Sarah Brown on Nostr: In his culturally significant work of 1995, Mr Cocker gives an allegedly ...

In his culturally significant work of 1995, Mr Cocker gives an allegedly autobiographical account of a night spent in a field in the southern English county of Hampshire. The account is based on a claim, supposedly overheard, that someone makes detailing their abundant possession of a number of substances which probably include a mixture persil and chalk dust.

These, however, would generally be regarded as excipients, resold considerably above their retail value. The significant active ingredients of the mixture would be 3,4 methelyne dioxy N-methyl dextro alpha metyhl phenethylamine (“Molly”) and its base compound, dextro alpha methyl phenethylamine (“Benny”)

These are both monoamine neurotransmitter releasing agents and monoamine neurotransmitter reuptake inhibitors, with significant efficacy on the monoamines, dopamine and noradrenaline.

Mr Cocker elaborates by noting that in the middle of the night, the experience of consuming inadvisable amounts of these substances is an agreeable one. Their relatively short period of efficacy, however, results in levels of the two aforementioned monoamine neurotransmitters becoming clinically depleted at around 6am.

In a phone call to his mother, perhaps from a BT phone booth as this story occurs just before the wide scale adoption of cellular telephones and certainly ones that would still have significant charge at this point, the storyteller laments to his mother a “horrible feeling” which “grows and grows” and leads him to deduce the absence of an “important part” of his brain.

That Mr Cocker describes monoamine insufficiency as a “horrible feeling” leads your author to regret her lack of mastery of the tiny violin as she, perhaps understandably but uncharitably contributes, “welcome to my normal life, you daft bastard. Sucks, doesn’t it?”

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.