I’ve had the confusing privilege of being obliged – pretty much against my will, or at least having had zero say in the matter – to spend a lot of time over the past three years with my best mate’s girlfriend. It’s not like I chose to keep hanging out with the two of them. He was my flat mate. Until she stole him away from me. Now I live on my own and I’m sad.
Look how unenthused he is by the whole thing.
That’s not love etched onto his face. It’s pain.
Yes, pain.
Which isn’t all that surprising seeing as the conversational topics that spew from her pretty mouth on the regular can be boiled down to a grand total of three.
Horses.
Motorbikes
And whoever the hell is getting married in the not too distant future
And guess what’s happening next June?
They are.
They’re already fucking practising. It’s lame.
That’s not my mate’s dad. That’s him.
I know. Easy mistake to make.
You know that scene from the Shawshank Redemption when old man Brooks gets freed after doing fifty years, and starts living on the outside and finds it all very confusing and ends up wanting to reoffend because jail is the only place he feels he fits in and can make any sense of? Given the opportunity to live life over again, odds-on Brooks would’ve liked to have not done time at all. But shit panned out the way it did. Life just happened. Well, this is kind of the way I feel about Chloe.
What I’m trying to say is sometimes the things that get forced upon you have a funny way of sneaking up on you and before you know it one day you come to and you’re pretty attached to them. I put on a front but secretly I’m not that opposed to them getting married. Not at all. Who knows it might be quite cool.
I mean any girl who can do a flaming 360 on a freakin snake board is okay in my book.
There’s a coffee shop on Leather Lane in Clerkenwell called Prufrock. It’s run by a guy who won fifteen straight world barrista championships back in the day, before anyone even knew they were a thing, and you can tell, seeing as it takes them 23 minutes to make you a latte. In a good way. It’s a sweet place, but this isn’t about the coffee shop. It’s about its name.
In 1915 T S Eliot wrote a poem called The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Which is now known simply as Prufrock. I tweeted them to ask if there’s a link between the two, but they didn’t seem very interested in getting back to me. The below twitter stream is pathetic.
Last time I checked this blog wasn’t called dropthepoemonit but it’s not like I put any music up here, so indulge me because the following is legit. All of life is in this poem. In the same way the San Miguel advert below is weirdly impactful, because it’s about an old man looking back on the life he has lived.
That advert is good because it reminds us of the sacred nature of old age. We will all be that old man. And yes the old biddy causing havoc in the supermarket queue can be a ball-breaker, but she demands respect because she has seen the whole of life. The fact she might not have all her brain cells in tact mustn’t change that.
There’s something hypnotic and deeply moving about Prufrock. Its rhythm. It’s about a young man mapping out the whole of his life before him, and simultaneously looking back on it. I’d be lying if I said I understood it. But poetry isn’t so much about the poem’s meaning, rather than what you the reader decide to take from it.
If this poem doesn’t get you all…
Then you need a snickers to the forehead.
What’s more.
Eliot wrote it when he was 22.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question … Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, And seeing that it was a soft October night, Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time For the yellow smoke that slides along the street, Rubbing its back upon the window-panes; There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?” Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair — (They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”) My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin — (They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”) Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room. So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all— The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, Then how should I begin To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all— Arms that are braceleted and white and bare (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!) Is it perfume from a dress That makes me so digress? Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl. And should I then presume? And how should I begin?
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? …
I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! Smoothed by long fingers, Asleep … tired … or it malingers, Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me. Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter, I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all, After the cups, the marmalade, the tea, Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me, Would it have been worth while, To have bitten off the matter with a smile, To have squeezed the universe into a ball To roll it towards some overwhelming question, To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”— If one, settling a pillow by her head Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all; That is not it, at all.’
And would it have been worth it, after all, Would it have been worth while, After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor— And this, and so much more?— It is impossible to say just what I mean! But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: Would it have been worth while If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, And turning toward the window, should say: ‘That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all.’
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
Everyday is littered with tell-tale signs reminding me of the unwavering passage of time. One such sign I find particularly affecting is how far I have to scroll down the DOB year list when I’m buying a plane ticket. It’s enough to make me not want to go on fucking holiday in the first place.
Also, Discmen.
Another one I find a little stinging, is that the film Cliffhanger is so close to my heart.
Anything you watch when you’re like eight is going to have a profound affect on you, and my brother and I wore the tape in this VHS down to the nub. But the above looks so old it could be a retro Bond poster. And that makes me feel old. I envy the youth of today, with their angry birds and their snapchat and most of all their attention spans.
But no youth of today has ever watched, or will ever watch Cliffhanger. As a result, no youth of today will ever be able to describe the unbridled joy of finding the best acting performance of all time, hidden within the first five minutes of this staggering bit of cinema.
It concerns the – in almost all respects – pretty tense scene when the lady falls from the trip-line.
Strange the way Sly’s triceps can’t take the weight of an 8-stone girl, but plot inconsistencies to one side, it’s the performance of Frank the helicopter pilot that is worthy of closer inspection.
As the scene nears its disturbing finale, Sly is doing his absolute worst to keep hold of this girl who’s about to fall to her death. Looking on from the side is the husband of the lady, some hench rock-climber with even less acting prowess than Stallone, and our aforementioned man Frank.
And it’s the performance of Frank the helicopter pilot that steals the show. While this lady is very evidently on the brink of death…
Frank is absolutely creasing himself.
Check him out.
Seriously just watch the scene.
At 0:15 he’s just warming up, but it’s on 1:10 – as she’s falling – that he’s in absolute hysterics.
I don’t know if Universal weren’t paying him enough and he’d decided to botch the film in the only way he knew possible, but I mean how else can you explain this behaviour? I’ll tell you one thing. At that moment in time acting was pretty low-down on the list of Frank’s priorities.
My brother and I used to spend days rewinding and watching this again and again and again. I love the fact we weren’t alone. Someone uploaded the same scene having hit upon the magic too.
You said it brother.
So am I buddy, so am I.
*
So to all those ragamuffins born two decades after me, I can’t play angry birds – I could but I won’t – I don’t know what TickTock is, and I won’t live to see the 2070 World Cup final. But I can recall the unbridled fear of buying a porn mag, and I can tell you about Ralph Waite’s frankly unbelievable performance in the first five minutes of Cliffhanger. And that makes me feel alive.
They had the edge in all departments. More compact. Better organised. Stronger, fitter, faster. And there, burning behind their eyes, clear to all onlookers watching from the stands, was an instinct to kill. To decimate the opposition at all costs. For three quarters they had the blues on the ropes. It was ugly.
But then something happened.
Something inexplicable. Out of keeping with all reason. By no means slowly, but as surely as sure can be, the strength of the whites evaporated. Where they had been so strong, they became shadows of their former selves. Immobile, sluggish, stationary. And the blues began to strike back. In the space of twelve glorious minutes, the deficit was caught, overturned, and decimated. Like a solitary daisy in a silent field ripping the blades of a combine harvester to shreds.
Winter is number 40.
The fat kid, eyes closed, feet cemented to the floor of the gymnasium, making the block of his life.
Spring is 14.
Suspended in air beneath the basket, unopposed, delivering the mother of all consummate game-clinching finger rolls. The one that crowns his team’s comeback. And puts the whites to bed for good for another year.
At school I got so good at drawing the Jamiroquai logo I could do it in three seconds flat, blindfolded, whilst eating a turkey lettuce and mayonnaise sandwich, with both hands.
But having released two of the most incredible tunes in the history of music, he’s now displaying a similar aptitude for disappearing off the face of the earth. For one of the most sought-after producers on the planet to have zero presence, like none, in this day and age is kind of fascinating, like playing a protracted game of hard to get with a girl who’s obsessed with you. I’m in. I’d marry him tomorrow. Without even telling him to get a new haircut.
Check out musical featherweight Caribou talking about his tune Jasmine.
To make things a little more interesting and also more of a ball-ache, him and his little brother AK have come up with a music platform called the Paul Institute. Some 80s style cryptic webpage with sound effects which you can only access by giving them your phone number, at which point they send you your own personal password by text, and then you’re in.
Cool huh.
Well I’ve lost my freaking password. So I can’t get inside.
So I can’t listen to any tunes.
*
Luckily his little brother AK Paul is a little more prolific – maybe three tunes in the last four years – and less hellbent on doing his best Frodo with the Ring of Power on impression, so if you try hard enough you can access the music without needing to remember some password. From a place in the far-off depths of the Milky Way where he resides, gazing seductively back at the earth upon the setting of the sun, he just dropped some absolute fire called Watchin U.
Without a PhD in advanced computer hacking downloading it onto your desktop is a problem, but you can inbed it. And seeing as your collective happiness is my delight, here it is. For your weekend delectation. To melt through your headphones over a first sip of organic cider, to pump to the max as you scythe through traffic on your piece of crap Santander, to waft through the bedchamber as things get steamy and smoothed-out and melodic and morph from the realms of the mental to the physical.
When it comes to NYE, the pressure is always on. Everyone’s looking for the right night. Everyone’s worried about the disappointment of a shit one. It’s that rare beast, a night with so much heady expectation that anything but an unabated smackdown is a monumental letdown. An embarrassment to take into the new year. Messing NYE up is like going down in the first round, first punch KO. What does a sorryass New Year leave in store for the drudgery of January and February, or the rest of the year for that matter.
That’s why you need to be at the right place.
You need to find the right vibe.
So there I was morosely stumbling through my options, hellbent on finding a killer vibe worthy of the best night of the year, when someone forwarded me a link to this. It slapped me clean across the face around mid-morning on some idle Monday. Proper hands in the air Always Bon Jovi concert moment. Some party in a secretive east London location accessed exclusively by lift. I mean what kind of shit party fucks around with a stairwell these days. I was down.
But what really got my gurn on was the dresscode.
Let’s have a look at this in a little more detail.
So apparently whatever it was that worked SO well last year, they’re sticking to it.
Couple of questions. Does this mean that last year’s theme was Vibey too? Or that last year’s party was simply characterized by a good vibe, hence the decision to stick to the same general plot-line. In both cases, what isn’t broken doesn’t seem to need fixing. The choice to go with Vibey is shrewd to say the least. Not only does it set things up enticingly for the new kids, last year’s crowd gets a shout out too.
Everyone’s a winner.
The exclamation mark is also a confident touch. I’m not sure VIBEY would carry the same gravitas without this kind of punctuation to round things off. It’s upbeat and care-free. A statement.
So let’s take a look at some of the suggestions.
That matching trouser and shirt combo you bought in total confidence.
Can’t remember the last time I saw someone matching their shirt with their trousers. Wait, yes I can.
I don’t even think he was being ironic (!)
This guy would fit right into Vibey.
Careful with the strobes though buddy.
Let’s see what else is on the menu.
Those five days changed my life forever.
Why the hell not.
Also an intriguing option.
I love this whole theme of recycling wacky garms.
Flea market in Berlin? 87 hours in Berghein waiting for one single specific drop off Villalobos’ 58th unreleased neck-brace bootleg reissues compendium doesn’t really leave much time between A&E, Soho House bag-pickup and the departure lounge at Schönefeld airport to visit a flea market. Let alone purchase an in-inverted-commas-vintage shirt. Let alone one that’s a touch too lairy. It’s a nice idea.
Church garms, a gold jacket, a kimono? Why wasn’t I there last year? What was I doing.
Last time I checked a couple means two, but now I’m just nit-picking. That’s not in the spirit of New Years at all is it. Word on the street is that this thing sold out months ago. I’m not surprised. If all goes to plan and these dresscode suggestions make a direct hit, this is going to be one truly unforgettable soirée. You have to hand it to the party organisers. The highest forms of art are the most elusive, but in the end they’re the ones on the tip of all our tongues. It all comes down to a simple mantra.
If anyone’s got a spare ticket please get in touch, on the comments or whatever.
Remember that time JLS dressed up in the four different colours of m&m at the official unveiling of M&M World in Leicester Square.
Me neither.
Not even the presence of these dudes in colour coordination could scupper the celebration of five floors of primed retail space opening in the heart of central London dedicated solely to the promotion of a chocolate brand. M&Ms are the chocolate-coated peanuted elixir of life. No other confectionary gets anywhere as near as close to my heart – literally – they clog up my arteries on the daily.
My busy schedule made a visit out of the question until last weekend, but on the bleakest of Saturdays pissing with rain and hanging like a carthorse I made the pilgrimage.
What an entry.
Blue m&m came to greet me and I had my photo taken.
But with five floors of subterranean madness to check out and my head pounding like an AK47 round from Arnold in Commando, things started going loco fast.
Some assistant inexplicably put Red m&m on my head.
He hit the floor.
The merchandise was super weird.
Although I’m sure the garms would’ve been fresh.
Had I been a six year old girl with an insta.
No matter, the real reason any hardened fan hits up M&M World is for some hard pound chocolate injection. This is what I’d come to see. Millions upon millions of peanut m&ms organised into coloured containers for the ultimate of all pickNmix experiences.
But much like having Cotillard, Hudson and Huntington-Whitely lying on a bed in kinky lingerie beckoning you towards them, at the most inopportune moment of all stage-fright took hold and hit me square out the park.
I totally lost it.
Leaving my half-composed m&m selection to hit the floor and scatter in multiple directions, I legged it towards the till, swiping a souvenir mug in slow-motion, refusing to end the experience without at least something to show for it.
That’s when I met Jordan. By the demented smile on his face I could tell he’d been subjected to an intensive program of extreme brainwashing and mind-control. His skin displayed an acute lack of vitamin D and his eyes lacked all signs of human empathy.
He stood cemented in this pose for ten minutes, holding my shopping bag, staring straight through me. After an eternity peppered by the crescendo of m&ms being crunched I realised he was trying to hypnotise me, and it dawned on me that those who enter M&M World are destined to never leave. In a last-ditch bid to save myself from I tore the bag from his vice-like grip and ran for my life, but not before snapping this testament to his insanity.
Barging old woman and toddlers mercilessly to the side I scythed up five flights of escalator and smashing this sign with a donkey-kick on my way through the door..
.. I cleaved through the 3rd rate oxygen of Leicester Square once more, embracing the homeless and china-men alike as long lost friends, basking in the freedom that five minutes before I was convinced would never be mine again.
Do not ever go to M&M World.
By all means sit on your sofa at home and chow down enough family packs to warrant getting yourself craned to A&E through your roof, but don’t ever go there.
*
Amusingly the only comment I ever received for this piece is below.
Your heart is in your mouth, you wonder why you bother, all the ways in which the next few hours will go wrong present themselves in a seamless highlight reel, an instinct rises above your fear and you keep moving, you’re locked in, you realise life is this, life is being in the game, this nervous energy is a sign from your gut you are alive, on you walk, you see the figure, the unsuspecting date, anxious, expectant, because your text-game is on point, of someone you now won’t live up to, who you’ve hoodwinked into spending the evening with.
First dates are terrifying.
They always scared me shitless. You wouldn’t know it though. When the lengthening shadows of my twilight years draw in, and I sit there by the fire with my patchwork memories, some less reliable, too smoothed over, too benevolent to the home truths of my past, I will cast my mind back and think, you know what, I’m not the last guy in the world you’d want to go on a first date with. Not at all. I gave it some unique flavour.
Meet me in Piccadilly, under the statue of Eros, I’d say. Baller starter move. With a knowing grin the God of Love would point his arrow directly down at us as we ambled up Regent St and hooked a left onto Heddon St. Having complimented the lady on her attire, I’d drop some casual knowledge about an obscure David Bowie album cover, and we’d proceed up the pedestrianised boulevard. If it was winter time I might make some passing remark about the chill in the air. She would concur.
I’d then stop, look her straight in the eye.
Cold?
It’s about to get a whole lot colder.
Emanating from the shadows, a neon haze would move across our periphery and reveal its source. An establishment dripping icicles of class, charisma, clean-lines and sophistication.
In both temperature and atmosphere the Ice Bar is indisputably cool. Upon entry one is handed a thermal cloak and gloves before passing into a sub-zero chamber, whereupon a ticket grants you a complimentary spirit cocktail. They play very loud EDM, and you sit on ice stools and drink your drinks and slowly get colder until your tumblers – also made of ice – begin to melt and your twenty minute time slot comes to an end.
I asked a Russian once if the atmosphere of the Ice Bar reminded her of the Moscow winters of her youth and she shot me a look I imagine her compatriots reserve strictly for leering through the Ukrainian border fence. Another girl found the whole thing so distasteful she insisted we leave half way through our allocated slot, which at £18 a head was a blow to both my wallet and my self esteem. But I couldn’t blame her. The place was awful, full of Italian tourist families taking selfies, the drinks were bad, the music was shit, it was freezing.
But it was also kind of the point.
The Ice Bar was something to laugh at. Something to do together that was kind of interactive, that involved a couple of drinks but was less neutral than the pub, that was weird enough for us to feel connected in spite of. I remember once to my horror a fully booked Ice Bar meant the pub was the only other option, and it was far more intimidating. As if over a pint there would be nowhere to hide. When you were as nervous as I was, the ice bar was a diffusion technique, an expert way to…
break the ice.
And strangely the real world seemed a lot more manageable once back in normal clothes amid a normal temperature, like the two of you had only just met but had already been through the ringer, and walking back across Regent St into the beating heart of Soho, it felt like you were meant to be together.
My mate Chuckles once proffered some advice. Bro, he said, on a first date always book a restaurant in the vicinity, and if things are going well covertly beeline for the joint in question and just at the moment you’re walking past be like… I know this great place, and duck in. It’s a classy move.
The restaurant was Hix on Brewer St, it had these beautiful bar stools, and sitting side by side one felt both closer and yet under less scrutiny. Life has taught us, wrote St Exupéry, that love does not consist of gazing into one another’s eyes but looking together in the same direction. I would quote this around the time we took our seats. Hix also had a bar downstairs and once dinner was done we could keep the vibe going by drinking extremely strong cocktails til closing around 1am. I’d then see them off in a cab, giving the crucial double-tap on the roof once the lady was sitting comfortably.
I must have done this first date five or six times.
Did I feel bad repeating the same formula? Every date was different, and my thinking was the smoother the logistics ran the better for both of us. I don’t think I repeated any of the same punchlines or got any names mixed up. I remember one girl asked me 3 questions in six hours, which I deemed reason enough not to go on a second, and another, an architect, asked me so many questions I made my excuses and hit the gents to compose myself. But I don’t think my company ever deemed the date a disaster.
As the years drew on, as the doorman at the Ice bar started recognising me and their weekly newsletter peddling subzero deals cascaded into my inbox, as my mates relentlessly ripped the piss, seasons changed and rearranged and one day the Ice bar went under, and even Hix started emptying, eventually closing its doors for good. So came to an end the chapter of my first dates. I also somehow got a girlfriend, which removed those evenings from the equation in the best way possible.
*
And so one morning, many years later and just a few ago I found myself on long-forgotten once familiar ground, feeling my way around the edges of a first date once more. There was nobody in my sights, only a strong instinct in me to want to meet someone. I was coming out of a period of unease and as tended to happen on the upswing, the heady mead of life was re-entering my body and I felt alive and happy.
In the intervening years the landscape of dating had changed. Introductions through friends were an option, but most had found one another by then, and the pickings were slim. These days, meeting someone involved the small task of swiping right on a glowing interface. That, or you went old school. The I gotta go see about a girl technique. Walking up to someone in a public place, facing the firing line of ultimate rejection, asking for a number.
One afternoon, sat in a bar opposite my house sipping a non-alcoholic IPA I heard a voice, and peering in its direction as nonchalant as I could manage, I saw her. Sharp intake of breath. She was unreal. Pouring sweat for half an hour I worked through a plan of action, something self-deprecating but not too creepy that would justify interrupting her and her friend mid-flow. I decided to bust home and put something cooler on.
Walking back across the road fifteen minutes later to seize my destiny with clammy hands, she was nowhere to be seen. But something had clicked into motion.
A few days passed, it was the week before Christmas, I was meeting a mate and his fiancée to hit their local for dinner. And in there, across the floor, was this girl, waiting tables. She was something else. I couldn’t keep from following her with my eyes, tracing her, the way she walked, how she carried herself, interacting with the revellers, gliding around the room. I spent two hours boring my friends talking tactics, and as the place was emptying, they went to wait outside and I made my move.
I’d written down my number on a napkin. I went over to her, motioning to pay, and looking up at me quizzically, she pointed to the bit of paper I was clutching with a peculiar agitation. The receipt? Nn-no, I stuttered, it’s on the table. And as we walked over a pall of terror drew across my mind, I grew faint, and lost it. In a last attempt to salvage some coolness I threw out a couple of insights about Christmas being a busy period, she frowned and half-nodded, and tumbling like a redwood onto a forest floor of regret, I flat-lined, paid and left. From the corner of my eye I could make out my mates’ faces pressed against the window, front row seats to the spectacle of my failure.
I pussied out, I said under my breath as I got outside, and without so much as a sideways glance blurted Happy Christmas, got on my bike and cycled home, dejected and full of defeat. But I didn’t make it. Half way across Well St Common, moving between the shadows cast by the beams of lamplight I heard the beating of enormous wings. In front of me an Angel hovered, stopping me in my tracks. I dropped my bike to the tarmac and stared. Be brave, came the voice of calm, if you do not have courage nothing good will ever come.
I went back.
Many months later my girlfriend told me it was the coming back that got her. If you’d asked straight out I don’t think I would’ve given you my number, she smiled.
*
I went back to the park the other day and saw the spot where I’d thrown my bike down. How weird I thought, a two and a half year relationship could’ve been snuffed out forever, vanishing into non-existence then and there in the space of ten seconds, on the basis of one decision. We weren’t even supposed to be in the pub that night. Louise had planned on cooking but was pooped after a long day, so the plan changed.
How arbitrary life is. I might’ve married this girl and I was two split-decisions away from never meeting her. How many opportunities pass us by, within metres and minutes of us. How alive is every day, every single one, singing with potential, a swirling moat of magic lying in wait, for our courage, ready for us to reach out and meet it without fear with arms outstretched.
The feeling I felt cycling back that night with her number, the feeling that made me want to shriek at the sky, having gone towards the thing I feared the most and made it, whatever the feeling was, I must go towards it again. I wondered how many new discoveries, interactions, ways of seeing and being in the world, every morning might bring about, with the vision of that feeling in my heart. The spirit of the unformed future, circling above us giggling and pirouetting in the air. What we call fate, said Rilke, does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us.
I gotta go see about a girl.
Am I enthusiastic. Am I terrified. I don’t know. I know that I like myself more these days. I have less reason to hide, behind a thermal cloak and some loud EDM.
The other day, on a train, someone tells me how great her last few Tinder dates have been. I thought the opposite was normally true, I ask. Well yeah, if you want something serious I’d steer well clear of them, you’ll be disappointed. But for meeting new people and cool conversations they’re great. My phone can’t get on dating apps, I say. You’re fine. Stick to the going up to strangers getting numbers game. You did it once already, she says. You can go again.
My mother has this weird habit of revealing absolutely nothing about what she’s up to and then one idle morning of April she’ll be like oh yea I’ve been lowkey restoring a Victorian greenhouse for the last year and I’m entering a competition would you make me a video about it darling, and she’ll drop these bombs with the insouciance of an October leaf falling gently to the floor and I’ll make my excuses and hit the lav and be like what in the hell my mother is a superwoman.
I made it onto the nation’s airwaves the other day.
I had some things to say that needed saying. In my moment of glory I glossed over coronavirus and the size of Chris Witty’s collar, avoided mention of the Oprah interview and went straight for the jugular. Talked about the most important thing I could think of. Mark(if that’s your real name bro) had called in saying he thought this was LBC’s most boring phone-in ever, and I was having none of it.
Psychedelic substances are the talk of the town.
Micro-dosing tech wizards in California, Ayahuasca ceremonies in East Anglia, psilocybin clinical trials for the treatment of addiction and depression, the psychedelic revolution that was shut down in the 60s has come back for round two. But what exactly are these things. And why do they even exist. For my money, psychedelics pose the most important questions of all, ones we simply have no answer to.
*
Peterson looks deadly seriously at his interviewer:
What we don’t understand about psychedelics is a very thick book. They bend the structure of reality. I have no idea what they do. They could be anything. They are unbelievably strange. What they reveal to me is how little we know about everything, and that’s a terrifying thing.
Something to be investigated further?
With great risk.
A couple shroomz on a hill at sunset, what’s so terrifying about that bruh. In small doses psychedelics can bring on a feeling of calm and connectedness, can amplify colour and sound, can give you hysterics, some profound and beautiful insights, none of which would seem overly terrifying. But you could call this tickling the feet of the sleeping giant. Those most familiar with these substances, the tribes of the Amazon, the Gnostics, the Ancient Egyptians among others, deemed them to be anything but recreational, and to be taken only in very specific circumstances.
The crux of it all, is the size of the dose.
In high doses, psychedelics bring about effects in the brain and changes in consciousness so grandiose and total that they are deemed by their subjects as among the top three most meaningful experiences of their lives. They are experiences that can bring about extreme self-realisation, can heal past trauma and alter the course of lives. But these experiences can also be extremely challenging, and if not taken in the right circumstances are so powerful they can be dangerous. Put simply, the brain does not know what to do with them.
What they put us in touch with is the mystery. Their effect has been described as drawing back the curtain, so we can experience what lies ‘beyond the veil’.
In the famous words of William Blake:
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.
On the walls of caverns from Indonesia to Périgord lying in long forgotten darkness for millennia, prehistoric cave-art show the presence of shamanic transformation, of therianthropic half-men half-beasts, and point to mounting evidence that mankind’s relationship with these substances goes back to the dawn of man itself.
From the Amazonian Tribes who knew inexplicably to combine a leaf with a vine from 150,000 plant species in order to make the Ayahuasca brew and when asked how, they replied simply ‘the plants told us’. To the Bwiti people from Gabon who ingest the Iboga root and use it to contact the dead. To the Vedic texts from ancient India and their talk of Soma, a drink made from the Amanita Muscaria mushroom, to the Mayans and their veneration of psilocybin and the mushroom stones carved in their honour.
In Ancient Greece, Eleusis was known as the light of the ancient world. ‘Athens has given nothing to the world more excellent or divine than the Eleusinian mysteries’, wrote Cicero. Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, they all went down into the great subterranean hall, the Telestrion, to drink from a brew called the Kykeon, and reported experiences that transformed their lives and removed their fear of death.
Used the world over by different cultures throughout time, pyschedelics are now known to have been responsible for the birth of religions and profound leaps in cultural evolution. Some posit the Book of Revelation is an account of one long psilocybin trip. There is even mention of mushrooms in the Bible . I dug it out and found in Exodus 16:12 a description of man-na.
In the morning ye shall be filled with bread; and ye shall know that I am The Lord your God. And when the dew that lay was gone up, behold, upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground. And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another, it is man-na: for they wist not it was. And Moses said unto them, this is the bread which the Lord hath given you to eat.
*
They are a tool, said the shaman, when I asked him what the hell it all meant. But what does it mean, I kept saying. The previous evening I’d drunk Ayahuasca for the first time and was sitting in a cabin in a wood in Holland with questions teeming inside me that I wanted answers to.
They are an endless library, he said. On thousands of journeys, every time a different book is presented to me. Sometimes I am shown the womb, sometimes an electron moving around a proton, sometimes the outer reaches of the universe, sometimes the dark corners of my past. They are a tool to help us live better.
But his explanation didn’t cut it. This wasn’t answering my question. The world made enough sense as it was, without these mysterious plants or fungi hanging around positing enormous question-marks about the make-up of everything. Why did they exist at all. A tool? If you want to get to an island and you’re not Michael Phelps, odds on you’re going to need a boat to get there. But this didn’t tell me what the hell the island was doing there. According to him these things enabled us to garner learning to help us orient ourselves in the world. Fine, but where did this learning come from. What on earth was this place.
Was it even on earth at all.
The neurochemistry is in.
Psychedelics light up something in the brain called the Default Mode Network. When this is switched on, multiple brain regions are able to interact with each other simultaneously. Brain scans show that most of our neural activity is expended in containment rather than letting things run free. Aldous Huxley called the brain a ‘reducing valve’ and psychedelics ‘gratuitous graces’ provided by nature to allow us to bypass it, in order to see what our brains prevent us from seeing in our normal waking lives.
But it’s still the brain though, barks a defiant Dawkins, when asked what psychedelics reveal about the nature of consciousness.
Fifteen years of DMT research would suggest otherwise. Rick Strassman a psychiatric professor at the University of New Mexico administered dimethyltryptamine to volunteers in clinical trials over a fifteen year period and grew so uncomfortable with his findings he brought the trials to a close. The volunteers all reported the same experience. Being shot out of their bodies like a rocket into worlds of such intense detail that words fall short of describing them, where they encountered entities, some of whom were happy they had been found.
This has given rise to the idea that, contrary to what Dawkins believes, consciousness might reside outside our brains, and that we are more like receivers tuning into a radio frequency. ‘We have absolutely no proof consciousness is generated in the brain: this is the great lesson of psychedelics,’ wrote the Czech psychiatrist Stanislav Grof. What if these medicines allow us to access dimensions we are normally unable to reach, tuning us into new frequencies, permitting us to see beyond the veil of our bandwidth.
Rather than being aware of their hallucinating brain, the DMT subjects reported their experiences to be ‘more real than reality itself’. Their accounts were mystifyingly similar, as if they were all journeying to thesame place. But Strassman grew disenchanted with his inability to prove scientifically what these accounts seemed to be revealing, and in the end could only conclude he was in the presence of what he called a spiritual phenomenon.
Whatever room these substances swing a creaking door open to, there is no assurance the human brain can deal with what lurks therein. Maybe evolution has kept the door locked for a reason. In a letter to a friend on the subject of mescaline, Carl Jung warned of Goethe’s poem Der Zauberlehrling the sorcerer’s apprentice, who knew how to summon the ghosts but not how to get rid of them. What one has seen, one cannot then unsee. Jung insisted on being on our guard against ‘wisdom we have not earned’.
This is why Peterson spoke of great risk, and why psychedelics must come with a warning. There is no knowing what resides in the dark corners of the world, what forces are at play there, and what exposure to these things might do to a mind unprepared for it. The interviewer furrows his brow…
Maybe a way to get in touch with the dark side?
Yes… or for the dark side to get in touch with you.
But native cultures saw them as sacred medicines for good reason.
Imagine your mind is a snow-covered hill, wrote a Dutch scientist, and your thoughts are sleds moving down the hillside. The older you get the deeper the grooves in the snow become, until you reach a point where all your thoughts end up following these pre-set grooves all the way down. Psychedelics are a fresh dump of powder. All of a sudden the sleds are able to run free, to move where they want, this way and that, finding all sorts of new ways down, just as the mind can think in new ways denied to it for years, sometimes a whole lifetime.
My experience with Ayahuasca showed me myself in a way I had never seen. I was shown myself walking into a pub, and from a corner incognito I sat and studied myself interacting with people. This was how others saw me, I realised, as I was, rather than through the lens of my relentless self-criticism. I was curious, engaged, quick to laugh, vulnerable, I was alright, I thought. I’m alright.
I often forget that vision and version of myself, floundering in the muck of bad days and regret when I am no friend to myself, but somewhere in me is the understanding that what I saw was the truth, and I must hold onto it. To not forget what was shown to me and to uphold it as an antidote in the unforgiving hours of muted afternoons. If I look hard enough the idol within me is still flickering.
The shaman was right after all. The question I was asking, what does it all mean, had no answer. Once back from these journeys of the mind, the only reality we inhabit is the shared reality in front of our faces, and the learning and self-knowledge can be put into practice only right here, right now. In this way, they can only be tools.
And still the question remains. Why should plants have this kind of intelligence, why should they contain messenger molecules capable of interacting with the human brain to cause such extreme life changing journeys of thought and perception. Could the earth know we are in danger and be trying to get a message to us, the problematic apes, to say wake up.
The modern day shamans of the Amazon believe our world has severed its connection to spirit. That despite our intelligence and civilisation, we are missing out on ancient signals from the earth, messages from the natural world that we are no longer picking up, as if the earth is speaking to us. What if, in the 10,000 years of history and culture and the dawn of modern man, our connection to spirit has been cut. And our unhappiness, our neurosis, our sickness, have moved in to take its place. This might explain the residue left over, why we now sit with our spiritual yearnings and our nostalgia for a paradise lost.
Could the answer lie in a return to the past, to the Shamanic traditions of the Amazon that have been preserved by the jungle itself, ready for us to find again this lost way of seeing, and recover once more our connection to spirit, to the divine inside us.
The Swiss Chemist Albert Hoffman who discovered LSD and lived til the age of 102, would take tiny quantities of acid and go wandering around his garden in the early morning. In conversations with his friend Stanislav Grof, he said:
I see the hand of God there. If they think this is just the work of atoms, they don’t know what they are talking about.
If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. These substances, whatever they are, bring about a sense of connection to the universe far beyond the narrow band of our consciousness. Allowing us to peer deeply into ourselves, demanding our humility to acknowledge how little we understand, beckoning to us to reach with arms outstretched to touch the transcendent, as we behold the miracle and mystery of all things.
My Russian friend Olga has the flyest set of nails this side of the Kolskiy river that creeps frozen through her hometown of Murmansk. And guess what. The words you see are none other than her favourite excerpts from War & Peace, immortalised right there on her nails. She explained how she did it, something involving alcohol, trawling through all 950 pages of Tolstoy’s megalith, and with the help of a crane, pressing the book down in all the right places.
I remember a few years back when this popped up in my inbox, a pdf brochure for a new housing development called Hackney Square.
I thought it was a joke.
The definition of Urban Living?
Sterling Ackroyd have got their wires crossed with this one. Besides the fact that only about three people in east London have a moustache quite as ridiculous as that, people hate hipsters. I don’t understand how putting two guffawing hipsters on a housing brochure is going to entice anybody to move there. It’s like advertising a new-build in Camden and putting three goths on the front.
Does anybody see this and think, I want to look like that, perhaps if i buy a 600K hamster cage in Hackney Square and keep the razor away from my top lip for six months, I could be that guy. I’m not convinced. Hipsters are labelled that because they congeal in poorer/more scuzzy/more vibrant parts of a city where they can feel safer expressing their individuality.
Nobody aspires to be a hipster.
Hipsters are hipster by default because they wear outlandish clothes and grow stupid moustaches and act different to the mainstream. But in doing so simultaneously and all in the same place, by being different together they all become the same, and lose all the individuality they sought to express in the first place. At least this seems to be the approved theory of anybody who lives a stone’s throw west of Aquarium on Old Street roundabout.
What a place.
It strikes me the only folk looking to move into expensive new builds in east London are young french bankers, who let’s face it aren’t the coolest cats on the planet. Will they assimilate to the Hackney Square demographic so explicitly painted by Sterling Ackroyd? Will that kind of moustache cut it amidst the marbled atriums and escalators of Deutsche Bank? How will this work? Will they move in, keep hitting the Gillette with abandon but still hang around with Mr Walrus up-top, keeping a safe distance whilst being cool and hip by association? What is the future of Hackney Square?
Take a read of Vita Sackville-West writing to Virginia Wolf.
Fire.
Milan, January 1927
I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite desperate human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it.
And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is really just a squeal of pain.
It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this – But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly.
You have no idea how stand-offish i can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it down to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.
The other night, me and my man Greg hit up a spoken word event at Shoreditch House. We’re classy like that. It was great, some very talented and under-appreciated bards who went at it for over two hours. Perhaps none more talented than this guy, Sean Mahoney. He performed the poem below on the night too. It was a game-changer.
So just before the interval the emcee, a man called Lionheart, took the stage and grabbed the mic and said, I want to prove to all of you that anyone can write a poem if they try. So I’m going to pick 3 people at random from the audience, and they’re gonna spend the next ten minutes writing whatever comes to their head. Then at the start of the second act, they’ll get up here and read it out to everyone.
Poor fuckers, I thought. Next thing I know Lionheart’s finger was pointing directly at me and I felt an excruciating urge to hit the gents and stay in there til 2056. By the time I’d come back, located a piece of paper and a biro, I had six minutes left.
He asked me if I knew what I wanted to write about. I said yeah. He asked me what he could do to help out. I told him given the amount of pain he’d caused me in the last four minutes, the best way to make the remaining six as painless as possible before social suicide in front of 70 strangers was to leave me alone.
When you have no time at all to write something, editing goes out the window. So it’s pretty much stream of consciousness scribbled onto a page. Lionheart surpassed himself once again, and 43 seconds later called time. I hardly had the chance to read it through before I was reading it out.
But it went okay.
Until one point half way through when after an especially poignant line the whole audience pissed themselves. I stopped, but then realised they were laughing with me. I was killing it. Check out the dude behind me. The three pixels that make up his face say more than words ever could. Something like stunned surprise. And then enraptured admiration. As clear as mountain lakes on crystalline mornings.
Anyway the room seemed to like it and I got some pretty nice applause.
Greg reassured me I hadn’t totally bombed.
The best bit was when Sean Mahoney came up to me at the end, and told me he’d loved what I’d written.
Really? I asked. Yeah, he said. Your poem broke my heart.
I read this once in a doctor surgery waiting-room magazine.
People spend all their time trying to find the person they want to go to bed with, when they should really be looking for the person they want to wake up next to.
