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.
