This is a story about comebacks...

I have very little memory of the last couple of weeks, or maybe even the last couple of months. I've basically been backed into a corner, shaking with the stress and feeling of being totally overwhelmed by the task of having to deal with all the things that couldn't be put off any longer.

The 'pinnacle' or culmination of this breakdown period, was when bailiffs entered my flat in order to cut off my gas & electricity, for non-payment of bills. The bills, naturally, had remained in a pile of unopened post, with me none the wiser as to the growing threat of this debt collection. Of course, I knew that the bills had to be dealt with sooner or later, but the crisis point happened to be reached just as I was sleeping off the 'hangover' of the last three months silliness.

I've basically been asleep for about 2 weeks, because I started taking Mirtazepine, which is an atypical antidepressant which was prescribed to me years ago, and I thought was OK at the time, but addiction issues kinda derailed me from taking it on a proper regular basis. This time around, I found that it helped me to get to sleep, and then carry on sleeping as a stress avoidance tactic, for much of the following day, until there were only a few hours of evening to fill before I could take my next dose.

This medication was not prescribed to me for depression. It wasn't prescribed to me at all in fact. I prescribed it to myself to treat drug withdrawal symptoms, after a hefty period of abusing legal benzodiazepines and Supercrack. I'm not exactly sure when this crazy new UK law comes into place, pretty much banning anything that's psychoactive, but I don't want to be trapped into being dependent on something that's illegal.

As it stands at the moment, it has been over a year since I have accessed the Dark Web and I'd like it to stay that way. The Dark Web can end up being unhealthy window-shopping for a former junkie, and then eventually, in a moment of weakness, disguised envelopes containing all manner of disruptive troublemaking can be wending their merry way to you through the postal system. That's a situation I definitely want to avoid.

Withdrawing from Mirtazepine was extremely unpleasant. I was overwhelmed with anxiety and insomnia. I'm hoping tonight will be better, but today, at least I didn't have the daytime sleepiness and lethargy that allowed me to spend the best part of 2 weeks in bed. I even made the bailiffs come and collect a credit card from my grubby mitts, while I lay in my pit of despair.

You see that slight upswing at the end of March? Hopefully that delimits the end of months of depression and drug abuse, and the beginning of a period of productivity. I've tackled some of the most pressing stuff that had to be done today, and if I can steer clear of the medications/research-chemicals that seem to make all your troubles go away, then things can continue, provided I don't become totally overwhelmed by stress and anxiety.

It feels like the Government is testing us, risking our lives, to discover what happens when they pull the rug out from under our feet. The shoddy, hole-filled 'safety net' has finally been so undermined, that nobody could possibly consider it an option, no matter how dire their circumstances. Get better or die, is the Government's unspoken mantra.

Personally, it is long overdue, me pushing myself to find more contract work or even something permanent, provided it isn't going to grate and gnaw at my soul so intolerably, that there's little point as the outcome would be entirely predictable.

I say "long overdue" but that's a little unfair on myself. The winter, plus the timing of losing my contract were particularly hard on me, coupled with the fact I was completely exhausted from efforts expended on the doomed HSBC Customer Due Diligence project anyway. I did need some time to rest and recuperate. There were chances to get straight back on the horse, and I would have done if fortune had favoured those opportunities, but the optimism of November of last year quickly turned into resignation about the wasted 6 or so weeks of Xmas build up and early New Year 'dead spot' in the recruitment calendar.

I actually feel reasonably awake and alert, and not totally overwhelmed when my thoughts turn to my todo list. I know that my suit and shirts are dry cleaned and shoes are shone, ready for action, and even that doesn't worry me now that the clocks have sprung forward and the weather can surely only improve from this point (famous last words!).

I know that I'd dearly like to see my Sister & Mum, now that I'm a bit more well. Too many broken promises and wasted good intentions in the last few months, so I'm not going to rush at anything, especially as my sister was really cross at me recently, using my parents words. It's easy to discredit and undermine a person's character when they're keeping themselves a safe distance away from yourself.

I know my blog has been my refuge and something solid to grab onto during some pretty wild storms, and it upsets my sister that I have seemingly had so much time to blog, but I hope you'll be seeing a return to consistency and continuity that went awry during the turbulent first months of 2016. Let's see where it takes me next, and I hope it's informative and entertaining for those following at home.

So deep think. Much complicated. Very story to tell. Wow!

Tags: #recovery #depression #stress #anxiety #drugs #addiction

This is a story about clean slates...

Life is like a line of dominos all perched precariously upright. People have filled massive areas - like basketball courts - with row after perfect row after perfect row of these surprisingly weighty little objects. Watching a huge 'wave' fan out as all the dominos fall over, after just the very first one looks very pretty from a distance.

Let's imagine I'm 1/10th the size of a domino, and I'm staring up at these skyscrapers. I couldn't lift them or knock them over. I'd assume it was something like stonehenge: an unnatural arrangement of things, so much bigger than human scale.

When the seismic event finally happened, and the first one was pushed so that it would fall over and cause the other one to fall, you wouldn't be able to believe your eyes and ears. That something so heavy and seemingly stable, could topple over would be amazing. It would seem to take ages to accelerate and smash into its neighbour. Then with an almighty crash, most of the energy would be transferred and the next one would fall to the ground.

Looking at the two fallen objects, they would seem now to be permanently in this collapsed heap. The idea of re-standing something up that's so big and balancing it again... unthinkable, impossible. People who never saw the objects upright, would be amazed when you told them that they were, at one time, defying gravity.

Every event can be traced back to something that started a chain reaction.

I now own the world's most expensive pencil. Well, I don't - technically it's capital expenditure on a business asset. I was having a cashflow crisis when my business insurance expired. That means that when my Macbook Air had its 3rd major hardware failure, and is completely broken, there is no policy for me to claim on.

Her Majesty's Revenue Collectors have come up with 2 ways to get businesses to invest in new assets. Firstly, I'm on a scheme where if I spend over £2k on a single invoice, I get the VAT back (£334). Secondly, I can buy assets rather than pay tax. So if my Corporation Tax bill was £2,000, I would buy assets instead of paying the bill.

This is how my company came to own an iPad Pro as well as the Apple Pencil. I don't even like drawing on it... I much prefer the feel of graphite on paper. It's good for more accurate 'white board' type stuff, where you're sketching out technical ideas, but it's still plastic slipping all over really shiny glass, with no sense of how hard you're pressing down.

So I have the Mac Pro now, instead of the Air. The main difference is that it's nearly a completely blank slate. I've decided that I'm not going to rush to fill it up with Adobe Photoshop, Windows & Microsoft Excel etc. etc.

I have a backup of old photos and things, so I'm not panicking too much about lost data yet. I can find most things somewhere in 'the cloud' but I still have a habit of creating local notes for myself, and not putting code into github.

I wrote a piece of code that basically simulates a CPU, so I could track bits through left and right shifts. Theoretically, it could be used to solve 'impenetrable' algorithms like SHA, which have such a cascade of effects from changing just one bit, leave the end result unrecognisably different from the unaltered starting data. This code is lost.

I wrote my own blockchain (e.g. Bitcoin) in Java, so I could reverse-engineer the problem, and figure out some theoretical attacks on the cryptocurrency. This code is lost.

I'm not really worried about losing code. If I had to do it again, it would improve immeasurably, and take me a fraction of the time. I might also gain a new insight, understand something a bit better, or completely restructure things, so they are elegant and simple.

There will be little notes, half-finished graphic design projects, other people's example work they gave me on a USB stick... they'll be gone. One day soon, I'm going to say to myself "I know what I can use here" and I won't have it. No biggie. I am going to start taking more regular backups from now on though.

I also have a clean slate in terms of where I go from here. A contact thinks I can get Undercover Manic Depressive published in serial form, which means I'd be a paid author... how cool is that?

Self-publishing in digital form is cool 'n' all and I did it as an experiment to see how hard it was. It took me 5 or 6 hours to write 12,000 words, sign up with Amazon, upload, create a cover... and that was it! My incomplete book with terrible formatting and zero editing is published and can be bought for $3. I don't think it's going to compare to actually seeing a book I wrote on bookshelves, if it happens.

Cashflow is a disaster... paying rent left me with £40 and my company probably can't afford to pay salaries at the moment. My salary of £676 is about 70% of my rent, but I needed a new laptop, and at least this way I can keep writing on a half-decent machine with a familiar keyboard.

Yes, it seems ridiculous to risk eviction and bankruptcy, to sit by the River Thames, writing, on a brand new laptop. Do you know how long I've been out of full-time work, in total, since my 17th birthday? It's less than 2 years. So, any of you who went to Uni or had a couple of gap yahs can get off your high horse. I genuinely did earn this. Sadly, it was my ex who nicked the profits and my parents who've had to reach into their pockets and give me just enough to do nothing except be stressed and not able to reach escape velocity.

Getting up to go to a job that feels like it conflicts with my values, ethics or has simply reached the point where I'm sick of the lack of passion and expertise, gave me a 'direct debit' life where everything got paid on time every month, and I never had to borrow any money. In fact, I had tens of thousands of savings, and spent tens of thousands more on the poison dwarf (ex) and it was killing my soul. I feel I have died a thousand deaths and I fear not one more.

Yes, it's upsetting that this disruption means missing out on time with friends, my sister, my niece and maybe my mum. People might think it's selfish, immature, irresponsible... those certainly weren't adjectives that were being applied to me when I skipped University, and missed out on all those sweet girls, drunken nights, reading books, writing and just thinking and being challenged by something different every day.

If you want to know about deferred gratification, ask me.

This is the kind of stuff there's no space or time for in Canary Wharf or The City. I needed to stop and smell the roses, and we ask so much of our children with homework and good grades to get into a good Uni to get a good job etc. etc. that there are some people who just don't know how to say "I feel I'm not getting what I need in life to stay alive, but I have never had chance to explore what that is".

Tags: #london #career #computing

This is a story about destructive relationships...

I stood up my most respected and one of my most sorely missed friends for the third time yesterday.

I was supposed to see him and his family just before Xmas, then we were going to have Tea at the Ritz, then we were going to travel to Heathrow, catch up on the train and in in the ample time before his flight.

WHAT'S GOING ON?

Well, I've never not had a girlfriend. I'm too addicted to sex. After the most almighty row at my ex-wife's brother's wedding, we took a break from each other for a few days. While she discussed my faults and possible solutions with her parents, I found a way out of one destructive relationship and into another.

I have written before about our unhealthy co-dependency on sex, and sex on drugs. "NRG-3" had no ingredients listed, but it was the last untried chemical on a legal high & research chemical website where each weekend, my ex and I would fuck on a different drug.

I would spend a bunch of spare time at Cambridge, reading about research chemicals, and then I would order one, ready for when I next saw my ex. I saw us like Alexander and Ann Shulgin, and had read their candid co-biographies about synthesising about 3,500 psychoactive drugs, and testing them all on themselves. The ones that seemed safe and interesting, as an aphrodisiac, Alexander took with Ann and they compared notes in their famous books PIHKAL and TIHKAL, which I read when I was 17/18 years old.

Only "NRG-3" was going in the bin. I did some snooping and found that "NRG-x" was the name for the old stock of unsold 'legal' highs that weren't legal anymore. Most people speculated that it was Methylenedioxypyrovalerone, which Crystal Meth and Crack users were switching to because it was 1/1,000th of the price per dose. Except MDPV had terrible extrapyramidal side effects in people not regularly abusing stimulants: panic attacks, palpitations, tachycardia, hyperthermia and said to be more addictive than the illegal drugs.

John McAfee, the famous billionaire software engineer became addicted to MDPV and started posting videos of himself pointing a loaded gun at his head on YouTube. The more I read, the more convinced I was that I needed to add the pyrovalerones to my 'never try' list (heroin, crack, crystal meth, PCP).

Only, in a suicidal state after the aforementioned temporary separation from my ex-wife, I thought "fuck it, what harm can 15mg do?" 15 milligrams is 10 to 20% of the size of a dose of 'most' stimulants. The line of white powder is more of a short, thin, hyphen. Your eyes can't believe that 15mg is so tiny.

My affair started immediately. I loved this drug. I loved the effects of this drug more than the pleasure I derived from my destructive relationship with my ex-wife. I had a mistress. I was having an affair. I was also free from the fear of losing my co-dependee.

I took 800mg over 4 days when I had intended to only take 15mg, for the duration of it's effects, which could be between 3 and 24 hours. It's not a stable and predictable compound. My behaviour had always been stable and predictable: I would take a single accurately measured dose, orally, and I had never ever broken my rule.

I had tried maybe 50 drugs up to this point, so I wasn't naïve, but I found myself saying and doing things I knew were addict clichés. "I'll just have a little bit more", "that looks underweight/small, I'll just increase the dose slightly", "I'm going to have one last dose then I'm going to stop", "OK, this really is the last one".

I didn't eat, I didn't sleep until the 3rd night. When I woke up I was having a terrible panic attack. Time inched by. My pulse and blood pressure were maxed. I was convinced I was going to die. I wasn't naïve though. I downloaded a computer game called Samorst, and played that for 12 hours. I felt a bit better.

This happened a few weeks after Springboard ended. I knew I had to pitch in London a month after demo day. I remember almost turning back home as I was almost on the train to London, because the thought of leaving my drugs for a few hours was scary. Way scarier than giving a pitch while high and hoping nobody from Springboard noticed I was high, sleep deprived and I had lost weight.

Everyone said that my London pitch was better than my Cambridge one (practice? home town?  drug-induced confidence? Smaller audience?).

Maybe I just didn't care so much. Jason Trost of Smarkets spotted the founder problem I had right away. I picked a startup that would be cashflow-positive, I could code in on my own in no time, and we already had a customer (5 or 6 household names by the time we started Springboard). The problem was this: I'd solved the problem in my head, written it: boring work only now, and I had no founder passion except pride in our startup.

David Hazell should have been the CEO from day one, and it took him well out of his ColdFusion comfort zone, but he can code Java and Objective-C as well as running a well administered business.

So how do you cure an MDPV addiction? Simple. Stop taking it. My ex took it as personal that I got addicted and she thought I wouldn't quit out of stubbornness  and I just needed shouting at and abusing.

I had a 'man cave' (office/lounge/bedroom) built in the summerhouse I built, but she would still walk down the garden path to shout at me there.

As if this wasn't enough, my parents were ordered to come and take me away. Things didn't get off to a flying start when my ex lets my Dad in and he's been primed to start shouting "you're a junkie" too, the moment he got in my front door. I was in the middle of an email about admission to a specialist drug clinic in London, and I should have told the hypocritical c**t to get the fuck out of my house that I paid for, back to his house which was bankrolled by my mum, and the money that came from the profit of the little cottage that my granny bought her.

My parents then insisted that we get some fresh air (it was January and I was not in a good state). Even though I wore dark glassess and a coat with a big collar, it was still mentioned at work that somebody had seen me out on the clifftop while I was off work sick.

My GP kindly gave me 5 weeks so I could attend the 28-day detox program at The Priory, where one of the country's best psychiatrists specialising in dual diagnosis (Bipolar & substance abuse) was based. A few white lies were told to protect my professional reputation and my health insurance would pick up the £12,000 bill.

My ex-wife said if I went into private hospital, she would divorce me. My psychiatrists said dual diagnosis mortality rates are very high, they disagreed that it was lack of willpower that had meant I hadn't quit by means of being shouted at, and professional care was needed, even just to see what was going on with my comorbid Bipolar II.

3 and a half weeks is what I lasted in hospital, before it dawned on me that I was going back to the same life. 3 weeks became a kind of benchmark. I could quit for 3 weeks, but never any longer. Ignorant people will say that proves a lack of willpower. Fuck you ignoramus.

When separation and divorce finally started to happen, my friend Will rescued me back to London, where I managed 2 months abstinence before my lazy ex wife insisted I travel 240 miles to get 3 valuations on a house she lived and worked less than a mile from.

I had just founded a new startup, was in advanced discussions about raising money, had built a working prototype, cycled to TechStars London every day, had a beautiful girlfriend and lived with one of my oldest friends and made new local friends as well as reconnecting with old.

Paying the mortgage on an empty property ate my savings, especially when she rejected a cash buyer who wanted to move in 6 weeks. Instead she chose an agent who didn't know the area or have any clients looking in that area, and accepted an offer from a couple in a chain who didn't even have an approved mortgage. They took 6 months.

When my parents refused to help ease the cashflow burden like they had repeatedly promised they would - not wanting stress to cause a relapse - it took me a hell of a lot of effort & distraction to raise money that I would have prepared in advance, if I knew their offer was just hot air.

I relapsed back in Bournemouth, with the idea of turning the house into a homeless shelter or something else to piss my ex off. Rang the family solicitor after all the other laughed at me, because I had trashed a hotel room in a drug-fuelled rage, and I wanted to prepare them before I handed myself in to the police.

Strangely my friend Tim turned up, got me out of there, then my Dad got me back to Oxford. Turns out the family solicitor had phoned my mum and begged them to help their son. I was very keen my dad contact the hotel and let me settle the matter with them directly. He didn't care. He doesn't have my ethics.

I had told Will (most innocent and naïve man ever) to chuck me out if I ever got any mail from Spain or Germany. Luckily I managed to find MDPV in the USA, but it still feels shitty using drugs in your friends house, even if you're trapped on the first floor with your leg in plaster in agony because the docs won't give you anything stronger than Tramadol (in case you abuse it).

Camden Town is not a good place to be a drunk or a drug addict. I would meet with Frank every day for weeks until he got a paid hostel bed. While I was making notes, to tell his story, I unwittingly took down the addresses and contacts of everywhere I had to go to try and get help from Camden.

Eventually Will did chuck me out, because of lies my Dad told him. Will did it very nicely, but my Dad destroyed the relationship we had. I remember lying in hospital, 2 canulas, torn liver, burnt abdomen, failing kidneys, and not only did Will ask for his keys back, he asked if I had made any other copies.

This is what happens when a drug addict hypocrite c**t like my Dad starts 'helping' instead of helping like he originally falsely offered to do with a modest bridging loan.

(as an aside my parents lied to my sister and said they'd lent me 250% More money than they actually did, and that I was 'emotionally blackmailing them' by being in hospital, even though they're not my next of kin anymore and I would never bother telling them if I was in hospital. No, my mum said it's ok because it's only worth making the coroner's if they need somebody to identify my body)

I survived homelessness and further hospital admissions, so I saved my mum that train fare, but Camden Council kept reneging on their promises. I got a one line email from Camden Council Housing, saying I couldn't even get a hostel bed

"On the basis of the information you have provided I am afraid that you do not meet the residence criteria to be considered for our Hostels Pathway Scheme."

What the fuck? Do you only accept people with money and houses and nice parents?

If you ever want to speak to a psychiatrist in hospital here's a little trick. Ask the the receptionist if you can borrow her phone and then dial the switchboard. Say "can I speak to the bleep holder for psychiatric liaison please?" Make sure you don't let on you're a patient until you absolutely have to. Saying "I'm trying to locate a bed in a psych ward or crisis house in London for a voluntary admission" doesn't actually contain any lies.

In this way, I was able to get 2 whole weeks of accommodation out of the council tax I pay Camden Council. I don't feel bad, because I had a massive wound in my leg and my penis was hanging off.

At the end of the two weeks, Camden Council said "here's a number for you to phone [if you haven't been mugged or stabbed, and still have your phone]  in the morning for us to come check on you". I said I wanted to stay in a a derelict tennis court maintenance shed to stay dry. They said, "we need you to stay where [muggers are and people have pissed]".

So I booked myself into a suite at the Royal Camden Golf & Spa Resort (a 14 bed dorm in a hostel) and proceeded to go into drug withdrawal. The think about London hostel dorms is, there's bunks, and there's a bathroom, and then outside there's the capital city of London, but if somebody is going through drug withdrawal in one of the bunks, fuck London, you should stay and watch them cos there's no privacy. It's like "Trainspotting" as a live play with one of the best actors you'll ever meet.

Fuck rehab at £430 a night... a hostel is a great place to get clean, provided you have a Laurence. Laurence could see that this was a dress rehearsal, and opening night would be never hopefully, and ushered a disappointed crowd of rubberneckers off around the sights of London. 

I'd managed to hang onto enough money to put myself through the cheapest rehab in the country, which is in Bournemouth believe it or not. I told my mum to hang on though (could hae been yet more lies anyway) because I needed to finish my round of golf and I had a massage booked for later [as in, hostels are like cheap rehab anyway].

Before long I had a group of friends. Laurence from the mountains. Rory the Lidl vodka stealer. Jody the poet. Definitely not French Jack. Psychic Laura. "I just want a baby" Priscilla. "Quite Old But You Still Would" Marla, Gorgeous Flavie, My later ex (banned) Antonella. DJ Kristos.... and many many more, including Paolo who had previously been acting tourguide, but with about 8 times as many years in the Big Smoke than him, I accidentally stole that role.

The thing about a hostel is, if you want drugs, everybody else wants to share, and you have to be high in public. Also, there's none of this pious "not a drop of alcohol shall pass my lips bollocks", and it's a lot easier to get clean with a beer in your hand than an herbal tea being told by some ex-junkie "drugs are bad mmmkay".

It took me a month to get clean and another month to get a job (and stay clean) and then I stayed clean until I dumped Antonella for being abusive, and then Laura got all mumpy that I didn't move onto her. Jody, who was in Love with Antonella, also was angry with me. My entire group of friends in London (except Rory) fell apart, and then my contract ended.

• Abusive relationship = multiple relapses
• No money + massive stress = relapse
• No job + no friends = relapse
• Innocent/naïve middle class person + lies about drug addiction = no friend

So I was nursed back to health by the nicest family in Ireland. The O'Riordan's of Killlavullen, Cork [The Rebel County]. I owe them my life.

The thing about the O'Riordans is that they're the smartest most hard-working and make do people you'll ever meet. Eddie, Laurence's dad's climbed 8,000m peaks and can sail, as well as repair just about anything. Breda, Laurence's mum is just so full of love & care, without all that œdipus complex bollox that my mum needs to deal with. There's sister Maria the nurse who all the boys in Magners drink in to look at and chat to, but they know they'd get the beating of a lifetime if they touched her. Then there's Danielle, with her scholarship, but she's practically already [unofficial] #2 in a company that's about to IPO. She's got Dublin culture but no arrogance.

Anyway, seeing and staying touch, and not falling out with friends is hard. Imagine if all your money just takes you deeper into debt, and keeping your mind quiet is harder than working any job... and it used to say lots of interesting things, but now it just says one: "MDPV"

Just about anything and anything that could have hurt my self esteem has happened. Showing a nurse your penis hanging off is a good one. How's about the police leading you out of a hotel, handcuffed, just wearing boxing shorts ["I'm sure you deserved it, you devil"].

And I keep having to go back to doing what I have done since the age of 17 to stop myself from going bankrupt, but I hate it and it's so easy I can type and have a conversation at the same time. And then when I've got just enough money, I'll walk into the boardroom and I'll tell the board exactly what I think, and I always get fired, but they're too scared I'm going to whistleblow to not give me a reference, so they just quietly sack whoever needs to actually go.

So, I came up with a couple of lists of things I like doing and don't like doing, and I've come up with a bunch of ideas that bring in money, keep me busy, and doing the things I like not the things I don't.

I'm sending it to Jakub, because he's the only man alive who can judge whether I'm talking pie in the sky bollocks or it might be worth a go (maybe with some discussion with his dad).

I have a practical speculative list too, which I might send to Rory, as he's the only man alive who'd come in on me with some mad scheme to stop both of our minds from driving us mad.

Jakub, it just remains to say, I'm so sorry for standing you up, but I was 6 months clean in San Francisco, but I had to ethically walk away from the HSBC corruption and incompetence. Since then, it's been promises, promises and false starts, but I'm waiting for the day when I either die cos I'm dumb enough to figure out how to get high for 14p a day, or smart enough to do something I can be proud of and it was my destiny.

So cute (9 October 2013)

P.S. - Sansa (Happy Birthday!), Lydia, Margaret, Nicola, David, Willian, Will, Jess, Cameron... I'm going as fast as I can. It's like trying to get a 10,000kg ball rolling.

Tags; #startup #addiction #friends

This is a story about two against one...

I'm fed up of being ignored and getting no respect from my Dad. This is a twofold problem. Now they don't take drugs anymore, they have  lost the only social bond to many freinds, and they don't know how to make new ones. They also live in a co-dependent abusive bubble, where my Mum has to agree with my Dad 0r else there will be arguing that my Dad always wins, because he puts ego ahead of relationships.

Growing up, I learned that making a reasoned argument, supported by evidence would get me nowhere. My most logical and intelligent statements would be put down with "smart arse" or "know-it-all", which is like an adult blowing a raspberry at a child because they can't think of a reply or they know they're wrong.

I'm writing two books, One on Bipolar Disorder and one on Legal Highs. I only have one literary agent at the moment, so if you know somebody who publishes non-fiction, please get in contact.

If you would like to read the first 12,000 words of my first book, please click this link and request access (I can't make it public, or else I can't sell it): https://drive.google.com/a/grant.gb.com/file/d/0B1Yzdy-TF4Z2WkczX28zVjRJNk0/view?usp=sharing

An advance would be really handy right now, because the thought of going back into a corporate environment again after 20 years of playing the game takes the saying 'deferred gratification' to an extreme level.

I would also like to borrow a vehicle of some sort, or be allowed to pitch my tent on your land. I'd like the option to change my environment. Marine Girl had offered her camper van but I guess she's away on half-term.

I'm going to keep my London base, because it's a gorgeous flat and my flatmate is such a great friend who really understands what I'm going through.

I have plans to keep a modest regular income, and I want a physical project too. I'm currently looking for derelict commercial property in London, that would be converted to house unaccompanied minors as part of Techfugees. If there's one thing I do well, it's the project that everybody else is too busy waiting for permission to do.

If anybody wants to 'buy' something from my company, I'm selling money-back guarantees. It also gives me an income of 4.5%. Also, if anybody wants to buy any 'nearly new' Macbooks etc off me, I'm offering a discount of up to 12.25%, but it'd be helpful if I could keep the whole 24.5%. Same goes for anything else that's VATable. Maybe you should buy that van (please lend it to me for a bit).

Also, I would like to sell some of my services, so I don't give the VAT man NO tax next quarter. Is there anything you have to do regularly on your computer, but the macro is just too hard? Do you want an ecommerce website or a forum or some graphic design work? Is there a data export/import task that takes you ages? See if you can get the purchase approval for the most IT experienced temp you've ever met in your life.

I do lecturing and pulic speaking too: London Business School, Bournemouth Business School and this little place called Cambridge.

If all else fails, I'm good at looking around a business, learning from your best people, and then shouting at everybody until things start going a bit better, if you're spending a lot but it all seems to be disappearing into a black hole. It's time for me to leave, which is normally when people return to their old habits or the management team think their failing project/company is just going to fix itself if everybody keeps the faith.

A leader should inspire confidence, the faith to follow them, but if that's up a dead-end then you're stuffed. Always remember this: leaders are promoted up to the level that they're no longer competent at their job.

So my parents will have a fantasy story about who I've 'become' and what I do with my time, and where my money goes. Why don't you get back in contact with me. I'll be pleased t0 hear fr0m you and I always appreciate advice and feedback. nick@manicgrant.com or @ManicGrant if you do that new-fangled Twitter thing.

If you hear something about me from my Mum or Dad, just say "with respect, you never email him, visit him and he ignores your calls after you only ever used them to guilt-trip him about his sister and niece, or say ignorant judgemental things". I need the family's help, not two ingnoramuses spreading inaccurate gossip about me.

I want my Mum & Dad in my life, but they need to grow up and learn that respect is a two-way-street. I'm still their son though, so if I'm in trouble and you've promised to help, then help, and help 100% not 50%, and certainly don't hinder by phoning all my relatives and telling them not to lend me any money because I became a drug addict devil overnight who complies with every stereotype.

Blame is a fruitless excercise. Just make good on your promises and help where you can, otherwise you inflict consequences which are not the same as blame.

I'm so exhasted, but I'm going to go look for buildings for unaccompnied minors. Guess where they mostly came from?

I always thought that drugs funded terrorism, but I feel so much safer already knowing that terrorism won't be getting any of its funds from pistachios and saffron.

Tags: #parents #childhood #politics #refugees

This is a story about individuals and their identity...

This chicken has been excluded from school because its wild hairstyle is not in line with the dress code. Education and employment are all about conformity, and this flamboyant character is causing dissent amongst the ranks.

There are lots of choices to express your individuality, without falling foul (sic.) of the rules:

• Trousers can be black, navy blue or grey. No jeans/denim/tracksuits
• Socks can be black, navy or grey. No patterns
• Shoes can be black or brown. They should be formal lace-ups. No velcro. No trainers.
• Shirts should be white, long-sleeved and with a collar. No patterns or textures allowed.
• Jumpers must be V-necked and in plain grey, black or navy blue. No logos.
• Waistcoats should be black, navy or grey.
• Jackets should be grey, black or navy. They should be single breasted with plain buttons. There must be a lapel/collar.
• Ties and other neckwear can only be the approved item in the correct corporate colours
• No jewellery
• No visible tattoos
• No make up
• Haircuts should be short back & sides for boys
• Girl's haircuts should be dull as fuck
• Any other kind of fashion accessory is forbidden, with extreme prejudice

As you can see, there are quite a lot of possible combinations and permutations to express your individuality here. Can you really say that the boy wearing the grey trousers with the brown shoes and the blue V-neck jumper, looks anything even slightly like the girl wearing the navy blue trousers and blazer? No way!

Once, there was a boy who had his nose pierced. He was burnt at the stake later that day as a warning to any other rebels. His screams of agony and the pungent smell of burning human flesh was the only way to send a clear message of just how important it is that we all stay within a narrow set of parameters. Non-conformists will be dealt with by any means necessary.

The names and dates of famous battles, or the deaths of kings and queens are very well documented, and would take seconds to look up in a reference book. The multiplication or division of two large numbers is something that a calculator costing less than £1 is able to do with perfect accuracy. Writing an essay about the third word, on the second paragraph of page 122 of a book, is not even going to be read. There is no point in hundreds or even thousands of students sitting the same exam... one of them can do it and then just produce as many photocopies of the answers as are required to satisfy the arbitrary requirement for questions with known answers to be written down from human memory.

When we later come to work, we can simply work out the asset value of all the buildings, land, machinery etc, sell it all off and divide the money between all the employees. In the case of banks, we can add up all the funds under management, and then just divide that up between every man woman and child on the planet. Probably about £12,000 each, just for the derivatives.

Given that half the world lives on less than $2 a day, once we've done this, we can all live for 25 years without having to do another exam, go to 'work' or stress out about any spreadsheets, promotions, kissing your boss's arse. Not just you, not just me... every single person on the planet, including the brown people who we don't generally give that much of a shit about.

I would pass some new laws. Anybody who asked you which Uni you went to, or what your A-level results were could be shot. Anybody who asks you in any way to jump through a hoop or roll over and play dead or generally act like a performing animal could be rounded up and euthanised. It's cruel to let these insane individuals, who think they're superior enough to sit in judgement over others, to continue with their delusions of grandeur.

Unless you're growing food, catching fish, building houses etc. etc.... basically, unless you can explain to your granny what the hell it is that you do, then you can either stop doing that and go get a proper job, or you can be shot.

All 'managers' would probably be the first wave of people who would be put into cargo planes and flown to sub-saharan Africa. Although some lions might choke on their biros and find their flipcharts hard to digest, I'm sure that society would feel immediate benefits.

A special team of assassins would be tasked to go round all the super-wealthy and ask them "did you earn your money?". Any kind of affirmative response would result in summary execution and reappropriation of the hoarded wealth. It's rather tragic to think of all those poor deluded individuals who think they worked harder than a malnourished boy scouring a rubbish dump for enough plastic bottles to pay for a mouthful of rice. The world will not miss those entitled little pricks.

I'm tempted to say that anybody with a face as smug as David Cameron's is clearly in line for the chopping block, but I suppose there could be one or two unfortunate individuals who just happened to be born looking like a silver-spoon in the mouth cockwomble. Probably best to just kill everybody who went to Eton, Harrow and Winchester, just to be sure though.

There would no doubt be total anarchy, chaos, lynching mobs, grudges being settled, looting, rape, pillaging... pretty much everything that we export today to the developing world.

I have no idea what I'm blathering about, but I'm just trying to take my mind of my sister, who's had her rent & bills paid, cars bought and maintained and regularly had her begging bowl filled by our parents, could possibly accuse me of being a hypocrite. I even put the deposit down on a car for her one Christmas. Perhaps she's been taking the same drugs as my parents.

Do I owe the world more than I've given? Yes, you're damn right I do. Have I been through hell. Yes, I've been through hell too, so there's probably some karma there. Are you God? No? Fuck off then.

Tags: #politics

This is a story about modern life...

I missed 5 blog posts. 3 people were worried on Facebook, plus my flatmate. My sofa-surfing Kiwi has gone back to NZ.

2 of those people, I met at a hackathon, back in October. When I had to go into hospital a few weeks later, one of these new friends brought me a backpack that contained a set of hand-picked items from around my room, each thoughtfully chosen as something that I would probably need during a week or two in hospital. It felt like Christmas.

When I got really sick over the Xmas/New Year period, my other new friend came and sat on my bed and gave me a hug. He also did loads of my washing, cooked for me, and generally nursed me back to health. The most important thing he did though, was to just be thoroughly lovely. It makes a difference, somebody asking how you are and giving you a hug.

I was in a pretty bad way with muscle wastage and weight loss, having stopped eating for about 2 and a half weeks. Obviously I couldn't impose on my poor friend, with additional burdens, such as extra shopping to carry home, when he was already doing so much that was well above and beyond what any flatmate and friend would do.

Another new friend had become concerned by my lack of blog posts, and had actually come over to my flat on her own initiative. She's a very active person, with a busy life, but it so happened that she was off work... although I doubt that she pictured herself nipping to the Tesco Local for protein shakes, isotonic fluids and anything that had high calorie content. It was so kind and helpful of her that she did.

So, I just received an email from my sister. Apparently she's been getting shit from my parents, because they've read my blog and being the horribly abusive people that they are, they are taking it out their frustration with semi-illiteracy and their almost total exclusion from my life, on my poor sister.

Let's recap what wonderful parents they are, because apparently I've forgotten all the great stuff they did for me:

• Born to a couple of junkies. My mum was a student and my dad was failing to make enough money to support a family by buying and selling junk.
• Grandparents took pity on 3-year-old grandchild and bought them a house. Dad still doesn't have a proper job... too busy taking drugs.
• I spend all my time when I'm not at school in the pub, because my parents still can't afford to support a family, a drug addiction and alcoholism. Alcohol comes first.
• My Dad decides to scale up the junk buying/selling that didn't work before, so I have to leave all my playgroup and primary school friends to move to Oxford
• Between eye patches that I don't need and a yet another girl's bike with a fucking basket on it, I pretty much become the most bullied kid at school. I remember picking gravel out of my back whenever I was 'clotheslined' on the hard play area.
• My mum did take me to London a bunch of times, which was nice. We went to the Science Museum, which got me interested in science.
• Move to a school with a uniform. Turnups and the school blazer (optional) plus carry-over from previous school means the bullying continues. My mum sympathises with the bullies.
• I get a goldfish. He's called Fred. You can't stroke a goldfish. It's a shit pet, but I cry when he dies and make a little gravestone for him.
• Finally get a home computer. Not the Apple Mac like Julian and Joe have, or the PC like Barnaby, Ben, Marcus etc. etc. No... this is the last of the ZX Spectrums ever made
• Have to move school again. Great school. Bullying not quite so bad as there is an unpopular Russian boy and I'm in all the top sets and a good form group... so my parents decide we should move to France
• Some accountant friend of the family takes pity on me and gives me the oldest PC you've ever seen in your life. No software works on it, but that doesn't matter because the monitor is black and white anyway. This is my parents main gift to me: giving me something that's so unbelievably unfit for purpose that I try and try in desperation to make things work.
• Learn to speak French in France. Also didn't make any friends in the UK, and was away from all my other friends. Given the choice, I'd rather have friends than be able to speak French.
• Another new school. Bullying atrocious. Teachers are nice though. One of them takes me sailing after school... like a dad.
• Rather than leave me in a town where I can cycle everywhere and remain with my friends during puberty, we move to the middle of fucking nowhere. I write letters to my friends on floppy disks and post them to them. One friend comes to visit. One. That's it. One.
• Sailing club is good... thanks again to that teacher
• Another start at a new school ruined by the only bike that was capable of tackling the steep hills being a proper mountain bike. One that my dad stole. It was a girls bike. I had to ride past over 1,000 children all congregating on a big long pavement, before going up the steps to the school. My few sailing club friends disowned me.
• I was supposed to be saving up for another new computer, but £10 a week from a paper round doesn't leave a lot of spare money to buy replacement parts for my mountain bike, which gets used at least twice a day on very steep hills
• With a small contribution from me in cash, but absolutely huge in terms of the number of miles I cycled every day on my paper round, my Dad got me my new computer, well after its processor became obsolete. It doesn't have a co-processor or enough memory, but I figure I can upgrade those parts when I get a better job than a paper round.
• My dad bought the shittest, most rotten, neglected boat that looked totally not water-worthy. I restored it, then sold it for a big profit. Can't remember if I paid him back.
• I had a small financial contribution when I bought my 4th and 7th cars. The 7th car was brilliant, but I could have paid for it myself. I think I was only short a few hundred quid, and I was IT contracting so I was raking it in. I can't believe how my parents still say they "bought" me that car. I shall have to dig out the bank statements.
• That's it!

Oh, here are a few things that my parents like to misremember:

• They gave me one of their cars. My mum had crashed it and it had been repaired by a blind man. The thing is, it wasn't a gift. My granny had been saving money since I was really little so that I could get a car and insurance, and I would have easily been able to buy a small engined petrol car, in a low insurance group, with cheap parts... like everybody else my age. Instead, ALL the money had to go on insurance, and the shitty car broke down all the time, and because it was a complicated diesel with expensive parts, it was the world's shittest car for a broke 17 year old.
• Holidays: well, actually these were conferences for my mum, or the shitty dilapidated house in France where I was away from all my friends in the UK. My parents were always pulling me out of school, and sure it was an education and experience, but it was just what my parents wanted to do, with me along in tow. If you were going to do it anyway, it doesn't count as something you did for your kid. The fact we drove past Alton Towers so many times but never went illustrates their mindset perfectly.
• I've cost them a lot of money. Horseshit. I read books from the library or was playing round at friend's houses or somewhere I shouldn't have been. My parents never bought me the correct shoes to not get beaten up. Once I saved up the money from my granny and bought a pair of Nikes. I remember everybody commenting at school for days. I remember wanting to fall asleep just looking at them.
• They lent me money when I was in London. Nope. What they did was not lend me money when I was in London. I needed it in October 2013. Two years late is too late.

Ok, so there are myriad little things, mainly to do with cooking with my mum. My mum is really great. She did try her very best to give me a nice life. She worked hard, paid the mortgage and bankrolled my dad.

I'm trying to think of a nice memory with my dad, but it's all so practical. I was always watching him do DIY or cook but the only thing I think we learned together was when he taught me to read & write. Later, we would change the oil on a car and suchandsuch, but we never did something together, although I was allowed to come along to car boot sales, for example.

My only memory of him really taking an interest in something in my life was when I wanted to do a sponsored mountain bike ride, and I hadn't been doing the big hills for long enough to really travel all the way to the town where the event was being held, and then have much remaining energy to race.

It wasn't much more than a completely lumpy field, with a savagely steep climb, long traverse, descent and then back on the flat to the bottom of the climb again. I had no bottle cage on my bike and I was dressed in jeans, and it was a pretty hot day. People were laughing at this kid in jeans with a touring helmet, no other safety gear, on a girls bike.

When the race started, I left everybody who had "all the gear but no idea" behind. The traverse was quite tricky, especially without toeclips. The descent was suicidal on a fully rigid bike, but I started to lap quite fast.

The more the laps went by, the more of the skilled but unfit riders fell away. The ascent really was a killer in that heat. Anyway, I decided I'd better stop after quite a few laps, because I was feeling really badly dehydrated, and I was sick of getting flies in my eyes.

My dad was gobsmacked. I can't remember where I finished, but from his point of view, I was just lapping everybody over and over and over again. He took me to the bike shop in the nearby town and bought me a pair of clear cycling glasses for the flies, mud and stones, plus a bottle cage and bottle so I could carry a drink with me.

Perhaps if I racked my brains I could think of something else, but getting complemented on my riding, and then him making a further investment - unprompted - to allow me to take my hobby further, was a special moment.

So, my sister's pretty pissed off with me, but I can't understand why. My dad conspired with my wife and my GP to drag me away from my home, my life was dismantled, and the one time in my adult life when I did actually need and want their help - and it had been offered - they reneged on their promise in October 2013, and bang went my best chance to put my life back together in London, thanks to their lies.

I've not really altered the formula, and it's really quite simple:

• Place to live (not a hostel, tent, or shop doorway)
• Job (I'm an IT contractor. Thanks for your offer of [insert low wage job] but it would be uneconomical of me to not focus my search on highly paid contracts)
• Enough money for any cashflow shortfall until the 60+ days it takes before I get paid are done, plus I've absorbed the hit of the 6 weeks deposit, 1 month rent & agent fees
• I'm afraid that I'm so profligate that I replace my suit every 5 years, and my overcoat every 12 yeas. Shoes, I'm afraid I throw away when the shoe repair man laughs in my face. Shirts, I replace when the collar is worn through and it's horribly yellow under the arms.

There are certain things that people in London don't do either:

• They don't walk for 2 or 3 hours. They get the tube. That costs over £5 a day
• They don't bring a thermos flask of coffee into the office. Coffee is a £6 a day habit, but a necessary social visit
• They don't bring a picnic basket, get the blanket out, lay it down on the office floor, sit down and start getting foil-wrapped cucumber sandwiches out. Lunch is a £5 a day habit
• They don't drink much water. Sometimes they drink fizzy drinks. Sometimes they drink a kale, ginger and apple smoothie. Drinks are a £3 a day habit
• They don't have home-brew kegs hidden under their desks. When a Londoner goes for an after work drink, which is pretty much a social necessity, they will spend £5 a pint or more
• They don't work the longest hours in Europe and travel on a packed tube train to then get home, travel back in time, and start making fresh pasta and picking basil leaves in the garden they don't have. Your economy Londoners will buy fresh pasta and pesto, and will even push the boat out for a bit of parmesan: cost £7. Some days, you're at work so late that you might even get a luxury stonebaked pizza sent to the office, or failing that, you'll probably pick up a takeaway on the way home, because you're just going to fall asleep as soon as you've eaten: cost £15.
• They don't live in Zone 99. The zones go 1-2-middle-of-fucking-nowhere-99-100. Yes, it's true that you can save 50p a year on rent by living in Zone 99, but it will cost you over a million pounds for a travel card that goes out that far. It would also be quicker to just get a jet or a helicopter to City Airport if you're that far out.
• They don't all take loads of coke. Yes, it's true that there is some drug taking in the capital, but I bet there are good statistics to show that a far greater percentage of people are on drugs in the provinces, because it's so fucking dull out there.
• They don't fret about saving 7 pence on a loaf of mouldy bread, or consider it profligate to buy popcorn at the cinema, because wages are so much higher and you'll be working too hard to do all the stuff that you have to do to entertain yourself in the provinces on your meagre wage

So, anyway, I've shown my magic formula works. I know what I need to get back into work, routine, friendships and get on an even keel financially, so that I never ever have to explain to a dimwitted out-of-towner why the cost of living initially looks quite high.

However, my sister has a shit job, got pregnant with kid they couldn't afford, went through a divorce, lives in midlands suburbia and generally acts with incredulity that I could maybe have found it a bit stressful trying to re-enter London life on a credit card, living in a hostel.

I had said that my sister & niece were the only thing keeping me alive when I was in hospital. My life is fucked, the cashflow doesn't work, I'm not very well, I still haven't got a contract and there are now further delays. I know what'll happen... I'll get a nice big money contract, but after a month I'll be bankrupt, and my money will still be 30 days away at least. If I take it all out as soon as I can, then it means I'm not maximising my dividends, and it means I have to live on 33% of my income, instead of 100%. That means the stress carries on, month after month after month. But, apparently everybody's an expert in accountancy and cashflow forecasting now.

Apparently one of my sister's friends has it so much harder than me or something. Anyway, they're dead now. I'm just being a martyr or something. According to my sister and parents it's really easy to blag your way into a mental hospital, and slicing lengthways down my forearms with a razor blade was some kind of emotional blackmail, or maybe it was melodramatic... I don't give a shit anymore.

I literally think that you are a grade-A douchecanoe if you have no idea just how hard it has been to survive in London with no parental or state support, when I was completely fucked.

A big part of me says "fuck it". I was a homeless bankrupt drug addict in a park one day, and then you expect it to be all fixed in 5 months because I managed to get a flat, and a job. Then you only choose to help me when I'm hospitalised, suicidal. And then after it's already too late you say it's blackmail.

Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.

Can't be bothered.

Why bother?

You have absolutely no idea how hard it's been to work my way back from the brink and just how carefully I've had to budget, and how cleverly I've done my accounting.

I really didn't want to write another thing about my parents. They're dead to me. But to hear my sister echoing their lies is heartbreaking, and to receive a lengthy message telling me things that are just total bullshit, and saying "I'm sorry, but I don't want to be anywhere near you".

That's just fucking awful. OK, so I've poured out my anger at my parents for forcefully removing me from my own home so my ex could cheat on me, generally backing her up, and then totally fucking me over when they had their chance to make good on something helpful. It's something I have been trying forgive and forget but they're never going to re-enter my life. They have no interest in it anyway. My dad didn't even want to come in my London house and meet my London friends, despite being parked right outside.

My sister says I should ask if I need help. My parents don't do anything until it's too late: I'll either be dead or in hospital.

That's not emotional blackmail. That's getting rid of some worthless cunts from your life.

I'm absolutely heartbroken that my sister has been taken in by their bullshit. We had been talking about her visiting London and her getting a matching semicolon tattoo.

Fuck life

Tags: #parents #childhood #sister #career #london #suicide #depression

This is a story about blowing off steam...

While the world gets on with its life, I seem to have one foot in the grave, or to be stuck in the past. Apologies for the self-absorption. I'm trying to move forwards, but it turns out there's quite a lot of stuff I needed to work through.

Many people might view me as a 'keyboard warrior'. Somebody who is far more aggressive and outspoken when protected behind a computer screen. I think you'll find that I don't really tone things down face to face, but when people read what I write they certainly interpret it as being quite angry.

It's hard to infer emotion from writing. I tend to use a mix of humour and sarcasm, as well as writing down explicitly what emotions I'm feeling, if they're strong enough to warrant recording in the text, as I write. Perhaps I'm just impervious to my emotions a lot of the time though. I'm mostly very calm when I'm writing.

I'm acutely aware just how self-absorbed I have become, and I certainly need a bit of a reality check. The fact of the matter is that I'm pretty exhausted, depressed, stressed and anxious. Writing doesn't seem to have brought any relief yet, but when suicide and drug abuse are places that your mind can wander to, it's good to have a distraction.

I reviewed what I wrote so far, and it's interesting to see a pronounced dip in quality, as I started to self-destruct over the Christmas and New Year period. I can really see my writing get sloppy and thoughts get jumbled. The writing up to that period was quite repetitive though, quite laboured.

It must be fairly obvious to any independent observer, that whatever I turn my hand to, I will get excessively involved with. If I start going to the gym, I will train far too hard and push my body too far. If I get into a new sport or hobby, I will obsessively learn everything about it and just pursue that one thing, to the exclusion of everything else in my life. If I get a new job, I will be so passionate about it that it will become very personal. I will be super dedicated to whatever I do.

Is the explanation for this behaviour simply that I am transferring my addict's habits into different kinds of activity? The repetition, the obsessiveness, the single-minded pursuit of one goal... it all smacks of addiction.

So, am I addicted to writing? Am I addicted to telling my story? Am I addicted to sensationalism and attention seeking? Am I addicted to the little dopamine hit I get for every Facebook like, Twitter retweet and Reddit upvote? Yeah. Probably.

But, at the same time, writing is immensely useful for recovery. I'm not sure I could have gone from the end of October to the end of January with no job and only one lapse, without the continuity of this blog. It's also served one its original purposes of keeping people informed, letting people know whether I'm afloat or whether I'm sinking. Even a simple "signs of life" as one caring friend put it.

I write for me, but it is meaningful who takes the time to respond. When somebody I haven't really been in contact with for a long time indicates that they've read something I've written, there is initially a gut-wrenching realisation that they've probably had their eyes opened to a side of my character that they never knew, then there is a pleasing sense that there is still an ongoing connection between us, as friends whose contact has dwindled over the difficult years.

It's interesting the responses that my writing has prompted from friends and strangers alike. People have shared some things with me, that I will keep completely confidential, but have really helped me to realise that we're all putting a brave face on things a lot of the time. Everybody has an untold tale behind their stoic exterior. The happiest, smiliest, 'life is perfect' type people have connected with something in my writing and shared some quite shocking truths about their own wayward journey through life.

Don't read a book by it's cover. Does a blog really have a cover? I suppose "manic" is quite a provocative title. It's interesting that you could dip in at any moment in time and dependent on the phase of writing, you could assume that I'm a junkie, sex addict, suicidally depressed, pissed off with my job, happy with my job, pissed off with my parents, had an unhappy childhood, had an interesting childhood, was a domestic abuse perpetrator, was a domestic abuse victim, had a shitty divorce and am completely bat shit insane, with long unintelligible monologues about some half-baked ideas in theoretical physics that don't really add up to a hill of beans.

Is it so different from the sumtotal of my Facebook status updates? I generally get the impression that the world has kids, babies, cats, dogs, cars, holidays and dubious politics, from what I can see on the Facebook walls of my friends. Who knew?

There are a lot of social commentators saying that this eruption of social media sharing of our innermost thoughts and feelings is leading to an addiction to Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat etc. etc. and that we're headed for some kind of armeggedon because of it.

Having been somebody who has written on forums under my own name for the best part of 14 years, I have only ever felt the benefit of human connection, even if it has been computer-assisted. With the kitesurfing/kiteboarding forums, we used to meet up every Tuesday and every weekend. I've made some of my very best friends through forums and the social ties that the forums enabled.

When you have to get through a long working week, your job isn't particularly challenging, you're a bit jaded and cynical and sick of the 9 to 5 drudgery, there's nothing quite like a forum to while away your 37.5 hours a week. I made it a personal mission to read every forum post, and respond whenever I could.

A life lived online is a bit strange, but I've been all over the world with people who I met online. Electronic communication is creating social cohesion where otherwise there would only be urban solitude. Unless you live in some 1950's throwback community, where you know your neighbours and you leave your doors unlocked and let your kids play with the dodgy looking guy in the raincoat, then you probably live most of your life in social isolation, beyond the members of your household, and a small group of people who you go out of your way to stay in regular contact with.

Most of us probably have a certain day or a time that we speak to our mums. Most of us probably have people that we regularly speak to online or a regular social get together. Most of us probably have a group of friends that we regularly meet up with at weekends, and see in the pattern of our daily lives: the school run, the kids birthday parties, the meals out with a network of friends, celebrating some event or other. Plus there are the people at work. You know how many kids they have, and some vague things about what's happening in each of their lives. You have an established social routine with your work colleagues.

If you're a bit of an oddball like me, you don't really fit in. For a long time, I was a lot more senior than people my age. When I started my career, I was the young kid with poor social skills and a bad dress sense. Later, I was the golden boy who was trying to do the same thing as his peers - have a nice settled little life with a family and a lovely home - but was roughly the same age as the group who were partying and generally having fun.

This disjoint has meant that as my boring old person life fell to bits, it was just about at the same time as my younger friends were all getting big houses and having babies. My older friends now have kids who are going to big school. My younger friends are up to their elbows in nappies.

I guess it happens to everybody. There are waves of engagements, marriages, house purchases, babies and then come the divorces. Thankfully, not too many of my friends have started dropping dead yet.

Everybody is so darn busy, and working so darn hard. Apparently, life is supposed to be taxing on parents with two kids. Life is optimised to bleed the parents dry, of their time, energy and money of course. If you're not flat broke, exhausted and don't have a minute to yourself to sit down and read a newspaper, you're not trying hard enough.

Sorry if that sounds condescending or anything... I have no idea what it must be like having copulated for 30 seconds and now having a screaming, shitting, vomiting thing that can't look after itself and you'll be chucked in jail if you hide it in the oven.

My views are probably quite obnoxious to many people. Certainly a recurrent theme is parenting. I'm very hard on my parents, and sure there are a lot of people who say "I'm sure they did the best they knew how to do" and I'm not going to re-iterate the fact that sitting around on your arse taking drugs is a bit stupid, when you're supposed to be childrearing. I certainly see a lot of smiles on the kids faces that get posted onto Facebook, and I know that my sister is doing a great job with my niece, so I certainly don't think that my friends and sister are doing a bad job.

It must seem very annoying and pathetic that I'm complaining about my lot in life, and being so self-absorbed and selfish, sitting around writing crap about "woe is me!" and so oh-so difficult life is for me, me, me. Sorry about that. I must be doubly difficult when you're struggling to make ends meet financially, and you're stressed about little Oliver's violin recital, and whether Hermione's going to get into that grammar school. I'm sure you hate your job too. I'm sure you'd love to have a breakdown and be in bed for 14 hours a day exhausted, shaking like a wreck.

Yes, I do claim that I don't feel entitled, but I'm certainly able to some extent, to spend some time thinking about the past and wallowing in self-pity. I have no dependents. I didn't spawn any gene cloning machines that I'm trying to protect from the wolves in the forest. I'm not being smug. I'm actually jealous. I can see that it's pretty exhausting and terrifying, having 'skin in the game' but I can also see those chests swelling with pride and those eyes lighting up with delight at your beautiful children. I don't get any cuddle time with my offspring that I don't have.

So, life looks a lot simpler for the single guy with no kids, but in a way, my life is less dictated by the demands of feeding, clothing and schooling of any infants, which means I kind of have to find a reason for living, every day.

I hope you don't hate me for saying I have to decide what I'm going to do every day. I'm sure you have a long list of things you'd love to do, if you had the time. My life is not exactly like that... I don't wake up and think "shall I learn to waterski today, or should I go to Mexico?". However, I don't wake up and think "I have to get the kids dressed and make them breakfast" just like every morning for the next 18 years.

I can't decide whether having made a rational decision to defer parenthood was a mistake. It would be interesting to compare some kind of objective quality-of-life scores with my peers who made different choices, but I suspect that things would be comparable, as I know that many of my friends have suffered with depression and anxiety just as much as me, despite being mummies and daddies. I know that many of my friends are just as cheesed off with the work they do, and it's making them unwell.

Anyway, we're all slowly inching our way to the grave, like it or not. One thing's for certain with life: death will follow hot on its heels.

Yeah that's lava going in the sea. Salt water cleanses everything, especially tears

Tags: #depression #parents

This is a story about protecting the fruit of your loins...

I wouldn't blame you for jumping to the wrong conclusions about whether I'm safe to be around your family. You're programmed to protect. You're programmed to be paranoid, and act irrationally. The chances are that there isn't a Sabre-Toothed Tiger lurking outside your front door, but your DNA doesn't change fast enough for you to not at least subconsciously check for vicious predators outside your cave.

The assumption must be that everywhere I go, I leave a trail of used hypodermic needles infected with HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis, even though I've never injected drugs and I don't have any infectious diseases.

Perhaps my bags and coat pockets are full of highly toxic drugs and medications, which are not in child-safe containers? Perhaps your inquisitive child may go through one of my unattended bags or pockets and discover something that looks like sweets, only to be fatally poisoned. No, I don't carry things like that around with me.

But what about my influence? Perhaps I'm 'soft on drugs' and my laissez-faire attitude to narcotics will somehow rub off on your tiny tots, and just being within earshot of me will lead them to later experimentation with powerful narcotics, addiction and death. Well, actually, one of the main reasons for writing this blog is as a warning klaxon, to those who might venture up the same dead-end alleyway where I unfortunately found myself stuck.

I hope that nobody thinks I'm glorifying or making light of my numerous brushes with irreversible health damage and death, that I have sustained over the last few years. In fact, it's only been because of the published memoirs of some other unfortunates, that I've not abandoned all hope on the assumption that my own fallibility is some indictment of my character.

Certainly, it's easier to divide the world into good and bad, light and dark, virtuous and evil. Certainly, it's easier to condemn a character. Certainly, it seems somehow safer, prudent, to keep bad apples away from the rest of the harvest, lest infection spread.

However, that's not how human nature works. If you make something taboo, then you make something more interesting to people, but they will hide their curiosity and feel guilty for feeling drawn into a forbidden world, even though it's totally natural to be inquisitive. For the outcasts, the misfits, the eccentric family member who has been excluded, is shaped by the imagination of those unhappy children, into some kind of folklore figure. The family freak, the black sheep, can end up being far more influential than you had ever intended, just by your very refusal to acknowledge their existence.

Anyway, I'm soon going to reject all the labels, which I have been urged by most Psychiatrists and Psychologists to not apply to myself anyway. I push more and more of the actions of the past into the annals of history. To judge my character on a few select moments from 36 years on the planet seems like the real madness. To condemn my entire future based on some ageing evidence that is entirely outweighed by a mostly normal healthy life, is not exactly very fair or very kind, is it?

You would be shocked to learn that the whole private psychiatric/psychological treatment setup is driven to protect your professional image. You are encouraged not to use clinical labels. You are encouraged to maintain medical secrecy, privacy. I can see why, but I'm enjoying playing with people's prejudice. I'm enjoying seeing how close to unemployable I can get, before I step back from the brink of reputational ruin.

So, if you're keeping me at arm's length, at a safe distance, I do understand. I forgive your instincts to protect your family. It's only natural.

You should know that I would never venture anywhere near you or your home if I was in a mess though. I have no fear of living on the streets again. I choose suicide and destitution ahead of putting any of my friends or my sister and niece in any danger.

I choose suicide. I choose destitution.

Tags: #suicide #mentalillness #depression #addiction #bipolar #drugs

This is a story about logical conclusions...

My parents were illegal drug addicts for 30 0dd years, but their logic was that they weren't proper addicts because they supposedly didn't become addicted when they used heroin, cocaine and speed. They used to boast about being "old school" people who were immune from addiction (apart from the drugs they were addicted to, of course).

I was getting pissed off with my parents and ex-wife's assumption that they held some moral superiority over me. I was suicidally depressed, so I obtained all the drugs, to prove that I could take them and then stop taking them, without becoming addicted.

The first thing i got hold of was Cocaine. It didn't do much for me. I could see that taking Cocaine leads to more taking of Cocaine. I was able to see that it was self-reinforcing, but I couldn't really see the point. All that happens in your brain is that it tells you "do that again". There was no enjoyment, only addictive potential.

So I took what was left of my Cocaine, mixed it with baking soda, microwaved it, and made my own Crack Cocaine. Because I was a middle-class homeowner with a similarly highly paid group of friends in professional jobs, I didn't happen to have a crack pipe lying around. My solution was a wine glass over the stove with a drinking straw to catch the smoke.

Crack Cocaine was not pleasant. My heart shot right up to Maximum Heart Rate (MHR) and my nose and mouth were all numb. It was a bit scary actually.

So I bought a rock, and then decided to break a bit off, crush it up and snort it. When that didn't have any effect, I ate the remaining rock. It turns out that Crack is not water soluble. You can only smoke it. I bought another rock and got somebody to show me how to smoke it off a perforated Coca-Cola can. It was shit. Don't waste your money.

Ok, what next? Crystal Meth. So I didn't have a meth pipe, on account of being a respectable member of the community, so I just chopped it up really fine and snorted it. It kind of worked. Not mind-blowing, but there was energy and euphoria there. I could imagine myself getting addicted, and for a week, I did take it. But I couldn't quite see the fuss. It was just like having a massive dose of speed.

I assumed the problem was ROA (Route of Administration) so I bought a pipe. There's something satisfying about watching the stuff liquify and then vaporise. The high is very short lived versus snorting it or eating it though. It also starts to leave you pretty edgy, anxious, paranoid.

So, having tried, Coke, Crack and Meth, there was only really Heroin to complete my 2 week experiment. I bought a gram of No. 3 Afghan Brown. I have no idea what that means. It just looked like dirty brown powder. Given my lack of hypodermic syringe, I decided to try foiling it (chasing the dragon). It's quite hard to stop the damn stuff from running around when it liquifies, and it takes co-ordination to not burn yourself and catch any smoke. My first experiments were not successful.

I decided to use my meth pipe to try and smoke it. It's got a lovely sweet flavour, but maybe that's psychosomatic because you're getting 'high'. I didn't feel high. I felt like I wanted to have a really nice sleep. Solution: put crystal meth AND heroin into the pipe together. Non-injected speedball. Man, that confuses the hell out of your body. On the one hand you're monged out, and on the other you're highly stimulated. Everything takes on a warm yellow glow.

Now I ripped through the Crystal Meth, but I'd barely used half the bag of Heroin. I decided that it was probably too subtle - like Coke and Crack - to even notice addiction creeping up on you, so I flushed it down the loo.

When the Crystal Meth was gone, I looked at the price, and thought "screw that". You can get nearly 30 grammes of Speed Paste (Base) at 70% purity for the price of a gram of Crystal Meth. So I used Speed Paste to manage my nonstop poly-drug usage down to a level where I was functional again.

Then I switched to Dexedrine/Dextroamphetamine. Very expensive, but at least it's slower release and you know exactly what dose you're getting. Was I addicted? Well, it's a very effective antidepressant. Fast acting and long lasting. You don't even get much of a high.

The final route to freedom was Bupropion (legal). It's pretty much like an amphetamine. You get an energy boost, a mood lift, and it takes care of cravings for other things. It makes normal things enjoyable again.

I know it says Zyban, but it's Bupropion and is marketed as the antidepressant Wellbutrin

You can re-enter the world of the living, legally. Bupropion is not a controlled substance. Buy it from India or somebody's leftover prescription from when they tried to quit smoking, and hey presto, you have some semblance of a normal life back.

You can't even take too much Bupropion because you'll just have a seizure. Thankfully my seizure threshold is quite high.

However, the insomnia and anxiety, panic attacks can be quite bad, so it's useful to have some Zopiclone for sleep, and some kind of fast acting benzo for any panic attacks. Zopiclone's not a controlled substance, but most most benzos are. Benzos are physically addictive and abrupt withdrawal will kill you.

You have to do a lot of half-life calculations to get off benzos. Diazepam lasts frigging ages. It was still coming out in my urine 5 days after I stopped taking it. Alprazolam (Xanax) starts to move you in the right direction. Then move on to Zopiclone to get some sleep without being totally monged out the next day. Then there's Zolpidem, which is handy when you're off all the other stuff but you just can't initiate natural sleep. Then you just need to half the dose, then skip every other night, and before you know it, you're free from the Benzo trap.

From top to bottom: Zolpidem (Ambien/Stilnox), Zopiclone, Alprazolam (Xanax)

But, back to the original point. I can know tell my parents and my ex-wife to go f**k them selves, because I've been able to try these drugs, and not become addicted. I just needed to escape their sneering ignorance, and sense of superiority to quit drugs cold turkey. When my life was a living hell with the people who are supposed to care about you but treat you like you're weak, inferior, lacking in willpower, I showed that substitute prescribing could replace harmful hard drugs with medically sanctioned antidepressants and sleep aids. The root cause of the issue was still present though... the people who are supposed to care about me most in the world treated me like shit, with no excuse.

So is addiction a disease? Is addiction a way of treating depression? What's causing the depression? In my case, I was depressed because the people who supposedly loved me wished me dead. The whole thing started out with me wanting to die of a drug overdose, and suddenly I was the bad guy. My ex-wife and Mum absolutely loved the faux sympathy they got from spreading my secrets and painting my problems in the light of somebody who'd done something selfish and didn't love them enough to stop.

You're damn right. If you're going to spread rumours around my family, friends and work colleagues, you might as well just smother that person to death with a pillow while they sleep. That's what you're doing to them. It's not about you, cunts, you'll have plenty of time to grieve when the person's dead. You can't blame the drugs. Drugs didn't buy a gun, come to my house and shoot me.

"How did he die?" people say, and if the answer is "drugs", then the response is "oh, yeah, drugs are so evil". No. Incorrect. Most people take drugs because people treat them like shit and it's a way of escaping the ignorance and the blame. Blame for what? If somebody commits suicide and they never took any drugs, and they leave a suicide note saying "I couldn't take your bullying, and being treated like dog shit anymore" then where does the blame lie?

People are slippery little cunts. I know I keep banging on about it, but my parents have zero respect, and they're liars. For some reason my Auntie wouldn't re-issue a cheque I forgot to cash. For some reason my Dad thought he knew what the f**k he was talking about when I travelled over 200 miles to sell my house. If my ex wanted to get a bunch of valuations, she lives in the local area, she could get as many valuations as she wanted. If I make a trip to sell a house, I sell a house. I had the deal done on the same day, with cash buyers who wanted it all completed in 6 weeks. I battered the Estate Agent down on his fees, and there wasn't a single penny needed spending on the house to get it sold.

Instead, my ex-wife put it on the market with a total fucktard agent, took weeks to put the place on the market, brought us some buyers in a chain who used the most retarded firm of solicitors imaginable, and quelle surprise, the 6 week sale took 6 months.

I actually offered to top up the sale price £7k in cash, if she'd just back the fuck away from financial and property matters she didn't have a frigging clue about. Worst case, I'd lose about £3.5k but I wouldn't have had to pay her a £1k bribe for unnecessary 'decorating', so that puts my loss down to about £2.5k.

It was obvious that there were many tens of thousands of pounds of equity being unlocked, and my parents told me not to worry about short-term cashflow. What a couple of lying cunts. I could have used my good credit rating and low interest rates to bridge the gap, but when I really needed to raise some  money, my parents had put their efforts into telling lies about me. They told people I was addicted to expensive street drugs, and I was as good as dead. The truth of the matter is that as soon as I left that abusive relationship with my ex-wife, my 'addiction' just magically disappeared. Hard drugs bought illegally are expensive. I've probably spent less than £300 on illegal drugs in my life. You see what happens when you lie?

There is a substance nicknamed Supercrack. It used to be sold as NRG-3 for £13.50 a gram. A gram is 1,000 milligrams. A dose of supercrack is around 10mg and lasts 18 hours. S0 y0u can fuck yourself up for 3 months for 14 pence a day. Now, I did get addicted to Supercrack. You can snort it, rub it on your gums, swallow it, put it up your arse, and presumably inject it. The stuff is potent. 10 days without sleep is my record, and then I passed out in my attic hiding from 'police' (there were no police, I was just psychotic).

I'm not even going to tell you what Supercrack actually is because I had decided I was never, ever, ever going to take it. The horror stories were just too much to bear. It's clearly one dangerous drug.

Anyway, thanks to the tabloid press, they alerted me to legal highs, and I read about them all, but nobody knew what was in NRG-3, so I didn't risk it, especially as everybody who'd written about trying it had ended up in hospital. Anyway, when I got home from trying to get enough courage to kill myself by driving into a concrete pillar at 100mph, I decided to try it. I was pretty terrified.

2 days later I heart arrhythmia and was having trouble breathing, having consumed 800mg of a substance you're only supposed to take an absolute max of 30mg of. I wrote a note describing my symptoms, saying what I'd taken and would you please mind taking me to hospital if I was unconscious, and stapled a £20 note to the note. I then walked to the hospital. I calmed down a bit before I got there. I found that it was mostly a psychological problem and my tight pounding chest and shortness of breath went away if I kept my mind occupied.

Anyway, Supercrack became the benchmark. Regular crack, crystal meth, heroin... they're all a bit 'meh!' once you've tried Supercrack. The comedown is so terrible that you are literally convinced you're going to die, but you can always take more until you pass out through sleep deprivation.

The more you take, and the more sleep deprived you get, the more paranoid you get, and the more obsessive you get with completely futile tasks. I spent a whole 12 hours trying to rig up a webcam so I could see if anybody was coming to my house. I spent hours and hours trying to rig up a sheet and a towel as a short of makeshift privacy curtain. You're so obsessive that you keep trying the same thing over & over, even though it didn't work the 999,999 times you tried it before.

The worst part of all, is that you're addicted and psychotically ill, but then the government decides to make Supercrack illegal, but you're already addicted. Is there any plan for those people caught in that net? Is there hell. I managed to wangle myself 28 days in The Priory thanks to a pre-existing mental health problem: Type II Bipolar. However, they call it Dual Diagnosis when you have mental health and addiction problems. The statistical outcomes don't look good for the double whammy.

I could always manage 2 or 3 weeks without a 'fix'. You're so f**ked from 5 to 7 nights without sleep and hardly any food, that you're body is pretty badly in need of those things. The problem is, that all the reasons why you were susceptible to addiction are still there, and everybody's got the same genius idea that taking drugs causes addiction, not a shitty lives that cause people to take drugs.

Everybody assumes that when you're not taking drugs, your life is f**king peachy. Well, normally it's a lot worse than when some selfish shitbag decided to start slandering your character. My own mother said "I can smell the drugs on you" on the morning of my sister's wedding. That's total bullshit. I hadn't been taking drugs, and even if I had, the only thing you might be able to smell is a slight sweatiness, and that's only if you're absolutely so off your nut that your body temperature is getting towards hyperthermia.

If somebody has pupils like saucers in a relatively well lit space. If they have restless legs. If they're talking faster. If they seem to have boundless energy. If their mood seems extremely elevated, they're chatty and confident... those would be giveaways. The smell capabilities of somebody who's nearly 60 and smokes are not going to detect something that a portable mass spectrometer can't. Sure, you can swab surfaces like hands and the inside of your mouth, and detect drugs, but just about the only thing you can smell on a drug addict is self-neglect.

Naturally, I was showered and wearing a freshly dry cleaned suit and laundered shirt to my sister's wedding. I was also wearing body spray and a splash of aftershave. It's people's presumptions that they know f**k all about you and your life that makes life very hard to justify continuing.

I once took a flight out of Heathrow and I was taking Dexedrine at the time. A policeman and his drug dog came over, his dog sniffed me, but he didn't sit down (the signal that the dog has smelt something). It's possible the dog was trained for coke and heroin, but you would have thought that if any animal could smell drugs, it'd be a trained dog,  but you're probably wrong.

I've got a theory that the dogs can't actually smell the drugs or explosives, but they can smell fear. Fear of a dog is a fairly primal instinct for animals, from the time we were preyed upon by packs of canines. For dogs to be able to track the scent of an animal in fear, obviously has huge evolutionary advantages, when hunting. Domesticated dogs are also incredibly good at understanding human body language.

So, perhaps even dogs can't smell drugs. They can just smell fear. You probably want to train a pig if you want it to snuffle for something valuable.

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes, I quit cold turkey a bunch more drugs than my parents ever have, or indeed most people have. I've done the experiments, and Supercrack is top of the pile. Heroin relapse rates and overdoses are highest (about 40% of heroin addicts will die in a 20 year period, from OD or AIDS) but of the stimulants, Supercrack is way more addictive than regular Crack or Crystal Meth according to my research. I've actually chucked Crack and Heroin down the toilet, just because one addiction at a time is enough to handle.

They actually sell opiates over the counter, legally. You just have to go to about 8 chemists, buy the maximum of 3 boxes of 32 tablets you're allowed to buy of Co-Codomol (8mg of Codeine). So that's potentially almost 768mg of Codeine. You just have to get rid of the 48g of Paracetamol, because that'll f**k up your liver.

Luckily Codeine is soluble below 5 degrees celsius, but paracetamol isn't. So you smash up all the pills, dissolve then, then put a load of ice in there and put the saucepan in the fridge set to 3 degrees for ages. Then you filter the paracetamol out of the liquid. It should weigh the same as the paracetamol + pill filler, once it's dried out. You might want to rechill the liquid and repeat the filtration, just to be sure you get out as much paracetamol as possible.

Then you're left with 768mg of opiate dissolved in water. Enough to kill you. So just drink half. 384mg of codeine is way less than the 450mg that would kill somebody of my weight, 50% of the time (calculated using the LD50 = the lethal dose that kills 50% of people). It's 17% less, so I figured that gave me a 67% chance of surviving. 2 in 3 odds.

I hadn't really reckoned on the fact that I was fairly drunk when I came up with this crazy idea, and that would affect my tolerance, but I did still manage to do the sums and follow some kind of experimental procedure to safeguard my liver from paracetamol poisoning.

Anyway, I had a nice sleep, and everything was kind of 'rose tinted' for a bit. Not what you''d call euphoric, but my problems did kind of melt away. I was soothed. Can't see myself getting addicted. It's not really life enhancing, it's more life avoiding. It's nice to take a day off, but it's not real life, is it?

So, what of Supercrack? Well, I've done 6 months without it, cold turkey. But so what? People will say "oh, that explains everything" even though I made a buttload of cash, got through a divorce, moved house a million times and worked on some incredibly stressful projects. Also, if I had all the money I'd spent on drugs back in my pocket, I'd maybe have £700-800? Remember... Supercrack is 14 pence a day. I spent far more on anti-addiction drugs like Bupropion, less addictive substitutes like Dexedrine and treatment. Let me tell you about treatment.

The way it's supposed to work is that you detox to get your brain back to some semblance of normality. That's a 3 or 4 week process. Then you rehabilitate. All the backlog of shit that hasn't been done because you've been completely dysfunctional is piled up and threatening to topple over and squash you flat. If you try it on your own, you're swamped by stress and depression and pressure, and you're brain is quite rightly telling you that you have to deal with twice the shit of everybody else, because you have to run the household affairs, and deal with the backlog. Actually, it's 3 times the shit because nobody will help you because everybody's been telling people you're an untrustworthy addict

Sure, don't let somebody in active addiction come and stay in your house or lend them money. But what if they detox? What if their game plan has changed from "get drugs, take drugs" to "get friends, get place to live, get job, get hobby, get girlfriend"? Well, you have a little insider information thanks to kind people like my parents and my ex-wife, who like to talk about isolated incidents of behaviour as if they're really talking about character.

"He's dangerously violent, he hit me" is the nice sound bite that condemns a man's character. It's also asymmetric information. The complete statement might read "I used to verbally and physically abuse him, and hit him, and then one of the many times when I was getting aggressive and threatening and he was scared, he hit me" which is behaviour, not character. The next question, to our 'dangerous' man would be, "how do you feel about having hit somebody?". If they say "they deserved it, they got what was coming to them, it felt good to get some revenge" we might doubt the character, but if they say "I feel really guilty and ashamed, and bad about what I did"  then we start to build up a true picture of somebody's character. We can ask the other person, and they might say "he should have stuck up for himself. it made me angry when he wouldn't do what I wanted. it made me angry when I didn't get what I wanted". Now we have discovered the root of why addicts struggle to quit.

It doesn't matter if you're 6 months clean, or 6 years clean, you still know a hell of a lot more about self-discipline and biting your tongue in the face of blatant character slurs, than those who like to taunt and undermine. My parents are dead to me because they can't be bothered to travel 45 minutes to help me, or even see me die in a hospital bed. If I want help, I'll go and get it from somebody who wants to see me succeed, not some arsehole who never leaves the house out of sheer laziness and smugness. If I want help, I'll go and get it from somebody who keeps their promises. There is no excuse for breaking your promise to somebody at the most fragile time in their life. Some pathetic pocket change, 2 and a half years later, probably done without my Dad knowing. It's a joke.

Don't claim you don't owe me anything. You offered help, I didn't ask. Your risk was secured against a huge pile of equity. You owe me for the damage of breaking your promise at the most critical time imaginable.

I blame you for 2 and a half years of setbacks. I blame you for making me so unwell I had to spend £17,000 trying to get better after being hung out to dry for 3 or 4 months. After you f**ked me over.

You owe me the self esteem you stole from me, sending me to school on stolen girls bicycles, dressing me like a fucking idiot, not listening to a single word I said about what was important. These weren't "nice to haves" you stupid cunts. I had to spend 35 hours a week in those c**ting schools. I had to face the consequences of your selfish ignorant decisions, not you.

So if you think I'm going to ask nicely for help: f**k you! So if you think I'm going to be grateful for a pittance of cash, 2 and a half years too late: f**k you! So if you think I'm to blame for having to spend £17,000 on treatment to try and undo the damage you did by breaking your promises and undermining me: f**k you. You think it's helpful to take someone away from their own home, own friends, everything in their life: f**k you.

You sell some f**king stuff and bust your balls photographing and describing stuff on eBay for some pittance.

I came back to London, beat addiction, did a new startup and incorporated a Limited company ready to do some IT contracting. What did you do? Fuck all apart from get in the f**king way and undermine me, so here's the bill:

• 4 months house sale delay mortgage: £4,000
  
  Butt the f**k out of my house sale. I needed a deal done quickly because my ex-wife said she wouldn't wait until my life was stabilised. I did a great deal. You f**ked it up
  
  
• Detox: £10,000
• Rehab: £7,700
  
  Yeah, if you lie to somebody, tell them you're going to support them, delay their house sale by 4 months and leave them virtually penniless, that cost is YOURS to pay. I had enough bitcoins to buy a lifetime supply of Supercrack but I was clean until December. when you started supporting my horrible ex-wife in some bullshit game where she was trying to keep my money from me until March. What a shower of c**ts.
  
  
• Grievous Bodily Harm: £3,500
• Recovery loss of earnings: £18,000
  
  Yeah you remember when you smashed up my leg. Can't really get suit trousers on over a plaster cast. I had interviews lined up. There's this thing called human language. You should look it up sometime. Physical attacks are for animals.
  
  
• Loss of earnings due to stress caused by your recent lies: £6,000
  
  Remember when I had to spend 2 weeks in hospital. No, you can't remember s**t can you, you f**king c**ts. Especially not your promises.
  
  
• Additional expenses occurred because of your recent lies: £2,800
  
  Stay in a hotel you said, because you didn't want me to be stressed out of my mind. I think you'll find it was me who paid, and that kind of wasted money is stressful.
  
  
• Self storage costs due to your lies: £4,000
  
  One day, a nice parent will help their child, until then, they'll always being trapped in a load of shit you made for them
  
  
• Having to borrow from commercial lenders because of your lies: £7,200
  
  Yeah, you remember when you said 2 and a half years ago that you didn't want a stressful divorce, moving house, finding friends, finding a job, getting back on my feet to be a stress when I had many tens of thousands of pounds just waiting to be released from my psychopathic ex-wife? Yeah, you lied.

TOTAL: £64,500

All of this has come out of my own pocket, or is owed to me for the Grievous Bodily Harm.

The time to get you the fuck out of my house, get you the fuck out of my life, shut your lying trap has long expired. You've had your chances to defend me, to make good on promises, and now it's time to add up all the damage you've caused by dragging me somewhere convenient for you and my ex-wife, smashing up my leg and then pretending I don't exist. All the damage caused by the fact that I believed that I could avoid thousands in interest payments if you kept your promises. 

All my f**king time and money wasted coming to see you sitting on your lazy f**king arses talking b**lshit. All you do is criticise and break promises.

So, this is goodbye. I've had enough. I know you'll never settle your outstanding balance. I know you can never be trusted. I know that you robbed my childhood happiness in order to give you just about enough money to sit in your house reading newspapers and watching TV, slowly selling off your assets until you die penniless.

G00d for you that you just did whatever the f**k you wanted, whenever the f**k you wanted to. Good for you that you're so heartless you didn't give a shit about the suffering of your children.

I mutilated my own body to show you how much I hate you. The words in this blog barely express how you've left me totally in the s**t. My Mum would be OK if I could get her away from my Dad's poisonous words. He's so controlling over my Mum that I have to voice record telephone conversations with them, to point out that he's stopping her from loving and supporting her children. When she does help, it has to be in top secret.

My Dad knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. He's the son of a wealthy accountant who sent the kids to private school, and they always had cars and motorbikes, and he fucked about all he wanted, changing jobs because he's a spoiled middle class twat. My Dad could never have afforded to send me to private school or buy me a decent bike, or a decent computer, or do the activities my friends did, or make any contribution to higher education if I wanted to go. He's a classic case of a middle class guy who's fucked up every opportunity and has nothing to show for it.

Yes, my Dad's got some property (which is really my mum's... she's always bankrolled my dad) but it's their pension fund, and they're going to have to sell all of it so I can put them in the shittest nursing home I can find. I want to find one where the patients are degraded every day, bullied by the staff, patronised and talked down to. Yup, that will be poetic justice for the shit they put me through.

I had offered to pay for one of the houses to be set up with a lift, and home nursing care, but f**k that. I'll probably just wait until they've been 2 and a half years dead and then burn half the cash equivalent sum of £50 notes, and mix that in with their ashes, and then scatter them in a sewerage farm. Ashes to ashes, s**t to s**t. Rest in pooh.

I hope you can see from this simple illustration that if you have a hard working son who is doing everything in his power to be self sufficient and generate a substantial income, and a large proportion of that had been earmarked for supporting my ungrateful parents, your belittling of children you don't love, messing around doing things that never make any money, and generally ignoring the distress of your kids, is going to have major consequences.

Instead of your kids worrying that you're getting old and you're going to die, you're already dead to them and they're angry with you. You failed as a parent.

Hopefully, the silver lining is that if I become a dad, I'll reprioritise my life, so that I have adequate income to provide for the family. I'll provide a stable home, and try and be the most consistent father I can be. I'll try and listen and understand my kids and their frustrations. I'll concentrate on them having as many friends as possible, rather than dragging them all over the country and asking them to say goodbye to all their old friends, and have to make a load of new ones. I will look for value not cheapness, and if something is really important to that child, I'll buy the best that I can afford and economise in my own life. I'll try and treat my kids as individuals, rather than putty to be moulded into uniform shapes. I won't treat my kid as a performing animal or a clotheshorse.

There's potential in people, and you just have to support them so that they can achieve it. Assuming somebody is bad until impossibly proven beyond all reasonable doubt that they're amazing (which means they're not bad, they can never be amazing because they were once labelled as bad) despite everybody booing and jeering  and sneering and trying to hold them back.

Tags: #addiction #drugs #childhood #parents

This is a story about stormy weather...

Apologies for the interruption to the blog regularity. This was caused by unpleasant winter weather and being unemployed. I also couldn't see straight and I passed out. Normal service will be resumed again soon.

Since my life fell apart due to illness and divorce, I have never managed get all the essential life things in place at the same time:

1. Stable Accommodation (without 13 snoring people per dorm)
2. A job that's more than just giving blow jobs in a toilet (never tried it, but it's plan "Z")
3. Friends, who respect me, and understand that my life was decimated
4. Family, including parents who can understand how hard it is to do all the things on this list (with no money, despite working)
5. Getting my stuff out or storage and into my apartment
6. A hobby: kitesurfing maybe. Failing that, at least some holidays
7. Deal with a huge pile of 2-and-a-half-year-old post
8. Do my business administration and tax affairs
9. Live near work
10. Not just getting totally smashed drunk all the time, and don't abuse drugs

You have no idea how hard it is too do almost all those things, when you are barely just surviving. The individual tasks are not hard for a person with a job, girlfriend, home. I'm is pretty much totally exhausted and suicidal from other attempts to fix my life. When you get low on funds then idiots start pulling the plug, and all the other work is ruined.

Just because you have a sorted life, don't lecture me. I bought my own home and did loads of work on it, never missed a bill payment, quit my job despite having a "top" ranking in the company (according to my annual performance review). I went to work for New Look to help them internationalise. Job was OK. Commute was too far.

I became an entrepreneur again. I sat in my back garden and made iPhone apps. I had a couple of number 1 hits. This gave me encouragement to say away from 9-5 drudgery, I started IT contracting again, and it was an improvement on being disrespected by the people above your pay grade.

I was then an electrician. If you think your paperwork is bad... wait until you've got to do safety certificates, inspection reports, quotes, cashflow forecasting, wholesaler credit and the challenge of doing all of this comes before paying any money into the bank.

After being an electrician, I went back to iPhone apps, but developing custom ones for companies. That business gave me just about everything I wanted, except a high quality team, and having the cash to grow. There is also even more paperwork associated with a technology company.

I took Hubflow/Mepublish business through the Springboard Accelerator program in Cambridge. We even won 2nd prize at the Cambridge Union Society. The angels didn't want to invest in me at first, because I pitched for their money in flip flops. We still managed to find investors though.

Seeing 150+ mentors in 2 weeks, plus all the other Springboard work was hard too. We had very little time to fix our users bugs, stay on top of invoicing our clients and all the other business administration crap. There were actually too many things on the list.  It was too much to handle.

When I got back from Springboard, my horrible ex was there, pressuring me to go to social occasions and blocking me from moving to the Startup capital of the UK: London. She liked having at least 3 or 4 luxury holidays a year. She liked doing a hobby job that got to stroke her ego. Teachers can work anywhere. She needed to support my 3 years of busting my balls to get into the Tech startup scene.

Anyway, she wouldn't. Her main preoccupation was getting blind drunk at social occasions and then smashing up my expensive camera(s). She'd smashed up one of my cameras 3 weekends in a row. She was never sorry. "It was an accident" is not accepting blame. "I'm sorry" is how humans apologise.

Shortly after Springboard finished, in 2011, the last evening event we ever went to, she smashed another camera, and then when we got back to our hotel room, she started verbally abusing me. She was saying things like "you're a weirdo, none of my family like you [not true] and none of my friends like you [not true]" then she got up, opened the door and stood in the doorway, just shouting "YOU'RE A WIERDO, YOU'RE A WIERDO, EVERYBODY HATES YOU, YOU WEIRDO, YOU'RE A WIERDO" at me at the top of her voice.

I'm not sure whether she held the door open so that people could hear, if I shouted back, or whether it was so she could make a quick getaway if she verbally abused my too much. Whatever the reason, it backfired.

I snapped. I don't really remember what happened, because the next thing that I remember is her screaming. Her scream brought me back to reality. Reality at the time was that she was on the floor, pinned down by me, and my fists was raised in anger.

Because she screamed I let her go and she ran off to many of the concerned faces peering out of their bedrooms: they had been woken up by her tirade of verbal abuse.

I tried to remember what had happened. I remembered asking her to stop abusing me. I asked her to stop being so disrespectful about having broken 3 digital cameras in 3 weeks... I'm the one who paid for those cameras and replacements. I remember being called a "weirdo" over and over again, which was often a schoolyard chant for bullies, which I was on the receiving end of a lot.

Afterwards, my brain finally pieced what had happened together. She had said I was worthless and abusively insulted everything I've ever done, interspersed with calling my a "Weirdo" and telling me that friends and family don't like me.

I grabbed her, but she started trying to punch me, so I threw her on the ground and pinned her arms. She spat in my face, and then the rage was really unleashed. I was no longer in control - I'm guessing - because I don't remember the rage bit. I threw 4 or 5 punches against the struggling abuser before she screamed. The scream woke me up and I got off her and let her run away to the people who had been looking, because of her shouting "weirdo! weirdo".

She spent the night surrounded by her friends and family. I got in my car, knowing that there were a couple of concrete columns I could drive into at 100mph.

Domestic abuse perpetrators should commit suicide though, right. I agree that there need to be severe repercussions for those who commit domestic abuse. Smashing up my face with her fists, going though my personal stuff, isolating me from my friends, controlling my life, verbally abusing, destroying my stuff with no intention of replacing or repairing it, generally being a low grade piece of shit... that kind of stuff affects people.

I blamed myself. I didn't even use the provocation or fact that she physically abused me, as an excuse.

I turned my airbag off and made I made a couple of 100+mph lunges for motorway pillars on the way home. Sadly, most of them have fencing to deflect drivers who  have fallen asleep or want to die.

When I got home I bought something online to kill myself with. It almost worked, but it had very unexpected consequences.

If you think domestic abusers deserve to be miserable, depressed and die, then I'm in agreement with you to some extent.

I had to go to work with two black eyes and a broken nose, and lie for my girlfriend. Nobody can see the verbal and psychological damage that she was doing either. She had an insatiable appetite for spending hours, days, outside my cell, just hurling abuse and threats of violence.

If there is that kind of abuse going on, and you're missing one or more of the 10 things on my list, you are going to struggle to be well. Yes, my mood gets very bad in winter and Xmas/January are particularly horrible times for making it through the seasons.

How can you expect somebody to sort out all the broken things in their life, when they just escaped an abusive relationship, but they lost their job, their home, their friends, their money etc. etc. Just because you've entered a routine boring life, doesn't make you special. I had a normal life. In fact, it wasn't ordinary. It was extraordinary.

Bipolar Disorder can have its blessings. When I'm depressed I can't do much about the shits who gang up on me, but when I'm hypomanic I can work like an absolute machine and avoid having my reputation tarnished by the people who hit and verbally abuse me, and make promises they have no intention of carrying through (another form of abusive): like waving a £50 note in front of a homeless person, asking them if they want it, and then setting fire to it.

To help somebody with a manageable mental heath problem, it's really easy. Just don't lie to them. Don't insult them. Don't stigmatise them. Don't make them spend all their money on private treatment, so they don't have any money. Don't take away their house. Don't badmouth them too all their friends so that they're totally isolated and alone. Don't tell them that you know f**k all about managing a mental health problem that they already successfully managed for 32+ years.

If you're always leaving them out in the cold. If you're always removing opportunities rather than creating them. If you're physically injuring them. If you talk to them in a disgusting way. If you're a totally disrespectful c**t... that's going to drive that person to a bad place.

During my 6 month experiment I discovered this, beyond all reasonable doubt. My Dad's an abusive waste of space who would ruin a supercar to save the money on a single bolt. My Mum is kind and generous, but she's not immune from ignorance, and she trusts my Dad's disgusting views. My ex-wife wanted me dead so she could have my live insurance money, and she's successfully painted a picture of me as some sort of demon.

In private treatment, they teach you not to accept a clinical label for an acute illness as a it will be used against you as derogatory term. Stress and unreasonable expectations, abuse and the relationships collapse around you. Your only visitor is the one who runs the prison. The prison in your home. Your gaoler will come and bang on your locked door around the clock, to make sure you are as agitated as possible.

That's what I've learnt. I've learnt that playing by the rules, being kind, not being vindictive, trusting professionals, but fundamentally evaluating everything base on an objective analysis of the data, has shown this:

• The NHS is wonderful, but Fluoxetine as a first line of defence is ruining lives
• The NHS is wonderful, but getting a referral to a Psychiatrist takes far too long (6+ months)
• The NHS is wonderful, but their Psychiatrists are used to dealing with mostly psychotically ill people who are completely dysfunctional
• The NHS is wonderful, but it's NICE who get to decide what medication they can use. Most things on offer will give you horrible side effects and have very little evidence of long term efficacy
• So, in short, if you're an educated patient, don't listen to your GP. My GP helped to kick me out of my house, so my absolute c**t of an wife could have an affair without distractions
• Your parents know f**k all. Especially if they've put you in hospital a couple of times. Oh, and if they've caused Grievous Bodily Home because they've such primitive apes that they don't have the power of speech, to say "I'm coming to attack you with a piece of glass now because I only know how to be a violent psychopath"
• Private Psychologists and Psychiatrists can be very kind and non-judgemental, and can actually say things that really help. You can actually have a conversation with them about whether a medication is good for dribbling and Jeremy Kyle, or whether there are any upsides
• Dual diagnosis is a fucking curse. Dual diagnosis is a death sentence. When you say something, people have an unlimited amount of ignorant idiotic crap with which to belittle and dismiss your opinion.

But the short explanation is this: people are not very mature and people are not very intelligent. People love to point and laugh and label and exclude the different kid. That translates into adult life too. One of the big reasons why adults don't lose their vicious c**tishness is that all they do is do crosswords and watch TV. They're hopelessly idiotic. When I go to the doctor, I tell them what I want, and they give it to me.

I went to my GP and said "I'm having unmanageable suicidal thoughts, and thinking about self-harming. I've tried to keep myself safe, but I no longer feel able to keep myself safe any more".

My GP wrote a letter to Psychiatric Liaison at the Royal London Hospital, and sent me there immediately.

I spoke to Psychiatric Liaison, and explained that my life was unmanageable, because "my parents kept lying about supporting me, but they were just stringing me on, and that was an unmanageable situation, with a stressful job and the recent stress of moving (without their help of course). I explained that 2 years ago they had told me not to borrow a small amount of cashflow money, and that they would help. I explained that they lied. They waited until the last minute and pretended they had never made the offer, even though they had made it on multiple occasions"

I spoke to the Duty Psychiatrist, and told her I wanted Olanzapine (never taken it before, but I knew it was fast acting... I had no plans to take it... I just wanted to give the Psychiatrist a job) but I wanted to be admitted to hospital.

The Duty Psychiatrist gave me the spiel about hospitals not being a nice environment. I reassured her that I had been on Psych wards before.  She suggested Monday to Friday visits with the Crisis team. I pointed out the day was Saturday.

When I got into the Psych Ward that I wanted, I was happier, relaxed. That's the way things are supposed to work. It took me 13 hours, but I got what I needed.

One of the nurses brought me my Olanzapine, which is what I said I wanted. I knew it's a much smaller pill than Quetiapine, so I could hide it under my tongue and then spit it out when I was out of view.

Yes, I finally got what I wanted out of the NHS, which was to help me from committing suicide. They gave me a safe hospital environment to shield me from the bullshit life that drove me to suicide. Can you believe that my boss at HSBC actually gave me and my sister a hard time. I was in hospital for 2 weeks with a suspected heart condition. That's disgusting.

3 hot meals a day and a bed. Oh, and maybe a TV. I was a little bored, but the other patients were good to talk to, and we did our little Hole in my Bucket musical number. A s**tload more interesting than working on a project that's falling flat (HSBC Customer Due Diligence: CDD) on it's face because they terminate the contracts of anybody with expertise and skill and has a track record of turning failing projects around.

Oh, and while I was in hospital (was it the 4th or the 5th major admission, I've lost count) my parents decided to give me half the sum of money that they promised me I could borrow off them 2 and a half years ago, but just lied. That's right, they lied. They lied about wanting to help, and their lie was exposed too late for me to be able to arrange an alternative. Two and a half years later! Having to spend 2 and a half years living off my wits in London is hard.

So here's the bottom line: if you love your children and you want to help them, listen to them and if you make a promise to help them, don't let them down.

If you think you've got a "bad kid" you're probably a hypocritical c**t. My mistreating your kids, mugging them off, taking the p**s out of them, never praising them for anything, just doing whatever the hell you want all the time. There's no such thing as a "bad kid" they've all got parents. If those parents drink and smoke and take drugs and can't be bothered to get a proper job, and had their house bought for them by their elderly parents... what disgusting hypocrisy.

The reason why this blog post is late, is because I always have to take matters in to my own hands. You know all those anti-depressants you pop, and the beer, wine and vodka that you tip down your gullet? You're buying overpriced medication, and self-medicating for whatever problems you have in your life, or baggage you're still carrying around.

I'm still not drinking, but I'm sick of being in hospital. I'm sick of how much time & money it costs me to be your convenient scapegoat. I'm sick of people looking at medicine bottles and thinking that they know something about me. I actually keep my medication in a bottle by the bed to get rid of shallow girlfriends. The medications inside have never been touched.

I'm going to start tapering psychoactive substances into my life. Total abstinence proves nothing. If we follow the abstinence theory to its ultimate conclusion, we give up on food, because it's converted to glucose in the body, and glucose is sugar.

So, which is a more fitting epitaph?

Here lies Nick. He was such a non-addict he even gave up food. Any oxygen. What a hero. He died, so that his parents could continue being complete selfish ignorant cunts. A noble sacrifice. Turns out that life is a lot more livable with sugar and other things

Or I've got another one for you. Do you like this one?

Here lies Nick. He died doing what he loved. His parents actually gave a shit about him, so they decided to support him for once, and involve the rest of the family rather than just spreading malicious bullshit about him. Turns out that you don't die young if you're nice to your sons and daughters. Rumour has it that Nick's dad even gave £1 to charity for the first time in his miserable life, in the hope that Nick could see it from the afterlife.

They're quite long. Maybe they need to be edited down a bit.

Anyway, chemical oblivion awaits. Wake me up when 2 and a half years have passed and my cunt Dad might actually let my mum help her son.

Oh, help myself? Did you say "help yourself".... yeah, good idea. I've been doing it for my entire adult life, because my parents are such selfish liars who should never have had kids. I've had barely the briefest breaks in between companies in my career. I work my f**king arse off. I'm busting my balls to help myself, and others too.

This is what my parents think I spend my money on. No, when my life has been completely fucked over I very rarely spend the price of a large Dominos pizza on enough drugs to tranquilize an elephant, because you lie to me and fuck over my plans, which is very stressful (December 2015)

Tags: #drugs #suicide #bipolar #nhs #addiction