This is a story about an addiction to adrenalin...

See that red circle? That's where I've lived for the last 2 years. Only two or three times a year, the combination of wind speed, wind direction, and a low tide will all co-incide, creating perfect conditions to be able to kitesurf at my local 'beach'. That's me, launching my friend's kite at the edge of the water.

The water is slightly brackish, but at low tide it's mostly full of really really nasty stuff that will give you an ear infection, eye infection, gastroenteritis or other medical complaint due to contact with and ingestion of faecal coliforms.

I was on holiday on a North African desert island, with a beautiful sandy beach and warm water, one week after I excitedly told my friend that the conditions were perfect for him to achieve a lifelong ambition of kitesurfing in the middle of our capital city... far, far away from the sea. Is it any wonder that I didn't want to spend a week puking my guts up and taking antibiotics?

Just to prove I'm not pulling your leg, above is a picture of my mate dodging his way in-between boats, as he crossed the river on his tiny kiteboard. He even did a trick because he knew that a bunch of shocked onlookers were videoing him - ever the showman, but who can blame him?

If you don't believe me about dodging between boats, have a look at the kind of vessel that cruises down the river, that I can see from my living room.

Yeah, that's the same river and yes that's my lounge and balcony. That's the same view that I have taken hundreds of photos of, all from that same vantage point. Yes, that's a frigging cruise liner sailing right past my apartment, which is every bit as surreal as you'd think it would be.

Also, if you thought I was making pathetic excuses about why I didn't want to go into the dirty brown water, then check out this next photo, taken a week or so later.

Yeah, that's me in the shades, looking all pasty white because I don't get to leave the house much these days. Just look at the beautiful aquamarine colour of that water. There was no need for a wetsuit - the water was as warm as bathwater. Why would I want to swim in raw sewerage when I had this week of kitesurfing heaven to look forward to?

I will my miss riverside life, but I've paid a king's ransom to experience it, and I've also had a queue of lazy liars, who've wanted to take advantage of me and my industriousness & ingenuity. It's been hard work to make these kind of iconic and memorable life experiences possible. It might sound boastful, but is there anything wrong with reaching a point where you can look backwards and say - without a shadow of a doubt - that you've lived your life to the fullest possible extent.

There used to be a time when the future couldn't come soon enough. I wished away today on tomorrow's dreams and ambitions. Then, I lost my virginity, learned to drive a car, got my first full-time job, bought a house, married a girl... one by one, I ticked all the things off the list.

How rich and 'successful' do you want to be? I've owned both a yacht and a speedboat. I've stayed in fancy hotels and had luxury holidays. I've eaten in the best restaurants, had the most gourmet food and drunk the finest wines. If you continue in relentless pursuit of the glitz and the glamour that you see in films and on TV, then you'll never be happy and content. No matter how many digits you have in your salary or net worth, it'll never be enough. Do you want to earn a million? Why not a billion? Do you want to be the first trillionaire? Why not a quadrillionaire?

If you were cursed with even a handful of braincells, I hope you'd quickly figure out - like I did - that things like experiences and friendship have an intangible value that can't be measured in dollars, pounds, euros, yen, rupees or even shiny gemstones and lumps of rare metals. You can't eat diamonds, although I must say I haven't tried. I have had a drink that contained actual gold, floating around and getting stuck in my teeth, like shiny bits of food, but even if I drank loads of that stuff, all I'd end up doing would be quite literally flushing money down the toilet - gold cannot be metabolised.

So, it's with a heavy heart that I leave my riverside home tomorrow, but it's not been the best place I've ever lived. The best place I've ever lived co-incided with when I had the most friends who I saw on a regular basis. More friends = more happiness. In some ways, my apartment block has had the stench of misery about it - full of rich old men with nothing to look forward to in life except a swift and painless death.

Maybe that's all there is for me in the future: frustration, disappointment, age-related illness, pain, discomfort, suffering and then death. However, I've got a few years before I'm 40 (technically) and I haven't passed on my genes to any unfortunate offspring yet. I'm still a hopeless romantic who believes in true love and holds out hope of meeting a special somebody to spend the rest of my life with; to grow old and grey with.

There's a moral question about whether it's right to drag an individual kicking and screaming literally into existence, as a shitting, puking, pissing, blood and amniotic fluid covered hopelessly helpless baby version of a fully-grown human being. There's another moral question about whether it's right to do so, when you can see that climate change and Donald Trump have our planet on collision-course with disaster. There's a personal moral question, about whether it's right to take the risk that I might pass on bad genes, or act as selfishly and irresponsibly as my parents did - to inflict as much misery on an innocent child who has no choice in matters which so deeply affect their quality of life.

I'm so desperate not to be like my dad, that there's an easy way to guarantee that never happens: to never have children of my own. However, can I say that I really experienced every possible thing that it's possible for a human to do, unless I sire and rear my own genetic offspring? It's a gut-wrenching decision. I'm more risk-averse than you might think, given the number of times I've risked my own life, but it's quite another question entirely when you're talking about the miserable childhood of some poor kid.

In leaving the capital city, I leave behind a huge pool of highly educated, highly intelligent and devastatingly beautiful women of my age, who decided to have put career first and placed motherhood on hold. Now they're all shitting themselves about the sun setting on their fertility, and make bloody brilliant girlfriends, to be honest. Prior to my my thirties, my experiences of the opposite sex had rather made me wish I was homosexual.

Talking of sunsets, this is the last photograph I'll ever take from this balcony, in all likelihood. I literally just rushed out and snapped this photo in-between writing the last sentence and this one. This is goodbye. There will be no time for anything more tomorrow, as I throw the few remaining unpacked items into my luggage and head off to start my brand new life: a fresh start; a new beginning.

You could have walked in on any chapter of my life and felt anything from pity to envy; from disgust to sympathy; from protective instincts to the desire to join a long queue of people who'd like to cause me distress and misery. If you think I've lost my sense of perspective, you're wrong; you've leapt to the wrong conclusions and too hastily. There are two years of my life captured here, on the pages of this blog. I invite you to dip in at random and judge me based on the extreme ups and downs that you can read about... everything I've been through.

Of course, I view myself as no different from anybody else. We all get hungry, we all get thirsty and most of us want to get laid. Beyond that, of course I view pure blind chance - luck and probability - as the only over-arching thing that's led me down one path, while you down another. Our places could easily have been the other way around, in another life; another universe.

So, dear reader, I will write to you again, after I've arrived at a destination that is completely alien to me.

Wish me the best.

Tags: #london #kitesurfing