This is a story about relativity...

So, there are children starving in Africa. That's sad.

There are lots of things that are sad in the world. It's sad that so many people are being shot. It's sad that so many people are being blown up. It's sad that most people have so little, while a handful of others have so much.

Sadness is not really relative. Neither is depression. Once you are suicidally depressed, you can't get any more depressed. You just kill yourself and then it's over. That's the limit. That's the maximum that you can be depressed.

 As a child, I wasn't allowed to cry at the sad parts in movies. This was apparently because I should have been more sad about starving African children. I was sad about them too, but there weren't many Disney movies about starving African children, made for kids.

My Dad was pretty determined that I should have a lot of stuff on my conscience, as a small child. I needed to be responsible for my part I played in the decadent lifestyle of the West, as a bourgeois infant. How thoughtless and irresponsible of me to not have martyred myself for the plight of the developing world, at birth.

So, if you don't believe I think about my blessings and how lucky I was to be born into a relatively wealthy advanced civilisation... you're wrong. It's been smashed into my skull for as long as I can remember. It's been rammed down my throat with menace.

Perhaps we should teach children about consequences, not that their feelings are wrong. If a child is genuinely selfish and unwilling to share, or even worse, if they steal and perpetrate violence against other children, then those are the antisocial traits that we would want to re-educate that child about. It's impossible to teach a child to not have feelings that they already have.

I don't think that education really needs to start with children. There are plenty of adults who are ignorant and are passing on their vile views to their children. Let's build good role models in the world.

If children see adults - who they look up to - killing each other and badmouthing each other and generally being vile, what are those children going to do? Monkey see, monkey do.

If you want the world to be a better place, stop glorifying soldiers and war, stop saying racist things, stop sitting in that chair reading crappy newspapers, watching dreadful television and ranting about a nonexistent past that never existed. Nostalgia is a lie.

You only perceive things from a totally ignorant, hypocritical standpoint. Put yourself through a little hardship so that you might empathise with the refugees, starving and marginalised people, who grew your food and made the mass produced goods that allow you to sit idle in comfort, while all the atrocities in the world are perpetrated.

If you say I'm the hypocrite, you're wrong. I'm prepared to go to jail or be locked up in hospital in support of my views. I'm not a criminal, but I am prepared to rock a boat full of fat lazy hypocrites, even if I'm going to get wet myself.

I've come from nothing, so I've got nothing to lose. I don't have the fear that you have.

This is not about me. It's not about the UK. It's about the world's suffering people who we should be sad about, because we are all responsible.

If you have children, then don't tell the developing world to stop having babies.

If you feed your children, then pay more for your groceries so that the developing world's farmers can work their way out of poverty.

If you drive your children around in a car, or take them on holiday in an aeroplane, then you might as well just drown them now, as that's what you are doing to the world with uncontrolled release of greenhouse gasses.

If you send your children to school, then don't complain about the cost of school uniforms, books and tuition fees. Education is the route to family planning. It's a gift that should be shared, not just kept for the elite.

If you give your children a roof over their heads, then don't expect refugees to live in a tent. Or maybe you'd like to live in a tent so that a bigger family than yours can make better use of the world's limited resources?

If you think that I have no sense of perspective, it's you who is totally mistaken. I would happily live in a tent or a large hostel dorm again. I feel that the world I live in is sterile and far removed from reality. It doesn't sit easily with me. I'm way more unhappy than I've been in a long time. The rich-poor divide is something I find very hard to live with.

I'm easy to discredit: I've given away all the ammunition. The tried and trusted ways of rubbishing an opponent are openly on display, here in this blog, and I plan to give you even more sticks and stones, with which to break my bones.

I've been bullied and abused so much, I'm fairly impervious to personal attacks and below-belt blows now.

I have died a thousand deaths, and I fear not one more.

That is all.

Here is a picture of Frankie, who is a happy cat wherever in the world he finds himself, provided there are no guns or bombs (December 2007)

Tags: #politics #parents #childhood #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #frankie #homeless

This is a story of a culture that is destroying people's mental health and lives...

Management by balance-sheet, bean counters, spreadsheet jockeys and "yes" men and women are joining a set of executives who do everything in their power to abstain from any of the hard work and responsibility that is necessary in the world.

We have all heard horror stories of people being sacked by text message. In fact, skilled workers, professionals, have been steadily robbed of their worth and self-esteem since powerful rich men, behind closed doors in gentleman's clubs were allowed to asset strip British industry. The practice continues today, as companies are allowed to be headquartered in the UK, but are offshoring all the jobs for cost reasons, and are draining the wealth of the nation.

Europe is fast becoming little more than a tax haven for global businesses, with billions, if not trillions of dollars of profits being pushed through legal entities that have little reason for existence other than to evade the taxes that these companies rightfully should pay to the countries that they have extracted the profits from.

Luxembourg is the most obvious example, but Ireland has recently jumped on the bandwagon. The amount of tax that is paid by Vodafone (group HQ is Luxembourg... funny that, considering that Newbury, UK is where I thought they were founded?) or Apple and Amazon (taxed via Irish legal entity... I know Apple Maps is rubbish but it's a long way from Silicon Valley?) is a pittance. The amount of profits that these companies make is disgusting, versus what they pay as percentage of their gross profits.

However, maybe there is a good reason for all of this?

When I became unwell, and asked good old UK government for support - as somebody who has always paid my full taxes, has no offshore bank accounts, has never tried to evade or avoid taxes - I found that there was worryingly little of a safety net there.

I went to my doctor (General Practitioner, or GP for short, here in the UK) and had a 30 second conversation about what was going on in my life.

"Have you heard of Fluoxetine"

Well, yes, I have heard of Fluoxetine. It's the generic name for Prozac, which is an antidepressant from the 1980s. What the hell is my doctor doing dishing out 25 year old pills to somebody who they have taken 30 seconds to get to know? Well, we know that the NHS is extremely cost pressured, given that we have to give such large tax breaks to profitable billion dollar companies and make sure that we don't take too much inheritance tax from dead multi-millionaires. Oh, and we need nuclear atomic bombs too. Yes, we need to make sure we can always annihilate every person on earth at the flick of a switch.

Luckily for me, I walked away from a course of powerful psychoactive medication, that has been proven in long-term studies to be less effective than placebo. It also takes 6 weeks to take effect. My episodes of depression tend to be about this long anyway. Also, SSRIs make you fat and destroy your sex life, as well as blunting your emotions and generally making your sh1t life even more sh1t, but you'll be too doped up to even realise, unless you ever emerge from the chemical haze.

I'm pretty upset about this, if you hadn't picked up on that.

Another thing that is very annoying is that, as anybody who takes a few more minutes to get to know me will tell you, I'm certainly not what you might term unipolar. My life is littered with examples of radical mood swings. Catch me at a certain time, and you will see my racing thoughts, pressured speech, lack of sleep, intolerance of dimwitted twits, and evidence of my wacky projects.

One day I whimsically decided to knock down my shed, order a load of wood from a sawmill and build a giant beach hut summer house thing in my back garden. Somebody suffering from unipolar depression does not normally do such a thing, according to the DSM-IV/V.

I had to learn all about Google Sketchup, so that I could design the thing, learn about different types of timber, wooden building construction techniques, roofing techniques, planning laws governing outbuildings, estimate how much I would need in terms of materials, locate a sawmill, find a roofing supplier, get a chop saw, nail gun and roofing blow torch (the most fun tool of all).

At no point did any of this seems slightly strange or beyond my capabilities, as a spotty IT nerd who did little more than turn coffee into software for a living, by pressing buttons on a computer, in a comfortable air-conditioned office.

Working around-the-clock seemed perfectly normal too. I remember one neighbour pointed out that the sound of nails being hammered at 9pm was not helping him to study for an English exam... but how are you supposed to hammer quietly? I did try and hammer more considerately, but it seemed more considerate to simply get the project done as fast as possible (I think I took 3 days to complete the structure) given that I didn't know the sleep patterns of everybody within earshot.

So "Mega Shed" as she was affectionately known, appeared at the bottom of my garden in under a week, at a cost of £700. An ordinary week in anybody's life? Well it's hard to judge from an internal point of view, as you can't step out of your own mind and view yourself as others would.

Naturally, friends, colleagues and family are always impressed by a person's industriousness and ingenuity, so I saw no real reason to back off the gas. When the world rewards you for efforts, this reinforces your belief that what you are doing is sustainable.

I then decided to sit in my garden and read a huge stack of books on Quantum Mechanics. This then progressed to me reading every paper that looked interesting in Cornell University's online archives. Naturally, I then started emailling a bunch of the authors, and getting engaged in particularly interesting email based discussions with people around the world about De Broglie's Matter Waves (Pilot Wave theory) which looked a hell of a lot more elegant than all that Standard Model crap that couldn't be unified with General Relativity.

Instead of being discouraged, I found academics to be kind, indulgent and generous with their time. I took things too far, of course, and wrote a paper on the measurement of collapsing Quantum States in an entangled system, spread over a physical space larger than the light-cones of the particles being measured. Standard Quantum Eraser type stuff. I even tried to get it published. Lolz.

At no point did anybody actually directly say to me "you seem to be as mad as a box of frogs on acid with lasers coming out of their nostrils" so I kept digging myself into a deeper and deeper thought hole until I sank into another depression, with no idea what had just happened to me.

The thing is, it's fairly entertaining, enthralling, to watch somebody who is hypomanic. In our age of Big Brother and myriad reality TV shows, we seem to think that it's OK to be a spectator in somebody's spectacular life.

We seem to think it's OK to sit back and watch somebody go absolutely bezerk. It's that person's fault, right? Or maybe it's not their fault, but it's not your responsibility... that would be somebody else? Maybe doctors? Maybe the police? Maybe the council? I don't know... I'm just going to watch - because this is just too horrible to miss a minute of - and I can't tear my eyes away this is just so awful, somebody should do something about it, but not me, and not yet because I'm really getting into this. Brilliant. Who needs TV anyway?

I don't think that I'm not personally responsible for getting unwell, but I don't think that people know how to help, really. I don't think that people are particularly incentivised to help either. We have a very isolated existence. We don't know our neighbours, we don't trust strangers, we ring the police to deal with things that we used to work out between ourselves, we expect our doctors to give us magic beans to cure all society's ills.

So, today is World Mental Health day and World Homeless Day. I can tell you, from personal experience, that mental health issues can lead to homelessness. When I was discharged from hospital after a suicide attempt, I was given 2 weeks accommodation, and I was expected to use that time to arrange my own accommodation. I went to the council offices with a letter from my doctors, explaining that I was extremely vulnerable and that I should receive urgent assistance. The person I spoke to then went on holiday and that was the last I heard of it.

I don't blame the system or the people. People are trying to do the best that they can, but there are so many people in need of assistance, and so little money, because we are fixated on helping the rich to get richer, rather than supporting the most vulnerable members of society. I'm not even angry about it. Living in the Royal Parks and on Hampstead Heath was an eye-opening education for an extremely highly qualified and well educated guy who fell on hard times. If you think I chose to become homeless, then f**k you, you ignoramus.

Yes, I could have sold my camera, but I wanted to document what happened to me and I already sold all my other possessions to support myself. When will you be satisfied? Sell my clothes? Locking me up for being naked will be expensive (June 2014)

Tags: #mentalhealth #bipolar #depression #homeless #sex #banking #career #london #culture

This is a story of a growing problem in people's lives....

I can't get no sleep. That's a double negative. What I mean is, that I have a problem with insomnia, because I stare at backlit devices around-the-clock. The problem with backlit devices is that they output light that hits your retina, telling your body "it's daytime, get up".

When I'm awake, which is most of the time, I'm either at work on my laptop or working at a double or even triple monitor, looking at my phone, or looking at a TV, tablet or some other backlit device. I had even taken to reading books on my phone, which means that my body had absolutely no light-based clue as to what the f**king time is.

Unsurprisingly, this messes with your circadian rhythm, even if you eat your meals at regular intervals, and attempt to get in and out of bed at normal times. I generally keep at least 3 electronic devices within grabbing distance of my bed anyway (phone, laptop, smartwatch) and often times I fall asleep with either my laptop on my lap, or still wearing my smartwatch (which helpfully vibrates, so I can briefly wake up to check any alerts).

Photographing stuff on my phone and uploading it to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, posting check-ins and status updates, and making snide or sarcastic Tweets - from 4 different accounts, at least - has grown and grown, leading to a kind of live-blogging of my life.

To say that I was obsessed with social media would be a massive understatement. It's actually an addiction that is affecting my health. That's the generally recognised definition of an addiction: when something you enjoy is negatively affecting your life, but you are struggling or unable to reduce your dependence on the thing you are addicted to (water, oxygen and sugar don't qualify, you see, because you die without those things).

The inscription around the woolly head of our sheepie friend reads: we are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep. Shaun would be well advised to make sure he gets enough sleep, as our immune systems can get dangerously low if we aren't giving our brains and bodies the rest they were designed to have.

Modern life gives us surprisingly few environmental cues as to what we should be doing. Here in London we have artificial lighting 24 hours a day, and there is barely a wall that doesn't have some kind of flat screen attached to it now. We really are a City that doesn't sleep. When all the bankers, lawyers and accountants go home in their taxis, just before midnight, an army of cleaners and trash collectors sweep in behind, to collect all those discarded coffee cups and sandwich wrappers.

Most offices are now 24 x 7 x 364 (you get Christmas Day off - this is the only real Bank Holiday) which have cost-saving motion sensing lighting, so you only have to glance up at one of the tall office blocks at an unusual hour, to get a rough idea of just how many people are working on some unrealistic deadline for their client.

Delivering a deal, getting the Thank Yous from your bosses and clients. High-fiving your colleagues, and adding another tombstone to your impressive collection of deals or projects that you have delivered... that's addictive too. You get a little dopamine hit every time one of those things happens, and before you know it, you find yourself going into the office 7 days a week and answering the phone to your bosses whenever they call.

In a global business, we operate a follow-the-sun model, where Europe hands over to the Americas, and then onto Australasia, and then Asia-Pacific, and then Middle East and North Africa and all too soon it's dawn again. Where those business centres are unable to fully support themselves, some poor sod carries their phone and/or BlackBerry everywhere anytime. We used to call it Crackberry when we first got our BlackBerries, and you found yourself checking email at 4am, even when you officially weren't on call.

We can't actually help ourselves anymore. Whenever we hear that bleep and see that message notification light blinking, we have been habituated into reaching out and grabbing it, no matter what time of day it is, no matter how socially inappropriate it might be, no matter what else we are attempting to do at the time.

I find myself looking at my smartphone, one-handed, while cycling along in front of 3-lanes of red London busses and trucks... what could go wrong? I find myself finishing typing a message, one-handed, while descending steps and even a ladder that leads down onto the 'beach' outside my flat. That ladder is about 80ft high. It would hurt if I fell, or maybe even kill me.

It's a similar deal with selfies. People will go to extreme lengths to get the shot. They won't even let you skydive with a camera until you have done a certain amount of jumps, because of the sensible precaution that people should concentrate on the hard ground that is approaching at 125mph, and not the killer shot that will make their Facebook profile look super awesome.

So I tried to photograph 64 painted sheep in Covent Garden yesterday. Should we be quite worried, in a pathetic hand-wringing Daily Mail reader way? Why? In the above image, some adults might have been accidentally been photographed obsessively taking photos of their children. The image is low enough resolution that you can't actually recognise people, but some idiot will still declare that their privacy has been invaded. Welcome to London, you muppets. We are one nation under CCTV.

(NOTE: I took particular care to avoid taking a photo of anybody's child, and no, that really is not your kid in the image... it's someone else who shops in Baby Gap or Mothercare or wherever, and has a blonde/mousey/dark-haired kid. Can you imagine how hard that is in Covent Garden?).

So, for my part, I am pretty much putting my entire life - not including anything I am under contractual and professional obligation to protect - into the public domain. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear.

Is this brave, or stupid? Will I come to regret doing this? Am I embarrassed? Yes, there is embarrassment at first, and then this grows into a feeling of being liberated. Nudity, sex etc. are still taboos, so I'm not going to take things that far, and I am mindful of other people's need for privacy so I won't be exposing anybody else to my public life laundry. Ask yourself though, why do you feel uneasy about something leaking out?

So, I believe that Cannabis is a very dangerous drug that has been allowed to enter popular culture (some conservative estimates say that 1 in 10 people are regularly 'stoning' themselves). My biggest concern is that prodromal Schizophrenia is being turned into fully blown psychotic episodes in young people. The paranoia and disordered thinking that I have witnessed in friends and relatives is disturbing.

The strains of Cannabis that have been developed with very high Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) content are ruining many lives. People just sit around, eating, playing computer games, and p1ssing their youth away. These are smart and enterprising people. We are losing a whole generation, and I'm pretty angry about that.

If you walk around Camden Town, you will realise how the Marajuana plant has become a ubiquitous emblem for a huge powerful narcotics industry. The revenue and turnover involved is many many billions, in the UK alone. The corruption involved, the bribery of government officials, is a multi-agency problem that spans Border Controls, Customs, Police, Local Government, and of course, Parliament. Professor David Nutt was run out of government for trying to bring some sanity to the issues which threaten to tear our society apart.

We can't have an entire generation, whose ideas and energy have been repressed by a chemical 'straight jacket'. These stoners are too intoxicated to see that they have been conned. They might think they are part of a counter-culture revolution. From my first-hand observations, they are actually spouting complete rubbish, gawping at the TV, surrounded by empty junk food wrappers, in the stained clothes they have been wearing for days.

It sounds like I'm having a go at young people. I really am not. This is a major sadness in my life, that brilliant, bright, intelligent, energetic, beautiful young people are selling themselves so short, because they have been trapped into a cycle of poverty and intoxication, addicted to strong narcotics. What other hopes do they have? Getting a job as a young person is almost impossible.

Can't get a job without the experience. Can't get the experience without the job. That's the spine-chilling Catch 22 that is destroying a whole generation. These are your children who are being frozen out from the employment market. Take a bloody look at yourself, stop looking at the profit and turnover for your company, and ask yourself how many apprentices have you trained? How many entry-level positions have you created in your company? What are you doing to help the next generation?

Give young people the break they need in life. It could be as little as a small business loan, of a few hundred or few thousand pounds. That kind of money is pocket change compared to the value of your savings and assets. If you don't give away more than 1% of your total personal wealth (value of your house + value of your salary + value of your savings + value of your pension) every year, for the lifetime of each child that you have spawned, then you are a pathetic spineless leech on society.

My parents, tried to be as supportive as they were capable of being, and I love them. They have made mistakes, just the same as all of us, and I do recognise that being a parent is hard, and everybody is just winging it.

Tags: #childhod #addiction #mentalhealth #drugs #privacy #london #banking #career

This is a story of the son of a historian and a philosopher...

Here's where I grew up. I literally had the West Wing. This 26 bedroom 'house' cost £120,000. Only my father - the most inspirational person in my life - had the vision and the courage to take the plunge on such a venture. You can't even see the whole house... there are still 2 blocks,  an indoor basketball court, a grass tennis court and a 5-a-side football pitch, that you can't see.

So what riches paid for all this? What family money? What inheritance, trust fund, or silver spoon were we all born with?... is there a chance that your preconceived notions might be wrong?

My Mum was the main breadwinner in our family, on an entry-level academic salary. My Dad used to be a gardener. We used to live in Gardiner's Arms Cottage. The cottage backed onto some woodland, and I could hear Wood Pigeons coo-ing from my bedroom (my parents had the only other bedroom). In order to make this tiny cottage liveable for our growing family, my Dad built an extension, built me a tree house, and used to poach the Pheasants and Wood Pigeoens in the woods, in order to save money on meat.

I cried when we left the cottage, as my life seemed pretty complete. I got to play in my tree house, sniff the flowers and water the grass... what more is there to life? However my Dad had bigger and better plans for the family. The problem with workaholics, is that they don't know when they have won, and when to stop. I'm very grateful that my parents are who they are, and it's taken me 36 years to really see their master plan, and get on board with the winning team.

As well as a gardener, my Dad has been a philosophy undergraduate, car mechanic, metals trader, chef, pub landlord, junk shop owner, holiday cottage operator, builder and antique dealer. His knowledge and love of architectural antiques, plus his skill as an entrepreneur helped him to build Oxford Architectural Antiques into a business that counted Formula One drivers amongst his clientele, as well as him providing architectural centre pieces that were focal in the work of famous interior designers and restauranteurs.

My Dad taught me the importance of not only building a profitable business, but being part of the economic community. He created jobs, and firmly believed in the Guild of Master Craftsmen. He made the former coal yard that he rented into a beautiful jewel in the heart of Jericho, that won an Oxford in Bloom prize. He was interviewed by the BBC. He put on fireworks shows for my school friends and me. He sponsored struggling local artists and musicians, to put on cultural events. He is my hero.

Unfortunately, career politicians saw his yard, only in terms of prime property development value, and eventually it had to be sold off so that flats could be built on the land of his thriving business, as well as nearby Lucy's Iron Works. Because of this Jericho no longer had these sources of wealth generation and employment.

This is the definition of a Lean Startup. I learned from the best in the business (circa 1986)

Tags: #startup #entrepreneur #lean #childhood #oxford #parents

This is a story of friendship, love and adventure...

A group of friends put their trust, their money and - indirectly - their lives in my hands, and I took us all to Caracas, Venezuela, where we were transported across the city in trucks that had holes in them that looked very much like bullet holes. We all survived.

I must admit, if the holiday was a success it was more by good luck than by good judgement. I'd like to say that it was effective delegation that made the difference, but really, I just outsourced the problems to an excellent local guide - Alejandro Battistini - who was trying to make a name for himself and the island of Coche, off the coast of Margarita island, South of the Caribbean.

Having been to both islands on a couple of occasions before, myself, I was familiar with the way things worked as a traveller in a small group. Having a huge group was a different logistical proposition all together, however.

I negotiated a seemingly sizeable deal with American Airlines in order to get nearly 20 people plus 20+ kiteboards, and perhaps as many as 50 giant kites, to our destination without incurring costly excess luggage fees. When we came to try and fly to a small group of coral sand islands called Los Roques, I knew that we would be taking an extremely small turboprop plane and weight would be an issue. I tried to impress upon the group the importance of travelling light, but when the airline staff saw a gigantic pile of bags, they baulked at the prospect of a sketchy takeoff.

This was a big blow to the group, and to make matters worse, there was then a lull in the wind and we found ourselves killing time on the beach without enough wind to kitesurf even with our biggest kites. Everyone should have been very annoyed with me, and I felt really bad that things had not worked out.

What's bigger than a big kite? Two big kites. Instead of letting me feel all embarassed and sheepish about everyone sat around on the beach, the gang helped me with the crackpot idea of flying two kites at once to get twice as much power. I was the only one who got to try it, as it needed so many people to help me launch the kites but make sure I didn't get launched into outer space by 26 square metres of bi-kite. That was an inspiring piece of alturism on the part of the group.

The most fun I've ever had with my clothes on. Thanks guys & gals! (April 2005)

Tags: #adventure #kitesurfing #kiteboarding #leadership

This is a story of identity, respectfully, on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, New York, USA...

When people ask where I'm from, I'm not sure how to answer the question. My surname is Grant, which is Scottish, but I was born in Aberystwyth, which makes me Welsh. But my Dad was from Yorkshire, so maybe I'm a Yorshireman. However, my Mum was from Lancashire, so maybe I'm Northern. But then again, I grew up in Oxford and Dorset, which are in the Midlands and South. I have lived & worked in London, England most of my career, and this multicultural smelting pot is where I feel most at home.

The short answer is, in my opinion, that we are all global children in the age of jet travel, international journalism and the Internet. I identify most strongly with the American people, who made me feel comfortable with my modern idenity, and the Irish people, who made me feel welcome despite my shortcomings.

As a European, I grew up during a period of IRA bomb scares and bombings. I remember not wanting to drink my milk at primary school because of fallout from Chernobyl. My school was once evacuated due to a bomb threat. My neighbour was working late next door to the Baltic Exchange when it was blown up. During the height of "The Troubles" our family felt scared to visit Northern Ireland, when we were on holiday in the Republic of Ireland. Several friends were nearby when the Brixton and Soho nail bombs went off. I remember being scared of planes carrying nuclear atomic bombs from the USAF bases in Oxfordshire. I remember the Lockerbie bombing and I remember being scared of planes being blown up or crashing while I was in one.

When I started my first Banking job in Canary Wharf in 2000 (age 20) there was no HSBC or Citigroup tower (let alone Barclays, JPMorgan, KPMG, Fitch etc. etc.) - they were just digging the foundations around Canada Square - the glass windows in the offices, that were blown out by an IRA bomb, had only relatively recently been replaced. My first job in The City (Square Mile) of London was in an office, which overlooked the bombed derelict ruin of The Baltic Exchange.

In May 2001 (age 21) I started my first Investment Banking job, quite near the Natwest Tower (now called Tower 42). On May Day the previous 2 years, The City had been engulfed by protestors against the rise and rise of Global Capitalism. During the riots, my office reception had been amongst several that had been compromised by protestors, leaving pinstripe-wearing, briefcase carrying, FT-reading fat cats (if that's how you care to think of these friends and colleagues of mine) barricaded in their offices.

On the 9th September, 2001, I moved to Surrey and was commuting into London for the first time. On the 11th, I remember the unfolding of events precisely and vividly. People crowded around my computer screen, which had been one of the few that had managed to refresh the BBC News Homepage during the surge of Internet traffic following the first tower of the World Trade Center being struck.

We made our way up to the trading floor, where they had TV, and we gasped as the second plane struck, and truth was immediately obvious - that this was a deliberate attack on the World Trade Center - fear spread throughout our office and The City. We believed planes were headed for Tower 42 and 1 Canada Square. We made our way home quietly, afraid, whereupon I had to buy a TV. I remember standing in the shop, just watching the footage over and over, transfixed with horror. We were frightened and saddened for the American people, and for ourselves too. Human suffering defies borders, defies race prejudice, defies class divides.

In early summer 2005, I started working for a U.S. Investment Bank and relocated to the South Coast of the UK. On the 7th of July, London was hit by 4 bombs on public transport. Before I relocated, I could walk to work from Angel to The City, but when my office had been relocated to Canary Wharf in 2003, I used to take the tube every day. On that particular day, one of the bombs detonated when the tube was right underneath where I used to work, in between Liverpool Street and Aldgate East.

I can barely imagine the horror of living, working or having friends and relatives on Manhattan Island on 9/11,  but in the UK the emotional connection spread as fast as the images were transmitted around the globe. On 7/7 there was chaos and confusion. I remember the phone network not being able to cope with the volume of calls and SMS messages, as we all reached out to one another to check we were OK. Nobody knew what was going on.

The images of the towers falling, and the dust cloud engulfing a city, will always be etched in our memories. Despite not being an American or having any direct connection with New York, I hope it does not seem churlish to say that I am symapthetic with the plight of those who were more directly involved in the events of either 9/11 or 7/7, and also have basic human fear and life-preservation instincts, that make me a little more fearful than I would care to admit to a terrorist, on the prospect of working in my 42-floor office with 12,000 souls, even 14 years later.

Somebody took a giant dump outside my office recently, as a non-violent protest about banking ruining the global econonmy, presumably. If somebody is angry enough to drop their trousers and curl one out, right in front of the security guards and CCTV, then I think there is still a large body of people who are pretty unhappy with those 'fat cats', still.

This is not at all about me. This is meant to be a message of sympathy, empathy, respect and common understanding, that we have all shared experiences of terrorism, and they are real and affect us all, in some way.

Condolences to all the families who lost loved ones on this day.

Tags: #london #career #banking #terrorism #capitalism #civildisobedience