This is a story about the precariat...

Here I am, in psychiatric hospital with underpants on my head and pencils up my nose. I think you will agree that this makes me perfectly qualified to run the country.

Having a manifesto is something that we associate with nutters who commit mass murder. The end justifies the means, in the minds of people consumed by their political ideologies.

Admitting to having political ambitions is laughable for an ordinary British citizen. The route into politics is through namedropping, brown-nosing and suffering the bullying & infighting of the dominant political parties, as you rise through the ranks. Going into politics is not about campaigning on a manifesto which comprises your deeply held political beliefs. Going into politics is not about a commoner being elected to the House of Commons. There's no room for the riff raff in politics and you're going to need wealthy donors to back you. You'd have to be stark raving mad to think you could get into politics as a representative of the constituents in your local area.

Politics is a career; it's not about improving the lives of your fellow citizens. There's no room for anybody who hasn't made politics their specialism. An interest in government is a fetish for three-line whips.

Political office is granted in recognition of a complete lack of empathy for the proles that a prospective MP has spent their whole life exploiting. Our ministers should be selected from a pool of wealthy elites, who have no concept of life without a trust fund and the advantages of nepotism. The benches of parliament should reflect the people who helped win those seats: the wealthy donors.

Pretending that political parties are given an equal campaigning platform, and that we don't have a two party system, is a hilarious prank that's being played on the electorate. Who could possibly compete with the big two parties, who hoover up so much political donation money? If you're looking to buy yourself a peerage, are you going to waste your hard-earned cash on a party that stands no chance of winning a majority? What a joke!

The top three manifesto promises of the Tories are: plutocracy, plutocracy and plutocracy. Crush the proles. Smash their unions. Keep them insecure and divided. Oh, what a glorious thing, to see the landed gentry literally lording it over the riff raff.

Posh little girls and posh little boys grow up dreaming about the day when they'll get to destroy the welfare state and lower the living standards of ordinary people. "On yer bike!" the jumped up little twits shouted when they were youngsters, and now they're ushering in the Britain they always wanted: where the only fucking job you can get is being a Deliveroo takeaway food bicycle delivery rider.

We don't want anybody getting into politics, who has any idea what life's like for the vast majority of British citizens. We need people who live and breathe the Westminster bubble, to think about real issues, like where they're going skiing this year with their barrister chums.

- ALTERNATIVELY -

I know what it's like to claim benefits, be homeless, suffer mental illness and have to navigate an under-funded National Health Service. I know how digital transformation will affect every aspect of the world around us, and I've worked in education, retail, defence, financial services, security, transport, housing & construction and a host of other sectors too. 

I've studied the dismal science - economics - as well as starting several profitable businesses. I have in-depth knowledge of almost every tax we have: from income tax to capital gains tax; from Value-Added Tax (VAT) to corporation tax; from import duties to stamp duty. I understand trade deficits, fractional reserve banking, financial instruments and the national debt.

With a background in science and technology, I have a big-picture view that broadly encompasses every aspect of modern life. This is not stuff I've read about and only understand theoretically: I'm a practitioner and I have real-world hands-on experience. I have a worldview that starts in the subatomic realm of particle physics and finishes in the intergalactic universe of cosmology, with a geopolitical overview of terrestrial matters somewhere in-between those two extremes.

I'm not a specialist. I have no desire to study the minutiae of anything, like a stamp collector or a train spotter would, but instead I've gathered knowledge of how all the different component parts fit together. It's no co-incidence that I've been able to write game of life type software simulations: computer models.

Anybody involved in politics would benefit from being a generalist not a specialist. When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It's impossible to reconcile the competing views of thousands of specialists, because they all have a very narrow worldview. It's all very well being an expert in your field, but where's the balance?

If I was going to pick a bunch of people to run the country, they would be the fiction writers and the computer game designers. Without an enticing vision of the future, reactionary forces will drag us back into the dark ages. Without a working virtual world, how are you ever going to test your ideas, without your mistakes inflicting untold misery on real people?

As a prerequisite for becoming a minister, you should be able to build a thriving happy metropolis in Sim City and complete a game of Civilization through cultural influence, not war. If you're a failure in those virtual worlds how can you think you're even remotely qualified to wreak havoc on the lives of the electorate? We wouldn't turn you loose on the roads without a driving license.

All minsters and their children should attend state school and be treated by the National Health Service: you've gotta eat your own dog food. There should be a means test, that excludes wealthy families, trust fund babies and any nepotism: only a single generation of any family may enter into politics.

In fact, some of those who govern should be selected randomly, like jury service. Wanting to exercise any kind of power over your peers should be an automatic disqualification. The House of Commons should be balanced out with ordinary people, who have no interest in politics per se: it's the civic duty of every British citizen to muzzle the dangerous megalomaniacs.

Housing, transport, education, healthcare and a host of other essential services, are public services and as such, they should never be profitable. The state should have a monopoly on the things our citizens need. To allow a private firm to profit from our population's needs is a crime. The private sector is welcome to compete in the world of wants, but not needs. Simple economic theory will tell you that prices have upwardly inflationary pressure on things that you have to have: are you going to skip getting cured of that deadly disease, because it's too expensive?

Do you want to live in a world of zero-hours contract McJobs, insane house prices, stress, long hours, insecurity and indentured servitude, for the benefit of big business? That's what you're getting when you allow the country to be run by commercial interests.

We need to smash the plutocracy. We need to have dignity in labour. We need to be united, not divided by those who tell us that we're easily replaced and make us crawl over broken glass for a few mouldy crumbs. Inequality and the arrogance of the elites has reached unsustainable levels. We can't afford the rich any more.

If you think these are just the immature words of a bleeding-heart liberal who never grew up, and I don't understand the complexities of the world, I think you're being a mouthpiece of the elites when you say that it's not as simple as just dividing the wealth. It's easy to be an intellectual snob, because you believe you're destined for greatness. Just because it's not you, going with your cap in your hand to the mill owner to ask for a bowl of gruel, you could easily fall from grace at any moment. Just because you can't imagine what it's like to be poor and struggling, doesn't mean that it couldn't happen to the likes of you. Your fancy education and your expertise won't save you, when the working classes rise in anger and strike down the bourgeois rentier parasite class.

The irony of me writing this, while sipping champagne and looking out over the River Thames and the London skyline, from the balcony of my luxurious home, is not lost on me. The working-class heroes and self-made millionaires can be some of the most awful people. There's absolutely nothing humbling about rising up through the ranks and being successful; quite the opposite in fact.

I write as somebody who's been incredibly fortunate - getting propelled into a life of privilege and wealth - only to lose it all and have to rebuild from scratch. I write as somebody who knows that there's a fast track, as well as how hard it is to overcome prejudice and adversity. I write as somebody who can have delusions of grandeur as much as a sense of worthlessness. I know I'm flawed and I know I can fail, as much as I know how to succeed.

Worshipping power and status has led to layers of sycophantic courtiers, each one existing only to polish the egos of old men. Do you really want your whole country run, just so some exploitative megalomaniacs can be called Sir or Lord? Do you really think anybody deserves your respect, when they preside over the destruction of living standards in an epidemic of mental health issues, caused by the stressful modern life they created?

A central tenet of my desire for political influence, is my first-hand experience of depression, misery, exhaustion, stress and anxiety, which is an intolerable situation, created unnecessarily by unrestricted free-market capitalism. Are these the pillars that you want our working world built on? Should British citizens suffer as much as they do, just to have a crust of bread, a roof over their head and the hope of one day being able to pass on the suffering to the next generation? My answer is: no.

I don't necessarily believe that the state should own the means of production, but the workers should benefit most from the fruits of their labour. Wealth needs to be distributed, not concentrated in a few idle hands. Trickle down economics is a terrible lie.

I think that without social reform, eventually people will put down their tools and violently protest at their exploitation.

Obviously, I'm just a maniac up on my soapbox, shouting absolute nonsense, but who do you believe more: the wealthy elitist who tells you that everything's fine, or the person who's suffering at the hands of those elites?

Tags: #politics

This is a story about political correctness gone mad...

The liberal metropolitan elites are on the right side of history, right? The neanderthal knuckle-draggers are simply poorly educated angry white men, who need to step aside and make way for the black one-legged Muslim lesbian immigrants to take all the jobs and go on the dole, right? I probably can't even say black. It's political correctness gone mad.

Right, I've probably successfully got your heckles up. Now, get your calculator out.

The average wage in the UK is roughly £26,000. The average house price is £260,000. Assuming you can borrow three and a half times your income, you can get a mortgage of £91,000. So, you'll need a deposit of £169,000.

For the current tax year, average take home pay is £1,737. Average rent in the UK is £900 a month, leaving £837 a month for council tax, gas, electric, water, sewerage, food & drink, toiletries, cleaning products, transport, clothing, mobile phone, Internet, home & life insurance, home maintenance, alcohol & tobacco, gambling & lottery, going out and saving money.

Let's assume that our average UK citizen is a super scrimpy person who lives on budget baked beans and never turns on the heating or any lights. They can probably save a maximum of £500 per month, which leaves them £337 a month to spend on everything else. To save up the £170k they need to buy a house, they'll need to be thrifty for the next 28 years... assuming house prices don't go up.

Of course, this also assumes that you can even get a job that pays about £12.50 an hour, when 80% of all new jobs being created pay less than £17,000 per annum. Most jobs pay less than the average, because the average wage is skewed by a small number of very high earners.

OK, but we can all just go on benefits, right?

Well, housing benefit doesn't pay enough to rent a place. Rents are higher than housing benefit. If you work more than 16 hours a week, your benefits will be cut off, so you can't use housing benefit to top up your income. If you're a 'snowflake' millennial, you'll have just £57.90 to live on each week, plus your housing benefit that isn't enough to pay the rent.

So, what's the solution?

Well, if you're an immigrant you might be prepared to live in an appallingly shit house, with several people in every room. Many of us grew up in houses with sitting rooms and dining rooms. If you have a look round a house full of economic migrants who are all working for minimum wage, you're not going to find any reception rooms: every room is a bedroom.

Who cleans the toilets? Who waits the tables? Who serves the coffee? Who picks up the litter? Who hoovers your office? Who washes your car? Who built your house? Who unblocked your drain?

When we want something, we demand rock-bottom prices. We believe all the bullshit about 'rogue traders' and 'rip-off Britain' when in actual fact we are mostly idle and spoiled. We wanted cheap goods, so the factories moved to the Far East. We wanted easy jobs, so the immigrants came to do all the shitty ones. We wanted big fat undeserved early pensions, so asset prices bubbled. The petit bourgeois rentier class is a parasite on young people who need somewhere to live.

"Build some more houses!"

Yes, but who's going to build them? You wanted people who work hard for peanuts, so you got Poles. It's a fairly established middle-class thing to do: to demand Eastern European builders, because your British counterparts are supposedly lazy and work-shy, but aren't you part of the problem if you're not rolling up your sleeves and getting on with the job yourself?

The UK population was 50 million in the 1950s. Now it's 65 million. If there were 30 children in a school classroom in the fifties, there would be 39 today. If there were 1 million cars in the fifties, there are 1.3 million now. Hang on! That can't be right, can it?

Yes, ostensibly our observations don't match the hard numbers. Our day-to-day experiences don't tally with the facts, data and opinion polls.

Of course, I picked a difficult example: car ownership has soared, along with our living standards.

Our living standards have soared, haven't they?

Well, why do so many people want to go back to some kind of golden era of yesteryear? Perhaps 1954 would be the perfect year for us to roll the clock back to: when rationing ended.

"Britain's full" we hear. Certainly, many of us perceive overcrowding, congestion, heavy traffic, problems making a doctor's appointment, problems getting our kids into the school we want our little darlings to go to. What the hell? And there's always some darkies in the queue too... it must be all those mozzies, right?

The liberal metropolitan elites [like me] will tell you that you're imagining things. You're just not colourblind enough. If you squint your eyes - like a Chinaman - you'll see that your crowded train carriage actually has plenty of seats, and the few passengers are white men wearing hats, reading broadsheet newspapers and puffing pipes.

There's clearly a mismatch between perception, reality and what the 'facts' tell us. How can Britain have filled up when the population has only increased by 30%?

Let's look at the example of the economic migrant.

I don't live in The City of London. I live out near Canary Wharf and commute into the Square Mile for work. I migrate each day, for economic reasons. The official population of the City is 12,000 people, but in fact the population on a miserable Monday morning is more like 400,000. That's a 33 fold increase. That's a helluva migration every day.

In the desperate struggle of the rat race, both parents are now working, when previously the husband's sole income was adequate for the household's meagre expenses. I'm sorry to be so heteronormative, but women were housewives and men were the breadwinners. With sexual equality comes a doubling of the workforce, taking up space on the trains and roads, struggling to get to work each morning.

If both parents are working, who's going to clean the house? We're going to need a Lithuanian cleaner. Who's going to look after the kids? We're going to need a Spanish au pair. Who's going to prepare lunch? We're going to need an Italian sandwich maker.

We cluster together where all the jobs are: London and the South-East. We all commute huge distances on horribly overcrowded transport networks, because it's cheaper for our employers to build massive office blocks. The more office blocks you get in one place, the bigger the pool of potential employees, creating a liquid market for commoditised humans.

Most of the UK is an also-ran. Who gives a fuck about job losses across the whole country, when London earns so much tax for the treasury and financial services dominates 80% of the 'economy'.

Of course, it's disingenuous to think that the coal mines are going to re-open, the demand for steel can remain constantly high forever, and there will always be a need for unskilled manual labour. However, didn't we forget that a lot of people have been thrown onto the scrap heap, because we only worship facts and figures, not lives?

Is it possible that the knuckle-draggers  -- who hanker for a yesteryear of homophobia, sexism, bigotry and an empire riding roughshod over the developing world -- also have a small handful amongst their number who are right? Their quality of life would have been a lot better when they could have afforded to buy a house, get married, have kids and earn a living without having to resort to government handouts, black market jobs, benefit fraud, drug dealing and other degrading things.

I feel like I need to be the liberal metropolitan elitist who empathises with the plight of the scrounger, the NEET, the JAM family, the council-estate dwelling na'er do well. It's terribly patronising, but what have the unwashed masses noticed that we haven't?

I'm not even allowed to raise the questions without tarring myself with the brush we lazily swish over the enemies of progress: bigot, xenophobe, homophobe, FASCIST!

I hate UKIP, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump and their ilk, but they're shrewd in their observation that people have detected a certain lack of greatness in their once-great nations. Perhaps they weren't great places to be an educated black gay woman, in those yesteryear eras, but isn't politics about the greater good, to some extent? We don't have to lynch the blacks for the benefit of the whites. Trump et. al. have emboldened the racists, and that's awful, but why are they so angry?

Until the liberal metropolitan elites can accept that "[poor ill-educated] white male" has become a pejorative term amongst a sneering set of arrogant, privileged people who rule over them, doesn't it seem obvious that the anger is going to boil over?

Football, X-Factor, Big Brother and all of the other distractions and titillations are inadequate to contain the dissatisfied masses: they don't have any prospects; they don't have anything to hope for, except for a life of miserable poverty; they're unwanted in 'their own' country.

That's what "take are (sic) country back" means... it means that through the Internet, the masses have figured out that they outnumber the rulers and their court, and they want their fair slice of the pie. They've been misdirected into blaming immigrants, because that's always the last desperate ploy played by the greedy people who control the country. The simple fools don't even realise that the rich get even richer during times of war and conflict. Who's going to fight this imaginary fight that we're being whipped into national hysteria over? It will be the poorest, least educated and least privileged who will lose out, yet again.

Sadly, unless income inequality and declining living standards are addressed, there's little to offer the angry people except a cathartic bloodletting. Obviously, it offends my liberal sensibilities to see anger misdirected at the hardworking immigrants who cook me delicious halal food and act as a kind of lightning rod, stopping me from getting beaten up as a yuppie... a gentrifier.

What happened to class warfare? What happened to the labour movement? What happened to revolution?

TV melted your brain, dude.

Tags: #politics

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

24. Jailbird

Her little car was buffeted by strong winds as she drove up the busy motorway towards Manchester. Steely grey skies drizzled just enough rain that her windscreen wipers juddered annoyingly as they swept the few droplets of water away. Huge lorries overtook each other, filling the inside two lanes. Lorries were speed limited to 60 miles per hour, but there would be 1 or 2% difference between the fastest and the slowest. Motorists sat in an endless miserable queue of traffic in the outside lane, travelling only marginally faster. The sheer number of vehicles meant it was bumper to bumper all the way from the Midlands to the North of England.

Night brought an orange glow: illumination from the lights above. Headlights reflected in the puddles and off every vehicle. Heavy goods vehicles threw up huge plumes of blinding spray, with the red lights of the driver in front as the only point of reference to keep on the road. Lara was in a trancelike state, just following in procession, watching out for brake lights as traffic ground to a halt.

Reaching the junction she needed, Lara pulled off the motorway and into the service area. A sign directed traffic to the right for fuel, straight on for refreshments and left for a hotel. She turned left. The car park was filled with shiny new fleet rental vehicles used by sales representatives and other businessmen and women who travelled all over the country, touting their wares. Row after row of medium-sized family cars from respected German manufacturers, in sensible colours: black, silver, grey and navy blue. Some had suit jackets hanging in the back, ready for business in the morning.

Parking her cheap French car that was nearly 10 years old, it looked worse than ever now that the spray from the long drive had given the white paint a thick coating of dirt up the sides. You could hardly read her back numberplate and her hands got covered with filth when she opened and closed the boot to get her overnight bag out.

After checking in to the hotel and finding her way to her room, she looked at herself in the mirror. She wouldn't need to do much to pretend to be exhausted and in a bit of a state tomorrow. Rounding off a long drive, the rooms had paper thin walls: a man snored loudly on one side while a woman made over-enthusiastic unconvincing sex noises on the other. She would have thought that it was somebody watching porn on TV except she could hear the bed thudding into the wall.

Dropping her key-card at the reception desk in the morning, there was no need for her to check out. The bland chain of traveller's hotels had no room service, minibar or other services for their guests. There was no bill to settle as she'd paid for her stay in advance.

Tired, hungry, stressed, without make-up: she was looking perfect for the day's goal.

Punching an address into her sat-nav, she was directed to an industrial estate on the outskirts of Greater Manchester, near a large satellite town. Many large corrugated metal sheds were spread over an area of several square miles, served by a warren of private roads. This was one of the largest warehousing and distribution hubs in the UK, handling stock for many national retailers as well as much smaller businesses too.

Lara knew precisely where she was going, having consulted a map of the estate at the entrance, but she left her car and continued on foot. She passed several bus stops and made a mental note of their route numbers and the bus company that provided the service. The large estate was divided into several different parts, with side roads allowing access to the units that subdivided the enormous sheds. Each unit had its own loading bay and a door into the reception and office areas.

Finding the unit she was looking for, the loading bay was deserted but there was a light on in reception. The red LED on a keypad showed the door was locked and there was an entryphone. A dog-eared piece of paper in the window of said: "Post/courier: *81#". Lara typed it into the keypad. The LED flashed green and the door lock buzzed. She stepped inside and there was a 'beep-bop' electronic noise.

She approached the unmanned reception desk. Part of the desk could be lifted up to get behind it and through to a short corridor with 3 doors. The door at the far end was open, but she couldn't see any further inside. One of the other doors opened and a man stepped out. He closed the door behind himself and walked up to the desk, looking quizzical.

"Can I help you? We weren't expecting anybody today." he said.

"Yes, I'm hoping you can help me. I've travelled a long way." Lara replied.

"Oh? Where have you come from?"

"London."

"You must have set off very early."

"I stayed in a hostel in Manchester last night and then got the first bus out to the estate this morning" she lied.

"You must be very keen to see us about something."

"Yeah, it's about an order."

"An order? We haven't sold anything for months."

"I know. That's why I'm here."

"Look. I'm very sorry but we've ceased trading. We haven't even got any stock any more. I'm just here doing some administrative work."

"My boyfriend and I are desperate. We've been going through hell since you shut down."

"You do know why we shut down, right?" the man asked.

"I heard something."

"What do you want?"

"I want to buy FRL." Lara replied

"That was a special order item." the man said, his eyes narrowing.

"Randy! I'll take it from here" said a female voice at the end of the corridor. A woman came from the left hand side of the open doorway, stirring a spoon in a mug. She walked down the corridor and set her drink down on the front desk, lifting up the part to allow access.

"Follow me, my love." the woman said, giving Randy a long look as she walked past him and down the corridor. She turned left into a kitchen with a metal sink, water-cooler and a round table with 3 chairs around it. "Take a seat" she said, gathering a few papers that were on the table and putting them upside down under a blue notebook. "I'm Pauline. Who are you?" the woman asked.

"My name's Lara."

"Lara what?"

"Lara Sutton."

"Do I know you?"

"You might know my boyfriend's name. He bought from you regularly."

"What do you want?" Pauline asked, firing off quick blunt questions with a blank impassive expression.

"FRL."

"You know all my stock has been seized. It's all been tested. My solicitor has got a copy of the results. You've got everything you need. What more do you want?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"Look. I need to speak to my solicitor. I've already been co-operative and everything is in my statements. I think it's time for you to leave."

"You think I'm a policewoman?" Lara asked, shocked.

"Or a journalist. I don't know. Either way, I'd like you to leave."

"Look you fucking bitch. My boyfriend's dead, OK. He's fucking dead. I want to know what the fuck FRL is and where you were getting it from." Lara yelled, anger suddenly surging up from deep inside. Her eyes blazed with rage and she stood up so fast that the chair she had been sitting on crashed over backwards. Randy leapt out of the office and stuck his head around the corner.

"It's OK, Randy" said Pauline. "Sit down and be quiet" she said with a smile curling up at the corners of her mouth. She looked like a predator toying with its prey.

Lara slowly pulled the other chair round the table without breaking eye contact, scraping the legs noisily across the concrete floor. She sat down and folded her arms, glaring ferociously back at Pauline.

"You're really clueless, aren't you?" Pauline asked rhetorically, chuckling to herself. "Is your boyfriend really dead?"

"You don't seem to care."

"That's not true. Everything we ever sold was marked 'not for human consumption' with a big skull and crossbones, but yet I'm probably going to end up in jail."

"Yes, but it will be for conspiracy to supply a controlled substance, not for manslaughter."

"Oh, so you do know something" Pauline feigned a shocked face.

"All I know are the charges brought against you. I don't know what FRL is or where you were getting it from."

"Ha!" Pauline suddenly laughed. "Nobody knows what FRL is. That's the fucking point. Do you want to know the little joke we had in the warehouse?"

"Tell me" Lara said, gritting her teeth. She desperately wanted to punch this woman in the face but she knew that she had to bottle her feelings or else she wouldn't get a single bit more information until the trial.

"Fuck Real Life. That's the joke. Do you know what the V part is?"

"No."

"Version. Whenever we used up a batch, we'd make up another lot using whatever we had in stock. A cocktail. We didn't know what we were selling any more than the junkies knew what they were buying."

"So you knew you were selling to addicts? You knew people were taking the drugs you were selling?"

"If an addict's not buying from us they're buying from a street corner or direct from China. I'm just a middleman. Supply and demand" said Pauline matter of factly.

"Your drugs killed my boyfriend."

"You don't know that though, do you? Be honest."

Lara's eyes betrayed her. She broke her stare for a fraction of a second and Pauline saw a flicker of doubt cross Lara's face.

"He stopped ordering from you 6 weeks before he disappeared."

"How much was he taking?" Pauline asked.

"I don't know. He was spending £25 each time."

"Different things cost different amounts. I don't remember all the prices of everything we sold."

"I've got an invoice here" said Lara, producing a photocopy with Neil's name and address redacted.

"Half a gram." Pauline said.

"Where does it say that?"

"Right there. 0.5g. That's 0.5 grams."

"Enough to kill him."

"I couldn't say. I'm not a doctor. But it's not enough to last a junkie for 6 weeks."

"He could have quit and relapsed."

"Well if he did, he didn't get his drugs from me. By your own admission he hadn't bought anything from us for 6 weeks when he disappeared. When did he die? What drugs did he have in his bloodstream when he died?"

"You'll find out when you're put on trial, murderer!" Lara spat. "I bet you've never had to look your victims in the eye, you heartless bitch."

Pauline sat calmly with icy coldness, looking at Lara, considering her.

"If your junkie boyfriend bought drugs directly from China, as I suspect he did, cutting out the middleman, then he would have been getting 99% purity."

"What do you mean?"

"We would add an excipient to the products we sold, to bulk it out. If your boyfriend was buying half a gram from us, that would be the same as buying 5 grams direct from China."

"So you're saying what you can get from China is 10 times stronger than what you sold?"

"At least. The Chinese chemists are always coming up with new stronger drugs too. He could have ended up with something a hundred times stronger than anything we were selling. A completely novel compound unknown to anybody here in the UK. He was a human guinea pig. If he only wanted half a gram, the Chinese labs would send him a free sample of their latest creation to get him hooked."

"You disgust me" Lara said, her eyes filling with tears. Her head swam with all this new information and she was overwhelmed. She didn't know who to be angry with, who to blame. It was all too much to process.

She'd had thoughts that she wanted to hurt Pauline, or at least scream abuse at her. She wanted her to know how much damage she'd done. She wanted justice. Lara couldn't think about that at that moment. She stumbled to her feet and out of the warehouse. Outside she sucked in gasps of cold air, hyperventilating.

The unit opposite was a garage and had its loading bay door open. Two cars were lifted up on inspection stands and were being worked on by mechanics. A man in dirty overalls came over.

"Are you OK?" he asked.

Lara looked at him but couldn't quite hold herself steady enough to speak.

"Do you need an ambulance?"

"No. I'll be OK. I just need to get away from here" she said, starting to walk off in the direction of where she parked.

The mechanic went back to the workshop, taking off his oil-stained gloves. A moment later, he emerged from the garage driving a car.

"Do you need a lift?" he called through the passenger window.

Lara stopped walking and thought about it for a moment.

"My car isn't far. Just by the entrance to the estate."

"Jump in anyway. It'll save you 5 minutes walk."

There was a moment of silence as they pulled away. The mechanic was sat on a clear plastic bag that protected the driver's seat. He kept his eyes on the road.

"What was that all about?" he asked as they pulled up behind Lara's car.

Lara looked at him, but she didn't reply.

"I work opposite. I've seen the police in there quite a few times, pulling out loads of stuff bagged and tagged as evidence. Everybody on the estate knows they're scumbag drug dealers. There are housing estates in Manchester where they beat the living shit out of any heroin dealers they catch. These 'legal high' places selling on the Internet seem to be getting away with murder."

"You're not wrong about that. Thanks for the lift." said Lara.

Next chapter...

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

20. Segmentation

When Lara was working her day shift, she would get home at around 7:30pm and have an hour where Neil was vaguely compos mentis. He would take his medication at around 8pm and by 8:30pm his eyelids were heavy and he would be slurring his words.

"Time for bed, Neil."

Uncomplaining and compliant Neil would be led to the bedroom where Lara would help him undress and get under the covers. It was as if he was blind drunk: barely able to comprehend where he was or navigate the short distance to the bedroom on his own. It was alarming to see how heavily medicated he was, but Lara trusted the judgement of the doctors and had confidence that his health would soon improve.

During her night shift, Lara became aware just how little of the day Neil was awake and active. Sleeping until nearly 11am, he pulled on some clothes and lolloped down the staircase where she heard him collapse on the sofa. The sound of daytime television could be softly heard from the bedroom, but she knew he was half-dozing with glazed eyes, not taking anything in. Before she left to go to work in the evening, his mind seemed a little less cloudy, but he had little more than an hour before he had to take his 8pm dose of medication.

The change from his depressed demeanour was unmistakable. When he was depressed he was present, but also cold, withdrawn and a little passive-aggressive. He was hostile towards the world, fatigued, but his mind was still sharp. Now, he was a shell of a man: he shuffled around, slept and ate, but there was no living spirit within him. He was dead behind his eyes, which seemed more sad than the expression he wore when he said he didn't want to live anymore.

It was pretty clear when Neil skipped his medication. He would be wired: wide awake with manic eyes and an electric energy, restless.

"Did you take your meds?" Lara asked.

"Whose prescription is it? Mine or yours?"

"It's yours."

"OK. Good. You worry about your medications, I'll worry about mine."

He wore a fierce expression. He was upset, defensive, offended that she would question whether he was taking his drugs. It was obvious when he hadn't, but she couldn't press him further on the matter without an explosive argument.

At first, he only skipped doses sporadically. It was as if he wanted to occasionally remind himself what it was like to be unmedicated.

Returning home one day, Neil was not in the snug or in the bedroom. Looking in the box room and the spare bedroom, Neil didn't appear to be in either. As she walked through the hallway towards the kitchen, she heard a sound come from the cupboard under the stairs.

"What the hell, Neil? What's wrong?"

He was in the cupboard completely naked with a bright red mop bucket on his head.

"Get away from me! Shut the door!"

"What's wrong, Neil?"

"Don't let those bloodsucking bastards get in here. Keep the fucking bats away from me" he shouted, with his hands flailing in the air.

"What's wrong with your arms? They're covered in scratches."

This seemed to stir some memory in him that he had forgotten. He started attacking his skin.

"Insects. Ants. Under my skin. Look at them crawling under there!" he picked at something unseen on his arm. A little blood appeared where his fingernail dug in.

"Neil you're seeing things. There aren't any bats. There aren't any insects."

"Fuck off. Fuck off. Fuck off." he shouted, cowering in the corner of the cupboard and pulling the bucket down over his head as if it could protect his whole body.

"Please come out from there. You're covered in scratches. You're hurting yourself."

"Leave me alone. You're a liar. You're a fucking liar."

"What am I lying about, Neil?"

"You know what it is."

"What is it?"

"You know. You all know. Fuck off and leave me alone."

The crisis team convened an assessment with Neil's doctor, a psychiatrist, a social worker and a mental health nurse. Two police officers stood in the hallway. Lara hovered in the doorway of the snug looking extremely anxious. Neil was sat at one end of the sofa in his dressing gown.

"We know you've stopped taking your medication, Neil. You should have refilled your prescription a week ago."

"I told you. The side effects were intolerable."

"Yes, but the medication was controlling your illness. You need the medication to stay well."

"I wasn't unwell before I started taking it."

"That's not true. Your notes say you were very unwell. The crisis team have been in contact for quite a while now."

"I wasn't hearing things. I wasn't seeing things."

"That was because the medication was working."

"The problems started when I stopped taking the quetiapine."

"There you go then, see! The medication was working. Why won't you start taking it again?"

"I told you. I'm OK. I can't stand the side effects. I don't need the quetiapine."

"But you had a psychotic episode. You got very sick without the medication. You need the medication to control your illness, Neil."

"What illness? I was depressed. That was all."

"Neil. You're very sick. You're exhibiting all the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. We're all very worried about you. You're not safe if you're not taking your medication."

The social worker from the crisis team got up and took Lara into the dining room.

"Look, we're going to have to take him into hospital to look after him and to assess him."

"OK, when? How long for?"

"I think we're going to recommend that he stays for 28 days. He's really sick and we need to get to the bottom of this. He's clearly not coping at home. You've been doing a great job, but he needs to be looked after in hospital."

"So, you're sectioning him?"

"We need to make our final decision, but it's likely that he's going to go to hospital under section two. He's not well and it's the best thing for him right now."

"What happens next?"

"We'll find a bed for him at a local facility and then he'll be admitted. Once he's settled in you'll be able to visit. He might not have to stay for the full 28 days, but we need to make sure he's in a safe place where the doctors can properly assess him and help him get better."

"He's angry with me. He was furious that I called you guys."

"You did the best possible thing you could. He was a danger to himself. It's really great that you called us and we can start to get Neil the help he needs."

Lara wasn't able to get to the ward during visiting hours until the weekend. Neil didn't want to see her and refused to come out of his bedroom.

"I'm sorry Lara, he doesn't want to see you right now" a nurse explained.

After 3 weeks, Neil appeared back at the house.

"I didn't know you were coming home."

"They let me have some leave. Time off for good behaviour" Neil chuckled darkly. He avoided eye contact and he scowled.

"Are you OK?"

"Would you be OK if you'd been forcibly removed from your own home, bitch?"

Lara drew her breath sharply, as if she had been physically struck.

"Neil!" she sharply rebuked at the harshness of his language, but she was more hurt and shocked than anything.

"It wasn't like that" she said with a concillatory tone. "You were really sick. Do you remember what you were like? Do you remember? You were under the stairs with a bucket on your head. What was I supposed to do?" Lara asked, reaching out to touch his arm. Neil pulled away from her baring his teeth, his eyes flashing with rage.

"Stay the fuck away from me."

She knew she sounded patronising and he felt betrayed. He had been brooding in hospital and the situation was highly charged, but she wanted him to know that she hadn't meant to hurt him. It was painful to see so much anger and mistrust directed towards her.

"Look. I love you. I care about you. I just want to see you get better."

"You got all those people ganging up on me. You turned my own doctor against me. What right do you have to do that?"

"You were having a crisis, Neil."

"Stop using my fucking name. It's just me and you here. There's nobody else here. Fuck."

Neil stormed off. Lara heard the sound of shattering glass and then a yell of pain. She hesitated and then started to walk upstairs. Neil crossed the landing and went into the bathroom. Tentatively, she poked her head in the doorway.

"Fuck off. Fuck off and leave me alone."

Neil was wrapping tissue paper around his hand. There were blood spots on the grey tiles all over the floor around his feet.

"Why the fuck are you still stood there? Fuck off. FUCK OFF" he screamed.

Lara went into the bedroom where a full-length mirror was shattered. The glass was mostly clean but large dark red blood spots were soaked into the carpet, trailing through the hallway and into the bathroom. Neil emerged and walked into the spare bedroom.

"Are you OK?" she asked.

He slammed the door closed.

"FUCK OFF!" she heard him yell, muffled inside.

On Sunday evening Neil left the house without saying a word. Lara waited until about 9pm and phoned the hospital.

"Is Neil back?"

"Yeah he came back a couple of hours ago."

Lara was relieved. She had been torn, not knowing whether to phone the crisis team again or not, knowing that Neil would feel even more betrayed. She sunk into the sofa and convulsive sobs hit her before she'd even put the phone down.

Next chapter...

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

17. The Holiday

"What do you mean you're not offering the service anymore?" Neil asked as courteously as he could, although he was aware that his question was put through gritted teeth and a fake smile that looked more like a grimace.

"It's not something this post office is doing anymore."

"But when we spoke, you said you were able to receive my mail."

"Yes, but then I discussed it with my manager and he contacted the regional manager and we decided that our branch was too small to offer the service."

"So what's happened to my mail?" asked Neil.

"We had to return it to the sender."

"OK. Thank you" Neil said curtly, tapping the counter top lightly as he turned and left. There was no way he could conceal his annoyance but he knew there was no sense in kicking off, creating a scene. He knew that if he pressed the matter further it was likely that the other post offices in the area would be told they couldn't accept poste restante mail.

It wasn't a complete disaster but having to wait a couple of weeks for two envelopes to wing their way around the globe would be agonising.

"Why didn't you deal with this earlier?" he muttered to himself under his breath on the street outside.

The town was filled with market day traders and shoppers and he was drawing unwanted attention to himself as he walked slowly along the pavement. His cheekbones stood out prominently on his face and his eyes were sunken in dark hollows. He'd been able to do little more than smear dirt around his face with a wetted rag and his baseball cap did little to hide his greasy matted hair. Now back in the open, his odour wafted away in the breeze, but the person who had queued behind him in the post office had left a considerable gap because Neil desperately needed a wash.

Neil had not planned on buying more than a plastic bag full of food & drink as soon as he had collected his third envelope. He hadn't really got a plan B. He'd been worried that there would be a problem at one of the post offices, but he was also desperate for things to go his way. Today, they hadn't. He was still dealing with his disappointment and annoyance. He wasn't thinking clearly.

Walking all the way back to the van, he cursed under his breath.

"Fucking hell. What a fucking shit. What a fucking pain in the arse. Shit. Fuck. Piss. Bollocks."

He'd started to walk more briskly now that he knew what must be done, but he had none of the energy and sense of urgency that he would usually have when returning with his envelope. He stared down at the pavement a little way ahead of him, blinkered to everything around him, lost in a world of his own.

"What an absolute shit. What a total fuck up" he muttered.

Finally reaching the van, he opened the back doors and got out a small blue rucksack. He slammed the door closed and locked it. He raised his eyes momentarily, realising he was drawing attention to himself on the quiet residential back street where he had parked. There didn't seem to be anybody around.

Jumping in the driver's seat, he got his laptop out and powered it up.

"Fuck. Fucking idiot country bumpkins. Fucking backwards cocksuckers" he said to himself, hitting the steering wheel and slamming the lid of the laptop closed.

Stepping out of the van and locking it, Neil now walked back into the town centre.

"What a waste of fucking time. What a waste of fucking energy" he muttered over and over again. He was passing people on the pavement again and held his tongue, knowing that a wild looking man talking to himself was liable to be alarming sight for the local people.

Entering a pub, Neil approached the barman.

"Excuse me. Do you have Wi-Fi?" he asked.

"Yep. For customers" the barman replied with hostility.

"Half a lemonade, please."

Unplacated, the barman poured the drink.

"And a packet of salt and vinegar crisps, please."

"That'll be two pounds fifteen. The Wi-Fi password is on the blackboard in the back by the pool table" the barman said, now satisfied that Neil had spent an adequate amount of money to be considered a customer. Too many people used the pub's toilets without even buying a drink on market day and he was not in a good mood.

Whipping out his laptop, Neil positioned himself with his back facing the corner of the room so that nobody could see the screen. Connected to the Internet wirelessly, he plugged in a memory stick and opened a password-protected document. Pasting links, usernames and passwords from his document into the web browser, he did everything that he needed to do within ten minutes. His lemonade and crisps were untouched when he left the pub.

The Chinese working day was over and it would take the postal service 7 to 10 days to deliver, which meant he had at least 8 days to wait. Envelopes usually cleared customs without any delays, but he was dreading the day when something went missing in transit or took much longer to be delivered than expected. 

Feelings of exhaustion and depression swept over him as he trudged along, walking the same route for the 4th time that day. He felt tearful. He felt anger and frustration. At times he would look up and glance at the people he passed. Was he angry with them? He was angry with somebody, everyone, anyone.

Driving back to the caravan he had the heater turned way up. He was sleepy and he wasn't concentrating. He got lost a couple of times on the back lanes.

"Stupid fucking time-waster. What a waste of fucking space" he yelled at himself.

Eventually he parked up in the forest. He didn't really want to turn the engine off because he was cosy and warm. He sat in the van as it got darker and darker and the warmth seeped away before stiffly easing his way out of the driver's seat and staggering back to the caravan. In the bedroom he wrapped himself up tightly in the sleeping bag and curled up in a ball. His hands and face were freezing and he was trembling. His whole body ached.

He woke up knowing he'd slept for a long time but he was still really tired. He was hungry and thirsty and he needed to go to the toilet. He felt cold but he really didn't want to get out of the sleeping bag because he knew it would be even more cold. He wasn't comfortable, but he wanted to lie there on the bed, curled up.

Eventually, the discomfort in his bladder drove him to get out of bed and go outside to urinate. He hopped lightly back into the caravan, hugging himself to keep warm even though he was fully clothed. Going to his rucksack, he went to the top pocket and pulled out a strip of pills. Popping two pills out of the blister pack he paused for a second and then popped out two more. He paused again and then popped out a fifth. Necking the tablets, he then looked around for a bottle with any liquid left in it. There was a water bottle with barely a mouthful left, which Neil snatched up, unscrewed the cap and tipped into his mouth with his head back, swallowing.

After a cursory glance around confirmed there was nothing else to drink in the caravan, he returned to bed. Soon, he fell into a comfortable drugged sleep. He woke up feeling groggy and hung over. His thirst and his hunger were now unbearable, but he slowly surveyed the scene of the caravan with one eye open, groaning as he rolled over in his sleeping bag. Eventually, he dragged himself out of bed.

Unsteady on his feet, he straightened out his clothes and sighed. Rummaging in his rucksack, he pulled out the black duffel bag and left the caravan.

In the car park by the convenience store in the first town he'd visited, he knew he was taking a huge risk, but he desperately needed supplies. He felt hot and cold flushes and his joints ached. He was weak and he shuffled along, but he didn't have far to walk to get to the shop and to drag his bag back to the van.

In the shop he bought a 5 litre bottle of mineral water, shower gel, deodorant, disposable razors, toothpaste and a toothbrush, toilet roll as well as 10 cans of caffeinated energy drink, a large bottle of cola and several Cornish pasties.

"Big night last night?" the young shop assistant chuckled.

Neil replied with a grunt. He swayed a little at the counter as he waited for the items to be scanned.

"Are you OK?" the young man asked.

"I'm fine. How much is it?" Neil replied.

Packing all his shopping into the black bag, Neil was slow and clumsy. Other customers were waiting to pay, but he didn't notice: his mind was cloudy; he was sick and exhausted.

In the van, he downed an energy drink which slaked his thirst. The brief boost to his blood sugar meant that he felt OK driving back and he managed to drag the duffel bag into the caravan. After three bites of a Cornish pasty, he curled up by the dining table and fell asleep.

For four days he felt too unwell to leave the bedroom except to eat, drink and go to the toilet. He had cold sweats and his whole body ached. Waves of nausea swept over him, but he managed to avoid throwing up and held his food down.

On the fifth day he felt a little better and he thought about going home, to his home town, his house. Maybe he could get in contact with Lara. Maybe she would come and look after him. He knew it would be a horrible journey on public transport when he was still feeling very unwell, but he could manage it. Perhaps his journey was at its end.

He ate his remaining food, drank the last of the cola and had a couple of energy drinks. With the help of a couple of sleeping pills, he managed to get a good night's sleep.

Waking up, he felt refreshed and a little energised. It was a cold day, but he knew that he had to wash. Rinsing the soap out of his hair with freezing water gave him an ice-cream headache, but it felt nice to be taking care of his appearance after so long. He flanneled himself with a soapy rag, getting rid of the worst of the dirt and smell from his body. Brushing his teeth and spraying deodorant all over his body, he felt like a new man. He put on his set of clean clothes.

There was no doubt in his mind about what he was going to do next.

"Hi. Is there any post for me?"

With the envelope in his hands, he wasn't going to make the same mistakes this time. He rushed to the hardware store and bought some self-adhesive plastic to obscure the caravan windows, a stanley knife, a staple-gun, a bolt for the bedroom door, a screwdriver, a hammer, some masking tape, insulation tape and duct tape. He drove to the supermarket on the edge of town and parked in the car park. He bought 6 large bottles of mineral water, 6 large bottles of cola, 5 tins of baked beans, 5 tins of spaghetti hoops and 6 packets of salted crisps.

Driving home, he was struck with the urge to stop outside the fish & chip shop and get a takeaway. He bought a large cod and chips and a pot of curry sauce.

"You're looking well" the woman behind the counter said.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"I saw you in Axeton the other week. You looked like death warmed up"

"Yeah, I wasn't very well" he replied.

"Well, it's good to see you're on the mend. All the colour has come back into your cheeks"

Sitting down at the caravan's dining table with all his purchases, Neil unwrapped the paper of the first hot meal he'd had in over a month. The food had gone a little cold but delicious smells wafted up: battered fish, golden chips, salt and vinegar. He ate quickly and soon he felt uncomfortably stuffed, because his stomach had shrunk.

Why hadn't he just gone to sleep and then gotten himself away from there?

Now he lay contemplating his fate. He was a little appalled that he threw away such a great a chance to escape; to run for his life. For a brief moment, there had been a glimmer of hope, of redemption, but he hadn't cared at the time. He hadn't given it a moment's thought, but now he considered how close he had been to avoiding his current predicament, if only he had made a different choice that night.

Next chapter...

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 earning money...

In the agricultural revolution, the scythe, the plough and the mill brought about greater productivity in our fields, and put more bread in our bellies. In the industrial revolution, the steam engine, the foundry and great big machines brought about greater productivity in our factories, and put shoes on our feet. In the information revolution, the spreadsheet, email and meetings have brought about greater productivity in our offices, and put zeroes on the end of the bank balances of the mega wealthy.

The average return on capital is exceeding the growth rate. This means that no matter how hard you work, the rich will get richer and poor will get poorer. If you are already wealthy, you will grow more wealthy, but for the rest of us our wages are falling in real terms.

"The triumph of human capital over financial capital and real estate, capable managers over fat cat stockholders, and skill over nepotism is largely illusory.” -- Thomas Piketty

It's a depressing situation, but sadly it's true. We are now living in the era of the supermanager. The remuneration for those at the top of the pyramid is completely unhinged and insane. There is absolutely no way that the eye-watering salaries demanded by top executives, in any way reflects their productivity. In fact, quite the opposite.

The National Health Service (NHS) has spent billions on re-organisation. The NHS is drowning under a sea of managers, while front-line services are cut back.

The reason why economic growth is stagnant, is because productivity is an illusion. When nearly everybody is a manager, hardly anybody is actually doing any work.

Managers only do three things:

1. Any good news from their team, they just forward to their boss
2. Any pressure / demands / requests / questions from their boss, they just forward to their team
3. They think up ways to justify their jobs

A manager has a lot of time to dream up creative ways of wasting everyone's time, because they don't actually do any work. A manager needs to look busy, so they come up with all kinds of time-wasting scams and schemes in order to justify their pointless existence.

Microsoft have actually cottoned on to the fact that there is a giant army of middle managers, who do nothing but forward emails up and down the chain of command. In the email program Microsoft Outlook, there are actually buttons that make it even easier to just forward good news to your boss, and to forward other requests and things to your team. I literally just need two buttons to do my job. I don't even have to do any typing.

People don't like doing the typing.

Everything's a copy & paste job. Being a manager has become a job of forwarding emails and sitting in meetings because you're bored. If you feel really pointless, you can do a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation to bore the shit out of everybody. Nobody writes concise emails that everybody can dutifully ignore because they're pointless noise.

There are a few idealistic young employees - unpaid interns - who do all the work, which is then re-hashed as it works its way up through the ranks of middle management. Every layer of management is careful to remove any reference that would give credit to the person who actually did the work. Managers pass things off as their own effort, although secretly they know that they don't actually do anything.

This is so much worse than Imposter Syndrome. Most managers are actually imposters. They're there for the comfy seat, free coffee, warm office and hefty pay packet at the end of the month.

It's no wonder that lean startups are actually able to deliver great things: they're unencumbered by the valueless people who try to add value when actually they do nothing of the sort.

Trying to get a decision out of the chain of command is like trying to nail jelly to the wall. Managers know that the only way they're going to get fired is if they make a decision that turns out to be wrong. The easiest way to be secure in your job is to avoid taking decisions. The very managers who were hired to be executives - high-powered decision makers - are actually avoiding ever making a decision, in case it ends up reflecting badly on them. No manager has the guts to actually make a decision and face the potential consequences. Middle managers are experts in avoiding all responsibility.

We now have an office culture, completely dominated by a kind of 'pass the parcel' children's game. Everybody knows that things are going badly because nobody is doing any work and nobody is making any decisions or showing any kind of leadership. Instead, the buck gets passed round and round, as everybody tries to blame everybody else, and avoid any responsibility themselves. Often, it's the very people who are too busy doing the actual work who get blamed, because they didn't have the time to play the silly game and cover their arses.

You can be assured that when things go wrong, the blame will trickle down, until some poor sod on the front line is criticised for not staying on top of a totally unreasonable workload. Some poor scapegoat will be blamed, because they made a minor error, through exhaustion and stress.

What's remarkable is how few 'executives' actually face the chop themselves, when everything screws up. You would have thought that the whole point about receiving a big salary would be because you were the one taking responsibility, and therefore you would be to blame when things go wrong. However, there is absolutely no corporate accountability. It is the workers who are held accountable by their managers, because the workers are too busy to spend time justifying their existence and covering their arses.

The most profitable thing of all is to sit idle, on a pile of money. You can never make a mistake if you simply earn interest on your capital. There's nothing ventured at all, when your wealth is growing simply because you own the casino. House always wins.

If you have wealth, if you have success, if you have an audience and fame, then you can leverage it to become even more wealthy. What - pray tell - is the innovative business idea behind Keeping Up With the Kardiashians? Presumably, some family who are completely lacking in wealth and fame would also like to be highly paid to be featured on reality TV? However, it is only those who already have wealth who are given the opportunity to make more wealth.

This era of low growth and wealth worship is absolutely destroying society. The economy is run for a tiny elite with unimaginable wealth, while the vast majority struggle in dead-end careers that are stressful and boring.

Middle management is just a position in the lower order of the entourage of the oligarchs, royalty and fat cat plutocrats. Middle managers have bought into the belief that they are going to succeed in the capitalist's pyramid scheme. Organisation charts give the belief that you are 'only' a certain number of layers of management from being the CEO, but it's a con, because each layer of middle management expands the base of the pyramid by a factor of 10.

Organisations have now started to throw around job titles like "Vice President" and "Managing Director", and there are even CEOs who are not actually CEOs. An organisation like HSBC might have hundreds of "CEO"s amongst their 230,000 staff. It's just a bullshit job title given away to make somebody think they're getting ahead in the game.

The fact of the matter is that while we toil in the hope of a promotion and a pay rise, we are wasting our time because we are becoming de-skilled and institutionalised. Our grandfathers could build houses and fix mechanical things. Our office-based service industry economy has left most people unable to even change a lightbulb.

Come the revolution, when there are power cuts and the Internet stops working, how much use are your skills in forwarding emails?

The middle managers might be able to justify their jobs today, and are attempting to stuff as much money in the mattress as possible, but it won't be enough. Even property deeds, policing and the rule of law won't matter when the masses rise up in anger at having been oppressed for too long. Even soldiers are feeling the economic squeeze, and will be unwilling to turn their guns on their own people, in order to protect the plutocrats.

The unwillingness to address income inequality and share the wealth can only lead to popular uprisings.

Tags: #capitalism #career #banking #politics

This is a story about revolting peasants...

The problem with a race to the bottom is that once taken to its ultimate conclusion, mass extinction or war, revolution & regression are the only options.

As a technologist it seems like the huge cash mountains, built up by the dominant players in the information age, might lead to innovations that could solve some of the crises facing humanity.

If you think that Elon Musk and his Gigafactory producing staggering amounts of lithium batteries is the answer, you haven't looked at the fundamentals. Batteries are about energy storage, and energy still has to be generated somehow. Lithium is a metal, and all metals have to be mined. All that production capacity for batteries drives the price much lower, while the countries who have the mineral reserves can price gouge for their scarce resources.

Let's imagine that the gulf states move from oil to solar, because they're hot desert countries with very little cloud cover. Let's imagine that China produces all those solar panels, and also fulfils its ambitions to become one of the world's top lithium exporters, to rival Chile, who are currently number one.

Wealth is going to continue to flow to the gulf states, because we're still wedded to petroleum products. Nobody has yet come up with a realistic way of moving huge container ships, aeroplanes, freight trains and heavy goods vehicles, without fuel oil, kerosene and diesel. Most industrial plant used in mining runs on diesel. Crude oil is still the grease on the wheels of industry.

Automotive transport is a disproportionately high energy user in the USA because it's a wealthy country where almost every household has a car. In China, only 13% of the population have a car. Electric self-driving cars might be a big deal in the land of the free, but the 320 million people in the USA just can't compare to China's 1,360 million.

The bulk of what's going on in the tech world at the moment is silly toys for silly boys. Yes, the achievements of the SpaceX project are incredible. Yes, electric vehicles appear to go some way towards addressing climate change. However, it's an absolute piss in the ocean for most people on the planet.

I'm not even that worried about the rise of the robots, and automation. The main problem we've got is the social disruption. For sure, things like Uber seem to deliver a great advancement for people who are already wealthy. As a rich city dweller, being able to have a "private driver" (to borrow from Uber's tagline) feels like the promised future has arrived. In fact, what's happening is that a load of cab drivers who invested a lot in their local 'knowledge' and fleet of vehicles are now on the scrap heap. Uber attracts immigrants who can raise the money to buy a Toyota Prius, and are prepared to accept appalling working conditions.

For every person's livelihood robbed by technological 'advancement', a whole family is put into an economically precarious position. What are all London's black cab drivers going to do, with their investment in their vehicles and the approximately 3 years it took them to memorise 125,000 points of interest?

It seems logical and rational that people should adapt to change as quickly as they can, because hesitation will only leave them further behind. However, people don't tend to like it very much when the rug is pulled out from under their feet. People tend to dig their heels in, complain and protest, when their comfort zone is threatened.

From weaving looms to agricultural mechanisation, the peasants have been deeply unhappy with technological advancements. For hundreds of years, people have wrung their hands about the proletariat being left idle, while the machines till the fields and make our clothes. Clearly, the workforce has adapted. New types of jobs have been created. We have seen the rise and rise of the service sector, and entertainment.

You would have thought that people would be happy. We have low mortality rates, and we no longer have to work in the blazing heat and pouring rain, out in the fields, or in the choking smog of the industrial towns. We sit in our air-conditioned offices, moving a mouse around and tapping on a keyboard. These should be halcyon days.

However, we have failed to stem the flow of information and imagery of the excesses of the wealthiest 1% flaunting their money on the world stage.

We can't help but compare ourselves with others, and most of our media is obsessed with the super-rich. The idea of a jet-set lifestyle, with limousine transport is part of what makes Uber so successful. We have been promised a better life for so long, but yet we are stuck with the drudgery of menial jobs. Suddenly we too can be chauffeur driven around. However, we forget that we are living in a tiny bubble.

The very vast majority are still living absolutely shit lives of grinding poverty. While wage increases at the bottom of the food chain look very good in percentage terms, they really don't measure up to the increased expectations of those people who are being paid marginally more. Also, there is little data to suggest that increasing somebody's salary from $1 a day to $2 a day is transformative to their quality of life.

Nearly 50% of the world's population uses the Internet, and so implicitly, those people expect to soon have a helicopter, a superyacht, a private jet and an idyllic desert island. These are the images that we see every day. This is what we're promised. I can follow Kim Kardashian on Instagram, just like I can follow my mate Fred Bloggs from down the road. It takes one swipe of my finger on my smartphone to compare myself with the top 0.1% of the population, just the same as it does to compare myself with the 99.9%.

I'm not given to comparing myself with the billions of other Internet users. Looking at Twitter is depressing. Guess what? Everybody's got a mum. Everybody's got cats & babies. Everybody's got the same worries about money, relationships and how attractive their body is. Everybody blogs. Everybody photographs. We're all just so much meat in the mincer.

There is a bit of us that needs to feel special and unique and different. "Big data" doesn't care that you're special, unique and different. Technology says that you're just one of billions of users. You're just one pair of eyeballs in a sea of marketing opportunities. Tech is a numbers game. You're a statistically negligible number.

As our communities have collapsed, and we have been driven into increasingly desperate lonely isolated lives, where our only connection with the world is through social networking, the war on our workplace rages on. The same technology that knows if you're engaging with advertising can be used to make sure that we're paying attention while we're working our jobs. Eye-tracking technology could easily be used to deduct money from your wages every time you stare out of the window, instead of focussing on your spreadsheets and email.

Technology is developing very fast, and the hype suggests that exponential growth is delivering all the things that we've been imagining for hundreds of years.

The truth, however, is that somebody still has to mine your lithium, install your solar panels, and actually permit the switch to be thrown to enable our robotic overlords.

What we're going to find is that even though the geeks might be right, people still don't like to end up standing around with their dick in their hands, looking like a total idiot. The message from the technologists seems to be "this is better, so you'd better get on with accepting the future" and "evolve or die".

It's been very frustrating as a technologist to be held back by dinosaurs who just don't 'get it'. It's been very frustrating to work with organisations that are extremely resistant to change. A lot of people who I meet in my job have 99 reasons why something won't work, and will be deliberately obstructive. In order to get anything done, I've had to become extremely resourceful about going round people who just want to protect their jobs.

There are more people than you think who are having a shitty time. There are all those people who society has been happy to leave festering in the "economically inactive" bucket. There are the vast majority, who are seen as a commodity pool, to be given zero hours contract McJobs on minimum wage. There are the jaded, disillusioned, demotivated and demoralised people who are educated and intelligent enough to see that the system's pretty crooked - the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer - who are also bored zombies in their horrible office jobs.

The thumb screws are getting tightened on the working class, with austerity, benefit cuts, job insecurity, pay cuts in real terms, ever-increasing cost of living (i.e. food, housing, energy, transport) and every other thing that creates a death by a thousand cuts.

And why are the ordinary people suffering this low growth, high stress environment? So that we can have bank bailouts, corporate welfare and tax breaks for millionaires.

Yes, us technologists can imagine a utopian society of endless leisure time, self-driving electric cars and android servants, but we are very unlikely to get there while the bankers, oligarchs and politicians are attempting to feather their already plump nests.

Already, we see anger directed at gentrification. How long before the peasants march to Palo Alto with their pitchforks and burning torches, in order to lop off the heads of the plutocrats who say "let them eat Facebook likes"?

Tags: #computing #socialmedia

This is a story about office life...

Look closely at the image above. It appears like I already wrote this blog post. It certainly feels like that. Haven't we been here before? Deja vu?

When you get stuck into a cycle, how do you break out of it? When the loudspeakers scream with feedback, because the sound that the microphone captures is being amplified and re-amplified, how do you reset, without cutting the power?

My behaviour might look self-sabotaging, but I'm actually deliberately burning bridges so that I have no line of retreat back to the places that made me unhappy in the first place.

When I worked in the City the first time around, I used to have 3 or 4 strong macchiato coffees every day. That's 12 espresso shots. I used to get drunk most lunchtimes and after work. I needed 2/3rds of a bottle of red wine to get to sleep, after all that coffee.

Uppers and downers, round and round. We rode the rollercoaster nonstop until we were sick. Every day, every week, every month, every year... they were the same.

When I was in my early 20's it wasn't such a big deal. We used to tank up on caffeine, churn out a load of code that would form the backbone of the world's economy, and then go get drunk to try and calm down a bit. We thought we could carry on like that forever, with our uppers and downers.

I saw colleagues get sick with stress, anxiety, depression, alcoholism. Some of my colleagues needed liver transplants. Some of my colleagues died. The system chewed us up and spat us out.

By my mid 20s I'd owned a yacht, a speedboat, sportscars... for some reason no amount of material possessions and status symbols seemed to quench the massive insecurity and frustration with life. Take a socially awkward, unpopular geek, sprinkle in wealth and the illusion that you're being 'successful' in life, and you wind up with a pretty confused adult.

While my schoolfriends paired off with lifelong partners and started to have children, I would suddenly decide that a loving relationship would be my salvation. I moved to a Surrey commuter town with a girlfriend, and started to play golf and generally start to think & act like a middle-aged family man. That was a bit of strange thing to do for a 21 year old.

Back in London after my first experiment into becoming a happy adult had failed, I satisfied myself with extreme sports, Internet discussion forums and lots of holidays and weekends away with nice big social clan. The London Kitesurfers 'club' was a lovely thing to be part of for several years. However, I still felt that I was missing that 'love' piece of the puzzle.

Some nice scientist kitesurfer girl seemed to tick all the boxes, and I launched myself with great intensity at a long-distance relationship that was never going to work. Relocating to the South coast, I quickly got involved with a geek girl who was into adventure sports: she seemed ideal, on paper.

I set about building the framework for a comfortable family life: the house, the steady job, the sensible car. However, I ignored the massive red flag: my girlfriend was a mean person.

I'm not easily dissuaded from my goals. Whatever obstacles I encounter, I just go around them. I'm a completer-finisher. I try to fix, improve, change, rather than throw things away or start again.

Anyway, I was flogging a dead horse. No matter how many times I painted a perfect picture postcard of how life could be, I'd found somebody who was stubbornly resistant to the idea of being nice and kind and supportive of the person who potentiated a 5-star luxury lifestyle for both of us. There was plenty of space for us both to shine, but sadly, she wanted me to be subdued and subserviant. She had gotten used to being showered with praise and being top of her class. She wasn't used to sharing the stage. She wasn't prepared for both of us to be happy.

I abandoned that life. I lost my business, my reputation with the major employers in the local area, my house and a substantial chunk of my wealth. I was fighting for survival, so I didn't have the time to go and carefully unpick the things that I had spent years building. I had no need of a house and shedful of things. What was I going to do with all that stuff? It was an unncessary millstone around my neck.

Now I find myself following a tried-and-trusted formula for wealth and 'success'. I'm rapidly putting together a lovely home again. I'm rapidly rebuilding my cash position. I'm rapidly rebuilding my reputation. However, I've seen it all and done it all before. I'm just going through the practiced motions.

"How did you know that was going to happen?" my colleagues ask me, like I'm some kind of clairvoyant. My ability to 'predict' the future is nothing more than making educated guesses, because I've been seen it all before. It looks prescient, but it's no more amazing than somebody who's learned from their mistakes.

That means my day job is pretty dull. I finish people's sentences, and I take great delight in giving people things they need before they ask for them. I'm ahead of the game. In the oft-quoted words of Wayne Gretsky, I'm skating to where the hockey puck is going to be.

I'm aware that this seems very arrogant. I'm not delusional. I know I'm not special or different. I know I'm no smarter than your average Joe.

I've done a 'gap' analysis, of my unsatisfying, unfulfilling and depression-filled life, and it seems like I need a dog, a cat, some kids and a loving supportive partner. If you ask children to draw a picture, they'll normally draw a house, the sun, some clouds, their parents and brothers & sisters, their pets. It seems like a pretty tried-and-trusted formula for life.

However, I even feel guilty about my cat living with my parents because he comes from a broken home. My cat, Frankie, has had to move house once in his kitty life, and I feel bad about the disruption and stress I caused him. I would love it if Frankie could live with me, but it would be cruel to make him live in a 4th floor apartment in a busy city. Having Frankie adopted by my parents, with their generous garden and surrounding Cotswold countryside, was the least bad option, but I still feel guilty.

Can you imagine how bad I'd feel if I had kids and they had a stressful home life? Can you imagine how guilty I'd feel if I knew that I selfishly chose to have children because they would give my life purpose and meaning, but I failed to adequately consider that the world I bequeathed to them is dying?

I'm running in autopilot at work. My brain is on tickover, doing my job. This unfortunately leaves a lot of time to consider the plight of the world's poor and struggling people. I have a lot of time to think about war and preventable diseases. I have a lot of time to think about inequalities and morality. I seem to be like a sponge, sucking up all the pain, suffering, cruelty, anger, hostility, selfishness, greed and immorality that seems to characterise the human race.

I could cut myself off from reading the news, but what would I do all day while I'm bored at work?

I can read the news, and if I get caught then nobody's really that bothered because I'm on top of my work and performing well. If I write my blog and try to stay on top of these feelings that threaten to overwhelm me, then I'm always nervous that my mask is going to slip.

I'm flirting with disaster anyway, wearing a semicolon tattoo just behind my ear, that advertises my struggle with depression, anxiety, addiction, self-harm and suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts.

When you have a problem, you can try to solve the root cause, or you can find a workaround. I know what the workarounds are. I know what the root cause is. I'm just not really satisfied that I can either do much about human nature and a selfish race intent on destroying itself, and neither am I very happy to attempt to insulate myself from reality, using drugs and money to put myself into a protective bubble

Begging is illegal in the City of London. Canary Wharf is a private estate, so undesirable members of society can actually be thrown out of the rich little enclave. You can kid yourself that there aren't any problems in the world, because you don't see them - out of sight out of mind - but that's why we got in this mess in the first place.

What happens next is as much a question of morality as it is a question of personal survival. Is it better to have lived life with some values and standards, rather than just saying "I was just doing what everybody else was doing" as if that's some kind of defence.

I know this is very lecturing, and once you've got skin in the game you have no choice but to try and do the best for your tiny tots, but I have a choice. I actually choose not to get a dog, because they're polluting (dogs need to eat masses of meat) and I choose not to have a family, because I can't make any guarantees that there's going to be a liveable planet for them to grow up on.

It doesn't make me a morally superior person. It's just the way I personally think. I know parents are racked with worry about the kind of world that their kids are going to inherit. I do empathise with the stress and challenges faced by families. Doesn't mean that's an excuse for me to join in though.

Tags: #family #capitalism #climatechange #career #london #banking #computing

This is a story about being in touch with your feminine side...

When I was a pre-pubescent boy, I read a book by Judy Blume about girls getting their period and having their first kiss with a boy. Before you boil over into a fit of inexplicable anger (as women are prone to do because they're completely ruled by their emotions) I'm not actually saying I know what it's like to menstruate, have boobs and to carry a baby inside me for 9 months and deliver it into the world through my vagina.

My education and upbringing was pretty heavy on the whole sex-ed thing. My sister was born when I was 10 years old, and so I clearly remember her birth and my Mum's pregnancy. My teacher at school was pregnant when we were being shown childbirth videos, and the schools in Oxford are actually pretty progressive. We were taught about the reproductive cycle in the first year that I went to middle school, when I was 9 years old.

Of course, I will never have the first-hand experience of having my cervix dilated by the large head of my child, to the point that it tears, and other painful sounding childbirth related stuff. I know that I would get yelled at with hormonal illogical female rage, if I was to suggest that other stuff that's happened to me has been painful. The muscle on the front of my calf was sliced in half, severing 4 tendons. The hospital in Oxford kept me for 3 days to re-stabilise my kidneys - no painkillers - and then sent me back home to London for the operation 2 days later. My whole journey on the train and across the capital was done without crutches or pain relief. My bandages were soaked with blood. I'm sure those 5 days where my calf had a muscle that was sliced in two down to the bone would give me no capacity to imagine having my vagina ripped to bits by a baby though.

I genuinely don't want to insult mothers. You're right, I'll never know what it's like to have a bad back from carrying round all that weight of a baby bulge for 9 months. I'll never know what it's like to have my internal organs being squished by the life growing inside me. I'll never know what it's like to be woken up by my unborn child kicking. I'll never know.

If you think I'm being flippant or sarcastic, I'm sorry, but I'm actually being genuine. I've often given consideration to the things I'll never know.

What man hasn't given consideration to how much fun they might have, if they got to swap bodies with a woman for the day. Of course, we'd like to play with our tits, but we're also fascinated to know what it feels like for a girl. There's a <blush> slightly kinky element. What does it feel like to be penetrated? Are multiple orgasms as good as they sound? Errr... did I just say that? Moving swiftly on.

Yeah, it's pretty shameful to admit this stuff, but I've made it my mission to vicariously experience what I can of the feminine. I don't think I'm one of those men who thinks that they're a woman who got born into a guy's body. I've just made it a goal in life to empathise. Empathise with everybody. Including the opposite sex.

When I was a teenager I read female erotic fiction. I tried to get into the mind of what women want. I tried to learn how to be a generous lover, so that I could please my girlfriends. I put a lot of effort into my 'research' and I have to say, I got a big kick out of it. However, I read an article recently where the author - a woman - was actually offended by how much of an ego boost guys get by knowing they've moved the Earth for their lover. Well, guess what? That's been added to the long list of considerations too.

So am I painting this picture of me as some sort of perfect guy? No. Don't be ridiculous. What I'm saying is that I'm an information gatherer, and I was born as a sensitive little soul who takes in a lot of what people say, how they feel and whatever I can divine from the media I have consumed. I guess I figured out from an early age that I wasn't going to learn everything I needed to know from pornographic magazines and videos.

It's laughable isn't it, to say that I empathise with women, mothers. and it's actually not true, I don't. I try to, but of course I fail on so many levels. You can't possibly know how much you don't know. Dunning-Kruger effect. Blah blah blah!

But, if you can have a tomboy, can you not also have a tamgirl?

I remember when a friend was talking about her hen do. I enthusiastically gushed "OMG! When is it?" without thinking that I would not actually be invited. I just kinda assumed that I would be. It was a strange situation, because she was a "one of the lads" kind of girl, and I'm a "comfortable with my sexuality" type of guy, so the gender exclusion of the event didn't even register with me.

So, why have I taken a wordplay of Mumsnet, turning it into something that's supposed to sound like The Social Network? Well, because I'm jealous. I feel like I'm missing out on something.

My same friend who I mentioned regarding the hen do was at one time (I'm not sure if she still is) an active contributor on the Mumsnet forum. I actually met her on a forum to do with kitesurfing, many years before. We were both active forum contributors. In fact, I think we competed for the top spot, quite often.

Another friend, a wonderful geek girl whom I very much enjoy the pleasure of the company of, is also another active Mom social networker, who I think also frequents the pages of Mumsnet.

The blogosphere is heavily colonised by mommybloggers, looking for some kind of activity to connect with the world in a way that fits with the demands of family life. Family members eagerly devour every last detail of life of the youngest members of the clan, and will scour the pages of every social media source in order to gather any updates and juicy pictures of the cute little kids as they grow up. Blogging about your family life is a natural extension of that.

However, I imagine that having kids can be a fairly bleak and isolating existence at times. Just as being single can leave you left out from all those couples events - who's going to invite sad Dave to dinner on his own? That'd be weird! - so the stressed out mom who's had to spend all day with fractious children is going to be overlooked by friends who don't want their peaceful child-free existence shattered by the arrival of mountains of childrearing equipment and tantrum-prone toddlers disturbing the peace.

Yes, unless you have a good baby circle of other moms who have kids of a similar age, it's kinda hard for anybody to relate to the particular struggles that you're immediately facing, whether that be teething and nappy rash, or the defiant "NO!" phase as the loveable darlings assert their own personalities. Which of your friends understands that they need to remove all the sharp, swallowable and fragile ornaments from the low surfaces? That bowl of potpourri looks terribly decorative on the coffee table, but to a parent of a young child, that's just a choking hazard. The worlds are going to collide.

And so, sleep-deprived moms get isolated, as social lepers because they're no longer footloose and fancy free. Not only must the children travel with mom, but also the changing mat, clean nappies, wet wipes, sterilising equipment, bibs, blankets, toys, teething rings, potties, spare clothes, medicines, high chairs, carrycots, pushchairs and every other bit of parenting paraphernalia to keep the tiny tots clean, comfortable, fed and watered, in the hope that they'll smile and giggle, not cry.

I have no idea if an Internet forum can provide some of the camaraderie that is necessary to make things seem a little less desperate, when Junior just won't go to sleep and he's driving you nuts with that noisy toy that grandma bought for him. I have no idea if getting together online, as moms who've been through it all too - they know all the shit that you're going through - in some way makes getting through the day a little easier.

I know that I miss my time being a top contributor on a forum. I know that I miss those familiar nicknames. I know that I miss the purpose and routine that it gave my life, trying to read absolutely everything, and make comments in the most active threads. I miss those virtual friends, who actually turned out not to be virtual at all. Some of the best friends I have, I made through forums. Some of the best experiences of my life, were when a bunch of us nerdy Internet dwellers met up, in the evening for drinks, for weekend trips away, or for adventures around the world.

The gender-blind part of me thinks that I should sign up for Mumsnet and join in the discussion and debate, but something tells me that might not go down too well.

There is a considerable hole in my life, without an online community to belong to.

Tags: #friends #socialmedia #sex