This is a story about treating every day like it's your last...

My life plan was a fairly simple one: earn loads of money working in IT, marry an attractive & intelligent girl who was into outdoorsy stuff and live happily ever after. I lived by the seaside. I owned my own home. I had masses of savings. I owned everything outright: my car, my boat, the furniture... I paid cash for everything.

When it turned out that the girl I picked was, errr, 'incompatible' with living happily ever after - to phrase it delicately - I didn't really have a plan B.

To be honest, after my marriage went to shit, I hadn't really planned on living very long. I'm really rather surprised to find myself alive and in reasonable health today. I was warned that my new plan - to take copious amounts of drugs and die in a hedonistic blaze of glory - would drive me insane and I'd find myself permanently brain damaged and dying slowly and painfully as my organs shut down one by one, or perhaps I would just suddenly and unexpectedly drop dead.

"Suddenly and unexpectedly drop dead."

Isn't that a risk that we face every single day anyway? There's a certain chance that your heart is just going to stop pumping and go into cardiac arrest at any moment. If you have a cardiac arrest outside a hospital, you're 80% likely to die.

The biggest threat to my life at the moment, statistically - and this goes for any 37 year old man, not just the ones with bipolar disorder and substance abuse issues - is suicide. Suicide is the biggest killer of men under the age of 50.

If I made smart lifestyle choices like not taking copious amounts of dangerous drugs, riding my bike through central London in rush hour traffic with no helmet on, stopping eating and drinking to the point where my organs fail and I piss blood, you'd have thought that I'd be doing a pretty good job of minimising my risk of premature death. NOPE!

What about all those extreme hobbies of mine? Off-piste snowboarding, skydiving, mountain biking, kitesurfing, rock climbing and mountaineering. You'd have thought that it'd be a good idea to give up those dangerous sports, if I wanted to minimise my risk of premature death. NOPE!

I was trying to have this argument with the Royal London Hospital consultant in the Renal High-Dependency Unit, where I was being kept alive by dialysis. I basically said, look, you're going to have to discharge me and let me go and start my new job and I'll just have to take the risk that my kidneys get worse and I drop dead. "You're playing Russian Roulette with your life" she said. Not really. The biggest threat to my life is suicide, and it was inevitable that losing my job would leave me in a psychologically critical condition.

One thing I quite often hear is criticism of risk takers. "How can you climb that mountain and risk your life, when there are people who are terminally ill, who would give anything for just one more day alive?"

"Treat every day as if it's your last."

That fairly innocent sounding platitude actually backfires, when you realise that it's an incitement to maximise your risk in pursuit of hedonistic pleasures and thrillseeking.

Knowing that suicide is the biggest killer of men under 50 is just a meaningless statistic, until you lose a friend or a relative to suicide, or you become suicidal yourself.

That's me in the picture above. I'm stood on a pinnacle of rock that's nearly 3,000 metres above sea level. If I fell - and I'm not tied onto anything - then it would a very long freefall before I went splat into the ground. Why am I not tied on? Why haven't I taken the precaution of attaching myself to a rope? Is it because I was suicidal?

The more you climb; the higher you climb; the more steep and perilous things that you climb, you start to become used to the exposure. The constant threat of falling to your death is something that you just get used to. One slip and it's curtains... but you're not afraid anymore.

I've got rather a toxic mix of psychology. I've got the ability to manage my own fear, stress and adrenalin, so that I can throw myself out of planes or climb frozen waterfalls, but when I become suicidal, I'm acutely aware that I could act on a suicidal impulse very calmly and methodically.

What is this silly little dance we call life anyway? Is it about procreation? Is it about making money? Is it about looking after your grandparents and parents as they get old and die?

Do I 'owe' anybody anything? Do I 'owe' it to my parents to treat the fact I'm alive with respect because they 'gifted' me a life that I didn't ask for? Do I 'owe' it to terminally ill people, to treat my life with respect, because I'm lucky and they're not? Do I 'owe' it to my friends to struggle on through the misery, because they'd be a bit sad if I committed suicide?

There are a couple of families - one in Ireland and one in Bletchley/Suffolk - who have been there for me during my darkest moments. There's a friend who I would've seen over the Christmas break, except for an unfortunate bout of illness laying him low. There are a handful of people in the world who've seen what my friend Laurence calls 'The Horrors' and they've protected me; stuck by me; defended me and been loyal friends. There have been people who've appeared unexpectedly - most welcome - back in my life. I'm not the most predictable of people, having decided to visit an old school friend in San Francisco, booked a flight and boarded it, within the space of just a few hours.

That's how it goes. Here today; gone tomorrow.

The speed with which my kidneys failed was shocking, even for me. The fact I needed dialysis was shocking, even for me. The length of time it took my kidneys to start working efficiently again was shocking, even for me.

Does that sort of stuff make me think "oh wow! that was close!" and "I better be careful and treat my life with respect"? You're asking the wrong question. My suicidal thoughts drive my reckless risk taking behaviour. Suicide was, and still remains, the biggest threat to my life. The shitty stuff that happened was all a consequence of my flirtation with death. I don't quite have the nerve to take the active steps to 'pull the trigger' as it were, because I know that I'm psychologically strong enough to just do it, without hesitation.

My trip to the Golden Gate Bridge was a metaphor for just how quickly, impulsively and with single-minded determination I can reach the point of no return.

My friends who hosted me in San Francisco read some of my recent blogs and asked if there was anything they could do to help. These are some of the people I admire and respect most in the world. They have super busy stressful lives raising little kids on the other side of the Atlantic, on the West coast of America.

What can anybody do? Everybody's got their own problems. Everybody's got their own money worries. Everybody's got a lot of shit on their plate. We've built a society where we are isolated, alone, overstretched by ordinary life to the point where we're just about managing. Who can afford to shoulder part of the burden for somebody who's struggling? Who can afford the time? Where are you going to find the energy when life is already so exhausting? Who has the financial means to help every fuckup with their begging bowl held out?

More fundamentally, under what kind of terms am I prepared to help myself? Arguably, I've thrown away 3 very well paid IT contracts for 3 massive banks, doing work that I can do with my eyes closed. Why the fuck would I do that?

I'm a complex beast. I feel guilty about my role in building systems that were pivotal in the financial crisis of 2007/8. I hired a development team in Mumbai, India, and I led that team to create a trade confirmation system for derivatives that handled over a quadrillion dollars in volume, in its first year. That's immoral. I knew what I was doing. I was busily fixing my own mortgage rate, knowing that there was a credit crunch coming. I invested my money in physical gold, because I had so little faith in the banking systems that I helped build.

I also had a taste of what it's like to own and run my own company. I outsourced. I ran software projects. The only difference was that it was my money and nobody could tell me "no". I could do whatever I wanted, and the ego rub from holding the job title "CEO" is a hard place to come back from. I now wander from company to company, pointing out the things that are on fire, fixing them if they let me or otherwise getting into conflict or suffering incredible boredom and frustration as I try to keep my mouth shut about the impending disasters I can see unfolding. Sure, I get paid a buttload, but it upsets me. I still spend money like it's my own.

That last project I was working on had an annual budget of about £25 million and was handling 30 customers a day. Basically, the cost of customer acquisition was over £2,000. These were not high-net worth individuals. They were simply ordinary banking customers. The project was not very complicated, but the waste was incredible.

What the hell is wrong with me? Am I a prima donna? Am I Goldilocks? Everything's got to be 'just right' for me? Do I consider the kind of work that's available to me to be 'beneath' me?

Certainly, I struggle with the prospect of having to do the kind of job that I mastered 10 or 15 years ago. I sometimes laugh out loud in interviews when somebody asks a question that's the equivalent of asking a master builder if they know what a brick is. Is it arrogant? I don't give a fuck... it psychologically destroys me, running projects for dinosaurs who pay top dollar for the best consultants and then don't listen to them.

I remember quite distinctly in 2001, I was deciding whether to learn a new(ish) computer programming language. I read a book about it. I was already learning another programming language at the time. Then it hit me: I had become a polyglot, somewhat by accident. I was able to read any code and understand its function - its intent - no matter what the actual specific implementation technology was. I knew that me and software had reached the end of the road. I asked my boss for a sabbatical while I considered what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

It's kinda hard to change career direction and it gets harder with age. You not only have to bankroll yourself through training and getting started in whatever new thing it is that you're doing, but if you're turning your back on one of the most lucrative careers there is, you'd better be pretty damn certain that you picked the right alternative.

I bump along the bottom, being dragged back into god-awful, boring, unambitious, ill-fated and badly run IT projects, whenever my bank balance reaches danger point. But the hardest thing is the dread: the dread about selling my soul; the dread about having to keep a straight face when people are panicking and running around like they've never seen some mundane issue before.

I can't escape. I'm in a deep hole. The hole isn't deep at all for an IT consultant, but for almost any other job, it's an inescapable pit of doom. The reason why I got in such deep shit is divorce, mental illness, and being smeared all over the streets of London, in and out of hospital. Like I said earlier, it's a miracle that I'm still alive.

I hadn't really planned on living this long and that's a bit of a problem. Because I'm so suicidal and trapped, I guess there's an easy decision to be made. I know that I have absolutely no problem following through and overcoming any psychological hurdle that might stop most ordinary people from killing themselves.

I wrote this, while I was working my last IT contract:

Once he had started, he knew there would be no stopping until it was done.

That's why it had taken him so long before he started his final journey; because he could picture every single step of it. He knew that he would just methodically follow the steps, and then it would be over. He could be cold and clinical when required; rational and calculated; measured in his approach. There would be no panic, no rise in pulse, no hyperventilation. To all outward appearances, there would be nothing that would cause alarm or alert suspicions in anybody, until he was at the very brink; in the final moments.

The imagery of the bridge was so ingrained in everybody's mind, because it was such a major landmark. The bridge had featured in so many films. The bridge had been photographed so many times. The bridge was a prominent part of company logos and corporate branding. The bridge was something you could close your eyes, and picture it in exquisite detail. If you were asked to draw the bridge from memory, you'd be able to make a passable sketch of it. Even if you'd never been to the bridge before, it felt like you had been there.

That's why he had never been to the bridge. He could never be sure if he was there just in his imagination - where there were no irreversible consequences - or if he was there in real life. It would be so easy to follow through with his day dream - his fantasy - in real life. He'd played it all through in his head so many times.

Staring up at the spot on the centre of the bridge, where it was highest above the river below, he could imagine himself walking up to that spot, knowing that when he reached that point, only the chest-high barrier would separate him from the edge. He knew that the hardest part would be the bold step of climbing over the barrier. It would be so easy to peer over the edge, while safely protected by the barrier, and then chicken out. That's why mental preparation was important. That's why visualising the whole thing in advance was important.

He wasn't unfamiliar with the psychological battle of overcoming your fears and hurling yourself over a mental obstacle. Stepping off an edge was something you did every time you stepped off the kerb and into traffic. Vaulting a barrier was something you did when you climbed over fences as a kid, playing with your friends. He had done bungee jumps, where it was up to you - free will - to actually jump. He had done skydives and parachute jumps, where it was up to you, whether or not you hurled yourself out of a perfectly good aircraft. He knew he could overcome the psychological challenge of cutting loose and falling. Falling, not attached to anything, tumbling free in space. Nothing to grab onto. No second chances. No way to change your mind once you throw yourself out into empty space.

People talked about cowardice, selfishness, but they missed the point. People didn't understand that have to be brave to choose to put your life in danger, especially when falling to your death is one of the obvious risks. You also have to be brave to choose death. Who knows what happens when you die? Fear of the unknown is why people cling to life: self-preservation instincts.

He'd been a leader in the mountains and on rock faces. The leader always took the biggest risk of falling. At some point, falling became inevitable. If you roll the dice enough times, your number is going to come up eventually. If you take risks, you have to accept the increased chance of injury and even death. He'd had friends who had been killed or permanently disabled. A certain amount of "it could never happen to me" bravado and gallows humour stopped people from losing their nerve. At funerals, people would say that "he/she died doing what they loved" which was true, but this was mainly to distract from the reminder of our mortality, while doing the things that we - the living - love.

Those psychological skills, as a rock climber, mountaineer, bungee jumper, skydiver... they all now worked against him. He knew what it felt like, to be on the edge of a perilous drop, with nothing holding him safe except his own grip, and his own sanity: to not hurl himself over the edge.
At the top of tall buildings, on a mountain, or at a cliff-top, it troubled him how easily he could just jump off. He had to stay away from the edge; not because he wanted to keep himself safe, but because he didn't know if he could trust himself to not just jump. It would be so easy. It was the ease of it that troubled him. The proximity to a fall that would deliver a swift death called to him like a siren. Instead of being appalled by the fear of death, there was an allure.

When learning to climb, people clung to the rocks with white knuckles. They kept their bodies pressed as close to the cliff face as they could, as if being flat against the surface would mean that they were somehow safer from the pull of gravity. Most people were not psychologically prepared to be climbers or mountaineers. People on mountains collapsed on the flat ground, when sheer drops to either side of them overwhelmed them. Our instincts tell us to lower our centre of gravity, but when you are up high, gravity can only pull you down. It doesn't work, putting yourself closer to the cliff or the ground. You will still fall to your death.

There was something different about him. Sure, he wasn't the only one with the strange mutation of the mind, that allowed him to overcome the self-preservation instincts, but it was rare. Most people dislike heights. Most people are scared of falling. Had he always had this ability to put himself in a position of peril, and to overcome the instinct to simply freeze, to overcome the instinct to not jump out of the aeroplane, or climb up high where you could fall.

Possibly through repeated exposure to perilous situations, he had become immune to the threat of death. He had become comfortable, being in situations that put your own mortality as the immediate and most pressing concern. Sure, you could die crossing the road, but most people aren't thinking about that. Those first few times that you jump out of a plane, you most certainly are thinking "what if my parachute doesn't open?".

But the what ifs can be set to one side. What if I end up in Hell? What if I change my mind, in the split second before I die, when I'm past the point of no return?

Death is the great unknown, and we intrinsically fear the unknown. He had become well practiced at entering the unknown, in mortal peril. Who knows how you're going to feel, plummeting towards the ground at terminal velocity? He knew.

In a way, he had answered too many questions that previously had comforting answers dreamt up by priests, shamen and witchdoctors. The answers of the unknown, and of the intrinsic fear of death that dwells within all mortal creatures, for the purpose of self preservation instinct, had been given by those who sought to profit from believable fairy-tales for simple minded idiots. His rejection of organised religion gave him little comfort, in an uncaring universe.

Science tried to give answers, but it could offer no meaning. Why was anything the way it was? It just was. Even science broke down at some point, demanding that those who studied it just accepted the cold hard equations that revealed themselves in the mathematical patterns that were observed in reality. However, science had nothing to say about how to adjust to the incomprehensible vastness of the universe, the insignificance of existence and the seeming finality of death.

Science demonstrably showed that there was nothing after death. After the neurons of your brain ceased in their electrical dance, you were gone. There is no soul. A person is nothing more than the quantum potential, held in a brain. Consciousness is nothing more than an illusion, an unintended consequence of the vast complexity of an organ belonging to an organism that was only intended to allow genes to replicate.

What had he done, opening Pandora's Box by studying theoretical physics, and all the applied sciences that were derived from the fundamental rules that governed the universe? It was if by pulling back the curtain, and shattering the illusion of the theatre that played out in front of his eyes, he had of course ruined the enjoyment of life.

The willing suspension of disbelief was necessary to get any enjoyment out of any theatrical presentation. For sure, the sets were made of wood, and the birds were painted onto the background and never flapped their wings. For sure, it wasn't really snowing when a stage-hand in the rafters tipped a bucket of white polystyrene balls from above, but the illusion was passable if you didn't pick it to pieces.

He had picked everything to pieces. By relentlessly asking "but why" until the question made no sense anymore, nothing made any sense anymore. When he had reached the realisation that he was nothing more than an insignificant speck in a universe that was as good as infinitely huge, and incalculably complex, it was hard to return to a simpler, happier time, when there was some mystery and joy in things. When you can reason everything from basic principles, there is no more magic in the world. When the magician's trick can be picked apart by logic and reason, he turns from an entertainer bringing joy and delight to his audience, to a con-man.

Everything had turned to shit for him. With a Midas touch, he now applied sharp reason and logic to everything he saw, and the curtain was permanently pulled back. He saw humanity's ugliness. He saw people fighting and fucking each other over, and just vast numbers of total idiots, everywhere he turned. His heart was broken. Where had the beauty and mystery all gone? What questions were there really left to ask, when it seemed like all could be answered on his own, using base principles.
Through extrapolation, he saw no more point in continuing his life, than a scientist would in repeating an experiment that has been proven beyond all reasonable doubt to yield the same results time and time again. Only a fool does the same things expecting different results, he was often fond of saying. If you keep putting garbage in, you'll keep getting garbage out.

The world had exhausted him. In love with ideas of building a utopia as a child and young man, he now accepted that there was no shortage of good ideas, but there was also no shortage of people who didn't want to see them implemented. There were too many vested interests. People had too much to lose. He couldn't fight the world anymore, with reason and logic, and arguments about the greater good. Nobody wanted the greater good. Most people just wanted to be at the top of the pyramid, king of the hill.

Perhaps that's why men climbed mountains, because for a brief moment when you stood on the summit, you could count yourself amongst just a handful of people who had faced great adversity to be higher than almost everybody else on the planet at that moment. Standing alone on the top of Mount Everest, anybody else you could see, with solid ground under their feet, would be literally beneath you. The air passengers and astronauts in the International Space Station don't count: they didn't walk there, on their own legs, and they're not standing on Earth.

That was a brave thing, to get into an aeroplane or a rocket. We have become desensitised to it, now that jet travel is commonplace, but imagine those first adventurers in space flight and aeronautics. Imagine again, how mad it is to put yourself in a position where you could fall to Earth.
So, he supposed it was apt, that he should end his life in this way: falling.

He walked up the steps, to where the bridge departed from the land, crossing the chasm below, held in space by the tensioned steel structure that towered above. He started to cross the bridge to the opposite side, that he had no intention of reaching.

In a dreamlike state now, his vision narrowed. His hearing was dulled. The fine detail of the universe around him seemed to fall away. He no longer noticed the cars driving across the bridge: their engine noise, and the rush of air as they went past. He no longer noticed the people, who were photographing themselves, talking to each other and headed to their own unknown destinations. He no longer noticed the rumble of a jet passing ahead, or the blast of a horn on a giant ship, that passed under the bridge, on the river below. He was now living his daydream, with everything playing out exactly has he had pictured it so many times before.

Reaching the centre of the bridge, he turned to the barrier. He couldn't hesitate for a single moment. If he hesitated, then doubt would enter his mind, and he would start to have thoughts: rational thoughts. He would start to re-analyse things. He would start to talk himself out of what he was going to do next. He would start to think about the "what if?"s He would start to enter some unknown situation, out of control from the destiny he had chosen. Things could easily get out of his hands. Some kindly good Samaritan could step in. The police could become involved. Psychiatrists. People to save him from himself.

He threw his leg over the barrier, and lowered his foot to the little ledge the other side without a pause. He then brought his other foot to meet the other on the ledge. He was now stood with his back to the river, facing onto the bridge, but on the outside of the barrier. He stared dead ahead for just a second, steeling himself to make the final moves.

He twisted his body 90 degrees, and swung his left foot out into space. Now, he swivelled on his other foot on the little ledge, and reached behind himself, grabbing the handrail of the barrier, with the bridge now at his back. He returned his left foot to the little ledge, with his feet now pointing outwards.

Pausing to look down, he didn't really see anything. His vision had glazed over. He knew that to focus on what was below him, and to consider the height that he was at, would be to invite a sense of peril into his mind. He had put himself into a trance-like state. All of the mental rehearsals beforehand had prepared him for this. All of the times he had pre-visualised these steps, meant that he was now following a dance routine, and his mind was quiet and calm. All he had to do was exhale, and make his final move.

His stomach rose in his chest, constricting in his neck, before he even released his grip. His body anticipated the weightlessness, before he had even stepped off the ledge. He knew he was going to jump, before he had even done it. He knew he had passed the point of no return - psychologically - before he had even physically started the process. The decision had been made in his brain, and the signals were being sent to his muscles, but he was already conscious that he had done it. He had jumped, even though his hand still gripped the barrier and his feet were still on the ledge.

Now, he was just a passenger. He felt himself let go of the handrail, and let his arms drop to his side. He felt himself squat slightly so that he could launch himself off the ledge. He felt himself straighten up, springing forward and away from the bridge. He brought his arms up, above him and pushed out his chest, forming a 'Y' shape with his body, as he cut through the air.
He didn't tumble. He fell fairly flat, with a slight incline towards the ground, as he gently rotated towards a head-first plummet to Earth.

He felt the air briefly rushing past his face, and heard the noise of wind get increasingly loud. He didn't see the ground coming towards him. It was all too quick, in the end.

Then, blackness and silence.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

Tags: #suicide

This is a story about the opium of the people...

God is dead. We killed him with our science and our medicine. We killed god when the healing power of doctors trumped the ridiculously unsuccessful power of prayer and divine miracle. We killed god when Thomas Edison invented the electric lightbulb and let there be light. We killed god when the Manhattan Project unleashed the energy bound up in the atomic nucleus, creating bombs powerful enough to destroy the world. We killed god when popes, bishops, vicars, priests, nuns, monks, rabbis, mullahs and other spokespeople for organised religion, were proven beyond all reasonable doubt, by the scientific method, to be snake-oil salesmen; charlatans; frauds... just like witch doctors, mystics, faith healers and anybody else who claims they can perform magic or speak to nonexistent entities.

With life stripped back to pure truth; pure reason, a life of suffering and decay seems rather pointless. There is joy in procreation: watching your own flesh and blood offspring fumble their way through a harsh and uncaring world. The bonding hormone - oxytocin - and vicarious enjoyment of your kids' childhood makes parenthood neurologically rewarding enough for you not to just fuck off as soon as the screaming incontinent midgets have been ejected painfully from your vaginas.

Life has been built to not give you much joy. You can fuck, but you'll need a rest in-between copulations, and over time your interest in sex with a single partner will wane, as life prompts you to go and fuck somebody new, who you may be a better fertility match with. We weren't designed to have so much sex with so few partners, and produce so few children. The French have a name for the post-orgasm feeling a man has: la petit mort. Lit: the little death. Every time you cum and you don't make a baby, you die a little.

In a world of push-up bras, gymnasiums, good diet, flattering garments and mostly indoor jobs, women look amazing for far longer than they would under less favourable conditions. We have a culture of strip bars, escorts, pornography and film, television & print media bombarding us with images of the world's most attractive women. Ordinary women have responded by making ever raunchier choices of clothing and make-up, as well as complying with men's desire for casual sex and promiscuity. The ease of finding a 'hook up' on a mobile phone app - which doesn't carry the stigma of paying for sex - has meant that many men are quite content to not have a monogamous relationship, further exacerbating the problem, as women struggle to find the 'nice guys' who are looking for a something serious, but must use sex to bait the hook.

When you've had your fill of contraception-protected sex, skydiving, water-skiing, deep-sea diving, hang gliding, windsurfing, motorcycle racing and everything else that gives you a little hit of something that tickles your brain 'naturally' where are you going to go from there?

We live in a world where you can have an instant face-to-face conversation with your pick of 3.2 billion people, as if they were there in the same room as you, without either of you leaving your house. We live in a world where you can get into a pressurised aluminium tube and 17 hours later you will be on the other side of the planet, where day and night are swapped around, as well as summer and winter. We live in a world where news and information is distributed globally at the speed of light. We live in a world where many of us have access to vehicles that can carry us almost anywhere we choose to go, on a whim, at speeds that are far greater than we were ever evolved to travel at. How are our bodies and brains supposed to cope with this modern world? There are so many unnatural stimuli, can you really say that anybody is truly living a natural life?

When you start asking around, it turns out that we can't really cope with the modern world, without modern innovations. We need tranquillisers to calm our nerves, after the overstimulation of the city lights that never switch off; the sirens; the car horns; the traffic; the congestion; the crowds; the towering phallic structures of concrete, steel and glass. We need stimulants to be able to concentrate and overcome the exhaustion of the daily assault on our senses, and the steadily rising demand for our attention at all times of the day: there is always something electronic somewhere, bleeping at us for our attention. We need things to intoxicate ourselves, to escape the madness of the world and briefly be set free. We need things to numb the pain and insulate us from the growing discomfort and inescapable truth of our inevitable decrepitude and death, which is followed by black nothingness. There is no afterlife. There is no heaven and hell. This life is all there is, and then it's over, forever.

Some mentally ill people have this thing called religion, which is where they find comfort in imaginary friends and they really believe the stories in the children's books they read, to be true stories. These mentally ill people suffer from delusions, where they believe that talking to nonexistent sky monsters will change the outcome of events. These mentally ill people suffer from terrible superstitions that make them act extremely weirdly, like not eating certain things, saying certain things, and they do really boring stuff like going and sitting in buildings with other people who suffer from the same mental illness, and performing rituals based on delusional beliefs. However, this madness somehow seems to ease the suffering of a few of the mentally ill people a little bit. When there is a death in the family, for no reason other than the random chaotic unpredictable nature of the universe, the mentally ill people have their delusions to fall back on, so they can mistakenly believe that there was some reason behind an otherwise totally meaningless event, which actually helps them not feel so afraid and alone in harsh and uncaring universe that's out to kill them in an infinite number of ways.

The universe quite literally does not give any fucks who you are.

Entropy will destroy your body, to the point that every single atom will be scattered throughout the universe and even those atoms will decay. It will be as if you never even existed. Entropy will tear down everything you ever built, in the blink of an eye. Entropy is an unstoppable force, that will take everything you think is ordered and understood and under control, and it will show you just how puny and pathetic you are in the face of its relentless power to smash everything up and reintroduce the chaos and disorder that reigns supreme in a universe of unimaginable magnitude.

In a way, I'm jealous of the religious. They must be so blissfully ignorant. They were too stupid or they were denied enough education to allow them to become able to question the obvious lies that they were told, setting them up for a life where they can ignorantly reject things that are plainly obvious to anybody with an inquiring mind. To believe that there is value in the study of ancient scrolls or parchment, instead of the discovery of new knowledge and the ability to make rational leaps of understanding, by joining up the dots and applying logic... much better to live with faith in gods and magic, than to know your unhappy fate in the world.

And so, with the spread of education, perhaps we have seen the spread of misery, anxiety, stress and the need for some salvation of our souls that would have otherwise have been provided by something spiritual. Instead of turning to our priests, bishops, vicars and the like, we turn to our doctors to heal us. Our doctors dish out the goodies, in the form of antidepressants, mood stabilisers, anti-anxiety drugs, tranquillisers, uppers & downers and chill-you-outers.

Can you imagine what would happen to the world if we woke up and there was no tea, coffee, betel leaf, areca nut, khat, coca leaf, opium poppy, hemp, tobacco and every other source of a tiny naturally occurring amount of bitter plant alkaloids that humans love so much, because they tickle our brains, just a teeny little bit.

You would have thought that if smoking one cigarette is nice, then smoking 100 at once would be incredibly nice. You would have thought that if one cup of coffee is nice, then drinking 2 litres of pure espresso would be amazing. In actual fact, you will find that humans have somehow evolved a dislike of too much of a good thing. Everything that's nice, is only nice in moderation.

Life functions perfectly well like this, until the sum of all these things tips you over the edge. Living in the centre of a huge city, with the International Space Station and a zillion satellites orbiting overhead, jets roaring across the sky, helicopters swooping down on you, tower blocks hemming you in on all sides, cutting off your view of the horizon, mobbed by a sea of people, with choking traffic fumes and the deafening roar of internal combustion engines, as trucks, cars and motorbikes zoom along all around you. You're bombarded with light from a million incandescent bulbs, fluorescent tubes and LEDs, as well as the other electromagnetic radiation from televisions, mobile phones, power cables, WiFi routers, bluetooth devices, walkie-talkies, microwave ovens and power transformers.

An ever-increasing number of us cannot function in a godless man-made world without being drugged-up. Alcohol aside, antidepressants are the number one choice for the masses to become better adjusted to a hostile universe. There's nothing wrong with those people needing those medications. There's nothing immoral about taking those medications. There's no shame in being sensitive and susceptible to the madness that surrounds us.

Slowly, we build up cocktails of medications that salve a particular ache or pain in our souls. Each medication has its side effects, so we add other medications to compensate for the other ones, until we rattle like a tube of smarties.

I don't believe in conspiracy theories like 'chemtrails' and other madness like that, but I sure as shit know that modern living has elements that the human body and mind just can't adjust to: the sum-total of the unnatural is beginning to overwhelm us. Our very sleep cycles are being changed - for the worse - by our addiction to social media, smartphones and communications apps like email and text chat. We used to joke about crackberry when we got our BlackBerry mobile email devices, at the turn of the new millennium. It seemed like a Brave New World but perhaps all that glitters is not gold.

Shiny shiny new tech.

I used to get so excited about new tehnological toys, but now I'm excited - relieved - to tear off the foil wrapper that protects the little pills in my daily ration of soma. I feel immediate psychosomatic relief when I swallow the little capsules, lozenges and pills, that contain magic ingredients to salve my aching soul.

Where would we be without these breadcrumbs that lead us deep into a dark forest? A dark forest that we would never enter, if we weren't chasing these tiny rewards... these little crumbs... these pathetic minuscule tickles that we can feel in our brain. We surely would never work these jobs, without our morning coffee and our cups of tea, our gin & tonic and our glass of red wine. We would surely never want our genitals to be torn apart by an alien bursting out of our groin, except for the tiny hit of pleasure from a brief exchange of bodily fluids in a sticky tryst of sweat, bad breath and a tangle of limbs and hair.

I've seen the future and it comes in pill form. A pill to feel loved. A pill to have the most amazing orgasm of your life. A pill to feel all wrapped up safe in cotton wool, without a care in the world. A pill to forget about your hunger and your thirst. A pill to be awake and a pill to be asleep. A pill to help you think and another pill to help you not think.

A pill for every ill; and yet none that quite hit the spot.

Tags: #drugs

This is a story about the rising sun...

My toes are literally a bloody mess. I have new smart formal black leather work shoes, that have not been broken in. I have been wearing an ankle brace on my left foot, because the muscle, tendons and nerves are all screwed up and it's difficult and painful to walk on that foot when I can't raise it and the muscle at the back of my leg - particularly around my hamstring - is swollen and tender.

I get up and strap this contraption to my leg, which involved pumping up some inflatable bubbles. One of the little inflatable pouches has developed a leak. Without the pouches being inflated, it seems that the velcro strap around my calf just slides down, and the plastic cover that goes over the top of my foot and up my shin, seems to work its way out of position and start giving me incredible pain. Basically, the ankle brace isn't really designed for walking 15,000 steps, commuting all over London and having to travel to fucking hospital every night after work for pointless blood tests.

To cap everything off, what nobody realises is just how close to breaking point, self sabotage, suicide, fucking myself up and everything that entails, I was. It's almost as if the universe has decided to throw all the consequences of a full on don't-give-a-fuck supercrack relapse at me, except that never happened. That's not to say I wasn't all prepared to press the fuck it button in the event that the job hunting fiasco carried on a moment longer. That's not to say that I wasn't already at the end of my rope. I was fucked off with everything. I was stressed and depressed and I'd reached my limit. Life was unsustainable.

Life is unsustainable if you can't pay your rent, pay your bills, buy food, afford to leave the house. Life is unsustainable if you're on collision course with bankruptcy that's going to make you unemployable. Life is unsustainable if you're doing everything that's within your control to do, but those things that are outside your control are not going your way, and there's no way you can make anything go faster or create a different result.

I got my result. I got my contract. I started the new job and I like it. I'm very happy with what I'm doing and who I'm working with. I'm overjoyed that my bank balance is moving in the right direction again, and I'm earning more than I'm spending to simply be alive. It costs money just to stand still. It costs money just to breathe the air and look at the moon and the stars. It costs money just to drink the rainwater. Finally, I'm getting money in again, and it's flowing in fast, which it needs to do because who knows how long my health can take this fucking rollercoaster bullshit.

Anyway, two weeks ago, I went from being suicidally depressed and giving up, to the point where I literally though there's no point even bothering going to hospital. I'd been pissing grey-black liquid and then it stopped. I stopped pissing. It was clear my kidneys had packed up. My leg/foot was fucked: numb, hanging limp and useless, and swelling up like a motherfucker. My trouser snake was seriously traumatised and had swollen up to the point where it was an almost unrecognisable blob of badly damaged flesh. There was skin that was literally peeling off, revealing pink rawness underneath. There was plenty of blood, of course.

The hospital wondered why I was resistant to the idea of a catheter. The doctors puzzled over why there was so much blood in the tiny bit of urine I managed to squeeze out as a sample. The catheter point came up again and again, but 'luckily' my bladder was empty, because my kidneys had completely failed. The doctors scanned with ultrasound, and found not a single drop of wee in my bladder. My kidneys were well and truly knackered.

This is the sort of shit that's supposed to happen if I go on a 10-day supercrack bender, where I end up hiding under my own bed and barricading every door in the house. This sort of shit only happens when I stop eating and drinking, and only ingest highly toxic chemicals that are known to be super destructive to poor kidneys. I had become so well practiced in the routine of the binges, that I knew exactly what shade of dark brown and metallic smell of blood, my urine had to have to indicate that it was time to either go to hospital or perhaps have a drink of some water and stop killing myself with deadly chemicals.

The really fucking annoying thing is that all that fucking happened this time is that I sat on my leg a bit funny. It's so fucking ridiculous. I'd been drinking isotonic drinks and generally looking after myself, avoiding deadly Chinese supercrack. What the actual fuck? How can this be the worst ever fucked up that I've ever ever been? Why the fuck does this have to co-incide with my chance to work my way out of the shitty situation I'm in? Why does this have to fuck up my plans for some nice meals out, holidays and to just generally enjoy not shitting myself about running out of money? All I have to do is turn up to work, and not fuck up for 5 or 6 months, and everything's fucking peachy again. I can do that. I've done that loads of times.

Why do I have to work so fucking hard for this? Why do I have to fight the doctors all the way, to understand that it's not just a job, but there's my whole sanity and will to live on the fucking line here. There's my whole fucking livelihood and future on the line here. It doesn't matter how much I wave the "serious medical problem" card, nobody gives a shit: it's a commercial market. I'll replaced overnight, with no qualms. That's business. That's the way of the world I work in.

The fact that I'm turning up to work, not looking too bad, and just about able to cope with the foot, kidney and cock problem, is a fucking miracle. The fact I haven't just said "OK, it's too fucking hard" and killed myself in a blaze of supercrack glory, is a fucking miracle. I've got the fucking stuff. I don't even want to take it. I want this fucking job.

Maybe that's the point.

Maybe that's the test: how bad can I want a job. I've never really wanted a job that badly. I've just wanted the fucking money, and really all I've wanted is to be able to take supercrack. The job has been just a means to an end; and that end is supercrack.

How can you just pause your addiction for 6 months, 9 months, 12 months, and then pick it up again? Well, it's the same skills you develop when you get a boring as fuck full-time permanent job. You learn to put up with you fucking shit job for fucking years don't you? Same fucking thing. You just count down the hours, minutes and seconds, until it's time to get the party started. I can pick up and put down my addiction just as easily as you pick up and put down anything: a meaningless thing you didn't mean to pick up, and you hastily just put it back and never give it a second thought. Scary, isn't it?

I've got some shit worth fighting for. I've got rid of a flatmate who was leeching away my cash. I've got a lovely girlfriend. I've got a nice place to live - albeit rented. I've got this well paid contract on a quite interesting project with quite interesting people. I've got money coming in, just in time to stave off any financial problems and replenish my dwindling savings. I've got the opportunity to have a nice lifestyle of eating out, travel and generally not stressing about money, and sharing that with a wonderful girl.

However, it's a pill that's too bitter to swallow, to have all that smashed up and taken away, right in front of my very eyes.

My kidneys will recover on their own, in time. My one-eyed trouser snake is recovering surprisingly fast, although it's still out of commission. I can live with the foot/leg problem - albeit by using copious amounts of pain relief. I can tolerate the risks. I can do the job. I can make it fucking work.

The demands of the fucking hospital are tipping me over the edge at the moment. The lengthy trips across London after work for blood tests are the very last thing I need. The stressful arguments with doctors who don't understand the reality of needing money to pay rent and bills, otherwise being evicted and bankrupted. Didn't these stupid fucks ever play Monopoly? You can't stand still. You have to roll the dice. It costs money just to be in the game - to be alive. You've always got to pay somebody. There's always somebody sending you a bit of mashed up tree that's been pressed into flat thin white rectangles, covered with inky hieroglyphics, demanding your money. There's always a bill for breathing.

I know how to win at this stupid game. I know how to get loads of fucking money, so you can beat those cunts who keep sending you envelopes, demanding money with menaces. "Give us all your money or else!"

I can get in front. I can get to the point where life is enjoyable again. I can beat the stress and anxiety.

Except I can't, because my kidneys are being slow to recover.

Slow to recover.

That's all it is.

I'm pissing plenty.

My kidneys are making plenty of wee.

My potassium is safely within the limits.

There's not a fucking problem. Leave me the fuck alone and stop making me do extra shit, because I'm maxed out commuting to my job, and making a good first impression on my first week.

If you want to fucking help me out, you can figure out what the fuck is wrong with my leg/foot. You [doctors] didn't even scan it, did you? You were far too busy saving my fucking life by getting my kidneys rebooted, but you didn't realise that my life was already under threat of suicide. It says in my notes that the last time I was in hospital, it was a psychiatric admission because I couldn't keep myself safe. That was two weeks in hospital, and this kidney shit only lasted 10 days, although I must admit that I discharged myself early. It all matters though. You can't ignore the psychological damage that you might do, and the risk to somebody's life that it might create.

I can tell you with almost certainty that my kidneys will recover on their own. I can also tell you with absolute certainty that I will self-destruct, if my hard won contract gets fucked up and I'm left without that all important income, job, routine, workmates, self-esteem and all the other good stuff that goes along with having a purpose in life.

Fuuuuck. what have I got to do? Change my mobile number? Move house?

I just want to be able to nip to Guy's and St Thomas Hospital - near my work - for any fucking essential shit that needs to happen, after work. I can't be traipsing all across London for some fucking bullshit belt & braces crap.

Like I say, I've got the gun pointed at my temple, and my finger over the trigger, itching to pull it. Just give me an excuse. Make my fucking day.

Tags: #suicide #drugs #addiction #hospital

This is a story about family...

I was born in Aberystwyth, Wales. This is the first house I lived in. We moved around lots when I was growing up - I went to 8 different schools - so I don't really know where to call home. For me, home is where I make it: I have a grab bag in my apartment in London, with a tent and a sleeping bag. I'll survive, but there isn't a family home I would visit ever again. Homelessness is the only option.

I was wondering to myself earlier whether I'm a misanthrope or not. I certainly dislike the stress of rush hour travel and battling crowds. You must wonder why I live and work in London, where it's so densely populated, but I find that it has amazing people, food, culture and lots of jobs for my skills and experience. I live by the river and it's actually pretty quiet down on the Isle of Dogs, as is the Square Mile, where I often get contracts.

I've decided that I don't hate people, but a lot of people seem to hate me. Changing schools so much is disruptive to a child's life. Instead of learning how to make friends and become popular, there's little point if you're going to get yanked out of some place you're happy with and dumped somewhere else. It's fairly obvious that the more disrupted a child's environment, the more they will retreat inwards, in search of some stability and consistency.

Bullying was a big feature of my childhood. It was a daily feature of life until I went to college. It's easy to make a child into a bullying victim: just give them something that marks them out as different. Take a look at the way all the children in school are dressed and make sure you dress your kid differently: turn-ups on their trousers, a jumper when all the other kids are wearing blazers, Clarks shoes when all the other kids are wearing Doc Martens. If they're a girl, dress them like a boy and vice-versa. If they're a boy, make them ride a pink bicycle with ribbons on it. Et cetera, et cetera.

My parents' only hobby was drug taking. In their imagination, there were fucking unicorns and rainbows everywhere and everything they said was profound and important. In their minds they were hard working and intelligent. In reality, they were sat around in a dirty house, dribbling like morons and unable to say a single syllable that was understandable. Their brains were intoxicated by drugs and alcohol and they were antisocial: preferring to spend as much time as possible alone indoors with their drugs.

I'm not sure if my parents are misanthropes, but they sure as shit don't have any friends. They have each other and they seem to think that they're the two smartest people on the planet and everybody else is thick as pig shit. When I feign snobbery and arrogance, it's easy because I just imitate my parents. They used to talk about friends and colleagues behind their back. I would get in trouble if I ever let slip a "mum says..." which taught me about two-faced hateful nasty people.

It's kind of fun to gossip behind people's backs, but having been the victim of social exclusion, bullying and also witnessed the nasty nature of horrible people who say mean things about people behind closed doors, I now try to stop myself. I'm not getting up on my high horse and saying I'm morally superior: I just mean to say that I have strong feelings about it, as it's affected my life. It's almost as if I was the one who suffered for my parents' desire to be hostile to everyone.

There I am. It's fairly obvious from those murderous eyes that I'm pure evil and had been plotting to do all sorts of dastardly deeds, while I was a sperm and an egg.

"My girlfriend" is how my dad referred to my mum. He made me call him and my mum by their first names. I wasn't allowed to call them "Mum" and "Dad". There was open hostility towards me, as if I had planned to ruin their drug binge and screw up their easy carefree life; as if my birth was some pre-meditated malicious atrocity. That's a pretty freaky thing to accuse a small child of.

What else do I know about myself?

Well, I was lonely. I was so desperate for secure, loyal friendships, that I would get very overexcited when I got to spend time with friends. I was super intense and hyper: I had to pack in all the friendship I could, when the opportunity presented itself. Sleep was always of secondary concern to maximising the time available, so it was exhausting seeing me for the short intense bursts that my parents permitted.

A number of my childhood 'friends' were the children of people my parents deemed good enough to hang out with occasionally, because they liked to take drugs. My parents made all objective judgements of people based on whether they liked drugs or not, rather than on personality or intellect. My dad rather styled himself on a man known literally as Mister Mean, who charged his wife and young children rent to live in 'his' house. What a cunt.

The biggest event in my life was the birth of my sister, when I was 10 years old. Parents are supposed to be outnumbered. Children are supposed to grow up with brothers and sisters. It's fucking abusive to have lonely isolated miserable children. Guess what? Children like playing together. Children like being children with other children.

It occurred to me that we spend so much of our time and energy trying to get children to act like adults, which is disingenuous and bound to lead to frustration and misery all round. If you want adult company, go make friends with people your own age. Kids need to be kids, which means play and socialising with their peers. Punishing a child for being childish is abusive.

Yeah, I'm banding round the term 'abuse' quite freely and easily. I'm sorry if there's a very specific context in which you find that English word acceptable, but it has a definition that you're at liberty to look up in the dictionary if you need to. I'm calling things abusive, because they've had life-altering negative effects on me and caused prolonged periods of abject misery. If you've fucked up your child's chances to form meaningful, secure happy relationships and partake in society as a well-rounded individual, you've really fucking abused a kid, OK?

This is turning into a bit of a "poor me, poor me" whinefest, but it's the background of the who am I type stuff I've been thinking about. I know it's horribly egocentric, but tell me, which pill do I take to just forget about this stuff and move on?

"Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man" -- Aristotle

Finding myself unable to get along with my peers and finding my parents to be disappointed that I wasn't born as a grown adult independently wealthy Victorian butler, I eventually found that friends' parents and some teachers were very nice to me. Having been raised to act with 'maturity' many adults found my good manners and strong communication skills to be charming. While I could do nothing right at home, I found that the adult world was mainly about kissing arse and saying intelligent sounding things at the right time. Naturally, my peers saw me as aloof and arrogant, which I guess I was.

It's easy to see how I got a head start in life: because I was lonely and isolated. I played on computers when others were playing with their brothers, sisters and friends. When I went to my first job interview, I wasn't intimidated because I felt more comfortable in the adult world than I did with children. When it came to making a good impression at work, people judged me on the fake image of maturity that I projected. In short: I seemed more grown-up than I was.

We're all a little insecure, but I desperately wanted loyal friends and a loving girlfriend. That lifelong damage that you do to a kid when you fuck up their childhood, means that they feel unloved, they don't know how to make friends, missed out on childhood sweethearts and feel distant from their peers. That shit carries over into adult life. Where's the confidence, the gregariousness, the outgoing nature? Where are you going to get that stuff, if all you know is bullying, isolation and disruption to your life that destroys every friendship you've ever cherished?

Every time I've been clingy, intense or a little too full-on... that's coming from that hole that was left in adolescence, where most people are swigging cider in the park and having fumbling trysts in the bushes.

But, I've also been affected by drugs. I'm not afraid of drugs. I don't have a healthy fear and respect of drugs, unlike people who've never been exposed to them. I'm in the situation of having in-depth knowledge of drug taking, but I'm surrounded by educated middle-class professionals who know nothing about drugs (except that if you inject a marijuana you will immediately murder a grandmother to steal her money).

It's crazy to think that the spotty, nerdy unpopular awkward geek who was bullied as fuck, took amphetamines and lost his virginity at the age of 15. Is it crazy? Well, a lot of people think drug taking is cool. It's seen by some simple-minded fools as an act of rebellion. Idiots see themselves as being part of a counter-culture movement, when they make themselves dumb and apathetic, spending their money on a trillion dollar commercial industry, never actually doing anything revolutionary or productive because they're sitting around indoors dribbling and babbling incoherently.

Doesn't it seem only natural that with insecurity and isolation, I would follow in the footsteps of my parents? It sounds like I'm blaming my parents for my addiction, but I'm not (directly). The debate about free will and our ability to make choices, is a complex one. 

"Boring! We've heard all this!"

Yes, but I'm retelling. I've been through Hell and I'm trying to understand everything myself. Through my writing, I'm coming to terms with a mind-boggling amount of experiences that I have to slot into place, in order to make sense of the world and where I fit within it. Life is not black & white; good & bad. I can't simplify things to the point of simply saying I'm a "bad kid" like my parents seemed to decide from very early on. Blaming myself for everything has gotten me nowhere.

No apology or even discussion was forthcoming from my parents, so it's up to me to figure everything out and make the correct judgements based on the evidence and rational investigation of the facts. Yes, it's nice and easy to jump on any one particular thing that seems to be the 'smoking gun' pointing to the fact that I must be an evil little shit sent from Hell to terrorise the world, but there comes a time when that story really doesn't stack up.

I've been wondering why I do a lot of looking back. I have very little control over the future. My future is bound up in the hands of decision makers, who will either give me a role that I'm qualified and experienced to do, in order to get the cash that's needed in this bullshit capitalist society. Otherwise, my life will be ripped to pieces by the vultures that prey on anybody who doesn't fit the mould.

Life's definitely a lot easier when you're not penniless, sick, homeless and addicted to drugs, but it's not as simple as that. What's your purpose? Who are you? What's your identity?

Being a vagrant is actually a fairly strong identity. There is something cool about being half-dead. There's something attractive about the hollow eyes, pale skin and skinny body of heroin chic isn't there? If you don't belong to a sports team; you weren't one of the popular ones at school; you aren't trying to get as many letters after your name as possible; you haven't conflated your professional and private identities... then who the fuck are you and what the fuck are you doing?

Drugs neatly encapsulate both identity and reward. Instead of getting small dopamine hits by bragging about your promotion at a dinner party, you can get a big dopamine hit by staying at home and taking drugs. Also, you feel that you 'belong' to a special club: you learn to identify other addicts and you feel a connection to them... a sense of belonging.

If you can roll a joint and you have weed, you'll have 'friends'. If you have enough money to buy cocaine, you'll have 'friends' and you'll want to share it because you're not an addict, right? Except you are.

I found - by accident - that drugs gave me the self-confidence that had been stolen from me by my parents. I was able to chat to girls. Pretty much most of the time that I had sex, it was on speed (amphetamine), mushrooms (psilocybin) or Ecstasy (MDMA).

Eventually, I discovered - through dangerous experimentation - a drug that was so powerful that it was a far superior substitute for my abusive ex. She was no longer needed. She was abusive, mean, selfish and unpleasant and I was very glad that the spell was broken, even though it cost me a period of addiction and a lot of money. I wasn't strong enough to leave her, without the drugs.

Now, I'm all cleaned up. I'm a good boy.

But, I'm left wondering about that whole purpose & identity thing.

Tags: #childhood #parents #divorce #drugs #addiction

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

8. Infamy

The eldest brother could do no wrong in his mother's eyes. He was quiet and studious. The teachers at school said that he was destined for great things - provided he tried his best - which echoed his parents' long-held hopes for their first-born child. Despite being unpopular, bullied and having few friends, academic achievement was the only thing that seemed to matter in his life, or so he was told by the adults he came into contact with. Wanting to please those anxious faces that looked on, scrutinising every piece of schoolwork, exam grade and report from teachers, he had allowed himself to be moulded into the 'perfect' son. Dressed by his mother and developing no independent identity of his own, his impeccable manners and good behaviour had other parents clucking with jealousy, as their own children were defiant, argumentative and seemed intent on ruining their futures.

The youngest brother was infantalised; babied; mollycoddled. Adorably cute, he had a look in his eyes that could melt any heart and the entire family delighted in showering this child with physical affection and encouraging childish traits that were seen as funny and part of his delightful young character. The words he mispronounced were adopted, so that grandfather became "Gaduda" and a favourite uncle became "Cunigu". The babbling of a baby created an entire new and impenetrable lexicon that only the family knew and understood.

The middle sister held her place in the family as a gender-stereotyped girl. Dressed in pink and floral outfits, she had been showered with traditional toys like dolls, plastic ponies and role-playing sets for obedient housewives. She seemed to be developing normally, playing nicely with her soft toys - having make-believe tea parties for all her bears - as well as thriving socially at playgroup and school.

After puberty, the girl had grown into a young woman more quickly than any adult was able to comprehend or adjust to. When they looked at her they could not see beyond the image of a child that had cemented itself in their minds. Clearly, at the age of 13 or 14 she was still very much a child, but there was a kind of denial amongst family and teachers that this girl was maturing much more rapidly than her peers in a way that denied her a place as either adult or child.

At school, only the children could see what was happening to Lara.

Becoming quiet and withdrawn, Lara fell out of favour with her friends. She wasn't fun anymore. She didn't want to laugh and giggle and gossip and exchange misinformation. Talking about who had started their periods and what bra size they were having to buy, some confusing changes were slowly slotting into place, as the adult world careened into their carefree childhood existence.

The family were distracted. Lara's eldest brother was being coached for important exams and groomed for a top university place, even though his education had many more years until its completion. Lara's youngest brother had a streak of star-like quality now, and it was being considered whether the family would try to get him into a school with better drama and music facilities. A future in the performing arts seemed to beckon for Lara's little brother. The family indulged him as he sang, danced and generally entertained them, captivating every available bit of their attention.

Under the auspices of furthering her studies, Lara had started to travel into the city centre to visit the main public library. Without adult supervision, she had been free to peruse the shelves and select whichever books she wanted. Peeking at older girls and young women who she thought dressed nicely, she imagined that they could be the role models or peers that she seemed to be missing in her life. Listening in to snippets of conversation and looking at the books they chose, Lara came upon a cache of literature that was 'age inappropriate'. The elderly librarians didn't know much about the books that they stamped for Lara to take home.

Magazines provided a trickle-down of information through the girls in school. Well-thumbed copies of Just Seventeen were mostly read by giggling groups of 13 and 14 year olds, who pored over the agony aunt sections and articles about boyfriends. The children mostly came from reasonably wealthy and well-to-do families where they had led sheltered lives, but there were many who had been involved in fumbling trysts and could combine their first-hand knowledge with the information gleaned from the pages of teen magazines.

Lara drifted further from her original childhood friends who covered their bedroom walls with posters of boy bands and listened to saccharine-sweet pop music.

Print media slowly sexualised the schoolgirls, with magazines that were supposedly pitched at adults being more commonly read by 14, 15 and 16 year olds. These magazines - such as Cosmopolitan - featured sex positions and even blow-job techniques under titles like "How to Please Your Man". Fashion magazines were boring by comparison and Lara found Vogue pretentious.

There was a disjoint, a gap, between magazine articles that were light on any real detail, and what was shared between the braver and more adventurous girls who had experimented and fooled around with their first boyfriends. There was no romance in being roughly fingered by an overexcited 14 year old boy on a cold park bench, both tipsy from swigs of cheap cider straight from the bottle. The experiences were confusing, unpleasant even.

Lara had filled the gap with romantic and erotic novels, and the detail of not only the mechanics of the acts but also the feelings of love and lust filled out a much fuller picture of what boyfriends and sexual activities were all about. Lara started to feel contempt for the spotty horny boys at her school and the gaggle of catty girls who circulated vicious rumours about each other as well as boasting of experiences that were missing the caring caress and vital connection that Lara now desired in a boy who was as mature as she was.

By broadening her sphere of knowledge through reading, as well as careful observation of the mannerisms of young women rather than her peer group, Lara began to take on an aura of being quietly self-confident, knowing. As the school year wore on, she started to appear dark and brooding in a way that had a sultry kind of attractiveness. Lara wasn't becoming a goth but there was an intensity in her eyes that was extremely intimidating to other girls, as well as to her teachers. More and more boys started to take an interest in Lara. She was becoming more and more removed and aloof from day-to-day school life, making her seem unattainable. Rumours circulated that she had an older boyfriend who rode a motorbike.

The children elevated Lara to a status normally reserved for 'cool' adults. To treat Lara like an ordinary pupil brought anarchy to the classroom, as if the teachers had started calling each other names in front of the children. To her teachers, Lara was now untouchable, in the interests of preserving some authority. Lara wasn't interested in making trouble, so an uneasy truce came to pass. Lara would not show any disrespect for her teachers or contempt for her schoolwork, but no teacher dared to ridicule and belittle her for fear that they themselves would be laughed out of their class.

Nothing was especially wrong that warranted Lara's parents being contacted, but Lara was becoming feared and revered at school. The girls knew that their boyfriends' eyes were drawn to her and Lara could feel herself attracting an increasing number of staring faces. She started to become comfortable with male attention and would even delight in returning a boy's gaze in order to make him blush, caught looking. A kind of unspoken reputation made her unapproachable. No boy from her school was bold enough to try and speak to her anymore. The legend of the older boyfriend became cemented as fact, even though Lara by now had started to feel a little disappointed that the older boys seemed somehow immature. Refining her style, her sense of dress, in a subtle way that she copied from young women who seemed confident and happy, she started to draw attention from young men, some of it unwanted. These men were crass and crude, and harassed her. They had nothing cosmopolitan, cultured or urbane about them. They were likely lads who fancied themselves as a hit with the ladies. Lara was repelled by these ugly creatures who dressed in sportswear, had gold chains, earrings and wore far too much aftershave. These young men were only ever brave enough to make an approach when accompanied by a group of their friends, watching with a slack-jawed smile as the sullen Lara silently dismissed them with crushing indifference.

Lara imagined that when she left school for university she would find a completely different set of people. Young men who were more mature and romantic, she imagined a boyfriend who could be her equal; somebody she could respect. It wasn't that she was saving herself for true love, but more that she hadn't yet met anybody who measured up to her expectations. The more she read, the more she developed a better sense of the kind of guy she wanted to date, which included a kind of worldly-wiseness, experience and a self-assured manner that was lacking in schoolboys and men who hung around near schools trying to pick up teenage girls.

Age 15, with a mature body and the comportment of somebody older, Lara started to draw the attention of more predatory and silken-tongued men who attempted to woo her with more subtlety. Hanging around on the fringes of school social events and struggling to find a group where she belonged, several well dressed young men struck up casual conversations with her. At first, she felt as though she was beginning to make new friends and would perhaps soon have a new gang to hang out with. Brutally, she found that it was a ruse and these men would try and kiss and grope her after some perfunctory chat. Lara became despondent, beginning to lose hope that there was anybody out there for her who didn't want to just get in her knickers.

At weekends during a mild late September, she had taken to reading a book in the park on a favourite bench that was partly shaded, but still had enough sunlight that she was pleasantly dappled with warming rays. Today, there was a young man sat on one end of the bench who was ghostly pale, wearing a winter coat but still shivering. His coat was pulled up to cover the bottom half of his face, but his eyes were shining brightly, with dark rings underneath. He looked as though he was suffering with a fever and his forehead was a little sweaty.

Lara hesitated before sitting down, but she decided that the man's body language suggested he was trying to make himself as small and inconspicuous as possible. He seemed non-threatening and he was sat right at the other end of the bench. Lara took her usual seat and began reading, somewhat distractedly.

She imagined that the man would get himself up and off home to bed soon, but as the afternoon wore on, he was still sat there. Lara was hardly getting any reading done, but she had a stubborn temperament and was determined that she would attempt to read for as long as she normally would, even though her thoughts were filled with concern about the wellbeing of her companion on the bench.

Eventually, her patience ran out and Lara stood up to walk home.

"Are you OK?" she asked the young man.

The man lifted his eyes slowly to meet hers. There was pain behind them. Not physical pain, but something else. His expression of discomfort softened with her question, but he seemed shocked that anybody had addressed him or even acknowledged his existence. It was as though he thought he was invisible up to that point. There was something incredibly vulnerable and raw about this man; not just the sickness that he seemed to be suffering with. Lara felt a surprising protective instinct for this slim and pale young man who had a haunting gaze.

"I'll be alright" he said.

Lara started to leave and then she stopped.

"What's your name?" she asked.

"Sam"

"Do you have somewhere to go? You don't look well" Lara said.

"Yeah. I'm waiting for somebody. I had to get out of the flat. I was going crazy at home, waiting" Sam replied.

"Do you have a number for them? Do you want me to help you try and contact them?" Lara asked, confused and concerned.

"No. No. They'll turn up. Sometimes they just make me wait. Feels like forever" Sam said.

Lara didn't understand and she couldn't think of anything else to say or ask.

"Oh, OK. Bye then" she said.

"Bye. And thanks" said Sam.

"Thanks for what?" asked Lara.

"Thanks for asking"

When she got home, Lara could still vividly picture Sam's face. He was pale and sick but he was clearly a good looking young man. She was intrigued and also worried about what was going to happen to him. Was he going to be OK? He hadn't asked her name. She wanted to know what he'd meant; why he couldn't wait at home.

Lara wanted to go back out that evening and see if Sam was still on the bench. What would she say if he was? What would she find out if he wasn't? She resisted the urge to go back to the park.

Next chapter...

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

7. The Journey

A large black expedition duffel bag contained a red rucksack, which had a thick winter sleeping bag and a few other items inside it. The bags were virtually empty at this stage. The journey was just beginning.

His house was silent but Neil was being extremely cautious to avoid being followed, traced, or anybody interfering and attempting to derail his plans. He left after the morning commuter rush had quietened down. On foot, he made his way to the coach station. His appearance was very much in keeping with the usual way he dressed. In clothes that he'd often been seen wearing by his friends, neighbours and family, the floppy half-empty bag was the only thing that was out of the ordinary, if somebody were to recognise him walking down his local streets.

Coaches to London were regular and there was already one at the station. The coach had offloaded any passengers who wanted to alight and was now awaiting its scheduled departure time. The coach door was open and the driver sat in his seat reading a newspaper. Neil bought a one-way ticket to Victoria station from the coach driver and paid in cash. There were only three other passengers on board, who were sat well apart from each other. Neil stowed his bag above an empty pair of seats and sat down.

The coach was relatively new and clean, but there were common features of coach travel that had been preserved for posterity. The upholstery was grey with streaks of orange, beige and red in a pattern that ran down the centre of each of the seats. The luggage racking above the seats was black plastic with a moulded texture that poorly imitated leather. There were black plastic handles on the seats lining the gangway up the middle of the coach. The carpet and fabric covering the interior roof and underside of the luggage racking, matched the colours and patterns of the seats. Black plastic strips trimmed every edge. More black plastic was used for the air vents and reading lights that were above each seat. The windows of the coach had smoked glass and grey curtains also impeded some light, even though they were tied back. The inside of the cabin was quite dark, despite the bright daylight outside.

There was a hiss of compressed air as the coach door closed and then the engine rumbled into life. The coach would be stopping at several towns on its way to London, to pick up and drop off. The journey was scheduled to take a couple of hours if the service kept to its timetable. Neil had elected to use the coach because the quality of the CCTV coverage on coaches and at coach stations was far inferior to that of the rail network. The first challenge he was setting for anybody who was trying to find him, would be to discover whether he got off at any of the stops before the coach reached London.

By the time the coach reached London, many more people had boarded, but Neil still had two seats to himself. Getting off at Victoria took a little time as bags were retrieved from the overhead racks, but Neil was happy to blend in with a group of fellow passengers. The coach station was crowded with tourists and their luggage. Neil felt comfortably anonymous as he slipped away from the transport hub and onto the nearest busy main street, lined with many well known high-street shops.

Walking away from the coach, tube and rail stations, the shops started to change from national chains to smaller independent businesses. Neil was looking for somewhere that bought and sold second hand and refurbished electronics. He came to a street that had a number of mobile phone repair and accessory shops, along with family-run stores that sold cheap imported goods and had appropriated part of the pavement for the display of their extensive stock.

There was a shop that was painted with garish red gloss paint and had a metal grille permanently affixed to protect the windows. Through the mesh, Neil was able to see a range of electronic goods laid out for sale on glass shelving with prices handwritten on bright yellow stickers underneath each item.

Neil bought the cheapest laptop that the shop had on sale after checking it had the right version of Windows and it booted up OK. The shop owner was most bemused by Neil's request for a very basic phone that only had a monochrome screen and no camera or Internet browsing capability. Imploring Neil to spend an extra fifteen or twenty pounds in order to obtain a far newer and more feature rich phone, the man could not understand why Neil would not want features such as GPS, which would allow him to navigate using a maps application. Neil was firm and resolute: he wanted the most basic phone that the shop had. He purchased both items with cash.

From an electronic accessory store he purchased an inverter, that would allow him to charge his laptop and phone from the 12 volt cigarette lighter of a vehicle. From a newsagent, he purchased a pay-as-you-go mobile phone SIM card and several top up vouchers. Each top up voucher had a silver part that was scratched off to reveal a unique code. Every transaction was made with cash, making the laptop and mobile phone virtually untraceable. There would be no record of serial numbers and identifying codes that was recorded anywhere that could possibly lead back to Neil.

Entering a sports clothing discount store, Neil bought a navy tracksuit and a grey tracksuit with trousers that could be easily removed by undoing poppers down the length of each side. He also bought a black baseball cap and a pair of grey trainers that had black parts on the top and sides. After much deliberation, Neil had selected the trainers because it was hard to decide whether the colour of the trainers could be described as predominantly black or grey.

In a public lavatory cubicle, Neil got changed into the navy tracksuit, and then put on the thinner and baggier grey tracksuit over the top. He pulled on the baseball cap and put on the trainers, stowing the outfit he had been wearing in his rucksack. He then put his rucksack back inside the black duffel bag.

Killing time reading newspapers in a busy fast-food restaurant, Neil waited until night time before returning to the coach station. Arriving a short time before its scheduled departure time, he boarded the last coach to Bristol, which would arrive in the small hours of the morning.

After an uncomfortable night's sleep in the waiting room at Bristol's main coach station, made a little warmer by the fact that he was wearing two tracksuits, Neil now boarded the first coach to Exeter. There was a small cramped toilet on board the coach, but there were no other passengers for the first part of the journey so he was able to unbutton his tracksuit bottoms and stow them in his rucksack along with the tracksuit jacket, baseball cap and the black duffel bag, without the driver noticing.

As Neil stepped off the coach the driver asked "didn't you get on with a big black bag?"

"Nope" said Neil, walking off with his rucksack slung over one shoulder.

Walking safely out of earshot from the coach driver, Neil knew that he hadn't shouted or chased after him. That was the kind of minor incident that would be memorable if anybody was trying to trace his movements, but he knew that he had taken so many safeguards in his journey to this point that it would be virtually impossible to join up the dots.

It was late morning in Exeter, but Neil still had plenty of time to find a van to buy.

In the caravan, on the bed, naked and in pain, surrounded by filth and damp air filled with noxious smells, Neil struggled to reconcile the danger he was now in with his original and meticulously planned desire for total privacy and anonymity: to be in an isolated, remote location. He was virtually impossible to find and it was highly unlikely that anybody knew where he had gone.

It was certain that with inaction his organs would soon fail and his dead body would be discovered by chance months or years later. Decay would set in almost immediately and the smell of rotting flesh would attract flies as soon as spring arrived. Maggots would strip his corpse to the bone in a matter of weeks. The police would quickly discover that his Estonian driving license was counterfeit. Identifying his body would be impossible except using dental records.

With the available evidence, it would be nearly impossible for a coroner to conclude anything other than misadventure or return an open verdict. Neil started to feel frustrated that the secret of the well planned sequence of events that had led to this point, would go to the grave along with him. A fate that was finally sealed by his own inaction, resulting in nothing more than an impenetrable mystery, would be horrible. He started to wonder whether a written note would survive decay in the caravan for long enough to still be read whenever he was discovered.

What on earth could he possibly write in a note to convey the complex reasons why he had started this journey and reached this point? What could be achieved by connecting his last movements at home with his final resting place? It was an impossible task, to try to put things into words with his remaining time and energy.

It seemed important that his death should be understood as a result of deliberate action. Neil started to think about the razor blade he had brought with him. He wondered if the blood stains in relation to where his body and the blade were found, would leave enough clues to show that he finally chose to exit the world through suicide.

Suicide had not crossed his mind recently. He had been thinking about getting to hospital or at least getting to the road, where somebody might find him alive. Before that, he had been consumed by fear that he had been discovered and that his private bubble was about to be burst. He had been so desperate to never be discovered in such an appalling state while alive, that he had never stopped to think about being discovered dead.

Linking his name to the disgusting scene of his final resting place was something he wanted to avoid at all costs, but also, he couldn't bear to think that people would conclude he died by accident.

Next chapter...

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

5. The Van

The freedom of the open road; the remote isolated locations that could be reached anywhere in the country; the ability to up sticks and move at a moment's notice; the anonymity of a mass produced vehicle; the privacy of metal walls. Buying a van seemed like the perfect "plan A".

However, the plan didn't bear close scrutiny. With cold hard rational analysis, there were a number of flaws.

In order to buy a street legal van, it would have to be taxed and have passed an annual safety inspection to certify that it was roadworthy. This would increase the asking price considerably and make a cash transaction unworkable. A sizeable bank transfer would be something that would catch somebody's attention and warrant further investigation.

There was a risk of being caught driving without insurance. There was the question of the name and address where the van should be registered. Both of these posed a significant problem, as the insurance company and the vehicle registration agency would both send postal mail and anything undeliverable would alert them to the fact that a false name and address had been given.

By doing things legally, the police could search the vehicle registration database and then alert the national force to look out for a van make, model, colour and a certain numberplate.

Public roads were a hazardous place to be. An accident would trigger an avalanche of issues. Even finding safe places to park a van would be extremely difficult. Anywhere that could be reached by public road was hardly isolated and remote.

Neil decided to relegate the van idea to "plan B".

When he remembered the caravan Neil's new "plan A" began to take shape in his mind, but he still needed some way of travelling around when he reached the caravan. Initially considering cycling, he dismissed the idea because he knew it was a remarkable sight to see somebody on a bike in winter on steep hills. A vehicle seemed to make sense, because he could drive to local towns and villages on quiet country lanes, park on the outskirts and walk the short distance to get what he needed.

By buying a vehicle that was declared as an insurance write-off, scrapped or otherwise off the road, Neil wouldn't have to worry about the vehicle registration. He would just keep to the back roads and only make short trips. He would buy a van, so that he could use it as accommodation if the caravan was no longer there or useable.

Neil's journey to the caravan had brought him to the city where Westbound motorways ended. From there, only smaller roads continued deeper into the Westcountry. His first task had been to buy the local newspapers which had classified adverts in them.

Walking away from the city centre, Neil found a quiet residential area and an empty bus shelter. Here he got out a local area map, notepad, pen and his mobile phone. He started dialling the numbers of any advert for a van which was marked "No tax. No MOT". He started with the ones at the top of his budget, hoping that they would be more likely to be reliable good runners.

After a few calls that weren't answered and sellers who abruptly told him the van was sold and immediately hung up, he found a more promising lead.

"'Lo, s'Andy" said a male voice as the phone was answered. He spoke with a broad Westcountry accent. This was a good start.

"I'm ringing about the van" Neil tentatively began, not saying much other than the bare minimum to establish whether it was still for sale.

"Yar. Still got 'em." the man said.

"Is it a runner?" Neil asked.

"Yar. Use 'em every day to get around the farm see" the man replied.

This was great. Neil wanted this van.

"What d'you want 'em for?" the man asked.

"Just getting around on the back roads, the lanes, cheap like, you know?" Andy replied, put on the spot by a slightly unexpected question.

"Well if you ever broke 'em for spares, you should know the tank's no good" the man said.

"Fuel coming out a bit rusty, is it?"

The man laughed heartily at this.

"Yar. Yar. Sure is" the man said, chuckling again.

This codified exchange confirmed something far better than Neil could have possibly hoped for. The 'rusty' colour of the diesel meant this man was a farmer who was running the van on fuel that had been marked with red dye, because it was untaxed and intended only for farm equipment. It also meant that Neil would likely be able to purchase a tank of fuel from this man for cash, without having to visit a petrol station.

"The van is just what I'm looking for" Neil said.

"Yar. I speck 'tis" the man chuckled, knowingly.

"What's your name?" Neil asked.

"Andy, like I said"

They made arrangements for Neil to travel to a large village about 20 miles outside the city. Neil would take a local bus to the village and then walk up one of the lanes for about half a mile, where Andy would be waiting to pick him up. Neil would drive the van back to Andy's farm, to check it was running OK, then he'd buy the van and a tank of red diesel too.

Everything went smoothly. The van was quite small with faded red paint that was almost pinkish in places. There were patches of paint that were a much deeper shade of red and still had some shine, where stickers had been removed. It was clear that this van had formerly been owned by the Royal Mail, for a postman to do delivery and collection rounds. How ironic, Neil thought.

Neil drove out of Andy's farm gates just as it was starting to get dark. Finding the caravan and checking it was still OK to use would have to wait for daylight the following day and Neil would sleep in the back of the van that night. Driving through the forest with his headlights blazing was a risk, but it would only take a few minutes for him to be buried deep in the maze of tracks before he parked, isolated and remote.

How long ago was that? Neil had no idea. He knew it was weeks ago, but he didn't know exactly how many. Had it been months? He couldn't be sure, but he had the vague sense it was probably between two and four months. He'd arrived in the autumn and there was no sign of spring, so he felt certain that it was less than five months.

Although he had parked close to the caravan, Neil's damaged body felt as though it could barely carry him a hundred metres, let alone down the steepest part of the hill and through the trees to the gravel track where the van was. Escaping his predicament seemed unimaginably hard. He knew that his mobile phone had no signal. This part of the rural countryside was remote and black spots for phone coverage were common. Reaching the van was his only hope.

Pushing himself upright, he shuffled to the end of the bed. Bending his legs was incredibly painful, but if he kept them completely straight the pain subsided to an ache which was tolerable. He grabbed at the doorway and pulled himself onto his feet. Sharp shooting pains in his back caused him to yell aloud, wince and jar his body from the shock. He could do nothing more than stumble out of the bedroom, hunched over. He propped himself up on the kitchen worktop, opposite the bathroom door.

Neil really didn't want to open that door. Around the edge of the door, moistened toilet tissue had been used as improvised papier mâché, hardening as it dried to create a better seal. Instinctively Neil drew a deep breath and held it as he pulled the handle. The door creaked open. Inside the bathroom, the chemical toilet was filled to the brim with unspeakable filth. It was regrettable that the only mirror in the caravan was on the back of the bathroom door, but Neil wanted to know what his face looked like. The smell from the toilet had been unleashed and it was disgusting, but Neil was in such physical discomfort that he barely retched.

His eyes shone brightly: two glassy baubles in the murkiness of the caravan. His pupils were fully dilated in the half-darkness; two inky black circles taking in all the horrific detail. His eyes seemed sunken into dark blackish-purple skin, which served to further emphasise the deathlike pallor of the rest of his face. Facial hair sprouted unevenly from sideburns, top lip and chin, as well as other patches on his face. The hair was coarse and wiry. The bridge of his nose bore a scab. Perhaps he had broken his nose at some point? He couldn't remember. There was a scab on his right cheek and one on his chin, which caused another patch of missing hair on his unkempt and unruly beard. The hair on his head had grown untidily and surprisingly long, and it was greasy.

Able to better examine other parts of his body with the help of the mirror, Neil noticed that there were deep hollows above his collar bones and the contours of his ribcage were clearly defined as they ran down the centre of his chest. He was clearly malnourished and his muscles were wasting away. Things were worse than he had imagined. Seeing his own reflection shocked and scared him a little, although there was no sense of panic or alarm. He feared his own image in the same way he would fear any ghoul that surprised him in the darkness. He could barely recognise himself. He knew that his appearance would be extremely shocking to anybody who saw him. This presented additional difficulties.

Closing the bathroom door in the hope of trapping the noxious smell within the tiny room, he contemplated whether he should open the outside door in order to recycle the air in the caravan. He decided instead to keep the heat in, given that he was naked and everything was quite damp. Stumbling back to the edge of the bed, he clawed his way back to the position he had been laying in before. He felt exhausted and queasy, although he knew that he would not be able to vomit. His bile had dried up.

The momentary nausea passed and Neil reflected on how he would have found it easier to make his next move if he was in the back of the van, rather than in the caravan.

With hopelessness came apathy, calmness and philosophical thoughts. Neil noted with macabre amusement that he wasn't praying to any deity or whimpering for his mother.

Next chapter...

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

3. The Forest

Matthew's dad owned and ran a bike shop. The 1980's had seen a craze for BMX bikes, which made the shop very commercially successful. The 1990's had been the era of the mountain bike, which was another boon for the profitable bike shop. Matthew had grown up riding and racing BMXs and in his teens he had transitioned to cross-country and downhill mountain biking.

18 years old and completing the final year of his A-level qualifications, Matthew was in the 6th form at the local comprehensive school. He had passed his driving test and now drove a battered pickup truck to school each day, which was a well known vehicle to pupils and staff alike. A rusted hole in the exhaust meant that it was particularly noisy, as well as being driven dangerously fast by the highly competitive Matthew.

Built around a deep river gorge, the city had some extremely steep roads and Matthew's school sat atop a high hill outside the city centre. There was only one main road that led out in the direction of the school, before the turn onto the approach road. It was a particularly grueling climb out of the valley to reach the school from anywhere but the surrounding towns and villages outside the city.

On Matthew's drive to school, he had noticed one of the younger boys cycling the same route as him each day, up from the city centre. This boy's mountain bike was a cheap model, but still a well respected bike for the money. Splattered with mud, the bike was clearly used off-road as well as the mode of transport that carried this boy to school each day.

As the September start of the new school term turned into October, and then November, Matthew was impressed to see this younger boy out in all weather, climbing the hill each morning on his bike, with relentless grit and determination. The fitness required to tackle such a climb was impressive.

One particularly frosty morning, Matthew passed the boy in his pickup truck and then decided to stop at the side of the road. He jumped out.

"Hey! Do you want a lift to school?"

The boy had eagerly thrown his bike in the back of Matthew's truck and they sped off up the hill. Matthew introduced himself, and the boy in turn introduced himself too. He wasn't even out of breath. That was how Matthew met Neil.

Matthew and Neil's friendship grew because Matthew's competitiveness was perfectly matched by Neil's fitness. Neil wasn't particularly interested in competing in any races and had never found a group of casual mountain bikers who could match his fitness. Matthew would never race to make friends; he raced to beat the competition. It was nice for Matthew to have a friend who wasn't a potential race competitor.

Neil had explored the mountain biking trails that could be reached by bike from the city, but had not been able to travel further afield. Paired up with Matthew, they were able to spend whole weekends driving throughout their home county and the surrounding counties, even crossing the Severn Bridge into Wales, in order to ride the very best mountain bike trails.

As mountain biking exploded in popularity, a lot of trails started to become crowded with bikers, many of whom were talentless and unfit. "All the gear and no idea" was the commonly heard criticism of these debutante riders, whose shiny and expensive steeds had barely seen a muddy puddle since being purchased.

Matthew and Neil pushed deeper and deeper into the Westcountry, trying to find new areas to ride, far away from main roads and packed car parks full of middle-aged men clad in lycra cycling clothing.

By chance, on a country lane the pair happened upon a forestry track that was not gated off, because it also led to an isolated cottage that could only be reached by this gravel track. The Forestry Commission who managed the woodland had left a maze of tracks and firebreaks open to be explored in Matthew's pickup truck. From autumn through to early spring the forest was empty and silent, with no logging, no horse riders, no dog walkers, in fact no sign of human activity at all. It was eerily quiet in those woods, where the soft leaf mulch of the forest floor and the tightly packed trees would deaden any sound.

The forest grew on the South-facing side of a hill. At the top, there was a steep ridge to the South, and to the North there was a plateau where the forest thinned and eventually turned into rolling farmland as the hill gently sloped away. The trees were coniferous, which meant that little light penetrated the evergreen canopy in the cold months of the year. Logging had thinned the forest on the lower flanks of the hill, where large piles of logs were stacked up. Higher up in the forest the trees were younger, but it was much darker, thickly wooded and dense in foliage.

This area was virgin territory for mountain bikers. There were no hikers or dog walkers to have to avoid crashing into. There were no horse riders whose animals might be startled by muddy mountain bikers suddenly emerging from the undergrowth at high speed. Matthew and Neil pretty much had it to themselves for the first winter that they spent, visiting that same spot almost every weekend, in order to build a number of their very own mountain bike trails through the forest.

As their eyes started to adjust to the darkness of the forest, the pair started working their way further and further up the side of the hill, where there were fewer tree stumps that could easily cause a wheel-buckling and bone-breaking crash if they strayed off the trails they had made.

One gravel track led high up into the forest, near the ridge at the top where there was a cliff-like soily bank. On top of this bank was a line of conifers that had not had their lower branches cut off, such that there was a wall of trees that particularly intrigued Neil. He decided to explore further, but had to walk a fair way along the ridge to find a part where it wasn't too steep to climb. He followed the ridge back until he was near the end of the track. He could see that some conifers were surrounding something, much like a hedgerow. Neil called down to Matthew, and got him to climb up and join him.

Neither of the pair particularly wanted to penetrate the dense row of trees, which they now walked around the perimeter of. The forest was still thickly wooded at this point, but these trees was clearly concealing something. Eventually, Neil's curiosity overcame his initial hesitation and he started to push through the branches. Emerging into a clearing within, Neil called out to Matthew.

"You have got to see this!"

With some difficulty, Matthew entered the clearing too, and the pair stood looking at a particularly grimy caravan that sat atop some tree stumps. The caravan's wheels were missing, but otherwise it was in one piece. On the caravan's roof were a considerable amount of fallen branches, the sides had a lot of moss growing on them and the windows were grey with dirt, sprayed by wind and rain.

"Do you think it's locked?" Matthew asked.

Without hesitation, Matthew reached out and tried the door handle. Some corrosion of the hinges and door seal meant the door did not open easily, but the caravan was clearly not locked.

Neither of them had the nerve to actually try and enter the caravan. What would they find inside? It felt like breaking and entering somebody's home. It felt wrong. It felt like they were intruding, trespassing.

Neil had an idea. He rubbed off some of the dirt at the top of the door, about halfway along. He now affixed a small square of duct tape that he carried in his backpack - useful for makeshift repairs in the wilderness - stuck across both the door and the door frame. The small square of duct tape above the door was hardly noticeable.

"Now we'll know if anybody else has opened that door, if we come back in future" Neil said.

Over the rest of the winter, the pair continued to ride in the forest, but they never went back to the caravan. It seemed like it was almost a taboo subject. They never discussed it again that year.

At the end of the school year Matthew started working for his dad at the bike shop. The pair continued to mountain bike together, although during the summer they hadn't been out very much. The warmer drier weather meant that the popular nearby trails were over-run with other people. Their favourite private spot was off limits because the Forestry Commission would be logging.

Early in October, Matthew and Neil drove to the forest they had been eager to ride in again since they had to leave in the spring. They hardly spoke on the long drive deep into the Westcountry. No plan had been made, but they were both thinking the same thing.

Without any direction from Neil, Matthew drove the truck as high up the forestry tracks as the truck would carry them. The pair walked up to the ridge of the hill, leaving their bikes in the back of the truck. Making their way into the clearing where the caravan lay, it was clear that they had one thing on their mind: had anybody else been using the caravan?

The duct tape lay intact, still glued to both the door and the frame, although it had been covered over with a layer of grime such that it was virtually invisible. Neil peeled it off to reveal a clean square underneath.

The pair used the caravan as a base at weekends and for longer trips during Neil's school holidays, sleeping in there during the long cold nights, but being careful to preserve the caravan's concealment and look of abandonment. They kept warm with extra thick sleeping bags and they avoided using torchlight when outside. There was a chemical toilet in the caravan, but with no way to empty it, they buried their bowel movements out in the forest instead.

When Neil left school and started at technical college, he and his friend started to drift apart. Matthew got a girlfriend and they spent less and less time together. By the time Neil completed college and got his job, their priorities had changed from mountain biking to other things. Neil was focussed on making a good first impression at work and Matthew was deeply romantically involved with the girl he had met, as well as taking on an increasing amount of responsibility at the bike shop.

When Neil visited the caravan again, he hadn't spoken to Matthew for 8 years. Lara had never met Matthew, although she had heard Neil occasionally reminisce about his mountain biking days. Neither Neil nor Matthew had told a single soul about 'their' forest and the caravan.

Next chapter...

This is a story about projection...

Do you want to predict the future? Would you like to be in the right place at the right time? Ever wonder how ice hockey star Wayne Gretzky gets to where the puck is going to be, not where it's been? How does a torpedo fired from a submarine intersect with its target, while following a relatively straight trajectory? Welcome to the world of dead reckoning.

Imagine I have a single data point - a latitude and a longitude - which tells me the location of a target at one point in time. I don't know how fast it's going, and I don't know what direction it's going. Fairly useless information. In the parlance of physics, I know location, but I don't know momentum. All we can say is that the probability of its next location spreads out from the point of origin: the thing being tracked is very unlikely to be a long way away, and it's more likely to be somewhere near where it was last seen. This is a probability cloud.

Next, we've measured two data points. We're sure it's the same thing that we're tracking, because we have identified some unique characteristic about it. In the submarine example, the sonar operator will be listening to the sound of the propeller, so they will know if it's the same ship, because it's got the same number of propellors generating the same kind of sound, underwater.

If we have two data points, we can draw a straight line between them, and assuming the same course and speed, we can predict where the object we are tracking is going to be next. We measure the distance between the two points, and divide by the time it took to travel between them, and we have the speed. Then, we simply extrapolate the line between the two points, and we can guess where the target will be on that line, at a future time.

But, the simple extrapolation model is flawed. Perhaps currents are pulling the ship in a different direction from the direction steered. Perhaps the captain of the ship is steering an arc-shaped course, to go around an obstacle, or to change direction.

With three data points, we can now fit an elliptic curve to fit those measurements. The elliptic curve shows us whether the captain is steering or drifting right or left. Additionally, we know whether the ship is speeding up or slowing down. If the ship is accelerating, but steering a constant course, it will be further along the line we plot than we think it will be. Equally, if the ship is decelerating, it won't get as far along its course as we anticipate.

Finally, with four data points, we can come up with a mathematical function that fits the data. To give a very simplified example, if the captain of the ship is zig-zagging to avoid submarines, we could fit a sine wave to the data, and predict when the ship is going to make its next turn... assuming that the captain tacks with regular frequency, of course.

As we gather more and more data points, plotting the course history of the ship we're tracking, we can come up with ever more sophisticated mathematical models to predict where we're going to see the ship next.

The arc of a ball travelling through the air is fairly easy to model. We just need to model momentum, gravity and air resistance. Momentum would be constant in a vacuum, so if you whack a tennis ball with a racquet while floating in the outer reaches of the galaxy - where there is little gravity - then the tennis ball will continue on a straight trajectory, at the same speed, more or less forever. Back here on Earth, the tennis ball will be pulled down to the ground by gravity, and it will also slow down, due to air resistance.

Given that air density and gravity are more or less constant at ground level, where you expect to find tennis courts, we probably only need 3 data points, and we should be able to make an accurate guess as to where the tennis ball's going to land. Even with gusts of wind, the flight of the tennis ball is relatively short, so the wind speed is unlikely to change dramatically during the flight of the ball. It should be a case of simply fitting an elliptic curve to the 3-dimensional co-ordinates of the 3 points of measurement, and then working out where that curve intersects with the plane of the ground, to predict where the ball's going to land.

"But what about spin?" I hear you ask. Yes, good point.

Spin is angular momentum. For our tennis ball example: the fluffy exterior of the ball will exert a 'grip' - friction - on the air. Therefore, the spin of the ball makes a reasonable difference, as more air gets pushed towards one side of the ball, by the rotating face. Just like a wing, the ball will experience a small amount of lift: the ball is 'pulled' towards the side that is spinning in the same direction as the air flow. That's the Magnus effect.

If we had hit our tennis ball with spin out in the vacuum of space, it would not create a curved trajectory, because the fluffy tennis ball has no air to grip on - a vacuum is frictionless. However, the centripetal force of the spinning ball will cause it to stretch to be slightly bigger than it would be if it wasn't spinning, because the outside is being thrown away from the centre, like a centrifuge. The elasticity of the ball will be trying to pull it back inwards, and in so doing, energy will be released in the form of heat. Eventually, all the energy of the spin will be radiated away, and the ball will slowly stop spinning. This effect is far too minuscule to even bother calculating, for our tennis court example here on Earth.

Of course, all this maths is just to model a dumb tennis ball, which can't make decisions and alter its own course, once it has left the racquet. To predict the behaviour of even a single individual is hard - this is the work of top poker players - and when we try to model complex systems made up of vast numbers of individuals - such as financial markets - the systems become chaotic and unpredictable. Thus, past performance is not a predictor of future results, unless you're a tennis ball.

Tags: #physics

This is a story about suffocation...

I was just watching a documentary about the burning oil wells in Kuwait, and I wondered how many barrels of oil we get through in any given day. Turns out it's about 95 million.

Here's where the maths part happens.

So, we're burning our way through 95,000,000 barrels of crude oil, every single day. But how much crude oil is there in a barrel?

In the USA, there are 42 US gallons in a barrel of oil. Given that most figures are stated in US measures, this will do as an equivalent figure for our maths, even though the actual volume of oil in a physical barrel can vary by country.

So, how much petrol or diesel is produced from a barrel of crude oil? Well, refineries generally produce 12 gallons of diesel and 19 gallons of petrol, as they 'crack' the crude oil. That is to say, the refinery does a fractional distillation of the crude oil, and different products will 'boil' off at different temperatures. 31 out of 42 gallons in one barrel of crude oil will go to produce petrol and diesel.

95 million barrels of crude oil multiplied by 12 gallons, produces 1,140,000,000 gallons of diesel.

95 million barrels of crude oil multiplied by 19 gallons, produces 1,805,000,000 gallons of petrol.

How much carbon dioxide - CO₂ - is released when you burn a gallon of petrol or diesel? Well, for petrol that's 19.24 pounds, and for diesel that's 19.91 pounds. Therefore, petrol is clearly the more polluting fossil fuel, because even though it releases slightly less CO₂ more of it can be produced from the crude oil.

So, the amount of CO₂ being belched out each day by petrol cars and motorbikes is 34,728,200,000 pounds. Let's convert that to kilograms, because I actually prefer metric. That's 15,752,446,543 kilograms of CO₂ being emitted by petrol alone, on one day.

The amount of CO₂ coming out of the exhaust pipes of diesel trucks, taxis, busses, trains, boats and everything else that runs on diesel, such as industrial plant, comes to 22,697,400,000 pounds. Again, let's convert that to kilograms. That's 10,295,367,459 kilograms of CO₂ from diesel engines, on any given day.

Right, now let's add those two figures together.

26,047,814,002 kilograms of CO₂ being chucked out into the atmosphere by internal combustion engines, every single day.

Obviously, we don't just use our cars and trucks on one day. Let's have a look at what happens when we do this for a whole year: 365 days.

9,507,452,110,730 kilograms of CO₂ is being produced per year. Ouch! That's 9.5 billion metric tons.

For comparison, The Empire State Building weighs just 331,000 tonnes. The Hoover Dam weighs 6 million tonnes. Therefore the CO₂ emitted in a single year weighs 1,583 times more than The Hoover Dam. Damn!

But what about a really heavy thing. How much does the entire atmosphere weigh? How much does all the air that we breathe weigh? Estimates are in the region of 5 quadrillion tonnes. About 21% of the atmosphere is the oxygen we need so that we don't suffocate. So, there's about a quadrillion tonnes of oxygen trapped by gravity around our planet. However, only 0.039% of the atmosphere is CO₂ which equates to 195 trillion tonnes.

Using these numbers, you can see that petrol and diesel are increasing the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere by a small percentage each year. However, it's much, much worse than that.

I've just been talking about just the petrol and the diesel. There's also the CO₂ from all the coal, natural gas, propane, kerosene, paraffin and every other fossil fuel that gets burnt, that emits carbon dioxide. The amount of CO₂ being released each year is more than 40 billion tonnes.

There's a measure of CO₂ in the atmosphere called PPM - parts per million. Prior to the year 1750, which is considered the 'pre-industrial' baseline, the PPM count of CO₂ in the atmosphere never exceeded 300 ppm. In about 100 years, we've taken it to over 400 ppm: a rise of well over 30%. Might not sound like much, but look at what's happened to global temperatures.

I mean, just look at your goddam thermometer. Whether you're a climate skeptic or not, you're able to read the mercury, right? You can tell when it's a hot summer, even if you're not one of these 'corrupt' scientists, right?

We've just had 15 consecutive months of record-breaking temperatures. This isn't just an exceptional year, because this has been going on for years, decades... more than a century even!

"Oh well it can't be the cars then"

Wrong. Before the internal combustion engine - which was invented in 1876 - we used to have coal fired trains, coal fired steam engines and steamships, coal to heat our homes, coal to drive our steel industry and the industrialisation of the world.

You can't on one hand say that the scientists are making it up and climate change is a big hoax, and on the other say that everything's going to be OK because the scientists will come up with a way to save us. You can't enjoy the benefits of automotive transportation, global shipping and air travel, and with the same breath say that those scientists and engineers who gave you those things are a bunch of crooks who are cooking up a breathtakingly well orchestrated global conspiracy.

If you don't believe in climate change, presumably you don't believe that man can fly either, so go and live in a fucking cave and reject everything else that science has given you.

You are quite literally a public enemy if you perpetuate myths that man-made climate change isn't real. I can't believe the USA is potentially going to elect a climate change denier to be the leader of the free world. Donald Trump is actually doing work to protect one of his golf courses from rising sea levels. What reason was given for this? Climate change. The man is a lying lunatic who will take the human race to its grave.

The risk to low-lying countries, islands and coastal towns and cities is dire. If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet breaks up and melts, sea levels will rise by over 3 metres. That means I'll have to use a canoe to get to work here in London. The water will be lapping at my front door. Worse still, if you live in Bangladesh or Holland, you'll be dead.

Obviously, it's not like it's going to be a sudden tidal wave that will come and drown people, but billions will be displaced. It will be a human catastrophe on an unimaginable scale. Even if it was only a 1% chance of happening, you'd still do something about it, wouldn't you? What would you do if your carbon monoxide detector went off? Ignore it, because it might be a false alarm?

The sea rise is just one component. The other is the inhospitable temperatures for countries in the Middle East. Alright so you might not like those "sand n****rs" and "towelheads" very much. You might believe that all Muslims are terrorists. However, these are people who are going to become climate refugees. Whether you like it or not, they're going to be displaced from their homelands, which have been made uninhabitable by reckless energy consumption in the West.

You can't even live on a boat anymore: the sea is littered with shipping containers that are like icebergs you can't even see before you hit them, because they float just below the surface. The sea is a brutal place, and weather is going to get more and more extreme as the planet gets hotter. Only the very best sailors are able to survive for months offshore, and everybody needs to put into port to make repairs and re-stock supplies. In the event of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet melting, sea levels would rise by 60 metres, which would mean that the maps of the planet would need to be torn up. Every coast would be dramatically changed, and whole countries would disappear under the ocean waves.

This sounds like an unlikely doomsday scenario, but actually things can accelerate in ways that you haven't even considered. A warmer planet means warmer water. Warmer water actually takes more volume than colder water - thermal expansion - and of course warmer water can accelerate the effects of the melting of the ice caps. Additionally, with less ice on earth, less of the sun's energy is being reflected back into space, making the planet even hotter. Hot air can hold more moisture than colder air, so we will see more and more flooding and torrential rain, as much as we'll also have to contend with rising sea levels, and the expansion of inhospitably hot parts of the globe.

A sustained wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT) exceeding 35 degrees Celsius is going to be fatal, because your body can no longer cool itself through the evaporation of your sweat. You'll die of hyperthermia. Heat and humidity will be too much for the body of even fit, healthy adults to survive. This scenario had been imagined as something far off and unlikely, but because of the component that humidity plays, we are likely to see the Persian Gulf become uninhabitable in our lifetimes. Ironically, the Arab nations that pumped a lot of the oil have sowed the seeds of their own destruction.

Of course, with hotter temperatures, higher humidity is to be expected because a hotter atmosphere can hold more moisture. Again, even conservative estimates seem to show that for many parts of the planet, they will quite literally be turned into a deadly sauna.

Even if we slashed our emissions to zero, it seems likely that there's a certain amount of momentum, that means things are going to get a lot worse before they might improve. Even if we mothballed every gas-guzzling vehicle overnight, that atmospheric CO₂ is still there, as well as the temperature gains that have been made during the modern era. It's not like the planet is just going to cool down because we're not emitting CO₂ any more. The greenhouse gasses are still there, creating their greenhouse-like effect. Until we actually scrub the atmosphere, the effects can't possibly be reversed.

The fact that Donald Trump is even in the running, suggests that we have a problem right from the very top. Why are we going to change our ways, when even the man at the top is perpetuating the lie that climate change is a hoax? If he gets elected, I'd better get saving up my money for my spacesuit and a ride on a rocket, like all the smart billionaires are doing.

I sense there is a policy of "don't scare the horses". Politicians don't want a panic on their hands. There is already a refugee crisis. There is already war and conflict because climate change has caused crops to fail. There are already heat waves, flooding, hurricanes and other natural disasters that have been more numerous and worse than anything seen before in history, because of climate change. Look how woefully the Americans protected their own people during Hurricane Katrina. The wealthy elites just don't care about the lives of ordinary people.

It's tough, because until somebody at the top mandates that we all have to make drastic lifestyle changes, who's going to be the first to do it? Why should I give up my car, if you're not going to give up yours? Multiply that attitude by 7.4 billion people, and you can see where the problem is.

You've probably got this whacky idea that you're going to be OK. You've probably got this sick fantasy of all those pesky Africans being wiped out, which is what needed to happen anyway because they were having too many babies. There isn't going to be some Malthusian catastrophe that will return everything to its rightful state. If immigration is your number one concern today - "Britain is full" and "send them home" - then you're woefully ill-prepared for the billions of people who are going to be displaced by this inevitable climate catastrophe. Families aren't just going to stick around to drown and die of heat exhaustion. A certain amount will die, but there will be unimaginable numbers of people coming to Europe and America because their own countries have been destroyed by heat and flood.

Of course, I'm still youngish, healthy and single. My parents treated me like a piece of shit, so they can rot in hell for all I care. I can easily up sticks and head for the hills. I haven't got to worry about any offspring that I unwisely fathered. I can move fast & light. I guess we're still 15 or 20 years away from armageddon, but I'm likely to still be healthy.

Anyway, screw saving for your pension. As is often said, if you think wealth is more important than the climate, try holding your breath while you count your money.

Tags: #climate