This is a story about liberal arrogance...

Ah, caps lock, my old friend. Also, exclamation marks: you can never use too many. Do you think if there was more caps lock typing and sentences ended with multiple exclamation marks, we could wake the sheeple from their coma? The sheeple are clearly sleepwalking [or is it shleepwalking?] towards disaster.

While this is self-deprecating humour, it's also mockery of the same old liberal lines that are trotted out instead of any kind of nuanced counter-argument.

During Brexit, I noticed that people on both sides would say "I can see you're far too intellectually inferior to be able to have a debate, therefore this argument is over and I won". I lament the loss of anybody who can actually be bothered to have a proper debate, without being so childish.

Your white-trash, redneck, poorly educated person is now incredibly bored with the tried and trusted liberal short-cuts that supposedly immediately discredit an opponent in a debate. "Bigot" is a particularly charged word, and guarantees instant disengagement by the disenfranchised members of the public, being browbeaten by a group of elites who consider themselves morally superior.

I'm as guilty of it as anybody.

But, I've also noticed a kind of pathetic infighting amongst the intelligentsia.

Firstly, one must overcome the snobbery of the grammar Nazis. For your argument to even be considered it must be deemed to have attained certain standards. The most innocent spelling mistake will become the focus of commentary, rather than the points raised by the original author, no matter how eloquently the central argument is presented.

Having established oneself as 'a cut above the rest' there is one kind of ad hominem attack that succeeds where all others might fail. All one has to do to win the argument is write "WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!!" in mockery of your opponent's attempt to make a reasoned argument and reach a sensible conclusion. Essentially, you're accusing somebody of being a nutjob; a raving madman. Case closed. End of debate.

Our asylums are stuffed full of 'visionary' people, and those seized by absolute conviction that the end of the world is nigh. However, do we not also laud that tiny handful of individuals who successfully predict recessions, stock market crashes, credit crunches, housing crises and other cataclysmic man-made events?

Why is it that a stock market trader or hedge fund manager, who might make a good living from short selling - betting against the market - is considered a highly intelligent person - cloaked in the mystery of mathematical models - while others who also forecast negative events, are dismissed as lunatics?

Humans always err on the positive side. There is a psychological test where participants bet money and win precisely as much as they lose. In this randomised gambling experiment, most test subjects will report that they think they're making a profit, even though they're breaking even. Even when the experiment is adjusted so that the participants are losing money, most will still think that the course of events is in their favour.

It's undeniable that we do see a herd mentality amongst groups of humans. The accusation of sheep-like behaviour is entirely valid and well supported by evidence. Stock market crashes are created by market sentiment not by external events. When investors collectively lose confidence, there's a rush for the door. The sheep line up for slaughter, even though by selling their stock, they're going to lose money.

Bank runs are another great example. The FCA underwrites deposits - your savings are safe - but we still saw long lines of people queuing up to withdraw cash from Northern Rock, during the credit crunch. That's a bank run, and it's driven by sheeplike behaviour. The panic is not rational. It's animalistic behaviour, not calculated and logical.

The well-educated middle classes have turned on one another, in this zero-growth second Great Depression. Research grants are at stake. Well paid middle-management jobs are at stake. The baby boomers are trying to collect excessively generous pensions. For God's sake don't even breathe, for the whole house of cards may come tumbling down at any moment. We are so highly leveraged - indebted - that one hiccup and we're all screwed. 

We should remember that the working-class are more numerous than the middle-class. While the working-class wail inarticulately about their poverty and lack of opportunities, the middle-class lock themselves into an echo-chamber of Facebragging and snobbery. Whenever somebody is critical of the status quo, we quickly shut them down by typing "WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!!" to bully them into submission.

Personally, having safely circumnavigated the City of London - and profited - during the dot com crash, 9/11, the commodity price boom (and bust), the credit crunch and Bitcoin's ups & downs, I feel rather like Cassandra.

Dismiss and ignore me at your peril.

Tags: #politics #capitalism #economy

 This is a story about drug dealers...

The top image shows an official UK prescription. A doctor registered with the GMC prescribed me the medication and a pharmacist registered with the GPHC filled my prescription. The bottom image shows black market prescription drugs for sale on the Dark Web. When you buy from the Dark Web an anonymous vendor will sell you whatever you want, no questions asked.

In order to receive my official prescription, I had to answer 14 yes/no questions. One of the questions was "do you have high blood pressure?". How the hell should I know? The last time I had my blood pressure checked was 11 months ago, and I've gained loads of weight and have been drinking far too much since then.

According to my order tracking, a doctor spent 7 minutes deliberating my 14 answers - 30 seconds per answer - before writing my prescription. I never met this doctor, we never spoke and they never saw my medical records.

Some years ago, with a great deal of arm-twisting from my private psychiatrist, my GP agreed to prescribe me Bupropion for the depressive episodes of my bipolar disorder. In the UK, Bupropion is not licensed for the treatment of depression or bipolar disorder. NICE guidelines do not recommend the use of Bupropion for anything other than as a smoking cessation treatment. Basically, my GP faced being struck off the GMC register if I suffered some horrible medical complications because of an adverse drug reaction.

I've been back in London for 3 years and I've had 2 different GPs since then: one in Camden and one just across the road from where I live. Neither of them has prescribed me a single medication, but the Camden GP took it upon himself to phone me on my mobile in his personal time to see if I was still alive. My GP went out of his way to try and help me.

The average face-to-face GP consultation time in the UK is just under 9 minutes. Imagine having just 9 minutes to establish that somebody is suicidally depressed and then select a psychiatric medication for your patient. The medication could either save them or reduce their quality of life even more. It's not much time, is it?

And so, I became an educated well-informed patient. A doctor I spoke to some years ago said that I would be better off finding a "prescription pad psychiatrist" who would write me a prescription for whatever I wanted. These doctors exist. They're available online, without even having to meet them or speak to them on the telephone, it would seem.

I have no criticism of the ethics of what the doctor and the pharmacist who I obtained my official UK prescription from are doing. It doesn't seem unethical to me.

Interestingly, it cost me £90 for 60x 150mg Bupropion tablets. I could easily buy the exact same medication for less than half that price on the Dark Web. If I was to buy the medication from India, it would cost me less than £6 (plus postage).

On the NHS, a prescription costs £8.40 if you're working and not entitled to welfare benefits.

Basically, you pay for convenience. With the online pharmacy I had a short form to fill in and I got my medication delivered next day. With the Dark Web, I would have had to faff around with Bitcoins, but my medication would also have been delivered next day. With my doctor, I would have had to make an appointment, and there's every chance that they wouldn't have been prepared to take the risk of writing an off-label prescription. With the Indian medication, their postal service is appalling and it takes weeks for a delivery to arrive.

One reason not to order from the Dark Web though, is that you can get anything you want. It's easy to start window shopping. Once you've loaded up your account with some Bitcoins, it's easy to fill up your 'shopping basket' with all kinds of things that you're curious about, or things that you know you really shouldn't be buying because they're bad for you. It's a slippery slope.

One of the reasons why I don't have any drug dealers phone numbers and I've never bought drugs from a drug dealer, is because it's so convenient. I don't believe in the idea of a 'pusher'. People want drugs, plain and simple. The drugs push themselves.

One of the reasons I'm not using internet banking at the moment, is because it makes it too easy for me to buy some Bitcoins, transfer them to a Dark Web marketplace, and have a little jiffy bag containing deadly white powder, hitting my doormat the very next day.

I don't believe prohibition works, but certainly making things a little more inconvenient does offer some protection from temptation. I wouldn't even know where to begin, trying to find a drug dealer, unless I wanted to buy low quality cannabis or terrible quality imitation cocaine from one of the many dealers who hang around by Camden Lock.

Prohibition created legal highs. Prohibition created the Dark Web. Because I'm an IT expert and a sensation seeker, when I read about legal highs in the news I was tempted to give them a go. The rest is history. All of that "moral panic" crap in the media had precisely the opposite effect than intended. A naïve middle-class IT professional working for an investment bank, suddenly became exposed to a world that I would never have become part of, if it wasn't for the fact that prohibition lowered the barrier to entry.

As the legal highs started to get banned, I then took to Internet forums to find out where people who had stockpiled - like me - were supposed to go after we ran out of drugs. That was how I found out about the Dark Web. Yet again, prohibition moved me from a world that was legal, taxed and regulated, towards the dark and murky world of illegal drugs.

One day, in a pit of despair at my spiralling addiction, I decided to order all the drugs. I bought crack, heroin and crystal meth. I didn't even know what to do with them. You can snort heroin and meth, but not crack, as it turns out. How does a middle class homeowner even smoke crack? I didn't even own a cigarette lighter.

A couple weeks later, I had nailed my door shut and put newspaper all over the windows. It's remarkable how quickly a respectable middle-class rich person can turn the house they own into a crack den.

What's also remarkable is how quickly you figure out that you've bought a one way express ticket to an early death, if you have vast sums of money and a reasonable intellect.

One day, I smoked a pipe - I had bought a meth pipe off the Dark Web by this point - that had been filled with heroin, crack and meth. I thought "is this as good as it gets?". The room was bathed with a yellow light, even though it was barely lit. There was a calm serenity. I thought "this ain't even that great" and decided that I'd better stop before I decided that it was great.

It's the strangest thing, flushing rocks of crack and a big bag of heroin down the loo, not because you're addicted and you want to quit, but because you can see how easily you could become addicted.

People think that drug addiction is all about wanting drugs and taking drugs, but it's not that at all. Drug addiction is about identity, routine, habituation, ceremony, lifestyle... things that I even struggle to explain. If you're just locked in a room with a virtually limitless supply of drugs, because the postman keeps bringing your supply and you have lots of money in the bank... you'd think you'd just take drugs and more drugs until you died or ran out of money.

In actual fact, addictions are self-limiting. Given a clean pure supply of drugs, eventually, addiction becomes kinda boring or the downsides start to outweigh the upsides.

I'm lucky, because I'm wealthy and I'm not a total dumbass. I tried so many drugs, and eventually found one that was far better than crack, heroin or crystal methamphetamine, but cost less than £1 a day.

I used to buy a packet of capsules off the Internet for £27. This was a legal high called "NRG-3", which turned out to be MDPV: I've nicknamed it supercrack. The packet contained 20 capsules, and each capsule had 100mg of MDPV in it. I would hide these capsules all over the house, so that I would never have to hunt for very long to get my fix, when the cravings became unbearable.

I would divide the 100mg contents of a capsule into 3 equal piles. Then, I would divide one of the piles into 2 lines. I would snort one of the lines, which would weigh approximately 17mg.

17mg of MDPV is a very strong dose. Basically, it's enough to be bat-shit insane for 24 hours. I would pretty much always end up going back for the second line... so that's 48 hours of insanity, with no sleep. I would go back to work for a rest.

120 days of bat-shit insanity for £27.

Cheap.

Deadly.

You spread 120 days over the weekends, and you've got 2 years worth of hiding a drug habit. If you do anything for 2 years, it becomes an integral part of your life. It's hard to change the habits of a lifetime. Again, you've gotta be smart and spot the changes in your behaviour.

I started cancelling plans, because a 1-day drug binge turned into a whole weekend drug binge.

I started not making any plans, because I was planning on taking drugs all weekend.

How the hell I held down a job during this time, I have no idea.

My psychiatrist and my GP thought I was self-medicating for depression. They thought I was in control. They actually told me "don't stop what you're doing... just try to cut down gradually". My GP signed me off work for 5 weeks, and I thought "great! I can take drugs for 4 weeks and then spend a week recovering".

It's true that my clinical depression and abusive relationship had led me to self medication, but when it became drug experimentation, I lost control over the course of a year. I started with a legal drug called Methylone, which I took every day and it worked to alleviate my depression. Then, when I found NRG-3 during a messy breakup, I was completely hooked.

Less than a month after becoming addicted to NRG-3, I started carrying a letter with me and a £20 note in an envelope. The letter said:

"I am a drug addict. If you have found me with breathing difficulties or unconscious, please put me in a taxi to A&E".

In actual fact, the letter was far more detailed and contained some information that would have been useful for any medical professionals who had the misfortune of trying to look after me... but you get the idea. The penny had dropped. I knew I was in trouble. Self-medication had turned into experimentation, which had unleashed addiction.

For others, there are 3 valuable lessons I learned:

1. Depression, stress, relationship difficulties, money worries, housing worries: these are the things that create a festering swamp. Addiction will take hold, not because of the drugs, but because somebody's life is already awful. If you want to prevent addiction, you need to improve people's lives, not ban drugs.
2. Even though it sounds disingenuous, it does make sense to shop around. Think about all those Oxycontin addicts who haven't yet figured out that heroin is stronger and cheaper. They're going to one day. How much money are they going to 'waste' in the meantime?
3. Addictions are naturally self-limiting. People need to quit on their own terms. There's an oft-quoted line about how addicts and alcoholics "can never get enough of their drug of choice". In actual fact, very few people can actually afford to take as many drugs as they want. Look at the mega wealthy: aren't you surprised that so few of them drop dead from drug abuse?

Alcohol is a dumb choice of drug, because it's so damaging to the liver. In a way, benzos are the smart alternative. GHB/GBL makes you 'drunk' but it doesn't have the same hangover, and it's not so damaging to the body. You can buy 10 litres of "alloy wheel cleaner" from BASF in Germany for about £500. That's equivalent to 7,000 shots of vodka, and it won't give you cirrhosis of the liver.

Cocaine is a dumb drug of choice, because it's so expensive and the adulterants are highly damaging to the mucous membrane in your sinuses, to the point where you might lose your nose. You can buy nitracaine from China in bulk for just a few dollars per gram, and it'll be 99% pure.

Heroin is damn cheap. It's the injecting that causes the problems: collapsed veins, abscesses and dirty needles leading to blood-borne diseases. With an adequate supply of medical grade diamorphine, a heroin addict can live a long, healthy happy life, and will probably "grow out" of their habit in their 40s or 50s.

Crystal meth is cheap anyway. Smoking meth is undoubtably incredibly destructive to teeth and lungs. It sounds crazy to say this, but given an adequate supply, at least crime will go down and the need for prostitution goes away. With higher self-esteem because people are not selling their body to get drugs, surely a large number of addicts are going to stop using eventually?

I'm not saying "legalise all drugs and have your local supermarket stocking crystal meth". Drugs are so widely available and so cheap, we're at the point where prohibition is like a bad joke. Shutting the original Silk Road marketplace on the Dark Web just caused dozens more imitators to spring up and fill its place. You can't legislate to control human nature. It doesn't work. Supply and demand are the only forces that you need to understand.

If you have a loved one who you think is at risk of addiction, or struggling with addiction, you can prevent that journey from even starting by making their life vastly better so that addiction never takes hold. Once an addiction has started, you're not going to be able to cut it short by cutting off their supply of money or forcing them into some rehab program. An addict will simply go around any obstacle. An addict needs to quit on their own terms, when they've had enough.

Perhaps I will never have had enough, because perhaps my life will never improve. Certainly, when you're depressed, stressed, bored shitless by your job, worried about money, isolated and lonely... those things are perfect breeding conditions for addiction to take hold. Why the hell are you being clean & sober, if your clean & sober life is utter bullshit?

This is how I've arrived at the decision to start using drugs again.

Except, I'm being smart... I think. I think I'm smart. Correct me if I'm wrong. Am I smart?

What am I doing differently? Well, nothing really. I'm combining my experience from far too many years of ups, downs and dangerous self-experimentation. However, I have meticulously gathered data. I have documented pages and pages of details on my drug and medication use, and cross-correlated that with my mood diary, earnings, movement data and every other data source that I could harvest.

My conclusion: I need a fast-acting antidepressant that gives me a mood improvement.

So, I decided to prescribe myself Bupropion.

It arrived today.

I took it.

The experiment continues. It's a big relief to finally change something, after 6 painful months of controlling the variables, even though it was causing me untold mental anguish.

Actually, two things changed today, which is a shame, in terms of conducting a decent trial.

Today, I'm unemployed.

Anyway, I need to get another job, and it might just be a little easier, now that I have relented and I'm taking happy pills... let's see, shall we?

Tags: #drugs #addiction #mentalhealth #medication #depression

This is a story about suffocation...

I was just watching a documentary about the burning oil wells in Kuwait, and I wondered how many barrels of oil we get through in any given day. Turns out it's about 95 million.

Here's where the maths part happens.

So, we're burning our way through 95,000,000 barrels of crude oil, every single day. But how much crude oil is there in a barrel?

In the USA, there are 42 US gallons in a barrel of oil. Given that most figures are stated in US measures, this will do as an equivalent figure for our maths, even though the actual volume of oil in a physical barrel can vary by country.

So, how much petrol or diesel is produced from a barrel of crude oil? Well, refineries generally produce 12 gallons of diesel and 19 gallons of petrol, as they 'crack' the crude oil. That is to say, the refinery does a fractional distillation of the crude oil, and different products will 'boil' off at different temperatures. 31 out of 42 gallons in one barrel of crude oil will go to produce petrol and diesel.

95 million barrels of crude oil multiplied by 12 gallons, produces 1,140,000,000 gallons of diesel.

95 million barrels of crude oil multiplied by 19 gallons, produces 1,805,000,000 gallons of petrol.

How much carbon dioxide - CO₂ - is released when you burn a gallon of petrol or diesel? Well, for petrol that's 19.24 pounds, and for diesel that's 19.91 pounds. Therefore, petrol is clearly the more polluting fossil fuel, because even though it releases slightly less CO₂ more of it can be produced from the crude oil.

So, the amount of CO₂ being belched out each day by petrol cars and motorbikes is 34,728,200,000 pounds. Let's convert that to kilograms, because I actually prefer metric. That's 15,752,446,543 kilograms of CO₂ being emitted by petrol alone, on one day.

The amount of CO₂ coming out of the exhaust pipes of diesel trucks, taxis, busses, trains, boats and everything else that runs on diesel, such as industrial plant, comes to 22,697,400,000 pounds. Again, let's convert that to kilograms. That's 10,295,367,459 kilograms of CO₂ from diesel engines, on any given day.

Right, now let's add those two figures together.

26,047,814,002 kilograms of CO₂ being chucked out into the atmosphere by internal combustion engines, every single day.

Obviously, we don't just use our cars and trucks on one day. Let's have a look at what happens when we do this for a whole year: 365 days.

9,507,452,110,730 kilograms of CO₂ is being produced per year. Ouch! That's 9.5 billion metric tons.

For comparison, The Empire State Building weighs just 331,000 tonnes. The Hoover Dam weighs 6 million tonnes. Therefore the CO₂ emitted in a single year weighs 1,583 times more than The Hoover Dam. Damn!

But what about a really heavy thing. How much does the entire atmosphere weigh? How much does all the air that we breathe weigh? Estimates are in the region of 5 quadrillion tonnes. About 21% of the atmosphere is the oxygen we need so that we don't suffocate. So, there's about a quadrillion tonnes of oxygen trapped by gravity around our planet. However, only 0.039% of the atmosphere is CO₂ which equates to 195 trillion tonnes.

Using these numbers, you can see that petrol and diesel are increasing the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere by a small percentage each year. However, it's much, much worse than that.

I've just been talking about just the petrol and the diesel. There's also the CO₂ from all the coal, natural gas, propane, kerosene, paraffin and every other fossil fuel that gets burnt, that emits carbon dioxide. The amount of CO₂ being released each year is more than 40 billion tonnes.

There's a measure of CO₂ in the atmosphere called PPM - parts per million. Prior to the year 1750, which is considered the 'pre-industrial' baseline, the PPM count of CO₂ in the atmosphere never exceeded 300 ppm. In about 100 years, we've taken it to over 400 ppm: a rise of well over 30%. Might not sound like much, but look at what's happened to global temperatures.

I mean, just look at your goddam thermometer. Whether you're a climate skeptic or not, you're able to read the mercury, right? You can tell when it's a hot summer, even if you're not one of these 'corrupt' scientists, right?

We've just had 15 consecutive months of record-breaking temperatures. This isn't just an exceptional year, because this has been going on for years, decades... more than a century even!

"Oh well it can't be the cars then"

Wrong. Before the internal combustion engine - which was invented in 1876 - we used to have coal fired trains, coal fired steam engines and steamships, coal to heat our homes, coal to drive our steel industry and the industrialisation of the world.

You can't on one hand say that the scientists are making it up and climate change is a big hoax, and on the other say that everything's going to be OK because the scientists will come up with a way to save us. You can't enjoy the benefits of automotive transportation, global shipping and air travel, and with the same breath say that those scientists and engineers who gave you those things are a bunch of crooks who are cooking up a breathtakingly well orchestrated global conspiracy.

If you don't believe in climate change, presumably you don't believe that man can fly either, so go and live in a fucking cave and reject everything else that science has given you.

You are quite literally a public enemy if you perpetuate myths that man-made climate change isn't real. I can't believe the USA is potentially going to elect a climate change denier to be the leader of the free world. Donald Trump is actually doing work to protect one of his golf courses from rising sea levels. What reason was given for this? Climate change. The man is a lying lunatic who will take the human race to its grave.

The risk to low-lying countries, islands and coastal towns and cities is dire. If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet breaks up and melts, sea levels will rise by over 3 metres. That means I'll have to use a canoe to get to work here in London. The water will be lapping at my front door. Worse still, if you live in Bangladesh or Holland, you'll be dead.

Obviously, it's not like it's going to be a sudden tidal wave that will come and drown people, but billions will be displaced. It will be a human catastrophe on an unimaginable scale. Even if it was only a 1% chance of happening, you'd still do something about it, wouldn't you? What would you do if your carbon monoxide detector went off? Ignore it, because it might be a false alarm?

The sea rise is just one component. The other is the inhospitable temperatures for countries in the Middle East. Alright so you might not like those "sand n****rs" and "towelheads" very much. You might believe that all Muslims are terrorists. However, these are people who are going to become climate refugees. Whether you like it or not, they're going to be displaced from their homelands, which have been made uninhabitable by reckless energy consumption in the West.

You can't even live on a boat anymore: the sea is littered with shipping containers that are like icebergs you can't even see before you hit them, because they float just below the surface. The sea is a brutal place, and weather is going to get more and more extreme as the planet gets hotter. Only the very best sailors are able to survive for months offshore, and everybody needs to put into port to make repairs and re-stock supplies. In the event of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet melting, sea levels would rise by 60 metres, which would mean that the maps of the planet would need to be torn up. Every coast would be dramatically changed, and whole countries would disappear under the ocean waves.

This sounds like an unlikely doomsday scenario, but actually things can accelerate in ways that you haven't even considered. A warmer planet means warmer water. Warmer water actually takes more volume than colder water - thermal expansion - and of course warmer water can accelerate the effects of the melting of the ice caps. Additionally, with less ice on earth, less of the sun's energy is being reflected back into space, making the planet even hotter. Hot air can hold more moisture than colder air, so we will see more and more flooding and torrential rain, as much as we'll also have to contend with rising sea levels, and the expansion of inhospitably hot parts of the globe.

A sustained wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT) exceeding 35 degrees Celsius is going to be fatal, because your body can no longer cool itself through the evaporation of your sweat. You'll die of hyperthermia. Heat and humidity will be too much for the body of even fit, healthy adults to survive. This scenario had been imagined as something far off and unlikely, but because of the component that humidity plays, we are likely to see the Persian Gulf become uninhabitable in our lifetimes. Ironically, the Arab nations that pumped a lot of the oil have sowed the seeds of their own destruction.

Of course, with hotter temperatures, higher humidity is to be expected because a hotter atmosphere can hold more moisture. Again, even conservative estimates seem to show that for many parts of the planet, they will quite literally be turned into a deadly sauna.

Even if we slashed our emissions to zero, it seems likely that there's a certain amount of momentum, that means things are going to get a lot worse before they might improve. Even if we mothballed every gas-guzzling vehicle overnight, that atmospheric CO₂ is still there, as well as the temperature gains that have been made during the modern era. It's not like the planet is just going to cool down because we're not emitting CO₂ any more. The greenhouse gasses are still there, creating their greenhouse-like effect. Until we actually scrub the atmosphere, the effects can't possibly be reversed.

The fact that Donald Trump is even in the running, suggests that we have a problem right from the very top. Why are we going to change our ways, when even the man at the top is perpetuating the lie that climate change is a hoax? If he gets elected, I'd better get saving up my money for my spacesuit and a ride on a rocket, like all the smart billionaires are doing.

I sense there is a policy of "don't scare the horses". Politicians don't want a panic on their hands. There is already a refugee crisis. There is already war and conflict because climate change has caused crops to fail. There are already heat waves, flooding, hurricanes and other natural disasters that have been more numerous and worse than anything seen before in history, because of climate change. Look how woefully the Americans protected their own people during Hurricane Katrina. The wealthy elites just don't care about the lives of ordinary people.

It's tough, because until somebody at the top mandates that we all have to make drastic lifestyle changes, who's going to be the first to do it? Why should I give up my car, if you're not going to give up yours? Multiply that attitude by 7.4 billion people, and you can see where the problem is.

You've probably got this whacky idea that you're going to be OK. You've probably got this sick fantasy of all those pesky Africans being wiped out, which is what needed to happen anyway because they were having too many babies. There isn't going to be some Malthusian catastrophe that will return everything to its rightful state. If immigration is your number one concern today - "Britain is full" and "send them home" - then you're woefully ill-prepared for the billions of people who are going to be displaced by this inevitable climate catastrophe. Families aren't just going to stick around to drown and die of heat exhaustion. A certain amount will die, but there will be unimaginable numbers of people coming to Europe and America because their own countries have been destroyed by heat and flood.

Of course, I'm still youngish, healthy and single. My parents treated me like a piece of shit, so they can rot in hell for all I care. I can easily up sticks and head for the hills. I haven't got to worry about any offspring that I unwisely fathered. I can move fast & light. I guess we're still 15 or 20 years away from armageddon, but I'm likely to still be healthy.

Anyway, screw saving for your pension. As is often said, if you think wealth is more important than the climate, try holding your breath while you count your money.

Tags: #climate

This is a story about escape velocity...

A happy healthy life is a fairly simple prescription. It's not hard to look for slightly happier people and imitate their magic formula.

In essence, what I have distilled things down to is this:

• Home - so you can be warm and dry and your stuff isn't stolen
• Job - so you can pay your rent/mortgage, bills and buy food & clothes (yes, clothes wear out)
• Family - not blood relatives, but anybody who loves and cares about you
• Friends - social media doesn't count; you have to see friends face to face
• Disposible income - get deeper and deeper into debt and you'll lose your home
• Goal or passion - this can be work, this can be your kids, this can be a hobby; you need something.
• Girlfriend/boyfriend - everybody's gotta get laid, and it's important to have intimacy and companionship

At the moment I have 3 out of 7. Assuming that you need 50% or more to be OK, it's no wonder that I'm depressed as hell and have a lot of suicidal thoughts.

Yes, I have friends who I see less than once a week, so I do have friends. Yes, my sister and I do occasionally exchange text messages, even though we haven't seen each other for the best part of a year. Yes, my goal has been to get myself into a position of financial security, and I've been making great progress, but it's not really my goal... it's just a necessity because of needing to not be homeless and destitute.

So, all I really have is a home, a job, and I'm making more money than I'm spending, which is digging me out of debt.

I love my friends dearly, and it does help that people are in contact via social media, email, text message. I have the offer of speaking to a few friends on the telephone, which I'm grateful for. I also make the effort to travel as much as I feel able to, in order to see people face to face, and I'm glad when I do it, even though it's expensive, exhausting and time consuming to zoom all over the country, if not the world.

I just don't have a group of buddies you know? People to go to the pub with. People to go out for a meal with. People to play frisbee with in the park. I'm lacking a social group.

I'm also lacking that significant other. Somebody to just hang out with. Have sex with. Make food with. Watch movies with. Play games with. Go sightseeing with.

I've stitched together a patchwork quilt of whatever I can get, in order to just about cling to life with my fingernails, but it's inadequate. That's not to say I'm not ungrateful for those occasional invites to hang out and do stuff. It's just not enough. I thrive on face to face social contact, and I'm not getting enough.

To further compound problems, the team I've been managing at work are all in the Far East, so I don't even get proper face-to-face social contact at work. I sit at my desk, lonely and bored. I've helped to create a great culture in my team, but I don't really benefit from it, because they are quite literally 6,666 miles away (I just looked that up - I love that fact!).

In desperation, I made compromises that are just not acceptable, sustainable. I took a job that pays well and is very easy, but doesn't provide anything other than the money that I need. I made other choices because of the desperate need for something rather than nothing. There's an opportunity cost. If I'm in a job that I hate and drains my energy, then I don't have the time and the motivation to get something better.

In a way, it's good that a couple of things are coming to an end, because it's prompting me to go after the things I want rather than the things that I took through desperation. Of course, I'm grateful to have the money, and the support that I've received, but you make different choices when you're in deep shit.

So, on Thursday 22nd September, 2016, I will have completed a year of blogging, 6 months 'clean' and my 6 month employment contract will be over.

On Thursday 22nd September, 2016, I will have 1 out of 7 of the things that I need, with the threat that I will quickly lose even that one single thing.

Without a job, I'll have more expenditure than income. I need to pay rent, bills, service debts. I need to replace worn out clothes and things that break. I need to buy food and toiletries. Life is not sustainable in Western society without income.

I don't have savings, but I do have creditworthiness. Yet again, I will have to borrow money in order to keep my head above water. I have no financial safety net. What I have instead are commercial lenders who are prepared to extract their pound of flesh so that I can avoid homelessness and destitution.

If you think I could have saved more money than I have done these past months, you are mistaken. Without a short holiday, I would never have lasted the extra months. Without alcohol, I would never have coped with the stress and anxiety. I could have penny pinched on my accommodation, but can you imagine how awful it is living in a hostel when you're working full time? I worked, slept and ate. How far has it got me? Well. Probably about 50% of the way towards financial security.

I need to take a break, because my nerves are frazzled and I'm exhausted.

I doubt any contract could be as bad as the job I'm about to finish on Wednesday. For my next contract, I'm going to look for something where I'll be working with a team in London. I need a much more interesting workload. Being bored to death is no way to die.

With money comes the opportunity to travel, socialise, make the investment in a new hobby. With a more tolerable day job comes energy and enthusiasm for each day. With a more liveable life comes the freedom from drink, drugs and medication, in order to simply get through the day.

It's a fucking nutty strategy, to go for the big win. What you just don't understand is just how close to irreparably broken my life is. You just don't understand what it's like to not have so many of the elements that prop up your life. Look again at the bullet pointed list above, and score yourself. How many of the things you need do you have?

Look back at the last 4 weeks of your life and ask yourself this:

• How many nights were you homeless? - zero, I presume
• How many days did you work? - I'm guessing somewhere around 12, on average
• How many times were you in contact with your family? - I'm guessing at least 4
• How many days did you see friends face to face? - I'm guessing at least 8
• Did you make more money than you spent? - I'm guessing at least breakeven
• How many times did you do something 'fun'? - I'm guessing at least 4
• How many times did you have sex or snuggles? - I'm guessing at least 8

Those would seem like adequate answers to me. If you're hitting those numbers, your life is probably just about OK. Less than that in one area, maybe you can make up for it in another. For example, you might have been out of work and losing money, but at least you were surrounded by your loving family a lot more of the time, because maybe you were staying at home looking after the kids.

I'm certainly not saying it's easy being a stay at home mom or a househusband, but suicidal depression can come about through death by a thousand cuts. All the little things that are wrong in your life add up to an unbearably horrible situation.

In some ways I'm relishing next Thursday, because I can sleep and recharge my batteries. With spare time that's completely free from artificial structure, such as having to be in a certain office at certain times of the day, then I can start to relax and decide what I want to do next.

The obvious thing to do is to get another lucrative contract, and work for at least another 4 months, so that I can get a cushion of savings to support me in pursuing a passion. Without being able to underwrite my own risk, I have zero faith in my family or government to support me if I fall on hard times. I have a friend who's offered me some financial support, but I think it's unethical to accept it because then I'm borrowing from their safety net.

In this individualistic society, nobody parachuted in to rescue me when I was homeless, destitute. Nobody came to rescue me. Nobody came to my aid. Help was not forthcoming. Even when I had letters from my doctor, my psychiatrist, my social worker... all begging for the government to support me as a vulnerable person with mental health problems, the people I dealt with were unhelpful, obstructive and ultimately just wasted my time and effort even asking for the support that I was entitled to, because of their legal and moral obligations. Those public servants' salaries are paid for with my goddamn taxes. I've paid a lot in, and when I needed it, I could get nothing out.  It's down to me to support myself. I might as well be living in some developing world country, where at least the cost of surviving is lower.

People who warn me to stay within easy reach of the National Health Service for mental health reasons, are just naïve. I've been round and round the system many times since becoming clinically depressed in 2008. The system is bullshit. There is no safety net if you're a single man.

And so, I must play russian roulette with my life in order to support myself. The upside is OK: I might become wealthy and comfortable again, in a relatively short timescale of just a few years. The downside is horrible though. Can you imagine how much time I've spent thinking about how I'm going to kill myself? Can you imagine what it's like to spend a significant proportion of your waking hours feeling so awful that you pretty much want to die?

I swear if one more person tells me to go to my doctor and get some magic beans I'm going to scream. STOP MEDICALISING NON-MEDICAL PROBLEMS. The problem is clearly outlined above. I don't have broken brain chemistry. My brain has correctly identified the problems in my life. There are no short cuts. There's no way to cheat the sytem.

Of course, there is a short cut.

Drugs will tell your brain you feel loved. Drugs will make you feel relaxed. Drugs will make you feel happy. Drugs will make you feel contented. Drugs will tell you that you don't need friends. Drugs will tell you that you don't even need to eat or drink. Drugs will tell you that everything is fine.

Everything is not fine, so I don't want drugs - and by that I mean medication too - to tell me that things are fine. Things are not fine. I almost need these awful feelings to prompt me to get a better job, find some new friends, get a girlfriend, get a hobby. It's just that financial circumstances have constrained me more than you can possibly imagine.

Imagine if I'd declared bankruptcy at the start of the year. That would have been a stupendously dumb decision, in hindsight, wouldn't it? I'm presently not bankrupt. Presently, I have enough money to clear my credit cards, my overdraft.

Of course, my position can't last. You have to run just to stand still. I'm losing my job, and that means I will quickly go into debt again.

"Get another job then"

Guess what, Einstein... that's what I'm going to do. Even though I'm suicidally depressed, overcome with anxiety, I'm going to go and get another motherfucking job you c**t. Even though I'm technically entitled to disability benefits and a council house because my mental health is so debilitating, I am able to do these crazy raiding missions to go and gather nuts before my brain explodes and it all comes crashing down again. I'm locked into this boom & bust cycle. No wonder my bipolar disorder is so exacerbated.

And so, round and round I go. Up & down. Boom & bust. Highs & lows. It's not a medical problem. Its the motherfucking dance I'm forced to do by this farcical society. This is what you get when you don't support people. This is what you get when you isolate people. This is what you get when you only look out for number one.

"The pills will help you stabilise"

No, they won't. Have you looked at the long term studies? Have you studied the data, the clinical outcomes? Have you done the research? No. Of course you haven't. You just have this bullshit belief in the power of medical science. If I had an infection, I'd go to my doctor for antibiotics to treat it. I don't have a fucking infection. I have an allergy to shitty unbearable unliveable life.

I've tried all the meds under the sun. I know what life on medication is like. I've had tons of doctors and psychiatrists. I've tried tons of therapies. It's all a crock of shit. The fundamental problem is the fucking shitty world. Look around you; do you like what you see?

I'm not going to change the world begging on the street with a cardboard sign. I'm not going to change the world by impoverishing myself. I'm not going to change the world by trying the same things that people have tried for hundreds of years, without success. Only an idiot tries the same things expecting different results.

So, I'm on this crazy journey. I'm hoping that by next Wednesday I might have managed to write 365 blog posts, and probably around 450,000 words. That might not make a difference to you, but it's surely making a difference to me. It's probably making a difference to somebody, somewhere. I have visitors from around the world, reading what I write. Even if it's absolute garbage, it's better than just being a helpless spectator. Even if you think I'm an irrelevant bleeding heart lefty liberal who doesn't amount to a hill of beans, at least I'm composing my thoughts. At least I have a belief system. At least I have values and things that I passionately believe in.

It's very hard for me to come up with a reason why I'm struggling along at the moment. Why am I putting myself through this awful shit? Why don't I just kill myself, and then the pain will be over? Why don't I just give up, and relapse back into drug addiction?

Actually the second one is fairly easy to answer: somebody who dies of drug addiction is easy to discredit as a 'dirty' junkie. Somebody who's 'clean' and has just completed an important project for a major corporation, in a valuable role, and has set their financial affairs in good order, is a rather more inconvenient and difficult problem to find a soundbite to toss them into the gutter.

I want to be a thorn in the side of every selfish c**t out there who wishes their fellow humans dead. I want to shame people into action, from their comfortable existence where they don't even lose sleep over every homeless, hungry struggling person in pain and suffering out there.

Where the fuck are people when those around them are in distress? Who the fuck do you think is going to sort problems out, if it's not you?

Even though I could have put my tax money to far better use supporting myself, rather than paying the salaries of people who tell me they're not going to help me, I'm still glad to give away a substantial proportion of my income. However, I'm not buying a clean conscience. It's not like I pay my taxes so I can watch my friends become homeless and mentally ill, and assume that the council and some doctors are going to wave their magic wands and make it all better.

What the fuck happened to the empathy? I think I would offer to let somebody sleep on my couch, lend somebody money or go and visit somebody in distress, before I even experienced horrible things first hand myself. I had quite a comfortable existence up to the age of 32 or thereabouts, but I didn't think it was big OR clever to sit on my fucking arse not doing anything when people were suffering.

Those who have been kindest are those who have suffered the most, which makes me detest the comfortably off for their lack of empathy, their lack of humanity.

If humanity is destined for a situation where we let even our own family members and friends flail and drown, then I'm pleased that climate change is going to wipe you miserable c**ts out of existence. You don't deserve to survive, if your "I'm alright Jack" attitude is the prevailing one. I hope you and your kids and grandkids die slowly and painfully if you spawned more mouths to feed with not a single concern for anybody else.

Believe me, I do observe how happy and fulfilled my friends who are parents are, even if they complain how hard it is being a parent. Did you forget that we live in the age of birth control and abortion? You chose to have kids, and no matter what you say, you do get immeasurable benefit from having them. You have happiness and security, knowing you procreated. You have a flood of oxytocin when your cute kids throw their arms gleefully around you.

Believe me, I do observe how happy my friends are to own a dog, even if they complain about having to pick up the poop and hoover up the hair and other mess. You chose to have another carnivore on the planet, eating meat that meant that food for livestock was grown, rather than having more food for those who are starving, and depriving the planet of those extra trees that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Having a pet dog is selfish as fuck, but I do see how nice it is to have your dog playfully jumping with joy to see you, and throwing sticks in the park for them to fetch.

I can see that there are choices that benefit me as an individual hugely, but I choose not to take them, because I'm responsible for more than just myself. I don't believe that collective responsibility is something that naturally follows from individual responsibility. In fact, I see that the two things are naturally opposing.

Can't you see the fucking trends? Of course you do, but you just don't want to believe it.

You don't want to give up eating meat. You don't want to adopt instead of having your own biological children. You don't want to stop driving your precious little darlings around in a gas-guzzling 4x4 "because it's safer for our family". You don't want to plant trees instead of having a pet dog. You don't want to do anything different at all, in fact, even though you're fucking everything up for your kids and your grandkids.

That's why I'm depressed. That's why I'm suicidal. That's why I'm stuck in a hole I can't get out of. That's why I'm desperate and driven crazy by all this bullshit. That's why I'm doing things that are atypical... because the typical is what got us into this fucked up mess in the first place.

I don't care whether you're religious or not, but imagine some future judgement day, when it's obvious that the planet and the future survival of the human race is clearly doomed: will you say that you went along with things, supported the status quo, or did you try and change things? Did you at least act differently? Did you at least try and help in a way that's less pathetic than recycling your bottles? Did you help anybody other than the fucking clones you spawned to replace yourself?

Note: I'm not anti-parents. I don't hate my friends. I'm not some "wake up sheeple" fucktard. Dismiss me if you like using some convenient label that you were taught to use by those who wish to perpetuate the status quo.

If you're not acting with your conscience, or at least kept awake at night worrying about this shit, that's unconscionable.

You probably should worry about me. No doctor in a white fucking coat is going to make everything OK. It's not a medical problem. It's not a government problem. It's everybody's problem, including mine, but it's more than I can handle on my own.

Tags: #suicide #depression #mentalhealth #climate #politics #capitalism #homeless

This is a story about spoon feeding...

There are a number of writing guides that suggest cutting out unnecessary words, shortening sentences and generally dumbing down what you write to appeal to the lowest common denominator. I personally think that would be an insult to the intelligence of anybody who takes the time to read my writing.

The academic equivalent of willy-waving is to try and pepper your text with obscure vocabulary and other curios. At best, you're going to impress some sneering pretentious elites. At worst you're going to write impenetrable text that's virtually unreadable without a dictionary. Somewhere in-between the best and the worst, you're going to trip yourself up and have those who are highly educated chortling at your clumsy use of language, while everybody else just thinks you're a stuck-up twat.

I write in a conversational manner, very much in the voice of my internal monologue. You, as the reader, must hear the stream of my thoughts, as a facsimile in your head as you read my words.

With editing, I could produce more concise text. With some rewriting, I could represent ideas and concepts, experiences and stories, in a much more concise manner. I could write to convey things with much more simplicity. But then, wouldn't you just be reading yet another yawnfest of Internet banality?

To try to be original is impossible: we are all just a product of our experiences. Monkey see, monkey do. However, to be authentic merely takes bravery... or is it stupidity?

I'm not writing a Wikipedia article. I'm not writing a self-help guide. I'm not writing a scientific paper.

This is a secret diary that has been made public. This is my psyche, laid bare so that my distress, confusion, isolation and the hideous complexity of the circumstances that I find myself in, are not obscured from view. I'm genuinely concerned for my safety, and without my detailed account of who I am, I might die completely misunderstood.

Don't we all fear that we might die misunderstood? Well... it's more complex than that.

If you have kids, you fear that you're not going to get to see them grow up. The fact of the matter is that you're unlikely to outlive your kids, but you've set yourself some unspoken milestones:

• "As long as I get to watch them grow up to the age of 18, I'll be happy"
• "As long as I get to watch them graduate from university, I'll be happy"
• "As long as I get to watch them get married, I'll be happy"
• "As long as I get to meet my grandkids, I'll be happy"

Perhaps you're concerned about how elderly your parents are getting, and you want to be around to look after them. Perhaps you're loved by your brothers and sisters, and your nieces and nephews. You're aware that you'd leave a hole in your family's life if you were gone.

Things are a bit different for me.

This is what my mum said to me, when I asked her why she never travelled the 45 minutes on the train to come and see me when I was in hospital:

"The police will tell us when you're dead and we can come and identify your body at the morgue if we have to"

I think it's pretty clear that my parents have faulty genes that need to die off. I can understand that you might not want to spend £5,000 on an operation to save the life of your pet hamster. However, I would spend thousands if my cat or my dog got sick. I would spend every penny I had, to save my child. My parents didn't think I was worth the £20 for the train fare from Oxford to London, and the 45 minutes of their time.

If you want to understand how or why I arrived at the notion that my family would not only be better off without me, but they actually actively want me dead then you only have to study that one example.

Whether you like it or not, you are responsible for your children's lives. Your children didn't ask to be born. Your children are not supposed to be grateful to be alive. You're supposed to be grateful if you have healthy children.

It's a risky decision to have a child: they might be born with birth defects, they might be disabled. Your child might be suffering and in pain. Instead of adopting one of the many children who don't have a family, instead you decided to create an extra mouth to feed on the overcrowded planet, and take a chance that your shitty genes might leave them with terrible quality of life. Instead of considering what you could give the child, you thought about what you could take in terms of feeling satisfied that you have procreated.

Being brought up to feel apologetic that you even exist is an awful thing. Being told you're a bad kid because you didn't pop out of the womb ready to serve your parents like some subservient sycophantic butler is an awful thing.

"I taught you how to use a spoon"

Don't make me fucking laugh. If you don't feed your kid you're a negligent parent. What do you want, a fucking medal for taking the bare minimum responsibility for the life that you chose to bring into existence? If my parents didn't teach me to eat using a spoon, I would have eaten with my hands, or somebody with more of a nurturing instinct would have taught me to eat using cutlery, or I would have died earlier and suffered less.

Yes, I've reached the point now where I'm basically saying "what's the fucking point?".

What is the point, really? Surely, it's a fucking gift to rear a child and be pleased you actually took some fucking responsibility. There can only be shame in neglecting your responsibilities. There are no medals and ticker-tape parades for parents, because you wanted to fuck, you wanted to experience the miracle of life, you wanted it... your kids didn't. Remember that: nobody asked to be born.

If your kids are miserable and want to die, you have failed miserably as a parent. Victim blaming is no use to sidestep the responsibility. On the day of judgement, can you say hand on heart that you acted in your child's best interests, given your decision to create that child in the first place?

We are not fucking fish! We don't just spew out eggs and sperm into the ocean in the hope that some of our spawn reaches adulthood. What the fuck happened to your brain? What the fuck happened to your education? My parents both had the benefit of free university places. My parents both think they're oh-so smart. It's not like you can hide behind the defence of saying you're just a dumb animal.

I'm smarter than an animal. I'm smarter than my genes.

I know that my genes program me to want to procreate, but I can choose not to. In fact, on the evidence of the behaviour of my parents, passing on their genes would be the most irresponsible thing I could possibly do. Clearly this line of genes needs to die out, because I detest parents who don't take responsibility for their choices, their children.

My parents are too stupid to even read, as it turns out. I suckered them in with some honeyed words, to get them hooked reading this blog, and then I dialled up the honesty. They could not have cut & run any faster. Like Usain Bolt, they sprinted for the hills. The truth is hard to deal with when the only way you can look yourself in the mirror and sleep at night is by pretending your son is already dead.

It's a bit strange to write and write and write like this, labouring a point, but until they die from old age, smoking and drug/alcohol abuse related illness, I feel there needs to be this constant reinforcement of the consequences of their mistreatment of me.

Instead of thinking "my friends would miss me" I think "what if my parents attempt to corrupt the truth after I die". In a way, I'm staying alive to defend my memory, but when the truth is fully told I can finally collapse with exhaustion and rest in peace.

Sure, my parents spoon fed me. I wish they hadn't. If you're not going to go the distance, what's the fucking point? Why even start? It's fucking cruel, to bring someone into the world who didn't ask for it, and then to fuck them over. If I'm here just to pass on your genes, guess what? I'm not going to.

Why am I seething with such anger about something in the past? Well, it's in the context of how much of my life I felt secure, happy, loved (not much). It's in the context of how suicidal I feel (very). It's in the context of how things will look, when I'm gone.

The most loved I ever felt was when a lovely family in Ireland took me in. That just ain't right... what the fuck is wrong with my parents? Is it because they're drug addicts and alcoholics? I doubt it's the drugs or the alcohol because I'm very loving and nurturing, so I must conclude that there must be genes in me that haven't yet been expressed. I fear that I may be a terrible father, if I had kids, even if I was a loving caring husband, and I cared for my pets more than I even cared for myself.

Oh well, maybe it'll all be over soon and I can leave the final analysis to somebody else.

Tags: #parents #suicide

This is a story about quicksand...

After being discharged from psychiatric hospital, what do you think you'd do next? Well, imagine that for months you have been travelling but you haven't been moving.

Things are not stable for me, no matter what my senses tell me. I go to the same office, looking at the same computer screen, surrounded by the same people, for months if not years on end. According to my senses I'm not moving anywhere.

However, my bank balance would tell a very different story. Just sitting mute in a chair, keeping my head down and being a perfect corporate drone who never rocks the boat, means that I am very rapidly travelling... financially. My body and mind don't really agree though.

My moods tell a very different story again. I don't necessarily notice seasonal effects and depression taking hold. I'm not fully able to tell when I'm getting hyped up and excessively involved in work or other projects. I'm not great at judging when it's time to take a break, either because I'm too down or too up.

It is unhealthy and unnatural that I work in the same place, doing the same thing, and working a job that moves at snail's pace. I just don't have the social life and hobbies at the moment to get any balance, let alone the financial means to travel, socialise and pursue pastimes with the usual gusto that I apply to everything.

What happens is that I become like a champagne cork. The pressure builds and builds, and then I explode with frustration.

My journey began with a two week stay in a psychiatric hospital, because I was so beaten down by the task of getting myself off the streets, back from the brink of bankruptcy, beating addiction, working on a massively important high-pressure project, renting an apartment, moving house for the zillionth time, and then realising that I was in an unsustainable situation: I needed to get rid of a 'friend' who thought he'd live with me rent free and get pocket money: for what reason he thought he deserved that, I'm not even sure. I also needed to quit a horrible contract that just wasn't worth the sleepless nights.

Next thing I knew, I was sleeping in a Mongolian yurt in Devon.

Then, I was surfing and hitch-hiking in Cornwall. Hitch-hiking is surprisingly hard, it turns out. Hitch-hiking is a bad way to get around if you have to be in a certain place at a certain time. I'd hitch-hiked once before, earlier in the year, in Ireland, but it turns out the Irish are a lot more friendly, helpful and trusting than the British, based on my anecdotal evidence.

Back in London after my Westcountry adventure, I still felt overwhelmed by depression and the feeling that I was trapped by my job. I had a lovely trip, but it had been very short and coming home was very anti-climactic. I knew I needed to quit my job, but I didn't quite have the guts to terminate a very lucrative contract.

I had made a plan a couple of months prior, to shame HSBC by sleeping rough in Canary Wharf, right by their headquarters. I found it deliciously ironic that they had inadvertently helped one of their customers to avoid bankruptcy, escape homelessness and generally improve their financial situation. I had no doubt that if they'd done their due diligence on me, then I would never have been employed to work on their number one project. I was planning on getting my contract terminated for no reason other than I cared about my job and was trying to do the right thing: acting with ethics and integrity.

But, I still had the contract like a millstone around my neck. I was desperately trapped and depressed about it.

I decided to fly to San Francisco and go to the Golden Gate Bridge. I wanted to illustrate how the desperation of my situation had driven me to contemplate suicide. I also wanted to go because I had planned to go 3 years earlier, but my parents had reneged on a promise and generally conspired to pull the rug out from under my feet at a time when I was terribly vulnerable. What they did was an awful thing, and I wanted to take that trip that I never got to make, because of their horrible behaviour.

I booked a flight for approximately 4 hours' time, packed a bag and left immediately. It's the most impulsive thing I've ever done in my life.

In San Francisco, a friend kindly picked me up and I dumped my bags at her house. I then borrowed a bike and rode to the Golden Gate Bridge. Less than 24 hours had elapsed since deciding to travel 5,351 miles. I stood in a jetlagged and travel weary state, peering over the edge, looking at the perilous drop to the sea below.

Travel, novelty, adventure, excitement, old friends, social contact, good weather... all of these things are the perfect antidote to depression. Who knew that the prospect of being chained to the same damn desk, in the same damn office, doing the same damn work you've done for 19 years, could lead to a tiny twinge of "Fuck My Life".

Obviously, the whole dumping your bags at your friends' place and then going off and killing yourself thing would be poor social etiquette. Plus I'd arranged to see an old schoolfriend while I was in San Francisco. The potential for positive experiences was massive. In the office, I had found myself hoping for a fire drill just because it would be slightly novel.

I'm no dumbass. I know it's important to stop and smell the roses. But, there isn't the time, energy or motivation to do so when you're trapped in the rat race.

In San Francisco I took delight in the simplest of things, like taking a selfie of myself by a road sign that matches my surname. I didn't even do any specific sightseeing or look at a map. I took a trolleycar because I saw one passing. I found myself by landmark buildings, just because I stumbled on them. I walked miles and miles.

My AirBnB host invited me out to a Halloween party. I dressed up. We drove to some house near Mountain View, where there were fascinating Silicon Valley tech people to meet from Google and Apple. That kind of shit generally doesn't happen when you're depressed working your desk job.

I got a tattoo to piss my parents off. My sister has several tattoos and my parents are always giving her a hard time about them. I thought that getting a tattoo would be some gesture of solidarity with my sister, and my parents would have to give both of us a hard time for having one. It was also a kind of souvenir from the trip, and a bit of reminder that I was going to try and stay in the land of the living for a little longer.

I caught up with a schoolfriend who I hadn't seen for years and years. He was supposed to be a mentor on a startup accelerator that I did in 2011, but he'd had to move back to California. It was great to see him, in the Mission district of San Francisco, even if we only had the briefest of time to catch up. Precious moments.

Meeting my friends' second child, and hanging out at their house reading stories to their eldest. Going with the kids to the science museum and playing with the interactive exhibits. Still etched in my mind.

Getting a glimpse into family life, valley startup life, California life... special.

Hanging out with some of the people who I have so much respect and love for... priceless.

I tried to provoke HSBC into terminating my contract immediately, by sending truthful emails, saying things that needed to be said, but were blatantly above my pay grade. Sadly, the mark of a corporate drone is somebody who's completely gutless and two-faced. They emailed me to say they just wanted to have a "routine chat" with me when I got back. No matter how hard I pushed, they wouldn't admit that my contract was effectively terminated, which is what I wanted so I could stay in the USA longer.

I came home. I went into the office and exploited the fact that nobody would be straight with me. I kinda got my goodbyes from everybody, even though they were "great to see you back in the office" but only those who were nice genuine people seemed to be unaware that the long knives were drawn. I loved the look of shock on the faces of those whose incompetence I had exposed.

I shaved my stupid beard and kept my moustache, because it was now November. There's no greater pleasure than having your contract terminated from a 'straight' job, when you're wearing a stupid moustache and you have a tattoo. This was all part of the plan in preparation for the sleeping rough by HSBC headquarters anyway.

Then, I was deflated again.

It'd been a helluva journey. Psychiatric hospital, Devon, Cornwall, Mongolian yurts, surfing, hitch-hiking, sleeping on the floor of New York's JFK airport, cycling over the Golden Gate Bridge, sightseeing in Silicon Valley, old friends, nice work colleagues, miserable office drones, contract termination... relax!

Bonfire night - November 5th - I was still pretty hyped up. For some reason I decided that I wanted to whizz around London giving out brightly coloured cardboard stars. I think I spent 90 minutes from conceiving the idea, to then whizzing round London sticking stickers on stuff, giving out stars, losing my luggage and generally careering out of control somewhat. That was classic hypomania. What gets held down must go up. It was such a relief to be released from my soul-destroying contract that the nervous energy almost demanded to be released by doing something crazy.

I decided I needed to see some neglected UK friends. I zoomed down to Bournemouth and stayed in the Royal Bath Hotel by the pier. I met up with one of my most loyal friends, and met his son, caught up with him and his wife, saw their house. I caught up with another friend. Friends who had offered to take me kitesurfing didn't materialise, but it didn't matter... I'd already had a very action-packed trip.

Then, finally, the night of the sleep out came. Lots of things got conflated in my mind: "Hacking" humanity, Techfugees, homelessness, bankruptcy, HSBC's unethical behaviour, soul-destroying bullshit jobs and the unbelievably erratic, exhausting, stressful path I had taken to reach that point.

I always knew that keeping moving is the answer to staying alive, but there's so much financial incentive to be trapped into a chair, chained to a desk, not moving anywhere, not doing anything, not talking to anybody.

As I burnt through my money on rent and bills over the winter months, I knew the day would come when I'd have to go back into the rat race, and it depressed the hell out of me. By Christmas Day I was in a pretty shitty state. By New Year's Eve I was cutting my arms with a razor blade.

For the last 4 months, I've sat at my desk, not saying anything. For the last 4 months, I haven't rocked the boat, I haven't tried to improve anything, I haven't tried to do a good job. For the last 4 months, I've kept a low profile. My bosses couldn't be more pleased. My bank balance is much improved. In theory, my mental health should have done something but it doesn't feel like my mood's done anything but sink.

How am I supposed to reconcile the drudgery of the rat race with the excitement of the crazy tale that led me here? When I look back 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, things were very different. Are things better? It doesn't feel like it.

I'm still not moving, I'm not travelling. I still don't have my needs met.

If I want to survive, I need to be moving. It's not sustainable for me to stagnate. I wasn't built to just sit and rot at a desk.

If I stop moving, I sink into the quicksand.

Tags: #depression #suicide #bipolar #career #startup #computing #homeless #addiction

This is a story about not reading enough...

Writers don't really want any more writers. Writers want more readers. You could write a brilliant book and find that hardly anybody wants to read it, let alone pay for it. I'm not writing a brilliant book. I'm churning out words into the ether. I'm not writing for self-aggrandisement. I'm writing because my self-esteem has collapsed and I'm suicidal.

If I wanted to get rich from writing, I would write a "How to be a Better Writer" book, or I would run a creative writing course. Far more people want to be writers than there are paying readers to support their ambitions.

We all want to be heard above the roaring waves in the sea of digital noise. This modern world is isolating, and it's also disheartening when everything you do is compared against a global benchmark. If you microblog on Twitter, why don't you have millions of followers? If you've written something, why isn't it a bestseller? If you founded a little tech startup, why isn't it valued at a billion dollars?

What's the difference between one blogger's Wordpress site and another's? Now that we're all competing on the same level playing field - the self-publishing revolution that is the Internet - isn't it clearer than ever that the differences between human beings are marginal? I find it just as interesting reading a mommyblog as I do reading whatever is flavour of the month. In fact, I find the mommyblogs far more interesting than the pretentious wank pedalled elsewhere in the interests of clickbait.

A clique of established writers tell me I don't have anything interesting or high value to say. Whenever I read articles about National Novel Writing Month or other writing festivals, the message is the same: your writing is boring, low quality, narcissistic and you shouldn't bother. In other words, clear off and make room for the established players.

Well, guess what? Tough titties.

I need writing and the community of people writing for non-commercial reasons. I don't need to support people who've already achieved the thing that we all dream about doing: a job that we love.

For sure, writing and the other creative arts are not a hobby. We need entertainers. We need people who are brave enough to share. To try and establish some pecking order and say that lesser mortals should keep their mouths shut and not share their content, is elitist in a way that I despise.

I was saddened to read about how much trouble The Guardian and The Observer are in, especially in light of the fact that they're newspapers that are supported by trust money, not by media moguls. The Guardian broke the Edward Snowden whistleblowing, and had GCHQ jumping all over them for their trouble. Press freedom is important, and the colonisation of journalism by advertising revenue hungry organisations, churning out human interest clickbait, is to the detriment of all of us.

I lament the death of the novel, as we increasingly consume what we read in bite-size chunks that we 'pay' for with our eyeballs, thanks to the rise and rise of the Facebook news feed as the vast consumer of our spare time. However, to attack budding writers, and to effectively picket them and call them 'scabs' for writing free content, is not going to fight the rising tide. It's inevitable that our reading habits will change forever. The idea of paying for a printed novel is all but dead except for those who have a paper fetish and like to advertise their pseudo-intellectualism by having large bookcases.

I note that I passed 400,000 words and 1 year of blogging without even noticing. The supposed discipline and difficulty of overcoming writer's block is largely overstated. It's true that my writing is very lightly edited, but actually if you go back and read what I've written a few days later, you will see that I have been making myriad edits, corrections, revisions, improvements. But, in this content-rich era, who has the time to read anything once, let alone twice?

Some friends derive a great deal of pleasure from reading their favourite books again and again. Those books must have been pored over by their authors, and certainly they are great works of fiction. However, just as we once bought a few high quality garments made by skilled clothes-makers, now we live in the era of fast fashion, where we now buy many cheap things to wear, that are quickly worn out and thrown away.

Whether it's wood pulp and ink, or cotton and dye, to waste those things is not sustainable on a planet of finite resources. However, the Internet is not running out of bytes. There's nothing wrong with churning out page upon page of writing, which may catch the eye of one of the billions of readers. Even if it's just some linguistics algorithm at Google that slightly improves its natural language parsing ability, by processing my words, then it hasn't been a fruitless exercise.

I don't think people are reading less. I just think they're reading fewer books. I certainly think that people are turned off by the endless intellectual masturbation of the elites.

If there's a shortage, it's not a shortage of readers. I think there's a shortage of candid tales written by people who are brave enough to actually write the things that nobody had dared to say, or had previously been allowed to publish.

No matter what government stats say, there are undoubtedly painful societal changes afoot. There is so much contradictory data. How can quality of life be increasing and the amount of people with clinical depression also be increasing? How can we be so amazingly interconnected by technology and we feel so lonely and isolated?

Writing has changed. Instead of writing a book, publishing it, and sitting back to enjoy praise and admiration, writing has now become a conversation. Interactions and discussions have replaced lectures and speeches.

Sure, I'd like to see micropayments succeed, to replace the ad-revenue driven model that's mostly hoovered up by Google & Facebook, so that my favourite writers can continue to pay their bills.

However, just as the 15-hour working week has been predicted for a long time, writing and other creative arts are going to feel the pinch first. There are a virtually unlimited number of people who would rather be writers than picking vegetables in the fields, or flipping burgers.

To call aspiring writers narcissistic, self-aggrandising spammers, is breathtakingly insulting. In a way, I'm an intellectual migrant, seeking asylum from the warzone of wage slavery. In a way, every 'successful' writer who tells me that I should stop writing, or mocks my work as low quality, is the same as somebody who says "bloody immigrants, coming over here, taking our jobs".

You're damn straight I want to be a penniless writer. I want to smoke a pipe and wear a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows. Have you tried the working world? It's fucking awful. I've worked harder than you, and that's why I'm prepared to work for 'nothing'... because it's a damnsight more rewarding than the crap I've been doing for my whole career.

You know what? People who have been having a tough time have reached out to me, and shared their stories. I would never betray their confidence, but people have confided their stories about depression, suicide, alcoholism, addiction and becoming jaded and disillusioned with wage slavery.

I read an article saying how hard it is being a struggling artist in London, and the only comments on social media were "get a proper job" and "art is just a hobby". While I disagree that art and entertainment are valueless, I do think that those who are upset about how their novelist ambitions are being thwarted should try writing something that is actually relatable.

Of course it's naïve as hell and a cliché to say "if my writing helps one person who is going through a tough time, it will have been worth it" but guess what? I think it already has. A number of private discussions have confirmed that there are plenty of people out there, lurking quietly, feeling like nobody understands what they're going through, feeling like they're the only one who's going through what they're going through.

When I was struggling with mental health issues, suicidal thoughts, addiction, alcoholism and a lack of employment opportunities that were in line with my values and needs, I found a few books and blogs that helped me immensely. I gratefully hoovered up the words that few brave people had shared, and I felt less alone.

I don't want to pat myself on the back. I'm not declaring what I've done to be a success. I'm not saying I've saved lives or anything else so self-congratulatory.

All I'm saying is that if you want the mommybloggers and every other wannabe writer out there to shut up, to make more room for your pretentious crap, then it's you who should shut up, because like you say... there are already more than enough good novels out there.

Tags: #writing

This is a story about homeostasis...

Do I think I'm smarter than a doctor? Well, consider how much training in psychiatry a generalist has had. A general physician must be knowledgeable of heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, stomach, gall bladder, large intestine, small intestine, ears, nose, throat, eyes, bones, veins, arteries, muscles, tendons. A general physician must be familiar with viruses, bacterial infections and parasites. A general physician must be familiar with eczema, psoriasis, warts, bunions, corns, fungal infections and allergies. On top of all that, a general physician has a basic grounding in the most complex organ of all: the brain.

"Would you take antibiotics if you got an infection?"

This is good question. Antibiotics are a pretty blunt instrument. Antibiotics are very damaging to the health of the gut microbiome. There are "good" bacteria and there are "bad" bacteria, and killing both can be very bad for you. Widespread antibiotic use is also the reason why we have super resistant bacteria like MRSA. It's quite possible that our heavy usage of antibiotics might be something that ends up causing huge numbers of people to die in a microbial infection epidemic.

"Would you get your leg set in plaster cast if it was broken?"

Yes, of course I would. Don't be so stupid.

"Would you take insulin if you were diabetic?"

Yes, but I wouldn't increase my risk of diabetes through bad diet.

"So why don't you take antidepressants to fix your broken brain chemistry?"

Well, my brain chemistry isn't broken. It's not like there's a broken bone. It's not like I've got a malfunctioning pancreas. It's not like I have an infection. My brain is doing what it's supposed to do: it's responding to environmental stimuli and telling me "WARNING: something is wrong!".

If you were feeling a sharp pain in your hand, you could take painkillers, or you could remove the sharp object that was hurting your hand. Pain is a feedback mechanism, telling your brain that something is damaging your body.

My body is getting very damaged. I sit on my arse, bored out of my mind, getting fat and unfit. The environment I work in is completely unstimulating. The environment that I work in could not be more unnatural.

Humans need natural light, exercise, social contact, stimulation, challenges, variation, goals. I have none of these things. I'm trapped inside a shitty office, mainly dealing with a computer. I don't even need to get out of my chair all day long. The work that I do is mind-numbingly boring and easy. The only goal is to get old and die so I don't have to go to work anymore.

Obviously, my brain - as an organ - is a lot smarter than any amount of doctors and psychoanalysts. My brain is virtually unchanged from the one that evolved 2.5 million years ago. My brain kept me safe from sabre-tooth tigers and allowed me to kill wooly mammoths to have enough to eat. My brain told me to move when things got too hot, too cold, or when I was hungry, thirsty... whatever. My brain helped me survive. My brain knows when something is wrong.

London's daytime population is circa 11 million people, with millions of people travelling in from the surrounding areas to take part in the rat race. The rush hour tube is awful. There is no personal space. People are crammed together like sardines in a tin. You think that's natural? You think that's healthy?

London's roads are crammed with cyclists, mopeds, motorcycles, cars, vans, lorries, busses and trucks. Every road junction has traffic coming at you from all directions, and scurrying commuters trying to get across the road without being squashed.

London's buildings are packed to capacity. Any spare land is built upon, as high as the planning officers will allow. Every apartment is sublet and sublet, until many cheaper places have 5 people living in one room. Every office uses hotdesking to increase the capacity. Nobody has their own desk anymore.

My brain screams out in agony at this assault on my senses. I have no car at the moment, so I can't escape when it all gets too much. To escape would mean dragging my luggage on tubes and trains, along with the rest of the heaving masses of people.

I have a little oasis of calm at home, where my apartment block is set back from the road in a gated community, and it overlooks the River Thames. At the back of the building, the sound of thousands of people, all shouting at one another, echoes around the courtyard off the hard surfaces of the buildings. Drunk people argue outside the pub. Road rage incidents occur between drivers. Teenagers squabble. Fraught mothers yell at their kids. Meathead fucknuggets yell at the top of their lungs to show off. At the front of the building, on the balcony, things are mostly calm, except for the riverboat cruises blaring out disco music at high volume, and the Thames speedboat thrill rides, zooming along at top speed.

London is pure theatre, and I fear I might crumble to nothing without its stimulation, but the entertainment is purely monkeys at the zoo, squabbling, masturbating, copulating and screeching as loud as they can.

It's clear that I need to make environmental, lifestyle changes. The problem is not my brain chemistry. The problem is the shit that I'm forced to do. I need to be in London, because London's where the jobs are. I need to work, because how else am I going to have a roof over my head and food on the table?

An obvious quick fix for my mental health would be to escape to some more unspoiled wilderness, which isn't so desperately overpopulated. I need to escape from dead-end boring jobs that I can do with my eyes closed, in shitty offices with artificial lighting, full of boring drones who I have no need or interest in talking to.

It's a shitty compromised situation, where I'm forced into yet more wage slavery until I reach a level of financial comfort where I can truly consider my health needs. It makes sense to earn a lot of money very quickly, so I can escape the rat race sooner. I need a financial safety net which I can use to find a job that doesn't desperately depress me and stress me out.

Life is fucking agony at the moment, but what choice do I have? Short term pain for long term gain, in theory.

Work hard. Complain harder.

Tags: #mentalhealth #depression #suicide #career #london

This is a story about bravery...

How do terrorists win? By spreading terror. There's a video going round on the Internet of a prankster in Arab head-dress throwing a black duffel bag at people and shouting "Allahu Akbar!". His unwitting victims run for their lives. For me, this is anecdotal evidence that the terrorists are winning.

I tend to be a little irreverent and it's easy to miss my satire or irony sometimes, but I'm disappointed when people act as thought police, and act with more offence than is strictly justified by their personal involvement with a tragedy. Taking up the position of moral outrage is simply thought policing, when no outrage is warranted.

When I write about terrorism on 9/11 or 7/7, I'm always mindful that family members, friends or work colleagues of people who lost somebody during those attacks, might be offended. However, there are billions of Netizens and the chance of somebody directly affected reading my stuff is negligible. It's in the greater public interest that I should discuss the terror that obviously affects so many, instead of self-censoring because of the tiny risk that anybody might take legitimate offence.

Having grown up in the UK, from 1979 to present, I lived through the IRA's bombing campaign. Far more people died in 1985 through 1995 than in recent years, including 2001. I used to work near the Baltic Exchange and I live and work in Canary Wharf. Both of these places were blown up by IRA bombs.

So am I Irelandophobic? Am I afraid that every Irishman I meet is a terrorist? Do I detest the Irish, because they all carry some collective responsibility for the actions of a small handful of their fellow countrymen? No. Of course not. Some of my best friends are Irish. The Irish have shown me nothing but love.

Being brave doesn't mean dropping bombs on people from 30,000ft, safe in the cockpit of your $350 million fighter jet. Being brave doesn't mean killing civilians in a drone strike, pushing buttons on your joystick, watching everything remotely on a TV screen. Being brave doesn't mean being racially abusive - "build a wall" and "send them home" - while you teach your kids to fear and reject people who look different, and are from a different culture.

Being brave certainly doesn't involve shutting down people who appear to be desecrating the memory of the dead.

If we're going to move forward as a race, we've got to get over this whole "your tribe killed somebody from my tribe" bullshit. A couple of days ago there was great offence taken at a stag party taking selfies at Ground Zero. Hey! Guess what? Nearly every inch of the globe has had human blood spilt on it at some point, at the hands of another human. Get over it.

We need to move beyond the "brown/black/Irish kills privileged white shocker!" type headline trolling. There are underprivileged people who get killed in gang shootings and knifings every day here in London, but it never makes the national news. If you're not white caucasian and you're poor, attacks that are not overtly religiously motivated just aren't news outside London. However, a bunch of whites appear to be mocking some other whites, and that's global news? What the fuck is that all about?

An estimated 675 people have been shot and killed by police in the USA this year so far. There were 990 last year. If we say that in the 15 years since 9/11, on average 700 people have been killed by police each year, then over 10,000 people have died at the hands of the police. America, you had fewer than 3,000 killed in 9/11, but you've killed more than 3 times as many since then, just with your cops.

Grief is a kind of hobby. "You just can't say this stuff today... people are grieving" I hear you say. Well, who's grieving for those 10,000 people who got gunned down by cops? When is the day that you grieve for them?

Lest we forget.

Well you did forget, didn't you? You forgot that being afraid of black and brown people means that terrorism is winning. Terrorism affects your life. Terrorism is something you're afraid of, so the terrorists have successfully created terror. The terrorists have won.

You forgot that the biggest threat to your life is not terrorism, but guns in the hands of your fellow Americans. Toddlers kill more Americans than terrorists do.

Maybe I have no right to contribute to this debate, because I'm not American. However, Donald Trump waded in on the side of Brexit, and the UK has suffered a huge upsurge in racially abusive attacks on our own people, as a result of the referendum result. In a little under two months, the presidential election could possibly elect a racist into office, and cause a further wave of abuse and attacks.

Europe is a more dangerous place when anti-Islamic sentiment is allowed to foment. Europe suffers the consequences for America's rhetoric. The UK becomes a proxy target for anti-American attacks, when the phoney war on Islam is perpetuated.

Terrorism is just a phoney distraction. So few people are dying in terrorist attacks that it shouldn't even get any media attention. It's not relevant. It's counterproductive to spread terror for the terrorists.

I'm expecting to get shot down in a big way, for any number of reasons, in writing this piece. I'm not trying to be deliberately offensive. I'm not being insensitive. If you lost your mom in 9/11, I'm sorry, but I really don't think you personally know anybody who lost their life on that day. 0.0001% of the population were killed.

There were 372 mass shootings in the US in 2015. I should be far more worried about an American with a gun than an Arab with a bomb.

If we use this day for anything, perhaps it should be to reflect on how well the British and the Irish generally get along today. If ever there's an example of putting terrorism behind us, it must surely follow this model. I love the Irish. I don't see us as different. We were all Europeans, until Donald bloody Trump wandered into our debate and we voted to leave the EU.

The brave thing to do is to act irreverently. Don't allow the terrorists and the thought police to disseminate fear and mistrust.

Tags: #terrorism

This is a story about being chewed up and spat out...

London might only be the 17th most expensive city in the world to live in, but it's still in the top 20. I call it home, and I have nowhere else I can saunter back to if things don't work out. Where would I go?

The work that I do demands that I have my bum on a seat in an office a stone's throw away from the Bank of England, 5 days a week. It's not like I'm one of those fabled tech workers who can just idly tap away on a keyboard from some remote location. I get paid to be in the same room as my colleagues, face to face. I need to be in London for my work. It's not like I could just pop into town for meetings. I spend at least 40 hours a week immersed in my job.

How bad do you want it?

In order to remain in London, I've slept on night busses, in parks, on heathland, in squats and in hostels.

Nobody is underwriting my risk. When things have gone wrong, it's meant homelessness. I don't mean the kind of homeless where you sleep on your friend's couch. I mean the kind of homeless where you're dirty and you're getting robbed in a park, freezing cold, snatching some fitful sleep in a bush.

Lots of petulant children will run away to London, get tired, hungry, dirty and find out that being homeless is pretty shit. They will slink off back to their families. I don't have that option. Homeless means homeless, in my case.

Sometimes being homeless means living in a dormitory with 15, 20 even 30 people, all snoring and farting. People come into the dorm and make a racket all night, and then they cause an almighty disturbance in the morning, as they fuck about with their luggage. Theft is a constant problem. People have taken my wallet out from under my pillow while I slept. None of your valuables are safe, even in the lockers, which are often prised open with crowbars. It's exhausting, being in such close proximity to so many other human beings, night & day, 7 days a week. It's relentless.

Sleeping in the parks and on heathland is welcome relief from the stress of having to live in such close quarters with other people. The weather is a problem though: fine summer evenings are all well and good, but rain and cold weather are miserable. Muggings and thefts are a nightly occurence, as well as fights and generally being preyed upon by other homeless and vulnerable people. To keep clothed and clean is hard enough, let alone keeping a few possessions safe.

When I was in the position where I knew that homelessness was a very real threat, I prepared. I would sit with homeless people and talk to them for hours, making notes on how to survive. I found out which night busses you could sleep on. I found out what the laws around squatting were. I learned how to spot overgrown back gardens of houses that were unoccupied, that could be used as campsites. I learned where the soup kitchens and Hare Krishna gave out free food. I learned how to spot friend from foe. I learned how to stay away from trouble. I learned where the cheapest hostels were. I learned how to stay reasonably clean and presentable, using showers in railway stations and such like.

A friend stayed one night in a youth hostel, and asked me where you could get a shower when you were homeless. He was clearly considering the possibility of homelessness, as if it was some jolly adventure, a silly fun game, When the day of reckoning came, his parents paid for him to go home and stay with them rent free. He knew which side his bread was buttered. His risk was underwritten. He didn't want to stay in London badly enough. He had backup options.

My backup option is a tent and a sleeping bag.

I've lived in doss houses, with 8 people in a room, all working black market jobs and spending all their money and spare time messed up on drugs. I've seen the grimmest possible working and living conditions. I've been bitten to death by bed bugs. I've experienced the cold and the damp of London's shittest accommodation, where people just about eke out an existence.

Now, I live in a lovely apartment, but it comes at a price. Not only is the rent extortionate, but I also have to drag myself into a job that I hate, 5 days a week. There are few words to describe just how incompatible my job is with my mental health. There is so little stimulation and challenge, that the hands of the clock seem almost stationary. I'm battling severe depression and 'recovering' from addiction. Do you think it's a great idea to be so alone with my thoughts, with no distracting tasks to hurl myself into? Do you think it's a great idea that I have to be a steady dependable worker, turning up on time and working all the hours, when my moods are unstable and I'm exhausted from all the stress and anxiety of getting myself off the streets and off the drugs?

It's a fucking miracle that I'm paying my rent, paying my bills, servicing my debts, working my job, pleasing my bosses, putting on my suit and looking like I've got my shit together.

I really haven't got my shit together, and I'm not taking passengers or carrying any dead wood, because I don't have the spare capacity to do that. It wasn't that long ago that I was hospitalised with the stress of it all. It's still a pretty desperate situation, even if it doesn't seem that way on the surface.

What more do you want from me? What more can I give?

Why don't you get a job? Why don't you try working full time? Why don't you try taking responsibility and paying the rent, the bills and paying off your debts?

It sickens me that anybody would suggest that I could be doing something more fun and in line with my values. It's a joke that anybody suggests that I could take my foot off the gas, take some time out. How the fuck could I do that, when it's me who's the responsible one round here, holding down a job and paying the rent & bills.

Yes, it's OK if you can go back and live with your family. It's OK if somebody's there to pick up the pieces of your failed idle fantasies, when they don't work out. But a fuck up for me means homelessness and destitution. Nobody underwrites my risk.

It's not that hard though: get a fucking job and work it, or fuck off back to mummy. Don't hang around in my fucking home town, mooching off people and talking about your grand plans, when really you're just sponging off those who are genuinely working hard. I'm sick of the bullshitters.

I know the difference between those who are genuinely industrious and hardworking, and those who expect to get paid for nothing. I know the difference between those who are genuinely facing homelessness and destitution if they don't get off their backsides and work their way out of a bad position, and those who have a comfortable position to fall back on, if they hit [not very] hard times.

My charity seems to have attracted more than a couple of idle wasters, but thankfully, I also have some other people who recognise that I'm vulnerable and can be taken advantage of. I'd go mad if I didn't have the counsel of true friends, who can tell me the truth, when people are looking for a free ride at my expense.

I don't mind giving people a chance. I don't mind taking a risk. I don't tend to lend more than I can afford to lose. Everybody deserves a break.

I would never ask anybody to work harder than I'm prepared to work myself.

But, if you don't share in the risk, you don't share in the reward.

Tags: #homeless #london