This is a story about reproduction...

A flower is the sexual organ of a plant. A bunch of flowers is a bunch of genitals. They're a lot prettier than a man's meat & two veg though, admittedly.

Apparently, sending a picture of your manhood to the object of your affections is an accepted part of the new modern courtship ritual. A friend once told me she thought it was basically the same as "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" except completely unsolicited. I shudder to think what it must be like for girls on Tinder and Snapchat.

I guess I'm almost an ultra-conservative. I actually aspire to have a relatively old-fashioned relationship. I think gender roles are not actually a bad thing. The expectation for women to carry the unborn infant, give birth and be the primary caregiver, whilst also being expected to take the lead in maintaining domestic bliss, and have a career to boot, is too much to ask of somebody. Whore in the bedroom, chef in the kitchen, maid in the home, nanny to the kids and power-dressing bosswoman.

Men like to feel useful, needed, but frankly, once you've ponied up half a teaspoonful of baby batter, in order to impregnate somebody, your job's pretty much done in this society where women do it all. Is it any wonder that it's acceptable for men to be the butt of so many jokes: we're truly the weaker sex.

I feel like I might have offended a couple of my friends who are parents, with my bitter rants at my own parents. There's been plenty of times that I've written about the neurology of parenthood - the endorphins that are released in order to bond parent with child - and it has perhaps seemed like I've been attacking the 'magic' of parenthood by reducing it to its chemical nuts and bolts.

Believe me, I'm a sensation seeker, and just about the only thing left on my bucket list is to know what it's like to become a parent. I'd love to be so reckless and irresponsible as to just take a wild leap into the unknown, on the assumption that everything would be just fine. "You'll find a way" people say, and "there's never a right time".

Yes, that's right, there's never a right time. I've been thinking about population growth, and how much faster the human population has grown than anybody would have ever predicted. 60 years ago, the population was predicted to have grown to 3 billion by the year 2000. In actual fact, the population was over double that.

We now have over 7 billion mouths to feed on planet Earth. Not only that, but we all want to drive our little darlings around in gas-guzzling cars, have a pet doggie, take the whole family away on exotic holidays and fill our homes with cheap goods manufactured in the Far East. Something doesn't add up.

We talk about economic austerity, but the reality is much, much worse. The standard of living that we've all enjoyed, needs to take a massive nosedive, but nobody wants to hear it.

I desperately want to have some kids of my own, and a pet dog, and probably a cat too. I desperately want to return to the jet-set lifestyle I enjoyed a few years ago. I want to buy another car, another speedboat. However, just recycling a few bottles and buying a Toyota Prius is not going to offset the global impact of these selfish choices.

If there's one thing I know about experts, it's that they're usually conservative in their estimates. If the weatherman says to prepare for a gale, you should get ready for a hurricane. If the population experts say that the world population is going to be over 9 billion in 2050, we should assume that it's going to be 12 billion. If climate scientists say that global temperatures are going to increase by 2 degrees centigrade, we should assume they're going to increase by 4 degrees. If tide gauges show that sea levels have risen by a foot, we should expect them to rise another two feet in the coming years.

We have a culture where we're encouraged to think of our little nuclear families as little fortresses. We have double-locked front doors, and fences round our gardens. Our homes are our castles, and we view the world as vicious place, full of paedophiles, rapists, robbers and other things that are "out to get us". We are not only individually selfish - thinking about the immediate gratification of our reproduction and nurturing instincts - but we are collectively selfish, in that we put the needs of our family ahead of the needs of our species.

Yes, you're damn right, I would love to be a dad and to have a best friend in the form of a dog. I'm sure nothing could be more fulfilling than the feeling of adoration from the animals I feed. Many scientific studies have proven that it's nice to feel like the alpha, the leader of the pack, and nothing epitomises that more than the domestication of dogs. Dogs are pack animals, so they are genetically predisposed towards seeking approval of the 'alpha'.

However, dogs and babies are polluting. Disposable nappies are convenient, but make up a huge component of landfill. It's said that if an alien race were to come to Earth in a couple of hundred years time, when we've all died, they'll assume that we were a civilisation of incontinent midgets, because the mountains of nappies will still not have biodegraded.

I certainly wouldn't want to raise a kid without modern parenting aids. I certainly don't hanker for the days where we all died prematurely of preventable diseases and of starvation when the crops failed. However, where is the responsibility?

Dog ownership is the very pinnacle of irresponsibility. These are predatory carnivores. The meat we need to keep them means that huge swathes of arable land is used to grow animal feed, in order to keep our pets fed. Nobody can argue that keeping these animals as pets is a good use of finite resources. Having a dog is more polluting than having a car.

City living is responsible living: where we are entertained by culture rather than wiping up snot and vomit and spawning more mouths to feed. Where we are able to move around using mass transit systems that only work where there are economies of scale. Where we are able to be fed in massive refectories. We can have vast variety of food with relatively little wastage, because the population is so dense. Where the distances we have to travel are far less, because we build upwards, not outwards.

Yes, I feel unfulfilled, not having a nurturing outlet. I'd love to have some kids, a dog, a house in the country. However, it's irresponsible.

Just doing what your parents did, what other people do... that's sheep-like behaviour. Saying "well they did it too" is no defence, when you know you're acting recklessly, irresponsibly. We have birth control, we have planned parenthood, we know the problems we face as a species, as a planet. Do you want your kids and grandkids to starve to death on an infertile, polluted and inhospitable Earth?

Tags: #politics #climate

This is a story about the choice you didn't make...

There is an arrogance amongst ageing Westerners that I detest. There is a sense that these people somehow earned their wealth, that they worked for their place in the world, that they made smarter choices, that they avoided bad choices, that they made their own destiny. This delusional belief makes me spit with fury, rage.

I wrote a Facebook post entitled "Dear Baby Boomers" some time ago, and it really raised some heckles, but let's re-examine the whole thing, because it appears that the message really is not penetrating some very thick skulls.

The single most important deciding factor in your entire life happened before you were even born. If you were conceived in the Baby Boom generation, in the UK or USA or some other wealthy western nation, to a reasonably wealthy family (i.e. one of your parents was working, and maybe you even had a mortgage on your house) then you were quite literally born with a silver spoon in your mouth.

Let's put this in context. If you were born a hundred years earlier, if infant mortality didn't kill you, then preventable disease probably would have taken you to an early grave. Did you choose to be born after the discovery of Penicillin and the eradication of Smallpox and Polio? Did you choose to be born after the mass production of fertiliser and pesticides meant that farming yields give the West huge grain surpluses? Did you choose to be born after modern surgical techniques, such as the ligature of blood vessels and blood transfusions with the correct blood type had been developed? Did you choose where in the world you were born? Good job you didn't choose to be born in sub-saharan Africa, right?. Being born in Ethiopia would have been a pretty dumb choice wouldn't it? Good job.

Let's put things further into context for you. As part of the post-war Baby Boom generation, meant that you could expect to have a job, buy a house, get married and start having children, all with a single salary. And there would still be money left over for the flourishing practice of tourism. Yes, with each passing year, airfares as a proportion of your disposable income got less and less expensive, and the destinations got more and more exotic. Your disposable income meant you could save up money and buy a car, outright. You could own your car, and after 25 years, you could own your house. And you probably wouldn't need to be on any kind of property ladder... most Baby Boomers were able to buy family houses as their first home.

But you're grasping, and greedy and arrogant. You wanted more. You wanted an extension. You wanted two cars. You wanted three foreign holidays a year. You wanted premium bonds and high-interest savings accounts and a stock portfolio. You wanted world-class healthcare and education, provided by the state. You wanted the best of everything, and - being frankly honest - you didn't really work for it at all.

I find a 35 hour working week just a laughable concept. The fact that a whole generation were able to commute either by car or aboard uncramped public transport where they would get a seat in order to read their newspaper. A whole generation would work their 7 hours a day, with a whole hour for lunch. They would actually eat lunch and not just stuff a sandwich in their mouth while continuing to hunch over their keyboard. Then everybody would leave, en-masse at 5pm, and return home in the comfort of their car or their usual train carriage, thinking about the meal that their housewife would have prepared for them on their return. What a joke.

The Baby Boom generation is responsible for nuclear arms proliferation, an unmitigated climate catastrophe of global proportions which may condemn billions to their death, and financial profligacy of such wanton excess that the entire capitalist system, if not indeed the entire western civilisation, is teetering on the brink of collapse.

And these are supposed to be be fine minds, are they not, these arrogant fuckers? They got to go to University with full grants and no tuition fees. They got to fuck about studying to their heart's content, with somebody else picking up the bills. Yes, didn't the Baby Boomers choose to have a free University education, at the expense of future generations?

Didn't the Baby Boomers choose to drive around in those big engined cars and take all those foreign holidays, and have lovely warm centrally heated houses with crappy insulation, at the expense of future generations?

Didn't the Baby Boomers choose to grasp and grab the maximum that their greedy little mitts could get their hands on, leaving little in the pension funds for any future generations?

Didn't the Baby Boomers choose to elect politicians, and buy products from companies, that put profits and short term comfort and luxury ahead of any kind of long-term planning? Didn't the Baby Boomers choose to cover themselves in glory and pat themselves on the back, and make premature proclamations about having improved the standard of living? In fact, didn't the Baby Boomers choose to inflate their own standard of living at the expense of future generations? Yes. Yes they did.

Living standards are in decline, and it's not because young people make bad choices. It's not because young people are not smart. It's not because young people don't work hard. It's not because young people are not resourceful. It's not because young people have unreasonable expectations or they're spoilt. There is simply less opportunity, less on offer, more stress, more obstacles, more competition, fewer resources, higher costs, slimmer chances and young people have to work much much much harder than you can even imagine.

When I talk to people about how far they have to travel to get to their jobs, the conditions of public transport... it's atrocious. When a nurse has to get up at 5am, take 3 busses travelling for nearly 2 hours, to then work a 12 hour shift, and then has a journey home that's just as hard as the one they took in the morning, that's an unacceptable drop in the standard of living. When over 50% of their wage goes on rent alone. When they just quite simply don't have any disposable income because all their income goes on rent, council tax, electricity, gas and travel... how THE FLYING FUCK can you criticise them for choosing not to save money for a 'rainy day'.

Yes, you got to put money aside, because you were part of the arrogant smug generation of cunts who had your hand in the till stealing all the money. Because you didn't pay for your University eduction. Because you will be taking far more money out for your pension than you paid in. Because you didn't work very hard, and when you did work, the working conditions were slack as fuck. Yes, I'm angry about this. I'm angry that there are a whole load of sneering ignorant arrogant smug awful awful people who think that the reason why they mostly paid off their mortgage, maybe have some savings, maybe own their car, maybe have some disposable income each month... they think they fucking earned that, through smart choices and hard work, and they didn't.

Here's a smart choice for you: give away your wealth. Give it away as fast as you can. I doubt you'll even be able to give it away fast enough, because you've pissed off every subsequent generation that you stole from. You might sit in your armchair with your crappy rag of a newspaper, watching shitty TV, wallowing in your ignorance, luxuriating on your bed of lies, but there's an entire subcontinent who were economically enslaved to give you your ill-gotten lifestyle, and that wasn't enough for you... you even mortgaged the kids and the grandkids.

So, when you come to try and retire. When you come to try and cash in some of those casino chips you've been hoarding. When you ask the kids and the grandkids to carry you on their back, despite the fact that their life is shit when yours was lovely, do you think they're going to do it?

Given that we're talking about choices being the things that we're responsible for, do you think the millennials are going to choose to be responsible for your profligacy, your arrogance, your ignorance, your myopia? Are they going to pick up your trash and wipe your arse, when you kicked them and beat them up as scapegoats for your own shitty short-term gains and comfort?

Young people are being driven to emigrate, in search of a better standard of living, while at the same time, vast numbers of refugees and migrants are trying to get into the West for a better life. Meanwhile, you still expect to retire on your full pension having barely broken a sweat your whole working life? In your massive house that is far bigger than you could possibly need? Reading books, with your superior intellect from that University education that you never paid for? Overweight and full of obesity-related diseases from all the luxury food that you relentlessly push into that greedy hole in your face, but you just want more savings, more investments, more 000's on the end of your bank balance.

It's you who chooses more. More more more. More for you, less for everybody else. You're part of it. Collective responsibility.

Spend a bit less time talking about people's bad choices and a bit more time thinking about somebody who doesn't even have a choice, because of when and where they were born... which last time I checked, wasn't something you could choose at all.

Tags: #parents #politics #childhood

This is a story about wearing a straightjacket...

Life is better in flip flops. Life is best of all barefoot and with lush green grass underfoot, in some nice warm sunny climate. Why is it that we get so little of what our soul is screaming out for sometimes?

I decided to wear a grey suit and chase the dollars, as a technologist/engineer working in banking. That's a double whammy. Not only are you already working in a dry technical field, but you're also entering the bleak world of bean counting, which is daily corporate drudgery. There's no room for creativity or colourful characters in banking's IT departments.

My game plan has always been to earn enough to not have to worry about money. It's kind of worked. At times, I have been able to go for long stretches of my life without ever having to check my bank balance or do any budgeting. I've been able to have everything I wanted, when I wanted it, without thinking twice. However, there's another price to be paid: freedom.

In order to fit in a neat little box, and slot in and play nice with the other drones in the hive, you have to sacrifice any individual freedom of expression. There's no room for free spirits in the great grand pyramid scheme of corporate finance, capitalism and wage slavery. You need to appear to be a regular guy who is playing by the same rules as everybody else. You can't buck the trend. You can't beat the street.

Whether it's working 5 days a week, when you could easily afford to drop your hours to 3 days a week, or taking only 5 weeks of holiday when you could afford to only work 6 months of the year... you have to still put in the hours, weeks and months, to appear to be corporate enough to be allowed into the grand palaces of glass & steel.

Learning when to keep your mouth shut. Knowing who you're allowed to escalate issues to. Whose head are you allowed to go above. Learning which arses to kiss, who to brown nose. Learning when to come in early and when to leave late. Learning exactly which shade of grey is culturally in fashion at any given moment, and curtailing any longings you might have for a bright and gaudy tie or other flamboyant display of individuality.

You might have seen a scene in American Psycho, or perhaps read the chapter in the book, where the main protagonist and a colleague are comparing their business cards. The style details that they notice would escape the gaze of most people who are not immersed in the bland corporate world, but something as subtle as the serif on a font is a blaring foghorn to those who spend their days in a desert, devoid of all creativity.

This blog might appear to be intellectual masturbation, but really all this stuff had to come out. I've spent the best part of 20 years with no creative outlet. Sure, I got to design a few logos during my forays into startup land, and I got to do the graphics and sound for my iPhone games, but that was the briefest of respite from an unrelenting demand for my time to be spent pushing paper around a desk in a dreary office.

Ok, so I can't really complain. I've had a lifestyle and opportunities that many could only dream of. However, there is a feeling that everything that has come from that world is somehow dirty, and it's only by burning everything to the ground, and starting again, that I will find any peace and comfort. Everything that I've built using money from the corporate realm has felt just as fake as that entire make-work world.

Do you have to become destitute to appreciate things? What trigger is necessary in your life, to tell you to stop and smell the roses? What point do you reach, where you are prepared to watch your entire life fall into ruins, with some element of glee, with some sense of liberation? How is it that you can be happier as a person, when your whole world is collapsing?

Maybe I'll never own my own home and garden again. However I've lived in Royal Kensington Park Gardens. I didn't own the gardens, but when the park wardens have finished their sweep for any remaining interlopers (like me) after they have closed the park gates, and you have managed to evade discovery, then you pretty much have the place to yourself until the next morning.

The bulk of the homeless people in the park clustered unwisely and lazily around each other and the park entrances. They frequently robbed each other and got into fights. The park wardens and the police knew where to find them, and would go and antagonise them whenever park life was becoming a bit to cushy.

Being the lone wolf that I am, I found myself a thorny bush, with thick ground cover such that me and my tent were obscured from view, within its thorn-free centre. My bush was located a long way from any of the park entrances or paths through the park. It was in a part of the park that far fewer people would visit, as there's no monuments, statues, lake or other attraction. There was quite an extensive preparatory scouting operation and a lot of thought went into choosing my spot.

If you have chosen a more conventional lifestyle, you are probably in fear of eviction. You are probably afraid to default on your mortgage payments or get into rent arrears. You are probably fearful of losing your home and being turfed out onto the streets. Actually, it was pretty exciting and fun at times.

I really don't recommend that you become homeless if you have a family. It's more of a leisure activity for a single man in reasonable physical health, who has no fear of public ridicule or being ostracised.

Actually, this whole downward spiral has been immensely liberating. Who would honestly quit their job in order to write the equivalent of two novels, all of which would make them completely unemployable, and none of which would be commercial. There is no content here in this blog which is monetizable. I write because I have to... this stuff's been bottled up for too long. It has to go down on paper, before I lose my mind.

Who gets to be an artist? Who is allowed to have art as a career aspiration? Who has the talent? Or is it only the spoilt brat children of the moneyed elite who get to spend their days penning poetry and painting? How do artists pay the rent? How do artists eat?

Sorry, that sounds like I'm giving myself the title "artist" which is clearly undeserved, unearned. But what on earth is this monstrosity of a creation going to turn out to be? Calling the curious ramblings of an idiot in the process of losing his mind, an artwork, is surely preposterously pompous and delusional. Let's just keep calling it a blog for now. It will surely descend into an account of what I had for breakfast and other such banality anyway.

Surely words have to be printed on paper and bound into a book, before there can be any credibility for somebody's writing. Surely, unless there is a willing publisher, then the words are worthless. Without a publisher's mark, why should anybody care what somebody has taken the time to write?

There's a proper book from a proper author. I could quote from the book, and of course the words would have much greater gravitas, authority, because they're coming from a work of physical publishing. Ink had to soak into paper, and glue had to dry on a binding, for me to be able to hold this object in my hand, so therefore it exists, unlike this blog which is just made of ones and zeros and squirted down a fibre optic cable across thousands of miles.

A friend charmingly refers to my blog as a "blag" and naturally he doesn't read it. I'm not sure I'm blagging. I'm pretty much an expert in blagging and this feels like the complete opposite. I'm laying my soul bare here. I'm pouring my heart out. I'm giving you all the ammunition you need to destroy me.

There's a considerable leap of faith here, to lay yourself wide open to ridicule and shame. My actions are wide open to be criticised and cut to pieces. Every bit of my life can be dissected, like some lab animal. You'd be second to the carcass though. I already thoroughly dismantled my own mind and picked over the bones of my past.

I like to think that there might be something here after extensive editing, that could prove interesting to those going through the complete self-destruction of their life. Certainly there is inspiration that I have taken from other people's narratives of their descent into madness, addiction and destitution. I'm trying to emulate their writing, but also add to that body of literature, as I have struggled to find enough to read to satisfy my own demand.

But, let's just call this writing practice. I know that everything I've written to date is far too jumbled up and mixing topics to follow any kind of thread that somebody could just sit down and follow with any interest. It's too hard to find the nuggets that tickle your individual fancy.

Things would probably be a lot harder and flow a lot less verbosely if I was to set myself the strict constraints of a plot to follow and having to keep things in chronological order. This jumble of thoughts would struggle to make it out of my brain and onto a page if they had to be ordered, structured, constrained.

I hope you don't think I'm arrogant for considering the possibility that other people might read what I write. Perhaps it's naïve to even think that I could offer an interesting tale to another lost soul, wandering aimlessly or feeling alone.

Anyway, I'm going to go and eat my tea now.

Tags: #career

This is a story about self-imposed constraints...

I was hoping my depression would go away if I gave my brain a chance to achieve homeostasis, but there's always something that's pulling your mood this way or that. Whether it's a new friend, girlfriend, going shopping (even just for food), exercise or being a slave to the highs and lows of social media. Work is also obviously something that affects my mood in a huge way.

Apologies for this stupid Advent Calendar thing I wanted to do. It's just because I had an idea for a blog post on December 26th. I've padded things out, laboured points, repeated myself.

I'm looking forward to letting things flow naturally again.

Merry Christmas, by the way. I'm sorry my stuff has been so self-pitying and not at all festive. In fact, I've been quite the boring misery-guts. I appreciate that over 100,000 words on oneself is either conceited as hell or it's just me trying to brain dump and order my jumbled up thoughts.

Nearly 6,000 words on subjects as diverse as climate change and subatomic physics was really not written with the idea that anybody might read it. I'm embarrassed if you did, but maybe you got a little glimpse into the world I'm trying to navigate.

I don't know where I stand on social media. In some ways it's addictive and anti-social. In other ways it's a lifeline and a means of maintaining some social contact, when you haven't figured out how to get a social life back again, yet.

Anyway, I appreciate all the lovely messages of support, and people looking out for me.

Tags: #friends #socialmedia #computing

This is a story about burying your head in the sand...

The gravy train has left the station. The party's over. The song has stopped. If you haven't got a place to sit you're out of the game of musical chairs.

The middle classes have been very busy playing musical chairs with their make-work jobs in bloated service industries that contribute nothing to the real economy. Meanwhile, in the real world, climate change and poverty have been largely ignored.

Sadly, a large swathe of older middle class people are very lazy. They sit at home in their big houses, watching TV, reading newspapers and criticising everything, but never lifting a finger to do anything. Many don't even vote or destroy their ballot paper.

Today, at the climate change march held in London, I saw many grandparents who are very concerned about the world that is going to be left for their grandkids. Sadly, my parents have no concern for their children or grandkids. You can't make a difference to the world by sitting around taking drugs, sorry Mum & Dad... the world doesn't work like that.

My parents have sucked a great deal of money out of the state to pay for illnesses relating to their abuse of alcohol, drugs and smoking, but they give so little back. It's really embarrassing. When they were contacted because I was in hospital with a 30% chance of surviving, they decided to wait for the call from the coroner... they decided it wasn't worth the 45 minutes or so to travel from Oxford to London Paddington.

Okay, so I'm not doing a great job of changing the direction of my writing yet. I'm trying to move it from the angry rants into some more positive stuff, and finishing my own story. However, I had to deal with my parents earlier in the week, and I just found it incredible that they would sit there and tell me that London is too far for them to visit a gravely ill son or daughter in hospital. Today I saw many thousands of pensioners who are far older and in much worse health than them, out in the wind & rain, protesting against man made climate change.

My parents live not far from David Cameron's constituency home, and I think that they epitomise the Conservative mindset of out of sight, out of mind. Because these ridiculously selfish people never actually see suffering and pain first hand, they can smugly sit there in their multi-million pound Cotswold houses and do nothing except criticise the victims of the world's cruelty.

That's an injury that was inflicted on me by my own father. He seemed to think that treating his own son like a human was somehow optional, and it was OK to perpetrate an act of savagery against me. I really don't think there could ever be any justification or reasonable explanation for somebody of sound body and mind doing something like that to a person, so I'm not even going to go into the circumstances surrounding it. I'm totally appalled by the way that my parents speak to me and treat me, and the things that they have done to me. I'm over it. They're pretty much dead to me.

There's a simple formula for looking after a human life: be kind. That's it. It's not hard. If you're hitting humans, abusing them, telling them they're bad, calling them names, criticising and undermining them, humiliating them and generally robbing them of self esteem, disrespecting them and treating them like utter shit... yeah, that's not good. That's probably going to fuck them up.

The National Health Service (NHS) was kind to me. After I bandaged up my leg with sanitary towels and a dressing gown cord, I came back to London. The Royal Free Hospital repaired 4 tendons and 2 nerves in my leg, so I could move it and have feeling again. God bless the NHS.

I've always looked after myself and it's ironic that the first time I needed an operation is because my own parent attacked me. My dad has actually had to have a few operations because of his poor lifestyle choices. Drinking and smoking and taking drugs f**ks up your body and it's the NHS who have to pick up the pieces.

It's better to build happy healthy children than to try and fix f**ked up adults. Surely it seems to make more sense to hug your kids and make them feel loved and cherished, to look after them, rather than just dump them on the state? I don't believe in this difficult child horse-shit. Kids respond to their upbringing. Be nice, and your kids will be nice too. It's that simple.

I've been trying to get all of my travelling and entrepreneurial ambitions out of my system, and I know that drug-taking in front of children is a complete no-go. I have even delayed fatherhood while I figure out what's going on with my mental health. I take the responsibility of parenthood very seriously. If you don't alter your lifestyle at all for your children, you're a terrible person.

So my friend Klaus keeps reminding me that "your wound is your gift" and I think he's right. I look at the huge scar on my leg, and I'm reminded just how toxic even my own parents could be, and that I need to be kind and compassionate and work hard for the benefit of humanity. I'm reminded just how irrelevant such terrible people are in my life, in the lives of the ordinary people of the world and in the future of the planet.

Such horrible selfish people need to be outed from their positions as moral authorities, and stopped from gaining any kind of political influence. If you don't have empathy, kindness, compassion... what the hell are you doing having any influence over children and grandchildren? You don't deserve anything more than to sit and rot in your home in lonely misery.

So where is my own empathy, compassion? Well, I'm very beaten down, but when my parents are eventually as weakened and old as the oldest and weakest member of the climate change march that I saw today, then perhaps I will approach them again with the olive branch of peace. Until then, they are far too vicious and cruel and ignorant and horrible to be approached. Let them stew in isolation for fear that their toxic ideas might permeate.

I'm very jealous of friends who have good relationships with their parents. I would like to have a loving, caring family with close ties between us all, but my parents are so toxic that they have poisoned many of the relationships between our family members. They spend a lot of time cultivating their woe betide me tales of their own suffering. Yes, it's called karma. If you drink and smoke and take drugs and treat your kids like shit, then you'll be sick and miserable and you'll deserve it.

Weirdly, I do still love my parents. I guess this recurrent feeling of feeling unconditional love for somebody who treats you like shit could be the basis for a mood disorder. Always trying hard to please a parent, and receiving an unpredictable response dependent on their state of intoxication with drugs or alcohol can create a lot of uncertainty in a child's life. It can shape a personality into one that has issues with boundaries and healthy forms of self-expression.

Communicating my distress via a blog looks like really strange behaviour, but believe me, I've tried all the other ways, and the above scar is my reminder that the result is never good. I had successfully managed to keep my parents at arms length for many years, much to the benefit of my health and happiness, but sadly my ex-wife managed to screw that up with some kind of bullshit story that brought my dad and his heavy-handed aggression, violence and woeful ignorance into play, with disastrous results for me.

When your back is against the wall, when you're cornered, when there is a lynching mob out for your blood, whipped into a frenzy with lies and ignorance... you have to resort to unusual tactics if you want to survive. I'm not really sure if I want to survive. I'm very exhausted by death by a thousand cuts, and everybody wants to put the boot in. However, unfortunately the survival instinct seems to prevail even though I'd love to just curl up and die.

So, I'm lashing out again. Sorry about that. Maybe you shouldn't corner and cruelly torture somebody who has been so badly beaten and bruised. They say that an injured animal is the most dangerous.

I'm trying to redirect my energy into more positive things though. I'm trying to be heard again, not in the hope of saving myself, but in the hope that somebody else who's in a similarly dark place can see that they're not alone. I'm hoping that somebody else who's going through hell might read my story and feel a little bit less alone in the world. I'm hoping that anybody who can relate, feels a little bit less like an unwanted freak.

I'm going to continue on my path of brutal honesty. I'm not out to name & shame anybody. This is my unedited story. There's a lot more to come, and a lot of it is going to be shameful and embarrassing for me, but I'm going to tell it anyway. I'm going to tell it because it needs to be told. People need to know what happens when you bully and abuse somebody. People need to know what happens when you repress and oppress and humiliate and exclude and destroy self-esteem and take away somebody's hope and reason for living.

I also want to try and keep going on a positive path of recovery, and discover if there's a path back to happiness and light. If the story has a message of hope in it that is emerging, that's a good thing. It might help somebody else who's going through hell, and then it was worthwhile me sharing and facing my fears of ridicule and shame.

I'm trying to do good deeds.

You can take the boy out of Oxford, but you can't take the Oxford out of the boy (November 2015)

Tags: #politics #parents #childhood #london #nhs #injury

This is a story about the seasons...

I'm not just a city slicker. I'm actually reasonably tuned in to nature. I have studied weather patterns and the seasons. I have studied tides and rivers. I'm pretty adept at spotting patterns, and I can be a good data scientist to prove it.

Tomorrow - Sunday - I'm going on a climate march in the capital of the UK, London. It will be the first ever political march I have ever taken part in. That's pretty shocking. I have been remiss in my duty as a citizen in keeping UK politics honest. I've been one of the silent 76%. I will be writing about the reasons for why I was so quiet during the last General Election in later blog posts.

I had the pleasure of taking a plane ride home chatting to a couple of millennials a couple of years ago, and oh my God do they work hard. They wanted to go to University, but they quite rightly saw it as a huge privilege to go, and were exceptionally grateful for the opportunity. They laughed at the idea of spending a precious penny of education money on frivolities like partying. They gawped at the idea that the baby boomers paid no tuition fees, got grants and had plenty of money for drugs, drinking and smoking.

Yes, there is a huge generation gap. One generation got to drive around in gas guzzling cars and have heaps of foreign holidays where they travelled all over the globe by jet aircraft. That generation guzzled all the profits, the equity of the nation.

Baby boomers have bankrupted the UK with an unsustainable pensions model based on passive asset management. These lazy people were asleep on the job... never attending any shareholder meetings, while blue chip companies paid huge salaries and bonuses to lazy executives, and the massive enterprises were asset stripped in order to keep paying dividends into pension funds that were managed for short term growth.

The next round of asset stripping is now taking place, with round after round of redundancies, with all the jobs going offshore to China and India, plus the multinationals are restructuring to make sure they hardly pay a penny in corporation tax.

This won't work. We are expecting the millennials to prop up the pension funds, like a ponzi scheme, but we are getting rid of their jobs at the same time. How are they supposed to work to support the baby boomers in their retirement, if the same baby boomers have offshored all the jobs? There won't be any tax receipts either, because everybody will be either retired or unemployed and the multinational corporations won't be paying a penny in tax to the UK.

We are governed - politically and in our jobs - using a top-down approach. A pyramid scheme. The problem with that model is that if the guys at the top are total psychopaths, megalomaniacs, myopic losers... then the whole world is screwed.

The only antidote is grass-roots activism. The power of the unions was destroyed by the Tories, but we thankfully still have the right to peacefully protest about our lives and planet being destroyed by greedy fat cats.

I don't really care whether you believe man made climate change is real or not. If you want to deny the existence of the overwhelming body of evidence that shows that things are probably way worse than we could possibly imagine... get to the back of the queue for the water tap when the drought hits. Why don't you move to the edge of the Sahara... that'd be lovely and warm for you?

Yes, why don't we do that? Instead of taxing a tiny bit more for people who drive polluting vehicles, why don't we suggest that them and their family are therefore put lower down the priority list for assistance, when climate catastrophe hits. When there's a flash-flood, wildfire or a hurricane, you'll be last to be saved. How's about that?

If you're putting yourself first and ignoring the wellbeing of humanity and the planet, that seems fair, doesn't it? If you're so busy watching TV and reading crappy newspapers that print lies and pandering to your spoilt children and teaching them the same ignorant crap that you've bought into, I don't see why you and your lot shouldn't drown in the rising sea levels that you've caused.

We are a nation of sailors in the UK, and we are an island nation with the 2nd biggest tides in the world. The English Channel is one of the windiest places on the planet. Also, the UK is only able to enjoy its mild climate because of the anomaly of the Gulf Stream. The sea might look tranquil at times, but it can rage and storm and smash everything to bits too.

If you are a sailor you must master the state of the sea (waves) the tides and the wind, which can gust and squall out of nowhere. You have to look at the clouds and the surface of the water to see what's happening in the invisible currents of the air. You have to look at any points of reference on any land that you can see to guess what's happening in the invisible currents of the sea. The tide can carry you far faster than the wind sometimes.

It's a similar thing with the planet. You have to get way up a mountain or look from the basket of a balloon or the window of an aeroplane, in order to gauge the state of the climate. If you can see melted glaciers, dry river beds, empty lakes, dust bowls, deserts... the planet might be trying to tell you something.

Everything might feel OK in your double or even triple glazed house with air conditioning and other refinements that are designed to shut nature out and maintain a degree of microclimate control. Everything might feel OK in your air-conditioned car with tinted windows. Believe me, things are not OK.

The oil/energy industry is bigger than you can possibly comprehend. Their lobbying power is immense. They have bought politicians and media outlets around the world. They have controlled almost everything that is printed and has been broadcast, for a very long time. It's only with the advent of technology like the Internet that these monopolies are being eroded, and honest people are allowed to be heard for once.

You see that hole in the cloud cover, which is like a lovely dappled blanket over most of the area you can see? That hole is caused by a power station. Its heat output has actually vaporised the cloud cover above it. That means that not only the energy output of the power station is being pumped into our greenhouse, but also less of the sun's energy is being reflected back into space.

Can you  see how nice and white the clouds are, when you look down on them from an aeroplane? That's because the sun's energy is bouncing back into space. Clouds are fantastic at keeping the planet cool.

You know what isn't good for keeping the planet cool? Water. Yes, as a sailor you learn about something called sea breeze. This is wind that is created because land heats and cools very rapidly, but water absorbs and stores the sun's energy. That means that when the land starts to cool when the sun goes down, you get a big rush of warm air out at sea, back towards cold land. You always get a nice on-shore breeze in the evening during the summer.

Imagine if much more of your planet is covered by water, and much less by snow and ice (which is white, so reflects sunlight) and you have way less cloud cover because the temperature is raised so high that water droplets are not forming. Imagine if what little land that remains has been covered by power stations, roads, airports, offices and houses, which pump out huge amounts of energy. Imagine that.

What I think would happen would be very extreme weather. Cataclysmic storms, bush fires, mudslides, expansion of the deserts, inhospitable temperatures, flash flooding. Yeah... pretty much what we're seeing.

The oil/energy men will say that it's not true. They won't refute it with good science. They'll just say it's not true, and tell you to keep buying their plastic crap and driving around in your gas guzzling car and having heaps of foreign holidays in aeroplanes.

Yes, it's true that I flew all the way to San Francisco to have my photo taken at the Golden Gate Bridge. It sounds like I'm the ultimate hypocrite. However, it wasn't a holiday. I was going to kill myself.

That's right, I have reached the point where I can no longer stand what I see in the world. I can no longer bear wars being fought in my name, people being oppressed in my name, the planet being destroyed in my name. Politicians need to stop using me - their citizen - as an excuse to perpetrate war and suffering.

There is talk of austerity. How's about this? We don't bomb Syria. I will take a 'cut' in the amount of bombs that I buy. I don't want to buy any bombs at all, let alone have them dropped on anybody's head. Zero bombs for me, please. That goes for bullets and shells too. Yes no bullets for anybody's guns and no shells for anybody's tanks and artillery. I don't want any. None, zero, zip, nada... I don't want any. Not for me no. Never.

So, I'm a member of the majority of people in the UK. I'm one of the 76% of people who didn't vote for the Tories. That means that no war should be waged in my name by an unelected minority. Unelected? Yes... 76% of people in the UK don't want the Tories.

So, don't let these unelected wankers, these Eton toffs, these psychopathic warmongering twats... don't let them commit war crimes and global destruction in your name. You didn't vote for these awful awful people. We need to get out into the streets and let the arrogant little shits know that we won't put up with their awful policies.

The Tories will try and bolster their power to subvert and oppress the UK citizens. They will try and keep the police and the armed forces on side with flag-waving nationalism and warmongering, plus ostracising the poor and underprivileged. They will try to divide and rule. It's so painfully obvious that they have all studied the 'success' of the Falklands war and the growth of the City and financial services, in terms of Tory popularity. They seem to have lost sight of the fact that they caused the recession and the Poll Tax Riots.

Please remember that I'm promoting civilised nonviolent protest. No vandalism, no abuse and please be mindful that the police are just doing their job, and doing it in really tough circumstances. We do need law and order. We just don't need the kinds of laws that the Tories would really like to sneak through Parliament using their plutocracy.

I think the Queen and the House of Lords are actually doing a reasonable job of keeping a muzzle on the dangerous dog that is the Tory party. I was reading today about what a bunch of bullies and psychopaths are at the very heart of a party that will gladly drive people to suicide to further their political agenda. These dangerous megalomaniacs need to be treated with the contempt that they deserve.

So I know that many people are turned off by politics and probably will not have even read as far down as this. I will try and dumb things down for people and keep my political message coated in sugar and generally hidden from sight, like peas hidden in mashed potato to get a fussy child to eat some green vegetables. I'm sorry that's a little patronising, but you're letting the country and the planet get ruined by people who are political... but they're horrible.

I seriously recommend that you get some people who are nice and honest and caring, into the political system. All the psychos are really making the whole nation, the whole planet, very sick indeed.

That is all.

It's time to make the call to action right now. Christmas is going to be a big distraction, but when the credit card bills start hitting people's doormats in January, the suicide rate is going to soar. It's also going to be a bitterly cold winter because of climate change (October 2015)

Tags: #politics #suicide #mentalhealth #civildisobedience #notanonymous