Within ten years, you’ll be buying cannabis at your off-licence

The first time I came across skunk cannabis was in an underground out-of-hours bar in Nottingham in 1997. I think I’ll leave that as ‘came across’, if it’s all the same to you. I might want to be prime minister one day, and it’s important to have my tenuous denials lined up in advance. More expensive than your regular cannabis, I remember, uh, people saying, with a stronger smell and a far -stronger effect. Which I noticed, obviously, from the behaviour of other people. As I studied them with clear, unreddened eyes, like an anthropologist. Yes.

From then on, until I stopped moving in such circles, skunk was all there was. In my Scottish teens, the druggy kids — no, -officer, I didn’t get their names — smoked hashish, presumably brought in with the heroin through the docks at Leith. At university it was mainly marijuana. In my twenties, though, dope meant skunk.