This is a story about being locked in...

Let me quote from a poem called The Panther by Rainer Maria Rilke:

His weary glance, from passing by the bars,

Has grown into a dazed and vacant stare;

It seems to him there are a thousand bars

And out beyond those bars the empty air.

 

The pad of his strong feet, that ceaseless sound

Of supple tread behind the iron bands,

Is like a dance of strength circling around,

While in the circle, stunned, a great will stands.

 

But there are times the pupils of his eyes

Dilate, the strong limbs stand alert, apart,

Tense with the flood of visions that arise

Only to sink and die within his heart. 

Some of us do not seem to suffer in captivity. Some of us even thrive. "This is great: it's so comfortable, warm and dry in this big building" one pig says to another. "Yeah, I know and they keep bringing us all the food we can eat". Have these hogs found hog's heaven?

Perhaps this analogy serves well to explain why I bite the hand that feeds me. Perhaps it explains why any short-term comfort does not outweigh my long-term unhappiness.

"Stop complaining and take the free food and be grateful to work in a nice warm office" you might admonish me. "There are other people in the world who'd dream of having what you have".

How low do you need me to go? I've been homeless, penniless. I've cleaned hotel kitchens and done the washing up. I've done shitty jobs for shitty money. I've lived on the streets, in parks, crisis houses, and hostels. I've accepted food handouts. You want me to sink even lower? How's about being locked up in police cells, or on secure hospital wards? Is that low enough for you?

I tasted freedom once, when I was briefly released from my lifelong cage, and it was such a sweet feeling. No exams, no holiday projects, no homework, no bullying, no kissing ass to teachers. No interviews, no performance evaluations, no targets, no made-up work, no kissing ass to bosses. Nobody ever said "you're screwing up your academic prospects" or "you're screwing up your career" if I didn't conform and consent to live in a cage.

Obviously it it would be lovely to be a painter, a writer, a musician, a poet, and to be able to cope in captivity. Captivity demands zero creativity. Captivity can't cope with creativity.

Personally, I think the two worlds have been designed to be mutually exclusive. If I tell people at my day job that I wrote a novel they look visibly uncomfortable. The two groups just don't know how to mix, mingle, let alone relate to one another, or ask non clichéd awkward questions.

Am I medically broken for not being able to happily live in my cage, being fattened up for slaughter? Am I medically broken for wanting to be free of mortgages, ISAs, savings accounts, watching my digital bank balance slowly increment upwards. along with the days, weeks and years counting down until the day I die? Am I sick, if I reject a life of stress and anxiety, which benefits my paymasters, not me?

I'm sure there's a medically sanctioned happy pill out there to shut up the part of my brain that says "why are you enslaving yourself?" and turns me into a good well-behaved consumer, dragging a ball-and-chain of debt around with me.

Should I run clamouring for my doctor to anaesthetise me from reality? Should I ask for a chemical lobotomy that would allow me to be well-adjusted to a fucked up world?

Tags: #depression #suicide #career 

This is a story about dance, trance and magic plants...

On the left hand side of the picture above, we see drugs that are considered to be medications. That is to say, they are considered to have some useful function in the practice of medicine. On the right hand side of the picture, we see drugs of abuse. Drugs of abuse are considered to have no useful function at all, and have been made outright illegal in all contexts.

In the middle of the picture are pills that are sometimes considered medicine and sometimes considered drugs. Probably the best example I can give you of such a dichotomy is ketamine (not pictured) which is well known as a horse tranquilliser. In fact, ketamine should be better known as a general anaesthetic, and the drug of choice for paramedics to treat pain in victims of traumatic injuries, for example in the aftermath of a road traffic accident.

Dihydrocodeine is an opiate, and opiates are analgesic. Analgesics don't cause numbness, but they do increase pain tolerance. With enough analgesic, you could saw off your own leg and feel everything, but you wouldn't care about the pain. Anelgesics are painkillers. Dihydrocodeine is a painkiller.

Tramadol is an opiate, therefore also an analgesic.

Zopiclone, Xanax, diazepam and etizolam are in the hypnotic/sedative/anxiolytic category. Zopiclone will help you have a good night of uninterrupted sleep and wake up without a drug hangover: it's an excellent sleep aid. Xanax is a fast-acting, short-lived tranquilliser: it's great for stopping panic attacks, and might be useful if you're suffering a bout of unbearable stress and anxiety or struggling to drop off to sleep. Diazepam is a long-lived tranquilliser that's good for longer term management of stress and anxiety. Etizolam is a result of prohibition: it's an imitation of diazepam that used to be legal to sell and possess as a 'research chemical'.

MDMA is the abbreviation for 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (and yes, I did just write that without having to look it up) which is more commonly known as Ecstasy, molly, mandy or generally as 'pills' in a clubbing/rave context. It's a stimulant and empathogen: it stimulates empathy. Its peak effects last 6 to 8 hours, but takes about 12 hours to wear off completely. The experiences can be very profound and long lasting. MDMA is extremely draining on the serotonin system of the brain, which can lead to a form of delayed comedown, coming days after taking the drug.

Crystal Meth is the commonly known name - thanks to the TV series Breaking Bad - of methamphetamine. It's a very powerful stimulant with effects lasting 12+ hours, and it disrupts sleep long after its desired effects have worn off. The more astute reader may notice that the final part of the chemical name of MDMA is the same as the chemical name of meth. As you might expect, there are similar effects: loss of appetite, increased energy and decreased need for sleep. However, while MDMA stimulates empathetic behaviour - hugging etc - meth tends to stimulate rather more hedonistic behaviours, such as fucking and masturbating to pornography. However, both drugs - being amphetamines - cause a man's dick to shrink to a little nubbin that's no use to anybody. Polydrug abusers might use sildenafil (Viagra) or other erectile dysfunction medications in conjunction with meth, in order to sustain a decent hard-on.

Spread out on the kitchen counter top, there's probably about £300 worth of drugs.

MDMA is extremely cheap, coming in at circa £10 per gram, which is enough for 5 very strong doses. Far cheaper than getting drunk in a pub or a bar. Pound for pound, MDMA represents excellent value.

Crystal Meth is the most expensive, coming in at about £100 per gram. Because of the crystalline form of the drug, it's far harder (although not impossible) to cut it with other things. Cocaine has an average street purity of less than 20%, because it's so tempting for every person who handles the coke in the chain, to cut it a bit and increase their profits. All white powders look the same, and numbing agents - like baby teething powder - will give the numbing effect that cocaine has. Crystal meth is generally pretty pure. It's usually smoked or injected. You do not want to mess with this stuff.

Diazepam is frighteningly cheap. 100 pills containing 10mg of diazepam each, will set you back £30 or maybe even less. The price has fallen drastically, from £1 a pill, to now 30 pence. It's important to remember that diazepam is a benzodiazepine, and the benzodiazepines are physically addictive. You can die if you take a load of diazepam and then stop taking it. It's not something you should mess with.

Xanax, by comparison, is very expensive. Because it's convenient to be able to take it and not be spaced out the next day, it's become America's favourite tranquilliser. The Rolling Stones might have sung about Mother's Little Helpers - referring to Valium - but now the housewife's choice is Xanax. Physically addictive, blah blah blah.

Zopiclone is nice and cheap and works really well without nasty side effects. The only problem is, becoming too reliant on it for sleep. At some point, you have to stop relying on pills and alcohol to get to sleep, and learn natural ways of making sure you can drop off and get your precious 8 hours. Try blue-light filtering glasses, not having any screen time after 10pm and sleeping with your smartphone and other electronics in another room, so there's no temptation to pick them up and start looking at Facebook or whatever.

Tramadol and Dihydrocodeine will take you on the journey to opium, morphine, fentanyl and diacetylmorphine (heroin). The cheapest opiate of all is heroin, because of the simple economic law of supply and demand. People fucking love heroin. I've smoked heroin on a few occasions and I enjoyed the feeling of carefree sleepiness, but I never got a rush of euphoria like I imagine you must get when you inject. I've never injected drugs. One should be mindful that the vast majority of new heroin addicts in America started their journey with opiates prescribed by their doctor - oxycontin, for example - and then moved to heroin because oxy is prohibitively expensive. Tramadol and codeine are pretty cheap, but they're also very weak compared with morphine and heroin.

There's no need to be afraid of any of these drugs in the sense that they're not going to leap down your throat and cause you to instantly become an addict who's prepared to murder your entire family for 50 pence, so you can have one more tiny little hit. These drugs are not like Venomous Agent X, which can kill you almost instantly if you absorb even the tiniest amount through your skin. You do not want to touch a pin head sized amount of VX nerve agent, but you can safely handle Ecstasy pills, shards of ice (crystal meth) and all of the other drugs pictured, and you will come to no harm at all.

Taking these drugs once, or even twice or three times, is very unlikely to result in addiction. You may enjoy the sensations; the experience, but it's quite possible that you might find the effects of the drug to be extremely unpleasant. Certainly, MDMA can be very intense and the intoxication of tramadol can be alarming. Interestingly, the calming effect of the benzodiazepines is often the best treatment for a 'bad trip' that you very much want to end. Sadly, there's no 'off' switch for most drugs. It's like when you've had too much to drink and you're throwing up: you wish that you could stop feeling so sick and that the room would stop spinning, but there's no instant fix.

To have this vast array of drugs just lying around, seems to invite disaster and is a risk in terms of the illegality of possessing so many controlled substances. Are you going to ring the police? Do you think I should go to jail? Is it right to ruin my life, because we should follow the law to the letter, even though the law is an ass?

To address the second concern: doesn't this invite disaster? I've had enough disasters in my life. I've reached a point where I'm rather sick of the drama and the near-death experiences. I'm rather sick of the paranoia and the comedowns. The drugs don't even work any more, because my brain has become so used to powerful narcotics. My brain is literally saying "you've been doing this shit for far too long". I'm almost at the point where drugs bore me.

Right now, I need tramadol, because I'm in a lot of pain because of my leg injury. The zopiclone will be handy when I run out of pregablin, which I'm using to sleep through my pain and discomfort. Having Xanax and diazepam lying around is never a terrible thing. At least benzos are a lot cheaper than a bottle of wine or two, a lot less fattening and a lot less liver damaging. It is a slippery slope though, and it is easier to get hooked on benzos than it is to become an alcoholic, because there isn't really a hangover per se, with the benzos.

The MDMA and the meth should probably get flushed down the loo. I'm too old to go clubbing/raving, and the crystal meth tips me straight into a hypomanic episode and turns me into a total sex maniac.

The dihydrocodeine will gather dust in the medicine cabinet, as a strong painkiller, in case I ever have a nasty injury again and the doctors are dicks about giving me prescription drugs to relieve pain. I do think that doctors in America have been foolishly over-prescribing opiate painkillers, because they believed the marketing of the pharmaceutical companies.

I'm sure you think that this cornucopia of chemicals is crazy. I'm sure you think this deluge of drugs is deranged. I'm sure you think this mass of medications is madness.

However, it's fucking hassle having to get a doctor's appointment, wait for the allotted date and time, and then persuade the doctor to give you what you want and need. There's every chance that the doctor may end up sending you away empty handed. Far better to have your own well-stocked pharmacy cupboard, and have whatever you need whenever you need it.

Of course, the nanny state is there to protect us from ourselves, which is why we arrest people who are about to climb mountains, don't we?

Prohibition has failed spectacularly, because it has created highly efficient black markets. Prohibition has failed spectacularly, because it has needlessly ruined lives of otherwise law-abiding citizens. Prohibition has failed, because the middle classes take just as many drugs as poor people, but the rich middle-class people are very rarely prosecuted. Prohibition has failed, because drugs are just as widely available as ever, and the main beneficiaries are corrupt customs, corrupt police and organised crime gangs. Prohibition has failed, because it fails to acknowledge the inescapable fact that people are always going to make, sell, buy and take drugs, no matter what the law says. Prohibition has failed, because it makes people paranoid and exacerbates mental health problems. Prohibition has failed because it directs money that could be used to help the tiny proportion of people who struggle with addiction, instead of using vast amounts of resources to persecute ordinary law-abiding citizens, who just want to smoke a bit of dope or take a pill when they go clubbing on a Saturday night.

You know prohibition has failed spectacularly, when the government makes mushrooms - which grow naturally in the ground all over the UK - a Class A drug, in the same category as crack cocaine and heroin. Are you fucking nuts? Are you fucking telling me that we should stuff our prisons full of people who picked a fucking mushroom in a fucking field?

Imagine this conversation:

Prisoner A: What you been nicked for?

Prisoner B: Murder. What about you?

Prisoner A: I picked a mushroom

That is quite genuinely the situation that the government introduced into UK law. I'm being quite serious here. Mushrooms are considered just as bad as crack cocaine. I wonder what the government were smoking when they made that insane decision.

As we know, when a government bans a drug, then clever chemists create another one that's almost identical. In America, they have a law that makes analogues illegal, so only whole new classes of drugs can get around their laws. All kinds of obscure chemicals - legal highs - burst onto the scene thanks to America's attempts to get clever with prohibition.

The UK government has gone a stage further and attempted to ban anything that has a psychoactive effect. That means that we're all 'in possession' of illegal drugs, because our bodies are stuffed full of chemicals that are psychoactive. It also means that drugs will simply get sold in 'kit' form: mix the ingredients at home and hey presto! There's your drug of choice. People will always find a way around the stupidity of prohibition.

The fear that has been stoked up by these terrible prohibition policies, has created a squeamishness about being able to have honest open conversations about drug taking. We should be well informed, not ignorant. We shouldn't be paranoid about being persecuted by the authorities. You have to be fairly brave to stick your head above the parapet. A lot of corrupt officials make a lot of money, through the ongoing boom times of the black market. There is an insatiable demand for drugs - and there always will be - which is why there is so much resistance to making drug taking into something that's safer, regulated, quality controlled and a well understood problem, rather than something cloaked in secrecy and hampered by stigma.

I've had problems with addiction in the past, but it makes me a stronger more well-rounded person, to have been through that ordeal and to know what difficulties are faced by people who become ensnared in the traps that have been set for them: draining their bank balance, destroying their health, and driving them to criminality. Why can't I talk openly about my experiences? Why do I have to be anonymous, hiding away with other 'dirty' junkies, in church halls where we self-flagellate for our 'sins' and hang our heads in shame.

Obviously I've had enough of prohibition, but I've had enough of being stigmatised and shamed into silence and anonymity too. I've had enough of people's wilful ignorance, when it comes to drugs and the lives of drug users. I've had enough of ridiculous horror stories and misinformation.

Perhaps you didn't even read this far, if you're the kind of person whose mind I'm trying to open, but perhaps you did, because on the face of it I'm an educated middle-class white professional man, working for prestigious companies in seemingly important roles. You can't quite imagine me smoking heroin, can you?

I'm challenging your preconceived ideas. I'm making you question what you thought you knew, and what you thought was obvious and without exception.

Tags: #drugs

This is a story about affordable care...

I've been able to roll the dice a few times - following my dreams and chasing my ambitions - because of progressive liberal socialist policies put in place by the Labour government of 1945: most notably, the creation of the National Health Service.

I chose to leave an extremely well remunerated job with an American investment bank, with amazing private medical insurance and a brilliant team of occupational health doctors. That US-style of healthcare certainly gave me access to the very best treatment, whenever I needed it, but it was part of a "golden handcuffs" deal: a job that was so much better than anything I could get anywhere else, that I had to be insane to quit.

Life is a balancing act. You can have loads of money, but no time to spend it. You can have loads of time, but no money. You can have job security, but you'll be bored and constrained. You can have freedom and be your own boss, but you will carry all the risks and responsibilities. You have to choose what works for you.

While one friend has parked his tech startup dreams and has taken a salaried job, another couple of friends have just sold their tech startup. In the space of 6 years, I made myself sick with stress, trying to run my own tech startup; I went back to my old job at the American investment bank and stayed sick until I started rebuilding my life in London as an IT consultant. In the space of those 6 years, my friends had countless sleepless nights and worked relentlessly to build their startups to the point where they were worthy of investment or acquisition. In the space of those 6 years, my friend who originally introduced me to the tech startup ecosystem, built a bunch of cool tech and very gracefully pivoted into a job that really suits him, working for a company he really admires. In the space of those 6 years, my friends from the technology accelerator program we attended in Cambridge, raised millions of pounds of investment and sold their company to a tech giant.

Friends went to Silicon Valley to follow their tech dreams. One friend had to break up with his girlfriend. Another had to move his young children away from the family support network, and live with the risk that the USA would reject him and his family's request for residency. Imagine if I had moved to America. How would I ever afford the medical bills, when things have gone badly wrong? I would have been bankrupted many many times over!

Nobody's keeping a seat warm for me in a cushy job because I went to a posh school and a prestigious university. I have no trust fund or family money behind me. Running out of money has meant homelessness. Starting a business had to be profitable from day one.

There's just no way that I would have been able to pursue the opportunities that I have, without the National Health Service. In theory the UK and US are lands of opportunity, where anybody can start a business and become rich and successful. In practice, it's almost impossible unless you're already quite wealthy. The consequences of failure are just too much to bear, for most people.

My current business is consultancy. If I'm sick, I don't get paid. If I don't have a client, I don't get paid. However, I've calculated that I only need to work a few months of the year to earn the same as as the 'secure' job I gave up. It's a calculated risk. I might end up not being able to pay my tax bill. I might end up not being able to pay my rent. But, when things go well, they go really well. The odds are in my favour: if I can just get two or three contracts in a row, not get sick, maybe have some projects that run longer than expected, then I'll suddenly be way way way ahead of where I would be if I'd just plodded along with the golden handcuffs on.

I sat awkwardly on my leg and it went numb. My foot became swollen. My leg swelled up all the way above my knee. My kidneys shut down. I was admitted to hospital and put on dialysis. I haven't had any income since September. Surely this is why it's best to have a nice 'secure' job?

I've been stressed and depressed about losing a lucrative consultancy contract. I was literally about to start working again when I got sick. Contractually, I have no rights: the company could just award the contract to somebody else. I was going to have to start the search for a client all over again, meaning yet more loss of earnings.

Here I am in hospital. I've been here for a week.

I was seen by a doctor within an hour of arriving at Accident & Emergency. I've had two private rooms with amazing views over central London. I've been seen by top consultants, surgeons, registrars, nurses, phlebotomists, physiotherapists. I've been wheeled around by porters and served meals by catering staff. My bedding has been changed and I've been given clean gowns and towels. Numerous medications have been dispensed. I've had ultrasound scans and my blood has been scrubbed clean and drained of dangerous toxins by dialysis machines. My blood pressure, blood oxygen, pulse and body temperature has been monitored around the clock. Even the amount I drink and piss is meticulously recorded by the staff on the ward.

Nobody has ever asked me for my medical insurance details, credit card or discussed how I plan to pay for all this world-class treatment. Nobody is going to send me a bill when this is over.

As luck would have it, my client has decided they will wait for me to get better, so I can start my contract. Imagine if I wasn't able to take that contract in the first place, because of the risk of getting sick. Imagine if all the profit from my contract got wiped out by a humongous medical bill. How is anybody supposedly 'free' to become rich and successful, if they can't predict when they're going to get sick and how much it's going to cost?

This story is really a re-telling of three stories. The story of the friend who inspired me to follow my startup dreams and who inspired me to write about the importance of the National Health Service for social mobility; the story of the friend who succeeded, after 6 years of sacrifice, blood, sweat and tears, with countless sleepless nights and untold stress; and the story of me, who couldn't handle the chafing of the golden handcuffs, and got unwell because of the combined stress of running a tech startup with an unsupportive partner and unsupportive family.

I'm now lucky enough to have reconnected with old London friends, repaired friendships that were damaged or neglected when I got unwell, made new friends who are incredibly loyal and caring, and I have found an amazing lady who makes me feel loved to bits and completely accepted for who I am. Her family have welcomed me with open arms and most of the get well cards I've been getting have been from her family, along with offers of help to get me back on my feet.

While the welfare state is deeply flawed and it's an impossible task to get the social support that you need, as a single man whose life is imploding, the National Health Service has been the glue between the pooh, holding my shit together and just about keeping me alive. When you add in an amazing girlfriend, her family, loyal and caring friends and the rest of the social fabric that a person needs, you finally stand a chance of getting your life back.

I read with great dismay that the US Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) is being repealed. What the actual fuck, America?

If you wanted a case study for a society that's as close to perfect as you're going to get in an imperfect world, we should look to London. 300 different languages are spoken in London schools. The tower blocks of Canary Wharf sit in a London borough that's 46% Muslim. There are cycle superhighways, driverless trains, an underground railway that moves 5 million people every day. The Metropolitan Police are humble public servants, who protect the vulnerable and take people to hospital, involve social services and mental health crisis teams, rather than flashing their badges and drawing their weapons. The whole city exudes tolerance, inclusion and diversity: it's in London's DNA.

You might mistakenly believe that London is a city for the rich, but it's not: because of the National Health Service. The NHS employs 1.7 million people, and funded properly - like it is in London - it shows that socialism and multiculturalism can be made to work. The last piece of Britain's nationalised socialist infrastructure, not to be wrecked by the greed of capitalism; the NHS is a fly in the ointment for the Tories who want to sell everything off for private profits and damn the lives of British citizens.

I want the railways re-nationalised. I want the energy companies re-nationalised. Most of what comes out of Westminster is good for London but bad for the rest of the UK. What we're seeing is one rule for Londoners and another for everybody else. London gets state-owned public transport where 100% of the profits are re-invested in infrastructure. London has a remarkable set of public services that create jobs as well as keeping the residents well looked after. Socialism for London and capitalism for the rest of the UK... that sucks.

In my week in hospital, I've realised that London truly offers an enticing vision of a near-utopian society, so unlike the ugly one pictured in the dark minds of the populists. London is a European city, connected by train to Paris and Brussels. London is a mercantile centre, where East literally meets West at the Greenwich meridian line: the perfect time zone to deal with both Japan and San Francisco in the same business day. The peaceful co-existence of so many cultures in one crowded city is a modern miracle. I live here because of the immigrants, not in spite of the immigrants. London simply wouldn't function without its chaotic diversity.

Getting used to living in London is hard. The congestion is hard. The clash of cultures is hard. Seeing people who look and act differently is hard. Processing the humbling fact that the world is huge and complex is hard. Realising that you're in the racial minority is hard. Living a small, neat, efficient, considerate, reserved life, where you quietly observe and ask questions, as you discover your fellow Londoners have had incredible journeys, arriving here and building their lives, is hard. It's hard damn work, letting all this chaos and complexity assault your senses.

I don't want private hospitals, private health insurance, medical bills, policemen carrying guns, offensive foreign policy and an economy that offers no hope of escape from the socio-economic background you're born into, except for a tiny handful of sports stars, lottery winners, rappers and criminals. I don't want private prisons stuffed full of black people being used as slaves. I don't want a world of "us" and "them" with torture, pre-emptive strikes, invasion of sovereign nations, regime change and covert ops to destabilise other nations.

In a week in hospital, I've benefitted from everything that's great about Great Britain in the European Union and London's huge immigrant population. Only a tiny handful of the staff who've saved my life were born in Britain. Only a tiny fraction of the medical supplies and equipment were designed, tested and manufactured in the UK. I'm a stone's throw away from mosques where alleged firebrand hate preachers are supposedly plotting against the British people. Whitechapel Market is crowded with women wearing full-face veils, but I'm just another Londoner to them. If there's an exemplary organisation to demonstrate multicultural society working perfectly, doing life-saving work, it's the National Health Service.

Affordable care not only saved my life, but it's keeping my hopes and dreams alive, so I don't have to take a zero-hours contract McJob flipping burgers, just in case I get sick.

Tags: #NHS #hospital

This is a story about bias...

When you go hypomanic, you overestimate your capacity to work without sleep and food; you overestimate your ability to take on difficult tasks without negative consequences; you believe you can achieve superhuman feats. Often, hypomania can mean hypersexuality and the belief that you're irresistible to the opposite sex. Hypomania brings extreme risk taking, for me, and I'm a big risk taker anyway!

There must be an element of underestimation too. When hypomanic, you underestimate the difficulty of what you're trying to achieve. You underestimate the risks and the consequences of failure. "How hard can it be?" you find yourself thinking, as you get stuck into the quantum mechanics books. I rejected a highly paid career, in favour of building my own business, mostly because it seemed like it would be quick and easy at the time.

Depression has flipped all that on its head. I had an interview with a well known high-street bank earlier in the week. I thought it went dreadfully and I sank into an even deeper depression, because I gave such an appalling performance. I was beating myself about things I said and cringing about holes in my knowledge and experience that the interviewer had exposed. Then my agent phoned me:

"They loved you. They want to meet you again"

I spent the rest of the week dreading this second interview. I imagined all the things that they were going to ask, that would be difficult for me to answer. They were going to haul me over the coals and my incompetence would be laid bare for all to see. It would be embarrassing; shameful. I was losing sleep over it and waking up each day with a feeling of dread.

At the second interview, they cooed enthusiastically at everything I said, and laughed encouragingly at my anecdotes. It was almost as if we were friends and work colleagues, gossiping conspiratorially about the good and bad things that happen in the world of grey suits and office blocks. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Afterwards, I thought "oh no!" What if my intuition is wrong again? What if there's an inverse correlation between how I feel like things went, and how impressed my interviewers were?

Depression is almost like a defence mechanism: a reaction to a hostile world where bad shit happens. When the UK voted to leave the EU, and when the USA voted for Donald Trump, I had placed bets correctly on both outcomes, at substantially long odds. I knew I was sad that those things had happened and I didn't make enough money to be happy, but I still didn't really feel anything even though they were awful events. I was prepared for the worst. In fact, I expected the worst.

There are psychological experiments that prove that depressed people are able to perceive the world more accurately, in certain circumstances. This depressive realism is the antidote to illusory superiority. This depressive realism is the antidote to the madness of crowds and a misplaced sense of optimism.

Humans are notoriously bad at perceiving the risk of very real and likely events: stock market crashes, earthquakes and hurricanes. If we were risk-averse according to probable catastrophes, we would steer clear of the Pacific Rim of Fire and the San Andreas Fault, but yet we see insane real estate prices and a concentration of our best technologists, in Silicon Valley and Japan.

London is currently rated by MI5 as at severe threat of international terrorism: an attack is highly likely. When I see huge crowds of people at Canary Wharf underground station, I see a swarm of sitting ducks. There are two vans full of armed police parked nearby, but it doesn't make me feel any safer... it just makes me glad that I don't have brown skin.

On a day-to-day basis, I generally assume I'm going to be blown up by a terrorist, fail to get a job, run out of money, be evicted, be declared bankrupt, never be able to work again, society is going to collapse, there will be riots and looting and the human race is going to retreat into the dark ages of barbarism, religious dogma, superstition and ignorance. It just seems likely, given the evidence.

I might be wrong, but I tend to put my money where my mouth is, and I've sadly been right more than I've been wrong.

I just placed a bet on Marine Le Pen. I hope I lose.

Tags: #depression #bipolar

This is a story about treatment for drug addiction...

Having been to four different rehabs, I feel fairly qualified to give a few insights into what happens behind closed doors. Residential rehabs often hide away in leafy suburbs, where there are large houses that can accommodate human trash: dirty junkies and nasty alcoholics.

"Death's too good for 'em! String 'em up!" I hear you say.

Yes, yes, don't worry. We'll get to the idea that an addict will always be an addict, and that we should just write them off as a lost cause.

Boscombe in Dorset - an area of Bournemouth - is where many councils choose to send their difficult members of society, from all over the country. Supposedly, being by the seaside will be good for recovering alcoholics and former drug addicts. There are certainly plenty of rehabs in the area. Even Paul Gascoigne has found himself shuffling around Boscombe's streets, buying bottles of gin from the local off-license.

Ironically, many years after moving to Bournemouth, I became addicted to drugs and found myself in the perfect place to get treatment for my addiction.

Let's talk a little bit about drug addiction.

Having a 'drug habit' is not the same as drug addiction. 'Experimentation' is not the same as addiction. Partying is not the same as addiction. Addiction will rapidly destroy your health, wealth and prospects. Hospitals, police cells and prisons are the institutional stomping grounds of the addict, on their rapid descent into the fires of Hell. If you're successfully hiding your habit from your friends, partner and boss, then addiction hasn't fully taken hold. Addiction is destructive.

What about detox?

You can't really rehabilitate while the drugs and alcohol have got their hooks in you. If you abruptly stop drinking, you might get the shakes, become delirious, have a fit and maybe even die. If you stop taking heroin, you're going to feel sick and in pain. If you stop taking cocaine or amphetamines, you're going to be unbelievably exhausted and depressed, to the point where you're in real danger of killing yourself.

"You should kill yourself if you're a junkie" I hear you say.

What you haven't understood is that drug addiction is slow suicide. Do you think the addict or the alcoholic isn't aware that their body is getting utterly fucked up, and they're going to go to an early grave?

Detox is about breaking the physical addiction that the body has to drugs and/or alcohol. Detox is about suffering the worst of withdrawal, in an environment where substitute drugs can be administered to make the process safe, humane and tolerable. An alcoholic literally risks death if they stopping drinking without Librium. Is it ethical to ask people to die just because you're hung up on ideas like "willpower"?

There's the term "psychological addiction" that needs to stop being used. It's better to think about addiction like this: why did somebody get addicted in the first place?

"Because drugs are fun" I hear you say.

There are shitloads of people who take drugs all the time but they aren't addicts. Every weekend, raves and nightclubs are packed full of people taking Ecstasy (MDMA). Vast quantities of cocaine gets hoovered up by the eager nostrils of young professionals in cities around the world. Every day, a huge proportion of humanity smokes cannabis or drinks alcohol. Why aren't all these people raging addicts and alcoholics?

If you ever feel like quitting, remember why you started.

Most addicts' lives were truly appalling before their addiction took hold. For sure, addiction doesn't improve anybody's life, but it's not like there's any hope of a better life just because an addict quits drugs. The cycle of petty crime, scoring drugs, getting sick, being hospitalised and being locked up... it doesn't look great, does it? But what's the alternative? Flipping burgers and still not having enough money to make ends meet?

So, it's obvious that the rehabilitation process will only be successful if it can return a person to a better life than the one they were trying to escape from with drugs and drink.

The first rehab I attended was in Bournemouth, situated in a grand house at the end of a sweeping driveway, surrounded by mature pine trees, on a road of millionaires' mansions. The place was full of people from Greater London and the surrounding counties, ejected by their councils to make room for more rich middle-class people.

The biggest issue amongst my fellow rehab residents was housing. Boscombe has vast numbers of crappy bedsits that can just about be afforded with housing benefits. London and the South-East has no cheap housing for undesirable members of society. My fellow rehabbers were gleefully pushed away from where they were born and bred - and their families - because they were written off.

A typical day at the Bournemouth rehab would consist of a breakfast of baked beans, white toast and cheap sausages, followed by many rounds of tea, coffee and biscuits, until the 'therapeutic' day began. There were two or three sessions a day, where everybody sat in a big room, slouching on comfy sofas, vaping on e-cigarettes and slurping drinks. It was supposed to be group therapy, but it was basically just listening to heartbreaking tales of people's children being taken into foster care.

Most of the day in Bournemouth rehab was given over to matters of court appearances, housing office appointments, social worker visits and attempts to obtain various forms of welfare benefits. Almost everybody in rehab was in poor physical health, due to a life of drug abuse. Almost everybody in rehab had some underlying mental health disorder.

Those were the dregs of society, but they were warm and welcoming and they accepted me as one of their own. I was warned by staff to leave my iPhone at home and watch my wallet, but I never felt for a single moment as if my peers were going to rob or take advantage of me. I was somewhat appalled by the staff members' low opinion of their service users, but I suppose there's an element of the gamekeepers and the poachers: anybody who's keeping you under lock and key is kind of fair game, because resentment is going to build about the power that staff exercise over people in treatment.

Over the course of the 28-day program, my fellow rehabbers and I would build up special privileges for good behaviour, such as being allowed to go to Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous or Cocaine Anonymous meetings. Being allowed to go into town, accompanied by a staff member, was the next privilege that accrued. Then, trips to town were permitted when accompanied by a peer who had attained 3 weeks of good behaviour. Finally, you might prove yourself to be trustworthy enough to go into town alone or as a chaperone.

Transgressions could include: not getting up in the morning, not doing your assigned chores, not attending group therapy, being caught with contraband, failing a drugs test and - most serious of all - going somewhere without permission.

Being expelled from rehab for going into town on your own might not sound like a terrible consequence, but almost everybody was there because treatment was mandated by the courts, as part of parole or an attempt to retain contact with children. Being chucked out of rehab could result in going back to prison, or never seeing your children again. The line between treatment and punishment was rather blurry.

My next rehab was 5-star luxury by comparison. You might have heard of it. It was The Priory.

If you're paying £12,000 for a 28 day stay in the countryside, you'd expect it to be pretty nice, wouldn't you? The Priory certainly delivered on making me feel special and cared after... for a high price. Therapists outnumbered patients, the bedrooms were very well appointed and comfortable, the food wasn't bad and there were luxuries like a gym and grounds to take a stroll around. Nobody was made to feel like a prisoner under house arrest.

Unsurprisingly, my fellow Priory rehabbers were rich compared to the Bournemouth lot. There were six-figure salary earning executives and heirs to multimillion-pound fortunes. Alcohol was also the predominant poison, as opposed to heroin.

One girl was so desperate for a drink, that she filled a mug with hand sanitising gel - which contained alcohol - and sweetened it with orange squash.

Therapeutic days were packed full of yoga, mindfulness, art therapy, educational videos, as well as group therapy. Supposedly following the 12-step program we only had enough time to complete the first two steps. AA and 'aftercare' meetings were held in the evenings at The Priory, which we were encouraged to attend, but most of us just watched DVDs in our bedrooms.

In my final week at The Priory, I asked "what next?"

Turns out that 28 days just isn't long enough to turn your life around. 28 days is just about long enough to get over the worst of the drug withdrawal and start thinking about how awesome the drugs are going to feel after a little break and three square meals a day. Aftercare programs are almost as expensive as rehab and last 3+ months: who's got that kind of money and can afford to take that long off work?

Having been through an acrimonious divorce, sold my house, rescued a tiny fraction of my most treasured possessions, boxed my life up, put everything into storage and suffered a horrible family Christmas, I was pretty fucked up by the whole ordeal. I needed to get cleaned up and straightened out again.

The next rehab I booked, I asked for a detox. I didn't want to have to get up in the morning and go to stupid group therapy. I hadn't slept or eaten properly for weeks. I'd been taking benzodiazepines for months and it was possible that I'd developed a physical dependency that could be life-threatening. I needed professional medical care.

The rehab I ended up in was like an alternative therapy spa break. There was a hot tub - called the sex pond - and a vibrating massage table, with whale music playing in the pitch black room. The main thing I was there for was sleep, food and a doctor on hand in case I had a seizure. Reluctantly, I consented to have acupuncture and to do some mindfulness: both of which I fell asleep during.

Most of the staff were kind and caring, but the guy who owned and ran the rehab was a complete egomaniac who clearly wanted his own cult. This idiot tried to force me to attend 'group' therapy, which was basically him giving interminable boring monologues about the time when he went into a Native Indian sweat tent. Believe me, the last thing you want when you're recovering from a near-fatal toxic combo of drugs, is to be a captive audience for some total moron.

While I was at that third rehab, a man was brought in, smashed out of his mind and covered in red wine. He'd been transferred up from the first rehab I'd been in down in Bournemouth. He'd walked out and gone into town to get pissed. Revolving doors.

I had to get away from that place. It wasn't therapy. Fuck knows what it was. Probably just a bit of respite for both family and addict alike.

Finally, I achieved what I wanted: I got back to London. Bullshit family Christmas was over. Divorce and house sale was over. I was free from horrible destructive relationships and nasty people, but I had picked up an addiction and failed to deal with it. My life to that point had been dictated by people who didn't care about my welfare.

I got myself into my fourth and final rehab: a 13 week residential treatment program in Kensington, West London.

Immediately, the place felt right. Rehabs are supposed to be run by former addicts and alcoholics. The guy who I met on my initial assessment had gold teeth and mean tattoos. The guy who ran the place had a massive scar across his face. These were people whose opinion an addict could respect, because they'd been all the way to rock bottom and back again: they'd seen friends die from overdoses and a lot of other rough shit too.

My most important lesson in rehab was how to do time. I had already been heavily institutionalised by working my whole career for massive corporations - with the limits that full-time work and education imposes on your freedom - but I still had lessons to learn about liberty. It helped a great deal that one of my fellow rehabbers was a young lad who'd been in prison twice by the age of 21.

Rehab is literally a kind of house arrest. You can leave anytime you want, but there will be consequences. It was fun to walk up to the gate (pictured above) and put a foot out over the pavement... just stopping short of taking a single step off the property.

It's not too hard to white-knuckle 3 or 4 weeks of abstinence. The first couple of weeks you'll feel awful, but your body is so abused that it's grateful for the sleep and the food. The next week or two are hard, but you know there's light at the end of the tunnel: you'll soon get your fix. You just have to count down the hours, minutes and seconds.

I don't believe you can rehabilitate somebody in just 3 months. So many things get fucked up when you're an addict. You need to get a job and go back to work, pay your bills and any debts that got racked up, repair and replace broken stuff and get a place to live. Everything got fucked up by my addiction: my shoes and clothes were wrecked and everything in my life was in total disarray.

Imagine being a company director through a period of addiction. My accounts and taxes were all messed up, and important paperwork was lost or misplaced.

What about my CV? How could I explain those periods of absence from work?

What about my routine?

Do you realise how much of your life runs itself on autopilot? You pay your rent/mortgage, council tax, electric, gas, water, sewerage, broadband, mobile phone, home insurance, life insurance, car insurance, road tax, MOT, TV license and a zillion other things. You get up every day, have breakfast and go to work. People know and respect you at work and you know how to do your job. You see your friends and socialise. You have your hobbies and you exercise. Do you think you can put all that stuff back together, running smoothly, overnight?

When you're an addict, everybody distances themselves from you. It's obvious that if you even so much as speak to an addict, they're going to steal your newborn baby and sell it to buy crack cocaine. It's obvious that anybody who injects marijuana or sniffs glue is a worthless selfish nasty person who's out to kill you.

Rehabs are necessary because family and friends are judgemental gossips who offer you useless advice like: "have you tried not taking drugs?" or "maybe you should just stop".

Rehab was a holiday from being judged to be an evil failure, morally weak and simply lacking in willpower.

Rehab showed me that I do have the willpower to stop taking drugs whenever I want. Rehab showed me that I'm not weak and I'm not powerless.

By the time I finished my four stays in rehab, I still hadn't run out of money, I had never been arrested, locked up, hospitalised or homeless. I had been nowhere near rock bottom.

I never actually reached rock bottom though. I experienced things that were awful at the time, but I needed to have those experiences.

Stopping drugs is the least of anybody's concerns. Drugs actually help when your life is unbearably shit. Just ask anybody who suffers from depression or anxiety if they'd like to give up their antidepressants or tranquillisers.

Obviously, I'm glad I never got a criminal record or sustained any life-changing injuries, but maybe I needed to come close. Being locked up in a police cell a couple of times and spending weeks in hospital, were not things on my bucket list, but I think they were necessary experiences to complete my adventure.

When the time was right, I got a place to live, a girlfriend and a job. Without those things, life isn't worth living, but equally, those things don't create recovery.

Bullying was relentless and intolerable at school for 11+ consecutive years. Nothing I did was ever right or good enough for my parents. My parents' relationship was appalling - full of verbal abuse and hostility - and I got involved with a girl who physically and mentally abused me, who I stayed with for many years. I got so used to broken, abusive relationships. Do you think that kind of stuff can get healed by 28 days in rehab? Do you think that all my problems came about just because I sniffed a bit of white powder?

You might think I act normally and sound perfectly reasonable, rational and able to string a sentence together, but it's the opinion of the medical professionals who've treated me, that I'm dealing with depression, bipolar and even borderline personality disorder. Clearly, I've had many episodes of mental health issues... including a period of many years before drugs even entered the picture.

This is called dual-diagnosis: the clusterfuck that is both addiction and mental health issues combined. The tail that wags the dog.

I've cherry-picked the best treatment and the most humane and compassionate approach to fixing my addiction and now I've arrived at the situation where - joy of joys - I'm 'just' dealing with depression and anxiety.

I'm itching to press the 'fuck-it button' because life is intolerably stressful, unrewarding and my depression is refusing to lift. What's the solution? Drugs? Been there, done that.

Rehab taught me how to quit drugs cold turkey. Rehab taught me that I'm in control, so long as my life seems worth living.

Addicts and alcoholics are taught on the 12-step program that they're powerless. I'm certainly powerless, but it's over things like whether I get offered a decent job that pays enough money to be able to live. Being powerless to influence the things that really matter to me in life, such as whether I can live with dignity or not, creates incredible stress and anxiety.

I can choose to stop drinking or taking drugs, but why would I, if the alternative is ESA assessments and having my inadequate welfare benefits cut off by somebody who's not even a qualified doctor? Why would I quit, if I have to prostitute my mind and body, to go and work some pointless bullshit job for somebody promoted into a position of incompetence, if I'm 'lucky' enough to be offered a pittance to do the job?

It's so hard to escape the things that drove us to drink & drugs in the first place.

Rehab was important for me to forgive myself for things that weren't even my fault. I didn't make a mistake, getting addicted to drugs: it was a deliberate act and I'd live my life exactly the same if I got to start over from scratch. Rehab was respite from those who wish to scapegoat sick people.

Fundamentally, rehab connected the 'clean' and the 'dirty' world and allowed me to see that they're two sides of the same coin.

Every saint has past and every sinner has a future.

Tags: #addiction #drugs #alcohol

This is a story about referees...

Here's me travelling to work by boat during the tube strike. But why do you even have to go to work anyway? Why do we need the fancy towers of glass, steel and concrete? Why do we need to move millions of people away from their homes and into the cities every day? Why do we need to inflict untold agony on a huge proportion of humanity, just so we can keep some office chairs warm?

Imagine the global economy to be a game of football: the defenders are the police, army and healthcare professionals; the midfielders are the builders, farmers and fishermen; the attackers are the engineers and scientists. So, who's the referee?

The banks are the referee: they're the ones keeping score.

Banks are simply supposed to keep a tally - a balance - of who's winning the game. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. You can play football without a referee, but it's supposed to be a fairer game if you have somebody impartial to be in charge of the match, running it according to the rules and without cheating.

Why the hell would over 80% of our economy be given to the people keeping score?

If you think about it, most of what goes on at head office is administration. Administration never put food on the table or a roof over anybody's head. Administration is an unnecessary overhead, not a business in its own right.

For sure, administration is hard and complex, but that doesn't mean it's valuable. Just because you've been to business school and got your Masters in Business Administration (MBA) doesn't mean you know fuck all about building a profitable business that adds value to humanity. In fact, you probably got a bit confused and you started to think that administration is the same as business.

If you don't pay your taxes, the government will shut you down. If you don't follow the trading laws, your business is going to get big fines and may be forced to cease trading. However, following the regulations isn't actually the same as running a business.

It's easy to believe that because your business is well administered, your book-keeping is well done and your taxes are all paid, that you're doing a great job. In fact, that's utter horse-shit. What does your business actually do?

So much money is wasted building fancy head offices and filling them full of administrative drones. One office block I worked in actually had a worm farm in the basement in order to eat all the useless paper that was generated by the bean counters.

Do we really need all these people doing bullshit jobs? Do we really need all these records and processes? Is it really helping humanity? Is it making anybody happier?

Today, London was paralysed by a tube strike, but what's the fucking point of those miserable journeys into the office anyway? What got done today? What wouldn't get done if nobody turned up? Would the world end? Would people go hungry or not have a place to live?

"But what about money? What about mortgages?"

Fuck those things.

There are plenty of resources. There's plenty of land to build houses and grow food. There are plenty of rivers and reservoirs. There's plenty of wind and solar energy to be harvested. Fuck sitting at a desk shuffling paper around. Fuck kowtowing to some bean counters.

You've been mortgaged. The reason why you have to do a pointless bullshit job that adds no value to humanity, is because the natural world is being destroyed to create more phallic towers of concrete, full of administrative drones, to add some more fucking zeros onto the digital bank balance of a small-penised oligarch. Does that sound like a useful endeavour to you? Is that how you want to say you spent your life?

It maddens me that we have to get up early in the morning in the middle of winter and struggle to get to 'work' on overcrowded commuter trains, because our bullshit economy worships the referees; the bean counters. The banks are supposed to grease the wheels of commerce, not hoover up all the fucking wealth.

It disgusts me that the lawyers, accountants, bankers and other financial service leeches are wallowing in cash, doing precisely fuck all of any value, and mandating that humanity has to commute across the country twice a day in order to shuffle paper around a desk and move digital money in increasingly pointless complex ways.

In financial markets, we talk about 'naked' positions. That is to say, the trading of a financial product with no need to do so except to try and make a quick buck in the global casino. Futures contracts were invented so that a farmer could sell his corn before it was harvested, in order to buy a combine harvester, and so that the corn flake factory knew exactly what the cost of their raw materials would be. Futures contracts were NOT invented so that some wanker who flies a desk could make an easy buck without so much as breaking a sweat.

The whole fucking system has gone berserk. Money is supposed to be exchangeable for labour or scarce goods, but instead money's just casino chips that have no use outside the global financial markets. We're all paying a heavy human price for our financial services, accounting, legal and administrative world, where we've ended up toiling over ever-growing mountains of worthless paper, instead of trying to build a better life for ourselves and future generations.

What the fuck are we doing, when our most brilliant minds go off to work in head offices, doing administrative and accounting type jobs, writing legal contracts, banking and other kinds of referee type bullshit? What the fuck are we doing, running a football match with 22 referees and a kid with two left feet who can't kick a ball?

Referees don't make a football match. Head offices don't make an economy.

Tags: #capitalism #banking #economics

This is a story about being naughty...

If you're thinking about what you're going to get me for Christmas, I'd like a tame raccoon or squirrel. But, I know that I've been a bad boy, so I've been crossed off Santa's list. There's a black mark against my name.

How do you know a 'wrong un' when you meet one? How do you know a lost cause? How do you know that somebody's got an evil streak?

I once begged the police to punish me. I was convinced that I was a bad man and I should be locked up. The police have cautioned me four times, but never brought a prosecution. The police deal with bad people every day, don't they? Cops & robbers; cowboys & indians; goodies & baddies; right & wrong; innocent & guilty. If anybody knows what a bad lad looks like, it'd be them, wouldn't it?

But what about all my victims?

Obviously I've shoplifted, pick-pocketed, mugged, defrauded, burgled, assaulted, vandalised, robbed and generally gone on a crime spree, leaving a trail of misery in my wake.

Except I haven't.

Maybe it's a question of morality. Morality is absolute, not relative, isn't it? If a billionaire steals an apple that was the only food that a whole starving family had to eat, that's exactly the same crime as the father of the starving family, stealing an apple from a billionaire who owns all the orchards. Theft is immoral, always. All crimes are equally bad.

Presumably, if there are gods and they smite the wicked, anything shit that's happening to me is all part of some divine comeuppance for my evil deeds?

However, the evidence doesn't show that. Despite being a desperately bad boy, who's misbehaved like crazy, it seems to have done little to destroy my health, wealth and prospects. I certainly don't want to take my good fortune for granted. I'm well aware how close to disaster I've been and I know how much assistance I've received from some lovely people. But... doesn't the conventional wisdom say that I should be disowned, excluded and thrown onto the bonfire of human bodies that we make with anybody who strays from the righteous path?

Lock up your daughters!

In fact, you're probably better off keeping your daughters away from the kiddie-fiddling priests who claim to be moral authorities and pillars of our society. Your children can't 'catch' my mental illness. I'm not an active promoter of dangerously deadly deeds. I don't leave cyanide-soaked baby rusks lying around, and drop HIV-infected hypodermic syringe needles all over the place.

Is there something intrinsically attractive about a bad boy?

Why would anybody want to get close to somebody with flaws? Why would you be drawn to somebody who's sad, vulnerable, lonely, sick?

We know that kittens and puppies instil protective instincts in us, so why shouldn't the same be true of a homme fatale? If I wasn't rescued when I was on my knees, I'd be dead. If all the 'best' boys are taken, then what's the next best choice? Do you go for one of the second-rate options, or do you find a broken one and fix him up?

It's said that men find a woman they love, and they hope they'll never change, but they do. Women find a man they love and they hope they do change, but they don't.

Wouldn't it be good if you could find a bad boy and turn him into a model boyfriend; a perfect partner?

"You knew what I was like when you married me" said I, never.

I tried so hard to re-shape who I was - to bend and twist my personality - to please my ex-wife, but it was the wrong thing to do. I tried to please my parents; to impress them. Waste of fucking time.

'Good' and 'bad' are labels that other people want to attach. Behaviour is amoral, because it's driven by circumstances, environment, upbringing, instinct, natural urges and evolved biases. We have strong views about things that other people should or shouldn't be doing, but we want freedom for ourselves. Our moral code is defined by our own unique moral compass.

So, if you think your kids are being naughty this Christmas: the question is not "how can I control this naughty child and make them do what I want?" but instead you should ask yourself "what is driving their behaviour and what do they want?"

For my part, I've decided I'm going to drink lots of Tizer, bite people, scream, pull the ornaments off the Christmas tree, refuse to sit at the table, repeatedly say "I want sweeties" while crying lots and not let anybody else play with the toys.

Tags: #childhood #christmas

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

28. Anonymity

When Neil's work, the crisis team, the police and Colin first called Lara, she was shocked and worried. As time wore on, she became exhausted by the ups and downs of Neil's mental health. When Neil had disappeared, she compulsively checked her phone for any missed calls or messages, desperate for any news. Months later, the nervous energy dissipated and she became emotionally distant and withdrawn; numbed.

Lara had a voicemail and few missed calls on her mobile phone when she finished her shift. It was Neil's parents' home number. She listened to the message.

"Hi Lara, it's Colin here. I appreciate you're probably at work but phone me when you get a chance. Also, see if you can take the weekend off. You might want to come away on a trip."

Spying Anne going to her locker, Lara walked over to her.

"Can we swap shifts this weekend?" she asked, in a hushed tone.

"What the hell, Lara? You were supposed to be coming out with us on Saturday night."

"I know, but it sounds like something important's come up."

"Important how? Is this about Neil? You know how upset you were last time you got mixed up in trying to find him. You only had the memorial service a few weeks ago. Try to take your mind off everything for a while."

"It's not like that, Anne. Neil's dad sounded... different this time. I think he's made a big breakthrough."

"Well find out and let me know. It's going to take a lot to convince me though. I think it's a bad idea."

Sat in her car in the hospital car park, Lara phoned Neil's parents' house. His mum answered.

"Oh hello, dear. I expect you want to speak to Colin, don't you?"

"Yes. I'm returning his call. He left a message."

"The phone has been going crazy this week. Since the service, quite a few of Neil's old friends have been in contact. We met some of them at the service, but it seems there was something in the news and... well, I'll let Colin explain. Here he is."

"Hi, Lara?"

"Yes, Hi Colin."

"Great. Did you meet Neil's friend Anthony at the memorial service?"

"No, I don't remember meeting him, but there were a lot of people there."

"Well, he phoned us up a week later and said he'd seen something in a local newspaper. Said he didn't want to mention it because it was probably nothing."

"Umm, OK."

"Well, he posted us a newspaper clipping. It's a grainy black and white photograph of a man in a hospital bed, but I'll be damned if it isn't a dead ringer for Neil."

"But it isn't Neil?"

"Well, the newspaper says it's an Eastern European man who's lost his memory. He seems to have forgotten how to speak."

"How do they know he's from Eastern Europe?" Lara asked.

"He had an ID card in his wallet. He's from Estonia and he's called Romet Kukk. Did you speak to Matthew at the service?" Colin asked.

"No, why?"

"Well, Matthew knows Anthony. They were all at school together. Matthew phoned up and asked about Neil's disappearance. He reckons he knows somewhere Neil might have been staying."

"Staying?"

"Yeah, like a secret den from when they were kids."

"Where's this?"

"Well, the hospital is in Exeter in Devon. The den is in the same county."

"Sounds like we'd better go down there and see what we can find out."

"Good. That's exactly what I was thinking."

The memorial service had stirred up a lot of emotions and it had been very upsetting to finally let go of Neil. Friends, colleagues and family members had spoken about his life, which was moving. However, Lara had already been to the funeral of an ex-boyfriend. She was tough and she had emotionally shielded herself to some extent. Lara's parents and brothers had helped her move out when Neil was getting seriously unwell and she'd kept things at arms length as best as she could. She couldn't possibly imagine that this doppelganger would be her missing financée. She had no idea what use it would be, going to a place that Neil and Matthew used to visit years ago. It all seemed too co-incidental.

Leaving messages with the local newspaper and the hospital, nobody had been able to answer any of their queries. Lara left early on Saturday morning to pick Colin up, then the pair continued to Bristol to pick Matthew up. They drove straight to the hospital.

"Hi, we're here to see Romet Kukk. Can you tell us which ward he's on, please?" Lara asked.

"Friends or family?" the receptionist asked.

"We're family."

"Are you listed as next of kin."

"I don't think so."

"Does the patient know you're coming? Are they expecting a visit?"

"No."

The receptionist's expression was icy cold. Lara casually flashed her NHS security pass, pretending to rummage for something in her handbag.

"Let me just check where they are. Kukk was it? Mister or missus?"

"Mister." said Lara, relieved that the receptionist was going to help them.

"Oh. It says here they're not at the hospital anymore."

"Discharged? Transferred?"

"The system doesn't say."

"Which ward was he staying on?"

"The system doesn't say. I'm not allowed to see information like that. I'm sorry, that's all I know."

"That's alright. You've been really helpful, thanks." said Lara.

Spying an unmanned reception desk, Lara could see a phone number for the hospital's main switchboard on a piece of paper. She punched the number into her mobile phone but didn't dial it. Grabbing Colin, who was lingering nearby, they went back into the car park where Matthew was waiting with the car. Lara got inside and phoned the switchboard.

"Hi, can you page the bleep holder for psychiatric liaison, please?"

"Sure, no problem" the operator said.

After a few minutes wait, the operator came back.

"Connecting you now."

There was a click on the phone line.

"Psych liaison" a different voice said.

"Hi, my name's Doctor Sutton from UCLH. I was trying to find out who'd been dealing with a patient of ours at your hospital. Name of Romet Kukk" said Lara, lying.

"Yep, I was handling the case with a couple of my colleagues. Piers Cowley. How can I help?"

"Well, to be honest, we were wondering where he was. He doesn't seem to have been referred back to us."

"Yes, that's right. He wasn't discharged. He just disappeared."

"Disappeared? When?"

"About a week ago. Look, can I phone you back in about half an hour. What's your extension at the hospital?"

"Can I give you my mobile number?"

"I'd really rather phone you back on your extension if we're going to discuss the case notes in more detail. What was the number?"

"I'm in a bad signal area, we might get cut off. It's 1-3-5..." Lara hung up. "Shit."

"What's wrong?" Colin asked.

"I think he just rumbled me."

"Did you find anything out?"

"That patient isn't at the hospital anymore. Romet Kukk disappeared."

"OK, Matthew. You'd better show us where this den of yours is" Colin said.

"It's about an hour's drive from here" said Matthew.

Next chapter...

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

26. Descent

She could hear the car crawl to a slow and follow her at walking pace. She had grown accustomed to the sensation of being stalked, stared at. She could feel a pair of eyes burning a hole in the back of her head. With the subtlest of movements she looked out of the corner of her eye at the road. She didn't recognise the vehicle or the driver. There seemed to be somebody in the passenger seat too. The car drew level with her and the passenger wound down their window. She glimpsed short hair full of styling gel, a white tracksuit and prepared herself for unwelcome sexual advances from a dimwitted numbskull.

"Hey!" came a surprisingly hushed call.

"Psst!"

This was not how things usually went. Normally lecherous creeps would lead with their best line, full of false flattery and often beer-induced bravado.

"Hey you!"

It was irritating, but a different and more measured approach from what she was used to. She was sure that as soon as she even acknowledged their existence, they would launch their full chat-up offensive. This was just the preamble.

"Hey!"

She was sure that their patience would quickly evaporate and she would be loudly cursed as a "stuck up bitch" and the car would roar off into the distance with its loud exhaust and bass-heavy music thumping out from their souped-up boy-racer chariot.

"Nah, she doesn't want to know" said the passenger. It looked as though he was addressing somebody in the back seat. Lara risked another glance backwards and sure enough, there was another passenger, slumped low with their coat pulled up high around their face as if they were trying to hide.

"He says he knows you" the passenger tried again.

"Who?" asked Lara, now looking in through the car window and surveying the scene, while keeping walking.

"Sam" said the passenger, pointing his thumb at the back seat. "He's sick. He needs some help getting into his flat."

"Why can't you do it?"

"We're just giving him a lift home. We've got to be somewhere else, pronto. We ain't got time."

"Some friends, you are." Lara mocked.

"Look, just help make sure he gets in OK, can you? We could just dump him nearby, but there's no telling if he'll get into his place on his own in the state he's in."

"What's wrong with him?"

"He's just had too much to drink."

"That's a really shitty thing to do to your friend. To just dump him like that."

"He's not exactly a friend. We hang out, but it's not like that. We're doing him a big favour driving him home."

"Yeah, BIG favour" said Lara sarcastically.

She couldn't help herself peering in the back windows at Sam. He was very dimly aware of what was going on. His head drooped and his eyes were closed, but he wasn't asleep. He didn't look boisterously drunk or like he was going to throw up. He was just intoxicated.

"Alright how far away is it?"

"Just down in the town centre. Jump in."

Sam was reasonably well co-ordinated and not slurring his words. He didn't even smell of alcohol. He could walk and talk without staggering, but he kept slipping into a catatonic state. His sentences would tail off and he would be half-asleep on his feet. As long as she kept repeatedly reminding him where they were and what they were doing, she could coax him towards his front door.

"Come on, Sam. Nearly home!"

"What? Eh? Oh" he said, as he seemed to remember what he was doing and take a few more steps, opening his eyes a fraction. He leant on the front door, dozing.

"Get your keys out, Sam. We're at your flat. This is where you live, right?"

"Yeah, uh. Right" he fumbled in his pockets and unsteadily directed his key at the lock.

With the door flung wide open, Sam made a bee line for his day bed and collapsed on it face down, before rolling into a slightly more comfortable position. Lara was still stood at the threshold, gazing into the large loft apartment, taking it all in.

"OK, I'm going to close this door and go home now."

"Don't go. I need you" Sam said, holding up a hand and beckoning her in.

Lara took a few steps towards the day bed.

"What do you need me here for? You're home now."

Sam patted the bed next to him. Lara didn't get the sense that he was trying to get her to sleep with him, but that he wanted her to sit. She sat awkwardly on the edge of the futon.

"You're home safe now. You can go to sleep. You'll feel better when you wake up."

Sam now opened his eyes much wider and tried to look at her. There was a kind of fear that played across his face.

"You can't let me sleep. I'll die" he said.

"What are you talking about."

"If I fall asleep, I'll stop breathing."

"If that's true it sounds like you need an ambulance."

"No!"

"Why not? What's wrong?"

"Overdose." he said, with the effort of his honest admission seemingly causing him to slump. He relaxed. His face was tranquil. Lara leant over him. He was breathing, but very shallow.

"I'm going to go phone 999. You need to go to hospital" Lara stood up and walked towards the door.

"Nooo! Stay with me" Sam called out, reaching towards her from where he lay. She hesitated at the door and looked back. "I'll be OK soon. Just stay with me a little while."

Babysitting him while he fought through a near-fatal overdose, Lara was torn. She could see his lips getting slightly purple as she fought to keep him conscious enough to keep breathing. In waves, he would get so relaxed and comatose that he would sleep peacefully and could barely be roused. She would be close to running for help. Then, he would come round a little, gasping for air and she would plead for him to stay alert and keep breathing. She knew instinctively that in the time it took her to go away, find a phone and give the address, he could very easily slip away. It took little more than an hour before he started to come round, but it felt far longer.

The experience shook them both and Sam said that he never wanted to risk dying like that again. At first, he was resolute that he needed to quit heroin and that the close call was the wake-up call he needed. He was so grateful to Lara for keeping him alive and for avoiding a hospitalisation. Then, he explained that his body would start to go into a painful withdrawal and he would feel like he "needed" his next fix. Quitting wasn't so easy and he'd need to wean himself off. Would she help him?

He genuinely meant everything he said.

In reality, Lara became his regular babysitter, so that Sam could shoot up big doses of heroin, knowing that there was somebody there to keep him safe if he overdosed. At first, Lara didn't know it. She felt that she was helping him to get cleaned up and off the dope, but after months going round to his apartment almost daily, it was clear he wasn't giving up any time soon.

She adored his tortured soul and his fascinating life. She loved their asexual relationship, which still had a kind of comfortable intimacy. Sam's first love was heroin, but Lara didn't mind being his mistress. She felt like she could make a difference.

Eventually they quarrelled. He had no intention of ever quitting, she said. He did, but it was hard, he explained. He said he'd try harder, but he started to be more secretive. He hid his habit and Lara knew it.

"You'll always keep using if I stay with you" were the last words she ever said to him. He didn't even reply. His eyes were filled with tears, but he knew the truth. Perhaps he would quit one day, but that wasn't the path that their relationship had followed. He used and she was there to keep him safe. That was the way it had been since day one and that was the way it was always going to stay.

She'd gone back to the apartment on the pretence of picking up some things she'd left there, but really she was checking up on him. Making sure that he was OK. He was so alone. His mum had left when he was little and his dad had died leaving him the inheritance that paid for his apartment and his drug habit, but he had no real friends: only drug dealers and addicts hoping to mooch off him. He was no fool, so he didn't indulge the parasites. He had nobody.

Lara knew right away that it was different from the other overdoses that she'd witnessed. There was no life left in his body. He'd been dead for some time.

Poor little rich boy. He had a kind of infamy amongst the local drug users, with many plotting to rob and cheat him out of money. He was even known to the police as a tragic addict: a dead man walking.

By the time she had left him, she was prepared for the worst. Or at least, she thought she was. Of course his death was more traumatic than she could ever have imagined, but she knew that the burden of his life was more responsibility than she should ever have been asked to shoulder. She could forgive herself, but always wondered if things could have turned out differently.

Neil's behaviour was completely different. He seemed in control, even though he was unhappy. It was Neil's desperate wish to be happy and productive again that made him so different from Sam. The addiction that she'd known had no end to it. Without a doubt, Sam would take heroin forever, given an unlimited supply and no consequences. Neil was different. He only ever took his pills begrudgingly and always talked about "recovery". His mental health problems were just a blip, in his eyes. Medication was a means to an end: like a plaster cast on a broken limb, helping it heal.

It seemed unthinkable to Lara, the idea that Neil had lost control and was slumped somewhere, dead from an overdose. She'd known so many years of him being steady and dependable. She'd seen him go through depression and psychotic episodes. However, he didn't seem to be hiding a drug habit and it seemed unimaginable that he could have been consumed by an addiction so quickly that she would never have seen it creeping up. The evidence suggested that somebody flicked a switch and her fiancée went insane. It was impossible to know somebody so well and for them to hide a whole other side of their personality. She knew what addicts were like when they hid their habits.

She confronted Colin.

"You're not telling me everything."

He sighed. "What you don't know can't hurt you."

"If there's stuff you've found out, I want to know."

"I think we just need to let Neil go and keep our best memories of him intact."

"What do you know?" asked Lara, now looking horrified.

"It's a lot worse than we thought" replied Colin with a grim expression.

"I really do want to know absolutely everything."

"He was taking some highly addictive drugs. I'm sure he's gone now. We should probably talk about some kind of memorial service."

"I guessed as much. I've been reading about those legal highs and they're nasty. Not many deaths though."

"Yes, but he was getting some really dangerous ones direct from China at 99% purity. I'm almost certain he overdosed."

"How do you know?"

"I found some traces at the house. I'm so sorry, Lara. I've been waiting and hoping that the body will be found, so we can grieve properly, you know?" said Colin, his eyes pricking with tears.

"You're a good man, Colin. I don't blame you for not telling me" replied Lara, hugging him.

Next chapter...

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

25. The Scales

The crisis team - part of the community mental health team - social services and the police had all been quite helpful when Neil had originally gone missing. The police had quickly discovered that Neil had left his phone, wallet and passport behind. All the services were very concerned about Neil's welfare and had attempted to establish his last known movements as well as searching for him. Because Neil was considered a vulnerable person at risk of suicide, there had been a lot of initial effort, focus and attention on helping Lara, Colin and the family to make sure he was found safe and well.

With all avenues exhausted, there was little more that any of the services could do unless new information emerged. Lara and Colin were main points of contact, liaising with a police detective who was in charge of the ongoing - but parked - investigation.

Frustrated with a lack of progress, two highly regarded private investigators were contacted by Colin. After initial discussions they decided that there was insufficient evidence for them to be able to pursue the case. The truth was that nobody really wanted to touch the case, because of the number of government bodies already involved: National Health Service, mental health services, the police and social services.

Colin had eventually taken matters in to his own hands and gone to the house to look for more clues, when he found the transactions that had led him to the ongoing prosecution of the businesswoman and her associates. Once he'd found the names of the defendants, it was a simple case of searching the register of directors and finding the trading address of their company in the public records.

Now, he was back at the house once again. He regretted involving Lara so closely, but she wanted to play an active role and had discovered vital information that he himself - a grey-haired man in his sixties - would have been unlikely to have been able to extract from anybody embroiled in the court case.

Colin had sounded out friends - retired police officers, solicitors and even a judge - about bringing their own case to court. "Not a hope in hell" were the exact words of one former Justice of the Peace. His sentiments were pretty much echoed by everybody else Colin consulted informally.

"Imagine if a person was selling rat poison as heroin" said Bill, the retired judge. "Now, if that person was to sell rat poison in place of sugar, they might be convicted of murder or manslaughter. But as soon as they sell it as heroin, they'll be convicted for supply of a controlled substance, even though rat poison is not illegal to sell per se."

"But that's insane! Surely the charge of murder should take precedence over the charge of supplying a controlled substance" protested Colin.

"Well, it's about the buyer. If the buyer thought they were buying heroin, then nobody really cares whether that junkie dies. The seller will be convicted as a drug dealer, not a murderer."

"So the law really doesn't care whether you sell a junkie sugar, caffeine, heroin or rat poison?" asked Colin.

"Yep."

"What if the buyer didn't know what they were getting?"

"What did they actually buy?" Bill asked.

"A controlled substance."

"What was it sold as?"

"A chemical for laboratory research."

"There's no chance it could have been confused for a foodstuff? Was it marked as hazardous? Unfit for human consumption?"

"Yeah. It's not like it was sold as sugar or anything" Colin replied.

"Well then, the only conviction you could possibly get would be for supply of a controlled substance."

To make matters worse, everybody advised Colin not to mention the drug use to the police. One whiff of drug abuse and the case would be filed in a dustbin marked 'lost cause junkie'.

Back at the house searching for more clues, he looked high and low before finally he decided to search the attic. Boxes of Christmas decorations and long-neglected exercise equipment, the attic contained very little else except for a disused hot water cylinder and a galvanised metal cold water tank. There was a chipboard lid on the tank and Colin noticed that it was an inch or so out of place, overhanging on one corner. Lifting the lid, there was a green plastic box floating inside with a black plastic handle.

In the kitchen, Colin towelled off the green box so it was clean and dry and took it through to the dining room. Unclasping the two black plastic latches, the lid was stuck tight until the airtight and dust proof seal released the pressure. Inside the box was grey foam to protect the delicate instrument contained within: a laboratory-grade weighing scale.

Normal kitchen scales might tell you the weight of something in grams, but not very accurately. If you needed to weigh 10 grams - approximately the same as a one pound coin - then your kitchen scales would be woefully inadequate. Even fine balance scales with small weights would struggle to weigh anything lighter than a gram. Some digital scales could weigh one tenth of a gram with reasonable accuracy: 0.1g. The scales that Colin had found could weigh at a sub-milligram accuracy. Less than 0.001 grams. Even breathing on the instrument or standing too near the table on a wooden floor would cause measurement fluctuations, so there was a special stand, cover and calibration weights to ensure the readings were accurate. The "quick reference" instruction manual inside the case was a hefty pamphlet.

There were some spatulas and a metal dish inside the green box. A tiny amount of light brownish powder residue was visible on the foam that held the dish and the spatulas. There was also a very small plastic resealable bag which was almost empty except for the tiniest residue of powder in the corners.

Colin spent the whole next day searching the Internet and phoning testing facilities, before he finally located a laboratory that would be able to swab and test the tiny traces of drugs that he had found. Using gas chromatography mass spectrometry, the lab was able to then search the 'signature' of the chemical compounds and to find a match in their database.

After sending the scales by courier to the lab in the Netherlands, it took 3 weeks before he got the results emailed to him. There was no conclusive match, but there were several compounds that were 97% similar to chemicals that were held in their database. He had been warned that a 99% match was the highest that he could expect anyway, so it was a good start.

Searching the Internet, he found detailed online encyclopedia entries for two chemicals, as well as a brief summary of a third. The compounds were stimulants from three different families of drugs. Two had been developed and patented in the 1950's and 1960's, but had never been marketed to the public because of serious side effects. Colin found a shorter acronym form of the full chemical name of each of the three compounds and started to search the Internet for more information.

Quickly, Colin was immersed in a world of online discussion forums. Thousands of Internet users from around the globe were talking about their experiences of self-experimentation with chemical compounds that had been abandoned by pharmaceutical companies or not even patented. Some of the chemicals had only been thought of as theoretically possible, but a laboratory somewhere in the world was cooking up these drugs for people to buy and try on themselves.

He couldn't read any more. What he saw was immediately horrifying. Hundreds of stories of addiction and horrible psychotic episodes, health damage and hospitalisations. Internet users were swapping stories about how awful these chemicals were and that they were the most addictive drugs they'd ever tried. Many lamented the day they ever first experimented. One message stood out as clearly as the obvious warning to never take these substances: accurate measurement was the difference between desired effects and overdose.

Perhaps Neil had two sets of scales, but one set alone was worth almost £1,000. If he had overdosed at home, surely he would have been found there along with his scales?

From what Colin had read, a powerful dose of those drugs was just 0.005 grams. If Neil had half a gram delivered from China, that would be 100 doses. The effects would last well over 12 hours. That meant Neil would have been on a nonstop drug binge for 50 days with just one free sample, assuming he was measuring accurately.

He felt sick. His son had got mixed up with something so dangerous that it had overwhelmed him and taken his life in the blink of an eye. There was no way to sugar coat this. Was there even any point in telling Lara and the family that Neil had been completely consumed by addiction and stimulant psychosis? In less than 6 weeks these powerful Chinese drugs caused him to flee his home to his final resting place.

Next chapter...