This is a story about a fresh start...

Why do we believe we can motivate change by shaming people, blaming them, making them feel guilty, placing even more obstacles in their path, isolating them, damaging their self-esteem and denying them the basic respect that every human should expect to receive?

My assumption, from childhood, school and my longest relationship, is that I'm going to be physically and verbally abused, to get me to comply with somebody else's idea of how I should think and act.

If you tell somebody they're "bad" enough times, sometimes, that person might say "screw it" and start acting up to the bad name you've given them. If you always expect the worst from somebody, one day, they might start fulfilling your long-held prophecy.

I saw a satirical cartoon the other day, where a policeman arrests a person doing drugs, because "drugs destroy lives". That person is then tried in court and sent to prison, and of course, they then can't get a job, seeing that they're a convicted criminal. When the policemen then sees that person, now living destitute on the street, the policeman says "I told you so!".

I've been trying to escape the gravity of an abusive relationship for quite a long time now. It's harder than you think. When your partner that you love has no respect for you, and your self esteem is destroyed, you can't expect a person to get back on their feet quickly. You don't know how deep the damage runs.

I've still got the shouting and screaming and battering of doors ringing in my ears. Imagine being shut into a tiny room, with somebody raging and snarling and unleashing a torrent of vicious aggression on the other side of the door. Imagine being trapped in that corner, not knowing when it's going to end, not having any way out.

I'm not looking for pity. I'm trying to explain how a confident, outgoing, gregarious character, with a bright, sunny positive disposition, might end up becoming pale and withdrawn. How that person might end up falling foul of escapist traps, and being brainwashed into believing that they're a "bad", "evil" and "worthless" person.

I've been asked to carry the can, to shoulder a shit-tonne of blame. I've been asked to beat myself up and hold myself accountable for every 'choice' I've made, and every consequence. I'm expected to think of myself as some isolated individual, who acted entirely with free will... I'm not subject to influence of other people, circumstances, my environment. Apparently I'm the first person in the history of the Universe to be in total control of my own destiny.

I don't think it's at all useful, this idea of holding everybody accountable for unforeseeable consequences, or the unavoidable results of being beaten into a corner. Does it really make you feel better, to have subdued a person, where they just resentfully start to parrot your bullshit? Does it really feel like a victory to have abused a person to the point that they submit to your muscle-flexing and intimidation?

Feeling sorry for myself is not going to lead anywhere positive. Yes, if you do wrong by a person, you do give them an excuse to act up, to react. I'm sorry, but if you're going to treat a person like shit, you have given them the mandate to act the way you wanted them to. That's not to say that you've revealed or changed that person's character though. There's no such thing as 'bad' or 'evil' people... we're all shaped by the world around us.

It's taken a hell of a long time to move judgemental, unkind people with no compassion or understanding, away from me. Breaking the bonds with people who were supposed to care - but don't - is a hard thing to do. It's not my job to re-educate those who would rather see a life destroyed than admit they're wrong. It's not my job to soak up the abuse of somebody who's got an axe to grind, and I'm their punchbag.

I don't want to become another bitter, twisted, negative, cynical and bullying individual, out to trample other people in order to get ahead myself. If I can't beat them, I'm not going to join them... I'm going to put as much space between me and them as possible.

When we think about Game Theory, and specifically a game called Prisoner's Dialemma, what strategy would you employ? In this game, the person who rats out their co-conspirator stands to gain the most, by stabbing their partner-in-crime in the back. The person who acts in a positive, giving, trusting way stands to potentially lose everything, even though their motive is to reach the fairest possible outcome.

I refuse to switch my strategy to that used by my persecutors. I refuse to become a backstabber, because then the whole world just turns into a horrible place of mistrust and unpleasantness. I don't want to live in a world where everybody is out to screw over everybody else.

I have literally turned the other cheek. I had the trust that, having received a black eye one side, I would return my face to centre and allow it to be struck the other side, if my abusive partner wished to dish out further unprovoked blows to my head. They gleefully gave me a black eye on the other side, before planting one square in the middle of my face, breaking my nose.

Even with self defence as a reasonable just cause to raise my own fists, I'm quite glad to say that I simply took that beating and stood by my strongly held beliefs that we can't simply descend to the level of animals, and be ruled by our temper, anger, aggression, violence.

When I eventually cracked, it was with glee that I had given this vicious person exactly what they wanted, and they tried to label me as the 'bad guy'. For some crazy reason, I felt guilty about no longer wanting to be the passive punchbag. For some crazy reason I felt guilty about defending myself. For some crazy reason I felt guilty about retreating into a corner, in self-defence.

This abusive partner had the gall to talk about me infringing their human rights, when they had me as a prisoner in my own home. Violence, aggression, verbal abuse... and I was the bad guy for using a door as a shield to protect myself from the blows of their fists, and kicks. That doesn't make any sense.

That was how this horrible, horrible relationship ended, with me having been sealed into my own tomb, a sarcophagus. I had no access to a toilet, food or drinking water, but still it was me who was in the wrong, despite the fact I was completely trapped, dying, in a corner.

When the separation was mercifully forced upon this unrelentingly vicious person, a friend took pity on me and took me into his home, to release me from the place that had become my prison cell.

It should come as no surprise that there was lasting psychological damage from the sustained attacks that I received. However, the expectation - especially from my family - was that I should bounce back immediately and be absolutely fine. They were even surprised to find that given the same treatment: shouting abuse at me, while cornering me, would give the same negative response of me retreating into a position of trapped self-defence, paralysed by fear.

It was me who made the brave steps to start moving forwards. I was living with a generalised threat of abuse, invasion of privacy, being attacked anywhere, anytime. I had gone through the long period of abuse, and been psychologically scarred, but it was me who made the first moves to try and repair the damage.

I tried to allow myself to be even more open to attack. I tried to fight fear with trust. I thought that by allowing myself to be in a vulnerable situation, things would somehow improve. It's very hard to let yourself be vulnerable when you've been so deeply affected by something that's damaged you so deeply.

My attempt to open myself up to abuse by my persecutors backfired spectacularly. Psychologically, I couldn't cope with that level of threat, and it made me act in a very strange way. The net result was that I kept myself hiding in my corner, with absolutely no defence. I spent 3 days paralysed by fear, before eventually being physically attacked by a member of my family who's supposed to love and care for me. I was hospitalised with a major injury. Hardly a success.

Later, I ended up in large hostel dormitories, which meant the total loss of all personal space, privacy... living in a totally exposed way, under continuous scrutiny. Again, you can't imagine how hard it is to be suffering major psychological trauma, while being watched like a goldfish in its bowl by nosey strangers. Many people found it far more entertaining to stare at me, rather than get on with their own lives, mind their own business.

People found me fascinating to sit and stare at. Instead of leaving me alone, moving away from me and the shit that I've been dealing with, they've been drawn to me like moths to a flame. They've pulled up a chair, got out the popcorn and sat back to enjoy the show.

"Oh my god, this is awful" they must have exclaimed. "I know, we can't miss a single second of this engrossing stuff. It's so entertaining" is what they really mean. Nobody recoiled in horror, or could tear their eyes away. They were fascinated, intrigued. Are we so used to seeing pain and human suffering on TV that we genuinely consider it entertainment, a spectacle for us to simply sit back and observe, for our own sick pleasure?

One of my friends, who actually understands a bit of what I've been through, actually managed to convince people that I'm not part of the paid entertainment. I'm not a one man travelling show, for your viewing pleasure. Much to my audience's disappointment, he actually convinced them to go and gawp at something else. That helped. A lot.

Very recently, another friend masterfully diverted attentions from creating an unwelcome storm, an intrusion that would have been unhelpful. He recognised the hallmarks of somebody trapped by psychological trauma, and actually held back those forces that I feared so much, so that some repair work was finally done.

Fools rush in, and first, do no harm. These are good mottos. If you don't understand what somebody is going through, it's not a spectator sport, and you don't know what damage your interference is going to do. Hands off, back away from the person who's trapped in the corner... don't drive them deeper into their attempts to fend off the world.

There's a hell of a long journey to feeling safe and secure in my own home again. It might not seem like it, because the story is a long and complex one, but there's a lot of damage to be repaired and it takes a lot of time.

It's the rushing that makes everything take so much longer. When you expect a person to be magically back to normal overnight, and you do nothing to understand what they've been through, or try to imagine what they're dealing with... that's what keeps a person trapped in a never-ending cycle.

You might think that episodes of illness prove that I'll never be fully better again, but it's actually you who is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you mistreat a person, assume the worst, and act on your own negative views, of course you're going to trap a person into a position they can't escape.

It's hard enough to just deal with the backlog of problems. To have extra obstacles placed in front of you, to have support withdrawn and be left to fend for yourself... those are the reasons why lives get written off, why people sink without a trace.

It's a long game, helping somebody recover, get their strength back, get back on their feet. There are no short cuts, and there are no easy conclusions you can jump to. Even when you start to think you understand what makes a person tick, and you can extrapolate, guess, and work out what their possible future is, you're wrong. As soon as you start writing a person off, you're part of the problem. You're hurting and hindering that person.

I know it sucks to care about a person who's really hurting, and is really damaged. I know it's easier to protect yourself by joining in the attack on that person, rather than taking the harder road of actually undoing the years and years of attacks that an easy target sustains.

Once you've started to be abused and bullied, you get weaker, so you're easier to abuse and bully, and so the cycle continues and gets worse. Everybody wants to be on the winning team, to some extent, and there's an animal instinct to pick on the weak.

I think we should be better than that. We're humans, not wild animals. We need to be better than that.

Damaged people need a clean, fresh start, but you don't know how much baggage they've got. You don't know how much of a burden still rests on that person's shoulders. It takes a lot more effort than you could possibly imagine to give that person a chance of a fresh start, a clean break.

Tags: #divorce

This is a story about dying while doing something you love...

Please forgive the gallows humour. I find death quite darkly comic, having lived in its shadow for far too long.

I found myself in possession of a year's supply of Supercrack once. It cost me less than $150 including shipping. A whole year of drug abuse, in one little baggie. Addiction never leaves your side. You can go anywhere you want, but you can't escape yourself.

Having a year's supply of your drug of choice should be an addict's wet dream, right? Well, it depends on the nature of your addiction. If you're still managing to eat and sleep, then perhaps you will make it to the end of the year. If you're not eating or sleeping, then you're simply committing suicide, slowly.

When I was trapped in an abusive relationship and kept away from London, I had given up on life. I was dying. I used to occasionally get scared of death, and clean up my act for a few weeks, but then I would always relapse, because of the same old abusive relationship and isolation from the city I call home.

I finally made it back to London, but there was pointless crap dragging me back into things that were far less important than saving my life.

That's a letter I received, in my mother's handwriting, hassling me about some divorce paperwork that could have waited until I had completed the treatment that I was undergoing to save my life. I had explicitly stated that I didn't want my wife or parents to be in any form of contact with me, while I was trying to get better. During this second attempt, I explicitly forbade my wife and parents from having any contact with me or the professionals who were paid to take care of me.

It was time to get better, get away from the s**ts who nearly hounded me to my grave. It was time to move on. It was time to recover.

Eventually, the vultures f**ked off and thankfully I had enough money left to pay the deposit on a flat and the first couple of months rent and bills, so I could get myself settled, get into a new job etc. etc.

I rented a room in a shared house near some friends in Kentish Town. My time up to this point had been wasted on pointless divorce crap that could have been deferred. I had been relentlessly harassed. Also, having my leg in plaster cast and being on crutches didn't help. My treatment was ruined by people not respecting my wishes. I was in a worse state than ever.

I hobbled into my new room and collapsed. I spent a week crying myself to sleep, I was so exhausted by the trauma of everything that had gone before. I had just about enough money left to make a go of things, but not quite. Everything had to go perfectly.

I had resolved not to commit suicide in my friends' house, where I was a guest, as it would have been a very unpleasant legacy to leave behind in somebody's home. They seemed committed to making that house their forever home, so there was no way I could do that to them.

After moving out and having a week where I felt that I didn't have the reserves of strength and money to continue, I decided to shut up shop. I decided to commit suicide.

The final straw was when my Dad tried to poison my friend's opinion of me, with his warped version of events. People were talking behind my back, and my confidentiality and consent to share information were completely breached. The place where I had spent the best part of £8k on treatment became some kind of counsellor and general centre for misinformation for my parents, despite explicit instructions that they weren't allowed contact.

I took a massive overdose and collapsed on the floor. The three metal prongs of a plug were sticking painfully into my thigh, but I couldn't move. The hot transformer for my laptop was burning my abdomen, scorching the skin, but I couldn't move. My arms were in the most uncomfortable position, but I couldn't move. The weight of my head rested uncomfortably on my chin, with my neck extended very awkwardly, but I couldn't move.

When you have taken an overdose, and you realise that it's overwhelming you, you start to panic. Can you make yourself throw up, if you've swallowed your poison? You know that it's too late... the chemicals are already entering your bloodstream and vomiting will make no difference. There was a moment's regret, and then resignation.

My body spasmed and twitched for quite a long time. There were a lot of auditory disturbances (I heard weird things). My mind kinda went blank for ages, or was caught up with weird confused thoughts. Then it dawned on me that I was alive but still on collision course with death. Day turned to night, and night turned to day, and so on. About 4 days went by with me paralysed like that... just breathing, and my body spasming.

I then started to think about death. I started to consider the possibility that I was going to discover if there was an afterlife or not. I started to think how embarrassed I would be to meet some deity who I never believed in. I didn't start believing in any god, but I considered how sheepish I would be if I met my maker.

Next, I started to think about the waste of it, the waste of life. Not that I was wasting my life, but that there was nothing positive that was going to come from my death. I started to consider how I could leave a message that would somehow prove useful to those who survived me. I started to consider how frustrating it would be to discover something in death, but have no way to pass on that discovery to the living world.

I started to imagine a weird experiment, where two suicidal people would risk their lives to discover if it's possible to communicate from beyond the grave. They would be in two isolated chambers, each with a keyboard. There would be a randomly timed event that would kill them, but they would get about a minute's warning before they were about to be killed. They would then type messages, and only in the event that the messages were co-incidentally the same, would the time be extended.

Eventually, one of the experimenters can type no more and rushes out of the experiment exit to safety. The other experimenter is killed. When the messages are later examined, we can see that the co-incidence of the messages being the same is immensely unlikely, but yet there were a sequence of messages that were identical, despite death being inevitable at that point.

Don't worry, I didn't decide to start a cult with a suicide pact. I did however decide that dying alone, leaving no note or anything was rather silly. I summoned the strength to claw myself off the floor and onto my bed, where I lay in agony for some time.

I urinated into a pint glass - I was virtually immobile - and saw that my urine was cloudy and the colour of orange juice with a lot of blood in it. My organs had started to shut down. My thigh was a painful mess from the plug that had dug into it, and my abdomen was burnt from the laptop transformer. My kidneys hurt and my tummy was tender and painful. My muscles were weak as hell. I had a lot of fluid on my lungs and my chest was tight. Breathing was difficult.

I decided to try and make death a bit quicker by severing my jugular vein, but my blood pressure was so low and it was actually really hard for me to even find a pulse. I kept blacking out with orthostatic hypotension.

Later, my ex-girlfriend discovered me in this dreadful state, and got me to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, where the hard-working lovely people of the NHS saved my life.

Here's the view I woke up to, from my hospital bed. I was quite surprised to wake up (May 2014)

Tags: #addiction #suicide #divorce #depression #london #nhs #injury

This is a story about gushing all over the Internet...

What happens when you lay your soul bare for public examination? Well, don't worry about it, because everybody is pouring their private lives out into the public domain on social media and via email, text message and other electronic communication mediums.

I have overcome my fear of dying alone. My frustration with life now outweighs my fear of death. Now my only fear is of being survived by anybody who knew me. The way that people misremember you will be your legacy.

We all write and create so much content these days. Digital cameras are ubiquitous. We create thousands of photographs and videos. We write hundreds of thousands of words in emails, text messages and social media posts. Our digital footprint is huge.

You would have thought that there would be shame, embarrassment, regret in sharing my most private secrets, but the more I do it, the more I am liberated from the desire to prove myself worthy. I like admitting I am fallible, that I have made mistakes, that I have gone astray. It's exhausting fighting the rumour mill and trying to maintain a spotless image.

I'm actually struggling to return to the 'real world'. Spending every day with nothing more important to do than write is nice (who knew?). I'm sure that those of you with jobs and kids must hate my guts for the fact that I reject responsibility and instead, my time and energy is ploughed into pontificating like a student, like a child, like a spoiled teenager.

Presumably you see that sitting an exam with known 'correct' answers is pointless? Allowing yourself to be measured, to be sifted, to be sorted... subjecting yourself to the degradation of allowing somebody to sit in judgement over your intellectual value. Surely you can see that being channelled through such a system is brainwashing you? You might as well get "KNOW YOUR PLACE" tattooed to the inside of your eyelids.

Writers, photographers, musicians and other artists must struggle to be heard over the cacophony of "me too" voices. Any douche with an iPhone is a photographer or a film-maker these days. Any douche who can play three chords on a guitar is a musician. Any douche who's not completely tone deaf is a singer. Any douche who can string a coherent sentence together is a writer or a poet.

When was the last time that you stepped back from what you were doing, and questioned your place in the big picture? When was the last time you examined your reason, your motives, for doing everything you do?

An experiment was conducted on public transport, where a person would ask somebody who was sitting down "can I sit there?" indicating that they would like the person sitting down to give up their seat. There was no obvious reason to give up the seat, such as being pregnant, old or having an injury. We just want to sit down. Perhaps an unreasonable request, when at least second in line for that seat.

The result from the expriment was that, a large proportion of the time, people would give up their seat and allow the other person to sit down. Sometimes the person would ask "why?" and the reply "because I want to sit down" would be given. An unreasonable reply, perhaps, but that was enough of a reason for some people to give up their seat after initially questioning the justification.

We are all very familiar with the 'teacher' experiments that show that many people would administer lethal electric shocks to a 'pupil' if we were told to do it by an authority figure. People are very compliant with social norms. We very rarely question things, especially if there is obvious rank and status in play.

How dare I publish my photographs, unless I have done some kind of photography course. Maybe I need to be a fellow of some kind of academy or society of the arts? Maybe I need a piece of paper to wave, as well as the end of my camera lens.

How dare I read academic papers and do my own research, consider my own hypotheses, publish my own thoughts and ideas. Maybe I need to be a graduate from some esteemed academic institution? Maybe I need to have a qualification that says that I was measured by somebody in authority, and found to meet a certain standard? Maybe I need to be gagged and blinded.

How dare I write, unless I have received an advance from a publisher, or have other works published. Maybe I need to have a number of press clippings and a bibliography to prove my words have the necessary importance. Words without quotation, without citation... they're worthless noise.

Have you ever heard of original thinkers? People who don't give a shit who you are, and how important you think you are. People who don't give a shit about rote-learning the same crap as everybody else. People who aren't afraid to question the status quo, or to keep asking "why?" until the limit of understanding is reached, and the shaky foundations of knowledge are revealed.

Sure, a great debate rages about the contribution of laymen and women. Sure, everybody thinks that their contribution is valid, and there isn't enough time to lay bare the fundamental error in every half-baked crackpot idea.

Publish or perish, though, publish or perish. Everything is indexed for search these days. It really doesn't hurt anybody, having these 143,000 words out there in the public domain. It actually helps me, because I have a non-monetary life-insurance policy. It serves to capture a little piece of me, alive. I'm living through my words, because I don't feel like my fingernails are going to grip onto life for very much longer.

Yes, it would be easy to say that this sounds alarmist, attention seeking. However, I know how close I am to death, because I've captured the data and I've done the calculations.

I can see the cyclical nature of myself. I can see the downward slide of things

Tags: #privacy #suicide #depression

This is a story about repetition ad nauseam...

I have been stuck in a trance, obsessed with the past wrongdoing of a couple of people. I need to draw a line under things and move forward. I know they will be relieved to hear that, and feel that they got away with things and they're off the hook. However, my writing has gotten very repetitive and boring, because I keep labouring the same points. Time to change.

I know it must come across that I'm very stubborn, determined, single-minded. I don't quit, I don't relent, I'm a dog with a bone that I won't let go of. This has taken me fairly far in life, because I've solved problems that other people couldn't. I've achieved things that other people wouldn't, because it just requires too much sacrifice and dedication.

Mucking about with computers is not healthy or normal, and it's certainly not a choice, it's more of an alternative when other routes are barred. Yes, I would love to be part of the gang, part of the crowd sometimes, but I'm clearly odd-one-out. Piggy-in-the middle is fun to tease. Excluding a minority gives you somebody to pick on, to point and laugh at, to make you feel better about yourself. "At least I'm not them, ha ha ha!"

I've retreated inwards as a response to stress and depression. It might seem mad to cut yourself off, but when your general life experience is of loss and people turning on you, then your survival instincts tell you to be self-reliant in dark times. A life lived on Facebook is no life at all, but the virtual world seems more friendly to me than the one where I have lost so many friends.

It takes two to tango, and I know that I've not been a very good friend. I know that I've let friendships go cold, not replied to messages for long periods, not picked up the phone. I can't remember the last time I made or received a phonecall. It must have been over a month ago.

Communication is a strange thing. I remember being able to text message at lightening speed on an old Nokia phone where you had to press the number keys multiple times to get the letter you want. Why didn't I just phone? It would have been quicker.

In a world that has been largely offensive and unpleasant to you, bullying, the protection of a screen is hard to deny. I can compose my thoughts. I can review what I'm about to say. I can edit before I send. I also like the fact that there is a written history of what has been transmitted and received. I find that a lot of people have very poor memory of what has been said, when later quizzed about things.

I find it very frustrating dealing with people who are not honest, straightforward, rational and have a good memory. I'm not sure whether it's drug and alcohol abuse, or simply genetic flaws, but there are definitely people who I find it very frustrating to deal with because of their selective recall of events, and irrational bias that they place on their interpretation of reality.

Everything in the world is fairly clear-cut to me. I try and avoid black & white thinking, but sometimes the blindingly obvious is clearly a polar thing. There is such a thing as right and wrong. All the interpretation and alternative opinion in the world doesn't make a difference when you apply a rational objective analysis of events over the top of things.

You normally get quite a few warnings from me before common sense eventually has to prevail, with me leading the charge. My friend Laurence was driving too fast down country lanes. There was a friend and me as passengers in my hire car. He was jeopardising three lives, plus whoever he was going to have a head on collision with, plus my hire car that he wasn't insured on. I warned him multiple times that I was unhappy, afraid, and that he needed to slow down.

I pulled the handbrake on as hard as I could when we reached a straight piece of road. This seemed very sudden and dangerous to Laurence, but it was quite a calculated act after a good 5+ minutes of me warning him to slow down, and the lanes were getting narrower and narrower, with more and more blind bends. Potentially there wasn't going to be another wide stretch of straight road, before we collided head-on with another vehicle. It was then or never.

Keeping a sliding car on a straight road is not hard. Momentum will carry the car on a straight line. Even if you spin, you're unlikely to do much more than bump off the hedge. More likely, the car will just continue on the original trajectory, because there is so much forward momentum. The back of the car started to slide out, but it really didn't make much of a difference whether Laurence corrected it or not.

Laurence was upset, but his interpretation of events was incorrect. He was speeding down narrow country lanes, round blind bends, uninsured in a car, with two other people he was responsible for, ignoring all reasonable pleas to slow down from the person who was legally in charge of the vehicle. Clear cut. Case closed. No other interpretation necessary.

When I act, it might look sudden and brutal, but a lot of thought has gone into things. My actions are far more premeditated than they look. When I take risks, they're calculated.

Sometimes I can override my own calculations. My friend JP was hanging off a broom handle tied to the roof rafters, suspended several feet above the ground, in order to practice some kiteboarding moves. I said that it looked very dangerous and I thought it was going to snap and drop him onto the hard ground. After he had been successfully doing it for some time, I decided that perhaps I was wrong and I would risk having a go. Of course, it snapped, and I landed on my shoulder, possibly breaking a bone. I now have a lump on my shoulder on that side. I literally have a chip on my shoulder.

However, I'm a balanced person, because I went snowboarding on an indoor slope, tried to do a flip and landed on my shoulder the other side, doing a very similar injury. I now have chips on both shoulders, balancing me out.

You will find me fair and reasonable.

Oh man I miss boardsports. I would love to be kiteboarding or snowboarding right now

Tags: #divorce #parents #friends #childhood #computing #socialmedia

This is a story about captains of industry...

The boy stood on the burning deck whence all but he had fled. Is my task yet done? Rats leave a sinking ship but a skipper will go down with his vessel.

There's just no way you can have a meltdown halfway up a rock climb or a mountain that's higher than a rope's length. You wouldn't be able to lower that person safely down to the ground. There's no way you can have a meltdown in the middle of the sea or ocean. There's no chance of you being harmlessly blown into a tranquil harbour.

If you have experience leading a rope party or skippering a yacht, in the hostile environment of the sea and mountains, then you tend to be quite a stoic, calm, rational individual.

I remember we broached my yacht when I was on the foredeck trying to take the spinnaker down. I was hanging onto the spinnaker pole, with nothing but sea underneath my feet, as we heeled right over on our side. It seemed to take an absolute age for her to right herself. I looked back, and my crew were up to their thighs in water that had flooded the cockpit. I yelled "let go of the spinnaker sheets" and my crew member who was gripping the ropes that held the 'kite' in full sail were still gripped in his white knuckles, and his face was blank with terror. I had to repeat myself several times, and change the tone of my voice, so that he would break from his trance and release the wind, allowing me to then pull the sock down the sail and stow it below decks. It's interesting how people respond to catastrophe and stress.

A whole expedition party that I was in, found ourselves at the top of a large rock buttress, which we had to abseil off. There was a single thin metal piton, hammered into a crack in the rock, as an anchor point for our abseil rope. This piton was clearly bending under the weight of a person abseiling. I wasn't leading that expedition, and I was told to shut up and be quiet, when I whispered my concerns to the leaders. This was a decision motivated purely by money. The leaders didn't want to leave behind valuable equipment, in the interests of safety. You should never belay or abseil on a single anchor point, as my friend Sam was to later find, with tragic consequences.

I'm completely mental, and take some crazy risks, but I don't put other people's lives on the line. When I climbed Crib Goch with friends, I took them to a saddle in the hills beneath the mountain where we could get a good view of the ridge, and I showed them the route I was proposing. I told them it was very challenging, and talked about the exposure to steep drops either side. I told them that we would quite possibly have to retrace our steps, if we couldn't find a suitable gully in which to make our retreat. I shared the information, so that each person could make their own decision about the risks. We were all grown ups.

The sign reads "CAUTION: Route to Crib Goch". The choice to continue up to this knife-edge ridge is yours. You read the sign. You stepped over the stile. You knew what you were doing. Individual responsibility.

Our nanny state is trying to protect people from themselves all the time. We have railings at road crossings, so that you can only cross at one specific place. We have warning signs on hot drinks and for hot water taps, cautioning us that hot water is hot. I'm surprised that we don't yet have laws outlawing running with scissors.

From April, the UK is going to have bizarre legislation in place that attempts to outlaw all drugs except for nicotine, alcohol and caffeine. Does this sound sensible to you? Well, it makes about much sense as banning the sale of parachutes, mountain bikes, horses, skis etc. etc. If you look at the statistics, many sports and hobbies are more dangerous than most of the drugs that are being banned.

Drugs are dangerous, don't get me wrong, but the government concentrates on making things illegal, rather than minimising harm and risk and treating those who do get into trouble. I myself became addicted to a legal high, which was made illegal with absolutely no plans around supporting those addicts who were criminalised. There was no treatment plan or alternative offered to me. I was forced to turn to the black market, and then my own savings in order to get treatment in the private sector. If I hadn't had a pot of savings, I would have been picked up by criminal justice, rather than by national health. That's appalling.

If we were to, say, make mountain climbing illegal because it's dangerous, do you think that would stop people wanting to climb? If the danger didn't discourage people, why the hell do you think laws are going to be any deterrent. The laws are flying in the face of human nature.

Imagine every mountain and cliff in the UK, surrounded by a razor-wire fence, with policemen at the gates and patrolling the perimeter. Perhaps there would be guard towers with powerful searchlights, just in case anybody tried to scale or cut through the fence at night. Perhaps the fence could even be electrified. Does that sound like a sensible plan, for the protection of society?

People talk about drugs causing an increase in crime. Yes, there is a mountain of data showing that alcohol causes monumental problems in society. Anti-social behaviour is rife in town centres across the United Kingdom. Binge drinking is out of control. You don't tend to hear a lot about fights at raves though, do you? Yes, not a lot of anti-social behaviour amongst people who just want to dance, even though they have taken loads of pills. Also, Ecstasy is less dangerous than horse-riding, as Prof. David Nutt once famously commented.

We really do need to end this war on drugs, which is a load of hot air, rhetoric, causing the needless destruction of so many lives. Being tough on drugs is just another way of saying that you're going to chuck your friends and relatives under the wheels of the bus because you're too ignorant to educate yourself about the damage of criminalising somebody, demonising them, excluding them from society, offering them no treatment and generally shaming and isolating them, blaming them for society's ills.

Prohibition puts every man woman and child at risk of slipping and falling into the death-trap of the 'undesirable' bucket. We label drug takers as undesirable members of our society, and push them through the revolving doors of a criminal justice system that makes people unemployable, while also connecting together a criminal underworld that has to survive on its wits, given no lawful alternative.

The police are being forced to make judgement calls about whether to pursue prosecution against members of the public, who have made wayward decisions, but are they really criminals? While we haven't solved violent and sexual crime, and the poverty that drives people to steal, how can we be wrecking people's lives for messing around with recreational drugs?

I bought a yacht at the age of 21, and it cost me a buttload of cash. Boat ownership is a costly addiction. Mooring fees, antifouling, repairs, insurance, fuel... all of this nautical dependency was hazardous to my wealth. Did you know that there is no legal requirement to be qualified to navigate UK waters? I could buy a boat and go and get myself in big trouble in some part of the sea that I'm completely clueless about, and then just phone the coastguard to come and rescue me. Does that not seem a little more anti-social, than a gay man taking poppers in the privacy of his own home?

Perhaps I'm not a very good mascot for the anti-criminalisation movement, because I've most definitely cost the NHS a buttload of cash, as they struggled to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. However, maybe I am. If there was actually a plan to help and treat addicts, my issues could have been resolved before I even got so sick that I ended up needing emergency treatment to save my life. A stitch in time saves 9 and all that.

I think I count 32 stitches in my leg. All those stitches were completely avoidable. It was pure ignorance and stupidity and manipulation by government and media that led to me being cornered and attacked. You're looking for victims? Try taking a look at the early deaths and health complications of people who are marked as black sheep, disowned by their own families, labelled as criminals by a 'justice' system and shunned by society, to the point where sure, the needle seems more of a friend than any of the hostile sneering faces.

Why should alcoholics and addicts have to be anonymous? Why should they have to hide themselves away in groups of their own kind, recounting tales of their own weakness, their faults, their shame and their regret. Why do you refuse to give a homeless person money, because "they'll only spend it on drink/drugs"... yes, they probably will, if that's your attitude.

We're kicking people into the gutter, and I'm not OK with that.

When my friend John had completely ballsed up the interview I had gotten for him, and he was facing the reality that life is a little bit harder than just larking around doing whatever the hell you want, he started to become critical of me. He started to attack me rather than make a critical appraisal of himself and his own choices. It was interesting that he tried to use my prior misdemeanours, that I had told him about in confidence, as a weapon against me. It's amongst the reasons why I chucked him out of my flat.

Addicts are not weak people. In fact they are probably a lot stronger than you, because they not only endure the crushing guilt they place on themselves, but they're also a convenient scapegoat for anybody else who's feeling a bit s**t about their own life. Calling somebody a junkie is a lot easier than admitting that you've failed as a fellow member of society. A junkie's life is no way easy. It's a wall of death, with the addict having to ride faster and faster to stay stuck to the wall, while gravity tries to pull them downwards to their untimely demise, destruction.

There's some stats for you, on your common junkie. 15,000 steps a day on average. That's a lot more than your average couch potato, sitting around reading rubbish newspapers, watching crappy TV and sitting in judgement over groups of people they're totally ignorant about.

Do you see an obese junkie? No. Do junkies drain loads of NHS money by giving themselves diabetes, because of all the sugary drinks and junk food they stuff into their faces? No. Junkies are hard working and resourceful.

How would you rather that resourceful intelligent people spent their time? In the getting and taking of drugs, or perhaps put to some more productive aims and objectives?

We are wasting talent. We are wasting human lives. We are destroying people's dignity. We are robbing people of opportunities to shine and show us the better side of their character. We have untapped resource and we are wasting other resource in locking people up and dealing with preventable consequences of terrible drug policies.

There are good people out there... sheep in wolves clothing. We have tarred people with the junkie brush, and it's a crime to write people off like that.

It's a crime to kick people into the gutter.

Tags: #addiction #drugs #alcohol #nhs #injury

This is a story about brain damage...

When George Ricaurte and his team vivisected Rhesus monkeys and dissected their brains, after having given them enormous intravenous doses of Methamphetamine, they found that their neurons had been damaged. The very cells of their cerebellum had withered and died.

It's very hard to objectively judge whether you have driven yourself irreversibly insane, or how stupid and brain-dead you have made yourself, through the abuse of drugs & alcohol. But both are freely and relatively cheaply available in massive quantities to almost anybody who wishes to avail themselves of such substances.

I have a rough measure for the strength of my sanity. I can tell you, in terms of number of nights of sleep lost, at what point I will become psychotic, and at what point I will lose consciousness. 10 seems to be the magic number.

I had to go back to my house in Bournemouth, leaving behind my new home, my new friends, my new girlfriend, my new startup and my newly incorporated company, in order to rummage in my attic and find some crap to sell in order to raise some money, because my parents had reneged on their promise to save me the stress and hassle.

For 9 nights, I was hopped up on Supercrack, just about managing to sell my car and gather a few high value things, but otherwise totally out of it. On the evening of the 10th night, just as it was getting dark, I was convinced that the house was surrounded by police, and climbed into the attic without the ladder and tried to close the hatch behind myself.

I blacked out, and when I came round I didn't know what I was. I literally couldn't understand my blurry vision or what any of my senses or thoughts were telling me. Then I didn't know who or where I was. Was I in a rustic farm building? Was I a farmer? Then it became clear to me that I was in an attic, and I remembered who I was, but I had no idea how or why I would be there. Then it became clear that I was perilously close to the edge of an open hatch, with an 11 foot drop onto steep stairs, which descended another 10 or so feet onto a hard wooden floor.

A previously absent sense of self preservation caused me to cautiously lower the ladder and descend from the attic, whereupon I noticed that it was late afternoon. At least 18 hours had elapsed. I surely could not have slept, for I'm sure that movement in my sleep would have sent me tumbling through the hatch.

Remembering then, why I had entered the attic, I was surprised to not see any police. As a precaution, I then went and hid in my shed for another day or two, before I phoned a friend and asked if he could drive me back to London with the couple of valuable items I was going to sell.

It must be re-iterated that these items were not going to be sold for drink & drugs. Supercrack costs just 18p per day, remember? I'm not really built to sell junk from attics and sheds. I find it stressful. My Dad's 'job' since getting my Mum pregnant with me had been to buy & sell junk. My job, for almost my entire professional career, has been to write computer code in an air conditioned office.

Anyway, you can see that my window of opportunity had closed, and my life had become rather dysfunctional.

As soon as I got my share of the house sale money I put myself through 8 weeks of rehab, before remembering that there was some Supercrack hidden inside a golf brochure sent to me from Canada, in my stack of unopened post from 2 months prior. Given how much I hated my parents for tossing me to the wolves, I saw no reason not to pay them a visit and have a massive relapse in their home.

My left leg was destroyed as I tried to leave, in an unnecessary tussle with my Dad. I then tried to O.D. in some terrible flat in Kentish Town. As the amount of blood in my urine grew and grew, as my organs slowly shut down, I phoned an ex-girlfriend for help, when I felt sure that I only had about 24 hours left to live. The hospital gave me about a 30% chance of survival, and treated me for about 3 weeks, 6 intensive days of which were very touch-and-go.

Camden Council were most uncooperative in helping me, despite letters begging them to support me, from my GP and Psychiatrist. Finally, with no state support, I ended up in a hostel in Bayswater, and then living in a bush in Kensington Park Gardens.

Obviously, life was rather unstructured and dysfunctional, and again after the magic 9 nights of madness, I believed I was being pursued by police, ran across a rooftop, fell through a glass window, and then went and hid 80ft up a massive tree with a huge shard of glass sticking out of my 'good' leg.

The scar on my leg is about 5 inches long and nearly an inch wide. I lay in my bush in Kensington Park Gardens, in agony, until it healed enough for me to hobble to Paddington Station, where there is a public shower. I got cleaned up enough to get myself a hotel room.

A friend invited me to come and stay at her flat in Notting Hill, but I was so mad by this point that I tried to hide under a mop bucket in her basement. A fully grown naked man cannot be concealed by a mop bucket on his head.

She coaxed me out of the basement, whereupon I then tried to hide in a fortress of pillows and sofa cushions, and then decided to hide in her shed. I then took offence to my own penis and tried to rip it off my body. Having made quite a mess of it, and clearly sanity having escaped my grip for far too many weeks, I decided to try St. Mary's Hospital and Westminster Council.

Westminster Council beat up Camden Council for being so beastly towards one of their residents, and UCLH Androgyny were quite helpful in repairing my male member. One of the mental health Crisis Houses took me in for a couple of weeks while a search party for my marbles was despatched.

Fundamentally, I still believed that the state would keep its word in helping somebody who became addicted to a legal high, which the government then made illegal. My social worker had promised imminent admission to treatment services. There was also the promise of supported accommodation, post-treatment. This was salvation.

However, it all got botched. One social worker lost all my paperwork and had to restart the process entirely, and the next one decided to keep deferring my case, because she believed I could recover without state support.

It was me who blinked first, after 6 months of this hell. I used my credit card in order to get myself a hostel bed and no longer be sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath. In a way my social worker was right, I had been sufficiently scared, shellshocked and traumatised. It helped that when I once got arrested, the police doctor was very surprised that I didn't die in custody when she saw how low my blood pressure was. Being in a cell, dying, is not a very nice experience.

Anyway, I went cold turkey in a 14 bed hostel dorm, in full public view, on street bail with the police.

After a couple of months, I got a job and things appeared to be going swimmingly. However, the lifestyle of a completely insane, drug addicted homeless person, is somewhat incompatible with the life of a middle-class IT consultant working for a global bank. There was a certain amount of friction between old life and new.

Somewhere between losing all my friends, losing my job, the contract ending on a room that I had let and the general disintegration of my life, the whole horrible cycle started again. Recovery is fragile.

By May 2015, I believed that my mobile phone was talking to me and giving me instructions. Under its direction, I then embarked on a half-marathon, with a fully loaded backpack with all of my most valuable possessions in it.

This is your brain on Supercrack. Pre-existing mental health problems + drugs + gentle external encouragement = completely bat shit insane behaviour. Somebody doesn't just run like this just because they're on drugs, but it doesn't take much to get them going.

Don't worry though, because by June I had a job working for HSBC on the number one project: Customer Due Diligence, which is naturally where you would expect a homeless, insane, drug addict known to the police to find themselves. The global bank is clearly an expert in doing due diligence background checks on people.

Anyway, I might have made all this stuff up just to embarrass HSBC and the CIO in charge of the number one project, plus the rest of the management team, who are making a bit of a botch job of things. You'd need to do the due diligence to find out, which presumably HSBC did?

So, I leave it to you, dear reader, to judge. How do you find me? Completely bat shit insane on a permanent and irreversible basis that means I should be 'committed' immediately to an institution, where I will shuffle around for the rest of my heavily-medicated days, no longer a menace to society... or is there a question mark hanging over the whole infernal affair?

This very document, this entire blog, seeks to challenge your presumptions about addiction and mental health. Has it succeeded yet?

Tags: #nhs #mentalhealth #addiction #bipolar #depression #suicide #career #banking #london #homeless #injury

This is a story about killing yourself slowly and painfully...

So, this one time, I stopped eating on a Saturday, then I can't remember if it was Monday or Tuesday that I was dragged off against my will to Oxford John Radcliffe hospital. Yet another 'mistake' of my parents that left me dangerously malnourished. They didn't ever learn that antagonising and terrorising a person makes them anxious and not want to eat. In their haste to force me to do whatever the hell they wanted to do - they didn't actually tell me - my leg was cut to the bone.

In hospital, they had a look at everything that was wrong with me. The most worrying thing was the toxicity of my blood. My Creatine Kinease (CK) readings indicated that I had damaged kidneys. The large laceration to my leg indicated that a traumatic muscle injury had occurred. Blood vessels had be severed, causing Ischemia to large parts of my muscle, which promptly died. My kidneys were going to die too. They were already barely functioning and quite badly damaged.

This is called Rhabdomyolysis. You don't actually need a test to diagnose it. If your piss is the colour of coca-cola and stinks, you're well on your way. If your piss starts turning the colour of orange juice with loads of blood in it, you've pretty much had it.

So they didn't bother to operate on my leg, they just put me in a high dependency unit and pumped as much saline and glucose and the machines could pump. My arms were pincushions from the phlebotomists taking blood measurements around the clock.

It wasn't until the following Saturday that the muscle damage was repaired. It should have been a day procedure, but because none of my friends would pick me up from the hospital and I lived on the 1st floor, the doctor's couldn't really discharge me with my leg in cast and expect me to get up the stairs on one leg.

When my friends prompted me to move out a few weeks later, I stopped eating again. I had no body fat left. My kidneys were already damaged. It only took about 5 days to collapse on the floor and be unable to move. I had been trying to cut my jugular vein and femoral artery, because I knew I only had to lose about 8 pints of blood before it started overbrimming the waterproof container I had made, and by which time, nobody would be able to resuscitate me.

Only a friend Lara came over, discovered me, and took me to hospital. I was in hospital for a week that time and two weeks recovering nearby after a psychiatric bed couldn't be found for me. Being sick in Camden is shit.

I can barely comprehend the shitness of a situation where somebody can barely walk and is in complete agony from muscle damage is supposed to go and deal with bureaucrats and fill in reams of forms. How much sleep do you think you get in a week on a ward with loads of people dying next to you? In Oxford, I literally heard about 3 people stop breathing, and presumably their heart stopped beating because loads of alarms went of and staff rushed over to see if they could coax some life back into their fucked bodies.

In London I was on more general wards after a couple of days in A&E. People there are just in a lot of pain and discomfort. Night time is worst. People seem to be distracted from their pain by TV and visitors.

I really don't want a life shuffling and muttering to myself, doped up on the drugs they give you when you can no longer cope with hectoring ignoramus parents, abysmal jobs that suck wealth out of the developing nations while destroying the planet, people who do charity work more because it makes them feel good about themself, rather than for a noble cause.

If you're reading this, it's because you've learned English and you have access to a computer. That means the chances are that you have never been in hospital because you didn't eat enough.

There're billions of people who don't have enough to eat. Do you like your office job and cheap groceries and enormous apartment more than you like those people? Look at the evidence. The evidence shows that you're happy for the developing world to grow all your food and make all your clothes and other goods. The evidence shows you're pretty happy with the current arrangement. Putting £1 a charity collection box is great value money for you. You can bullshit yourself that you played your part in changing the world.

£1 for a clear conscience. Bargain of the century.

Tags: #nhs #charity #oxford #london

This is a story about a split personality...

This is 1 Churchill Place and this is Nick: the schoolboy who leads an exciting double life. For when Nick eats a banana, an amazing transformation takes place. Nick is BANANAMAN, ever alert for the call to action.

I'm not actually Bananaman, but I do eat porridge and a banana every morning. I'm also ever alert for the call to action. I wasn't born to follow.

In Silicon Valley, and with the top people in banks, there is an arms race. But it's not with weapons, it's with smart people. If you let good people go to your competitors, they will beat you. It's that simple. High performance teams make stuff happen.

There's no point in being part of a race to the bottom. I was really impressed by the way that Barclays have embraced the modern software development paradigm. They hired bright young people and allowed them to get on and make some damn high quality software. They let them run their projects with a risk-based approach and using Agile best practices.

I got a bit cross with a couple of people at Barclays, who were straddling the line. They were neither demanding quality and an old-school attention to detail, nor were they very talented or quick. However, the bulk of the developers were amazing and a pleasure to work with. There is always dead wood in any organisation. The problem comes when somebody gets promoted to a position of incompetency.

There's no sense in bluffing your way into a role you can't handle. If your skills aren't up to it, you can't handle the pressure or you just don't have relevant experience, stay away... you're just going to land you, your team and your company in trouble. I've never stepped away from a role in a particularly elegant way, but I haven't dug myself a hole either. I hate people who make themselves into a key man dependency when they're incompetent.

Fail fast. Move fast and break things. There's no sense in spending years and years doing something you're not very good at. I hate the way that we all need to push for promotions in order to get a pay rise and not be on the breadline, but people end up being promoted to positions they're hopelessly unqualified for, because all they're good at doing is kissing ass to clamber up the greasy pole.

Yes, if I had an hour to do some actual work or an hour to make myself more indispensable, or improve my promotion prospects, you can guess which one I'm more economically incentivised to do.

The way that corporations are run encourages people to delegate the things that they're supposed to do, and concentrate on things that only further their personal objectives, which are in direct conflict with the organisational needs. The most junior team members do all the work, while their managers concentrate on making themselves look good, and scrapping over the few promotions.

This adversarial system is flawed from the outset.

Look at how compliant these suit wearing office workers are, patiently queuing to get on a packed tube train to take them back to their miserable tiny home that they hardly spend any time in. They spend all their time pushing paper around in order to service the mortgage, which is a millstone around their neck.

God forbid that you end up procreating. Then your nuts really are in the vice. You will be having to sprint along on that treadmill to service all your debt, working to worship angry bawling midgets that are hungry and have relentless needs for clothes that they will soon outgrow or be ruined by this decadent practice of 'playing'. Ha! F**k those little sh1ts! They get to 'play' all day... how nice for them. Bastards.

Well, there's a way to punish those little sh1ts for being born. Yes, they should have a taste of what it's like to have not kept your cock in your trousers. Yes, they should be forced to go to an office like environment. No play for them. I have to sit at a desk all day, bored out of my mind, so the fruit of my loins has to too.

That'll teach the kids for being so stupid as to give birth to themselves, without a care in the world for how they're going to pay the mortgage, dress themselves or feed themselves. There's a rumour that babies can't even forage for food or kill an antelope. Who the hell do this race of midgets think they are? Arrogantly expecting to be wheeled around in carriages, and getting to gorge themselves on milk swelled breasts all day. That looks like a jolly nice life to me. I don't get to suckle on any breasts at all in the office. Yes, I was sacked last time I did that.

I'm rather patiently waiting for the day that I'm big enough to go to school. Mummy says that when I'm all grown up I will get to go and study with the other children. I will get to read books all day, and write poems and sh1t. Yes, that sounds like good fun. I would like to do that all day. At the moment all I do is follow grown ups around and get told off when they make mistakes. I do tests that they know the answers to, but they don't like my answers.

I see that the grown ups like to drink coffee and alcohol. I'm too young to have those things, but they look like a lot of fun. I would like to have those things. It looks like the coffee allows you to concentrate on doing your job, rather than having to deal with the existential angst of executing pointless tasks. It looks like the alcohol allows you to deal with the anxiety of never quite being able to break free from a system that is engineered to break the will of the sheep-like people, and force them into a system of meek compliance.

Yes, I think I will like it when I become a student, and I will get to lie around drinking booze and coffee, and pontificating about life the universe and everything. Reading books and writing is a lot more fun than being told what to do by grown ups. Mummy says I'm smart so I deserve to get to sit around and be complemented for coming up with the same answers to questions as the grown ups.

I can see now that the master plan is working very well. I can see now that studying history, politics and having mastery of the English language, has led us to this point of great enlightenment. Yes, I can see how amazing society has become since we started getting everybody to read the same books and work in the same offices doing the same kinds of things. I can see now that this kind of groupthink has been a very successful experiment. Life is so amazing now.

I'm so disappointed that I didn't come up with the very clever idea of studying other people's mistakes in order to be able to be an expert on mistakes. I'm clearly not very clever, because I'm not very good at making mistakes. Except the mistake of accidentally doing successful stuff. Yes, I should be like the grown ups who study mistakes and then copy them. I'm not very good at following their example. I'm not a very good student of failure.

I stupidly keep building stuff that works. I stupidly keep making a profit. I stupidly keep succeeding. How silly of me. Yes, that's clearly not the way the world works. We need to have failure. We need to have fighting. We need to have war. Success is not an option in the modern, enlightened world.

Let's not listen to the successful people who are proven and are making things work without violence and conflict. No, let's glorify the bullies and the warmongers instead. We should definitely have a society run by failures, run by those who can't make things work, harbour ideas of violence and vengeance to compensate for their inadequacies. Those are the kinds of leaders I want.

I see now that we are choosing just the very kinds of leaders that we really need. The kinds of people who want to go into positions of authority, responsibility... they are invariably the kinds who are not on a total ego-trip and grinding an axe, have a chip on their shoulder. They definitely don't have micropenises and some kind of small-man syndrome.

Yes, all the warmongering. Getting your willies out, I mean getting your guns out. Yes, it's very macho. It's definitely not overcompensation for your inadequacies. I'm definitely full of much more admiration for leaders who advocate violence. I'm definitely in favour of a global society based on bashing each other over the head with clubs. I'm definitely not in favour of diplomacy and peace. War is the answer, but I've been too stupid to see it before.

How foolish of me not to see the brilliance in the idea that we can all have pointy sticks and we can just attack each other and take whatever we want. I'm really looking forward to living in a cave again and foraging for nuts and berries and trying not to be eaten by a tiger. It sounds a lot more exciting than working in an office.

Yes, working in an office is pretty boring. I'd much rather be bullying somebody with my pointy stick. Especially if I have a pointy stick but they don't. Yes if I get to poke them with my pointy stick with no fear them being able to poke me back, because I'm the only one with a pointy stick, then I'll feel like the king of the world, which is the whole reason for the existence of the Earth and humanity, right? The whole reason the entire planet and the human race was created was as a massive entertainment system for me, right? I'm entitled to go out poking whoever I want with my pointy stick because it's fun.

The whole reason the world exists is so that I can have fun. It's a playground, and I'm allowed to play. I'm bored in my job and I want the attention of the other children and I like playing games, so I'm going to sharpen a stick and go and poke the most vulnerable weak person I can find. That will make me feel good.

I have no words to describe just how boring it is moving money around for pointy stick manufacturers. I have no words to describe just how boring it is never getting to play with those pointy sticks. I have no words to describe just how boring it is to never get to poke anybody with a pointy stick.

I've studied the history of poking people with pointy sticks and it sounds like a lot of fun. There's a lot of hope & glory in poking people with pointy sticks. It sounds like a barrel of laughs. It sounds like a game of soldiers.

So what the hell am I doing flying a desk when I could be flying a drone. I'm good with computers. I used to like computer games. Poking people with pointy sticks makes you feel better about yourself. What's not to like? I think I've found my perfect career.

It must take a lot of bravery to sit behind a screen, pressing buttons, in the full knowledge that the remote system that you are controlling that is poking people with pointy sticks, completely protects you from any physical pain or risk of injury or death. Yes, that's a really brave thing, I think, to sit playing war games on a computer.

Whether the people being poked by your pointy stick are real or they're simulated, that doesn't really matter. It's just that the graphics are probably more realistic in the simulator. I like the way the heads explode when you shoot them in the simulator. I don't like the physics of reality. They say that the simulated people don't even have families. Where's the fun in killing some computer simulated person who doesn't even have a family?

It gets boring after a while, killing simulated people. Time to drop some real bombs. The physics in reality isn't as good, but at least you're killing real people with real families. At least there is real human suffering. We haven't figured out how to simulate human suffering yet, or maybe nobody is particularly interested in experiencing simulated human suffering. Maybe there's no money in simulated human suffering. Maybe there is only money in real human suffering, for the manufacturers of pointy sticks.

That is all.

Frankie is well trained. Look at him doing his filing. It's a File-o-Frank (April 2007)

Tags: #frankie #politics #computing #banking #career #london

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 unquantifiable needs...

It takes a lot of effort to keep up with somebody in distress. If you're not going to go the distance, you are just guessing, and you will be wrong on every conclusion drawn from lazy presumptions.

Whenever my homeless friend Frank phoned me, I would get on my bike and travel from Kentish Town to King's Cross to meet him. This might have been rather inconvenient for me, but I had started so I was going to finish. That's the first thing you need to know about me & Frank: we are determined people who finish what we start.

I had decided to take a trip to Prague, Czech Republic, to see a friend from the Springboard Accelerator Program, Cambridge. In so doing, I wasn't there for Frank. The consequences for him were nearly disastrous.

Did you know you can't keep one single solitary crab in a bucket, because it will crawl out and escape? However, you can keep two or more crabs in a bucket, because as soon as a crab tries to escape the other(s) will pull it back down into the bucket. They keep each other imprisoned. Mutually assured destruction.

Frank is a happy-go-lucky kinda guy, like me. We trust people. We give people the benefit of the doubt. We ran into some of Frank's 'friends' just before I had to catch my flight to Prague. They tried to mug me. Luckily I was streetwise enough to see what was happening and I cycled off. There was nothing else I could do. They stole Frank's iPhone, so I couldn't contact him. I had no idea what had happened to him.

When I got back from my trip to Prague, I got a call from Frank's friend, Paul, saying he had just been discharged from hospital.

There was a significant disparity between Frank's story and his hospital discharge notes. He told me he had been discharged from St. Pancras Hospital, but his discharge notes were clearly from UCLH. He told me that he had sustained a head injury, but there was no mention of that in the notes.

However, what did check out was that Frank was an alcoholic and he had gone through untreated withdrawal that could have killed him. Delirium Tremens killed the famous singer Amy Winehouse and it nearly killed Frank. The notes didn't seem to draw much attention to the fact that he did not receive treatment for his withdrawal. I guess London hospitals see a lot of homeless alcoholics though... mainly in the morgue.

When I first met Frank, on Primrose Hill, the first thing I noticed was that he was clean shaven, well dressed, had a tidy haircut and spoke articulately. The second thing that I noticed was that he was drinking at 7am. When we went to get a cup of tea later, I noticed that he started shaking quite badly... it was time to skip the tea and get him an alcoholic drink.

Buying alcohol for an alcoholic? Had I lost my mind?

You are ignorant about the dangers of abrupt alcohol withdrawal syndrome for an alcoholic. It's not a perfect solution, to buy them a beer, but do you really want somebody having a Grand Mal seizure and dying right in front of your eyes, because you are too stubborn to educate yourself about the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you don't trap that an alcoholic can't escape.

So, alcoholics are abandoned by society, begging enough money to self-medicate for their physical dependence with the threat of horrendous withdrawal syndrome and possible death, if their blood alcohol level drops too abruptly.

How do I know this? I've known alcoholics, I've seen people get treated, I've read books and papers and online resources. You can do it too, if you care. It's certainly a lot easier to be wilfully ignorant, though, and incorrectly say "why don't they just stop drinking and use some willpower?". It's certainly a lot easier to not know any facts and just be wrong about everything.

What if that person was your son, daughter, brother, sister, husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, friend? Just let them die, right?

Well done.

First, do no harm (October 2013)

Tags: #frank #homeless #alcohol #addiction #NHS #friends