Monthly Archives: January 2017

 

So, maybe you’re a smoker who has stumbled across this website while researching your options? This can be your new term; it can be the moment you step up from Primary to Big Kid School. But if you’re already a vaper, this doesn’t have to exclude you, there’s plenty of scope to broaden your fun.

New kit purchases

This is simple for the smoker switching to vaping – buy everything.

For vapers, if you are lucky, you won’t have spent far too many hours this week being dragged about from store to store. The fortunate will not possess teenage girls, who appear to need to see every product that every shop sells before deciding what things to try on. And after the trying on comes the need to drink something (normally served hot but she prefers it fancy and with ice in) while deciding what things to go back and try on a second time.

But Vaping’s New Term means you can justify that thing you wanted to buy. You can look your partner directly in the eye, lie about the cost, and add it to the drawer of things that rarely get used. What have you put off getting?

Then, like the need to maths sets and new folders (despite the fact that I can go into the bedroom upstairs and find at least two functional maths sets and enumerable serviceable folders), you are also going to need to stock up on lots of different types of juice, wire and wicks.

New times, new learning

New vapers have a mountain to climb; you are all a bunch of Doug Scotts, Junko Tabeis and Aleister Crowleys. You may have set up base camp with a starter kit, but the odds are you’re feeling intimidated looking up at the peak of Mount Cloudchucker. The next heading may help you out.

Likewise, for experienced vapers, there is probably at least one aspect of vaping you’ve put off because you can’t be bothered with the faff. The hot favourite in the betting stakes for this is building a mesh wick and using a genesis/genesis atomiser. Just do it. Set aside some time to mess about with a cheap one and walk about feeling all steampunk and old fashioned.

New friends

Friends are simply people you don’t like the look of and haven’t spoken to before. Or something like that, we don’t pay too much attention to motivational posters.

Get along to a vape meet, join a group on Facebook, and/or sign up to a forum like Planet of the Vapes. Vapers are happy little souls who are always bursting to help other vapers. OK, this may be a bit of an exaggeration, but meets and online sites are excellent sources for tips and hints.

Plus, another key aspect to any new term is to the little kids – you know, the one who is smaller than the rucksack he has enveloping him like it’s consuming him during the school day. Actually, forget that bit.

Finally, if you’re a vaper who is just about to embark on a career as a teacher then there is only one tip for you: go to a supermarket, buy as much alcohol as you can afford, consume, then repeat this on a weekly basis.

 

 

Think of T-shirt sales, it’s probably a safe bet to say that there have been more sold adorned with the mugshot of Mr Guevara than there ever would be with one of, say, Mary Berry. Rebels were people like Gandhi, James Dean and Robin Hood; they were the poets, the artists, the pirates and the highwaymen. Even the Rebel Alliance was a bunch of rebels. We are Sappho, Sylvia Plath and Mary Shelley.

The thing is we have a problem, and it’s an almost insurmountable one.

Were you in a band when you were younger? Did you start one from scratch with your mates? If you can answer ‘yes’, then you know what the issue at hand is. The first thing a freshly formed band does is to convene a meeting at a nearby pub. The assorted members troop in, nurse a single pint for three hours and argue the merits of the names they scrawled on the back of a receipt from Tesco.

World of Leather? No.

Accident and Emergency? No.

Three Letter Acronyms? No.

Bag of Sh you get the idea. Round and round they go, because they appreciate how stupendously vital the epithet is. Trivial stuff such as writing songs, rehearsing and performing live gigs can wait – that sort of flotsam is almost irrelevant to the modern musician anyway.

Naming a band is more difficult than naming a baby. This is a fact for almost all baby namings because of the absence of a drummer, drummers have the knack of messing everything up – hence the reason they tend not to be responsible for having a child. Drummers will never agree to any band name.

How can we all band together, we free-spirited cloud creators, if we don’t have a snappy collective name? Rebels need to be in opposition, which needs to be conveyed in the sobriquet. We need to be Anti-something.

This means that we are Anti the anti-vapers.

This means we are the Antiantivapers.

Or, Antiantiva.

Antiantiva, the sexy, rebellious militant wing of vaping. Well, militant to a point, don’t let that bit scare you. We aren’t setting out to smash the state, system or even the settings on the television. Antiantiva plans to be militant about the sort of cakes we have at meetings, and we might have a very heated discussion about what type of tea to buy from Morrisons.

First order of business: any person with basic knowledge of science knows that two negatives make a positive, so the antis cancel each other out. Removing the anti and the other anti from Antiantiva means that we are just Va.

Damn, which means we are simply vapers. Like every band naming session I’ve ever been a part of, this was all a big waste of time – except that this is proof we are all cool.