This is a story about the comeback kid...

Here's quite an interesting document, to me anyway - it says that I was transferred to a Northern city hospital's intensive care unit (ITU) on Sunday 10th September and all I had were the clothes on my back. The date of my original admission to hospital - Saturday 9th September 2017 - is shown quite clearly in the top left, under my name.

The reason why this document is interesting to me, is that I started having seizures at some point after arriving in hospital. I was already well into a fatal tramadol and codeine overdose when the emergency services got to me. I'm pretty sure I remember the hospital telling me that they'd make me as comfortable as possible but I was probably going to die, or words to that effect.

I've been through all my paperwork and I can't find my hospital discharge summary. I suspect that it may have gone wayward during the insane events of the Wednesday & Thursday following my fatal overdose. I will be obtaining another copy as soon as I can. Any documents I can lay my hands on are useful for me, because seizures, coma and unconsciousness are not particularly conducive to remembering the events of my hospitalisation very well.

What must be self-evident is that I was very sick indeed, to have been in intensive care.

Anybody who's followed my story knows about my plans. One only needs to go back to a blog post on August 10th to see one of the actual boxes of legally prescribed medication that constituted part of my fatal overdose.

I use those words fatal overdose quite deliberately. I had calculated the dose that would be fatal, doubled it and then chucked in another shitload of prescription opiates for good measure. I wasn't messing around. This wasn't a cry for help. This wasn't some attention seeking bullshit. This was a very real, calculated, pre-planned and meticulously executed suicide - following the precise steps that I had outlined earlier in the day.

It might surprise you to learn that I set an alarm on my phone, so that I wouldn't tweet or otherwise let on that I was in the process of killing myself, before I was beyond the point of no return. Who does that? Certainly not somebody who has any intention of going on living, I would've thought. Would you be brave enough to take a fatal overdose and gamble that you might get saved by social media? Seems like a pretty dumb publicity stunt or way of getting attention - in all probability you'd just wind up dead.

I remember when I was in the Emergency Department of the hospital, trying desperately to get a drink of water - I was fully aware that having more fluids in me would allow more of the deadly medications to be absorbed into my bloodstream, accelerating my death. The hospital were wise to my suicidal intent and they knew that they could ignore my requests to not be treated, as soon as I fell unconscious or started having seizures. The anaesthetists must have stepped in at some point and put me into a medically induced coma.

Imagine waking up in a hospital gown, with a tube coming out of your piss hole, sellotaped to your leg. Imagine waking up and not being able to speak, because there's a tube down your throat. Imagine waking up and all you can see all around you are machines that are either pumping stuff into you or taking stuff out - loads of screens and loads of digital readouts. I had more input and output ports than a Personal Computer (PC) from the 1990s.

I've written about this before, but I need to write about it again, because I'm trying to process what happened to me with only the scant information that's available. Between the hospital and the police, they pretty much conspired to keep my friends, family and work colleagues completely in the dark about whether I'd lived or died and what the hell was going on. I wasn't really conscious until Tuesday 12th of September 2017 - that's quite a long time to be in limbo land. On the Tuesday, I was vaguely aware that my sister and my work colleagues wanted to speak to me, and I wanted to speak to them, but I wasn't allowed to. What utter bullshit.

The police have since phoned the company that I was working for, and told them in no uncertain terms that I was in hospital and not at all able to communicate with them to let them know I was going to be off work on the Monday & Tuesday. However, the company has severed all contact with me and has been avoiding the office since Wednesday 13th September 2017. What on earth could they be so afraid of, that they daren't answer the phone or go to the office? What on earth are they thinking? I have no idea, because they won't return my calls or reply to my emails.

Over that Wednesday & Thursday following my fatal overdose, everything collapsed around my ears. Without a phone, wallet, cash, laptop or any of the other things most of us take for granted every single day, I was lost in a city that was nearly completely alien to me, with not a single person to turn to. It was highly distressing. It was exhausting and stressful, to go from place to place, replacing whatever I could.

The Apple Store in the nearby shopping centre became the centre of my world, having been impolitely muscled out of my office with rather flimsy excuses. I dug my heels in, because something fishy was going on and I wanted people to come clean - what the fuck was going on? Why was I being treated so unprofessionally? It was a horrible experience, and not something I should have been put through, given my recent discharge from hospital.

I received a phonecall saying I had an email with some letters from a solicitor, from the company I was working for. How was I supposed to read this email, without my laptop or smartphone? Nobody from the company would speak to me properly. I did not receive even the bare minimum professional courtesy that should be extended to somebody who'd been a valued member of the team for some time.

Because the matter is now being handled by legal professionals, due to the complete refusal of the company to treat me with the common decency that any human being might expect - let alone adhere to contract and UK laws - I can't really go into any more detail. I'll be sure to share the details of any court proceedings so that this blasted company can't get away with their inexcusable misbehaviour.

Of course, the pages of this blog document my darkest secrets in unflinching detail, but this is therapy for me and I do not mix my professional and my social media identities in a way that might besmirch or sully the reputation of a company that is trading ethically and within the law. There are a lot of Nick Grants out there in the world, and I'm just one of many. In fact, this whole blog could have been created by somebody who maliciously intended to impersonate me, for nefarious purposes, couldn't it? Have you been careful to check who actually controls my Twitter, Facebook and blog? Is there anywhere that there is a direct reference to who and what I actually do for a day job, that could justify the mistreatment I've suffered?

One should remember that this blog has been the best thing I ever did, in terms of being able to stabilise my life and recover my poise after homelessness, addiction, alcoholism, financial problems and a whole world of pain, absolutely tore me to shreds. Should I hang my head in shame and hide in the shadows? Should I keep my mouth shut, and pretend that nothing bad ever happened to me?

There's absolutely no way you're gonna shut me up without killing me. I'm loud and I'm proud. It's more important that I write my story in unflinching detail, than cowering in fear and attempting to cover up what's happened to me. What have I got to be ashamed of? I've worked damn hard to get my shit together after it was blown to bits, so I'm damn well going to write about it.

Of course, culturally we only allow those who are already successful to share their stories of their life struggles, that challenge the status quo and our preconceptions. Paul Gascoigne and George Best have done a lot to bring the ethical debates surrounding alcohol abuse into the public consciousness, for example. Ronnie O'Sullivan and Stephen Fry have candidly shared their experiences of cocaine addiction, but yet we still revere them as great people... why is this? If you've been reading carefully, you'll know that I'm teetotal and I'm not on any drugs, except for pregabalin (for nerve damage) and zopiclone (because it's bloody hard to sleep on a noisy psychiatric ward of a hospital) which are both legally prescribed to me.

It seems I've taken a battering, because of foolish assumptions that have been made about me. Just about the only correct assumption that you could've made, is that I should probably be dead, after having ingested such a massive overdose and had plenty of time for it to take effect before the emergency services got me to hospital.

I really can't get myself into the mindset, where I would mistreat somebody who'd been hospitalised and was very sick. Please, somebody explain to me what have I done wrong, apart from what I've already very publicly admitted to? Is it right to crucify me; to punish me beyond the punishment that I've already suffered? Do you not think it was awful, what I've been through? Why would you put the boot in and kick me when I'm down? I don't understand why the shit continues to be rained down upon my head.

Does somebody want to explain to me how it's at all ethical, that I came to find myself homeless, unemployed and isolated in a city I'd never set foot in two months ago, after I took all the risks and put in so much effort to try and make a go of things?

Answers on a postcard to Nick Grant, Planet Earth.

Tags: #suicide #depression #mentalhealth #bipolar #career

This is a story about trying too hard...

"You've got to meet my friend..." she enthuses. "Can [my friend] stay at your place on Saturday?" she asks, well in advance of the weekend. "You two were separated at birth - you share the same spirit animal" she tells me. The pressure to get along with this new person - talked about in reverential terms - is immense.

She's planning a meal out. At the restaurant, I'm told that I'm going to be sat specifically next to this over-hyped friend, because it's assumed that we are going to get along like a house on fire. That's an arson joke, but we'll get to that later.

Friday - the night of the meal - all my new friends-to-be had signed a card to welcome me into their lives. There was a helium balloon on the table, like at a 5-year-old's birthday party. Nobody ever went to such elaborate lengths to make me feel a sense of belonging; acceptance. I was almost moved to tears, but I had a job to do that night: to meet & greet and make a good first impression.

We were eating dinner - Brazilian barbecue meats - and my 'spirit animal' was sat in the corner of our booth, not eating. It was announced - against her wishes - that she had been on a 4-day drug binge, taking what is colloquially known as "meow meow". Unsurprisingly, an exclusive diet of powerful stimulant drugs does not give you an appetite for anything of nutritional value. Sitting in a restaurant is probably the last place on earth I'd ever want to be after a binge like that. I decided to temporarily park any "getting to know you" chit-chat with her until a time that my spirit animal was in a better place, physically & mentally.

After dinner, the group began to fracture. There were some who wanted to go to a packed noisy pub selling lousy overpriced drinks, and others who preferred to come back to my nearby apartment, where we could all have a comfortable seat on my big couches, and converse without having to shout - a bona fide middle-class thirty-something cliché: the house party.

One reason for the success of the house party is that it's a far better environment for the consumption of recreational drugs. I'm not foresworn from drug use, but to me, addiction is not a social activity. My general personality and attitude - no fear & everything to excess - had led me to drug overdoses of supercrack that put me in hospital with multiple organ failure. My drug taking was not recreational - it was abusive, reckless and akin to playing Russian roulette with a 6-bullet revolver loaded with 5 bullets.

If you have successfully made yourself a comfortable wealthy middle-class life, it's your mortgage repayments and other household bills that keep you awake all night, not powerful Class-A narcotics. To lose just one night of sleep and have the mentally destabilising effects of recreational drugs, has a profoundly negative effect on the week that follows. I never noticed that my weekend partying had a negative knock-on effect on me when I was young, but now my age has now become a factor.

One of my new friends - who's the same age as me - did the sensible thing and headed home at a reasonable hour. He had his sister's wedding on the Saturday and he appointed me as the responsible adult, in charge of putting the girl who was going to drive him to the wedding, into a cab, in time for her to then drive a gazillion miles across the country. "How are you going to stay awake and concentrate on the road after partying all night?" I asked her. "Amphetamines" was her answer. I can't fault her logic - if it works for fighter pilots, then why wouldn't it work for an ordinary car driver.

Fighter pilots have "go pills" and "no-go pills" which are taken respectively at the beginning and end of a mission. I offered to make her one of my special "no-go" preparations, so that she wasn't wired as hell at the wedding and clearly off her nut on speed, but she declined.

At the first ever party I've thrown in my new apartment, it was snowing. When the "good stuff" started to run out, Billy Whizz came out for a run. The white dusting on a makeup mirror started to become a hybrid mix of different substances. Molly came for a visit too.

Predictably, like any party that Charles is invited to, the whole room was talking over the top of each other and making boastful claims. For some reason, my reaction to this was to admit that I'm a grower not a show-er. This prompted one of the guys to claim that he was both a grower AND a show-er. Having been dared to get my dick out and show him I duly obliged in front of my guests. This guy then took me in the kitchen to prove one part of his aforementioned claim: he did have a substantially proportioned soft penis.

I then asked the room for their opinion on a classic ethical philosophical dilemma thought experiment, knowing that it would provoke lively and entertaining debate. Soon, this prompted a couple to leave the party, almost without saying goodbye because they were still arguing about the 'right' answer to a question that divides legal, moral and scientific opinion. "Bullseye" I thought to myself.

With Charles still having a strong influence on the room, oneupmanship raged out of control. We ended up comparing scars. While the girls were not exactly thrilled to show off any evidence of self-harm, me and the guy with the big [soft] dick debated who had the better scar from an operation. This segued into "who's spent more weeks in hospital?" as I steered the competition towards "who's the most insane?" knowing that I would easily be the undisputed champion.

At this point I was getting a bit bored with the war of words, so I just rolled up my sleeve and slashed 3 or 4 cuts into my arm with a kitchen knife. I then became immediately aware that I was so desperate to impress my new friends that I had just mutilated my body in a sudden act of self-harm.

With the theme returning to dares again, my 'spirit animal' dared me to suck my own penis. I explained that without an erection, it would be a difficult act to fulfil, but in the spirit of the dare, I asked if she would be content to see me lick my own foreskin. She confirmed that it would satisfy the conditions of the dare. Without hesitation, I dropped my trousers and got my soft penis as close to my mouth as I could, and then pulled my foreskin until I could touch it with my tongue - it was actually easier than I thought it would be. Obviously, there are not that many people - especially growers not show-ers - who would drop their trousers and suck their own dick for the amusement of their guests. This was a far more impressive feat of courage than cutting my arm with a kitchen knife.

After that, the number of crazy anecdotes that I could tell were stories that all revolved around a similar theme: being hospitalised or locked up in police cells. The stories that drug addicts tell are not that varied or interesting.

I decided to demonstrate my culinary skills in the kitchen. With an unspecified secret ingredient - some of the snow that was falling earlier in the evening - I gave a practical demonstration of a chemistry experiment. Namely the conversion of a salt to a "free base" where water, carbon dioxide and sodium chloride are isolated as 'useless' byproducts. This chemical reaction allows a salt with a high melting point - which would combust in the presence of a naked flame - to be altered into a crystal with a low melting point, allowing it to be vaporised without burning.

With sodium bicarbonate mixed with the mystery ingredient, in a spoon, a few droplets of water were added. The carbon dioxide fizzed away in a delightful effervescent chemical reaction. A few pinches of sodium bicarb later and we reached the point where the fizzing stopped. Then, I heated the spoon and boiled away the salty water, leaving only the "free base" crystals.

What would you do with this crystalline substance, one might ask?

Well, first, you need to take an empty beer or soda can and make an indentation at the opposite end from the bit you drink out of. Then, perforating the thin aluminium of the can with a pin, you can create an area where air may enter the can, when you to suck on the end you'd normally drink out of. Another option - if you can find such an object - is to take a hollow glass tube and put wire wool (Brillo pads work well for this) into one end.

Having allegedly made this concoction and strange contraption - which was all part of me showing off what a badass I am - I had allegedly demonstrated how to make crack cocaine and a pipe to smoke it. There couldn't have been a more "fuck you - I'm fucking hardcore" demonstration of how 'streetwise' I am, unless I'd whipped out some rubber tubing, a thin aluminium spoon, clean pins (hypodermic syringes), a small ball of cotton wool and proceeded to 'cook' a batch of heroin and prepare it for injection. I've never injected heroin by the way, although I did have fentanyl - which is 1,000 times more powerful - injected into me in hospital. Most people are afraid of needles and associate needle use with people whose drug addiction has led them to a completely dysfunctional life that consists of a miserable merry-go-round of theft/robbery/prostitution, 'fencing' stolen property, scoring herion and then getting high until there's no drugs left and there's only 4 hours until you get "junk sick" and have to repeat the whole exercise again.

Before I put the last of my party guests into a taxi - my friend who was driving to the wedding - at about 6:30am, three of us insufflated a few final lines of white powder, allegedly.

My spirit animal had a nice time until the drugs started to wear off, and then cognitive impairment, a drug-induced panic attack and akathisia (inability to stop twitching/tic'ing and/or jiggling of legs) left her in a rather sorry state where it was pretty clear that she was suffering from an unpleasant ordeal. I tried laughing at her. I tried telling her to stop being such a wuss, given the relatively 'mild' binge that she'd been on - just 4 or 5 sleepless nights, and relatively low doses of very impure drugs. In the end, I took pity on her and made her a little shot glass with things to cure her anxiety, replace lost dopamine and serotonin, and basically put her to sleep - there's no 'magic bullet' for insomnia and sleep deprivation, but sleeping pills damn well help. I threw all manner of things into my special 'comedown cure' that would ease her suffering. She was talking gibberish; she couldn't understand what I was saying, and I had to spend 20 minutes trying to maintain her concentration and eye contact for long enough that she could swallow what I'd prepared for her. Then, finally she fell asleep with a look of calm on her face. I don't mind babysitting the occasional person who's going through the consequences of 'self-inflicted' shit, but it would have been inhumane to let her suffer unnecessarily.

Saturday night, I made her another concoction that would prevent "the Sunday from Hell" where the consequences of an outrageous drug binge were brought into sharp focus by the need to start work again on Monday. "I want to order a pizza" she announced at about 11:30pm, having swallowed the curative remedy only 10 minutes earlier. "You have 10 minutes to get into bed, otherwise you're going to pass out on the floor" I warned her. My earlier good work had moved her out of binge mode and into a state where her appetite had returned, but 8 more hours of quality sleep was vital for both of us. The die was cast.

10 minutes later, I pulled her mobile phone out of her hand - the pizza company's number half-dialled - picked her up from the floor where she had collapsed in a most unladylike position, and carried her to bed. I was so tired that I could barely see straight to send a couple of texts before I passed out too.

After 9 hours sleep, we both awoke feeling pretty damn refreshed, considering the way we'd abused our bodies. I'd improved her average daily sleep time for the week, from 2.5 hours to 5.3 - more than 100% better. Ideally, we would all have perfect sleep hygiene and get 8 hours a night. I needed to end her drug binge, save her from many hours of unnecessary suffering and let her catch up on desperately needed sleep. I was giving her a fighting chance of not losing her job, thus spiralling even further downwards. This is about the best you can ever hope to do for an addict until they're ready to acknowledge that their addiction is rampaging out of control. Addiction always leads to complete & indiscriminate destruction of your entire life, health and will prematurely kill you.

I incurred the wrath of my 'spirit animal's' best friend for not condemning her addictive behaviour. Do I have the moral authority to lecture anyone on their lifestyle? I know better than anybody else I've ever met, how you can go from riches to rags. Supercrack was the paving stones of the road to Hell - hospitals, police cells, hostels and sleeping rough. I overcame my addiction to one of the most powerful drugs on the planet, as well as dealing with the total destruction of my life - divorcing my wife, selling my house, losing my job. So it would seem that if anybody's got an opinion that's worth respecting, it'd be mine. However, humans' relationship with drugs & alcohol is way more complex than "this is bad for me so I'm going to stop"... otherwise nobody would take drugs, get drunk, smoke cigarettes, drink coffee or energy drinks.

We live in a world where we try to find somebody with anatomically opposite genitals to us, squirt some love snot into them, and then spend the next 18+ years looking after our blood and mucous covered alien-like midget progeny, that was painfully ejected from the girl's sex hole. Human behaviour does not follow purely rational rules.

Human use of intoxicating beverages and preparations of plants that contain bitter alkaloids - with the intention of seeking psychoactive effects - is behaviour that's almost as old as cave painting, making fire and sharpening pieces of flint to make spears.

My kidneys are over 50% recovered from my last hospital visit. The facial tic that was caused - quite literally - by brain damage, has now repaired itself. The people and places that are no longer in my life because of supercrack addiction, have been replaced by a new city, new home, new job and new friends. Yes, it could've been worse, but believe me... nobody needs or wants to be told the bleedin' obvious. If it was just a case of saying "fire is hot and will burn you" and "knives are sharp and will cut you" then we'd see a 100% reduction in those injuries, by the bullshit logic that we need to nag and shame addicts into fixing their dirty little habits.

Often an addict is conveniently labelled as a black sheep, and becomes entertainment for the group that surrounds them. Lots of concerned hand-wringing and "we need to do something" empty talk goes on, but all that really happens is that the addict becomes a pariah, with nobody nonjudgemental left to turn to - it's the loneliest thing... lonelier even than being a homeless person injecting heroin under a bridge. Trust me: to spend time in the company of addicts and alcoholics who make no secret of their loss of control and the destruction of their lives, is to gain a nonjudgemental social support network that can make the difference between life & death. Fuck any condescending prick who thinks they're a moral authority who can sit in judgement and save you from yourself. Even with my stories of drug-induced insanity, hospitals, police cells and psych wards being by the far the most extreme you've ever heard, I can't tell an addict or alcoholic what to do with their life.

To hear the same hectoring, lecturing bollocks from people who [do or don't] know what it's like to realise you've overdosed and you've got 30 seconds to dial 999, or just let yourself die... it's not working, is it? I don't know if you've seen the stats, but only Portugal is winning "the war on drugs" and the way they're doing that is to destigmatise and decriminalise drugs, despite immense pressure from the United States to stop saving lives and improving the wellbeing of the Portuguese people.

So, that was the weekend that was full of drug-fuelled insanity that would supposedly trigger me to relapse back onto supercrack. Bullshit.

Tags: #addiction #friends #drugs

This is a story about key performance indicators...

Most of us have salaried jobs and most of us have line managers. We sit down once or twice a year with our manager - the boss - and we agree some performance objectives for us to try and meet. When we have an appraisal of how well things have been going at work, we look at whether or not we managed to achieve what we were supposed to do.

I hate to have to break it to you, but what you're doing is complete and utter bollocks.

In hierarchical organisations, your pay rise and promotion prospects are decided by somebody who's been promoted into a position of total incompetence. Intrinsic to their very existence, organisations have a pyramid structure, where there are vast numbers of people trying to reach the next rung on the ladder; the next layer of middle-management.

You would hope that hard work and rhetoric about meritocratic culture would help you get ahead in life, but you've been playing the game by the wrong rules.

Work is a popularity contest. If you want to get the best pay rise and the best promotion, you have to be liked by people who are more senior than you are, and you have to make your boss look good: those are the only two rules.

If you are not liked by your boss and you didn't do any of the things that you were supposed to do, it doesn't matter at all, so long as you did things that make your boss look like he or she is 'managing' you effectively. If you are liked by multiple senior people, then your boss will not be able to block any ambitions you have for promotion, which is pretty much all your boss is trying to do - bosses are promoted until they can no longer be promoted, and then they block their subordinates from progressing in their careers.

Being liked by your peers and/or your subordinates is completely unimportant. Nobody gives a shit about the underlings' opinions. Nobody is ever going to ask your peer group what they think about you. Therefore, to be popular amongst people at the same level as you - or below - is only to waste precious time that you could spend impressing more senior people.

It is notable, that at no point have I mentioned doing any work. This is because doing work is a complete waste of time. Nobody ever got a pay rise or a promotion for doing actual work. If you're busy doing work, then how are you going to have any time to make yourself popular or do things that make your boss look good? If you do the things that you agreed with your boss, how can your boss take any credit for doing anything other than just doing their basic job?

Thus, organisations have disincentivised work and incentivised spending time kissing asses and yelling loudly about how great we are, while we attempt to get promoted into positions of incompetence.

Seriously, if you think you're good at your job, you're stuck at a dead-end - you're going nowhere.

Pictured above is a plastic crate full of empty wine bottles, beer bottles and beer cans. When the plastic crate is full, I can count the empty containers, read the ABV (Alcohol By Volume) off each one, and total up the aggregate amount of alcohol that I have consumed in a given time period. This gives me a data point, which I can record in a spreadsheet.

You might assume that there would be an inverse correlation between my alcohol consumption and my monthly take-home pay, but in fact, the very opposite is true - the more I drink, the more I earn.

I'm not going to argue with the data. The facts are the facts. My consumption of alcohol is the best predictor of my income. I can't tell you what the causality is, but I can tell you for certain that there is a correlation. However, I will tell you what my hypothesis is though.

Drinking is a social lubricant. I'm prone to saying and doing regrettable things while under the affluence of incahol, but the lunchtime 'sesh' or the after-work beers are not subject to any organisational hierarchies - we are all equals when inebriated. Being drinking buddies with the bosses never did any harm to anybody's career, provided you are not sick on anybody's shoes.

Being hungover compromises your ability to function, forcing you to find creative excuses for your lack of productivity. Hanging around the water-cooler or coffee machine - nursing a sore head - you often encounter your partners in crime from the previous night's drinking escapades, many of whom will be senior managers. When later questioned "what the f**k have you been doing all day?" you have a absolute watertight excuse that you have been talking to some highly respected member(s) of your organisation.

Over time, the objective of achieving tangible productive output is replaced by the skill of being drunk or hungover for most of the time that you're at work, while also looking busy and making influential friends.

If we consider a hypothetical scenario. Subject A works hard and drinks very little, but subject B works very little and drinks very hard. We then plot the salaries and alcohol consumption onto a comparative graph. When we do this, we can see that subject A is badly paid, whereas subject B's wages are significantly higher and climb steadily - well above the rate of inflation.

Furthermore, if we measure our hourly wage, based on the amount of sober and productive time that we give to our employers, we can see that the heavy drinkers - at least in my own case - are paid an astonishing amount of money for their work.

One caveat: drinking a bottle of vodka every night alone at home, is out of proportion with the amount of alcohol being consumed with members of your organisation. When social drinking metamorphosises into pure alcoholism, your hourly sober wage becomes infinite. You are swigging from a bottle hidden in your desk or your gym bag, in order to maintain your state of intoxication throughout the working day... you are not making your boss look good or increasing your popularity with senior managers. In short, your days are numbered.

Great companies are built on the foundations of alcohol & coffee. Some of the most amazing people I've ever met are 'functional alcoholics' but the pejorative term seems to be an oxymoron. It's impossible to decide whether alcohol gives us the 'Dutch courage' to tackle horribly stressful things, or whether people who shoulder great responsibility, are reaching for the bottle to salve their anxiety.

Of course, I am not encouraging you to drink intoxicating liquor, but it would be dishonest of me to deny the facts contained in the data and perpetuate the myth that sobriety and productivity are virtuous, in the amoral world of business.

One must question one's motives for continuing existence. Are you here to pass on your genes - to rear your progeny - and if so then why are you not having unprotected sex at every opportunity? Are you here to maximise the amount of time that you are drunk or high, and if so then why are you not drinking morning, noon and night?

Some of the more conceited individuals who walk amongst us - including myself - talk about leaving their "mark" on the world. I imagine leaving a fucking great big smoking crater, like the one from that huge asteroid that struck the Earth, wiping out the dinosaurs. That's not to say I want to commit mass murder, but simply that I'm on a trajectory travelling at high speed, and I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to smash into and what damage I'm going to cause.

To avoid the difficult questions and the certainty that you will die and leave a hole in people's lives, is folly.

Why is it that I gravitate towards brilliant individuals, who are never teetotal vegans who abstain from sex, masturbation and everything else that might be vaguely enjoyable? Why is it that when you scratch the surface of anything that glitters like gold, there's a strangely alluring stench of debauchery?

If I wanted to die in obscurity, written off as an addict and an alcoholic, would I not have just allowed society to label me and blame me for everything that's fucked up and has no other convenient scapegoat? How can we hold William S. Burroughs and Ernest Hemingway in such high regard, when they epitomise alcoholism, heroin addiction and suicide?

To say I'll die a meaningless death is apparently untrue ("you'd be missed") but to say that my death will have repercussions - like ripples in a pond - is conceited and a dreadful cliché... many suicides are motivated by the idea that it's the grandest of gestures.

We must all confront our own mortality, and every day that you spend 'doing your job' is just a waste of fucking time.

Tags: #alcohol #career #suicide

This is a story about mass consumption...

"I need to stop drinking so much" I think to myself ridiculously frequently. Alcoholic drinks are very fattening and I'm not doing enough exercise. A combination of a sedentary job, depression and a physical injury, have conspired to give me every possible excuse I need, to spend my spare time in a state of intoxication. Banks grease the wheels of commerce - so we are taught in economic theory - and alcohol is the oily lubricant for every kind of social situation imaginable: births, weddings, celebrations & commiserations. I doubt the United Kingdom would achieve a fraction of its productivity, without the motivation of knowing we can have a beer or a glass of wine, when the working day is done.

It should come as no surprise to you that having lived on the ragged edge my whole live - an adrenalin junkie and extreme sport enthusiast - I would turn every knob and dial up to "11", give it 110% and to take things TO THE MAX, yeah!

The UK's chief medical officer recommends that I drink no more than 140ml of alcohol per week, which is 20ml per day. A conservative estimate for my current alcohol consumption would be 100ml per day, which is 5 times the recommended healthy limit. Each week, instead of drinking 140ml, I am drinking 700ml at least.

I have 3 pints of 4.8% strength beer after work, with my colleagues. An imperial pint is 568ml, and 4.8% of 568ml is 27ml. My daily allowance is 20ml of alcohol, so a single pint of beer already exceeds my daily drinking allowance by 35%. By the time I've drunk all three pints, I've had 82ml out of my weekly allowance of 140ml - 59% gone in a single social outing, and just 41% left for the rest of the week.

I have a bottle of wine at the weekend - a two glasses on Saturday, and a glass with my Sunday lunch. Wine bottles contain 750ml, and wine is around 13% ABV, so therefore that adds up to 98ml more alcohol, on top of the the 82ml I already drank, making a total of 180ml for the week - an excess of 40ml versus my recommended weekly allowance, which is 29% more than I'm supposed to consume.

The reality is that I easily drink two pints of beer or ⅔ of a bottle of wine each day. 14 pints of beer contains 382ml of alcohol. 3.5 litres of wine contains 455ml of alcohol.

Does that make me an alcoholic, you must be wondering.

My psychiatrist accused me of being an alcoholic, to which I replied "pish and fibble; what flabbergasting nonsense". We can do some easy calculations, to work out if I am an alcoholic or not.

Let's take the worst-case scenario where I consume 100ml of alcohol per day. Ethanol is metabolised at a constant rate in the human body. That is to say, the quantity of blood in your alcohol-stream does not follow some kind of exponential decay calculation. Assuming I drink for 4 hours each evening, by around 6am in the morning, I'm completely sober. This means that I'm stone cold sober for 13 hours out of 24, which is 54% of the time. This simple mathematics shows that I'm not an alcoholic, quod erat demonstrandum.

My psychiatrist is clearly not capable of recalling her basic medical training, which would have taught her that alcohol is metabolised by the liver in a completely different way to more complex molecules. Very specific proteins and enzymes are required to chemically decompose inorganic (i.e. invented in a laboratory) medications. We can do a simple test, to again prove whether I'm an alcoholic or not.

Again, taking the worst-case scenario where I consume 100ml of alcohol per day, if I was to abruptly stop drinking alcoholic beverages, we should expect me to exhibit alcohol withdrawal syndrome within a few days of sobriety. Assuming that I suddenly ceased all alcohol consumption, I should - at the very bare minimum - get shaky hands and other physical symptoms that would prove that my body has become physically dependent on alcohol. The fact of the matter is that I can stop drinking for 2 or 3 days, and suffer no ill effects beyond a psychological craving for intoxicating liquor. This simple test, again shows that I'm not alcoholic, QED.

Despite the failings of my highly qualified physician - my psychiatrist - who has specialised in the alteration of brain function through the blunt instruments of psychoactive medications, she unarguably stumbled upon a truth in amidst her lazy and untrue accusations of alcoholism: I do drink too much.

Another definition of an alcoholic or an addict, is somebody whose life is adversely affected by drink or drugs, but who does not respond to the negative consequences in a rational manner. If you put your hand in a fire it hurts, right? So, why would you put your hand in the fire again? The perverse behavioural pattern of continuing to act in a way that is undeniably harmful, has also come to be recognised as another definition of alcoholism and addiction.

One only needs to consider the question "why do people smoke?" to see that there is grey between the lines. Smoking is expensive, makes you smell, stains your teeth and makes your mouth taste unpleasant to any non-smoker whom you kiss [with tongues and stuff] - these are the immediate consequences of smoking tobacco. In the medium term, smoking will give you a revolting phlegmy cough as well as literally burning enough cash to purchase a reasonable quality second-hand motor vehicle, or enjoy several foreign holidays. In the long-term, emphysema and lung cancer will bury smokers in an early grave.

It's oft-quoted that "the liver is the only organ in the human body that can repair itself" but this is patently untrue. Chronic cirrhosis - scarring of the liver - will not heal itself. Conversely, many drug addicts who have overdosed and been declared "brain dead" have gone on to make full recoveries, despite a consensus of medical opinion that life support should be withdrawn. The BBC commissioned Louis Theroux to make a series of documentaries about life in Los Angeles, and the episode entitled "Edge of Life" recorded the 'miraculous' recovery of a man whose brain was deprived of oxygen for at least 12 minutes, which is well beyond the limits of what we believe any human to be able to withstand.

Many of those who have been unfortunate enough to be a victim of a stroke, will go on to recover the ability to speak, walk and recover other functions that were lost as a result of brain injury - this is underpinned by the inherently plastic nature of the brain. Plasticity does not mean 'made of plastic' - it means adaptable to change, including the ability to recover from trauma.

An alcoholic may easily consume a litre of vodka per day - perhaps some 400ml of alcohol - which would equate to 2,800ml of alcohol per week. Given that the recommended weekly intake for a man or woman is just 140ml, alcoholics - of whom there are very many - consume at least 20 times as much alcohol as they should do, according to the UK's top doc.

It seems unsurprising that somebody who drinks to an incredible level of excess - where they are intoxicated from the moment they wake up to the moment they lay their head to rest - should sustain an injury to their liver, rendering the organ irreparably damaged.

This essay does not seek to argue that I would not benefit - in terms of my physical and mental health - by abstaining from alcohol consumption. However, one must be mindful that drinking is endemic in UK culture and to be a non-drinker would impose significant societal pressures and judgements upon me. I have, in the past, been falsely accused of being a "recovering alcoholic" merely for the reason that I chose to be teetotal for a period of over a hundred consecutive days. I decided to be alcohol abstinent for a competitive challenge - one of my best friends had completed a period of 100 days of sobriety. In the end, I beat his sober-streak by 20 days.

If you're concerned about your alcohol consumption, drug habit or the quantity of psychoactive medications that you guzzle into the cavernous hole in your face every day, then you should simply ask yourself this one question:

Are you shovelling more and more mind-altering substances into your body each day, or have you found a steady quantity that satiates your want and need for intoxication?

While you fret about eating a 'balanced' diet and being 'healthy' you forget that for 4,000,000,000 years, organisms - just like us - have had to cope with a world that's too hot, too cold, too acidic, too alkaline, too oxygen rich, too carbon-dioxide rich, too sulphurous, too contaminated with arsenic & other toxins, and generally fucking hostile to anything that we define as 'alive'. Humans inherit all of the many abilities to deal with everything from the icy wastes of the frozen poles to the dry & scorching sandy deserts.

The ubiquity of alcohol represents the antidote to the curse of becoming self-aware; the torment of perceiving our own mortality; the torture of realising that life is fucking bullshit, and we all die alone. If we don't go crazy we'll lose our minds.

I do not seek to dissuade alcoholics from seeking treatment, nor do I encourage anybody to recklessly endanger their health. I would hope that any reader who has been able to follow the thread of my thesis to this point, would be able to see that I'm mounting a robust attack on those who seek to perpetrate alarmist & sensationalistic nonsense, onto a populace who have been harmlessly intoxicating themselves since well before any form of any recorded history.

If you are teetotal, I applaud you and I advise you to maintain your alcohol-free existence, but you probably possesses some characteristics that predispose you towards abstinence, not shared by your brethren who imbibe intoxicating liquor. Please; do not smugly think of yourself as morally superior.

By happy accident, I never addicted myself to nicotine, so I look upon smokers with a detached sense of amazement that tiny quantities of a plant alkaloid - in the order of a grain of salt - can induce antisocial behaviours in those who are in the vice-like grip of nicotine: a chemical compound whose psychoactive properties are formidable. I apply a cool objective reasoning that I am able to enjoy, to other addictions that I do and do not partake in.

It's Friday, and in the time that it has taken me to compose this essay, I have consumed 35% of my weekly alcohol allowance.

Cheers!

Tags: #alcohol

This is a story about winos...

If you've ever spent a night in a cheap sleeping bag, you'll know what it's like in the small hours of the morning, when the temperature plummets and you can't get warm - you're frozen to the bone and your body shakes to move your muscles, burning energy to heat your blood, which keeps you awake. All you can think about is how nice it would be to be snug and warm and cosy. A rough night will teach you to appreciate your duvet, blankets, heating boiler or furnace, roaring fire and other sources of warmth, like spooning with your sweetheart.

I've slept on a glacier, and it's horrible how quickly the ice leeches away the heat from any body part that strays off your sleeping mat. Concrete is just the same - without some insulating barrier between you and the floor, the cold seems to rise up and enter you... your lips turn blue and your teeth chatter.

In this city of concrete, brick & cement, limestone and granite, there are far more homeless people than I'm ever used to seeing. I've been homeless and slept rough in London. The UK's capital city is a magnet for those seeking to improve their fortunes, through employment opportunities, begging from rich tourists or simply the high quality narcotics.

"Have you scored?" yells a man behind me, to a man at the other end of the road. It's 9:30am on a Wednesday, and these two beggars look familiar to me. My ten minute walk to the office takes me past almost 15 men, who all congregate along the route between the city's two main railway stations - each with their own 'patch'. Some sit quietly with a paper cup on the pavement in front of them; eyes downcast but intently watching the world go by in their peripheral vision. Some look me square in the eye from several hundred metres away - well aware that I am pretending to not notice them - before timing a polite and muted "spare some change please?" request to perfection... all I can say is "sorry mate". Some linger at an intersection, where they step into my path... "excuse me" they say, and my eyes flick up to meet theirs... they know immediately that the element of surprise has not worked - I saw them before they saw me - and I continue my walk undiverted.

How do I know that it's a man who slept rough in that doorway, and he was probably an alcoholic and/or a heroin addict? If one wishes to be pedantic, I don't.

Speaking frankly, a woman who sleeps rough is is at risk of becoming a rape victim at some point. Another unspeakable and unpalatable truth is that a woman in the grips of addiction is not going to spend her nights having her body illegally violently sexually violated against her will, when she could spend that time turning tricks - there are an insatiable number of punters for blowjobs and sex - to pay for just enough heroin and crack to numb the pain of another shitty day of human existence.

What I say is not sexism, prejudiced or anything other than the situation as it stands in the UK - sadly, there are enough rapists out there to make sleeping on the streets a dangerous thing for a woman to do, so our local government will ensure that they are not complicit in any acts of rape or sexual assault that get perpetrated on the streets, though their negligent inaction.

A single man with an alcohol and/or drug problem is not considered to be vulnerable enough to be housed by the local government. In fact, the alcoholics and addicts who line the busy thoroughfares of this bustling city, are viewed as a liability with regards to giving them money and a place to live. "They'll only spend it on drink and drugs" completely misses the point about cause and effect, but statistically it's proven to be mostly correct. Council houses (a.k.a. social housing) and apartments have been turned into absolute shitholes by so many men in the past, that the local authority treats their homeless adult single male population like a plague of modern-day lepers.

Thus, I can make an educated guess that this almost entirely unused fire exit doorway, was where a man laid his head to rest last night. He was probably a heroin addict, but this means nothing - whether it's a symptom or the cause of his destitution is a non sequitur, because homelessness and addiction are intractable. It is as if we ask "which came first? the eggshell or the egg yolk?" without considering the ridiculous notion of having one without the other, and completely ignoring the chicken.

The United Kingdom was flooded with cheap alcohol during the boom years of the 1980s, when the British pound sterling was strong versus the French franc, and enterprising men and women set off across the English Channel to bring back vast quantities of wine. France grew grapes and fermented them in a country that was predominantly rural and agricultural. England, by comparison with our nearest neighbour, has dense areas of population clustering around factories, coal mines, steel mills, dockyards and other organs that were necessitated for the functioning of an empire, as well as the defence of the realm.

Heroin's quality and availability once fluctuated wildly in the UK. The fields of opium-yielding poppies flourish in Afghanistan and Thailand, but the trade routes - the Silk Road - were at the mercy of incredible geopolitical forces. Now, thanks to the intervention of the USA and the UK in illegal foreign wars and 'regime' toppling, the supply of high-quality cheap narcotics has never been in more rude health.

If you think a homeless heroin addict single man is a fool and a failure, you are wrong; completely wrong. If you think in terms of 'bang for your buck' a £10 bag of heroin is going to get you a lot more fucked up than £10 of alcohol. If you think that injecting drugs is insane, you haven't considered the insanity of putting something you've paid your hard-earned money for, into your acidic stomach, where nearly 1/3rd of it will be destroyed. The rational thing to do is to put 100% of your intoxicant directly into your bloodstream.

If we followed the logic of the homeless man, we would all have a canula in one of our veins, and we would pay £1 for pure ethanol to be squirted into our bodies from a syringe, whereupon we would be immediately intoxicated to the point of near-blackout.

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Before we go any further, I should make it clear that I am not advocating injecting drugs - or drug abuse of any kind - nor have I ever injected any drugs, or had another person inject me with narcotics.

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If one wishes to consider the desperate plight of an addict or alcoholic, one only needs to think about the period when many homeless men would drink methylated spirits. Methanol differs from ethanol chemically, but methylated spirits - known colloquially as meths - has been deliberately poisoned by manufacturers, in an effort to discourage human consumption, without success. I can buy 5 litres of meths - roughly the same volume as 7 bottles of wine - for around £10, but to drink it would kill me. Out of desperation to avoid delirium tremens, which can cause seizures and death, alcoholics will drink small amounts of meths to self-medicate for their physical dependence on alcohol, despite the fact that it will cause them to go blind.

The war on drugs and the war on terror have now created a reliable supply chain, whereby the most powerful narcotics on the planet are available at unsurpassed purity and at rock-bottom prices, as never before witnessed in human history.

Competitive free-market economics has given rise to a swathe of pharmaceutical giants, vying to innovate with new medications that are 'better' than anything seen before, in a race for profits. Fentanyl and carfentanil were born into this world in the 1960s and 1970s, respectively. Carfentanil is so potent, that an aerosol mist of it could be used as a weapon of mass destruction. Although the Russian government does not officially acknowledge it, carfentanil has been used in a terrorist hostage situation - pumped into a building as a gas - resulting in the deaths of 125 innocent civilians in a single incident, from opiate overdose.

The rise and rise of the zero-hours contract McJob and a hopeless future for unskilled labourers, in the face of global capitalism, has created insecurity and the total destruction of the prospect of happy and contented family life for a scandalous number of men. While pram-faced mothers, with gold hoop earrings and their hair held back tightly in a scrunchie, will be prioritised for social housing, our entire welfare system discourages work and parental bonds. Economically, a single mother is better off than one who stays with the father of her children. Dads have been made redundant by cheap Far-Eastern labour. People respond to incentives, and so we have created a generation of children from broken homes. We have created an unacknowledged mountainous scrap-heap of homeless single male drug addicts, in a society that has no better use for them, other than to let them rot.

We are all familiar with the concept of supply and demand, but there is also something intrinsic in our genetic programming that makes us seek out value for money. It seems obvious that given the choice of intoxicants, I would select 1 gram of carfentanil instead of 1 gram of morphine. An amount of carfentanil the same size as a grain of salt is enough to kill me by overdose - carfentanil is better value for money, being about 10,000 times more potent than morphine.

The opium smokers became morphine addicts, then diacetylmorphine (heroin) addicts, then fentanyl addicts and now carfentanil addicts. The subsection of the population who have abandoned hope are always driven to seek the strongest mind-altering substance that they can obtain, for the money which they beg (panhandle), borrow or steal in order to support their 'habit' each day.

1 kilogram of carfentanil could kill the entire population of the United Kingdom. Carfentanil is produced in bulk quantities in the Far-East, where - ironically - all the manufacturing and mining jobs have gone, leaving vast numbers of men economically redundant.

In this city where I now live, the capitalists drove the cloth-making industry into a race to the bottom, negatively affecting the prosperity of nations such as India, which has over a billion inhabitants. It seems apt that the 'payback' for this global suicide pact should be so publicly conspicuous. Homelessness and addiction are openly on display, as symptoms of a world that is sick with an illness that's called capitalism; vulgar greed and hoarding of wealth.

I am full of sorrow that so many of my fellow citizens are left bewildered as to what happened to their once-great nation, and seek solace in all the wrong places. To help even one man (#frank) exhausted my economic reserves. All I have left is the power to spread word to more people than I could ever manage to speak to individually, using the power and freedom of the Internet. I preach to the converted, so often, but to stop and speak to the abandoned men - each in their 'patch' - is impossible in the face of a capitalists waving a fistfuls of dollars in front of a sea of hungry people.

All I can say to my readers who own computers, smartphones and Internet connections - you have a golden ticket that the man who slept on the cardboard in the doorway last night, does not have. He's viewed as trash, just the same as the remnants of his existence left behind when he awoke and moved elsewhere this morning.

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

This is a story about succession planning...

The British have always liked hot drinks.

Coffee shops were terribly trendy in the late 1600s, having been launched in Oxford before springing up across London, where ships that brought the crop of beans to English shores found many willing patrons for the roasted, ground and brewed end product.

Tea symbolises imperial Great Britain. The Indian town of Darjeeling - formerly part of the British Empire - is synonymous with the tender leaves that citizens of the United Kingdom douse with boiling water, infusing bitter plant alkaloids into the hot liquid. "Put the kettle on" are four words that will be said in millions of homes this evening, despite the stimulating effects of caffeine.

Cocoa beans have given rise to hot chocolate, also known as drinking chocolate. Even a small UK food & drink shop will offer all manner of flavourings for hot water. Nestled in amongst the other things that my fellow Brits would categorise as 'hot drinks' I found something that I think of as a powerfully concentrated and flavoured spread, ideally enjoyed on toasted slices of bread - a jar of Bovril beef extract.

The flavour of Bovril is closer to Marmite and Vegemite - or any other brand of yeast extract - than it is to beef, in my opinion. How exactly they "extract" Bovril from a cow is something that I don't really want to think about. I suppose it's a macroscopic version of what they do with microscopic yeast - microorganisms are just the same as cattle really... eating, shitting, reproducing and not doing much else.

In this Bovril-drinking Northern city, conspicuous by their absence are people with skin tones darker than my own and women wearing headscarves. I formerly lived in a region where the population is 46% Muslim. Surprisingly, the Bengali shopkeepers have no issue with selling pork and alcohol to those who are not forbidden - for religious reasons - from eating swine flesh and imbibing the intoxicating liquor created from fermented fruits and grains.

In this unfamiliar part of Northern England, there are innumerable drinking establishments in my local vicinity, as well a vast number of hot food outlets where a bacon or sausage "bap" can be procured as a traditional breakfast snack.

India - before she was partitioned in 1947 - was a nation where Muslims would respect the holiness of cows in the Hindu culture, and reciprocally the Hindus would respect the Muslim rejection of pigs as unclean animals, and alcohol as an addictive intoxicant that places a heavy burden on any society that permits its consumption.

Modern global society still holds strong religious views on the treatment of domesticated animals and the brewing and consumption of alcohol. When we examine the historical evidence using the scientific method, we can see that cows and pigs would not exist today as we know them, without human intervention spanning many more thousands of years than even the oldest religion. Furthermore, we can see that humanity has been intent on its own intoxication throughout the history of civilisation. The Mayans were chewing coca leaves at least 3,400 years before Islam had its golden age, and vastly predates Hinduism and Judaism. Ergo, we must conclude that excluding beef, pork, alcohol and other things from our diet and habits of consumption is a relatively recent 'fad'.

The Chinese are the biggest per capita consumers of pork, while America and the developed nations hoover up vast quantities of refined coca leaves in the form of white powder cocaine and rocks of freebase cocaine, known as crack. Opium, morphine and diamorphine (heroin) are endemic worldwide. Caffeinated beverages - hot or cold - are guzzled by the globe. Alcohol is cheaper than bottled mineral water from desirable brands like Evian or Perrier. Yet, only in the North of England - so far as I know - do people consume a hot drink made from Bovril.

I hate being spread thin. I'm adaptable and I can be sent all over the globe to work with people who observe different cultural traditions. I am relatively worldly-wise enough to not commit a faux-pas, such as eating food before sundown in front of those observing the Ramadan period of fasting. I can pretty much figure out whatever you want me to do, if you're paying me enough and you're not open to persuasion that your ideas are probably terrible in their original unmodified form.

Why have a dog and bark yourself?

Now I find myself juggling the essential task of finding a doctor who will keep me supplied with the medications that I have become physically dependent on, while also settling in a new home in an unfamiliar city. I must also meet the demands placed upon me in the pursuit of enough money to eat, service my debts and give myself more security and freedom of choice.

I'm withdrawing from Xanax (alprazolam), Valium (diazepam), Ambien (zolpidem), zopiclone and Lyrica (pregablin). All of these drugs work in a very similar way - mimicking the brain's own 'brakes' and calming neural activity. These medications cause a chemical called GABA to be released in the brain, block the brain from recycling any unused GABA, or imitate the 'signature' of GABA itself. The overall effect is tranquillising, stress relieving and aids sleep, but the withdrawal is quite the opposite. In fact, the abrupt withdrawal from any or all of the medications listed can cause life-threatening seizures.

I must juggle social drinking - alcohol is a mandatory social lubricant in most UK culture - with the need to use alcohol as a form of self-medication for the stress I'm under. I also use alcohol as a substitute for the powerful psychotropic medications that my body has become dependent on, like heroin addicts kick their habit using methadone. Alcoholics can break free from physical dependence using benzodiazepines such as Librium (chlordiazepoxide). I'm doing it the other way round, because I know I can stop drinking - I plan on doing so in October, when I will use the excuse that I'm going teetotal to raise money for charity (a.k.a. Stoptober) - as I have done successfully before.

How I ended up with so much on my plate is not really my intended subject of this lengthy diatribe, but in my dark and difficult moments, I am facing a clusterfuck of competing demands on my time and energy, while also dealing with panic attacks and a general feeling of uneasiness and discontent; a false perception of threat, danger and imminent disaster.

My perceptions are not completely warped. Earlier this year, both my kidneys completely failed. Very recently I narrowly escaped homelessness, bankruptcy, destitution and destruction. Unpleasant feelings are a harbinger of a genuine medical emergency - I am detoxing myself without the supervision of a doctor or nurse, while also working full time.

I've skippered yachts and kept my crew safe in stormy weather; I've led groups safely up and down dangerous mountains covered with snow and ice; I've become blasé about near-death experiences, because I've now had so many. I don't think I'm exaggerating or being hyperbolic when I say that I'm facing my life's toughest challenge so far.

The demands placed upon me in my day job seem unreasonable at the moment, but I was desperate for fast cash. I was drowning and I was thrown a lifeline - beggars can't be choosers.

Friends who have submitted themselves to the mercy of the state seem to have suffered greatly from the trials and tribulations of dealing with compassion fatigued bureaucrats. A great many nurses and doctors have told me that I'm 'entitled' to live at the expense of the government - i.e. my fellow citizens - because of the taxes I have paid in my life, and because my mental illness disqualifies me from being 'fit for work'. To put work as my priority, ahead of treatment is something that none of my doctors want, but equally there's a long queue of people who would prefer to sit at home smoking cannabis and playing on their Playstations, rather than flipping burgers or scrubbing toilets for the minimum wage.

Like concentrated beef extract, I'm intense; I'm focussed; I can achieve a lot very quickly. The terrifying truth is that the world applauds anybody who exhibits bipolar behaviours... what happened to all those 'overnight successes' and 'one-hit wonders'? They spent all their money on fast cars, beautiful women, drugs & alcohol, and the rest they just wasted, is the oft-repeated quote.

Once you've figured out a winning formula, all you can do is teach others to follow in your footsteps. If you can train an army of mini-mes to do the grunt work - the heavy lifting - then life becomes more sustainable. Only a fool repeats the same behaviour, expecting different results.

And so, I desperately need to find my successor - somebody to fill my shoes and shoulder some of the burden, allowing me to recover and stabilise, rather than being trapped in a cycle of just repeating things that I've done before a thousand times.

It's hard to find somebody who's willing to do a shitty job, and it's hard to find somebody who's able to navigate their way through the piles of shit and find the better way of doing things. I might be that diamond in the rough, but that doesn't mean it's a great idea to get me scrubbing toilets or flipping burgers, even though I will do if you ask me, pay me and I'm desperate enough.

Having a desperation-driven economy, with most of us spread thinly - stressed out and always on the brink of breakdown and ruin - is a terrible, terrible thing to do to people.

Hunger will drive ingenuity and industriousness, but it's not a sustainable strategy, no matter how much Bovril you have to eat and/or drink.

Tags: #career #addiction #drugs #mentalhealth #bipolar

This is a story about panic attacks...

Am I thirsty or do I just want to get pissed? I feel like my world is falling apart, but maybe I just want to numb myself with medication. I feel like I can't cope, or is it that I crave soothing chemicals? I feel like the tasks ahead are impossible but my perceptions are clearly warped - I don't know which way is up and which way is down.

If somebody was to burgle my home, I'm not sure whether they'd be more pleased with the expensive consumer electronics that they could resell, the wad of Euros that they could convert into pounds or the massive bag of opiates, benzodiazepines, sleeping pills and other highly coveted medications, which would probably be the reason for their criminal trespass in the first place.

I stopped taking opiate painkillers earlier in the year. It was hard, but it wasn't that hard. Sweating and nausea and pain; constipation and loose bowel movements; sleepiness and blunted emotions - withdrawal was over eventually and I don't even remember it being that bad, in hindsight.

How long have I been drinking a bottle of wine every day for? Tonight I've had a tiny bottle of beer and that's it, but my drinking has raged out of control, as I've sought to calm my nerves and self-medicate for incredible stress and emotional pain in my life.

How long have I been taking tablets for? Certainly long enough that if I abruptly stopped, I would have a seizure. It's a miracle that I haven't had a fit, but the gaps I've had in-between handfuls of pills - lasting two or three days - could have killed me in a multitude of other ways anyway.

Almost every day, I wonder why my optimism and hope has turned to fear, doubt and despair - I become convinced that I'm unable to function; unable to face the future.

Like many addicts any alcoholics, I'm overwhelmed by negative feelings and I become convinced that the only way to ease my suffering would be to kill myself - quickly by suicide, or slowly with drink & drugs.

Without structure & routine - social contact and the prospect of a happy & contented life - it's a miracle that I've not plunged into the deep depths of fully blown alcoholism and an ever worsening drug problem. Today was a sink or swim day, but I made it through.

No bottle of wine today. No Xanax. My situation is improving. My unhealthy consumption patterns of alcohol, drugs & medication, continue to abate, despite the protestations of my brain. I was in two minds about committing suicide tonight. I was tempted by alcohol - of course - but the urge to drink was relatively easily resisted.

If you wished to categorise me as an alcoholic and/or a drug addict, I'm afraid your attempt would be thwarted by the facts. Alcoholics can't stop drinking and drug addicts can't stop taking drugs. Guess again, sucker.

I'm suffering unspeakable discomfort at the moment, but I'm forcing my body - including my brain - down a path that it's reluctant to take, but it's for its own good. It will be weeks, maybe even months before I feel the benefits of what I'm putting myself through, but I know that if I don't do it, the alternative outcomes are very undesirable, to say the least.

Eventually, I will sleep without sleeping pills, feel free from panic & anxiety without tranquillisers, be able to cope with my neuropathic pain without painkillers... perhaps my body will even repair its damaged nerves, without the interference of artificial compounds not found in nature. Two and a half million years of human evolution, and you think we got everything right in the last 70 years?

Would I take antibiotics for an infection? Yes. Would I edit my genes if I could get rid of any faulty ones? Yes. However, psychiatry doesn't have a lot of triumphs to crow about - if superbugs don't kill you, then mental illness will probably ruin what little quality of life you had anyway.

My brain tells me I'm about to die or that I should kill myself. I know - rationally - that my brain is feeding me unreliable information, and that I should ride out the storm, however, knowing this doesn't make me feel any different at all.

Eventually, it's too much.

Tags: #suicide #alcohol #addiction

This is a story about an addiction to adrenalin...

See that red circle? That's where I've lived for the last 2 years. Only two or three times a year, the combination of wind speed, wind direction, and a low tide will all co-incide, creating perfect conditions to be able to kitesurf at my local 'beach'. That's me, launching my friend's kite at the edge of the water.

The water is slightly brackish, but at low tide it's mostly full of really really nasty stuff that will give you an ear infection, eye infection, gastroenteritis or other medical complaint due to contact with and ingestion of faecal coliforms.

I was on holiday on a North African desert island, with a beautiful sandy beach and warm water, one week after I excitedly told my friend that the conditions were perfect for him to achieve a lifelong ambition of kitesurfing in the middle of our capital city... far, far away from the sea. Is it any wonder that I didn't want to spend a week puking my guts up and taking antibiotics?

Just to prove I'm not pulling your leg, above is a picture of my mate dodging his way in-between boats, as he crossed the river on his tiny kiteboard. He even did a trick because he knew that a bunch of shocked onlookers were videoing him - ever the showman, but who can blame him?

If you don't believe me about dodging between boats, have a look at the kind of vessel that cruises down the river, that I can see from my living room.

Yeah, that's the same river and yes that's my lounge and balcony. That's the same view that I have taken hundreds of photos of, all from that same vantage point. Yes, that's a frigging cruise liner sailing right past my apartment, which is every bit as surreal as you'd think it would be.

Also, if you thought I was making pathetic excuses about why I didn't want to go into the dirty brown water, then check out this next photo, taken a week or so later.

Yeah, that's me in the shades, looking all pasty white because I don't get to leave the house much these days. Just look at the beautiful aquamarine colour of that water. There was no need for a wetsuit - the water was as warm as bathwater. Why would I want to swim in raw sewerage when I had this week of kitesurfing heaven to look forward to?

I will my miss riverside life, but I've paid a king's ransom to experience it, and I've also had a queue of lazy liars, who've wanted to take advantage of me and my industriousness & ingenuity. It's been hard work to make these kind of iconic and memorable life experiences possible. It might sound boastful, but is there anything wrong with reaching a point where you can look backwards and say - without a shadow of a doubt - that you've lived your life to the fullest possible extent.

There used to be a time when the future couldn't come soon enough. I wished away today on tomorrow's dreams and ambitions. Then, I lost my virginity, learned to drive a car, got my first full-time job, bought a house, married a girl... one by one, I ticked all the things off the list.

How rich and 'successful' do you want to be? I've owned both a yacht and a speedboat. I've stayed in fancy hotels and had luxury holidays. I've eaten in the best restaurants, had the most gourmet food and drunk the finest wines. If you continue in relentless pursuit of the glitz and the glamour that you see in films and on TV, then you'll never be happy and content. No matter how many digits you have in your salary or net worth, it'll never be enough. Do you want to earn a million? Why not a billion? Do you want to be the first trillionaire? Why not a quadrillionaire?

If you were cursed with even a handful of braincells, I hope you'd quickly figure out - like I did - that things like experiences and friendship have an intangible value that can't be measured in dollars, pounds, euros, yen, rupees or even shiny gemstones and lumps of rare metals. You can't eat diamonds, although I must say I haven't tried. I have had a drink that contained actual gold, floating around and getting stuck in my teeth, like shiny bits of food, but even if I drank loads of that stuff, all I'd end up doing would be quite literally flushing money down the toilet - gold cannot be metabolised.

So, it's with a heavy heart that I leave my riverside home tomorrow, but it's not been the best place I've ever lived. The best place I've ever lived co-incided with when I had the most friends who I saw on a regular basis. More friends = more happiness. In some ways, my apartment block has had the stench of misery about it - full of rich old men with nothing to look forward to in life except a swift and painless death.

Maybe that's all there is for me in the future: frustration, disappointment, age-related illness, pain, discomfort, suffering and then death. However, I've got a few years before I'm 40 (technically) and I haven't passed on my genes to any unfortunate offspring yet. I'm still a hopeless romantic who believes in true love and holds out hope of meeting a special somebody to spend the rest of my life with; to grow old and grey with.

There's a moral question about whether it's right to drag an individual kicking and screaming literally into existence, as a shitting, puking, pissing, blood and amniotic fluid covered hopelessly helpless baby version of a fully-grown human being. There's another moral question about whether it's right to do so, when you can see that climate change and Donald Trump have our planet on collision-course with disaster. There's a personal moral question, about whether it's right to take the risk that I might pass on bad genes, or act as selfishly and irresponsibly as my parents did - to inflict as much misery on an innocent child who has no choice in matters which so deeply affect their quality of life.

I'm so desperate not to be like my dad, that there's an easy way to guarantee that never happens: to never have children of my own. However, can I say that I really experienced every possible thing that it's possible for a human to do, unless I sire and rear my own genetic offspring? It's a gut-wrenching decision. I'm more risk-averse than you might think, given the number of times I've risked my own life, but it's quite another question entirely when you're talking about the miserable childhood of some poor kid.

In leaving the capital city, I leave behind a huge pool of highly educated, highly intelligent and devastatingly beautiful women of my age, who decided to have put career first and placed motherhood on hold. Now they're all shitting themselves about the sun setting on their fertility, and make bloody brilliant girlfriends, to be honest. Prior to my my thirties, my experiences of the opposite sex had rather made me wish I was homosexual.

Talking of sunsets, this is the last photograph I'll ever take from this balcony, in all likelihood. I literally just rushed out and snapped this photo in-between writing the last sentence and this one. This is goodbye. There will be no time for anything more tomorrow, as I throw the few remaining unpacked items into my luggage and head off to start my brand new life: a fresh start; a new beginning.

You could have walked in on any chapter of my life and felt anything from pity to envy; from disgust to sympathy; from protective instincts to the desire to join a long queue of people who'd like to cause me distress and misery. If you think I've lost my sense of perspective, you're wrong; you've leapt to the wrong conclusions and too hastily. There are two years of my life captured here, on the pages of this blog. I invite you to dip in at random and judge me based on the extreme ups and downs that you can read about... everything I've been through.

Of course, I view myself as no different from anybody else. We all get hungry, we all get thirsty and most of us want to get laid. Beyond that, of course I view pure blind chance - luck and probability - as the only over-arching thing that's led me down one path, while you down another. Our places could easily have been the other way around, in another life; another universe.

So, dear reader, I will write to you again, after I've arrived at a destination that is completely alien to me.

Wish me the best.

Tags: #london #kitesurfing

This is a story about changing beyond recognition...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a story about pulling the wool over somebody's eyes...

Every day, between 6pm and 8pm, I get a visit from a different stranger. They all belong to Tower Hamlets' Community Mental Health Team, and specifically to the home treatment Crisis Team, but it must be a big team because I almost never see the same person more than once. Everybody's reaction is the same when I let them in: "wow! look at the view!".

The fact is, I have enough money to last me 2 more weeks, but then I'm not just skint... I'm actually insolvent. I have a lease that doesn't expire until September and I have to service various debts that I ran up, just trying to stay alive.

"Oh, you probably spent all your money on drugs" I hear you say.

Recently, I was on the dark web, looking for something for a friend - something to relieve pain that wasn't on offer on the NHS. Having located some vape oil, containing medical cannabis, I then couldn't resist the urge to continue window shopping. To my alarm, the worldwide supply of supercrack had dried up, due to the Chinese very effectively banning the production and sale of it.

There was one supplier - in the whole world - selling his remaining stock of supercrack. 10 grams. That amount of good quality cocaine might cost you £900. For 10 grams of supercrack, I paid the princely sum of $134.

How long do you think 10 grams of supercrack lasts? Well, we can work it out. A severe addiction might consume as much at 15 milligrams per day - that would be enough to not sleep for a whole day and night. So, easy maths then.... 10,000 divided by 15 = 667 days. One year and ten months, of daily drug abuse for $134. No. I did not spend my money on drugs.

So, back to the strangers in my home each evening. I sit them down on the sofa, next to the patio doors that lead onto the balcony.

Still somewhat wowed by the view, they can also see a number of expensive electronic trinkets lying around. The conclusion that is instantly drawn is that I'm not really in crisis, but in fact I'm wealthy, successful and totally in control of my life. They couldn't be more wrong.

I wrote about this the other day, but lurking behind the door into the kitchen, are a load of bottles for recycling. In theory, I've stopped drinking, but that's just a technicality. If you're in the grips of a mental health crisis or drug-induced behaviour, then you don't tend to have a glass of wine in front of the TV. Remarkably, I've had a bottle of white wine in the fridge, unopened, for over a week.

"Why don't you just have one glass and stop?" a psychiatrist asked me. I replied that oxygen would make the wine go off, so I needed to finish the bottle once it was open. She suggested a vacuum pump wine preserver, to which I replied that I bet I'd never be able to find one. The penny dropped, and she realised I was taking the piss. The reason why I don't stop is because I don't want to. Alcohol is an effective way of getting intoxicated, so you don't give a fuck about your problems... except I do seem to give a fuck in a strange way, because whenever I get ridiculously drunk, I punch my bathroom door so hard that it makes a hole in it. Then I wake up and think "why did I do that?" and I'm filled with regret.

Strangers who come in my house don't see my bedrooms. My main bedroom with the ensuite has got blood spots all over the floor from some accidental injury or something. There's lots of evidence that I imprisoned myself in that room, for some reason. In fact, there's lots of evidence outside the communal areas, that I've absolutely lost my mind at times.

Recently, being in possession of quite a good set of tools, as well as a box of screws, I set about attempting to screw a desk to the door of my spare bedroom, or something like that. The plan wasn't even clear to me. Once you lose more than about 3 nights of sleep, your priorities are quite corrupted. Instead of hydration, food and sleep, my focus switched to barricading the bedroom door. If you have a dark sense of humour, you may chuckle at the fact that as soon as I had completed my task, I then needed to undo my work because I needed to use the lavatory.

These are the kinds of things that are quite important if you want to understand just how sick I am, but the 'window dressing' which is my lounge, balcony and view, rather distracts from the piles and piles of dirty dishes, and overbrimming laundry baskets. The home visit team members walk away thinking "I must tell my colleagues about that awesome view", rather than "I must tell the doctor that the patient looked like he hadn't slept for days, or eaten much".

Can I fix things? I've pretty much given up hope. There just isn't time.

10 grams of supercrack certainly doesn't help, and I knew that a relapse would be one problem too many, on top of a giant shit sandwich. However, the things I've tried that are a sensible and realistic approach, have brought in way too little cash for way too much effort. I'd rather have my MacBook Air and iPad Pro, than a few pennies, even if they're surplus to requirements most of the time.

I could keep up appearances for friends and family, but I lived in fear of my work colleagues discovering that I suffered from mental illness for so long, that the exhaustion became unbearable. It was an open secret that I would be late to work during periods of depression, or not turn up at all. Everybody knew that I liked a drink, but I surrounded myself with other heavy drinkers. The problems worsened, and I had to run twice as fast to just to stand still. I came to London, knowing I could burn a bunch of bridges, and never exhaust all the options open to me, but it's bullshit, having to interview for jobs when you've got a 20 year career behind you and countless people who know you're good at what you do. Also, why shouldn't my friends know what's going on in my life. If they're true friends, they'll see that I'm still me, but I'm in crisis - they won't suddenly change their opinion of me, because of prejudice, although one close friend did and it broke my heart.

Don't lift up the rugs or look under anything: I've swept so many things under the carpet. Out of sight out of mind. I don't bear close scrutiny, but nobody looks very carefully anyway. First impressions count for everything.

After the insanity comes a further insanity - a paranoia that my flat is trashed and I'll never be able to bodge it up good enough to escape hefty bills for repairs that are completely over-inflated by the unscrupulous letting agents.

Where am I going to go? What am I going to do? The fact that you're asking those questions is the clue as to why I might wish to escape into alcoholic oblivion, or take supercrack. There are no easy answers. I know I keep going on about it, but the whole hospital/dialysis/job loss fiasco has left me questioning what the f**k I'm doing, working IT contracts in London, except for the staggering amount of money that it brings in. It doesn't compensate for the up-front stress, followed by the abject boredom and misery.

You'll probably find me sidling up to you in a bar in 20 years time - the known local drunk - and saying to you "I remember the time I lived by the River Thames and worked for the world's biggest companies" and you'll think that I'm some delusional twat.

I hope I just die before I suffer that indignity.

Tags: #mentalhealth #depression #alcohol #drugs #addiction