This is a story about sick leave...

On my very first week at my very first full-time proper job after college - working for British Aerospace - my friends talked me into pulling a sickie so that we could go to Alton Towers for the day. This was 1997 and I didn't yet have a mobile phone. I had to call my boss from a payphone in the car park of Alton Towers. You could hear people screaming with terror, as a rollercoaster thundered by, not far away from where I was making this tense phonecall.

I didn't make a habit of throwing a sickie. I moved to the town where I worked, so I could wake up late and walk to work. My boss was quite relaxed about me turning up late, as long as the work was getting done.

No sooner had I moved to Dorchester, then BAe decided to send me off to the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) on Portsdown Hill, near Portsmouth. A friend and colleague, who became my boss for this project, would come into my maisonette every morning and coax me out of bed. The early morning starts were agonising, especially if I had spent the weekend clubbing in London and was recovering from drug-fuelled all-night dancing. My body clock was sent haywire, but because I was only 18, I suppose I could just about cope.

I didn't have another sick day with BAe or DERA, or with the next company I moved to Winchester to work for. When I worked for Research Machines near Oxford, I even managed to get to work during the petrol crisis. I was allowed a day off when snow pretty much paralysed the country, and I went sledging in Haslemere, Surrey.

As an IT contractor by now, I realised I could use the time off between contracts to do cool stuff. I went on a week-long RYA Day Skipper course, to learn how to sail cruising yachts. I spent time with family in Devon, and did my interviews over the phone.

The dot com crash and 9/11 were rather unsettling events, so I decided to take a permanent job with HSBC, who are one of the more conservative banks. The interview process was exhaustive, testing my literacy, numeracy, reasoning and a bunch of other aptitude tests, and a grilling from various managers. "Why do you want a permanent job when you're earning good money contracting?" they asked. "Why do you want to work in banking, now that the bonuses aren't so good?" they puzzled.

HSBC Asset Management had a very familial feel to it. They had a policy of hiring a lot of former London Irish rugby players, and Surrey and Middlesex cricketers. If you were accepted, they would look after you. There was camaraderie. There was true team spirit. There was also copious amounts of drinking.

Somehow I got through some 4+ years at HSBC without pulling a fake sickie. One weekend, I ate far too many magic mushrooms, and then a team in Hong Kong phoned me up to ask why millions of pounds worth of equities settlement messages were stuck in a queue and were not being processed. The backs of my hands looked like playing cards, the walls were throbbing and swaying and everything was bathed in bright green light. I made my excuses and quickly phoned a trusted colleague, begging him to handle the support call for me, because I had accidentally gotten a bit too pissed. He laughed and I got away with it.

I had a persistent tickly cough that was annoying me. I had read somewhere that dextromethorphan - the cough suppressant - could make you have a psychedelic trip if you took enough, so I rang my boss, and said that my cough was so bad I couldn't come to work. I then downed 3 bottles of cough syrup, containing DXM. I got precisely zero thrills out of that particular mad caper.

Moving to JPMorgan, I had the perfect job. I used to work mornings and evenings, and go kitesurfing during the day. I say 'work' but what I really mean is that I used to turn the volume up really loud on my laptop, so if somebody sent me a message or an email, it would wake me up and I could see whether I needed to deal with it. JPMorgan were really cool with people working from home, especially if you were supporting their live systems, which was mainly my job at first.

I loved that job at JPMorgan, and never pulled any sickies. In fact, I would often work weekends and late nights. I was pissed a lot of the time, and there were plenty of Friday afternoons in the pub where we never went back to the office except to get our coats and laptops on our way home, but that was the culture. Work hard, play hard.

Switching to New Look - the high-street fast fashion clothing retailer - I had a long commute to Weymouth every day and they didn't really know what they wanted me to do. I spent a day working in a store, which was interesting. I spent a couple of days at their distribution centre, watching the boxes of clothes arrive from the sweatshops, and the stock being sent out to the stores. I spent some time trying to understand what the hell they wanted to do as a business, and what the hell I was supposed to do about enabling it. Eventually, I broke down and decided I couldn't face the commute. I couldn't face the job. I couldn't face anything.

Three days off... no problem... just fill in a self-certification of sickness absence form when you get back to the office.

Four or more days off... got to go to the doctor and get signed off: get a sick note.

It started with two weeks off. Then a couple more. Then I couldn't even face going to see the doctor any more.

I found out what happens if you just stop turning up for work, sending in your sick notes, answering your phone... anything. I just disappeared. The company gets scared that they're going to get taken to some tribunal and found guilty of making somebody so stressed and unwell that they can no longer work. The company is scared it's going to cost loads of money and be hard to get rid of you, so they offer you a cash payment to fuck off quietly, promising you a good reference if you just resign.

With my JPMorgan bonus, my payoff from New Look and my iPhone App income, I was having a pretty bloody good year financially, despite being laid low with depression for a couple of months. I would have continued to take time off, but my phone rang and it was an agent with a contract in Poole: about a 20 minute drive from my house. I interviewed and got the job. I was the highest paid contractor in the company, which was a joke because the company mainly did Microsoft work, and I'd specialised in completely different technology. I actually bumped into another contractor I knew - Bob - and I felt bad that I was earning more than he was, because he taught me so much and he was so much older and more experienced. Oh well, the arrogance of youth, eh?

Anyway, my boss was this cool French guy who liked the fact I could speak colloquial French quite well, so he used to send me over to their main office in Besançon very often. It was great in the winter, because I could go snowboarding in a little place just outside Geneva, before flying home. Me and a friend bought a boat and used to go wakeboarding during our lunch hour. I took my boss out on my boat. I took one of my colleagues out sea fishing. Life was pretty sweet. However, I got bored and started claiming I had illnesses like swine flu, so I could take some time off work. I took so much time off sick, that my boss asked if I really wanted the contract anymore. I admitted that I didn't, so we parted company amicably. I partly needed to get away from an annoying guy with a ginger beard who I had to work with, who irritated the shit out of me.

I then became a full-time electrician. At first, I let the customers choose when I would do the work, and filled my diary up with lots of random jobs. Then, I learned that I could block time out, to give myself a break whenever I wanted. I could tell customers that I was booked up in the mornings, so I didn't have to get up early. It should have been a dream job, which allowed me to go kitesurfing whenever I wanted, but by this stage my relationship was on the rocks and I was depressed and stressed as hell. I didn't do much of anything. I sold my share of the boat. I started to get out of my depth with the work that I was taking on.

After becoming too sick to work, I had a couple of months doing nothing, and then a tiny bit of holiday cover work for a friend turned into some iPhone development work, which then exploded into my idea for a startup: Roam Solutions. I decided to create a software house specialising in mobile apps for enterprise. I threw together a hunk of junk proof of concept and we exhibited at the Learning Technologies conference, at Olympia. Somehow, in the space of a couple of months, there was a working app on iPhone and Blackberry, a fancy website and some glossy brochures. A whole exhibition stand had to be designed and built, allowing people to play with the phones but not steal them. There was so much branding to do. So much design.

I wasn't actually that passionate about what Roam Solutions did, which turned out to be mostly digital agency work. Rebranding as mePublish, then Hubflow; rewriting all the software and creating an Android version - those were momentary distractions. Sales meetings were stressful. Supporting your software 24x7 with just you and a mate is stressful. Getting any money out of our customers was like getting blood out of a fucking stone.

We managed to get about £16k out of a couple of customers and raised another £10k by selling a few percent of the company's shares. In return, me and my mate got to go on a 13-week 'accelerator' program. The program was fantastic fun, but exhausting. By the end, I didn't turn up for a couple of days because I was 'sick'. The truth was, I was burnt out.

I should have swapped roles with my business partner. He made a great CEO in the end, when I stepped down. Anyway, I just disappeared for months, and my friend helped to tidy up the mess and calm the shareholders down. I was almost out of cash. I needed a job.

I went to work for a company that helped people who'd got into debt problems. Not one of those debt consolidation places - we actually wrote to the creditors and negotiated debt-write offs, freezing the interest and lower repayments. We helped people avoid bankruptcy or IVAs. It was a cool company, but they wanted me to be IT director without actually vesting me in or letting me sit on the board. I wrote them a brilliant IT roadmap. They ignored it. I had an argument with the CEO. I went off on a sickie. The private equity firm that owned the company liked me and sacked the CEO. But then I got paid off because I couldn't face going back. The following year, I was at a conference, and there was the bloody CEO of the parent company, who'd followed my fucking IT roadmap to the letter, telling the delegates how well it worked. I felt proud, vindicated, but also I know deep down that it would have taken a lot of hard work to implement, and I was no part of that, so I can't really claim credit.

After the London Olympics, I went back to JPMorgan. I was not a well man. I was limping along.

I managed to fix one of JPMorgan's major issues that was threatening to cause a major catastrophe - front page of the Financial Times stuff - and then I disappeared, never to be seen again. I got a phonecall from my boss, saying I'd received an extra bonus in recognition of the important work that I'd done. I felt like a fraud, thanking him for that, but knowing that I was so sick that I wouldn't be able to go back to work.

My GP signed me off for 5 weeks, and my first thought was literally this: "I can get fucked up on drugs for 4 weeks and have 1 week to recover enough to go back to work."

There was The Priory. There was the separation from my wife. There was the realisation that the rumours of my mental health and drug problems were well known to everybody I knew in Bournemouth and Poole. It's a small place. I used to ride a tiny folding bicycle invented by Sir Clive Sinclair, for the 10 minute trip to work, but yet this had not escaped the notice of all kinds of people whose path I crossed. I was becoming known as a rather odd and eccentric character - a nutty professor; a madman; a drunk; a junkie. It was time to go somewhere so big that those kind of labels couldn't follow me around: London.

I put my back out picking up my niece to put her on the swings at the playground, so I had a week working flat on my back at home, while I was working for Barclays. I started to slowly relapse into taking legal highs, and ended up taking another week off, where I rewrote the entire software system we were working on in a nonstop hackathon without sleep. It rather made a mockery of the whole project, as well as terrifying the hell out of the architects.

At HSBC, I had a full on meltdown after my first week, realising that it was impossible to work a demanding contract while living in a hostel. Somehow, I managed to get away with a week off work, thanks to my sister ringing my boss and making excuses for me. I did also have half a day off because I was so dreadfully hung over once. I wasn't going to bother at all, but my boss persistently phoned me. I reeked of booze, as I turned up at my desk at 2:30pm.

At a well-known leading consultancy, working for the world's biggest security firm, I didn't take any time off at all. I was a little late on a couple of occasions, and had to ask one of my team to run my morning meeting on my behalf, but I was mostly a reliable little worker bee. It helped that I had a whole week-long holiday: my first relaxing week-long break for over 3 years.

I was all set to start a new contract with a well known high-street bank, who I once worked for when I was 20 years old and Canary Wharf was mostly just a building site. However, I knackered my leg, which caused my foot to swell up and my kidneys to fail. I had to pull a sickie on the very first day. Thankfully, they've waited two weeks for me to get better; most of which I've spent on a high-dependency hospital ward, having dialysis. My leg is still fucked.

And so, I go back to work tomorrow, limping along with my robocop ankle brace and doped up on tramadol. I've got one reliable reference from the last couple of years. HSBC hate my guts. Most people at Barclays were shocked and appalled that my contract was terminated early, and my boss lost his job over his decision to fire me, but do you think I can get a good reference? Who knows.

I should have paid my rent 10 days ago. I just told the taxman that he's not getting any VAT off me for a whole quarter, and he fucking hates that. I have no idea what my bank balance is, but I'm sure that what little money I have is being frittered away at a frighteningly quick rate.

However.

I could possibly delay a few weeks and get another contract. I could have stayed in hospital, letting them do their blood tests and fretting over my kidneys - which have proven resilient so many times before - and waiting patiently for them to finally take a look at my original complaint: my fucked foot/ankle/leg. It feels like I've torn a bunch of ligaments and muscle. It feels like my old injury has suffered major complications.

But, two weeks work gives me the best part of 3 months rent. If I can limp through the contract, I go from zero to hero. I've been so depressed about having to watch the pennies and not being able to treat my girlfriend to romantic dinners and whisk us off to exotic locations, or at least make plans to have fun. My plans have all been focussed on stopping the ship from sinking.

You might think I'm mad to take such a risk with my health, but mental health is part of it. Stress is part of it. Money and the need to not run out of it, is something that has to be considered. I don't trust myself: that I'm able to knuckle down and get on with the job. I did a good job of keeping my mouth shut in my last contract and it sorted me out financially a bit. This is my chance to continue that streak of improvement, if I can hold my shit together despite my health being a bit iffy. This is my chance to get in front. This is my chance to reduce all that stress and those worries and that anxiety and that depression about having to be super careful with money.

Anyway, let's see what happens tomorrow, eh? Let's see how sympathetic people are, about the fact that I've just been discharged from a high-dependency hospital ward, where I narrowly avoided chronic kidney failure, which would have meant having to have a kidney transplant and all the rest of that kind of shit. My leg is fucked, but I've found some contraption that allows me to get around without crutches. Still though, it looks like I broke my ankle or something. Surely, I've got to get cut a bit of slack, given what I've been through.

But, it doesn't work like that with IT contracting. Nobody owes me anything. The contract is between my company and another company. It's not an employment contract. It's a contract that says my company will provide consultancy services to their company - I could send anybody I think is qualified. I could hire somebody on minimum wage, train them, and send them to go do the job in my place, and I'd earn just as much money. However, the client doesn't really want somebody like me. They want me and they want me tomorrow at the latest, otherwise they'll just find somebody else. London's not short of talent. It was an extremely kind personal favour, that they waited this long for me to get better.

It's going to be horrible, starting work in pain and so exhausted from the nights in hospital where you're repeatedly disturbed by patients yelling out in pain, nurses coming to measure your blood pressure and take your temperature, and phlebotomists coming to take blood samples. They wake you up at 7am for the crappy breakfast of dry bread and marmalade. It's going to be a struggle to stay awake at my desk, especially with all the pain medication I'm taking.

So, it might all go to shit anyway, but at least I tried. I could have taken my sweet time over everything, and let the hospital string me along, but eventually, I can't cope with the frustration anymore: the lack of control, when your destiny is in the hands of somebody who doesn't even know what they're looking at. Somebody who's hiring because there's a knowledge gap in their organisation: they're hiring somebody who knows what they don't know, so how can they know that the person they're hiring knows what they know? So many stupid interviews, where the interviewer just wants to talk about the lame crap that they have just about managed to memorise. So tedious. In the end, intolerable.

I'm falling asleep and it's 5 o'clock and I didn't wake up until after 10:30am. Tomorrow's going to be fucking awful. But, think of the money. Just think of the money.

Tags: #career

This is a story about conflict...

Israelis, are you fucking colour blind? The United Nations partitioned Palestine, to create the state of Israel in 1947. Stay behind your fucking border and stop killing Palestinian children with your American planes, bombs, guns, tanks, helicopters and every other piece of advanced military hardware that you have, to terrorise poor people who only have sticks and stones to defend themselves.

Israel, you have nuclear weapons, so the Arab countries that are in your proximity have a right to have them too, to defend themselves. You can't continue to bully and fuck over the poor nations in the region. You've got your territory. It's time to stop being such genocidal maniacs and total arseholes. You're the fucking reason why we have terrorists, along with your American sponsors.

Quit your fucking boo-hoo-hoo about the holocaust, and crying "ANTI SEMITE" whenever the international community criticises your atrocious violation of United Nation resolutions and your brutal assault on your impoverished neighbours. The Jews aren't the only group to have suffered a genocide. Check your fucking history books and have some fucking humility. Ever heard of the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian Genocide? Quit your fucking self-pity and stay the fuck within your borders. Get the fuck out of Palestine and stop killing children.

Can you see lines on a map? Can you read? Does the name of that place you're bombing or invading have the name of your country on it, or somebody else's? Why do you think that these places have existed for long enough to have borders and names? Do you think it's because some kind of peace and stability in the region has been achieved: an uneasy truce?

So, Saddam probably gassed some Kurds. So fucking what? Boo fucking hoo. Sadam kept a lid on the Sunni vs. Shia bullshit, and kept the fucking Kurds at bay. The goddam Kurds are the thorn in everybody's side: just ask the Turkish. They're like those fucking nutjobs who think Cornwall should be independent from the UK. Bunch of nutters.

The Assads aren't exactly chuffed about American troops occupying the Middle East. How would you like it if some bunch of trigger-happy jumped up twats decided to live in part of your fucking house? Hafaz el-Assad was quite successful at getting the Americans to fuck off. Bashar al-Assad was doing quite a decent job of building a modern Syria, until neighbouring Iraq got illegally invaded and the whole fucking region was thrown into chaos, allowing 'rebels' to have a stab at trying to grab power through violence and coup attempts.

You can dig up dirt on any government, which is trying to maintain stability and control. The longer the region is left to stabilise, the less brutal the government has to be. I'm no fan of the Tory regime, with the evil dictator Theresa May. I would be locked up as a political prisoner - persecuted - for my right to rebel against the government by getting a gun and trying to take power by force. How can people be expected to live under such appalling conditions?

Afghanistan. Ever heard of this shitting place? I'm sure you've heard tales about how easy it's been for countries to take it over and control it. There's lots of history about how the British found it really easy there, and definitely didn't get totally massacred. Then the Russians were there and they had an absolutely wonderful time and didn't have any problems at all. Finally, the Americans decided that they'd have a go at this super soft target, because of the simplicity of the task of conquering this country with a long history of being easily dominated by massive military might. Yes, history has definitely shown that massive numbers of British, Russian and American troops, with all their military hardware, can easily control this strategically important country on the Silk Road. Nobody ever got their arses kicked... presumably. I'd need to check the history books, but I'm sure that it's written down somewhere that this is a totally cool place to invade.

You want to move goods from East to West, but there are only so many passes through the mountains where it's possible to get truckloads of whatever it is you're transporting, to be traded in the Middle East and Europe via Afghanistan. Maybe you've heard of the Khyber Pass and the Silk Road. It's pretty strategically important to have land-based supply chains.

Afghanistan looks innocuous enough on the map, but it's actually super important for anybody who doesn't want to be forced to deal with the Ruskies in the North.

You know sometimes you hear the name of a country and you think "I really want to bomb that country, just because I don't like the name". Sometimes you think "god damn, there's a country with some really nice infrastructure and a thriving economy... we really should bomb the shit out of some of their stuff". That's what Americans think when they hear Libya.

In 1986, three people were killed in a nightclub bombing in Berlin - which is in Germany by the way - so the obvious response was for the Americans, who live nearly 5,000 miles away from Germany and over 6,000 miles from Libya, was to bomb the shit out of the Libyans.

What about this poor bastard, Iran? The country that the US just won't leave the fuck alone. Oil rich and with a highly educated population, Iran has managed to get close to being able to defend itself, despite the US's attempt to use the monarchy to control the population for their own advantage. When the Shah started backing his Arab allies, especially as part of OPEC, the West had no more use for this puppet, and he was driven into exile. Ever since then, endless boo-hoo-hoo propaganda bullshit about how awful it is that now rich twats in Tehran have to act with some cultural sympathy, is fed to us in the West, while internally the country prospers as best as it can, despite bullshit sanctions designed to stop Iran from being able to stand up to the bullying imperialists, and be a strong Arab ally in the Middle East, to counter the disproportionate force of the genocidal Israelis.

In short: the world is a safer place if Iran gets nukes, because then the Israelis might have to stop acting like such utter cunts. If the Yanks and the Israelis stop pissing off the Arabs and destabilising the whole of the Middle East, then terrorism goes away and we all have a nice peaceful co-existence.

Basically, history since the end of World War II pretty much goes like this:

• State of Israel created so that persecuted jews have somewhere to call home
• Israelis start being right bunch of cunts, with American weapons, and pissing off all their fucking neighbours and threatening them with nukes and stuff
• Invasion of Middle East and illegal occupation of countries, pisses of some really poor people
• Americans and American-armed Israelis start killing Arab children and generally acting like fucking Nazis
• Americans jam their thumb up the arse of the Arabs and smear pooh all over their face, just to piss them off
• Israelis keep leaving human faeces on the doorstep of every Arab home
• Eventually, the incredibly poor people who don't have any weapons start chucking stones at the occupying forces, with their body armour and tanks.
• The Yanks and the Israelis start ethnic cleansing, blowing people and shit up and generally pursuing a policy of terrorism.
• A tiny handful of extremely pissed off Arabs blow up some planes, nightclubs, army barracks and other targets, in attempt to get the invading and occupying forces to fuck off out of their countries.
• The Israelis decide to invade and occupy parts of Egypt and Syria, just because they fucking can, because the Americans are backing them and they've got far superior weaponry. They even threaten to nuke the Egyptians.
• The Americans invade and blow everything to fucking pieces and completely destroy all peace and stability in the region.
• Some US government shit that shouldn't have even been in Libya gets attacked. Big deal. Get the fuck out of Benghazi - check the map... it's in Libya, not the United States.
• The Americans blow up a convoy allowing the Libyan leader to be lynched, after already destabilising the whole place by selling guns to both sides.
• "Regime change" is a synonym for "unleashing an unbelievably awful power struggle".
• All the fucking nutters that Gadaffi, Saddam and the Assads kept under control, start fucking up the peace and stability of the region.
• Iran is aggresively and relentlessly fucked over, because they're trying to defend themselves from American-sponsored Israeli aggression.
• The policy of supporting the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine and Golem Heights in Syria, allowing the Israelis to threaten the Middle East with their nukes and generally act like total Nazis, and whinge about anti-Semitism, while committing atrocities, continues to aggravate the Arab world
• Even a white middle-class British man who was born in Wales and grew up in Oxford, can sympathise with how fucked over the whole Arab world is by the Americans and the Israelis, and can understand why they would fight back by throwing stones or even suicide bombing
• Every fucking nutjob thinks their particular ethnic region should be an independent country, even though they couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery, let alone agree how to divide the land and self-govern. The Kurds attempt to fuck Turkey and Syria up. Various religious nutters try to enforce their bullshit patriarchy on whole developed countries, because they're not getting enough sex.

You could say it's all about oil, but in actual fact, all those petrodollars had built some amazing infrastructure and raised living standards exceptionally high in the Middle East. The middle classes were thriving. Educational standards were amazing. The 'developing' world was threatening to become a bit too developed. The Yanks decided to bomb and destabilise, invade and occupy, until the whole of North Africa, the Middle East and the Gulf states were totally fucked, and collapsed into internecine conflict.

In 1973, the world got a very clear message from the Arab world: don't fuck with us, because we can turn off the oil taps. The Arab world asked to be treated with some fucking respect, because they wield some power too. The Yanks didn't like that very much.

The Brits had done a decent enough job of chopping up the Middle East and installing some rulers who would give the region some stability. OK, so it was stability achieved by machine-gunning large numbers of religious nutjobs, like the pesky Wahhabists. OK, so a few militant Kurds needed to be liquidated. Call it collateral damage. You can't argue with the fact that it was at least peaceful after World War II, thanks to the Brits understanding the history and culture of the region very well.

The Americans are a bit stupid when it comes to the definition of terrorism. When the IRA would blow up a pub or a hotel or something like that, that wasn't terrorism. When the Israelis would terrorise all the impoverished people in the Middle East using American high-tech weaponry, that wasn't terrorism.

Israel and the Americans got annoyed that somebody threw a rock at them that harmlessly bounced off their kevlar body armour, so they decided they'd better take over the management of the Middle East, by bombing the shit out of everybody, killing civilians without giving a fuck and getting rid of 'regimes' that kept the whole region stable.

Obviously, it pissed the Yanks off that they were asked nicely to respect other countries and treat them with decency. Obviously, it pissed the Yanks off that they couldn't just take everything they wanted, whenever they wanted it, while the whole world starves in squalor and they live in opulent luxury. After the indignity of having to pay slightly more for their petrol in the 1970s, they decided to destroy an entire continent's living standards and directly and indirectly kill millions of people, just because they wanted to feel like a "big guy".

More of the history of the Middle East and North Africa is about the Brits and the Americans being able to sell weapons and supply the Israeli military, than it is about oil. Oil only enters the equation, because the cartel of OPEC pisses off arrogant Americans, who think they're the boss of everything and need not show an ounce of respect or diplomacy towards anybody.

So, if you were wondering why we have to suffer Nazis like Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen and other truly deplorable twats who threaten to destroy the peaceful world we've been able to enjoy since the last world war, then the answer is: because America has totally screwed up the Middle East, with Britain tagging along for the ride, even though us Brits actually stabilised the region in the first place.

There's so much disproportionate revenge from the United States, using weapons of mass destruction. You kill one of their soldiers who's invaded your country and is occupying your land, and they'll drop an atomic bomb on hundreds of thousands of your civilians. That's the kind of bloodthirsty evil shit of a country that we're dealing with: a bully that's armed to the teeth, and will inflict horrible death and suffering using any excuse.

If you want to know why we can't all get along, why we have all those security checks at airports and we're scared of Arab-looking men, it's because we fucking deserve a good kicking. We've been part of America's global campaign to be an absolute dick to everybody with a brown face, kill mind-boggling numbers of innocent people and cause unimaginable suffering, in the interests of imperial arrogance.

How much, exactly, do you want to have? The 1950s sounded pretty awesome, and the 1960s too. Why not stop there? Why go marauding all over the globe, fucking up other people's shit? Why on earth does America need to flex its muscles and bully impoverished nations?

The Brits seemed to develop a smidgen of humility, and stop pissing the Irish off so much. Ireland is Ireland. The British invasion and occupation of Ireland is something we should apologise for and be ashamed of. You can see what a bad attitude the Brits had, when you look at the Argentinian Malvinas, which fucking arrogant Brits seem to think are somewhere off the coast of Cornwall and are called the Falkland Islands.

Empires are one thing, but fucking with the stability of a region is quite another. The American quest to fuck up Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya and just about anywhere else that's peaceful and prosperous, but doesn't buy much Coca Cola and McDonalds, is the reason why we have these 'national security threats'.

So, 52% of the UK population are intent on fucking up the unity of a peaceful Europe, because they don't like immigrants and refugees, and they're fucking paranoid about terrorism. But think about why people might want to hurt us, or might want to come here: because their home countries got fucked up by us, as part of an American-led campaign to keep the poor in their place. Americans can't feel prosperous unless they're making somebody else suffer.

A billionaire reality-TV star, who's completely useless as a businessman, having been bankrupt many times, has now been elected leader of the 'free' world, by being a racist; a Nazi. How did this come about? What kind of world has resulted in building massive walls, revoking visas and banning visitors from certain countries? How on earth does any of this not sound like we're just repeating the mistakes that led to world wars?

This is not democracy in action. This is awful. The marginal Brexit victory, and the technical victory of Donald Trump - he got less votes overall - does not show the will of the people. It shows the disgusting attitude of the people. These weren't votes... this was an opinion poll that showed that there are a terrifying number of racist cunts in our midst.

Democracy and capitalism are not only failing, but they're giving credibility to awful things. There's no way I can respect a vote to abuse immigrants. There's no way I can respect the portion of the electorate who want to do awful things to their fellow human beings.

Try to remember that the Nazis didn't take their power by force. Try to remember that we all have an individual responsibility to vote with our conscience, not with malice, xenophobia and bigotry. It takes effort to be kind and humanitarian, but we have a responsibility to act with decency; both collectively and individually. It's a terrible thing when a gang of thugs starts throwing their weight around, and thinking it's OK because there's safety in numbers.

We may well find that democracy is completely flawed, when people turn nasty, because they're protected by the anonymity of the voting booth. Imagine if there was a permanent public record of how you voted: you could be held jointly responsible for the damage, suffering and deaths you caused through your nastiness, thinking that you could get away with it. Imagine being prosecuted for a crime against humanity, because you voted for something so evil and selfish, that was harmful to so many people.

It's our job as citizens of democratic countries to curb the warmongering ambitions of our political leaders. Every prime minister and president wants a war to call their own. It's our collective responsibility to muzzle these dangerous dogs. These wars should not be fought in our name, even if some of us are stupid enough to be swayed by the propaganda.

Take another look at recent history, and try to look at it without the Hollywood bullshit, that tells us the world is made up of good guys and bad guys. Why don't you find out what it was really like to live in Iraq under Saddam, Syria under Assad, or Libya under Gadaffi, before these places were torn to shreds by forces unleashed when America and a few allies - like us Brits - attacked, invaded, bombed, drone struck and generally destabilised.

Take another look at why the 'bad guys' - who are far fewer than you might imagine - want to 'kill us'. Think about motive. Think about what we might have done to other countries, that makes our own countries a target for retaliation. Think about what injustices we perpetuate, oppressing people. What can these unarmed victims do, in the face of these invading armies who have all the latest high-tech weaponry? 

Re-tell the story, without bleating on about the holocaust - it was a long time ago, by the way - and painting this demonic figure of 'radical islam'. Let's hear the story about illegal invasions, occupation, aggression of militarily superior nations against impoverished nations with limited ability to defend themselves. Let's hear the story about the bullies beating up anybody who's advancing and improving: keeping things unfair; unbalanced.

If having nukes means that you act with kindness, restraint and generosity, then maybe it's OK if only a few nations have them: countries that set a good example for the rest. However, having nukes seems to make a country act with aggression, arrogance, cruelty and a thirst for world domination. Therefore, the only solution is for everybody to have nukes, so nobody gets bullied. The other solution would be for every nation to give up all their nukes, but that ain't ever going to happen.

Anyway, everything looks like it's about to blow. Everywhere I look, things are fucked. Greece and Italy are in big economic trouble. Turkey is so strategically important, but also in the middle of a massive power struggle. Iran is exercising its rights as a sovereign country to develop weapons to defend itself, but America doesn't need much of an excuse to start wars and fuck countries up. Iran's probably one of the last stable proper Islamic republic democracies in the Middle East: the Iranians voted "Yankee go home". As the weather warms up, the huge movement of migrants will start again. The French are pissed off with having everybody trying to get to the UK, fucking up Calais. A wave of right-wing Nazism threatens a clean-sweep across the globe: Le Pen and Wilders joining the likes of Farage and Trump, in a world that thinks that racism is suddenly OK now. All it's going to take is one trigger event - a stock market slump, economic calamity or a major act of terrorism - and a massive domino effect will be triggered. Take a look in your history books and tell me what's happened before when people feel poor and insecure. Fuck the stats: the reality is that most families are just about managing, and it's fucking stressful. Something's gotta give.

Debt levels are unsustainable, suicides are soaring. All the omens are very bad. There's definitely a whiff of the 1930s about what's going on, with hints of another Great Depression and the rise of fucking insane nationalist Nazi parties. It all makes me feel rather nauseated.

I reckon we've probably got one chance to step back from the brink of disaster, but nobody seems to be capable of saying "ooops, I was wrong. I made a mistake". Nobody seems to want to say "look, I know that so-and-so won on a technicality, but really, I don't think our democracy should be run by a bunch of racist cunts".

Everybody's too busy just about managing to be able to understand what's really going on and act with some human decency, rather than having our emotional buttons pushed by the very people who have exploited us and pushed us to breaking point.

Why are you not more worried about history judging you to be one of the bad guys, than taking a clear stand and fighting for what's obviously the right humanitarian, compassionate thing to do?

Tags: #politics #history

This is a story about artistic integrity...

He who pays the piper calls the tune. Does the piper ever get to play, for their own amusement and freedom of expression?

If you look at my life strategy, it's pretty insane. I've picked a career that uses skills that I mastered as a child, and I now find the job mind-numbingly boring, easy and soul-destroying. I've picked an industry which is essentially just keeping a running total of who owes who what: simple addition and subtraction. I've chosen maximum income, for minimum effort. My life is constrained - certain rules have to be adhered to - but I have set things up so that I can jump through the pointless hoops as effortlessly as possible.

My theory is, that if I were to mix work and pleasure, then it would break my heart whenever I had to compromise. Let's imagine my passion in life is painting. I'd like to paint 1970's sci-fi inspired futuristic cityscapes, clinging to the rocky surface of distant planets. Those paintings are very intricate; detailed. The attraction of that art, for me, is the sense of scale that's given when you paint thousands of tiny windows on the buildings, and lots of tiny people in space suits, wandering around in their futuristic world. However, there's probably only a niché market for such paintings, and they'd take hundreds of hours to paint. Commercially, I'd be far better off splattering a canvas with bright primary colours and calling it abstract modern art - it would take far less effort and would have a much broader appeal. In order to pay my rent, I'd be economically incentivised to produce crap that I hated, because it would be much more profitable.

My strategy is to earn a lot and not work very hard, so I have lots of money and spare time to pursue whatever passions I have, without compromise.

Of course, there is always compromise.

Luckily, there is a Nick Grant who is a rapper, a Nick Grant who is a photographer, a Nick Grant who is an expert in sewerage processing, a Nick Grant who is a lecturer in American Studies at the University of East Anglia, a Nick Grant who's a toastmaster, a Nick Grant who's an expert in credit risk management, a Nick Grant who's a researcher in the Elementary Particle Physics department at the University of Warwick, a Nick Grant who's the CEO of Severn Trent, a Nick Grant who's a Labour Party candidate, barrister and head of legal services for Sainsbury's, a Nick Grant who's the concertmaster of the San Diego Symphony Orchestra, a Nick Grant who's the strategy director for Cancer Research UK, and there's even a series of fictional Nick Grant Adventure books by Jamie Dodson.

This means that I can pretty much write whatever I want on the public Internet, under my real name, without the fear that most salary earning wage slaves would have, that our employers will discover our deepest darkest secrets, prejudicing our career progression and perhaps even jeopardising our employment.

However, ex-colleagues from places like JPMorgan and HSBC occasionally visit this site, and pick up juicy tidbits about the implosion of my life and see the thrashing of my legs, beneath the surface of the water, when I'm swanning about trying to look as serene as possible in my professional capacity. I have old bosses as friends on Facebook and following me on Twitter.

I took an insane gamble. Instead of locking down my social media to only friends who can be trusted to not gossip with anybody connected with my former employers; instead of editing and censoring myself; instead of setting up a pseudonym - a pen name - I write under my real name, with real details that leave me no plausible deniability, to say "it isn't me" and "it must be another Nick Grant".

I guess there aren't that many people who leave the privileged and highly paid world of financial services and IT, in pursuit of the risky dream of doing something more rewarding in an intangible way. Earning bucketloads of cash is all the reward you'd want, right? Why would you want to earn less money being an electrician? Why would you want to have all that stress and risk your life savings, trying to start your own company? Why would somebody who's been a steady dependable 9 to 5 worker, with decades of dedicated service under their belt, suddenly lose their mind and end up in psychiatric hospitals, drug rehab and homeless?

So many of us dream of making a big change in our lives, but when we face up to the reality of the risks, sacrifices and effort involved, we decide that maybe the timing's just not quite right... maybe we'll do it next year, or the year after. We end up boring our friends and family with our grand plans that will never be implemented: forever on the drawing board.

When somebody is mad enough to unshackle themselves from the golden handcuffs and give something a proper go, it's big news. There are hundreds, if not thousands of bored office-working drones, who are fascinated to know the details of the trials and tribulations of anybody who had the guts to follow through on a plan to retrain in a completely different field, or start a business. When you quit your soul-destroying job, you're the underdog; David taking on Goliath - your former colleagues want to live your exciting life, vicariously. Former colleagues are rooting for you to succeed. Former colleagues want to know if you fail spectacularly, to re-affirm that they made the right decision, staying in their nice safe boring jobs.

Bootstrapping means taking on projects where you're not beholden to somebody for the funding. The whole point of me doing a job I hate, is that it's provided the dosh to do whatever I want without having to kiss ass, kowtow and do things in a way that they approve of. The whole point of founding my businesses with my own money, was so that I could run things exactly how I wanted, without investors and lenders breathing down my neck and making stupid suggestions about my business plan.

When it comes to a personal memoir type project, where I'm pouring my guts out, I'm somewhat burning the bridge back to the straight-laced world of boring jobs for boring people with boring lives. I have a CV that says I've worked for various companies and I have various qualifications. People who get salaried jobs by sending off their CV and going for interviews, are not allowed to have exciting lives where they do things that don't neatly fit into boxes. The world that provides my income has a strict rule: fit in or fuck off.

So, I made a decision. I decided FUCK IT. I decided that I would just write whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I would be myself, I wouldn't censor, I wouldn't edit and waste time considering what the drones of the corporate world of wage slavery would think about my unorthodox life.

And so, with practice, my passion and - dare I say - my skill, is to document my innermost thoughts and feelings, publicly. It might not be art and it might not be commercial, but it sure as hell isn't compromised. I have moments of fear, where I think that I need to hide my blog, put a sticking plaster over the semicolon tattoo behind my ear, find out just precisely what my former colleagues are prepared to say about me: put them on the spot and say "look, do you judge me on the good work that you saw, or on the secret life that I chose to reveal to you?"

It drove me paranoid and crazy, trying to maintain a squeaky clean perfect professional image, whilst also dealing with all sorts of awful things in my private life. It exhausted me to the point where I lost my mind, covering up the fact that life outside the office was chaotic and unstable, and I didn't want anybody to know that I was just about surviving in grotty student flats, hostels, hotels and friends' sofas. I didn't want anybody to know that my engine had run out of petrol and was running on fumes. I didn't want anybody to know that I had no margin for error, no safety buffer: my finances were on the brink of total disaster.

Why should anybody know these things? If I get stuff fixed up and pick up where I left off, then who would be any the wiser? What people don't know can't hurt them, can it?

However, it hurt me. It hurt me every time a friend thought it was hilarious to tell my ex JPMorgan colleagues things that considerably damaged my reputation. It hurt me every time the grape vine managed to spread gossip about my attempts to find job satisfaction. "I heard you're an electrician now!" a colleague from HSBC who I hadn't spoken to for 6 years, said to me when we connected on LinkedIn. How the fuck do people find this stuff out?

"Oh you were in The Priory... like some kind of rock star. So cool!"

Not cool. That kind of stuff colours people's opinion of you. They make assumptions and whisper behind your back. "Shall we invite Nick to the pub at lunchtime?" somebody says. "No, better not... he's a recovering alcoholic, isn't he?" [I'm not, by the way]

What I write is repetitive. I have no idea what chapter of my life you're going to walk in on. I have no idea what I'm going to be writing about when you dip into my private world. So, I cover the same theme over and over again: I am me.

I'm no longer the straight-laced perfect employee with the immaculate CV. What are those gaps in my employment history? Well, in the context of me being your wage slave, that's none of your fucking business. You don't pay me enough to bribe me to act a certain way and to gag me. You don't pay me enough for me to compromise my integrity, my identity.

I've suffered enough boredom and I've been patient for long enough to have earned the right to be myself; the right to be creative; the right to express myself without hesitation; the right to not have to wear a mask; the right to not live in fear of negative judgement.

What happens if and when the worlds collide? Well, I've set the challenge: it's up to other people to decide whether to judge me on what they see in the office versus what they discover through my candour, in a totally unrelated context.

I'd love to make it into print. I have a penchant for debate, and strong views about government and society. At some point, my ambitions to be an author and to get involved in politics are going to be realised. Every word I write on the public Internet makes me more discoverable to somebody, somewhere, on some topic or other. If I simply wanted a book deal or to raise my profile, I could compromise and conform; I could channel my energy into being commercial and popular.

What does it mean to be authentic? You think it's some fucking option that we all have? You think it's a fucking lifestyle choice?

To be authentic is a risk and it's a privilege. You could lose friends and fall out with your family. You could lose your job. How are you going to find your true voice? The voice that speaks with childlike honesty; fearlessness; tapping into your live stream of thoughts, rather than the lines you've memorised; the act you've learned to play. It takes practice, to be able to express what you feel, rather than say what you think people want to hear. Many of us are disciplined to engage our brains before our mouths: to hesitate, withhold and communicate in a manner that conforms to social norms. We are coached and bullied into hiding our unique outlook and personality.

If I make myself unemployable, I'll be forced to try and monetise the things that I have a natural aptitude for. At the moment, writing is effortless, but I could push myself to write with more purpose, spend time editing and reconnect with some literary agents I started conversations with last year.

If I find myself barred from the land of boring jobs and immaculate CVs, then my energy - my creative output - will have to be expressed in ways that come naturally to me, not just easily. In a way, I'll be unbounded; unleashed; unchained. Of course, it invites hypomania to come and destabilise everything, but at least my crazy projects usually result in cold hard cash in my pocket and something else to add to my portfolio.

I'm scared. I can't play the game any more. I have a contract - ink dried on paper - and I can do the job with my eyes closed. I've been in hospital enough times with kidney problems to know when I'm in trouble, and to know when I can look after myself. I can't humour everybody with this "my health comes first" bullshit anymore. I'm the guy who's pissed copious amounts of blood on more than one occasion, and done the calculations: how long have I got before total organ failure will kill me? I'm the guy who knows when I'm in deep shit, and when I can take a calculated risk.

What scares me more than anything is going through all the same old shit I've been doing since I was a teenager. What scares me more than anything is playing the same fucking games, wearing the stupid fucking mask, and acting and speaking the lines I've learnt and spoken a zillion times before.

I've got a fairly simple plan: conform and comply just enough to get what I want out of some rich fucking banks who I don't give two shits about. The last thing I want to be doing in the world is help some dinosaur of a bank run a simple software project at snail's pace, but they're going to pay me a king's ransom to do it, and it gives me a tiny taste of freedom... I put up, shut up, suffer the boredom, and the reward for my patience is that I keep a bit of integrity; a bit of dignity; a bit of identity.

Maybe I should do this job or that job, people suggest. Wouldn't I be great as a carpet salesman, or a tyre fitter? Isn't my natural calling in life to be a supply chain analyst or a fork lift truck driver?

Maybe it's the mission of the company that I need to get right. Selling people financial products they don't need or want, and profiting on the margin between the borrowing rate and the lending rate, using fractional reserve banking, is hardly going to give you a warm fuzzy feeling, is it? Perhaps I should work for a charity that's managed to help a handful of individuals and a large number of donors to feel better about how disgustingly wealthy they are and ignore the fact that the gap between the rich and poor is growing. Perhaps I should simply find my place in the whole fucked up mess, where I can delude myself into thinking I'm making a positive difference.

But, I've seen too much. I know too much. I know that things are rotten to the core and it sickens me to emotionally involve myself, when everybody wants you to just STFU, keep your head down, do what you're told, not rock the boat and don't for god's sake solve any problems at the root cause.

Writing's the only time I can let rip and not get bogged down by the wilful ignorance and DGAF attitude of those around me. I'm not saying I'm superior and I've got all the answers, but I'm saying that when I get a hunch and I set out to prove my point, I've got plenty of examples of things I've done that have worked, when I'm free from constraints and naysayers.

I love this quote:

"People who say it can't be done should not interrupt those who are doing it"

Somebody's gotta be positive. Somebody's gotta do the math, calculate the risks and take a chance. Somebody has to be brave and stick to their guns. Somebody has to persevere through the setbacks. Somebody has to keep going when the way ahead looks blocked, to figure out how to overcome the obstacles.

I also love this quote:

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat" -- Theodore Roosevelt

I feel gagged. I feel cheated out of the opportunity to demonstrate the best of my abilities; to tap into my creativity and problem solving skills. I feel jealous of those people with inherited wealth, trust funds and other advantages that allow them to dispense with the wearisome world of bullshit jobs, and instead they can flounce around reading interesting things, writing, debating & discussing, composing, painting, drawing, sculpting and generally expressing themselves.

To have those prizes just out of reach, because of the demands of societal conformity, is agonising to the point where it makes me want to give up. I've worked hard enough for long enough that I should be in a different position. I'm left miming the same actions that I've done a thousand times before, in order to keep the money flowing, the rent paid and the food on the table, which is like some kind of psychological torture.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but I knew I would get a contract fairly quickly, and I know that I will be able to run the project really well, very easily. I've seen it all before; done it all before. I can see all the way to the end: no surprises. Because it's all just a means to an end, it makes it that much harder. I've got nothing to prove, and the fact that I'm employed to solve the same old problems in the same old way, time & time again, simply proves that they might as well just give me the money and not bother with the project, if they're not going to listen to the experts who know how to build better systems than these follies; these white elephants.

I've got this easy money contract all lined up. I know what the hell is going on with my kidneys. I've been in hospital enough times with rhabdomyolysis to know when the numbers say I'm fucked, and when the numbers say I've dodged another bullet and I'm fine & dandy. I know when I'm in big trouble and in desperate need of assistance, and I know when my tough little body is patched up and working again.

It's been agonising, to string this client; this consultancy; this agent along, while I've been in limbo: who could have predicted that it'd take nearly 15 hours of dialysis before my kidneys rebooted? Was I ever worried about my life, my health? You're asking the wrong question. You'd have thought that if you pissed absolute jet black liquid and you couldn't feel your foot or your calf, you'd be straight over to A&E, but it doesn't work like that if you're already at the limit of what you can take.

I phoned my client and said I wasn't going to make the 30 minute induction and I was too sick to start work that week. Chances are, that was the end of that: they'd just cancel the contract.

Things in my life are either there to be endured, they're an adventure, something good that's happening, or I've had enough and I'm going to self destruct.

Being in hospital again has been part adventure - I've never had dialysis before - partly something good, in terms of her seeing first hand the shit that I've been through a bunch of times. But there's the actual boring work that has to be endured if I still have a contract by the time I get discharged. There's the self destruct threat, because I've solved all these problems before. Everything's been overcome, so far as I can see. My client will wait until Monday for me to start work, my blood tests are stable and my kidneys are definitely working.

I had no control over whether the client would wait for me to get well. I had no control over when my kidneys would reboot. To discharge myself would have been suicide, so it didn't matter whether I lost the contract or not.

Nobody can see that the recent acute kidney failure is not the root cause of the problem here. Why did I let the problem get so bad? Why am I not afraid of a catastrophic chain of life-changing or life-ending events? My kidneys are working AND the client says I can start work on Monday, but why would I trust my knowledge, experience and the blood test data, and discharge myself, when I could just get another job in a few weeks or months? Why don't I avoid all risk, act like a sensible normal person, and just do everything I'm told?

There's a delicate chain here: I was lucky that my client has waited this long for me to get well, I was lucky that my kidneys recovered quickly, I'm lucky that I have a job that's easy money, I'm lucky that I don't have to suffer more agents and interviews, I'm lucky that I've got a financial lifeline that fixes my cashflow, I'm lucky that this contract keeps me within touching distance of the day when things are stable again, and I have the opportunity to think about doing something rewarding, challenging, creative and everything else I need as the antidote to 20 years of office boredom.

The ticking time bomb exploded, but it was unseen. I couldn't hang on any longer. I couldn't take any more delays and setbacks. My patience for being depressed, stressed and running out of runway, without success at securing a job (that I didn't really want anyway) had expired. I'd been strung along too long. Christmas and New Year slowed everything down and stopped progress, so the agony was drawn out longer than I could take.

Somebody's going to end up not getting what they want.

The doctors want to discharge me with blood tests that show my kidneys are clearing the remaining backlog of toxic crap out of my blood on their own. They want me to have an operation to have a dialysis line put in my jugular vein. They want to do more observation, without dialysis, to know how my kidneys are doing without any assistance.

Her and our friends want me to follow the doctor's advice, and treat my health as if my life hangs by a thread. They care about me. They don't care about my client. They know that there will be other jobs.

I want good quality sleep in my own bed for a couple of nights. I want to try on my ankle splint and get used to getting around on crutches. I want to make a plan for how I'm going to get to work during the tube strike. I want to figure out my medications so I'm not fuzzy-headed and sleepy during the day. I need to not have to start all over again. I need to balance the small risk that my kidneys might take a long time to clear the backlog of creatinine, against the big risk that I can't be out of work any longer, and I can't face starting the job hunt all over again, without depression and stress destroying me.

Yeah, I'm going to feel shit. I was always going to feel shit. I'm going to wish I was more well rested. I'm going to wish things worked out differently. I'm going to wish I could just press the fast forward button and be 6 months further through the year, and everything's gone exactly how I know it's going to go, but I don't have to suffer the boredom, the monotony and the ridiculous deja-vu of solving the same problems in the same way, over and over again.

What's the alternative? I can't cut & run. I can't switch career. I can't chase some stupid pipe dream.

Some people think I'm a know-it-all. Some people think I'm reckless and stupid. Some people think the answer to all my problems is to do the things I've tried before: regular salaried jobs, doctor's advice, safe & sensible behaviour, conformity to the norm.

All I can tell you is, I can make dumb decisions and get myself into deadly situations, but I'm also a bit of an expert in recovering from some very harrowing shit.

It's a bit unfair to ask people who care about me - both loved ones and professionals - to allow me to take what they see as an unnecessary risk, but the flip side is a complex web of psychological risks and consequences that are almost too hard to explain.

If I seem impatient, foolish, arrogant, entitled or somehow like I deserve different treatment and life opportunities to everybody else, all I can say is this: at some point you can't keep trying anymore, you give up and you slip away. At some point, it doesn't seem worth the struggle and the stress, just to line somebody else's pockets and allow them the freedom to pursue their artistic creative ambitions and generally waft around having a lovely time.

If I get what I want, start my job tired and in pain, work for at least 6 months, bored out of my mind and upset that I wasn't well rested and properly prepared; but at least the cashflow hole is plugged, my stress starts to go down, I start to relax about the purse strings, I can show my love and appreciation for the people who I care about and who care about me, I can start to improve my work:life balance and I can start to dream about longer-term ambitions, without torturing myself because things are so far out of reach.

If you think I expect this to happen overnight, you're wrong. I'm forecasting 6 months to stabilise, 6 more months to build up a healthy safety cushion, and another year before I can even dare to dream and start to think about a less soul-destroying life.

As I wrote before, I've got some amazing pieces of the puzzle in place - more love and support than I've ever had in my adult life - but I still can't afford to have other important things slip away for the sake of an acceptably small risk and some short-term pain, discomfort, exhaustion and a bit of extra stress. There is no perfect solution.

There is one thing that nobody can take away from me right at the moment: I'm a penniless writer.

Tags: #writing #art #hospital #career

This is a story about filtration...

Muscle damage causes the release of myoglobin. The kidneys try to filter out the myoglobin, but it causes damage to the renal tubular epithelium, causing acute kidney failure. Creatine kinase (CK) is an enzyme and a marker that allows muscle damage to be detected by a blood test. Creatinine is a waste product produced in your muscles, normally eliminated by your kidneys. High levels of Creatinine in your blood indicate kidney failure.

So, we know that a muscle of mine must have been damaged, because my CK reading went higher than the test was able to measure. We also know that my kidneys had failed, because my Creatinine levels were also off the charts.

Dialysis has cleared the backlog of all the toxic crap that was damaging my kidneys and had caused them to fail. My kidneys are now a bit better and I'm now making pee.

The question is, are my kidneys working efficiently enough to remove all the creatinine that my muscles are creating? Also, is the original muscle injury still chucking out a load of toxic myoglobin, which is injuring my kidneys?

So, I measure how much I drink, and I measure how much I pee, and hopefully there isn't much difference - at least my kidneys should be able to get rid of the fluids and stop my body from swelling up. Also, my blood gets regularly tested. The creatinine, which is currently at about 1,000ppm, needs to drop to around 100ppm. My CK should reduce slowly over time, and certainly not increase. Provided all those things are happening, I can stop dialysis and let my body heal itself.

If my creatinine is not going down, or starts going up, then my kidneys just aren't recovered enough to be able to cope on their own. If my CK starts going up, then I still have some kind of muscle injury that's going to cause my kidneys to fail again, unless I have regular dialysis to filter the toxins out of my blood.

So, every drop of pee counts. The more I drink and the more I pee, the more creatinine and CK gets carried out of my body, making life easier for my kidneys and increasing the likelihood that I can recover without any more medical intervention.

I'm currently trying to build up a data set of blood test results, drink consumption and volume of pee, so that I can demonstrate to the doctors tomorrow that I don't need weeks and weeks more dialysis, and I can go start my new job on Monday.

So, cross your urethras for me that I can do it, and get my pee up to impressive volumes and get that nasty creatinine and CK flushed out of my system naturally, so I can go home tomorrow or Saturday.

I also get to have a rubber tube that's been inserted 24 centimetres - over 9 inches - into my groin region, removed from my body. I'm hoping to avoid having to have a similar tube inserted into the jugular vein in my neck.

Lots at stake. Pray for pee!

Tags: #hospital

This is a story about affordable care...

I've been able to roll the dice a few times - following my dreams and chasing my ambitions - because of progressive liberal socialist policies put in place by the Labour government of 1945: most notably, the creation of the National Health Service.

I chose to leave an extremely well remunerated job with an American investment bank, with amazing private medical insurance and a brilliant team of occupational health doctors. That US-style of healthcare certainly gave me access to the very best treatment, whenever I needed it, but it was part of a "golden handcuffs" deal: a job that was so much better than anything I could get anywhere else, that I had to be insane to quit.

Life is a balancing act. You can have loads of money, but no time to spend it. You can have loads of time, but no money. You can have job security, but you'll be bored and constrained. You can have freedom and be your own boss, but you will carry all the risks and responsibilities. You have to choose what works for you.

While one friend has parked his tech startup dreams and has taken a salaried job, another couple of friends have just sold their tech startup. In the space of 6 years, I made myself sick with stress, trying to run my own tech startup; I went back to my old job at the American investment bank and stayed sick until I started rebuilding my life in London as an IT consultant. In the space of those 6 years, my friends had countless sleepless nights and worked relentlessly to build their startups to the point where they were worthy of investment or acquisition. In the space of those 6 years, my friend who originally introduced me to the tech startup ecosystem, built a bunch of cool tech and very gracefully pivoted into a job that really suits him, working for a company he really admires. In the space of those 6 years, my friends from the technology accelerator program we attended in Cambridge, raised millions of pounds of investment and sold their company to a tech giant.

Friends went to Silicon Valley to follow their tech dreams. One friend had to break up with his girlfriend. Another had to move his young children away from the family support network, and live with the risk that the USA would reject him and his family's request for residency. Imagine if I had moved to America. How would I ever afford the medical bills, when things have gone badly wrong? I would have been bankrupted many many times over!

Nobody's keeping a seat warm for me in a cushy job because I went to a posh school and a prestigious university. I have no trust fund or family money behind me. Running out of money has meant homelessness. Starting a business had to be profitable from day one.

There's just no way that I would have been able to pursue the opportunities that I have, without the National Health Service. In theory the UK and US are lands of opportunity, where anybody can start a business and become rich and successful. In practice, it's almost impossible unless you're already quite wealthy. The consequences of failure are just too much to bear, for most people.

My current business is consultancy. If I'm sick, I don't get paid. If I don't have a client, I don't get paid. However, I've calculated that I only need to work a few months of the year to earn the same as as the 'secure' job I gave up. It's a calculated risk. I might end up not being able to pay my tax bill. I might end up not being able to pay my rent. But, when things go well, they go really well. The odds are in my favour: if I can just get two or three contracts in a row, not get sick, maybe have some projects that run longer than expected, then I'll suddenly be way way way ahead of where I would be if I'd just plodded along with the golden handcuffs on.

I sat awkwardly on my leg and it went numb. My foot became swollen. My leg swelled up all the way above my knee. My kidneys shut down. I was admitted to hospital and put on dialysis. I haven't had any income since September. Surely this is why it's best to have a nice 'secure' job?

I've been stressed and depressed about losing a lucrative consultancy contract. I was literally about to start working again when I got sick. Contractually, I have no rights: the company could just award the contract to somebody else. I was going to have to start the search for a client all over again, meaning yet more loss of earnings.

Here I am in hospital. I've been here for a week.

I was seen by a doctor within an hour of arriving at Accident & Emergency. I've had two private rooms with amazing views over central London. I've been seen by top consultants, surgeons, registrars, nurses, phlebotomists, physiotherapists. I've been wheeled around by porters and served meals by catering staff. My bedding has been changed and I've been given clean gowns and towels. Numerous medications have been dispensed. I've had ultrasound scans and my blood has been scrubbed clean and drained of dangerous toxins by dialysis machines. My blood pressure, blood oxygen, pulse and body temperature has been monitored around the clock. Even the amount I drink and piss is meticulously recorded by the staff on the ward.

Nobody has ever asked me for my medical insurance details, credit card or discussed how I plan to pay for all this world-class treatment. Nobody is going to send me a bill when this is over.

As luck would have it, my client has decided they will wait for me to get better, so I can start my contract. Imagine if I wasn't able to take that contract in the first place, because of the risk of getting sick. Imagine if all the profit from my contract got wiped out by a humongous medical bill. How is anybody supposedly 'free' to become rich and successful, if they can't predict when they're going to get sick and how much it's going to cost?

This story is really a re-telling of three stories. The story of the friend who inspired me to follow my startup dreams and who inspired me to write about the importance of the National Health Service for social mobility; the story of the friend who succeeded, after 6 years of sacrifice, blood, sweat and tears, with countless sleepless nights and untold stress; and the story of me, who couldn't handle the chafing of the golden handcuffs, and got unwell because of the combined stress of running a tech startup with an unsupportive partner and unsupportive family.

I'm now lucky enough to have reconnected with old London friends, repaired friendships that were damaged or neglected when I got unwell, made new friends who are incredibly loyal and caring, and I have found an amazing lady who makes me feel loved to bits and completely accepted for who I am. Her family have welcomed me with open arms and most of the get well cards I've been getting have been from her family, along with offers of help to get me back on my feet.

While the welfare state is deeply flawed and it's an impossible task to get the social support that you need, as a single man whose life is imploding, the National Health Service has been the glue between the pooh, holding my shit together and just about keeping me alive. When you add in an amazing girlfriend, her family, loyal and caring friends and the rest of the social fabric that a person needs, you finally stand a chance of getting your life back.

I read with great dismay that the US Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) is being repealed. What the actual fuck, America?

If you wanted a case study for a society that's as close to perfect as you're going to get in an imperfect world, we should look to London. 300 different languages are spoken in London schools. The tower blocks of Canary Wharf sit in a London borough that's 46% Muslim. There are cycle superhighways, driverless trains, an underground railway that moves 5 million people every day. The Metropolitan Police are humble public servants, who protect the vulnerable and take people to hospital, involve social services and mental health crisis teams, rather than flashing their badges and drawing their weapons. The whole city exudes tolerance, inclusion and diversity: it's in London's DNA.

You might mistakenly believe that London is a city for the rich, but it's not: because of the National Health Service. The NHS employs 1.7 million people, and funded properly - like it is in London - it shows that socialism and multiculturalism can be made to work. The last piece of Britain's nationalised socialist infrastructure, not to be wrecked by the greed of capitalism; the NHS is a fly in the ointment for the Tories who want to sell everything off for private profits and damn the lives of British citizens.

I want the railways re-nationalised. I want the energy companies re-nationalised. Most of what comes out of Westminster is good for London but bad for the rest of the UK. What we're seeing is one rule for Londoners and another for everybody else. London gets state-owned public transport where 100% of the profits are re-invested in infrastructure. London has a remarkable set of public services that create jobs as well as keeping the residents well looked after. Socialism for London and capitalism for the rest of the UK... that sucks.

In my week in hospital, I've realised that London truly offers an enticing vision of a near-utopian society, so unlike the ugly one pictured in the dark minds of the populists. London is a European city, connected by train to Paris and Brussels. London is a mercantile centre, where East literally meets West at the Greenwich meridian line: the perfect time zone to deal with both Japan and San Francisco in the same business day. The peaceful co-existence of so many cultures in one crowded city is a modern miracle. I live here because of the immigrants, not in spite of the immigrants. London simply wouldn't function without its chaotic diversity.

Getting used to living in London is hard. The congestion is hard. The clash of cultures is hard. Seeing people who look and act differently is hard. Processing the humbling fact that the world is huge and complex is hard. Realising that you're in the racial minority is hard. Living a small, neat, efficient, considerate, reserved life, where you quietly observe and ask questions, as you discover your fellow Londoners have had incredible journeys, arriving here and building their lives, is hard. It's hard damn work, letting all this chaos and complexity assault your senses.

I don't want private hospitals, private health insurance, medical bills, policemen carrying guns, offensive foreign policy and an economy that offers no hope of escape from the socio-economic background you're born into, except for a tiny handful of sports stars, lottery winners, rappers and criminals. I don't want private prisons stuffed full of black people being used as slaves. I don't want a world of "us" and "them" with torture, pre-emptive strikes, invasion of sovereign nations, regime change and covert ops to destabilise other nations.

In a week in hospital, I've benefitted from everything that's great about Great Britain in the European Union and London's huge immigrant population. Only a tiny handful of the staff who've saved my life were born in Britain. Only a tiny fraction of the medical supplies and equipment were designed, tested and manufactured in the UK. I'm a stone's throw away from mosques where alleged firebrand hate preachers are supposedly plotting against the British people. Whitechapel Market is crowded with women wearing full-face veils, but I'm just another Londoner to them. If there's an exemplary organisation to demonstrate multicultural society working perfectly, doing life-saving work, it's the National Health Service.

Affordable care not only saved my life, but it's keeping my hopes and dreams alive, so I don't have to take a zero-hours contract McJob flipping burgers, just in case I get sick.

Tags: #NHS #hospital

This is a story about seeing the light...

Nobody preaches louder than the convert. I've been accused of speaking like a sanctimonious prick on several occasions, but let's just have a little think about a book I've never read, shall we? I had the good fortune of avoiding almost all religious indoctrination, despite attending Church of England schools, the occasional event at Easter, Christmas and observing a few other antiquated religious customs.

So, let's start with revenge.

I'm pretty sure that Jesus wasn't a "never forget" and "make those bastards pay for what they did to us" grudge holding kind of guy. In fact, despite my lack of bible study, I'm pretty sure there was something he said about turning the other cheek and forgiveness. Yes, now I think about it, all that "eye for an eye" stuff definitely wasn't attributable to Big J and his disciples. You could say that bloodthirsty acts of revenge and 'pre-emptive' strikes are definitely not Christian at all.

What kind of dude was Jesus anyway? Like I say, I never read the bible, went to Sunday school, went to church or got taught much about his life, but I know this: he didn't think being disgustingly wealthy was a great idea.

I probably can't name all 12 disciples, but if I had to guess I'd say: John, Paul, George, Ringo, Sleepy, Dopey, Dasher, Dancer, Thomas, Henry, Edward and Gordon. For some reason I think that Matthew and Luke should be on that list, but those names don't exactly sound like fishermen and farmers from the Middle East.

What I can tell you about Matthew and Luke, is that they both reckoned that Jesus used to say that we should stop building piles of treasure on Earth. Both those dudes said that Jesus was all about giving up your worldly possessions so you could donate to the poor. The upshot being, Jesus wasn't intent on being a billionaire, building big tower blocks with his name on and decorating everything with blinging gold.

The Bible - although I've never read it - comes in two parts and is translated from Aramaic. Basically, it's a Syrian book... you know, the place where Saint George the patron saint of England came from. The most popular English translation runs to some 750,000+ words. It's not all the disciples' account of Jesus' ramblings and crazy shit that happened to him. There are also some fairly simple commandments in there.

The first three of the famous ten commandments are all about God being a really jealous imaginary dude who demands your undivided attention. If the commandments were in order of importance, numero uno is that you're not allowed to so much as think about another God. In fact, it's not until commandment number 6 that we get onto trivial things like not killing other people. In fact, so many commandments are given over to not saying God is a stinky pooh-pooh head and other weird rules, that rape didn't even make the list. No to murder. No to adultery. No to theft. Rape... well, it's not as big of a deal as worshiping an idol is it?

In fact, most of The Bible is full of absolute garbage. Exodus 23:19 forbids us from eating cheeseburgers. Leviticus tells us we can't get tattoos, cut the hair on the side of our head, trim our beards and most bizarrely of all, you can't mix cotton and wool clothing.

"a garment mingled of linen and woollen [shall not] come upon thee"

So, basically, we know that to study The Bible is to study a laughably backwards culture and a book written by many authors, with many agendas, over several ancient periods of time. You simply can't use it as an instruction manual for modern life.

Now, back to the original question: what would Jesus do?

It's a fairly serious question. If the dude was alive today - walking around in his sandals and his dusty robes - what kind of shit would piss him off and how would he act?

I'm pretty sure he'd be straight into the temples of the money lenders, turning their tables over and kicking their arses for the sin of usury. We can be certain that Jesus was no fan of banks and financial services.

On the pro-life debate, Jesus seemed pretty sympathetic towards mothers and the choices they want to make with their own bodies. Basically, the bible's pretty clear that other people's unborn foetuses and fertilised eggs are none of your goddam business, as explained in this passage from the bible:

"As you do not know how the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything" -- Ecclesiastes 11:5

Most telling of all, the bible contains this passage:

"[an aborted foetus] does not enjoy life's good things, and also has no burial, I say that an [abortion] is better than [an unwanted child]... [that] has not seen the sun or known anything" -- Ecclesiastes 6:3-5

Jesus would have one thing to say to those pro-life people who harass poor women who are trying to get into abortion clinics: "he who is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her". In other words, who the fuck are you to judge? Who the fuck are you to intimidate a poor frightened woman who's faced with an incredibly difficult decision? Jesus would be pretty mad about supposedly Christian people, acting with so little compassion and forgiveness.

All this Islamophobia and anti-refugee sentiment would certainly piss Jesus right off. He would be angry as fuck about the way that the wealthy West is slamming the door in the face of refugees they created, through bombing and drone strikes. What part of "thou shalt not kill" didn't you understand? What part of "love your neighbour as you love yourself" got mangled into "look after your own"?

How dare Theresa May - an alleged Christian - and Donald Trump, leader of "God's own country" carry on in such an unchristian manner. There isn't an ounce of Christianity in these greedy megalomaniacs, who care nothing for the poor and needy.

I'm an atheist by default, because my scientific studies have answered questions and provided truth that makes all religious faith look like a mental illness, but the sentiment - the morality - of Jesus Christ is perfectly relevant, and a useful guide for us all when thinking about how we should treat one another.

I'm never going to become some born-again Christian, repent my sins and start banging on about The Bible, but when I weep at the cruel, callous, greedy, selfish and inhumane leadership demonstrated by British and US politicians and business leaders, I do sometimes think we need a decent human being as a moral beacon for us all. Aspiring to be like the fanny-grabbing billionaire bigot Donald Trump is going to be a rocket ride straight to a metaphorical hell.

Religion has been perverted by a clergy who've lined their own pockets and committed atrocious acts of paedophilia, as well as other abuses of power. We can reject religion, while also saying that Jesus Christ sounded like a pretty cool dude. The world would be a better place if we all tried to be a bit more like Jesus: a bit more Christian.

I really don't give a fuck what fictitious character we decide we love and want to emulate - perhaps Robin Hood? - but reality TV idols and wealth worship has taken us to a terrible, terrible place.

This is obviously written from my hospital bed, where I'm a bit loopy from kidney failure and painkillers, but I hope my writing is still reasonably cogent. All I can tell you is how I cry and cry and cry when I read the news right now, because the action of our leaders doesn't match their rhetoric about peace, compassion and care for the poor and vulnerable.

Tags: #religion #politics

This is a story about the wanker of the wharf...

London's financial services sector is the gift that keeps on giving. Through Y2K, the dot com bubble bursting, 9/11, 7/7 and the credit crunch, the good times never stopped rolling.

I'm now experiencing deja vu. My very first contract in Docklands was at Harbour Exchange, working for Lloyds TSB. I wore a shirt with cufflinks shaped like taps. I thought I epitomised the height of business fashion. In my defence, I was only 20 years old.

As I look around the glimmering tower blocks on the wharf, and look at their revolving doors leading into their fancy foyers, I realise that I've done at least two tours with so many of the companies: HSBC, JPMorgan, Barclays, Lloyds and others too.

It's good that these places will have me back. Why wouldn't they? I left on good terms, with great references and a bunch of people who'd remember me and some of the things I did when I was there.

But, I've started to burn bridges.

I know how to play the game and keep my mouth shut; not rock the boat. I know that the whole banking world keeps you hostage with golden handcuffs. You're ridiculously well paid, so you try to silence the voices in your head that say: what we're doing here is just not ethical.

You can immerse yourself in the propaganda, that says that the financial products that we offer are greasing the wheels of commerce, but you know that deep down, most of what you're doing is helping the rich to hide their wealth and shield it from taxation. When you ask your customer what their source of wealth is, they're not exactly going to say that it's sweatshops and drugs, are they? They're not exactly going to confess that their family is wealthy because they embezzled a load of money, leaving their fellow citizens starving.

Even a close friend, who seems reasonably ethical banker, has helped his father - a judge - to hide the family wealth in an offshore trust. They had some problems proving that they controlled the money, in order to get a mortgage, but the bank was eventually satisfied. The people who work in banks are outsmarting the ones who work for the regulators and the taxman, so that's why the rich pay very little tax, while the poor shoulder the burden of social programs. Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.

Am I a hypocrite? Am I ungrateful, when I bite the hand that feeds me? Well, the easy defence is just to say that if I didn't do my job, somebody else would. Isn't it better that I'm on the inside, trying to make things better, than on the outside where I would have very little power and influence. I could easily throw my clogs into the loom, if I thought that was the right thing to do.

Fintech is a conflation of financial and technology. Fintech tends to mean the challenger banks and ecosystem that exists outside of the long-standing institutions. Arguably, I've been working on Fintech - financial services technology - since 1998, but yet I might get mocked by my startup buddies as working for dinosaurs. Indeed, one well-respected friend from the venture capital world, even wrote a blog post which suggested that my return to Canary Wharf was an admission of defeat; a failure.

I do feel like a failure. Even though I just secured yet another contract for yet another massive bank, doing some cool stuff with AI and other bleeding-edge tech, and I'm going to be exceedingly well remunerated, I still feel like I sold out. I'm also really worried about my chequered past catching up with me. Instead of popping a champagne cork in celebration of my new role, last night, instead I have butterflies in my tummy and I'm incredibly anxious about getting everything signed, starting the job and making a good first impression, without any hiccups.

My self-assured manner and my self-confidence has all been destroyed, replaced instead with self-doubt. I started looking for a new contract on the 30th of November, and it took all this time to get one. I take that pretty personally, and I worry that I'm not a competitive candidate anymore: I'm not making the grade, amongst the other contractors in the market.

Obviously, when I actually start working these contracts, I realise that there's a real lack of tech pedigree and good leadership. I realise that there is a need for my skills and experience, and I can add value.

However, I struggle to play the game anymore. I struggle to keep my mouth shut for the benefit of my career and my bank balance. I struggle to let things go, for my own personal benefit. When I see wrongdoing and incompetence, I feel that I have a responsibility to the general public, to not just turn a blind eye. I feel like I have to act ethically... not because the regulators are watching, but because it's the right thing to do.

I struggle to do the work anymore. I don't enjoy tech for tech's sake. Often times I don't really believe that tech is improving anything. Most projects are doing the same kinds of things that have been done time and time again, for years. You'd have thought that if we were solving real problems, we'd have solved them already and moved on to something more useful, like finding a cure for cancer. The banking problem - debit account A and credit account B - is not a hard one to solve.

Who the hell am I, to sit idle for the whole month of November, writing a novel instead of trying to get a job. Who am I to arrogantly assume that I'll be able to win another lucrative contract, instead of getting a regular job like everybody else does? Who am I to only work 4 or 5 months of the year? Who the hell do I think I am?

Well, you're welcome to hate me if you like. I'm a banker; a capitalist pig; a lickspittle of the wealthy elites who cause so much human misery.

However, I'm an ideological misfit. I know that I'm well remunerated, but I don't confuse that with value. I don't feel valuable, I feel like I'm wasting my time building stuff that doesn't help; it hinders. I feel bribed into doing a job, because I need the money. Aren't we all? Yes, so why work a job that's just as pointless, but get paid a lot less? Do you think that by depriving that massive corporation of yourself, you're hurting them?

Arguably, if we were to all take an ethical stance with our employment, and refuse to work for weapons manufacturers and banks, we would starve them of the manpower they need to function. However, humanity responds to incentives: if you couldn't buy guns, somebody would start sharpening pointy sticks and selling them; if you couldn't get a bank loan, loan sharks would lend money.

The problem is when you follow a set of rules to their ultimate conclusion, you get some undesirable outcomes. Free-market capitalism might work when you're conquering the Wild West and building all the critical infrastructure to colonise the New World, but what about when it's all done, and populations start exploding? Is it right that being born into wealth or poverty is not a choice: inherited wealth and ownership determine everything.

If we pressed the 'reset' button and set all the bank balances to be the same, how many would lose and how many would gain? Yes, it's unfair that some who've worked very hard would lose out, but what about those who think it's unfair that their inherited wealth shouldn't be subjected to a Robin Hood tax? Surely it's more unfair that some people have a lifelong trust fund income, while others have to flip burgers and still can't afford to raise their families. Surely, there are more people who would benefit, than lose.

So, eventually I arrive at the conclusion that we need to have debt forgiveness, or else civilisation will be destroyed. I mean, what are the wealthy even doing with all their ill-gotten gains? It's dog in a manger behaviour that's the problem here, not jealousy.

In the rigged system we've built, success is not about hard work. The fable of the girl who swept the factory floor being promoted up the career ladder until she was eventually the CEO, is total horse-shit. We know that all the best jobs go to wealthy men from a handful of powerful families. You could bust your ass your whole life, and still have nothing to show for it except the little plastic stars on your McDonalds name badge.

To say "twas ever thus" and blame human nature, is disingenuous. You don't have to look very hard to see that civilisations rise and fall, based on the satisfaction of the hoi polloi. It doesn't matter how high you build the walls: when enough people want to smash down your defences, you'll find that even the most robust barriers are too flimsy to protect you.

What do we really believe in? What cause are we fighting for?

The top echelons of society are wealthy enough to have their every whim catered for, but what do they believe in? How many of our rulers are passionately engaged in the pursuit of something more meaningful than money?

I wanted to save up and buy a house. I wanted luxury holidays and fine dining. I had become totally bourgeois.

If we leave noble causes - like the search for scientific knowledge, world peace and hunger - to a handful of charity workers, while we ourselves fret about buying a bigger house or another boat, then our most educated and powerful portion of society is consumed by the consumer economy, which is intent only on separating fools from their money.

Western civilisation will fall, as if knocked over by a feather, because we believe in nothing.

Tags: #politics #capitalism #career #banking

This is a story about the precariat...

Here I am, in psychiatric hospital with underpants on my head and pencils up my nose. I think you will agree that this makes me perfectly qualified to run the country.

Having a manifesto is something that we associate with nutters who commit mass murder. The end justifies the means, in the minds of people consumed by their political ideologies.

Admitting to having political ambitions is laughable for an ordinary British citizen. The route into politics is through namedropping, brown-nosing and suffering the bullying & infighting of the dominant political parties, as you rise through the ranks. Going into politics is not about campaigning on a manifesto which comprises your deeply held political beliefs. Going into politics is not about a commoner being elected to the House of Commons. There's no room for the riff raff in politics and you're going to need wealthy donors to back you. You'd have to be stark raving mad to think you could get into politics as a representative of the constituents in your local area.

Politics is a career; it's not about improving the lives of your fellow citizens. There's no room for anybody who hasn't made politics their specialism. An interest in government is a fetish for three-line whips.

Political office is granted in recognition of a complete lack of empathy for the proles that a prospective MP has spent their whole life exploiting. Our ministers should be selected from a pool of wealthy elites, who have no concept of life without a trust fund and the advantages of nepotism. The benches of parliament should reflect the people who helped win those seats: the wealthy donors.

Pretending that political parties are given an equal campaigning platform, and that we don't have a two party system, is a hilarious prank that's being played on the electorate. Who could possibly compete with the big two parties, who hoover up so much political donation money? If you're looking to buy yourself a peerage, are you going to waste your hard-earned cash on a party that stands no chance of winning a majority? What a joke!

The top three manifesto promises of the Tories are: plutocracy, plutocracy and plutocracy. Crush the proles. Smash their unions. Keep them insecure and divided. Oh, what a glorious thing, to see the landed gentry literally lording it over the riff raff.

Posh little girls and posh little boys grow up dreaming about the day when they'll get to destroy the welfare state and lower the living standards of ordinary people. "On yer bike!" the jumped up little twits shouted when they were youngsters, and now they're ushering in the Britain they always wanted: where the only fucking job you can get is being a Deliveroo takeaway food bicycle delivery rider.

We don't want anybody getting into politics, who has any idea what life's like for the vast majority of British citizens. We need people who live and breathe the Westminster bubble, to think about real issues, like where they're going skiing this year with their barrister chums.

- ALTERNATIVELY -

I know what it's like to claim benefits, be homeless, suffer mental illness and have to navigate an under-funded National Health Service. I know how digital transformation will affect every aspect of the world around us, and I've worked in education, retail, defence, financial services, security, transport, housing & construction and a host of other sectors too. 

I've studied the dismal science - economics - as well as starting several profitable businesses. I have in-depth knowledge of almost every tax we have: from income tax to capital gains tax; from Value-Added Tax (VAT) to corporation tax; from import duties to stamp duty. I understand trade deficits, fractional reserve banking, financial instruments and the national debt.

With a background in science and technology, I have a big-picture view that broadly encompasses every aspect of modern life. This is not stuff I've read about and only understand theoretically: I'm a practitioner and I have real-world hands-on experience. I have a worldview that starts in the subatomic realm of particle physics and finishes in the intergalactic universe of cosmology, with a geopolitical overview of terrestrial matters somewhere in-between those two extremes.

I'm not a specialist. I have no desire to study the minutiae of anything, like a stamp collector or a train spotter would, but instead I've gathered knowledge of how all the different component parts fit together. It's no co-incidence that I've been able to write game of life type software simulations: computer models.

Anybody involved in politics would benefit from being a generalist not a specialist. When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It's impossible to reconcile the competing views of thousands of specialists, because they all have a very narrow worldview. It's all very well being an expert in your field, but where's the balance?

If I was going to pick a bunch of people to run the country, they would be the fiction writers and the computer game designers. Without an enticing vision of the future, reactionary forces will drag us back into the dark ages. Without a working virtual world, how are you ever going to test your ideas, without your mistakes inflicting untold misery on real people?

As a prerequisite for becoming a minister, you should be able to build a thriving happy metropolis in Sim City and complete a game of Civilization through cultural influence, not war. If you're a failure in those virtual worlds how can you think you're even remotely qualified to wreak havoc on the lives of the electorate? We wouldn't turn you loose on the roads without a driving license.

All minsters and their children should attend state school and be treated by the National Health Service: you've gotta eat your own dog food. There should be a means test, that excludes wealthy families, trust fund babies and any nepotism: only a single generation of any family may enter into politics.

In fact, some of those who govern should be selected randomly, like jury service. Wanting to exercise any kind of power over your peers should be an automatic disqualification. The House of Commons should be balanced out with ordinary people, who have no interest in politics per se: it's the civic duty of every British citizen to muzzle the dangerous megalomaniacs.

Housing, transport, education, healthcare and a host of other essential services, are public services and as such, they should never be profitable. The state should have a monopoly on the things our citizens need. To allow a private firm to profit from our population's needs is a crime. The private sector is welcome to compete in the world of wants, but not needs. Simple economic theory will tell you that prices have upwardly inflationary pressure on things that you have to have: are you going to skip getting cured of that deadly disease, because it's too expensive?

Do you want to live in a world of zero-hours contract McJobs, insane house prices, stress, long hours, insecurity and indentured servitude, for the benefit of big business? That's what you're getting when you allow the country to be run by commercial interests.

We need to smash the plutocracy. We need to have dignity in labour. We need to be united, not divided by those who tell us that we're easily replaced and make us crawl over broken glass for a few mouldy crumbs. Inequality and the arrogance of the elites has reached unsustainable levels. We can't afford the rich any more.

If you think these are just the immature words of a bleeding-heart liberal who never grew up, and I don't understand the complexities of the world, I think you're being a mouthpiece of the elites when you say that it's not as simple as just dividing the wealth. It's easy to be an intellectual snob, because you believe you're destined for greatness. Just because it's not you, going with your cap in your hand to the mill owner to ask for a bowl of gruel, you could easily fall from grace at any moment. Just because you can't imagine what it's like to be poor and struggling, doesn't mean that it couldn't happen to the likes of you. Your fancy education and your expertise won't save you, when the working classes rise in anger and strike down the bourgeois rentier parasite class.

The irony of me writing this, while sipping champagne and looking out over the River Thames and the London skyline, from the balcony of my luxurious home, is not lost on me. The working-class heroes and self-made millionaires can be some of the most awful people. There's absolutely nothing humbling about rising up through the ranks and being successful; quite the opposite in fact.

I write as somebody who's been incredibly fortunate - getting propelled into a life of privilege and wealth - only to lose it all and have to rebuild from scratch. I write as somebody who knows that there's a fast track, as well as how hard it is to overcome prejudice and adversity. I write as somebody who can have delusions of grandeur as much as a sense of worthlessness. I know I'm flawed and I know I can fail, as much as I know how to succeed.

Worshipping power and status has led to layers of sycophantic courtiers, each one existing only to polish the egos of old men. Do you really want your whole country run, just so some exploitative megalomaniacs can be called Sir or Lord? Do you really think anybody deserves your respect, when they preside over the destruction of living standards in an epidemic of mental health issues, caused by the stressful modern life they created?

A central tenet of my desire for political influence, is my first-hand experience of depression, misery, exhaustion, stress and anxiety, which is an intolerable situation, created unnecessarily by unrestricted free-market capitalism. Are these the pillars that you want our working world built on? Should British citizens suffer as much as they do, just to have a crust of bread, a roof over their head and the hope of one day being able to pass on the suffering to the next generation? My answer is: no.

I don't necessarily believe that the state should own the means of production, but the workers should benefit most from the fruits of their labour. Wealth needs to be distributed, not concentrated in a few idle hands. Trickle down economics is a terrible lie.

I think that without social reform, eventually people will put down their tools and violently protest at their exploitation.

Obviously, I'm just a maniac up on my soapbox, shouting absolute nonsense, but who do you believe more: the wealthy elitist who tells you that everything's fine, or the person who's suffering at the hands of those elites?

Tags: #politics

This is a story about 140-character soundbites...

Who has the time for the long read? Just read the title and guess the rest. If it can't be summed up in a tweet, it isn't worth reading. Jump straight to the comments section: that's where the real action is.

I bought a book that was based on a series of tweets. Worst book I ever read.

One of the best tweets I ever read was in 9 parts. Infographics are good, but they often have more text on them than would be permitted by the 140-character limit. If you put text on a graphic, it's not searchable.

Do you realise that everything you write on Facebook is completely unsearchable from anywhere except within the walled garden?

You're slowly being erased.

So much discussion has moved to Slack and most of that is just meme sharing anyway. In fact, most of what goes on anywhere on the Internet seems to be meme sharing. Are we being discouraged from in-depth online discussion? The rise of microblogging and the domination of the social media space by Facebook, is ridiculously successful at recirculating trivial distractions, which discourages us from creating original content.

When you think about all the words you've written into messenger apps, they're lost in the ether: it's not like those discussions are held in topic threads, indexed and searchable. All those words are throwaway. There's a cheapness to words. Imagine what happens when Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp cease to exist. All that text that was transmitted all over the planet will disappear into nothingness; gone forever.

What would a historian of the future make of your digital footprint? Could they infer who you were as a person from the animated GIFs that you chose to share? Could they gain any insight into your worldview; your politics; your philosophy; your personality?

Have we not been cheated out of owning our digital identities? We could all be famous bloggers and valued discussion forum contributors, with our online persona well known to fellow Netizens around the world, but instead we are confined to small groups of Facebook friends and Twitter followers: the people we knew before we entered the walled gardens.

Nobody is going to discover you and find out anything about who you are and what you believe via the mainstream platforms. Facebook wishes to keep you as a captive audience, to feed you adverts while you browse through baby photos. Twitter wants you to worship the cult of celebrity, or provide convenient soundbites for journalists, while you tweet in total obscurity.

Nothing you ever do online is going to go viral. Well orchestrated marketing campaigns have huge teams of people to sow the seeds. It's like a Mexican wave: you need to coordinate a critical mass of sufficient numbers if you don't want to look like an idiot, waving your arms on your own in a stadium grandstand.

You're not going to be the next online video sensation, because nobody's solved the problem of video discovery yet. If you broadcast a Facebook Live video, you're just going to be spamming your friends and family. If you put something up on Youtube, how are people going to find it in that sea of noise? Videos only have a title, description and a few tags. People are only going to watch things that are popular, and popularity is achieved through marketing, which is expensive and time-consuming.

The idea that the Internet is democratising opinion sharing is disingenuous. Most of the opinions I read online are either from the mainstream sources, or from my existing network.

I'm exceedingly unusual, because I bought into my friend Ben's vision of a social media platform that allows me to retain control of the original content I create. Instead of wasting effort on tweets and Facebook status updates, I put it all onto a website that's fully search indexed: anybody can find the fruits of my labour.

"But what about privacy?" I hear you ask.

I can email, private message and talk to people face to face, about things that I want to keep private. I really don't consider Facebook very private, when I have hundreds of Facebook friends and I have no idea who's reading what. I could waste loads of time sharing things with selective audiences on Facebook, but why would I go to all that effort?

Why do I write hundreds - if not thousands - of words every single day and make them publicly available? Well, the Internet is responsible for lifelong friendships, fruitful discussions and a network of people who help me feel connected to humanity, when I'm otherwise roundly ignored. Occasionally, some complete stranger will reach out to me and say that there was something I wrote that resonated with them, and that's the nicest feeling in the world.

Why does anybody write? Why write a fictional novel? Why tell people what you thought about that movie you just watched? Why do anything? You could just curl up in a dark hole and die, quietly.

In a world of urban solitude, loneliness and living lives of quiet desperation, don't you want to feel a little anchored to something; somebody? Don't you want to feel that you made your mark; left a legacy?

Writing this blog is like carving my name on a tree. Writing is like spraypainting my 'tag' on the Internet. It's "Nick woz 'ere" writ large.

Of course, you can sneer at that, but what's your mark on the world? Your children? That dissertation you wrote that never got published? Your job? What you consumed during your life? Should we chisel a list of all the books you read onto your headstone?

I came back to London, partly because I could be anonymous. I could fuck up and burn a few bridges, and nobody would care. I came back to London to be a nobody.

Now that I'm cleaned up and back in the land of the living, I no longer want to be a faceless nobody; I don't want to be alone; overlooked; forgotten. I'm trying to rediscover my value; my place in the world. At times of great stress, I've reached out to the Internet for validation: validation that I exist, that my opinions are well regarded and that I have a place in the community. It's given me great confidence, to have an online persona when the rest of the world largely overlooks and shuns me.

There is no short-form version of what I'm going through. It might be the same as every other person on the planet, but this is how I choose to express myself; this is how I vent and attempt to cope in a healthier way than drink and drugs; this is how I attempt to ward off the fear of being mischaracterised as some kind of evil na'er do well.

Perhaps, the more you read, the more my mask slips and you can see some underlying character flaws. Certainly, the more I write, the more narcissistic and self-absorbed I must be. The justification I have for this self indulgence, is that I feel suicidal every day. Do you begrudge me leaving this digital legacy, for anybody who cares to know who I was and what made me tick?

I can write 140-character retweetbait, but I choose not to. I choose to write with depth and meaning. I choose to offer more than just a fleeting distraction. I choose to offer the whole story, not just the headlines.

Tags: #writing #socialmedia #suicide

This is a story about fragile male egos...

Insecurity. Wrenching away my self-confidence, my self-esteem, my sense of value. Insecurity is degrading and causes me to say things through fear and pain, further undermining my decaying self respect. Those sensitive subjects; the nerves; the over-reaction. What am I even arguing about? I can't admit it, because it's too shameful and it leaves me even more exposed. I feel so vulnerable. I can't tell anybody what my weaknesses are.

"Pervert!"

She never said it, but she could. It's not normal to like sex. I'm a freak; a weirdo. I'm a dirty old man for wanting sex. I'm too much of an easy target. It's too much fun, to knock somebody back when they're vulnerable. What power! What fun!

I haven't worked since September and I'm rapidly running out of runway. I feel pretty useless. I can't risk spending money on holidays and eating out. I don't feel like a provider. I don't feel very manly.

Without work or hobbies, I don't have any projects to feel proud of. I have this blog, but it's easily dismissed as a ranty diary, with no real substance behind anything I write. Anybody can voice their unqualified opinions on the Internet, can't they? Just another ignorant stupid voice. Nobody cares what I've got to say, because I'm not speaking in a professional or academic capacity.

The antidote to the fear that my chequered history might be discovered, is to write candidly about it. However, I'm no more than a couple of months away from being bankrupt and evicted onto the streets. I'm no more than a few clicks of the mouse away from relapsing into drug addiction. I'm months - if not years - away from financial security, luxury holidays, fine dining and the rest of the trimmings of wealthy urban lifestyle.

It's been so long since I had all the pieces of the puzzle: the job where I'm an expert, the income that exceeds my expenditure, the savings that give me a safety net, the comfortable and secure place to live, the friends who give me a social life, the hobby that I'm good at, and the girl to share the good times with. Who wants to share in my misery, depression and the unravelling of my life?

Every insecurity - am I fat, ugly, stupid, worthless? - becomes amplified the longer I languish in obscurity. I'm a hermit, writing in my bedroom and pushing my words out into the ether. Who even knows that I exist? Who am I? Why was I even born?

My entire existence is fixated on financial income. Without money, I'm nobody. Every failed interview is a disaster and depression threatens to consume me. I drink copiously to cope with the stress and anxiety, but it's a flawed solution. I know I could take a low-paid job that I could do with my eyes closed, but it would pain me to be so undervalued; under-appreciated; unchallenged.

On Saturday night we meet some people; I'm drunk. Making polite conversation, I'm asked what I do. Nervously, I say that I'm an IT consultant, but it feels like a lie. I work for less than half the year and it makes me unwell; I hate it. My debut novel is mentioned and a dam is broken; I'm gushing forth with rabid enthusiasm about my writing. I can sense that my eyes are wide open and there's an intensity to the way that I'm speaking. My speech is almost pressured; rushed. Then, I think that I've become horribly egocentric. I regret talking expansively about myself, in response to polite middle-class smalltalk. I'm embarrassed about how narcissistic I am.

She tries to reassure me, but I struggle to believe what she says. She's a famous bird off the telly and she even passed her O-levels without cheating or nuffink, so what does she see in me? Surely she's dumbing herself down, so that I don't feel as intimidated?

Gender roles are reversed. She takes me out for dinner. She says she'll protect me. I could easily become her cheerleader; idolise her; put her on a pedestal.

I dig into my archives, looking for things that I'm proud of. The problem is that most of it was years ago. What am I doing at the moment that I'm proud of? I haven't yet managed to find a publisher for my novel, let alone a new IT contract. What opportunity do I have to strut my stuff?

A game of Monopoly: now's my chance to demonstrate my entrepreneurial business talents!

But, there's too much pressure on this rare opportunity and it's a game of chance. Luck doesn't go my way and I'm losing, despite playing a winning strategy. The board gets flipped over and the pieces go everywhere. What a bad loser!

What can I do? I'm damned if I do and I'm damned if I don't.

Tags: #sex #relationships