This is a story about terrorism...

Do we take stability for granted? In actual fact, I think we do a remarkable job of Keeping Calm and Carrying On, in the face of the threat of violence.

I often think about Britain's role in my lifetime, as a diplomatic and tolerant nation. We made great strides in the Northern Irish peace process, and IRA bombings and bomb scares had almost faded from memory. We managed to protect Salman Rushdie, when he published the The Satanic Verses, while at the same time maintaining a good relationship with the Islamic world. Acts of terrorism, like the Pan Am bombing, were committed on British soil, but yet our nation never stumbled as a respected statesman in foreign affairs.

However, perhaps our politicians took our position for granted.

Entering into an illegal war against Iraq was just downright arrogant and stupid, on the basis of supposed intelligence that was never questioned within the corridors of power, despite the fact that the public were obviously not convinced by the outlandish claims.

Surely nobody can deny the fact that Britain's recent foreign policy has made our nation a target, rather than a safer place for our citizens. The war in Iraq was cited by the 7/7 bombers, as the reason for their attack. Our MPs voted to bomb Syria, further compounding a refugee crisis, and angering the Arab world. Then we held a referendum on leaving the EU, which threatens to derail the Northern Irish peace process as well as unleashing a tidal wave of racist hatred & intolerance.

London needs to remember that Britain is a European nation, and Europe has land borders with the Middle East. We are not the USA, with a massive body of water - The Atlantic Ocean - that separates us from those who want to kill us.

It's OK for the USA to meddle in the affairs of Ireland, Europe and the Middle East, because they are the best part of 4,000 miles away. So long as the Arab parts of the Middle East don't get intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, they're more than happy for Britain to idiotically make itself unsafe in the process of protecting American interests.

Our Irish neighbours who believe in the re-unification of their island under a single republic, can quite easily take a short ride on a car ferry and come and blow us up. Have we forgotten that? I can't really tell you how my fellow Brits in Belfast feel, but I certainly don't want to offend my friends in The Republic of Ireland, by making them feel like Britain is yet again becoming a viciously violent imperialist, at the expense of European peace.

Britain has long had a tradition of multiculturalism, and offending our Muslim population seems unwise. We can't deport people based on their religion. Many Muslims are second or third generation. They're as British as you or I.

The USA can send Israel guns, bombs, tanks and warplanes, in order to illegally occupy Palestine and oppress the Arab people. The USA can do this, because they are thousands of miles away, across vast oceans, from the vast swathe of the planet that they are committing atrocities against. Muslims are just 0.9% of the population of the USA. However, in England, 5% of the population follow the Muslim faith.

Britain is in no position to act like the USA, in terms of foreign policy. Britain is in no position to make itself an enemy with its neighbours and its own citizens.

Horrible racists like Donald Trump might talk about "the ban" on people of the Muslim faith, and this might even be sadly workable, because of the popularity of the policies in a predominantly isolated nation. However, Britain is an island trading nation, a multicultural society, and close to the great landmass of Europe, which borders Asia and the Middle East. We don't have a Panama Canal to the south, and an Arctic wilderness to the North. People quite regularly swim across the English Channel.

To use the language of the USA is ridiculous. We can't talk of imposing our own brand of freedom on people, and riding around the world in war machines, blowing up whoever we like, and then acting all surprised and upset when a few people fight back.

The UK has increased and increased its reckless stupidity with foreign policy that threatens the safety of every peaceful law-abiding citizen. I don't want to live in a country where I have to be mistrustful of the Muslim community, the Irish community. I don't want to go back to the days of bomb scares and terrorist attacks.

Britain and London's great success has been in welcoming visitors to our shores. I feel safer in a multicultural London, than I would in a sea of angry white faces, all chanting jingoistic racist nationalistic tosh, at the expense of national security.

You can't use violence and aggression to bring peace. All that warmongering foreign policy, and racist domestic policy, will accomplish, is to alienate the many cultures who had previously felt at home in Britain, and turn ourselves into a proxy target for those who seek to hurt the imperialists that oppress them.

Having Tony Blair as Middle East peace envoy was a dreadful insult to the Arab world. What on earth is Britain doing, other than painting a big target on its back?

Tags: #terrorism #politics #london

This is a story about getting rich quick...

Don't get high on your own supply, they say. It's good advice, because weed seems to dull the wits of my friends, and to curb their enthusiasm for anything more than the getting of more weed, and the consumption of shit food and crap TV.

When I meet young people who feel like they're part of a counter-culture revolution, because they smoke a bit of marijuana, I think how easily they have been duped. How foolish you are, to think that you're fighting the establishment, through your choice of intoxicant.

Governments and the police are mightily pleased to have a stoned population, who are too doped up to be bothered to get off their arses and do anything about social issues, or involve themselves in politics. Chuckling at low-brow humour that is designed to appeal to the stoner brain, is never going to change the world.

The energy and passion of youth has been quashed by the dreaded weed. You're not cool or "fighting the power" by smoking dope. You're actually playing into the hands of the establishment. The cannabis leaf - that ubiquitous emblem - sells tons of merchandise. Camden Market is London's second most popular tourist attraction, and it's mostly because of drug culture.

But what hopes have young people got? They're never going to be able to afford a house, pay for a wedding and be able to support a family, without topping up their income somehow. For those kids with wealthy parents, they might be able to go with their begging bowl to Mum & Dad, but it's hardly the independent self-sufficient life that we should all be entitled to live, is it?

You bust your balls all through school, get some grades, and now what? You can get a massive student loan that will only cover your tuition fees, and you still have to figure out how to pay for accommodation, food & books for your 3 years of undergraduate studies.

Maybe you can save up money before you go to University, but under-18s will be paid £3.87 per hour. Do you think a 17 year old is less capable of stacking a supermarket's shelves than a 64 year old? Why on earth should a young person be paid just 54% of what an old person earns, for doing the same job?

While you're at University, you'll be paid slightly more for your bar work, waitressing or whatever part-time job you can get. You'll get a whopping £5.30. That's still 26% less than somebody with arthritic joints and early-onset dementia. Who would you want working behind a bar? The young attractive, energetic student, or the miserable old codger who shuffles around?

So, what do the most enterprising individuals do, to cope with the crippling debt burden that they face, with little hope of elevating themselves from a position of poverty? Well, some of them will sell their bodies, and sell drugs.

If you deny people a legal route to pay for a quality of life that they're entitled to, they will turn to a life of 'crime'.

The two bestselling commodities, in the history of humanity, are sex & drugs. Ugly people need to fuck, and people want to get high and forget about their shitty lives. The drive to get intoxicated is not even a uniquely human thing. There are plenty of examples from the animal kingdom of non-human species that get off their faces, using various substances.

You might think that demanding plenty of interest on your life savings and wanting a nice fat pension, is OK, because you're entitled to a cushy retirement. However, your young, beautiful and fresh faced daughter or grand-daughter might have few options to live independently, other than being a stripper, escort or 'flatmate with benefits'.

If you browse the London property adverts, you will see a shocking number of offers of free accommodation in return for sex. This is the society that has been created, by structuring everything around the pension funds, instead of investing in young people.

Can't get the job without the experience, can't get the experience without the job. That's the Catch 22 that entraps most young people into minimum wage jobs and living in shared rooms in atrocious quality housing in big cities. It's no fucking picnic being young at the moment, and weed is probably the only thing that allows people to forget the hopelessness of their situation.

A pint of beer in London is £5 or more. That means I can buy two pints for £10. For the same amount of money, I can buy a gram of super-strong skunk weed, and get dribblingly intoxicated for at least a day. Two pints would make me slightly tipsy, and because I'm well-off, I could then easily afford to have 3 or 4 more pints and get violent, abusive and urinate and vomit in the street. However, it's more economical - as a young person - to get stoned out of your mind and not do anything.

The girls who have sugar daddies, hustle for tips as waitresses and strippers or even sell their bodies - these aren't fallen angels, forced to prostitute themselves because they have a drug habit. Often times, the drug habit is a result of having to use what mother nature gave them, as a means to make money. These girls have a plan. They're smart. They've figured out that no amount of shelf stacking for a supermarket will allow them to ever escape poverty.

Our prettiest daughters and grand-daughters are living in luxury apartments in the city centre, taking taxis, eating in expensive restaurants and ordering cocktails at the bar... but how is that lifestyle funded? Every gorgeous pouting selfie you see on Facebook or Instagram... doesn't that say something about the sexualisation of an entire generation, through economic necessity, to you?

The boys will grow weed, or cut coke. The girls will strip or fuck. This is what we've wished for. The olds sit idle in their big empty houses, while their sons, daughters and grandchildren have no option but to pursue the most economically profitable path they can: drugs & prostitution.

I'm painting a bleak picture, but I don't think it's inaccurate.

"It's only a bit of harmless dope" right? Wrong. Can't you see that people's eyes are dulled. The fire has gone out of people's hearts when they're just sitting around stoned. Where is the energy and enthusiasm to change society for the better?

Tags: #drugs #addiction #society #politics #capitalism #sex #police

This is a story about the final countdown...

My target was 300,000 words in less than a year, and I'm almost there. There is certainly quantity, but the quality has been hit & miss.

Why would I continue to write, when the number of readers I have has dwindled? I descended into ranting insanity during a rocky start to 2016, and then the ever-unpopular topic of politics.

Well, at some point you're going to make a breakthrough, turn a corner.

Because Google has indexed all of my 292,000 words for search, people are finding this website from all over the world, and they're able to explore the inner-workings of my mind, on a range of different topics: mental illness, addiction, banking, IT, childhood, and of course the running theme of a person who writes candidly, without self-censorship.

I'm going to write more extensively on the topic of 'open sourcing' the contents of your mind. You might think that I'm narcissistic, self-obsessed, but in actual fact it takes time & effort to sit down every day, compose your thoughts, and attempt to convey your feelings, the inner-workings of your own brain.

Imagine if anybody ever wanted to create a 'bot' version of me. How would you 'download' my brain into a computer system, so that my mind could be simulated? There is no technology in existence today that can create a facsimile copy of my entire neural network, and no technology is likely to be possible in any immediate future, given the trillions upon trillions of nerve cell connections in your brain.

However, the more you write, the more data there is for a machine to analyse. The technology for parsing natural language is very advanced. Also, how would you want to interact with me? Today, most of my friends communicate with me via text chat. If I had already created a bot version of myself, would any of my friends even know?

My friends: how are you, Nick?

My bot: I want to die. Every day is pain and suffering.

You see... it wouldn't be that hard.

My friend Ben created a bot that can do certain tasks, like a Siri-style personal assistant, but wouldn't it be so much cooler if you could interact with a virtual version of me that encapsulated my personality, my values, my unique thought patterns and writing style?

Alan Turing famously came up with the Turing Test, where a computer attempts to convince a human that it is also human. As yet, no computer system has managed to pass the test.

Instead of thinking about complex algorithms that can analyse a question, and formulate an appropriate response, shouldn't we start by thinking about how we can capture a human mind, in digital form?

Sure, we could take all your emails and Facebook status updates, and attempt to reconstruct your personality from data like that, but aren't we constrained by social protocols and expectations? Besides, the computer system would be fooled by the fake image you wish to project.

So far as Facebook thinks right now, the human race is full of happy smiling people who love their kids, never have arguments, and whose lives revolve around a culture of trite soundbites, quotes. So far as Twitter thinks, the human race revolves around clipped, concise 140 character retweetbait. Are we really a race defined by short witticisms?

And so, this long-form verbose version of myself, where my heart and soul gets poured out onto these pages is hopefully highly representative of who I am, what makes me tick. I've tried to leave no stone unturned, no hidden characteristic and shameful secret undocumented.

I still have a time-based objective - to write for at least 1 year - to complete, but I really feel like that's not going to be hard. Writing has slipped seamlessly into my life, and I now depend on it to be able to manage my emotional state. Writing is like the best counsellor that money could buy, because the pages of this website are always here, ready to listen to me, as I pour my little heart out.

Maybe I should STFU, but why? I'm not hurting anybody. This is a legacy. An insurance policy. If anybody's ever standing around wondering "why?" it's probably documented somewhere right here. The smoking gun is undeniably here for all to see.

I know from public speaking, that the more you tell an anecdote or a story, the better storyteller you become, and the more engaging and entertaining you get. For sure, it's addictive, putting yourself out there, once you get over the initial fear of embarrassment. However, how would you feel, if faced with the prospect of writing the equivalent of 5 novels in the space of a year?

How should I feel about the vast quantity of white noise I have pushed out onto an overcrowded Internet? Should I feel embarrassed, ashamed, to have not contributed something more pre-planned and better executed? Am I simply polluting the world of words, with my own contribution that doesn't come with a seal of approval from an institution? Where is my peer review? Where is my commercial or academic backer, to lend authority to my case?

Perhaps we should all go on creative writing courses or get degrees in English Literature from University, before we are allowed to be let loose on a keyboard?

No. Writing is democratic. Writing is human. Writing captures the very essence of who and what you are.

I like my little time capsule.

Tags: #writing #socialmedia

This is a story about premonitions...

Our perception of reality is subjective, and it is coloured by our state of mind. I'm deeply depressed, so I tend to see everything as negative, hostile, and doomed to failure.

Yesterday, I was writing a piece about how I thought the markets had over-corrected, and how I expected to see another rout in the FX and equities markets, of Sterling and the FTSE. Little did I know, that as I was writing, a terrorist attack was occurring in Istanbul, Turkey.

When your mental health is suffering, sometimes you can start making too many connections, seeing too many co-incidences. Last year I started to misinterpret events as significant in my life somehow. I started to feel overly connected to things happening around me - because I was unwell - and thought I was at the epicentre of a seismic event again, like during the Credit Crunch, when I felt at the very heart of the derivatives market and Credit Default Swaps, with JPMorgan.

Michael Cherkasky, the monitor from the US Department of Justice, still isn't happy with HSBC's customer due diligence, but nobody seems to give a shit. The share price might have dropped almost 20%, but so far as I know, nobody's going to prison for not warning the shareholders, which would be a violation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which has tried to force public corporations to be honest and open when things are going wrong.

The thing is, the show must go on, and everybody has a vested interest to some extent. Bear Stearns couldn't fail, because the markets were already spooked by Lehman Brothers. Greece couldn't default, because the entire stability of the European single currency and the stability of global markets was at stake.

Even now, with Britain prompting a disorderly rush for the door, and the potential for systemic collapse, as a domino-like chain of events is set off, we are still seeing a surprising amount of stability.

Market economics is supposed to weed out the weak and the reckless. The companies and governments that have gone beyond their means are supposed to be punished by the market, but actually what we have all demanded is stability, not a free market.

Really, Bear Stearns should have been allowed to fail, AIG should not have been bailed out, Greece should have been allowed to default on its debts, the UK should be allowed to precipitate the collapse of the Eurozone and the inevitable failure of the Euro and debt defaults across Southern Europe.

What people seem to be voting for is the free market that we supposedly have. Where would we be, if we had bitten the bullet in 2007/2008 and not simply propped everything up? Aren't we going to have to suffer a global recession that is many, many times worse than it might have been if we'd allowed reckless companies and governments to fail earlier?

However, the politicians and the banks believe that they've been tasked with economic stability. Certainly, the Bank of England's brief is to try and maintain inflation in a certain range. It certainly runs contrary to our Keynesian understanding of economics, when central banks are actually used to prop everything up, to maintain the status quo.

Gordon Brown famously declared that we had seen the end of boom & bust, but haven't we simply made a farce of the idea that debts ever have to be repaid, and there isn't an endless supply of money?

Civilisations normally fall when the burden of debt is unmanageable, but creditors refuse to forgive debts.

The world needs to deleverage, to have a debt haircut, for debts to be forgiven. The system has failed. There's no moral hazard. Everything is too big to fail. There is no market economics anymore.

I think that what people want is either inflation, to inflate away their debts, or debt forgiveness, because they are over-burdened with huge mortgages, student loans etc. etc. People feel that they've been hurt in the pocket, and they really don't care about the stability of stock portfolios and the value of Sterling.

I see the Brexit decision as almost a vote to accept a devaluation, in the hope of stoking up domestic inflation. It's a vote to accept volatility and chaos in the financial markets, that we supposedly wanted to avoid during the Credit Crunch, but people were never asked if they were OK with a whole heap of bad banks going bankrupt.

Yes, people are probably naïve about how upset they'd be about their life savings being wiped out, and having to use a barrowload of pound notes to pay for a loaf of bread, but perhaps it's better than their lives of quiet desperation, while the rich get richer and the poor get poorer?

I'm incredibly impressed to see stability in the markets today, but I don't think that's what anybody wants. People are looking for a shake-up in the pecking order. People are rocking the boat, because they're unhappy, and they literally don't care about the global economic impact and systemic risk. Perhaps propping it all up, and forcing a very long period of austerity onto everybody wasn't such a smart move.

The next question is: how far are the wealthy prepared to go, in order to get their pound of flesh?

Tags: #politics #banking #capitalism #hsbc #politics #europe

This is a story about volatility...

Most people don't like Mondays. I don't like Wednesdays. I refer to them in my own mind as "whacky Wednesdays" and try and make a mental note not to be travelling anywhere on that midweek hump day. The world always seems to be going bezerk on a Wednesday.

I woke up early this morning to check what the Nikkei - the top 225 shares traded on Tokyo's stock market - was trading at. Money has to go somewhere. When money takes flight, it can run to save-haven currencies, like the Swiss Franc, or it can flow into to other global markets: heading East or West in a follow-the-sun tidal wave. 3 trillion dollars are currently on the move.

Capital can move into scarce commodities like gold when stuff is really turning sour, like it did in the lead-up to the credit crunch. Finally, there are the bond and gilt markets, for the mugs who believe in the power of governments and corporations. Built on top of all these securities are quadrillions of dollars worth of derivatives, but it's very hard to get any sense of what the value of these 'assets' are, and where they're held.

Derivatives are a bet on an underlying security's value. Futures and options are the classic instruments, that allow you to bet that the share price of a company is going to rise or plummet more than the market expects.

The thing about placing a bet is that it manipulates the market. George Soros was famously given so much leverage by the investment banks backing him, that he was able to exhaust Britain's foreign currency reserves and force the UK out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, causing the value of Sterling to plummet.

Laughably, people were able to speculate on the outcome of the EU referendum in very much the same way... including George Soros! The amount of commission earned by investment banks on trades last Friday will pay for some pretty good bonuses this year, I expect. The result of the referendum was obvious: speculators had placed such big bets that there was a vested interest in the result.

When a jockey jumps off a horse, or a goalkeeper throws a game, are we surprised? An entire baseball team fixed the world series, for fucks sake. It's basic economics: people respond to financial incentives.

If you want to know what's going to happen, just follow the money.

Vast sums of money flooded out of Kuwait before Saddam's invasion. Loose lips sink ships, but loose lips also make the whole capitalist system go round. How do you think hedge funds know what to bet on? They've got a fucktonne of bent lawyers, who tell them what's happening with every merger & acquisition... that's how!

You can somewhat regulate share dealing: it's obvious when somebody has bought or sold a big stake in a company. But with spread betting, derivatives and FX, there's no record of who was clearly 'insider dealing'.

Opinion polls and equity markets mean jack squat. If you want to know what's going to happen in the global markets, have a look at which way the betting is going.

When it comes to bookmaking, the favourite is the one that's likely to win, right? Well, err, not exactly. A bookmaker's job is to price things according to sentiment not probability. If you want to sell anything, it has to be at an attractive price to your buyer.

So, when we came close to the referendum, there were very generous odds on backing Brexit. What does that say to me and George Soros? We're both speculators. Neither of us hold a position. We've got a big purse of money, and we're going to back a particular outcome, and the bookmakers have baited their hook, looking for a buyer with deep pockets.

In a year where the 5,000 to 1 shot, Leicester, win the Premier League, surely people could see that the generous odds were pointing to something? In a 1 in 20 horse race, odds of 1 in 5,000 are generous. In a 2 horse race, the odds that we would remain in the EU peaked at 86%. Don't you feel just a little dumb, if you think that everybody is playing fair? There's so much money at stake, why would they?

Why do the rich keep getting richer, and the poor keep getting poorer?

Well... the game is rigged you stupid c**ts. From sharp-elbowed parents getting their kids the best places in school, to executives making sure they get a big pay-rise and bonus while holding down the wage inflation of their underlings. This isn't some illuminati conspiracy-theory bullshit. The hard data is right there in front of your eyes.

So, tomorrow, your pension fund gets trimmed still further and your currency takes another hammering. More wealth leaves your pocket and enters the pockets of the guys who know what's going to happen next before it's even happened, because money talks.

I also fear that there is going to be some terrible event soon, because of the forces of hell that have been unleashed by this jingoistic rhetoric, hateful language and right-wing empowerment. I have this feeling of dread that a mosque is going to be desecrated, or another person like Omar Mateen or Thomas Mair is going to commit an atrocity. The tinderbox of hatred has been set alight by those who seek to profit from instability and volatility.

Anybody who thinks that bankers are suffering from the Brexit vote is an idiot. The markets love volatility, and trading floors are making a killing.

Tomorrow is business as usual in the City and with the hedge funds, and the idiotic British public have played into the hands of speculators like George Soros spectacularly, yet again.

Tags: #banking #capitalism #london #europe #politics

This is a story about substance dependancy...

The daily grind. How do you get through the working day? What is your routine?

150 million Americans drink coffee every day. That's roughly 50% of the entire population. No matter where you are in the world, you have some kind of vice to help you limp along.

Coca leaves, coffee and tobacco in the Americas. Tea and opium in Asia. Betel nut and Khat in Africa. Alcohol just about everywhere across the globe.

The workforce will literally down tools and be unable to work, without the substances that they're dependent on to pep them up and chill them out. The world functions through substance dependency.

Presently, I'm under pressure to addict myself to anti-depressants and tranquillisers in order to be able to work. My chemical-free life is unbearable. How am I supposed to cope with the relentless pressure without something to calm my jangled nerves? How am I supposed to cope with the futility of my existence without something to artificially raise my spirits?

Caffeine will alter my concentration span, so that I can feel productive even though my day is largely pointless and boring. Alcohol will shut my brain down and dull my senses, at the end of the day, when all there is to do is worry about having to do the same shitty stuff all over again tomorrow.

Yes, I could fill my life with kids, cats, dogs, guinea pigs, so that I'm too busy mopping up shit and snot to even notice that all I'm doing is perpetuating human misery. The opiate endorphins that are released during childrearing or caring for pets will make my life more bearable, at the expense of the poor unfortunates that I have spawned. Defining my existence by the fruit of my loins is merely handing on the problem to the next generation.

Doing sports merely floods my body with opiate endorphins, as my body tries to manage the pain of the muscle and joint damage that I have inflicted on my body. Yes, it's a 'natural' high, but it's every bit as natural as putting a synthetic opiate into your body, and a hell of a lot more likely to lead to arthritis and injury.

Pursuing adrenalin, through kitesurfing or skydiving, will give my brain a jolt of 'fight or flight' chemicals that I could get by fighting a tiger, or putting amphetamines into my body. The relief of having survived an encounter with a wild animal trying to kill me, will make me feel happy to be alive, but sooner or later you're going to get mauled to death. The pursuit of adrenalin knows no bounds : you will always have to push the envelope a little further each time.

I have a deep moral objection, to having to medicate myself to function in modern society. Just because everybody I know needs their morning cup of coffee, their cigarette breaks, the glass of wine when they get home from work... it doesn't mean that we are living our lives correctly.

Things have gotten even worse in modern life. Now people need anti-depressants and tranquillisers just to hold a job down and not have a nervous breakdown. People are popping pills from their doctor just to hang onto what they've got. "I'll lose my job if I don't have these pills to help me hide my crippling mental health problems" people say. Where is the cause and effect?

What if your mental health problems are a result of your job, your lifestyle, your life? What if your mental health problems are a symptom of having to do shitty work that you hate, and compete in the rat race?

We have been indoctrinated, at school, to prepare ourselves for a world of work, but it's not a real world. We are not supposed to be away from our families. We are not supposed to live with such insecurity, and in such uncaring environments.

From the very first day at school, we are being set up to compete with one another. Only a small number of the kids can get the "A" grades. Only a small number of students will get a first class degree. This prepares us for work, where only a small number of us will get the good jobs. It's a pyramid scheme, so most people are losing.

You've been set up to fail. Your rent is always going to be a significant proportion of your income. Your household expenses are always going to leave very little disposable income. The cost of childrearing will always leave you with less than you really need, to not feel anxious, afraid, insecure.

We are living in a world that has been completely shaped by market economics. The very design of our economy is designed to separate fools from their money, in the most efficient way. If you get a pay rise, the cost of goods and services will automatically rise to compensate. Prices are fluid, dynamic. Freedom is always going to be just out of reach.

Wouldn't you like it if only one parent had to work? Wouldn't you like to see more of your kids than just kissing them goodnight, and stealing a glance in the morning before you have to rush off to work? Wouldn't you like to be close to home, in case there's something you need to take care of, or just to see more of your loved ones? Why do you have to do a shitty commute that takes up hours of your day, and deprives you of time with your family? Why do you have to leave the village where you grew up, and go to the big polluted crowded city, in order to seek your fortune?

But don't worry about such existential questions. Just dope yourself up with tea, coffee, alcohol, antidepressants, tranquillisers. Don't worry about it, just zap your brain with enough chemicals to kill an elephant. Don't worry about it, just keep putting toxic stuff into your body, because you need that job, you need to stay in the rat race, you need to stay competitive.

Students are even taking Modafinil and Ritalin in order to stay awake and concentrate on their studies, because it's so important that they get good exam grades.

Doesn't all this sound like a terrible arms race to you? Doesn't it sound like our efforts to compete with one another are destroying our mental health? Doesn't it sound like we're sacrificing so much of our existence, to do more homework, study harder, work harder, work longer hours, deny our aching heart that cries out to be at home, cuddling our kids and hugging our loved ones.

Aren't we denying our very humanity, and using chemicals to mask problems that we label as mental illness? Wouldn't we all be more mentally healthy if modern society allowed us to be more human than just some worker-drone in an anonymous big city somewhere, with a cruel boss who only cares about productivity and timekeeping?

The lives we lead are collective madness. We are killing one another, not with guns, but with our relentless drive for good exam grades, pay rises and promotions.

I'm in favour of a general strike, because the madness has to stop.

Let's get some new kind of society under construction, where we worship happiness, not money.

Tags: #politics #capitalism #career #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #addiction #drugs

This is a story about the last word...

Is this a time for levity? Should we go back to our normal everyday lives, as if nothing important is happening in the world, apart from funny videos of cats and the banality of our everyday existence?

What is Facebook for? Is it a soapbox for those without a voice in the corridors of power? Is it somewhere to spam your friends, with your thoughts, ideas and political agenda?

I have no idea what the answers are to these questions, so I look to people that I like and respect, and try to imitate their behaviour. I have a friend who is a vociferous Conservative party member, who shares many opinions on Facebook, so this encourages me to set myself up, in opposition somewhat. I have another friend who is an admirable humanist and eloquent writer on the topic of social injustices, who keeps me informed of many things that are unpleasant in the world, and how compassionate individuals are seeking to drive back those evil forces. This encourages me to share messages of hope and support in this cause.

You don't have to read my blog, and you probably don't. You've seen it pop up on your Facebook wall enough times, and been confronted with somewhat of a wall of words, or some kind of shame-spiral and deeply personal things that should perhaps never be shared.

Just ignore it. It will probably go away. Just one blog post a day is pretty easy to ignore.

But what about when it becomes a raging torrent of social media sharing? What about when your Facebook wall or Twitter feed is filled with a person with a bad case of verbal diarrhea? Time to unfriend them? Time to unfollow them?

The reason why I won't shut up at the moment is summed up neatly by this famous quote:

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing

The far-right have been encouraged to go on the rampage, and I can't see what's going to curtail the rise and rise of racism. What will cause the bigotry, xenophobia and outright fascism, to be stopped in its tracks?

I was going to spend the evening watching light entertainment television shows, or perhaps a couple of films, but I have been provoked into breaking my one-a-day blog post rule, by the fact that a couple of people I like and respect think that their work is done. They voted, made their protest, and now it's time to crack open the champagne.

In actual fact, whatever the political outcomes, I really don't give a shit whether I have a British flavour of democracy or a European flavour... I just don't want racists to think that it's OK to abuse people in the street.

I don't want people laminating little cards and shoving them through the letter boxes of Eastern European people, telling them they're "vermin".

I don't want racists on a bus telling anybody with a darker skin tone, or speaking in a foreign language, that they are not welcome here in the UK.

I don't want people shouting racial abuse in the street.

Perhaps these things would have occurred, whichever way the vote went, but my intuition tells me that it somehow seems more acceptable in society to be racist, when you feel like you're in the majority.

Does it seem like I'm being a patronising patriarchal London effeminate City banker-boy ponce to you, if I remind you that immigrant bashing propaganda was how the Nazis swept to power. Of course, it seems like I'm an over-earnest teenager, in making such an obvious observation, but somebody's got to call it out, haven't they?

You can't just say "I'm bored of hearing about your anti-racist sentiment now. I want to see a dancing cat on stilts playing a piano. HA HA HA!". You were either part of the group that ushered in this dark era of mistrusting Johnny Foreigner and bashing the darkies, or you were part of the group who said "hey! let's be inclusive and tolerant!".

I really couldn't give two hoots about which group of elitists rule my life with an iron fist, if we're going to be overrun with skinhead neo-nazis and suffer the resurrection of fascism in Europe.

Does it not concern you more that we need to shut down detestable entities like the BNP, UKIP, France's Front National etc. etc. as a priority?

There is no victory to celebrate in the 'majority' vote. There is no "the people have spoken and it's time to move on" when huge numbers of those people are FUCKING RACISTS. Priority #1 for the country has to be shutting down the far-right, not shutting each other up so we can all go and live in la-la land where we all have milk and honey because we're politically governed slightly differently.

Don't you get it? There is no "move on, let's be positive" when groups of disaffected people are out looking for a mosque to torch, or a person with different skin colour to them to abuse.

Will I shut the hell up? Will I fuck, when the ugly face of fascism is showing itself again.

There's perhaps an important lesson to be learned about whether people like myself - the London Guardian reader - have helped or hindered, but I certainly predicted this result and its consequences, and I certainly understand all the concerns of the underclass.

Will I stop spamming my Facebook friends? Yes, I'll probably retreat into blog-land, where I can write at length without taking up a disproportionate amount of space on a wall that should be filled with grinning infants, prowling pussycats and raucous nights out.

What will you say though, to your grandkids, when they ask you what you did after the UK voted to leave the EU?

Tags: #politics #europe #friends #socialmedia

This is a story about respecting your elders...

Who's the responsible one round here? Who's got to carry the can, at the end of the day? Who's got to live with the consequences of bad decisions, and clean up other people's mess?

There isn't a class war going on. There's a generation war.

The baby boomers drove around in gas-guzzling cars, burnt dolphins to stay warm, dynamited the glaciers, blew up nuclear weapons under the polar ice caps, and generally whizzed around the globe spraying deadly chemicals on everything and saying "FUCK YOU GRANDCHILDREN, HA! HA! HA!".

I remember at school, when I was 10 or 11 years old, me and my friend Ben used to write long rhymes about saving the environment, and read them out at school events. We basically urged a modicum of control over the unmitigated climate disaster we saw all around us.

Growing up in the Thames Valley, huge numbers of my friends were asthmatic. Particulate emissions from internal combustion engines, gathered in the river valley, and in central Oxford the percentage of kids suffering from respiratory conditions was at the highest level in the country.

My friend Ben's parents had responsibly given up smoking for the health of their children, but mine would not listen to my pleas to stop wasting a significant proportion of the family income on something that was destructive to the health of us all. It was selfishness, plain and simple.

I still vividly remember one time when I begged my Dad to stop taking drugs. "Do you expect me to be a boring old fart?" he asked, incredulously. The tragic thing is, that I didn't need him to take drugs to look 'cool'. It was his own insecurity and pathetic attempt to impress young family members like my cousin Sue, that meant that he thought he was some kind of counter-culture hero, just because he took addictive drugs.

My Dad was adamant that I should not get to go to University, nor my sister, even though him and my Mum both enjoyed a free University eduction. My sister and I were both educated in state schools, even though my parents enjoyed the option of private/selective schooling.

My parents had substantial financial help from my grandparents to purchase their first home. No such help has been forthcoming from our parents, and indeed I bought my house without any financial support from my parents, as well as paying for my wedding & honeymoon out of my own pocket. My sister has - as a percentage of her income - possibly been even more financially independent than me.

As kids and adults, my sister and I have certainly been very economical, responsible, mature, in ways that my parents don't even come close to. We've paid our own way in life. We've grafted harder than my parents could possibly imagine.

And for what? So that my parents' generation can tell us that we're profligate, reckless with money, irresponsible, lazy? My parents' generation tell us we should save money for a rainy day, when the pensions that they draw bear no relation to the actual amount of money that they've saved up. The baby boomers are hoping to have hefty final salary pensions that far outstrip the amount of money they've paid into the schemes, to the point of causing a massive black hole in the nation's finances.

The upper-class Victorians used to say "children should be seen and not heard" but those children were reared by wet-nurses, nannies and au pairs, plus all the other servants. If you don't have servants to rear your children, you don't get to say such obnoxious things, because you're the only person in your child's life.

Infant mortality used to be very high, so ordinary Victorians cherished their children. Having a healthy child was a blessing, and something to be celebrated. There wasn't this strange culture of worshipping people with old-fashioned ideas, who sat idle for 30, 40 years, just criticising everything. Yes, we'd all like to retire and just sit around in our favourite chair reading shit newspapers and being mean to everybody, but the retirement age was always supposed to be just 1 year more than the average life expectancy.

Our economy is structured around the 'grey pound'. After the banks, the most powerful institutions in the country are the pension funds. These massive piles of money, managed by asset managers and institutional investors, for the benefit of their pension-drawing clients, decide everything about how this country is run. When we talk about things being run for the benefit of shareholders, those shareholders are mostly pension funds.

If anybody ever says to me "what have you given back to your parents?" or  "be grateful your parents gave you the gift of life" I'm going to struggle not to scream in their face with rage.

My whole life has been generating value for shareholders. Every penny and pound of profit that I have generated for my masters has gone into dividends and higher stock prices, to inflate the asset value of a pension fund somewhere. My whole life has been toiling to allow the baby boomers to have a life of idle luxury, not that they're fucking grateful.

But you know what? Things have gone way too far.

The older generation has fucked up the environment, fucked up the economy and demanded that young people suffer austerity, University tuition fees, job insecurity, wage stagnation, eye-watering rent, impossibly over-inflated house prices and listen to a sneering arrogant bunch of lazy grey-haired cunts telling them they're lazy and stupid the whole fucking time.

They say you should be nice to your kids because they'll choose your nursing home. Damn fucking straight, but you don't get to have 20 years of idle luxury before you go so damn senile that you have to be put in a home, so that your hard-pressed children can continue working all hours to pay for your profligacy, laziness and arrogance.

Yes, it's true that a huge proportion of wealth has been diverted into the hands of a few eye-wateringly rich families. However, WHO THE FUCK WAS ASLEEP ON THE JOB WHEN THAT HAPPENED?

Why the hell is it me who has to go on political marches, to demand that wealth is more fairly redistributed? My parents were too busy sat on their fucking arse taking drugs and reading books and newspapers to actually get off their lazy backsides and engage in the political process, for the good of the country and the good of us kids and grandkids.

Don't pretend like voting to leave the EU is somehow in the best interests of the country and future generations. One lazy pencil cross in a box doesn't make up for the idle years spent enjoying a free University education, job security, high pay, reckless drug taking, low cost of living, great housing, foreign holidays, new cars, superb pension and lots and lots of disposable income. YOU HAD IT FUCKING EASY, YOU STUPID OLD CUNTS.

As you can tell, this is a fairly calm and measured response to being sold down the river, and having my future destroyed by a bunch of people who won't be around to suffer the global warming and economic depression.

Literally, almost everybody I know my age or younger suffers from depression and/or anxiety. What a legacy!

We used to sing "he's got the whole world in his hands" but where is your fucking God now?

Tags: #parents #childhood #oxford #family #politics #capitalism

This is a story about body shopping...

What's the difference between a temp, a freelancer, a self-employed person, a contractor and a consultant? What's the difference between an employee and an entrepreneur?

Last year I was working for HSBC, along with a bunch of nice folks from several different consultancies, plus a handful of permanent members of staff. The teamwork was brilliant, but the surprising thing was that we all had different agendas.

Given that I had gone back to HSBC as a contractor, having been a permanent member of staff there for over 4 years, it was somewhat of a mindset change. I was also homeless and still very much in the vice-like grip of drug addiction, which wasn't a good start.

I was exhausted, and I had somewhat induced within myself, some fairly major symptoms of mental illness, which caused me to make some rather outlandish interpretations of the reality I experienced.

Imagine being plucked from the park, where you are living and contemplating bankruptcy and the coffin nail that will drive into your career, your business. Imagine facing up to the reality that everything you're qualified and experienced to do, since you started IT contracting at age 20, is now going to go down the shitter, and you're homeless, abandoned by the state - the council have sent you a one-line email saying that you're not even worth a hostel bed to them.

Then, imagine that almost overnight, you're working on the number one project for the biggest bank in Europe. You're so exhausted that you are sleeping in the toilet. Everything seems surreal, from the moment you put on your suit in the morning in a hostel dormitory paid for with a credit card you can't afford to pay off, to the moment you turn up in the headquarters of a prestigious Tier 1 bank that you used to work for, when you were clean, sober, young, happy, ambitious, energetic, enthusiastic and respected.

The challenge was to get through 60 days of working, without running out of credit completely. I had to get to work every day and pay for my hostel bed, for a whole month before I could submit my first invoice, which would be paid 30 days later. Obviously, it also looks rather unusual to your colleagues if you can't afford to eat lunch or socialise. The pressure was immense.

What does a poker player do, if they have a weak hand? They bluff, obviously.

To compensate for my fear, and the odds that were stacked against me, I turned the dial up to 11. I tried hard. Far, far too hard. I told the team that I'd take responsibility for a critical piece of work, and deliver it in a short space of time, along with an extremely capable colleague, who actually knew that it was a monster piece of work.

I should have been laughed out of the door. I can't believe that nobody particularly picked up on the fact that I was shooting from the hip, out of a combination of fear, exhaustion, drug withdrawal, mental illness and a touch of arrogance.

How on earth was my ego not going to be stoked? I had just cheated death, bankruptcy, destitution, and now I had the CIO of the number one project in the biggest bank in Europe surprising me, by naming me in person, as the team member responsible for one of the pivotal pieces of the program, in front of the entire town hall. I looked around - "is he talking about me?" - yes, it appeared he was. How surreal.

As a drug addicted homeless person, you're kind of invisible. People would like it if you just crawled into some dark hole and died, quietly. You're nobody's problem but your own, and everybody pretends not to notice you, as you drag your bags through the street, swatting at invisible flies and talking to yourself incomprehensibly.

Suddenly, people not only seem to value you, listen to you, but also look to you for some kind of professional guidance, leadership. Is this the state that important IT projects have reached, where the hobo junkie is the one calling the shots? I realise that I wasn't actually calling the shots, but that's what it feels like when you've been scraped up from the pavement, stuffed into a suit and now you're working in a fancy office full of glass, steel and granite.

It embarrasses me, but also pleases me that I'm still on good terms with a few respected colleagues, and they can tease me about "the time when you said you were going to deliver X by Y". However, not everything I said was worthless tosh.

This is where the difference in mindsets comes in.

As a permanent member of staff, your best shot of getting pay rises and promotions is to raise your profile. Given an hour to do some work, you might as well spend 50 minutes writing an email about what a brilliant person you are and how clever you are, and 10 minutes actually doing some work, rather than the other way around. People who just knuckle down and get on with the work they're supposed to be doing, tend to be overlooked when it comes to the end of year review.

As a contractor, you're all about contract renewals. When your contract is coming up towards its end, you're on best behaviour. You try to shine and make yourself a key-man dependency, so that you can demand a big rate increase, because you're indispensable. Personally though, I hate making myself a key-man dependency. It's unprofessional, however you are economically incentivised to do it, so many contractors dig themselves into little fiefdoms.

As a consultant however, you have the worst of both worlds. You have to kiss the arse of both the client and your consultancy. There's a huge conflict of interests. The consultancy want you to stay on your placement, and for as many headcount as possible to be working with you on the client project, if you're working time & materials. What exactly is consulting about being a disguised employee? Where is the value-add from the consultancy, when the client wants you to be embedded in their organisation, like a permanent member of staff?

The reasons for using consultancy staff, contractors, temps, freelancers, is that you can get rid of them when the project is done. However, the other reason is that you don't have all the headache of having to performance manage underperforming and difficult staff members out of your organisation. In theory, it's a lot easier to hire & fire... with the firing being the desirable bit.

It used to be the case that you could get a job as an IT contractor with just a 20 minute phone interview and start the next day. If you were shit, you'd just be terminated on the spot. Never happened to me, but that was the deal you struck... you'd be on immediate notice for the first week. Then you'd be on a week's notice. Then you'd be on 4 weeks notice, just like a permie. However, I always used to get my contract renewed, because I know how to play the game, kiss ass and keep my lip buttoned at the right time.

So, what happened? Well, stress, money, recovery from addiction, relapse, housing stresses and everything in-between conspired in my private life to mean that I was living life by the seat of my pants. I was running for my life.

After only a week in the new job, I decided that it was an impossible mountain to climb, and that there was no way that I could live in a large hostel dormitory and work on a stressful project, plus get myself clean from drugs, plus dig myself out of near-certain bankruptcy. There were just too many problems to face, working full-time in a crisply laundered shirt and a nice suit, while hiding the crippling problems in my private life.

You can't just go to your boss and say "I'm sorry I didn't mention this before, but I'm a homeless recovering drug addict, who suffers mental health problems at times of extreme stress and exhaustion, and I'm practically bankrupt as well as barely able to keep myself clean, sane, out of hospital and off the streets". Contracting doesn't work like that. Your personal life is nobody's problem but your own... you've signed that deal with the devil. You get paid more, but you're also expected to not get sick and not bring your personal problems with you to the office.

I disappeared on my second week in the job, getting mixed up with the police, thrown out of the hostel where I was living, and ending up in hospital, as the pressure was simply too much to bear, I thought that my lifeline was pretty much spent. The odds of being able to get off the streets were too slim anyway. It couldn't be done. I gave up, and relapsed.

Do you think you can just pick up the phone and say "errr, yeah, I need two weeks off to sleep, an advance of several thousand pounds, and I'd like to come back to work part-time for a little while until I'm up to full strength, because I've been dragging bags all over London, living in parks and on heathland, in and out of hospitals, rehabs and crisis houses, addicted to some deadly shit and battling mental health problems. It seems silly that I didn't mention this at the interview, as I'm sure you would have been just fine with giving me an opportunity to get myself off the street and back into the land of the living"?

You know what though? I did get a second chance. There's no denying that certain allowances were made for me. A blind eye was turned to the fact that I was basically either shouting at people or nodding off in meetings for the first week. I went AWOL twice. Once for a whole week where I basically decided that everything was f**ked and there was no way I could ever make things work, and once for nearly a whole day, when I was swept up in the euphoria of working with nice people and got paralytically drunk with my colleagues and couldn't face telling my boss that I was sick again.

Through my divorce, I lost heaps of friends who were shared with me and the ex. I decided to move back to London, because I knew I could find lots of work. However most of my London friends had moved out of town, in order to start a family. Also, you don't make many friends when you're living in a park sniffing supercrack, and getting hospitalised for 14 weeks a year. I can tell you more about the private life of a friendly police officer that I know, than I can tell you about some other acquaintances from that turbulent period.

Anyway, I was desperately trying to cement things - get my own flat, get some money in the bank, get into a working pattern that was sustainable - but it was too much to ask. 'Friends' sensed that I was recovering, and decided to come asking for favours : lend me some money, let me live with you, give me a job etc. etc.

When you're desperately lonely, because you've split up with the two loves of your life - your wife, and supercrack - you're vulnerable to wanting to people-please. I risked my reputation, when I got a so-called friend an interview, because he pressured me. I overstretched myself, renting a flat that swallowed up all my money, which was my safety net. I didn't even pick my flat... my friend did, and he thought he was going to get to live there rent free. I put up with a lot of shit, because I was desperate for friends, for acceptance, to be liked.

If you think all this can be boiled down to a 'drug problem' you're wrong. In order for a person to feel whole, they need friends, they need a job, they need a place to live, they need to feel that they're living independently : paying the rent, earning their money, able to pay for the essentials of life, and not always just hustling, on the run.

There are quite a lot of pieces to the puzzle that is a complete life that's worth living. Do you really think I just want to be kept alive, in a straightjacket in a padded cell. Is it unreasonable to want to work, to want to feel like I'm making a contribution, to want to feel like I'm liked, loved, to want to feel like I exist, and that I'm valued somewhere, by somebody?

I loved the instant social connection I had with the "winners" who were a group of fellow consultants at HSBC. There was good camaraderie, and they were young and enthusiastic, not bitter and jaded like me. Their enthusiasm for their job and inclusive social circle was exactly what I needed, along with cold, hard cash, and a place to go every day that wasn't a bush in a park, with a wrap of supercrack.

Somewhat unwittingly - although I don't know how much people were able to guess or find out behind my back - the Winners bootstrapped my life. Even though there were the usual commercial rules of the game, about being a disposable contractor who's supposed to keep their mouth shut and not rock the boat, there was still bucketloads of humanity there. People were kind to me. They invited me into their lives, and in doing so, they saved mine.

When a colleague texted me while I was in California, to say that we had to go back to work doing the shittiest possible work for a scrum manager we didn't have a whole heap of respect for, it was pretty clear that it wasn't sustainable. I busted my balls to get cleaned up, off the streets, into a flat of my own and to restabilise my finances. However, I've never been the best at buttoning my lip and allowing myself to be 'managed' by somebody I have barely concealed contempt for.

I knew that all I had to do to get my contract terminated was to send one or two fairly outspoken emails to the project's management team who were insecure and relatively incompetent. They'd actually started to listen and change things though, so there was no purpose to the emails I sent, other than to try and elicit an email saying "don't bother coming back to work" so that I could spend some more time with my friends in San Francisco.

The pressure of having to try and cement the gains that I had made, while still carrying some of the burdens that had been accumulated, was too much. I was in no position to be the responsible guy, picking up the phone every time things went wrong and having to mop up messes. I was in no position to be paying 100% of my rent, with a lazy flatmate who shared none of the risk and none of the financial burden or responsibility for making sure the bills got paid and the household ran smoothly. I was in no position to face months and months more, working at the kind of breakneck pace that was inevitable on a project that I had been forced to take out of desperation.

I had done far too many 12 or 14 hour days. I was on email around the clock. I never switched off. I had driven myself insane, pressurising myself to fix all the broken things in my life, and shore up the gains that I had made. Insecurity and fear had given way to delusions of grandeur. I wanted to do everything, for everybody, immediately. I was very, very sick, because of the enormity of the task of not only the project, but the problems I was overcoming in my personal life. A breakdown was inevitable.

Managing things elegantly was unlikely to happen. I dropped hints about needing a holiday, but I needed to be firm, to assert myself. People expected me to manage my own personal needs, but what they didn't realise was that my needs were conflicted: I needed a financial safety cushion just as much as I needed some time off. When the offer of overtime was wafted under my nose, and the management team wouldn't stop phoning me up at weekends, they didn't have to twist my arm very hard to get me to work Saturdays, Sundays, nights. I needed the money, and I needed to feel like I was important and valued again, having only just escaped being an invisible homeless bum, tossed out of civilised society, never to return.

My experience as an IT contractor, my seniority as somebody who's run large teams, as a Development Manager, an IT Director, a CEO... I'm no fool. I knew that I was working at an unsustainable pace, making myself sick, but what choice did I have? I had so much to fix, and money and hard work can fix most problems. I knew that I needed a holiday, but I was vulnerable to being pressured into doing things that I would never do, under normal circumstances, due to the fragility of my situation.

My colleagues were kind enough to drop hints, and to tell me the tricks that they were employing to avoid management pressures and the general panic that was endemic on the project. They could see I was tired, and going slightly mad. They were worried, and it was kind of them to think of me, on a personal level. However, they didn't really know just how bad things were in my private life. They didn't know just what a journey I had been on. They didn't know what I was running away from.

When I snapped, I didn't know where to run for safety. I thought the safest place would be hospital. I was desperate. I could easily have run for drugged-up oblivion again, even though I was 5 months clean at that point, and one month sober. I could easily have run for the kitchen knife, and slit my wrists in the bath. I was desperate. So close to recovery, and yet so far.

I needed to chuck my freeloader flatmate out of my apartment. I needed to quit my contract and get something easier. I needed to not have the expectation, the weight of responsibility I had unnecessarily brought upon myself, in my desperate insecurity and desire to feel wanted, needed, useful, important, after my entire sense of self had been smashed to a pulp by the dehumanising experience of destitution.

Hospital was a safe place to do it.

Then, unable to grasp the nettle of what needed to be done, which could have been as simple as saying "I need another two weeks off work, to go on holiday, because I'm fucked", I decided to just run away. I booked a flight to San Francisco, leaving myself just a few hours to pack my bags and get to the airport. What was my plan? I had no idea. Even suicide seemed preferable to continuing to live with such crushing pressure, fear and hopeless odds stacked against me.

After a few days amongst friends, I decided that I wanted my contract terminated, immediately. I fired off a provocative email to the CIO. Jackpot! The guy who was responsible for us consultants emails me to say that he wants to see me... in Wimbledon, miles away from HSBC headquarters. I mail back to ask why, but he deftly avoids telling me my contract is terminated via email, despite me pressing him on the matter. Does nobody get the hint?

I come back to London, pissed off that nobody has had the guts to actually call me out to my face, or even by email, and that I've not been able to extend my stay in California. Out of spite, I decide to embarrass the consultancy and the management team, by going into HSBC HQ, blagging my way in even though my security pass has already been deactivated. I march up to the program director and ask him if he's happy with my work, is there a problem? In front of the whole team, he says he's happy with my work and there's no problem, he's pleased to have me back at work.

I milk a few hello-goodbyes with colleagues who I like and respect, while watching the people who want me gone squirm with discomfort. I'm loving every second of watching who's got integrity, humanity, and who's decided that I'm no longer flavour of the month. It's a masterclass in office politics, even though we're all contractors, all consultants. I'm committing every exquisite detail of my final minutes in the office to memory, as I deliberately waste time having my breakfast, before making my way to Wimbledon to wind up the poor messenger whose job it is to try and help the consultancy and the management team save face, by terminating my contract.

By this time, my access to email has been revoked, even though a colleague who accompanies me out of the building, pretends like everything is normal and like we're just having a friendly chat - as opposed to being escorted off the premises by a security guard. I know. Do they know I know? Surely they must.

Unable to send a goodbye email, I ask a colleague who is also called Nick Grant, but who works in Leeds, to send an email on my behalf to a mailing group that contains everybody on the project. It's naughty as hell, but I'm enjoying twisting the knife. What is it that I've really done wrong, other than getting sick and having to go to hospital? What is it that I said, other than what needed to be said, the truth? But I know the game. I know that nobody wants a loose cannon. Nobody wants anybody rocking the boat. I didn't play by the rules. Does anybody realise that this is my way of quitting with immediate effect, and without having to work my notice period?

It might seem like sour grapes. I needed that job. I liked my colleagues. I loved that social scene. That contract saved my life.

However, how do you reconcile your social life, your personal difficulties, your needs, with the role you've been forced into?

What's the difference between a contractor and a consultant? A contractor knows they're a mercenary. They're there to earn as much cash as quickly as they possibly can, and they accept that they can be terminated at the drop of a hat. A consultant just doesn't realise they're getting a bum deal. There's no such thing as an IT consultant. It's just a made-up thing now that software houses and long-term IT contractors have fallen out of favour, with the dreadful rise and rise of outsourcing and this stupid idea that software is ever going to be cheap and easy.

So, to the Winners. Thank you for saving my life. Thank you for putting up with my rocky start, my dreadful ego, my shouting. Thank you for putting up with my arrogance, and for laughing at my over-ambitious ideas. Thank you for trying to keep me humble, and remind me of the rules of the game. Thank you for taking me into your lovely social world. Thank you for the emotional support. Thank you for treating me like a human being, not a software robot. Thank you for dealing with the fallout that I inevitably caused, when implosion happened. Thank you for not hating me, as I wandered into the territory of delusions of grandeur and heroics, and self-important jumped-up craziness.

You might not realise this, but you saw a rather twisted, weird, screwed up version of me, as I clawed my way up a cliff face of recovery, from the bankrupt, homeless, junkie, friendless, single, lonely, unhappy, insane husk of a man that I was, in mid-June last year.

It's been quite a year. God knows what happened with the Customer Due Diligence project, but I'm glad the due diligence on me didn't work, because the Winners and HSBC ended up unwittingly saving my life and getting me back on my feet. I don't think I would have ever had that opportunity if my dark private life was known in advance.

I'm sorry if it feels like I used you. Hopefully, it feels like a good thing happened. Hopefully you feel happy to have played a role in bringing a person back from the brink, even if I was a sneaky bastard, and somewhat underhand about the whole thing, as well as going a bit bonkers at times.

Silver linings, eh?

The photos I've put up include some rather unflattering images of a rather battered and bruised body, that just about hung together with sticky tape to somehow carry me through some brutal times. My private life wasn't exactly 'healthy' leading up to last June.

Tags: #career #banking #hsbc #computing #london #suicide #addiction #homeless

This is a story about being price insensitive...

There is a desperation, a lack of ideas, a disillusionment with politics, the status quo, the instruments of government and civilised society, when people vote to bite the hand that feeds them.

However, we can't ignore the obvious message: people are pissed off.

Voting to leave the EU is clearly an own goal, an act of spite, made out of petulant frustration, a temper tantrum because people are not getting their own way. However, isn't the country supposed to be run for the benefit of the majority of the population? Doesn't this act of madness seem predictable, when clearly the powers that are supposed to represent the common person, actually represent the moneyed elite?

With no ability to vote a party into power who represent your interests, and with no ability to be able to influence policymaking to actually improve your day-to-day life, why wouldn't you seek to exercise whatever control you can, to express your distress, your unhappiness, your frustration?

We ask people to work longer hours, accept pay cuts in real terms, have less job security, no pension, no chance of buying their own home, no chance for their kids to go to University or better themselves... no hope. And for what? So that there can be another quarter of profit increase, just as the City analysts expect? So that some number on a spreadsheet can continue to grow... no matter how arbitrary.

80% of our economy is in the service sector, but over 60% of people are unhappy in their jobs, even though the working conditions look fantastic, compared with manual labour in a polluted industrial town, with its brick terraces caked in soot. Why on earth would people hanker after an era when we died younger, due to hard, physical work?

Well, those who run the economic engine of the country have completely misread the mood of the public. Highly remunerated professionals in London think nothing of spunking £6 for a pint of strong European beer and £30 going to a 'secret' cinema screening, where there's some gimmick like sitting in a hot tub on a rooftop.

There is a huge insular community of well-spoken, privately educated, fresh-faced young people, working in law, accountancy, management consultancy, finance, insurance, politics. These people are the entourage for a group of portly ruddy-faced men, who live in large houses in the London commuter belt. Between them, the lives of every single citizen of the United Kingdom are ruled, except they're completely clueless as to how ordinary people live.

Economists talk about how price insensitive people are. I literally don't care whether my coffee is £2.50 or £4.90. I just tap my contactless payment card, and walk out of the cafe with my hipster flat white. I literally don't care whether my lunch costs £5 or £10. I just go to whichever vendor I fancy on a particular day. I literally don't care that it costs more to travel on the Underground than on the bus. I just tap my card on the ticket barrier, and don't even look at my balance.

Everybody who decides how your daily life is improved, or worsened, is more concerned about where they're going skiing this year with their other young professional chums, than whether somebody on some shitty council estate can afford a box of fags.

Yes, Londoners think of themselves as cultured, urbane, sophisticated. Sadly, they also think they're somewhat in touch with the working classes, because they rub shoulders with people from all walks of life, as they travel into the city to clean toilets and wait tables. However, sharing the same streets does not equate to co-existence.

I used to live on a street in Islington, where the grand Georgian houses were worth many millions on pounds. One street away, there was a lot of social housing. You'd think that this is an example of an integrated society, but you'd be amazed at how people living in such close quarters are so successfully able to avoid each other.

While I used to dine in the restaurants of Upper Street, mixing with other City Boys, my fellow residents would head the other way, towards Hackney, where there were cheaper places to buy food, and the kinds of places I would never dream of entering: betting shops, pawnshops, low-quality takeaways.

Today is the starkest warning of where our society is headed: a two-tier system, where the 'haves' are living in a different world from the 'have nots'.

While those who wish to divide and rule have cleverly manipulated people's fears for political ends, this ignores the fact that the wealthy are busy stuffing the mattress with the working class' hard-earned cash.

When people realise they've been conned, there's going to be hell to pay.

Tags: #politics #europe #london #banking