This is a story about medical notes...

My ex-wife - a biochemist by way of undergraduate degree - once screamed at me in an incoherent rage because I had innocently asked her "how big is a protein?" having wondered how many nanometers across, the average protein molecule measured. The sheer audacity of me asking such a question enraged her, perhaps because free thinking is expressly forbidden in an academic world which promotes rote-learning of facts and examinations graded to a marking scheme, ahead of learning.

(The answer, by the way, is roughly 3 nanometres in radius).

When I attempt to answer a difficult question, I sometimes pause and chuckle. "What is consciousness?" came one question. Although I was desperate to talk about weakly interacting subatomic particles, General Relativity and nuclear fusion, I somehow managed to constrain myself to a meaningless analogy, while keeping quiet about my "mind's eye" which could picture every piece of information that captured my entire existence, smeared out in a infinitely thin sphere at the event horizon of a singularity, across all meaningful spacetime for the entire universe that I will ever perceive, which would have been rather a mouthful to express.

Just as one may cram for an exam the night before, I've attempted to only ever amass the prerequisite knowledge that may be considered the minimum viable to navigate whatever situations I have had to endure to reach my goals. Education has never seemed like an end in and of itself, given that our understanding of the fundmental nature of reality is evolving, and the Standard Model of particle physics is rather long in the tooth. Although I find it quite delightful that there are quarks named strange, charm and beauty in the particle zoo, I would find it rather frustrating to dedicate years of my life, obtaining a degree and writing a thesis using tools which may soon look as clunky and outdated as Newton's inverse-square law of gravity.

The mathematicians will mock physics as simply being applied mathematics. The physicists will mock chemistry as simply being applied physics. The chemists will mock biology as simply being applied chemistry, and so on.

Computers are now capable of solving equations and modelling real-world phenomena, potentially making algebra and calculus into dying arts, along with handwriting and long-division. The Fractal Geometry of Nature has revealed that cold rational calculating machines can produce simulations that imitate reality, through repeating patterns. Massive computational power does not only aid human discovery of hidden algebraic equations.

Amid much fanfare, computer software is touted as potentiating new drug discovery by simulating molecular binding, protein folding, rapid gene sequencing and personalised medicine. However, we seem to have forgotten that half the planet is impoverished & hungry, and vast numbers of those who are fortunate enough to live in advanced, wealthy & technologically advanced societies, are suffering from an epidemic of anxiety, depression and other mental health issues that is bad enough to drive vast numbers of men in the prime of their life to commit suicide: the biggest killer of males under the age of 45 in the UK - more than road traffic accidents, drug-related deaths, physical disease, murder, accidents and all the other causes of death.

One should consider that I took leave of my senses in 2008, but since that time I have only managed to attract two clinical diagnoses - convenient medical short-hand - although I have acquired a third which is perhaps the bluntest instrument of the three, and much more of a pejorative than a diagnosis.

"Substance abuse" is a catch-all term which serves me well when I haven't the time & energy to go into detail. Given humanity's long history of self-intoxication, some physicians would consider themselves to be well-versed in the matter. Even the most insulated amongst us, will have struggled to escape contact with a drunk in our lives. We quickly forget, of course, that psychiatry is an extremely young discipline. The isolation, refinement and synthesis of molecules which can short-circuit brain mechanisms, is something that dates back only 70 or 80 years, along with the branch of medicine chiefly concerned with treatment of matters of the mind.

The brain: the most complicated organ in the human body - estimated to have up to a quadrillion neuronal synapses - is often considered only in terms of its vital function as central nervous system, insofar as the same fatty grey matter helps other species to fuck, fight, flee and feed. This does not, however, tell us much about human consciousness, and even less still about pathological thought.

I once sat down and hand-wrote 12 pages of notes, from memory, of every General Practice doctor, psychiatrist and hospital, which I had attended during a 7 year period. Although I kept things as brief as I could, with names, dates and locations, as well as diagnoses and medications, there was a great deal to write. I'm not a complete hypochondriac - there were important notes about my episodes of depression and hypomania, where my mental health had caused me to become significantly dysfunctional.

Perhaps your mind is now skipping ahead - as mine often does - and you're attempting to finish my sentences. Presumably, you're trying to guess the punchline of the joke. I assume you've already got more than enough information to diagnose and treat me.

I'm second-guessing myself here, and I'm struck by the egotism and "navel gazing" of the very act of being sufficiently appraised of my own medical history that I should remember such a level of detail. Who the hell am I to take an interest in my own diagnosis and treatment? Where's my certificate, framed on the wall? Where's the photo of me wearing a mortar board & gown, and clutching a scroll of parchment with a red ribbon tied around it?

When I think about where I should spend my precious time and effort, I'm not motivated by the prospect of being an understudy to a failure. While psychiatry continues to produce dismal outcomes for humanity, in terms of the epidemic of mental health problems, addiction and general societal collapse under the weight of stress and burnout, I'm reluctant to follow in the path of those who are not succeeding in improving the human condition. It should however be noted that I do not for a single moment, criticise the well-meaning intent of those in the healthcare professions, nor do I mean to discredit the lifesaving work that takes place every single day.

The idea of using myself as a case study seems quite ridiculous, but one must consider that it would be unethical to - for example - risk a person's life when there is a treatment available that has been proven to be more effective than placebo.

With a sample size of one, perhaps nothing useful can be gleaned from my first-hand experiences, but I have attempted to corroborate my findings with other evidence wherever possible. I have deliberately avoided areas where another data point would make no difference: what use would it be if I too experienced anorgasmia as a result of SSRI medication, for example?

A great deal of our knowledge regarding the anatomy of the human brain has been gleaned from unethical experiments on unconsenting psychiatric patients - lobotomies, testing of medications and induced seizures. Animal studies have been gratuitously gruesome, with a great deal of unnecessary suffering inflicted upon primates. I'm not an anti-vivisection nutcase, but there must be very tangible goals to justify the means of obtaining the results.

To bathe a brain in psychoactive molecules that will cross the blood-brain barrier, is barbaric when we consider that the theoretical reasons why drugs have the effect that they do - the theories have so often been disproven. The 'chemical imbalance' theory that said that depressed brains had lower levels of serotonin, and that SSRIs would increase levels of synaptic serotonin, has been conclusively disproven, yet it is still a widely-circulated myth.

The much-vaunted sequencing of the human genome looks like a ridiculous white elephant of a project, when we consider that epigenetic gene expression had been discovered to allow genetically identical animals to exhibit completely different physical characteristics, depending on the environment that they have been exposed to.

In a collapsing global economy, education is one of the few sectors that's not feeling the pinch, and good solid science is getting drowned out in a sea of noise: pointless research. There are already excellent animal models which demonstrate that overpopulation and otherwise horrible living conditions, will produce a "behavioural sink" and addiction, in individuals who would otherwise lead happy healthy lives.

It has seemed fairly obvious to me from the start, that my mental health problems have stemmed from the ethical objections I had to the conduct of financial services organisations, and the role of global capitalism in ruining billions of human lives, in pursuit of unrestrained, unregulated and immoral profits, to the exclusion of any and all consideration of long-term consequences. In short: my problems should not be medicalised. I'm having a sane reaction to an insane world.

While this essay goes well beyond the "answer A, B or C" multiple-choice options on the prescriptive menu that is on offer, I feel that this does not invalidate the points I am making.

To have invested heavily in a mainstream education, would be to risk becoming incoherent with rage whenever somebody was so impertinent as to ask a thoughtful question - questions that spring into a mind that's unconstrained by the narrow status quo viewpoint, rote-learned while kowtowing to those with the necessary credentials to approve clones of themselves.

This is not "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge" anti-intellectualism, but instead a suggestion that we don't need so many people who've all read exactly the same books and sat more-or-less exactly the same tests. Moving towards intellectual homogeny is as dangerous as book burning, in my opinion.

In conclusion: this is a convoluted way of saying that you're unqualified to judge me, although you're possibly technically correct if you say that my problems are mostly of my own making.

Tags: #mentalhealth #suicide #addiction

This is a story about free will...

Having spent the best part of a month in hospital, I am now convalescing in the Welsh countryside. It's remote, rural, peaceful and therapeutic, which is exactly what I need. Why on earth wouldn't I stay here, when this is the very best place I could be for my health and wellbeing?

If you believe in free will, then I'm afraid you're quite deluded. Every decision we make is heavily biased by circumstantial factors.

Having experienced the stress of moving to new places, getting jobs, making friends and otherwise climbing the greasy pole, I've got nothing to prove - I know exactly what to do and exactly what to expect. I have very little motivation to repeat the same well-worn moves that I learned a long time ago - I'm sick of playing the same old game. Rebuilding my life holds no surprises; only stress and misery.

Thus, I arrived at the decision to die, some time ago.

When you've decided to die, there isn't any fear of failure, shame, embarrassment or any of the other things which would usually predispose your behaviour towards more risk-averse choices.

If you look at my life choices through the prism of depression and defeatism - I have no desire to play by fucked up rules - things make a lot more sense than any stupid over-simplifications. Perhaps you think I'm infantile, immature and irresponsible? In actual fact, I'm not inflicting this shit on children who didn't ask to be born. I'm terminating the cycle of pain: somebody's gotta stand up to the relay-race of human misery, where fathers fuck up their sons.

I'm not critical of parenthood per se, but it would be irresponsible of me to spawn offspring of my own when my kid(s) might ask me one day "if you had a miserable life, then why did you bring me into the world?". Given that my children might ask about my own unhappy childhood, it seems unconscionable to take the chance that I could perpetuate that misery.

In a world of war, famine, climate change and spiralling problems, we are clearly on collision course with disaster. I don't want to add to the world's woes. To be yet another sharp-elbowed parent, concerned with the propagation of my genes at the expense of everything else, does not seem like a good idea when there's another option: to not do that.

I can end the male lineage and bury the surname "Grant" which I inherited from a heroin addict. I can do my bit and act in accordance with a conscience that encompasses more than my animal instinct to rut like a beast and impregnate willy-nilly.

Fucked up ungrateful entitled rich spoiled know-it-all brat says my shattered brain. I think about the people who've tried to help me; who care about me. I feel guilty that I feel so bad; still feel suicidal. Countless opportunities seem to be open to me - am I rejecting them? Am I throwing the 'gifts' that I have received back in the faces of the bearers? If I am ungrateful, so what?

My charmed existence has led me to a situation that's quite wonderful, but also exquisitely painful because of it - this isn't real life I think to myself. I can't stay here. The need to earn money to pay for debt and taxes will force me back onto the treadmill. The misery of the rat race is inescapable, except through suicide.

Tags: #suicide #depression #career

This is a story about how nothing really mattress...

This is the last double bed I slept in, 27 days ago. That's my brand new bedding with brand new pillows and a brand new duvet. I moved to Manchester with nothing more than my laptop and a bag of clothes. New life - clean slate. This is the apartment where I tried to kill myself. It was a miserable place and I'm glad I never slept there again.

I woke up on Saturday 9th September, and I was miserable. I wrote a blog post in this bed, about how miserable I was and how close I was to committing suicide. It was prescient.

The next bed I lay upon was owned by a guy who I had become friends with through my girlfriend. My girlfriend at the time was of no fixed abode - sofa surfing with a guy who she met on a dating website. I'd travelled to this friend's apartment to see my girlfriend. We lay kissing and cuddling on our friend's bed. Then, we broke up.

Coming home to my miserable apartment, I didn't get into bed - I took a massive overdose and lay on the bathroom floor in the dark, waiting to die. The next bed I laid upon was in the Accident & Emergency department of the nearest hospital.

I'm presuming - because I was unconscious - that I stayed on the same hospital bed, as I was transferred from A&E resus to the Intensive Treatment Unit (ITU) and then to a High Dependency ward. I was on life support. I was having seizures. I don't remember any of this.

I vaguely remember having to scramble across onto a different bed, to move me out of the High Dependency ward and onto a general ward. I remember this because there was a bag of my piss sloshing around that had to be moved too, and there was a tube coming out of my penis, which I had to be careful not to entangle with anything. The tube that was going up my dick yanked my male member around - it wasn't a comfortable experience.

From hospital I was thrown in a police cell. There was a 'bed' made of concrete painted with light blue paint - the same glossy paint that adorned the floor and walls of the cell. To slightly soften the hard concrete, there was a thin blue foam mat, which was wipe-clean. I did not sleep.

Driven home by the two police who had interviewed me - at 2am in the morning - I finally got back home at 3:30am. My sleep medication was nowhere to be found and I'd had a traumatic day - sleep was impossible. I lay awake on my bed, waiting until the earliest possible moment I could go to the office and try to find a work colleague - I was in a desperate situation and I needed help from somebody friendly and sympathetic to my plight: alone in a strange city with no friends or family; no smartphone, laptop, debit card, credit cards, cash or driving license.

After a second dreadful day I was pretty fucked up, as one might expect of somebody abandoned in such shitty circumstances. As sleep deprivation reached the 40+ hour mark, I ended up back at the same hospital's Accident & Emergency department that I had been in 5 days earlier.

Another day, another hospital bed. This one I came round face down on, with my wrists handcuffed behind my back, after having received an intramuscular injection of 4mg of lorazepam. It was approximately 3am in the morning - now 6 days after my original hospital admission.

Sectioned first under a 136 (up to 72 hours) and then upgraded to a section 2 (up to 28 days) I was then taken to a secure psychiatric facility with airlock-type doors, to stop anybody escaping. I was given a private room that was quite nicely appointed, with a writing desk and an ensuite wet-room.

Having blearily come round in the early hours of the Tuesday morning, it was now Thursday night. I finally had a single bed in a comparatively peaceful environment in which to collapse and sleep, mercifully with the assistance of some zopiclone to calm my jangled nerves and soothe me into my slumbers.

Gone were the bleeps and hisses of the machines that were keeping people alive, on the Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU), replaced with the sound of alarms, slamming doors, shouting and running in corridors, as my fellow patients were restrained by staff. I found it somewhat comforting, to know that my crisis was no longer at its peak.

After 8 days on the PICU, I was transferred to an acute psych ward. It was terrifying.

With me in hospital I had two Apple iPhones, two Apple Macbooks, a Nintendo Switch and £1,150 in £50 notes. It's not really recommended to have that amount of valuables on your person, in amongst some very poor and deprived people. The wealth disparity was vulgar.

My guardian angel facilitated the return of my surplus iPhone and Macbook - Apple were excellent and refunded me with no quibbles.

I begun life on the new ward in a private bedroom, but I didn't have an ensuite shower and the TV blasted right next door for 19 hours a day, at full volume. At first, I was too tired to care and I could sleep through the dawn chorus of utter bullshit television a million decibels, but then it started to keep me awake, leaving me less than 5 hours of shut-eye per night.

Then, the dreaded dormitory. Dorms are a mixed bag - very dependent on the luck of the draw, in terms of your fellow occupants. Security is a massive concern, as nothing more than a privacy curtain separated my personal possessions from anybody who'd care to have a look through my bags. Snoring can be a pain in the arse, with one person able to keep everybody else awake listening to their noisy slumbers. Thankfully, my dorm buddies weren't too bad.

This morning I woke up to "second; minute; hour; power; shower" repeated over and over, as a poetic dorm buddy wrote a new rap. That was 5:15am. It was still dark. He was pretty loud. He's sleeping now - snoring.

Today, I'm bustin' out of the psych ward. Watch out, general public of the United Kingdom - I'm going to be moving among you again as a free man.

This is my current bed. I'm lying on it as I type this. I don't know what the bed or the room I'm sleeping in tonight looks like - I've never set foot in the house I'm going to travel to this afternoon. It's a leap in the dark, as is my wont.

Some of my few remaining worldly possessions are here with me in Manchester and some are in London. I'm surprised that I haven't lost more of my valuables. I can't quite bring myself to do the maths, to figure how much money I've lost on this crazy jaunt to the North of England. What does it matter? I'm alive and about to be accepted into the fold of a kind family who are taking me in - the IT consultant who lost his mind in a city where he didn't have any friends or family. It's unlikely that I'd have ended up homeless, but I wasn't relishing the prospect of being chucked off the psych ward and into a dreadful bed & breakfast, in some shitty suburb.

The very definition of "my" home and "my" bed has been smashed to smithereens. Tonight will be the tenth bed I've lain upon in less than 28 days, including several hospital beds and the concrete slab that passes for a bed in a police cell.

Distress flares were fired off and a good samaritan is coming to rescue me from a fairly dire situation.

Tonight, I sleep in a normal house for the first time in what feels like a very long time.

Tags: #hospital #mentalhealth #nhs

This is a story about being overwhelmed...

I sit sunning myself in the park. It all looks very idyllic, doesn't it? How enviable my life is - I have not a worry in the world. Wouldn't you too, love to be as footloose and fancy free as I am? Wouldn't it be great if you were unburdened from all your responsibilities and worries, and could just cavort around doing whatever the fuck you wanted, just like me?

A friend phones me. He tells me that all my problems are all my own fault. I can't disagree with him. He tells me that I'm self-centred. I can't disagree with him. He tells me some stories about some problems in his own life. I can't say that my woes are worse than anything he's been through. He tells me about how tough things are in the developing world. I can't disagree.

My head buzzes with thoughts. My thoughts aren't racing; they're quite rational, reasonable, structured and logical. My thoughts aren't warped by a broken ability to correctly perceive reality - I corroborate how I'm feeling with people who are considered to be sane, to validate that I'm not thinking what I'm thinking because I'm unwell.

I've been seriously unwell before. I sat in ice-cold bathwater for hours with a sharp knife at my throat, keeping my elbow on the bathroom door so that if it was opened it would drive the blade into my jugular vein and carotid artery - that was unwell.

I've been seriously unwell before. I've imagined people abseiling down the side of my apartment block who were going to smash in my windows and come into my bedroom. I've imagined that I'm being spied upon. I'll leave it to the reader to conclude what psychiatric label is usually attached to such thoughts.

I've been seriously unwell before. I spent 12 or even 18 hours at a time, trying to make something out of cardboard, string, plastic, rubber, metal, wicker, cloth or whatever else was lying around. I was once convinced I was building a house around myself, but when I had a moment of lucidity, I realised I had simply been moving the same cushion around in a small circle, in a trancelike state.

Of course, I'm not claiming to be well at the moment.

It's been suggested to me by a few people that I could be malingering - that I took an overdose that was very likely to kill me in circumstances where I was very unlikely to be saved, fully knowing that I would survive... somehow; that I managed to fake mental illness so well that I was brought to hospital under a section 136 by the police, and that I continued to fake mental illness so well with the team who assessed me, that I was detained in hospital under section 2 of the Mental Health Act. It's either the greatest ruse - a masterful piece of deception and death-defiance - or maybe it's really easy to abuse the few brain cells I still have left, for nefarious purposes.

Anyway, I'm not supposed to be writing about myself. Think about the starving African children.

Where do you think I live? How do you think I eat?

I'm dependent on charity.

Park bench.

Yeah, damn straight I'm glad I was born in Northern Europe, in a wealthy country where we have a welfare state. Damn straight I'm glad I don't live in some hot dusty shithole, where hunger and disease are rife.

"I want to go home"

My home is this park bench. It's true, I have received kind offers to live with a couple of very charitable people. It's a big deal, to invite a mentally ill, recovering alcoholic, recovering addict, into your home. I bet you wouldn't do it, would you? I probably eat newborn babies and stomp on kittens' heads, just for my own sick amusement.

"I want to go home"

I hear people asking to go home a lot. Every day I hear people shouting that they want to go home. I don't ask to go home. I wonder why?

I chat to somebody about living in a caravan and hiding from debt collectors. My heart leaps. I yearn to escape the relentless pressure I feel to get back to work and start turning the pedals again, but I'm conflicted - I'm a principled man and I want to service my debts; I want to play by society's rules.

Nobody plays by society's rules, except those at the bottom who are trapped into poverty - they have no choice. I've played by the rules for long enough, and it's made me so miserable that I tried to kill myself. People urge me to take a break from the rat race, but they don't understand that the house of cards is going to collapse - there's a lot of money riding on me being able to get back on my feet.

Like a sportsman who chokes at the critical moment, I feel immense pressure to perform and it affects me.

It sounds like I'm pointing the finger of blame everywhere other than myself. Is that your signature on a contract that says you would accept Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) on that loan? Why didn't you read the contract? Did you take out that endowment mortgage or didn't you? How come you didn't understand something that was completely straightforward? Why won't you take responsibility for your obligations?

My friend is right. My life is a problem of my own making.

This whole fucked up mess is a problem of our own making. We are joint and severally liable - do you understand what that fucking means? Do you own up to your part that you've played in all of this?

I'm trying to do my bit and it's making me unwell. So unwell in fact that I tried to kill myself. I mean proper kill myself - dead, forever, gone, finito, sayōnara, the end.

Either I'm the most devious bastard that ever disgraced the surface of the Earth, or circumstances are somewhat out of my control - I'm not fully responsible for the gigantic mess I'm in. Of course, I'm a very convenient scapegoat though.

Although it seems very disjointed and jumbled, this blog does not write itself effortlessly. This blog is not unimportant. This blog is important to me, so that's at least one reason why it's important - I don't need any more than that. Call me selfish and self-centred all you like but I've tried to remove myself from the picture, and I failed. Am I supposed to be sorry that I'm not dead, and I'm still wasting your precious oxygen? Am I supposed to apologise for writing something that you could choose not to read, if you wanted to?

Think about the starving African children. Wow I'm cured!

Tags: #mentalhealth #homeless #suicide #bipolar

This is a story about inevitabilities...

If you stay alive long enough, sooner or later you're going to have to fend for yourself. You might have been lucky enough to have fallen in love with your childhood sweetheart and gotten married young. Perhaps your partner took the baton of domestic duties from your childhood primary caregiver, in a kind of relay race that has insulated you from household drudgery. Perhaps you were born into a wealthy family with a maid and a cook and a cleaner and a nanny... so the items above are as alien to you as anything that was tossed out of a passing flying saucer and into your hands.

In all likelihood, most people in the UK will have the misfortune of having to purchase and use a variety of products that are not glamorous or fashionable, but are essential for the functioning of a clean and hygienic home. The products pictured all belong to a family of consumables that will need to be used until the day you die, to clean up after yourself.

To say I lived a sheltered and cosseted existence as a child is untrue and unkind. However, I learned how to change the filter and engine oil of a car before I learned the importance of defrosting a freezer and cleaning a fridge at reasonably regular intervals. I'm not sure if I've ever cleaned any windows or dusted any cobwebs in my entire life, but I'd probably mowed more acres of lawn and collected a mountain of grass cuttings and leaves bigger - at the family home - than almost any boy in the United Kingdom.

I'm no working-class hero but I'm no pampered and spoiled brat either. I defy all simplistic attempts to classify me with a label of convenience. Even the word "manic" is something that I have taken ownership of - therefore it's me who uses the word ironically, mocking people's prejudices, as opposed to it being a pejorative that could be used against me.

You might believe that nature is 'in-balance' and that the 'top dog' or alpha males will have the best genes, but you'd be wrong. I'm sorry ladies, but if you decided to cash in your chips early with that popular and attractive boy when you were young, you've played a losing strategy. Like chess grandmasters, the most intelligent animals wait for the opposition to make a mistake and have planned several moves ahead, so that when the orgy of juvenile copulation is completed, those geeky boys who didn't get any attention in their teens are able to cherry pick the very sweetest, juiciest and most succulent fruit. Revenge is sweet, if you don't turn bitter.

"But he was so hunky and so good at sports" I hear you wail, neck-deep in housework and childrearing duties.

"But she was so sexy and good at blowjobs" I hear you grumble through gritted teeth as you sit in traffic, collecting your offspring from after-school activities before ferrying them to their next engagement like an unpaid taxi driver.

If your other half is male, does he have a beer gut, hairy ears, man-boobs and think that foreplay is rolling you over and shoving it in dry? If your other half is female, does she have saggy tits, a vagina ruined by the brats you spawned to replace yourself, and bingo wings?

Do you think pornography, prostitutes and rent boys are used predominantly by single people? You need your head examined if you do.

One of my most beloved science teachers - Mr Laithwaite - was reduced to tears when his wife gave birth, because of some emotions that were beyond his describing. These were definitely not tears of sadness though, but neither were they clearly tears of joy. A puppy is not just for Christmas, and a child is not just an inconvenient consequence of 30 seconds of copulation, which can merely be suffocated in a plastic bag and tossed into a canal.

Do you think I don't feel anything when I see a little kid hug their mummy or daddy? Do you think I don't desperately want to have a dog that licks my face and wags its tail in sheer delight when it sees me? Do you think I don't miss my cat, and my eyes don't prick with tears when I think about him?

Men don't have a menopause and erection medications have extended my 'use-by' date. My scrotum will continue to be full of sperm until I die, and if I froze some sperm today then I could virtually guarantee that I would be able to complete a vanity project - the raising of a chid who inherited half my genetic material, instead of adopting a malnourished child with no access to healthcare, or at least a child whose prospects would otherwise be fairly dire without adoptive parents.

"Fuck you, you sanctimonious prick!" I hear you vociferously snarl.

I adopted a kitten and raised him to adulthood even though this clearly made no sense - to bond with an animal that has 38 chromosomes when I have 46 - and I was so concerned with giving this pet the best possible life, that I fed him every day, even when I was skipping a week of meals myself. I care so much about the wellbeing of my cat, that I have only ever made him move house once in his entire life, which was unavoidable due to the actions of my ex-wife - she forced an innocent animal to suffer the upheaval of divorce [my cat, not me... but I suffered too].

They say that for men, moving house and divorce are the two most stressful things that can happen to you in your life. Anybody who's seen my two hand-drawn maps will know that I'm no stranger to moving house, and that a succession of house moves started before I was even 1 year old, and continued regularly at the whimsical behest of my parents, throughout my childhood... despite my childhood one might say.

Thus, we arrive at the present day. Fucked up childhoods create fucked up kids. Quelle surprise!

All I can say is, that when I left home before the age of 18, it was a great relief. Even though I have had to cook, mop floors, hoover carpets, make beds, wash, dry and iron my clothes - it has felt like a privilege, not a chore.

Also, I've used contraception, which has been available since well before the day I was conceived. There's no fucking excuses for any 'accidental' or 'unplanned' pregnancies - we're not baboons or amoeba, reproducing without sentient intellect.

Tags: #childhood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for visiting my website!

Tags: #writing

This is a story about fresh starts...

My luck is astounding. In fact, it's almost enough to make me believe in divine intervention and go all religious. However, I've studied theoretical physics, so I don't believe in imaginary sky monsters.

Underpinning our entire understanding of the universe is a theory that says that our very existence - our consciousness - is determining the reality that we experience. To give you a simple example, when you look at the Moon, every single atom of the Moon must choose its position in the sky, but when you look away, all those atoms could be anywhere... it's as if the Moon doesn't exist until you choose to look at it. The very action of looking at the Moon is what makes it exist, roughly where we expect to see it, but until you turn your gaze to the night sky, those atoms are just a probability cloud.

Just as we all know that Schrödinger's cat is both alive and dead until we open the box and look inside, what is less well known is that same uncertainty principle means that if you're not able to witness the universe around us, it completely collapses into a mathematical mess of probability - basically, if you die, the universe dies with you.

"But that can't be true! People die all the time!" I hear you scream.

Yes, you're right, but how would you witness their death, unless you had your own universe in which to observe independently. You can prove this fairly simply, by having Alice and Bob both make observations of quantum mechanical experiments, and see who is the one who is influencing reality. If you're Alice, you'll see that Bob has no effect - it's all down to you, baby. This universe is all yours.

"He's lost his mind and gone hypomanic again" I hear you grumble with frustration.

Until you've read Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics by John Bell and you've read the various interpretations of quantum mechanics - from the Copenhagen mathematical abstract idea, to the multiverse and the many minds interpretations - then I'm afraid, dear reader, that you're not qualified to judge me.

If you go deep enough down the rabbit hole, then you arrive at a quantum suicide paradox, and quantum immortality. Basically, in all the possible universes where you die... how would you know about them? In an almost infinite number of ways, your brain and your consciousness have died, but there are still an almost infinite number of universes left where you're alive and well. Does your brain hurt from all this? Well, try taking a gun, pointing it at your head and pullling the trigger - you won't die! Quantum mechanics literally predicts that the gun will misfire. In the universes where your brains got blown to pieces, you won't be alive to witness the aftermath, so you'll only be consciously aware of the universes where the gun jams or misfires or malfunctions in some way.

Basicallly, re-imagine the Schrödinger's cat experiment, but if the cat dies, you die too. What would happen is that every single time you ran the experiment, you open the box and find the cat is alive. You could do that experiment a thousand times, and 1,000 cats would be alive and well. The reason is simple: who's going to open the box if you and the cat are both dead?

Without a god, this is the only way that I can reconcile my experience of reality with the vast quantity of scientific books and academic papers that I have read over the years. God(s) are far more convenient and quite a lot more fun. Imagine being an ancient Greek, or a Roman: you'd have had loads of gods to thank and blame for everything that happened, good or bad. Learning stories about these imaginary sky monsters is a lot easier and more fun than learning differential calculus, matrix mechanics and imaginary numbers.

How does any of this relate to me and leaving London? Well, only a few weeks ago, I thought I was going to be sleeping on a sheet of cardboard in a doorway, sheltering from the rain. I thought I was going to be scouring London for empty houses with overgrown back gardens, where I could pitch my tent in the undergrowth and live in quiet seclusion; free from the possibility of being beaten up or pissed on by a lager lout; safe from the chance that I might be mugged for anything valuable that hadn't already been stolen from me.

Every area of my life had collapsed. I'm estranged from my family. I had lost touch with friends. I had broken up with my girlfriend. I was in arrears with my rent. I had no job; no income. Just servicing my debts was going to gobble up the few pounds and pence I had left. I'd sold everything of any value and raised a fairly paltry sum of money for my weeks of effort. I was going to lose my deposit and be unable to raise the rent and deposit needed to get another place to live. How would I pay the ongoing rent anyway, without income? Destitution looked like a certainty.

Then, I looked at the Moon and the planets aligned or the gods smiled on me or whatever you want to believe, but my plans to commit suicide by taking a tramadol overdose got transformed into a plan for a fresh start: the chance to have another go at getting the secret recipe right: friends, family, home, work, income, expenditure, stress, fun and every other variable that needs to be tweaked until it's just right, and you want to live more than you want to die.

If you've never taken a razor blade or a sharp knife, and deliberately cut into yourself, looking for veins and arteries, then you'll have no idea what I'm talking about. The closer you get to death, the closer you get to meeting your maker. Stephen Hawking could have sought solace in the mumbo-jumbo of religion, believing in an afterlife, after finding out that he had between 2 and 4 years to live, when he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. Instead, he wrote "A Brief History of Time" and discovered that black holes evaporate by radiating X-rays and wins the Nobel Prize at the age of 71. He's 75 years old now. He says that "god" is the universal laws of physics, which are still not fully understood by us... the Standard Model of particle physics is good, but it's just a model - there's no theory that explains why there are up quarks, down quarks, top, bottom, strange, beauty and charm. What the f**k is a tau neutrino and why do we need them? There's no theory that tells us for definite whether an electron is a fundamental particle and we've never actually seen a proton decay, although we have smashed them to bits and tried to figure out what the hell they're made out of, by looking at the pieces of debris that come flying out of the collision.

We're living in an age where we can actually make antimatter. You know that science fiction stuff? It's the most expensive substance on the planet, and you can't charge for it by weight because it has negative mass. That is to say, if you put it on some scales, it would float up and not weigh them down... you'd have to PAY to have people take your antimatter away, and you'd only need a tennis ball sized amount to pretty much destroy our whole planet, because of course as you know E = mc² and there's a f**king shit tonne of energy bound up in matter. When antimatter meets matter, the matter is annihilated into pure energy and you'll get something that will beat the shit out of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and every nuclear explosion ever detonated all put together.

Do you want to see my life, reduced to atomic scale?

There it is. 7 cardboard boxes, a couple of bikes, a bag full of kitesurfing gear, a guitar that I'm too talentless to play and its amplifier, and a filing cabinet full of old post that I really should throw away. I'll be adding in a load of duvets and bedding and clothes that I only wear infrequently, but it's sad how my entire life doesn't even fill this tiny space, when compressed like atomic fusion.

I leave this riverside apartment, which to all intents and purposes looks idyllic to the uninitiated, but in fact, the endless boats full of drunk people dancing to disco music - in their flared trousers or whatever the kids are wearing these days - is nearly continuous on the river side, and the local watering hole - the Tooke Arms - has a police van parked outside every Friday and Saturday night, to take away those who inevitably become so drunk and disorderly that they no longer appreciate the saintly patience of our beloved Metropolitan Police. You really REALLY have to piss off a London policeman to get yourself arrested. Trust me; I've been there, done that and got the bracelets (handcuffs). You don't get to keep any souvenirs, unless you want to frame your cautions and criminal charges (I have none of the latter, and I don't know if they even give you a certificate, like when you graduate from university).

I'm around in the capital for a little while longer, so if you want to say goodbye in person, then you should register your interest now. The day that I leave with as many bags as I can carry on the train, keeps getting pushed back and back and back, but it'll be worth it, especially if I get to meet two twin boys for the first time - the baby sons of the couple who rescued me from a messy divorce and a very unhealthy mess I'd gotten myself into.

It's interesting, when you're challenged to think what you really need, day to day. There are your favourite clothes, of course. There's your phone and your laptop and the accompanying accessories, but there's very little else. I'll take my Lumix camera with a Leica lens, even though my iPhone takes perfectly good photographs. I'll take my headphone amplifier, even though I can already deafen myself with earphones that only cost £30. I'll take 2 books I want to read, even though they're heavy and made out of tree pulp, and once I've read them they're just wasting valuable space on the planet and depriving us of oxygen giving trees. I'll take my suit - which is virtually brand new - and overcoat, even though it's total overkill to look like a sleazy salesman, in whatever off-the-peg trendy fashionable garments were available that season.

I've not even seen inside where I'm going to live. It's a total gamble, but it's bound to be better than a doorway that smells of piss and has spikes on the ground to discourage you from trying to shelter from the elements there.

As I wrote in a stupid lovesick poem a little while ago, I don't remember ever feeling this daunted and exposed; fearful & anxious. One little slip and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down, and the devastation that I felt when I lost the Lloyds contract earlier this year will look like a piss in the ocean by comparison.

It's almost like I'm holding the universe to ransom: I'm saying "gimmie what I want or I'll kill myself". Obviously, nobody gives that much of a fuck about threats like that. In fact, if you were to beg your doctor to put you in a safe place, where you couldn't harm yourself, that very act of self-preservation would be proof that you don't actually want to die: Catch 22.

Anyway, the universe has ponied up and given me everything I ever wanted: 98 out of my 101 things on my bucket list. Every cloudy evening, I think "oh bummer, no nice sunset tonight" and then there's this beautiful sky that suddenly appears all lit up in orange and gold, and with wispy white vapour trails from the planes overhead, and every shade of grey in amazing cloud formations.

I could share 100 photos with you, every one of the same view from the same vantage point, but every one has something of interest, even though it's the same skyline. Whether it's fireworks going off on New Year's Eve, or a long-exposure shot of the supermoon, taken with an 8 second shutter on a tripod. Those who are of the Christian faith, would say I've been "blessed". I simply view my consciousness as an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, but also a complete accident - simply a statistical co-incidence. I've been very sad to lose things and I've suffered terrible stress at times, but I always get what I want in the end, even if it seems like blind luck.

I want to share more. I want to write and write, but if you read what I wrote before, you'll understand the fragility of my situation; the precarious position I find myself in.

I know that I'm revealing a side to myself that has no place in this day & age of mindless 'entertainment' programmes, where some botoxed pretty-boy with teeth that are blindingly white, chats mindless bullshit to a bottle blonde with big fake titties. I read "Brave New World" and other dystopian and utopian novels when I was very young. One of the kindest gifts I ever received from my dad - as I remember - was a book that explained special relativity for kids. Imagine that! Imagine having your 8 year old son travelling on a beam of light looking at his watch and seeing the hands tick just like normal, but when he comes home, Dad's been dead for millions or billions of years. That's just f**ked up.

I'll write again, before I go, but it's 1am and I'll have a regular 9 to 5 job soon. it won't be quite like the corporate humdrum I'm used to, but I've still got to play by certain rules; societal norms. I've got a week to straighten myself out.

I want to tell you about all the hidden gems of London that you'd only know if you've lived here for 10 years or more. I want to share my heartache about leaving the capital of the country that my identity is inextricably bound to. I speak the Queen's english with an old-fashioned BBC TV presenter's posh accent. "Sorry" is a kind of punctuation, where I start and end every sentence with what seems like an apology, but it's not... it's just the product of that inexplicable 'Britishness' that we offer insincere apologies all the time: "Sorry", "begging your pardon", "excuse me" and even the British "ahem!" cough that basically says "get the f**k out of my way you piece of s**t tourist" with an insipid smile as the feckless idiot steps out of the gangway they're blocking.

Oh London, I'm going to miss you so very much. With your cultural collision that's so inclusive that the sum total of all the terrorist attacks has claimed less than 100 lives, ever. 52 on the 7th of July 2005, but all the others don't even take the total into 3 figures. How can you strike a blow against a city that speaks more languages than any other on the planet. New York - in 2nd place - speaks half as many languages as London, which can boast 100+. To attack London is to attack humanity itself.

There would be novelty if I was moving to New York or Tokyo (numbers 99 and 100 on the bucket list) but to experience another major city in the UK is still exciting. I just hope it isn't like Bournemouth - trying so hard to be like London, or even like Brighton, but ending up as a cheap and tacky pastiche that offends the sensibilities of a genuine Londoner.

Of course, those born in London call me a "blow in" and mock my privileged existence, but taking the example of my friends with the twins. Their house cost them the equivalent of £1.3 million, and the beneficiaries were what the British refer to as "benefit scroungers" - people who've never worked a day in their lives and have now f**ked off to Spain, where they live in idle luxury, as tax exiles.

Oh London, how I love thee.

Better publish this or I'll be writing all night again.

Tags: #london

This is a story about the never-ending story...

When I lost my house in my divorce, I did a smash and grab, boxing up things that I thought would have good resale value. I had money, even though my ex-wife had tried to bankrupt me, because I sank every penny I could borrow into Bitcoin at just the right time. I had a friend's guest bedroom. I had my health. I had hope; optimism.

"Why don't you sell some stuff?" my parents unhelpfully asked, when my ex-wife demanded a £7,000 bribe so that she would stop delaying the sale of the house and trying to bankrupt me. At that time, I didn't have £7,000. I had about £3,500. I sold my car, raising about £2,000, but I knew that to spend weeks and weeks getting £100 here and £200 there, just wasn't going to raise the remaining £1,500 without a couple of months of dedicated time-wasting. If you can earn £500 to £600 a day contracting, should you spend time selling a small TV for £100, or should you go and get an IT contract instead?

I hadn't 'lost everything' by any stretch of the imagination. Losing your home is unbelievably traumatic. Moving house is one of the most stressful things you could ever do. However, I was now living with two old friends and their three lodgers. What I lost materially, I also gained by getting out of a relationship where I was either being abused or in fear of being abused (yes: having to keep yourself behind a door, when somebody is punching and kicking it and screaming abuse at you is "abuse") and I gained some new friends and regular contact with some old ones.

That old life sat in boxes in storage for a couple of years, and I didn't miss any of it. I lived with my friends, then a miserable shared house that drove me to attempt suicide, then a bed & breakfast (Camden's alternative to a psychiatric hospital), then hostels, then the park, then a crisis house, then Hampstead Heath, then hostels again, then a kind man's spare room (who was horribly abused by his wife) and then the flat where I live now.

I've learned from my mistake, and I'll be storing the very minimum I can get away with. A lot of stuff is going to be thrown away. I know it sounds wasteful, but I've tried for over two weeks to sell some things for a price that makes it more like I'm being a charity than trying to get some money. Certainly, my time has been wasted more than you could possibly imagine, for an incredibly futile amount of money. I could make more money begging.

I now don't have enough money to pay for cheap accommodation long enough to get a job, start it, and get paid. There's also the Catch 22: in London, I can earn enough to dig myself out of the hole, but I can't afford the high cost of living. In some other town or city, I can earn enough to sustain my current shitty situation, but I'll never escape. Somebody's going to lose money they're owed (e.g. my landlord) and I'm going to pay reputational cost: credit rating wrecked, county court judgements... maybe even bankruptcy.

I could feel some relief to be off the treadmill, and be able to live "poor & happy" but poor is one thing, and having a black mark against your name is quite another. You can't even rent a place in this country without a credit check.

I'm not sleeping in a shop doorway that smells of piss, and having to beg enough money for food each day, but I've got a near impossible decision to make: is hope more important, or is it more important to have less pressure to keep a good credit score and avoid black marks against my name, They're both equally shit to be honest. As soon as I start defaulting on debts, the courts will fuck me over, and all hope of a simple life will simply evaporate - I'll be working shit jobs AND paying a disproportionate amount of my salary to leeches.

I've got a new pair of shoes, and they make me happy. My flip-flops, which were my summer footwear - very much part of my identity - I can't walk in because my left foot is numb. I tried cycling the other day, and it's really hard to bunnyhop with a numb foot. But, my summery shoes have been my lottery win, in the face of unrelenting worry.

How ironic, that the last time my life collapsed, I was trying to get away from somebody who was ruining my life, and this time, the collapse has almost been guaranteed by the fact that I left somebody who was improving my life, giving me hope, supporting me and underwriting some of my risks. I'll probably never meet somebody like that ever again, and that's the hardest thing... knowing that a moment of mental illness has cost me more than it ever has done in the past, and I've lost at least 3 well paid jobs because I went hypomanic.

I can't cope. I can't cope in the slightest. I can't even begin to face the first step down a road I've walked before. I've been cutting my arm again, but going slightly deeper and with a sharper knife; figuring out how hard I have to press to open my veins lengthways. I think about those 8 grams of tramadol - all you need for an overdose - and how easy and painless it would be. I think about the relief of it all being over.

The usual admonishment is about how selfish it is to leave so many problems for the living; that no matter how tidily you leave your affairs, somebody still has the awful task of going through the detritus of your life. What can I say? Sorry? It's not like anybody ever thought to themselves "oh, better not kill myself because it's a bit selfish".

Don't ring the police or panic or anything. If it's done and there's a body, you'll know and you'll be warned, so that unfortunately, some front-line worker will have to deal with it. At the moment, I'm just trying some food and some sleep, in the hope that this feeling will pass, because it's never been this strong and it terrifies me, to know I'm so close to the limit, but the need for some peace and relief from the stress and the misery and depression is totally overwhelming me.

"Try upping your medication" - oh go fuck yourself.

"There must be somebody who can help" - yeah, that's probably you, but because everybody thinks "there must be somebody" that means there's nobody.

"What about the government?" - yawn. Go watch "I, Daniel Blake" and then you'll understand what the Tories have done to the welfare state. Ken Loach didn't even use true stories he could have done, because he wanted to represent an average experience, rather than an extreme and sensationalistic one.

I'm going to try and sleep on it, but just getting through this evening seems like too much to cope with.

Tags: #suicide

This is a story about a better world...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: #politics

This is a story about whether it's right to stay with an alcoholic and/or an addict...

Poor me, poor me, pour me another drink. Like every alcoholic and/or addict I have a million and one reasons why I had one too many bottles of wine, or why I lapsed or relapsed into drug addiction.

I mentioned on Facebook earlier today that I rearranged the furniture in a hotel room in Bournemouth, right at the very worst most moment of my divorce. If you think that "worst moment of my divorce" caveat is me getting my excuses in early, then you're wrong. Let's get this straight: I didn't break anything or chuck a telly out of the window, but I made a lot of extra work for housekeeping.

I was actually so concerned that I was in such a bad frame of mind that I was actually going to throw a telly out of the window, so I phoned the duty solicitor. The duty solicitor gets phoned after you've been arrested, if you don't have your own solicitor.  I had not been arrested, but I didn't like the way things were going.

The duty solicitor was rather bemused by a person ringing up to chat about things before they're arrested.... in anticipation. He said that he didn't think the police would arrest me, and I should probably just ring friends and family. I was loathe to involve friends & family in a mess that I had made.

Eventually, having tried several other local solicitors, I rang the family solicitor, who phoned my Mum, who told my Dad to phone me. He was exceedingly unhappy that one of his longest friends had suggested that I might be in the need of a bit of support during a messy divorce.

I rang my friend Tim, who texted an ex police constable, who confirmed that the police would not press charges given the circumstances. Tim came to the hotel, and said it wasn't bad at all and we could fix it up in 5 or 10 minutes, but I just wanted to get home.

Despite a couple of offers of financial compensation for any inconvenience or damage the hotel manager laughed, being rather experiences with the wrecked hotel rooms due to the large amount of stag dos who visit Bournemouth. His housekeeping staff had not even commented. However, I still feel guilty about that today.

That was December 2013.

Let's make one thing really clear before we go on. My ex wife did not addict me to drugs. She's not responsible for any of my addiction: then or now.

My startup company fell to bits because I was under unbearable pressure to deliver Investment Banker lifestyle on startup wages, and base my company in Bournemouth, where there are no angel investors, no venture capitalists, no startup scene, no customers, it was over 2 hours away from my co-founder and his new baby girl. It was an irreconcilable problem, with my ex-wife being least willing to compromise despite having a job she could work anywhere in the country. But, that's not her fault. It's my fault. It's my fault that I made myself CEO instead of my co-founder. It's my fault I couldn't handle the pressure. It's my fault I wasn't strong enough to leave a toxic unsupportive relationship.

Drugs - legal highs - appeared on the scene in the autumn, as I sat at home, desperately depressed about the situation. I had already tried about 5 different antidepressants by this point, and had even moved on to trying over 10 extremely rare antidepressants that are extremely rarely prescribed, even in treatment-resistant depression cases.

It's not like I didn't recognise the problem. I accessed local drug & alcohol drop in centres, where I sat listening to teenaged alcoholic prostitutes talking about their children being taken into care, knowing that I owned my own home, cars, boats, hot tub, summer houses and had tens of thousands of pounds in the bank. I left, because it feel like sheer selfishness to deprive the time that could be given to somebody more needy.

I spent a day in a residential rehab as a day patient. By the end of the day, I had brushed up all the leaves, done all the washing up, hoovered, mopped and done just about everybody's weekly chores. The people's lives were fascinating, but most of the day was drinking tea & coffee and sitting around.

I don't know if I was successfully hiding my habit, but I gave a talk to a bunch of startup founders in London, and a few came over and said they'd heard me speak in Cambridge, and they thought my public speaking had improved a lot. Go figure.

The only real problem for hiding my habit was school holidays - my ex being an educator - when I wouldn't have the daytime to take drugs. Christmas holiday was unspeakably awful, with me sneaking off in the middle of the night to take drugs.

Getting clean and staying clean is my sole responsibility, but I found it telling that the only book on addiction my ex read parts of was called "Nag your loved one sober".

After Christmas, my ex demanded that my parents take me away. Naturally, they resisted and I resisted. My dad came down, and my ex had been nagging our mutual GP about how hard it was on her to deal with my addiction. Deal with my addiction? She didn't even know about it until a week earlier, when I struggled to hide it during the school holidays.

I was completely spooked by the sudden appearance of my dad and my GP, through no request of my own. The idea of leaving my home, my friends and everything else I'd spent years building around myself, to go live in a house I'd never lived in, trapped in a village where I didn't know anybody. That's fucking offensive.

Anyway, the psychiatrist I saw just before I left Bournemouth told me to taper off the legal highs gradually - over the course of 6 to 8 weeks - because nobody knew what withdrawal would be like.

Having gotten rid of me to my parents' house, my ex then refused to take my phone-calls and generally treated me like dog dirt.

I would say, that if it turns out you're dating an addict and/or alcoholic, you should make a decision - based on how long you've been together - as to whether they're the type who's going to bleed you dry and move onto the next unwitting victim, whether you're prepared to help them - and trust me, it's really fucking hard - or whether it's your moral duty to help them because they became unwell while they were your husband, wife or long term partner.

Anyway, my ex continued to be a right ***** until someone who isn't me hacked her email account and found out that no sooner had I left MY house, she had been dating other people. I confronted her with her infidelity, and she started treating me like a human again. Unfortunately, I thought a leopard could change its spots, so I spent £4,000 on flights to Hawaii to get married and £3,000 on an engagement ring. As you can tell, I'm the kind of junkie who spends all their money on themselves.

I struggled with sobriety, but held down a couple of good jobs and continued to be a good provider. My ex could have called off the wedding at any point.

The wedding, which was supposed to be stress-free with no guests, somehow became one of the most stressful things I've ever had to deal with. The whole holiday was ruined by my bridezilla. In the end, I threw a tantrum and said I could no longer deal with teepees and camper vans that break down and other eclectic but stressful shit that I had to organise, and booked us into the $800 a night Hilton. I had cocktails by the pool and it was bliss, but there were two days until we had to go home.

I relapsed as soon as we got home. It didn't help that my then-wife had booked a taxi online, specifying the wrong year. We could have stayed at Heathrow and waited for 4 hours, but having been on a plane for most of a day, I wanted to get home: unexpected £180 taxi ride in a black cab that I managed to negotiate.

My then-wife must have ordered my parents to come and 'deal' with me, because my dad marched into my house and said "you're an addict. you're an addict. Can't you see you're a dirty addict?" which was rich coming from a man with a history of drug use. That's not the kind of treatment you should ever receive in your own home, nor did it take account of the fact that I'd been in a lot of correspondence with several specialist psychiatrists who could deal with my specific condition: dual diagnosis. I was bipolar before I was a junkie, and the two do not complement each other well.

My mum had decided that she could 'smell' drugs on me. Unless she has a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer for a nose, she is wrong. You can smell smoke and cannabis on somebody's clothes, but drugs that you snort, swallow and inject are excreted through kidneys and faeces. It's a completely disproven hypothesis. Anyway, My then-wife did nothing to vouch for my sobriety when my mum had a go at me on my sister's wedding day (I was clean).

I'd gone back to working at JPMorgan, and they coughed up £12k for me to go to The Priory for 28 days, without a single qualm. My general psychiatrist had said I needed treatment in a therapeutic environment, which clearly my home was not. My then-wife said that she'd divorce me if I followed his advice and got treatment, and that she'd rather be a widow than a divorcee.

On my first day at The Priory, I phoned the local florist near our home, and asked them to leave a different flower each day under the windscreen wiper of my then-wife's car, before she left for work. She however, joined the dating sites again and decided not to visit or phone me.

During my stay at The Priory, we established that I was not well supported at home, and indeed, perhaps my relationship did not contain the prerequisite levels of respect, love, care, compassion etc. etc.

I panicked on day 27 of rehab, realising I had to divorce my wife, sell our house and decide what I was going to do next with my life. I spent the day talking to a few friends about different ideas, and returned for my final day a lot happier.

Straight after that was the birth of my niece. My loving then-wife did not attend. In fact. I remember her once being extremely put out that my grandmother had the temerity to die at an inconvenient moment. I think my friends had been right all along: she really was "the poison dwarf".

Anyway, after being under virtual house arrest, where I must admit I abused a lot of drugs as I tried to grapple with the magnitude of selling a house and downsizing. Probably moving to London. The friends who would take sides. Having to get a new job. I got fed up with my then-wife making me feel absolutely terrified by her unjustified rage and abuse, so I took to cocooning myself into a single room of our ample 3-bedroomed house, and even built myself a man cave in our summer house. She was never content to leave me be, and would hammer and scream all the time at whichever door I cowered behind.

Then, I sent an SOS email to our parents, to come and force our separation. I was starving. I had no toilet, no shower. Do you think that's the way that people get clean & sober?

My friend Posh Will kindly offered his spare bedroom to get back into London life. I was clean & sober, riding my bike all over London, incorporating a new company and touting for consultancy work. I was entrepreneur-in-residence at PlayFair capital and I was loving the London startup scene. I was making new friends and I quickly got a beautiful new girlfriend. I know I wasn't the first to commit adultery, because someone who isn't me hacked my then-wife's email and found out she was fucking a married man with kids.

Then, divorce turned nasty. A six week house sale turned into a six month sale, simply because my then wife wanted to drag it out, knowing I had no income yet in London. She kept making me do the 4 hour round trip to Bournemouth to do trivial things she could do herself, like get estate agent valuations. Finally, we arrive in December 2013, where I went to a hotel because our house was sold but I was so angry and frustrated by my wife dragging out the sale to the point I almost ran out of money, I was going to trash the place.

Sure, I then did a 5 days of a 10 day detox, at a place where they didn't know what a detox was, or how to deal with somebody with a benzo habit. I then did 7 weeks at a proper residential rehab. My parents were on my no-contact banned list, but my mum still wrote to me with Louise's divorce demands. I told her from the start I wanted to rent out the house, defer the divorce and deal with it all when I had my health. When she refused, I said take whatever you want, but just don't drag it out. If I wasn't the kind of person who assumes that everybody's OK deep down, I'd say that it was all because she's a vindictive, abusive, greedy, *****.

Anyway, after a mix-up at my parents about what day of the week it was, my dad demanded that I get dressed in front of him and leave immediately. I agreed to leaving immediately, but I refused to get dressed in front of him, on the grounds that it would be one of the most degrading things you could ever ask a person to do. He manhandled me and a mirror got knocked off the wall, slicing my shin muscle in half along with 4 tendons and 2 nerves. Only then did he allow me to get dressed in privacy.

After my operation, I was taking fentanyl and tramadol - both strong opiate painkillers - for the pain, and yet I managed to avoid becoming addicted to these drugs. Having to wear a plaster cast kinda means you're going to have to destroy a nice business suit, and who wants to hire somebody who's sick?

My friends said it was time for me to get a place of my own, although I was still on crutches. I rented a room nearby. I went for dinner with Posh Will, and I was honest with him about my addiction struggles, and his attitude towards me changed visibly immediately. Our friendship was almost ruined, because he had such strong preconceived notions about what drug addiction is. He virtually accused me of being at risk of coming round to his house to steal stuff to feed my habit. I had the money from the sale of my house and some successful Bitcoin investments. I didn't need to steal from my friends. I cried myself to sleep and then tried to commit suicide.

Hospital discharged me, but I'd lost my flat, so I was homeless. I lived in hostels and Kensington Gardens. I guarantee you that not many people get clean from drugs when they're homeless.

Anyway, I finally got a great group of friends at a hostel in Camden, and a beautiful girlfriend. Those were some of the happiest months of my life. I also got an IT contract for Barclays and a room in a student house in Swiss Cottage.

I did have a couple of 'lapses' on mild drugs, but I was clean and I was happy. Then Barclays terminated my contract and I was evicted (the landlord was selling the apartment).

I tried to put a brave face on things and have a happy family Christmas, but I'd broken up with my girlfriend, lost half my friends, lost my contract, was homeless again. A lovely family in Ireland saved my life, looking after me at one of the most depressing and vulnerable times of my life.

At the suggestion of Posh Will - ironically - I stayed in a hostel in Shoreditch. Initially I had a whole dorm to myself, but when they realised I had an OK personality and was a long-term resident, they moved me to the infamous 'Ward P'. The drink and the drugs were off the scale in that place. I had to leave because I was off my face around the clock, but it seemed normal because everybody was.

I started staying in AirBnB places, because they were homely and I could do short [but expensive] lets. I'd recently reconnected with an old friend, so it was nice to live near him, in the East End.

I was running out of money again, so I stayed in a really awful hotel that's covered quite extensively in the blog post called Finsbury Park Fun Run.

That got me back to the Camden Hostel, but I was still hopelessly re-addicted to drugs. Trust me, it's hard to hide a drug habit in a 'regular' tourist hostel, and the tourists don't really love it if you're acting all weird because you're so strung out you can't even see straight.

Somehow, I managed to land the HSBC contract.

I ran out of money. Working for HSBC while living in a hostel is just not possible either. More drugs - whole week AWOL from work. Got away with it.

Stayed clean all the way to Christmas pretty much. I was a wreck on Christmas Day. I hadn't eaten for days. My Kiwi sofa surfer had kindly cooked the turkey but he'd pretty much cremated it, and it'd taken him hours to coax me out of my bedroom. Still, it was super kind of him to cook the world's most depressing Christmas lunch.

Then drugs, drugs, drugs to March 21st. I had a bag that could quite easily have kept me supplied for 3 years. That's the problem with being rich and choosing a cheap and powerful drug - you're never going to run out.

Are you spotting a theme yet?

January, February and March are my nightmare months. If I'm off kitesurfing at some exotic location, no problem. If I'm working a contract, no problem.

This year, I've had acute kidney failure and severe and ongoing leg/foot trauma AND the loss of my contract at Lloyds to deal with. However, I had the best Christmas ever and I'm also dating the world's most amazing girlfriend, so perhaps these things should cancel each other out?

I have to think about drugs at the moment, because my leg is so damaged that I need a cocktail of strong opiate painkilllers, nerve blockers and a sleep aid, just to be able to partially function. I wake up every 4 hours in the night in excruciating agony.

Through the urgent need to re-stock on painkillers, I found myself back on the Dark Web. It was a stupid move. I kinda knew I'd never be able to resist the urge to go window shopping. I tried to order weaker drugs that might satisfy the craving that was instigated by nothing more than buying other products, but lapse and relapse were inevitable.

My most amazing girlfriend in the whole wide world is somebody I could spend 100% of my time with, and never get tired of her company. We like the same trashy TV. We enjoy the same high-brow movies. We both have an insatiable appetite for feature-length documentaries. We love London. We love the same things and we love each other.

Why then would I relapse onto incredibly dangerous and destructive drugs?

The watchword you need to look for here is trigger. When I was with my ex-wife, if she ever went on holiday on her own - which is something she did regularly during the death throes of our relationship - it built a Pavlovian association with an opportunity to take drugs without having an aggressive abusive ***** attempting to kick my prison door in and screaming horrible things at me.

I found a black market seller who would supply just enough for me to have a moment of fun, but not enough for me to end up in a destructive binge. Then that supplier disappeared, and I ended up buying the next smallest bag I could find: 100 to 200 mild to medium strength doses.

The net result is that I spent all yesterday evening and all last night trying to jam my locked bathroom door closed with a pair of nail tweezers, because I was convinced that angry neighbours had phoned the police, and even a mob had formed outside my apartment, ready to heckle me when the police led me from the building, cuffed in shame.

That's a net result of two things:

1. Having more than you need of a highly addictive drug is bound to lead to a binge
2. It's impossible to measure milligram doses of drugs without excellent scales. The difference between no effect, and psychotic overdose, can not be seen by the human eye

I sold my scales because I've successfully been having long periods of abstinence, and it makes sense to get rid of drug paraphernalia that could 'trigger' a craving.

Of course, I should have controlled my craving. Of course, I knew what the worst-case scenario would be. Of course, it seems to suggest that the love of my beautiful girlfriend is not enough.

All I can say in my defence is that my life is pretty depressing right now. I'm on such strong pain relief that I can barely even concentrate on writing. I'm not well enough to go back to work. I've been stressed about running out of money and being evicted.

Life is also awesome right now, because me and my incredibly fetching and intelligent and knowledgeable girlfriend both have riverside apartments, and we take turns to spend nights watching sunrises and sunsets.

She has a really difficult decision to make right now. My longest period of abstinence from drugs is what? 9 months, since becoming addicted. My longest period of sobriety was 121 days. All my money has been frittered away on private healthcare, periods where I was too unwell to work, and yes - perhaps as much a 5% - has been spent on drugs. Would you choose somebody like that for your boyfriend?

Alright, so my drug habit isn't going to lead me to a life of crime. I've been cautioned by the police 4 times, but there's not much point in wrecking my career because I'm an addict is there, when I'm not shoplifting, dealing drugs, robbing, doing fraud or committing any other crime.

However, this weekend has shown that I still have the capacity to get myself in a life threatening mess. I was ready to stab myself in the carotid artery this morning, rather than have my life ruined by a criminal record and have all that shame on top of what has already been a pretty awful February and March.

Of course, nobody can deny that I brought this on myself and that the behaviour is just the same as it was over the last few years. Is my addiction getting better? It's certainly not cured.

If you want to know if my addiction is getting better, you could look at my medical records for 2014. I was an inpatient for 14 weeks. You could consider the fact that the longest period I had without my drug of choice was 2 weeks, for the first couple of years. You could consider the fact that I'm in a meaningful relationship with a kind, caring and compassionate girlfriend who's sympathetic and well informed. I'm not lying to her to have a drug habit behind her back. I've lied to her twice when she went away on holiday, both times shortly after I had lost a contract and was a bit depressed.

Ask yourself, am I worth knowing as a friend? I could drop a dirty HIV or hepatitis infected syringe in your kid's playpen. I might replace your salt with cocaine for a prank. I'll probably take money out of the purse and wallet of everybody in your house. I'll nick anything that isn't nailed down. All I want to talk about is drugs drugs drugs and my life story's not interesting because it just goes addiction addiction addiction. I'll bring shame on your family and you'll get in trouble just because you're friends with me. Not worth it, is it?

What about dating a junkie? Well, everything they say is a lie, and you won't like having sex with them all the time because you know they're probably thinking about a syringe of heroin while they're doing it to you. They'll take all your money and ask for more. Nobody ever got cured of drink & drugs. Death's too good for 'em.

I do feel terrible about the lies [two] and the betrayal of trust. Also, she knows that a binge could easily hospitalise or kill me. She's also trying to have a relaxing holiday break, but she knows I'm sick, haven't had any sleep and haven't had anything to eat.

She can't watch me like a hawk all the time. She can't spy on me using webcams when she's on holiday. She doesn't know what I get up to at home when she's at work.

Why take a risk on a loser with such a poor track record?

I've told her if she wants to break up with me, I'll fight to save the relationship, but I won't just say anything to talk her out of it. I actually advised her to break up with me, because I'm a month or two away from earning money again, I've got depression, bipolar and maybe even borderline personality disorder, along with the death sentence of dual diagnosis. Would you want your kids to have those faulty genes? Would you want your family to find out one day that you've been dating a loser?

Anyway, that's where I am right now.

No amount of stick will stop anybody from taking drink or drugs. I need to find a social group to regularly attend. I need to get out of the house more. Through socialising will come enjoyment of even more people's company, as well as routine. There will be new opportunities. Maybe a new hobby? I'll get a new contract and throw myself into work. Once the money starts rolling in, me and her can have holidays and plan adventures.

Could I replace everything and everybody in my life with supercrack? Almost. It is pretty fucking good. Still, how much money would you need? Even if you lived in a tent, I still reckon food & drink would cost you £150-200k over your shortened lifespan. I do however think you get sick of it after a while, but the bastard thing is so fucking good when you go back to it after a little break.

What can I tell you? That's the truth?

So am I honestly comparing a night with the love of my life, with a sniff of supercrack? No. The comparison is facile. If you choose the tent dwelling supercrack life, there's no coming back from that. Also, I've never been in such a good relationship in my life: it just keeps getting better and better.

One final question to ask yourself? Even if you think you have the perfect partner, perfect friends, perfect job and generally perfect life... do you still occasionally do something that looks totally insane in the context of your amazing life, like get too drunk, or take a recreational drug even though you never do drugs? Do you think the fact that you do that, means you love your partner any less?

Tags: #drugs #addiction