Liam, she might have gone further.

The one thing I noticed this year was the num­ber of peo­ple who I’ve spo­ken with who have taken great pride in pro­claim­ing that they haven’t watched BB this year and that BB was a fail­ing, dying for­mat. It was as if peo­ple decided they were too good for it this year. How wrong they are!

BB con­tin­ues to be annual event tele­vi­sion, fill­ing Chan­nel 4’s cof­fers with loads of dosh. The rat­ings were down this year, but the pro­gramme con­tin­ues to deliver the right demo­graphic that adver­tis­ers love and in the younger age groups, inter­est remains very high. Maybe I just only talk to aging media-types. I need to get some cooler, younger new friends!

And if there were any doubts over the future of the next series of BB, Davina promptly put them to rest last Fri­day night, when she opened the audi­tion call for BB9. If you want to spend next Sum­mer inside the BB house, be ready to daz­zle the BB pro­duc­ers, start­ing in Novem­ber. Good Luck!

I do want to thank all 23 house­mates who spent time in the house this year. One way or another, each of you enter­tained me in your own spe­cial ways and for this I am grate­ful. And thank you to my hip­py­fans, who have put up with my spo­radic out­put and stuck with me for my thoughts on BB.

This will be my last for­mal BB col­umn, I’m not going to do it again next year. I won’t say I’m never going to com­ment on BB again, but I won’t be doing it in such an organ­ised way. I hope you’ve all enjoyed read­ing it all as much as I’ve enjoyed writ­ing it.

But fear not, this hippy still has plenty of other inter­est­ing things to bring you, so don’t be a stranger, OK?

Yes. Yes, I am.

I haven’t stopped watch­ing it. I just haven’t writ­ten about it in a while. I’m a bad hippy and deserve a spank­ing, but don’t get any funny ideas about send­ing Jonty ‘round to do the hon­ours. This hippy don’t play that way.

Not that there’s any­thing wrong with a lit­tle bit of light spank­ing, I would just pre­fer that it were Chan­nelle admin­is­ter­ing my much deserved pun­ish­ment. As if she would even look in my gen­eral direc­tion while hav­ing one of her infa­mous strops, let alone smack my ass for all she was worth!

Ah-hem.

The res­i­dents of the house have cer­tainly changed since last I com­mented on it. We’ve had a fake house­mate, we’ve seen Chan­nelle walk and Charley evicted, twice! We’ve also got five new best-friends, though after tonight, there will be pos­si­bly two less of them.

It seems to this more than casual observer of BB, that the pro­duc­ers have had some clever gim­mick up their sleeves every week of this run. A lot of it has been enter­tain­ing and amus­ing, but all of it is feel­ing some­what man­u­fac­tured. I guess that’s what the for­mat has become, after so many years of it. It’s had to change and evolve, to keep us all watching.

I’d watch any­way, but then I’d watch paint dry, if it was smeared all over a dozen com­plete strangers!

It’s been a weird series for me, I haven’t really warmed to any of them, but then I don’t really hate any of them either. My reac­tion to them is as bland as a con­ver­sa­tion with the twins.

I find Gerry nice, but too whiny and moany. I like Car­ole, but she doesn’t really shine either. The twins are cute, in a very imma­ture way. I could go on, but you get the idea.

I bought the Ziggy and Chan­nelle rela­tion­ship com­pletely. No one would put them­selves through that much angst and bull­shit, if they didn’t really have feel­ings for each other.

I dis­agree with all of you who think Ziggy was using her. No, I don’t think she was the love of his life, but I think his inten­tions were gen­uine. He liked her; he would have dated her prop­erly out­side the house if he could have. He couldn’t, instead he had to live with her for 2 inten­sive months.

Chanelle liked Ziggy too, but I go back to what I said before. She’s the sort of girl who always has a boyfriend, and to her it’s like a cast change in a play. A lot of the shit she was tak­ing out on Ziggy was more than likely bag­gage from pre­vi­ous rela­tion­ships, redi­rected at him.

In real terms, a two-month rela­tion­ship in the house is prob­a­bly equiv­a­lent to a full year in the real world. It would be more intense then you could ever imag­ine. I don’t envy either one of them, not even the sex. I can’t see a self-conscious shag under a duvet and the gaze of a dozen cam­eras can be very sat­is­fy­ing. I’ll never, ever know.

I was glad to see Charley go, I think she out­lasted her use­ful­ness. She was amus­ing to watch at first, but her shtick grew old and tired, fast. How can some­one be like that, with every­one, all the time? It’s just so unpleas­ant. Would you spend time with some­one who behaved like Charley? I wouldn’t, unless I was empow­ered with the right to deliver a well placed back­hand to the chops, when it all got too much.

Bye, bye, Charley. It’s back to obscu­rity for you. Channelle’s well-timed walk has stolen your week and your thun­der, at least if the tabloids are any mea­sure. Oh wait, they are.

I enjoyed fake week, which I realise must seem like ages ago now. Thalia/Pauline was hot, the tasks were amus­ing and I loved how wound up they all got by the mis­in­for­ma­tion. The plane with the ban­ner about the other house was great!

I was impressed that Car­ole seemed to see right through each and every one of BB”s tricks that week. She’s a sharp one, sometimes.

I can’t say I’m blown away by the halfway house­mates and the twists that fol­lowed, espe­cially since it’s ended up with three of them back where they started, ready to be booted out the door. I think mainly, it was the appar­ent ran­dom­ness of the final twist, send­ing Ziggy, Liam, Amy and Jonty into the main house that ruined it for me. There was no drama, no sense of the unex­pected, it was just down to a whim of the producers.

Maybe this whim was pre-planned, but it had the feel­ing of dam­age con­trol. “Oh, shit, we can’t lose Ziggy or Liam, and the Jonty guy would be a waste if he left with­out a spank­ing. And if we’re going to keep Liam, we might as well keep Amy too, so he can have a sexy, buxom, canny lass to play with…”

You get the idea.

They’re will­ing to risk Tracey, but she doesn’t really bring that much to the show any­way, so it’s a cal­cu­lated risk. Near as I can tell, as it’s a dou­ble evic­tion tonight, she’s vul­ner­a­ble, so we could still see some drama and real tears.

David is a gonner tonight, peo­ple have taken an instant dis­like to him and his giant, over­con­fi­dent ego. Only Gerry will be dis­ap­pointed to see him leave, but he didn’t have a hope in pulling him, so its prob­a­bly for the best.

The other evictee will be either Shanessa or Tracey. I’d rather see Shanessa stay, as she is real com­edy gold and car-crash TV at it’s finest. I’ve never been a Tracey fan, though I should be because we both like to get off our faces. I find her dull and her rep­e­ti­tion of those innane catch phrases just doesn’t float this hippy’s boat. I might even feel the need to cast a few votes myself.

The real ques­tion is, what hap­pens to the two peo­ple left in the halfway house? Do they move into the main house? Do the two leav­ing tonight get to choose a 3rd to come with them, live with Davina?

How the hell should I know? I’m sit­ting here on my sofa, slack-jawed and wide-eyed, watch­ing it myself, just like the rest of you!

There’s only a month left, so I guess we’re around two-thirds of the way gone. Any­thing can hap­pen and it’s not 100% that Brian is going to win. It would be cool if he did, because he always makes me laugh.

Hands up if you’ve ever thought about being a house­mate on Big Brother…

Go on, admit it, you’ve won­dered what it would be like to be a con­tes­tant on BB. You’ve con­sid­ered how you would deal with the sit­u­a­tions. You’ve started a sen­tence with “Well, if I was in the house…”

I have too. Only, there is no way in hell I would actu­ally con­tem­plate audi­tion­ing for the pro­gramme. No way. I don’t want that sort of atten­tion; I don’t want the press on my ass. I don’t want to ever be famous.

Except, of course, here on the internet.

As much as we may all imag­ine liv­ing in that lit­tle mul­ti­coloured house in Elstree, in real­ity we don’t have a clue what its like to be trapped in that camera-coated pres­sure cooker, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for a poten­tial 13 weeks.

It all sounds beyond hor­ri­ble to me.

Yet, I sit here, slack-jawed and wide-eyed, watch­ing the high­lights show, not believ­ing what I’m see­ing and think­ing, “well, if I was in the house, I would never say/do/touch/eat…”; to what­ever I was react­ing to at the moment.

Talk about bullshit!

The truth is most of us would come apart at the seams under that sort of pres­sure and scrutiny. I also think a great num­ber of us wouldn’t get beyond the psy­cho­log­i­cal screen­ing and I’d put myself in that group too. I’d crum­ble like a rag doll in days; or worse, snap, in a big, bad scary way by snap­ping a few annoy­ing necks with a swift, deft, unex­pected jerk of my arm.

I’m not fuck­ing joking!

You wouldn’t want to see me in the house, any­way. Lim­ited cig­a­rettes, no dope, poten­tially naked and/or erect plus homi­ci­dal? Let’s leave all that to your furtive imag­i­na­tions and not mine, because it is all far too foul for me to contemplate.

Please try to remem­ber, we’re not in there. They are. We don’t know what it’s like for them, because we’ve never been in an envi­ron­ment like that.

But then, again, we don’t know any of them that well either.

We’ve got to be around day 21 now, which means we’ve really only had 19 days of high­lights pro­grammes (day 20 should be tonight – Tuesday).

If you’re like me, you watch the prime time, Chan­nel 4 daily high­lights pro­gramme. Its where I get most of my BB info because it is the offi­cial record of that day as put together by the producers.

To date, I’ve seen 19 evening high­lights pro­grammes, less 3 Fri­day night evic­tions shows and the Weds — £100,000 spe­cial. That means I’ve actu­ally seen 16 nor­mal high­light shows, 3 Fri­day night ½ hour/ one hour com­bos, and the one hour Weds big-money extravaganza.

Here comes the science:

16 high­lights x 45 mins = 720
3 Fri­days x 45 mins = 135
1 x Weds x 23 mins = 23
Total = 878 minutes

(all times are less com­mer­cials, Fri­day and Weds tim­ings also allow for live inter­views and Davina links, as well as adverts)

I can’t be both­ered to work out the aver­age num­ber of peo­ple in the house over the course of those days, so I am going to pull a num­ber out of my ass: 13.5 house­mates on aver­age per day over 19 days. If some­one wants to be more accu­rate, I wel­come your correction.

If we divide the num­ber of min­utes of actual house cov­er­age by the num­ber of aver­age house­mates, we come up with the aver­age num­ber of min­utes we’ve seen of each house­mate since the series started.

65 min­utes.

That’s how much time, on aver­age we have seen each house­mate featured.

If you really think about it, the Ziggy/Chanelle romance tips the scales heav­ily in their favour, thus reduc­ing the aver­age for other housemates.

And if you then add Charley to the mix with the amount of screen time her tirades take up, you dis­cover just how lit­tle you really know most of them.

Don’t worry, I’ll return to Charley shortly, but first I want to men­tion a cou­ple of the nearly invis­i­ble people.

Wangers.

I just like the word. It makes me laugh. Say it out loud; it will make you laugh too.

Wangers.

Unfor­tu­nately for all of us, the per­son who owns that nick­name isn’t as amus­ing. I can’t be the only one who finds her a com­plete mis­ery guts? She never has any­thing nice to say about any­thing or any­one. She’s one big, blimp-chested bum­mer, man.

Maybe that’s just the bits they’re show­ing, maybe the footage of her turn­ing cart­wheels and telling funny sto­ries is strewn across the (vir­tual) cut­ting room floor? Maybe, she’s the real enter­tainer of the house and they are hid­ing it away with the editing?

Nah!

And speak­ing of non-entities, how about Tracey?

Tracey fea­tures in the high­lights so infre­quently that one night I actu­ally started to won­der if she qui­etly went out the back­door and I some­how missed it. I’m not joking!

“Bring it on”.

“Well up for it”.

“Deal with it”

“’ave it”.

I’ve just saved you the trou­ble of watch­ing her best bits, because they are her only bits!

For fuck’s sake woman! Do something!

I don’t think Tracey is stu­pid, I actu­ally think she’s try­ing to be clever. She’s put a lot of thought into her behav­iour in the house and arrived with a very sim­ple game plan.

Tracey’s aim is to stay off everyone’s radar and coast as close to the final as she get, pos­si­bly even reach­ing it. And then, once that final hur­dle is in sight, we’ll finally get to see a more life-like ver­sion of the real Tracey, though again fil­tered through her long-term game plan.

If Tracey can pull this off, it will be impres­sive, but I think there’s a good chance the rest of them are going to get sick of the catch­phrases and she’ll be nom­i­nated again soon.

I think one of the weird­est aspects of this year’s series is the total lack of groups. In this house, it’s every man and woman for himself!

They all have allies and ene­mies, but it is far from tribal. Each and every one of them has a dif­fer­ent friends and ene­mies list, with over­laps hap­pen­ing all over the place.

Zak and Chanelle are the clos­est to any sort of real alle­giance at the moment, even if only based upon lust and yet they typ­ify this weird dynamic. They both have dif­fer­ent peo­ple they like and dif­fer­ent peo­ple they hate and nei­ther one of them really blinks any eye at the other over this.

Ok, Ziggy’s reac­tion to the Billi/Chanelle rumours not with­stand­ing, but I think we’d all agree that roman­tic jeal­ousy should be an excep­tion to the hypoth­e­sis. The green-eyed mon­ster can only fuck you up!

The best exam­ple of this “every man for your­self” phe­nom­e­non is Charley. See, I told you I’d come back to her.

Charley will claim to love each and every one of them, while telling them that that, “she’s not being funny, right, but…” insert insult­ing, profanity-laden shrieks at any­one else.

Charley is nice to peo­ple when it suits her and hor­ri­ble to them when it amuses her. Just look at how she enjoyed humil­i­at­ing poor Brian when he showed her his erec­tion, which she knew she inspired. Then, com­ment­ing on his maybe-wank, with glee­ful spite, while know­ing the guy is 18 years old and her dirty, sug­ges­tive talk got his hopes up. Urghhh!

Or worse, tak­ing the piss out of him because he pissed the bed. Not nice!

And by the way, can Brian really be that stu­pid? I can’t imag­ine any­one over the age of, oh I don’t know, birth…not know­ing who Romeo, Juli­ette or Shake­speare is!

Was he putting it on? Was it an act, meant to make him popular?

If it was an act, it didn’t work.

If it was gen­uine, then oh my god, the future is fucked! Thank­fully, cli­mate change and global warm­ing will mean that it won’t mat­ter how stu­pid tomorrow’s gen­er­a­tion is, because they’ll all be too busy killing each other over the last few drops of drink­ing water.

Ah, happy days.

The rea­son I’ve titled this abor­tion of a BB col­umn “The Char­lie Show” is sim­ple, that’s what I’ve been watching.

You’ve been watch­ing it too, only I bet you’re reluc­tant to admit it.

I was the same, but then I thought about how lit­tle we actu­ally see and how much she dom­i­nates every­thing. I don’t like her, but I like watch­ing her.

Think about it.

Really, take a moment, and pon­der what I am sub­mit­ting for your consideration.

Charley has been the star of the show. She’s the wannabe it-girl, you love to hate!

Check out my friends, the tabloid news­pa­pers. She fea­tures promi­nently almost every damn day. The red tops are usu­ally a good barom­e­ter for pub­lic opin­ion and on that basis, we are all enjoy­ing watch­ing Charley. We just wouldn’t want to invite her ‘round for a cup of tea.

That’s so cool with me.

The kind of peo­ple I’d invite over for a cuppa (wink – you know what *I* really – an exotic ciggy), are not the kind of peo­ple I’d want to watch on BB. My mates are all fairly well adjusted, sorted, nor­mal types.

You know, like me!

Ha!

I think there’s a very good chance our girl, Charley, is going to be up for evic­tion this week and dammit all to hell, its too soon for her to go!

It’s week three and there are ten more weeks remain­ing. It is way too early for Charley to go. I’m not say­ing she has to win; I’m not even say­ing she has to make the final, but for the love of god, can we please not be stu­pid and vote her out too early?

Please?

PLEASE?

We’ve made this mis­take in pre­vi­ous series, get­ting rid of the mad, crazy, (un)likeable ones first, only to com­plain it’s become bor­ing a week or two later. Let’s just avoid this sce­nario, ok?

There will be other chances to get rid of Charley, I promise you.

Let’s all agree to leave Charley alone this week.

I will, if you will?

I inad­ver­tently hit upon some­thing in my last BB piece, which is indica­tive of the cast­ing of the entire series. The more I’ve watched, the more this fact has stood out:

Every­one in there is very media savvy; they are very aware of the process and the part they are play­ing in it.

My first clue to this was when Emily Parr men­tioned sev­eral cor­po­rate brand names, right after her racist slip of the tongue. She was hop­ing that they would dip the sound and spare her fur­ther embar­rass­ment – well, we all know how that turned out!

The point is, Emily was very hip to the game, even if she was too pig igno­rant to apply her knowl­edge with any great effect. Emily’s not the only one.

Let’s take everyone’s favourite housemate…to hate, young Charley Uchea. She’s appar­ently worked a pole dancer, that’s a form of enter­tainer; she had to deal with pubic, er pub­lic atten­tion. I’m sure she knows what pole danc­ing audi­ence wants to see. She’s also got a cousin who plays Pre­mier­ship foot­ball, hangs out in all the “hot clubs” and has had sex with other “celebs”, at least that’s what the papers say. She’s more clued up than you might realise at first and she knows how to use it all to her advan­tage. If it wasn’t for her sour face and ugly per­son­al­ity, she might be a threat!

First evictee, Shab­nam Paryani is another great exam­ple of this media aware­ness. On day 3, when she was con­sid­er­ing a walk out the back door, did she ask about how quickly she could see her fam­ily? Did she ask if there would be men­tal health sup­port? Did she even ask if she could have a hot meal once she got out­side? Nope, all she was inter­ested in was her “pack­age”. No, that is not some vague ref­er­ence to the rumour that Shabs is a pre-op trans­sex­ual. Shab­nam wanted to know if she could still sell her story to a tabloid or glossy mag­a­zine. She wanted to know if she would get to appear on BBLB and BBBM. She wanted to know if her bra and knick­ers pics would be in a Sun­day tabloid news­pa­per, with rev­e­la­tions of her secret love ses­sions with men AND women.

Shab­nam didn’t walk, but her desire to dis­close her sex­ual his­tory while pos­ing in her undies did appear in yesterday’s News of the World. So you see girls, being stu­pid and doing noth­ing doesn’t mean you can’t have your dreams come true! Who needs an edu­ca­tion or skills?

And while I’m on the scary sub­ject of Shabs, how about that ass-crack of an evic­tion rou­tine! If that didn’t con­firm how sub­nor­mally intel­li­gent she is, what else would? How about the shrink on Sunday’s BBLB telling Der­mot that her IQ was under 70? Yikes!

Yes, I know I’m being harsh, but that’s my point. Those who live by the media, die by the media and I should know, because I’m the media whore you all love to adore! But you won’t see me skulk­ing around Bou­jis hop­ing to get papped!

This is by far the most self-aware group of house­mates ever. They know the fourth wall is there and they are play­ing to it with reck­less aban­don, because they know if they can paint the right pic­ture of them­selves to the out­side world, great riches await.

I’ll just throw some ran­dom obser­va­tions out there, hap­haz­ardly drawn together from my own per­sonal media monitoring:

- Seány O’Kane – trav­elled to the states to fol­low the Michael Jack­son trial, was inter­viewed repeat­edly by British TV crews, as the lone, crazy from back home, Report­edly audi­tioned for Bad Lad’s Army, was rejected for not being “men­tally sta­ble” enough.

- Shab­nam Paryani – Appeared on Britain’s Got (no) Tal­ent and some pro­gramme about embar­rass­ing illnesses.

- Billi Bhatti – one of the new guys, a model who has done print work and, if what I read on forums is true, snogged a trans­sex­ual in a music video. Does any­one know if it was Shabnam?

- Jonathan Dur­den – mil­lion­aire, media company-owner and for­mer com­men­ta­tor for the Guardian on adver­tis­ing. Sound like a real media insider to me. What’s he doing in the house? Ladies and gen­tle­men, start your con­spir­acy theories!

- Chanelle Hayes – a posh spice look-a-like, mak­ing per­sonal appear­ances as Vic­to­ria Beckham.

- Zak “Ziggy” Lich­man – for­mer boy­band mem­ber, model and music producer.

I could go on, and on and fre­quently do, but you get the idea. This year, it is an open secret that fame and for­tune is what they all crave. They all think that just on their looks and per­son­al­ity alone, we should love them and give them lots of money and ado­ra­tion, but we know better.

I like the fact that they are all unashamed, wannabes. It brings an ele­ment of hon­esty to BB this year that we’ve not seen before. It’s a know­ing wink from the pro­duc­ers, that they know that we know that the house­mates know just what is await­ing them after a stay in that house.

In the first series, win­ner Craig Phillips wanted to win the sev­enty grand so he could pay for an oper­a­tion for a young woman with Down’s Syn­drome, which at the time, moved most of us to tears. Craig’s gen­eros­ity was touch­ing and genuine.

In this series, they all want to win so bad they can taste it. Then they’ll have the money to shop for cloth­ing and sun­glasses, so they can look nice on hol­i­day in the Mal­dives where they get snapped, sun­bathing top­less “in the secret pho­tos they didn’t want you to see”, which paid for the trip, plus a lit­tle extra for a pair or two of Manolo Blahniks.

Isn’t that what we all dream of?

I was really expect­ing not to like this year’s BB. I’d already set myself up for bit­ter dis­ap­point­ment at what was going to be a dull series. So far, it’s been any­thing but dull and I’m lov­ing it, already!

It doesn’t take much to draw me in; just a bunch of fit, but stu­pid young girlies and other assorted human odd­i­ties, a small, enclosed space and lots of cam­eras. I’m a sucker, what can I say?

There were rumours of an all-female house, but I didn’t buy into them. I thought it was a risk the pro­duc­tion team wouldn’t be will­ing to take. How wrong was I?

As I watched the house­mates enter­ing the shiny new house, for the first time, I felt pity for many of them. They all just seemed so small, so lim­ited and so myopic with their sim­ple goals of fame and for­tune, for doing sweet FA. The best exam­ple of this is 19 year old Chanelle Hayes, the Posh Spice wannabe.

Chanelle comes from a small vil­lage out­side Leeds and lit­er­ally aspires to be Vic­to­ria Beck­man. I find that very sad, for as role mod­els go, VB cer­tainly shouldn’t be one, unless you value stu­pid­ity, van­ity and under-eating to nearly star­va­tion as some­thing to be cel­e­brated. Appar­ently, the news­pa­pers do, for this if the woman some much as farts (as if!), it is splat­tered on the front pages.

Chanelle is much bet­ter look­ing than ol’ Posh Pish­face and can prob­a­bly sing bet­ter too.

The first thing I thought when I saw the ini­tial 11 women in the house is that there wouldn’t be enough Page 3’s to go around. Most of them are going to want to don a thong, fold their arms artis­ti­cally across their as-of-yet un-surgically enhanced bosoms and smile pretty for the cam­eras, with an accom­pa­ny­ing inter­view detail­ing their Big Brother hell! Ok, maybe not Car­ole, but then again you never know.

Car­ole Vin­cent was an early favourite of mine, with her left lean­ing pol­i­tics and bisex­u­al­ity, what was not to love? But has she put any creepy moves on any of the other women? Has she done any­thing other than clean the house and act as a ser­vant to the rest of them? Big dis­ap­point­ment so far, but it is early days.

And speak­ing of crotch­ety old broads, how about that Les­ley Brain, appro­pri­ately named because of her enor­mous intel­lect. She really fan­cied her­self as so much bet­ter than the rest of her house­mates. She’s used to get her own way, and walk­ing all over any­one who impeded her. I can’t say I was dis­ap­pointed when she walked out on Sat­ur­day. Small loss, she didn’t con­tribute much more than snarky com­ments and dis­ap­prov­ing looks. Yawn.

The twins, Sam and Amanda Archant, fall into the pity cat­e­gory. They’re ever so cute and ever so dim, but their Page 3 pho­to­shoot will be a double-spread. Every­one will buy a copy of what­ever red­top is lucky enough to print the pics that day!

And stay­ing with the pity party, may I draw your atten­tion to the deluded Shab­nam Paryani, who won’t be appear­ing on Page 3 any­time soon, though in her mind she is wor­thy of that, and more. She’s weird look­ing, obnox­ious and thick, which makes her a triple threat in BB terms. If the evic­tion hadn’t been can­celled, she’d be mak­ing a pub­lic appear­ance right now at the open­ing of a Pound Shop on my High Street.

And speak­ing of can­celled evic­tions, I couldn’t believe the bloody stu­pid­ity of that ultra-dim Emily Parr. She was des­tined for Page 3, but not any­more, unless the BNP newslet­ter has such a fea­ture. I wouldn’t know, I don’t sub­scribe and nei­ther do you, if you’re a proper hippyfan!

What was Emily think­ing? Was she even think­ing? Did she really know what the word meant as it passed through her lips?

I bet she sure as shit does now! This is girl who thinks indy music is brand new and sweep­ing the nation! She has the men­tal age of 7.

But Emily wasn’t com­pletely stu­pid, as right after she uttered the offend­ing word, she quickly men­tioned sev­eral cor­po­rate brand names. Why? So they would dip the sound on the live feed? Clever, eh? She might not know any­thing about race rela­tions, but damn, if she ain’t media savvy! Shame it wasn’t enough to keep it out of the prime time high­light show or keep her in the house, but you can’t blame a gal for trying!

Were they right to boot her out? After Shilpa-gate, they didn’t really have a choice. They had to be seen to be doing some­thing, and swiftly. If they acted this quickly last Jan­u­ary with Shilpa and the witches’ coven, they wouldn’t be apol­o­gis­ing so much right now!

And who are the 900 peo­ple who com­plained that it was unfair to eject Emily? She can’t have that many friends and fam­ily members!

Emily was an aspir­ing actress and I said “was” inten­tion­ally. With that one word uttered fool­ish­lyy, she’s pretty much kissed her glit­ter­ing show­biz career good­bye. I don’t see how she can reha­bil­i­tate her­self back from this one.

Sorry, Emily, I’m sure you’ll Google your way to this page even­tu­ally. That’s my con­sid­ered opin­ion, but remem­ber it’s never too late to learn IT and com­puter net­work­ing skills! You’ll never go hungry!

I know I men­tioned Chanelle ear­lier, but I want to come back to her. Along with Nicky Maxwell, Chanelle has a good back­story; they both do. Nicky was raised in Mother Theresa’s orphan­age in India, before being adopted by a fam­ily here in the UK. Chanelle’s mother was a pros­ti­tute who was mur­dered and has also been adopted. I’m a sucker for a sob story, so are the tabloids. Only, and trust me on this, the tabloids pro­vide a lot in the way of lurid details than I will.

Charley Uchea is a nasty piece of work. She’s the sort of girl your mother would have warned you about, if your mother could have ever imag­ined that such a woman even existed! My mother could never have pic­tured Charley!

Hot body, ugly face, even uglier per­son­al­ity! Another BB triple threat. Buy her a drink? She’d want the bot­tle, and trust me mate, it wouldn’t be cheap! Her cousin plays foot­ball, that’s why she’s spe­cial. Page 3 chances: High, high, high!

Wangers.

Wangers?

When I was a kid, “wang” was another word for your din­kle, so wangers is a new one on me. I’m old, I don’t always keep up with the lingo you kids are using these days.

What­ever hap­pened to tits?

Laura Williams, AKA “Wangers” has ginor­mus breasts and a Welsh accent. She wants to be a funeral direc­tor, which is code for under­taker, which is fur­ther code for peo­ple who pre­pare the dead. Yuck. I don’t even like to touch raw beef or pork!

I don’t really get Laura, but appar­ently you all do, as up until the 2 new guys went in, she was the book­ies’ favourite to win!

Tracey Barnard scares me. She’s the sort of intense per­son who would cor­ner you at a party, get really in your face and spout her pas­sion­ate opin­ions on one sub­ject or an other for an hour or more and at the end of it, you still wouldn’t know what she was talk­ing about. Tracey is a type we’ve not seen before in BB (unless you count Bez from the celeb ver­sion), but a type none the less. Go on any demo, attend any ille­gal rave, or visit your near­est squat and you’ll find a Tracey-type, bor­ing he shite out of someone.

You’d think an old hippy like me would like Tracey; you’d be wrong. I did like the rumour they were test­ing her rolling papers for drugs, but that’s stu­pid. If she were going to smug­gle in some blot­ter acid, she wouldn’t do it on the cig­a­rette papers, but on the packet – prob­a­bly the flap – you know the bit you tear to make a roach! It’s made of card­board and far more absorbent. I just hope she does some­thing fun with it, like put it in the stew, so they can all trip their nuts off.

If only Tracey brought in some dull, rusty knives, then my BB dreams would really come true. Click HERE and/or HERE to see what I mean!

That’s the girls all well and truly slagged off, now what about the guys?

For­mer boy­band mem­ber and male model, Zak “Ziggy” Lich­man seems nice enough, in an innocu­ous, inof­fen­sive way. He’s dull, but the chicks dig him and isn’t that what really mat­ters. They deserve some eye-candy too. And I don’t blame him for zero­ing in on Chanelle, she is the hottest lit­tle hotty in the house!

Big Brother’s big twist when they put in the next two men was to send him a pair of gay guys. Whoa! What a turn! Gay men on BB, who’d have thunk it?

I haven’t really seen much of either one of them, so I will save my ini­tial impres­sions until my next post.

I don’t hate every­thing about this series, there are things I do like, they just don’t hap­pen to be the house­mates, that’s all.

I like the new house, I think the design is fan­tas­tic. I love the colours, the lay­out, espe­cially the lit­tle entrance­way to the diary room, with the colour-changing light strips. I like the new graph­ics and the eye as well.

Mainly, I still love the for­mat, even with the twists and changes. Lock­ing peo­ple up in a small, con­fined space and film­ing their every move is still pure, unadul­ter­ated genius.

I only wish it was my idea; then I would be filthy, stink­ing rich! I bet that’s a good thing to be. I’ll prob­a­bly never know.

I’m pissed off today.

I’m pissed off most days, if I’m really hon­est, so to be more pre­cise I’m par­tic­u­larly pissed off at a cer­tain news­pa­per for their embar­rass­ing and point­less pol­icy shift against cannabis.

Yes, “The Inde­pen­dent on Sun­day” news­pa­per, I’m talk­ing about you!

For two suc­ces­sive Sun­days, the IoS ran scare-mongering, anti-cannabis sto­ries on their front page, which were filled with mind­less hys­te­ria rather than actual, fac­tual report­ing. I expected so much more from this news­pa­per and I am so dis­ap­pointed by the col­lec­tive weak will of their senior edi­to­r­ial staff that I could cry 96 tears. Cry, cry, cry, cry, 96 tears!

Ten years ago, the Indy called for the legal­i­sa­tion of weed, which is a wise and informed posi­tion to take but that all changed when they apol­o­gised for doing this, a cou­ple of weeks ago on the front page. They say that they have revised their pol­icy fol­low­ing all the recent “evi­dence” sur­round­ing the dan­gers of dope.

The Indy then goes on to recount the story of a young man who killed him­self, accord­ing to his griev­ing mother, as a result of his abuse of the demon weed.

I won’t be pro­vid­ing a link here, as I do not want to pro­mote this news­pa­per in any shape, man­ner or form, but I am sure with a lit­tle clever surf­ing you could find it yourself.

It is quite a har­row­ing read and while I am sym­pa­thetic to the woman for her loss, I can’t help think­ing that they left quite a few impor­tant details out of the story.

The mother says her son had suf­fered from men­tal prob­lems, which would imply that more than likely that he received psy­chi­atric care and treat­ment. In real­ity, treat­ment would be a big, fat pre­scrip­tion for anti-depressants.

Anti-depressants have a doc­u­mented his­tory of caus­ing teenage sui­cides. Was her son tak­ing them? Did he sud­denly stop tak­ing them, cold turkey? It would be good to know!

Per­haps he had emo­tional trou­bles before he started puff­ing on spliffs and he only sought out cannabis as a means to self-medicate and lessen his men­tal anguish. He wouldn’t be the first.

Maybe his psy­cho­log­i­cal woes were so bad, that no amount of treat­ment could have pre­vented him from tak­ing his own life. It happens.

And, gasp, you’re not sup­posed to say this, but what if his mother was just a lousy parent?

I’m not say­ing she was and by all indi­ca­tions, it doesn’t seem like it, but we’ll never, ever know. I’m sure her son would have had an inter­est­ing take on the ques­tion and it is a fair one to pose.

It’s so much eas­ier to blame the weed, rather than any­thing else! It’s the lazy, coward’s excuse.

Let’s go back in time, to my own trou­bled teenage years. My par­ents were ill equipped to deal with me, they were older than most, by a gen­er­a­tion and out of touch with mod­ern life. My fam­ily was dys­func­tion, espe­cially my extended fam­ily, on both sides. I was way too smart for my own good and prob­a­bly too sen­si­tive as well. I suf­fered from deep, teenage depres­sion of the fairly nor­mal, morose variety.

My par­ents did what any self-respecting, slightly afflu­ent, upper-middle-class fam­ily with health insur­ance was expected to do; they packed me off to a shrink.

I didn’t need a shrink, but I thought, what the fuck! Maybe some­one would lis­ten to me for a change! I went, every week, for a cou­ple of years.

Around half way through my stint with the Dr. Head­shrinker, my par­ents dis­cov­ered I was smok­ing weed in my bed­room. It was as if they found out I was secretly a mem­ber of the Man­son fam­ily and had been out butcher­ing new­borns with a rusty knife. Their son was “on drugs”! Oh, the hor­ror, the shock, the shame!

In real­ity, I was just like most peo­ple my age, in the late 70s or early 80s; I sim­ply liked “to party”.

The ben­e­fit to my par­ents for all of this was sim­ple, they had an excuse for my moods and behav­iour; they had some­thing exter­nal to blame for any­thing and every­thing they thought was wrong with me.

And even bet­ter than that, it meant they could dis­miss and lin­ger­ing doubts they had about their par­ent­ing skills, because it couldn’t be their fault if I was messed up on drugs!

I should add that dur­ing this time period, I was a full time stu­dent and worked a full time job. That’s a 40-hour work­week, plus a full course load and asso­ci­ated home­work. Go me!

My par­ents were absolved of any guilt for how I turned out. If I talked back to my mother, it was because I was “on drugs”. If I stayed in my room when rel­a­tives vis­ited, it was because I was “on drugs”. If I came home too late and ate all the choco­late cook­ies, it was because I was “on drugs”.

Alright, I will give in to that last one, but the oth­ers are total bullshit!

I’ve smoked weed every day since I was 18, includ­ing and espe­cially skunk. And speak­ing of bull­shit, skunk is not new and call­ing it a brand new type of super-weed is patently false.

I had been smok­ing for around a year when I was first intro­duced to what we all now call “skunk”. I was 19 and the year was 1982, which if my drug-addled brain can still do math is 25 years ago!

The guy I was pur­chas­ing from had what every­one had back then, nor­mal Colom­bian which was brown and tasted of dirt. Bleuch!

Then, one day I called ‘round to see him and he asked me if I ever had “Indica” before. It was a new one on me.

He brought out three large bags, each graded accord­ing to strength and explained that the strongest was the top bud, and the other two grades were lower down on the plant. The buds were just that, proper buds, and the first I had ever seen. It looked like green cau­li­flower the size of infant’s fists. And the smell, wow, it was overpowering!

It smoked like a dream, with a full rich flavour and potency beyond any­thing I had before. It was love at first puff and that love affair con­tin­ues to this day!

Was it 20 times stronger than “nor­mal weed”? Of course not! It was notice­ably stronger, though and I bought as much as I could afford. I still do, though it remains fairly scarce here in London.

The strains, which are known col­lec­tively as “skunk” were actu­ally pio­neered in the Nether­lands in the 60s, so there is around 40 years of col­lec­tive knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence to draw from on the sub­ject, right here in Europe. I would love to see some data from the Dutch men­tal health sys­tem on their rates of teenage mad­ness as a result of dope! I would ven­ture a guess that they do not see any link.

In Hol­land, where weed is openly tol­er­ated, and sold under con­trolled rules, it’s harder for under­age kid­dies to score. Also, because respon­si­ble adults openly con­sume it, teenagers are less likely to chase after it for it’s illicit nature. In the Nether­lands, reported rates of cannabis use among teens are much lower than it is in the UK. Why can’t we fol­low the Dutch example?

The rea­son why skunk is more preva­lent in the UK now is sim­ple; because more weed is grown domes­ti­cally. It’s grow domes­ti­cally because it is cheaper and eas­ier to do that than to risk import­ing it into the coun­try in quan­tity from coun­tries where it grows well out­side. If you want weaker weed on the streets, then let the smug­glers bring some in! THC lev­els would be lower, and peo­ple could choose what they wanted to smoke.

Think of nor­mal weed as beer and skunk as the equiv­a­lent of spir­its. Peo­ple don’t drink pints of whiskey, do they? Ok, some peo­ple do, but most are able to exer­cise a degree of mod­er­a­tion. If weed were legal, the strength could be printed on the pack, the same way alco­hol con­tent is with booze. I’ll stop now, I’m mak­ing way too much sense!

In the sec­ond anti-cannabis hys­te­ria front-page arti­cle of the IoS, they had a very funny and unchal­lenged quote from Sir Richard Bran­son, which should not have been printed. In his apol­ogy for endors­ing the Independent’s legalise-weed cam­paign, Bran­son said that he would never had sup­ported the cause if he knew about these “new, genet­i­cally mod­i­fied” types of dope. What the fuck?

Does he really think that there are sci­en­tists in lab­o­ra­to­ries re-sequencing cannabis DNA to yield increased potency? Look, if it is true, I really want to meet these intre­pid geneti­cists, who’ve given up on cur­ing can­cer or the com­mon cold in favour of get­ting me higher! Bring on the Nobel Prize!

Seri­ously, does he really believe that research grants are back­ing GM mar­i­juana? I thought Bran­son was a bright guy, but this is really dumb.

Cannabis, like any plant, is bred for cer­tain qual­i­ties, nat­u­rally, by using one plant to pol­li­nate another, the same way they fig­ured out how to get rid of potato blight. Say you find a plant that yields well, or tastes espe­cially nice and another that flow­ers quicker than oth­ers. By cross breed­ing the two plants, you should even­tu­ally end up with a sib­ling plant that has a com­bi­na­tion of the pos­i­tive ele­ments of both par­ents. That does NOT qual­ify as genet­i­cally mod­i­fied in my book. Mak­ing toma­toes glow in the dark by adding jel­ly­fish genes, now that’s GM!

Rather than con­tinue to debunk the fac­tu­ally and emo­tion­ally inac­cu­rate report­ing in the IoS, I would pre­fer to let my favourite news­pa­per, do it for me, with the fol­low­ing very inter­est­ing arti­cle that you can read RIGHT HERE. The Guardian is the voice of sense and rea­son! Rock on!

Don’t let the ever-increasing media hys­te­ria get to you. They are 100% wrong. Stick with this hippy for the truth about dope, first hand and with­out a neg­a­tive bias!

(NB: In the inter­est of full dis­clo­sure, the northlon­don­hippy was under the influ­ence of “skunk cannabis” dur­ing the writ­ing of this blog entry and he is still a sane, well-balanced, tax-paying mem­ber of soci­ety.)