This is a story about the hungry tide...

Humans are supposed to live near water. It's so essential to life, that I think that we find tranquility when we are near the source of something we can drink, wash with and watch life go by, carried by the currents.

Growing up in an area of Oxford called Jericho, the canal was a moat-like border, to the West. There was a footbridge and one road bridge, but those were the only ways of getting across to the far bank, besides swimming.

A short walk up the canal would bring you to Port Meadow, where the river Thames snakes its way through the flood plains of the flat valley bottom. Although it's the second longest river in the United Kingdom, it's quite a different beast in Oxfordshire than it is in London.

By the time the Thames reaches the Isle of Dogs, it's close enough to the river mouth that the tides affect it in quite a pronounced way. At low tide, there are some fairly sizeable beaches that are revealed, accessible from ladders and steps down from the riverside footpaths.

Growing up in central Oxford, the only discernable change with the Thames was when the river burst its banks and Port Meadow flooded. Then, a huge area of green field became a massive lake. One year the lake even froze, and you felt OK walking on the ice, because you knew there was a grassy field just beneath: you weren't going to fall through and get sucked under by any river current.

The Oxford canals froze too, and although we hefted bricks and stones onto the ice to try and smash it, it would have been fairly crazy to try and walk on the ice. I do remember driving my radio controlled car on the ice, and how much fun it was to make the little toy spin doughnuts and do huge drift slides.

Presumably dogs and ball games could only take place in Mill Quay if the water is frozen over. I hate these signs that basically say "NO FUN". Growing up in the 1980's in central Oxford meant lots of playing on the streets, in the parks and on Port Meadow. Usually involving water bombs, smoke bombs or other incendiary devices.

In London a strange kind of separation of society exists, where big groups of kids hang around near their high-rise social housing, but they are more than unsupervised: they are completely ignored by the entire adult population. This is completely reciprocated. As a white middle-class thirtysomething person, you're completely invisible to huge groups of teenagers, hanging around doing their own thing. The impoverished kids and the wealthy professionals co-exist within metres of each other, but neither group acknowledges the existence of the other.

The Isle of Dogs is in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, which is one of the most deprived areas of the UK. You only have to step one street inland from the riverside apartments, to see a totally different side of London to the gated communities that line the Thames.

There's something nice about not feeling totally surrounded. Here is a city of 8 million permanent inhabitants, plus the millions more who make up the commuters, tourists and those who are unofficially living here. When you're in a basement, with several flats above you, surrounded by houses and offices on all sides, it's easy to feel rather hemmed in.

By reaching the very top of a skyscraper, so there is nothing but the open sky above you, or by reaching the water's edge, so there is nothing but an expanse of water on one side of you, you can turn your back on the chaos and overcrowding of the city, whenever it pleases you.

Sure, there's the occasional ferry, canal boat, pleasure cruise or whatever, but water represents enough of a barrier to most ordinary folks caught up in the rat race that it's nice to watch the boats go past in a way that can't be said of watching stressed commuters scuttle down underground passages.

What the hell am I doing, living in a riverside apartment I can no longer afford, since my last contract ended? Well, if you've never had to sleep rough or in a hostel, you should try it sometime, with your work clothes and all your worldly possessions. Try commuting to the office from under a bush or after spending the night in bunk bed with one bathroom and 13 other dormitory friends, in different states of alcohol and cannabis intoxication.

Homelessness, poverty... these things tend to connect you with chaotic environments that do not exactly improve your mental health and capability to rebuild a life, return to work, get back to health, wealth and stability.

When I was working, I was getting up at 7am to take a run by the Thames, and pulling some fairly serious hours spent working on an extremely stressful project. Do you think that's possible when you also can't sleep and relax at home, and it takes ages in a cramped tube, overground train and bus to get back to your miserable hovel?

When we talk about standard of living, what do we really mean? If you choose a job you love, expect to be underpaid and overworked. If you choose a job that pays well, expect to be bored and stressed. If you choose to be working in 2016, expect to have little job security and for your cost of living to be vastly more than it would have been for your parents, at the same age.

We just don't have the spare time. Our partners are not at home doing housework, and come and pick us up from the station at a reasonable hour, and we have some time at home to play with our kids, eat, even do something else with spare time. Now we get home just in time to kiss the kids goodnight, and then we shovel whatever we can into our exhausted mouths before collapsing into bed, before all too soon, the alarm goes off and we start all over again.

We're enslaved to fixed core working hours, and the idea that we can ever reach some imagined future sustainable state, by pushing ourselves to the maximum output that we can manage. Working 80 hour weeks in the hope of getting enough pay rises to be able to slack off a bit in our greying senior years.

When was the last time that you took the Thames Clipper to work, even though it takes longer than the tube? When was the last time you walked to work, across one of London's many amazing bridges, just to admire the beauty of the architecture, even though it would add another hour or two to the length of your working day?

If you look really carefully, you can see a rainbow in the clouds above The Shard, created by sunlight refracted through glass at the very top

Tags: #london #oxford #childhood #capitalism #politics

This is a story about impaired memory...

I actually have very patchy memories of the last 3 months, because I had unfortunately been consuming at least 255 strong Benzodiazepine type tablets. These would be commonly known as sleeping pills, or 'downers'. Amnesia is one of the known side effects.

If you're suffering from stress-related anxiety, insomnia or a comedown from stimulant drugs, Benzos are manna from heaven. However, after a few months of taking them, you are risking a withdrawal syndrome that could kill you, if you abruptly stop. It's important to taper off slowly if you have become physically dependent on these drugs.

I had no idea that I had taken so many pills: a common side effect being the fact you can't actually remember taking them, so you end up taking more. In fact, the last few months are scarily patchy. I read many emails that I don't even remember sending. I only have vague recollections of doing things that must, presumably, have required quite a bit of thought at the time, like publishing an eBook on Amazon Kindle.

Anybody who is familiar with junkie folklore will know about the speedball, which is a mixture of heroin and cocaine, injected, or basically the combination of an 'upper' with a 'downer'. Combining Supercrack with Benzos is kind of a Speedball, and inflicts the same kind of problem on your brain: it makes you kind of sleepwalk, until either the stimulant or the depressant wins the fight.

It was not my intention to ever mix uppers and downers, but the mean elimination half-life of Benzos tends to be a lot longer than that of stimulants. You can still have a load in your system when you wake up and start using stims again.

This is how most overdoses happen. It's not normally a single drug that's found in the bloodstream, but polydrug abuse is by far and away the most common reason why addicts die of overdoses. The interaction between drugs can cause dangerous respiratory depression: shallow breathing and even stopping breathing altogether.

The life of a successful 34 year old barrister was destroyed when his boyfriend died of asphyxiation in his sleep. They had been fans of chemsex, and had taken Meow Meow (an upper; Methcathinone) with GBL/GHB (a downer; sometimes called Liquid Ecstasy). The fatal combination was with alcohol, and it is likely that the 34 year old legal star's boyfriend choked on his own vomit, while he was unconscious.

BBC coverage of the news story is here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35976705

Seeing as these drugs were already criminalised, I can't see that the new laws would have had any effect to save the lives that are already being blighted by addiction and drug abuse.

There are a large number of men, in their 30s and 40s, who've come to drugs late and are now doing it regularly

There are so many things that sound like familiar echoes of the chemsex world that my ex-wife and me entered. There was a fairly long period where we wouldn't have sex unless we were high on Ecstasy, amphetamines, cathinones or GBL/GHB. It became an accepted and normal practice to lose at least an entire day of the weekend to these kind of sexploits.

I say we were careful, because I have always educated and informed myself, and we used to use super accurate measuring pipettes and miligram scales, as well as following golden rules about not exceeding certain dosages, and definitely never mixing drugs.

When you enter the dark and deadly world of an all-consuming addiction though, you're in things on your own. You're fumbling around in your pit of despair and one packet of pills looks the same as any other bag of white powder, which you indiscriminately crush up and snort up your nose, rub on your gums or otherwise desperately try and shovel into your body somehow, chasing your lonely isolated high.

By making drugs illegal, we set up a division in society where the law-abiding middle class citizens go about their business in complete ignorance of the life experiences that are being racked up by those exposed to a degree of drug experimentation and use of 'soft' drugs.

If one of these ignorant, drug naïve people gets caught up in the world of chemicals of abuse, then they are ill-prepared for the hard lessons ahead. The first comedown from Crystal Meth without anything to cushion the landing is something that you're unlikely to forget.

In this dangerous new world that is being discovered by middle class professional thirtysomething gay men, and the occasional open minded hetro, we are likely to see many more tragedies like the one in the news story above, and many struggles and unexpected car wrecks like my own.

Who knows, maybe my own story ends with a fate that is unfortunately all too familiar to the coroner: drug overdose due to polydrug abuse.

All I've got in my favour is the fact that I remain well educated, well informed. I knew that this new legislation was coming, so I got myself off the little blue & pink pills that were threatening to become a physical dependency.

It's not like a change in the law is going to make any difference to the easy availability of drugs of abuse though.

These are the Central London meetings of Crystal Meth Anonymous. The one time I went to attend one I ended up relapsing onto legal highs instead. Was never a Meth addict though, but there's no Supercrack Anonymous, yet

Tags: #addiction #drugs #alcohol #politics

This is a story about late starters...

The way that girls enter and leave my life is fairly strange. Often I find myself dating somebody who was firmly in the friend zone. It never seems to pan out with the girls I've picked myself, so far.

I seem to be inescapably hopeless at reading hints that are dropped, or other indications that the opposite sex has taken an interest in me. When I replay past events, conversations, sometimes it seems obvious that there was flirtation, and I slap my palm to my forehead, but other times I seem to completely get the wrong end of the stick.

While some people might mourn the loss of the games, the ambiguity, the 'chase', playing 'hard to get' and generally feeling insecure and uncertain, I'm very glad that we're entering a more modern phase in the development of society, where we tell each other what we think and girls are allowed to be as forward as boys are. Hopefully, everybody gets what they want a lot quicker and easier than the old fashioned way.

It would seem to me though, like matching people's self-esteem levels is as important as matching people who are attractive to each other. Getting together with a girl who you feel is 'out of your league' when she confidently let you know she was attracted to you is one thing, but can you handle those little deliberate or accidental blows to your sense of security? When one partner clearly feels they have the upper hand, is the relationship doomed?

In your mid thirties you can't deny that the stakes of the game change substantially for the sexes. For women who haven't yet had babies but would like to be a mother at some point, the biological clock doesn't have that many more years to tick. The race to find the few remaining single men who haven't become fathers, adulterers or terminal imbeciles, is a challenge that I don't envy the opposite sex.

So, the photo-message of bodily parts is the new pre-date paradigm, apparently. After the exchange of phone numbers, WhatsApp'ing can commence, and for many men, the urge to send the object of their affections a picture of their 'junk' is too hard to resist, apparently. Perhaps shorthand for all that conversational 'getting to know you' waffle, the sending of penis photos is quite normal now, I'm told.

I don't think I've even photographed mine, let alone entrusted the digitised image to the internet for delivery.

I know that my ex used a no-strings sex website for a hookup, and photos of genitals were positively and eagerly sent and received there, but I can't see how it could have made a transition to traditional dating, although I guess it's the next logical step now that we are doing away with the hint dropping and more subtle flirtation.

I feel quite glad to have had a few relationships end amicably, or fizzle out naturally, to reassure me that things don't have to end as badly as they did with my ex-wife. It's true that with one fiery Italian, things were a bit too similar for comfort, with plates and other kitchen implements being hurled at my head. When she stormed out of my flat, I was all too pleased to lock the door behind her. She was surprised and disappointed I didn't chase after her.

Finding a girl who'll sunbathe on a windswept beach for an entire week, taking photos and videos of you kitesurfing, is jackpot kind of stuff, but holidays are only brief respites from daily drudgery. If you're not getting along in your regular everyday life, at some point the relationship is going to fall apart.

The modernisation of relationships is great in terms of transparency and getting what you want, but personally, I can find myself going along with things and ending up somewhat embroiled in situations that I never intended, simply because I still lack self confidence and don't assert myself sometimes.

Being polite, courteous and generous when buying drinks or food can often be mistaken for shy guy flirtation, and I know I've sent some girls confusing signals, when I've done little more than conduct myself with good manners, or so it seems to me.

I read something the other day that suggested men have sex whenever they can, and women have sex whenever they want. I guess I must be quite the freak if the article rings true with most other people, as I myself have found myself faking illness and even faking climax, although that one is slightly harder to pull off without a condom.

If you've read much of my blog, you'll know I'm exceptionally weird anyway.

Not having sex or at least trying to kiss the girl on the first date is seen as saying you're not interested and there's no 'spark' so far as I can tell. Taking things slowly with girls I've really liked has always been misread as me not being interested, and so it is that things tend to move pretty fast in the London dating scene.

Pulling in a nightclub is still a black art to me, but perhaps I shouldn't flirt so much with my gay friends. Probably sends out the wrong kind of signals.

What's the proper protocol to observe when trying to pull a girl in a club? I know there's something about meaningful glances being exchanged, and then you dance closer and closer, until you're definitely unnaturally in each others body space. Then I guess there's a point at which you just grab each other and start getting off. Either that or you get knee'ed in the bollocks and some kind of sexual harassment change is brought against you, presumably. I haven't really had the guts or the stupidity to try it.

Men are pretty lazy and content to go with the flow. I wonder how many relationships have continued to the marriage and children phase, simply because a guy couldn't face the tears and practical task of actually separating. According to the James Bond movies I've seen, women seem to make their selection of partner based on someone wh0 pushes themselves upon them most forcibly, before then becoming limp and compliant.

Personally, I seem to not have benefitted at all by trying to be the gentleman, doing things in a slightly old-fashioned way, even if I do benefit from the fact that at least I know where I stand with most girls now, and opportunities for promiscuity are there even if I'm still pretty much a serial monogamist.

I guess London has always had its seedier side

Tags: #london #divorce #friends

This is a story about being isolated from the real world...

I remember an ex-girlfriend had lived her entire life in the village centre of Haslemere, Surrey. She was completely oblivious to the existence of the struggles of lower social strata. I remember my washing-machine repairman friend, Justin, being absolutely speechless when she casually talked about her parents retiring to Beaulieu, so they could be closer to their yacht. She was completely clueless. Not her fault.

One of my friends from school said he used to like coming to play over at our house, because at mealtimes there was lots to eat and it wasn't just potatoes. I liked playing at his house, because we would be messing around on decaying railway infrastructure, climbing huge mountains of coal or precarious games that involved the canal. Oxford might have become gentrified in parts, but there were still areas that were incredibly deprived.

The number of my friends who have spent time in jail, have some kind of criminal record or have at least spent time in the criminal justice system, is surprising, given my background could have completely isolated me from the 'bad crowd'. I did go to state school, but central Oxford has enough sons & daughters of lower ranking academics to mean that in the top sets of streamed subjects you would be unlikely to find a proper 'working class' child. Our form groups were also chosen quite specifically to try and stop the ruffians getting mixed up with those destined for greater success.

I hope that I'm fairly 'class blind' and don't judge people on their socioeconomic background. I also hope that I'm sensitive to the fact that I've had opportunities which are quite simply barred to a huge proportion of society. Being taught to speak like I was to the manor born, having posh sounding schools (although entirely ordinary state entities) and being quite relaxed speaking to adults of any rank or status, means that many doors have been open to me.

In some cases, money simply prices any ordinary people out of the market, so you'll find that all your neighbours are wealthy, successful and educated. There might be gates or a gatehouse or some kind of obvious border to the pocket of wealth you find yourself in, but often there isn't such clear demarkation. In London, for example, things are very subtle most of the time. The part of a London area that has the chic delicatessen, nice restaurants, a Waitrose, tastefully in-keeping shopfronts, colourfully painted townhouses or monolithic blocks of grand Georgian terrace... these things are pretty obviously what happens over time to an area after the hipsters have increased rents which drives out those who wish to shop at Cash Converters, Argos and Lidl.

Camden Town is a strange melting pot. A stone's throw from Regents Park and Primrose Hill, where some top dollar rent is demanded, but yet the high street has more than its fair share of pawnbrokers and low priced food outlets. I guess nobody really wants to live by the market, where drugs are dealt openly on the street at night, and in the daytime is crawling with tourists and pickpockets.

S0, I find myself now living somewhere that seems to only have an abstract connection with London. I live in a gated community with a concierge who is only too happy to take delivery of online supermarket shopping, if I never wished to leave the comfort and security of this well-insulated riverside apartment at all. There is water on 180 degrees of one side of the apartment... not even any roads, with the capital's incessant sirens as emergency services vehicles make their way from one incident to the next.

Only, where there are navigable waterways, there is always the chance for social mobility. Boatloads of people on the Clipper, party boats and speedboats come joyriding and commuting along the Thames. The police boat can even be regularly be seen jetting off up-river somewhere, with it's blue lights flashing. Tugs removing barge-loads of trash, or bringing containerloads of goods, chug their way up and down through the semi-tidal water.

I used to be content to watch a massive storm batter the coast, even if I had driven for many hours in the hope of being able to kitesurf, but the conditions were too rough and wild. As my equipment improved, I was able to afford a range of kites that could handle high winds as well as light breeze. I was able to actually get on the water in a storm, but that's right at the limit of survival and you don't have any time to actually think about what's going on around you.

I don't recommend you try it, if you've never been in the water when the wind is plucking you up, and depositing you several hundred metres downwind, as a 60-70mph gust comes through, turning the top of the water into stinging spray and foamy froth.

I don't recommend you try it, if you've never been in the water when breaking waves are the size of 2 or 3 storey houses, and all you can hear is a deafening roar as they're breaking behind you, as you try to outrun them. When one of these monsters catches you near the shore, it pummels you underwater into the seafloor, which hopefully is made of sand, not rocks or coral or something else sharp. Without your kite to pull you back to the surface and back onto the beach, you're as good as dead.

Kitesurfing used to be a fairly level playing field. Now, the equipment is so expensive I can't see how anybody of ordinary means could enter the sport. I guess surfing is still low cost-of-entry but who has enough time to bob around on a floaty thing waiting for a wave big enough to be worth paddling for? The English Channel is about the 3rd windiest place on the planet, and living on an island means you can't be too many degrees of separation from somebody who has at least some sense of how to move on water.

But here I am, inland, although only a stones throw from a river which would quickly carry me to the seawater of the Thames estuary. I used to kitesurf on Canvey Island and at Whitstable, which have reassuringly brown estuarial water. The water there very definitely came from the arsehole of midlands.

It's been so long since I had to rub shoulders with the proletariat. I'm not sure it's exactly made me forget the struggles of ordinary people, to lose perspective, to feel entitled or not realise that most of my worries and stresses are pretty much first world problems. Not travelling also means not seeing people who are not just a social division below, but an entire national or continental division below my own standard of living. When you're kitesurfing you tend to be in the poorest fishing villages in some of the remotest parts of the world, and when a fisherman saves your life, you definitely can't avoid feeling humbled.

It's a strange existence, being able to glide across the surface of the water on a thin little tray, and fly into the air as if you didn't weigh so much as a bird, but at the same time, your equipment, your choice of leisure activity puts you in a very exclusive club indeed.

It takes a certain amount of insanity to shackle yourself to a kite big enough to pull you bodily out of the water and into the air

Tags: #london #kitesurfing

This is a story about living with a mood disorder...

Type II Bipolar Disorder took a long time to diagnose, despite a fairly obvious pattern of moods that can be easily traced back to adolescence. Of course, we all have mood fluctuations, but it's the extremity of those moods that qualifies something as a disorder.

I would say that hypomania was the more obvious one of of my pathological moods. Being able to concentrate and work with great intensity, with little sleep & food and a refusal to be diverted from my task, an irritability for distractions, hypersexuality, spending loads of money, risk-taking. Talking seems too slow to express your thoughts... the speed that you're thinking is too fast to explain to anybody else, to put into words. You're just a blur of activity.

It felt like driving with the hand-brake engaged for a lot of my life. I was always waiting for the next slim window of opportunity to work on something that I loved. Whether that was the Design & Technology at school, where there was never enough time to finish what I was working on before the end-of-class bell, or the lego model I was making, before it was mealtime and playtime was over.

Of course, we all have to work within a timetable, and we all have to eat & sleep, but these things always made me feel like I had to rush at everything I did as fast as I possibly could, in the hope that one day, I would complete one of my projects. I also grew incredibly frustrated with the limitations of timetables, mealtimes, bedtimes.

Switching to the world of work, there wasn't actually very much to do. Most people did very little. I ended up searching around for extra things to do.

The computer network at my first full time job ran like an absolute dog. That was because AppleTalk traffic from the office Macs and their printers was polluting the Ethernet traffic from the Sun SparcStations. I managed to talk my friend Lucas into helping me to rewire all the cables one evening.

I wish I could show you the actual images, but we weren't even supposed to be in the server room. This was a Ministry of Defence prime defence contractor with a high level of security clearance. The two junior programmers aren't supposed to go and fix all the networking problems in the office without any authorisation.

The next morning, everybody was commenting how amazingly well the network was running. Lucas & I obviously couldn't claim any credit, because we had acted without authority, but nobody was going to do a witch-hunt when everybody was so pleased that the most major problem affecting everybody in the office had been solved overnight.

That's pretty much how a person with Bipolar Disorder hides out in a corporation. You bumble along, bored, depressed, coming in late, demotivated... and then you suddenly pull something out of the bag that nobody else would risk their career to do, let alone the lack of sleep and unsociable hours.

Bosses seemed to just accept my erratic working patterns, knowing that when there was something that needed doing with an impossible deadline, that's normally around the time I'd wake up and start hacking something together.

It all kind of hung together until I started at a new company in 2008 and the project they were asking me to do was so huge, I didn't know where to begin. I was just entering a depression, which was bad timing. There was also a cultural problem, where their in-house IT staff built everything using Microsoft Excel, and any 'proper' software was built by Oracle consultants or bought off the shelf... but nobody liked those big expensive systems.

My depression got so bad I couldn't even get out of bed or stop crying randomly. I knew I wasn't going to bounce back quickly from that one. After a couple of months I quit that job and started making iPhone games in my back garden. 18 hours a day, 7 days a week. I couldn't go fast enough.

And so began a completely unstructured phase of my life. I would take on a project or interest, completely immerse myself in it for as many hours as I could stay awake, and stay obsessed with that single task until I burnt out. Then I would be depressed, and with no reason to even drag myself out of bed and go and be miserable at work, I would just be depressed all day in bed. I stopped answering my phone. I stopped answering the door. I never opened the curtains.

Being self-employed after 11 or so years of 9 to 5, Monday to Friday structure and routine, is kind of a red rag to a bull, if you have a tendency towards mood instability.

I relished those periods of hypomania. I wrote a series of iPhone games. I built a wooden summer house. I read a huge pile of books on Theoretical Physics and had lengthy email conversations with professors around the world, I wrote a mobile eLearning system and launched it at Learning Technologies conference, I decided that I wanted to be a startup founder and applied for TechStars, I learnt all about Bitcoin, bought Bitcoin miners and started mining in my summer house, I traded Bitcoin for profit, I wrote my own virtual CPU so I could attack algorithms like SHA-256, I started investigating security loopholes in things like internationalised domain names and the Google and Facebook developer platforms.

It's not long before you stray into legal grey areas though, so a lot of my projects have been shelved and I've had to go on raiding missions back to the corporate world, to stay afloat financially. These are normally timed with my hypomania, so a company gets 3 months of incredible productivity, and then a month or two of me being depressed, and then we normally go our separate ways.

My depressions have gotten worse and worse. They seem to last longer, and I've actually started to harm myself more & more. It's strange, when you emerge from a depression and enter a period of hypomania though... you can't remember just how dark those previous days were. There's no rational voice that says "hey! slow down, or else you're going to crash again!". Instead, the voice says "better go as quick as you can, because we know a crash is coming again soon".

So how do we know that depression is the pathological mood at the other pole from my hypomania? Well, I sleep. A lot. Sometimes 16 hours a day. When I'm awake I have very low energy, low motivation. I have no interest in things I'd normally find enjoyable. I don't want to see or speak to anybody. I generally think that everything is pointless, broken, useless, hopeless. Lots of negative memories keep coming into my head, and make me think "I can't believe I said/did that" with extreme regret, embarrassment, shame. I think the world would be better off without me. I start to do pros & cons of living lists, either in my head or written down. I start to think of ways to kill myself, and what affairs I would need to set in order before I committed suicide. This goes on for weeks, months.

I've written before about trying mood stabilisers and antidepressants. The side effects just aren't compatible with good quality of life. You might think that risk to life outweighs quality of life, but it doesn't, especially when you have the waves of hypomania to surf, before crashing onto the rocks of depression.

My body and my mind seems to have decided to adapt itself to this world, to this society, to this environment. We applaud the kid who busts their balls to study for their exams, and can then collapse in a heap during the school holidays. We applaud the employee who pulls the all-nighters and comes in at weekends when work is behind schedule. We applaud the 'overnight success' stories, when an impressive project is unveiled, seemingly created out of thin air, as if by magic. There is no magic. It's just an unsustainable burst of energy, focus, determination, single-mindedness and a touch of madness.

I'd like to go back to the routine I once had, pre-2009. Only I don't seem to be able to retrace my steps, yet. I know the formula that used to work, and a very dear and trusted friend urges me to take a permanent job, and he's probably right to some extent. However, if it all goes horribly wrong again, I would have earned a fraction of what I would have done in a contract.

I'm hoping I can find my little niché. Somewhere I can deliver more value than keeping a seat warm from Monday to Friday. Somewhere where the bosses are more interested in results than headcount in their empire. Pretentious? Moi?

I don't really care whether you think I should cheer the fuck up or calm the fuck down... my moods seem pretty intent on doing whatever they want to do. I've been fully aware of the calamitous consequences of not keeping my mouth shut at the right time, or not getting out of bed and doing some urgent crap. It doesn't really feel like I'm choosing even if it does look like a choice to you, as an outside observer.

This looks like a load of angst-filled teenaged immature self-centred selfish drivel. It probably is. I call it my life.

I'm probably more self-aware than you give me credit for. If you're thinking "oh my God, can you even hear what you're saying? Can you even hear yourself?" the answer is yes, yes I can. I spend a lot of time cringing and wishing things weren't so, and indeed wondering why I'm like a moth to a flame so often. I can see the train wrecks before they happen. I've plotted my mood and activity data, and the patterns are as clear as day. So what?

I'm sure there are days when you'd really like to be a bird, just soaring on the air currents above the ground, looking down on people & buildings. It doesn't matter how badly you want to be a bird. It doesn't matter how rational it seems, to become a bird and just fly right over that traffic jam that's getting in your way, it's not actually possible. That's a bit like those days when I would really like to feel normal. I can want it, but it's not actually possible. Anybody who tells you that you can stop worrying or be happy just by choosing is full of shit. You have my permission to punch them in their smug mouth.

So, I'd say my experiment with abstinence was a failed one. We need a little alcohol to calm our nerves. We need a little caffeine to perk us up. We know when we need it, and most of us know our limits. We're pretty adept creatures at tweaking our own moods. We probably need a pet for a bit of soothing oxytocin. We probably need a girl/boyfriend for a bit of serotonin and a squirt of dopamine. Other than that, we just need something to keep our minds occupied as a distraction from the inevitability of death and decay. Not God though. God is for crazy people.

Anyway, that's my two cents, on my two poles: Type II Bi-polar Disorder.

Tags: #bipolar #mentalhealth #depression #suicide #nhs

This is a story about individuals and their identity...

This chicken has been excluded from school because its wild hairstyle is not in line with the dress code. Education and employment are all about conformity, and this flamboyant character is causing dissent amongst the ranks.

There are lots of choices to express your individuality, without falling foul (sic.) of the rules:

• Trousers can be black, navy blue or grey. No jeans/denim/tracksuits
• Socks can be black, navy or grey. No patterns
• Shoes can be black or brown. They should be formal lace-ups. No velcro. No trainers.
• Shirts should be white, long-sleeved and with a collar. No patterns or textures allowed.
• Jumpers must be V-necked and in plain grey, black or navy blue. No logos.
• Waistcoats should be black, navy or grey.
• Jackets should be grey, black or navy. They should be single breasted with plain buttons. There must be a lapel/collar.
• Ties and other neckwear can only be the approved item in the correct corporate colours
• No jewellery
• No visible tattoos
• No make up
• Haircuts should be short back & sides for boys
• Girl's haircuts should be dull as fuck
• Any other kind of fashion accessory is forbidden, with extreme prejudice

As you can see, there are quite a lot of possible combinations and permutations to express your individuality here. Can you really say that the boy wearing the grey trousers with the brown shoes and the blue V-neck jumper, looks anything even slightly like the girl wearing the navy blue trousers and blazer? No way!

Once, there was a boy who had his nose pierced. He was burnt at the stake later that day as a warning to any other rebels. His screams of agony and the pungent smell of burning human flesh was the only way to send a clear message of just how important it is that we all stay within a narrow set of parameters. Non-conformists will be dealt with by any means necessary.

The names and dates of famous battles, or the deaths of kings and queens are very well documented, and would take seconds to look up in a reference book. The multiplication or division of two large numbers is something that a calculator costing less than £1 is able to do with perfect accuracy. Writing an essay about the third word, on the second paragraph of page 122 of a book, is not even going to be read. There is no point in hundreds or even thousands of students sitting the same exam... one of them can do it and then just produce as many photocopies of the answers as are required to satisfy the arbitrary requirement for questions with known answers to be written down from human memory.

When we later come to work, we can simply work out the asset value of all the buildings, land, machinery etc, sell it all off and divide the money between all the employees. In the case of banks, we can add up all the funds under management, and then just divide that up between every man woman and child on the planet. Probably about £12,000 each, just for the derivatives.

Given that half the world lives on less than $2 a day, once we've done this, we can all live for 25 years without having to do another exam, go to 'work' or stress out about any spreadsheets, promotions, kissing your boss's arse. Not just you, not just me... every single person on the planet, including the brown people who we don't generally give that much of a shit about.

I would pass some new laws. Anybody who asked you which Uni you went to, or what your A-level results were could be shot. Anybody who asks you in any way to jump through a hoop or roll over and play dead or generally act like a performing animal could be rounded up and euthanised. It's cruel to let these insane individuals, who think they're superior enough to sit in judgement over others, to continue with their delusions of grandeur.

Unless you're growing food, catching fish, building houses etc. etc.... basically, unless you can explain to your granny what the hell it is that you do, then you can either stop doing that and go get a proper job, or you can be shot.

All 'managers' would probably be the first wave of people who would be put into cargo planes and flown to sub-saharan Africa. Although some lions might choke on their biros and find their flipcharts hard to digest, I'm sure that society would feel immediate benefits.

A special team of assassins would be tasked to go round all the super-wealthy and ask them "did you earn your money?". Any kind of affirmative response would result in summary execution and reappropriation of the hoarded wealth. It's rather tragic to think of all those poor deluded individuals who think they worked harder than a malnourished boy scouring a rubbish dump for enough plastic bottles to pay for a mouthful of rice. The world will not miss those entitled little pricks.

I'm tempted to say that anybody with a face as smug as David Cameron's is clearly in line for the chopping block, but I suppose there could be one or two unfortunate individuals who just happened to be born looking like a silver-spoon in the mouth cockwomble. Probably best to just kill everybody who went to Eton, Harrow and Winchester, just to be sure though.

There would no doubt be total anarchy, chaos, lynching mobs, grudges being settled, looting, rape, pillaging... pretty much everything that we export today to the developing world.

I have no idea what I'm blathering about, but I'm just trying to take my mind of my sister, who's had her rent & bills paid, cars bought and maintained and regularly had her begging bowl filled by our parents, could possibly accuse me of being a hypocrite. I even put the deposit down on a car for her one Christmas. Perhaps she's been taking the same drugs as my parents.

Do I owe the world more than I've given? Yes, you're damn right I do. Have I been through hell. Yes, I've been through hell too, so there's probably some karma there. Are you God? No? Fuck off then.

Tags: #politics

This is a story about the willing suspension of disbelief...

People think that beating drug and alcohol abuse is about abstinence, sobriety. It's not.

Are you familiar with experiments where rats were given bottles of water laced with drugs, as well as bottles of clean water and food? In cages that had a placebo, the rats obviously ate, drank, slept and lived until they died of old age. In the cages with heroin in the water, the rats would drink some heroin, fall asleep, wake up, eat, clean themselves, drink some more heroin, sleep some more... until they too died of old age. In the cages with cocaine in the water, the rats would drink and drink and drink from the cocaine laced water, until they died prematurely.

These were barren cages, with nothing to do but drink from a bottle, eat some plain food pellets, or sleep. No other rats to socialise with. Nothing to explore. Nothing to play with. No stimulation. Not really much of a life, even for a rat. What do you think you'd do, behind bars with nothing to do except drink from a bottle?

Did you know that they ran those experiments again, except this time they created Rat Park, which was packed with everything a rat could want from life. There were other rats to socialise with, and have sex with of course. There were tubes and slides and places to hide, and nice bedding and toys. The food was varied and tasty. Of course, there were still two water bottles, one of which was laced with drugs or a placebo.

Do you know what happened? The rats weren't interested in drugs. They were happy in their little ratty lives, and drugs had no place in those happy fulfilled rodenty days.

So what does that tell us about addiction? What do you think would happen if you took away somebody's self-esteem and pushed them out of society? What do you think would happen if you labelled somebody a junkie, a druggie an alkie, and demonised them? What do you think would happen if you mistreated your fellow human, your family member, your partner, your friend? Do you think that would cure them of their addiction?

Rehab is for quitters. Ha ha ha! No, not really. Rehab is a bit of a joke to be honest. The relapse rates are appalling. It's really not working. Do you know why it's not working? Because rehab is the place we send the black sheep of the family to beat themselves up, and to make us clean-living superior people feel better about ourselves.

What's the difference between an addict and a normal person? One puff on a cigarrette, one gulp of tea or coffee, or one sip of liquor.

Yes, it's true that addicts and alcoholics are on a death-spiral downwards that they can't stop on their own. The destruction of their life has begun, and they're going to ride that helter-skelter all the way to rock bottom, unless there is intervention.

Intervention means locking them away from their poison of choice, right? Wrong. Everything in that person's life that caused them to become addicted to drink or drugs is still there. Their environment, their social group, the pressures, the stresses, the broken life that they have... all those things are still there.

Finding the key that unlocks your addictive potential is not easy, luckily, but finding the key that unlocks you from the trap of addiction, that's easy: you just need a life that's better than living on the street in complete destitution, begging and stealing enough money for your next fix, while the whole of society thinks you're a piece of s**t and wouldn't p**s on you if you were on fire.

But that can't be right, can it? Lots of rich people get addicted and die young, and their lives are amazing. Well, let's examine that claim a little more carefully.

Having been down-and-out on the streets of Camden Town, London, it seems apt to talk about Amy Winehouse.

They tried to make me go to rehab but I said, 'No, no, no.'

Yes, I've been black but when I come back you'll know, know, know

I ain't got the time and if my daddy thinks I'm fine

He's tried to make me go to rehab but I won't go, go, go

Everybody wanted her to sing that song. Over and over and over again. Can you imagine that? Being a human jukebox, a human CD player, just performing the same song, over and over and over again.

Imagine being an amazingly talented creative artist, but nobody wants to hear any of your new material, they just want you to stand on stage and repeat the same old s**t, again and again and again.

Dancing bears get driven insane, and will dance and dance, even when they're not performing. How do you think the human psyche is affected by similarly being whipped and cajoled into performing the same act, repeated and repeated and repeated again.

But Amy Winehouse was rich. Tina Turner was rich. I've been relatively rich. How can these rich people complain or get messed up, when they're so rich? Rich people's lives must be amazing. Well, actually, the rich cry too. Rich people need the same emotional sustenance as anybody else. Rich people need to feel fulfilled too, and just being rich doesn't make you feel fulfilled.

It's less of a "how can they be sad" and more of a "how dare they be sad". People are incensed by the fact that they think they want the life of a wealthy person, but they haven't considered the sacrifices that that person has had to make in order to become wealthy. You haven't heard about how hard Michael Jackson and the Williams sisters fathers drove them, for them to attain success, for example? It's well documented.

This could very easily turn into a Monty Python sketch, where I implore you not to donate any money to help save the rich, so I had better re-ground things. The point is, we're all human. Wealth doesn't really touch the soul. Wealth is just a silly made up game that's external to all of us. Sure it seems to control much in our lives, but the really important thing is human connection, and money can't buy you love.

Sure, it's true that money is a major stress factor in most of our lives. I have got less than two months before I'm financially screwed, but it takes 60 days before I get paid on a contract and I don't currently have a contract anyway. Does not compute. Doesn't add up. I'm going to be out on the street whether I work or not.

Surely that's down to self-sabotage? Surely that's down to a lack of planning, of cashflow forecasting? Well, there's only so much you can do. I worked my arse off, got paid a lot of overtime, but it made me very unwell. It's a Catch 22. I can 'sing that popular song' over and over and over again in order to plump up the bank balance, but it makes me sick... literally.

Yes, mental illness is invisible and poorly understood, but you feel it just the same. You feel it in your dark thoughts, you feel it in the pit of your stomach, you feel it when you deliberately hurt yourself to try and let the pain out. Isn't suicide the ultimate in self sabotage?

My days currently consist of lying awake anxiously all night, then sleeping until I force myself to get up and have something to eat, then I try and distract myself from the anxiety until it's time to pretend to go to sleep, but just lie there anxiously all over again. Lovely life, huh?

I started to fantasise last night, not about taking drugs, but about doing a backflip off the 48th floor of a nearby building. I thought about the slow rotation of my body, head over feet, as I accelerated through the air towards the ground. I thought about the collision with the pavement below, and how it would bring instant relief. No more stress. No more anxiety. No more depression. No more isolation. No more demonisation. No more pain.

I then started to think about BASE jumping from up there, and you know what? I started to get stressed. I started to think about getting caught by security. I started to think about having line twists or colliding with a streetlamp or some hard object. I started to think about how much it would hurt, to survive. I got sweaty palms and my pulse started to race, my body became restless. The thought of staying alive, with all this stress and pain and anxiety is not a pleasant one.

That's how people get pushed into addiction. When their life becomes stress and anxiety and depression, and all of their human connection collapses. You're driven inwards by stress and anxiety when nobody is there to help you. When people who care about you start to label you, demonise you and refuse to assist you, you retreat into yourself, you have to be self-reliant and you no longer trust people around you.

I know that all I need to stay alive is the food from soup kitchens and the Hare Krishna, plus my good sleeping bag and my bivouac. Yes, there's a certain amount of pride that stops me from crawling over broken glass back to my parents. I'd rather be homeless and destitute than live with their abuse. Without any self-esteem or identity I might as well just slit my wrists now.

I knew things were going to get tight if I didn't find work right away in November, but I didn't care. I couldn't work. I was exhausted and depressed, and my mood was sinking lower and lower. With retrospect, there was no way that I was ready for another contract. I wouldn't have lasted more than a week.

Now I'm looking down the barrel of financial armageddon, but I can't care. There's literally nothing I can do about it. I'm swamped with stress, anxiety and the feeling that I might as well give up. Where do you think those feelings lead?

What do you think happens when you swamp somebody with anxiety, stress? What do you think happens when somebody has no opportunities? What do you think happens to cornered rats?

The motherf**king cycle continues.

There's my old bike at Silicon Roundabout. I could tap up Tech City for some work, but it's the last bridge left unburnt and I'm definitely not having my finest hour

Tags: #drugs #alcohol #addiction #suicide #depression #career #london

This is a story about gushing all over the Internet...

What happens when you lay your soul bare for public examination? Well, don't worry about it, because everybody is pouring their private lives out into the public domain on social media and via email, text message and other electronic communication mediums.

I have overcome my fear of dying alone. My frustration with life now outweighs my fear of death. Now my only fear is of being survived by anybody who knew me. The way that people misremember you will be your legacy.

We all write and create so much content these days. Digital cameras are ubiquitous. We create thousands of photographs and videos. We write hundreds of thousands of words in emails, text messages and social media posts. Our digital footprint is huge.

You would have thought that there would be shame, embarrassment, regret in sharing my most private secrets, but the more I do it, the more I am liberated from the desire to prove myself worthy. I like admitting I am fallible, that I have made mistakes, that I have gone astray. It's exhausting fighting the rumour mill and trying to maintain a spotless image.

I'm actually struggling to return to the 'real world'. Spending every day with nothing more important to do than write is nice (who knew?). I'm sure that those of you with jobs and kids must hate my guts for the fact that I reject responsibility and instead, my time and energy is ploughed into pontificating like a student, like a child, like a spoiled teenager.

Presumably you see that sitting an exam with known 'correct' answers is pointless? Allowing yourself to be measured, to be sifted, to be sorted... subjecting yourself to the degradation of allowing somebody to sit in judgement over your intellectual value. Surely you can see that being channelled through such a system is brainwashing you? You might as well get "KNOW YOUR PLACE" tattooed to the inside of your eyelids.

Writers, photographers, musicians and other artists must struggle to be heard over the cacophony of "me too" voices. Any douche with an iPhone is a photographer or a film-maker these days. Any douche who can play three chords on a guitar is a musician. Any douche who's not completely tone deaf is a singer. Any douche who can string a coherent sentence together is a writer or a poet.

When was the last time that you stepped back from what you were doing, and questioned your place in the big picture? When was the last time you examined your reason, your motives, for doing everything you do?

An experiment was conducted on public transport, where a person would ask somebody who was sitting down "can I sit there?" indicating that they would like the person sitting down to give up their seat. There was no obvious reason to give up the seat, such as being pregnant, old or having an injury. We just want to sit down. Perhaps an unreasonable request, when at least second in line for that seat.

The result from the expriment was that, a large proportion of the time, people would give up their seat and allow the other person to sit down. Sometimes the person would ask "why?" and the reply "because I want to sit down" would be given. An unreasonable reply, perhaps, but that was enough of a reason for some people to give up their seat after initially questioning the justification.

We are all very familiar with the 'teacher' experiments that show that many people would administer lethal electric shocks to a 'pupil' if we were told to do it by an authority figure. People are very compliant with social norms. We very rarely question things, especially if there is obvious rank and status in play.

How dare I publish my photographs, unless I have done some kind of photography course. Maybe I need to be a fellow of some kind of academy or society of the arts? Maybe I need a piece of paper to wave, as well as the end of my camera lens.

How dare I read academic papers and do my own research, consider my own hypotheses, publish my own thoughts and ideas. Maybe I need to be a graduate from some esteemed academic institution? Maybe I need to have a qualification that says that I was measured by somebody in authority, and found to meet a certain standard? Maybe I need to be gagged and blinded.

How dare I write, unless I have received an advance from a publisher, or have other works published. Maybe I need to have a number of press clippings and a bibliography to prove my words have the necessary importance. Words without quotation, without citation... they're worthless noise.

Have you ever heard of original thinkers? People who don't give a shit who you are, and how important you think you are. People who don't give a shit about rote-learning the same crap as everybody else. People who aren't afraid to question the status quo, or to keep asking "why?" until the limit of understanding is reached, and the shaky foundations of knowledge are revealed.

Sure, a great debate rages about the contribution of laymen and women. Sure, everybody thinks that their contribution is valid, and there isn't enough time to lay bare the fundamental error in every half-baked crackpot idea.

Publish or perish, though, publish or perish. Everything is indexed for search these days. It really doesn't hurt anybody, having these 143,000 words out there in the public domain. It actually helps me, because I have a non-monetary life-insurance policy. It serves to capture a little piece of me, alive. I'm living through my words, because I don't feel like my fingernails are going to grip onto life for very much longer.

Yes, it would be easy to say that this sounds alarmist, attention seeking. However, I know how close I am to death, because I've captured the data and I've done the calculations.

I can see the cyclical nature of myself. I can see the downward slide of things

Tags: #privacy #suicide #depression

This is a story about captains of industry...

The boy stood on the burning deck whence all but he had fled. Is my task yet done? Rats leave a sinking ship but a skipper will go down with his vessel.

There's just no way you can have a meltdown halfway up a rock climb or a mountain that's higher than a rope's length. You wouldn't be able to lower that person safely down to the ground. There's no way you can have a meltdown in the middle of the sea or ocean. There's no chance of you being harmlessly blown into a tranquil harbour.

If you have experience leading a rope party or skippering a yacht, in the hostile environment of the sea and mountains, then you tend to be quite a stoic, calm, rational individual.

I remember we broached my yacht when I was on the foredeck trying to take the spinnaker down. I was hanging onto the spinnaker pole, with nothing but sea underneath my feet, as we heeled right over on our side. It seemed to take an absolute age for her to right herself. I looked back, and my crew were up to their thighs in water that had flooded the cockpit. I yelled "let go of the spinnaker sheets" and my crew member who was gripping the ropes that held the 'kite' in full sail were still gripped in his white knuckles, and his face was blank with terror. I had to repeat myself several times, and change the tone of my voice, so that he would break from his trance and release the wind, allowing me to then pull the sock down the sail and stow it below decks. It's interesting how people respond to catastrophe and stress.

A whole expedition party that I was in, found ourselves at the top of a large rock buttress, which we had to abseil off. There was a single thin metal piton, hammered into a crack in the rock, as an anchor point for our abseil rope. This piton was clearly bending under the weight of a person abseiling. I wasn't leading that expedition, and I was told to shut up and be quiet, when I whispered my concerns to the leaders. This was a decision motivated purely by money. The leaders didn't want to leave behind valuable equipment, in the interests of safety. You should never belay or abseil on a single anchor point, as my friend Sam was to later find, with tragic consequences.

I'm completely mental, and take some crazy risks, but I don't put other people's lives on the line. When I climbed Crib Goch with friends, I took them to a saddle in the hills beneath the mountain where we could get a good view of the ridge, and I showed them the route I was proposing. I told them it was very challenging, and talked about the exposure to steep drops either side. I told them that we would quite possibly have to retrace our steps, if we couldn't find a suitable gully in which to make our retreat. I shared the information, so that each person could make their own decision about the risks. We were all grown ups.

The sign reads "CAUTION: Route to Crib Goch". The choice to continue up to this knife-edge ridge is yours. You read the sign. You stepped over the stile. You knew what you were doing. Individual responsibility.

Our nanny state is trying to protect people from themselves all the time. We have railings at road crossings, so that you can only cross at one specific place. We have warning signs on hot drinks and for hot water taps, cautioning us that hot water is hot. I'm surprised that we don't yet have laws outlawing running with scissors.

From April, the UK is going to have bizarre legislation in place that attempts to outlaw all drugs except for nicotine, alcohol and caffeine. Does this sound sensible to you? Well, it makes about much sense as banning the sale of parachutes, mountain bikes, horses, skis etc. etc. If you look at the statistics, many sports and hobbies are more dangerous than most of the drugs that are being banned.

Drugs are dangerous, don't get me wrong, but the government concentrates on making things illegal, rather than minimising harm and risk and treating those who do get into trouble. I myself became addicted to a legal high, which was made illegal with absolutely no plans around supporting those addicts who were criminalised. There was no treatment plan or alternative offered to me. I was forced to turn to the black market, and then my own savings in order to get treatment in the private sector. If I hadn't had a pot of savings, I would have been picked up by criminal justice, rather than by national health. That's appalling.

If we were to, say, make mountain climbing illegal because it's dangerous, do you think that would stop people wanting to climb? If the danger didn't discourage people, why the hell do you think laws are going to be any deterrent. The laws are flying in the face of human nature.

Imagine every mountain and cliff in the UK, surrounded by a razor-wire fence, with policemen at the gates and patrolling the perimeter. Perhaps there would be guard towers with powerful searchlights, just in case anybody tried to scale or cut through the fence at night. Perhaps the fence could even be electrified. Does that sound like a sensible plan, for the protection of society?

People talk about drugs causing an increase in crime. Yes, there is a mountain of data showing that alcohol causes monumental problems in society. Anti-social behaviour is rife in town centres across the United Kingdom. Binge drinking is out of control. You don't tend to hear a lot about fights at raves though, do you? Yes, not a lot of anti-social behaviour amongst people who just want to dance, even though they have taken loads of pills. Also, Ecstasy is less dangerous than horse-riding, as Prof. David Nutt once famously commented.

We really do need to end this war on drugs, which is a load of hot air, rhetoric, causing the needless destruction of so many lives. Being tough on drugs is just another way of saying that you're going to chuck your friends and relatives under the wheels of the bus because you're too ignorant to educate yourself about the damage of criminalising somebody, demonising them, excluding them from society, offering them no treatment and generally shaming and isolating them, blaming them for society's ills.

Prohibition puts every man woman and child at risk of slipping and falling into the death-trap of the 'undesirable' bucket. We label drug takers as undesirable members of our society, and push them through the revolving doors of a criminal justice system that makes people unemployable, while also connecting together a criminal underworld that has to survive on its wits, given no lawful alternative.

The police are being forced to make judgement calls about whether to pursue prosecution against members of the public, who have made wayward decisions, but are they really criminals? While we haven't solved violent and sexual crime, and the poverty that drives people to steal, how can we be wrecking people's lives for messing around with recreational drugs?

I bought a yacht at the age of 21, and it cost me a buttload of cash. Boat ownership is a costly addiction. Mooring fees, antifouling, repairs, insurance, fuel... all of this nautical dependency was hazardous to my wealth. Did you know that there is no legal requirement to be qualified to navigate UK waters? I could buy a boat and go and get myself in big trouble in some part of the sea that I'm completely clueless about, and then just phone the coastguard to come and rescue me. Does that not seem a little more anti-social, than a gay man taking poppers in the privacy of his own home?

Perhaps I'm not a very good mascot for the anti-criminalisation movement, because I've most definitely cost the NHS a buttload of cash, as they struggled to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. However, maybe I am. If there was actually a plan to help and treat addicts, my issues could have been resolved before I even got so sick that I ended up needing emergency treatment to save my life. A stitch in time saves 9 and all that.

I think I count 32 stitches in my leg. All those stitches were completely avoidable. It was pure ignorance and stupidity and manipulation by government and media that led to me being cornered and attacked. You're looking for victims? Try taking a look at the early deaths and health complications of people who are marked as black sheep, disowned by their own families, labelled as criminals by a 'justice' system and shunned by society, to the point where sure, the needle seems more of a friend than any of the hostile sneering faces.

Why should alcoholics and addicts have to be anonymous? Why should they have to hide themselves away in groups of their own kind, recounting tales of their own weakness, their faults, their shame and their regret. Why do you refuse to give a homeless person money, because "they'll only spend it on drink/drugs"... yes, they probably will, if that's your attitude.

We're kicking people into the gutter, and I'm not OK with that.

When my friend John had completely ballsed up the interview I had gotten for him, and he was facing the reality that life is a little bit harder than just larking around doing whatever the hell you want, he started to become critical of me. He started to attack me rather than make a critical appraisal of himself and his own choices. It was interesting that he tried to use my prior misdemeanours, that I had told him about in confidence, as a weapon against me. It's amongst the reasons why I chucked him out of my flat.

Addicts are not weak people. In fact they are probably a lot stronger than you, because they not only endure the crushing guilt they place on themselves, but they're also a convenient scapegoat for anybody else who's feeling a bit s**t about their own life. Calling somebody a junkie is a lot easier than admitting that you've failed as a fellow member of society. A junkie's life is no way easy. It's a wall of death, with the addict having to ride faster and faster to stay stuck to the wall, while gravity tries to pull them downwards to their untimely demise, destruction.

There's some stats for you, on your common junkie. 15,000 steps a day on average. That's a lot more than your average couch potato, sitting around reading rubbish newspapers, watching crappy TV and sitting in judgement over groups of people they're totally ignorant about.

Do you see an obese junkie? No. Do junkies drain loads of NHS money by giving themselves diabetes, because of all the sugary drinks and junk food they stuff into their faces? No. Junkies are hard working and resourceful.

How would you rather that resourceful intelligent people spent their time? In the getting and taking of drugs, or perhaps put to some more productive aims and objectives?

We are wasting talent. We are wasting human lives. We are destroying people's dignity. We are robbing people of opportunities to shine and show us the better side of their character. We have untapped resource and we are wasting other resource in locking people up and dealing with preventable consequences of terrible drug policies.

There are good people out there... sheep in wolves clothing. We have tarred people with the junkie brush, and it's a crime to write people off like that.

It's a crime to kick people into the gutter.

Tags: #addiction #drugs #alcohol #nhs #injury

This is a story about rehab...

What's the difference between detox, rehab and inpatient treatment for mental health disorders? Very little actually. Here's my little exposé into being a patient of the UK's most notorious private drug and alcohol abuse treatment provider.

As far as my medical records show, I was admitted to The Priory for treatment for Type II Bipolar Disorder, during an episode of acute illness. My private health insurance picked up the bill and JPMorgan gave me the time and the space to get better. They're a great employer actually.

I had found a local private psychiatrist, as I was running out of ideas for how to deal with my Dual Diagnosis (Bipolar & substance abuse) and I knew that the stats weren't good. Not many people recover from such a death sentence of a diagnosis.

I was very lucky to find the psychiatrist that I did. I had been trying to get in contact with a number of specialists directly, but things were very slow going during the Xmas/New Year period, when a lot of people suffer a big decline due to the bad weather and family pressure to put a jolly face on everything during the holiday season.

I contacted a general psychiatrist at the local private hospital, and he turned out to be one of the nicest, kindest people I could ever have hoped to meet. It was pure relief to meet somebody nonjudgemental who would hear my story without leaping to immediate conclusions. The first time I met him, he simply said "we can only play the cards we are dealt" which had me in floods of tears, as it was the first time that anybody had ever said something so kind to me.

I had been taking quite a kicking from my supposed loved ones - but I'm not going to go into that anymore - and been made to feel very guilty and a total failure for having gotten sick. It should be noted that I became clinically depressed and suicidal before any substance abuse entered the picture. Bipolar symptoms had always been present in my life, but it took a further 2 years to get diagnosed. Then, finally, substance abuse reared its ugly head and became the most pressing issue.

From my point of view, I had struggled for years and years with recurrent suicidal ideation, suicide plans. I have struggled all my life with mood instability. To be simply dumped in a bucket labelled 'lost cause addict' was a bit s**t to be honest, after 30 odd years of reliable good service, despite fairly debilitating mental health problems.

Perhaps I'm complaining too much, making too much of a big thing of my struggles? Yes, yes, yes, there are people who've had it so much harder than me, blah, blah, blah. Ok, unless you've sliced your forearms multiple times, lengthways along your veins, with a razor blade, do me a favour and shut up? Some of my friends are wonderfully supportive and have gone out of their way to learn about mental health problems. Perhaps you could follow their example?

So you think this is attention seeking? Save it for the funeral.

It's true that it's taking me a while to work up the bravery to take the Final Exit. Ending your life is a big deal, and you've got to do it right, otherwise you're just going to end up in hospital in pain.

I've had cans of inert gas to suffocate myself, 2 grams of Potassium Cyanide, enough barbiturates to slip into a coma and drown in my hot tub while unconscious, travelled to the top of tall buildings, cliffs and peered over the edge of high bridges. The most serious attempt I made was trying to open my veins with a razor blade. I must admit though, I was just testing the water. You want to make sure that you open some major veins, like the jugular, if you want to die quickly.

Stupidly, I still have hope and some faith in myself. I should write myself off for dead, like those-who-shall-not-be-named have done.

So it came to pass that I went into The Priory, with a referral to one of the country's leading experts on Bipolar Disorder and Dual Diagnosis. JPMorgan were told that I was experiencing mental health problems (true) but the main objective was for me to detox for 28 days, so that there was a clearer clinical picture, and the treatment of my Bipolar and depression could begin.

That makes me an addict right? Don't need to read the rest of the story. Skip to the end. Case closed.

Well, actually, The Priory and my psychiatrists were concerned with my mental health, and saving my life, not just labelling me as an addict and sticking me into the revolving doors of mistreatment and stigma that those suffering individuals endure. The Priory is actually a private hospital, and cares primarily for those suffering with various mental health disorders that are less controversial and stigmatised than substance abuse. There were ten times as many patients who were there because of depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, eating disorders etc. etc.

It's actually all part and parcel of the same group of problems. One fellow patient had been admitted with mental health issues, but out of some drive to self-destruct, she started filling up a mug with alcohol-based hand sanitising gel and flavouring it with orange squash, and drinking it to get drunk.

One of my fellow patients tried to commit suicide by climbing a high wall and hurling herself off, while I was there. Does it matter if she was being treated for depression, or for substance abuse? The fact of the matter is that she was suicidal at that moment. Mental illness of some kind had driven her to try and take her own life.

There was a game we used to play, when a car used to roll up to the house, and out would step the worried looking family members, dragging some dishevelled son, daughter or partner out of the back seat and into a meeting about admission. We used to try and guess what they would be admitted for. Sometimes it was obvious - if they had red wine all spilt down their clothes for example - but often it was nearly impossible.

But what's it actually like, in private hospital? Are there rock stars and stuff? Well, my doctors had treated a number of high-profile sportsmen and women, but when I was there, there weren't any rock stars. Couple of millionaires but no rock stars.

Really, it's much like an NHS mental hospital, except a little more well appointed. Everything is bolted down and the windows don't open and the doors don't lock. The lights don't dangle down and there are no curtains. Mirror glass is made of plastic, and pictures are screwed to the wall, not hung. Yes, there is quite a lot of anti-hanging thought that has gone into things.

When you arrive, you will hand over your razor, scissors, tweezers, solvent containing toiletries, shoelaces, belt etc. to the nurses to keep at their station. If you want to have a shave you'll have to ask for permission, and you'll only get a short amount of time to attack your face with something sharp.

Plus, it's still a hospital, and people are very sick. One woman said to me "it's OK, your secret is safe with me" and tapped her nose with a knowing wink. It later emerged that she thought I was a royal prince, and that my presence in hospital was a state secret. She also came into my room and stole all my underwear and my books, before the nurses tracked down her hiding place.

The rooms are actually as good as any 3-star hotel, with a writing desk, nice view of the gardens, an OK single bed and an ensuite with no shower curtain or plug (drowning is frowned upon). Once you're off suicide watch, you might get to move to one of the double bedrooms that are further away from the nurse's station.

Other than the slight refinement of having a TV and a telephone in your bedroom, there is little different from NHS mental health treatment. The food was very good, I have to say, but your days are generally structured around morning and afternoon trips to the dispensary hatch for your medications, and being regularly checked on by nurses if you're not in some group activity.

Between art therapy, yoga, mindfulness, music therapy, table tennis, TV, movie night and generally socialising with the other patients, it all sounds like a thoroughly lovely spa break. There was a gym and quite big grounds that one could roam in, provided you told the nurses where you were going and how long you'd be gone for. Leaving the compound within my 28 days was forbidden.

Your partner can come and visit you, and you can give a knowing wink at the nurses station before you have sex, so that nobody barges in on you unannounced. Just don't take too long. Visiting is only on a Sunday, so you'll probably have a sack like Santa anyway. You have to hand over your mobile phone and laptop, and digitally detox, so pornography is hard to come by. Probably because sex addiction is also treated at the hospital.

We should remember that although people talk about 'rehab' we need to be quite clear about the treatment route of substance abuse. There is first a detox. It's necessary to break the body's dependence on substances, and treat the withdrawal. If you are an alcohol or a benzodiazepine abuser, there's a good chance that withdrawal could kill you, so the hospital will put you on tapered medication to get you off those substances. If you are an opiate abuser, you will get very sick from withdrawal symptoms, and these can be attenuated with substitute prescribing or by putting the patient into induced sleep. If you are a stimulant abuser, you will suffer cognitive impairment, exhaustion and suicidal depression.

After detox, which could take the whole 28 days, then comes rehabilitation. Depending on how dysfunctional a person has been, they could need 3 to 6 months of rebuilding their damaged life in a safe environment. Just breaking the cycle of chemical dependency is not enough. There's a reason why a person entered that cycle in the first place. There's a reason why that person stayed in that cycle.

We know that gambling addicts don't inject packs of cards into their veins, so addiction can't just be about chemical substances, can it?

So it was, as my time at The Priory drew to a close, the staff gave me the bad news that my treatment was incomplete. I would need another 3 months of rehab if I wanted to make the changes permanent. I flipped out. I discharged myself, went home for a day. Then I spoke to one of the staff on the phone and decided to go back for the remaining few days of treatment. She-who-shall-not-be-named decided that I had "failed" in my commitment to getting better. That's simply a lack of understanding about the commitment that is needed to support somebody in recovery.

Recovery is not about abstinence, it's about having people who love you trying to support you. Support does not mean hectoring, bullying, nitpicking and generally being obnoxious to a person. Your holier-than-thou drinking and smoking and generally behaving like it's OK to do whatever you want and laughing in the face of the abstainer is not helpful, OK?

Abstinence doesn't even work anyway. It's just a continual reminder of what people want to believe: that you're somehow a bad person, that you're faulty, defective. People want to treat you differently, want to label you. Teetotallers are ridiculed, treated with contempt. Why bother being teetotal?

Certainly, not being a smoker was a problem in hospital. There would be long periods where I was left all on my own, because everybody was outside smoking. There is no real abstinence in the world. I found the nurse's stash of caffeinated coffee in one of the more remote kitchens, and in some hospitals you are even allowed to have caffeinated drinks. 'Addicts' are encouraged to not give up smoking and tea/coffee, because they will need those things as a crutch, during those early days of abstinence.

If you look a little more closely at human behaviour, you will see that people are self medicating in one way or another. You'll see the hypocrites, dosing themselves up with stimulants in the form of caffeine. You'll hear the hypocrites, being hypocritical about addiction inbetween puffs on their cigarette. You'll suffer the hypocrites, swallowing their pills and liquids they have as government sanctioned, medically approved substitute addictions.

I could go to my doctor and get a prescription - called a script in addict parlance - for something to salve my addiction and turn it into something seemingly acceptable in society. It's OK if my pills come in boxes from the pharmacy, with my name printed on them and with a prescription from my GP or psychiatrist?

If I had to go to work at the moment I would probably need some Dexamphetamine, or at least a gallon of super strong black coffee. Because I've used so many stimulants, I can drink heaps of coffee without having the anxiety, palpitations and sweats that you would get, but it's a poor substitute for genuine amphetamines, even if the caffeine molecule is virtually identical.

There's no magic in treatment. There's no magic to recovery. It's just time & space and being treated nicely by people, being respected as a human being.

It's important to respect people.

Just respect people.

Tags: #addiction #alcohol #drugs #suicide #mentalhealth #nhs #bipolar #depression