This is a story about seeing red...

My dad had a fairly simple moral code for me, when I was a little boy: boys shouldn't hit girls or boys wearing glasses. That's about it. I remember guns were bad and I got in trouble (age 3.5) for looking like I enjoyed myself playing with a friend, who had brought his plastic guns with him. I eat anything and everything today, but I also remember being terrorised into eating rice pudding - which was slimy and disgusting in texture to me, before the age of 4 - so much so that I started throwing up with stress and anxiety, before every mealtime and lost so much weight I had to be hospitalised.

Perhaps it's clear, in retrospect, why I would turn to a hospital to protect me from bullies.

But, perhaps it's me who's evil, and needs to be locked away from the general public? Certainly, now that I've got chance to stop and catch my breath, I'm finding I've finally got time to examine the morality of the way I've acted in the past.

If you hit your kids or generally terrorise them to the point that they need to be hospitalised, trust me, they're not having a brilliant home life. At playgroup and school, I took this pacifism thing that my dad had been very angry about - a.k.a. playing with a friend with a plastic gun - very seriously and I got the crap kicked out of me by other kids... it wasn't until many years later that my dad suggested fighting back, which seemed somewhat odd given that I'd received these hippy lectures about being nonviolent. Anyway, I went down the path of pacifism and that's where I stayed. I was not having a brilliant school life - I was picked on every single day, to the point where, again, it would leave me collapsing in uncontrollable sobbing fits, while on the way to primary school.

Boo hoo! Get the violins out!

My first experience of domestic violence was me crying and being punched in the face, giving me two black eyes and a broken nose. I didn't even defend myself, let alone strike back... why would I need to? I didn't understand why I was being victimised like this, by somebody who was supposed to love me. I had to go into work with a bullshit story about having collided with a buoy while kitesurfing, to explain my two black eyes. It was the male extreme sports equivalent of "I walked into a door". I had to lie to her parents, when we went to see them for a planned visit soon after my face had taken that pommelling.

I'm 6ft tall (183cm), 13 stone (82kg) and I still retain some of my muscle bulk from rock climbing, kitesurfing and wakeboarding, although I'm obviously not in peak physical shape. I've got the mindset of a terrorised 3-year-old, ganged up on by two fully grown adults, but I'm in a body that can do some damage and defend itself now.

The problem - if there is one - is that if I feel bullied and attacked, and you managed to corner me, I'll smash my way out of the situation. I don't hit people - I'm still nonviolent. I don't get into fights. However, very occasionally I will trash something - more often than not it will be my own property - because the insanely horrible emotions just have to come out.

"Do you think that was the right thing to do?" a stern-faced looking policeman asks me. "Do you think there might have been a better way to handle that situation?" comes a second question, as if the first one - which I haven't had chance to answer yet - was not clear enough for me. Of course, I would have loved to handle things differently. Of course, I feel guilt and regret when I snap; when I can't take the onslaught anymore, and I've done something that I wish I hadn't - some property has been damaged.

She's asked me to travel out to the suburbs from the city centre; it's a considerable car ride away, including some travel on a dual-carriageway - the main road South, which turns into the motorway and would safely take me back to London, if we stayed on it. I get the cab to stop at a shop so I can buy some things for a romantic evening. I'm greeted with a hug, we lie on the bed kissing and cuddling... this is all how I hoped things would be; I'm relaxing and enjoying a pleasant evening; this is very nice. Then, she's hurling abuse at me, telling me I'm a terrible person... I'm sitting down while she's standing up, verbally attacking me and generally bullying the shit out of me. She suddenly asks me to leave... alright, no problem. I jump up, grab a rolling pin from the kitchen where it lies idle on the worktop and I smash her laptop to pieces, then I leave immediately. I regret it instantly and text her that I want to replace it, as I make my way to the nearest cab rank, to get a taxi to retrace the journey that I took hardly any time ago. Why had I been summoned to the suburbs for this abuse? Certainly, my loss of temper at the injustice of it all is in no way a justification for destroying her laptop - it was a disproportionate response.

I don't think people really see what's going on underneath the surface, even though I tell them.

Two police officers are interviewing me. It's 2am in the morning. I was just discharged from hospital after a suicide attempt, and my kidneys are still not fully functioning. My body is bruised as hell from where the emergency services had to kick in the bathroom door to get to me, slumped in the dark, dying. My muscles ache from the damage that was done to them by the massive overdose of opiates - prescription painkillers I had stockpiled. I answer the police questions. I admit smashing up that laptop - of course I did it and I want to replace it. The last messages I ever sent while still alive were attempts to get her bank details, so I could transfer her enough money to get a brand new replacement... although of course the destruction of her laptop must have been a shocking over-reaction in her eyes and upsetting for her, and I can never fix that.

Don't people see me as vulnerable? I feel like a 3 year old, being beaten up by grown-ups. I feel vulnerable; scared. People must see me as an easy target, because they certainly don't hold back when they're ripping into me. I find myself back in my trashed apartment at 3:30am on Wednesday morning. How did this happen? Why do people think I'm perfectly fine - OK to chuck out from hospital as soon as my kidneys are working a little bit? Why do people think I'm physically and psychologically indestructible? Why would the massive overdose that I took be seen as unimportant, and that I'm perfectly able to pick myself up and carry on with life?

I feel like I get a double-whammy. I feel that people take advantage of my good nature: my trusting and happy-go-lucky approach to life, where I try to be generous and loving. I take the risks - I make the first moves - and I put myself out there in the hope of getting something back. If I get nothing back, that's fine - let's just leave it there and move on. Why did I have to get dragged all the way out of the city centre and far from my home, simply to receive cruel and unpleasant treatment and be told to get out? My reaction was out of proportion though, so I also get the guilt. I'm guilty of smashing up that laptop. I'm guilty of seeing red, losing my temper, retaliating at the injustice of the situation, in a totally unjustifiable way. Now, I still carry that guilt and I always will - it stopped her hurling abuse at me, but that doesn't make it right. In fact, I can never make things right - I'm always going to feel terrible about her stunned silence, and the fact that it must have seemed like a crazy over-reaction to a bit of 'light-hearted' bullying and abuse in the place she'd dragged me out to, to do it - in the middle of fucking nowhere. If it sounds like I'm conflicted, I am. Where's the sympathy for the fact that I was taken advantage of, abused and left feeling totally abandoned in a strange city? Where's the consideration of the fact that it's obvious that I was on the edge: I very nearly succeeded in killing myself, as the very next thing that I did.

This whole traumatic episode has forced me to dredge up every 'bad' thing I've ever done, and reconsider whether I could have handled things better. What the fuck am I supposed to do? Turn down friends and girlfriends when they cross my path? Am I supposed to be negative and untrusting? Am I supposed to shut myself away, isolated behind closed doors and be anti-social, because I always end up just feeling like a mug... financially taken advantage of and cleaning up after my 'guests'. Should I not give people a chance? Should I be closed and negative, assuming everybody's out to get me? Certainly, everybody's come and picked my fucking pocket, quite gleefully.

I'm no angel. This is certainly not a piece that argues things in black & white. If you want to talk about black & white, then you have it in black & white: I smashed up her laptop with a rolling pin in a sudden fit of rage. My regret and remorse is meaningless - I did it, so that's that. I'm guilty of being an "angry man" right?

I wonder what percentage of my life I've been angry for. Certainly, most people who've known me for any length of time would not think "angry" as one of the first words that sprang to mind. Perhaps I just hide it very well. It's not really for me to judge anyway, what my personality is in the context of this tale and the wider issue of whether I'm some kind of crazed nutter, intent on smashing up the entire world.

I guess you could consider the nature of a dog, as an analogy. How much can you abuse the dog, before it bites you? Are the best dogs the ones that just whimper and maybe even shit themselves? Does a dog - even though it has sharp teeth and powerful jaws - only qualify as a good dog if it never turns on somebody who's abusing it? If you can answer that question, you might have gone some way to answering the question that fills me with doubt at the moment: am I a bad person; am I evil?

Frankly, I think we're all capable of saying and doing regrettable things, in the heat of the moment. The question is, how do you feel about what you did? Do you do horrible things on a regular basis? What's your predominant personality - are you a victim, victimiser or something in-between?

I don't want to fall into the trap of feeling too sorry for myself; feeling too victimised. I've said and done things I wish I hadn't. Also, why can't I stick up for myself? Why can't I avoid the people who think it's OK to pick my pocket? Why can't I tell those who would take advantage of me, to fuck off, before they bleed me dry?

I've seized upon this word "vulnerable" which neatly sums up me and my situation. I trust when I shouldn't; give when I shouldn't; take a chance when I shouldn't and generally end up fucked. Surely nobody would argue with the facts: I'm the one who ended up isolated and alone, dying of an overdose, losing all my property, losing a lucrative consultancy contract and an employment offer. I'm an example of the person that lawmakers had in mind, when they created laws that protect me from mental health discrimination and prejudice based on confidential matters.

There's a line in a song I've probably never heard, but I know the lyrics because my guardian angel told them to me. The song talks about how bullying a kid every day created a monster.

Am I a monster? I certainly seem to fight with monsters. Perhaps I would be wise to remember the words of Nietzsche, and be careful that I do not turn into a monster myself, if I continue to fight monsters.

It's not my instinct to fight. It's my instinct to be nonviolent. I only fight^* when I've got nothing left.

Tags: #bullying #relationships #suicide

* - I don't mean fight her. She's got the money to replace her laptop now, I hope, and I really hope we can move on with our lives as best as we can, although I do appreciate that it was traumatic and seemingly an over-reaction from me. I feel very bad about what I did.

This is a story about therapy...

Everybody's an expert on my mental health, it seems. I need to be exercising more, eating a balanced diet, abstaining from alcohol and mind-altering substances BUT not the ones the doctors want to give to me. But which doctors? Every doctor has a different idea of how I should be treated - which doctor should I listen to? Perhaps somebody else knows, because people have some very strong opinions on what I should be doing, considering that only a handful of individuals with whom I am still in contact, have known me for any length of time and have followed along. Only I know what I've tried before and what I haven't - what works and what doesn't.

Here, there's a student nurse whose dissertation investigated the benefits of exercise, in terms of potentiating - that is to say improving - the efficacy of medications. Not considered for a single second, was the control study which would have investigated the efficacy of exercise alone. This student nurse, who I find passionate and intelligent, was eager to suggest that I tried sodium valproate or lithium - both life-shortening medications prescribed to people who have regular episodes of mania where they believe they're Jesus reincarnated etc. Everybody thinks they've got a cure to a problem I might not even have - it was under a very dark cloud that I entered hospital, one must remember.

Externally, the perception of a psychiatric ward is that it must be a place of therapeutic activities and meetings with doctors to fine-tune my medications and cure me of my madness, making me safe to release back into the community again. Internally, my fellow patients perceive staff members as persecutors, jailers and masters of everything from food & drink, to bedtimes and bathtimes - a cross between a policeman, a teacher and a parent. Certainly, to have a blackboard on the wall is an incredibly dated nod to the classroom days of our youth. Note that the list of activities for the ward is completely blank, which I find quite accurate... not that I'm complaining.

The UK's stringent fire regulations for institutional buildings - hospitals, schools etc - mean that they look very similar. A company that manufactures and supplies the fixtures and fittings for a school will probably also supply those same items to a hospital. Everything needs to be built to last in this incredibly abrasive environment, where the footfall in the corridor would destroy even the most hard-wearing of floors, laid by a contractor who normally worked in regular houses. The finish is not just high standard, but the selection of the materials used has been honed over the years to create an interior that is easily mopped and wiped down, and very hard to damage.

As a patient, I find myself recalling my schooldays, as a dinner lady ladles goo onto plastic plates and I sip juice from containers that are identical to those that I had in my boyhood. Just like school, nothing much really happens except for crowd control. There is a little sifting and sorting, so the naughtiest boys end up in the shittest parts of the hospital, and the golden child will find themselves in the top class. However, it must be remembered that staffing a hospital is a job to quite a lot of people, and over the many years that they will work their job, any ill-founded notions of making a difference, will be thrashed out of them by the system. Nothing changes very much or very fast in massive organisations - you can't fight the system, or else you will drive yourself insane... that goes for both patients and staff.

It's very hard to not be driven mad by being hospitalised. It's a chicken and egg situation. For sure, nobody gets hospitalised without putting some effort into it. It's very hard to get a psych bed in the UK, unless somebody's gonna pay £5k/week for you to go into a private place. Of course, the patients here are here for a reason, but I have also experienced the terrifying moment where I realised that my liberty has been restricted. I just heard the jangling of a massive bunch of keys, carried by one of the staff members, as she passed my bedroom door. If I was to draw back my curtains, I would see bars on my window, to stop anybody climbing in or out. There are constant reminders that I'm here under lock & key, and to escape would require a little more social engineering (or climbing) than another secure ward that I was on in 2015, where I could have just walked out behind somebody who was leaving the ward, and then run away. To run away now, I would need to request an escort off hospital premises, and then I would simply get an Uber or perhaps I might have arranged a local cab company to have my getaway car waiting. I came into hospital with £1,150 in crisp £50 notes, so I have the financial means to grease whatever palms I need to.

Why would I want to escape though? Yes, you're right - to discharge myself prematurely would be a mistake. This isn't a very therapeutic environment, because staff spend so long spying - quite literally - on patients, which is absolutely dreadful for mental health: creating an us & them culture and exacerbating even the slightest hint of paranoia. If you value your dignity, privacy and liberty, psych hospital is not for you. There aren't any therapeutic activities. However, it is a safe place where my rent and bills are paid, I get 3 free hot meals a day, I get my own bedroom/office type thing which is quite generously proportioned and has an ensuite bathroom, and I don't need to cook, clean or otherwise worry about the responsibilities that burden nearly every other creature that was unfortunate enough to have been born.

Sounds nice, doesn't it? Perhaps you too would like a stay - mandated for up to 28 days on a section 2 - in the hotel "psych ward". Perhaps you imagine that it's a calm and restful place, where I get to sleep lots and read books. I think perhaps you're getting confused with that holiday you took to Tuscany last year. On a psych ward, you get woken up in the middle of the night by alarms going off, staff running in the corridors, yelling and screaming. On a psych ward, music blasts at top volume from patients' bedrooms, because headphones are not allowed lest we strangle ourselves with the cables. On a psych ward, one must evaluate the level that one's fellow patients are intoxicated by their cocktail of medications, and whether one has the energy to engage in their psychoses that are extremely repetitive - I've been here a week and I've learned a little of everybody's "thing"... their particular identity on the ward, which is characterised by an apparent madness, which is why we must remain here. I wonder what mine is? The staff tell me that I'm lazy - always just sitting with my laptop. Yes, that must be me right? Probably just watching mindless Netflix rubbish on it, right?

Ward rounds - when important decisions about "leave" are made - happen on Fridays and nothing else happens apart from waiting and hoping. Most patients here are hoping to get some leave. Some have not left the ward for nearly 6 months - considered too much at risk of running away, if they were allowed out of this super secure part of the hospital, accompanied by a staff member.

Gossip is rife, and everybody on the ward knows that I arrived with a wad of cash and was granted leave from the hospital almost immediately. I try to downplay these things, and now people have forgotten. When takeaways or shop orders are being placed, I feign not having any money, in the hope that I can alter my perception in the eyes of my fellow patients and the staff. I remember being called into the office, simply because some of the senior staff members wanted to have a look in my envelope, containing all those fifty pound notes. It's totally vulgar, and an accident of the illness that was stimulated into existence by the ridiculous sleep deprivation, stress and disruption to my medications and routine, over Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday of last week, which followed my near-fatal suicide attempt... it should be expected that my behaviour would have gone a bit haywire, under the crushing pressures I faced.

Perhaps I will be "stepped down" to a less restrictive ward today. I had to pack my bags last night, because I thought I was being moved. I should have remembered that nothing happens very quickly in the National Health Service, but sometimes if you're quick, you can nip in before the system decides that actually you're getting ahead far too fast. I'm not really in a rush to go anywhere though - this ward is perfectly decent and I know the two spots where I can get 3G signal.

I'm here to recover, but I'm not here to feel completely isolated. Who do I know in the local area who can come visit me? Two months ago I'd never set foot in this city, and the company I've been working for has cut all contact and has been skulking around in a most unusual manner. I have nobody - it's a real ball-ache for any of my friends to travel, just for a 2 hour visiting slot. Even my fellow patients, who are locals, do not have visitors - the hospital environment is not exactly somewhere people would like to spend their free time.

Should I immerse myself in the daily rhythms and routines of the hospital? Should I hang around by the door to the kitchen, looking for food scraps to be tossed out? Should I hang around by the door to the yard, hoping to be let outside? I'm not a fucking dog. I find it immensely useful to maintain contact with those who are still in full possession of their marbles, while I'm in an environment where staff humour the patients - "is it Tuesday today?" one asks, and is told that yes it is, even though it isn't... is that useful, helpful, therapeutic?

I was very sick when I was brought in, without a doubt. Some incredibly stressful things still hang over me, like Damocles' sword. I have little power to influence the speed of my recovery, nor the speed with which those who have wronged me are forced to offer recompense. At least I'm in a safe place to pursue what is rightfully mine: to get money that is owed to me and recover my possessions. I'm in a safe place to make arrangements for housing and income, so that I don't fall flat on my face, as soon as I leave.

I'm glad I'm here, at the moment.

Tags: #mentalhealth #bipolar #suicide #depression #hospital

This is a story about privacy and digital identity...

I woke up this morning in my bed, in my bedroom in my home, where I live. I got out of bed and had a shower. I used shower gel and shampoo. Then I dried myself off, had a shave and brushed my teeth.

Later on, I had some breakfast. I had bacon and sausages and eggs. It was hot and I ate it all with a knife and fork off a plate. I finished all of it because I almost always finish every meal I have - I eat really fast and I don't like throwing away uneaten food; plus I'm really greedy.

Then I looked at the internet. Not the actual internet, because that would be impossible, but I used a computer of some description to look at websites on the world-wide-web (WWW).

After a few hours I was hungry again so I had some lunch. I decided to have food instead of poison or something indigestable - the food had a taste and smell that all contributed to the impression that what I was shovelling into my mouth was edible, and so I ate all of it. I also had some drink, because of all the thirsty work I'd been doing. Also, humans die without fluids. Not liquid sodium though... that would be so hot that you would be instantly incinerated.

Then I went out to some places and did some things. Some of the things were necessary and some were for my own amusement. I had to go to some of the places because they were inbetween where I was and where I wanted to be. I wasn't able to teleport myself... well, not yet anyway. People think I look a bit odd, scrunching up my face, really concentrating on trying to travel through a higher dimension in order to avoid moving conventionally in the three dimensions that we're used to. Then I gave up and just walked, or ran, or cycled, or got a car, bus or train to take me where I wanted to go; also aeroplanes, but not today.

Then it was time to guzzle more nosh into my food hole, and tip more liquid into the cavernous opening in my face. I repeat this ridiculous ritual 3 times a day, because if I didn't do it for a long time, I would die. Also, I like it - I like the tastes and the flavours; I like starting hungry and finishing not hungry - that's a good thing.

I watched some form of entertainment that held my attention while I just sat there looking with my eyes and listening with my ears. My brainbox got filled with stuff that people wrote and performed for the benefit of an audience, of which I was a member. Sometimes I consume a kind of entertainment where millionaires play kids' games that they got really good at because they played them so much. Some people think that shouting at the millionaires will change the outcome of unknowable and unpredictable future events they have no control over, but I'm too well versed in theoretical physics and the evidence of experiments to believe in magic, religion or whether I exert any power to influence things (like which team of millionaires is going move a spherical object into the right place, versus another team just like them, trying to do the exact same thing).

Then I went to bed where I would have had sex if there was another willing participant of the opposite sex who I found attractive occupying the same sleeping contraption as me. No willing participants for a game of hide the sausage were co-located during the time I was in bed and awake.

Before I knew it, I was asleep, except I didn't know I was asleep because the very definition of being asleep is the partial loss of consciousness. If I knew I was asleep, I probably actually woudn't be asleep - it's a paradox.

I expect tomorrow will be much the same. In fact I can guarantee that 99.999...% of tomorrow will be exactly the same, even if a massive asteroid obliterates the Earth while I'm asleep. The universe is a big place and most of it is intergalactic and interstellar space. Almost everything is just empty space. I don't even sleep on top of anything at all - it's simply the atoms of my body refusing to fuse with the atoms of my bed, which is lucky because a fusion reaction in my home is not something I really want - I would be likely to irradiated by high-energy photons and die of radiation burns.

Please, keep reading. If you look back at previous blogs that I've written, you'll see they're all like this - simple descriptions of my day, in terms of things I ate, things I did and places I went, which are mostly the same. I'm sure you'll find it gripping stuff. If you read and enjoyed this, you will be sure to enjoy reading it again & again.

Thanks for visiting my website!

Tags: #writing

This is a story about human waste...

Here is a pictorial representation of my life in London.

Starting on the left, are socks that I purchased in a supermarket after being discharged from hospital. I was homeless and living in a hotel room paid for by the NHS, because I had only just recovered from a failed suicide attempt but the hospital needed their bed back.

Next is the spotty sock. This sock was bought when I had been homeless and nearly died a few more times, but then got myself back on my feet (sic.) - I was working again. I had just enough money left to be able to get a new suit, which was very understated and plain, so these socks were my act of rebelion - thumbing my nose at the grim reaper and saying "Ha! I cheated death and destitution".

Then comes the stripey sock. This sock was bought when I was living out of a hotel room again. I'd run away to Ireland when my life had fallen apart, and the loving family of a friend I'd met in a hostel, pieced me back together again and sent me home to the UK a new man. I had no money anymore, so I was living on business expenses, out of a suitcase and back in a hotel. This sock represents the insecurity of the time - I needed to keep my big mouth shut and not be so loud until I had money again. This sock represents a tiny bit of humility, but still some resistance to playing by the rules.

Finally comes the Burgundy sock. This sock was bought when I finally remembered how to fit in and conform; to take perverse pleasure in spending an entire week at work, blending in to my surroundings and being completely unnoticed. That's what big corporations want - they want you to fit in or fuck off. This sock represents complete capitulation. I needed the money: I had rent to pay, friends to pay back, pay bills and I had depleted my savings. My back was against the wall again, so this time I didn't push my luck. I was the corporate chameleon.

Each of these socks has lost its partner and will be discarded. I can't anticipate a time when I would be so desperate for some kind of foot covering, that I would be reduced to wearing odd socks, which would so blatantly not be a premeditated fashion decision. People would judge me as having 'problems' if I was seen wearing any combination of these lone socks.

Here is the entirety of my wardrobe, for at least 3 months; maybe even a year. Who knows? A pair of jeans will last for 3 or 4 years. I wear my clothes until they're just rags. I was feeling stressed and anxious about transporting everything I need in my life, across the country, but now I've seen a huge pile of clothes fit into this suitcase I feel tiny and insignificant. Isn't my life so small, that you could snuff it out and nobody would even notice? I could disappear and hardly leave a trace.

Of course, I've been aggressively selling, recycling, giving away or throwing away anything I never use or wear. Like Occam and his razor, I have been shaving away parts of my life, little by little, until all that's left is the very bare minimum. Minimum Viable Person (MVP) - that's me.

I feel guilty, of course, that my ecological footprint (sic.) is still so big, as I dispose of enormous amounts of mass-produced crap, and it will probably end up in landfill. Clothes, particularly, are manufactured so unbelievably cheaply, and imported so vastly that the per capita amount of clothing is enough to allow our entire nation to cease doing any washing and just buy new clothes when the old ones get dirty. We're living in the age of disposable fashion. I don't even know why I'm taking a huge suitcase of clothes on such a long journey, when I could buy a similar size bagful of Primark garments, for the same price as the luggage, which I bought to transport my much more expensive, higher quality wardrobe.

I'm absolutely on the ragged edge of how much stress I can stand, having never set foot in the city I'm about to travel hundreds of miles to, or the apartment where I am to spend at least the next few months. I've had nearly 2 years where, despite everything, I've had at least one stable constant: my apartment in the city I've known longer than any place on Earth. I can navigate to and from any two parts of this densely populated and hugely diverse metropolis, with pure instinct, which has developed over the years. Even though the river meanders and is an absolutely useless reference point, I still know which way is North, when bridges and tunnels go North-South, East-West and West-East, assuming you're North of the river... which you will be if you've got any class and style.

It should be a happy moment, to be so unencumbered by material possessions, family ties and the considerations of a life partner; every lone sock that I cast aside should lighten the weight of my soul, but I've not made my mark on the world yet. Who am I and why should you even care that I once lived?

Maybe I'm the odd sock. I don't fit in. I don't pair up. I don't play nice with the others, so I should fuck off because I don't fit in.

That's the way I feel right now.

Tags: #london

This is a story about changing beyond recognition...

This 25 year old Londoner was hopelessly addicted to kitesurfing, and had secured a job in Bournemouth, where he would work mornings and evenings, leaving his afternoons free to go to the beach. Working for a huge international organisation, he had secured a ludicrously good deal - salary and relocation allowance - and the Human Resources (HR) people who he negotiated with had no idea that the real prize was to be able to kitesurf every day.

Despite being confident and outgoing, he was hiding crushing insecurities about his attractiveness to the opposite sex - a complete lack of self-esteem - and was struggling to find the girl of his dreams, who would be the cherry on top of a lovely cake. Being a hopeless romantic, and pretty inexperienced despite his 25 years on this Earth, he could fall in love at the drop of a hat and be heartbroken when a simple fling didn't turn into anything more serious.

Overcoming his ineptitude with women, he got together with a girl who looked perfect on paper and she was a pretty and petite blonde. He was smitten. She was a science graduate and a computer programmer. She even worked for a client that he'd worked for 6 years before, and he knew many of her colleagues.

In the words of one of his best friends, she was a "conversion project". He would teach her to kitesurf, and then they could travel the world together, chasing warm wind, soft sand and water that was mirror flat or had perfect waves. Brazil, Venezuela, Cape Verde, South Africa, The Canary Islands... there was an endless list of exciting countries to visit with this beautiful girl, and kitesurf together.

There she was, giving it a damn good go in Poole Harbour, under his tuition. Why she was wearing a buoyancy aid in water that's so shallow you can stand up in it, was anybody's guess, but I guess it made her feel more confident. Kitesurfing in those days was super dangerous - the emergency release mechanisms were just being developed, and if you let go of the bar, you'd be dragged along out of control, like being tied to the back of a speedboat being driven by a maniac, until you crashed into one of those harbourside houses.

After a year, he decided to propose. He asked her dad's permission. He did all the things that he thought he should do: buy a house, get married, get a pet, have kids. Thankfully - for the kids' sake - they stopped short of doing that last one. Just looking after their a cat had a very strong bonding effect. Their cat is probably the reason they stayed together as long as they did.

They got married in Hawaii, of course. He was allowed to wear flip flops, but not board shorts. In fact, he had a tough time from bridezilla for almost the whole trip until he put his foot down and said he just wanted to sit by the pool or on the beach, drinking ice cold beverages. She wanted to be sightseeing in a decrepit camper van that they weren't insured to drive. He checked them into a luxury hotel, which cost a small fortune - it was Christmas time after all - and finally, for a brief moment, he had a tiny bit of holiday relaxation.

Notably, they didn't take their kites or kiteboards. Travelling with a wedding dress and linen suit was a teeny bit difficult, but not as hard as lugging a 30kg bag that's nearly as tall as person. However, Hawaii has wind, waves. warm water and beautiful sandy beaches. Barely a few hundred metres from where Barack Obama was spending his holiday break, our missing young man was forced to try pole dancing (windsurfing) for the first time, in desperation to get his 'fix'. There was the shame and indignity of being a beginner windsurfer he was an experienced kitesurfer in a paradise location, who could have been having the time of his life.

After landing at London Heathrow, after over 20 hours of flight time, it turned out that his new wife had used an online booking website to arrange the taxi home, but had not accounted for the fact that they would be away over New Year's Eve. An innocent mistake, but it left them stranded, exhausted, in the middle of the night.

Within a month, he was in private hospital. It was all too much for him. She would rage and throw tantrums when things didn't go her way. He would bite his tongue and try to fix everything. The pressure to please her was unbearable... but it was never enough. He'd bought her a hot tub because she said she had loved having one in California. He'd shown her the world, staying in the best hotels and eating in the best restaurants. He'd married her in one of the most romantic destinations you could ever choose, and he'd even agreed not to wear board shorts. She was threatening divorce while he was sending her a different flower every day, from hospital, to show he still loved her. Despite him being a generous lover, she was on 'no strings attached' dating websites, looking for sex.

If crêpes Suzette, flambéed at your table, with the best views of any restaurant in Malta, is not enough to whisk a girl of her feet, he was left bamboozled as to how he could possibly please her. He was completely naïve, believing that if he treated her like a princess, she would love him as much as he loved her. He was wrong. It hurt and he was heartbroken.

It made no sense. People would come to their summer garden parties and be served home-made burgers and marinated chicken, plus endless varieties of sausages hot off the barbecue, while a range of delicious salads that she had prepared, were laid on for the vegetarians and to garnish the plates with. Fire pits and patio heaters kept people warm after the sun went down, and there was the hot tub kept at a toasty 38 degrees (100 degrees Fahrenheit).

It made no sense. People would come out for trips on his boat to see one of the largest natural harbours in the world. Him and his wife were a natural host and hostess. They were a great team when they were entertaining guests.

For her birthday one year, he took her in his boat up the Wareham River, moored up outside The Priory Hotel, and they ate lunch on the patio, which was some of the finest dining in Dorset - cooked by Michelin star standard chefs - with beautifully manicured lawns leading down to the river bank.

Why they quarrelled and grew apart is a mystery. She wanted to learn to sail and he was an RYA dinghy sailing instructor and experienced yacht skipper. She wanted to rock climb and he had the qualifications and experience to teach her. She wanted to climb mountains, and he had spent months in the high Alps and was a mountain leader (guide) experienced in dealing with emergencies, working with groups of varying ability, and acclimatising to altitude. He taught her how to snowboard and was grinning from ear to ear when she followed him off piste without a moment of hesitation.

However, he was baffled and slightly insulted that she spent a lot of money to go and learn from other people. He'd taken her sailing multiple times, and taught her a lot. He'd taken her rock climbing, and shown her the ropes; pardon the pun. He'd taken her into the mountains and shown her the basics of navigation, safety, route planning and even how to retreat when things don't go to plan. That's our missing man and his ex-wife, in every picture above except the mountain one. where he's the one taking taking the photo.

He was, undoubtably, looking for the love of his life, but married the wrong person. Friends warned him that him & her weren't a good match. "The poison dwarf" was too hot to handle, especially for a sensitive guy who was relatively inexperienced with women and still nurtured the Disney "happily ever after" idea of finding true love. He mounted a kindness offensive - an attempt to satisfy her every whim, her every ambition, but yet it still wasn't enough. He was delicate. She was aggressive.

It made him sick - mentally unwell - all this arguing and rejection. He wanted to just grab her and squeeze her tight until she felt safe and loved. Maybe that was the problem: she felt trapped and smothered. They met when she was only 23, which I guess is quite young, considering that he proposed when she was only 24. For their parents' generation, that would not have been unusual, and he did things the old fashioned way: buying a house to start a family. However, she complained she hadn't seen enough of the world; experienced enough of life's adventures. He set out to rectify this, but what she was really saying is "I'm not ready to be a one-dick woman just yet".

His best friend coined the phrase "conversion project", which is to take a girl and turn her into a kitesurfer; a sailor, a climber; a mountaineer. This friend literally asked "are you ready to be a one vagina man?". Soon after that, this friend went on a trip to sow his wild oats across Scandinavia, before coming home to marry the poor girl who'd had to tolerate this temporary break-up in the full knowledge that his motive was completely unreasonable. They're a happy couple with twins and a lovely house now, so maybe he was right. At the time, his wife wanted to punch his friend in the face or testicles, or probably both.

Before his petite blonde wife, the happy smiling 25 year old - pictured when our story began - had tried to make it work with a kitesurfer who lived 186 miles away, and nowhere near the sea. He'd tried to make it work with other kitesurfer girls too. An incredibly beautiful Burmese kitesurfer girl seemed to be flirting with him when she was on holiday with him in Sardinia, but he was so shy and inexperienced, he didn't dare try to kiss her.

Our missing man tried to make it work with his wife, again and agan and again and again, and eventually it broke him. He broke down and sank into depression, bipolar disorder, alcohol abuse and made a stupid mistake which was his ultimate demise: the abuse of legal highs. This was the beginning of the end.

In the chaos, confusion, stress and trauma of divorce, selling his house, saving his most precious possessions, leaving the town he'd called home for 8 years and all his friends... all mixed in with toxic additives like mental health problems, addiction and alcoholism, he was a little lost boy. He's been missing for nearly 11 years. There have been times when somebody who appeared to be him popped up briefly, but like an apparition, he melted away into nothingness again.

Is it any wonder that he disappeared? He gave so much of himself away - his love - trying to make relationships work; trying to make girls feel special and cherished and loved and like princesses; trying to please; loving unconditionally.

This blog contains the bitterness; the accusations of wrongdoing - the evidence of the inexcusable and terrible behaviour that was perpetrated against the author. This blog tells the story of why that young man went missing, and why he's still missing. Perhaps why he'll never be found. If he's missing, perhaps, you shouldn't search for him.

Perhaps there's no place in this world for a naïve little boy who has so much love to give, but nobody to give it to. So many times in life he was left reeling, hurt and wondering what he did wrong, when all he tried to do was to be as nice as he could possibly be. Perhaps that silly little boy got it all wrong, and life's not about being nice and kind to people; it's about using people and getting what you want at all costs. The boy was not made for this world - he was like an alien from another planet.

Look at this old man. Look at the sadness that he tries to hide, but something in his eyes betrays him. He knows he's nothing like that happy smiling 25 year old young man, photographed 12 years ago. He knows that all the kings horses and all the kings men couldn't put him back together again. He knows that whatever it was that happened, it damaged him badly. Unconditional love, infectious happiness, a sense of contentment and the enthusiastic exuberance that characterised our missing little lost boy, are qualities that this old man doesn't possess - they're completely different people.

It's a tragedy when we lose somebody who brought fun & excitement, adventure & exhilaration, thrills & spills, into people's lives. It's a tragedy when many lives are touched - improved - and then we lose that person.

I don't think we'll ever find him though. He's gone forever.

Tags: #relationships #depression #bipolar #mentalhealth #alcohol #drugs #suicide

This is a story about home treatment...

This is what the Conservative government's 1990's Care in the Community policy looks like, in practice. An extremely low-paid NHS worker, who isn't trained as a mental health nurse, is dispatched on public transport to travel across the London borough of Tower Hamlets, to bring me a bag of medication. They're supposed to check that the old packets are empty, which 'proves' I've been taking my medication. They're supposed to escalate any problems to nurses and doctors, back at base. If they can't find me or get in contact, they're supposed to ring the police.

It's that final point that's the important one: the police got co-opted into this half-baked scheme. Of the people the police deal with - the front-line officers - most of them will have mental health issues. The police are picking up the pieces of the mental health epidemic. When somebody is truly having a mental health crisis, the police will be the ones who get that sick person to the place where they should have been in the first place: a psychiatric institution.

There are nurses, psychiatrists, social workers and the like, who are involved in assessing whether you need to be detained under the Mental Health Act - what's known colloquially as a 'section'. If you're seriously mentally ill and out in the community, it's down to the police to find you, catch you, detain you and get you to that assessment where you get 'sectioned'.

Also, the police are out there, picking up body parts off the train tracks and underground railway. The police are there when somebody has jumped off a bridge and landed in a river or on some mud flats, or maybe gone splat into something harder below - perhaps a road. The police are there when somebody looks like they're about to jump under a train or off a bridge - CCTV operators are trained to look out for agitated members of the public, who look like they're about to top themselves.

Around the time of Care in the Community, there was an explosion in prescribing of psychiatric medication by our ordinary general practitioners (GPs) - our regular family doctors - there were 9 million prescriptions for Prozac in the UK in 1991. This is the principle behind Care in the Community: put people in a chemical straightjacket, and they can be safely released back into the general population. Ten years later, there were 24 million prescriptions for Prozac and another ten or so years later again, and London alone gets through over 60 million prescriptions for Prozac. These are almost all issued by a GP, not a psychiatrist.

When it comes to "serious" mental illness - anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder (a.k.a. manic depression), schizophrenia, personality disorders - the NHS kicks you out of the bit where you get various therapy options (e.g. CBT) and instead you're referred to a psychiatrist, who will prescribe some fairly brutal medication. In the case of schizophrenia, you could have a risperidone implant, injected underneath your skin, which will keep you in a chemical straightjacket for up to 6 months.

The other people who got co-opted into this Care in the Community policy were the general public. An average member of the public is fairly fearful of a schizophrenic, believing them to have multiple personalities and a propensity for violence. Several murders that received significant media attention, focussed on the fact that they were committed by formerly institutionalised schizophrenics. Depression is now such a common feature of people's lives, that any stigma has gone, but most people would be fearful of living near, working with, or having their children around a schizophrenic, surveys have found. Lock your doors - there might be a madman lurking nearby.

If I was in hospital, I'd have somebody checking on me every 30 minutes to an hour - making sure I hadn't found some way to harm myself. With the Crisis Team (a.k.a. Home Treatment Team) who are tasked with keeping me safe at home, I see them every other day. I could take a fatal overdose 2 hours before they were due to arrive, and by the time an ambulance got to me, I would be well and truly dead as a dodo.

I had stockpiled 336 tramadol tablets (16.8 grams) which is enough for two people to commit suicide, easily. As part of their responsibility to help keep me safe, they asked me for the tramadol back. I gave them 112 tablets (one box) which was a tick in their box. In hospital, I would never be able to hide the remaining 224 tablets from the nurses. If I took an overdose, I'd be fed activated charcoal, have my stomach pumped, be put on a respirator and given various medications to counteract the deadly effects of a tramadol overdose, in plenty of time to save my life.

I can't tell you what the cause and effect is. I can't tell you whether Care in the Community is the reason for the mental health epidemic, or whether it's something else, such as the collapse in living standards and precarious lives we live now, with our income and housing under constant threat.

Most people don't like to lose their liberty. In fact, it's distressing to be locked up somewhere, and not allowed to leave. There are crisis houses, where you can come and go as you please during the day, but you have to be back by nightfall and sleep there or else the police will be sent out to find you. This seems like a compromise that would suit most people who are having a mental health crisis, who pose no danger to the general public.

With the false security of Care in the Community, the number of beds available for those having a mental health crisis, has been slashed dramatically. You can attempt suicide and be hospitalised - in intensive care - and then discharged out onto the streets, simply because there isn't a free bed on a psych ward or in a crisis house, where you could more safely transition back to normal life. You can be suicidal, and the best the NHS can offer you is to come check that you're still alive once a day.

As a man, I'm many times more likely to commit suicide than a woman, but far less likely to seek help. This means that I have had the good fortune of being looked after once in a crisis house and once under a voluntary 'section' on a psych ward. Not many people receive lifesaving treatment like that - the resources just aren't there anymore.

So, what's the solution? Pharmaceutical companies tell us their medications are better than ever. More and more of us are taking powerful psychiatric medication. But, yet, the percentage of the population suffering from mental health issues is ever-growing; suicide rates keep climbing - there is, undoubtably, a mental health epidemic. My personal opinion is that it's not a medical problem: it's a problem created by insecurity: jobs and housing; it's a problem created by declining living standards and soaring levels of stress.

No amount of pills are going to fix the mental health epidemic, even if you bring them to my door.

Tags: #mentalhealth #suicide #depression #bipolar

This is a story about mismatches...

Writing is hard. More specifically, writing well is pretty damn hard. To write well every day; to finish a book; to have the discipline - that's the hardest. Lots of people write - it's our preferred method of communication these days, rather than the phone. My Facebook friends are mostly what you'd term "well educated professionals". Some of my Facebook friends are people who used to write every day on the same discussion forum as me. When I step out of that bubble, I'm reminded that it was the general populace who invented 'text speak' and still use it to this day, because writing is just a means to an end for them - to send short colloquial messages about their banal lives, where the style, grammar and intangible beauty of a well-constructed sentence has zero value to them.

When I started my blog, I didn't know where I was going with it. Then, I remembered that a friend who aspired to be an author, and has now published three books, said that he was going to blog for a year, to test his discipline and hone his art. I copied that idea.

When I started my debut novel, the idea was to write at least 1,667 words a day, so that after a month, I would have achieved a 50,000+ word count.

This year, things started going wrong almost from the very outset.

In the blink of an eye, I found myself in hospital on a high-dependency ward, with acute kidney failure. My weight had gone from 77kg to 95kg, because I had stopped urinating: my bladder was empty. I was on dialysis and generally being poked and prodded by some very worried looking doctors. I didn't have my laptop or a means to connect to the Internet - those aren't the kinds of things you take with you when you get a phonecall from the doctor you saw in Accident and Emergency saying "how soon can you get back here? Do you need us to send an ambulance?"

Like dominoes, the pillars of my life started to collapse. First, I lost my job - they couldn't wait for me to get better, even though I discharged myself from hospital after two weeks, against medical advice. Then, rent, taxes, bills, insurances and everything else started to become a matter of imminent financial implosion. Depression tore through my mind like an inferno through a building. The strong opiate painkillers, that I needed for the leg injury which caused my kidney failure, made doing anything at all quite challenging - it might not have been heroin, but I sure as hell got sick if I forgot to take my 4-hourly dose. Writing and work were replaced with lying on the sofa in a drugged-up haze, half-aware of whatever was on TV.

You'd think that after I got off the painkillers and I could walk distances again, without it causing me agony, I would be ready to find another job. Anybody who followed my story through December and January, will know that Christmas and New Year scuppered my job search. Effectively, I went through the stress twice, and then lost the job anyway through no fault of my own. I wrote about how psychologically damaging that was, having argued with the doctors so much, discharging myself and getting angry phonecalls from doctors and consultants saying I needed to go back to hospital; I was risking my life and I was still critically ill.

I didn't need concerned doctors to tell me I was still ill and in no position to work - my commute to work, with my heavy ankle brace, caused me untold pain. How was I supposed to travel every day on overcrowded public transport, and walk the final part of the journey, when it would leave me exhausted and crying in pain when I got home. I was relieved when my boss told me to take some more time off to get well; only it was him being cowardly - my contract was terminated soon after leaving the building.

Everything else from that point has been measured by that yardstick.

If it's hard and stressful to get a job - and to start that new job - under normal circumstances, can you imagine pulling out a 25cm dialysis tube from a massive blood vessel in your groin, with blood everywhere, and leaving hospital when all the doctors are begging you to stay? Can you imagine your first day in the office, except that less than 48 hours ago you were considered so sick that you might need a kidney transplant, or even die because the dialysis wasn't working effectively? Can you imagine working those first few days in your new job, getting phonecalls twice a day from different doctors saying that if I turned up at any A&E and had a blood test, they would admit me to hospital as a critical case, because of the dangerous toxins circulating in my bloodstream? Can you imagine dealing with almost unbearable pain as well as doing your job? And then what happened? I went to all that effort and I lost the job anyway.

I've been a full-time IT professional for 20 years, and to be honest I lost the love for it very quickly. I spent most of 1999 recovering from weekends of all-night raves. I spent most of 2001 to 2005 chatting with my friends on a discussion forum and organising kitesurfing holidays and weekend trips away. 2005 through 2008 I worked very hard, but I surrounded myself with alcoholics, who were some of the very best people I've ever had the privilege of working with. 2008 I thought I was pissed off with JPMorgan, but it turned out that I had simply reached the limit of what I could take with IT jobs for big companies. Ever since then, I've made my money as an entrepreneur, independent developer and IT consultant, as well as speculating in emerging technology (e.g. iPhone apps, Bitcoin mining). I work about 5 months a year, and I hate it, but it pays the bills. My last contract paid £660 a day, so you can see, I don't have to work for very long to earn what I need.

So, now I'm in the situation where I was tipped over the edge. It's not normally very hard for me to find a new contract, and I find the actual work very unchallenging; easy. To have worked so hard to get well, get out of hospital, get to that job, and then to lose it... when I fucking hate IT work anyway. It was the last straw. The company said they'd have me back as soon as I was fully recovered, but the spell was broken - I used to put up with the boredom and the bullshit, because I was earning the equivalent of well over a hundred grand a year... if I ever worked a year. I can't go back to it. You could offer me £1,500 a day, start tomorrow, free rein to work on whatever project I want, and I don't think I could do it. It's like all that hatred of the job and the politics and the bureaucracy and the insanity and incompetence of people in positions of authority, suddenly hit me all at once.

I stopped caring that I'm going to be nearly £6,000 short on my tax bill, in 27 days time. I stopped caring that I'm not going to be able to pay my rent next month. I stopped caring that if I go bankrupt I'll never be able to work in financial services again, be a director of a company, have anything except the most basic bank account, which means I wouldn't be able to - for example - rent a car. I stopped caring that I'll never be able to get another mortgage or rent my own place. I stopped caring that I would lose my excellent credit score - I have borrowing facilities of £30 grand and no debt that shows up on those credit checks. I stopped caring that many of my possessions would be sold by bailiffs for a fraction of what they're worth. I stopped caring that I would lose things that I spent years and years choosing and customising: a mountain bike I bought when I was 18, with the lightest frame money can buy, handmade and hand painted - including my name - which I have added the very best of everything to, bit by bit, until the total cost of the bike is as much as a decent car... but it's not about the cost; it's about the pride in doing that - the pride in customising something with painstaking effort over 19 years.

Now, I'm a minimalist. I'm a digital nomad. I've used all my experience as a mountaineer and Alpinist to travel light, with clothes that pack small, but they're super warm and everything either dries quick or stays dry. I have a grab bag that weighs perhaps no more than 15kg, but I could sleep quite comfortably in an extremely cold winter. I learned through bitter experience, the discomfort caused by cheap equipment: blisters, wet feet, damp clothing, sleeping mats that don't stop the cold penetrating from frozen ground, tents that get flattened by gales, synthetic sleeping bags that don't keep you warm. Everything that I carry meets the three criteria: light, strong and expensive. There's also a fourth criteria: how effective something is in terrible weather. It might be subtle, but there really is a big difference between a 'good' waterproof jacket, and one that costs well over £400; for example, are you able to use the hood but still move your head to look around? How many drawstrings are you able to operate without having to unzip anything?

There's so much crap that I just want to dump. I've ended up with paperwork that goes back to 1997. I only ever wear a few different outfits and I wear my clothes until they're threadbare. I could lose 95% of my clothes and not even miss them. I have boxes of stuff that I rescued from my house before it was sold, during my divorce. It was a smash & grab - I was paying for the man & van by the hour plus we had to get back to London before my self storage shut. I literally took no more than an hour to grab anything of real value, and a mug that my sister hand-painted for me. Can you imagine that? I dumped my books, a summerhouse that I designed and built myself, stuffed full of gardening equipment, garden furniture, tools, mountaineering equipment like ropes, ice axes, crampons, a pile of kites that probably cost me many thousands of pounds when they were new. I dumped my hot tub. I dumped games consoles, games, DVDs. I dumped kitchen knives, Le Creuset cast iron casserole dishes. I dumped my Weber barbecue, my fire pit and patio heaters. I dumped the bed I bought when I moved to West Hampstead in 2000. I dumped the oak dining table and chairs I bought when I bought the house. I dumped an antique sash window that had been turned into a mirror by my dad, as a Christmas gift. I dumped the huge wardrobe that I built to go right to the bedroom ceiling - one side customised just how my ex-wife wanted it, and another side customised just how I wanted it. I dumped a garden that I had lavished hundreds of hours on, making the grass lush and green, weeding the path, mulching the beds and tending the mature shrubs and palm trees. I dumped my electric guitar and electronic drum kit. In fact, I dumped a whole band's worth of instruments for playing Guitar Hero. Where was I going to keep all this stuff, living in my friend's spare bedroom? It was going to be ages before the house was sold and I got the money to get a place of my own again.

Now, I have a place of my own, by accident. One friend thought he was going to live with me rent free, but he hadn't done the maths - the rent was more than his salary, and he was fucking useless. The one bit of work that he was supposed to do that would have brought in some money for my company he fucked up. He hassled me for an interview at HSBC, which I wangled for him... and then I had to deny I knew him very well, as he was exposed as inept. My next flatmate didn't pay his rent for 3 or 4 months and never paid me any bills. He was surprised when I told him that he was going to find his stuff dumped on the street if he didn't get the fuck out.

If I was going to cut & run, I'd want my two MacBooks (Air & Pro) and I guess I'd take my iPad Pro too - call them tools of the trade - plus 3 pairs of high-end headphones, and my grab bag (tent, sleeping bag, sleeping mat) with my good waterproof jacket and my down jacket. I'd wear my waterproof trainers, water-resistant trousers and my fleece, with a merino wool base layer. I'd take my passport and €500 in cash that I have lying around. I'd take phone and a battery pack that can charge it 12 times. There's not a lot more that I tend to travel with, except copious quantities of benzodiazepines and Z-drugs. When you live in a hostel for a year, you learn what you need and what you don't. When you live under a bush in a park or on a heath, you learn what you're prepared to have stolen, potentially. It took my fellow homeless in Kensington Palace Gardens over a month to find my hiding place - people don't really venture into massive thorn bushes. If you're smart, you can disappear from the world, despite living in a densely populated city. People's dogs would smell my food, but their owners couldn't see me in the gloom. Hampstead Heath is somewhat more of a challenge, because people like to fornicate in the bushes, but the general rules apply: people are lazy and stick to the paths mostly, so by choosing the remotest part of the heath, you very rarely see anybody.

My life is in the process of breaking up again; disintegrating. I don't care. I am so depressed.

Let it all burn down, I say.

Tags: #depression

This is a story about radicalisation...

One week before the 2015 terrorist attack in Paris, I did an experiment where I acted suspiciously and lost large items of luggage on public transport, during the evening rush hour. Within 30 minutes, I lost a bag at London Bridge, one at Oxford Circus and two at Westminster... which was co-incidental because it was Guy Fawkes Night. I undoubtably have mental health problems and protested against war in Iraq and Syria. Does that make me a terrorist sympathiser, and a possible suspect?

The point here is about how easy it is for anybody who's motivated to kill and maim, to slip through the net.

Relatively recently, 52 year old Thomas Mair - mentally ill - killed MP Jo Cox, while 53 year old Adrian Ajao - a teacher - killed four tourists and a police officer. One inspired by white supremacy, the other by radical Islam, but both acting alone.

"What's your point? We're sitting ducks?" asked my then-girlfriend - a BBC journalist - on that night I lost my bags.

Yes. Yes we are sitting ducks. As we cluster together at rock concerts, or on cramped public transport in overcrowded cities, we are certainly sitting ducks. As we assume that the police, army and military intelligence are working together to maintain our security. We are relaxed and feel safe.

Bombs kill indiscriminately, and if you're dropping them from 20,000ft then you're not around to see the devastation of the aftermath. If you're firing Hellfire missiles from a drone control centre in Nevada, you're 7,000 miles away from whoever you're being told to kill - you don't know whether there was any 'collateral damage'. Tomahawk missiles fired from a ship or submarine can travel over 1,000 miles, and none of those sailors pushing the "FIRE!" button will see their target explode, and the dead bodies when the dust has settled.

Hateful language about refugees being potential terrorists; phobia of Islam and of people with darker skin tones than your own - heard everywhere, even from the mouths of politicians. Influential people in positions of authority spread fear to try and increase their power. Seemingly inconsequential governmental changes, such as removing Britain from the union of European nations, have an emboldening effect on nationalists, patriots, racists, bigots and other extremists. A toxic stew of "us versus them" bubbles, threatening to over-boil at any moment. Festering resentments about the injustices of the world, are taken out on innocent targets, as some kind of bloodletting.

The Manchester Arena bombing is awful, but so was the Bataclan theatre attack; so were all the attacks. This Wikipedia page lists the suicide bombings in Iraq in a single year - there's at least one nearly every single day.

It's worth being reminded of this simple repeating cycle:

Am I being insensitive to the victims of the Manchester Arena bombing, given how recent it is? Perhaps my words should be condolences and condemnations. Certainly, the death of innocent children is sad; certainly, I condemn bombing as an act of indiscriminate killing.

I hope every British and American citizen of voting age remembers the 2003 invasion of Iraq. "Operation Iraqi Freedom" was fought in your name and mine, and every drop of innocent blood that was spilled is on our hands. We cut of the head off the snake in the name of regime change and in the process we unleashed Hell. We toppled so-called tyrants, but created a wave of suicide bombings, internecine strife, civil wars and a refugee crisis bigger than any in history. This is what we should remember, in conjunction with innocent lives lost on our own soil.

I am sorry for the victims and their families, of the Manchester Arena bombing, but anybody who is looking to lay blame with the mentall ill, white supremacists or radical Islamists, should consider the foreign policy of their nation; our armed forces' conduct abroad; the dead Iraqi and Syrian children, killed by allied bombs, who far outnumber last night's dead.

The overused "thoughts and prayers" line is increasingly coupled with some claptrap about "our values" being under attack. It's utter bullshit. Jingoistic, nationalistic, patriotic rubbish is combined with false nostalgia for the glory of war and the bravery of soldiers. There's nothing brave or glorious about killing somebody with a Hellfire missile, 7,000 miles away from the target, sat in a comfortable office chair operating a joystick in an air-conditioned building.

If you really care about what happened last night, why don't you take in some refugees? - let them live with you; help them rebuild their shattered lives. If you hate the perpetrators of terrorism so much, why don't you go and join the Kurdish forces in Northern Syria, fighting Daesh (Islamic State)? - you can offer to fight with them on their Facebook page.

No? Didn't think so.

Tags: #terrorism

This is a story about a better world...

On the topic of how the human race should divide labour & treasure - the products we manufacture and the food we harvest - a friend and former boss challenged me to come up with "something new and truly revolutionary" because I'm "a smart chap". Challenge accepted.

To my friend, the "constant drone of the right and the left is incredibly boring". Ok, fine. Let's set aside all political parties, their ideologies and their manifestos.

Right now, in the UK, we are a rudderless ship. Parliament was dissolved. All those constantly droning politicians are out campaigning, rather than doing what we elected them to do, which was to make new laws which we thought would make our lives better.

So, what the hell is going on? Why isn't there rioting in the streets? Why do I still have power in my apartment and water coming out of the taps? Why haven't a revolutionary group stormed the gates of the Palace of Westminster, and forcibly taken up residence in the House of Commons, declaring themselves as our new rulers?

In our day-to-day lives, we're quite familiar with parts of our national heritage. You picked up the letters off the doormat, with The Queen's head on a stamp. The jolly postman drove off in his red Royal Mail van. The train you travelled on to get to work, ran on tracks that are maintained by Network Rail. The road you drove on to get the kids to school is maintained by the Highways Agency. If you crash, the police and ambulance service will get you to a National Health Service hospital. When you eat any food, DEFRA will make sure that it's fit for human consumption. The electricity that boils your kettle was transmitted through the National Grid. Your house was built to national building regulations, the electrical system conforms to the national wiring regulations, the gas supply conforms to national standards. The Met Office warned you of any bad weather and made sure that various flood gates were opened to protect residential areas. When you got home, you watched British Broadcasting Corporation television programmes. Let's not forget the Foreign and Commonwealth Office who will look after you if there's trouble abroad, and of course the Passport Office who issued you with valid travel documents in the first place. The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency will make sure that the nation's roads are free from unsafe drivers, and the Department for Transport will make sure that every vehicle is inspected and tested to meet national standards. Her Majesty's Land Registry makes sure that nobody steals your house and the police make sure nobody steals your possessions.

Then, there are parts of our national heritage which are quite unseen. As a maritime nation, Britain imports and exports a lot of goods. UK Export Finance will lend to private companies who are exporting British goods, so that cashflow isn't held up while the container ship makes way for whichever port it's destined for. The Ministry of Defence is busy dreaming up new ways to kill people in nasty ways, while also forming part of the United Nations permanent peacekeeping forces, which keep a lid on pockets of unrest in faraway lands, which hopefully maintains a degree of global stability, although this is a controversial point. The MoD also have at least one Vanguard class submarine at sea, hidden underwater from the prying eyes of satellites, containing 16 Trident thermonuclear missiles, which in theory stops anybody from nuking us. Although not really acknowledged as existing, MI6 is busy gathering intelligence - i.e. spying - to protect us from foreign threats, which at the moment is mainly radical Islamists and the IRA.

All of those droning politicians haven't done a single thing except drone, since parliament was dissolved, so why is the UK still continuing to function perfectly well?

One might argue, why do you really care whether your electricity came from a state-owned monopoly power station, or a privately owned and operated one? In terms of the benefit to us all, the question is always the same: where did the money go, and how was it distributed?

In an unrestrained system of free-market capitalism, a foreign company will build their power station here in the UK using foreign labour and foreign materials. They will then sell us the electricity. Obviously, the foreign power company now has some pounds that they don't really want, so they sell them for another currency. This drives down the value of the pound, as well as creating a net currency outflow: more pounds leaving the UK than coming in. This attracts asset strippers and other vultures, who buy up valuable assets at a price that seems cheap to them, but expensive to anybody who lives in the UK. Look at the soaring value of London property prices: most of the transactions have been foreign investors; many of whom won't even live in the houses and apartments they've bought.

Eventually, if privatisation is allowed to continue, everything we need in daily life - housing, energy, food, clothes, water - will profit a foreign investor and our pounds will be virtually worthless, so things will be really expensive. The idea of competition works well when you're buying something you don't really need off the Internet, but are you going to move house every time the landlord puts the rent up, because the place next door is more competitively priced? Efficient markets only work when there's liquidity. Have you ever tried changing your bank or your energy supplier? It's a massive ball-ache.

I like living in a country where buildings don't fall down, I don't get electrocuted, the roads are safe and if I am unfortunate enough to have an accident, then I'll be sewn back together by world-class surgeons and looked after in a super well-equipped hospital.

My utopian ideas revolve around self-sufficiency. My utopia is probably a steel-hulled self-righting sailboat, with wind and solar electricity generation, big batteries, water purification and desalination. For food, the main boat would tow a super-tough floating greenhouse containing some kind of gimballed field to stabilise it in the waves. I would grow genetically-engineered beefburgers and other high-yield crops, and tow my floating greenhouse along with me in calm weather. In an unexpected storm, I could cut away the greenhouse-boat, and then retrieve it later using radio transmitter tracking. Most of the time I'd be moored up in some cove that's sheltered from the prevailing winds. Line-caught fish and squid would be a large part of my diet, but underneath the field-boat would be lots and lots of ropes growing mussels. I think a family of 5 could live a fairly decent life until the next generation were old enough and experienced enough to take to the seas on their own vessel.

Obviously, utopia doesn't scale, so most political discussions unfortunately, revolve around questions of ownership and wealth inequality; plus there's the important point about people who steal from the UK, by not paying their taxes and moving their money offshore.

As for revolution; that's just foolish. We need political reform: proportional representation and preferential voting. We need to abolish wealthy donors buying peerages from political parties. In fact, I'm in favour of abolishing political parties altogether. We need very low caps on how much money you can spend on political campaigning.

I'm less of a Marxist/Stalinist/Leninist/Maoist/Trotskyist than you think (well, maybe the latter a little bit) and I'm most concerned with the staggering amount of wealth that's hidden in tax havens, and tax that's avoided using accounting scams like Vodafone and their ilk. I'm also concerned by CEOs and politicians who don't "eat their own dog food" - if you run a bank, you should keep all your money in a bank account with the bank you run (hint, hint, Stuart Gulliver) and if you're a Member of Parliament, you should send your kids to state school and have regular NHS healthcare: no private options for those who seek to govern.

There isn't really an -ist that describes me, nor can I be pigeon holed as left, right or centre. My views and opinions are influenced by some ideas, but to say that I think that there's some autocrat, political party or ideology that works perfectly, is quite wrong. The world is a messy place, and there are plenty of people who'd like to poop your party just to show you up, even if you ever conceived the perfect system for society to conform to.

Summing up what I want from our society: social justice, income spread of no more than 100% from the lowest paid to the best paid, state-owned monopolies on essentials like health, energy, transport, education and housing, investment in science and technology, investment in massive infrastructure projects that are a source of national pride, minimum income (as opposed to full employment), 100% inheritance tax and your house/apartment reverts to state ownership after death, beefed up Competition and Markets Authority with a mandate to attack any area that has become a significant part of ordinary people's monthly expenditure, halve spending on defence and spend that budget on the UK Space Agency, decriminalise all drugs, regulate and tax sales of Cannabis for medicinal use, drug law enforcement budget to be spent on addiction treatment and education instead, the creation of a state-owned national investment bank and laws to restrict the use of financial instruments, make charging interest illegal.

That's quite a lot, isn't it? Implementing it all would be a pigging pain without treading on a lot of toes; hence the boat idea.

Tags: #politics

This is a story about being a groupie...

On the steps of the podium stand the winners of the 2007 Poole Animal Windfest. There is a girl and a boy for 3rd and 2nd place. If you look closely, where is the boy who won 1st place?

In 2007 I was involved in building part of the software system that processed over a quadrillion dollars worth of toxic bullshit for JPMorgan, in a single year. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a bad job and they didn't treat me badly. In fact they kept a private driver waiting down by the seashore; engine running; waiting for the kitesurfing competition to finish. Then I jumped in the Mercedes with smoked glass windows and we sped off to Heathrow for me to catch a flight. I didn't even have time to wash the salt off my skin or sand out of my hair... or collect my prize for winning the competition.

There used to be a time when JPMorgan's main office in Bournemouth had squash courts and a gym onsite. There was a bar. There were enough car parking spaces for everybody, so everybody drove to work. Then, they grew; and they grew; and they grew. Investment banks were - and still are - ludicrously profitable. The IT budget that paid for my little team of 30-odd people was circa $10m per annum. You're never quite sure what the real numbers are though, when you work for an organisation with 130,000 direct employees.

Slowly, prefabricated office buildings sprang up on parts of the car park. The bar, gym and squash courts were turned into office space. That was OK. We still had several tennis courts and a sports centre nearby with badminton courts and 5-a-side football pitches. You could park nearby in an overflow car park. It was still a great place to work, and nobody had a fucking clue what they were doing or what impact it would have on the world, unless they really stopped and thought about it.

I've always been one of those pain-in-the-ass employees who does stop and think about the ramifications of everything that's being done. When it turned out that senior management had decided to support outsourcing a lot of our software development, I was very vocal about my displeasure and concerns. I was a thorn in the side of everybody more senior than me, in the hope of JPMorgan seeing sense: cheaper employees do not equate to cost savings. You get what you pay for.

So, I got landed with a stinker of a project. To train up about 20 brand new offshore employees, in Mumbai, and also to build a piece of software that was not only late, but was a critical component in a global initiative to get all the toxic bullshit warehoused in one place - a depository - so it could be figured out who the fuck owed who what, and how much? Who was holding the toxic debt? Who was bankrupt?

How big is a million dollars?

$1,000,000

It's hard to say, but it's probably a few times bigger than the value of your house, or twenty times bigger than your salary. Now, let's multiply that by a thousand.

$1,000,000,000

Now what you're looking at is a billion dollars. 1% of a billion dollars is $10 million. You'd be pretty happy with $10 million, wouldn't you? That'd set you up for life. Now, let's multiply that by a thousand.

$1,000,000,000,000

This is quite obviously a trillion dollars. 5 trillion dollars is the value of all the world's 'money' - the cash in your pocket, the coins in your purse, your bank balance etc. etc. Now, let's multiply that by a thousand.

$1,000,000,000,000,000

We've reached a quadrillion dollars. 1% of a quadrillion dollars is $10 trillion, which is twice as much as all the 'money' in existence. So, how the fuck does JPMorgan process over a quadrillion dollars in a single year? Two answers for you: 1) Derivatives 2) Financial crisis of 2007/8

A derivative is a financial instrument that derives its 'value' from an underlying security. By security, I mean something tangible: a fucking house or a metal coin that has its value stamped on it. Derivatives are just pieces of paper that say "in the event X, I will pay Y"... for example "if the stock market goes up, the value of this derivative goes up ten times as much". Derivatives contracts have been created that have become more valuable than all the 'money' in the world. As much as a thousand times more valuable. This is just worthless paper, and nobody has the money to pay up: insufficient collateral.

I know, right? Don't stop and think about this stuff too much. Nobody else did. There was too much money to be made.

So I get landed this stinker of a project, drive off from the beach at Sandbanks to Heathrow airport in a luxury car, in order to train 20 or so Indians on how to build a piece of software that's going to be instrumental in the Financial Crisis of 2007/8. I'm an engineer. I solve problems. I stopped thinking about the madness of outsourcing to India when JPMorgan was already plenty profitable. I stopped thinking about the madness of there being quadrillions of dollars worth of derivatives contracts, when there was only $5 trillion of money in existence. I started thinking about software designs and who I had in my new team to build this software system.

At some point, I was seduced. I was seduced by limo travel, private drivers, 7-star hotels, business class flights, everything paid for on expenses, company credit cards. I was seduced by everybody telling me what an important project it was, and what an honour it was to be in charge - the manager - when I was only 27 years old; so young & ambitious. Giddy with this seduction, I started to see the world in different colours. Things were rose tinted. I was sucked in. It was like I was dreaming.

A year later, I'd woken up from a nightmare where I'd played a significant role in helping the Investment Banks to hold the world to ransom. "Pay up, or we'll crash the global economy and plunge the world into a depression that will make the 1930's look like nothing" they said. And the ransom was paid. Every government; every central bank coughed up hundreds of billions, so the bullshit could continue and none of the bullshitters had to lose a cent. In fact, the only people I knew who lost their jobs were the ones who were replaced by Indians I trained.

I started thinking again. Big mistake.

I took to the bottle. I drank every lunchtime and every evening. I was drunk most of the time. How could JPMorgan sack me or even reprimand me? What they'd paid me to do; what they'd asked me to do... they could never make that right. They just let me do whatever I wanted, which was mostly to go to the pub and get drunk. Nobody ever questioned it.

As Bear Stearns was being taken over by JPMorgan - asset stripped under the auspices of being 'rescued' - I'd had enough. Building software for banks made me sick. I was sick at what they did to their own people. I was sick of what the industry was doing to the world. I was sick of producing nothing of value; helping nobody except the lucky few who knew how the con-job worked.

Don't get me wrong, I should have looked the other way; kept taking the fat bonus cheques and big salary; kept those golden handcuffs on - loose enough that they never chafe - but I wanted to get as far away from it as possible. The whole thing left me feeling like I had blood on my hands. Every company that went bankrupt; every person who lost their job; every home repossessed; every suicide due to financial worries... I was one of the co-conspirators who fleeced them out of their money and assets.

Some colleagues stayed, but most of the cynical ones - like me - drifted away. Some died or at least nearly did, as they beat themselves up with alcohol for their sins. JPMorgan paid for a lot of people to go to The Priory to dry out. Those who couldn't face working again were pensioned off early. You only had to work for a year, and then you were covered by a generous insurance policy so you never had to work again. Occupational health were busy, getting rid of an entire generation of engineers who had built the bedrock foundations of the global financial services empire, now shakily propped up using public money. Masses of public money.

Ten years on, I watch in horror as those hastily made repairs to a fundamentally broken system start to crumble.

Record high national debt and record low tax receipts. Our economy is 80% financial services - an industry that's booming if you haven't noticed. You probably haven't noticed unless you work in the Square Mile or Canary Wharf. You've probably seen stagnant wages, a lack of jobs and insecure employment, such as zero-hours contracts. There's always a McJob, if your self esteem is finally fully eroded by the capitalists.

Brexit had a frontman - Nigel Farage - who was a trader from the City. Brexit had billionaire donors, like the stockbroker Peter Hargreaves, who literally said "insecurity is fantastic" - referring to his desire to see workers abused by their employers, in the interest of profits.

I don't wish to segue into commentary on current affairs, but you have to be aware who you're dealing with. Who's putting words in your mouth? Who's planting ideas in your head, through the newspapers and TV channels they own?

You have to wake up out of your nightmare.

Tags: #politics #banking #capitalism