Politi-hippy 3: The death of politi-hippy

Brexit, Politics, society, the hippy, ,

You won! Get over it! 

I feel like screaming this at the Brexiteers who continue to hurl abuse at people on the left. They are suffering from a brand new thing, that I have dubbed SWS, which stands for Sore Winner Syndrome.

It’s like the home team beat the away team at football, but all the home team fans jumped on the away team’s bus, just to continue the abuse all the way back their hometown. Not cool. If I won something, I would be happy. The winners of our recent election, don’t seem happy at all.

Seriously, you guys won. Get over it!

You get your Brexit, you get a toxic, incompetent government, with more cruelty, and more austerity. What more could you want? 

You own Brexit now. You own the next 5 years of this parliament, enjoy it. You’ve got no one else to blame. You won. We lost. Get. Over. It. Don’t be sore winners. It’s unbecoming of your massive victory. 

It already feels like a 100 years ago, when we went to the polls last month and handed Boris Johnson this huge majority. 

Well, I say “we”, but there were a lot of us who didn’t vote for Boris’s Tory Party and we are all still here. Fun fact: more of us voted for remain-leaning parties than leave-leaning parties. And how did that work out for us? We still lost. Fragmentation of the remain vote, like life, is a bitch. 

The Tories only increased their vote share by 1% nationally, yet they won tons of seats. They seemed to get just the right amount of votes, in just the right places. It’s almost as if someone was showing off, just how skilled they are at voter manipulation, by demonstrating the economy of their abilities. 

Voter manipulation is easier than everyone thinks, because no one thinks it works on them. Guess what, like any repetitive advertising, it is extremely effective. 

Here, you can take my super-fun, three question quiz:

1) What kind of chicken is “finger lickin’ good”?

2) What do Weebles do?

3) What is the “real thing”?

Answers: 1) KFC, 2) they wobble but they don’t fall down, and 3) Coca Cola. I bet you knew all three answers, as any good consumer would. Advertising works!

I grew up in front of the television, advertising certainly worked on me. Brand new kids cereal, gimme! Brand new toys, gimme, gimme. Vote against my own interests as an adult? Why not! You can be easily swayed. We all can. 

Anyway, that’s my theory. I suspect the same tools used by Cambridge Analytica to deliver the Brexit referendum result, have only been refined and improved to the point where an increase of 1% vote share, in just the right constituencies, is achievable through machine learning, AI and a whopping great big data set. 

And the far right are employing these tools all over the world. If the left has any hope of ever getting anything done, they need their own dodgy dark tool box. It’s not hacking, it’s voodoo, it’s data science and algorithms, and a Facebook advertising platform that allows micro-targeting at such a granular level that you can literally flip votes as needed.

One of the saddest things I kept hearing from the campaign trail, is the repeated refrain that former Labour voters switched to the Tories because they felt the country needed a change from Labour. Huh? Labour haven’t been in charge of the government for 10 years, so what exactly were they changing from? Instead they voted Tory, the party that has been in government for the last 10 years, but they are expecting a different outcome. Mr. Einstein, what was it everyone says you said again, about insanity?

Look, I get it, we lost. Remain lost, Labour and the LibDems lost. We are leaving the EU at the end of this month, no ifs, ands or buts. And probably a year after that, we will get that hard, no-deal Brexit that Boris is so keen on, as the transition period won’t be extended. There is no chance of a comprehensive trade deal in a year. Shall we stockpile supplies for a third time? Oh we shall, we shall!

None of this matters. The Great British public doesn’t care about the truth or reality any more. Boris will lie and tell us that everything is fine, and a large number of people will believe it. Lies are comforting in an uncomfortable world. Trump knows this too. Don’t like reality? Then create your own twisted version of it instead. 

For example, Boris has banned the word Brexit after the end of the month. Brexit will be nowhere near finished, but if he eliminates the word, he eliminates the problem. He’s like Thanos with the Reality Stone. Reality can be whatever he wants it to be. Yay!

Who will the Tories blame when the economy tanks? I guess they will just tell us it’s all Jeremy Corbyn’s fault, for not losing hard enough. If Corbyn was a better loser, we wouldn’t be having all these problems. Stupid Corbyn!

Here are some random observations from the now dearly departed, Politi-hippy:

I was right about the branding of Jo Swinson’s Liberal Democrats, their messaging was way off the mark. They performed worse than even I expected. And I certainly didn’t predict Ms. Swinson’s loss. Rather bizarrely, LibDem MP and current peer, Lynn Featherstone, liked and retweeted this piece, which was highly critical of her party. I’m guessing she didn’t read it, but if she did and still retweeted it, then wow. Just wow.

I was wrong about tactical voting. I had hoped it would save us. It didn’t. We still lost. We could have toppled Tories, but we didn’t. 

Labour had so many problems, that I could write a series of books based on them all. I won’t, plenty of other people will do a better job than I ever could. The biggest issue to me, was the lack of unity within the party that was publicly revealed within minutes of the result. The split, between the centre and left wings of the party, will probably kill off Labour in the long term. They are a spent force, just check out the cavalcade of mediocrity trying to become leader. It looks and feels hopeless for them. 

A small selection of shitposts

During the campaign, I made a shit-ton of shitty graphics and shit-posted them on Twitter. I briefly increased my reach on Twitter as a result. I went from being an absolute total nobody, to a just plain old total nobody, but in spectacular fashion. 

Here’s an overview of my a normal hippy month on Twitter, from last April. Remember, I suck at Twitter.

As you can see, I sent a whopping 60 tweets for a measly 13,000 impressions.

Here’s another typical hippy month on Twitter, from October. Slightly better but still not rocking anyone’s world.

This time, 98 tweets, for nearly 30,000 impressions. Still not setting the world on fire, not by a long shot. And look, I actually lost followers.

And then, witness the birth of politi-hippy. For around a month during the election campaign, I made a bit of an effort with original content in the form of the aforementioned shitposted graphics. Doing this improved my statistics significantly.

I sent a over 1,000 tweets, racking up around 700,000 impressions and I gained 40 new followers. While it is a big change for me, it’s still a drop in the bucket compared to anyone with name recognition and a decent follower count. I used hashtags, I tagged famous people, and I replied to tweets from well established accounts.

I had retweets and likes from a wide variety of notable people, including Glen Matlock, the original bass player for the Sex Pistols, and Bianca Jagger, the well known human rights campaigner and first wife of Mick. The Times columnist, India Knight, liked one of my graphics too.

Ultimately, none of this had an effect on anything, other than giving me a fun new hobby for a month. It did show me that getting anywhere on Twitter is a lot of work for very little reward. 

Our side lost, my efforts online had zero effect, so politi-hippy is now crossing over to the great beyond. And with this final piece, indeed you are witnessing the slow death of politi-hippy. 

I started out this campaign by asking how many children Boris Johnson has fathered. We still don’t know. Our Prime Minister is the Jonny Appleseed of jism, he is the human lawn sprinkler of spunk. He could have a hundred little blond, floppy-haired sons and daughters out there, for all we know, and no one would care. We now have a deadbeat dad in charge of the entire country. Cool.

I really expected Boris’s first bit of legislation passed by his new, giant majority, to be a ban on court mandated paternity tests, but no, they went for the Brexit withdrawal bill instead. Maybe that paternity test ban will be next? Who can say. 

But from now on, I’m back to being the plain, old, normal version of the northlondonhippy. I want to reform the drug laws and get cannabis legalised. That’s my issue, that’s what I will campaign for, hard. I’ll leave the rest of real politics to the grown-ups, or for what passes for grown-ups in today’s world.

I was able to update one of my fun graphics, so it is valid for the next 5 years. This is the last official act of politi-hippy, before he draws his last breath. Sharing it is a public service. Enjoy!

The northlondonhippy is an anonymous author, cannabis evangelist and recreational drug user, who has been writing about drugs and drug use for over 15 years.  In real life, the hippy is a senior multimedia journalist with over 30 years experience of working in broadcast news. Soon, the hippy will be leaving journalism to embark on a career as a full time hippy, writer and activist. This is not a drill.

The hippy’s book, ‘Personal Use’ details the hippy’s first 35 years of recreational drug taking, while calling for urgent drug law reform. It’s a cracking read, you will laugh, you will cry and you can bet your ass that you will wish you were a hippy too!

“Personal Use” is available as a digital download on all platforms, including Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iBooks and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. The paperback is available from all online retailers and book shops everywhere. 

The hippy says his next book, “High Hopes” will be published in late Spring. The hippy says a lot of things.  

You can also find the northlondonhippy on Twitter: @nthlondonhippy but only if you look really hard.

Politi-hippy 2 – hippy’s revenge

Brexit, Politics, society, the hippy, Uncategorized, , , , ,

I’m going to tell you flat out, from the start, there is no revenge. I’ve never done a sequel to one of my pieces before, and I really wanted to nail the title. I’m not out to settle any personal scores, I just wanted to get your attention. Did it work? Are you reading? Cool.

As I mentioned in my previous piece, Politi-hippy, I have been swept up in this stupid election we’re stuck with this month. I wrote a couple of pieces about the campaign, one about Boris Johnson’s utter lack of character, and the other on the poor branding choices made by Jo Swinson’s Liberal Democrats.

The whole thing is really stressing me out, and I know I am not the only one. My coping mechanism is that I started making weird, funny graphics to express my quiet rage. I’ve made like 50 of them in the last week or so. I am ever so slightly obsessed. You can find half of them on the the original Politi-hippy post, including the 6 panel Baby Yoda series. No baby yoda is safe from Boris Johnson’ Tory party!

I’ve been sharing them on Twitter and at least one of them has gone viral enough that you may have actually seen it. It’s this one:

Yep, that was me. Basic joke, simple format, internet gold. Who knew? And here I’ve spent 15 years trying to come up with original material. I don’t mean to sell myself short, it’s a decent gag, but hardly my best. In my own defence, I posted it not long after the interview finished on TV, so my timing was very good. Sure, it’s uncredited, and I doubt many people will see me claim credit here, but that’s ok. I like making people laugh.

I’ve never gone viral before in any meaningful way, so this was a new one for me. I knew it had been successful when I saw other people posting it all over the place. The truth is, I suck at Twitter, but in the last week or so, I’ve learned how to suck at it less. Go me!

I went on to make a bunch of graphics around Donald Trump’s visit:

Similar format, another basic joke. Private Eye should hire me, when I am a free agent again. They won’t, I’m too expensive, and I doubt they pay in weed anyway. Will work for bud, just putting that out there.

I made a bunch for the Trump visit, but that was the best one. I did try some other jokes with the graphic, this is the only other one that seemed to land:

And I did this one, too, which seemed to do better with Americans than British people. And it’s funny, because it’s true. Allegedly.

Trump and Boris did meet, but you didn’t get to see it, until now:

Trump left early because a bunch of bad kids were gossiping about him, including his very best friend, Boris Johnson. Here’s what that looked like:

I even did an arty one, with a fancy-pants literary quote, that I had to Google because of my vague memory and piss poor American education:

Once dumb Donny ditched NATO, I shifted my attention to what I think is the key to this election, tactical voting. There’s far more of us, than there are of them, but we are fragmented. We need to be smart. Are you smart? Of course you are! Smart people vote tactically. We all might prefer different parties, but who we like is not nearly as important as who we defeat. We need to vote the Tories out! Feel free to share any graphic I’ve made, no need to credit me.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks and well done you! Since I started posting all these graphics, I have increased my visibility on Twitter exponentially. I’ve had tweets liked and RT’d by a former MP and peer, the ex-wife of one of the world’s most famous rock stars, newspaper columnists and the original bassist from the original punk rock band. That’s why I will be back to tell you all about this and more in part 3 of the Politi-hippy series, Politi-hippy-Post-mortem, coming as soon as I can, after election day. And man I can’t wait till election day is done!

As a special treat for making it all the way to the end, here are 4 bonus, extra graphics that I’ve only just started sharing on Twitter. You can share them too.

The northlondonhippy is an anonymous author, cannabis evangelist and recreational drug user, who has been writing about drugs and drug use for over 15 years.  In real life, the hippy is a senior multimedia journalist with over 30 years experience of working in news.

The hippy’s book, ‘Personal Use’ details the hippy’s first 35 years of recreational drug taking, while calling for urgent drug law reform. It’s a cracking read, you will laugh, you will cry and you can bet your ass that you will wish you were a hippy too!

“Personal Use” is available as a digital download on all platforms, including Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iBooks and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. The paperback is available from all online retailers and book shops everywhere. 

You can also find the northlondonhippy on Twitter: @nthlondonhippy but only if you look really hard.

Why I suck at Twitter

society,
Twitter, then and now.

This was originally published in August 2011. I haven’t edited it all, reposting it now, because 8 years later, I am not really that much better at Twitter. A lot of this still applies.

I love Twitter, but I fear my love for it remains unrequited.

I’ve been properly on Twitter for about two and a half years. To be more precise, as of this writing, I have been using Twitter since the 31st of January 2009, which works out to 931 days. I used howlongontwitter.com to calculate that, I didn’t count it up myself.

In that time, I’ve found Twitter to be indispensable and addictive and while I am not the most prolific tweeter you will meet, I constantly read my timeline. I must dip in and out of it a thousand times a day.

What I don’t do is tweet or interact with other people enough. That’s why I suck at Twitter.

My tweets tend towards feeble and offensive (but original) jokes that probably make people laugh uncomfortably, if at all.

I also tweet, or rather retweet stuff about legalising cannabis and other drugs, because that is my pet cause.

Occasionally I may tweet something that I feel strongly about, like the recent riots in London.

I tweet about what I’m watching on TV sometimes and the weather occasionally and even the odd food-related tweet too.

In other words, I’m not unpleasant or rude, just probably not that interesting. That’s why I suck at Twitter.

I’m anonymous online, by choice, mainly because I am so open about my own cannabis use and as its status is currently illegal, anonymity allows me the luxury of honesty. I like to pretend this stance furthers the cause of legalisation, but I’m not always convinced it does and that’s a subject best explored another day. This post is about Twitter.

The other reason I remain anonymous is I prefer to be unknown. I am not seeking attention for myself. If you Googled my real name, you wouldn’t find me anywhere online; I’m not on Facebook, LinkedIn, nothing. And while I have worked in the media for more than two decades, I’ve managed to avoid having a byline, screen credit, nor any mention of my real name and that has been intentional.

What it means on Twitter is I don’t use my real name or a photograph of myself as my avatar. That is why I suck at Twitter too.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I suck at Twitter for the rather silly reason that I have been sucked into thinking about follower numbers, something I have managed to avoid until now.

I’ve never really been bothered by how many people are following me, I haven’t done anything ever to intentionally gain them, never asked for them, begged for them, nothing like that. I’ve just tweeted when I felt like it, followed people (and accounts) that have interested me and that’s about it.

I’ve always found it a bit distasteful when people tweet about the number of followers they have, in whatever context.

“I need 27 more followers to reach 500, help!”

“Please RT this [insert celebrity here] I really need more followers urgently!”

“I gained 57 followers today, all because [insert celebrity here] retweeted me.”

Worse, is seeing celebrities tweeting each other and exaggerating their worth by bragging they have the most followers. I find this rather tragic.

Worrying about follower numbers is a mug’s game and sadly in the last week or so, I have become that mug. Here’s why: I’ve recently noticed a few people I know online, who started on Twitter when I did, now have double or treble the followers I have. I am a victim of comparative maths.

I know its silly, I know its meaningless, but its been on my mind recently.

This is not meant to be a moan or a complaint, everything I’m telling you is observational and self-critical, but not a whinge or backhanded plea for more people to follow me. I’m just trying to understand what I am doing wrong on Twitter.

What am I doing wrong on Twitter? Loads, it would seem.

There are quite a few people I follow on Twitter, who don’t follow me back. I don’t mean celebrities, but normal people, like you and me. Well, more like you probably as I don’t come anywhere near being normal.

The lack of follow-backs from people I like perplexes me.

Sometimes, I scroll through my own tweets and read them back, to see if there’s something in them that makes people not want to follow me. Nothing leaps out.

I think I’m fairly pleasant, thoughtful and I’m true to myself. So what could it be?

The lack of a photo and a name is off-putting, but my anonymity policy is not going to change until weed is legal. End of, as the kids today say. Its a reason, but that alone can’t be the only reason.

I don’t interact or tweet enough, but guess what? I’m probably the same in real life, being mostly a loner and misanthropic with it.

If you’re shit at life, you are going to be shit at Twitter. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to me, but it does.

How can I be more socially successful on Twitter than I am in real life? Answer: I can’t.

Quite oddly, I think I am probably more shy on Twitter than I am in real life. Often I do think about responding to other people’s tweets, then I think better of it and don’t. I don’t like tweeting negatively, if I disagree with someone, however strongly, I tend not to say anything. And if I do agree with someone, I don’t want to seem sycophantic, so I don’t tweet.

On the rare occasion when I do tweet someone and they don’t respond, even with the simplest of acknowledgement, then I am crestfallen and I think the fear of that often prevents me from interacting with people too. Maybe you know what I mean, maybe you think that’s a lame reason, but its true.

Whenever anyone tweets me and they are polite, I always make a point of responding. I always try to thank people for RTs too, as long as I’ve noticed they’ve done so. I guess I just try to treat people on Twitter as I would like to be treated.

I suck at Twitter because I suck at life. I’m starting to believe I’m not particularly good with either pursuit. That’s not a happy conclusion.

Or, I could take the tack that I’m not unpopular on Twitter, I’m just undiscovered.

The best lies I tell, are the ones I tell myself.

If you do follow me, well done you for finding Twitter’s best kept secret! You are truly a person of excellent taste! You have keen, discerning eye for the hippest and coolest, that your average nobody tends to pass on by without a second thought You’re a trend spotter and a trend setter!

Ah-hem.

I’ve pretty much accepted that I will continue to exist in Twitter obscurity, while others around me zoom ever higher. I’m ok with that.

I take a lot from Twitter, I’m quite greedy in my quest for knowledge, I just feel guilty sometimes that I don’t put enough back into it. I’d like to entertain and inform more people, but that’s not who I am, not in real life, not online. So it goes.

These truths should be self-evident, but its taken me nearly 1,300 words to get here.

So now you know why I suck at Twitter. And now I do too.

The northlondonhippy is an anonymous author, cannabis evangelist and recreational drug user, who has been writing about drugs and drug use for over 15 years.  In real life, the hippy is a senior multimedia journalist with over 30 years experience of working in news.

The hippy’s book, ‘Personal Use’ details the hippy’s first 35 years of recreational drug taking, while calling for urgent drug law reform. It’s a cracking read, you will laugh, you will cry and you can bet your ass that you will wish you were a hippy too!

“Personal Use” is available as a digital download on all platforms, including Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iBooks and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. The paperback is available from all online retailers and book shops everywhere. 

You can also find the northlondonhippy on Twitter: @nthlondonhippy You can find out for yourself just how badly I suck at Twitter. And why I don’t work in sales.

Politi-hippy

Brexit, Politics, society, , , , ,

I have been a bit General Election obsessed since this one was called. I’ve had a lot of time on my hands too.

So I wrote about Boris Johnson’s utter lack of character.

And then I wrote about how I wish I could support the LibDems, but I can’t. Luckily, I don’t need to, but I would if it made tactical sense. I don’t hate them, but I should support them more than I do.

And I made a bunch of very shareable graphics. Have you shared any of them? There’s still time, and there’s plenty of choice, so choose one that expresses your own personal style! I especially recommend choosing one from the ‘baby yoda’ series. Confuse your political enemies with his cuteness. They’re not branded to me and I am making them publicly available. Go crazy, they are free!

Now that I’ve published all of these in one handy place, I am going to chill the fuck out. We will have a result soon enough, but I don’t think any of us are going to like it. And chances are, a lot of these graphics may still be useful for our next election, coming in Summer 2020!

The northlondonhippy is an anonymous author, cannabis evangelist and recreational drug user, who has been writing about drugs and drug use for over 15 years.  In real life, the hippy is a senior multimedia journalist with over 30 years experience of working in news. The hippy is finding this election campaign really depressing and stressful.

The hippy’s book, ‘Personal Use’ details the hippy’s first 35 years of recreational drug taking, while calling for urgent drug law reform. It’s a cracking read, you will laugh, you will cry and you can bet your ass that you will wish you were a hippy too!

“Personal Use” is available as a digital download on all platforms, including Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iBooks and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. The paperback is available from all online retailers and book shops everywhere. 

You can also find the northlondonhippy on Twitter: @nthlondonhippy

Branding Jo Swinson’s Liberal Democrats

Brexit, Politics, society, , , ,

By all rights, I should love the LibDems. They want to stop Brexit, and they want to legalise weed, two things I would like to do, too. I really should support them, but I don’t. I can’t. Not this time. 

Do you want to know why we are having a General Election right now, and not that mythical second referendum on our membership in the EU? Jo Swinson’s Liberal Democrats refused to join a government of national unity because of their twisted dislike of Jeremy Corbyn. 

All a government of national unity had to do was sort out a referendum. Their agreement on the terms of a caretaker administration, would have included a ‘no new legislation’ clause. In other words, all they would have done is maintain the status quo until the referendum and then the subsequent general election. And then maybe, Brexit would have finally been sorted, one way or another. Instead, we get a general election around Xmas. Ho ho ho.

Swinson’s attacks on Corbyn have left me cold. Don’t get me wrong, I am not a huge Corbyn fan, but I do respect him. He is one of the most consistent politicians I’ve ever come across, with policies that would be popular with people, if they got to hear about them. But instead, the negative campaign run against Mr. C consists of personal attacks and twisted facts. But Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t trade in personal attacks, so it’s all very one sided and unfair.

I have nothing against personal attacks, if they are warranted. For example, Boris the bully from the Bullingdon Club, has earned the personal attacks aimed at him. I really want to know how many kids he thinks he has. No one can ever really know for sure. He’s a racist, and a liar. Those are undisputed facts, unless you drink the Kool-Aid served up by the Tories. Then you dismiss the overwhelming evidence of Boris Johnson’s utter lack of character, and you press on. 

Jo Swinson would say she attacks BoJo and Corby equally, but it is a false equivalence and you can’t lump them both together. If anything, I bet Swinson’s voting record is more closely aligned with Johnson’s than Corbyn’s.

If you Google Jo Swinson, the first suggested search term is ‘voting record’. It’s not pretty reading. Austerity, the bedroom tax, and university fees, to name just a few of her greatest hits. She was part of the Tory-led coalition, which is the root cause of many problems we have in our society today. Go Jo!

I didn’t live in the UK in the 1980’s, but I know plenty of people who did. They are not fans of Maggie T, not by a long shot. I can’t imagine Ms. Swinson’s campaign for a statue in Thatcher’s honour is a vote winner either

Whooopsie!

Ms. Swinson says that she wants to stop Brexit and I believe that is true. She also wants to increase the LibDems seat count, which is also true. The problem is where these two goals collide, like in Canterbury and High Peak, where the local candidates stood aside, to allow another remain supporting party a free run at the seat. Jo Swinson”s Liberal Democrat’s won’t allow that, and have imposed new, outside candidates to take their places on the ballot. It seems that the need for seats outweighs the need to stop Brexit, as that is their primary priority. It is extremely disappointing. 

One might say that because I am a north London media, liberal elite, that I would automatically support Labour. There is a kernel of truth to that. I don’t like to brag about my liberal elite status, but sometimes, when I go to McDonalds, I supersize my meal…AND I upgrade to a shake. But only sometimes, I’m not rich, like that uppity Jacob Rees-Mogg. I heard when he goes to McDonalds, he supersizes, he upgrades to the shake and he gets a McFlurry too. Not one of those little bitty mini ones either, but full sized. Shhhhhh, don’t tell nanny!

The reason I mention my media background is because I am coming to the point of this piece. “Jo Swinson’s Liberal Democrats” is terrible branding. I feel like some PR agency pulled a fast one by appealing to her vanity and turning her into the literal face and name of the party.

Have you see the bus? Jo Swinson’s Liberal Democrats’ Bus. Have a gander:

Branding gone wrong

I can just imagine the creative agency’s pitch meeting. Have you ever seen the Monorail episode of The Simpsons? 

“Jo, you have tested through the roof with our focus groups. People love you! So we want you to be the face of the campaign. Every leaflet will have a small headshot of you on the front, and a larger photo of you on the back! 

And have you seen the bus? A close up of you, full bus height! Gorgeous! And, are you ready for this, you will love this! We are going to rebrand the whole party as “Jo Swinson’s Liberal Democrats!”

A breathless, jubilant Jo Swinson’s shouts, yes, yes, yes! Where do I sign?

I can actually envision this being very close to the truth.

And when I first heard about this new branding, this was my immediate thought, now expressed in graphic form:

Seriously?

It sounds like a band name or an improv group struggling to break through at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It makes the party sound like her personal possession and plaything. And that shit is plastered all over her campaign bus! It’s a branding faux pas on an epic scale. It’s the ‘New Coke’ of political reinvention. 

I’m lucky, my local MP is as anti-Brexit as they come. My MP voted against triggering Article 50, and yes, my MP is a Labour MP with a sizeable majority. But I still checked a tactical voting website to see what they recommended. And you know what, they recommended I vote Labour for the best chance of stopping Brexit. I was going to do it anyway, but it’s nice to know it’s tactical too. 

If I lived somewhere else, where voting tactically for a LibDem candidate made sense, of course I would do it. They’re not a bad bunch of people, even if their election branding is bad this go-round, and they have a history of propping up Tory governments. What matters most in this election, is stopping Brexit. Sky News have nailed the branding, they are rightly calling it the “Brexit Election”.

All of our votes count, but they really, really count this time. Your vote matters, do your homework, work out which party in your constituency is best placed to win and stop Brexit. Then hold your nose if you need to, but vote for the party helps Britain remain in the EU. Your county’s future depends on all us, including and especially, you.

The northlondonhippy is an anonymous author, cannabis evangelist and recreational drug user, who has been writing about drugs and drug use for over 15 years.  In real life, the hippy is a senior multimedia journalist with over 30 years experience of working in news.

The hippy’s book, ‘Personal Use’ details the hippy’s first 35 years of recreational drug taking, while calling for urgent drug law reform. It’s a cracking read, you will laugh, you will cry and you can bet your ass that you will wish you were a hippy too!

“Personal Use” is available as a digital download on all platforms, including Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iBooks and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. The paperback is available from all online retailers and book shops everywhere. 

You can also find the northlondonhippy on Twitter: @nthlondonhippy but only if you look really hard.

A Question of Character

Politics, society, ,

Do you know how many children our Prime Minister has? Does anyone?

Even Wikipedia is not sure, just take a look. It says he either has 5 or 6 kids. That’s extremely vague and it is somewhat disconcerting to me, that no one knows the answer.

Even Wikipedia doesn’t know for sure

Why hasn’t anyone in the media asked Boris Johnson about this? It seems fairly basic to me. If you can’t trust a man to tell you how many children he’s fathered, how can you trust him with anything else? If you misrepresent this, what else are you not telling the truth about?

I appreciate it is a complex question, and the answer is probably not as straight forward as you might think. And I would suggest, that there is more than one right answer to this question, depending upon how the question is framed.

If a journalist asked Boris outright, how many children he has, I expect he would reluctantly provide an answer. This answer would become the number of children Boris acknowledges and it would solve Wikipedia’s conundrum for them. We would have an answer we could attribute to the Prime Minister, and that would end the debate. Except it wouldn’t.

It wouldn’t end the debate because there will be another answer, to a slightly different question, and that number would be higher than the first. The problem with this number, is it will only be known to Boris and his attorneys, as it is the number of children Boris supports financially. Those pesky court-ordered paternity tests are an annoyance, but reaching a settlement with a non-disclosure clause probably makes it all alright. So this number is out there, but it will remain a mystery. 

The third number, which is the actual number of children sired by Boris, is unknowable. The only being in the universe to have this answer, if he or she existed, would be an omnipotent god. Even Boris wouldn’t be sure. There will be terminated pregnancies, there will be paternity denials, and there could even be some children born, that have no idea he is their daddy.

Put it this way, if you are aged somewhere between zygote and around 40 years old, and you have floppy blond hair, an innate ability to say random things in Latin, and your momma never told you who your daddy is… Odds are your daddy is Boris Johnson.

Boris is a born liar. Boris lies so much during the day, that sometimes when he gets home at night, he is just too darned tired to lie to his girlfriend. He lies about everything. He was sacked from the Times for lying. He even lied to the father of a sick baby girl, about the press not covering his hospital visit, while the cameras were in the room and filming! Boris even lied to the Queen. He just can’t help it. Boris lies, the way the rest of us breathe, naturally, and without much thought. Lying is his gut instinct, go to strategy, to get himself out of everything. And he doesn’t seem to mind when he gets caught. 

Why is the media so complicit in all of this? How can a politician be given a pass on issues of trust? If you can’t trust a man to tell you how many children he has, how can you trust him on literally anything else?

Character matters. Honesty matters. And it starts with a really simple question: Mr. Johnson, how many children do you have?

The northlondonhippy is an anonymous author, cannabis evangelist and recreational drug user, who has been writing about drugs and drug use for over 15 years.  In real life, the hippy is a senior multimedia journalist with over 30 years experience of working in news.

The hippy’s book, ‘Personal Use’ details the hippy’s first 35 years of recreational drug taking, while calling for urgent drug law reform. It’s a cracking read, you will laugh, you will cry and you can bet your ass that you will wish you were a hippy too!

“Personal Use” is available as a digital download on all platforms, including Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iBooks and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. The paperback is available from all online retailers and book shops everywhere. 

You can also find the northlondonhippy on Twitter: @nthlondonhippy

Hating String Beans

"Personal Use", cannabis, decriminalisation, legalisation, society,
String Beans Photo by Sonja Langford on Unsplash

The first time I ever saw a string bean, I was 13 years old. I was dining with my family in a small, local restaurant, when a plate containing string beans arrived at our table. 

When I say string beans, I mean long, thin, immature runner beans, you may call them something else, fine beans, green beans, you might even call them haricot vert. I’d never seen them before, because my father absolutely detested them and they were banned from my childhood home.

I don’t think I can overstate just how much my father hated string beans. He hated them with the sort of passion usually reserved for ex-wives, rival sports teams and politicians. He despised them, hard. 

So when his steak arrived at the table and he gruffly ordered the server to return it to the kitchen to have the ‘green vegetable’ scraped from his plate, I didn’t understand, because I didn’t know what string beans even looked like. It wasn’t until my mother explained that I realised it was the aforementioned and disgustingly offensive, string beans. My parents had a good laugh at my ignorance, even though they were the direct cause of it.

I tried to understand why my father, a grown man, could find a vegetable so repulsive. He eventually explained that when he was in the army, he was forced to eat them on a regular basis. A tinned, tasteless, mushy version of them was slapped onto his mess tray, day after day after day. He said he made a promise to himself, that once he was out of the military, he would never, ever eat or even look at another string bean for the rest of his life.

Because of my father’s hatred of the dreaded string bean, that was my only encounter with them, that fleeting glance, before I reached adulthood. I hated string beans by proxy. My dad would eat almost anything, he ate pickled pigs knuckles, for God’s sake! If he didn’t like string beans, they must be foul and disgusting. It was the only sensible conclusion and I accepted it as gospel and never questioned it. It was the gospel of vegetables according to my sainted father.

Flash forward to years later, and I am a guest at a friend’s home for Sunday lunch. We sit down for the meal, and guess what was on my plate? That’s right, the evil green beans, which I hated only by reputation. 

As an adult, I had a more open mind, and I had worked out that my parents weren’t always right, so I decided in that instant, to taste the string beans.

I loved them. They were crisp, flavourful and delicious. I took another forkful and savoured them. These are good, I thought. These are really good. And I spent my whole life until that point, avoiding them, because of my father’s insane dislike of string beans. String beans are now one of my favourite vegetables, lightly steamed with a little butter, salt and pepper. Yum! 

Bud Photo by Get Budding on Unsplash

There’s another vegetable with a bad reputation that is also undeserved: The  Devil’s Lettuce. How’s that for a segue? This was always really about cannabis. Everything for me is always about cannabis.

Chances are, if you are anti-cannabis, you are hating it by proxy. You have learned to hate cannabis by channelling the hatred of others and have no first hand experience of it yourself. Lucky guess?

More likely, you have been force fed anti-cannabis propaganda your entire life. But unless you’ve experienced it for yourself, tried it yourself, you won’t really know the truth.

Perhaps I am wrong and someone you respect, someone with authority on the subject, has told you the truth, that cannabis is extremely beneficial for a variety of reasons. And if that is not true, let it be true from this point onwards. You just need to respect my authority on the subject, because I have been a daily cannabis consumer for nearly 40 years, a journalist for 30 years and I am the author of the book, “Personal Use”. This is exactly what I am telling you, that cannabis is good.

You have been lied to repeatedly, for your entire life, about cannabis. We all have, and the lies continue to dominate any discussion about weed. The only difference, is now it is easier to call out these lies, because some more sensible governments have taken steps to change their laws. We know with certainty that cannabis decriminalisation and legalisation improve things, and more importantly, doesn’t make anything else worse. It’s a win-win. Yes, yes.

I didn’t know how good string beans were until I tried them for myself. It seems obvious on the surface, but I was indoctrinated from an early age to hate the little green wonders.

We’ve all been indoctrinated to hate cannabis, to fear it, to expect the worst of it, and none of it is true. Cannabis is analogous to coffee, a mild drug that can be consumed safely on a regular basis. That said, you can die from caffeine poisoning, but you would need to consume an amount equivalent to your body weight in weed to do the same. And even then, it would probably be easier to just drop it upon your head from a great height to kill you.

Cannabis is safer than aspirin. I say that a lot, but for only one reason. It’s true. Yet no one complains if you self administer an aspirin, but self administer some cannabis…Oh wait, you can’t, because it is not legal for very much right now. 

One of the many mistakes made in pursuing medical cannabis in the UK, was insisting it be on prescription. I prefer the California model, of therapeutic use with a doctor’s recommendation. Or without a doctor’s recommendation, I’m easy. You wouldn’t need a doctor to recommend taking aspirin, would you? So why would you need one for self-administering cannabis?

Some campaigners have tried desperately to exaggerate the harm cannabis can cause, trying to offer legal, medicinal cannabis as the solution. The only harm actually caused, has been by this mendacious stance and it has set the legalisation movement back. 

Cannabis is cannabis, medical cannabis and recreational cannabis, are both the same cannabis. And if you grow your own, at home, that is cannabis too.

You will get no argument from me regarding the quality of some black market cannabis vs cannabis cultivated in a legal environment. I would much prefer something that has been safely grown, tested and certified as being good. I’d also be willing to pay tax on it. But please don’t lie and try to tell us that there is a genetic difference between the two. 

Weed is weed, there’s good quality weed and there is shitty weed. Not all legal weed is good quality, and not all black market cannabis is shitty…but you’re more likely to get excellent weed in a legal environment and more likely to get crappy weed on the black market. It’s just simple economics and good old capitalism.

For most people, legal weed in the UK wouldn’t make much difference. The estimated 5 million people who consume cannabis regularly, would continue to do so, only without fear of arrest. And higher quality products would be available to adults. The rest of the people, those who don’t consume cannabis, are unlikely to start or notice much of a difference in their lives. 

Certainly, that won’t be universal, some people will experiment, and of those who do, some may enjoy it or find it beneficial to their health and continue to consume it, but the number won’t rise significantly. How do I know that? I know it because that is what has happened in places where it has already been legalised. 

And this will blow your minds, the demographic that comes around to legal cannabis the most, is older folks, in my age group, 40s, 50s and 60s. (My age is somewhere in the middle of that, so I am ahead of the curve.)

We already have a large cannabis market in the UK, but it is untaxed and unregulated. There is an existing customer base as well, who would be thrilled to see this black market legitimised and legalised. This isn’t about creating a new market, it is about improving our existing one and bringing it into the light. We have nothing to fear from this conversion and everything to gain.

I will let you in on a secret. I already smoke good weed, and enjoy quality edibles, some even home made. But I’m not doing this just for me. I’m doing this for you. You deserve to know how good cannabis is, you deserve to discover for yourself, how beneficial it can be.

Let me put it another way, I am a dual national. I don’t make much of it, but I am, British and American. I could sell up, move to Colorado, or California, tomorrow, if all I wanted was to smoke cannabis legally. 

I want more than to just consume cannabis legally. I want the country I’ve lived in for more than half my life, to benefit from a legal, regulated cannabis market. London is my home, I want to give something back to the city and nation that has given me so much. I could easily jump ship, and save myself, but I don’t want to do that. I want to see the laws changed here, for the good of everyone. That’s all I’ve ever wanted, but I am planning on trying a whole lot harder in the near future. This is my calling, like a vocation, just a really cool one. I want to make it my life. 

Don’t let cannabis be your string beans. Don’t hate it because others hate it. If you want to find out for yourself what the fuss is all about, go for it. If you don’t like it after trying it, that’s cool. But if you do like it, that’s even cooler. And if you don’t want to try it, that’s cool too. All I ask is that you please kindly be supportive of the millions of us who do dig it. And please educate yourselves, learn how to spot the lies. I promise to do what I can to help with that. 

The northlondonhippy is an anonymous author, online cannabis activist and recreational drug user, who has been writing about drugs and drug use for over 15 years.  In real life, the hippy is a senior multimedia journalist with over 30 years experience of working in news.

The hippy’s book, ‘Personal Use’ details the hippy’s first 35 years of recreational drug taking, while calling for urgent drug law reform. It’s a cracking read, you will laugh, you will cry and you can bet your ass that you will wish you were a hippy too!

“Personal Use” is available as a digital download on all platforms, including Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iBooks and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. The paperback is available from all online retailers and book shops everywhere. 

You can also find the northlondonhippy on Twitter: @nthlondonhippy

A busy hippy

Brexit, cannabis, Climate Change, Climate Crisis, decriminalisation, drug use, High Hopes, Politics, society, , , , , , , , , , ,
Not an actual photo of me

You might have noticed in the last few weeks, I’ve been more productive than usual.

I’ve been a busy hippy. 

I’ve had some free time, so I decided to solve some big issues.

Dangerous Tea

For instance, I highlighted the truth about cannabis. Don’t blame weed, it is tea drinking that is the real cause of everything bad.

ClimateGear(TM)

Want to survive the Climate Apocalypse? I figured out how it can be done. First, you need to be super rich.

Brexit lives at the bottom of this very deep hole

I had a free hour, so I solved Brexit. It’s not pretty, but it gets the job done. You can thank me later.

Giant steps are what you take

I shared my memories of the first moon landing. I was 6 and a half when it happened, but I still came up with a few obscure details.

The UK is a dry country

I wrote to Grandma Hippy about living in a dry country. She is imaginary, and she lives in Colorado. She digs edibles. I do too.

Dump Trump, because Trump is a dump

I received my first 12 hour Twitter ban. I tried to fight the power, but the power of stupid prevailed.

Fire!

And, my fellow earthlings, I tried to convince everyone that we are all Citizens of Everywhere. It’s our only hope.

There’s not a lot to be optimistic about these days, but we can all distract ourselves from the mess we’re in. My distraction, ironically, is hope. Don’t lose hope, we can all help make things a little less miserable. This is my attempt to do just that.

My first Twitter Ban

Politics, society, , , ,
This is the worst man in the world

I received my first Twitter ban today. I can still read tweets, but I can’t like them and I am not allowed to tweet for 12 hours. So don’t blame me if you don’t know what I had for lunch today.

It was a Chicken Caesar Salad. Now you know. 

All I did was call Donald Trump a cunt. Even though I stand by my comment, which will be reproduced below, Twitter forced me to delete it. My knuckles feel well and truly rapped. 

Bad hippy! Naughty hippy! You called the worst human being in the world, a bad, naughty word. 

I’m not exaggerating, I really believe Trump is the worst person on the planet. Imagine having all that power, all that influence, a platform and pulpit do actual good, to, bring good into the world. And instead, you tweet this kind of bullshit:

This is not presidential.

The President or the United States is celebrating the burglary of a political opponent’s home. This is the state of America in 2019. It’s beyond satire, it is beyond a joke. Every tweet from this human cesspool sets a new low. He is a bottomless pit of toxicity and poison. He pollutes everything with his infantile rage tweets, a dozen times a day. Do they ever ban him? Do they, fuck! If anyone deserved to be stuck in Twitter’s penalty box, it’s Dumb Donny.

Elijah Cummings is a proper America hero. He has more decency in his little finger than the entire Trump dynasty, even if you went back 10 generations to the Drumfs. Don’t believe me? Wikipedia awaits.

For a serial liar, with more bankruptcies than successes in business, who has 5 kids from 3 wives, who grabs pussies and cheats at everything, who has besmirched and demeaned the the office of President more than Richard Nixon, to attack a man like Cummings, well it got my dander up.

I can’t imagine being gleeful over the the misfortune of another human being, even someone as vile as Trump. I will be gleeful when he is imprisoned, because he deserves it and it won’t be a misfortune. It will be justice. An orange jumpsuit for an orange moron.  

Recently, I have been allowing myself the occasional reply to Trump’s tweets. Not because I think ol’ mushroom dick would see them, but for me. I have been expressing myself, via a pressure valve, namely a tweet. Thousands of people reply to his tweets and I can understand why. We all feel so small and helpless in the face of pure evil, we need to respond or it would eat us up inside. I like my insides uneaten, thank you very much.

Wanna see my tweet? The one that got me in trouble. The one I had to delete. Of course you do! Here it is:

Sometimes, decency requires indecent language

I didn’t say anything that was factually inaccurate. I didn’t say anything, I would not say to him in person, if given the chance. I used a naughty word. Ok, technically the naughtiest word, but no other word would do. No other word has that power, not to shock, but to convey rage. It’s the rage-iest. It was the right word, at the right time, for the right purpose. 

I’m not sure what the threshold is for a Twitter ban. How many cry baby Trump supporting snowflakes had to report my tweet before I was banned? I don’t know, but it can’t be many, as I was banned within a couple of minutes of sending it.

This is what Twitter said about my tweet: “Your account has been locked for violating Twitter’s rules. Specifically for: Violating our rules against hateful conduct. You may not promote violence against, threaten or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability or serious disease.”

I was framed and plead not guilty!

In what way did my tweet violate any of that? I did not promote violence, threaten or harass in any way. I did insult, but is being insulting against Twitter’s policy? Seems like it is. Unless, being a cunt is considered a disease or disability, I didn’t break their rules.

Clearly some Trump supporting infant didn’t like my naughty words, or they couldn’t cope with the truth, so they reported my tweet to Twitter. It’s not fair. Life is not fair. Whatever. I would do it again. I probably will do it again.

My ban finishes at 3am this morning. I am trying to stay awake till then, just so I can post a link to this piece on Twitter. Instead of one tweet, I’ve written 800 words. Thanks for the inspiration, dumbass. If you didn’t report my tweet, I wouldn’t have been motivated to write this today. 

Oh and one last thing: #impeachtrump 

The northlondonhippy is an anonymous author, online cannabis activist and recreational drug user, who has been writing about drugs and drug use for over 15 years.  In real life, the hippy is a senior multimedia journalist with over 30 years experience of working in news.

The hippy’s book, ‘Personal Use’ details the hippy’s first 35 years of recreational drug taking, while calling for urgent drug law reform. It’s a cracking read, you will laugh, you will cry and you can bet your ass that you will wish you were a hippy too!

“Personal Use” is available as a digital download on all platforms, including Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iBooks and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. The paperback is available from all online retailers and book shops everywhere. 

You can also find the northlondonhippy on Twitter: @nthlondonhippy unless he gets banned again

Surviving the Climate Apocalypse

Climate Crisis, Politics, society, ,

By Doug – the northlondonhippy

CimateGear(TM) Ad Campaign

Great news everybody! The rich are going to survive and thrive during the coming Climate Apocalypse! Yay!

It’s the only explanation I can come up with regarding the institutional inaction and outright denial from much of the ruling class. They think they can use their considerable resources to adapt to the inhospitable hell-scape that is currently in our future. It makes sense, if you think you can survive our increasingly warmer planet, you will do nothing to slow that warming down. Throw another scoop of coal on the fire! Let it burn!

At least three prominent billionaires are publicly working on private space programmes, ostensibly to commercialise outer space. But if you take the vehicular element out of the equation, you know, the rockets, the rest of what they are researching is about surviving in a hostile environment. If you can sustain a community on Mars, you can sustain a community of the surface of our planet, once it is rendered uninhabitable. How could this not factor into their plans?

There is nothing to stop people from building the equivalent of a lunar base, here on Earth. For starters, it would be easier, as you wouldn’t need to transport your materials into space. No need to reach escape velocity to break the gravitational grasp of planet Earth, just truck, ship or fly what you need, to whatever safe site you choose.

Stephen Hawking said we would increase our chances of the continuation of the human race, if we become a multi-planet society. That may still be their goal, but these billionaire can’t count on this, so they must be preparing a way to survive the coming Climate Apocalypse on Earth. If you had billions in the bank, wouldn’t you?

Imagine an underground facility, meant to sustain life for 1,000 years. It would be powered by renewables, have access to a deep water spring, have food production facilities, waste recycling and disposal facilities, air filtration and advanced environmental controls, and it would all be self contained and self sustaining. Think of a cross between a nuclear bunker and a hippy commune. It’s not that far off from what they are hoping to build on Mars one day, only they will be building them here, while the rest of us disappear in the coming Great Die-Off. 

I am very pessimistic about the future of the planet. We are doing nothing, while the climate is out of control. Right now, as I write this, there are wild fires in the Arctic Circle. That’s insane. Just last week, record temperatures were broken all over Europe. Out of the 10 hottest years on record, 9 of them happened in the last 17 years. The last 5 years, are currently the top 5 hottest years on record. Betcha 2019 tops them all. This is beyond a worrying trend. This is climate change. This is a climate crisis. This is a climate emergency.

Source:  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_record

The mainstream media is catching up with this reality. CNN now uses the words, “climate crisis” and “climate emergency” regularly on-air.  The BBC had a story on their website last week, headlined “Climate change: 12 years to save the planet? Make that 18 months”. Shit is finally getting real. But shit, it is all too late.

We can’t mitigate the climate changes enough to save us all. Most of us are going to die. Hey ho.

We will try to adapt, and some will succeed. It’s already started, Sony is crowdfunding high tech personal, wearable air conditioners. I’d buy one right now.

I NEED one of these!

And that’s why today. I am launching. ClimateGearTM. 

Look good, feel cool, whatever the climate!

ClimateGearTM aims to create a line of luxury environmental suits to cope with our increasingly hotter, polluted environment. Based on the same designs and technology that sustained men on the moon, 50 years ago, our suits are perfect for the coming climate apocalypse.

Will they be affordable? Of course! For less than the price of a luxury car, you can cheat death while the poor boil in their own skins. And they will come in many colours, to suit all tastes and styles.

Whether you want to nip up to the shops to pick up sunscreen, or to visit the graves of your dead ancestors, ClimateGearTM Environmental Suits will keep you cool and alive in any hostile environment, including the one we are creating here on Earth. Climate change may be the end of our society, but it doesn’t have to be the end of you and your family!

If the super rich can survive all this, it’s time for me to get super rich. These suits are a billion dollar idea. So how many ClimateGearTM suits can I put you down for? I’m taking deposits right now, for delivery mid-2020, while supplies last. 

The northlondonhippy is an anonymous author, online cannabis activist and recreational drug user, who has been writing about drugs and drug use for over 15 years.  In real life, the hippy is a senior multimedia journalist with over 30 years experience of working in news.

The hippy’s book, ‘Personal Use’ details the hippy’s first 35 years of recreational drug taking, while calling for urgent drug law reform. It’s a cracking read, you will laugh, you will cry and you can bet your ass that you will wish you were a hippy too!

“Personal Use” is available as a digital download on all platforms, including Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iBooks and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. The paperback is available from all online retailers and book shops everywhere. 

You can also find the northlondonhippy on Twitter: @nthlondonhippy

I Live in a Dry Country

cannabis, decriminalisation, drug use, , , ,
The UK is a dry country

Dear Grandma Hippy,

Greetings from north London! Thank you for your letter! I hope both you and Grandpa Hippy are well! How are things in Denver?

I am still very envious of the legal cannabis market in Colorado, you and Grandpa Hippy are very lucky! I’ve read how legal cannabis has been embraced by by senior citizens, but I was still surprised to read how much Grandpa has been benefitting from it. And your state has so much revenue from the taxes on it. They have taken in over a billion dollars in tax, in 5 years. That could pay for so much!

And you, Grandma, getting into edibles, I am very impressed you are enjoying them so much. I live in a dry country. While we do have an extensive unregulated cannabis market here in the UK, we lack the choice, quality and safety of your legal, regulated cannabis products. 

I dream of day, in the very near future, when cannabis becomes legal and regulated here in the United Kingdom. It’s not like we would be creating a new market, but taking the existing market and legitimising it. Imagine quality checks, potency testing and labelling, a variety of products to suit all tolerances and requirements, some could even be certified organic! The possibilities are endless, as are the opportunities, if only we had a properly pro-business government. And cannabis businesses are some of the fastest growing businesses in the world right now, in a sector that is already worth billions. It is a shame the politicians here ignore all the evidence and cling to silly, discredited thinking about cannabis. “Reefer Madness” never died here in good ol’ Blighty. It is alive and well, and still seeing people put in jail for possession. We are still in the dark ages here. 

And as bad as all that sounds, it’s actually even worse because the UK is the world’s number one exporter of medicinal cannabis. That should be good news, well, it is for the people who profit from it, but it does nothing for UK citizens, whose access to medicinal cannabis is so limited as to be described as still having no access to it, at all. 

Check out this hypocrisy… either the UK government believes cannabis has medicinal properties, but lies about to its citizens, while allowing its export OR the UK government genuinely thinks cannabis has no medicinal value, but still allows companies to export it, effectively endorsing snake oil. Neither view is particularly flattering. For what it is worth, I subscribe to the former, while if the government could endorse one view, they would prefer the latter. Either way, it’s a terrible situation here, that needs urgently to change.

Thank you again for the invitation to move to Denver to live with you and Grandpa Hippy. Of course, it is tempting, especially with my health and cannabis use, but I think it is more important to stay here in the UK and fight for what is right. And what is right is to insure the people of the United Kingdom have the same access to cannabis, that you have. I know I could move someplace with more suitable cannabis laws, but I think I have a moral responsibility to help change and improve the cannabis laws here.

Write back soon, Grandma. And please send me your medicated brownie recipe! And some shatter! Just kidding, but not kidding, but kidding, but you could try if you want.

With lots of love from your Grandson,

the hippy xx

(In real life, all four of my grandparents have been dead probably longer than you have been alive. But if I did have living grandparents, and they did live in Colorado, or another legal territory, and we did correspond by letter, and I had to send a reply today, this is the letter I would send. Other than imaginary living grandparents, everything in this letter is 100% factually accurate.)

–

The northlondonhippy is an anonymous author, online cannabis activist and recreational drug user, who has been writing about drugs and drug use for over 15 years.  In real life, the hippy is a senior multimedia journalist with over 30 years experience of working in the industry. 

The hippy’s book, ‘Personal Use’ details the hippy’s first 35 years of recreational drug taking, while calling for urgent drug law reform. It’s a cracking read, you will laugh, you will cry and you can bet your ass that you will wish you were a hippy too!

“Personal Use” is available as a digital download on all platforms, including Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iBooks and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. The paperback is available from all online retailers and book shops everywhere. 

You can also find the northlondonhippy on Twitter: @nthlondonhippy

Giant steps are what you take

society, , , ,
Walking on the Moon

It’s unbelievable to me, that it has been 50 years, since humans first wandered around on the surface of the moon.

I watched it all live on TV, the launch, the journey, entering lunar orbit, the landing, and those famous, first giant steps. I was 6 and a half years old.

All of the build up and publicity surrounding the 50th anniversary has me probing deep into my brain, to see how much I can recall. 

Looking back on it now, I don’t feel like the current media nostalgia is capturing the unprecedented hype of the era. Everything was about space, from films and television programmes, to the artwork on cereal boxes. Nearly all products, and adverts, found a way to have a space-related theme. 

I remember one weird product, which was some sort of space food, that came in a tube, like toothpaste. It was chocolate flavour, with the consistency of cake frosting, but fortified with vitamins and minerals. It was exactly as appetising as it sounds. But it was from space! It’s what the astronauts were eating!

Tang. Tang is a powdered orange drink that the astronauts brought with them into space. It was advertised on television constantly. Maybe it still exists, I don’t live in America anymore. It was very sweet and very artificial. But it was from space! It’s what the astronauts were drinking! On the moon!

Can you feel my excitement? I was six and this was the coolest thing human beings had ever done, in the history of human beings. 

I remember thinking, now that we have been to the moon, we would start visiting all the other planets. It makes sense, that the progress would continue, exponentially and unhindered. How wrong six-year-old me was back then.  

The build up was immense, because I think people have forgotten, there were many Apollo missions before number 11 landed on the surface. The previous missions leading up to it, were also exciting and were covered just extensively. I watched them all, but nothing compared to Apollo 11. It was the culmination of years of anticipation, leading up to this huge event.

I was born into the space age, it really was a thing back in the olden days of my childhood. It was exciting, we thought it would usher in an era of great discoveries and before long, all of our lives would be exactly like Star Trek. I have not seen society have the same level of optimism, since. 

Every kid I knew was obsessed with space. We thought we might all travel there one day. I had space themed pyjamas, loads of space toys, a space lunch box, an astronaut GI Joe with a space capsule, an astronaut helmet, and even astronaut space boots. I had it all, as did all of my friends. We played make-believe space mission games too, pretending we were walking on the moon, or fighting monsters on Mars.

What I want to convey to you is this sense of optimism that surrounded all of this, was infectious. If we could send people to the surface of the moon, gosh darn it, we were unstoppable, progress was unstoppable. We could do anything!

Obviously, it hasn’t really quite worked out that way, but at the time, this unbridled optimism was intoxicatingly seductive and it just bought us all a fancy dinner.  We were ready for dessert. 

On the day of the landing, everyone was excited, not just me. You could feel it in the air. It was on everyone’s mind. It was the first time someone from our planet, from our species, had set foot on another celestial body, in space. Every bit of human ingenuity and knowledge that existed up to this point in time, made this possible. We were a space-faring race, we could now travel the stars.

The lunar lander, the “lem”, as the men in headsets, in Houston called it, landed on the surface of the moon that afternoon, east coast time. “Fire retro rockets”, said ground control. I wasn’t sure what a retro rocket was, but I knew one day, I would be firing my own.

My mother knew I wanted to stay up to see the astronauts climb out of the lem and take their first steps on the surface, which was expected to happen late that night. She understood my desire to witness this momentous moment, but she also knew I was six and a half years old. She encouraged me to have a nap, but naps were for babies and I politely declined. I was far too excited to think about closing my eyes for one single second. Instead, I was glued to the television all day, watching everything. 

As the day went on, the anticipation rose. There was rolling coverage on all three national TV networks. Back then, in America that’s all there was, three main channels. I know we were watching CBS, because I remember Walter Cronkite. He was the most trusted man in America at the time. I don’t think America has one of those, anymore. 

My entire family was gathered around our RCA 23 inch colour television as the astronauts prepared to step outside. There were 8 of us there, including me. My oldest half brother, his wife and their two very young children, drove over an hour, so we could all be together to watch history unfold. They joined me, both of my parents and my younger brother, who was only 3 years old at the time as we waited for it to finally happen. 

This is what TVs looked like in the olden days

As the magic moment approached, my 6 year old eyelids struggled to stay aloft, but I managed to make it all the way to the main event, many hours after my normal bedtime. Adrenaline is an amazing thing. 

My eyeballs were glued to the screen, as live images of  Neil Armstrong climbing out of the lem and descending down that long ladder were beamed into our family room. I, along with millions of people around the world, witnessed the first human being to set foot on the surface of the moon. One giant step…..

It was a historic moment of human achievement. Perhaps the pinnacle of human exploration and innovation. It’s debatable if we have ever topped it, or if we ever will. It was certainly the most significant world event of my childhood, perhaps even my entire life.

I was so tired, so very tired. My mother ushered me off to bed. She said she was glad I stayed up, glad I got to see this most amazing, historic event. She said one day I would tell my own children about it.

I don’t have any children. So I am telling all of you about it instead.

The northlondonhippy is an anonymous author, online cannabis activist and recreational drug user, who has been writing about drugs and drug use for over 15 years.  In real life, the hippy is a senior multimedia journalist with over 30 years experience of working in the industry. 

The hippy’s book, ‘Personal Use’ details the hippy’s first 35 years of recreational drug taking, while calling for urgent drug law reform. It’s a cracking read, you will laugh, you will cry and you can bet your ass that you will wish you were a hippy too!

“Personal Use” is available as a digital download on all platforms, including Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iBooks and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. The paperback is available from all online retailers and book shops everywhere. 

Citizen of Everywhere

"Personal Use", High Hopes, Politics, society, , ,
Shit’s on fire

A couple of weeks ago, I marked an interesting milestone in my life. I celebrated my 50/50 day. 

I can already hear you asking, what is a 50/50 day? Please allow me to explain, as it is a concept of my own creation. 

If you’ve read my book, “Personal Use” (getting the shameless plug in early), you will know that I wasn’t always a north London-based hippy, but I began my life on the east coast of the United States of America. I moved to London in the early 90s, when I was my late 20s. I’m mid-50s now.

My 50/50 day is a way I’ve determined to mark my dual nationality, as it is the day where I have lived exactly half of my life in each country. So the first 50% of my life was spent in the states, the 2nd half of my life has been spent in the United Kingdom. 

As I know my birthday and the date I moved to the UK, it was fairly straightforward to work out the exact date of my 50/50 day. I simply used an online date calculator that easily counts the number of days between dates. It worked out that I have lived over 10,000 days in each country. Wow.

Ain’t math amazing? And clearly I have too much free time.

But what does it actually mean, to mark one’s 50/50 day? All immigrants must pass this milestone, if they live long enough, so what’s the big deal?

For me, it is a way of honouring my dual heritage and reflecting thoughtfully about it. Don’t tell me I don’t know how to have a good time.

My paternal grandparents were Scottish and they moved to America and that’s where my father was born. My mother’s parents started their lives in Italy, and also moved to America before my mother was born. Both of my parents were first generation American-born, I was second. And then I moved back to Europe. It’s the circle of life, but with jet travel.

So I am half British and all European by birth, but my first nationality is legally American. I hold two nationalities now, as I am now also British, but what does it all mean? Other than a date I can point to as a midpoint in my geographic life, I guess it doesn’t mean that much. I just thought it was a cool thing to work out. 

I always like to say, I am an earthling first. It’s what we all are, we are all earthlings. We scurry around on the surface of the Earth, which makes us all earthlings. It’s the one thing we all have in common. It comes before your race, your nationality, and your gender. You are an earthling, most of all. 

“Hey, do you live on earth? Me too! That’s a huge thing to have in common. Let’s be best friends!”

We are the sentient, indigenous inhabitants of this planet named after dirt. Envy us, as we may be the smartest things that exist in the universe. Or pity us, as we may be the smartest things that exist in the universe. We may be as good as it gets.

Some say claiming you are a citizen of the world is controversial. Wasn’t it Terrible Theresa May who said it makes you a “citizen of nowhere”? It was.

What Terrible Terri doesn’t understand, and will never understand is that we are all citizens of the world. We are all really Citizens of Everywhere. We all flit about on the surface of this planet and while we may remain behind artificially delineated borders, we all share common hopes and common dreams. There is more that unites us, than divides us, as they say, but we forget this simple basic truth, so easily. 

Countries and borders are made up creations. We decided all this nonsense, to keep us apart, when the reality is that we are all Citizens of Everywhere. Who is to say where on the surface of the planet, we are allowed to exist? What if I want to stand over there for a while?

We all need to think in these terms, if we want to have any hope of the continuation of the human race. We desperately need to be Citizens of Everywhere. 

That may sound hyperbolic, but it is not. We are rendering the planet uninhabitable and we may reach a point, in the not too distant future, where human life will not be sustainable on Earth any more. 

I’m not going to lay out the case for climate change here. I accept it is happening and I believe the official estimates of the rate of change are extremely conservative. It’s much worse than the mainstream media wants to admit. It’s a climate crisis and no warning is dire enough. Though to be fair, I am seeing this view slowly creeping into the mainstream, it’s just not creeping in fast enough. Listen out for the words ‘climate crisis’, they are being used more frequently by the media. 

Sometimes, I hang out on a subreddit called r/collapse. It is not happy reading, but everyone deserves the truth. You can check it out RIGHT HERE. 

The pessimist in me believes it is already too late, that the damage has been done and there is nothing we can do to reverse our inevitable extinction. But the optimist in me still tries to find some hope. It’s not easy, in the face of the overwhelming evidence, but I try, anyway. 

Here’s a clip from a fictional TV show, called The Newsroom, from 2014. At the time of broadcast, it was considered over the top, now it is seen as visionary. Please take 5 minutes to watch.

https://youtu.be/XM0uZ9mfOUI

Our denial over the impeding climate crisis is a bit like our denial of other existential threats in our lives. The easiest example of this, is our denial over death. 

What do I mean?

I mean, we all know we are going to die. There is no cheating death, at least not yet. It is the only certainty. We can all expect to shuffle off our mortal coils, eventually. We don’t know when, we don’t know how, but we know one day, we will be gone. And somehow we put all of that out of minds and mostly live our lives with carefree abandon, day after day. 

It’s the same with climate change. We put it out of our minds, we accept the gradual and dramatic changes, and we normalise them, quickly. It’s part of our in-built coping mechanism, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. It’s how we get through every day. But our lack of attention to this detail, you know, that the entire planet is dying, only confirms our fate.

Ut oh.

I’ve been working as a journalist for 30 years, and I’ve been making the same joke in newsrooms for about as long. The joke is that I always hoped I would live long enough to be able to cover the end of the world. Funny, huh?

Now that I am confronted with the actual possibility (certainty?), I don’t seem to be laughing quite as much. 

I don’t think the world is going to suddenly end, that’s not what I mean. The planet will still be here, but it will rapidly become inhospitable to almost all life. There may be some bacteria, or perhaps some of the extremophiles will survive, but you can say goodbye to all the plants and animals.

We’re animals, in case you need reminding, so that means bye-bye us. 

Gosh, this started out being about me marking my dual nationality, and our global commonality, and somehow it lead me to the climate crisis.

Everything leads back to the climate crisis. It is the existential threat to all of our lives. And it might already be too late. 

In that context, my 50/50 day, is pretty insignificant, but I marked it anyway. We all need distractions, even if it is a distraction from the end of the world.

Have a nice day!

PS – If you found any of this upsetting, you are not alone. Check out r/collapsesupport for help with coping. You are NOT alone. Whether we like it or not, we are all in this together. 

The northlondonhippy is an anonymous author, online cannabis activist and recreational drug user, who has been writing about drugs and drug use for over 15 years.  In real life, the hippy is a senior multimedia journalist with over 30 years experience of working in the industry. 

The hippy’s book, ‘Personal Use’ details the hippy’s first 35 years of recreational drug taking, while calling for urgent drug law reform. It’s a cracking read, you will laugh, you will cry and you can bet your ass that you will wish you were a hippy too!

“Personal Use” is available as a digital download on all platforms, including Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iBooks and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. The paperback is available from all online retailers and book shops everywhere. 

You can also find the northlondonhippy on Twitter: @nthlondonhippy

There is only one way out a of hole

Brexit, Politics, society, ,
The actual Brexit hole

If you fall down into a deep hole, there really is only one way out. Up.

Brexit is a bottomless pit of abject stupidity and depressing despair, but we have to assume at some point, we will slam into the very rock bottom. When we do, what will happen? 

The only way out is up. 

I wanted to get this prediction written down, on the extreme outside chance I am right. If I am, and that’s a big eff-ing if, then I will be seen as a genius of prognostication and you might even want to invite me to your next dinner party. But before I accept, do you have a special smoking area, for, you know, cool smoking? 😉

Here’s how I see things playing out over the next couple of months. I won’t put in any firm timings, beyond the one obvious one… As the law stands, right now, as I bash my keyboard and spew out my scenario, Britain will leave the EU, without a deal, on the 31st of October. Halloween. 

Boo!

Did I scare you? You should be scared, because if we crash out on All Hallows’ Eve, it will not be a pretty picture. But I’m not here to debate or outline the calamity that would be a no-deal Brexit. I’m here to explain that unless something miraculous happens, this is the most likely outcome. 

But don’t worry, I am also going to outline what that miraculous salvation could be. It might be our only hope. You can thank me later.

Again, as I write this, the Tory leadership contest is still ongoing, with both candidates trying to outdo each other in just how quickly and efficiently they can drive the UK over a cliff edge into a no-deal, must-have, do-or-die, bang -on-time, Brexit. 

We live in Crazy Town, population, all of us. Please send help.

Unless a different miracle happens, we are headed for a government lead by Bumbling Boris Johnson. Or should it be Bungling Boris Johnson? How about bumbling on the first reference, bungling on the second? (Note to self, adopt this as hippy house-style from now on). 

So Bumbling Boris will almost certainly be our next PM. All Boris has to do to facilitate a no-deal Brexit, is nothing. If he does absolutely nothing, the clock runs out and we leave the European Union, as the current law states at the end of October. We know, from his disastrous spell as Mayor of London, that Bungling Boris is extremely lazy. Doing sweet FA is his specialty. Remember his limp, late response to the riots in 2011? He can handle doing nothing. I bet he is doing nothing right now, this very second. And for this, his advisors are grateful. 

But, but, but you say, parliament will bring down the government, if no-deal appears to be the likely outcome. I wouldn’t argue with this, I think that a no-confidence vote is very possible in this scenario. Likely even. And it may very well succeed. But that won’t solve our problems.

A no confidence vote will not solve our problems, because it leaves Bumbling, Bungling Boris, as caretaker Prime Minister. A dissolved parliament can’t force him to request an extension to Article 50, any more than a sitting parliament could. All he has to do is sit on his hands and run out the clock. But that’s not checkmate, not yet. 

While an election would strengthen any request for an extension, it would still require a formal request to be made, by the PM, Boris. The EU would not unilaterally grant one, even for an election, without that formal request. If Befuddled Boris doesn’t write to Brussels, an election at this point won’t help. Please see the previous paragraph about Boris sitting on his hands. 

Following a successful no-confidence vote, and before an election is called, opposition parties have a fortnight to form a new government with the Queen’s blessing. This is our only small glimmer of hope.

If the other parties could form some sort of government of national unity, they could do two very useful things. 

The first is to revoke Article 50. 

Sure, the government of national unity could request another extension, but at this point, I fear the EU would politely decline. Could you blame them? After watching this slow-moving car crash for over 3 years, it would make sense for the European Union to effectively tell us to shit or get off the pot. 

That would make for a very stark, binary choice, leave without a deal and suffer all that comes with it, or revoke Article 50, sparing the country enormous pain, while alienating a large portion of the general public. 

Decisions, decisions.

You might have noticed, I glossed over the whole government of national unity thing. At its heart, would have to be the Labour Party. Yes, the same Labour Party that currently doesn’t have a decisive remain policy. Let’s be honest, their stance on Brexit lacks any real clarity. They have tried to make it be all things, to all people and that strategy has failed. 

Labour would be the largest party in this mythical coalition, but the other parties that would help form it, are are all firmly on the remain side, For this to work, for Jeremy Corbyn to be Prime Minister, Labour would have to also come out hard for remain. They would not have a choice. The alternative is that cliff edge, that they claim to want to avoid. This will be their chance to avoid it, once and for all.

A government of national unity, as the name suggests, puts country ahead of party, something our current parliament, and especially the Conservative Party seems to be unable to do. If this all plays out, as I am suggesting, the least worst outcome would be the revocation of Article 50.

And I have crunched the numbers, based on the current composition of parliament. Mathematics follow:

Current State of the Parliamentary Parties
Source: https://www.parliament.uk/mps-lords-and-offices/mps/current-state-of-the-parties/

The Tories are a minority government, with 312 seats. The DUP prop them up with their 10 seats, as part of the confidence and supply agreement hammered out after our last election in 2017. 

There are 650 seats in parliament, The speaker, plus the 3 deputy speakers, don’t vote. Sinn Fein don’t take their 7 seats, and there is currently one vacancy, so a full house right now is 638. Half of that is 319, a majority of 1 seat is 320. The Tories and the DUP combined, have 322. That’s the current magic number the Tories and the DUP can muster to vote, on a good day.

Labour currently have 247 seats. The next largest party is the SNP with 35 seats, followed by the Lib Dems with 12, Change UK with 5, Plaid Cymru with 4, and the Green Party with 1. Total here is 303, so we are still shy 17 more MP’s to join the fun and games.

There are 15 independent MPs, for the sake of simplicity, I am going to divide that number in half and round it up to 8. It could be less, it could be more, so I think 8 is a reasonable compromise figure. That brings our historic government of national unity up to 311 seats. We are still 12 shy of the magic number, 323, to have more more votes than the Tory/DUP combo. 

Tories. We need Tories, less than a dozen of them. Maybe 10, maybe 12, without certainty, I will stick to 9. Based on rumour and voting records, I am banking on there being at least 9 principled Conservative MPs willing to join a government of national unity. 

If current media reports are correct, there are around 30 current Conservative MPs that are willing to bring a no-deal focussed government down, we should be OK on this score.

The Brecon and Radnorshire by-election is expected on the 1st of August. I’m not going to attempt to predict the outcome, especially since the pro- remain parties are cooperating. But this one seat, will probably be filled before my scenario will play out. So yes, my calculations are slightly fuzzy. Also, I am not a parliamentary scholar, I’m just some random British journalist and career stoner with too much time on my hands right now.

I am not saying any of this will be easy, or straightforward, but what I am saying is that it is possible. More than possible, but likely. And more than just likely, as I truly believe at this point, it is our one and only hope. 

The second useful thing my imaginary government of national unity will do, will be to call another no confidence vote, to bring themselves down. Having done the only thing required of them, by cancelling Brexit and getting all of us out of this very deep hole, it would no longer need to exist and an election could be safely called. 

Some MPs would be rewarded, and some would be punished in the next general election, but all of those who supported the government of national unity, will be looked upon by history most kindly, even if some people today, end up hating them. 

I have no doubt that our next parliament, and our next government, will be unlike anything we’ve seen in living memory. The Brexit Party will get seats, neither the Tories nor Labour will have a majority, and the Lib Dems may become players again. Maybe the Greens will finally get more MPs. Anything is possible. And we could end up with another coalition government that lacks a big majority and its chief feature would be its inherent instability. 

Whatever happens next, Brexit still needs to be dealt with, somehow. There is only one deal on offer, the same one that parliament has repeatedly rejected, the same one that the EU says will not be renegotiated under any circumstances. That deal is dead. And no deal would be a disaster. Our only hope is a government of national unity.

Or the apocalypse, but I am not convinced even the end of the world could end the endless stupidity that is Brexit. 

We can’t lose hope. There’s only one way out of a hole. It’s up. And up is the positive direction. So let’s put the up in uplifting. We need a government of nationality unity that will exist for one purpose, to revoke Article 50. So let’s just do that.  

The northlondonhippy is an anonymous author, online cannabis activist and recreational drug user, who has been writing about drugs and drug use for over 15 years.  In real life, the hippy is a senior multimedia journalist with over 30 years experience of working in the industry. 

The hippy’s book, ‘Personal Use’ details the hippy’s first 35 years of recreational drug taking, while calling for urgent drug law reform. It’s a cracking read, you will laugh, you will cry and you can bet your ass that you will wish you were a hippy too!

“Personal Use” is available as a digital download on all platforms, including Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iBooks and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. The paperback is available from all online retailers and book shops everywhere. 

You can also find the northlondonhippy on Twitter: @nthlondonhippy –  follow him and receive a free gift*)

(*There is no free gift)