2020 Kitchen Design V11 Crack Cocaine
Giorgina Calvello
When I got to university a couple of years later it was something I started doing most weekends when the loan stretched to it. In my twenties, I joined the glittering world of the London media where living at a fast pace and acting like a bit of cunt seemed pretty de-rigueur - and cocaine helped you do both.
Thanks Sam for more of your honest, heartfelt writing. Thankfully I never became a huge fan of coke. During my time working in the music industry in London in the 90s, I knew many users and their dealers, and it was always on offer if I wanted it. The drug always came with this tag of glamour in those circles, it was almost de rigeur to have a bang if it was offered. For me it always ended up in a situation where you would need a snort every 5 minutes just to maintain the high, and it became the be-all and end-all of the night to get back there. It dawned on me that it was a truly shit experience, because you were always chasing that first hit, which was never all it was cracked up to be in the first place. The idea of cocaine was always better than the reality...something about the feelings conjured by the word, the idea of it as an expensive 'treat' and its association with decadent 70s rock star living. Maybe it was just me and possibly others didn't experience that feeling of constantly coming down, but ultimately I'm just very glad it didn't get its hooks in me.
Everything I know about living well, feeling content and having a chance of happiness is based around peace, calm and stillness. Not full time, obviously. None of us are fucking Buddha, are we? Bills need paying, the kitchen needs cleaning and the cat wants feeding. I can\u2019t be just sat up a mountain contemplating spiritual enlightenment all the time - it would make no economic sense whatsoever. That said, an ability to embrace peace, react to things calmly and practise stillness every once in a while is the best shot any of us have of avoiding complete meltdown. I am totally convinced of this. French philosopher Blaise Pascal once said, \u201CAll of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.\u201D Bloody right. If we could all just tap the brakes a bit more we\u2019d be better off for it.
Cocaine is a powder you snort (or smoke or - if you\u2019re a seventies rocks star - have blown up your bumhole through a McDonalds straw by a flunky) that immediately, magically, makes you the opposite of peaceful, calm and still. When you take coke you become instantly anxious, noisy and intense. It is a poison: it corrupts everything inside your body, your mind and your soul. It makes you aggressively boring - babbling to anyone who will listen about your idea for the world\u2019s first electric cricket bat or how much you love Oasis\u2019 third album.
But you know all this, right? Because you, like me and everyone else, have done loads of cocaine. Seriously, every fucker in Britain over the age of twelve has been bang on the gear for years now. Boris Johnson is planning a government ad campaign to discourage something called \u2018middle-class cocaine use.\u2019 Like he thinks it\u2019s just the wankers at dinner parties who keep their gear in an ornate antique box on the mantlepiece who are the problem. The days of cocaine being a designer drug for Yuppies ended forty years ago. What about the builders, the Uber drivers, the football hooligans, the call centre workers and the unemployed teenagers who are all bang at it? Let alone the royals, the politicians, the tired out mums, the stressed out dads, the teachers, the doctors, the butchers, the bakers, the candlestick makers and - of course - the chefs (chefs love coke). Britain is collectively hooked on beak.
But no-one really likes doing coke, do they? We all know it makes you edgy and paranoid and twattish. It\u2019s not even as if the grim consequences are deferred to the next morning like booze and other drugs. Within hours of doing cocaine, you find yourself lying awake, sweaty and terrified in your bed, feeling more alone and worthless than you ever imagined possible. You know that\u2019s what it does to you and yet you still hand over sixty quid you can\u2019t afford for the pleasure. Cocaine defies every marketing orthodoxy known to humankind.
Maybe it\u2019s because we\u2019re all so knackered all the time. Maybe you\u2019re exhausted from work or from raising kids or both. Or maybe you\u2019re woozy from all the beer you\u2019ve drunk in the pub. I got to the stage where I couldn\u2019t contemplate having any more than two pints without making sure I had at least a gram either in my pocket or on its way in an Uber I was paying for.
It\u2019s no coincidence that coke made its big breakthrough in Thatcher\u2019s decade when we were all brainwashed into thinking that personal productivity was the only measure of human value and that rampant ambition was a desirable lifestyle choice.
Cocaine can be a useful accompaniment to those sort of warped life goals. If you\u2019re the sort of person who wants to \u2018work hard and play hard\u2019 then cocaine helps sustain your unnatural and wholly unsustainable lifestyle choices. Cocaine is not even meant to be fun to take - like ecstasy or weed or even (I\u2019m told) heroin. It\u2019s simply a means to an end. It will get you through a working day or a drunken evening without the need for a lie down.
No-one likes hearing other people\u2019s drug stories so I will keep mine as brief as I can. I saw a lot of cocaine snorting when I was a kid but I can\u2019t say it ever became normalised. I found it terrifying no matter how many times I saw it done. I didn\u2019t see much of a difference between the grim spectacle of Zammo chasing the dragon in Grange Hill and someone hoovering a line of bugle off my mum\u2019s coffee table.
Then when I was in my mid-teens my best mate and I somehow embroiled ourselves in the stag-do of a fella ten years our senior. He and all of his mates were MEN who did MANLY things on this stag - like having sex with women and taking cocaine. I was just a bewildered spectator. We ended up back at someone\u2019s flat partying and I fell asleep, pissed out of my head. When I woke up my best mate was striding rapidly around the living room clutching his nose and saying \u201COOOoooooowwwwww, fuck!!!\u201D He told me he had tried cocaine and was in immense pain. Which wasn\u2019t much of an advertisement for it, really. But you know how it is when you\u2019re a teenager: my mate had tried it so now I had try it.
That\u2019s how it tricks you into thinking you have agency. It was in my mid to late thirties that things got out of hand. I stopped using it for \u2018fun\u2019 and started using it as a crutch to get me through the increasingly taxing and stressful life of a busy dad, trying to operate at 110% in a variety of roles, from husband to parent to professional to mate, dickhead-about-town and all round fun guy to be with. That\u2019s not an excuse - by the way. Not everyone with those roles to perform resorts to narcotic support. Some people are able to balance their lives, attain perspective and just, you know, not do loads of coke all the times. But I didn\u2019t because I was stupid and had a distorted idea of what life was all about.
Throughout those final years of my cocaine use, I can honestly say I never once actually enjoyed the sensation it gave me. I was quite simply hooked: I had forgotten how to function without it. When I got clean a lot of mates (most of whom were the people I used to do coke with and probably felt a bit uncomfortable with my abstinence) scoffed at the idea that I was an addict. They told me I just had a \u2018bad habit.\u2019 As if having a bad habit was perfectly okay. Habit, addiction, call it what you want - but shovelling gear up your hooter in the disabled bogs at 9am to prepare for a meeting is not the behaviour of someone who is delighted by his own life choices or confident about the way the future is going to unfold.
You might still be doing gear and thinking to yourself \u2018that all sounds fucking seedy and depressing whereas my drug use is fun and social and glamorous.\u2019 But cocaine is a powerful, deceptive and sadistic substance that will fool you into thinking you have control until - BAM! You don\u2019t. Just like booze, it is a noose tightening slowly around your neck. By the time you can\u2019t breath anymore, it\u2019s too late to wrestle free. Fun times soon give way to paranoid solo-binges, frantic late night desperation calls to dealers who secretly pity you and that terrible, constant worry that the person you are talking to can see traces of white powder caked around your nostrils.
But the weird thing is that, of my two addictions, coke is the one I fear most. I can recall the warm glow that booze would sometimes give me and yet I never really miss it. I never crave an alcoholic drink - the thought actually sickens me. Whereas I know that cocaine could work its way back into my life at any moment if I don\u2019t stay vigilant. Cocaine is something I have nothing but negative memories of. From that first line I ever did to the last, it brought me nothing but discomfort, fear and regret. And yet I know it\u2019s still there, lurking in the shadows of my mind, waiting to lure me back into its toxic embrace at the first chance it gets. I am Dot Cotton and cocaine is my Nick.
For a future edition of The Reset, I am thinking of doing a Q&A with readers. I am not a therapist, shrink or any type of expert, of course. But the spirit of The Reset is about sharing stuff. By telling the truth about some of the darker stuff I\u2019ve thought, felt or done I hope that you might be able to relate and realise you\u2019re not alone.
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