I was woken in the night, rather unusually, by the sound of voices and music from an adjacent flat. The song, from the very first words, tugged at my memory, it was definitely something from my teenage years, something that I had not been fond of, nor disliked, but it was ubiquitous and had sunk into my bones. It took a while but eventually it came back to me – ‘Never forget’ by Take That, from 1995 – and since then it has been stuck in my head.
Uncle Gadget left last night, but not before giving an account of a Lahore American School field trip in the 1970s to the cannabis fields of Kohat and the workshops of Darra Adam Khel, where he and his fellow highly interested students followed the artisanal manufacture of hash from plant to ‘Cadbury Bar’, learned about the different grades then available, etc. It was another time.
It began in villages where women were responsible for the cannabis harvest – they tried bunches of seeds pods and then beat them against stones to extract the resin. Eventually what remained was a thick muddy sludge that their menfolk would take down to Darra Adam Khel, to the workshops which had already purchased the harvest months earlier. In the workshops the sludge would be filtered slowly. The thick chocolate brown cake on top would be wrapped in newspaper or (later) plastic and sold as the hash one finds in the market. Extending from the sieves in long thin stalactites was the better grade, the ‘red label’, as the Pathan workshop owner told his rapt audience, before plucking a rod or two to put into the Pakistani students’ pockets as a secret gift. Below, a filthy, matted sieve was carefully scraped for the ‘Chivas Regal’ fraction as he called it. And finally, the dew at the bottom of the screen was the real stuff, something so pure and delightful that it was collected in tiny perfume bottles, sealed, and sent to Saudi Arabia for the use of the royal family. The way of taking that final purest stuff was to dip the point of a needle in the bottle, then slide it over a cigarette. That was enough to make a joint that would remain fresh for years, giving a clean high and never a hangover.