Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

18. Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

"How did it go at the hospital?" Lara asked.

"Dr Asref has written me a prescription for two medications and he's made the referral to the crisis team" Neil replied.

It was the third time he'd visited the small community hospital as an outpatient and the second time he'd met the psychiatrist. Lara had never even heard of the hospital, even though it wasn't far from their home. The hospital mainly dealt with mental health patients.

The first appointment Neil had as an outpatient was for an assessment with a mental health nurse, 8 weeks after his doctor had made the referral to psychiatric services. He'd spoken to the nurse for about 90 minutes, while a trainee listened in and furiously scribbled notes. The nurse was kind and easy to talk to. He seemed to know exactly what kinds of things Neil was going through and was able to second guess what Neil was about to say, which made Neil relaxed and chatty for the first time in months.

The second appointment was with the consultant psychiatrist. He was not particularly conversational and seemed to be almost rambling to himself about various diagnoses and treatment regimens. He had presented Neil with a stack of photocopies of information on various medications and the consultation was suddenly over. Neil was confused and a little cut adrift. Asking what happened next, he was told to wait for another appointment where he could say which medication he'd like to try.

"Did you get the mirtazepine?" asked Lara.

"Yeah, but the consultant said I should take venlafaxine with it"

"Two medications?"

"That's right" said Neil, rattling two boxes of pills at Lara with a grin.

He seemed happier but his behaviour was worryingly erratic and childish. He would say and do regrettable things with no care for the consequences, or he would burst into tears and leave things in a mess if anything didn't go well.

One day, Neil had suddenly decided to demolish the garden shed with the supposed intention of building another one, but he hadn't purchased any materials to construct a replacement. Lara found him in bed when she got home, dreadfully upset and stressed about what he had done. That evening, she had to move the contents of the shed that could be damaged by rain and store them in the spare bedroom, while Neil cowered under the duvet.

His energy levels had improved, but often he would stay awake all night on the Internet. When Lara came home he would want to tell her about all the things he'd found out about UFOs, conspiracy theories, quantum physics, stock market trading and chaos theory. Neil's eyes would be flashing wide with wonder and excitement, but his thoughts were jumbled up and he was talking so fast she could only pick up every third word. He would get frustrated that she wasn't understanding and storm off in a huff.

"Did you get a new diagnosis?"

"He can't make up his mind. He said he's still convinced that it's major depressive disorder, but he also mentioned borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder. He wants to treat me as if it's treatment resistant depression" Neil replied.

"Who are the crisis team?"

"Well, it's a number to phone if I'm thinking about hurting myself"

"Are you still having suicidal thoughts?"

"Not really. I'm too busy with my project"

Since losing his job Neil had been obsessed with the idea of creating an out-of-the-box security system bundle that would include wireless CCTV and motion sensors. The house had become increasingly full of equipment from Far-East manufacturers that Neil was tinkering with. Lara worried about how much it was all costing. How did he intend to sell this system if he could even make it work?

"Can I have the crisis team number?"

"Yeah. I'm supposed to give it to you and family so they can phone if they're worried about me" he replied. "And to any employer, but I don't want work sending round their goons to spy on me" he spat.

Neil's employer had become concerned that he hadn't turned up for work and had called his emergency contact - Lara - to see if he was OK. Lara was working and hadn't been able to answer her mobile, so the police had been phoned out of concern for Neil's welfare.

Neil had ignored the knocking on the front door, hoping that the police would just go away. A neighbour let the police into the back garden and they jumped over the fence. Neil heard the officers shouting at the back of the house and knocking on the back door. Yelling from the back windows, the police had insisted he come to the door so they could see he was OK. Neil had begrudgingly complied.

Lara was weary from constant worry about how Neil. She was very much relieved that there was now somebody else to contact in an emergency.

"People care about you, Neil." said Lara.

"Why are you using my name?"

"What do you mean?"

"Is there anybody else here? Why have you got to refer to me by name?"

"I don't know what you mean"

"You're so fucking patronising" said Neil, storming off.

Lara could hear him go into the box room upstairs. She knew he would be pretending to fiddle with stuff, brooding angrily. He would probably sleep in the guest bedroom again, even though it was packed with junk and the bed was covered with stuff from his project. Perhaps he would be awake all night surfing the Internet, following some thread that captivated his interest. They were definitely not going to have any further cordial discussion tonight.

Picking up the tablet on the coffee table - an impulse purchase that Neil had made - Lara searched the Internet. Typing "borderline personality disorder" she wondered what borderline meant. Did it mean that it was a milder form of the illness? As she read the symptoms she decided that it didn't really seem like Neil at all. They'd been together for so many years and they were engaged to be married. The part about unstable relationships didn't seem to fit at all.

Searching for "bipolar disorder" she came across a number of symptoms that sounded much more like Neil's recent behaviour. Rapid speech and disordered thinking, irritability, spending money and risk taking. She read the word "hypersexuality" and felt a knot in her stomach. He'd shown relatively little interest in her recently, but she knew he was watching more and more pornography. With a kind of shamelessness she heard him masturbating at night and found discarded tissues littering the floor. He made little effort to hide his Internet browsing history.

"Delusions of grandeur" and "psychosis" were things that were a little hard to place. Lara had worked a night shift and she heard him on a phone conference call during the day with his boss and human resources. Neil had ended up yelling about how he knew more than "all of you put together" and how he would create a competitor company that would "crush you like a bug". She knew that he had become frustrated and enraged by the conversation which had been ostensibly about sacking Neil, but his crazed response was completely out of character. She put it down to the extreme stress of the situation.

He was withdrawn and distant. It seemed inconceivable that he would be hearing voices or suffering with hallucinations. In her eyes, Neil was still strong, rational, intelligent and in control. She trusted him. They had always been open with each other about household finances and shared the burden of balancing the books. Even though she was cross that he'd thrown away his job, she thought that it was necessary for Neil's health and that he'd easily get more paid employment when he was ready to go back to work. They had enough savings to cushion their loss of earnings in the short term.

Two days later, Neil had disappeared.

"What do you think I should do?" Lara asked on the telephone.

"Have you rung the crisis team?"

"No. I don't know what the best thing to do is"

"Well, he didn't like it when the police got involved" Neil's dad replied.

Neil's dad was a practical man and had become a useful person to phone when she didn't know who else to speak to. Lara's parents were very sympathetic towards Neil, but it meant that they tended to share and exacerbate her worries rather than offering simple clear-cut advice.

The crisis team had promised to arrive within an hour. That was early on a Saturday morning. Neil had returned home in the afternoon, but had barricaded himself in the box room and refused to talk to Lara. Some eight hours after she had originally got in contact, there was a knock at the door.

"Hello, Lara?" asked a balding man, slightly overweight and wearing rimless spectacles. A mousey woman waited nervously behind him in the darkness, clutching a bulging ring binder.

"Yes, Hi"

"I'm Dan. This is my colleague Sue. Can we come in?"

"Please. Please do. I've been waiting all day" said Lara, ushering the two visitors into the hallway. "Neil, there are some people here to see you" she called upstairs.

Dan and Sue stood awkwardly and Lara gestured towards the snug, where they entered and sat down.

"Sorry... Lara was it?" Dan said.

"Yes, Lara"

"We had a number of urgent calls come in."

"That's fine."

"I'm a social worker and my colleague Sue is a nurse. We're here to make an initial assessment and see how we can help. Can you tell me what's been going on? It's Neil isn't it?"

"Yes, it's Neil I phoned about."

Lara noticed that Neil was hovering by the door.

"Ah Neil. These people are from the crisis team. They're here to see if you're OK."

"I'm not" said Neil, half entering the room but not sitting down, surveying the scene with distrust.

"Hi, Neil. I'm Dan. This is Sue" said the social worker, leaping to his feet and offering his hand. Neil took it and shook it. Sue half stood up, but remained quietly in the background. "Can you tell us what's been happening with you?"

"I can't cope anymore. I feel desperate. Suicidal"

"I'm sorry to hear that, Neil. How long has this been going on for?"

"On and off for months. It got really bad this week."

"OK, I need to ask you some basic questions." said Dan, now looking at Sue. Sue opened her binder and readied her pen.

"Do you know what day it is today?"

"Yes. It's Saturday the 20th of August, 2016."

"Do you know who the Prime Minister is?"

"David Cameron. No, er, I mean Theresa May"

"OK, and where are we?"

"We're in my house"

"Are you hearing or seeing anything unusual. Any voices?"

"No"

"Are you receiving any instructions, do you believe you are able to make people say or do things you want?"

"No"

"Is there anything you're anxious or concerned about right now?"

"I'm worried I'm going to kill myself"

"OK. Thanks, Neil" said Dan, glancing at his colleague. "It says in my notes that you've never been in hospital, because of your illness. Is that right?"

"Yeah, that's right. I've never been in hospital in my life except as an outpatient."

"Well, I think the safest place for you right now is at home. Where your partner and family can keep an eye on you. The crisis team can come and check on you, to make sure you're OK. How does that sound?"

"I want to die"

"OK well psychiatric hospitals are pretty crazy places. You wouldn't get a lot of rest there. The staff don't have a lot of time to help everybody. You'll be much better looked after at home. Do you have anything to help you sleep?"

"I've got mirtazepine. That makes me really sleepy"

"That's great. Do you know where it is?"

"It's on my bedside table."

"Lara, do you want to get it for Neil? And a glass of water" Dan prompted.

While Lara was gone, Dan and Sue sat quietly smiling and then Sue's mobile phone rang. She stepped out of the room and let herself out of the house while taking the call.

Lara returned with the medication and a drink.

"OK, Neil. What you're going to do is take your usual medication and then we're going to come and see you tomorrow and the day after. We're going to come and visit you here at home every day until you're feeling better."

Sue now let herself back into the house and popped her head around the door.

"Dan, we've got to go."

"Alright, sorry it was such a flying visit, but we have to attend to an emergency situation" said Dan, standing up and smiling. Pausing for a moment and taking on a more serious expression he said "everything's going to be OK. Hang tight. We'll be back tomorrow."

"OK, thanks" said Lara, following Dan to the door. Sue was already outside, eagerly wanting to get away. Neil was sat on the sofa, a little dumbstruck by the whole experience.

The front door closed, Lara returned to the snug.

"That went OK. There'll be somebody coming to check on you every day. That's reassuring isn't it?"

Neil simply looked at her blankly and then went upstairs to bed.

Next chapter...

This is a story about quicksand...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then, I was deflated again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If I stop moving, I sink into the quicksand.

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

This is a story about equilibrium...

I've now had exactly as many days on Planet Earth as an adult as I have had as a child. I guess it's time to pretend to act like a grown up a little more now.

I guess at some point, one day, I'm going to stop living in the past and going on about all the things that went wrong, or are broken in my life. It's been a little tough to "move on" and "look on the bright side" when there have been constant reminders, constant stressors, constant anxiety.

But this week I am on a desert island, somewhere off the coast of Africa. This is good. It is sunny and it is windy. Bliss.

There's a good chance this could be seen as boastful. It isn't. It's been well over 3 years since I had a week's holiday. I think I deserve it.

Of course, nobody deserves anything. Think of the starving children etc. etc.

However, maintaining equilibrium of mental health is a battle of whatever it takes. If I need to drink coffee and alcohol to tweak my mood up or down, to get through the day, I'll do it. If I need to eat unhealthy food or laze around in bed feeling sorry for myself, I'll do it. If I need to treat myself to a week off the rat race, the daily commute, the insanity of a bullshit job, I'll do it.

This is the payoff. This is the reason for living in a concrete jungle, wearing a straightjacket of a suit and not walking out of the office yelling "YOU'RE ALL GOING TO HELL" while making obscene hand gestures at everybody.

We're only here once. We only get one life. Nobody is getting out of this alive.

So, I'm going to ride my board on the ocean, blown along by the wind, with the hot sun beating down on me. Screw you, world, I kinda won here, for a moment.

For a brief moment in a monotonous daily routine of questioning my very existence, my place in the Universe, I'm briefly liberated from the deeply unsettling feeling that everybody's kids and grandkids are going to have a really shitty time due to the collective insanity of humanity.

For a brief moment, I cared more about not surfing into a giant rock that suddenly revealed itself to me, as the sea pulled back and a wave rose up.

There's something life-affirming about entering the ocean, where you also enter the food chain.

Kitesurfing has long ceased to be a 'survival' sport, where you're just happy if you have a session where you're not smashed into any hard objects by your massive kite, but you can still have the odd occasional unexpected rock, or something brushing your foot or leg from the depths of the ocean.

It's a pretty guilt-free pleasure... using the wind and the waves to power yourself along. No carbon dioxide is being released to propel you forwards. You're just harnessing the forces of nature, as best as you can.

Of course, nature is always humbling. An unexpected gust will tug you skywards. An unexpected wave will pummel you towards the sea floor. What unexpected life-affirming event ever happened to you in the office? A paper cut?

So, it seems pretty clear that I need nature, wind and waves in my life, to maintain some degree of equilibrium in my life.

Money potentiates the pursuit of the things you need to stay sane and happy, but it's not exactly necessary. There are plenty of other systems and non-systems for organising the human race, such as barter, anarchy etc.

I'm playing by the rules, and things have started to go my way. Please don't presume that I'm off the critical list, but I'm certainly in a good place at the moment.

You might think of me as very self-centred and melodramatic. You might think of me as complaining too much, and ungrateful for my lot in life. You might think that my expectations are unrealistic.

However, I'd be pretty happy to be a destitute beach bum right now.

Tags: #kitesurfing #mentalhealth

This is a story about an ambitious project...

How would you go about uploading yourself to the cloud? Have you thought about death, and what happens to your personality, your mind, once the apparatus of your body ceases to be a viable vessel for its preservation? Do you want to live forever?

I unfortunately lost my original Google Mail account - grantnick@gmail.com - which I had since 2004. I've now accrued 6.6 gigabytes of email across my new accounts - nick@manicgrant.com and h@ckte.ch - which are both managed by Google and therefore fully indexed for search.

Did you know that you can download all your data from Facebook? I've been a member of Facebook for the best part of 10 years. Facebook probably knows me better than any other piece of technology. It knows where I've been, and who I was there with. It knows who I talk to, and how regularly. It knows what I've chosen to share, as status updates, which are often quite personal and private.

If you dig around in the old parts of the Internet, you can even find me in the Usenet newsgroups, writing under my own name, back in the 1990s. The old content of newsgroups has been preserved for posterity by Google.

So much of my digital identity has been lost, as I moved off the dial-up Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) onto my first email addresses with CompuServe, America On-Line and Hotmail. I then made a bad habit of using work email addresses for personal mail. That means that when I left those companies, I left behind all my mail archives. All that content is now in the virtual trash can.

Losing my Google Mail account felt catastrophic at the time. I even leveraged my contacts and managed to get David Singleton - Engineering Director at Google - to try to resurrect my account. However, I had been caught hacking, so I wasn't shown any favours. My pleas that it was "white hat" were ignored, when I was in clear violation of the Terms of Service.

I used to write on a forum for the British Kite Surfing Association (BKSA). That forum was then decommissioned, and all those old posts were lost forever. I then moved to the kiteboarder.co.uk forum, and you can still find my old content on there. I used to be one of the top contributors.

But, would you even be able to reconstruct my personality, from all that email, and those social media contributions?

What's the difference between a film adaptation and the book it's based on? In the film, it's very hard to include much of the internal monologues of characters. Using a voiceover, a narrator, sometimes works, but often we lose the very thing that makes a book so wonderful - to know how the characters think & feel.

When I'm writing something for somebody else to read, more often than not, I'm instructing somebody to act, or passing on information. It's rare that I'm opening up and giving an insight to the inner-workings of my mind. In fact, with most interactions, there is a necessary formality. I'm sure my colleagues wouldn't appreciate it if I polluted our emails with random thoughts and updates on my state of mind.

I've always had a candid, open, style of writing and speaking. I leave little to the imagination about the way I'm thinking and feeling. However, it's still a guess though, because there is actually very little opportunity in life to really open up and let the true essence of yourself flood out.

We are always held back by that voice in our head that says: "but what will people think?". We worry how we are going to be viewed, when we write, when we speak. We are constantly self-censoring and projecting things in a certain way, saying certain things, to try to maintain an image that we deem necessary for our relationships.

"I can't tell my boss that I'm on the verge of a nervous breakdown, because they will think I'm unreliable" we might say to ourselves. Or we might say "I can't let this attractive person know that I have any faults, or maybe they won't fall in love with me". We might say "I can't let my family know I'm on the brink of suicide, because that will stress them out".

The version of yourself in all those emails, videos, social media posts... it's not a very true version of yourself. You've been constrained by social protocols. "How are you?" is always followed by "I'm fine thanks". Nobody expects you to reply "I'm on the verge of killing myself. My life is misery". Nobody will thank you for giving an honest answer.

So what happens is we live a lie, and there is no true version of yourself in existence, except for the one inside your head that you never let anybody see.

If we were to reconstruct you from everything you ever wrote, everything you ever said, we'd get a corrupt version of you. The version of you that would be digitally recreated would say and do all the right things, but the thoughts inside that virtual brain wouldn't be right. All those things that you wanted to say, but didn't, simply wouldn't exist.

I have to write 1,318 words in this post, and then I've hit 300,000 words. It was easy. A novel is considered to be a text that is over 40,000 words. I've written the equivalent of 7 novels, by that measure. It's taken just 10 months.

Would you find it easy, to dump the contents of your brain out, in all its gory detail? No, I'm sure you wouldn't. Even when you're writing a diary, you're probably thinking "what if somebody read this?". You even worry about what you think of you. You try to impress yourself. You try to hide your innermost feelings, even from yourself.

The Internet is full of abandoned blogs. You can see a flurry of activity that normally spans a few months, and then peters out. You can see the sporadic posts, when a dead blog is resurrected, months or even years later. However, what's rare is the person who writes consistently, reliably, regularly.

There are piles and piles of blogospam out there, but can you really reconstruct a personality from any of them? There are people who blog about knitting, people who blog about their pets, people who blog about stargazing, people who blog about sports. Can I infer who you are, or who you were from any of this vast quantity of data? Do I really get a sense of the person, from your online persona?

Google has analysed my 300,000 words of content, and tried to figure out what I'm writing about. Google has tried to figure out what's significant in this body of work.

Somewhere in Google's servers, everything I've written has been indexed for search. In a way, I'm already alive in the cloud. People from all corners of the Earth can find me, when searching for topics that Google knows are significant. Those seekers can know how I feel, what I think. They can delve into a very private world that you ordinarily would never get to glimpse.

Do you want to live forever? Perhaps you already do. The recorded history of humanity survives death, even in the stories we tell about our dead friends and relatives, and influential members of a community. Somebody somewhere has seen your digital content, even if it's just the electronic eye of a machine. Who knows where your data is going to end up?

Those who educate, inform and entertain have a reach that goes beyond their family and friends. Those who put themselves out into the public domain have a reach beyond living memory.

My mother looks after the archives of those few people who we deem to be culturally important enough to preserve, for the Bodleian Library in Oxford - one of the oldest libraries in Europe. While the library has a digitisation project, aren't we looking at things the wrong way?

107 billion people have been alive, ever. That means you're part of about 7% of the human creative output that could ever be recorded. Writing is a relatively recent phenomenon, and the ability to output to a digital medium with no lengthy conversion process and no loss of fidelity, is something that has only come about in the lifetime of those who are alive today.

When I write, it's not as a medieval monk, in some priceless hand-scribed tome that will be squirrelled away in some private library. Instead, I write as a citizen of the planet. My writing is captured in the public repository of the Internet, and is accessible to almost every living soul.

And, what advantage, the fact that what I have created has already been digitised? Well... my content is already in a format that's friendly for machine learning.

Speech recognition and optical character recognition can understand the spoken and printed word, but it's slow. The cloud has already greedily swallowed my 300,000 words, and processed them in order to serve them up to any consumer who cares to use them.

Is it arrogant and naïve to consider whether there is any merit in this hefty lump of text? Well, we are not going to know how Artificial Intelligence and machine learning are going to advance in the coming decades. Moore's Law predicts the exponential growth of computing horsepower that can be bought for a fixed cost. However, the game changer is when computers are no longer programmed, but are instead taught how to do things.

How would I go about teaching a computer to be like me, to think like me, to speak like me? Well, it would be like teaching a child. I'd sit down and talk to the computer. We would have a conversation.

However, how long would it take to speak to a computer, before you had provided adequate input? How long would it take the computer to process the sound into a stream of text? How long would it then take the computer to process the stream of text into a form that it can understand? How long would it take the computer to then crunch the numbers and attempt to say its first words?

If I was going about this project, I'd want to provide a body of text in a consistent format. We all speak with different voices. We all have our own unique style. Language is a somewhat crude way of expressing yourself. Human communication is full of flaws, when it comes to transmitting the contents of our brains from one being to another.

I could feed a computer with digitised books. I could feed a computer with Wikipedia. I could just let a computer loose on the open Internet. However, would it be able to cope, without context? How is the poor computer going to cope with all those different voices, different languages, different agendas, different writing styles? How is a computer going to get from the complete works of William Shakespeare, to understanding the inner-workings of the Bard's mind?

I'm sure we're already within touching distance of having a computer system write a convincing love letter. We write great volumes of soppy crap to the objects of our affection. However, while the art of seduction and the emotional patterns of those who are engaged in the courtship ritual are not hard for our mechanised chums to understand, do we really know much about a person from their attempts to get their leg over?

For me, there's so much more depth to the human mind, than what we can see through forced interactions in the context of getting along with one another.

There's so much magic in the secret diary. From Anne Frank to Adrian Mole, and agony aunt columns, we voraciously devour anything that's private and intimate. Words are normally a crude means of making any kind of emotional contact with the being that hides behind those glassy eyes.

This essay is not an instruction manual on how a machine may pass the Turing Test, but when you build a computer system, you also have to think about how you're going to prime it. What is your input data? Garbage in, garbage out.

In a way, we have already succeeded. If I died tomorrow, and you wanted to know more about who I was, how I thought, what made me tick, you could do a lot worse than perusing the pages of this particular publication. If you can't get a sense of who I am from these 300,000 words, is there really any hope that Artificial Intelligence will ever be human-like. If we can't understand ourselves, what hope do machines have of understanding us?

Now, the question is: did I write this, or did I get a computer system to do it for me?

The brilliant thing about AI, is there's no wiring diagram, no schematics. Just like a brain.

Tags: #computing #writing #immortality

This is a story about being isolated from the real world...

I remember an ex-girlfriend had lived her entire life in the village centre of Haslemere, Surrey. She was completely oblivious to the existence of the struggles of lower social strata. I remember my washing-machine repairman friend, Justin, being absolutely speechless when she casually talked about her parents retiring to Beaulieu, so they could be closer to their yacht. She was completely clueless. Not her fault.

One of my friends from school said he used to like coming to play over at our house, because at mealtimes there was lots to eat and it wasn't just potatoes. I liked playing at his house, because we would be messing around on decaying railway infrastructure, climbing huge mountains of coal or precarious games that involved the canal. Oxford might have become gentrified in parts, but there were still areas that were incredibly deprived.

The number of my friends who have spent time in jail, have some kind of criminal record or have at least spent time in the criminal justice system, is surprising, given my background could have completely isolated me from the 'bad crowd'. I did go to state school, but central Oxford has enough sons & daughters of lower ranking academics to mean that in the top sets of streamed subjects you would be unlikely to find a proper 'working class' child. Our form groups were also chosen quite specifically to try and stop the ruffians getting mixed up with those destined for greater success.

I hope that I'm fairly 'class blind' and don't judge people on their socioeconomic background. I also hope that I'm sensitive to the fact that I've had opportunities which are quite simply barred to a huge proportion of society. Being taught to speak like I was to the manor born, having posh sounding schools (although entirely ordinary state entities) and being quite relaxed speaking to adults of any rank or status, means that many doors have been open to me.

In some cases, money simply prices any ordinary people out of the market, so you'll find that all your neighbours are wealthy, successful and educated. There might be gates or a gatehouse or some kind of obvious border to the pocket of wealth you find yourself in, but often there isn't such clear demarkation. In London, for example, things are very subtle most of the time. The part of a London area that has the chic delicatessen, nice restaurants, a Waitrose, tastefully in-keeping shopfronts, colourfully painted townhouses or monolithic blocks of grand Georgian terrace... these things are pretty obviously what happens over time to an area after the hipsters have increased rents which drives out those who wish to shop at Cash Converters, Argos and Lidl.

Camden Town is a strange melting pot. A stone's throw from Regents Park and Primrose Hill, where some top dollar rent is demanded, but yet the high street has more than its fair share of pawnbrokers and low priced food outlets. I guess nobody really wants to live by the market, where drugs are dealt openly on the street at night, and in the daytime is crawling with tourists and pickpockets.

S0, I find myself now living somewhere that seems to only have an abstract connection with London. I live in a gated community with a concierge who is only too happy to take delivery of online supermarket shopping, if I never wished to leave the comfort and security of this well-insulated riverside apartment at all. There is water on 180 degrees of one side of the apartment... not even any roads, with the capital's incessant sirens as emergency services vehicles make their way from one incident to the next.

Only, where there are navigable waterways, there is always the chance for social mobility. Boatloads of people on the Clipper, party boats and speedboats come joyriding and commuting along the Thames. The police boat can even be regularly be seen jetting off up-river somewhere, with it's blue lights flashing. Tugs removing barge-loads of trash, or bringing containerloads of goods, chug their way up and down through the semi-tidal water.

I used to be content to watch a massive storm batter the coast, even if I had driven for many hours in the hope of being able to kitesurf, but the conditions were too rough and wild. As my equipment improved, I was able to afford a range of kites that could handle high winds as well as light breeze. I was able to actually get on the water in a storm, but that's right at the limit of survival and you don't have any time to actually think about what's going on around you.

I don't recommend you try it, if you've never been in the water when the wind is plucking you up, and depositing you several hundred metres downwind, as a 60-70mph gust comes through, turning the top of the water into stinging spray and foamy froth.

I don't recommend you try it, if you've never been in the water when breaking waves are the size of 2 or 3 storey houses, and all you can hear is a deafening roar as they're breaking behind you, as you try to outrun them. When one of these monsters catches you near the shore, it pummels you underwater into the seafloor, which hopefully is made of sand, not rocks or coral or something else sharp. Without your kite to pull you back to the surface and back onto the beach, you're as good as dead.

Kitesurfing used to be a fairly level playing field. Now, the equipment is so expensive I can't see how anybody of ordinary means could enter the sport. I guess surfing is still low cost-of-entry but who has enough time to bob around on a floaty thing waiting for a wave big enough to be worth paddling for? The English Channel is about the 3rd windiest place on the planet, and living on an island means you can't be too many degrees of separation from somebody who has at least some sense of how to move on water.

But here I am, inland, although only a stones throw from a river which would quickly carry me to the seawater of the Thames estuary. I used to kitesurf on Canvey Island and at Whitstable, which have reassuringly brown estuarial water. The water there very definitely came from the arsehole of midlands.

It's been so long since I had to rub shoulders with the proletariat. I'm not sure it's exactly made me forget the struggles of ordinary people, to lose perspective, to feel entitled or not realise that most of my worries and stresses are pretty much first world problems. Not travelling also means not seeing people who are not just a social division below, but an entire national or continental division below my own standard of living. When you're kitesurfing you tend to be in the poorest fishing villages in some of the remotest parts of the world, and when a fisherman saves your life, you definitely can't avoid feeling humbled.

It's a strange existence, being able to glide across the surface of the water on a thin little tray, and fly into the air as if you didn't weigh so much as a bird, but at the same time, your equipment, your choice of leisure activity puts you in a very exclusive club indeed.

It takes a certain amount of insanity to shackle yourself to a kite big enough to pull you bodily out of the water and into the air

Tags: #london #kitesurfing

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 challenging your reasons for doing things...

If somebody said to me that Bipolar was an excuse to do whatever you want, whenever you want, I would find my position a little hard to defend. However, to fall into line, to fly straight, to conform, to bend my mood by sheer weight of will... that's not possible.

I'm a fairly liberated character. Since living with daily threat to my life and livelihood, my risk profile has rather altered from that of a normal rational individual. I tend to leap before I look, and certainly with very little premeditation.

To an outside observer, things look erratic, out of control, recklessly dangerous. To me, things look pretty much the same, but my actions do fit onto some kind of macro plan. Even when I backslide into something or somewhere I really don't want to go, it's a bit of a calculated gamble. It happens when there appears to be little else going on of importance, little other opportunity.

So, have I deliberately sabotaged my own life, at times? Yes, I probably have. But you might be surprised to learn that the motives are not always clear cut. I have become quite an uncompromising character, who finds it near impossible to live in a situation where my values, ethics and professional standards are being infringed.

When you have pushed yourself to the limit and beyond to deliver projects, to create cashflow positive businesses, you know the upper bound of what is possible, both personally and for a software team, and what the reward feels like. You start to get a sense of whether it's worth pushing yourself that hard, or not.

When you have sunk to unimaginable depths, in despair and abandonment of everything, you know the lower bounds of what is survivable. You know how low you can go before you will either shuffle off your mortal coil, or some shred of self-preservation instinct is finally activated. You know what it feels like to literally make a life or death decision. You start to get a sense of whether you really want to die, or not.

Above is a picture of me, 24 hours after having been discharged from the psychiatric ward of a hospital. I had been body surfing in Cornwall. Those powerful waves and strong currents. That thrashing violent cold winter sea.

There's little doubt that this extreme environment activated my self-preservation instincts far more effectively than a week-long stay in a locked Mental Health ward, where nurses checked on me every 30 minutes to make sure I hadn't topped myself. That's not to say I'm not extremely grateful to everybody in the NHS who helped me.

Teaching my friend Klaus to surf in Bude, I drifted into the river mouth, where a deeper channel has been cut into the sea bed. The water flowed faster there and I started to be pulled by a strong current, well out of my depth and into the path of breaking waves. I knew that it was going to take time, a load of stamina, and a certain amount of calmness, to swim out of that channel and back into safer waters, and body surf my way back into the shallows where I could stand on the sea floor again. I had no floatation aid, no surfboard of my own.

Drowning in the sea would be a much more unpleasant way to end your days than, say, clattering into the hard ground at 125mph from an aeroplane or a tall building, or slowly losing consciousness as your blood leaked away out of ruptured blood vessels. However, I still find it interesting that I was making game plans to save my own life. Was I going to try and attract the attention of the lifeguards, who would see that I was out of the safe swimming area and come and pick me up? Was I going to try the riskiest but less energy-consuming tactic of swimming for nearby rocks that waves were breaking onto?

It's weird how you can find yourself messing around with Sir Clive Sinclair's latest invention in Cambridge one minute, so full of passion and energy, optimism and enthusiasm. Then your mood seems to suck all the life out of you and you're not sure where or when it's going to bottom out. You're not sure if you're on a ride all the way to oblivion, or whether you'll pull up out of the nosedive at the last possible moment.

That's my true reaction to my moods, to pressure, to risk, to addiction, to unhappiness, to discomfort, to instability: I will do something extreme. I will actively seek out something that will challenge me to my very limits. I will push myself until I find the true edge of the abyss.

Sometimes you feel like you've tried your hardest, that you can't go on, that something's not possible. You've reached the limits. I'm regularly surprised by what reserves we seem to store up, as human organisms. The disparity between perception and reality is most pronounced, when it comes to strength, stamina and depression. When you come close to those limits, you realise that your fear is giving you a safety margin, a buffer, that keeps you a safe distance from the true edge.

However, my brain has been somewhat corrupted, warped, miscalibrated. I had little hesitation in attempting to climb up on a ledge on the 48th floor of a tower block, where there is a little outdoor area. It's only that my colleagues pulled me back that prevented me from standing there, on the ledge, eyeing up the drop.

As you can see, the ledge is quite wide, but there's still something that isn't quite wired up quite right in the head of somebody who would climb onto it, 48 floors above the pavement.

None of this quite compares with riding through central London, on a black bike, dressed from head to toe in black clothes. No lights, no helmet. Frankly, drivers quite often don't spot the cyclists who are wearing high-vis vests and covered in lights anyway, especially in the wet when London's many lights, and the reflection in puddles, make it virtually impossible for a driver to see what's going on around them.

I took an almighty tumble when a taxi driver who was indicating left and pulling over changed his mind in a fraction of a second, and decided to do a U-turn right in front of me. My rear brake was loose because of a buckled back wheel, and I was so quick and hard on the front brake that I went over my handlebars and busted my ribs, hip, ankle. The taxi driver didn't even see me. I jumped up and back on the bike, and carried on, and then this huge surge of pain hit me.

That could be a metaphor for my life, since losing my grip on stability in 2008. I take massive risks, but I jump up and carry on cycling after being completely obliterated. I push through the pain, knowing that stopping will only make it worse.

Tags: #bipolar #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #nhs

This is a story about maintaining a degree of freedom...

Which one of these faces represents your mood? What if there was a pill, powder, liquid or a gas that could take you from a face on the right, to a face on the left? Would you use it?

Apparently 90% of adult Americans drink coffee. That's a pretty amazing statistic, isn't it? Officially, there are 350 million Chinese smokers. That's more than the entire population of the USA. Every weekend, town centres across the United Kingdom are turned into warzones, with huge numbers of binge drinkers, taking themselves to the brink of alcohol poisoning, and even beyond.

That's just the stuff you can buy in shops, over the counter. You can walk down the road, 7 days a week, and purchase coffee, cigarettes and alcohol.

Now let's talk about prescription medications. In Tower Hamlets, the borough of London where I currently live, Prozac (Fluoxetine) prescriptions are rising at 8% per year. London issued 5.21 million Prozac prescriptions last year. Over 20% more Londoners are taking antidepressants than 3 years ago.

So, in all probability, somebody somewhere has got their hooks into you. Either you drink coffee, you smoke, you drink alcoholic drinks, or you take mind-altering prescription medication. You are owned by somebody. A proportion of your wealth and tax dollars are going on mind-bending substances.

The picture above is of a blade that I have managed to remove from a Gillette Fusion razor, and crudely bend into a cutting implement. It's actually pretty tiny, hence why I never noticed that it was still lying on the bathroom floor. However, it's easily big and sharp enough to slice open veins and arteries.

Wouldn't I be better off taking antidepressants, so that my mood doesn't sink so low that I attempt suicide? Wouldn't I be better off in a chemical straightjacket?

Given that I have no fear of homelessness and destitution, why do I need something that artificially props up my mood and allows me to function, when my natural mood is telling me that something is wrong?

What goes up must come down, and for every desired effect of a medication, there are one or more side effects. Often times, people will take a medication for one ailment, and then have to take another medication to compensate for the side effects, and perhaps even some more for further side effects. It's much like the old lady who swallowed the fly, who ends up swallowing a horse.

Ok, so my mood episodes are pretty brutal, but at least I have a clear clinical picture, in medical parlance. It's fairly easy for me and any clinicians to see what my mood is doing, as the water is relatively unmuddied by mind-altering substances.

So what is my mood doing? Well, it's yo-yoing up and down like an insane elevator operator. However, it pretty much follows the instability of my life. 7 or 8 months ago I was homeless, then I was living in a hostel, then I was living with an alcoholic and his unfaithful wife, then I was sofa surfing with a friend, then I was living in hotels during a time when just about every London hotel was booked out for the Rugby World Cup, and then I got a flat.

Jobwise, I had a 9 month contract, and then a 6 month contract. I'm working about 6 months in 12, with the chance to push that up to 9 in 12 if I can get my arse back in gear. It's not a very stable work environment though.

I spent about 15 weeks receiving inpatient treatment in 2014. That really was an annus horribilis. I was in hospital for about 8 days (2 admissions) in 2015. That's quite a big improvement. 2016 remains hospitalisation free, despite some fairly sketchy stuff that probably should have seen me admitted.

But you can't see the other data that I have in front of me. My alcohol consumption, my coffee consumption, my abuse of drugs & medications... all of this is going through a radical transformation too. From regular and massive binges on wine & beer, coffee to prop me up in the mornings, drugs and medication to while away the time inbetween jobs: I've knocked almost all of that on the head. Life is a lot more straightforward when you're not peering through a haze of mind-altering substances.

However, it's a little too straightforward. In terms of stress levels right now, I'd rather give up the responsibility of having a flat, bills to pay, a man to kowtow to. It might be cold and wet and s**tty weather outside right now, but I'd still rather be living in a tent and not looking at a stack of 8 box files full of paperwork I need to deal with.

Seems bizarre, right, to choose to be homeless, destitute? Well, I don't think it's any more insane than working your arse off to pay for your rail season ticket and pay for the mortgage and bills on a house you never get to spend any time in.

Personally, I just feel as though modern life is making me unwell, so I reject as much of it as I can. I do the bare minimum to keep the wheels turning, and otherwise I turn my back on the madness. I try not to be swept along by the current.

I know my mood will change, and I will feel differently about things during a different kind of mood episode. I'm not going to poke and prod at my mind though, and try and coerce it into taking on an altered perception of reality.

Tags: #bipolar #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #nhs

This is a story about helping people...

Those are some kids from an extremely poor fishing village in Northern Brazil who I gave my surfboard to. Imagine one of them gets really good at surfing, like former Brazilian windsurfing World Champion, Ricardo Campbello. But then imagine if they get a lucrative sponsorship deal and then with their wealth and fame, they get into drugs and die of an overdose. Did I help or did I hinder?

Same dilemma when a friend or relative gets sick. If you help them back to health, they might then go on to do something that they wouldn't have been able to if you'd just let them die. You now feel responsible for their fate. If they do good things, you feel glad and proud of what you did to help them. If they do bad things, you question whether you should have helped them, and not just let them die.

Is that how it works? I don't know. I don't tend to look at people and actions as good and bad. I tend to assume that there is a set of circumstances, an environment, that drives a person's behaviour. I also can't stand by and let things play out. I don't want to play God either, and decide that I know the future, and sit in judgement over anybody. I feel it's my duty to help where I can.

And so it was, I came to be helping Frank, or trying at least, to escape alcoholism and homelessness. A hotel and a hostel that I stuck him in, to get him off the streets, were not exactly thrilled to have him as a guest. But unwittingly, they are part of a larger story that saw Frank go through treatment for alcohol dependency, go teetotal and get a place to live.

For all I know, I may have delayed or detracted from something that was inevitable anyway. I might have actually risked his recovery, for all I know. All I know is that when I met him, he was homeless and a polydrug abuser with an alcohol dependency, as well as numerous other health complaints that were being exacerbated by living on the streets.

Naturally, Frank wanted more than I could give. He wanted me to make all his problems go away. Nobody can do that for somebody else. We're all fighting our own fight at the end of the day, we just need some supporters in our corner. We just need somebody to hold the bucket while we spit blood into it.

So, what's the difference between a lapse, and a fully-blown relapse into drug and/or alcohol abuse? Well, somebody who's had a drink, sobered up and is now telling you "I won't do that again" but has a bottle of vodka in their bag is clearly not very committed to sobriety.

During my recent shenanigans, I hid my little bag of Supercrack. Then I took a load of legal benzos and went to sleep. When I woke up, I considered that I needed to end the binge completely, or risk total relapse, however it was too easy to just go and retrieve my little baggie from its hiding place and continue the whole horrid affair.

It wasn't until I chose to flush the chemicals down the plughole, by my own free will, that I had clearly delimited the episode as a lapse, not a relapse.

Anybody is capable of going on the Internet and following the steps that I did, and then tearing open the postal envelope and snorting the contents inside. Therefore, we share the same addictive potential, you & I. In fact, I'm less of a risk than you, because I have far greater first-hand knowledge and experience of what the negative consequences are. It might take you several months or years before you realise that you're in deep s**t.

So, I'm presently going through a chemical and digital detox. That means that I probably haven't read any blog comments, Facebook comments, Facebook messages, WhatsApp messages or anything that has been sent to me electronically. Sorry about that. I do need those messages and I will get round to reading them and responding. I am extremely grateful that you took the time to send me anything. Please keep reaching out.

I do need your help, and it will make a positive difference. You're not 'enabling' me to continue to do anything naughty/bad, and you're not guilty by association to some future as-yet uncommitted crime spree or whatever it is that holds back those who think they have God-like Minority Report style powers to preordain the future.

I've been a bit of a puppet on a string, but I've managed to sever the ties to those unseen hands, and now I'm just your friend, who is very sick and very tired and very alone and very sad and very vulnerable.

Tags: #frank #homeless #addiction #alcohol #drugs #addiction

This is a story about making new friends...

I don't like bullying. My new friend Klaus Bravenboer doens't like rugby. Somehow we get along and became friends, fast. We are just about to go surfing. Yesterday I was in hospital feeling sorry for myself. That's the difference that friends make.

We are really enjoying a spur of the moment visit to Koa Tree Camp in North Devon/Cornwall, mapping the territory as a high-performance team. None of this was preplanned. We are just going with the flow, dude.

I've always been a bit of a man on a mission, and it's nice to have a healthy way to express my masculinity. I've been fetching wood, making fire, tending to the animals, walking round the farmland. I feel quite proud of myself, even though that's a little laughable to all you happy well adjusted people who are loving your lives.

Klaus and I have been capturing videos, taking photos and doing interviews with the lovely founders of Koa Tree Camp: Andy, Gemma, Sam & baby Hamish and Poppy the dog. You'll be seeing more of this on social media over the coming week or so, during the build up to the inaugural Man on a Mission weekend.

78% of suicides are young men. That's more than 3 times that of women. I'd like to understand why that is, and understand myself more. I just want to be happy and well adjusted, like you. I'm pretty happy right now, and I'd like to hang onto a little piece of that.

There will be more Frankie the cat pictures soon. Meanwhile. here is Klaus with a black and white pig (October 24, 2015)

Tags: #friends #manonamission #bullying #suicide #surfing #adventure #leadership