Is Cannabis a Gateway Drug and other stories

Is Cannabis a Gateway Drug and other stories: "Sometimes some of our beliefs make some sort of sense. But often they don’t. Some of our beliefs have been inculcated into us since early childhood. They’ve been repeated so often we take them for the truth. Our whole world is built around received belief-systems such as this.

Personally I always retain a healthy scepticism about anyone’s beliefs… and that includes my own."

Stonehenge and Civilisation

Stonehenge and Civilisation: "It probably took over a thousand years to build, from its first to its last, and was in constant use for several thousand years after that. Indeed, you could say that it has never really gone out of use, if my visit to see the sunrise with Joe can be counted too. Who are we but the latest in a long line of visitors come to admire and wonder at this mysterious structure?"

Landscape and Possession

Landscape and Possession: "That is what I mean by possession.

When a ghost enters a man we say he is possessed.

But what if he is already possessed and he no longer knows it?

What if the mind that he carries around in his head isn’t his real mind at all?

What if it isn’t just one man, but all of humanity that is possessed? Possessed by the demon of possession, in fact, by the mistaken belief that anyone can ever own anything."

Weird is the English Word for Fate

Weird is the English Word for Fate: "When fate casts its strange shadow – as it does sometimes – over the ordinary processes of our lives, it does so with reason. Fate is the question we ask of ourselves. Fate is the choice we are given. Once we have made that choice, then our lives are determined by it. But the moment of fate itself is actually the moment of greatest freedom."

Schrodinger’s Uncertain Cat

Schrodinger’s Uncertain Cat: "you can’t know if the cat is alive or dead until you open the box, because you can’t know if the atom has decayed or not. Mr Schrodinger merely posited the cat as a way of highlighting the weird contradictions inherent in the world of Quantum Mechanics; that is, on the small scale of atoms and subatomic particles."

Dancing With The Demons

Dancing With The Demons: "From poppy tea to codeine tabs, from cough linctus to “chasing the dragon”, from skin popping to, finally, the whole junkie works, the needle, the spoon and the tourniquet. To him this was all the height of romance, like dancing with the demons, like a love affair with death. It was his version of poetry."

Mental Arithmetic

Mental Arithmetic: "What are the kids being taught these days? At one stage they were allowed to use calculators in their maths exams. I don’t know if this is still the case, but one thing is certain: they can’t add up any more."