This is a story of a growing problem in people's lives....

I can't get no sleep. That's a double negative. What I mean is, that I have a problem with insomnia, because I stare at backlit devices around-the-clock. The problem with backlit devices is that they output light that hits your retina, telling your body "it's daytime, get up".

When I'm awake, which is most of the time, I'm either at work on my laptop or working at a double or even triple monitor, looking at my phone, or looking at a TV, tablet or some other backlit device. I had even taken to reading books on my phone, which means that my body had absolutely no light-based clue as to what the f**king time is.

Unsurprisingly, this messes with your circadian rhythm, even if you eat your meals at regular intervals, and attempt to get in and out of bed at normal times. I generally keep at least 3 electronic devices within grabbing distance of my bed anyway (phone, laptop, smartwatch) and often times I fall asleep with either my laptop on my lap, or still wearing my smartwatch (which helpfully vibrates, so I can briefly wake up to check any alerts).

Photographing stuff on my phone and uploading it to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, posting check-ins and status updates, and making snide or sarcastic Tweets - from 4 different accounts, at least - has grown and grown, leading to a kind of live-blogging of my life.

To say that I was obsessed with social media would be a massive understatement. It's actually an addiction that is affecting my health. That's the generally recognised definition of an addiction: when something you enjoy is negatively affecting your life, but you are struggling or unable to reduce your dependence on the thing you are addicted to (water, oxygen and sugar don't qualify, you see, because you die without those things).

The inscription around the woolly head of our sheepie friend reads: we are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep. Shaun would be well advised to make sure he gets enough sleep, as our immune systems can get dangerously low if we aren't giving our brains and bodies the rest they were designed to have.

Modern life gives us surprisingly few environmental cues as to what we should be doing. Here in London we have artificial lighting 24 hours a day, and there is barely a wall that doesn't have some kind of flat screen attached to it now. We really are a City that doesn't sleep. When all the bankers, lawyers and accountants go home in their taxis, just before midnight, an army of cleaners and trash collectors sweep in behind, to collect all those discarded coffee cups and sandwich wrappers.

Most offices are now 24 x 7 x 364 (you get Christmas Day off - this is the only real Bank Holiday) which have cost-saving motion sensing lighting, so you only have to glance up at one of the tall office blocks at an unusual hour, to get a rough idea of just how many people are working on some unrealistic deadline for their client.

Delivering a deal, getting the Thank Yous from your bosses and clients. High-fiving your colleagues, and adding another tombstone to your impressive collection of deals or projects that you have delivered... that's addictive too. You get a little dopamine hit every time one of those things happens, and before you know it, you find yourself going into the office 7 days a week and answering the phone to your bosses whenever they call.

In a global business, we operate a follow-the-sun model, where Europe hands over to the Americas, and then onto Australasia, and then Asia-Pacific, and then Middle East and North Africa and all too soon it's dawn again. Where those business centres are unable to fully support themselves, some poor sod carries their phone and/or BlackBerry everywhere anytime. We used to call it Crackberry when we first got our BlackBerries, and you found yourself checking email at 4am, even when you officially weren't on call.

We can't actually help ourselves anymore. Whenever we hear that bleep and see that message notification light blinking, we have been habituated into reaching out and grabbing it, no matter what time of day it is, no matter how socially inappropriate it might be, no matter what else we are attempting to do at the time.

I find myself looking at my smartphone, one-handed, while cycling along in front of 3-lanes of red London busses and trucks... what could go wrong? I find myself finishing typing a message, one-handed, while descending steps and even a ladder that leads down onto the 'beach' outside my flat. That ladder is about 80ft high. It would hurt if I fell, or maybe even kill me.

It's a similar deal with selfies. People will go to extreme lengths to get the shot. They won't even let you skydive with a camera until you have done a certain amount of jumps, because of the sensible precaution that people should concentrate on the hard ground that is approaching at 125mph, and not the killer shot that will make their Facebook profile look super awesome.

So I tried to photograph 64 painted sheep in Covent Garden yesterday. Should we be quite worried, in a pathetic hand-wringing Daily Mail reader way? Why? In the above image, some adults might have been accidentally been photographed obsessively taking photos of their children. The image is low enough resolution that you can't actually recognise people, but some idiot will still declare that their privacy has been invaded. Welcome to London, you muppets. We are one nation under CCTV.

(NOTE: I took particular care to avoid taking a photo of anybody's child, and no, that really is not your kid in the image... it's someone else who shops in Baby Gap or Mothercare or wherever, and has a blonde/mousey/dark-haired kid. Can you imagine how hard that is in Covent Garden?).

So, for my part, I am pretty much putting my entire life - not including anything I am under contractual and professional obligation to protect - into the public domain. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear.

Is this brave, or stupid? Will I come to regret doing this? Am I embarrassed? Yes, there is embarrassment at first, and then this grows into a feeling of being liberated. Nudity, sex etc. are still taboos, so I'm not going to take things that far, and I am mindful of other people's need for privacy so I won't be exposing anybody else to my public life laundry. Ask yourself though, why do you feel uneasy about something leaking out?

So, I believe that Cannabis is a very dangerous drug that has been allowed to enter popular culture (some conservative estimates say that 1 in 10 people are regularly 'stoning' themselves). My biggest concern is that prodromal Schizophrenia is being turned into fully blown psychotic episodes in young people. The paranoia and disordered thinking that I have witnessed in friends and relatives is disturbing.

The strains of Cannabis that have been developed with very high Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) content are ruining many lives. People just sit around, eating, playing computer games, and p1ssing their youth away. These are smart and enterprising people. We are losing a whole generation, and I'm pretty angry about that.

If you walk around Camden Town, you will realise how the Marajuana plant has become a ubiquitous emblem for a huge powerful narcotics industry. The revenue and turnover involved is many many billions, in the UK alone. The corruption involved, the bribery of government officials, is a multi-agency problem that spans Border Controls, Customs, Police, Local Government, and of course, Parliament. Professor David Nutt was run out of government for trying to bring some sanity to the issues which threaten to tear our society apart.

We can't have an entire generation, whose ideas and energy have been repressed by a chemical 'straight jacket'. These stoners are too intoxicated to see that they have been conned. They might think they are part of a counter-culture revolution. From my first-hand observations, they are actually spouting complete rubbish, gawping at the TV, surrounded by empty junk food wrappers, in the stained clothes they have been wearing for days.

It sounds like I'm having a go at young people. I really am not. This is a major sadness in my life, that brilliant, bright, intelligent, energetic, beautiful young people are selling themselves so short, because they have been trapped into a cycle of poverty and intoxication, addicted to strong narcotics. What other hopes do they have? Getting a job as a young person is almost impossible.

Can't get a job without the experience. Can't get the experience without the job. That's the spine-chilling Catch 22 that is destroying a whole generation. These are your children who are being frozen out from the employment market. Take a bloody look at yourself, stop looking at the profit and turnover for your company, and ask yourself how many apprentices have you trained? How many entry-level positions have you created in your company? What are you doing to help the next generation?

Give young people the break they need in life. It could be as little as a small business loan, of a few hundred or few thousand pounds. That kind of money is pocket change compared to the value of your savings and assets. If you don't give away more than 1% of your total personal wealth (value of your house + value of your salary + value of your savings + value of your pension) every year, for the lifetime of each child that you have spawned, then you are a pathetic spineless leech on society.

My parents, tried to be as supportive as they were capable of being, and I love them. They have made mistakes, just the same as all of us, and I do recognise that being a parent is hard, and everybody is just winging it.

Tags: #childhod #addiction #mentalhealth #drugs #privacy #london #banking #career

This is a story of queue jumping and those who get left behind...

I keep this in my wallet, to remind myself not to be one 0f the self-important pricks who thinks they deserve their position in the world. It reminds me that it's never OK to barge in front of the struggling masses. I found it in the middle of a forest in Ireland. The former owner, I imagine, was a jumped-up London eedjit who littered one of the most beautiful and unspoilt parts of our world I have ever seen. This little patch of green is one of the few places to not have been totally screwed by selfish and greedy monsters.

This keepsake also reminds me of the day that I decided to make a switch, from being so consumed with the rat race that I was unable to stop and smell the roses, to notice that there are very few places left that have not got massive concrete tower blocks, huge piles of plastic rubbish, terrible air quality, polluted rivers and all the increasingly obvious signs that the human race is acting with little or no care for the future of the planet.

It also marks the day that I reconnected with nature, having been stuck in the concrete jungle for far too long. The problem with London is, that unless you have a healthy outdoor hobby, like cycling or surfing, you have very little connection with your environment. We live under artificial lighting 24 hours a day, and our views are dominated by huge buildings, not towering trees.

Another problem with London is the drinking culture. I'm not sure if London drinks alcohol to switch off and get some sleep, after all those strong coffees, or whether to numb the realisation that the standard of living is actually pretty poor, when you consider long commutes, high rents, overcrowding, crime rates and poverty everywhere you look (except for Canary Wharf, which is a private estate).

So, I decided that I am going to quit drinking. This is harder than you would think, when you work in an industry where a standard interview joke with a candidate is "Do you drink? Don't worry if you don't, we can send you on a course". They closed the bars in offices, as the City has cleaned up its image, but you can still roll from your desk straight to a bar within barely a few strides.

Let's be clear about my drinking though. I drank pints of lager out with the lads from work. Drinking spirits and drinking alone set of alarm bells in my head, luckily, but binge drinking huge amounts of beer is not good either, even if everyone else around you is doing it too.

It has taken some time to prepare my colleagues for the relinquishment of my final vice. I have never smoked in my life. I gave up caffeine over the last year or so and I am now completely decaffeinated. I am targeting targeting a 1 pint a week, which will be cut to zero in October. This is a drastic reduction from having 5 or 6 pints of Peroni (over 5% alcohol) on a midweek evening, and my body and my colleagues have felt the impact.

So, at first, my body was extremely unhappy about going alcohol free. My sleep was terrible. I was waking up sweating in the middle of the night. In the morning I felt like I was full of flu: aching joints, feeling sick, painful abdomen. This was when I was STOPPING... surely we are supposed to feel better, not worse? Well, as it turns out, it takes quite a long time before you start to feel better.

I was shocked by how long it has taken me to taper my alcohol consumption down to just a single social drink, which I accepted on the proviso that nobody was allowed to pressure me into having another one, and I would go home after I had finished it. My colleagues carried on and were nursing hangovers the next day. I felt surprisingly rubbish after only 1 pint, but I was able to get up and have my breakfast at the normal time.

I think it really is like my friend, Tim, often jokes: "I'm not an alcoholic, because alcoholics go to meetings". The City runs on that kind of gallows humour. However, I have now started to lose friends and colleagues to alcoholism, and many more are very ill indeed. I don't want to be next.

Could this be my last ever pint? My body and brain wish it was (October 2014)

Tags: #career #london #alcohol #addiction #mentalhealth #banking

This is a story of exploration, at the ragged limit of control...

Promises are easily made, but you have to make good on those promises if you really meant what you said. When I found myself without any money or support to build the startup that would set my conscience straight, for my involvement in the Credit Crunch, and help me back to health & wealth after separation from my wife, I had to think creatively.

I sank every penny I had, plus everything I could borrow from the banks and other commercial lenders (which was a lot... I am extremely creditworthy) into Bitcoin, in August 2013. This turned out to be a rather shrewd investment. Only one friend, Cameron, was wise enough to back me, and I think the return on his capital is likely to have exceeded a lifetime of Governement-backed tax free saving.

Another friend, Will, decided to copy my investment strategy, and had me to manage the purchase and sale of his Bitcoin Miner to maximise his profit. However, he decided to hold and try to run his profits on his Bitcoins, when I was cashing out in December 2013. The losses he sustained from that mark-to-market point, have been pretty eye-watering. Oh well; he's still suckling at the teet of Investment Banking, so he doesn't need the money.

Selling my house, dividing up all my posessions and trying to move what I could to London, as well as divorce paperwork and general breakup unpleasantness, plus having to risk everything just to keep my hopes & dreams alive, was the very last distraction I needed. Doing a startup is hard at the best of times. Moving is stressful. Leaving everything you've built and worked for is heart-wrenching. Doing it when you are unwell... it's enough to finish a person off.

And so, in the first half of 2014 I had to invest in myself. All my profit was re-invested in my health. I parked my dreams of building a social enterprise - a not-for-profit built to salve an aching conscience - built with knowledge gleaned from my obscenely rich masters.

Exactly how rich did I make my masters? Well, software I designed and delivered was responsible for the confirmation of $1,160,000,000,000,000 in Credit Default Swaps contracts in 2008. That's $165,714 for every man, woman and child on the planet. That's f**ked up.

A guy I worked with resigned in moral protest... but he was really just looking after himself: he bought gold at $550 a troy Oz and a chicken farm in New Zealand. I was disturbed by what we were doing, but I'm just a frustrated coder... I knew I could deliver the project for the bank... I didn't know how to say "no".

Scarcity, collatteral, securitisation: the basis for the non-insane version of capitalism (September 2013)

Tags: #startup #career #banking #capitalism #computing #divorce #friends

This is a story of unintended consequences: opportunities and serendipity...

The National Health Service is a wonderful thing. Universal healthcare, including free dentistry and glasses for children and vulnerable members of society. I benefitted from this, but not in the way that might seem most immediately obvious, from the picture of a bespectacled little version of myself, above.

My parents were kind enough to not only care deeply about my eyesight - which was tested at a very young age - but also to impress upon me the importance of having 'adult' mannerisms: remembering my P's and Q's ("please" and "thank you" for anybody not brought up in the Victorian-era), thanking my host for letting me stay, complimenting the chef on meals, and other forgotten social protocols from previous generations.

The combination of a 'bookish' appearance, precicely enunciated diction and good manners, plus a whole repertoire of "party tricks" could be guaranteed to have adults coo-ing and clucking over a "lovely polite little boy". This was borne out of nothing more than any son or daughter's natural desire to please their parents.

I went to the local state school, in Jericho, Oxford, an area which was rapidly being gentrified by middle-class educated families who had discovered that the rental and house prices were excellent value, compared to the rest of central Oxford. This was on account of a stigma of living in "working-class terraced houses" near the canal and derelict, decaying industrial infrastructure of the City.

In 1930's Oxford, Jericho would have busled with coal carts, bringing up sackloads from the canal to heat the large, draughty houses of North Oxford, and the pall of coal smoke from Lucy's Iron Works would have hung close to the water, and through the comparatively narrow terraces, versus the grand wide boulevards of St. Giles and Broad Street.

Being 'right-on' liberals and socialists from humble backgrounds meant these families did not have the means to pay for expensive housing and private school fees. So it was, I ended up going to school with the sons & daughters of heart surgeons, Members of Parliament, bankers, lawyers, accountants and of course, academics, who achieved their place in the world by hard work, not by nepotism.

Amongst my primary school friends, Danny's Grandad, had been instrumental in bringing universal healthcare to the people of Britain, and in so doing, had 'cursed' me with the glasses, which I didn't appreciate the value of at the time.

When playing at the house of another friend, Joe, we were allowed to play on his Dad's Apple Macintosh Plus. Joe's Dad, Paul, is a famous Zoologist who used the Mac to author papers with the likes of Richard Dawkins. Joe's mum, Anna, was a Systems Analyst, and my career aspiration - to drive a coal lorry - was inadvertantly redirected into the world of computing from this point, circa 1986 (age 6).

I can remember those first experiences with a WIMP (Windows Icons Mouse & Pointer) as so intuitive, so natural. It was joyful. Bell Labs invented the transistor, which gave us the modern computer, rather than the collossal rooms of valves that went before. Probably equally important is the work of Xerox in inventing the mouse, and finally Apple, for making a packaged instrument that can be operated by a 6-year-old. "It just works" really is as true today as it was back then.

Sometimes - in fact most of the time - seeing is believing. But this sometimes isn't enough. We also need the pretty packaging. Our computers need to have a rainbow-coloured piece of half-eaten fruit on them. Our nerds need to have a pair of spectacles and talk like they've swallowed a dictionary.

No, I am not comparing myself to Steve Jobs. My career is only just getting interesting. Plus I don't wear enough black.

Tags: #parents #oxford #childhood #apple #computing