John Stuart Mill, Of His Own Free Will, On Half A Slice Of Hash Cake…
I did, with the benefit of hindsight, a really silly thing ahead of my Part One Finals Jurisprudence (Law) exam paper. It can only have been the election evening/night when we all sat around in Rectory Road Shelton watching the Tories romp back home and leave the Labour party in disarray.
While some drowned their sorrows in cheap beer (or perhaps something stronger) and puffed away at cigarettes, I had quit smoking and was not going to drink any booze (which was still often upsetting me a bit post glandular fever).
So Liza, Mike and Mandy decided, in order for me to be able to do something intoxicating with my sorrows, that they would bake a cake, infused with lashings of hashish sprinklings, thus mellowing my and everyone else’s mood.
It was done an act of kindness, but perhaps at least one of us should have known a rather important, basic, biological fact about the mind-affecting substance in question. When smoked, the effect wears off in a few hours at the most. When ingested, the effect lasts a good deal longer – 12 to 24 hours.
The Next Day – 10 June 1983
I basically ended up sitting my Jurisprudence paper feeling high as a kite. I don’t think I got a great mark…but nor did I flunk the exam. Philip Rose might have thought I was still icky from my glandular fever and taken pity on me. Or possibly my scribblings were enhanced by my relaxed state of mind, such that my paper really wasn’t at all bad.
A reasonable chunk of what I know about jurisprudence has subsequently been captured for posterity in the Gresham Lecture I gave in 2008 on Commercial Ethics. The video seems to have gone, but the transcript, sound file and pictures are all still on the Gresham site here. I wrote and delivered that lecture without the help of mind-affecting substances.
Returning to June 1983 at Keele – after doing two law papers (I think the other paper I cognitively-floated through was Torts) I went to see Victor/Victoria in the evening.
This film was highly acclaimed but I remember not liking it much. There were one or two good set pieces, such as the cockroach scene at the start of the film, but ultimately I found the conceit of it – a failing actress pretending to be a male female impersonator – a little irksome. I remember especially disliking the trailer for the film, which laboured the point about the Julie Andrews character being “a woman…pretending to be a man…pretending to be a woman” – just in case the audience was too thick to work out what was going on.
After The Exams – 13 to 19 June 1983
Monday 13 June – Last exam today -> Newcastle afternoon -> UGM in eve – stayed up late after
Tuesday 14 June – Lazed around all day. Stayed in eve drinking etc.
Wednesday 15 June – Lazy day again. Shopped – lazy evening
Thursday 16 June – Did little today – went to Shelton & NSP [North staffs Poly] – lazy evening. Cooked meal.
Friday 17 June – Lazyish day, Shopped – in evening went to see Diva – v good.
I do especially remember that movie Diva. I thought it was stunning. Not what I would now think of as my kind of movie, but the visuals and sounds were an explosion of sensory extremes that I rarely feel in the movies. Here’s the IMDb link. Below is the trailer:
Saturday 18 June – Did little today – Liza working most of the day and evening – stayed in cooked meal.
Sunday 19 June – Rose late – went Int [International] Fair – wet lunch at Sneyd – went Newcastle in eve – Liza v ill after
Lazy is the key word for the week after my exams. The following week was different again, as you’ll discover next time…