This is a story about demon drink...

Drinking champagne, meant for a wedding. A toast to the bride, a fairytale ending. Those are some of my favourite song lyrics.

I'm not alcoholic because alcoholics go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and they can't stop drinking. Alcoholism, by its very definition, is the inability to curtail your consumption despite the damage to your health, wealth and relationships. I don't abuse alcohol and I can stop drinking for long periods whenever I want, so I'm not an alcoholic. Quod erat demonstrandum.

I can go lengthy periods without alcohol. Currently, I've not been drinking for the last 76 days, and I'm going to do 101 days, just because I can. Yes, you might have the odd 6 days off drinking, but I bet you've never done 8 days. I bet you've never done 28 days. I bet you've never done 90 days. The chances are, if you tried to quit, you'd find that your 'willpower' is very weak indeed.

Alcohol is brilliant for treating anxiety. It calms the nerves. It's like Diazepam (Valium) in a bottle from the supermarket, with a hangover. The two drugs - alcohol and Diazepam - have exactly the same effect on the Central Nervous System (CNS)... the brain. They both cause the release of a neurotransmitter called GABA, which calms the brain. Alcohol is a GABA agonist which means it causes GABA to be released in the brain.

If you flood your brain with GABA, you will be more relaxed and somewhat disinhibited. People incorrectly say that alcohol is a depressant but it's actually a CNS suppressant. That is to say, it suppresses a certain amount of brain activity. It makes you chilled out and stupid. It does not make you depressed, but if you are depressed, those feelings may come to the forefront of your mind, because you are disinhibited.

You can get happy drunks, angry drunks and sad drunks. All that is happening, is that the person's mask is slipping and you're seeing what they're really like behind their public persona. Alcohol is almost a truth serum. In vino veritas, means "in wine, truth". The Romans knew a lot about wine.

Why do I keep quoting latin at you? Well, it's because I'm challenging your shorthand notation for a person's life. I think I overheard somebody describe my reason for not drinking the other day as "because he's a recovering alcoholic"... that's outrageous! I have elected not to drink through choice. If I was an alcoholic, I would be alcohol dependent, and therefore unable to choose to stop drinking despite my desire to save my liver and bank balance from being decimated.

In actual fact, stopping drinking has cost me staggering sums of money. I was working on HSBC's number one project - Customer Due Diligence - which was an incredibly stressful project requiring very long hours of sustained high pressure. The only way to cope was with alcohol. When I quit drinking, I could no longer cope with the madness of that failing project.

I had decided to quit drinking for the Go Sober for October charity event, which would give me an excuse to resist the relentless peer pressure to get drunk with my colleagues. I lived and breathed the project I was working on, and I live and breathe banking, which means I lived and breathed drinking culture. It's very hard to be a sober banker, especially on the number one projects.

Alcohol carried me through JPMorgan's DTCC project (their number one project that year) and we delivered it on time and on budget with a green offshore team of Accenture developers. I was the Development Manager. Just about the only way to cope with the pressure and stress of that project was with copious amounts of alcohol... oh and some very cool bosses who just let me get on with my job.

I've had the good fortune of working with some very brilliant people. Most of whom have been massive drinkers. I've started to lose friends to liver damage though. Alcohol abuse catches up with you eventually.

Is it some health scare that caused me to stop drinking? Well, so far as I know my liver is OK. I had an ultrasound a couple of years ago, and my liver was torn from blunt trauma and damaged by hyperthermia, but it wasn't cirrhotic. Alcohol didn't cause the damage because I wasn't drinking at the time (or eating, but that's another story). My liver has been fully recovered for quite a while now. It's one of the few organs in the body that can repair itself, if you give it a chance.

So, what's the short answer? What's the shorthand? What's the soundbite? Well I'm afraid there is no shorthand. You can't label me as an alcoholic because I don't abuse alcohol. I don't even drink. Q.E.D.

Did alcohol abuse cause me to go homeless? Did alcohol abuse put me in hospital? Are those events connected to alcohol? No.

No, sorry to disappoint you. I wasn't drinking at any of the times when I have been hospitalised. I know you're hunting for something to point your finger at. I know that victim blaming is convenient. We like to label people. We like to pigeon hole people. Sadly, I don't really fit inside a neat little box. Nobody does, despite how much easier and less scary life appears to be when we imagine that we can pre-judge everybody.

Nothing good ever came from prejudice.

That's a photo of the last alcohol that I consumed, on the 25th of September 2015. A glass of port with some shrooms. Not magic mushrooms, containing the psychedelic chemical Psilocybin, because that's a Class "A" drug. Nope, those shrooms contain ice cream. Those glasses contain port wine.

Since then, I've had a fall-out with one of my oldest friends who's now not talking to me, I lost my job and I've been in hospital for a week. I also nearly threw myself off the Golden Gate Bridge, due to suicidal thoughts. All in all, not a great case for sobriety. My wealth and mental health have been severely impacted by my 101 day experiment, but I've started so I'll finish.

Conducting this in-vivo experiment has been extremely unethical. To risk your life and livelihood in order to discover the link between alcohol, anxiety and depression, is not something that any medical professional could sanction, condone. I've had to ignore the advice of healthcare professionals in order to uphold my commitment to discovering what happens when you quit drinking.

I'm not completely reckless. I know that for dangerous levels of alcohol dependency, quitting drinking abruptly can kill people. Having a seizure due to the sudden drop in the alcohol levels in your bloodstream can kill you. In a treatment centre for alcoholism, they would give you Librium and taper your dose down gently, to prevent you from having a fit.

Despite not having a physical alcohol dependency, it has still been exceedingly unpleasant to quit drinking. The elevated levels of anxiety that you experience, due to the conditioning of your body to expect alcohol as a coping mechanism for high stress levels, makes life fairly unmanageable. You have absolutely no idea how much of a crutch alcohol is in your life, because you've never quit boozin' for months on end. You just haven't done it. Period.

I really don't give a toss whether you want to carry on drinking or not. I won't judge you. I'm not preaching to the world about the few benefits of being a non-drinker. I'm not expecting people to go teetotal like me. In fact, I really don't think you can do it. It's too hard for most people. Most people are addicts. They say "I can quit anytime I want" because they can not drink for 6 days and not have tea/coffee/coke for 2 days. Those are not long enough periods of time to make any pronouncement about your addiction. Those short periods of time prove nothing, except that you can fool yourself into thinking you're not substance dependent.

It takes time for cravings and withdrawal to kick in. The headaches and cognitive impairment associated with stopping caffeine use takes at least 3 days to kick in. You will have terrible cravings after a week or so. You don't know this stuff, because you never go for long enough without a cup of tea or coffee, or a can of Coca-Cola.

The anxiety associated with alcohol withdrawal is something that creeps up more gradually. Your body is conditioned to know that there's always a bottle or a glass handy when you need it. Just knowing that alcohol is readily available actually makes you less anxious. Just knowing that stress relief is available on tap actually makes you less stressed. You will feel relief from your anxiety, flooding your body from the very first sip of an alcoholic drink. That's not possible. The alcohol can't enter your bloodstream that quickly. Your brain has simply learnt to release the GABA, in response to the smell of wine, beer & spirits. It's a conditioned response.

I'm sorry to report that you're no different than Pavlov's Dog. Yes, you respond to the ringing of the bell for last orders at the bar, by salivating for more alcohol, with just the same conditioned response as a dog slobbering for its meat chow, when the mealtime bell is sounded.

You might think you're high & mighty, because you can use your higher brain functions in order to pass judgement over other people. But under your pseudo-intellectual skin, you're the same animal as anybody else. You simply aren't well educated or well informed enough to be aware of your own ignorance, when you pass judgement over people.

So am I a functional alcoholic? Well that's a contradiction in terms. Killing yourself, damaging your health and wealth... surely that's dysfunctional behaviour, by its very definition? The fact that I can start and stop drinking at will, whenever I want, for however long I want... surely that undermines the whole concept of any kind of alcoholic, functional or otherwise?

I will probably start drinking again, after 101 days. For my next trick, I'm going to have a glass of red wine every day, and no more than that. I'm going to show that I can exercise self-control even with the disinhibition of the intoxication from a dose of ethanol. Yes, it's obvious that impaired judgement associated with ethanol intoxication is a reason why people drink more than they planned, but the rational brain never gets put to sleep entirely. We can still exercise a degree of self control.

None of this is very hard for me... because I'm no longer homeless. I have the threat of homelessness hanging over me, because I lost my job (because I stopped drinking). When you're homeless and you have no hope of a better life, drinking helps to anaesthetise you from the cold. The cold of the weather, and the cold shoulder that friends, family and society shows to you. You become untouchable. You are considered a tramp, a bum, a loser... you are shunned.

There is a vicious cycle associated with homelessness and alcohol abuse. People never consider chicken and egg. They never consider the reasons why somebody started to abuse alcohol, and whether those reasons are still present. Alcohol abuse is a symptom, not a cause of somebody's problems. People don't drink to excess unless they're very unhappy about something.

Alcohol abuse is a form of self medication. Alcohol is not inherently the problem. It's a symptom of a problem. Treat the root cause of the issue, and the alcoholism goes away. Plenty of people drink to excess, but they're not homeless and destitute. We applaud Hooray Henrys who throw wild parties and drink with gay abandon. Those glittering socialites are heros.

Drinking £700 of sparkling wine that was meant for my wedding should have been a warning sign, but I was too intoxicated to see what was really going on. Self medication numbed me to the fact that I was trapped in an abusive relationship, and had taken to the bottle to be able to cope with it, and a super stressful job. It was more than any human is capable of handling, without chemical assistance. My medication of choice was alcohol, for a long time.

Am I confessing that I was an alcoholic? Let's repeat this once more: alcoholics are people who are unable to stop drinking despite detrimental effects on their life, and the lives of those around them. I can stop drinking at will, whenever I want. I'm an expert on not drinking. I know far more about not drinking than you do.

Perhaps I should do 9 months of not drinking, or however long it is that good mothers don't drink for. But we already know that stress, anxiety and depression in pregnant women and new mums is a huge problem. So there's already a good data set to prove that quitting alcohol is hard on the minds of women, despite the elevated oxytocin levels associated with childrearing. That's pretty damning evidence about the long-term psychological/brain damage that alcohol abuse does.

It's very controversial to be writing this stuff, but there is heaps of data and anecdotal evidence around to support it. We just need to be good scientists, and observe what we see in the world around us. Conducting in-vivo experiments is dangerous and unethical, but it's yielding interesting findings.

Roll on 101 days!

You've structured your life around addictive substances like alcohol and caffeine more than you will ever possibly know unless you do a lengthy period of abstinence (September 2015)

Tags: #alcohol #addiction #notanonymous

This is a story about being a scapegoat...

There's one simple rule to follow in life: don't be an arsehole. If you're bully, criticising, undermining and generally destroying somebody's character, you're an arsehole. People are basically good. Billion dollar companies like eBay have been built on positive not negative stereotypes.

If you assume that everybody is out to rob you, hurt you. If you assume that everybody is bad and you're the only good person on the planet, and treat people according to this negative worldview, then you're going to be isolated and lonely.

It's important to listen to somebody's story, and consider all things with an open mind. There is no shorthand for somebody's life. You can't just hear one negative label and think "yeah yeah yeah, I know the rest". You know absolutely nothing about a person.

I've been advised by mental health professionals, psychologists and amateur psychologists to avoid labelling myself. However, creativity loves constraints, so I have labelled myself and I'm owning that label while I tell that story, knowing that it will be strongly emotive.

My dad joked that we should name our black & white cat "Ginger" because it would challenge people. It would literally blow people's minds. People would fly into an irrational rage, just because a black & white cat was named "Ginger". Yes, some people are so brainwashed, that they feel pure terror and anxiety at the smallest thing that doesn't meet their expectations of conformity.

We are very programmed to conform. We are groomed, massaged, browbeaten, into a kind of group conformity. Kids in school and adults at work are a lot easier to deal with as one homogenous blob, a sea of blank grey faces, rather than a bunch of individual humans. It's much easier to command & control if there is groupthink and uniformity.

Bizarrely, I hankered after some conformity in my life. I wished that my parents were married, I wished that my Dad was into football like the other Dads, I wanted to wear the right trainers and tie my school tie in the 'correct' way, rather than the way that an adult would wear a tie.

Subcultural phenomena are immensely important as a means of indicating to people that you belong to their tribe. Wearing the right clothes and having an interest in the right things makes the difference between an easy life, or a life as a weirdo, an outsider, a spare part, an alien.

You might not understand why something's so important to somebody, but they do. They understand the difference it makes to their daily life, being singled out as 'different'. They have to deal with the daily consequences of being marked out as not belonging to the clan. Not wearing the right tartan, so to speak.

If you are forced to be trapped into a place where you don't belong, or you're not accepted into the group, to the community. If there is constant friction, resistance, then you have to find survival strategies.

I'm very good at zoning out, putting myself into a trance-like state. I can transport myself to another time, another place. I can transcend my body and just wait it out. If you think I'm impatient you couldn't be more wrong. I'm probably one of the most patient people you'll ever meet.

I had such a good grasp of time at school that one of my party tricks - that gained me a little oddball popularity - was being able to count down 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... and then the school bell would ring. I had a natural sense of good timing, given how important the end of school was in my life.

My entire soul yearned for the brief freedom from the bullies that came after school, at weekends and during holidays. The entire structure of my personality was reshaped by time, the clock, the timetable.

I would be down all termtime, and then I would go absolutely bezerk during holidays, trying to pack all that missing fun into those short periods. I would be very tired and lethargic and not enjoy very much of anything during termtime. I would be sad and crying about the bullying. Then, when the holidays arrived, I would hardly sleep, get ridiculously overexcited to have been released from the chains of relentless bullying, and I would launch myself at things with unbelievable enthusiasm and energy, because I knew that the holidays were short.

You might say that I'd be depressed for 6 or 7 weeks at a time, and then hypomanic for 1 or 2 weeks. Yeah, you could say that there were two extremes in my life. You could say that for 13 years there were two poles in my daily existence. You might say that my entire time at school, I had to be very bi-polar, because of the enforced structure of my life. It was the only way I could survive.

When I started work, I was 3 or 4 years younger than everybody else in the company. I was 17 years old and doing a graduate job for BAe Systems. The graduates tolerated me, but I was just a schoolkid to them. I hadn't yet been to University or done much growing up, so I was immature and obviously, I was a bit weird.

Sure, I made friends, but I was always a bit of an oddball. I was always doing something embarrassing or stupid, because I was going through the transition from childhood to adulthood. I was doing the growing up that my peers all did together at University. I made the mistake of accepting every drink that was bought for me, including the 'dirty pint' that I was tricked into drinking and throwing up in front of my colleagues, for example.

Time is the only thing that can change things. There is no short cut to growing up. Yes I was mature for my age in some ways, and I had to fight against ageism, but I also made mistakes that were purely down to immaturity. The best thing I could do was to sit tight and wait until my face matched my experience. I was never taken seriously when I was younger.

Respecting your elders is a mistake in technology, computing, IT, software. If you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got. Technology is disruptive, it's innovative, it's fast-paced and ever-changing. You can learn as much from the 'script kiddies' as you can from the key-man-dependency 'oracle' type character who think's he or she is the font of all knowledge.

Technology is truly meritocratic. I really don't care how many years you've worked in software. How many websites and apps have you made? How many users have used your software? How many trillions of dollars has your software processed? Those are the objective measures, obviously.

The grass roots are taking hold. The pyramid is starting to look like it's built on shaky foundations. The bullied kids, who spent all their time on computers as a form of escapism, are now running your company. You might think that because you did an MBA at some business school and were generally academically bright, that you command & control your company from the boardroom, where you puff out your chest and feel terribly important. You're wrong.

The thing about old companies is that they do things in old fashioned ways. They are not modernising fast enough, because of all the gatekeepers and people who have an over-inflated view of their self importance. Customers pretty much care about only two things: price and quality. Brand recognition is a function of consistent quality over many years of using a product or service. People won't stay loyal to a company forever, if they're getting inferior quality or paying over the market rate.

Challengers are offering innovative products, higher quality at a cheaper price. When it comes to technology, the challengers are offering a delightful user experience, rather than just the bare minimum for an older company to remain competitive. Old companies are all about cost cutting and keeping costs low. New companies are all about investment and offering something that puts them head & shoulders above the competition. New companies can't rely on a monopoly, so they have to try harder.

We live in a highly regulated world, so there's no risk associated with switching to a different product or service. They all have to adhere to the same standards, and they're all underwritten by the same guarantees. You have the same consumer rights, whether you've bought a product from an old company or a new company. You have the same rights as a consumer of a service from an old company or a new company.

The difference with the challengers is that they're hungry. They're enthusiastic, passionate and energetic. They're not sitting back, farming their monopoly and expecting the good times to roll forever. They're trying to nip and bite the ankles of the big players, and take a slice of the big market share pie, by delivering superior products and services.

My watch wasn't made by some amazingly skilled craftsman in Switzerland, who had to spend many many years learning the art of horology. No, it was 'assembled' in China after it was designed in California. It cost a fraction of what a Patek Philippe would have cost and it does a lot more stuff. I can pay for stuff with it, travel on busses and the underground, monitor my heart rate, receive directions when I'm driving or cycling, ask it questions, get reminders of stuff I need to do, check my diary, see who's phoning me before I get my phone out of my pocket, and read my messages and emails. It has seamlessly blended into my everyday life.

Monopolies don't last forever, and if you dig in and refuse to listen to what the disruptive young whippersnappers are saying then you will find yourself stuck out on a limb. You'll be sat there in your boardroom in your massive headquarters, wondering where all your customers and your profits went. The challengers are no longer coming. They have already arrived and they're disrupting your industry, and word is spreading amongst customers that there's a better way.

The geek will inherit the earth. The meek geeks are taking over everything. Chances are, you don't run a product or service company anymore. You run a software house that happens to specialise in a certain product or service. It's the software and systems that run your organisation, not your people and processes. You're mistaken if you think your best sales rep or most amazing manager are your most important assets. Those individuals just won't scale up like a software system can.

Automation and mechanisation is changing the whole world. There are still plenty of examples where we can industrialise. Where we can get the benefits of higher production and lower cost. We can eliminate human error and the limitations of workers ability to work fast and concentrate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The more that we allow machines to do, the more efficient industries become, and the more delightful the customer experience.

Have you ever noticed how it feels as if you're getting to your destination faster, if you see a queue of traffic and decide to nip down a back alley, to take a rat run? You might not actually be moving any faster, but at least if feels like you're travelling rather than standing still. You might take this analogy with supermarket kiosks. Now that you scan and process the payment for your own groceries, it feels faster, because you're not stood in line waiting for the cashier. Really, you're just saving the grocery store the cost of having to have extra checkout cashiers to cope with the demand, but the cost saving means they can deliver higher quality groceries for the same retail price.

Economies of scale do work, and retailers are very good at scaling things up, because their margins are very aggressive. In the marketplace with price comparison technology, consumers will vote with their feet if your prices are not competitive. Banking hasn't really got its head around that yet. Many people still bank with their original current account, because they haven't seen the benefits of being a 'rate tart' or finding a higher quality online or mobile app experience yet. However, as Apple Pay becomes more and more prevalent, your bank is becoming less and less relevant. Having access to a branch is irrelevant if you live in a cashless society and you have a good mobile app.

We are witnessing a changing of the guard. Out with the old, in with the new. Long live the Queen, cash is not king.

Robots are going to pick out your Christmas presents and despatch them to you. One day, a drone helicopter will deliver your packages. Change is coming. Don't fight it. Geeks don't like fighting (June 2008)

Tags: #bipolar #bullying #childhood #career #banking #capitalism #computing

This is a story about breaking point...

I don't believe in 'rock bottom'. Instead, I feel that I have either run out of fuel or suffered some kind of mechanical failure. You can't drive yourself at the absolute limit forever without some kind of blowout. I have melted my tyres by cornering at high speed.

When I was younger, I pushed myself very hard because I was bored and not at all challenged by what was asked of me. I needed to work many many times harder than my colleagues to prove that my age was no limit to what I could achieve. I've been programming since I was a little boy, so why shouldn't I be better at it than somebody who's been doing it for less years than me?

I had a couple of brilliant teachers growing up, one of whom taught me boolean algebra. If you can master boolean algebra, then there's not much you can't do with a computer. Else if, you're not cut out to be a programmer. End program.

So, I've been doing more or less the same thing in my full-time career for 19 years, because it's a skilled job and is very highly paid. However, there are so many asshats that I must endure in order to get on with my job, which is rather trying. Eventually, the pen-pushers grind me down and I lose my patience with them.

What's really heartbreaking is that I have worked so hard for so long in order to have some time & space to do some things which I actually love and I'm passionate about. However, just when things were seemingly working out for me, people came and picked my pocket.

Now, it's my own fault for being so open and trusting and generous. I have always refused to stop treating others the way I would like to be treated myself. Just because other people are mean and selfish and steal from each other, doesn't mean that I'm going to be like them too.

I imagine that they must feel pretty rotten about themselves, knowing that they have profited from other people's hard labour. I know that we all think of ourselves as relatively hard working. Just remember to look at the evidence. Think about how many 100+ hour weeks you have racked up in your life.

So this isn't about boastfulness, or oneupmanship. It's just about an attitude adjustment. I know that many baby boomers who are in the process of thinking about retirement feel pretty tired and that they have worked pretty hard. Well, I would advise you to look at some hard numbers about just how hard your sons, daughters and grandchildren are working and will have to continue working in order to fund your retirement.

There is a "screw it let's just drown our sorrows" attitude amongst the young, who have no hope of job security, not enough money to buy a house, not enough money to support a family without state support. This is a rational response to a world that has few opportunities left for them.

Underpaying people below the age of 25 is obscene. I was working as a contractor for Research Machines and Lloyds TSB at the age of 20 and they paid me top dollar because my skills and youthful energy got shit done.

It really depresses me, just how many layers of idle and out-of-touch management there are sitting uselessly on top of the toiling youth, while they wait to collect a pension that they didn't contribute enough towards to justify what they are going to withdraw from the system.

The future of children and grandchildren has been mortgaged by profligate baby boomers who were too busy getting stoned and taking LSD to actually ban the bomb and prevent British industry from being asset stripped and having our competitive edge completely destroyed by myopic idiots. Nuclear arms proliferation is not my legacy... it's yours, old people. The lack of jobs for young people is not my fault... it's yours, old people.

Ok, so you might be feeling rotten in your old age, but maybe your body wouldn't feel so bad if it wasn't full of cancer from all the radioactive particles floating around from your nuclear testing? Maybe you'd feel a lot better if the nation hadn't been totally bankrupted by you and your cronies, so we didn't have to cut medical research budgets?

My suggestion? Well, Soylent Green seems a little unpalatable, so perhaps we could just make sure that the burden of austerity falls on those who are responsible. It wasn't a debt binge by young people that caused the current crisis. It was a complete lack of political and social responsibility from the baby boom generation, that meant that the landed gentry had their hands in the safe, helping themselves to all the loot, while you sneering arrogant wannabe pensioners were drinking and smoking and taking drugs.

So, we have a very cold bitter winter ahead of ourselves. Everything is going to hell in a hand cart. Please please please remember not to blame your children for the implosion of the world and the collapse of society. Your pension is a privilege you get for leaving the world a better place than you found it, and I'm afraid you have no right to take something you didn't pay for.

I'm really reluctant to do another round of propping up a broken system, for the benefit of a bunch of ungrateful twats who show no appreciation. I think I'm going to stand back and watch the whole thing burn down.

That is all.

This is my sister's cat, Calcifer. He was catnapped. Us young people are struggling to look after our loved ones, because we are under too much pressure to work 6 or 7 days a week on hardly any money... baby boomers have no idea how hard it is being young (September 2014)

Tags: #career #parents #childhood

This is a story about being an activist...

The streets of London are home to a huge population of runaways, refugees and other homeless people who have been marginalised by society. We tend to ignore them and their struggles. There are so many, we can't help them all, right?

I'm not OK with people freezing to death on the streets, right under the noses of the wealthy. I'm not OK with just walking past human suffering on a daily basis, on the commute to the office. There are people huddling in shop doorways for a little shelter from the elements. It's brutal out there, and things are getting worse.

There are no words to describe just how cold it is, sleeping rough. I have slept on a glacier. Millions of tonnes of creaking ice. That's cold, even with a decent sleeping bag, sleeping mat, and a tent. Sleeping out on the streets is just as tough - most homeless people don't have equipment that cost hundreds of pounds. The most vulnerable people in our society don't even have enough money for food, clothes and other basics that they depend upon.

Normally charities will expect you to reach for your wallet. Normally charities will expect you to donate money. The whole fundraise & spend model of charity has failed, sadly. People and corporations are just not giving enough. People and corporations are treating charitable giving as a way to absolve themselves of personal responsibility for the wrongdoing in a society that they belong to.

Let's start with some empathy, instead.

If you haven't roughed it ever in your life, or it's been a very long time since you were truly soaked to the skin, freezing cold, shivering, and with chattering teeth... then you have lost touch with what some of your fellow human beings are going through. There are people freezing to death, here, in a supposedly civilised advanced Western econonmy. I'm not OK with that.

Please, try and make it to West India Quay with some warm clothes and a good sleeping bag, and sleep out with us. 7pm to 7am on Thursday 12th November 2015. It's incredible that this can take place when Canary Wharf Estate don't really want a whole tent army right under the noses of rich bankers!

The Centrepoint charity has worked incredibly hard to make this possible, and only by agreeing to do things in the most unbelievably controlled way. There is private security for the event, as well as Canary Wharf's own private security force, making sure that the wrong sort of people are not protesting about the abhorrent situation of young people being left freezing to death on the streets of London.

Sadly, in the 3 years that this event has been happening in Canary Wharf, my ex-employer JPMorgan Chase & Co has donated a paltry £70,000. That's a disgustingly small amount of money considering how this bank has wrecked lives. One of my colleagues was driven to #suicide by the insanity of what Global Banking is doing to the world.

I absolutely do not want to see this event lose credibility, so please sign up for an official ticket and donate whatever you can afford: https://www.centrepoint.org.uk/news-events/events/sleep-out/west-india-quay

Whatever happens, please please please tell everyone you know about the plight of the homeless and support this event.

7pm to 7am, Thursday 12th November, 2015.

So, last week, I was working for HSBC on their number one project. The biggest bank in Europe at the moment is HSBC. They just declared quarterly profits have risen 33% to $6bn. That's a substantial amount of cash that they have extracted from the world's pockets!

So, how much do HSBC care about the homeless? Well they employed a homeless person (me) but their due diligence should have prevented me from getting that job and working my way out of poverty and debt. I should have been trapped into living on the streets.

We can't have the wrong sort of people getting ahead in life, can we? It's all about the rich getting richer, at the expense of the destruction of society by people who already have more than they need.

I made sure I got this email from the HSBC Group so that nobody is going to get sued! Hurrah!

I've got a bunch of other emails that prove that Corporate and Social Responsibility is a joke. These companies pay a pittance in order to try and cover up wrongdoing on an unimaginable scale. The institutional corruption is disgusting.

I'm being warned by journalist friends to flee for my life for whistleblowing. You'll be able to find me... sleeping rough somewhere in London. If the Safer Streets teams can't find people, then good luck to the banks with their teams of lawyers out to gag me!

Come and sleep rough with us!

That is all.

 Tags: #homeless #frankie #london #banking #capitalism #notanonymous

This is a story about bridge burning...

How many of us are afraid to declare the causes we support, for fear of impacting our professional reputation. Does supporting mental health and homelessness charities make me look somehow less corporate, and consequently, make me less employable? Does the fact that I have even experienced these things first hand make me unemployable?

In fact, if my employment options became coincidentally curtailled at the same time as I have started blogging, despite a successful full-time career of some 18+ years, it would not take a brain of Britain to recognise that this must be because of institutional discrimination, which is probably illegal.

There is absolutely nothing to suggest that I am any less able than any other candidate in the job market, and in fact, my history makes me more of a 'catch' to a potential employer: the man who has nothing has nothing to lose. Plus I have been 'stress tested' to the limit and beyond. I know exactly where those limits are, and I can empathise with my colleagues when they are under stress and pressure.

When 'sh1t goes bad' who do you really want in the bunker with you? People who have never been in that kind of situation before, and are therefore an unknown quantity, or people who know their personal breaking point.

I've been in some hair-raising situations, both through choice and by accident. Challenging yourself, and being challenged by things that are out of your control, teaches you how to handle stressful situations. A certain amount of training, discipline and drills will prepare your muscle memory to pull the "parachute rip-cord" to use a layman's term. But how do you deal with the long plane journey up to 13,000ft? How do you mentally prepare to throw yourself out of a perfectly servicable aeroplane?

Worse still, how do you prepare yourself for people yelling at you and telling you you're an idiot? People do this because they are scared and have lost faith in your leadership. People believe that pain and fear can be magically taken away by those in positions of authority.

Losing authority can be dangerous, especially if you are the leader in a dangerous place. Generally, most people don't know what to expect when they are entering an extreme environment: the mountains and the sea (the poles and the deserts too, but I don't know much about those places, yet).

Let me tell you about crampons. These are a spiked device that attach to your feet, so that you can move safely on ice. I always shake my head in disbelief at people who are blunting an expensive pair of crapons on rocks. If they do encounter any ice, they will certainly not be effective if they are not sharp.

Let me tell you about ropes. These long flexible cords are no use at arresting a fall unless they are attached to something solid. In order to attach a rope to a mountain, you will need a whole load of other heavy metal gear that will need to be secured to the rocks, and the rocks themselves will need to be large and heavy and generally immovable.

So, if you see climbing parties with crampons and ropes, moving on snow - in an area with no glaciers - then these things are only there as a confidence trick. The fact is, that there is very little stopping you from plunging to your death, even with ropes & crampons.

I personally, don't like to be weighed down with unnecessary gear. It's not about not being prepared. It's about recognising that I'd rather have saved the energy, so that I can use that surplus reserve of energy in order to scout ahead of my group for problems, or fetch assistance if necessary. The main thing though, is to stay within personal limits as a leader, so that when people are tired and cranky, and scared and their feet hurt and they are cold and hungry, you don't mind giving them your personal stash of candy bars, you don't mind them calling you names, you don't mind them questioning your leadership skills.

The main thing that qualifies a person as a leader is how they cope under crossfire.

The more I lead people in stressful situations, the more I learn about my personal weaknesses, the more I learn about my personal limits. Nobody should underestimate just how hard I had to be pushed before I cracked, but nobody should consider themselves such a 'rock' or a hard nut that will never crack under pressure.

My best friend and climbing partner sustained life-changing injuries in a 'freak' accident when the chockstone he was abseilling from shattered. I have only just started to deal with feelings surrounding this, so I'm not going to write any more about this today, but my thoughts always turn to him and how I have shyed away from post-accident involvement, as it was such a terrifying reminder of our mortality and fragility. I knew I couldn't do anything to turn back the hands of time. Accidents happen, and the first thing you learn in the mountains is that you can't control all the variables. It's still something that victims, survivors and those connected to them, have to come to terms with though.

Ropes have their place in sport rock climbing. Modern equipment is so good - the Petzl Grigri in this case - I don't even have to hold the rope to be honest, but old habits literally die hard (October 2012)

Addendum for climbing nerd trolls: no, I didn't leave the rope all over the place like that. I was asked to step in and belay only seconds (sic.) before the photo was taken. And, no, I'm not even standing on the rope even though it looks like I might be from the low-resolution image. Anybody who has climbed multi-pitch with me will tell you my ropework is above your nitpicking.

Tags: #climbing #leadership #homeless #career #london #banking #adventure #mentalhealth

This is a story of a culture that is destroying people's mental health and lives...

Management by balance-sheet, bean counters, spreadsheet jockeys and "yes" men and women are joining a set of executives who do everything in their power to abstain from any of the hard work and responsibility that is necessary in the world.

We have all heard horror stories of people being sacked by text message. In fact, skilled workers, professionals, have been steadily robbed of their worth and self-esteem since powerful rich men, behind closed doors in gentleman's clubs were allowed to asset strip British industry. The practice continues today, as companies are allowed to be headquartered in the UK, but are offshoring all the jobs for cost reasons, and are draining the wealth of the nation.

Europe is fast becoming little more than a tax haven for global businesses, with billions, if not trillions of dollars of profits being pushed through legal entities that have little reason for existence other than to evade the taxes that these companies rightfully should pay to the countries that they have extracted the profits from.

Luxembourg is the most obvious example, but Ireland has recently jumped on the bandwagon. The amount of tax that is paid by Vodafone (group HQ is Luxembourg... funny that, considering that Newbury, UK is where I thought they were founded?) or Apple and Amazon (taxed via Irish legal entity... I know Apple Maps is rubbish but it's a long way from Silicon Valley?) is a pittance. The amount of profits that these companies make is disgusting, versus what they pay as percentage of their gross profits.

However, maybe there is a good reason for all of this?

When I became unwell, and asked good old UK government for support - as somebody who has always paid my full taxes, has no offshore bank accounts, has never tried to evade or avoid taxes - I found that there was worryingly little of a safety net there.

I went to my doctor (General Practitioner, or GP for short, here in the UK) and had a 30 second conversation about what was going on in my life.

"Have you heard of Fluoxetine"

Well, yes, I have heard of Fluoxetine. It's the generic name for Prozac, which is an antidepressant from the 1980s. What the hell is my doctor doing dishing out 25 year old pills to somebody who they have taken 30 seconds to get to know? Well, we know that the NHS is extremely cost pressured, given that we have to give such large tax breaks to profitable billion dollar companies and make sure that we don't take too much inheritance tax from dead multi-millionaires. Oh, and we need nuclear atomic bombs too. Yes, we need to make sure we can always annihilate every person on earth at the flick of a switch.

Luckily for me, I walked away from a course of powerful psychoactive medication, that has been proven in long-term studies to be less effective than placebo. It also takes 6 weeks to take effect. My episodes of depression tend to be about this long anyway. Also, SSRIs make you fat and destroy your sex life, as well as blunting your emotions and generally making your sh1t life even more sh1t, but you'll be too doped up to even realise, unless you ever emerge from the chemical haze.

I'm pretty upset about this, if you hadn't picked up on that.

Another thing that is very annoying is that, as anybody who takes a few more minutes to get to know me will tell you, I'm certainly not what you might term unipolar. My life is littered with examples of radical mood swings. Catch me at a certain time, and you will see my racing thoughts, pressured speech, lack of sleep, intolerance of dimwitted twits, and evidence of my wacky projects.

One day I whimsically decided to knock down my shed, order a load of wood from a sawmill and build a giant beach hut summer house thing in my back garden. Somebody suffering from unipolar depression does not normally do such a thing, according to the DSM-IV/V.

I had to learn all about Google Sketchup, so that I could design the thing, learn about different types of timber, wooden building construction techniques, roofing techniques, planning laws governing outbuildings, estimate how much I would need in terms of materials, locate a sawmill, find a roofing supplier, get a chop saw, nail gun and roofing blow torch (the most fun tool of all).

At no point did any of this seems slightly strange or beyond my capabilities, as a spotty IT nerd who did little more than turn coffee into software for a living, by pressing buttons on a computer, in a comfortable air-conditioned office.

Working around-the-clock seemed perfectly normal too. I remember one neighbour pointed out that the sound of nails being hammered at 9pm was not helping him to study for an English exam... but how are you supposed to hammer quietly? I did try and hammer more considerately, but it seemed more considerate to simply get the project done as fast as possible (I think I took 3 days to complete the structure) given that I didn't know the sleep patterns of everybody within earshot.

So "Mega Shed" as she was affectionately known, appeared at the bottom of my garden in under a week, at a cost of £700. An ordinary week in anybody's life? Well it's hard to judge from an internal point of view, as you can't step out of your own mind and view yourself as others would.

Naturally, friends, colleagues and family are always impressed by a person's industriousness and ingenuity, so I saw no real reason to back off the gas. When the world rewards you for efforts, this reinforces your belief that what you are doing is sustainable.

I then decided to sit in my garden and read a huge stack of books on Quantum Mechanics. This then progressed to me reading every paper that looked interesting in Cornell University's online archives. Naturally, I then started emailling a bunch of the authors, and getting engaged in particularly interesting email based discussions with people around the world about De Broglie's Matter Waves (Pilot Wave theory) which looked a hell of a lot more elegant than all that Standard Model crap that couldn't be unified with General Relativity.

Instead of being discouraged, I found academics to be kind, indulgent and generous with their time. I took things too far, of course, and wrote a paper on the measurement of collapsing Quantum States in an entangled system, spread over a physical space larger than the light-cones of the particles being measured. Standard Quantum Eraser type stuff. I even tried to get it published. Lolz.

At no point did anybody actually directly say to me "you seem to be as mad as a box of frogs on acid with lasers coming out of their nostrils" so I kept digging myself into a deeper and deeper thought hole until I sank into another depression, with no idea what had just happened to me.

The thing is, it's fairly entertaining, enthralling, to watch somebody who is hypomanic. In our age of Big Brother and myriad reality TV shows, we seem to think that it's OK to be a spectator in somebody's spectacular life.

We seem to think it's OK to sit back and watch somebody go absolutely bezerk. It's that person's fault, right? Or maybe it's not their fault, but it's not your responsibility... that would be somebody else? Maybe doctors? Maybe the police? Maybe the council? I don't know... I'm just going to watch - because this is just too horrible to miss a minute of - and I can't tear my eyes away this is just so awful, somebody should do something about it, but not me, and not yet because I'm really getting into this. Brilliant. Who needs TV anyway?

I don't think that I'm not personally responsible for getting unwell, but I don't think that people know how to help, really. I don't think that people are particularly incentivised to help either. We have a very isolated existence. We don't know our neighbours, we don't trust strangers, we ring the police to deal with things that we used to work out between ourselves, we expect our doctors to give us magic beans to cure all society's ills.

So, today is World Mental Health day and World Homeless Day. I can tell you, from personal experience, that mental health issues can lead to homelessness. When I was discharged from hospital after a suicide attempt, I was given 2 weeks accommodation, and I was expected to use that time to arrange my own accommodation. I went to the council offices with a letter from my doctors, explaining that I was extremely vulnerable and that I should receive urgent assistance. The person I spoke to then went on holiday and that was the last I heard of it.

I don't blame the system or the people. People are trying to do the best that they can, but there are so many people in need of assistance, and so little money, because we are fixated on helping the rich to get richer, rather than supporting the most vulnerable members of society. I'm not even angry about it. Living in the Royal Parks and on Hampstead Heath was an eye-opening education for an extremely highly qualified and well educated guy who fell on hard times. If you think I chose to become homeless, then f**k you, you ignoramus.

Yes, I could have sold my camera, but I wanted to document what happened to me and I already sold all my other possessions to support myself. When will you be satisfied? Sell my clothes? Locking me up for being naked will be expensive (June 2014)

Tags: #mentalhealth #bipolar #depression #homeless #sex #banking #career #london #culture

This is a story of two different investment strategies...

The guy on the left is Junior Banker, William Marshall. The guy on the right is Senior Analyst/Programmer Banker, Nick Grant. We are both professionals in Global Banking, economists, and philanthropists, who have read law and practice accountancy.

We have followed very different strategies for the banks that we have worked for. William is 'old money' and has practiced the buy and hold strategy of passive investment in the world's biggest companies. Nick is 'new money' and has practiced active investment in startups and disruptive companies.

I would say, that as we are well into the 21st century, and we have seen many cycles of boom and bust, that we have enough economic data to make a bold pronouncement: passive investment has failed.

Having large amounts of capital locked away in pension funds, where the fund managers are old and lazy, is not a good strategy for anything. In the 1980s it lead to asset-stripping of profitable enterprises that had employed a lot of people and were generating wealth. This made the Mayfair Set very rich, but left Britain with huge numbers of people laid off, and factories closed and sold off for the land and asset value. In the 1990s and beyond, it has led to boardroom excesses that frankly disgust me.

Male-domination of the boardroom, and eye-watering salaries, bonusses and golden parachutes that are paid to our company executives. This is a situation that must change immediately.

Both William and I share a common belief that we need to see more women in the professions, and we need to smash the glass ceiling that woman have been held beneath for far too long. Both of us have supported our partners to the fullest possible extent to allow them to be the Wonderwomen that they are.

William's wife is a Rocket Scientist, working on Europe's most important Space Missions. My ex-wife quickly became an amazing software developer, outclassing me in every company that we have ever worked for, including Research Machines and JPMorgan. I supported us delaying starting a family and her retraining to become a Teacher. With incredible speed, she rose through the ranks to become Head of the Chemistry Department at one of the best State-funded Grammar Schools in the United Kingdom. The admiration she has of staff and pupils, and the exam results that she has helped achieve are amazing.

Our boardrooms, our corporate culture, are starved of women, and a non-macho feminism in the thinking of the way that we build businesses. We are not being diverse enough in selecting the best minds in industry. We are still sexist in our thinking and our hiring. Myself and some colleagues had to fight tooth-and-nail to retain one of the most brilliant women that I have ever worked with, on the most important project in the biggest bank in Europe. That's not right.

Law, accountancy, medicine, journalism and IT are all lacking in women, while teaching, childcare, events, hospitality and catering are lacking in men. Meanwhile, strong independent intelligent women are being short-changed in their careers and sidelined into roles that they are totally underused and undervalued in.

Myopic business leaders are also short-changing our young people too. By investing in old dying people, rather than energetic young people, the pyramid of society has been stood on its head. Retirement is not a right, it's a priviledge. You only get to retire if you have left the world a better place than you found it. Sorrry, buster... you don't get to spend your hoarded cash until you fix the environment and create some damn jobs.

It's time to do the right thing.

We do need to respect our elders, but that should be strictly in a non-executive capacity. Should these people receive huge remuneration for such positions? Absolutely not. Only those who have already managed to build enough wealth, and can therefore afford to not have to keep working, are entitled to sit on the boards of companies.

The most enterprising and hard working individuals are implementing and executing large-scale changes to our economy, creating jobs, creating wealth and inspiring the next generation. The value of sitting in a chair and criticising everything is precicely zero.

Tags: #banking #career #gender

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a story of "greedy, lazy, incompetant people who got found out"...

Justice is a funny thing. So is Karma. Things will always catch up with you. "My name is Earl. I'm just trying to be a better person".

I might not particularly agree with the Patriot Act, but I agree with the punchy tagline that was used to sell a lie to the American people, who were still scared and reeling from the biggest terrorist attack on home soil: nothing to hide; nothing to fear

However, I have a job which I need to pay my rent, but someone who isn't me (Earl) was working with a colleague who had his/her contract terminated today. Here are some more words I heard from Earl:

"I had asked to be moved from one scrum team to another due to a difference in style and approach from the way I like to do things, which has always been quite successful for me. However, it's not in my remit to tell other people how to do their job, so I asked if I could work with the a person who seemed to be doing things more in line with my expectations.

There then followed a blissful two days of productivity. The business seemed happy. The product owner/CIO seemed happy. Us developers were overjoyed and we were high-fiving and walking around the office with big grins.

We decided to go out for lunch as a well bonded happy team, at the suggestion of our scrum master. But he/she never showed up. As we sat there at lunch, we all agreed what a great guy/girl he/she was, and that we wanted to support him/her from the inevevitable management pressure that was going to fall on his/her shoulders.

We were surprised that our colleague didn't join us for lunch, especially as it was his/her idea. We had left a note and tried phoning him/her.

Over lunch we discussed how 'damagement' (management) were not really interested in knowing the truth, and in fact didn't want to know it, as it would undermine plausible deniability.

I observed that a couple of people had been asked if they would like to consider other opportunities in light of the increasing and relentless pressure. I wondered whether I might have been guilty myself of precipitating one of the scrum masters' untimely departure. It was almost an open secret that I thought he/she was a micro-managing waste of space.

I had actually been one of the people who was asked to consider other opportunities. I nearly laughed in the face of the person asking me. The irony of it was beyond belief, given this person's dependence on me during the previous weeks. I stood my ground and asked him/her to resign instead.

This kind of brinksmanship must be going on all the time between these equally incompetant fools. Knowing that I was competant, it was not brinksmanship for me. Instead I felt confident that the project and the client needed me more than I needed the contract.

You can't bluff a poker player who is holding the nuts - the very best possible hand available from the cards that have been dealt. It's a simple matter of memorising the odds for all the possible hands, and then your play becomes automatic: you know almost immediately when you should fold.

When we got back from lunch, I went for a pooh. I sat on the toilet, looking at Facebook and taking my time. I was relaxed and enjoying my job again, for the first time in ages, after having been empowered to do my job and make things better.

I came back to my desk, and my team told me he/she was gone. Immediate effect. They had got rid of him/her while we were all at lunch, with that empty chair at the dining table.

We speculated during the afternoon that the reason for termination was a lack of fear. Our departed colleague was rumoured to have no mortgage. He/she was too honest. Too fearless. He/she wanted to do the right thing.

I liked him/her, even though many people didn't, seemingly for intangible reasons, unrelated to whether they could do their job well or not. His/her face didn't fit it seems."

Anyway, I'm not really able or willing to comment, given my position on a sensitive, high-profile project that I can't talk about, and would never talk about, given my professional duty to my client. I will say this though, of the attitude of me and my colleagues. We care very deeply about the needs of our client and customers, and we always put those needs first, often ahead of our families, our health. We are passionate and dedicated, and excel at our jobs, under the most intense pressure and stress.

We are all trying to be the very best we can possibly be. We need to be. The bank is "rotten as shit" as the Department of Justice will attest. $1.9bn fines don't get dished out every day. We are turning it around though. I really like the CIO. I really like my team. I really like my job. I really like trying to save hundreds of thousands of jobs. We don't get to do that in IT very often.

[Picture has been removed by IT Security]

Me in the office, wearing a rugby shirt, looking like I'm having a 'good time' despite having worked far too many 7-day weeks (September 2015)

Tags: #banking #career #london #leadership #agile #scrum #capitalism