It might not seem like it, just yet, but I am now a full time hippy. Yay! The countdown clock has ticked down and for the first time in a decade and a half, I am now unemployed.
I spent the last 30 years working as a journalist, mixed media really, but mostly TV news. The last 15 years was for the same company. It’s one you’ve heard of. but I’m not revealing it, yet. I’m not revealing much of anything, now. I’m still waiting for my final pay cheque. Once that’s banked, then I can pull back the curtain. I’m crazy, but I’m not stupid.
I will be publishing a piece in the next couple of weeks, which reveals my identity. Somewhat.
Spoiler alert: You will get my first name, and you will find out where I used to work. I’m still a nobody, my name won’t make a difference. I will still be the northlondonhippy, but I want to claim my real-life identity publicly, anyway. I have wanted to do this for a long time.
There will be a companion piece, which lays out my goals in my new role as the UK first self-proclaimed, cannabis evangelist. It’s not a crowded field, but I still want to make my mark. Hallelujah and amen to that!
Now that I have the freedom to operate a bit more openly, I want to spend the next few weeks getting some advice, I want to contact some people I admire who fight to reform our drug laws, plus some campaigners in other fields, and some media folk too. I want whatever I end up doing to have some impact.
Personal Use – Book Montage
When I wrote and published “Personal Use”, I had no expectations. It was a fun, secret side project. I used to joke if I sold a million copies, I would quit my job and be a full time hippy. I haven’t sold a million, not even close, yet here I am.
So while you wait for me to do whatever it is I am going to do, here’s a selection of 10 hippy highlights to keep you entertained:
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 was a senior multimedia journalist until Feb 2020. With over 30 years experience of working in broadcast news, the hippy’s now left journalism to embark on a career as a full time hippy, writer and cannabis evangelist.
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 2020. The hippy says a lot of things.
You can also find the northlondonhippy on Twitter: @nthlondonhippybut only if you look really hard.
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: @nthlondonhippybut only if you look really hard.
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.
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: @nthlondonhippybut only if you look really hard.
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: @nthlondonhippyYou can find out for yourself just how badly I suck at Twitter. And why I don’t work in sales.
