This is a story about an unholy trinity...

At a hotel I was given a voucher to connect to the internet. As you can see, it was foe pawn. I'm not sure if I used it foe pawn, but I possibly used it for porn, amongst my other general internet browsing.

Let me tell you about something that's a fairly irresistible combination: drugs, pornography and masturbation. Drugs and sex - i.e. chemsex - are bad enough, but there's a limitless supply of pornography out there on the internet, and given a limitless supply of drugs, you can get seriously messed up.

People who are dealing with the chemsex crisis talk about an unholy trinity of drugs: GBL/GHB, Crystal Meth and Meow Meow (M-CAT). These drugs are endemic amongst a group of promiscuous homosexual men, seeking to reach unimaginable highs from drug-fuelled sexual congress.

What happens when the secret is out? What happens when the wider, mostly heterosexual community finds out that having sex on drugs is many, many times more enjoyable than sex or drugs on their own?

Let me tell you, from bittersweet experience, that once you have tried chemsex, your ideas about pleasure and sexual ecstasy will be irreversibly corrupted. You can't un-experience things like that. You can't forget what you know. You can't un-feel what you felt.

Of course, 99% of people know that drugs are bad, and dangerous and will kill you just from looking at them, right? Well, unfortunately, people are discovering that the hard-line propaganda just isn't true, and the warning message is somewhat lost in the prohibitionist bullshit. So every cautionary tale is regarded with suspicion, or completely disregarded altogether.

In actual fact, there is so much taboo around drugs, sex, homosexuality, masturbation, fetishes... even just feeling horny is something we don't talk about openly. We are almost stuck in the Dark Ages when it comes to feeling guilty about our sexual desires, and the fact that we are inescapably driven to satisfy them.

At the end of the day, you can't fight hunger, you can't fight thirst, and you can't fight your libido. Those are the 3 things that ensure the survival of humanity as a species of animals. I know a small handful of us try to rise above the level of beasts, and act a little less like animals by using our higher brain functions, but we'll still die if we don't eat and drink, and we will actually devolve if the intelligent members of humanity don't reproduce.

Masturbation and drugs are the ultimate ways to thwart nature though. Once an animal has found something it prefers to eating, drinking and fucking, it's pretty screwed in terms of its survival prospects, and the likelihood of it passing on its genes. You could see this as a good thing: eventually addicts and wankers will die out. However, evolution is ridiculously slow, and chemistry is ridiculously fast. Checkmate, humans.

The above picture is an advertising campaign, suggesting that people don't try Crystal Meth "even once". The advice is quite reasonable. Meth is highly addictive, and the best way to not become addicted to drugs is to never take them in the first place.

By the same token, beating addiction sounds fairly simple. Just don't take drugs "even once" and hey presto, your addiction is cured. But things aren't that simple, unfortunately.

The brain is amazing at making connections between things. I would hope that everybody is familiar with Pavlov's dog, that started to salivate whenever a bell was rung, because it knew it was going to get fed. The brain had connected the sound of a bell ringing with getting food, and something that is normally completely unconnected with food and eating, became linked in the brain of this dog.

I would hardly consider eating food to be an orgasmic experience, but small amounts of dopamine - the pleasure chemical - are released in the brain every time we eat. It's natural that we should have evolved a brain that teaches us to eat... eating is what keeps us alive. Eating food is a kind of addiction, if you like. We eat because we get a pleasurable reward from doing it. We are satisfying a craving.

Sex and masturbation are a bit easier to understand. We get a much bigger dopamine hit every time we are sexually stimulated in a state of arousal, and another big hit of dopamine if we achieve an orgasm. It's much easier to see that sexual behaviour is the same as any other addictive behaviour. We feel a craving for pleasure: we get horny, we want to fuck or masturbate. We then satisfy this craving, with sexual acts, and then we are rewarded with pleasure.

However, the brain has natural systems to curb our enthusiasm for round-the-clock eating, masturbation and sex. After food or orgasm, a protein called prolactin is released from the pituitary gland, which signals to the brain that it's time to take a break from those pleasure-seeking activities. The amount of dopamine that's released if you continue to eat or fuck, is virtually nothing... you get no pleasure out of it, until the prolactin levels drop again.

The problem with drugs is, that they're almost always rewarding, provided you take enough of them. Sure, a tolerance builds up in your brain, but you can usually take bigger and bigger doses, and still get high.

If you combine drugs with sex/masturbation, you've got a problem... just like Aaron on his injected Crystal Meth, you might want to fuck or masturbate until the drugs wear off.

Now, if we imagine that Aaron is like that dog that salivates whenever the bell is rung... poor Aaron is going to want drugs whenever he gets horny, or he's going to get horny whenever he gets high on drugs. It's a vicious circle.

The only way that you're not going to feel horny is if you have your sexual functions interfered with, by medication or surgery. Castration for a man, removal of ovaries for a woman... the elimination of the sex hormones: testosterone, oestrogen and progesterone. That goes some way to eliminating your libido, but then, what are you if you're no longer a sexual being? You're certainly no longer human.

Drugs produce a temporary and mostly reversible effect, but the longer that you abuse drugs for, and the more of a link that is made in the brain between drug-induced pleasure and other actions, the harder it will be to undo those drug cravings, given the same stimuli.

When the stimuli is your own libido, you probably don't fancy becoming a eunuch. The only option is to de-link sex and drugs. That means having a lot of mediocre sex and joyless masturbation.

Once you start to realise how the brain works, you can start to disentangle why you do the things that you do. Why do you drink coffee? Because it contains the bitter plant alkaloid called caffeine, which causes dopamine to be released in your brain, which is pleasurable, rewarding. Why do you smoke cigarettes? Same reason. Why did you copulate for 30 seconds and produce a screaming shitting incontinent midget that can't even feed itself? Same reason.

If you truly want to elevate yourself above the level of the beasts, you would have to make yourself asexual and release yourself from the tiresome bother of having to eat and drink. However, you'd probably get so engrossed in some interesting area of research that you'd forget to eat and die of starvation. Plus, you wouldn't have any kids, so you'd just die in obscurity as some kind of eccentric hermit.

Of course you don't have to take things to the other extreme, and test the very limits of human ecstasy, pleasure... to get as high as it's possible to get. I really don't recommend it. It's bad for your health and probably pretty deadly. Everything else in life will be compared to that gold standard forever afterwards, and it's hard to get over the disappointment that nothing in your life is ever going to be as enjoyable.

This is a cautionary tale, but it's more an honest conversation that people are running screaming away from, because they're prudish, repressed, uptight, shamed by taboos and social norms into a culture of silent guilt about normal, natural human things that every person feels.

But there's another reason why some people go down the path of hedonism, while others go down the path of quiet family life: oxytocin. The bonding hormone is released when you stroke your dog or your cat. The hormone is released when you see your kids, and give them a cuddle.

Oxytocin is responsible for curbing our urge to seek pleasure, by giving us a warmer, longer-lasting kind of pleasure. If the dopamine hit you get from an orgasm is like injecting Crystal Meth, then the opioids that are released due to oxytocin are like injecting Heroin. You're happy to sit around, monged out in your pyjamas all day with your kids, because you're wrapped up in the cotton-wool opiate hit of a Heroin-esque oxytocin ride.

Nature wants you to change modes once you've reproduced, from the pleasure seeking fuck machine, into an obedient servant to your helpless infant(s). As a parent, your life is over. It's time to concentrate on stuffing calories into the greedy mouths of your offspring until you finally expire from exhaustion. It's a marathon, not a sprint, so having your brain calmed down and full of satisfying all-day pleasure chemicals while you're fulfilling your parenting duties works perfectly.

The most tragic thing is when these world collide. When children are conceived in the middle of a period of drug abuse fuelled sexual activity, it's going to be nearly impossible for your brain to switch modes. The amount of pleasure you get from your shitting, vomiting, snot-covered offspring is not going to be able to compete with powders and pills.

It might sound unpalatable, but if you're going to be a drug addict, you should be gay or be a wanker. Becoming a parent might provide an incentive to get clean and sober, but you're going to have a tough job kicking a habit and bonding with your child. That tiny bit of chest-swelling warm fuzzy feeling you get when you put your tiny baby on your chest... yeah, you're not really going to notice that if you're on a massive comedown.

It might seem like I'm a reckless risk-taker, and that I've come dangerously close to ruining my life, but that's the whole point: I've got no dependents. I've actually been really careful. The main thing to be careful about is to not spawn any offspring you're in no position to look after, because you're struggling with addiction.

But this isn't a lecture. This isn't me being holier-than-thou. Actually, it's me saying that I understand why families fall apart, why parents don't love their kids enough, why babies get born to junkies and hopeless drug-addled fathers.

One of the main reasons I have such a high metabolism, I believe, is because my Mum wasn't expecting to get pregnant with me, and when she found out she was pregnant, she then decided to lay off the booze and the fags. The withdrawal from nicotine and alcohol while I was in the womb would have meant that highly elevated levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, would have passed into my developing body, through the placental blood.

As an organism, whatever advantage we can get in our environment would have been crucial to our survival in a world that was out to kill us, 10,000 years ago. A baby that is going to be born into a world with little food and many predators should have a completely different metabolism from a baby that's going to be born into a land of plenty. You can't run away from the wolves very fast with a big fat blubbery baby, and there's no point in having a baby that's really good at storing energy in fat reserves if there aren't any excess calories around.

Addiction is just the same as hunger or thirst, and so, babies that are born to mothers who are recovering addicts will be affected as if they were starving: low birth weight, and the epigenetic expression of genes that cause features to create a skinny scavenger, constantly in a state of nervous tension, high alertness.

While it's easy to look upon me with ignorant, stupid eyes, and assume that my life has been directed by my choices, in actual fact, so much of what we think and say and do, and how our body and brain responds to circumstances which are very much out of our hands, is a result of a chain of causation that is far more impenetrable than a trite oversimplification.

What does it tell you that I've been able to take drugs like Cocaine, Heroin and Crystal Meth and not become addicted? What do your simplistic ideas about drug abuse tell you about that particular fact?

Drug addiction is a more complex relationship than simply a person and a chemical. Drugs are social. Drugs are sexual. Drugs are societal. Drugs are cultural.

Yes, it's true that the right combination of a drugs and activities associated with drug taking can form a nearly unbreakable bond in your habits, behaviour and actual brain programming, to the point that escaping addiction will be virtually impossible.

However, only a fool would write people off and say that somebody can never change. One thing is for certain about the brain: it's a plastic organ, that can adapt itself in amazing ways. One thing is for certain about humans: they're adept at handling almost anything the world can throw at them.

To stigmatise a huge group of people, to ask them to hang their heads in shame, to ask them to shoulder other people's guilt, to pay for crimes they're not responsible for, to be the black sheep, to be the scapegoats... it's a horrible thing to do, to sit in judgement over somebody who is 99.5% identical to you.

Ok, so you bought a dog, and a house, and copulated and made some kids and now you feel all smug and fulfilled, and you'd like to tell other people how they made bad choices and you're morally superior. Well, guess what? You're made of the same stuff. You'd respond just the same as the people you're judging, if you were put in their situation. Your brain works in exactly the same way.

You should really learn about how to lead people back to the right path, rather than trapping them onto the path they're on, which can only lead to their early death... a death that you share collective responsibility for.

I had to complain to the manager of this coffee shop that I couldn't see my veins in the toilet. Caffeine good, Heroin bad, right?

Tags: #drugs #sex #addiction #parents #childhood

This is a story about one hundred and one days sober...

I did it, and I also managed to go cold turkey on caffeine, sleeping pills, medication (antidepressants, mood stabilisers, anxiety drugs) and legal highs (sorry, they're called 'research chemicals' now) & illegal drugs, plus get some control over sex and spending money.

For 6 fucking months I sucked up the pill/powder withdrawal effects and over 3 more months no alcohol. I had not a single chemical that I could turn to to salve the emotional wounds, to ease the turmoil in my brain, to anaesthetise the pain. To attenuate the distress. To take a holiday from the stress.

Pure fucking discipline went into turning down every beer after work, every glass of mulled wine, every cup of tea or coffee that was offered, and every pharmaceutical that I can get by feigning symptoms in order to get an official prescription or just buy on the black market, and every 'research chemical' or just whatever the hell you want that is just one click away on the Dark Web.

Easy enough for a happy fulfilled 2.4 children, 9-to-5 family unit who watches TV all week and goes on outings at the weekends, and has their time filled with mopping up excrement and vomit and doing the kids homework. I'm sure it's very fulfilling to be guardians of your cloned genes, working as hard as you can to give those genes a chance to clone again.

I reached a critical juncture in my life where I was earning six figures including my iPhone apps, and I had a flexible lifestyle, and my fiancé/ex/girlfriend was earning £15k and didn't have very much flexibility. She wanted to be a trainee teacher, so evenings and weekends were for lesson planning and marking. I could write an iPhone app in a day and it would earn £8k. But she had a grand plan because she was so clever.

In the end I gave her three choices: either I go on medication so I don't give a shit that what I'm doing is soul destroying, I switch careers to one that will be really much less psychologically damaging but our kids will see much less of me, or we get pregnant and then it gives a reason for me to do what my professional experience qualifies me to do.

We opted for the latter, but I pulled the plug because I wasn't sure if I was going to pass on Bipolar genes or get too stressed and turn to drugs & alcohol to cope. I love her, I love kids, I love doing family stuff. But it's not all swings and roundabouts and cotton candy and rainbows. I started to doubt my coping mechanisms. I started to believe I couldn't be a trusted father (based on no evidence, beyond the fact that other people's kids love to play with me).

So our relationship became about hedonism. We took loads of GBL (GHB) which makes women have amazing orgasms. I took Cabergoline so I could have multiple orgsasms. Better sex through chemistry (or psychopharmacology actually).

I started fucking about with legal highs that would give me the energy to fuck all night. I was systematic. I would buy shitty tabloid newspapers to read what the kids were taking. Usefully, they led me to the piperazines and the cathinones (e.g. BZP and M-CAT a.k.a. Meow Meow). Those drugs are utter shit, but they led me to Methylone (bk-MDMA). I tried all the others on sale except for NRG-3 which didn't have an ingredient declared.

I'd made a list for myself of drugs to never take: heroin, crack, crystal meth, MDPV. Hang on, wait, what, MDPV. Yeah, it's the stuff that crack addicts and crystal meth tweakers get addicted to and then end up killing themselves or eating a tramp's face off or buying a Caribbean island and fucking a 17 year old girl while holding a loaded gun to their head and putting it on YouTube. Kinda standard stuff for a billionaire technology entrepreneur, right?

So if you don't know what's in the 'legal' high called NRG-3 and there are loads of crack addicts and meth addicts online saying this shit is way more addictive and they're now more fucked than ever and crack and meth seem like a weak cup of tea by comparison, alarm bells should be ringing.

In September 2011 I needed to break up with my selfish bully of a girlfriend. I didn't have the guts. I Went home, bottled out from driving into a concrete pillar at 100mph with the airbag turned off. Got home, ordered NRG-3, it was there the next day. Recommended dosage: zero milligrams. Insane dosage: 5 to 15mg. My dosage: 1,000mg.

I played with fire, got hurt, my fault right? Don't come crying to me when your medication gives you an averse reaction or a deadly interaction. Don't come crying to me when your medication does very little for your symptoms, but an endless list of side effects.

Turns out your heart can beat at 200bpm and not explode if you'e reasonably fit & active. Turns out your brain won't even start hearing voices or seeing things if your reasonably sane. Stimulants are a terrible thing to O.D. on. Barbiturates, opiates, cyanide, ricin, botox, nicotine, inert gas, poison gas, set fire to yourself, chuck yourself off a tall building or a cliff, sever a femoral or radial artery if you know enough about anatomy. Jugular veins, and any other large visible veins will get you there in the end. Fall on a sword around rib number 3 and hit the aorta or vena cava. That's all going to be in the 30 second to 4 minute region. Remember, you need to lose 8 pints of blood or suffocate for 3 minutes approximately.

Electrocution is hard now we have RCD circuit protection devices now, but if you're an electrician you'll be able to rig a circuit without protection. Hold something earthed in the left hand, touch something live with your right hand. Current will flow right across your chest and put your heart into ventricular fibrillation and probably cause enough internal burning to make defibrillation impossible.

Breathing pure nitrogen 0r s0me other inert gas probably seems least scary. No hypercapnic alarm response. Just like falling asleep, forever. Suffocation and you don't even know it's happening.

Jumping in front of busses, trains and tubes is unethical. Those witnesses will be psychologically scarred.

O.D.s... well most home attempts just screw up your organs and you die a slow and painful death. It has to be a nerve toxin, breathing suppressant, or something to stop the heart. An over-the-counter remedy would be co-codamol/Solpadine (without caffeine). Dissolve everything in warm water, then chill to sub 5 degrees C. Now filter out the nasty liver destroying Paracetamol using lab grade paper. Chill the solution again to sub 5 degrees C and filter again. What you're left with is liquid death.

Stabbing yourself in the aorta or vena cava or a pumping chamber is quickest. Just hammer the blade into rib 3 to 5 on the left hand side, and don't let muscles and tendons pull you back to the solar plexus or onto other ribs. You just need to 'fall on your sword' as the Japanese say.

A friend has given me enough to survive, food & drink wise. My flatmate has given me the space and time. My psychosis has gone after sleep. I need to check my kidneys function but my bladder seems to still be filling.

Shame seems to be the next threat to life. I have a blade that's long enough to penetrate my chest muscles, ribs and reach the top of my heart where the blood is at its highest pressure and death would be quickest. Seems prudent when I feel nowhere near close or well equipped enough to turn my health around and get my room into a phase 1 cleanup state, with the eventual state being pristine condition.

If not allowed to live without soul-destroying shame, I'd like to be a fly, vomiting on food and sucking up digested contents, laying eggs in putrid meat. Bhuddism is for me. Humans have a neocortex - consciousness - so I'd rather be re-incarnated as non-human. Thinking is a pain, although I could write an academic paper and a couple of books in a tent or a cave, or a psych ward or a prison, but the easiest thing of all would be non-human, and not troubled by consciousness.

The irony is that I now have several cerebral and physical/social things I would like to do, but I'm paralysed by shame that only I can begin to resolve. Being in hospital/psych/custody now just leaves me impotent to do anything to resolve anything. The end of the story will be written by somebody else.

Tags: #suicide #addiction #alcohol

This is a story about running out of ideas...

That's a light box. It's supposed to be a way of treating Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). It's the final thing I thought I could try, as a natural remedy for depression. The regimen that I have followed for 6 months is:

• Varied diet, including plenty of fruit & veg
• Sleep hygiene: strict bedtime and getting up after 7 or 8 hours, even on weekends
• No caffeine
• No alcohol (actually only 3 months)
• No medication
• No drugs
• No legal highs
• Amino acids
• Vitamins
• Minerals
• Exercise
• Making new friends
• Trying to have a stable place to live
• Trying to have a job
• Reconnecting with old friends
• Getting some professional help (only had a whole week in hospital)
• Being disciplined and self controlled
• Wearing blue-light filtering glasses after 4pm (for the last few months)
• Using the light box for at least an hour every morning (for the last month)

Guess what happened? My mood was able to react to things, and I reacted to my mood. There was no stability. In fact there was no coping mechanism. Everything I used to do to regulate my mood was removed, so I did other things that were detrimental to my overall wellbeing.

Being hung over or drunk at work is quite good if you hate your job and think that the management are idiots. Because I was sober, I told the HSBC management team that their project didn't stand a chance in hell of being delivered, because it was being run by people who are terrible at Agile Project Management, and seem to be completely lacking any relevant software development experience. I said I didn't want to be any part of it unless some big changes were made. I said I wasn't comfortable doing the wrong thing.

Being hopped up on coffee is good if you want to rescue a project. I recoded Barclays entire Corporate Pingit system, in 30 hours, with no sleep. I kept the existing public API, but everything else was thrown away. Instead of spaghetti code, full of copy & paste, and buggy as hell, poor error handling, poor logging - unsupportable - I just rewrote nice clean code. Lots of coffee, 30 hour hackathon, all the bugs solved, code reduced by 80%, production grade error handling and logging. The team leader felt important because the old system barely worked, so he spent a lot of time understanding the spaghetti. There wasn't really anything for either me or him to do after I wrote a decent system. My boss was happy, the team leader wasn't, I got my contract terminated, Barclays customers were happy, I was happy that I'd delivered the software that meant I no longer had any work to do.

Corporate software is boring. The projects I'm asked to do are child's play. 48 million customer's metadata? That's only 48 terabytes, if we store a megabyte per customer. A low res scan of their passport and maybe a utility bill, plus a few thousand characters for their name, address, phone number etc. etc. At JPMorgan we stored about 3 petabytes of document scans. That's about the same amount of data in the entire Library of Congress.

AI, games, simulation, data analysis, physics & cosmology modelling, codebreaking... those are the hard problems. I remember I wrote a program that calculated every single possible checkmate. Then I wrote a program that found all the moves that led to those positions. It ran out of memory before it got back to the early moves. Then I wrote a program that could take the position of the pieces on the board, and find the moves to checkmate, where there is no opportunity for your opponent to win. Most of the time the program couldn't find a path where the opponent had no chance. In theory, with enough processing power and storage space, chess could be solved by a program. However there are 10 to the power 80 (10 + 80 zeros) atoms in the universe, and there are 10 to the power 123 (10 + 123 zeros) moves in the chess game tree. We should probably concentrate on modelling the cosmos at subatomic scale before wasting our time on a silly game.

So, that's my quandary. I'm not very challenged or interested by anything in the corporate world, and my solution of just being drunk all the time can't have been doing my liver much good. However, without alcohol/benzodiazepines I think too much, and without caffeine/bupropion/stimulants, I can't get motivated to keep solving the same easy problems that don't even need solving.

In fact, when I think about it, I must have made a lot of people redundant. I've automated a lot of stuff that people used to be employed to do. I've made corporations very rich, by allowing them to lay off loads of their workforce, but increase their productivity and profitability. My main specialism is Straight Through Processing (STP). I know how to get $1.16qn processed with just a few programmers, database administrators, infrastructure engineers, network specialists and system administrators. You don't need project managers, because they just put the lies you tell them into a spreadsheet and tell everybody that everything is going really well. You don't need testers, because good programmers write good automation tests, and they don't write bugs. There's no difficult logic or calculations in a corporate system. I do get spooked out when my code works first time, but it's quicker to do it that way.

Human workflow and user experience. Here's a better use of your time and money. Fill out paper forms and then set fire to them. Nobody gives a shit about having to go through your life story just to become a customer or get a government service. If I want broadband, just send somebody to install it and set up a direct debit. If I want to rent a flat, I'm going to pay you 6 weeks deposit plus a month's rent in advance, plus letting agent fees. Just give me the keys as soon as I've put the money in your account. Don't even bother with the contract. Burn it. The contract is simple: I pay you rent, I live in the flat.

You send a person to read the electricity meter. They can take my card payment for whatever I owe when they are in my home. You send a person to read the gas meter. They can work out my bill and I'll pay it on the spot. You send armies of traffic wardens. They can spend less time hiding in bushes and more time knocking on doors taking card payments for the rubbish collection, street lighting, police, fire service, libraries, schools and other things that I quite like rather than hovering near cars whose meter payment is about to expire.

My bank sends me a letter saying that they've paid a bill for me, but I didn't have quite enough money, so they're going to charge me even more money. My bank's only function, so far as I can see, is to make my problems worse. Rather than ringing me up and saying "Hello, Mr. Grant. We can see your income has suddenly stopped. We're not going to charge you any interest until you start earning again, because otherwise we are going to stress you out and make you bankrupt, and then we won't get our money back". 

You see, everything trundles along fine when you play along with the game. Keep working doing that job you hate, at a company run by imbeciles, on a project that just needs 5 decent full stack developers to get on with what they do best, for 2 weeks, with no project managers who couldn't organise a piss up in a bar, and no 'architects' who just draw on whiteboards and produce documents that nobody reads, because they were rubbish at actually producing real working software.

The worst code I ever wrote was my first iPhone game. Games are awful as a single indie dev. You have to do all the graphics, sound effects, music, plus design the user interface, and then there's the game itself which has to run at at least 30 frames per second. The calculations are hard. Doing it in Objective-C was a nightmare. I've never know a language with such whacky syntax. I can probably write code in about 20 languages (BASIC, Pascal, Assembler, C, ADA, C++, Java, Javascript, C-shell, Korn-shell, Bash, Perl, PHP, C#, SQL, AWK, Batch, Google Apps Script, Logo, VBA, XSLT) and there's a bunch more I know enough of the syntax of to read and edit.

I can glance at some data and tell you if it's XML, JSON, Base-64, HEX, key-value pairs, fixed position, CSV. I can probably guess how the programmers of your favourite game store the high score table, and insert myself as the number one player with an unassailable score.

Yes, playing the games that everybody else does, competing... it seems a bit pointless when you know the game is rigged, and if I really wanted to, I could tweak my bank balance. Fraud is not hard, and banks make so much money they don't even go after the small fraudsters. It's easier to charge honest hard working people exorbitant rates of interest and fees rather than doing their actual legal & moral duty to Know Your Customer (KYC). I could buy a digital identity for about $100, open a bank account, get some loans, use the money to buy a real passport from a European country that's a bit more relaxed about staff members making identity documents in return for a cash bonus.

Once you're in Europe you can just keep heading east until you find a country where people don't read too many newspapers and watch too much TV. You can find somewhere you can afford to eat and sleep for a couple of years, while you wait out the storm. You can take some time out from the rat race, because you deserve it.

My iPhone app business was a hit, my first IT contracting company made loads of money, my electrician business was profitable, but the building trade is hard, my enterprise mobile apps business was too ahead of its time and never made much money, my Bitcoin trading and mining was hugely profitable, my second IT contracting company made loads of money. I don't really want to sell out and get another contract just yet. I've got some cool software ideas.  Instead of doing what I normally do and start with a profitable business model, I want to do something I'm passionate about.

I don't work at MIT or Stanford. I don't work at CERN or the UK Atomic Energy Authority, but I can tell you that the strong nuclear force is the energy that's released when a heavy element is split into two lighter elements. But what does "heavy" even mean when we haven't managed to get the Standard Model of Particle Physics to be unified with Special and General Relativity. Special Relativity tells us that energy and mass are two sides of the same coin, and General Relativity tells us how mass stretches the fabric of spacetime. Gravitational lensing has proven the theories predictions. The Standard Model had it's wartime and industrial applications. The transistor radio and faster computers. Every experiment discovers new weirdness though, rather than proving the model is complete. The particle zoo grows and grows, every time we smash protons together at higher and higher energies.

What does Quanta mean? It means "how much". A photon - a packet of light - comes in a specific frequency, which tells you how much energy it has. Let's imagine that a red photon is 2, green is 4 and blue is 6. We can also imagine that an X-ray might be 20 and a gamma ray 50. Do you notice that all the numbers are even? That's because you can't see anything odd numbered. A photon with the wrong energy won't interact with an atom that needs a higher energy to absorb it, and then emit a new photon. The only way you know anything exists is because of the photons that are emitted from atoms.

So we can only work with things we can see, and those things will only tell us about the photons that have the right energy. We can build a machine that measures microwaves, but what material should we use to listen to the frequencies that no known material interacts with. How would we even find elements that our eyes and our radios and our photographic chemicals can't detect?

Well, cosmologists reckon there's loads of it, whatever it is. They call it Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Nobody can see it, but they've done the math, and there just isn't enough visible matter to glue the galaxies together. Imagine if Dark Photons came in frequency 1, 3, 5, 7 etc. but our visible universe is governed by the Planck Constant, which means multiples of 2, in this  simplified example. If you can only see 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 etc. then you can't see the Dark Photons and the Dark Matter that can only be seen with the materials that we only hypothesise to exist.

General Relativity is normally right, and GR isn't fussy about the matter that it accelerates. It doesn't deal in packets of energy. GR doesn't do probabilities. Quantum Mechanics says that if we stop observing something it loses certainty and spreads out into a probability cloud. If you know the location of something, you can't know it's momentum. If you know something's momentum, you don't know where it's located. It's like saying that if everybody stops looking at the moon, it won't be where you predicted it to be when you look back. But GR doesn't care about that. GR has predicted the moon's orbit with incredible accuracy, and the moon always obeys the law of gravity.

If you ignore gravity in your subatomic world, you permit matter to behave unpredictably. If you ignore special relativity, you permit massive particles to fly around faster than the speed of light, in order to uphold the uncertainty principle.

If we think about the duality of light. Both a particle and a wave. We think of photons as massless, but they have energy and finite speed so General Relativity applies. The speed of light is too fast to get caught in orbit but light will bend around massive objects. Let's use the Pilot Wave Theory instead of all that Quantum weirdness. Imagine our photon being carried along by the gravitational waves that it's making. Gravity waves can travel as fast as they like and can even escape black holes. You can't detect them, because your ruler will stretch and compress as a wave passes. You can't take a timing of how long it takes for something to travel from A to B because time and space are different for different observers. Just by carrying my atomic clock to my fellow experimenter, to compare the time I measured and the time they measured, my clock will run slower because I'm moving in space. Time is not distance divided by speed.

Time measures how much slower you're moving than the speed of light. If you could travel at the speed of light, and tried to shine a torch forwards, no light would come out and your watch would be stopped. You wouldn't even be conscious, because you'd be frozen in time. If you slowed down to 99% of the speed of light and shone your torch, you'd see it beaming off just as fast as normal. That's because time is passing more slowly, so you don't notice that your light is moving at 1% of its normal speed. When you get back home, you'll probably find that everybody is dead, because time didn't slow down for them. Your clock is right, but so is theirs.

So what's going on at the subatomic scale then? Well, you can't really detect a single particle. When a photon hits the Charged Couple Device in your digital camera, it's absorbed. Enough photons have to be absorbed to trigger the discharge of a capacitor. Only the amplified signal is strong enough to be measured. The thing about amplification is that you get noise. You're trying to measure a signal, but a percentage of what you measure is noise. That's the signal to noise ratio. It gets worse. Because instruments are digital, they have limited precision. If you measure colour with 8 bits, you can only pick the closest of 256 colours. A CD can only store 16 bits of air pressure: 65,535 possible values. It does this 44,100 times a second. Pretty good, but only an approximation.

Because all digital equipment depends on an effect called Quantum Tunnelling, it's hard to know if the Quantum phenomena are being observed, or whether it's the instrument's noise that is being amplified. Early computers sent signals in parallel, but sometimes the data got 'skewed', with some bits arriving later than others. Now data is sent in serial, with very fast modulators and demodulators, but that means that a lot of buffering has to occur. If you imagine the time it takes for a detected signal to be amplified, that amplified value to be measured, the value stored in a buffer, a modulator to turn the value into electrical pulses, the time to travel down the wire, a demodulator to measure the pulses and store a value in another buffer, a memory controller to load that value into the computer processor's register, the processing instruction has to be loaded from the cache, and then the calculation is performed, the result is copied from the result register to memory, the I/O controller sends the result to the storage device.

Then, ages and ages and ages later, a scientist comes and looks at the values. According to Quantum Physics, every piece of measuring equipment, power source, data transmission cable, the computer and it's storage device, are all part of a quantum superposition, and the value is not determined until the scientist observes it, at which point the wavefunction collapses. Computers are great at doing calculations and for sharing research, but by their very nature as machines that exploit strange subatomic behaviour - semiconductors - they are also not very reliable when measuring the very properties of physics that they themself are built on.

It's useful to think of the Pilot Wave theory, because it explains observations like the double-slit experiment, in a nice deterministic way. Photons don't travel through both slits, but the wave does, and then the two waves interfere. Interference disappears as soon as you polarise the particle, because the peaks and troughs are no longer in phase. We really don't need to mess around with probability waves.

Yes I really hate probabilistic theories. Because subatomic things are smaller than the wavelength of light, we can only make statistical measurements. The size of the atomic nucleus was estimated by hammering a sheet of gold really thin and then firing electrons at it. Based on the number of electrons that bounced back and got detected, an estimate was made of how much empty space there is in an atom. However, you might know the weight of the gold, and the surface area, but you don't know how thick it is. It might be 5 atoms thick, it might be 50. Where did you get your measurement for the weight of a gold atom? How you know its density? How do you know how tightly packed the atoms are together?

At some point you're going to have to rely on some old science. The periodic table gives us the atomic weight, based on a presumed number of protons, neutrons and electrons. But what about the strong nuclear force that's holding the nucleus together? What about the energy of the electrons in the biggest orbits? Does a 1g diamond have as many atoms as 1g of Carbon dust? Prove it.

So we know that heavier elements are unstable, radioactive, and decay into lighter elements. We know what amount of what element, in a certain isotope, will give a self-sustaining fission reaction. We guess that fusion in stars creates all the elements up to iron, and all the elements after that we guess are created in supernovae. We haven't done much apart from a bunch of chemical reactions and some atom smashing yet though. We've done pretty well with electromagnetism and radio waves. Semiconductors and transistors are completely ubiquitous. It's all useless junk if the Van Allen belt blows away in a coronal mass ejection and we're all bombarded by cosmic rays and the radio waves are filled with static noise.

I can tell you something that's fairly easy to observe. Hotter air takes up more volume than colder air. Also, there's an altitude where Earth's gravity can no longer hang onto its Nitrogen, Oxygen, CO2 and noble gasses. Also, if you suck up dense polycarbons from deep underground, where they have been heavily compressed, and then set fire to them, the result is less Oxygen, more heat, and the expansion of liquid into a big volume of gas that's heavy, so it lies close to the ground, while the useful Oxygen is pushed into the upper atmosphere, where it thins out and drifts off into space.

If you have more CO2, you should plant more trees. However, we're doing the opposite. Deserts are spreading, rainforest is being cut down and fire sweeps through vegetation in California, Australia and Borneo.

So many people work in banking, insurance, accountancy, financial services, paper pushing jobs of such woeful uselessness that probably the bulk of humanity's job description is: sit at desk in front of computer, wear telephone headset, read the script on the screen to people on the phone and type their answers on the keyboard, drink tea & coffee, go home.

Why can't I do something to help feed some people, spread the wealth, speed up the conversion to clean energy, get more computers doing more useful calculations and modelling, rather than just massaging sales figures and marketing crap that nobody needs?

I'm going to risk running out of money for another few weeks at least, and that means I definitely will run out of money, because it's usually 60 days until I get paid. For the amount of money I'd get selling my depreciating electronics, and the time and hassle involved, I might as well get a job stacking shelves in a supermarket.

I'm just going to do the type of work that I'm passionate about and good at for a few weeks. I know HSBC are going to need a Customer Due Diligence system before February. I like my ex-colleagues, but my god nobody had the balls to just bin the junk and start again. It doesn't scale, it's not maintainable, it's so hard to roll out in-country, the pilot was a disaster, all the good people are leaving, and 85% of the work still has to be done.

I remember getting really angry at an all-day meeting with about 40 people. I didn't know at the time, but the CIO was there, and head honchos from Retail Bank & Wealth Management and Corporate Banking, plus the best in the software business trying to save Europe's biggest bank, on their number one project, money no object. It maddened me that we spent 2 and a half days estimating how much work there was to do in 3 weeks, but nobody knew what our productivity was. Nobody knew what the backlog was. Nobody knew what Minimum Viable Product was. Nobody was bothered about Continuous Deployment. Nobody had thought about the godforsaken task of pumping thousands of questions and rules and logic into a spreadsheet that you needed to know 3 programming languages to even make a stab in the dark.

I said I'd do half the questions on my own. I then had to spend an absolute age reprogramming the core system so that it would spit out meaningful syntax errors. There were about 500 things wrong before I even started. Then the architect admitted that he hadn't even thought about some fairly fundamental things and his solution took days to get right, while my suggestion was roundly ignored. Then the data architect started changing everything, even though it was tightly coupled throughout the entire system. I had to give loads of people lessons on Git and Maven artefact versioning. It was madness, and I had to call time out: I asked for a code freeze while we got everything stable. To everyone's credit, they listened to me, trusted me and supported me. I think it was only 5 straight days of midnight finishes. The work wasn't hard, but there were major bugs in every single component of the system. The pressure of knowing that hundreds of people are effectively twiddling their thumbs, and if you don't get it all working, you've damaged a huge amount of productivity.

A little cheer went up when everything integrated and the screens went green for the first time in weeks. It was also just in time for the CIO to announce that we'd achieved a significant milestone at the Town Hall. It was false optimism though. I had unearthed an absolute mountain of buggy code and dodgy config. My worst fears about performance were confirmed too. It took 5 minutes for the homepage to load.

I found a Scrum Master I liked and gave him a list of names that I wanted to work on a new version of the application. We picked good tech, designed a simple system and had something to demo in a week. They sacked my scrum master, me, and the longest serving member of the development team. People were getting jumpy and we were making management look pretty incompetent. I was also leaving a paper trail that was inconvenient. I was quite explicit about the urgency of the situation and what the simple remedies were. I didn't sugar coat it, because I'd been giving the same advice for 5 months.

I had plenty of warnings to keep my head down, and toe the line. I knew my days were numbered, and when I found out my old scrum master wanted me back because everything was tanking, I fired my parting shot. I knew I'd get terminated. Quicker than having to work a notice period. No need to lie about your reasons for leaving. No 4 weeks of hell working for a micromanaging idiot.

There's no challenge for me in corporate software. I ran the IT for a nice medium sized company. The board asked me for a data warehouse and a new phone system. Instead I gave them a new card payments processing system and an accurate set of accounts, with the correct ledger for all their customers. It's the only reason why the Office of Fair Trading didn't shut them down when they sent their forensic accountants to see why the books didn't really balance. Oh, and they were in breach of card data protection and were going to have a data theft until I tokenised all the card numbers. I had such a hard time in convincing the CEO of the right technology strategy that when he said "fit in or fuck off" I was more than happy to leave that rudderless captain.

When JPMorgan needed somebody to figure out why their FX system was running like a dog and they were going to cause a market liquidity disaster on International Money Markets Day, they'd had 10 Oracle consultants and none of them could find anything wrong. I found a DBA I liked in London, who didn't even work in my department, and we went through everything with a fine tooth comb. I also harassed the sysadmins until they got my disk I/O up to scratch and tweaked every kernel configuration value, applied every patch and generally wrung every bit of speed we could muster out of the hardware. I then had to take the vendor's code to bits and tell them where they had multithreading issues. They didn't believe me, but I kept sending them the measurements I'd made and pretty graphs, until they put a dev on the phone to me, and we talked through the code, and found a bug. Then the marvellous DBA found the setting that was causing the latency. With the new code and the much faster database, I could hardly believe the timings from the performance tests. When IMM day came, we blitzed it. We absolutely wiped the floor. Fastest FX platform in the world. There wasn't much appetite for developing our own in-house system anymore, I really didn't want to sit around looking busy. I liked my friends and the culture, but I still need interesting work.

And that's how it goes. Hire me to fix your technology problems, and I will, but then I'll want to leave if new challenges don't come along. I hate just keeping a seat warm. I guess that's Bipolar. I work like a son of a bitch for 3 or 4 months, then I'm really struggling to stay motivated for another month or two, and then I'll just stop coming to work.

I could try and pace myself, but invariably I find myself drawn to the impossible challenges. Normally you hire somebody who turns out to be rubbish, but refuses to leave. They literally stick to their chair like glue, because their main motivation is job security, not being good at their job. When you hire somebody who's really good, you can't let them know what a hideous stinking mess everything is in, and that they're going to be under relentless pressure to do horrible work. People who are really good will just go and find somewhere better to work.

I'm an idiot. I want to finish the job I've started and leave feeling proud of delivering stuff. I never ask for the poor performers to be fired. Most of the time I'm able to calmly filter out the new guy I'm training, when they're trying to impress me, but they don't know what they're talking about, and I've got an absolute bitch of a schedule to keep. I had to keep just saying "no" when 3 people were shadowing me, and they were all saying you forgot this or that, or you did that wrong... then I press a button and it all works first time and I can start to be more amenable again.

I'm absolutely not perfect. The first implementation is normally a dog. An ugly dog. But it works, and then the pressure is off so I can refactor for elegance. It's a bit of a thankless task though. When you start refactoring you then start looking at other code, and you end up having to change more and more and more and all the tests break because everything is so fragile, and then people start complaining that they can't find their bit of code anymore, and they have to merge their bit of work into an unrecognisable new world, because people don't pull, commit and push often enough.

I don't even write much code. Ask me for a bit of code that does something, and I'll give you a little bundle that you can plug in wherever you want it. When everybody is developing features but the application doesn't work, I'll concentrate on bug fixing and stabilising the build. When everybody is trampling on each other's toes, I'll concentrate on release management and versioning. When an important demo is coming up but people are committing code that doesn't work, I'll roll it back and tell them to put it on a branch until it integrates. When code starts getting promoted from DEV, to UAT, QA and PROD, somebody has to make sure the database is created with the latest schema, test data is loaded, Business Process Management tasks are cleared down, and all the little microservices are up to the right versions. That can take 3 hours on a bad day.

Software is not hard. Managing a huge team is hard. I haven't had a management role since 2013. However, I know that every untalented email forwarder who thinks they can manage a big project says "features, features, features, we're late, features, features, oh my god we are so late, let's just get it working, get it working, oh my god so many bugs, performance is terrible, let's try and go live anyway, oh my god it's hard doing a production rollout, and the users hate it even more than the testers, what do we do? what do we do? everybody panic, work 25 hours a day 8 days a week, 366 days a year, what do you mean we don't have any metrics? what do you mean we don't have any reporting? what do you mean it's not multilingual? why are all the good people leaving? why do things seem to get done a lot slower now we're supporting 3 or 4 more environments, instead of just one? who could have predicted such a thing? why didn't any highly paid consultants tell me? oh, they did? get me the mail server administrator immediately, there's some junk mail I don't seem to be able to delete permanently. Just get it done before the regulators come asking why we've failed to meet our timetable commitment".

And that's why I hate corporate bullshit.

It's the engineer's curse: we want to just solve problems, to make stuff that works, to make things better. I don't care that it hurts your feelings when I say your idea's rubbish. Your job is to listen to the experts, motivate people and sign the paychecks. My job is to come up with the ideas and make them a reality for you.

I don't really think I'm cut out for having a boss. I don't really think I'm employable anymore. I just completely ignore all the management, then they love me, then I tell them I'm not doing it again unless things change, then they hate me, then I get fired, then they get fired.

I probably need to figure out a way to get paid for more than 5 or 6 months of shouting and swearing at everybody and just doing whatever the hell I want. But it's so soul destroying to go to work and think that you made absolutely no difference. In fact you were complicit. Your day rate bought your silence. You were more worried about losing the stream of big invoices than your ethics. You put financial benefit ahead of professional, moral and legal obligations.

A bunch of white collars have got to get prosecuted soon.

Bankers have had their hand in the till for far too long.

Tags: #banking #bipolar #physics #career

This is a story about demon drink...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing good ever came from prejudice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roll on 101 days!

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

Tags: #alcohol #addiction #notanonymous

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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