This is a story about cyclical natures...

Summer = happy. Winter = sad. It's usually that simple. Why would anybody be happy in winter? Winter is a time of hibernation, cold, hunger and death.

However, human society has evolved to take advantage of seasonal variations. We all tend to have a wild time in August, as our children are off school and we also enjoy the good weather and general festivities. Summer brings optimism and joy, in line with our increased energy levels due to longer days and the balmy air temperature.

Frankly, this summer has been the most depressing that I can remember.

I thrive on human connection, and most people are distracted with all the fun of the fair at the moment. The bright lights and fanfare of the Olympics and other theatrical bullshit are titillating the fickle attentions of the proletariat. It's mighty dull for anybody who doesn't subscribe to the mass hysteria that can afflict our society of simpletons.

So, I'm riding out the summer, waiting for reality to bite and the true situation to reveal itself. Things always look better when bathed in golden sunlight. In the shortening days of the autumn, things are going to look pretty bleak. I don't relish the collapse in the current mood of delusional optimism, but at least destruction heralds reconstruction. So many things are broken. Limping along thinking everything is OK is not helping anybody.

I have now come to understand my own cyclical nature. Normally my moods are dictated by the prevailing weather, but now my mental health is so deeply damaged that even summertime cannot lift my depression. However, I'm able to appreciate that all of humanity is similarly affected by the weakness that means they feel unreasonably happy when the sun is shining.

Last year, I predicted a winter of discontent. This was plainly wrong.

But! I tend to be a bit premature with all my proclamations of doom. The number of years that I've been talking about a collapse in the London housing market have proven ridiculously wrong... although the bubble continues to inflate to epic proportions.

I was once young and naïve. Now I'm old and cynical.

I've made a few smart predictions: the credit crunch, the commodity boom (gold, oil) and Bitcoin. I've profited from astute investment and hedging during every crisis of the last 20 years. I'm most definitely proactive, not reactive.

The simplest thing to predict is that summer must come to an end. People will come back from holiday. The kids will go back to school. Workers will go back to their jobs.

In the cold light of day, everything's going to look pretty shit.

Tags: #economics #politics #bipolar

This is a story about surprises...

We are very keen to jump to conclusions. So many of us read the headline and assume that we know the story. Surprisingly large numbers of people will comment on a social media post without even clicking through and reading the content. It's so easy to walk in on a chapter of somebody's life and assume that you know the whole story.

Mental health problems? Blah blah blah... go and see a doctor, get some happy pills and all your problems will go away. No need to hear the end of that story. All problems can be medicalised and will be just fine if you just speak to the right specialist. For sure there are people out there who deal with this kind of stuff. Not my problem. Go away.

Drugs? Say no more. We know how this ends. Yes, your story is bound to involve selling your own grandmother to unscrupulous rogues in order to raise money for your dirty habit, and basically you're filthy scum and don't even deserve to have your story heard. GET OUT OF MY EYES AND EARS and go away.

Nervous breakdown? Why not take up yoga? Stop and smell the flowers. Do cartwheels in a field. Other people have things so much harder than you so I don't even know what you're complaining about. Everybody's life is terrible. Get a grip on yourself. It's all in your head. Why don't you exercise more? Salsa dancing? Homeopathy? I'll write the end of your story for you: all your problems went away and you were magically transported to the land of milk & honey. The end. Go away.

Sex addiction? You filthy pervert. Go away.

Workaholic? You should try sitting around on your arse on a continous jolly holiday. Why don't you retire or take up knitting? If you force yourself to smile, you'll suddenly feel much happier about everything. Take some deep breaths. Have you thought about shutting down the system and rebooting? Failing that, you can reformat the hard-disk and reinstall the operating system.

Isolated, lonely and suicidal? Chin up. Look on the bright side. Suicide is so selfish. Suicide just leaves a big mess for other people to clean up. You're so attention seeking. Cry for help. If you were serious you'd have done it already. Go away.

We are being told that problems are all in our heads, and the only person holding us back from achieving our full potential is ourself. This is utter bullshit. There are so many barriers to entry and things that are holding us back. Life is more complicated than every self-help book, motivational quote and trite soundbite that sounds inspirational but is actually really depressingly useless.

People who are happy and fulfilled are the ones who go to the gym, cook organic freshly prepared meals, don't smoke, don't drink, do yoga, meditate, smell the flowers, swim in the ocean and generally swan around having a lovely time. Doing those things is not the cure or the answer to anything. Doing those things is a symptom of the fact that your life is pretty bloody perfect. There's a reason why people are depressed, stressed and anxious, and it's not that they haven't done enough yoga.

The yoga can wait. It really can. I'm far too worried about earning enough money to pay my rent, bills, food, transport and other cost of living expenses, while also keeping myself washed, clean shaven, hair cut, nails clipped, nose and ear hair trimmed, and with enough clean clothes that are not completely threadbare in order to have a reasonably professional appearance. I'm far too worried about servicing my debts, staying on top of my taxes, keeping up with the administrative headaches that our bureaucratic government forces upon us, as well as turning up at work and keeping a seat warm from Monday to Friday. The yoga can wait. I'm far too preoccupied with my soul-destroying job that makes me suicidally desperate for escape, but escape is eternally just out of reach.

So you're going to quit your job and go travelling? What about your kids? What about your pets? What about your family? What about money? Oh, you don't have any money? Well you could save some up, couldn't you? Oh, you've been trying to save some up, but you're having a crisis NOW? Well, can't you just postpone your crisis, perhaps for another 30 years?

So you're going to quit your job and find a new career? What about your rent? What about your bills? What about all the money you need to pay for tuition and certification? What about the money you're going to need to fund yourself when you're looking for an entry-level job? What about the huge drop in income you're going to have, having no experience in your new career? What about the tent that you're going to buy because clearly you're going to go homeless if you lose your source of income?

So you're going to leave the city and get away from the rat race? What about the fact you don't have any friends or family anywhere else? What about the fact that there are no opportunities anywhere else? What about the fact that you've got nowhere to live, no car, no van, no tent, no cardboard box?

Oh yes, the world is stuffed full of opportunities to avoid the sources of stress that are destroying you. Yeah, sure it's all in your head and you should just imagine what you want to be, snap your fingers and it will come true. How's about a ballerina, footballer, pop singer, astronaut, fireman, deep sea diver? Yeah. The only thing holding you back is YOU you stupid dummy. How silly of you.

Or you could just do some yoga. Yoga fixes everything.

Here's the image that you had to click through to see, and scroll all the way down here. I hope the reward was worth it. Well done. Gold star.

Tags: #mentalhealth #suicide #addiction #career #depression

This is a story about taking a break...

This time last year I was charging around Ireland, exhausted and stressed out of my mind to the point where I was losing my marbles, because I'd had such a rough ride up to the point that I finally got out of the country for a few days break.

August is a dreadful time to get anything done. The French have the right idea, basically taking the whole month off work, leaving the cities and heading for the coast. I peaked a little early this year, because I wanted to be on holiday while celebrating my birthday.

A friend raised the very valid point that becoming engaged in debate is exactly what I'm looking for when I'm courting controversy. To say that I'm shitposting or attention seeking would be untrue, but there's certainly a reason why I don't just keep a private journal.

Now that I'm in my mid-thirties, most of my peers have spawned offspring, and that means they're taking their snot-nosed little shits on holiday. Can you sense the provocative sarcasm? Certainly the irony in my tone has not come across effectively at times, causing offence to stressed out mummies and daddies over my irreverence towards the magic of parenthood.

Every so often I reconsider whether what I've been writing is balanced and fair, and occasionally somebody tells me I'm out of line or otherwise gives me feedback that directs my attention towards points of view I hadn't considered.

However, now we are in the middle of the school holidays, I definitely feel like any attempts to address my critics would fall on deaf ears. Most of my child-encumbered chums are too busy trying to stop their offspring drowning while in the paddling pool or World War III from kicking off in the back of their family-sized car packed with infants and infant paraphernalia.

Unless you've met me during your sprogged-up years, you're not going to know that I'm actually poking fun. For my own amusement, I'm assuming a caricature: that of the footloose and fancy free bachelor, who is too much of a cultured citydweller to be bothered with mopping up sick and pooh. In actual fact, if you have met me during your years of parenthood, I hope you think I'm at least a little bit sympathetic to the trials and tribulations of raising unruly offspring, and it's obvious that I actually like kids.

Ironically, those friends who genuinely are footloose and fancy free and have rejected the commitments of family life, have also missed the point. While they are off partying around the world, with buttloads of disposable income and zero fucks given for how the other half live, they've ignorantly chided me for not being more grateful for my lot in life. A couple of pals who life has conferred considerable good luck upon, have deigned to give me a lecture on homelessness and the struggles of the working class... presumably while also sipping champagne on a yacht and completely failing to see the irony.

The irony is not lost on me, no matter what you might think, and believe me when I say that I do consider those who have not been fortunate in life when I bemoan my own situation. I hope that I always give an adequate nod to say that I acknowledge my own fortune that I haven't had my limbs all cut off and lemon juice squeezed in my eyes while my testicles are removed with a rusty spoon. My God I'm so glad that didn't happen to me. Oh how terribly fortunate I am. I can hold up a prompt sign if you like, so you know when I'm being sarcastic.

I have this strange habit of directing what I write at various groups of people or individuals, which must be very confusing as a reader, but it's also confusing for me as a writer. Who am I writing for now? My passive-aggressive attacks on my parents, and my rebuttals of my critics, have fallen on deaf ears. It's the school holidays and everybody's off on the beach or at a country show.

I could stop, regroup, and even take this opportunity to actually write on themes rather than using my writing as a vehicle to deal with the demons of my mind and argue aloud with the thrust of my critics words, even if they're not reading or responding.

There's something satisfying in knowing that you've won the argument, whether your opponent listened and responded or not. So many people are terrible at debating anyway, believing that contradiction is the same thing. "No it isn't" then "yes it is" repeated ad nauseam. Yawn!

And so it is, I feel like I'm talking to myself, and this feeling is further exacerbated by the summer break and the "calm before the storm" moment I'm facing, where I feel like I'm shouting into an empty room, but I also know that I'm closer than I think to making a breakthrough.

Taking a break can so easily mean the abandonment of a project, and the web is littered with abandoned blogs. I might not have achieved much, but I've certainly achieved a degree of consistency.

I'm so close to turning a corner, and yet it feels like I'm getting nowhere during a lonely school holiday where everyone is distracted spending time with their families in the sunshine while I plug away at an unfulfilling job and continue to bare every aspect of my soul on the public Internet.

I could stop, but then I would be like Wile E. Coyote when he runs off the cliff. It's only when he stops running and looks down that he falls. If that cartoon coyote just kept running he would be fine.

That's the discipline of the completer-finisher. That's my discipline. I don't stop. I don't give up. Not until I achieve something. Not until I reach some kind of goal. The project's not done. I have to continue even if it's bleeding me dry.

Anyway, void, I know you're always here listening to me and it's mighty therapeutic to be able to talk at length. Feels a bit weird continuing to blog away when so many people are off on their summer holidays, but there we go!

Tags: #writing #ireland

This is a story about the rich:poor divide...

Theresa May, the British prime minister, had the gall to lecture the poor on living within their means. In actual fact, the poor are working hard and just trying to keep up with the wealthy, who are racing ahead.

If you look at the Instagram account called Rich Kids of Instagram you will see that it is extremely popular. 'Reality' TV shows that have followed mega-rich people like Ozzy Osborne and family, the Kardashians and the cast of Made in Chelsea, are some of the most viewed and talked about things on television. Wealth worship is everywhere, and is it wrong for people to feel that they deserve a little of the life that is rammed down their throats by the media?

When we are talking about living within our means, this is coming from politicians who spend 6-figure sums of money each year on expenses alone, while also pocketing salaries that are many many times more than the average wage. The problem comes right from the top. The more that rich public figures splash their cash, the more the hypocrisy is insulting when they tell the poor to tighten their belts.

How many people on council estates are driving Ferraris that they can't afford the repayments on? How many hardworking families have ordered yachts that they now can't afford to pay the remaining balance on?

When we talk about living within our means, we are talking about people who are quite familiar with budgeting, make do and mending, and the general attitudes of postwar austerity. Really, when talking about living within our means, we should be talking to the banks, who recklessly endangered their financial stability by not living within their means in terms of their ability to maintain solvency. It's the banks that are insufficiently capitalised and are excessively over-leveraged. It's the banks that have lent many, many, many times more money than their reserves allow, in the pursuit of endless effortless profits.

When a person borrows money, they intend to repay that money using hard work. The borrower will go to their job every day, and be productive. In return for a person's hard work - productivity - they will receive their salary, with which they will buy the things that they need and repay their debts.

When a banker lends money, they intend to profit for no labour at all. Through interest slavery, the banker will make money, simply because they already have money. Using the money multiplier - fractional reserve banking - the banker will in fact be able to lend the same money, over and over and over again, multiplying the amount of effortless interest that is earned each time.

It is the banks who are not living within their means, nor being hardworking or productive in any way. It is the banks who have decimated global finances, and are now demanding that the hardworking people accept austerity, pay freezes, job insecurity, unemployment and low growth, simply because they overstretched themselves in pursuit of yet more effortless and labour free income for doing absolutely nothing.

Let's imagine that a banker, with zero money of his own, is paying a generous interest rate of 0.25% on deposits - exactly the same as the Bank of England. Using a fractional reserve of 5%, which is the minimum requirement for today's stress-tests of banks, to make sure they're adequately capitalised in the event of another credit crunch, that means the banker can multiply a £1,000 deposit into nearly £19,000 worth of loans. Obviously, the loans carry a hefty interest rate. Let's imagine that the banker lends out the £19k as overdrafts, which often carry a 20% APR on the high street. In a year, the banker will now net nearly £4,000 of profit, for doing absolutely nothing, out of just a £1,000 deposit. That's a 4 to 1 ratio! For every £1 deposited with Utter Bastard Bank Plc, they're going to make nearly £4!!

So, while the poor toil and tighten their belts, buying the cheapest groceries they can and cutting back on every expense, the banks are getting fat for doing absolutely nothing at all. Interest slavery is a con and a crime, and the perpetuation of this situation is the only reason why ordinary hardworking people are having to suffer NHS cuts, crowded public transport, packed classrooms, pay cuts, redundancies and every other economic penalty for the bankers' failure to live within their means.

Yes, we'd all like to make money while we sleep. Yes, we'd all like money for nothing. However, a bank is just utter bullshit. A bank is supposed to be an instrument to grease the wheels of commerce, not a massive leech, sucking so many pounds out of people's pockets, for every penny they leave in their bank accounts.

And, when you're richer, the things that go wrong in your life are mere pocket change. Let's look at a person who earns £20k, versus a banker who earns £200k, i.e. a 10 to 1 ratio:

• Parking fine £50... costs the banker £5
• Car breakdown £500... costs the banker £50
• Need a new central heating boiler £3,000... costs the banker £300
• Private school fees £12,000... costs the banker £1,200
• Food £300... costs the banker £30
• Holiday £700... costs the banker £70

Imagine if your budget used the values that the banker pays. They're a much smaller percentage of your income, aren't they? Life would be a lot easier if everything cost 1/10th of what it does. Well, guess what, the banker pays exactly what you pay, except they earn 10 times as much, so the two things are equivalent.

Everybody's car breaks down from time to time. It's a fact of life. In fact the shitty old unreliable banger that the poor family bought, is much more likely to break down than the brand new BMW that has a warranty, that the banker bought.

Once you've got money, you can keep it and you can make some more. If you haven't got any, no amount of living within your means is going to improve your situtation. It's a con. It's utter bullshit. It's a swindle.

When the banks in Italy start to fail, and cause a domino-like collapse of all the banks across the world in a re-run of the 2007/08 financial crisis, except much, much worse, it will become apparent that all of the suffering that ordinary people have gone through in order to rescue a deeply flawed banking system, was for nothing.

I think people are going to be pretty angry when they realise that patronising idiots like Theresa May arrived in their positions of power by luck not good judgement. I think people are going to be pretty angry when they find out that the good times never stopped in the City of London, and pay rises and bonuses are just as big as they ever were, while all the hardworking ordinary people suffer the consequences of propping up a broken and corrupt system.

It's time to smash the system, and rip it out of the hands of a psychopathic elite who would have us starving and dirty, living on the streets, if it meant they could maintain their ill-gotten position of wealth, power and domination.

What's the difference between a successful banker and a struggling worker? Absolutely fuck all, apart from pure dumb luck, but those arrogant fucks don't even realise how fucking hypocritical and patronising they are when they accuse other people of being underachievers, having been profligate and poorly mismanaged their finances, and having not worked hard enough.

It incenses me, that a tiny handful have such unimaginable wealth, when so many billions live in abject poverty. Just 62 people have as much money as 3.6 billion others. There is so much that is wrong with that. Off with their fucking heads!

Tags: #banking #capitalism #politics

This is a story about equilibrium...

I've now had exactly as many days on Planet Earth as an adult as I have had as a child. I guess it's time to pretend to act like a grown up a little more now.

I guess at some point, one day, I'm going to stop living in the past and going on about all the things that went wrong, or are broken in my life. It's been a little tough to "move on" and "look on the bright side" when there have been constant reminders, constant stressors, constant anxiety.

But this week I am on a desert island, somewhere off the coast of Africa. This is good. It is sunny and it is windy. Bliss.

There's a good chance this could be seen as boastful. It isn't. It's been well over 3 years since I had a week's holiday. I think I deserve it.

Of course, nobody deserves anything. Think of the starving children etc. etc.

However, maintaining equilibrium of mental health is a battle of whatever it takes. If I need to drink coffee and alcohol to tweak my mood up or down, to get through the day, I'll do it. If I need to eat unhealthy food or laze around in bed feeling sorry for myself, I'll do it. If I need to treat myself to a week off the rat race, the daily commute, the insanity of a bullshit job, I'll do it.

This is the payoff. This is the reason for living in a concrete jungle, wearing a straightjacket of a suit and not walking out of the office yelling "YOU'RE ALL GOING TO HELL" while making obscene hand gestures at everybody.

We're only here once. We only get one life. Nobody is getting out of this alive.

So, I'm going to ride my board on the ocean, blown along by the wind, with the hot sun beating down on me. Screw you, world, I kinda won here, for a moment.

For a brief moment in a monotonous daily routine of questioning my very existence, my place in the Universe, I'm briefly liberated from the deeply unsettling feeling that everybody's kids and grandkids are going to have a really shitty time due to the collective insanity of humanity.

For a brief moment, I cared more about not surfing into a giant rock that suddenly revealed itself to me, as the sea pulled back and a wave rose up.

There's something life-affirming about entering the ocean, where you also enter the food chain.

Kitesurfing has long ceased to be a 'survival' sport, where you're just happy if you have a session where you're not smashed into any hard objects by your massive kite, but you can still have the odd occasional unexpected rock, or something brushing your foot or leg from the depths of the ocean.

It's a pretty guilt-free pleasure... using the wind and the waves to power yourself along. No carbon dioxide is being released to propel you forwards. You're just harnessing the forces of nature, as best as you can.

Of course, nature is always humbling. An unexpected gust will tug you skywards. An unexpected wave will pummel you towards the sea floor. What unexpected life-affirming event ever happened to you in the office? A paper cut?

So, it seems pretty clear that I need nature, wind and waves in my life, to maintain some degree of equilibrium in my life.

Money potentiates the pursuit of the things you need to stay sane and happy, but it's not exactly necessary. There are plenty of other systems and non-systems for organising the human race, such as barter, anarchy etc.

I'm playing by the rules, and things have started to go my way. Please don't presume that I'm off the critical list, but I'm certainly in a good place at the moment.

You might think of me as very self-centred and melodramatic. You might think of me as complaining too much, and ungrateful for my lot in life. You might think that my expectations are unrealistic.

However, I'd be pretty happy to be a destitute beach bum right now.

Tags: #kitesurfing #mentalhealth

This is a story about ups & downs...

I used to quite enjoy my hypomanic episodes. I haven't had one for over 8 months though, and I'm beginning to miss the energy, focus, enthusiasm, fast-paced thinking, creativity and passion for something, anything.

When I average out the amount of time that I would spend hypomanic versus the amount of time I would spend depressed, you'd think that it's something you wouldn't want, because my episodes of depression were always far longer than my episodes of hypomania. However, I never wanted to give up those hypomanic highs, even though my episodes of depression have been brutal and I've nearly taken my own life.

Some people ask me "aren't you just experiencing what every human experiences? Joy and sadness?". Here is a graph that kinda explains the difference between Bipolar and 'normal':

Do you see much difference?

The first thing I should draw your attention to is the range. The red line never reaches the dotted line that signifies hypomania and depression. In any given moment, you might be happy that your sports team just won a game, or you might be sad because somebody ate all the cakes, but this is a normal range of moods. In normal life, you're not spending every cent in your bank balance, taking crazy risks and undertaking insane projects at breakneck speed. In normal life, you're not unable to work or socialise, and on the brink of suicide.

The second thing that I should draw your attention to is the irregularity of it. It's unpredictable, because it's dictated by external events. Who knows when a friend is unexpectedly going to drop by and say "Hi!" which will lift your mood. Who knows when your boss is going to say something's wrong with your work, which will make you upset. These events are unpredictable, because they come from the world at large, which is also unpredictable. This is normal life. Normal life is unpredictable and exciting.

With my Bipolar II, I know that every episode of hypomania is going to be followed by a crash. I know that my hypomania is going to last a few weeks, maybe a month and a bit. I know that my depression is going to last anywhere between 6 weeks and 6 months. These episodes are monotonous. Sure, good stuff and bad stuff happens during those episodes, but it does little to affect my prevailing mood.

This year I seem to have had the longest depression of my life. It's given me somewhat of an appreciation for what it must be like for people with Unipolar Depression. Here is a graph of what my life looks like at the moment:

Looks pretty bleak, doesn't it? Unrelenting depression, and only very brief moments where I feel OK. Look how sharp those spikes are. Surely my life can't be that bad?

Well, look at it in these terms: we are now in July. That means that in 2016, I have had 7 months of this shitty feeling. January to April, it was understandable that I was depressed, right, because it was shitty winter, I was unemployed and I was stressed about running out of money and being evicted out of my apartment onto the streets. You can surely empathise with that situation, and agree that it would be pretty depressing?

So what about May, June and July? Well, I've been working a job that I took out of desperation. My mental health really does not permit me to be working a shit job full time, because I'm exhausted and demotivated, due to the aforementioned depression. But what about all that cash I'm earning? Shouldn't I be happy - glad - to have a job again?

Well, I'm working to replenish my savings. I'm working to pay off debts that I ran up when I was unable to work. I'm working to literally stand still.

But what about fun time?

Well, look at it this way. There are 120 hours in the working week. Let's look at my lunch hour: that's about 4% of the time. So, 96% of the working week is not lunch hour. Another way of looking at it is Saturdays. Saturday is the only day of the week where I'm not working or anxious about going back to work. That means that only 1/7th of the week is somewhat free of anxiety. What about holidays? Well, 7 months have elapsed this year without a holiday. Let's say that I take a 1-week holiday. Leaving aside the fact that for the whole week I'll be dreading going back to work, we are only talking about 1 week in 30. That's right... I'm only on holiday 1/30th of the time.

Things will improve when I have money in the bank and I can afford to take more time off (I don't get paid holiday and I also have loss of earnings while I'm away) but predominantly, my life this year has been monotonous depression.

I'm dying for my mood to swing to the other 'pole' and to enter a hypomanic episode. Depression is literally killing me.

Tags: #mentalhealth #depression #suicide #bipolar

This is a story about perspectives...

Relativity. The difference between different observers, for a given frame of reference. Who can say that the reality that I experience is more 'real' than that which you experience?

As if by chance, a friend of mine who I used to be homeless with - sleeping rough - in the London parks, visited me this evening. Now, instead of living destitute in a bush, I was able to entertain him in a luxury Thameside apartment.

Do you think that this disparity, this clear 'upswing' in my social status and prospects, makes me think "ooh! how terribly fortunate I am!"?

In actual fact, when the Government had ignored my doctor and psychiatrist's imploring letters to support me during a particularly vulnerable period in my life, and I had been denied welfare and housing, I felt liberated. I lived within a stone's throw of a Royal Palace and was relinquished of the responsibilities of attending demeaning ATOS assessments, completing form upon form of personal information, and digging through vast archives of paperwork to find bullshit documents to satisfy some blank-faced bureaucratic drone.

Do you think I'm glad not to be homeless? Don't be so ridiculous. Everything comes with a cost.

I'm really in no position to be working at the moment. I feel like I'm going through one of the most prolonged periods of depression that I have ever experienced, and the stress and anxiety of my situation is so unbearable that I am closer to taking my own life than I have ever been before.

The fact that I am working is very different from being able to work. The cost to me is virtually immeasurable. If this brief period of stuffing cash in a mattress appears to be a success for those who believe that work will set us free at bayonet point, they are probably ignoring the historical precedent and likely long-term outcomes.

I note that those who criticise me for being ungrateful for my position may be doing so whilst on holiday in Barcelona, or perhaps on a yacht in La Rochelle. This seems to be the ultimate in ignorant hypocrisy, when these people have probably never known the hardships of homelessness and destitution.

If you imagine that a homeless person should be grateful when they are finally off the streets and into a stable housing situation, you are a buffoon. Housing, food, hygiene and an opportunity to put your skills to productive use, are the bare minimum for human dignity. These are human rights.

Instead, I feel like a prostitute. I have sold my mind to the highest bidder. My analogy is probably insulting to those who are genuinely compelled to sell sex, but in this way, you might understand the lack of empathy that my wealthy friends have shown towards my own situation.

Get rich or die trying. It's not even that simple. There are so few ways to dig yourself out of a desperate situation. Prostitution of the body or prostitution of the mind. If somebody wishes to shoot me down for such a melodramatic analogy, go right ahead, I probably deserve it and I'm an easy target, but this is how I feel.

I have made a bitter choice: work for three times as long, and have a somewhat easier time of it, but know the whole time that I'm being underpaid for my skills. Or, to be highly paid but accept the very worst work. The most soul-destroying and de-skilling work that is wholly unsatisfying and only the hardest, meanest, most desperate mercenaries would tolerate in the interests of getting rich quick.

My days are a completely calculated gamble. I put my mental health on the chopping block, hoping that I can struggle by for long enough to put a few dollars in the bank before I explode with stress, frustration, depression and having been completely exploited by a ruthless industry intent on burning people out in pursuit of pure profit.

It's hard to express how hard it is to do something that you mastered nearly 20 years ago, and has now become excruciating mental agony, but also an extremely well paid profession. I'm paid to be professionally bored, stressed, anxious and unfulfilled. I'm paid to put up with stuff that would have most sane people running out of the office saying "fuck this shit".

Yes, the majority of people hate their jobs. Yes, the majority of us would not work given the choice. This is different. I can compare and contrast. I can tell you what the difference is being an electrician from being the manager of an IT project. I can tell you which one destroys your soul and your mind more.

You know the best job I've ever had? Delivering newspapers on Monday to Saturday for £10 a week.

Tags: #homeless #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #career

This is a story about body shopping...

What's the difference between a temp, a freelancer, a self-employed person, a contractor and a consultant? What's the difference between an employee and an entrepreneur?

Last year I was working for HSBC, along with a bunch of nice folks from several different consultancies, plus a handful of permanent members of staff. The teamwork was brilliant, but the surprising thing was that we all had different agendas.

Given that I had gone back to HSBC as a contractor, having been a permanent member of staff there for over 4 years, it was somewhat of a mindset change. I was also homeless and still very much in the vice-like grip of drug addiction, which wasn't a good start.

I was exhausted, and I had somewhat induced within myself, some fairly major symptoms of mental illness, which caused me to make some rather outlandish interpretations of the reality I experienced.

Imagine being plucked from the park, where you are living and contemplating bankruptcy and the coffin nail that will drive into your career, your business. Imagine facing up to the reality that everything you're qualified and experienced to do, since you started IT contracting at age 20, is now going to go down the shitter, and you're homeless, abandoned by the state - the council have sent you a one-line email saying that you're not even worth a hostel bed to them.

Then, imagine that almost overnight, you're working on the number one project for the biggest bank in Europe. You're so exhausted that you are sleeping in the toilet. Everything seems surreal, from the moment you put on your suit in the morning in a hostel dormitory paid for with a credit card you can't afford to pay off, to the moment you turn up in the headquarters of a prestigious Tier 1 bank that you used to work for, when you were clean, sober, young, happy, ambitious, energetic, enthusiastic and respected.

The challenge was to get through 60 days of working, without running out of credit completely. I had to get to work every day and pay for my hostel bed, for a whole month before I could submit my first invoice, which would be paid 30 days later. Obviously, it also looks rather unusual to your colleagues if you can't afford to eat lunch or socialise. The pressure was immense.

What does a poker player do, if they have a weak hand? They bluff, obviously.

To compensate for my fear, and the odds that were stacked against me, I turned the dial up to 11. I tried hard. Far, far too hard. I told the team that I'd take responsibility for a critical piece of work, and deliver it in a short space of time, along with an extremely capable colleague, who actually knew that it was a monster piece of work.

I should have been laughed out of the door. I can't believe that nobody particularly picked up on the fact that I was shooting from the hip, out of a combination of fear, exhaustion, drug withdrawal, mental illness and a touch of arrogance.

How on earth was my ego not going to be stoked? I had just cheated death, bankruptcy, destitution, and now I had the CIO of the number one project in the biggest bank in Europe surprising me, by naming me in person, as the team member responsible for one of the pivotal pieces of the program, in front of the entire town hall. I looked around - "is he talking about me?" - yes, it appeared he was. How surreal.

As a drug addicted homeless person, you're kind of invisible. People would like it if you just crawled into some dark hole and died, quietly. You're nobody's problem but your own, and everybody pretends not to notice you, as you drag your bags through the street, swatting at invisible flies and talking to yourself incomprehensibly.

Suddenly, people not only seem to value you, listen to you, but also look to you for some kind of professional guidance, leadership. Is this the state that important IT projects have reached, where the hobo junkie is the one calling the shots? I realise that I wasn't actually calling the shots, but that's what it feels like when you've been scraped up from the pavement, stuffed into a suit and now you're working in a fancy office full of glass, steel and granite.

It embarrasses me, but also pleases me that I'm still on good terms with a few respected colleagues, and they can tease me about "the time when you said you were going to deliver X by Y". However, not everything I said was worthless tosh.

This is where the difference in mindsets comes in.

As a permanent member of staff, your best shot of getting pay rises and promotions is to raise your profile. Given an hour to do some work, you might as well spend 50 minutes writing an email about what a brilliant person you are and how clever you are, and 10 minutes actually doing some work, rather than the other way around. People who just knuckle down and get on with the work they're supposed to be doing, tend to be overlooked when it comes to the end of year review.

As a contractor, you're all about contract renewals. When your contract is coming up towards its end, you're on best behaviour. You try to shine and make yourself a key-man dependency, so that you can demand a big rate increase, because you're indispensable. Personally though, I hate making myself a key-man dependency. It's unprofessional, however you are economically incentivised to do it, so many contractors dig themselves into little fiefdoms.

As a consultant however, you have the worst of both worlds. You have to kiss the arse of both the client and your consultancy. There's a huge conflict of interests. The consultancy want you to stay on your placement, and for as many headcount as possible to be working with you on the client project, if you're working time & materials. What exactly is consulting about being a disguised employee? Where is the value-add from the consultancy, when the client wants you to be embedded in their organisation, like a permanent member of staff?

The reasons for using consultancy staff, contractors, temps, freelancers, is that you can get rid of them when the project is done. However, the other reason is that you don't have all the headache of having to performance manage underperforming and difficult staff members out of your organisation. In theory, it's a lot easier to hire & fire... with the firing being the desirable bit.

It used to be the case that you could get a job as an IT contractor with just a 20 minute phone interview and start the next day. If you were shit, you'd just be terminated on the spot. Never happened to me, but that was the deal you struck... you'd be on immediate notice for the first week. Then you'd be on a week's notice. Then you'd be on 4 weeks notice, just like a permie. However, I always used to get my contract renewed, because I know how to play the game, kiss ass and keep my lip buttoned at the right time.

So, what happened? Well, stress, money, recovery from addiction, relapse, housing stresses and everything in-between conspired in my private life to mean that I was living life by the seat of my pants. I was running for my life.

After only a week in the new job, I decided that it was an impossible mountain to climb, and that there was no way that I could live in a large hostel dormitory and work on a stressful project, plus get myself clean from drugs, plus dig myself out of near-certain bankruptcy. There were just too many problems to face, working full-time in a crisply laundered shirt and a nice suit, while hiding the crippling problems in my private life.

You can't just go to your boss and say "I'm sorry I didn't mention this before, but I'm a homeless recovering drug addict, who suffers mental health problems at times of extreme stress and exhaustion, and I'm practically bankrupt as well as barely able to keep myself clean, sane, out of hospital and off the streets". Contracting doesn't work like that. Your personal life is nobody's problem but your own... you've signed that deal with the devil. You get paid more, but you're also expected to not get sick and not bring your personal problems with you to the office.

I disappeared on my second week in the job, getting mixed up with the police, thrown out of the hostel where I was living, and ending up in hospital, as the pressure was simply too much to bear, I thought that my lifeline was pretty much spent. The odds of being able to get off the streets were too slim anyway. It couldn't be done. I gave up, and relapsed.

Do you think you can just pick up the phone and say "errr, yeah, I need two weeks off to sleep, an advance of several thousand pounds, and I'd like to come back to work part-time for a little while until I'm up to full strength, because I've been dragging bags all over London, living in parks and on heathland, in and out of hospitals, rehabs and crisis houses, addicted to some deadly shit and battling mental health problems. It seems silly that I didn't mention this at the interview, as I'm sure you would have been just fine with giving me an opportunity to get myself off the street and back into the land of the living"?

You know what though? I did get a second chance. There's no denying that certain allowances were made for me. A blind eye was turned to the fact that I was basically either shouting at people or nodding off in meetings for the first week. I went AWOL twice. Once for a whole week where I basically decided that everything was f**ked and there was no way I could ever make things work, and once for nearly a whole day, when I was swept up in the euphoria of working with nice people and got paralytically drunk with my colleagues and couldn't face telling my boss that I was sick again.

Through my divorce, I lost heaps of friends who were shared with me and the ex. I decided to move back to London, because I knew I could find lots of work. However most of my London friends had moved out of town, in order to start a family. Also, you don't make many friends when you're living in a park sniffing supercrack, and getting hospitalised for 14 weeks a year. I can tell you more about the private life of a friendly police officer that I know, than I can tell you about some other acquaintances from that turbulent period.

Anyway, I was desperately trying to cement things - get my own flat, get some money in the bank, get into a working pattern that was sustainable - but it was too much to ask. 'Friends' sensed that I was recovering, and decided to come asking for favours : lend me some money, let me live with you, give me a job etc. etc.

When you're desperately lonely, because you've split up with the two loves of your life - your wife, and supercrack - you're vulnerable to wanting to people-please. I risked my reputation, when I got a so-called friend an interview, because he pressured me. I overstretched myself, renting a flat that swallowed up all my money, which was my safety net. I didn't even pick my flat... my friend did, and he thought he was going to get to live there rent free. I put up with a lot of shit, because I was desperate for friends, for acceptance, to be liked.

If you think all this can be boiled down to a 'drug problem' you're wrong. In order for a person to feel whole, they need friends, they need a job, they need a place to live, they need to feel that they're living independently : paying the rent, earning their money, able to pay for the essentials of life, and not always just hustling, on the run.

There are quite a lot of pieces to the puzzle that is a complete life that's worth living. Do you really think I just want to be kept alive, in a straightjacket in a padded cell. Is it unreasonable to want to work, to want to feel like I'm making a contribution, to want to feel like I'm liked, loved, to want to feel like I exist, and that I'm valued somewhere, by somebody?

I loved the instant social connection I had with the "winners" who were a group of fellow consultants at HSBC. There was good camaraderie, and they were young and enthusiastic, not bitter and jaded like me. Their enthusiasm for their job and inclusive social circle was exactly what I needed, along with cold, hard cash, and a place to go every day that wasn't a bush in a park, with a wrap of supercrack.

Somewhat unwittingly - although I don't know how much people were able to guess or find out behind my back - the Winners bootstrapped my life. Even though there were the usual commercial rules of the game, about being a disposable contractor who's supposed to keep their mouth shut and not rock the boat, there was still bucketloads of humanity there. People were kind to me. They invited me into their lives, and in doing so, they saved mine.

When a colleague texted me while I was in California, to say that we had to go back to work doing the shittiest possible work for a scrum manager we didn't have a whole heap of respect for, it was pretty clear that it wasn't sustainable. I busted my balls to get cleaned up, off the streets, into a flat of my own and to restabilise my finances. However, I've never been the best at buttoning my lip and allowing myself to be 'managed' by somebody I have barely concealed contempt for.

I knew that all I had to do to get my contract terminated was to send one or two fairly outspoken emails to the project's management team who were insecure and relatively incompetent. They'd actually started to listen and change things though, so there was no purpose to the emails I sent, other than to try and elicit an email saying "don't bother coming back to work" so that I could spend some more time with my friends in San Francisco.

The pressure of having to try and cement the gains that I had made, while still carrying some of the burdens that had been accumulated, was too much. I was in no position to be the responsible guy, picking up the phone every time things went wrong and having to mop up messes. I was in no position to be paying 100% of my rent, with a lazy flatmate who shared none of the risk and none of the financial burden or responsibility for making sure the bills got paid and the household ran smoothly. I was in no position to face months and months more, working at the kind of breakneck pace that was inevitable on a project that I had been forced to take out of desperation.

I had done far too many 12 or 14 hour days. I was on email around the clock. I never switched off. I had driven myself insane, pressurising myself to fix all the broken things in my life, and shore up the gains that I had made. Insecurity and fear had given way to delusions of grandeur. I wanted to do everything, for everybody, immediately. I was very, very sick, because of the enormity of the task of not only the project, but the problems I was overcoming in my personal life. A breakdown was inevitable.

Managing things elegantly was unlikely to happen. I dropped hints about needing a holiday, but I needed to be firm, to assert myself. People expected me to manage my own personal needs, but what they didn't realise was that my needs were conflicted: I needed a financial safety cushion just as much as I needed some time off. When the offer of overtime was wafted under my nose, and the management team wouldn't stop phoning me up at weekends, they didn't have to twist my arm very hard to get me to work Saturdays, Sundays, nights. I needed the money, and I needed to feel like I was important and valued again, having only just escaped being an invisible homeless bum, tossed out of civilised society, never to return.

My experience as an IT contractor, my seniority as somebody who's run large teams, as a Development Manager, an IT Director, a CEO... I'm no fool. I knew that I was working at an unsustainable pace, making myself sick, but what choice did I have? I had so much to fix, and money and hard work can fix most problems. I knew that I needed a holiday, but I was vulnerable to being pressured into doing things that I would never do, under normal circumstances, due to the fragility of my situation.

My colleagues were kind enough to drop hints, and to tell me the tricks that they were employing to avoid management pressures and the general panic that was endemic on the project. They could see I was tired, and going slightly mad. They were worried, and it was kind of them to think of me, on a personal level. However, they didn't really know just how bad things were in my private life. They didn't know just what a journey I had been on. They didn't know what I was running away from.

When I snapped, I didn't know where to run for safety. I thought the safest place would be hospital. I was desperate. I could easily have run for drugged-up oblivion again, even though I was 5 months clean at that point, and one month sober. I could easily have run for the kitchen knife, and slit my wrists in the bath. I was desperate. So close to recovery, and yet so far.

I needed to chuck my freeloader flatmate out of my apartment. I needed to quit my contract and get something easier. I needed to not have the expectation, the weight of responsibility I had unnecessarily brought upon myself, in my desperate insecurity and desire to feel wanted, needed, useful, important, after my entire sense of self had been smashed to a pulp by the dehumanising experience of destitution.

Hospital was a safe place to do it.

Then, unable to grasp the nettle of what needed to be done, which could have been as simple as saying "I need another two weeks off work, to go on holiday, because I'm fucked", I decided to just run away. I booked a flight to San Francisco, leaving myself just a few hours to pack my bags and get to the airport. What was my plan? I had no idea. Even suicide seemed preferable to continuing to live with such crushing pressure, fear and hopeless odds stacked against me.

After a few days amongst friends, I decided that I wanted my contract terminated, immediately. I fired off a provocative email to the CIO. Jackpot! The guy who was responsible for us consultants emails me to say that he wants to see me... in Wimbledon, miles away from HSBC headquarters. I mail back to ask why, but he deftly avoids telling me my contract is terminated via email, despite me pressing him on the matter. Does nobody get the hint?

I come back to London, pissed off that nobody has had the guts to actually call me out to my face, or even by email, and that I've not been able to extend my stay in California. Out of spite, I decide to embarrass the consultancy and the management team, by going into HSBC HQ, blagging my way in even though my security pass has already been deactivated. I march up to the program director and ask him if he's happy with my work, is there a problem? In front of the whole team, he says he's happy with my work and there's no problem, he's pleased to have me back at work.

I milk a few hello-goodbyes with colleagues who I like and respect, while watching the people who want me gone squirm with discomfort. I'm loving every second of watching who's got integrity, humanity, and who's decided that I'm no longer flavour of the month. It's a masterclass in office politics, even though we're all contractors, all consultants. I'm committing every exquisite detail of my final minutes in the office to memory, as I deliberately waste time having my breakfast, before making my way to Wimbledon to wind up the poor messenger whose job it is to try and help the consultancy and the management team save face, by terminating my contract.

By this time, my access to email has been revoked, even though a colleague who accompanies me out of the building, pretends like everything is normal and like we're just having a friendly chat - as opposed to being escorted off the premises by a security guard. I know. Do they know I know? Surely they must.

Unable to send a goodbye email, I ask a colleague who is also called Nick Grant, but who works in Leeds, to send an email on my behalf to a mailing group that contains everybody on the project. It's naughty as hell, but I'm enjoying twisting the knife. What is it that I've really done wrong, other than getting sick and having to go to hospital? What is it that I said, other than what needed to be said, the truth? But I know the game. I know that nobody wants a loose cannon. Nobody wants anybody rocking the boat. I didn't play by the rules. Does anybody realise that this is my way of quitting with immediate effect, and without having to work my notice period?

It might seem like sour grapes. I needed that job. I liked my colleagues. I loved that social scene. That contract saved my life.

However, how do you reconcile your social life, your personal difficulties, your needs, with the role you've been forced into?

What's the difference between a contractor and a consultant? A contractor knows they're a mercenary. They're there to earn as much cash as quickly as they possibly can, and they accept that they can be terminated at the drop of a hat. A consultant just doesn't realise they're getting a bum deal. There's no such thing as an IT consultant. It's just a made-up thing now that software houses and long-term IT contractors have fallen out of favour, with the dreadful rise and rise of outsourcing and this stupid idea that software is ever going to be cheap and easy.

So, to the Winners. Thank you for saving my life. Thank you for putting up with my rocky start, my dreadful ego, my shouting. Thank you for putting up with my arrogance, and for laughing at my over-ambitious ideas. Thank you for trying to keep me humble, and remind me of the rules of the game. Thank you for taking me into your lovely social world. Thank you for the emotional support. Thank you for treating me like a human being, not a software robot. Thank you for dealing with the fallout that I inevitably caused, when implosion happened. Thank you for not hating me, as I wandered into the territory of delusions of grandeur and heroics, and self-important jumped-up craziness.

You might not realise this, but you saw a rather twisted, weird, screwed up version of me, as I clawed my way up a cliff face of recovery, from the bankrupt, homeless, junkie, friendless, single, lonely, unhappy, insane husk of a man that I was, in mid-June last year.

It's been quite a year. God knows what happened with the Customer Due Diligence project, but I'm glad the due diligence on me didn't work, because the Winners and HSBC ended up unwittingly saving my life and getting me back on my feet. I don't think I would have ever had that opportunity if my dark private life was known in advance.

I'm sorry if it feels like I used you. Hopefully, it feels like a good thing happened. Hopefully you feel happy to have played a role in bringing a person back from the brink, even if I was a sneaky bastard, and somewhat underhand about the whole thing, as well as going a bit bonkers at times.

Silver linings, eh?

The photos I've put up include some rather unflattering images of a rather battered and bruised body, that just about hung together with sticky tape to somehow carry me through some brutal times. My private life wasn't exactly 'healthy' leading up to last June.

Tags: #career #banking #hsbc #computing #london #suicide #addiction #homeless

This is a story about being a Francophile...

Vive la République! Having lived, worked and briefly been to school in France, I feel adequately placed to talk about some of the pros and cons of a different way of life that we aspire to.

Firstly, monarchy. I'm actually in favour of keeping the Royal Family. They're a great draw for tourists, and they give the UK a brilliant national identity. I like having the Royal Mail, Royal Mint and companies that are by Royal Appointment to various members of the aristocracy. Just as the USA has the stars and stripes, we have the Royal Crest and the Queen's head on everything. It's good branding.

The French might have cut off the heads of their aristocrats, but they still go nuts for all that royal shit. The palace of Versailles is still referred to as the Royal palace. The French still celebrate Bastille Day as if the monarchy were very much still in power: they ascribe a significance to royalty as if they had never actually become a republic.

What disadvantages do we have, remaining under divine rule? I can walk in the Royal Parks, enjoy looking at Buckingham Palace and seeing the changing of the guard, as well as all the other pomp and circumstance that accompanies the ceremonial head of state. It's better to sing God Save the Queen than some awful national anthem dreamt up by a committee, with its trite attempts to be inclusive.

Ok, so what about being a backwards agricultural nation of peasants, rednecks? Well, it's nice for a relaxing holiday. It's nice that the whole of France stops and downs tools for a proper lunch. It's nice there's still village life, with a butcher, a baker, a plumber, an electrician, a joiner and a builder, who are the mainstay of village life, under the Máire - the mayor - and people live a fairly old-fashioned life, where people shop locally and family life is at the centre of everything, along with good food & wine.

This is where I'm slightly divided. In the UK we have an 'always on' culture, where I can get 4G mobile broadband everywhere I go, and I'm constantly plugged into email, Twitter, Facebook. I eat my lunch at my keyboard and get crumbs from my sandwich all over my laptop. Village life in the UK has been destroyed as the commuter belts have moved further and further out into every pretty village with a railway station, within a few hours of London.

Sure, France has its cities, but over 50% of their working population work for the Government, and the spread of population density isn't quite as extreme as the UK, where the South-East is getting somewhat ridiculous, as London draws everything into its financial-services centric orbit.

While we're on the subject of financial services, would I rather be like France, which has had a relatively conservative approach to consumer debt and exotic financial instruments, or be like the UK where we're about as highly leveraged as we can possibly get? Well, apart from a few high profile cases like Société Générale, the French weathered la craque - the credit crunch - far better than the UK, which only survived because of the bailouts.

Basically, the UK is propped up on very shaky foundations. There is no underlying quality of life in the UK. Everything's on hire purchase, interest free credit, and the promise of work now, be rich later... screw spending time with your family or having anything other than work in your life.

Those who hanker after some kind of yesteryear could do worse than moving to France. However, you need to remember that a lot is lost in translation. Even with the best colloquial French, you're still not going to understand a lot of jokes, and pick up on the cultural subtleties. You're going to end up clustering together with ex-pats, swapping tea bags, Marmite and Heinz baked beans, and pining for England.

Certainly, if you have kids that have not been raised from birth in a bilingual environment, you're denying them the chance to really bond with their peers and get the most out of their education, and enjoy their childhood. They're always going to feel different. They're always going to be an outsider.

Gone are the years when France had significantly cheaper housing and cost of living. Gone are the days of cheaper food and fuel. Gone are the days of rustic farmhouse charm. Good riddance I say. Chopping firewood and fetching your water from the well, putting sawdust on your excrement in a freezing outhouse and burying your waste in the back yard... these are things that silly children like to do, because it's an adventure. It's not a way of life that we should aspire to.

Living without TV, Internet and high quality daily newspapers - ignoring current affairs and global issues - it's dumb. Just because France still manages to maintain a certain rustic charm and village idyll, doesn't mean that it's any way realistic in our globalised world.

In a way, the anti-EU sentiment stems from a history of mocking the French as cheese-eating surrender monkeys, who live some kind of hick outdated life. But there's also jealousy there. Wouldn't we dearly like to be as true to ourselves as the French?... protesting about every threat to our way of life, and insisting that our lingua franca is enshrined? The French are often unashamedly right wing and open about the divisions in their society. When we think of the Frenchman, we are likely to think of a farmer, rather than a Parisian, and hasn't our own culture been regrettably diluted by immigration, in a way that hasn't in France?

We look at the camps in Calais, and wonder why people don't just seek asylum there. Isn't France a safe country? There must be something desirable in our own country, but really, what we are saying is that we'd prefer it if people were just passing through the UK, rather than coming to settle. We'd rather be like France, where we have shipped our immigrants out to suburbs, camps, ghettos.

For me, a vote to remain in the EU is a vote of solidarity with Europe and with France. I want the UK to be more like France, and I want France to be more like the UK. I want to feel equally at home anywhere in Europe. I don't like these ridiculous notions of rolling back the clock to some unattainable yesteryear state, where we live in idyllic little villages and roll in the hay during an eternal summer.

For me the vote to leave the EU - Brexit - is clearly driven by this enemy at the gates idea that is epitomised in the Calais camps.

Frankly, I find the idea of building barriers between us and our nearest neighbour, most distasteful. Frankly I find the idea of rejecting our European identity to be complete madness, even if there is something emotionally appealing in the Union Jack and Her Majesty The Queen.

I feel a lot happier being a son of Europe than just a subject of The Queen. I like telling people I'm a European, just as a citizen of the United States of America would tell you that they're an American. I like the idea that I could live and work anywhere in Europe with no visa or work permit considerations.

Vive la France!

Tags: #politics #childhood #france #europe

This is a story about being a civilised adult...

Now that we have the Internet and social media, as a platform - a soapbox - for every vile, uncultured, ill-educated, nasty little specimen of humanity, people are throwing caution to the wind and broadcasting opinions that they would have never dreamt of publicly sharing, before the days that like-minded fools were allowed to cluster together, bonded by their mutually unpleasant views.

We are not at school anymore. You are a grown up. Try to behave as such.

With freedom comes responsibility. Just because you're not immediately dragged off to jail for detestably fascist remarks, it doesn't mean it's OK. Just because you're getting "likes" and "shares" of your social media posts, in the echo chamber of your hate group, doesn't mean that your views are acceptable.

Freedom of speech comes at a cost, and that cost is that individuals must self-censor and control their primitive animal-like behaviour. Public hangings, stonings, witch burnings, fights... these things will always draw a crowd. However, it's our collective and individual responsibility to condemn barbaric behaviour.

So, here's a 10-step guide to preventing the human race destroying itself, by exercising its freedom without regard for responsibility and consequences:

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1. Should you really say that?

There's a reason why hate crime has been written into the statute book. You are breaking the law if you incite violence and hatred with your words. Just being subtle about it doesn't excuse you.

If Nigel Farage can stand in front of a billboard with a bunch of people with dark skin tones, and suggest that these people are the enemy at the gate, that's a hate crime, to my mind. Every demand to "deport" the people you don't like very much because of their race, religion or skin colour, is perpetuating hate and divisions in society.

2. It's not just about you

Occupying a position of global dominance and wealth means that our nation has additional responsibilities. While you might think that we should "look after our own" in actual fact, what you are saying is that subjugated nations should continue to toil as our slaves.

If you don't share the wealth, you deserve to have your empire toppled. Do you really want to sit back and enjoy the spoils of war, torture and human suffering? Have you considered the price - in human lives - of the luxuries that you enjoy, or are you simply demanding to be wilfully ignorant?

3. Since when did conflict become desirable?

Why do things have to be "us" and "them"? Making things into an adversarial situation feels good, if you're on the winning side, but it's not the civilised thing to do. Of course, I'd love to get a big stick and a gang of thugs, and go and rob my weak neighbour, but that's not the way to conduct yourself.

If you're digging into your trenches, and thinking of ways to defend your argument and promote your cause, you're looking at things in the wrong way. Try to empathise with your 'enemy'. We all bleed red and we're all pink on the inside. You probably have more in common with the group that you're baring your teeth at, than you even realise.

4. Ad hominem attacks are not acceptable

Ok, you want to have some debate? You want to have a rational discussion? Well, personal attacks are not allowed. They're below-the-belt blows, not valid arguments. Differences of opinion cannot be settled by bringing somebody's character into question.

You might not like my views, but they could be the right ones, even if you don't like who I am as a person. Anybody can put the correct argument forward: they're just a spokesperson, a messenger for rational ideas.

5. Your defence is paper-thin

By grouping together with people who share your vile views, you share tips on how to defend yourself from the onslaught of a world intent on civilising you. You have developed a set of standard replies to the obvious criticisms of your unpleasant opinions.

Saying "I'm not racist, because Islam is not a race" is a straw-man argument. You're being discriminatory over a group of people. You're attempting to use some pathetic words to excuse your disgusting behaviour.

If you follow the same logic, you could end up being a Nazi apologist "because Judaism is not a race". I don't really care what the basis for your hatred is... it's wrong to discriminate.

6. What are you striving for?

If your goal for humanity is to go back to some time that you're nostalgic for, you are a being a fool. Today, we have medicine, safety standards, leisure time, vast quantities of high quality food, global communication and the ability to protect ourselves from many forces of nature.

You can't "close the door" on some advancing horde of brown people that you don't like very much, just the same as you can't abolish the poor either. You can't wave a magic wand and we'll all be transported back to some kind of bygone era, where we all live in a land of plenty. There are 7.1 billion mouths to feed on the planet, and they all have equal rights. I hope you're not arguing for some kind of race supremacy!

7. Do your research

There's no excuse for ignorance. Education is a privilege that you have enjoyed, and if you're sharing your nasty opinions on the Internet, then you're obviously able to read. I expect you might even be dimly aware that there were a couple of World Wars, and millions of people died. What did they die for? So that you can perpetrate another genocide?

Why do you not automatically recoil in horror from things that are echoes of an undesirable past? Why do you not associate the camps in Calais with prisoner of war camps and forced labour camps? Why do you not associate the refugee processing centres with ghettos, where undesirable members of society were forced to live, during previous atrocities?

8. What are your motives?

What does "take our country back" really mean? Is it true that really, deep down, you feel cheated? You're getting a raw deal. This isn't the life that you were promised. You've been let down. The system has failed you.

Your anger and frustration isn't with immigrants, it's with the politicians who gave tax breaks to the wealthy and allowed monopolies to dominate the world. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer, and sadly, you're in the bucket with all the other poor people. The landed gentry don't care about you any more than they care about the hungry brown person trying to get into our country for a bowlful of rice.

9. What are your values?

Do you strive for equality? Do you strive for greater knowledge? Do you believe in freedom? How would you like to improve the human condition? Do you have empathy, sympathy, compassion?

If your goal in life is to simply have more for you and your family, have you really considered the bigger picture? Do you really not give a shit, that for you to have Sky TV and a new car, perhaps hundreds and thousands of people are going to starve to death?

10. No man is an island

Yes, it's a nice fantasy, to think of yourself marooned on a desert island with everything you need. You're going to drink coconut milk, eat wild boar and civilise the natives. Bullshit.

What are you going to do without your smartphone, built in a factory in China or Korea? What are you going to do without your fresh fruit, that you can get even in the middle of winter, because it's flown into the country from Kenya? Who's going to clean your toilet and wash your car?

Building walls, or saying that your borders end at the seashore is total rubbish. Are you going to stop going abroad to all those countries that you want to send those brown people back to? Have you even looked at a map, and figured out where your all-inclusive package holiday is on the planet?

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Why does it not chill you to the core, the thought of a world of divisions? Why does the idea of dismantling unions, co-operative pacts, systems of teamwork and collaboration, not make you upset and feel like we're going backwards? Why does the idea that a brown person has fewer rights than you, with your white skin, not seem abhorrent, wrong?

Seeing a young, fit, healthy man who wants to come and work, pay taxes and grow the economy, should be a welcome sight. The sight of a family fleeing war and conflict, should instill a nurturing instinct - we should be welcoming people, comforting them, accommodating them, not slamming the door in their face.

Yes, it's true that infrastructure is at breaking point. Yes it's true that traditional ways of life are under threat. Yes it's true that society is not well integrated, and people have clustered together in ethnic groups. However that's not a cost, that's a benefit of progress. I love that I'm able to hear nearly 300 different languages spoken in my home town of London. I love that I'm able to travel between different areas and experience different cultures. My life is enriched and improved, by embracing the very best that the world has to offer.

The people who uproot their families and embark upon perilous journeys in order to make a better life for themselves, are making a better life for everybody. The people who you want to exclude from society are motivated, hard working, industrious, resourceful, humble, worldly and bring energy and enthusiasm, that is completely lacking in a population that wants to rest on its laurels.

Our grandparents and great grandparents fought for our freedom, not so that we could horde it for ourselves, but so that we can share it. Our way of life doesn't need protecting, it needs to be distributed globally.

Freedom is not a commodity that's just for us. Everybody should have freedom. But the price of freedom is being responsible, and acting with restraint and human decency. Those who are free must be kind and compassionate, and share more. Those who are free must set an example. Those who are free must try harder, reach further, think deeper, consider the implications of everything they do.

If we don't act with responsibility that extends beyond our own selfish wants and immediate gratification, everything's going to crumble before our very eyes, and finger-pointing at immigrants is going to be the catalyst. While we wail about brown people and lament the loss of a bygone era that never existed, we will throw away the beautiful things we have constructed.

All this infighting and tribal, regressive, aggressive behaviour deeply saddens me, and reminds me of nasty kids in the playground. Aren't we supposed to have grown up?

Tags: #politics #socialmedia