Friday, January 18, 2019

THIS is a weed.

I had to clamber down into a gully, contort my upper body and click away blindly with my phone, arm outstretched, to get a photograph of this winsome, little weed.  It was worth it.
Hairy bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta), a member of the mustard family, is a weed whose leaves grow close to the ground in a rosette.  It's not a very tall plant, it has attractive, diminutive white flowers and I just love how unassumingly delicate it seems.  Looks can be deceiving, however.  My favourite thing about this weed is the violent, spring-loaded flinging of its mature seeds if you so much as look sideways at it.  Watch out!  I do love weeds (I might have mentioned that once, or twice, before), what I don't love is weed.
I get an awful lot of unsolicited emails in my Vinsanity inbox.  Most of them are wine-related, but not all.  (I tend to simply ignore the ones that mention Muscat/Muscato, titter, titter.)  Recently, I received one untypical email three times.  Initially, the email caught my attention with the sales pitch of, "...this would be a great story for Vinsanity."  Okay.  The email, introducing a Canadian company called Sproutly, extolled the virtues of, "the world's only water-soluble cannabis solution" and asked if I would be interested in speaking with Sproutly's CEO.  Erm, no!  The only mood-altering beverage that I am interested in is wine.
Old hippies (underachievers, hedonists, common or garden losers...), in their pot-induced delirium, ascribe all sorts of miraculous attributes to weed, marijuana, pot, grass, ganga, dope, Mary Jane, etc.  Call it what you will, by any other name, cannabis is a psychoactive drug with behavioural and health ramifications.  Besides, the fact is that old hippies just smell like skunk.  And although I like the skunk as an animal, beats me why anyone would voluntarily want to stink like one.
I don't see anything hypocritical in my enjoying a glass of wine now and again, with food, and friends (and as a necessity of my job), compared to someone whose preference is to get stoned.  I personally know of a couple of people who get inebriated in this way all day long, calling it 'recreation'.  Well, I could drink all day long, but that would be called, and rightly so, 'alcoholism'.
Old hippies never die, they just smell worse by the day.

4 comments:

New Hampshire Wineman said...

LOL!
Great op-ed, and having ended my counter cultural dead end in 1981, what Vinogirl said so eloquently in 'few' words, is the absolute truth, even though truth is an ever shifting mystery to the laughter/paranoid mystics of little or even big smokes.

Vinogirl said...

NHW: Op-ed? No, believe me, I'm in full-on rant mode.

Thud said...

Never trust a feckin hippy.

Vinogirl said...

Thud: Absolutely!