How To Be A Hippie In The 21st Century

To save me preaching to young people at parties:

DO unto others as you would have them do unto you.
DON'T think for one second that Jesus wasn't the biggest Hippie of them all.

DO grow your hair. It keeps you warm in winter and cool all year round.
DON'T grow cynical. Your jaded negativity won't make you happy, but it will make others want to beat you to death with a copy of Dorian Gray.

DO speak out against intolerance and injustice wherever you see it.
DON'T kid yourself into thinking the monks of Burma are any better off because you joined a Facebook group supporting them.

DO teach your children to respect all religions and believe none.
DON'T name your children Indigo Moonbeam. That's just mean.

DO read the complete works of Huxley, Eco and Blake.
DON'T read anything by Dan Brown or that sub-Shelley hack who writes about emo vampires.

DO smoke pot. Eventually, they'll have to legalise it – that's how Common Law works.
DON'T make your friends stand in the cold to smoke it. You're not a pub. Or the government. Or my mum.

DO share the wealth with your friends. What goes around comes around.
DON'T take the piss. Especially when it's MY gear.

DO voice your opinions.
DON'T be scared to change them.

DO experiment with sex, drugs and Rock 'n' Roll.
DON'T experiment with incest, morris dancing, or golf. Trust me on those three.

DO listen to Acid Mother's Temple, especially when you're on drugs.
DON'T listen to me, especially when I'm on drugs.

12 Common Recreational Narcotics and Their Influence on Equestrian Prowess

In honour of Prof. David Nutt, a clever man with a great name who was fired for telling a politically inconvenient truth. One of his many apposite quotations about narcotics stated that taking Ecstasy was no more dangerous than riding a horse. In the spirit of science, I decided to go one further, and take a bunch of different drugs, and then try to ride a horse. Here are my findings:

Marijuana

You ride the horse perfectly, at one with its natural rhythm. After the ride, you and the horse sit on the grass and discuss post bop third stream jazz while eating dark chocolate and hummus.

Mephedrone

You ride the horse normally, only it takes you til eight o'clock in the morning. You spend all the next day swearing that you'll never ride a horse again.

Cocaine

You ride the horse hard. He eventually throws you because of your cruelty, so you run off and try and fuck his girlfriend.

Speed

You ride the horse all night and all the next day until you reach Paris. The French eat the horse.

Ecstasy

You ride the horse around the same field three hundred times, listening to progressive psi-trance. You then dismount and hug the horse for two hours. No-one can decide which one of you is the sweatier.

Salvia

While you are riding the horse, it turns into a construction made entirely of rice. Each individual grain of rice then explodes into a swirling constellation of infinite universes. The universes coalesce into a Rolodex which you flick through until you find a picture of a horse you recognise. You dive into the Rolodex to find that you have travelled exactly three feet.

Magic Mushrooms

You are unable to ride the horse, due to excessive laughter and the niggling conviction that your left hand has become invisible.

2CI

You become convinced that the horse hates you. You hide in a tree for six hours, humming Dazed and Confused and wetting your jodhpurs.

Heroin

You ride the horse to Glasgow, where you both fit right in. The horse eventually betrays you over a once-in-a-lifetime smack deal, and you die in a squat with a kitten and a dead baby.

LSD

You paint the horse in bright colours and ride it through the American Midwest, freaking out the squares. You eventually declare that the horse is God, you are Jesus, and you wake up in a California penitentiary with a swastika on your forehead.

Alcohol

You ride the horse at extreme speed into a bus-stop full of children, killing seventeen of them. You escape punishment, as the government decides that alcohol is perfectly safe, and that the horse must have had a technical malfunction. The horse is destroyed, and turned into glue. You appear in a series of popular beer commercials and turn into John Terry.

Ketamin
The horse falls asleep.