This is a story about helping each other...

How does one go about putting Humpty Dumpty back together again? The idea of some patriarchal figure - e.g. a king - has largely failed. Instead, we see that complex psycho-social problems are better solved by a community that is filled with mutual support and respect.

In order to get me to the point I am at today, it's taken a social worker. But not a social worker who was employed to help me, but instead a loveable Kiwi who was sleeping on my couch, who took it upon himself to think about my welfare.

It's taken a psychologist. Not a psychologist who I pay to sit on the couch of, while I pour my little heart out, but actually my beloved flatmate, who listened to me while I brain dumped in the small hours of the morning, or coaxed me out of whichever corner I was backed into, suffering almost PTSD-like symptoms.

It's taken a bunch of fellow people with mental-health problems, who "get it". They know that a "positive mental attitude" is just utter bullshit, and you can't just snap out of a severe depression or whatever ails you, when you already know that what you think and feel is irrational, and you would really rather not be feeling the way that you do, if it was a simple choice.

It's taken a bunch of addicts. Not necessarily needle-wielding junkies in the throes of active addiction, but people who aren't so holier-than-thou that they don't admit to their own fallibilities and judge you, lest they acknowledge the demons within themselves. Non-judgemental support is essential, for any way forward.

It's taken all my friends, from all corners of the globe. You might not think that a simple 'like' on social media would mean much, but the implied support has been my lifeblood. To say that I've been attention seeking is plain wrong. Everybody needs to feel that they have people that like them, support them, wish them well.

It would be massively premature to declare things a done deal. I need to make it through a winter somehow, without incident. Current thinking is simply to take off for the Southern Hemisphere for a while... follow the sun.

The plan has always been the same, since I decided to cut and run from my ex wife and Bournemouth: get back into IT contracting for the banks, go kitesurfing. Obviously, you also need a place to live and be on top of your finances. Obviously, you still need the occasional bit of midweek socialising to get you through to the weekend.

Am I some Goldilocks type character, who demands that everything is "just right"? No. I don't think that's true at all.

I accept that there is going to be loneliness, boredom, stress. I accept that things are going to take time. I accept that things are going to go wrong. I accept that it's highly improbable that everything will be going OK all at the same time. However, my basic life formula is pretty simple: work & play.

I tried to take direct action in somebody's life - Frank - when I returned to London. That was a relatively short burst of time & effort, and I can't tell you precisely how things worked out there, although I did see Frank about 18 months later and he was doing really well.

To round off my own story in a satisfactory way, I need to show that things are sustainable, I need to show that I'm not just mooching off people in order to continue on a reckless and irresponsible path through life. I need to close things out neatly: with integrity.

I know people are rooting for me, and it's nice to say that presently, I have a great place to live, a well paid job, and I'm getting back into the hobby I'm passionate about. I'm also increasingly getting back in contact with long-lost friends, as well as hopefully improving the tone of my communication: from bitter and negative, to philosophical, positive & hopeful.

My friend who drove me to the coast today, and has consistently been a pillar of support for me this year, always reminds me that recovery is nonlinear. I know that bad days and setbacks will follow an amazing day at the beach. Monday morning will be miserable, and life has a fully stocked arsenal of slings & arrows... but things seem a little bit better when your skin is salty from the sea and glowing from the sun and the wind.

It's oh-so clichéd, but that Beatles lyric seems apt:

I get by with a little help from my friends 

If it doesn't seem like I've acknowledged your help & support here, I apologise. Every little message, text, email, comment... it all adds up. I do appreciate it. I do appreciate, respect and love every one of my peers. Thank you.

Tags: #friends #kitesurfing #frank #mentalhealth

This is a story about an ambitious project...

How would you go about uploading yourself to the cloud? Have you thought about death, and what happens to your personality, your mind, once the apparatus of your body ceases to be a viable vessel for its preservation? Do you want to live forever?

I unfortunately lost my original Google Mail account - grantnick@gmail.com - which I had since 2004. I've now accrued 6.6 gigabytes of email across my new accounts - nick@manicgrant.com and h@ckte.ch - which are both managed by Google and therefore fully indexed for search.

Did you know that you can download all your data from Facebook? I've been a member of Facebook for the best part of 10 years. Facebook probably knows me better than any other piece of technology. It knows where I've been, and who I was there with. It knows who I talk to, and how regularly. It knows what I've chosen to share, as status updates, which are often quite personal and private.

If you dig around in the old parts of the Internet, you can even find me in the Usenet newsgroups, writing under my own name, back in the 1990s. The old content of newsgroups has been preserved for posterity by Google.

So much of my digital identity has been lost, as I moved off the dial-up Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) onto my first email addresses with CompuServe, America On-Line and Hotmail. I then made a bad habit of using work email addresses for personal mail. That means that when I left those companies, I left behind all my mail archives. All that content is now in the virtual trash can.

Losing my Google Mail account felt catastrophic at the time. I even leveraged my contacts and managed to get David Singleton - Engineering Director at Google - to try to resurrect my account. However, I had been caught hacking, so I wasn't shown any favours. My pleas that it was "white hat" were ignored, when I was in clear violation of the Terms of Service.

I used to write on a forum for the British Kite Surfing Association (BKSA). That forum was then decommissioned, and all those old posts were lost forever. I then moved to the kiteboarder.co.uk forum, and you can still find my old content on there. I used to be one of the top contributors.

But, would you even be able to reconstruct my personality, from all that email, and those social media contributions?

What's the difference between a film adaptation and the book it's based on? In the film, it's very hard to include much of the internal monologues of characters. Using a voiceover, a narrator, sometimes works, but often we lose the very thing that makes a book so wonderful - to know how the characters think & feel.

When I'm writing something for somebody else to read, more often than not, I'm instructing somebody to act, or passing on information. It's rare that I'm opening up and giving an insight to the inner-workings of my mind. In fact, with most interactions, there is a necessary formality. I'm sure my colleagues wouldn't appreciate it if I polluted our emails with random thoughts and updates on my state of mind.

I've always had a candid, open, style of writing and speaking. I leave little to the imagination about the way I'm thinking and feeling. However, it's still a guess though, because there is actually very little opportunity in life to really open up and let the true essence of yourself flood out.

We are always held back by that voice in our head that says: "but what will people think?". We worry how we are going to be viewed, when we write, when we speak. We are constantly self-censoring and projecting things in a certain way, saying certain things, to try to maintain an image that we deem necessary for our relationships.

"I can't tell my boss that I'm on the verge of a nervous breakdown, because they will think I'm unreliable" we might say to ourselves. Or we might say "I can't let this attractive person know that I have any faults, or maybe they won't fall in love with me". We might say "I can't let my family know I'm on the brink of suicide, because that will stress them out".

The version of yourself in all those emails, videos, social media posts... it's not a very true version of yourself. You've been constrained by social protocols. "How are you?" is always followed by "I'm fine thanks". Nobody expects you to reply "I'm on the verge of killing myself. My life is misery". Nobody will thank you for giving an honest answer.

So what happens is we live a lie, and there is no true version of yourself in existence, except for the one inside your head that you never let anybody see.

If we were to reconstruct you from everything you ever wrote, everything you ever said, we'd get a corrupt version of you. The version of you that would be digitally recreated would say and do all the right things, but the thoughts inside that virtual brain wouldn't be right. All those things that you wanted to say, but didn't, simply wouldn't exist.

I have to write 1,318 words in this post, and then I've hit 300,000 words. It was easy. A novel is considered to be a text that is over 40,000 words. I've written the equivalent of 7 novels, by that measure. It's taken just 10 months.

Would you find it easy, to dump the contents of your brain out, in all its gory detail? No, I'm sure you wouldn't. Even when you're writing a diary, you're probably thinking "what if somebody read this?". You even worry about what you think of you. You try to impress yourself. You try to hide your innermost feelings, even from yourself.

The Internet is full of abandoned blogs. You can see a flurry of activity that normally spans a few months, and then peters out. You can see the sporadic posts, when a dead blog is resurrected, months or even years later. However, what's rare is the person who writes consistently, reliably, regularly.

There are piles and piles of blogospam out there, but can you really reconstruct a personality from any of them? There are people who blog about knitting, people who blog about their pets, people who blog about stargazing, people who blog about sports. Can I infer who you are, or who you were from any of this vast quantity of data? Do I really get a sense of the person, from your online persona?

Google has analysed my 300,000 words of content, and tried to figure out what I'm writing about. Google has tried to figure out what's significant in this body of work.

Somewhere in Google's servers, everything I've written has been indexed for search. In a way, I'm already alive in the cloud. People from all corners of the Earth can find me, when searching for topics that Google knows are significant. Those seekers can know how I feel, what I think. They can delve into a very private world that you ordinarily would never get to glimpse.

Do you want to live forever? Perhaps you already do. The recorded history of humanity survives death, even in the stories we tell about our dead friends and relatives, and influential members of a community. Somebody somewhere has seen your digital content, even if it's just the electronic eye of a machine. Who knows where your data is going to end up?

Those who educate, inform and entertain have a reach that goes beyond their family and friends. Those who put themselves out into the public domain have a reach beyond living memory.

My mother looks after the archives of those few people who we deem to be culturally important enough to preserve, for the Bodleian Library in Oxford - one of the oldest libraries in Europe. While the library has a digitisation project, aren't we looking at things the wrong way?

107 billion people have been alive, ever. That means you're part of about 7% of the human creative output that could ever be recorded. Writing is a relatively recent phenomenon, and the ability to output to a digital medium with no lengthy conversion process and no loss of fidelity, is something that has only come about in the lifetime of those who are alive today.

When I write, it's not as a medieval monk, in some priceless hand-scribed tome that will be squirrelled away in some private library. Instead, I write as a citizen of the planet. My writing is captured in the public repository of the Internet, and is accessible to almost every living soul.

And, what advantage, the fact that what I have created has already been digitised? Well... my content is already in a format that's friendly for machine learning.

Speech recognition and optical character recognition can understand the spoken and printed word, but it's slow. The cloud has already greedily swallowed my 300,000 words, and processed them in order to serve them up to any consumer who cares to use them.

Is it arrogant and naïve to consider whether there is any merit in this hefty lump of text? Well, we are not going to know how Artificial Intelligence and machine learning are going to advance in the coming decades. Moore's Law predicts the exponential growth of computing horsepower that can be bought for a fixed cost. However, the game changer is when computers are no longer programmed, but are instead taught how to do things.

How would I go about teaching a computer to be like me, to think like me, to speak like me? Well, it would be like teaching a child. I'd sit down and talk to the computer. We would have a conversation.

However, how long would it take to speak to a computer, before you had provided adequate input? How long would it take the computer to process the sound into a stream of text? How long would it then take the computer to process the stream of text into a form that it can understand? How long would it take the computer to then crunch the numbers and attempt to say its first words?

If I was going about this project, I'd want to provide a body of text in a consistent format. We all speak with different voices. We all have our own unique style. Language is a somewhat crude way of expressing yourself. Human communication is full of flaws, when it comes to transmitting the contents of our brains from one being to another.

I could feed a computer with digitised books. I could feed a computer with Wikipedia. I could just let a computer loose on the open Internet. However, would it be able to cope, without context? How is the poor computer going to cope with all those different voices, different languages, different agendas, different writing styles? How is a computer going to get from the complete works of William Shakespeare, to understanding the inner-workings of the Bard's mind?

I'm sure we're already within touching distance of having a computer system write a convincing love letter. We write great volumes of soppy crap to the objects of our affection. However, while the art of seduction and the emotional patterns of those who are engaged in the courtship ritual are not hard for our mechanised chums to understand, do we really know much about a person from their attempts to get their leg over?

For me, there's so much more depth to the human mind, than what we can see through forced interactions in the context of getting along with one another.

There's so much magic in the secret diary. From Anne Frank to Adrian Mole, and agony aunt columns, we voraciously devour anything that's private and intimate. Words are normally a crude means of making any kind of emotional contact with the being that hides behind those glassy eyes.

This essay is not an instruction manual on how a machine may pass the Turing Test, but when you build a computer system, you also have to think about how you're going to prime it. What is your input data? Garbage in, garbage out.

In a way, we have already succeeded. If I died tomorrow, and you wanted to know more about who I was, how I thought, what made me tick, you could do a lot worse than perusing the pages of this particular publication. If you can't get a sense of who I am from these 300,000 words, is there really any hope that Artificial Intelligence will ever be human-like. If we can't understand ourselves, what hope do machines have of understanding us?

Now, the question is: did I write this, or did I get a computer system to do it for me?

The brilliant thing about AI, is there's no wiring diagram, no schematics. Just like a brain.

Tags: #computing #writing #immortality

This is a story about speaking to the audience...

Acknowledging the reader is not a great literary device, when overused. I think I have pushed most people away, by writing with a very lecturing tone. When I address my readers as "you" I normally have somebody in mind. I tend to be using this blog as a passive-aggressive device, to attack those who have wronged or offended me.

When I write about "get a job" idiots, it's because I'm highly offended, when I've had a 20 year career and been in full time education or employment since age 4. When my hackles are raised because somebody says "everybody has to work" it's because I've probably put up with more shitty boring jobs than most people, and racked up more hours. Investment Banking is not known as a career for slackers. IT projects always demand you to pull some epic hours to get things over the line.

When I write about the hypocrisy of my parents, it's because they epitomise everything I would never want to become: lazy, underachieving, highly critical and negative people, who have always put their own selfish wants ahead of their children's needs. When I look at the general decline in living standards of the younger generation, it triggers my deep sense of having had an enjoyable time as a child and young adult robbed from me. And for what? So I can now have a miserable boring job?

There's a Frank Zappa quote that I like, though:

If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it

But, in the words of my Dad: "you've got to pay to play". Of course, he forgets that his Dad was a wealthy accountant who very much paid for him to play.

So, I'm working a job that I hate, because I needed money and I needed it fast. Here in London I can get an IT contract very quickly and easily, and earn 5 or 6 times more than the average wage. You might think it's ungrateful, spoilt, to take this for granted and to even be unhappy, but after 20 years of playing the same game, using the same tried-and-trusted formula, there is no novelty, no surprises.

When I was 20 years old, I was earning £400/day working for Lloyds TSB in Canary Wharf. I was doing exactly the same work that I do today. It might seem vulgar to talk about money, but maybe you need to know why I'm not exactly thrilled to get out of bed in the morning.

There's a high-water mark: an expectation, set by your experiences. I really don't live any kind of jet-set life. I shop in regular supermarkets, I rarely eat out, I drink wine that costs less than £10 a bottle. I don't pay for satellite television, luxury gym membership or in any way indulge expensive tastes. Even my suit is threadbare and worn out, and I wear cheap shoes.

Some people need the status symbols, the trappings of wealth. Sure, I could plough my income into having a Ferrari, a speedboat, but you're missing the point: I completely rejected the rat race, made myself destitute, and I loved it. The feeling of liberation from monthly downpayments on some material object, or mortgage payments on bricks & mortar, brought joy back to my soul.

The highlight of my week was talking to the guy who shone my shoes. Under the grand arches of Leadenhall Market, by the futuristic Lloyds building in the City, this chap told me that he had quit his job as an auditor for Ernst & Young, and had become an actor. Sure, he was poor - having to shine shoes for £5 a pop - but you could see he was clearly in love with his life again.

You might see pictures of my fancy apartment, with its river views and think "flash bastard" and "that must cost a pretty penny". However, you have simply been fooled by the image that I wish to project... in fact, I need to project. I get paid a lot of money because I'm successfully hiding the fact that I'm a desperate man on the ragged limit of control. Only the semicolon tattoo behind my ear slightly gives away the fact that I'm living a life of quiet desperation.

In actual fact, the rent on my apartment comes to roughly double what it cost me to live in a hostel. Instead of living in a 14-bed dormitory with people who are on the very bottom rung of society, and having to share a bathroom and protect my few possessions from theft and spoil, instead I have an ample sized ensuite bedroom, storage cupboard and expansive reception rooms in which to relax in comfort.

You would think that living in a hostel would be cheap, so paying twice as much does not sound unreasonable, correct? When you consider that I can safely keep my bicycle in my hallway, I have a central London parking space, and amazing views over the River Thames from my balcony, you must surely recognise the value for money that I'm getting.

My one threadbare suit I only use for interviews, and the rest of the time I wear £50 trousers from John Lewis, no jacket and no tie. Somebody complemented me on my sharp attire the other day, and asked if my clothes had been tailored to fit me. I could only chuckle to myself, knowing that my outfit is entirely cheap off the peg stuff.

My accountant must despair of me, as I always cut things mighty fine. There is no profligacy - every penny I spend is calculated, right down to the few bits of bling that are necessary to indicate that you have attained a certain social status. It's just going to look a bit weird if you're an IT professional with a cheap shit laptop.

The really frustrating thing is how easy it is to fool people. Everybody assumes that under the surface, everything is just fine. If you dress yourself up in the right clothes and pretend like everything is tickety-boo, people have no reason to suspect that you are one negative event away from killing yourself.

I have no idea how I'm going to sustain the charade. Just because you're settled into your little rut, and figured out a system to keep turning the pedals, doesn't mean that I can do it. Smile and take the money, right? But what if it's too easy? What if the formula has been so perfected, that life is a paint-by-numbers?

I tried to teach a friend how to blag and hustle. I tried to show him the magic formula. I busted my balls to transfer as much knowledge as possible about how to play the game. He's no fool, and knew a few of the tricks of the trade already. However, ultimately he let himself down, because of the subtle detail.

There must be something that sets people apart. What is it that shatters the illusion? It could be something as simple as not noticing that your suit has still got the slit in the back of the jacket held together by a stitch of thread that you are supposed to cut yourself. It could be as simple as a cheap pen, or umbrella. It could be a single moment of self-doubt, or an answer to a question that clearly betrays the fact you're blagging, because you fail to one-up the interviewer and blind them with things they don't understand.

It might sound like snobbery, but it's actually the very essence of how people get into positions of authority. Having a shirt monogrammed with your initials, wearing an expensive wristwatch, carrying a Moleskine notebook, writing with a Mont Blanc pen, wearing the correct style suit and shirt and shoes. It's all so shallow, but sadly it works.

I'm part of a boys club, and there's no way I can show my hand. There's no way that my colleagues would be able to process the fact that I'm barely coping with mental health problems, the threat of relapse into drug addiction, and a desire to return to a simpler life when I didn't have to grind just to pay taxes, rent and maintain a fake image of having my shit together.

If I address the audience, it's because I'm so lonely in the little stage-play of my daily life. From Monday to Friday, I'm putting on a poker face, and looking busy at my desk. I face the threat of being found out as a blagger, a hustler, at any moment. The homeless guy is not welcome in the club. There's no room for anybody with a weakness, in the corporate dog-eat-dog world.

My colleagues tell me I'm doing a good job, and they like working with me, but I feel like a fraud when I submit my invoice for the week, and I think about how much time I spent on Facebook, writing blog posts, tweeting, reading the news and hiding in the toilet. I look at my timesheet, and it doesn't reconcile with the amount of work I have actually done. Sure, I was present in the office. My bum was on the seat for the hours I declare, but I don't feel productive or even useful.

So, I cast out into the world, looking for a connection, desperate for somebody to acknowledge my existence. Even when I rub somebody up the wrong way, at least it means some of what I say is hitting home somewhere. Most of the time, I'm alone with my thoughts and lonely as hell.

Every time I address "you" it seems to fall on deaf ears. I quickly forget that people have reached out, gotten in contact, because the conversation is so sporadic, unpredictable. This is such an unusual mechanism of communication, but what would I do without it? Friends have literally threatened to unfriend me on Facebook, because of the disproportionate amount of space I have consumed on 'their' wall.

I'm rambling, but I don't want this to end. It feels like I'm talking to "you". It feels like "you're" listening. It feels like I have a human connection, an honest relationship, that I just don't get for all those lonely, lonely office hours, where my whole focus is on trying to hide my depression, anxiety, boredom and desperate lack of purpose.

Without this blog, I'd be stuffed. There's a temptation to adapt my writing to be more appealing again. There's a desire to drive up the number of readers, by writing things that I know will be like clickbait, and nice to read.

However, that's not my style, not my purpose. We're having an intimate conversation, you & I. You might not realise it, but I'm thinking about hundreds of different potential audience members, as I write... trying to engage you... trying to connect.

Even if this isn't being read by the people I intended, at least it's there. There's something comforting, knowing that a little piece of me has been captured somewhere, in my own words. It feels like I'm at least winning, in the battle to leave a true account of who I was, and not become a convenient dumping ground for those who seek to abstain from any blame, for the part they did, or did not play in somebody's life.

I live in London. I'm practically an expert in turning a blind eye: ignoring the Big Issue seller, the clipboard-wielding survey taker, the collection tin rattling charity worker, the beggar, the pavement evangelist, and every other undesirable member of society who has fallen on hard times. I know what it's like to have your head down because you're so wrapped up in your own struggle, and so fixated on the rat race.

I've considered the question many times: am I a melodramatic attention seeker? Are my cries for help completely unnecessary? Is my lot in life no worse than anybody else's?

Frankly, who gives a shit? I'm just about scraping through every day by the skin of my teeth. Not only walking out on a boring job, but potentially leaving this shitty life altogether. I know how decisive I am. I know how bold and brave I can be, once I have decided to do something. I know I could easily snuff out my life, in the blink of an eye.

Doth I protest too much? Why take the chance?

Isn't this somebody else's problem? Aren't there pills for this?

Yes, try clinging onto those pathetic get-out-of-jail-free cards, once the person has gone.

Perhaps I'm dredging up emotions that could be suppressed? Perhaps the very act of writing is prodding at raw nerves, and actually keeping feelings on the surface that could easily sink back into my subconscious. Am I, in the very act of writing this blog, talking myself into depression and suicide? Well, the journal charts my moods, so you have all the data you need for the postmortem.

I live for writing. I live for my browsing stats and my Twitter followers. I live for those few moments when somebody emails out of the blue, and acknowledges my existence. You would be surprised how few and far between those precious events are.

Moan, moan, moan, right? Poor me, poor me, pour me another drink?

Perhaps Alcoholics Anonymous is the place for this, even though I'm not an alcoholic? Dylan Thomas wrote that an alcoholic is somebody who drinks just as much as you, but you don't like them very much.

Why do we push people to the fringes, the periphery? Why do we want the people who wail in distress to just shut up and go away? Do you think it completely meaningless, when somebody goes to great effort to explain how they're feeling, and attempt to communicate with you, by whatever means they can?

How long have I been doing this for? Shut up! Give up! Go away! Right?

If something doesn't immediately work, just quit, right?

Hasn't the message been received from you, loud and clear? You don't care. You're busy with your own life.

Is it the bystander effect? Surely somebody else is going to do something? Not me, I'm not going to be first. I don't want to get involved!

What do you think's going to happen? Are you going to catch my mental illness? Are you going to be made responsible for my life? Are you going to be shackled to me, forced to live with me, with me stealing food from your children's mouths? Am I out to ruin you and your family?

I feel like a dirty leper. I feel contagious. I feel a huge amount of pressure to pretend like I'm capable of just conforming, complying... when the truth is that things are getting worse, not better. My patience is worn thin. My energy levels have been exhausted. I'm later and later getting to work. I can no longer even pretend to be busy, and keep up the charade.

Join a gym. Eat some kale. Go to a book club. Get a girlfriend.

Can I chase away the existential dread with trivial frivolities, when the bulk of my waking hours are filled with such utter bullshit? Having a taste of freedom has perhaps ruined me. Knowing how the game is rigged, and how to play the system has left me reeling, with the shocking revelation of the pointlessness of it all.

Even if - for the sake of argument - I'm a dimwitted fool, it still doesn't take away the fact that my brain is in overdrive. I'm bombarded with thoughts in the empty hours where I am so unchallenged, so bored.

You educate a person. You train them for a job. You stretch them and challenge them and titillate their interests, and then what? You put them into a corporate machine where independent thought is undesirable? You put them into a bland business environment where creativity is discouraged? You put them into the straightjacket of the working world, where innovation and ingenuity are unnecessary?

Yes, I'm compliant, because I had a tax bill to pay, and debts to pay down. But every day is a simple test of patience. What's going to win: am I going to commit suicide, run away from my pointless responsibilities, or simply sit mute in my chair trying not to scream for long enough that I have built up another nest egg to fritter away on more life-affirming pursuits?

Life's too fucking short for all this. The clock ticks down to the day I die, and what can I say I did with my life? I didn't tell the boss to go fuck himself? I didn't storm out of the office, yelling at the top of my voice that everyone is wasting their precious existence on pushing paper around their desk? I didn't let the bank, the landlord, repossess their precious property and go live somewhere off-grid, to get away from the constant pressure to run just to stand still.

I'm writing and writing, because there is no end until going home time. How do I fill these empty hours where I'm 'working'. Does anybody even care that I've churned out tens of thousands of words, at the expense of the companies I'm contracted to work for? Does anybody even notice, that it makes not a jot of difference, whether I'm fulfilling my job description or not?

You're going to look at the length of this essay and think "what the actual fuck, who has the time for this?". I could put a cork in my mouth. I could curtail this bout of verbal diarrhoea. But what else would I do with my time? At least this wall of words - this tidal wave - records for posterity, the angst that might drive me to my early grave. At least people can see the kind of torture that my soul was subjected to.

Suffer in silence? Fuck off.

Tags: #writing #socialmedia #suicide #depression #mentalhealth

This is a story about being strung along...

How much does it cost to make a difference to somebody's life? How much time? How much money? How much effort?

By the time you end up homeless, far more stuff is broken than just needing a job and a place to live. Not only is your self-esteem destroyed, but also your squeaky clean credentials, which are required by the gatekeepers in the world of wage slavery.

I was asked to provide details of where I've been living for the last 5 years. If I was truthful, it would read like this:

• Current address
• Hospital
• Hotel
• Hospital
• Hostel
• Hampstead Heath (under some trees)
• Hostel
• Shitty student flat
• Hostel
• Hospital
• Girl's flat
• Kensington Park Gardens (under a bush)
• Hostel
• Crisis house
• Hospital
• Hostel
• Hospital
• Rehab
• Friend's guest bedroom
• Garden shed
• Own home

How the hell are the drones who process paperwork at my new job supposed to deal with that?

They say that moving house is one of the most stressful events that can happen in our lives. It's so disruptive. It's so hard to function, without a base, without somewhere settled to call home.

I used to drag tons of bags all over the city. It was worse when I was working, because I obviously needed smart clothes and my work laptop too. Can you imagine going from being homeless, to living in a 14-bed hostel dorm, but having to get suited and booted and go to work, with one tiny little locker and heaps of baggage? Can you imagine having to pack all your stuff up every morning, in case you got moved to a different dorm, and then going to work?

I've never claimed benefits, because I can see that they're just enough to do nothing but not enough to do something. For all the effort involved in filling in the forms, it's not worth it. No wonder people beg and steal... you really don't need that much money to support yourself in some kind of miserable existence, with no hope of escape. Benefits are the very worst option: maximum effort with minimum opportunity.

Anybody who thinks that cutting people off financially is some kind of motivatory strategy is simply an idiot. Here in the UK we have squats, soup kitchens and there is enough wealth to get by, hustling, scamming, stealing, panhandling and generally opting out of society. By raising the barrier to getting benefits, and offering so little assistance, people either find their way into antisocial behaviour, or get trapped into poverty.

Is it right that I should be trapped into a pool of people who can never work again, because we don't have a nice clean address history and we're stressed out as hell from being passed from pillar to post, as nobody wants to invest in our lives?

It takes time and it takes money, but there is a net benefit for everybody if you invest in the potential of people. There is no way that you can deny that the government, various councils and social workers decided that I was worthless, and not even deserving of a hostel bed, despite the fact that I contribute massive amounts of taxes. In the commercial world, it's the complete opposite: companies have shown that I'm worth huge amounts of money, despite the fact they'd shit a brick if they knew the truth about my past.

The obvious thing to do would have been to support me, so I could have gotten back to work sooner and started paying buttloads of tax again, but instead, Camden Council wasted months of my life before finally sending me a one-line email saying that they were making me homeless.

I wonder how many other 'lost causes' are actually capable people who just need a little investment. Stringing people along is not a good strategy. Shortchanging people, giving them less than they need, is a false economy.

Tags: #homeless #frank #career

This is a story about worthy causes...

How do you decide who is worth helping, and who has made their own problems? It's easy, right? People who drink and take drugs are the architects of their own misery, or so we think. Homeless people have to be clean & sober before they're worthy of our help and support. Alcoholism and addiction aren't symptoms, they're the root cause of problems, we believe.

But what if we got it wrong? What if people drink and take drugs to escape problems? What if people's lives are so miserable and hopeless that they need something to anaesthetise the pain, the discomfort and the fact they're treated like dirt, shunned by society and even their own friends and family.

Once somebody has the label attached to them as a waste of space, a lost cause, it's hard to shake it off. We don't like to see our own shortcomings, our own demons, reflected back to us in the eyes of the suffering addict, alcoholic. We'd sooner that the person just disappears into obscurity or dies, so that we can repaint them in some kind of idealistic light. We want to remember them as an innocent child, and having them hanging around as a living adult is rather inconvenient. The living embodiment tarnishes this false image we want to remember.

Some homeless people have poked fun at the ridiculous notion that giving them money will only 'enable' them to continue with their habits. We see images splashed all over the internet of signs begging for money to spend on drink & drugs "but at least I'm not bullshitting you" the signs say. This is confirmation bias. We have preconceived notions about a homeless person, a bum, a junkie... we find it hilarious, and pleasing, to see a sign that confirms our prejudices.

When I met Frank, he was keen to tell me that he wasn't an opiate addict. Because almost all of us have an innate fear of needles, the heroin addict is very bottom of the pile. Almost every non injecting drug addict will tell you "at least I'm not a junkie" as if it somehow makes them a better person. Every stoner will tell you "at least I don't take hard drugs". Every alkie will tell you "at least I don't take drugs". Every person on antidepressants or anxiety medication will tell you "at least I don't drink". There is a clear hierarchy here, but it's no different than a bullied person finding somebody weaker than themselves in order to bully, in order to make themself feel better.

This infighting amongst humans is uncivilised, inhumane. Where did the empathy go? Where did the sympathy go? Where did all this ignorance come from?

You really think you could make things any worse by helping? In actual fact, charitable giving is far more likely to make you feel smug about yourself, and feel like you've done your bit for society, so you don't need to feel guilty about your comfortable existence. The fact of the matter is though that going on a sponsored fun run was something you wanted to do anyway. The fact is, that the coins in your pocket aren't amounting to even 1% of your wealth. You're buying a clean conscience very cheaply.

To actually sit down with people, hear their story, get involved in their lives, take a risk... that's a big deal. We all have busy lives, so who has the time to do that, and aren't charities so much better, more qualified? Well, no, not really. Charities have salaries to pay. Charities have offices and need to pay bills. The amount of money that actually reaches the front line, through charitable giving, is clearly not making any difference. The levels of poverty and deprivation are bigger than ever. The rich:poor gap is the widest it's ever been.

Economists trumpet the fact that a large number of people who were living on $1 a day are now living on $2 a day. An increase of 100% in somebody's wealth sounds like a lot in percentage terms, but would you honestly feel happy if your pay rise for the last 10 years was just $365?

Perhaps we should just be happy and content to even have a job. But why? Why should we be content to live with insecurity? Why should we "count ourselves lucky" to have a job where we're exploited, and we don't even have enough money to comfortably pay our rent and bills and have anything left over in case the car breaks down?

Don't you think that living with Damocles Sword dangling over us is unhealthy? Worrying about unemployment, and the ensuing rent arrears or mortgage defaults is not a healthy way to live. The stress and anxiety of working all hours, commuting for long distances, being away from our families, the uncertainty over our finances and the security of our homes and livelihoods... surely it's this constant stress that's destroying countless numbers of people's mental health.

We can't shy away from the fact that there's a mental health epidemic. 5 million Prozac prescriptions get written in London alone, every year. A quarter of Londoners feel like crying on public transport at least once a week.

City living can be isolating and lonely, but it doesn't get any better outside of London. There are less jobs and wages are lower outside the capital. Rents are a bit lower, but bills are just as high, and public transport isn't as good so you probably need to own a car to get to work. Food costs much the same wherever you are in the country. Many towns and suburbs can be just as isolating, and there's always the fear that you don't want your friends and neighbours finding out how unhappy you are, how stressed and anxious, how depressed.

If you live in some poxy little town with only a few major employers in the area, you can't risk burning your bridges. If you get sacked because your mental health got unmanageable, you can potentially make yourself unemployable in the place where you live. You can potentially end up labelled amongst people. If it gets really bad, you can be known to friends and neighbours as a "troubled" individual. You'll be a joke, a laughing stock.

London offers some anonymity at least, and a much bigger pool of jobs, to compensate for the fact that you can feel totally overwhelmed by the impersonal and seemingly uncaring nature of the dog-eat-dog rat race. People do stop and listen, and can be very kind and compassionate. Sometimes, it feels like we're all clinging onto the pieces of our wrecked ship in a storm. There is gratitude when you connect with another person who understands the sheer terror of facing a hostile world, out to label you, to shun you, to try and trample you.

In a way, London has led the way for the country to adopt a kind of blinkered attitude, where we're all working too hard, and our communities have been destroyed, families pulled apart by the need to spend hours at work, commute long distances and live with unbearable stress. However, London has passed the point where it was completely unable to continue any more, and I actually find it far friendlier and caring than anywhere else I've been.

London has provided, where even my own family has failed me.

Many homeless and addicts are fleeing a life of blah

Tags: #homeless #frank #addiction #alcohol #drugs #london #mentalhealth

This is a story about destructive relationships...

I stood up my most respected and one of my most sorely missed friends for the third time yesterday.

I was supposed to see him and his family just before Xmas, then we were going to have Tea at the Ritz, then we were going to travel to Heathrow, catch up on the train and in in the ample time before his flight.

WHAT'S GOING ON?

Well, I've never not had a girlfriend. I'm too addicted to sex. After the most almighty row at my ex-wife's brother's wedding, we took a break from each other for a few days. While she discussed my faults and possible solutions with her parents, I found a way out of one destructive relationship and into another.

I have written before about our unhealthy co-dependency on sex, and sex on drugs. "NRG-3" had no ingredients listed, but it was the last untried chemical on a legal high & research chemical website where each weekend, my ex and I would fuck on a different drug.

I would spend a bunch of spare time at Cambridge, reading about research chemicals, and then I would order one, ready for when I next saw my ex. I saw us like Alexander and Ann Shulgin, and had read their candid co-biographies about synthesising about 3,500 psychoactive drugs, and testing them all on themselves. The ones that seemed safe and interesting, as an aphrodisiac, Alexander took with Ann and they compared notes in their famous books PIHKAL and TIHKAL, which I read when I was 17/18 years old.

Only "NRG-3" was going in the bin. I did some snooping and found that "NRG-x" was the name for the old stock of unsold 'legal' highs that weren't legal anymore. Most people speculated that it was Methylenedioxypyrovalerone, which Crystal Meth and Crack users were switching to because it was 1/1,000th of the price per dose. Except MDPV had terrible extrapyramidal side effects in people not regularly abusing stimulants: panic attacks, palpitations, tachycardia, hyperthermia and said to be more addictive than the illegal drugs.

John McAfee, the famous billionaire software engineer became addicted to MDPV and started posting videos of himself pointing a loaded gun at his head on YouTube. The more I read, the more convinced I was that I needed to add the pyrovalerones to my 'never try' list (heroin, crack, crystal meth, PCP).

Only, in a suicidal state after the aforementioned temporary separation from my ex-wife, I thought "fuck it, what harm can 15mg do?" 15 milligrams is 10 to 20% of the size of a dose of 'most' stimulants. The line of white powder is more of a short, thin, hyphen. Your eyes can't believe that 15mg is so tiny.

My affair started immediately. I loved this drug. I loved the effects of this drug more than the pleasure I derived from my destructive relationship with my ex-wife. I had a mistress. I was having an affair. I was also free from the fear of losing my co-dependee.

I took 800mg over 4 days when I had intended to only take 15mg, for the duration of it's effects, which could be between 3 and 24 hours. It's not a stable and predictable compound. My behaviour had always been stable and predictable: I would take a single accurately measured dose, orally, and I had never ever broken my rule.

I had tried maybe 50 drugs up to this point, so I wasn't naïve, but I found myself saying and doing things I knew were addict clichés. "I'll just have a little bit more", "that looks underweight/small, I'll just increase the dose slightly", "I'm going to have one last dose then I'm going to stop", "OK, this really is the last one".

I didn't eat, I didn't sleep until the 3rd night. When I woke up I was having a terrible panic attack. Time inched by. My pulse and blood pressure were maxed. I was convinced I was going to die. I wasn't naïve though. I downloaded a computer game called Samorst, and played that for 12 hours. I felt a bit better.

This happened a few weeks after Springboard ended. I knew I had to pitch in London a month after demo day. I remember almost turning back home as I was almost on the train to London, because the thought of leaving my drugs for a few hours was scary. Way scarier than giving a pitch while high and hoping nobody from Springboard noticed I was high, sleep deprived and I had lost weight.

Everyone said that my London pitch was better than my Cambridge one (practice? home town?  drug-induced confidence? Smaller audience?).

Maybe I just didn't care so much. Jason Trost of Smarkets spotted the founder problem I had right away. I picked a startup that would be cashflow-positive, I could code in on my own in no time, and we already had a customer (5 or 6 household names by the time we started Springboard). The problem was this: I'd solved the problem in my head, written it: boring work only now, and I had no founder passion except pride in our startup.

David Hazell should have been the CEO from day one, and it took him well out of his ColdFusion comfort zone, but he can code Java and Objective-C as well as running a well administered business.

So how do you cure an MDPV addiction? Simple. Stop taking it. My ex took it as personal that I got addicted and she thought I wouldn't quit out of stubbornness  and I just needed shouting at and abusing.

I had a 'man cave' (office/lounge/bedroom) built in the summerhouse I built, but she would still walk down the garden path to shout at me there.

As if this wasn't enough, my parents were ordered to come and take me away. Things didn't get off to a flying start when my ex lets my Dad in and he's been primed to start shouting "you're a junkie" too, the moment he got in my front door. I was in the middle of an email about admission to a specialist drug clinic in London, and I should have told the hypocritical c**t to get the fuck out of my house that I paid for, back to his house which was bankrolled by my mum, and the money that came from the profit of the little cottage that my granny bought her.

My parents then insisted that we get some fresh air (it was January and I was not in a good state). Even though I wore dark glassess and a coat with a big collar, it was still mentioned at work that somebody had seen me out on the clifftop while I was off work sick.

My GP kindly gave me 5 weeks so I could attend the 28-day detox program at The Priory, where one of the country's best psychiatrists specialising in dual diagnosis (Bipolar & substance abuse) was based. A few white lies were told to protect my professional reputation and my health insurance would pick up the £12,000 bill.

My ex-wife said if I went into private hospital, she would divorce me. My psychiatrists said dual diagnosis mortality rates are very high, they disagreed that it was lack of willpower that had meant I hadn't quit by means of being shouted at, and professional care was needed, even just to see what was going on with my comorbid Bipolar II.

3 and a half weeks is what I lasted in hospital, before it dawned on me that I was going back to the same life. 3 weeks became a kind of benchmark. I could quit for 3 weeks, but never any longer. Ignorant people will say that proves a lack of willpower. Fuck you ignoramus.

When separation and divorce finally started to happen, my friend Will rescued me back to London, where I managed 2 months abstinence before my lazy ex wife insisted I travel 240 miles to get 3 valuations on a house she lived and worked less than a mile from.

I had just founded a new startup, was in advanced discussions about raising money, had built a working prototype, cycled to TechStars London every day, had a beautiful girlfriend and lived with one of my oldest friends and made new local friends as well as reconnecting with old.

Paying the mortgage on an empty property ate my savings, especially when she rejected a cash buyer who wanted to move in 6 weeks. Instead she chose an agent who didn't know the area or have any clients looking in that area, and accepted an offer from a couple in a chain who didn't even have an approved mortgage. They took 6 months.

When my parents refused to help ease the cashflow burden like they had repeatedly promised they would - not wanting stress to cause a relapse - it took me a hell of a lot of effort & distraction to raise money that I would have prepared in advance, if I knew their offer was just hot air.

I relapsed back in Bournemouth, with the idea of turning the house into a homeless shelter or something else to piss my ex off. Rang the family solicitor after all the other laughed at me, because I had trashed a hotel room in a drug-fuelled rage, and I wanted to prepare them before I handed myself in to the police.

Strangely my friend Tim turned up, got me out of there, then my Dad got me back to Oxford. Turns out the family solicitor had phoned my mum and begged them to help their son. I was very keen my dad contact the hotel and let me settle the matter with them directly. He didn't care. He doesn't have my ethics.

I had told Will (most innocent and naïve man ever) to chuck me out if I ever got any mail from Spain or Germany. Luckily I managed to find MDPV in the USA, but it still feels shitty using drugs in your friends house, even if you're trapped on the first floor with your leg in plaster in agony because the docs won't give you anything stronger than Tramadol (in case you abuse it).

Camden Town is not a good place to be a drunk or a drug addict. I would meet with Frank every day for weeks until he got a paid hostel bed. While I was making notes, to tell his story, I unwittingly took down the addresses and contacts of everywhere I had to go to try and get help from Camden.

Eventually Will did chuck me out, because of lies my Dad told him. Will did it very nicely, but my Dad destroyed the relationship we had. I remember lying in hospital, 2 canulas, torn liver, burnt abdomen, failing kidneys, and not only did Will ask for his keys back, he asked if I had made any other copies.

This is what happens when a drug addict hypocrite c**t like my Dad starts 'helping' instead of helping like he originally falsely offered to do with a modest bridging loan.

(as an aside my parents lied to my sister and said they'd lent me 250% More money than they actually did, and that I was 'emotionally blackmailing them' by being in hospital, even though they're not my next of kin anymore and I would never bother telling them if I was in hospital. No, my mum said it's ok because it's only worth making the coroner's if they need somebody to identify my body)

I survived homelessness and further hospital admissions, so I saved my mum that train fare, but Camden Council kept reneging on their promises. I got a one line email from Camden Council Housing, saying I couldn't even get a hostel bed

"On the basis of the information you have provided I am afraid that you do not meet the residence criteria to be considered for our Hostels Pathway Scheme."

What the fuck? Do you only accept people with money and houses and nice parents?

If you ever want to speak to a psychiatrist in hospital here's a little trick. Ask the the receptionist if you can borrow her phone and then dial the switchboard. Say "can I speak to the bleep holder for psychiatric liaison please?" Make sure you don't let on you're a patient until you absolutely have to. Saying "I'm trying to locate a bed in a psych ward or crisis house in London for a voluntary admission" doesn't actually contain any lies.

In this way, I was able to get 2 whole weeks of accommodation out of the council tax I pay Camden Council. I don't feel bad, because I had a massive wound in my leg and my penis was hanging off.

At the end of the two weeks, Camden Council said "here's a number for you to phone [if you haven't been mugged or stabbed, and still have your phone]  in the morning for us to come check on you". I said I wanted to stay in a a derelict tennis court maintenance shed to stay dry. They said, "we need you to stay where [muggers are and people have pissed]".

So I booked myself into a suite at the Royal Camden Golf & Spa Resort (a 14 bed dorm in a hostel) and proceeded to go into drug withdrawal. The think about London hostel dorms is, there's bunks, and there's a bathroom, and then outside there's the capital city of London, but if somebody is going through drug withdrawal in one of the bunks, fuck London, you should stay and watch them cos there's no privacy. It's like "Trainspotting" as a live play with one of the best actors you'll ever meet.

Fuck rehab at £430 a night... a hostel is a great place to get clean, provided you have a Laurence. Laurence could see that this was a dress rehearsal, and opening night would be never hopefully, and ushered a disappointed crowd of rubberneckers off around the sights of London. 

I'd managed to hang onto enough money to put myself through the cheapest rehab in the country, which is in Bournemouth believe it or not. I told my mum to hang on though (could hae been yet more lies anyway) because I needed to finish my round of golf and I had a massage booked for later [as in, hostels are like cheap rehab anyway].

Before long I had a group of friends. Laurence from the mountains. Rory the Lidl vodka stealer. Jody the poet. Definitely not French Jack. Psychic Laura. "I just want a baby" Priscilla. "Quite Old But You Still Would" Marla, Gorgeous Flavie, My later ex (banned) Antonella. DJ Kristos.... and many many more, including Paolo who had previously been acting tourguide, but with about 8 times as many years in the Big Smoke than him, I accidentally stole that role.

The thing about a hostel is, if you want drugs, everybody else wants to share, and you have to be high in public. Also, there's none of this pious "not a drop of alcohol shall pass my lips bollocks", and it's a lot easier to get clean with a beer in your hand than an herbal tea being told by some ex-junkie "drugs are bad mmmkay".

It took me a month to get clean and another month to get a job (and stay clean) and then I stayed clean until I dumped Antonella for being abusive, and then Laura got all mumpy that I didn't move onto her. Jody, who was in Love with Antonella, also was angry with me. My entire group of friends in London (except Rory) fell apart, and then my contract ended.

• Abusive relationship = multiple relapses
• No money + massive stress = relapse
• No job + no friends = relapse
• Innocent/naïve middle class person + lies about drug addiction = no friend

So I was nursed back to health by the nicest family in Ireland. The O'Riordan's of Killlavullen, Cork [The Rebel County]. I owe them my life.

The thing about the O'Riordans is that they're the smartest most hard-working and make do people you'll ever meet. Eddie, Laurence's dad's climbed 8,000m peaks and can sail, as well as repair just about anything. Breda, Laurence's mum is just so full of love & care, without all that œdipus complex bollox that my mum needs to deal with. There's sister Maria the nurse who all the boys in Magners drink in to look at and chat to, but they know they'd get the beating of a lifetime if they touched her. Then there's Danielle, with her scholarship, but she's practically already [unofficial] #2 in a company that's about to IPO. She's got Dublin culture but no arrogance.

Anyway, seeing and staying touch, and not falling out with friends is hard. Imagine if all your money just takes you deeper into debt, and keeping your mind quiet is harder than working any job... and it used to say lots of interesting things, but now it just says one: "MDPV"

Just about anything and anything that could have hurt my self esteem has happened. Showing a nurse your penis hanging off is a good one. How's about the police leading you out of a hotel, handcuffed, just wearing boxing shorts ["I'm sure you deserved it, you devil"].

And I keep having to go back to doing what I have done since the age of 17 to stop myself from going bankrupt, but I hate it and it's so easy I can type and have a conversation at the same time. And then when I've got just enough money, I'll walk into the boardroom and I'll tell the board exactly what I think, and I always get fired, but they're too scared I'm going to whistleblow to not give me a reference, so they just quietly sack whoever needs to actually go.

So, I came up with a couple of lists of things I like doing and don't like doing, and I've come up with a bunch of ideas that bring in money, keep me busy, and doing the things I like not the things I don't.

I'm sending it to Jakub, because he's the only man alive who can judge whether I'm talking pie in the sky bollocks or it might be worth a go (maybe with some discussion with his dad).

I have a practical speculative list too, which I might send to Rory, as he's the only man alive who'd come in on me with some mad scheme to stop both of our minds from driving us mad.

Jakub, it just remains to say, I'm so sorry for standing you up, but I was 6 months clean in San Francisco, but I had to ethically walk away from the HSBC corruption and incompetence. Since then, it's been promises, promises and false starts, but I'm waiting for the day when I either die cos I'm dumb enough to figure out how to get high for 14p a day, or smart enough to do something I can be proud of and it was my destiny.

So cute (9 October 2013)

P.S. - Sansa (Happy Birthday!), Lydia, Margaret, Nicola, David, Willian, Will, Jess, Cameron... I'm going as fast as I can. It's like trying to get a 10,000kg ball rolling.

Tags; #startup #addiction #friends

This is a story about unusual techniques to stay alive...

I once filled up a law firm's email server with pictures of myself. I was quite concerned that I was dying and wanted to get the attention of the family friend who was mediating on a matter that was very stressful - an acrimonious divorce was threatening my life & livelihood. Still, very strange behaviour.

When I was getting completely nonsensical replies via email from somebody, I started CC'ing more and more people, so they could see that none of my questions were being answered and an ulterior motive was being pursued by this other person.

Obviously, letting people know when I was in hospital was a bit 'attention seeking' apparently, but messages of support were gratefully received. I know I still have to reply to quite a few people who were kind enough to reach out, but you can believe me when I say your messages did really make a difference.

There was a guy in London who was going to kill himself, but he decided that if, as he walked along, one person looked him in the eye and smiled at him then he wouldn't go through with it. The urban solitude of London had made him feel invisible, uncared for, alone. Thankfully, somebody did look him in the eye and smile. Human connection is important. Somebody saved that man's life with the simplest of gestures that cost nothing.

Urban solitude is a problem for many new arrivals in the capital. People have their headphones plugged in, reading a book, or their kindle, watching a movie on their tablet or perhaps just idly playing with their phone. Especially in the morning rush-hour, nobody is talking or in any way acknowledging that you're all crammed together like sardines in a stuffy tube carriage, on the way to that job that you all hate, from some far-flung flat that you can barely afford.

Anybody who shops in a town centre is probably expert at avoiding the people with clipboards who "just need a moment of your time" to fill in some survey or sign up to direct debit some regular donation to a particular charity. We have become experts in walking right through people giving out leaflets, who aggressively thrust them into areas of our body near our hands, but yet we avoid actually taking a damn leaflet. We can walk right past the beggar and the Big Issue seller without even acknowledging their existence. 1,000-yard stare, off into the distance, and pretend like you didn't even hear them, didn't even see them.

I was thinking today about the improvements that Frank made to his story he told me, in order to seem like a more worthy cause. He shaved 4 years off his age, and showed me his forearms and asked me to inspect for the track marks of an injecting drugs user. It makes me feel bad that I've told my own story of homelessness, if people are going to dismiss it because of my drug use that I'm being completely honest and open about.

When you meet homeless people, they are often very keen for you to know that drugs and alcohol play no part in their homelessness. To be honest, I was very surprised, when I sat down to have a chat with a homeless person, Matt, underneath the bridge outside Chiswick underground station. Matt was extremely articulate and erudite, and I owe him a big debt of thanks for some of the nuggets of information that were later to serve me well on my own journey through homelessness. I have to admit that although I believed him, I was extremely shocked when he told me he had no drug or alcohol abuse in his past. He was simply p**sed off with the system.

If it looks like I'm dropping all this stuff about getting to know the homeless, and trying to help Frank, into this narrative in order to big myself up as some kind of philanthropist, you're wrong. Actually, I found it fascinating, informative, later useful and certainly helping Frank helped me to avoid dealing with my own life at the time, and feel better about myself. There was no alturism there. It was escapism.

Every fun-run that you go on. Every sponsored walk or abseil, or parachute jump or whatever it is... you probably did it because you wanted to do the activity, to feel part of the event, to feel like you made a difference. Sadly, you didn't, except to your own sense of wellbeing and achievement. Yes, we salve our middle-class guilt by making paltry charity donations and taking part in fundraising. Charity doesn't work. It's failed.

We are arriving now at a situation where we are in the middle of a refugee crisis, a housing crisis, a benefits crisis, a pension crisis, an economic crisis, a mental health epidemic. Cancer, AIDS, Multiple Sclerosis and a heap of other diseases are still rife. Poverty has not been made history by any rock concerts.

I'm absolutely not discouraging you from getting involved with philanthropic work, and if you're a volunteer or you're doing your bit to directly help in the lives of others then I applaud you... not that you want or deserve such condescension. Sorry about that.

Everything's just so damn broken. Life's really not working well for the vast majority of people on Planet Earth.

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem, and I feel very guilty indeed.

Here I am being driven to work through a massive slum in Mumbai from my 7 star hotel. I'm off to help JPMorgan process $1.16qn of Credit Default Swaps, with a team of underpaid Indians who travel for hours on dangerous and overcrowded busses and trains to get to the office. Do you think I was helping this nation of 1.1 billion souls?

I was there in the middle of Ganesh Chaturthi and the monsoon rains. The streets were crammed with trailers with idols and flowers being towed to the sea, with dancing neighbourhood groups beating drums and dancing in the road behind them. The roads are pretty much gridlock anyway, without some gawping tourist of an investment banker sitting in the middle of the chaos with his private driver.

We can feel very special being driven around in the developing world, and living like a king relatively speaking. Many people fall for it. Many people fall for the trick and start believing they actually are special and they deserve their place in the world. That, for me, is where a person can cross the line and stray into narcissism and a sense of entitlement.

Several friends have told me virtually the same story, about thinking they were a hit with the ladies in South Asia or South America, and having 'pulled' a local girlfriend, they were surprised when later asked for cash. Just because you're not obviously in a whorehouse, doesn't mean that you're not participating in prostitution. Just because you're not obviously on a cotton plantation, doesn't mean you're not participating in slavery.

Economic slavery means using your hard currency (Dollar, Sterling, Euro, Yen etc.) in order to buy labour (and all labour's fruits) far more cheaply than you would be able to in a country with a hard currency. You can't get pedalled across a European city in a bicycle rickshaw for less than $1. In London it's £10/minute to be ferried around in this manner, and you can be stung with a £200 bill for a journey that would take 3 minutes by bus.

So, I'm able to sit about on my arse writing the equivalent of two novels all about myself on a blog, peppered with photographs of me. This can only happen at the expense of everybody who grew my food, stitched my clothes and manufactured the expensive laptop on which I type these very words. You could say I'm the ultimate narcissist and profiteer from the hard labour of others.

However, modern life can make you very sick. My friend Klaus often says "it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a sick society". I think he's right. Just because we are dry and warm and well fed and comfortable here in the UK, doesn't mean that our island is now 'full' and we should 'look after our own'.

We are beginning to pay the price for Imperial aggression and an unwillingness to share. That we don't even redistribute enough wealth to end homelessness and poverty within our own borders, shows just how far we have taken small-minded 'look after number one' attitudes. The tabloid reader's belief that immigrants are not an integral part of our society, is ironic when a great many of Britain's working class are clustered together on sink-hole estates that they can never escape. Nobody from higher social strata would ever have cause to venture into the isolated community of poor white Brits.

Do I think I'm better than those people? Am I above living in a council flat, claiming JSA and integrating with the [not] working class? Actually, I feel rather angry that these people have been manipulated by the media into scapegoating the wrong group of people. It's the moneyed political elite who are the reason for economic inactivity and stressful hand-to-mouth existance of the ordinary British public, not the immigrants and refugees.

Yes, I'm privileged. Yes, I still have some shred of self-esteem. Yes, I'm somewhat conceited in writing so much about myself and plastering photos of me all over it. But am I unaware of my actions? Am I unable to perceive the self-absorption of it all? No.

The fact of the matter is that I just don't want to be trodden underfoot, so I'm yapping like a little dog. I don't want to end up dying young, with everybody wondering what happened and whether they could have helped at all, whether they could have intervened.

Suicide might be a sane response to an insane world, but I do appreciate that it's not a pleasant thing for other people to have to deal with, when you're gone. I've written before about compassion fatigue, and it must be hard when one of your friends or a family member becomes unwell with something so poorly understood as a mental disorder.

Drinking yourself to death, or slowly killing yourself with drugs... these things are clearly part of the spectrum of mental disorders. Substance abuse is just part of a complex picture of declining mental heath that is tightly bound up with prejudice and urban myths.

I had to quit drinking for 101 days, and all drugs and substances for 6 months, in order to be taken seriously. I suffered for my art and my cause: to draw attention to the plight of ordinary human beings who are suffering, not because they are corrupt and immoral, but because our very society is sick, and we are turning our back on our own friends and relatives, because of stupid media bulls**t.

Things have to be pretty bad in somebody's life for them to take a risk with a deadly substance. Things have to be really bad in somebody's life for them to be driven into the arms of a chemical dependency, in preference for choosing life.

Why did I choose not to choose life? Why did I choose something else?

Tags: #drugs #addiction #homeless #frank #career #divorce #politics

This is a story about helping people...

Those are some kids from an extremely poor fishing village in Northern Brazil who I gave my surfboard to. Imagine one of them gets really good at surfing, like former Brazilian windsurfing World Champion, Ricardo Campbello. But then imagine if they get a lucrative sponsorship deal and then with their wealth and fame, they get into drugs and die of an overdose. Did I help or did I hinder?

Same dilemma when a friend or relative gets sick. If you help them back to health, they might then go on to do something that they wouldn't have been able to if you'd just let them die. You now feel responsible for their fate. If they do good things, you feel glad and proud of what you did to help them. If they do bad things, you question whether you should have helped them, and not just let them die.

Is that how it works? I don't know. I don't tend to look at people and actions as good and bad. I tend to assume that there is a set of circumstances, an environment, that drives a person's behaviour. I also can't stand by and let things play out. I don't want to play God either, and decide that I know the future, and sit in judgement over anybody. I feel it's my duty to help where I can.

And so it was, I came to be helping Frank, or trying at least, to escape alcoholism and homelessness. A hotel and a hostel that I stuck him in, to get him off the streets, were not exactly thrilled to have him as a guest. But unwittingly, they are part of a larger story that saw Frank go through treatment for alcohol dependency, go teetotal and get a place to live.

For all I know, I may have delayed or detracted from something that was inevitable anyway. I might have actually risked his recovery, for all I know. All I know is that when I met him, he was homeless and a polydrug abuser with an alcohol dependency, as well as numerous other health complaints that were being exacerbated by living on the streets.

Naturally, Frank wanted more than I could give. He wanted me to make all his problems go away. Nobody can do that for somebody else. We're all fighting our own fight at the end of the day, we just need some supporters in our corner. We just need somebody to hold the bucket while we spit blood into it.

So, what's the difference between a lapse, and a fully-blown relapse into drug and/or alcohol abuse? Well, somebody who's had a drink, sobered up and is now telling you "I won't do that again" but has a bottle of vodka in their bag is clearly not very committed to sobriety.

During my recent shenanigans, I hid my little bag of Supercrack. Then I took a load of legal benzos and went to sleep. When I woke up, I considered that I needed to end the binge completely, or risk total relapse, however it was too easy to just go and retrieve my little baggie from its hiding place and continue the whole horrid affair.

It wasn't until I chose to flush the chemicals down the plughole, by my own free will, that I had clearly delimited the episode as a lapse, not a relapse.

Anybody is capable of going on the Internet and following the steps that I did, and then tearing open the postal envelope and snorting the contents inside. Therefore, we share the same addictive potential, you & I. In fact, I'm less of a risk than you, because I have far greater first-hand knowledge and experience of what the negative consequences are. It might take you several months or years before you realise that you're in deep s**t.

So, I'm presently going through a chemical and digital detox. That means that I probably haven't read any blog comments, Facebook comments, Facebook messages, WhatsApp messages or anything that has been sent to me electronically. Sorry about that. I do need those messages and I will get round to reading them and responding. I am extremely grateful that you took the time to send me anything. Please keep reaching out.

I do need your help, and it will make a positive difference. You're not 'enabling' me to continue to do anything naughty/bad, and you're not guilty by association to some future as-yet uncommitted crime spree or whatever it is that holds back those who think they have God-like Minority Report style powers to preordain the future.

I've been a bit of a puppet on a string, but I've managed to sever the ties to those unseen hands, and now I'm just your friend, who is very sick and very tired and very alone and very sad and very vulnerable.

Tags: #frank #homeless #addiction #alcohol #drugs #addiction

This is a story about being down and out on the streets of Camden Town...

Performing your greatest hits over and over again drives you insane. However, the public and society expect you to keep repeating what you do best, again and again and again, like a dancing bear or a dog trained to do tricks.

Whoever pays the piper calls the tune, but I'm not a CD player. If you want to listen to the same song over and over again, just press the repeat button on your iPod. Making an artist compromise on their creativity, in order to simply be a human machine, a robot, can destroy them.

The anxiety associated with knowing you have to do something that you've done so much that it's a complete paint by numbers, starts to become an unbearable burden on your ability to be able to function. Pretty much the only way to remain functioning is to drink yourself into such oblivion that you just don't care anymore.

Alcohol is a GABA agonist. What that means is that it suppresses a certain amount of your brain activity. It's effectively making you chilled out and dumb. Yes, if you're chilled out and dumb, you don't mind doing the same stupid shit over and over and over again. If you're intelligent and creative it destroys your soul, your desire to continue living.

Is it arrogant to say "fuck this" and stop doing what your talent and experience qualifies you to do, because it's destroying you? Should I just shut the hell up and "get a job" as I've been told to do by some ignorant twats? Well, it would literally kill me.

There are 2 ways I could die right at the moment. I could kill myself or I could drink myself to death. These are both sane responses to an insane world. I'm not a robot. Sorry about that.

My whole job is to automate human tasks. My whole job is to get mechanical robots, machines, to perform repetitive tasks instead of having human slaves or human robots doing them. We have reached a point with the development of technology, computing, software, where we don't need to do stupid repetitive shit anymore. Even creating software doesn't have to mean re-inventing the wheel anymore.

So, if you ask me to do something that's just plain wrong, I won't do it anymore. If you ask me to write code that's just going to go into the dustbin, I won't do it. I've stopped writing bugs. I've stopped supporting failures and idiots who don't have a software background. If you don't know your arse from your elbow, I won't show you the respect that you don't deserve.

If you want to know how to build software that can process $1.16 quadrillion ($1,160,000,000,000,000) per year, you can pay me for my professional opinion and I'll show you how it's done. That's the most money that's ever been processed by a banking software system, so that means I know what I'm talking about. If you don't want to listen, we can part company and I'll wish you the very best of luck.

1% of 1 quadrillion is 10 trillion. 1% of 10 trillion is 100 billion. 1% of 100 billion is 1 billion. 1% of 1 billion is 10 million. Any questions?

Ignore what people tell you. Money really does grow on trees, for those who can be bothered to climb. Yes, geese that lay golden eggs really do exist. You just have to climb the beanstalk and risk the wrath of an angry giant.

Magic beans are not a waste of money. They can help you to climb the beanstalk. They won't help you climb back down again though. What goes up must come down, but you might take a tumble. More on this in a future post entitled: Self Medication (Part Two).

You've heard about doping in sport. Why would you think that the athletes of the corporate world would be any different from those who compete in the Olympic Games? The pressure to perform at the very top of your game is just the same, if not greater. The competition is fierce, and anything that gives you a competitive edge is needed unless you want to be trampled underfoot by the thundering herd.

Did you ever wonder why London drinks so much coffee? Did you ever wonder why people are prepared to pay the best part of £3 or £4 for some bitter black sludge? Well, it's because of a plant alkali called Caffeine. Yes, that's a performance enhancing drug. It helps you to concentrate, and allows you to work with more energy, stamina, than would ordinarily be permitted by your body & mind. It increases your output potential.

Limitless? No, not limitless. There is a cost involved, and that cost is insomnia and anxiety. But don't worry about that, because there's always alcohol to take the edge off the anxiety and put you into an alcohol-induced coma that is a substitute for sleep.

You are never more than a few tens of metres from an outlet for caffeine or alcohol in London. They even have bars at bus stops. Well, they don't really, but me and my friends made one. It was very popular. It was the ultimate London pop-up.

What can I get you, sir? Would you like uppers or would you like downers? Uppers in the morning, and throughout the day. Downers after work and throughout the whole weekend. Uppers again on Monday morning to get you going again. Heaps of downers on a Friday to try and calm down from the working week, to 'rest' and recuperate. Oh yes, London is a very high performance place.

So if it's not limitless, what happens when you reach the limits? What happens when you're working on the number one projects for the number one companies, dealing with the biggest amounts of money that have ever been processed in the history of humanity? What happens when you have completely saturated yourself with alcohol and caffeine?

Well, you need crutches. You need a wheelchair. You need something to keep you rolling. You become somewhat disabled, but you need to keep moving, so you get wheeled around or you have to hobble along. Why do you think your office chair has wheels on it? It's because you're probably so f**ked that you can barely stand.

Yes, globalisation and corporate culture will f**k you up. You're only playing by the rules. You're only trying to compete and stay up with the herd, but it's f**king everybody up. Setting everybody up to compete with one another is causing people to be trampled to death.

Adversarial culture is wrecking lives. Us vs. Them and the zero sum game is in the spirit of competition, not co-operation. For somebody to win, somebody else has to lose. The system is designed to have losers as well as winners, and because there can only be one winner, that means everybody else is a loser.

Ultimately, somebody is going to win. Yes, that's right. One person is going to have it all, and everybody else will be dead and buried. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, apart from the one-eyed man, who is king of the world. Everybody else just starves to death. Great system!

But we're all in this together, right? There's safety in numbers, surely? Well, you shouldn't put the Lions in charge of the herd of Zebra. That's pure madness. The conflict of interest between the Lions and the Zebra means that the Lions are not best placed to be in charge of the herd, even if they are at the top of the food chain.

Being an apex predator does not mean that you are best qualified to judge what the greater good is. It means that you're incentivised to be selfish. You don't want to tumble from your position at the top of the pyramid. Being one of the struggling masses is shit beyond belief.

Counter-culture does not mean sitting around smoking dope. That's just totally dumb. You might as well just hurl yourself into the Lion's mouth. Making yourself slow and stupid is just about the dumbest possible thing you could do. It's playing into the hands of the oppressive ruling class.

You think this is a bit paranoid and conspiracy-theory-esque? Well, do you feel lucky, punk? 2.7 billion people live on less than $2 a day. Would you and your family like to join them? Would you like to get to the back of the queue? Would you like to swap your decadent western life for the life of somebody in the developing world? No, I didn't think so. You'd much rather prop up the adversarial system where you're lucky enough to be near the top of tottering tree.

Yes, luck is the decisive factor here, not skill or hard work. You don't think people in Asia and Africa work hard? You don't think people in the developing world are smart and resourceful? You're wrong. You're arrogant. You're deluded.

So, why do I reject the system that I profit from? Why do I prefer to live on the street in a cardboard box? Well, it actually pains me to know that I'm part of a system that's causing so much human misery. It's actually physically and mentally damaging to me to help to perpetrate deeds that cause death and destruction. I can't bury my head in the sand like you can.

I know you'll say or do anything to defend your family. More fool you though for not keeping your cock in your trousers. There are plenty of orphans who need parents. Why the f**k didn't you adopt? Are you literally the most selfish c**t in the whole wide world? Yes, the evidence would suggest that you are. You prop up the adversarial system and you create more mouths to feed in the decadent west and do nothing to give a hand up to the already starving mouths in the developing world.

There's no pride in having made a screaming, shitting, vomiting midget. Your body is evolved to do that. You had sex because you enjoyed having sex. You had a baby because your body is programmed to make babies. You did what snakes and scorpions do. You did what sharks and wasps do. You did what spiders and mosquitos do.

If I could give you one bit of advice, it would be to have a lobotomy. Ignorance is bliss. Being stupid is brilliant. Having higher brain functions is a curse. Being conscious and able to absorb information from the world and process it using rational thoughts is a f**king nightmare.

If you're wondering why I liked living with homeless people, it's because our footprint was much smaller. We lived small. We only consumed what we needed, and nothing more. We weren't making more arrogant ignorant greedy clones of ourselves to fill the void in our meaningless lives. We were just surviving and self-medicating for the agony of the f**ked up world.

We were very cheap, in terms of our economic, social and environmental impact. When a white middle class rich person goes haywire, they normally hurt the world a great deal. That's why it's such a great shame that the west is run by such criminal psychopaths. They'll drop bombs and starve people in order to remain quaffing champagne in their palaces. I include relatively modest homes when I say 'palaces'. Yes take a look around at your home and remember that $2 a day to keep a person alive for a year is probably the price of one of your many flat screen TVs.

So am I a hypocrite? Well, calling me one from your palatial surroundings makes you a hypocrite. You can't hypocritically accuse somebody of hypocrisy. That's ridiculous. Have you been homeless? Have you lived on less than $2 a day? No, I didn't think so. Shut the hell up and go and buy your kids an iPad.

So, what's going to happen to me? Well, my current thinking is that I'm going to finish my story and then take the final exit. I can't really see any more point in existing beyond telling this story, this cautionary tale. I'm literally wasting oxygen.

I loved being homeless in Camden Town. At least it was an honest existence. At least it was true to my values (September 2014)

Tags: #homeless #suicide #frank #capitalism #drugs #depression #alcohol #london #career #banking

This is a story about a split personality...

This is 1 Churchill Place and this is Nick: the schoolboy who leads an exciting double life. For when Nick eats a banana, an amazing transformation takes place. Nick is BANANAMAN, ever alert for the call to action.

I'm not actually Bananaman, but I do eat porridge and a banana every morning. I'm also ever alert for the call to action. I wasn't born to follow.

In Silicon Valley, and with the top people in banks, there is an arms race. But it's not with weapons, it's with smart people. If you let good people go to your competitors, they will beat you. It's that simple. High performance teams make stuff happen.

There's no point in being part of a race to the bottom. I was really impressed by the way that Barclays have embraced the modern software development paradigm. They hired bright young people and allowed them to get on and make some damn high quality software. They let them run their projects with a risk-based approach and using Agile best practices.

I got a bit cross with a couple of people at Barclays, who were straddling the line. They were neither demanding quality and an old-school attention to detail, nor were they very talented or quick. However, the bulk of the developers were amazing and a pleasure to work with. There is always dead wood in any organisation. The problem comes when somebody gets promoted to a position of incompetency.

There's no sense in bluffing your way into a role you can't handle. If your skills aren't up to it, you can't handle the pressure or you just don't have relevant experience, stay away... you're just going to land you, your team and your company in trouble. I've never stepped away from a role in a particularly elegant way, but I haven't dug myself a hole either. I hate people who make themselves into a key man dependency when they're incompetent.

Fail fast. Move fast and break things. There's no sense in spending years and years doing something you're not very good at. I hate the way that we all need to push for promotions in order to get a pay rise and not be on the breadline, but people end up being promoted to positions they're hopelessly unqualified for, because all they're good at doing is kissing ass to clamber up the greasy pole.

Yes, if I had an hour to do some actual work or an hour to make myself more indispensable, or improve my promotion prospects, you can guess which one I'm more economically incentivised to do.

The way that corporations are run encourages people to delegate the things that they're supposed to do, and concentrate on things that only further their personal objectives, which are in direct conflict with the organisational needs. The most junior team members do all the work, while their managers concentrate on making themselves look good, and scrapping over the few promotions.

This adversarial system is flawed from the outset.

Look at how compliant these suit wearing office workers are, patiently queuing to get on a packed tube train to take them back to their miserable tiny home that they hardly spend any time in. They spend all their time pushing paper around in order to service the mortgage, which is a millstone around their neck.

God forbid that you end up procreating. Then your nuts really are in the vice. You will be having to sprint along on that treadmill to service all your debt, working to worship angry bawling midgets that are hungry and have relentless needs for clothes that they will soon outgrow or be ruined by this decadent practice of 'playing'. Ha! F**k those little sh1ts! They get to 'play' all day... how nice for them. Bastards.

Well, there's a way to punish those little sh1ts for being born. Yes, they should have a taste of what it's like to have not kept your cock in your trousers. Yes, they should be forced to go to an office like environment. No play for them. I have to sit at a desk all day, bored out of my mind, so the fruit of my loins has to too.

That'll teach the kids for being so stupid as to give birth to themselves, without a care in the world for how they're going to pay the mortgage, dress themselves or feed themselves. There's a rumour that babies can't even forage for food or kill an antelope. Who the hell do this race of midgets think they are? Arrogantly expecting to be wheeled around in carriages, and getting to gorge themselves on milk swelled breasts all day. That looks like a jolly nice life to me. I don't get to suckle on any breasts at all in the office. Yes, I was sacked last time I did that.

I'm rather patiently waiting for the day that I'm big enough to go to school. Mummy says that when I'm all grown up I will get to go and study with the other children. I will get to read books all day, and write poems and sh1t. Yes, that sounds like good fun. I would like to do that all day. At the moment all I do is follow grown ups around and get told off when they make mistakes. I do tests that they know the answers to, but they don't like my answers.

I see that the grown ups like to drink coffee and alcohol. I'm too young to have those things, but they look like a lot of fun. I would like to have those things. It looks like the coffee allows you to concentrate on doing your job, rather than having to deal with the existential angst of executing pointless tasks. It looks like the alcohol allows you to deal with the anxiety of never quite being able to break free from a system that is engineered to break the will of the sheep-like people, and force them into a system of meek compliance.

Yes, I think I will like it when I become a student, and I will get to lie around drinking booze and coffee, and pontificating about life the universe and everything. Reading books and writing is a lot more fun than being told what to do by grown ups. Mummy says I'm smart so I deserve to get to sit around and be complemented for coming up with the same answers to questions as the grown ups.

I can see now that the master plan is working very well. I can see now that studying history, politics and having mastery of the English language, has led us to this point of great enlightenment. Yes, I can see how amazing society has become since we started getting everybody to read the same books and work in the same offices doing the same kinds of things. I can see now that this kind of groupthink has been a very successful experiment. Life is so amazing now.

I'm so disappointed that I didn't come up with the very clever idea of studying other people's mistakes in order to be able to be an expert on mistakes. I'm clearly not very clever, because I'm not very good at making mistakes. Except the mistake of accidentally doing successful stuff. Yes, I should be like the grown ups who study mistakes and then copy them. I'm not very good at following their example. I'm not a very good student of failure.

I stupidly keep building stuff that works. I stupidly keep making a profit. I stupidly keep succeeding. How silly of me. Yes, that's clearly not the way the world works. We need to have failure. We need to have fighting. We need to have war. Success is not an option in the modern, enlightened world.

Let's not listen to the successful people who are proven and are making things work without violence and conflict. No, let's glorify the bullies and the warmongers instead. We should definitely have a society run by failures, run by those who can't make things work, harbour ideas of violence and vengeance to compensate for their inadequacies. Those are the kinds of leaders I want.

I see now that we are choosing just the very kinds of leaders that we really need. The kinds of people who want to go into positions of authority, responsibility... they are invariably the kinds who are not on a total ego-trip and grinding an axe, have a chip on their shoulder. They definitely don't have micropenises and some kind of small-man syndrome.

Yes, all the warmongering. Getting your willies out, I mean getting your guns out. Yes, it's very macho. It's definitely not overcompensation for your inadequacies. I'm definitely full of much more admiration for leaders who advocate violence. I'm definitely in favour of a global society based on bashing each other over the head with clubs. I'm definitely not in favour of diplomacy and peace. War is the answer, but I've been too stupid to see it before.

How foolish of me not to see the brilliance in the idea that we can all have pointy sticks and we can just attack each other and take whatever we want. I'm really looking forward to living in a cave again and foraging for nuts and berries and trying not to be eaten by a tiger. It sounds a lot more exciting than working in an office.

Yes, working in an office is pretty boring. I'd much rather be bullying somebody with my pointy stick. Especially if I have a pointy stick but they don't. Yes if I get to poke them with my pointy stick with no fear them being able to poke me back, because I'm the only one with a pointy stick, then I'll feel like the king of the world, which is the whole reason for the existence of the Earth and humanity, right? The whole reason the entire planet and the human race was created was as a massive entertainment system for me, right? I'm entitled to go out poking whoever I want with my pointy stick because it's fun.

The whole reason the world exists is so that I can have fun. It's a playground, and I'm allowed to play. I'm bored in my job and I want the attention of the other children and I like playing games, so I'm going to sharpen a stick and go and poke the most vulnerable weak person I can find. That will make me feel good.

I have no words to describe just how boring it is moving money around for pointy stick manufacturers. I have no words to describe just how boring it is never getting to play with those pointy sticks. I have no words to describe just how boring it is to never get to poke anybody with a pointy stick.

I've studied the history of poking people with pointy sticks and it sounds like a lot of fun. There's a lot of hope & glory in poking people with pointy sticks. It sounds like a barrel of laughs. It sounds like a game of soldiers.

So what the hell am I doing flying a desk when I could be flying a drone. I'm good with computers. I used to like computer games. Poking people with pointy sticks makes you feel better about yourself. What's not to like? I think I've found my perfect career.

It must take a lot of bravery to sit behind a screen, pressing buttons, in the full knowledge that the remote system that you are controlling that is poking people with pointy sticks, completely protects you from any physical pain or risk of injury or death. Yes, that's a really brave thing, I think, to sit playing war games on a computer.

Whether the people being poked by your pointy stick are real or they're simulated, that doesn't really matter. It's just that the graphics are probably more realistic in the simulator. I like the way the heads explode when you shoot them in the simulator. I don't like the physics of reality. They say that the simulated people don't even have families. Where's the fun in killing some computer simulated person who doesn't even have a family?

It gets boring after a while, killing simulated people. Time to drop some real bombs. The physics in reality isn't as good, but at least you're killing real people with real families. At least there is real human suffering. We haven't figured out how to simulate human suffering yet, or maybe nobody is particularly interested in experiencing simulated human suffering. Maybe there's no money in simulated human suffering. Maybe there is only money in real human suffering, for the manufacturers of pointy sticks.

That is all.

Frankie is well trained. Look at him doing his filing. It's a File-o-Frank (April 2007)

Tags: #frankie #politics #computing #banking #career #london