Dear Varsity,

Apparently what our Germanic ancestors liked to do of a Thursday afternoon was to feed castrated reindeer with fly agarics, then drink their piss. The psychoactive chemicals in the agaric, thus filtered clean of poison, yield a magical drink called Soma venerated in bronze-age Indo-Iranian culture. This according to an exhibition Freddie took me to at the Hamburger Bahnhof. They’ve filled the old engine-hall with live reindeer, giant mushrooms, canaries, one-way mirrors and mice, in a giant experimental recreation of the experience.

On the wall, a quotation from the Rigveda: We have drunk Soma and become immortal; we have seen the light, the gods discovered.

“That sounds rather good doesn’t it.”

“You think – we should try to score a tab of Soma while we’re here?”

There seemed no harm in asking. But the museum attendant told us coolly that Soma was valued at €1000 a pop, and that you had to shoot up at the museum’s nightly lock-in if you wanted a go. Nobody knows what Soma was, see, mushroom-piss is some mad German scientist’s untested theory, so you have to promise them before they let you at the hallucinogens that you won’t sue if you die. And it’s not even the real thing. The secret recipe for Soma is probably being safely kept out of the clutches of the Catholic Church by wise Rosicrucians in the basement of a chapel in suburban Glasgow.

So, despondently, we went to sit with a Club-Mate on some abandoned railway lines.

Club-Mate’s the Berlin drink, a sort of urine-coloured tongue-tingling dangerously strong ice-tea made of hand-squeezed rainforests. Nobody knows what goes into it. It comes in a bottle with a picture of Freddie Mercury in a sombrero on the front. It’s made in a factory that can’t be seen on google maps. Freddie and I turned and faced each other dramatically.

“You don’t think –”

“You mean –”

“It was under our noses all the time..?”

We saw the light. We discovered the gods. We drank Soma.

It wasn’t as good as they claimed. Legal highs, always such a disappointment.

Ali