This is a story about taking on too much...

I'm trying to sell the rights to one book, while writing another, and a blog, plus keep my eyes peeled for any easy contract work, plus try and find some missing VAT from the last quarter because the bill is eye-wateringly huge, plus get my annual acccounts up to date, which requires resetting my Barclays PIN and then importing a shittonne of data into Freeagent.

I'm also using my Braintree credit card merchant account to cycle my debts and avoid cripling interest payments. Oh, and I have to pay my rent soon, which at least I have the cash for this month. Really need to deal with the bills though.

The path of least resistance would be to go get another IT contract, but I would describe that particular channel as 'shit creek'. At least I feel alive, writing, even if responses thus far have been negative, apart from my whopping 4 sales on Amazon.

I read something written by my friend Julian today. I think it illustrated the gulf between me (blogging for 6 months, written 12,000 words of a book with a target of 60,000) versus him (blogging for years, author of a decent book that's selling well).

It's interesting how my life has been thrown into disarray by the simple act of dropping a phone in a bath. I could use my old one (pictured) but I mainly keep it for posterity. It's 8 years old.

8 years. What have I achieved in 8 years? That's a depressing thought.

I look at all my friends with their happy little families, all cuddled up in bed having story time or sleepy time, and I realised I fucked up somewhere. My flatmate Matt is one of the best friends you could ever ask for. I fell out with John, because his idea of winning is to undermine your opponent. I fell out with my Dad when he lost the use of the English language and the penny never dropped that at some point, respect has to become a 2-way street. Everybody else is just busy with their lives, and I've not kept pace, I lagged behind, chasing black widows and drugs.

What's to be done? There is a mountain of practical matters I can be busying myself with. Apart from my commitment to Matt to meet my share of the rent & bills, my gut feel is just to f**k off with a rucksack on my back. Perhaps to test the water, I should take Marine Girl on on her kind offer of the loan of her camper van. I've been within the M25 for far too long.

London kind of loses its magic when you live in a gated community on an 'island' (The Isle of Dogs).

I've made a right mess of things and it's going to take a lot of work to getting things back to pristine condition, but I can vaguely remember when everrything was shipshape and working like clockwork. Sure, there was boredom, an urge to create ripples in the calm water, but not this... not this churning thrashing shipwreck that threatens to engulf me.

Anyway, melodramatic as always.

See you in hospital.

Tags: #london #career

This is a story about two against one...

I'm fed up of being ignored and getting no respect from my Dad. This is a twofold problem. Now they don't take drugs anymore, they have  lost the only social bond to many freinds, and they don't know how to make new ones. They also live in a co-dependent abusive bubble, where my Mum has to agree with my Dad 0r else there will be arguing that my Dad always wins, because he puts ego ahead of relationships.

Growing up, I learned that making a reasoned argument, supported by evidence would get me nowhere. My most logical and intelligent statements would be put down with "smart arse" or "know-it-all", which is like an adult blowing a raspberry at a child because they can't think of a reply or they know they're wrong.

I'm writing two books, One on Bipolar Disorder and one on Legal Highs. I only have one literary agent at the moment, so if you know somebody who publishes non-fiction, please get in contact.

If you would like to read the first 12,000 words of my first book, please click this link and request access (I can't make it public, or else I can't sell it): https://drive.google.com/a/grant.gb.com/file/d/0B1Yzdy-TF4Z2WkczX28zVjRJNk0/view?usp=sharing

An advance would be really handy right now, because the thought of going back into a corporate environment again after 20 years of playing the game takes the saying 'deferred gratification' to an extreme level.

I would also like to borrow a vehicle of some sort, or be allowed to pitch my tent on your land. I'd like the option to change my environment. Marine Girl had offered her camper van but I guess she's away on half-term.

I'm going to keep my London base, because it's a gorgeous flat and my flatmate is such a great friend who really understands what I'm going through.

I have plans to keep a modest regular income, and I want a physical project too. I'm currently looking for derelict commercial property in London, that would be converted to house unaccompanied minors as part of Techfugees. If there's one thing I do well, it's the project that everybody else is too busy waiting for permission to do.

If anybody wants to 'buy' something from my company, I'm selling money-back guarantees. It also gives me an income of 4.5%. Also, if anybody wants to buy any 'nearly new' Macbooks etc off me, I'm offering a discount of up to 12.25%, but it'd be helpful if I could keep the whole 24.5%. Same goes for anything else that's VATable. Maybe you should buy that van (please lend it to me for a bit).

Also, I would like to sell some of my services, so I don't give the VAT man NO tax next quarter. Is there anything you have to do regularly on your computer, but the macro is just too hard? Do you want an ecommerce website or a forum or some graphic design work? Is there a data export/import task that takes you ages? See if you can get the purchase approval for the most IT experienced temp you've ever met in your life.

I do lecturing and pulic speaking too: London Business School, Bournemouth Business School and this little place called Cambridge.

If all else fails, I'm good at looking around a business, learning from your best people, and then shouting at everybody until things start going a bit better, if you're spending a lot but it all seems to be disappearing into a black hole. It's time for me to leave, which is normally when people return to their old habits or the management team think their failing project/company is just going to fix itself if everybody keeps the faith.

A leader should inspire confidence, the faith to follow them, but if that's up a dead-end then you're stuffed. Always remember this: leaders are promoted up to the level that they're no longer competent at their job.

So my parents will have a fantasy story about who I've 'become' and what I do with my time, and where my money goes. Why don't you get back in contact with me. I'll be pleased t0 hear fr0m you and I always appreciate advice and feedback. nick@manicgrant.com or @ManicGrant if you do that new-fangled Twitter thing.

If you hear something about me from my Mum or Dad, just say "with respect, you never email him, visit him and he ignores your calls after you only ever used them to guilt-trip him about his sister and niece, or say ignorant judgemental things". I need the family's help, not two ingnoramuses spreading inaccurate gossip about me.

I want my Mum & Dad in my life, but they need to grow up and learn that respect is a two-way-street. I'm still their son though, so if I'm in trouble and you've promised to help, then help, and help 100% not 50%, and certainly don't hinder by phoning all my relatives and telling them not to lend me any money because I became a drug addict devil overnight who complies with every stereotype.

Blame is a fruitless excercise. Just make good on your promises and help where you can, otherwise you inflict consequences which are not the same as blame.

I'm so exhasted, but I'm going to go look for buildings for unaccompnied minors. Guess where they mostly came from?

I always thought that drugs funded terrorism, but I feel so much safer already knowing that terrorism won't be getting any of its funds from pistachios and saffron.

Tags: #parents #childhood #politics #refugees

This is a story about getting airborne...

In startups, we talk a lot about runway. That is, how much money you have left to pay all your bills before you go bankrupt. The thing about doing a startup is, you don't make money from day one. You raise some money, build a product then try to get the revenue up higher than the bills... and you need to do all that before you run out of runway.

Most ordinary working-class folks know a lot about runway. They know that they have to pay their rent, bills and then make the remaining money last for things like food and transport, until payday. Every single month there is uncertainty about whether they're going to be able to get to work, if their money runs out before payday. That's called running out of runway.

A lot of low-paid jobs pay weekly. That's useful for something called cashflow smoothing. It means that your cashflow looks like lots of little peaks that aren't very high. If you got paid the same money on a monthly basis, you'd see a massive spike on payday, and then cash would slope down, down, down for a whole month, before spiking again.

If you run a limited company or a public company, you could pay yourself wages, weekly, monthly, whatever, but wages attract income tax. Income tax is 45% for people in the highest tax band. So if I wanted to do some cashflow smoothing, it's going to cost me 45% of the money I worked hard to earn. That's quite a waste of money if there's another way to pay myself that doesn't attract such high taxes.

Generally, I have to work for a month, then I can invoice my client for the days worked. My invoice is payable within 30 days, but it basically takes a whole extra month to get the money into my limited company.

Ok, great. Now I can pay myself wages... but I'll have to pay 45% tax and loads of national insurance. On the one hand, I really need some cash, because I've already lived for over two months without a single penny of income, but the main person who's going to get rich out of that arrangement is the taxman.

So I work another two months, plus the month for the invoices to be paid. That means that I have three months worth of invoices paid into my limited company. Now it's time to pay myself a dividend. Limited companies can pay dividends from their profits once every quarter. So, to maximise your dividends, you need to have 3 months of invoices paid into your limited company.

But that means that you've been working for 4 months, and not been paid a penny. Harsh man. However, the tax savings are considerable. This is not about me being a tightass with taxes. I always paid full taxes, and then when I got sick, there were no state benefits available to me, despite being under the limit for savings etc. etc. The state safety net just didn't exist when I was homeless and penniless, so fuck the government. I now save the tax and try and set it aside for when I'm sick.

Now, OK, you have your dividend... 3 months pay. You're feeling pretty rich, right? Well, if you've been living in a hostel, you might like to now get a flat. That'll be 6 weeks rent as a deposit, a month's rent in advance, and probably about £500 in estate agent fees. There goes £6,000 of your hard-earned cash.

What about how you lived for those 4 months with no income? How did you do that? I guess you probably had to borrow money. So, you use your remaining dividend to pay off all those debts you ran up, staying alive.

So, what now? Well, you'll have to work for another 4 months, and then pay yourself another dividend, and live off what's left after you got yourself a flat and paid off your debts. Oh, there isn't anything left? Oh dear.

The thing is, the system is fairly well tuned to fuck you. I can borrow money more cheaply than the tax, but the interest is compound, so it works out about the same. I could take a wage and pay the tax, but then I'll have less money left to pay off the debts. Between the banks and the taxman, you're f**ked.

It's true, each quarter things get a little better. I was planning on working for about 9 months, and then I would have been quite nicely sorted, but if you think that it's stressful waiting for payday, try waiting for 4 months for payday.

That's the life of an IT contractor. I'm an IT contractor. That's what I do, for a living. Yes, I could bake bread, stack shelves or work in a warehouse... are you fucking stupid? There's nothing wrong with those jobs, but if I wanted to burn money surely it would make more sense for me to do some IT contracting and then literally set fire to £50 notes. Jeeps, you must have a degree in Economics from Oxford if you think that it's a smart idea to not work the highly paid job I'm qualified and experienced to do, and instead work a job that doesn't cover my cost of living and is stopping me from getting the highly paid job that I'm qualified for. I'm sure that you'll be getting a tenured professorship any day now, with original thinking like that.

My cashflow is lumpy, and I don't have much runway, but at least this time I have the flat already, and a friend who can count higher than the 3 deformed stumps on their retarded hand has helped me to make sure I don't end up driven to suicide by the stress of being let down by liars again.

My plan was to start the contract hunt in the second week of January, when people were coming back from their holidays. I'm over 2 weeks late and sick as hell, but it'll be OK. I somehow got the HSBC job looking like this:

Yes, that's a hospital wristband. Arms are pincushions as usual from double canula and providing a gazillion blood samples (June 2015)

Tags: #career #london #computing #hospital #nhs

This is a story about modern life...

I missed 5 blog posts. 3 people were worried on Facebook, plus my flatmate. My sofa-surfing Kiwi has gone back to NZ.

2 of those people, I met at a hackathon, back in October. When I had to go into hospital a few weeks later, one of these new friends brought me a backpack that contained a set of hand-picked items from around my room, each thoughtfully chosen as something that I would probably need during a week or two in hospital. It felt like Christmas.

When I got really sick over the Xmas/New Year period, my other new friend came and sat on my bed and gave me a hug. He also did loads of my washing, cooked for me, and generally nursed me back to health. The most important thing he did though, was to just be thoroughly lovely. It makes a difference, somebody asking how you are and giving you a hug.

I was in a pretty bad way with muscle wastage and weight loss, having stopped eating for about 2 and a half weeks. Obviously I couldn't impose on my poor friend, with additional burdens, such as extra shopping to carry home, when he was already doing so much that was well above and beyond what any flatmate and friend would do.

Another new friend had become concerned by my lack of blog posts, and had actually come over to my flat on her own initiative. She's a very active person, with a busy life, but it so happened that she was off work... although I doubt that she pictured herself nipping to the Tesco Local for protein shakes, isotonic fluids and anything that had high calorie content. It was so kind and helpful of her that she did.

So, I just received an email from my sister. Apparently she's been getting shit from my parents, because they've read my blog and being the horribly abusive people that they are, they are taking it out their frustration with semi-illiteracy and their almost total exclusion from my life, on my poor sister.

Let's recap what wonderful parents they are, because apparently I've forgotten all the great stuff they did for me:

• Born to a couple of junkies. My mum was a student and my dad was failing to make enough money to support a family by buying and selling junk.
• Grandparents took pity on 3-year-old grandchild and bought them a house. Dad still doesn't have a proper job... too busy taking drugs.
• I spend all my time when I'm not at school in the pub, because my parents still can't afford to support a family, a drug addiction and alcoholism. Alcohol comes first.
• My Dad decides to scale up the junk buying/selling that didn't work before, so I have to leave all my playgroup and primary school friends to move to Oxford
• Between eye patches that I don't need and a yet another girl's bike with a fucking basket on it, I pretty much become the most bullied kid at school. I remember picking gravel out of my back whenever I was 'clotheslined' on the hard play area.
• My mum did take me to London a bunch of times, which was nice. We went to the Science Museum, which got me interested in science.
• Move to a school with a uniform. Turnups and the school blazer (optional) plus carry-over from previous school means the bullying continues. My mum sympathises with the bullies.
• I get a goldfish. He's called Fred. You can't stroke a goldfish. It's a shit pet, but I cry when he dies and make a little gravestone for him.
• Finally get a home computer. Not the Apple Mac like Julian and Joe have, or the PC like Barnaby, Ben, Marcus etc. etc. No... this is the last of the ZX Spectrums ever made
• Have to move school again. Great school. Bullying not quite so bad as there is an unpopular Russian boy and I'm in all the top sets and a good form group... so my parents decide we should move to France
• Some accountant friend of the family takes pity on me and gives me the oldest PC you've ever seen in your life. No software works on it, but that doesn't matter because the monitor is black and white anyway. This is my parents main gift to me: giving me something that's so unbelievably unfit for purpose that I try and try in desperation to make things work.
• Learn to speak French in France. Also didn't make any friends in the UK, and was away from all my other friends. Given the choice, I'd rather have friends than be able to speak French.
• Another new school. Bullying atrocious. Teachers are nice though. One of them takes me sailing after school... like a dad.
• Rather than leave me in a town where I can cycle everywhere and remain with my friends during puberty, we move to the middle of fucking nowhere. I write letters to my friends on floppy disks and post them to them. One friend comes to visit. One. That's it. One.
• Sailing club is good... thanks again to that teacher
• Another start at a new school ruined by the only bike that was capable of tackling the steep hills being a proper mountain bike. One that my dad stole. It was a girls bike. I had to ride past over 1,000 children all congregating on a big long pavement, before going up the steps to the school. My few sailing club friends disowned me.
• I was supposed to be saving up for another new computer, but £10 a week from a paper round doesn't leave a lot of spare money to buy replacement parts for my mountain bike, which gets used at least twice a day on very steep hills
• With a small contribution from me in cash, but absolutely huge in terms of the number of miles I cycled every day on my paper round, my Dad got me my new computer, well after its processor became obsolete. It doesn't have a co-processor or enough memory, but I figure I can upgrade those parts when I get a better job than a paper round.
• My dad bought the shittest, most rotten, neglected boat that looked totally not water-worthy. I restored it, then sold it for a big profit. Can't remember if I paid him back.
• I had a small financial contribution when I bought my 4th and 7th cars. The 7th car was brilliant, but I could have paid for it myself. I think I was only short a few hundred quid, and I was IT contracting so I was raking it in. I can't believe how my parents still say they "bought" me that car. I shall have to dig out the bank statements.
• That's it!

Oh, here are a few things that my parents like to misremember:

• They gave me one of their cars. My mum had crashed it and it had been repaired by a blind man. The thing is, it wasn't a gift. My granny had been saving money since I was really little so that I could get a car and insurance, and I would have easily been able to buy a small engined petrol car, in a low insurance group, with cheap parts... like everybody else my age. Instead, ALL the money had to go on insurance, and the shitty car broke down all the time, and because it was a complicated diesel with expensive parts, it was the world's shittest car for a broke 17 year old.
• Holidays: well, actually these were conferences for my mum, or the shitty dilapidated house in France where I was away from all my friends in the UK. My parents were always pulling me out of school, and sure it was an education and experience, but it was just what my parents wanted to do, with me along in tow. If you were going to do it anyway, it doesn't count as something you did for your kid. The fact we drove past Alton Towers so many times but never went illustrates their mindset perfectly.
• I've cost them a lot of money. Horseshit. I read books from the library or was playing round at friend's houses or somewhere I shouldn't have been. My parents never bought me the correct shoes to not get beaten up. Once I saved up the money from my granny and bought a pair of Nikes. I remember everybody commenting at school for days. I remember wanting to fall asleep just looking at them.
• They lent me money when I was in London. Nope. What they did was not lend me money when I was in London. I needed it in October 2013. Two years late is too late.

Ok, so there are myriad little things, mainly to do with cooking with my mum. My mum is really great. She did try her very best to give me a nice life. She worked hard, paid the mortgage and bankrolled my dad.

I'm trying to think of a nice memory with my dad, but it's all so practical. I was always watching him do DIY or cook but the only thing I think we learned together was when he taught me to read & write. Later, we would change the oil on a car and suchandsuch, but we never did something together, although I was allowed to come along to car boot sales, for example.

My only memory of him really taking an interest in something in my life was when I wanted to do a sponsored mountain bike ride, and I hadn't been doing the big hills for long enough to really travel all the way to the town where the event was being held, and then have much remaining energy to race.

It wasn't much more than a completely lumpy field, with a savagely steep climb, long traverse, descent and then back on the flat to the bottom of the climb again. I had no bottle cage on my bike and I was dressed in jeans, and it was a pretty hot day. People were laughing at this kid in jeans with a touring helmet, no other safety gear, on a girls bike.

When the race started, I left everybody who had "all the gear but no idea" behind. The traverse was quite tricky, especially without toeclips. The descent was suicidal on a fully rigid bike, but I started to lap quite fast.

The more the laps went by, the more of the skilled but unfit riders fell away. The ascent really was a killer in that heat. Anyway, I decided I'd better stop after quite a few laps, because I was feeling really badly dehydrated, and I was sick of getting flies in my eyes.

My dad was gobsmacked. I can't remember where I finished, but from his point of view, I was just lapping everybody over and over and over again. He took me to the bike shop in the nearby town and bought me a pair of clear cycling glasses for the flies, mud and stones, plus a bottle cage and bottle so I could carry a drink with me.

Perhaps if I racked my brains I could think of something else, but getting complemented on my riding, and then him making a further investment - unprompted - to allow me to take my hobby further, was a special moment.

So, my sister's pretty pissed off with me, but I can't understand why. My dad conspired with my wife and my GP to drag me away from my home, my life was dismantled, and the one time in my adult life when I did actually need and want their help - and it had been offered - they reneged on their promise in October 2013, and bang went my best chance to put my life back together in London, thanks to their lies.

I've not really altered the formula, and it's really quite simple:

• Place to live (not a hostel, tent, or shop doorway)
• Job (I'm an IT contractor. Thanks for your offer of [insert low wage job] but it would be uneconomical of me to not focus my search on highly paid contracts)
• Enough money for any cashflow shortfall until the 60+ days it takes before I get paid are done, plus I've absorbed the hit of the 6 weeks deposit, 1 month rent & agent fees
• I'm afraid that I'm so profligate that I replace my suit every 5 years, and my overcoat every 12 yeas. Shoes, I'm afraid I throw away when the shoe repair man laughs in my face. Shirts, I replace when the collar is worn through and it's horribly yellow under the arms.

There are certain things that people in London don't do either:

• They don't walk for 2 or 3 hours. They get the tube. That costs over £5 a day
• They don't bring a thermos flask of coffee into the office. Coffee is a £6 a day habit, but a necessary social visit
• They don't bring a picnic basket, get the blanket out, lay it down on the office floor, sit down and start getting foil-wrapped cucumber sandwiches out. Lunch is a £5 a day habit
• They don't drink much water. Sometimes they drink fizzy drinks. Sometimes they drink a kale, ginger and apple smoothie. Drinks are a £3 a day habit
• They don't have home-brew kegs hidden under their desks. When a Londoner goes for an after work drink, which is pretty much a social necessity, they will spend £5 a pint or more
• They don't work the longest hours in Europe and travel on a packed tube train to then get home, travel back in time, and start making fresh pasta and picking basil leaves in the garden they don't have. Your economy Londoners will buy fresh pasta and pesto, and will even push the boat out for a bit of parmesan: cost £7. Some days, you're at work so late that you might even get a luxury stonebaked pizza sent to the office, or failing that, you'll probably pick up a takeaway on the way home, because you're just going to fall asleep as soon as you've eaten: cost £15.
• They don't live in Zone 99. The zones go 1-2-middle-of-fucking-nowhere-99-100. Yes, it's true that you can save 50p a year on rent by living in Zone 99, but it will cost you over a million pounds for a travel card that goes out that far. It would also be quicker to just get a jet or a helicopter to City Airport if you're that far out.
• They don't all take loads of coke. Yes, it's true that there is some drug taking in the capital, but I bet there are good statistics to show that a far greater percentage of people are on drugs in the provinces, because it's so fucking dull out there.
• They don't fret about saving 7 pence on a loaf of mouldy bread, or consider it profligate to buy popcorn at the cinema, because wages are so much higher and you'll be working too hard to do all the stuff that you have to do to entertain yourself in the provinces on your meagre wage

So, anyway, I've shown my magic formula works. I know what I need to get back into work, routine, friendships and get on an even keel financially, so that I never ever have to explain to a dimwitted out-of-towner why the cost of living initially looks quite high.

However, my sister has a shit job, got pregnant with kid they couldn't afford, went through a divorce, lives in midlands suburbia and generally acts with incredulity that I could maybe have found it a bit stressful trying to re-enter London life on a credit card, living in a hostel.

I had said that my sister & niece were the only thing keeping me alive when I was in hospital. My life is fucked, the cashflow doesn't work, I'm not very well, I still haven't got a contract and there are now further delays. I know what'll happen... I'll get a nice big money contract, but after a month I'll be bankrupt, and my money will still be 30 days away at least. If I take it all out as soon as I can, then it means I'm not maximising my dividends, and it means I have to live on 33% of my income, instead of 100%. That means the stress carries on, month after month after month. But, apparently everybody's an expert in accountancy and cashflow forecasting now.

Apparently one of my sister's friends has it so much harder than me or something. Anyway, they're dead now. I'm just being a martyr or something. According to my sister and parents it's really easy to blag your way into a mental hospital, and slicing lengthways down my forearms with a razor blade was some kind of emotional blackmail, or maybe it was melodramatic... I don't give a shit anymore.

I literally think that you are a grade-A douchecanoe if you have no idea just how hard it has been to survive in London with no parental or state support, when I was completely fucked.

A big part of me says "fuck it". I was a homeless bankrupt drug addict in a park one day, and then you expect it to be all fixed in 5 months because I managed to get a flat, and a job. Then you only choose to help me when I'm hospitalised, suicidal. And then after it's already too late you say it's blackmail.

Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.

Can't be bothered.

Why bother?

You have absolutely no idea how hard it's been to work my way back from the brink and just how carefully I've had to budget, and how cleverly I've done my accounting.

I really didn't want to write another thing about my parents. They're dead to me. But to hear my sister echoing their lies is heartbreaking, and to receive a lengthy message telling me things that are just total bullshit, and saying "I'm sorry, but I don't want to be anywhere near you".

That's just fucking awful. OK, so I've poured out my anger at my parents for forcefully removing me from my own home so my ex could cheat on me, generally backing her up, and then totally fucking me over when they had their chance to make good on something helpful. It's something I have been trying forgive and forget but they're never going to re-enter my life. They have no interest in it anyway. My dad didn't even want to come in my London house and meet my London friends, despite being parked right outside.

My sister says I should ask if I need help. My parents don't do anything until it's too late: I'll either be dead or in hospital.

That's not emotional blackmail. That's getting rid of some worthless cunts from your life.

I'm absolutely heartbroken that my sister has been taken in by their bullshit. We had been talking about her visiting London and her getting a matching semicolon tattoo.

Fuck life

Tags: #parents #childhood #sister #career #london #suicide #depression

This is a story about the willing suspension of disbelief...

People think that beating drug and alcohol abuse is about abstinence, sobriety. It's not.

Are you familiar with experiments where rats were given bottles of water laced with drugs, as well as bottles of clean water and food? In cages that had a placebo, the rats obviously ate, drank, slept and lived until they died of old age. In the cages with heroin in the water, the rats would drink some heroin, fall asleep, wake up, eat, clean themselves, drink some more heroin, sleep some more... until they too died of old age. In the cages with cocaine in the water, the rats would drink and drink and drink from the cocaine laced water, until they died prematurely.

These were barren cages, with nothing to do but drink from a bottle, eat some plain food pellets, or sleep. No other rats to socialise with. Nothing to explore. Nothing to play with. No stimulation. Not really much of a life, even for a rat. What do you think you'd do, behind bars with nothing to do except drink from a bottle?

Did you know that they ran those experiments again, except this time they created Rat Park, which was packed with everything a rat could want from life. There were other rats to socialise with, and have sex with of course. There were tubes and slides and places to hide, and nice bedding and toys. The food was varied and tasty. Of course, there were still two water bottles, one of which was laced with drugs or a placebo.

Do you know what happened? The rats weren't interested in drugs. They were happy in their little ratty lives, and drugs had no place in those happy fulfilled rodenty days.

So what does that tell us about addiction? What do you think would happen if you took away somebody's self-esteem and pushed them out of society? What do you think would happen if you labelled somebody a junkie, a druggie an alkie, and demonised them? What do you think would happen if you mistreated your fellow human, your family member, your partner, your friend? Do you think that would cure them of their addiction?

Rehab is for quitters. Ha ha ha! No, not really. Rehab is a bit of a joke to be honest. The relapse rates are appalling. It's really not working. Do you know why it's not working? Because rehab is the place we send the black sheep of the family to beat themselves up, and to make us clean-living superior people feel better about ourselves.

What's the difference between an addict and a normal person? One puff on a cigarrette, one gulp of tea or coffee, or one sip of liquor.

Yes, it's true that addicts and alcoholics are on a death-spiral downwards that they can't stop on their own. The destruction of their life has begun, and they're going to ride that helter-skelter all the way to rock bottom, unless there is intervention.

Intervention means locking them away from their poison of choice, right? Wrong. Everything in that person's life that caused them to become addicted to drink or drugs is still there. Their environment, their social group, the pressures, the stresses, the broken life that they have... all those things are still there.

Finding the key that unlocks your addictive potential is not easy, luckily, but finding the key that unlocks you from the trap of addiction, that's easy: you just need a life that's better than living on the street in complete destitution, begging and stealing enough money for your next fix, while the whole of society thinks you're a piece of s**t and wouldn't p**s on you if you were on fire.

But that can't be right, can it? Lots of rich people get addicted and die young, and their lives are amazing. Well, let's examine that claim a little more carefully.

Having been down-and-out on the streets of Camden Town, London, it seems apt to talk about Amy Winehouse.

They tried to make me go to rehab but I said, 'No, no, no.'

Yes, I've been black but when I come back you'll know, know, know

I ain't got the time and if my daddy thinks I'm fine

He's tried to make me go to rehab but I won't go, go, go

Everybody wanted her to sing that song. Over and over and over again. Can you imagine that? Being a human jukebox, a human CD player, just performing the same song, over and over and over again.

Imagine being an amazingly talented creative artist, but nobody wants to hear any of your new material, they just want you to stand on stage and repeat the same old s**t, again and again and again.

Dancing bears get driven insane, and will dance and dance, even when they're not performing. How do you think the human psyche is affected by similarly being whipped and cajoled into performing the same act, repeated and repeated and repeated again.

But Amy Winehouse was rich. Tina Turner was rich. I've been relatively rich. How can these rich people complain or get messed up, when they're so rich? Rich people's lives must be amazing. Well, actually, the rich cry too. Rich people need the same emotional sustenance as anybody else. Rich people need to feel fulfilled too, and just being rich doesn't make you feel fulfilled.

It's less of a "how can they be sad" and more of a "how dare they be sad". People are incensed by the fact that they think they want the life of a wealthy person, but they haven't considered the sacrifices that that person has had to make in order to become wealthy. You haven't heard about how hard Michael Jackson and the Williams sisters fathers drove them, for them to attain success, for example? It's well documented.

This could very easily turn into a Monty Python sketch, where I implore you not to donate any money to help save the rich, so I had better re-ground things. The point is, we're all human. Wealth doesn't really touch the soul. Wealth is just a silly made up game that's external to all of us. Sure it seems to control much in our lives, but the really important thing is human connection, and money can't buy you love.

Sure, it's true that money is a major stress factor in most of our lives. I have got less than two months before I'm financially screwed, but it takes 60 days before I get paid on a contract and I don't currently have a contract anyway. Does not compute. Doesn't add up. I'm going to be out on the street whether I work or not.

Surely that's down to self-sabotage? Surely that's down to a lack of planning, of cashflow forecasting? Well, there's only so much you can do. I worked my arse off, got paid a lot of overtime, but it made me very unwell. It's a Catch 22. I can 'sing that popular song' over and over and over again in order to plump up the bank balance, but it makes me sick... literally.

Yes, mental illness is invisible and poorly understood, but you feel it just the same. You feel it in your dark thoughts, you feel it in the pit of your stomach, you feel it when you deliberately hurt yourself to try and let the pain out. Isn't suicide the ultimate in self sabotage?

My days currently consist of lying awake anxiously all night, then sleeping until I force myself to get up and have something to eat, then I try and distract myself from the anxiety until it's time to pretend to go to sleep, but just lie there anxiously all over again. Lovely life, huh?

I started to fantasise last night, not about taking drugs, but about doing a backflip off the 48th floor of a nearby building. I thought about the slow rotation of my body, head over feet, as I accelerated through the air towards the ground. I thought about the collision with the pavement below, and how it would bring instant relief. No more stress. No more anxiety. No more depression. No more isolation. No more demonisation. No more pain.

I then started to think about BASE jumping from up there, and you know what? I started to get stressed. I started to think about getting caught by security. I started to think about having line twists or colliding with a streetlamp or some hard object. I started to think about how much it would hurt, to survive. I got sweaty palms and my pulse started to race, my body became restless. The thought of staying alive, with all this stress and pain and anxiety is not a pleasant one.

That's how people get pushed into addiction. When their life becomes stress and anxiety and depression, and all of their human connection collapses. You're driven inwards by stress and anxiety when nobody is there to help you. When people who care about you start to label you, demonise you and refuse to assist you, you retreat into yourself, you have to be self-reliant and you no longer trust people around you.

I know that all I need to stay alive is the food from soup kitchens and the Hare Krishna, plus my good sleeping bag and my bivouac. Yes, there's a certain amount of pride that stops me from crawling over broken glass back to my parents. I'd rather be homeless and destitute than live with their abuse. Without any self-esteem or identity I might as well just slit my wrists now.

I knew things were going to get tight if I didn't find work right away in November, but I didn't care. I couldn't work. I was exhausted and depressed, and my mood was sinking lower and lower. With retrospect, there was no way that I was ready for another contract. I wouldn't have lasted more than a week.

Now I'm looking down the barrel of financial armageddon, but I can't care. There's literally nothing I can do about it. I'm swamped with stress, anxiety and the feeling that I might as well give up. Where do you think those feelings lead?

What do you think happens when you swamp somebody with anxiety, stress? What do you think happens when somebody has no opportunities? What do you think happens to cornered rats?

The motherf**king cycle continues.

There's my old bike at Silicon Roundabout. I could tap up Tech City for some work, but it's the last bridge left unburnt and I'm definitely not having my finest hour

Tags: #drugs #alcohol #addiction #suicide #depression #career #london

This is a story about dying while doing something you love...

Please forgive the gallows humour. I find death quite darkly comic, having lived in its shadow for far too long.

I found myself in possession of a year's supply of Supercrack once. It cost me less than $150 including shipping. A whole year of drug abuse, in one little baggie. Addiction never leaves your side. You can go anywhere you want, but you can't escape yourself.

Having a year's supply of your drug of choice should be an addict's wet dream, right? Well, it depends on the nature of your addiction. If you're still managing to eat and sleep, then perhaps you will make it to the end of the year. If you're not eating or sleeping, then you're simply committing suicide, slowly.

When I was trapped in an abusive relationship and kept away from London, I had given up on life. I was dying. I used to occasionally get scared of death, and clean up my act for a few weeks, but then I would always relapse, because of the same old abusive relationship and isolation from the city I call home.

I finally made it back to London, but there was pointless crap dragging me back into things that were far less important than saving my life.

That's a letter I received, in my mother's handwriting, hassling me about some divorce paperwork that could have waited until I had completed the treatment that I was undergoing to save my life. I had explicitly stated that I didn't want my wife or parents to be in any form of contact with me, while I was trying to get better. During this second attempt, I explicitly forbade my wife and parents from having any contact with me or the professionals who were paid to take care of me.

It was time to get better, get away from the s**ts who nearly hounded me to my grave. It was time to move on. It was time to recover.

Eventually, the vultures f**ked off and thankfully I had enough money left to pay the deposit on a flat and the first couple of months rent and bills, so I could get myself settled, get into a new job etc. etc.

I rented a room in a shared house near some friends in Kentish Town. My time up to this point had been wasted on pointless divorce crap that could have been deferred. I had been relentlessly harassed. Also, having my leg in plaster cast and being on crutches didn't help. My treatment was ruined by people not respecting my wishes. I was in a worse state than ever.

I hobbled into my new room and collapsed. I spent a week crying myself to sleep, I was so exhausted by the trauma of everything that had gone before. I had just about enough money left to make a go of things, but not quite. Everything had to go perfectly.

I had resolved not to commit suicide in my friends' house, where I was a guest, as it would have been a very unpleasant legacy to leave behind in somebody's home. They seemed committed to making that house their forever home, so there was no way I could do that to them.

After moving out and having a week where I felt that I didn't have the reserves of strength and money to continue, I decided to shut up shop. I decided to commit suicide.

The final straw was when my Dad tried to poison my friend's opinion of me, with his warped version of events. People were talking behind my back, and my confidentiality and consent to share information were completely breached. The place where I had spent the best part of £8k on treatment became some kind of counsellor and general centre for misinformation for my parents, despite explicit instructions that they weren't allowed contact.

I took a massive overdose and collapsed on the floor. The three metal prongs of a plug were sticking painfully into my thigh, but I couldn't move. The hot transformer for my laptop was burning my abdomen, scorching the skin, but I couldn't move. My arms were in the most uncomfortable position, but I couldn't move. The weight of my head rested uncomfortably on my chin, with my neck extended very awkwardly, but I couldn't move.

When you have taken an overdose, and you realise that it's overwhelming you, you start to panic. Can you make yourself throw up, if you've swallowed your poison? You know that it's too late... the chemicals are already entering your bloodstream and vomiting will make no difference. There was a moment's regret, and then resignation.

My body spasmed and twitched for quite a long time. There were a lot of auditory disturbances (I heard weird things). My mind kinda went blank for ages, or was caught up with weird confused thoughts. Then it dawned on me that I was alive but still on collision course with death. Day turned to night, and night turned to day, and so on. About 4 days went by with me paralysed like that... just breathing, and my body spasming.

I then started to think about death. I started to consider the possibility that I was going to discover if there was an afterlife or not. I started to think how embarrassed I would be to meet some deity who I never believed in. I didn't start believing in any god, but I considered how sheepish I would be if I met my maker.

Next, I started to think about the waste of it, the waste of life. Not that I was wasting my life, but that there was nothing positive that was going to come from my death. I started to consider how I could leave a message that would somehow prove useful to those who survived me. I started to consider how frustrating it would be to discover something in death, but have no way to pass on that discovery to the living world.

I started to imagine a weird experiment, where two suicidal people would risk their lives to discover if it's possible to communicate from beyond the grave. They would be in two isolated chambers, each with a keyboard. There would be a randomly timed event that would kill them, but they would get about a minute's warning before they were about to be killed. They would then type messages, and only in the event that the messages were co-incidentally the same, would the time be extended.

Eventually, one of the experimenters can type no more and rushes out of the experiment exit to safety. The other experimenter is killed. When the messages are later examined, we can see that the co-incidence of the messages being the same is immensely unlikely, but yet there were a sequence of messages that were identical, despite death being inevitable at that point.

Don't worry, I didn't decide to start a cult with a suicide pact. I did however decide that dying alone, leaving no note or anything was rather silly. I summoned the strength to claw myself off the floor and onto my bed, where I lay in agony for some time.

I urinated into a pint glass - I was virtually immobile - and saw that my urine was cloudy and the colour of orange juice with a lot of blood in it. My organs had started to shut down. My thigh was a painful mess from the plug that had dug into it, and my abdomen was burnt from the laptop transformer. My kidneys hurt and my tummy was tender and painful. My muscles were weak as hell. I had a lot of fluid on my lungs and my chest was tight. Breathing was difficult.

I decided to try and make death a bit quicker by severing my jugular vein, but my blood pressure was so low and it was actually really hard for me to even find a pulse. I kept blacking out with orthostatic hypotension.

Later, my ex-girlfriend discovered me in this dreadful state, and got me to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, where the hard-working lovely people of the NHS saved my life.

Here's the view I woke up to, from my hospital bed. I was quite surprised to wake up (May 2014)

Tags: #addiction #suicide #divorce #depression #london #nhs #injury

This is a story about unusual techniques to stay alive...

I once filled up a law firm's email server with pictures of myself. I was quite concerned that I was dying and wanted to get the attention of the family friend who was mediating on a matter that was very stressful - an acrimonious divorce was threatening my life & livelihood. Still, very strange behaviour.

When I was getting completely nonsensical replies via email from somebody, I started CC'ing more and more people, so they could see that none of my questions were being answered and an ulterior motive was being pursued by this other person.

Obviously, letting people know when I was in hospital was a bit 'attention seeking' apparently, but messages of support were gratefully received. I know I still have to reply to quite a few people who were kind enough to reach out, but you can believe me when I say your messages did really make a difference.

There was a guy in London who was going to kill himself, but he decided that if, as he walked along, one person looked him in the eye and smiled at him then he wouldn't go through with it. The urban solitude of London had made him feel invisible, uncared for, alone. Thankfully, somebody did look him in the eye and smile. Human connection is important. Somebody saved that man's life with the simplest of gestures that cost nothing.

Urban solitude is a problem for many new arrivals in the capital. People have their headphones plugged in, reading a book, or their kindle, watching a movie on their tablet or perhaps just idly playing with their phone. Especially in the morning rush-hour, nobody is talking or in any way acknowledging that you're all crammed together like sardines in a stuffy tube carriage, on the way to that job that you all hate, from some far-flung flat that you can barely afford.

Anybody who shops in a town centre is probably expert at avoiding the people with clipboards who "just need a moment of your time" to fill in some survey or sign up to direct debit some regular donation to a particular charity. We have become experts in walking right through people giving out leaflets, who aggressively thrust them into areas of our body near our hands, but yet we avoid actually taking a damn leaflet. We can walk right past the beggar and the Big Issue seller without even acknowledging their existence. 1,000-yard stare, off into the distance, and pretend like you didn't even hear them, didn't even see them.

I was thinking today about the improvements that Frank made to his story he told me, in order to seem like a more worthy cause. He shaved 4 years off his age, and showed me his forearms and asked me to inspect for the track marks of an injecting drugs user. It makes me feel bad that I've told my own story of homelessness, if people are going to dismiss it because of my drug use that I'm being completely honest and open about.

When you meet homeless people, they are often very keen for you to know that drugs and alcohol play no part in their homelessness. To be honest, I was very surprised, when I sat down to have a chat with a homeless person, Matt, underneath the bridge outside Chiswick underground station. Matt was extremely articulate and erudite, and I owe him a big debt of thanks for some of the nuggets of information that were later to serve me well on my own journey through homelessness. I have to admit that although I believed him, I was extremely shocked when he told me he had no drug or alcohol abuse in his past. He was simply p**sed off with the system.

If it looks like I'm dropping all this stuff about getting to know the homeless, and trying to help Frank, into this narrative in order to big myself up as some kind of philanthropist, you're wrong. Actually, I found it fascinating, informative, later useful and certainly helping Frank helped me to avoid dealing with my own life at the time, and feel better about myself. There was no alturism there. It was escapism.

Every fun-run that you go on. Every sponsored walk or abseil, or parachute jump or whatever it is... you probably did it because you wanted to do the activity, to feel part of the event, to feel like you made a difference. Sadly, you didn't, except to your own sense of wellbeing and achievement. Yes, we salve our middle-class guilt by making paltry charity donations and taking part in fundraising. Charity doesn't work. It's failed.

We are arriving now at a situation where we are in the middle of a refugee crisis, a housing crisis, a benefits crisis, a pension crisis, an economic crisis, a mental health epidemic. Cancer, AIDS, Multiple Sclerosis and a heap of other diseases are still rife. Poverty has not been made history by any rock concerts.

I'm absolutely not discouraging you from getting involved with philanthropic work, and if you're a volunteer or you're doing your bit to directly help in the lives of others then I applaud you... not that you want or deserve such condescension. Sorry about that.

Everything's just so damn broken. Life's really not working well for the vast majority of people on Planet Earth.

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem, and I feel very guilty indeed.

Here I am being driven to work through a massive slum in Mumbai from my 7 star hotel. I'm off to help JPMorgan process $1.16qn of Credit Default Swaps, with a team of underpaid Indians who travel for hours on dangerous and overcrowded busses and trains to get to the office. Do you think I was helping this nation of 1.1 billion souls?

I was there in the middle of Ganesh Chaturthi and the monsoon rains. The streets were crammed with trailers with idols and flowers being towed to the sea, with dancing neighbourhood groups beating drums and dancing in the road behind them. The roads are pretty much gridlock anyway, without some gawping tourist of an investment banker sitting in the middle of the chaos with his private driver.

We can feel very special being driven around in the developing world, and living like a king relatively speaking. Many people fall for it. Many people fall for the trick and start believing they actually are special and they deserve their place in the world. That, for me, is where a person can cross the line and stray into narcissism and a sense of entitlement.

Several friends have told me virtually the same story, about thinking they were a hit with the ladies in South Asia or South America, and having 'pulled' a local girlfriend, they were surprised when later asked for cash. Just because you're not obviously in a whorehouse, doesn't mean that you're not participating in prostitution. Just because you're not obviously on a cotton plantation, doesn't mean you're not participating in slavery.

Economic slavery means using your hard currency (Dollar, Sterling, Euro, Yen etc.) in order to buy labour (and all labour's fruits) far more cheaply than you would be able to in a country with a hard currency. You can't get pedalled across a European city in a bicycle rickshaw for less than $1. In London it's £10/minute to be ferried around in this manner, and you can be stung with a £200 bill for a journey that would take 3 minutes by bus.

So, I'm able to sit about on my arse writing the equivalent of two novels all about myself on a blog, peppered with photographs of me. This can only happen at the expense of everybody who grew my food, stitched my clothes and manufactured the expensive laptop on which I type these very words. You could say I'm the ultimate narcissist and profiteer from the hard labour of others.

However, modern life can make you very sick. My friend Klaus often says "it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a sick society". I think he's right. Just because we are dry and warm and well fed and comfortable here in the UK, doesn't mean that our island is now 'full' and we should 'look after our own'.

We are beginning to pay the price for Imperial aggression and an unwillingness to share. That we don't even redistribute enough wealth to end homelessness and poverty within our own borders, shows just how far we have taken small-minded 'look after number one' attitudes. The tabloid reader's belief that immigrants are not an integral part of our society, is ironic when a great many of Britain's working class are clustered together on sink-hole estates that they can never escape. Nobody from higher social strata would ever have cause to venture into the isolated community of poor white Brits.

Do I think I'm better than those people? Am I above living in a council flat, claiming JSA and integrating with the [not] working class? Actually, I feel rather angry that these people have been manipulated by the media into scapegoating the wrong group of people. It's the moneyed political elite who are the reason for economic inactivity and stressful hand-to-mouth existance of the ordinary British public, not the immigrants and refugees.

Yes, I'm privileged. Yes, I still have some shred of self-esteem. Yes, I'm somewhat conceited in writing so much about myself and plastering photos of me all over it. But am I unaware of my actions? Am I unable to perceive the self-absorption of it all? No.

The fact of the matter is that I just don't want to be trodden underfoot, so I'm yapping like a little dog. I don't want to end up dying young, with everybody wondering what happened and whether they could have helped at all, whether they could have intervened.

Suicide might be a sane response to an insane world, but I do appreciate that it's not a pleasant thing for other people to have to deal with, when you're gone. I've written before about compassion fatigue, and it must be hard when one of your friends or a family member becomes unwell with something so poorly understood as a mental disorder.

Drinking yourself to death, or slowly killing yourself with drugs... these things are clearly part of the spectrum of mental disorders. Substance abuse is just part of a complex picture of declining mental heath that is tightly bound up with prejudice and urban myths.

I had to quit drinking for 101 days, and all drugs and substances for 6 months, in order to be taken seriously. I suffered for my art and my cause: to draw attention to the plight of ordinary human beings who are suffering, not because they are corrupt and immoral, but because our very society is sick, and we are turning our back on our own friends and relatives, because of stupid media bulls**t.

Things have to be pretty bad in somebody's life for them to take a risk with a deadly substance. Things have to be really bad in somebody's life for them to be driven into the arms of a chemical dependency, in preference for choosing life.

Why did I choose not to choose life? Why did I choose something else?

Tags: #drugs #addiction #homeless #frank #career #divorce #politics

This is a story about doing more faster...

Startup accelerators are a good thing, don't get me wrong. But what's to be done with the wayward founders, the ones who burn out? How does somebody decompress, decelerate from the high demands of an intensive program like an accelerator?

Here's something I wrote on day 28 of the 13-week Springboard program, which is part of the global TechStars network: https://springboardcambridge.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/day-28-guest-post-validated-madness/

My company was shortlisted for TechStars, Boulder, CO, USA. I got the news at 6pm on a Wednesday evening. I needed to be in Boulder for about 10am the next morning. Solution? Get on a plane to Denver that night and drive straight to Boulder in the morning. No problem.

When I arrived at London Heathrow airport and went to check in for my flight, it turned out that the visa waiver program had changed since the last time I was in the USA. I needed an ESTA. This was a problem... the embassy was now closed. However, I managed to apply for my ESTA and get the all-important number in about 15 minutes, standing at the checkin desk, via a US government website.

On the plane, I read a book from cover to cover: Do More Faster by Dave Cohen and Brad Feld, founders of TechStars. It seemed apt, and I had finished the book by the time we landed in Colorado. I then met Dave Cohen later that day, along with Nicole Glaros who was heavily pregnant at the time, but still running the Boulder program.

I guess I shouldn't really associate myself with the TechStars network, given my precarious professional position, and the nature of this blog, but it's impossible to tell my story without somehow including the post-accelerator implosion that I went through. Certainly it's important to state that I always had the support of the network and fellow founders at all times though. Things would probably have ended up a lot worse without that safety net.

Anyway, I didn't really love my startup. I didn't have a lot of passion for the industry sector it was in and the software challenge had already been overcome. We started the program with a cashflow positive business, working software and an established customer and reseller base. I definitely took the wrong startup through the Springboard program. We should have pivoted more aggressively, but you live you learn.

I should have ceded control to my co-founder, David, a lot earlier. The acting coach that Jon got - Annette - to help us with our pitches, suggested that we give David a shot as the CEO. It was good advice. However, ego got in the way. I liked having those three little letters as my job title, even if I wasn't any good at the job and hated all the roles and responsibilities of it.

The problem is, I'm an engineer, and engineers just want to solve problems. In sales meetings, I would be far more concerned about the customer getting the solution that met their needs, than trying to extract a commercially sensible amount of cash from them. It was more important to me that my software was being used, rather than it bringing in sustainable revenues.

Looking back now, it makes much more sense that David and I should have switched roles. He's really good at the whole business administration and driving a hard sales bargain thing. He's really good at making sure that the whole business runs smoothly and is well administered. I only care about the software.

Jon did an interesting thing to try and save us from ourselves (or rather, from me). He got in a bunch of psychologists to come and tell us that we should be consultants, not running a startup. He had tired of nursing us through the growing pains of founder conflict, and joking about our "mutually assured destruction (MAD)" pact, which he wrote on the whiteboard above our heads.

Between Jon, Jess and the other founders we somehow managed to muddle through to the end of the program. There was only one time that I was so offensive that I nearly got my head kicked in. I would have deserved it. I was wrong, David was right, and my beef was with the browser, not him. I was upset that some technical detail wasn't quite measuring up to my preconceived notions, and refusing to try David's suggestion, which wasn't to specification. Of course, it did work, but being a stubborn engineer, I just didn't want it to work like that.

The weird thing is that David and me didn't have a very startup-y lifestyle. After I had finished with TechStars in Boulder, I jumped in my hire car, drove to Vail and went snowboarding. David used to be a ski instructor and sometimes do programming work in Arinsal, Andorra, inbetween forays onto the piste. We both had a pretty nice life. We didn't really need startup stress, hassle and belt tightening.

Apart from living away from our girlfriends in Cambridge for 3 months, there wasn't a lot of hardship that we really suffered, apart from the sheer workload of Mentor Madness and having to try and run a business at the same time as participate in a startup accelerator. I'm glad we did it though. Those experiences and contacts are very precious to me, even if I've not exactly made the most of them, yet.

Our intake must have been a record one for babies. There were two founders - including my co-founder, David - who had girlfriends who were pregnant. The first Springboard babies were born only months after the program ended. How those guys did it, I have no idea. Hero dads.

Obviously, David wanted to maintain a stable family home near Bristol for his first-born child. The end of the program marked the culmination of the intractable problem of where to locate the business. My ex-wife certainly wasn't giving any ground or prepared to compromise even an inch. I was rather caught inbetween a rock and a hard place. Naturally, I just had a meltdown rather than dealing with things in any sensible way.

The sensible thing to do would have been to ditch the girl who never supported me in any of my endeavours and was simply an ungrateful drain on my time, money and resources. She expected zero impact in our lifestyle, from me choosing an entrepreneurial lifestyle. Funding lavish holidays for her on a startup salary is quite hard to budget for.

But an unstoppable change had been started within me. I found Cambridge life to be exciting, exhilarating, even if it was only by some tenuous association with the University of Cambridge. I loved being around smart people. Startup founders are great to hang out with because they say "yes, and" rather than "no, but".

I really needed to go through a breakup, but I don't really handle failure very well. I knew my startup was going to fail with me at the helm. I had failed as CEO. I had failed to make my relationship work. I wanted to change my entire life, but I felt trapped.

My word is my bond, and I take commitment very seriously. I'm also a completer-finisher. I would rather finish something to a terrible shoddy standard, than leave a job uncompleted. I have lots of finished projects, but most of them are not to a very high standard. I'd prefer something was done, rather than perfect.

So it was, that I came to be trying to meet the screamed selfish demands of a spoiled partner, whilst also unable to bite the bullet and step down from my position as CEO, and also accept that I needed to chuck away and change most pieces of my life. They were challenging times, in the couple of months following Springboard.

During one trip back to Cambridge, in an attempt to secure a seed round of funding, I pretty much told all our potential investors that there was no interesting intellectual property in our business and it was a completely copyable business model. Not a smart move. I could almost see my co-founder facepalm when I told the panel this. Engineer's problem. I cannot speak a lie on technical matters.

Anyway, perhaps I wanted the thing to die, because my life was pretty miserable post-Springboard. Back in my spare-bedroom office, over a hundred miles away from my co-founder, and over a hundred miles away from London, and the wrong side of town to get to Cambridge. It felt like I was in the middle of nowhere, which I was.

Just about the only thing I've done too slowly in my life is to ditch a dead relationship. I tend to pick the wrong partners and allow klingons and coat-tail riders to try and hang on for a free ride. I tolerate fools too gladly. David is certainly no fool, and I feel very privileged to have gotten to work with him. However, he quite rightly stood his ground and didn't compromise on matters that were my responsibility to resolve.

The pressure to provide a luxury lifestyle for an ungrateful and unsupportive partner, and give up on my hopes & dreams was too much to ask of me. I was sinking fast into a depression, as my all-too-brief foray into the liberating world of running a business and being an entrepreneur, plus my time in the company of startup founders, mentors and academics, was looking like it was over forever.

I tried to prop things up, getting a job back in corporate bankerland. Shovelling other people's s**t for a living. It broke my heart. You can have the most lavish lifestyle in the world, but if what you do for 50+ hours a week is basically total bulls**t that you hate, then it won't be any compensation at all.

My ex-wife and my Dad really worked very hard to pull the rug from under my feet, and I'm really upset about it. However, I know it's my fault for not pushing those toxic people out of my life and following my dreams. They've been wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong again, but they still can't see that their small-mindedness and lack of vision has caused so many golden opportunities to be wasted. I actually have hard numbers showing that investment ideas of mine that they vetoed have now turned out to be ridiculously profitable. Never mind.

I actually feel as though I've never been allowed to dream. I've always been expected to just shovel shit for everybody else to prop up their dreams. I didn't go to University when all my friends were going, because my Dad made such a big deal about what a waste of money it was. I didn't follow my startup dreams, because I was pretty much forced to provide a luxury lifestyle, and chain myself to a remote seaside town for an ungrateful partner who didn't appreciate a single cent of it.

Anyway, moan moan moan. That kind of negative attitude is not going to get me anywhere. I've watched it all burn down, while my Dad and ex have stuffed their pockets and then distanced themselves from me. It should have been vice-versa. I should have shut those toxic people out of my life a lot sooner.

Shoulda. Woulda. Coulda. That's not going to be my epitaph. There's no sense in living in the past, and I apologise that this blog has been firmly rooted back in time, as I struggle to move forwards with my life.

You probably can't understand why I've left highly paid jobs and contracts, and put myself through all the stress of founding a business. I know I complain about the overhead of business administration sometimes, but I really have few complaints about the entrepreneurial lifestyle. I know that Jon's psychologists told me that I'm not cut out to be an entrepreneur, but it's something that keeps coming back to me... that desire to found and shape businesses, to lead, to create.

You don't see the sacrifice that has enabled me to enter the corporate world on a decent wage. You don't know how much of an isolated lonely existance that a geek had at school, programming their calculator and designing sprites in the back of their exercise books, when they should be having schoolday antics with the group of friends that they didn't have.

The loners, the eccentric introverts, the odd-ones-out are thrust together out of a necessity for safety in numbers, and sure those people become friends, but you're all still prisoners in your own mind to some extent. You might be able to see your friends get bullied too, but when it's your turn, you have to endure it all on your own.

Suddenly, being a techie geek startup guy becomes cool, and you are hot property. You can earn big cash selling your soul to the corporate sector, or you can sell lies to investors and have a super cool office of your own. Fake it until you make it, but you never faked it. You just woke up one day, and you're one of the highest paid people, because of stuff you did because you had a lonely childhood, with your head buried in books, or hunched over a keyboard.

Look, there are those sprites I designed in the back of my school exercise book, now on the wall of a global bank's office. You can't see how hard I've worked. You have no idea how much suffering there has been behind the bored looking exterior of the guy asking awkward questions on a conference call, slouched in his chair at his desk.

I can't hark back to 3 or 4 years of my life when I had very little to do except read books and write essays about things I found interesting. I never got to spend my investor's money on cool mosaic decorations on the wall, and bean bags and a table tennis table for my team. My startup life spans pretty much 3 months in a startup accelerator. That was the only time in my life when I really believed in what I was doing. When I was surrounded by smart people who I liked and respected. I was forging my own path through life.

So, what's to be done? Well, I'm running low on cash again, so I guess I will have to do another stint at the coal face. I will have to go on a raiding mission into corporate crazy-land and shovel s**t for some more dollars. I don't really have enough capital to risk chasing my dreams, as usual. As usual, I have been nickel and dimed by the klingons, coat-tail riders and the toxic people in my life, and I'm the one who feels bullied and alone.

I'm kinda used to it. I guess you could call this regression therapy. I've gone back to my childhood, where I had my head in the clouds and I was just writing programs and designing sprites, to distract myself from the crushing loneliness and brutality of the daily bullying.

It looks like there are a lot of open doors to me, but you've got to believe me when I tell you that it's virtually torture to go back into the corporate world, having had a taste of freedom.

I'll do what has to be done, and I'm sure you hate me for acting all spoiled and privileged, but you have to understand just how heartbreaking it is to sell your soul so cheaply.

Tags: #career #startup

This is a story about interpretation...

Anybody who has studied physics to an advanced level will tell you that at a certain point you have to suspend the search for the tangible, the intuitive, and start to make some leaps of faith. The Newtonian Universe, with action and reaction, starts to struggle to explain real-world observations.

I'm not in a survivable situation. I shouldn't have even been able to get this far, to climb this high. The odds are stacked against me in every way. There's not a chance that I could have been through what I've been through, and emerge relatively unscathed. People just don't recover from the trauma that I've put my mind and body through.

On examination, I have a facial tic and two hefty scars on my legs. My facial tic appears to have improved somewhat, since the summer. It's made worse by tiredness and stress, but I feel like it's not as pronounced as it was.

But what does this evidence tell us? Well, it's the tip of the iceberg. My mind and body have been to hell and back, quite a few times. For example, having functioning kidneys is a big surprise. You can't see the damage from the outside, but I suffered near-catastrophic levels of muscle loss, with accompanying damage to my kidneys, as the breakdown products from my body eating itself were going to ultimately prove fatal.

Would you believe that I have induced within my mind, all the symptoms of schizophrenia? I have, at times, believed that 'they' are out to get me (I have no idea who 'they' are... that's the point... it's mental illness) and been hearing and seeing things in a distorted way, misinterpreting what my senses have been telling me. These psychoses should be permanent. I should have been left permanently paranoid, psychotic.

The fact of the matter is that sanity is quite delicate. Anybody will start to have strange thoughts, if you skip enough nights of sleep and meals. Sleep deprivation and hypoglycaemia will mean that your brain will struggle to function. You can't really predict how badly each individual will react to these unusual stresses, but you can be sure that every human needs sleep & glucose.

I guess when you total up all the time that I've been in a psychotic state, it adds up to quite a worrying amount. Certainly enough to give me that facial tic. I used to have really bad full-body spasms, but I figured out which neurotransmitters needed topping up, as a form of prophylaxis to protect against early-onset parkinsons.

If you wonder why I eat so much protein, and take so many amino acids, it's because those things are providing my body with the building blocks to repair and protect itself. It's a thin line between temporary and permanent insanity.

If you were a psychiatrist or a psychologist, just looking at my clinical picture on paper, you would have to assume that I'd be a gibbering wreck. The path that has torturously wended its way through a few different counties NHS mental health services, through the private sector, and then back into NHS with rather a lot of chaos and the involvement of emergency services, across the midlands and several boroughs of London. Well, it's not a story that sits easily alongside a person who appears - to all outward observers - to have their s**t together.

The fact that I'm coping without medication, without the help of the mental health crisis team, without outpatient services, obviously not an inpatient... it's not something that very often crops up, given my case history.

I'm a bit of a statistical anomaly. I don't fit the data very neatly. If we're talking probabilities, I'm dead & buried several times over.

But what's going on inside my cranium? How much crazy am I just bottling up? Well, it's not pretty but it's not that bad either. I'm certainly not battling any psychosis. I don't hear voices, I don't see things, I don't think that I can read thoughts or control people with my mind. In fact, I have never experienced psychosis like that. My sanity has, thus far, been fairly solid in its foundations.

However, I have poked and prodded at questions, which are to all intents and purposes, unanswerable. I have plumbed the depths of what is knowable in an Earthly realm. I have considered things which are really not advisable to consider, lest you drive yourself insane.

Once you start to consider the full implications of something like the Many-Minds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics you start to question the very meaning of what it is to be conscious. When you start to do some basic maths, regarding the chances that you are alive and conscious at this very moment in time, with 7 billion other souls on the planet, then you can get rather overwhelmed by the statistical significance of it.

These thoughts come back to haunt me time and time again. When I'm unwell, I can even believe that I can perhaps model some of the Universe from base principles. I can perhaps come up with some great unifying theory of everything. Clearly this is a delusion of grandeur.

However, I'm no less able than anybody else to conduct thought experiments. In fact, I'm blessed with a very rational, logical mind. I have even done 'game of life' simulations and models in the past, with some success. But the fact remains, we're talking about hard problems, where hard doesn't even come close to cutting the mustard as an adjective.

So what's all this rambling all about? Well, in one sense my fate is sealed. If we were to consider the evidence, the clinical picture, the pattern of behaviour... I'm doomed! Either insanity, suicide or slow suicide by addiction should surely claim my life soon. It's a miracle that those fates have not already consumed me, and I'm here, stringing a sentence together.

Indeed, many people in my life have chosen to act as if there is a known outcome, as if they have a working crystal ball. Perhaps they have simply computed the odds based on the raw statistical data, and are playing the numbers. According to the numbers, I don't actually exist. According to the numbers, I died a long time ago.

I used to be very upset that people were writing me off before I had even had a chance to make an attempt at life. I used to get very frustrated that I was always a few days or a week or two behind those who wished to frustrate and undermine me. However, the tide has turned now and I finally have a fair wind behind me, and the gradient of the ground in my favour.

It must be upsetting to have somebody who just refuses to die and conform to your prophecies. It must be frustrating when somebody won't fit in the pigeon hole that you have assigned to them. It must be frustrating when somebody refuses to act in the way that you preordained, based on a supposed character flaw or some gift for knowing the future that you believe you have been blessed with.

I'm quite a fly in the ointment, refusing to shuffle off my mortal coil, or be driven irreversibly insane. People are a lot easier to handle when they fit nicely somewhere on the curve.

But I'm an outlier. I'm a stubborn son of a gun who refuses to just lie down and be neatly categorised. I'm very hard to manipulate. I'm very hard to discredit. I'm very hard to marginalise. I'm very hard to silence.

People have tried various underhand techniques to tame me, such as bullying, shaming, assaulting and the gathering of 'evidence' that they believe will show a 'smoking gun' unequivocally pointing to some easy conclusion that can be drawn. I'm sorry, but I'm just not that simple.

If I had one bit of advice for you, it would be to stop jumping ahead. Stop thinking that you can extrapolate from the few data points that you have. Stop thinking that you can predict the future, my future. I'm writing my future, and it very much seems as though my fate is not yet sealed, from what I can see. The grand finalé is as yet unwritten, despite your impatience to flip to the last page of the book and see how it all ends.

People come and go from my life, and I'm very grateful to those who have loyally stuck by my side. You have hopefully been rewarded with seeing a few different aspects of my character, and you can see that understanding and knowing a person is not as simple as making a rash judgement based on what you see, the moment you walk in on a person's life.

People are full of surprises, and even if you've known somebody their entire life, you still don't know what makes them tick, or what they're going to do next.

Tags: #mentalhealth

This is a story about discovering yourself...

Nostalgia is a liar that tells us that there was a bygone era when things were better than they are today. It tells us that despite a lack of antibiotics, immunisation, modern surgical techniques, telephones, internet, jet aircraft and reliable fuel-economical automobiles, there is something that we're missing from the pre-war years.

The fact is, that most people didn't have enough to eat, struggled to stay warm & dry and lived in fear of preventable diseases, which killed a huge proportion of people. Manual labour and low standards of health & safety killed men early. Childbirth and a lack of family planning killed women early. Infant mortality rates were stupendously high. Life was short & shit.

There's no point in looking backwards to those times. There's no point in stuffing your house full of antiques and dressing your children like some Dickens pastiche. There's no point in preaching a values system that probably never existed. You might like to believe that there was a time when there was more respect, more order. Do you think that the whip, cane and the gallows were never used? Even with corporal and capital punishment as deterrents, people still stepped out of line.

You might bemoan unruly or even ferral children, and imagine that there was a time when kids "behaved themselves". In fact, it is you who is delusional. Children are not dollies and mannequins. Children are not there for you to play dressing up games with, and to robotically comply with your instructions. They are little people, with their own identities.

The sooner that you accept that we live now, not yesteryear, the better. Your child does not have some imagined Victorian values stored hidden inside them. Your child exists as they do, today. They are shaped by this very moment, not your flights of fancy, nor your imagination.

Sure, as a parent, you have some preprogrammed delusions. You will always believe your baby is the bonniest. You will always think your child is the most adorable, the smartest, the one destined for success. No, probably not.

It's a good idea to back your kid up, to be on their side, to fight their corner. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. It all goes a bit skew-whiff when you start using your kid to live out your own fantasies though, getting your kid to compensate for your own inadequacies. If you didn't do well at school, pushing your kid too hard to be the academic that you failed to be will never fix your past failure.

And so it came to pass, that I arrived at the age of 17 without the foggiest idea of who I was as a person. I was quite clear about two different imaginary people that my parents wanted me to be, and just how much contradiction and impossibility there was in realising their fantasies. However, I hadn't the faintest idea of what shape my own personality took.

Discovering the drug, Ecstasy, allowed me to feel self-love and explore my feelings for myself. It also gave me a strange identity, bound up with drugs, dancing and music. I was a clubber/raver. I knew who I was on a Saturday night, in a sweaty railway arch, cutting shapes in the air and with pupils like saucers, high as a kite on MDMA. The rest of the time was dead to me. I was just counting down the hours, minutes and seconds until the next weekend.

This was clearly not a sustainable and complete identity, and my self-esteem was still at absolute rock bottom. In this vulnerable phase in my development, I slept with my male boss, believing - hoping even - that I was possibly gay. Turns out that I'm not gay. Shame. Life could have possibly slotted into some order, as at least there is some strong identity in being camp and effeminante, as a man.

The next cruel twist of vulnerability was to see me get involved romantically with an achondroplastic dwarf. She's one of the nicest girls you could ever hope to meet, and I really hope her feelings aren't hurt if she reads this, but she was quite aggressive in her advances. As I was completely lacking in self-confidence, I struggled to assert myself. I went along with things. I complied.

It's a bit strange, dating somebody that you're not attracted to, but I guess it's no different from my experiments with homosexuality. It's just that she was less unpleasant to kiss than somebody whose face is covered in stubble. Being f**ked in the arse is tolerable, but not exactly pleasant. This girl at least didn't want to penetrate me with some part of her body.

This strange little life had formed itself. I switched myself off during the week and went into hibernation. Then at the weekends I would take Ecstasy, and under the influence of this chemical, my feelings became much more fungible. It's easier to believe you have fallen for somebody, under the influence of the 'love drug'.

I guess I always maintained some toe-hold in reality though. I always knew that my feelings were being psychopharmacologically pulled this way and that, and I knew deep down that something felt very wrong.

It takes a long time to fix broken self-esteem and for you to emerge from the oppression of people who never allowed you to have your own identity. My own tastes had never been allowed to develop. I had never gained the skills of choosing my own clothes and outfits. I didn't know how to dress.

My hair was unruly and an inconvenience. I didn't like its style, but I had no idea how I wanted it to be cut. I had no idea how to tame my wavy locks. It's only because of an outdoors lifestyle, that I arrived at the shorter cut that I wear today.

IT contracting gave me the money to attain status symbols like a nice car, which I'm ashamed to admit, helped my self-esteem to some extent. Becoming some twat who is rather pleased with himself because he's rich and successful in those materialistic measures was not a road that I would have liked to continue down though. It was rather offensive to be flashing the cash to compensate for crushing inadequacy.

It was London that eventually gave me the space and the time to develop my own style, my own precious identity. It was tough going. One very bullying housemate drove me to the very limit of what I could endure, before she finally pissed off. Oh, what sweet relief! To finally be living in the Angel Islington, as a well dressed young man in a job that I was good at, with a healthy circle of friends and acquaintances. It was bliss.

The combination of corporate identity midweek - nice suit and crisply pressed shirts - with a surf style at the weekends, coupled with my newfound love of kiteboarding, really sealed the deal. I felt like a complete person, and for the first time in my life, age 23, I actually asked a girl out on a date.

I was still crushingly insecure, but I mostly muddled through because I was busy and I was optimistic and positive. I bungled a lot of the growing up, and failed to see the opportunity for bed-hopping for what it was, and instead continued to think I was falling in love at the drop of a hat.

I was hopeless at reading even the most un-subtle of advances by the opposite sex, and screwed up opportunities to trade up with some girls who I fancied the pants off. I was a faithful monogamist, but perhaps only because self-esteem and experience were still quite lacking in my love life. I kick myself now, when I think of some of the gorgeous women who advertised their availability to me.

In London you can find people whose style you wish to emulate. You can find those few inspiring fashion pieces, which can prop up your fragile self-esteem. You can start to develop your own identity, your own style, your own wardrobe. You start to feel good in your clothes, and then later in your body.

My broken self-esteem was restored to the point where I was confident enough to make a permanent mark of ownership on my body, in the form of a tattoo. I'm now so self-confident that I made the mark in a place where I can't even see it. From the photos that I've seen, it's not even quite in the right place but I don't care. It feels nice to have disfigured myself, deliberately, through my own choice.

I even grew a moustache for Movember, which is something I never thought I would do, given my lack of ability to grow decent stubble or a beard.

There's this tightly-bound link between London, outdoor/adrenalin sports, working for a corporation and being a secret raver/clubber, that is instricically linked to my identity. It's hard to shake those foundations as the things that I will run to in times of stress.

I know that MDMA will release me from the shackles of shame, regret and self-criticism, when I become paralysed by those oppressive thoughts. I know that the chemical will help me to have an epiphany of sorts, and move on with my life when I have become stuck in a rut. It's like taking a brief holiday from yourself and all your baggage. It's pretty hard on your body & mind in your thirties though! Quite a hangover.

I know that adrenalin sports will remind me that I'm alive, when I feel dead or dying. Just riding across London on a bicycle is enough to reaffirm that you still have some self-preservation instincts. You always end up having a moment where you nearly die, which puts things into perspective.

I know that immersing myself in corporate culture is occasionally good for my identity. It feels good to put on a suit, and know that the public are somehow looking at you as somehow more respectable, more mannered, more civilised. It feels good to puff your chest out with self importance and pretend like being part of the big money machine means that you have some value, even if the bubble soon bursts.

I know that being part of the heaving mass of bodies that make up London is a very cool part of somebody's identity. When you are somewhat hardened to it, used to the noise and the invasion of personal space, and the offence on your senses, you then start to get enjoyment from gliding serenely through the carnage. You know that people are looking at you and wondering how you managed to cut through the crowd and anticipate the seemingly random movements of individuals, so that you dance around the dawdler and dodge the ditherer. It feels good to have mastered the capital city, to know these mean streets.

Put it all together and you have quite a strong identity, quite a distinct personality. It's quite nice that a 'me' has emerged after a rather difficult upbringing, and further struggles to break free from parental oppression and some relationships which preyed upon my vulnerability, my insecurity.

If you wanted to try and get me outside the M25 now, you'd have to put my dead body in a pine box.

I love this dirty town.

Tags: #london #career #childhood