The National Hi-fi Show ' 10

Well Im off on the sunday all being well, looking forward to it

 

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blimnie bob, my driinks round cost more than that, good V.F.M.:JPS:

 

Another advantage to being virtually teetotal, so don't expect me to buy a round.

 

Oh ...... 'virtually'......... drinks are on Richard!

 

super, thaks richard that is nice of you,

 

I am afraid I am going to be really tweee about this. If I go in a place where people are smoking, I walk out. If I go in a place where people are drinking alcohol I normally walk out unless the bar is empty and doesn't stink. That is the point for me, alcohol, especially beer, stinks just as bad as fags do. It gets in the clothes so you stink out everywhere you go afterwards. I used to be a smoker and I never noticed it but I never liked the smell of beer, so it is the same for drinkers they don't notice they stink !!!

So the easiest thing is stay away, so unless you want to go in a cafe and have tea or coffee or a soft drink then count me out.

I haven't been in a pub, apart from if it has a restaurant, for over 20 years.

 

Hi all!

Last year's show was great so I'm really looking forward to this year's event - see you chaps there!

(Great choice of partnering kit btw, Rob and Simon )

 

Ah, well if its been twenty years you should be ok now.
No more smoking in bars and nearly all of them have efficient air conditioning.

Go on, I'll buy you a Pepsi

 

We weren't exhibiting last year and spent most of the day in the bar :beer:

Best behaviour this year though.

 

I am not completely teetotal, I have a G and T occasionally or also a glass of desert wine (terrible sweet tooth). When in Ischia I like an aperitif of Ruccolino or Limonchello, but beer disgusts me, it tastes and smells foul, perhaps I have an allergy to it.

Strange geezer ain't I !

But seriously when you don't drink just a G and T gets me mildly pickled, and that is the other thing I hate, the feeling of alcohol, I cannot understand why people like getting drunk, for me I would prefer to cut a finger off. Though I must admit until I gave it up in about 1975 I enjoyed a good Acapulco Gold in my favourite chillum but that was a completely different effect :MILD:

All I remember from getting drunk as a teenager was throwing up and the room spinning round, and people do this for pleasure

 

I'm not trying to say anything about Richard, but I often think people who don't like the effect of being drunk (not completely smashed) are afraid of what lies within themselves when the inhibitions are removed.

Having said that, beer does smell a bit, but I think larger is okay, and spirits are even stronger smelling!

 

I you seriously think alcohol tells you anything about anything you are bonkers, it is a suppressant of the energy paths in the body, the same as opiate derivatives. It shuts you down that is why people take it, to relax and not think!

You are talking to an old hippy here who started on cannabis in the summer of love in 1967 until given up in 1975 and also for a period of a year taking LSD at least once a week, do you seriously think alcohol allows you to explore and understand yourself more than that experience :MILD: On LSD you turn yourself inside out

The strangest experience I only tried once was fly agaric (amanita muscara), having met a strange bloke in my travels who called himself a druid (there were lots of strange blokes around in hippiedom, it was part of the culture). A visit to Epping Forest in October (a bit stoned) with him to collect these magical looking things, they are sooo bright red with white speckles, really beautifull when young and the mushroom fly maggots and squirrels haven't got to them. It is an old Anglo Saxon pagan tradition for druids to take them at Yule the pagan midwinter celebration to foresee the future growing year and to celebrate the old one. Anyway European ones are sometimes deadly poisonous but they vary in strength a lot, where as American ones will always kill you if eaten fresh. You don't eat them fresh, you dry them over a fire place for two months, then you don't eat for two days and don't drink for one day and then you eat one of them. Within half an hour you are feeling sick and throw them up, but by that time the hallucinogen is in your system and you go off on a (anything up to) three day trip. Very different to LSD, not as paranoid or zappy. What you discover is fairy tales are real fairies and goblins and elfs actually exist, they are us. Peoples personalities and personas are hallucinated into character, colours are dramatic, and scale and perspective is enormous like extreme 3d surround vision and sound stage. Anyway spectacular as it was once was enough, firstly for the first hour you feel you are dying, it is horrible, and it takes you a month or two to completely come out of the experience. But just think this was a normal act 2000 years ago

Laplander used them right up to present time but they get it by drinking Reindeer piss (though how do you get a Reindeer to pee in a bucket) as the Reindeer eat fly agaric and filter out the poison and the hallucinogen come out in the urine. This was how the northern European folk tales that created a red father christmas with white beard (the mushroom) and the Reindeer especially a flying one with a red nose came about, anyway silly but true but that is where the original folk story came from. The gifts were not physical but of insight!

So sorry I am off on one of my silly yarns again, but back to the point - I have been places in me and out of me that you couldn't even conceive of sonny boy

 

For all you know I could be a hard core drug addict just like you were.

Anyway, your post didn't change my opinion. It's pretty well known that people more freely express their internal thinking and feelings when a little drunk. Introverts become more extrovert. The key is not to drink too much and get completely wasted.

 

You can't be otherwise you wouldn't say this. Hardcore drugs are addictive, that is the problem with them, the effect of them becomes less and less so you have to take more and more for the same effect and the body becomes dependent on them. I have *never* touched hardcore drugs or been an addict, but you seem not to understand that. Just because society accepts alcohol I am afraid it is just another *hard core* drug leading to addiction, dependence and health problems.

All the halucinogens like cannabis, LSD, mescaline etc etc are not addictive or hard core. They do not behave the same way in your body, your body does not become dependent. People don't realise that natural drugs are rife in what we eat and drink - coffee, tea, energy drinks even sugars are drugs and create addictions, along with additives and natural medicines.

 

We are way off topic, but just a small follow up, yes on second thoughts I was a hard core drug addict, I was addicted to the nicotine in tobacco, and that is one of the hardest addictions to break. I broke it 24 years ago thank goodness. And cannabis smokers are addicts because most of them mix the cannabis with tobacco, so they become addicted to the tobacco not the cannabis.

Finally just to put the record straight, if I had my time again I would not touch any form of mind altering or body addictive drug, so I do not recommend anyone tries or participates in using any of them and that includes alcohol and tobacco.

 

Actual Nicotine addiction is fairly short lived, it is the habitualization of smoking that is hard to break. The same goes for smoking cannabis and anyone who believes its just the nicotine element that makes it addictive is just dreaming.

philip

 

Then a lot of doctors and scientists are just dreaming

 

How much is "too much" for you? 4-5 pints? or more?

 

a polypin,

 

Psychological addiction to cannabis is well documented by health organisations, sorry Richard but you are wrong in this instance.