This is a story about the straw that broke the camel's back...

You'd think that the closest I ever came to finishing this suicide note - and ending my life - would have been the time both my kidneys failed and an old ankle injury made it almost impossible to work. I also lost one of the best IT contracts I've ever had and became hooked on legally prescribed pain medication, which pretty much scuppered my ability to get another contract. I was running out of money fast, but struck down with physical and psychological problems - depression - I could barely function.

My girlfriend at the time was exhausted after spending weeks in hospital with me, while the survival of my kidneys was in doubt. She came to all my outpatient appointments. She helped me hobble around and get my prescriptions for my pain. Then, I dumped her. She was exhausted and she'd just been to Cornwall - Land's End - to meet her new nephew. I had a crisis while she was away and in her state of tiredness, she couldn't think straight. In the state I was in, I needed her help, but to me she didn't seem to care - that was my warped perception, at least. I immediately broke up with her, because what seemed like life or death to me didn't seem to matter to her due to compassion fatigue and physical tiredness. To my messed up mind it seemed as if she didn't care about me, when I desperately needed her help.

Having no girlfriend, no job, no money, bad health and a ridiculously expensive riverside apartment to keep up the rent & bills payments on, losing a loan that had been promised to me by my girlfriend, further compounded a dreadful situation.

I sold a lot of my most precious things, even though I knew that the money would barely cover a month's rent. Being a high earner, most welfare benefits were inaccesible to me and to have a black mark on my credit score would preclude me from ever working in banking again.

I became hopeless, resigned to a fate of eviction, bailiffs, debt collection agencies and destitution. The best option was to spend 28 days in hospital, said my psychiatrist - at least I would be safer there.

My trigger finger was itchy, but I knew that if I could beg a sofa or spare bed to sleep on, I would at least avoid another period of homelessness. One of my Twitter followers offered her spare bedroom and things briefly looked up, but then she changed her mind. One old friend offered to put me up in a bed & breakfast for 2 weeks, which would have been welcome respite. An old schoolfriend said if I was desperate I could couch-surf in his 1-bedroom apartment, where he has a 4-year-old daughter. Three offers, which gave me a momentary boost, but at the same time, it's somewhat depressing that of all the people I know on Facebook and Twitter who have generously proportioned houses, nobody else even offered to let me pitch my tent in their back garden... my experience of dealing with the local council and government benefits system means that you're just plain wrong if you think all those taxes you pay mean you won't end up sleeping rough, if life doesn't treat you well.

I always had a plan - 336 tramadol tablets - that would virtually assure me a swift and painless death, but I always felt a few steps removed from actually following through with it.

I'm so exhausted and unwell at the moment, in a stressful (but rewarding) job that it took hardly anything to push me over the edge to the most suicidal I've ever been. Losing my new local girlfriend and the accompanying social group, would be too much to bear, when I haven't the energy to grieve the loss and to pick myself up again.

There was no doubt in my mind about what the plan was. I could visualise the steps. It took every ounce of effort and willpower to overcome the urge to simply empty the 336 capsules into a small glass, add some other opiates that would cause respiratory arrest, and them simply get drunk until I passed out... probably less than 60 minutes, and I'd have departed from this world.

It might seem rash; an overreaction, but the rollercoaster ride I've been on has left me without a single percent of spare capacity. Even something minorly inconvenient or unexpectedly going wrong, can cause a seemingly disproportionate reaction.

I wasn't scared. I wasn't hesitant. It would have been done, and that would have been that. Call it a strength if you like - I can take bold fearless actions, even if they would certainly cause my life to be ended.

The scary thing is just how quickly I would have acted, having started the process. Less than an hour, to be a cold white corpse with purple lips and rigor mortis setting in. "Will I feel differently in an hour?" I asked myself, hypothetically supposing that I delay my deadly potion in order to see if my mood changed.

Luckily, I acted positively and pursued a more favourable resolution to what was almost certainly going to be a breakup. She said she wasn't going to pick up the phone or reply to my messages, which would perversely have only accelerated the commencement of my death ritual.

While it looks like a sudden thing to do over a very trivial trigger, things have to be seen in the wider context. I know how depressed and lonely I was before I met this girl and her friends. I know that the effort involved in courting her almost cost me my sanity, stability and job. I know how hard things have been at times during the umpteen years I've been diagnosed with clinical depression. At some point, you're so sick of a miserable life, that you'll gladly welcome the end of the suffering.

I felt a little bad about leaving the project I was working on unfinished, but I'd done the hardest bits, so most of it that was left to do was copy & paste.

I didn't feel any sadness or guilt, for depriving friends and family of the living version of me. Less than 1% of the people I'm in contact with, offered any kind of assistance when I was in a crisis. Basically, I mean fuck all to anybody, no matter what they say.

I'm sleep deprived and my brain chemistry just isn't right at the moment, but still, I know when it's time to go - you get sick of all the bullshit of living, Being alive is over-rated. It's been mostly suffering for me (boo hoo! get the violins out).

So, that was the time I nearly killed myself, deliberately... a close shave.

Tags: #suicide #depression

This is a story about inconvenience...

Being an independent man is not all it's cracked up to be. The trash that is strewn throughout my apartment is there to greet me when I get home, exactly where I left it all. Despite my best efforts to streamline my life and create an efficient existence, the daily demands of basic living outpace my ability to stay ahead.

Upon my coffee table are empty beer and cider cans, a used fork, mug and wine glass, half a pint of lime cordial, €50, a cigarette lighter and two candles, baby wipes, two rechargeable batteries, a rubber band, the plastic wrapper from a piece of cheese, a red ribbon and a roll of kitchen towel.

On the floor lies the plastic that held a 4-pack of cans together; the cans having since been separated from each other; no doubt their contents now consumed.

This is - in the English vernacular - my 'living' room. If I was going to do any withdrawing it would be to my bedroom, not my drawing room. I am not lucky enough to be blessed with a drawing room. My minuscule city centre apartment only has one reception room, which must double as both a place to sit and a place to eat - a 'lounge-diner' in the parlance of an estate agent (also known as a realtor, for my North American readers).

As well as clearing away the trash and doing my recycling, I also have the glamorous job of putting away my dried laundry. As you can see, my kitchen is not capacious enough to accomodate my trashcan, recycling AND leave me able to open the door to access my washer/dryer. Everything serves at least a dual purpose in this microcosm.

Gone is the luxury of the Nick Grant patent Floordrobe™ which allowed me to dump clean clothes into a number of boxes in a pseudorandom manner. Underpants and socks would be slowly sorted towards the rightmost boxes. Jeans and hoodies would be slowly sorted leftwards. Other garments would find themselves in whichever box they could fit in. Getting dressed would be a kind of rummaging exercise.

Now, I must carefully pair my socks and put my undergarments away in one of the three drawers that I store my clothing, bedding and towels within.

My life is pretty much indistinguishable from that of a successful multimillionaire pop star, as you can see.

Somebody has not been following the Operating Procedure Manual correctly. Used orange juice cartons should be discarded, as the waxed paper is not recyclable. The beer can should be in the recycling bin, ready to be emptied into the communal store. The plate and other cutlery should go into the sink, in the absence of any other space in which to temporarily queue these used implements, in preparation to be washed by hand.

The backlog of washing up is slowly accumulating. In order to fill this sink with hot soapy water, it may become necessary to remove the dirty items beforehand. I admit, this is an inefficiency, but I have not yet managed to find a convenient gathering place for the things that I will need to clean at some future time.

Living alone, I feel slightly better that I don't have to fill my dishwasher before I run it, in order to make energy-efficient usage of the household appliance. It's no hardship to wash a few plates, glasses, cutlery and utensils, but a dishwasher serves as a place to neatly stack the dirty dishes while one waits for the critical mass to be reached to justify the electricity, water and detergent that will be used.

I'm pleased that my refrigerator is not overbrimming with things that I am unlikely to consume before they are rendered inedible through mould and bacteria. It might be a sad sight, to see a fridge that belies such a pitiful existence, but at least there is nothing rotting or smelling bad in here.

If there appears to be a system, you are mistaken. By accident, all the alcohol has been concentrated on the top shelf, while the door contains the milk and orange juice as one might expect. However, the discrepancy between the position of the ketchup and the mayonaise shows that this is perhaps the most randomised of all areas which might be covered under my Operating Procedure Manual.

Now, we may look upon the systematic and rigorous thinking of an engineer and marvel. Upon the top shelf is bicarbonate of soda, which is useful for baking as well as making crack cocaine. The middle shelf is where my favourite crisps and biscuits are stored. The bottom shelf contains freeze-dried meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner - oats, pasta and noodles - which can be prepared with the simple addition of boiling water and only require stirring once or twice, to prepare a modest quantity of food within just 5 minutes.

Although the food in this larder has extremely high salt and carbohydrate content, there are actually some nutrients contained in these convenient packages.

I prefer to look to my fridge for a meal which can be microwaved, containing a mixture of meat and vegetables. The 'ready meals for one person' that I purchase - two for £5 - are the mainstay of my evening diet, excepting alcohol and crisps. I am supposed to consume 2,500 calories on a daily basis, as an average adult man - my breakfast starts healthily with orange juice, strawberry compote, a banana and porridge; my lunch marks the beginning of a downward spiral, as I devour a heated buttery flakey pastry with rich meaty filling; my dinner is largely a liquid diet of either beer or wine - I'm not fussy as long as alcohol makes up the bulk of the remaining calories that are the source of my sustenance. I imagine that I am consuming more calories than I need, given that my flat stomach now lurks somewhere beneath a modest covering of fat.

With my belly now full of wine and cottage pie - eaten directly from the plastic container in which I microwaved it - I eagerly anticipate spending the remainder of my waking hours restoring my tiny oasis of calm to a state of good order. Actually, I'm being sarcastic as fuck. I'm appalled by the idea that I now have to make several trips to the trashcan and recycling box, put away my clean laundry, wash my dishes and clean down the surfaces.

The more astute reader will have picked up on references to objects that seem out of character with a life of singledom. What, pray tell, would I be doing with a red ribbon and candles? On closer inspection of photographs, one can see strange objects like a hairbrush which looks like a penguin, were it to be turned over. It's not uncommon for hair straighteners, hairdryers, women's shoes and handbags, as well as other feminine accessories, to be seemingly randomly distributed throughout my apartment. In the course of courtship, visits seem to bring a shower of objects that would have no place or purpose in my normal day-to-day existence.

What should I do with the talcum powder on my dining table and hairbrush that I found buried deep in my couch?

My own life is barely manageable. I'm upset that I haven't found the time, energy or space to write for over a week. Some of my most beloved friends in the Twittersphere have written to me with concern that I have disappeared, fearful that perhaps I have relapsed and disappeared into some kind of institution, or perished.

When I set out to write a blog two years ago, I said to myself that I would try to write every single day; to be disciplined and give my life some purpose, even if I didn't understand what that purpose was at the time.

Now, as I slowly approach the million word mark, I'm pleased that I have written so much and so regularly, but the thing that I always wanted to avoid - mundane writing about my day-to-day life - has imposed itself upon me to such a great extent that I share with you, my beloved reader, the intimate details of a somewhat lonely and desperate existence. Of course, my blog charts the ups and downs of bipolar disorder, substance abuse and functional alcoholism, along with the journey from homelessness to somewhat more stable living arrangements.

The most perceptive amongst you will have detected the subtle undertones of a cry for help. How is it that a grown man can collapse under the trivial weight of some unopened mail and the other detritus of daily life? I don't know, but I can tell you with certainty that the effect on my sense of wellbeing is nontrivial, when I arrive home to an apartment in some state of minor disarray.

I'm happier than when my life was unencumbered by dating and women - as well as meeting new friends - but I'm also disproportionately freaked out by my delicate system being disturbed by tiny things that have seismic impact, psychologically. Is this hyperbole? Yes, it seems like it when I have tackled the list of easy tasks to put things back in good order. But my priorities are somewhat perverse: work, sleep, eat... and write. To say that the domestic duties are beneath me is wrong. I clean as I go. I tidy, wash and organise as an integral part of my movements. The left hand washes the right.

The minimalism with which I live my life - everything I own that's important to me fits in one large suitcase - is encroached upon by other lives which are messy and hard to integrate with my own systemic approach. Why would you leave that THERE? I wonder to myself, attempting to reverse-engineer the thought processes that probably don't exist.

A place for everything and everything in its place.

Tags: #dating

This is a story about trying too hard...

"You've got to meet my friend..." she enthuses. "Can [my friend] stay at your place on Saturday?" she asks, well in advance of the weekend. "You two were separated at birth - you share the same spirit animal" she tells me. The pressure to get along with this new person - talked about in reverential terms - is immense.

She's planning a meal out. At the restaurant, I'm told that I'm going to be sat specifically next to this over-hyped friend, because it's assumed that we are going to get along like a house on fire. That's an arson joke, but we'll get to that later.

Friday - the night of the meal - all my new friends-to-be had signed a card to welcome me into their lives. There was a helium balloon on the table, like at a 5-year-old's birthday party. Nobody ever went to such elaborate lengths to make me feel a sense of belonging; acceptance. I was almost moved to tears, but I had a job to do that night: to meet & greet and make a good first impression.

We were eating dinner - Brazilian barbecue meats - and my 'spirit animal' was sat in the corner of our booth, not eating. It was announced - against her wishes - that she had been on a 4-day drug binge, taking what is colloquially known as "meow meow". Unsurprisingly, an exclusive diet of powerful stimulant drugs does not give you an appetite for anything of nutritional value. Sitting in a restaurant is probably the last place on earth I'd ever want to be after a binge like that. I decided to temporarily park any "getting to know you" chit-chat with her until a time that my spirit animal was in a better place, physically & mentally.

After dinner, the group began to fracture. There were some who wanted to go to a packed noisy pub selling lousy overpriced drinks, and others who preferred to come back to my nearby apartment, where we could all have a comfortable seat on my big couches, and converse without having to shout - a bona fide middle-class thirty-something cliché: the house party.

One reason for the success of the house party is that it's a far better environment for the consumption of recreational drugs. I'm not foresworn from drug use, but to me, addiction is not a social activity. My general personality and attitude - no fear & everything to excess - had led me to drug overdoses of supercrack that put me in hospital with multiple organ failure. My drug taking was not recreational - it was abusive, reckless and akin to playing Russian roulette with a 6-bullet revolver loaded with 5 bullets.

If you have successfully made yourself a comfortable wealthy middle-class life, it's your mortgage repayments and other household bills that keep you awake all night, not powerful Class-A narcotics. To lose just one night of sleep and have the mentally destabilising effects of recreational drugs, has a profoundly negative effect on the week that follows. I never noticed that my weekend partying had a negative knock-on effect on me when I was young, but now my age has now become a factor.

One of my new friends - who's the same age as me - did the sensible thing and headed home at a reasonable hour. He had his sister's wedding on the Saturday and he appointed me as the responsible adult, in charge of putting the girl who was going to drive him to the wedding, into a cab, in time for her to then drive a gazillion miles across the country. "How are you going to stay awake and concentrate on the road after partying all night?" I asked her. "Amphetamines" was her answer. I can't fault her logic - if it works for fighter pilots, then why wouldn't it work for an ordinary car driver.

Fighter pilots have "go pills" and "no-go pills" which are taken respectively at the beginning and end of a mission. I offered to make her one of my special "no-go" preparations, so that she wasn't wired as hell at the wedding and clearly off her nut on speed, but she declined.

At the first ever party I've thrown in my new apartment, it was snowing. When the "good stuff" started to run out, Billy Whizz came out for a run. The white dusting on a makeup mirror started to become a hybrid mix of different substances. Molly came for a visit too.

Predictably, like any party that Charles is invited to, the whole room was talking over the top of each other and making boastful claims. For some reason, my reaction to this was to admit that I'm a grower not a show-er. This prompted one of the guys to claim that he was both a grower AND a show-er. Having been dared to get my dick out and show him I duly obliged in front of my guests. This guy then took me in the kitchen to prove one part of his aforementioned claim: he did have a substantially proportioned soft penis.

I then asked the room for their opinion on a classic ethical philosophical dilemma thought experiment, knowing that it would provoke lively and entertaining debate. Soon, this prompted a couple to leave the party, almost without saying goodbye because they were still arguing about the 'right' answer to a question that divides legal, moral and scientific opinion. "Bullseye" I thought to myself.

With Charles still having a strong influence on the room, oneupmanship raged out of control. We ended up comparing scars. While the girls were not exactly thrilled to show off any evidence of self-harm, me and the guy with the big [soft] dick debated who had the better scar from an operation. This segued into "who's spent more weeks in hospital?" as I steered the competition towards "who's the most insane?" knowing that I would easily be the undisputed champion.

At this point I was getting a bit bored with the war of words, so I just rolled up my sleeve and slashed 3 or 4 cuts into my arm with a kitchen knife. I then became immediately aware that I was so desperate to impress my new friends that I had just mutilated my body in a sudden act of self-harm.

With the theme returning to dares again, my 'spirit animal' dared me to suck my own penis. I explained that without an erection, it would be a difficult act to fulfil, but in the spirit of the dare, I asked if she would be content to see me lick my own foreskin. She confirmed that it would satisfy the conditions of the dare. Without hesitation, I dropped my trousers and got my soft penis as close to my mouth as I could, and then pulled my foreskin until I could touch it with my tongue - it was actually easier than I thought it would be. Obviously, there are not that many people - especially growers not show-ers - who would drop their trousers and suck their own dick for the amusement of their guests. This was a far more impressive feat of courage than cutting my arm with a kitchen knife.

After that, the number of crazy anecdotes that I could tell were stories that all revolved around a similar theme: being hospitalised or locked up in police cells. The stories that drug addicts tell are not that varied or interesting.

I decided to demonstrate my culinary skills in the kitchen. With an unspecified secret ingredient - some of the snow that was falling earlier in the evening - I gave a practical demonstration of a chemistry experiment. Namely the conversion of a salt to a "free base" where water, carbon dioxide and sodium chloride are isolated as 'useless' byproducts. This chemical reaction allows a salt with a high melting point - which would combust in the presence of a naked flame - to be altered into a crystal with a low melting point, allowing it to be vaporised without burning.

With sodium bicarbonate mixed with the mystery ingredient, in a spoon, a few droplets of water were added. The carbon dioxide fizzed away in a delightful effervescent chemical reaction. A few pinches of sodium bicarb later and we reached the point where the fizzing stopped. Then, I heated the spoon and boiled away the salty water, leaving only the "free base" crystals.

What would you do with this crystalline substance, one might ask?

Well, first, you need to take an empty beer or soda can and make an indentation at the opposite end from the bit you drink out of. Then, perforating the thin aluminium of the can with a pin, you can create an area where air may enter the can, when you to suck on the end you'd normally drink out of. Another option - if you can find such an object - is to take a hollow glass tube and put wire wool (Brillo pads work well for this) into one end.

Having allegedly made this concoction and strange contraption - which was all part of me showing off what a badass I am - I had allegedly demonstrated how to make crack cocaine and a pipe to smoke it. There couldn't have been a more "fuck you - I'm fucking hardcore" demonstration of how 'streetwise' I am, unless I'd whipped out some rubber tubing, a thin aluminium spoon, clean pins (hypodermic syringes), a small ball of cotton wool and proceeded to 'cook' a batch of heroin and prepare it for injection. I've never injected heroin by the way, although I did have fentanyl - which is 1,000 times more powerful - injected into me in hospital. Most people are afraid of needles and associate needle use with people whose drug addiction has led them to a completely dysfunctional life that consists of a miserable merry-go-round of theft/robbery/prostitution, 'fencing' stolen property, scoring herion and then getting high until there's no drugs left and there's only 4 hours until you get "junk sick" and have to repeat the whole exercise again.

Before I put the last of my party guests into a taxi - my friend who was driving to the wedding - at about 6:30am, three of us insufflated a few final lines of white powder, allegedly.

My spirit animal had a nice time until the drugs started to wear off, and then cognitive impairment, a drug-induced panic attack and akathisia (inability to stop twitching/tic'ing and/or jiggling of legs) left her in a rather sorry state where it was pretty clear that she was suffering from an unpleasant ordeal. I tried laughing at her. I tried telling her to stop being such a wuss, given the relatively 'mild' binge that she'd been on - just 4 or 5 sleepless nights, and relatively low doses of very impure drugs. In the end, I took pity on her and made her a little shot glass with things to cure her anxiety, replace lost dopamine and serotonin, and basically put her to sleep - there's no 'magic bullet' for insomnia and sleep deprivation, but sleeping pills damn well help. I threw all manner of things into my special 'comedown cure' that would ease her suffering. She was talking gibberish; she couldn't understand what I was saying, and I had to spend 20 minutes trying to maintain her concentration and eye contact for long enough that she could swallow what I'd prepared for her. Then, finally she fell asleep with a look of calm on her face. I don't mind babysitting the occasional person who's going through the consequences of 'self-inflicted' shit, but it would have been inhumane to let her suffer unnecessarily.

Saturday night, I made her another concoction that would prevent "the Sunday from Hell" where the consequences of an outrageous drug binge were brought into sharp focus by the need to start work again on Monday. "I want to order a pizza" she announced at about 11:30pm, having swallowed the curative remedy only 10 minutes earlier. "You have 10 minutes to get into bed, otherwise you're going to pass out on the floor" I warned her. My earlier good work had moved her out of binge mode and into a state where her appetite had returned, but 8 more hours of quality sleep was vital for both of us. The die was cast.

10 minutes later, I pulled her mobile phone out of her hand - the pizza company's number half-dialled - picked her up from the floor where she had collapsed in a most unladylike position, and carried her to bed. I was so tired that I could barely see straight to send a couple of texts before I passed out too.

After 9 hours sleep, we both awoke feeling pretty damn refreshed, considering the way we'd abused our bodies. I'd improved her average daily sleep time for the week, from 2.5 hours to 5.3 - more than 100% better. Ideally, we would all have perfect sleep hygiene and get 8 hours a night. I needed to end her drug binge, save her from many hours of unnecessary suffering and let her catch up on desperately needed sleep. I was giving her a fighting chance of not losing her job, thus spiralling even further downwards. This is about the best you can ever hope to do for an addict until they're ready to acknowledge that their addiction is rampaging out of control. Addiction always leads to complete & indiscriminate destruction of your entire life, health and will prematurely kill you.

I incurred the wrath of my 'spirit animal's' best friend for not condemning her addictive behaviour. Do I have the moral authority to lecture anyone on their lifestyle? I know better than anybody else I've ever met, how you can go from riches to rags. Supercrack was the paving stones of the road to Hell - hospitals, police cells, hostels and sleeping rough. I overcame my addiction to one of the most powerful drugs on the planet, as well as dealing with the total destruction of my life - divorcing my wife, selling my house, losing my job. So it would seem that if anybody's got an opinion that's worth respecting, it'd be mine. However, humans' relationship with drugs & alcohol is way more complex than "this is bad for me so I'm going to stop"... otherwise nobody would take drugs, get drunk, smoke cigarettes, drink coffee or energy drinks.

We live in a world where we try to find somebody with anatomically opposite genitals to us, squirt some love snot into them, and then spend the next 18+ years looking after our blood and mucous covered alien-like midget progeny, that was painfully ejected from the girl's sex hole. Human behaviour does not follow purely rational rules.

Human use of intoxicating beverages and preparations of plants that contain bitter alkaloids - with the intention of seeking psychoactive effects - is behaviour that's almost as old as cave painting, making fire and sharpening pieces of flint to make spears.

My kidneys are over 50% recovered from my last hospital visit. The facial tic that was caused - quite literally - by brain damage, has now repaired itself. The people and places that are no longer in my life because of supercrack addiction, have been replaced by a new city, new home, new job and new friends. Yes, it could've been worse, but believe me... nobody needs or wants to be told the bleedin' obvious. If it was just a case of saying "fire is hot and will burn you" and "knives are sharp and will cut you" then we'd see a 100% reduction in those injuries, by the bullshit logic that we need to nag and shame addicts into fixing their dirty little habits.

Often an addict is conveniently labelled as a black sheep, and becomes entertainment for the group that surrounds them. Lots of concerned hand-wringing and "we need to do something" empty talk goes on, but all that really happens is that the addict becomes a pariah, with nobody nonjudgemental left to turn to - it's the loneliest thing... lonelier even than being a homeless person injecting heroin under a bridge. Trust me: to spend time in the company of addicts and alcoholics who make no secret of their loss of control and the destruction of their lives, is to gain a nonjudgemental social support network that can make the difference between life & death. Fuck any condescending prick who thinks they're a moral authority who can sit in judgement and save you from yourself. Even with my stories of drug-induced insanity, hospitals, police cells and psych wards being by the far the most extreme you've ever heard, I can't tell an addict or alcoholic what to do with their life.

To hear the same hectoring, lecturing bollocks from people who [do or don't] know what it's like to realise you've overdosed and you've got 30 seconds to dial 999, or just let yourself die... it's not working, is it? I don't know if you've seen the stats, but only Portugal is winning "the war on drugs" and the way they're doing that is to destigmatise and decriminalise drugs, despite immense pressure from the United States to stop saving lives and improving the wellbeing of the Portuguese people.

So, that was the weekend that was full of drug-fuelled insanity that would supposedly trigger me to relapse back onto supercrack. Bullshit.

Tags: #addiction #friends #drugs

This is a story about convenience...

I emerge from my apartment building, take a right turn and walk down a street I've never walked down before, in a city I've never visited before. I reach a T-junction and I look left and right. Which way will lead me to what I want: somewhere to buy a roll of toilet tissue? I turn right again and when I reach the end of another unfamiliar road, I see a shop which is open until late at night. My instincts have guided me swiftly and directly to the nearest supplier of nearly everything that a man could need.

As I step inside this branch of a well-known chain of miniature supermarkets, the first thing I see is a range of 5 different flavours of noodles. To the plastic containers, one merely needs to add boiling water, producing something that tastes and smells like a small meal in around 5 minutes.

I had already eaten half a Chinese take-out, when I realised to my horror that in my haste to make way for home and satiate my hunger, I had forgotten to procure anything to drink - to wash down my food - or to deal with any digested remains.

I dismiss the dishes that can be prepared with very little cookery, and continue to peruse the shelves. I almost forget the reason why I left the house, when the next thing that catches my eye is a fridge full of cold beer. It was only an hour or so ago that I switched my fridge on - it had been switched off and left empty, while my apartment was unoccupied.

Now with a basket containing 100% alcoholic beverages, I find some concentrated juice drink to balance out my diet. Then, I force myself to get the one thing I left home to come out to buy, before I forget... distracted by dizzying array of choices, colours, prices and imagined tastes, as I browse the different foods on offer.

Making my way to the cashier to pay, I realise I have nothing but shampoo and shower gel - no soap for my hands and no detergent for the cups, plates and cutlery that I'm going to make dirty. I return to the shelves which I already visited, and drop more things into my shopping basket.

Emerging onto the darkening streets with plastic bags in hand, I curse as I remember that I will have to go out again to purchase my next meal. Forward planning, I am not.

I grumble with frustration as the part of my fridge designed to hold milk and orange juice will not immediately accept the alcoholic beverages in their boxed container - the first thing that I put into my fridge; my priorities are clear. I have no milk and I have no orange juice... I can buy those in the morning.

I realised I can never be a bachelor again, because I've been married and divorced. I recalled a time when I owned a house and cooked a 5-course meal with canapés, dining with the girl I had yet to marry, along with another couple. It was a suburban cliché that could have been lifted straight from the 1970s - domestic bliss.

If the operating lever of my life had been on the "suck" setting up until a certain point, it got flipped to "blow" and the contents of the vacuum cleaner bag were ejaculated back out. In a few short years, everything that had taken decades to grow and build was a dusty unrecognisable mess. Like belly button fluff - which is always blue - the colourful fabric of existence ends up as homogenous greyish crap that you toss into the trash can.

Anybody brave enough to pick through the remnants of what has been chewed through the machine may find recognisable things, but most people are repelled by something that they associate with dirtiness - I'm somehow unclean; untouchable.

I make a bet with a boy about the date of Kurt Cobain's suicide. I win a pint. The boy wasn't even alive on that day. There's something timeless in this moment where we compare notes from the past: both of us having lived in a school boarding house. How is this possible? How is it that I'm heading backwards, while this boy is heading forwards? On the day he was born, I went to my very first all-weekend music festival, yet our lives criss-cross and the dates are irrelevant. His face fell as I got an Apple Macbook out of my backpack, and I knew he'd lost another bet, having expected me to be a corporate man in a grey suit. I was that corporate man in a grey suit, but wasn't I supposed to just get older and then die?

I write and I mix the tenses; I jumble up the sequence of events. Who knows which way the arrow of time points and if time flows linearly? Does my story make more sense if I tell it backwards? The way that our memories work dictates the convention of telling stories in the past tense, but humanity does not dictate the laws of the universe... most of us subscribe to a worldview that is conveniently bitesize, but not at all correct.

I've flown through the turbulence of existence, experiencing ripples in the fabric of spacetime - like unseen variations in the density of air, which cause an aeroplane to suddenly drop and spill the passengers' drinks.

Today has been the most stressful day of my life. I woke up shaking, as if I was shivering with cold.

Despite the vast amount of things I've experienced and can remember, all I can really tell you for certain is that I've survived until today, which is a minor miracle. It sounds incredibly egocentric - the universe, after all, does not exist for my benefit - but to all intents and purposes, the sum total of all available sensory inputs that my brain has gathered in thirty-something years, has shown me precisely the opposite, despite my most diligent investigations into the underpinnings of our scientific understanding of the world around us.

I now need to stop pulling on that loose thread, because the wooly jumper of my mind has unravelled completely and now I'm gathering it back up into a messy spool.

I collapse into a bed I've never slept in, with brand new bedding.

I'm exhausted, of course.

Tags: #career #physics

This is a story about an addiction to adrenalin...

See that red circle? That's where I've lived for the last 2 years. Only two or three times a year, the combination of wind speed, wind direction, and a low tide will all co-incide, creating perfect conditions to be able to kitesurf at my local 'beach'. That's me, launching my friend's kite at the edge of the water.

The water is slightly brackish, but at low tide it's mostly full of really really nasty stuff that will give you an ear infection, eye infection, gastroenteritis or other medical complaint due to contact with and ingestion of faecal coliforms.

I was on holiday on a North African desert island, with a beautiful sandy beach and warm water, one week after I excitedly told my friend that the conditions were perfect for him to achieve a lifelong ambition of kitesurfing in the middle of our capital city... far, far away from the sea. Is it any wonder that I didn't want to spend a week puking my guts up and taking antibiotics?

Just to prove I'm not pulling your leg, above is a picture of my mate dodging his way in-between boats, as he crossed the river on his tiny kiteboard. He even did a trick because he knew that a bunch of shocked onlookers were videoing him - ever the showman, but who can blame him?

If you don't believe me about dodging between boats, have a look at the kind of vessel that cruises down the river, that I can see from my living room.

Yeah, that's the same river and yes that's my lounge and balcony. That's the same view that I have taken hundreds of photos of, all from that same vantage point. Yes, that's a frigging cruise liner sailing right past my apartment, which is every bit as surreal as you'd think it would be.

Also, if you thought I was making pathetic excuses about why I didn't want to go into the dirty brown water, then check out this next photo, taken a week or so later.

Yeah, that's me in the shades, looking all pasty white because I don't get to leave the house much these days. Just look at the beautiful aquamarine colour of that water. There was no need for a wetsuit - the water was as warm as bathwater. Why would I want to swim in raw sewerage when I had this week of kitesurfing heaven to look forward to?

I will my miss riverside life, but I've paid a king's ransom to experience it, and I've also had a queue of lazy liars, who've wanted to take advantage of me and my industriousness & ingenuity. It's been hard work to make these kind of iconic and memorable life experiences possible. It might sound boastful, but is there anything wrong with reaching a point where you can look backwards and say - without a shadow of a doubt - that you've lived your life to the fullest possible extent.

There used to be a time when the future couldn't come soon enough. I wished away today on tomorrow's dreams and ambitions. Then, I lost my virginity, learned to drive a car, got my first full-time job, bought a house, married a girl... one by one, I ticked all the things off the list.

How rich and 'successful' do you want to be? I've owned both a yacht and a speedboat. I've stayed in fancy hotels and had luxury holidays. I've eaten in the best restaurants, had the most gourmet food and drunk the finest wines. If you continue in relentless pursuit of the glitz and the glamour that you see in films and on TV, then you'll never be happy and content. No matter how many digits you have in your salary or net worth, it'll never be enough. Do you want to earn a million? Why not a billion? Do you want to be the first trillionaire? Why not a quadrillionaire?

If you were cursed with even a handful of braincells, I hope you'd quickly figure out - like I did - that things like experiences and friendship have an intangible value that can't be measured in dollars, pounds, euros, yen, rupees or even shiny gemstones and lumps of rare metals. You can't eat diamonds, although I must say I haven't tried. I have had a drink that contained actual gold, floating around and getting stuck in my teeth, like shiny bits of food, but even if I drank loads of that stuff, all I'd end up doing would be quite literally flushing money down the toilet - gold cannot be metabolised.

So, it's with a heavy heart that I leave my riverside home tomorrow, but it's not been the best place I've ever lived. The best place I've ever lived co-incided with when I had the most friends who I saw on a regular basis. More friends = more happiness. In some ways, my apartment block has had the stench of misery about it - full of rich old men with nothing to look forward to in life except a swift and painless death.

Maybe that's all there is for me in the future: frustration, disappointment, age-related illness, pain, discomfort, suffering and then death. However, I've got a few years before I'm 40 (technically) and I haven't passed on my genes to any unfortunate offspring yet. I'm still a hopeless romantic who believes in true love and holds out hope of meeting a special somebody to spend the rest of my life with; to grow old and grey with.

There's a moral question about whether it's right to drag an individual kicking and screaming literally into existence, as a shitting, puking, pissing, blood and amniotic fluid covered hopelessly helpless baby version of a fully-grown human being. There's another moral question about whether it's right to do so, when you can see that climate change and Donald Trump have our planet on collision-course with disaster. There's a personal moral question, about whether it's right to take the risk that I might pass on bad genes, or act as selfishly and irresponsibly as my parents did - to inflict as much misery on an innocent child who has no choice in matters which so deeply affect their quality of life.

I'm so desperate not to be like my dad, that there's an easy way to guarantee that never happens: to never have children of my own. However, can I say that I really experienced every possible thing that it's possible for a human to do, unless I sire and rear my own genetic offspring? It's a gut-wrenching decision. I'm more risk-averse than you might think, given the number of times I've risked my own life, but it's quite another question entirely when you're talking about the miserable childhood of some poor kid.

In leaving the capital city, I leave behind a huge pool of highly educated, highly intelligent and devastatingly beautiful women of my age, who decided to have put career first and placed motherhood on hold. Now they're all shitting themselves about the sun setting on their fertility, and make bloody brilliant girlfriends, to be honest. Prior to my my thirties, my experiences of the opposite sex had rather made me wish I was homosexual.

Talking of sunsets, this is the last photograph I'll ever take from this balcony, in all likelihood. I literally just rushed out and snapped this photo in-between writing the last sentence and this one. This is goodbye. There will be no time for anything more tomorrow, as I throw the few remaining unpacked items into my luggage and head off to start my brand new life: a fresh start; a new beginning.

You could have walked in on any chapter of my life and felt anything from pity to envy; from disgust to sympathy; from protective instincts to the desire to join a long queue of people who'd like to cause me distress and misery. If you think I've lost my sense of perspective, you're wrong; you've leapt to the wrong conclusions and too hastily. There are two years of my life captured here, on the pages of this blog. I invite you to dip in at random and judge me based on the extreme ups and downs that you can read about... everything I've been through.

Of course, I view myself as no different from anybody else. We all get hungry, we all get thirsty and most of us want to get laid. Beyond that, of course I view pure blind chance - luck and probability - as the only over-arching thing that's led me down one path, while you down another. Our places could easily have been the other way around, in another life; another universe.

So, dear reader, I will write to you again, after I've arrived at a destination that is completely alien to me.

Wish me the best.

Tags: #london #kitesurfing

This is a story about human waste...

Here is a pictorial representation of my life in London.

Starting on the left, are socks that I purchased in a supermarket after being discharged from hospital. I was homeless and living in a hotel room paid for by the NHS, because I had only just recovered from a failed suicide attempt but the hospital needed their bed back.

Next is the spotty sock. This sock was bought when I had been homeless and nearly died a few more times, but then got myself back on my feet (sic.) - I was working again. I had just enough money left to be able to get a new suit, which was very understated and plain, so these socks were my act of rebelion - thumbing my nose at the grim reaper and saying "Ha! I cheated death and destitution".

Then comes the stripey sock. This sock was bought when I was living out of a hotel room again. I'd run away to Ireland when my life had fallen apart, and the loving family of a friend I'd met in a hostel, pieced me back together again and sent me home to the UK a new man. I had no money anymore, so I was living on business expenses, out of a suitcase and back in a hotel. This sock represents the insecurity of the time - I needed to keep my big mouth shut and not be so loud until I had money again. This sock represents a tiny bit of humility, but still some resistance to playing by the rules.

Finally comes the Burgundy sock. This sock was bought when I finally remembered how to fit in and conform; to take perverse pleasure in spending an entire week at work, blending in to my surroundings and being completely unnoticed. That's what big corporations want - they want you to fit in or fuck off. This sock represents complete capitulation. I needed the money: I had rent to pay, friends to pay back, pay bills and I had depleted my savings. My back was against the wall again, so this time I didn't push my luck. I was the corporate chameleon.

Each of these socks has lost its partner and will be discarded. I can't anticipate a time when I would be so desperate for some kind of foot covering, that I would be reduced to wearing odd socks, which would so blatantly not be a premeditated fashion decision. People would judge me as having 'problems' if I was seen wearing any combination of these lone socks.

Here is the entirety of my wardrobe, for at least 3 months; maybe even a year. Who knows? A pair of jeans will last for 3 or 4 years. I wear my clothes until they're just rags. I was feeling stressed and anxious about transporting everything I need in my life, across the country, but now I've seen a huge pile of clothes fit into this suitcase I feel tiny and insignificant. Isn't my life so small, that you could snuff it out and nobody would even notice? I could disappear and hardly leave a trace.

Of course, I've been aggressively selling, recycling, giving away or throwing away anything I never use or wear. Like Occam and his razor, I have been shaving away parts of my life, little by little, until all that's left is the very bare minimum. Minimum Viable Person (MVP) - that's me.

I feel guilty, of course, that my ecological footprint (sic.) is still so big, as I dispose of enormous amounts of mass-produced crap, and it will probably end up in landfill. Clothes, particularly, are manufactured so unbelievably cheaply, and imported so vastly that the per capita amount of clothing is enough to allow our entire nation to cease doing any washing and just buy new clothes when the old ones get dirty. We're living in the age of disposable fashion. I don't even know why I'm taking a huge suitcase of clothes on such a long journey, when I could buy a similar size bagful of Primark garments, for the same price as the luggage, which I bought to transport my much more expensive, higher quality wardrobe.

I'm absolutely on the ragged edge of how much stress I can stand, having never set foot in the city I'm about to travel hundreds of miles to, or the apartment where I am to spend at least the next few months. I've had nearly 2 years where, despite everything, I've had at least one stable constant: my apartment in the city I've known longer than any place on Earth. I can navigate to and from any two parts of this densely populated and hugely diverse metropolis, with pure instinct, which has developed over the years. Even though the river meanders and is an absolutely useless reference point, I still know which way is North, when bridges and tunnels go North-South, East-West and West-East, assuming you're North of the river... which you will be if you've got any class and style.

It should be a happy moment, to be so unencumbered by material possessions, family ties and the considerations of a life partner; every lone sock that I cast aside should lighten the weight of my soul, but I've not made my mark on the world yet. Who am I and why should you even care that I once lived?

Maybe I'm the odd sock. I don't fit in. I don't pair up. I don't play nice with the others, so I should fuck off because I don't fit in.

That's the way I feel right now.

Tags: #london

This is a story about fresh starts...

My luck is astounding. In fact, it's almost enough to make me believe in divine intervention and go all religious. However, I've studied theoretical physics, so I don't believe in imaginary sky monsters.

Underpinning our entire understanding of the universe is a theory that says that our very existence - our consciousness - is determining the reality that we experience. To give you a simple example, when you look at the Moon, every single atom of the Moon must choose its position in the sky, but when you look away, all those atoms could be anywhere... it's as if the Moon doesn't exist until you choose to look at it. The very action of looking at the Moon is what makes it exist, roughly where we expect to see it, but until you turn your gaze to the night sky, those atoms are just a probability cloud.

Just as we all know that Schrödinger's cat is both alive and dead until we open the box and look inside, what is less well known is that same uncertainty principle means that if you're not able to witness the universe around us, it completely collapses into a mathematical mess of probability - basically, if you die, the universe dies with you.

"But that can't be true! People die all the time!" I hear you scream.

Yes, you're right, but how would you witness their death, unless you had your own universe in which to observe independently. You can prove this fairly simply, by having Alice and Bob both make observations of quantum mechanical experiments, and see who is the one who is influencing reality. If you're Alice, you'll see that Bob has no effect - it's all down to you, baby. This universe is all yours.

"He's lost his mind and gone hypomanic again" I hear you grumble with frustration.

Until you've read Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics by John Bell and you've read the various interpretations of quantum mechanics - from the Copenhagen mathematical abstract idea, to the multiverse and the many minds interpretations - then I'm afraid, dear reader, that you're not qualified to judge me.

If you go deep enough down the rabbit hole, then you arrive at a quantum suicide paradox, and quantum immortality. Basically, in all the possible universes where you die... how would you know about them? In an almost infinite number of ways, your brain and your consciousness have died, but there are still an almost infinite number of universes left where you're alive and well. Does your brain hurt from all this? Well, try taking a gun, pointing it at your head and pullling the trigger - you won't die! Quantum mechanics literally predicts that the gun will misfire. In the universes where your brains got blown to pieces, you won't be alive to witness the aftermath, so you'll only be consciously aware of the universes where the gun jams or misfires or malfunctions in some way.

Basicallly, re-imagine the Schrödinger's cat experiment, but if the cat dies, you die too. What would happen is that every single time you ran the experiment, you open the box and find the cat is alive. You could do that experiment a thousand times, and 1,000 cats would be alive and well. The reason is simple: who's going to open the box if you and the cat are both dead?

Without a god, this is the only way that I can reconcile my experience of reality with the vast quantity of scientific books and academic papers that I have read over the years. God(s) are far more convenient and quite a lot more fun. Imagine being an ancient Greek, or a Roman: you'd have had loads of gods to thank and blame for everything that happened, good or bad. Learning stories about these imaginary sky monsters is a lot easier and more fun than learning differential calculus, matrix mechanics and imaginary numbers.

How does any of this relate to me and leaving London? Well, only a few weeks ago, I thought I was going to be sleeping on a sheet of cardboard in a doorway, sheltering from the rain. I thought I was going to be scouring London for empty houses with overgrown back gardens, where I could pitch my tent in the undergrowth and live in quiet seclusion; free from the possibility of being beaten up or pissed on by a lager lout; safe from the chance that I might be mugged for anything valuable that hadn't already been stolen from me.

Every area of my life had collapsed. I'm estranged from my family. I had lost touch with friends. I had broken up with my girlfriend. I was in arrears with my rent. I had no job; no income. Just servicing my debts was going to gobble up the few pounds and pence I had left. I'd sold everything of any value and raised a fairly paltry sum of money for my weeks of effort. I was going to lose my deposit and be unable to raise the rent and deposit needed to get another place to live. How would I pay the ongoing rent anyway, without income? Destitution looked like a certainty.

Then, I looked at the Moon and the planets aligned or the gods smiled on me or whatever you want to believe, but my plans to commit suicide by taking a tramadol overdose got transformed into a plan for a fresh start: the chance to have another go at getting the secret recipe right: friends, family, home, work, income, expenditure, stress, fun and every other variable that needs to be tweaked until it's just right, and you want to live more than you want to die.

If you've never taken a razor blade or a sharp knife, and deliberately cut into yourself, looking for veins and arteries, then you'll have no idea what I'm talking about. The closer you get to death, the closer you get to meeting your maker. Stephen Hawking could have sought solace in the mumbo-jumbo of religion, believing in an afterlife, after finding out that he had between 2 and 4 years to live, when he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. Instead, he wrote "A Brief History of Time" and discovered that black holes evaporate by radiating X-rays and wins the Nobel Prize at the age of 71. He's 75 years old now. He says that "god" is the universal laws of physics, which are still not fully understood by us... the Standard Model of particle physics is good, but it's just a model - there's no theory that explains why there are up quarks, down quarks, top, bottom, strange, beauty and charm. What the f**k is a tau neutrino and why do we need them? There's no theory that tells us for definite whether an electron is a fundamental particle and we've never actually seen a proton decay, although we have smashed them to bits and tried to figure out what the hell they're made out of, by looking at the pieces of debris that come flying out of the collision.

We're living in an age where we can actually make antimatter. You know that science fiction stuff? It's the most expensive substance on the planet, and you can't charge for it by weight because it has negative mass. That is to say, if you put it on some scales, it would float up and not weigh them down... you'd have to PAY to have people take your antimatter away, and you'd only need a tennis ball sized amount to pretty much destroy our whole planet, because of course as you know E = mc² and there's a f**king shit tonne of energy bound up in matter. When antimatter meets matter, the matter is annihilated into pure energy and you'll get something that will beat the shit out of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and every nuclear explosion ever detonated all put together.

Do you want to see my life, reduced to atomic scale?

There it is. 7 cardboard boxes, a couple of bikes, a bag full of kitesurfing gear, a guitar that I'm too talentless to play and its amplifier, and a filing cabinet full of old post that I really should throw away. I'll be adding in a load of duvets and bedding and clothes that I only wear infrequently, but it's sad how my entire life doesn't even fill this tiny space, when compressed like atomic fusion.

I leave this riverside apartment, which to all intents and purposes looks idyllic to the uninitiated, but in fact, the endless boats full of drunk people dancing to disco music - in their flared trousers or whatever the kids are wearing these days - is nearly continuous on the river side, and the local watering hole - the Tooke Arms - has a police van parked outside every Friday and Saturday night, to take away those who inevitably become so drunk and disorderly that they no longer appreciate the saintly patience of our beloved Metropolitan Police. You really REALLY have to piss off a London policeman to get yourself arrested. Trust me; I've been there, done that and got the bracelets (handcuffs). You don't get to keep any souvenirs, unless you want to frame your cautions and criminal charges (I have none of the latter, and I don't know if they even give you a certificate, like when you graduate from university).

I'm around in the capital for a little while longer, so if you want to say goodbye in person, then you should register your interest now. The day that I leave with as many bags as I can carry on the train, keeps getting pushed back and back and back, but it'll be worth it, especially if I get to meet two twin boys for the first time - the baby sons of the couple who rescued me from a messy divorce and a very unhealthy mess I'd gotten myself into.

It's interesting, when you're challenged to think what you really need, day to day. There are your favourite clothes, of course. There's your phone and your laptop and the accompanying accessories, but there's very little else. I'll take my Lumix camera with a Leica lens, even though my iPhone takes perfectly good photographs. I'll take my headphone amplifier, even though I can already deafen myself with earphones that only cost £30. I'll take 2 books I want to read, even though they're heavy and made out of tree pulp, and once I've read them they're just wasting valuable space on the planet and depriving us of oxygen giving trees. I'll take my suit - which is virtually brand new - and overcoat, even though it's total overkill to look like a sleazy salesman, in whatever off-the-peg trendy fashionable garments were available that season.

I've not even seen inside where I'm going to live. It's a total gamble, but it's bound to be better than a doorway that smells of piss and has spikes on the ground to discourage you from trying to shelter from the elements there.

As I wrote in a stupid lovesick poem a little while ago, I don't remember ever feeling this daunted and exposed; fearful & anxious. One little slip and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down, and the devastation that I felt when I lost the Lloyds contract earlier this year will look like a piss in the ocean by comparison.

It's almost like I'm holding the universe to ransom: I'm saying "gimmie what I want or I'll kill myself". Obviously, nobody gives that much of a fuck about threats like that. In fact, if you were to beg your doctor to put you in a safe place, where you couldn't harm yourself, that very act of self-preservation would be proof that you don't actually want to die: Catch 22.

Anyway, the universe has ponied up and given me everything I ever wanted: 98 out of my 101 things on my bucket list. Every cloudy evening, I think "oh bummer, no nice sunset tonight" and then there's this beautiful sky that suddenly appears all lit up in orange and gold, and with wispy white vapour trails from the planes overhead, and every shade of grey in amazing cloud formations.

I could share 100 photos with you, every one of the same view from the same vantage point, but every one has something of interest, even though it's the same skyline. Whether it's fireworks going off on New Year's Eve, or a long-exposure shot of the supermoon, taken with an 8 second shutter on a tripod. Those who are of the Christian faith, would say I've been "blessed". I simply view my consciousness as an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, but also a complete accident - simply a statistical co-incidence. I've been very sad to lose things and I've suffered terrible stress at times, but I always get what I want in the end, even if it seems like blind luck.

I want to share more. I want to write and write, but if you read what I wrote before, you'll understand the fragility of my situation; the precarious position I find myself in.

I know that I'm revealing a side to myself that has no place in this day & age of mindless 'entertainment' programmes, where some botoxed pretty-boy with teeth that are blindingly white, chats mindless bullshit to a bottle blonde with big fake titties. I read "Brave New World" and other dystopian and utopian novels when I was very young. One of the kindest gifts I ever received from my dad - as I remember - was a book that explained special relativity for kids. Imagine that! Imagine having your 8 year old son travelling on a beam of light looking at his watch and seeing the hands tick just like normal, but when he comes home, Dad's been dead for millions or billions of years. That's just f**ked up.

I'll write again, before I go, but it's 1am and I'll have a regular 9 to 5 job soon. it won't be quite like the corporate humdrum I'm used to, but I've still got to play by certain rules; societal norms. I've got a week to straighten myself out.

I want to tell you about all the hidden gems of London that you'd only know if you've lived here for 10 years or more. I want to share my heartache about leaving the capital of the country that my identity is inextricably bound to. I speak the Queen's english with an old-fashioned BBC TV presenter's posh accent. "Sorry" is a kind of punctuation, where I start and end every sentence with what seems like an apology, but it's not... it's just the product of that inexplicable 'Britishness' that we offer insincere apologies all the time: "Sorry", "begging your pardon", "excuse me" and even the British "ahem!" cough that basically says "get the f**k out of my way you piece of s**t tourist" with an insipid smile as the feckless idiot steps out of the gangway they're blocking.

Oh London, I'm going to miss you so very much. With your cultural collision that's so inclusive that the sum total of all the terrorist attacks has claimed less than 100 lives, ever. 52 on the 7th of July 2005, but all the others don't even take the total into 3 figures. How can you strike a blow against a city that speaks more languages than any other on the planet. New York - in 2nd place - speaks half as many languages as London, which can boast 100+. To attack London is to attack humanity itself.

There would be novelty if I was moving to New York or Tokyo (numbers 99 and 100 on the bucket list) but to experience another major city in the UK is still exciting. I just hope it isn't like Bournemouth - trying so hard to be like London, or even like Brighton, but ending up as a cheap and tacky pastiche that offends the sensibilities of a genuine Londoner.

Of course, those born in London call me a "blow in" and mock my privileged existence, but taking the example of my friends with the twins. Their house cost them the equivalent of £1.3 million, and the beneficiaries were what the British refer to as "benefit scroungers" - people who've never worked a day in their lives and have now f**ked off to Spain, where they live in idle luxury, as tax exiles.

Oh London, how I love thee.

Better publish this or I'll be writing all night again.

Tags: #london

This is a story about all-night fun and frolics...

I had an interview today. I mean yesterday. I made a new friend last Wednesday, or was it Thursday? Once you go past midnight, things get complicated.

I lead a follow-the-sun existence. During the morning, I'm saying good night to my friends in Australia and New Zealand. As the day wears on, it's bedtime for my friends in India and other parts of Asia. At around noon, I say good morning to my friends on the East Coast of North America, and at about 3pm I say good morning to my friends on the the West Coast - we chat all day, all evening, into the night. Then, my friends in the Czech Republic, Italy and France remind me that it's almost my own bedtime, but I skipped my medication: I'll sleep when I'm dead. By the time 5am comes around, those friends in Canada and the United States are starting to think about getting some sleep themselves... but for friends in New Zealand and Australia, it's a whole new day. It's only me who hasn't been to bed and is getting confused about whether it's today or tomorrow.

I keep skipping my medication, so that I can be alert and on top of my game for job interviews. Without a job, I'm going to be bankrupt in no time. I'm already being turfed out of my apartment without getting a penny of my deposit back. Where am I going to live? How am I supposed to feed myself?

This isn't supposed to happen. I have mood stabilisers. I have sleeping pills. I have strict instructions to keep to the same bedtime every night and not to over-sleep: 8 to 10 hours is plenty, which will make many parents grit their teeth with envy. Under normal circumstances, I live a heavily medicated existence where I shuffle around and speak frustratingly slowly. The hospital staff who visit me at home to check on me are happy to see me in that state: I should be no trouble to anybody, in that chemical straightjacket.

I did take my pills tonight, probably more than 12 hours late. I doubled up on the sleeping pills, but I practically wrote the book on sleep deprivation. I can tell you exactly what happens after 3 or 4 days, then 6 or 7 days without sleep. After 9 days of 24-hour consciousness and not so much as a snooze, I can give you an approximate description of what this state of sleeplessness is like. At the 10 day point, who knows if or when I'll regain consciousness - psychosis consumes anybody who didn't sleep for as long as 10 days. Calendars and days of the week become as alien to me as a smartphone would be to an Amazonian tribe who've remained completely undiscovered in the densest and most inaccessible jungle.

I've been packing up my stuff, and I found some headphones I really love and an amplifier for them. I used to dance at all-night raves and club nights. I might not have been writing my blog so much, but I was having important online conversations. I decided I did't want to die angry with the world, so I started writing more conciliatory words; I started writing to say "thanks" instead of "f**k you buddy". All this while, I'm listening to music that I hadn't been able to stand because none of it matched my mood; none of the lyrics spoke to me; there was nothing I could relate to.

The last happy thing I remember doing with her was watching the sequel to Trainspotting. We were both buzzing. Reading - the town - was a special place for us both and the music festival in 1996 is where I watched Trainspotting in the cinema tent, and then heard Underworld play Born Slippy in the dance tent. The soundtrack to the movie got us both listening to the classic tunes and their modern remixes, and speculating about the meaning of the lyrics.

Dirty numb angel boy

And tears boy

And all in your inner space boy

You had chemicals boy

I've grown so close to you

She said come over

She smiled at you boy.

I then decided to repurpose a song I liked into a poem for her.

The poem is a sad goodbye if you like. I got the job. I'm leaving the city where we currently live. I'm leaving all those reminders of a time when I thought we'd be together forever, and she'd look after me if I got sick, and vice-versa.

Summer Break-Up

A thousand words
captured in a photograph
of me and you
drinking prosecco on the grass
so hard to breathe
the way you made me laugh.

That summer dating
ended all right
seemed like you would be
the only one for me
and seemed like I was too
the only one for you.

Later when we were alone
we promised everything we owned
and every little bit of me
tingled excitedly
this thing was so right
was exactly what it felt like
how could it go wrong?
now it's all gone.

People told me all the time
that love is just a state of mind
but they don't know love's hard to find
and that's why I'm not changing mine.

Yesterday
I called you up
the hundredth try
and I'm still out of luck
your number changed
and I guess so did you.

But I'm not the same little
helpless dying flower
that you nurtured and saved
because now I do believe
that inside of me
you set me free.

When I see your picture, I smile
because I think of you happier
without my weight on your shoulders
I must take my wings and soar
but I've never felt afraid like this before

It's 7am now. I'm going to get a couple of hours of sleep. I've probably been writing complete drivel, and I don't want to upset her. I did promise her that we'd leave each other alone to move on with our lives, but I lied... I felt like I was going to die. I just had to hope she'd never find out I'd killed myself. Now, there's a chance that things could work out for me, and I could get a fresh start; a new challlenge to hurl myself into to forget all about love and heartbreak for a while.

Time is a great healer, and if you're awake 24 hours a day, you're living about 33% more than everybody else, but you don't get over a breakup any quicker.

Sleep is also a great healer, so to bed, I must.

Tags: #relationships

This is a story about gratitude...

In happier times, I could cycle through a tunnel under the River Thames to go and see her. During a blissfully warm Indian summer, we courted on the hills above the capital, enjoying spectacular panoramic views across London: far better than even my overpriced central London apartment can provide. Sipping Prosecco out of plastic glasses and eating Marks & Spencer finger food, it was clear that our borderline alcoholism and gluttony made us a well-matched pair, or so it seemed as we muddled through the tail end of summer, autumn and the winter.

This is not a portmortem of our relationship. If anybody was looking for that, including her, I would hope they'd read So Lonely, which gives some insight into my half of the story of our breakup: a story that would never get told to her mum, brother, best friends and work colleagues. Instead, I'm a pariah. No; worse... I have instigated protective instincts that only a short time before extended to me, as a loosely connected family member: her partner and somebody fully committed to a lifelong future together. Her brother hates me, I assume.

There's the unresolved issue of the fact that I loved that she had some association with politics, by fluke of her career, while I had made political matters the core of my thinking; political ideologies were the thing I most passionately believed in. When I write pieces which show that my thinking is ahead of the pack - unencumbered by the corrupting influence of living and working too close to the very elites who have grown apart from the electorate - I can't help but wonder what my former best friend, lover and lifelong partner, would have to say, with the benefit of her amazing intellect... but she also benefits from her privileged position of having to do nothing more than to turn up at an office each day, to soak up the status quo and entrenched beliefs of the Westminster bubble. I hoped she would read Labour's Catch 22, especially as it predated Graham Jones and Gloria De Piero's rebellion over Labour arrogance that Corbyn's popularity will be enough to sweep the party to power at the next general election.

Before continuing further, it's important to note that I'm boxing up my belongings, putting them into storage, and it's likely that I will be leaving this city of nearly 9 million inhabitants - where bumping into somebody you know is incredibly improbable - and she should know that I respect our agreement to leave each other in peace; to move on with our lives, despite the pain and heartache of a breakup. I could be in a city in the North of the country, or I could even be abroad: the chance that we should ever meet again is close to zero percent.

It should be noted that she used to read everything I wrote, proofread it, help edit it, provide feedback and even helped shaped the plot of my debut novel. This is the first thing I want to say thank you for doing, whether she reads this or not.

I'm doing this in a kind of reverse order of importance, so the next thing I'm thankful for is her tolerance and even good humour, over things that very few partners could be so kind and understanding about. She might not have understood what bath salts were at first; she might not have understood that I suffer from a dual diagnosis, which makes understanding me a whole lot harder than buying the Amazon bestseller on bipolar disorder, but she damn well did buy that book. By way of a comparison, my ex-wife bought the book "Nag your Loved one Sober". That epitomises of the difference between my relationship with my my ex-wife and a loving relationship.

The next thing I've got to give thanks for is how she listened & observed. My walls were bare even though I had a photo of nearly 20 of my best friends, a photo of me that reminds me I was a young cool kitesurfer dude once, and a photo of an animal I have always professed a desire to keep as a pet. The frames that hold these pictures were part of a Christmas bonanza of gifts that I'm now bursting into to tears thinking about. Not so much because of the thoughtful gifts - although this was without question the best Christmas of my adult life - but because I was brought into the fold of a bonded and caring family and received so much love, care and acceptance.

Early in the New Year, I secured a new IT contract. Sadly, I sat on my leg and caused a kind of crush injury normally only seen in car accidents and building collapses. My kidneys stopped working and I found myself as a high dependency case in hospital, on dialysis. She burnt herself out trying to look after me for weeks, but not only that, she marshalled the troops: my friends and her family, in order to make me feel loved and supported. In all the multiple hospitalisations I've suffered over the last few years, I'd never received a single get well card and one of only two visitors came to demand I returned a copy of the keys to his house after a suicide attempt [not in his house]. It's imperative that I thank her [and her family] for their efforts in returning me to good health, through love and support.

Apart from raccoons, squirrels are another animal that I'm mad about. I guess that, living in London, squirrels are a cute animal that has gotten so used to human contact that they come right up to you and take things out of your hands, if you pretend to have food for them. If you do have food for the squirrels, they'll crawl all over you and put up with a certain amount of petting, even though they're wild. With the collapse of my second attempt at domestic bliss - my marriage to my ex-wife - my cat had to go live with my parents, from whom I'm estranged. I'm thankful that she gave me a third period of domestic bliss, with Mr Squiz as our inanimate pet [who she bought for me]. The lovely bedclothes, quilt and pillows are all thanks to her. She made me feel loved, and that I could love again.

No domestic bliss is complete without the trimmings of high quality kitchenwares and other day-to-day luxury items. Everthing from my tatty tea towels to my budget Ikea cutlery received a quiet makeover. My cheap-brand supermarket goods were replaced with the best that Marks & Spencer and Waitrose have to offer the upper-middle-class consumer and I started to develop a penchant for lime cordial made with 30% Mexican limes... available exclusively in the top-tier supermarkets. The hoi polloi have never tasted such delicious concentrated drink products, nor have they used John Lewis' or Joseph & Joseph homewares... they haven't lived. I must be thankful to her - without even a hint of sarcasm - for giving me a simidgin of a taste of the finer things in life.

Our final quarel might seem rather ludicrous to you. It resulted in me slicing deep gashes into the length of my forearm and making footprints in my own blood, on her walls. The only thing you can really know from this is that I was incredibly unwell, but you could also infer that there was something that was deeply important to me, about whatever was going on. It's very hard to understand people who are in an extreme mental health crisis, but my crisis was deepened and exacerbated by her decision to try and ignore me. I had tried and failed to walk to the local shop - a very short distance away - wearing my Brazilian Havaiana flip-flops, but due to the aforementioned leg injury, my left foot is completely numb and I'm unable to even feel if my big toe has become dislocated, which it easily can because of damage to my tendons. This is all highly complicated, but you should know that I've spent months each year wearing those Brazilian flip flops, and they had become intricately linked to my identity. She had offered - a parting gift if you like - to buy me a pair of summer shoes, which I could wear with my numb left foot. The Camper shoes pictured offer a wide footbed, allowing my toes to spread naturally: otherwise I would have no idea if I was getting a blister on one side or the other of my foot. She will probably never understand how important these shoes were to me; nor how important it was that she at least humour me, when our relationship had fractured and virtually disintegrated. She seemingly made an overnight change in how much care and attention that she lavished on me, in what was supposed to be a love to last until our dying days. My final thank you is for something that looks purely cosmetic or materialistic, but she eventually had the faith to make a final pyrrhic effort and expense, which she would never see any benefit of, to get me those shoes. I wear those shoes every day and the quality of life improvement they have brought me would astound anybody who hasn't experienced partial loss of the use of a limb or extremity, and the loss of the choices they get to make about their attire. This is more than simple vanity: it's identity, which is tightly bound up with self-esteem.

To write the best part of 2,000 words, in thanks to a partner who you've promised - mutually - to never be in contact with ever again, seems to plumb the depths of insanity, but while she has her resurgent career, I've had a close shave with being hospitalised and have been visited at home every day by somebody checking to see if I'm still alive. I'm not saying it's been a cakewalk for her, but she hurled herself back into her career, which was both therapeutic as well as beneficial to her ongoing job aspirations.

I'm not completely insane, and I know from the analytics of my website when I've had a visitor which is her, in all likelihood. I want to honour our "no communication" and "move on with our lives" agreement, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't have have the evidence to show that somebody's had a peek to see if I'm still alive.

What I need to do is lick my wounds; to try to forgive myself for acts that were driven by mental illness; to try and accept that her choice to break our no-communication agreement was for the private swallowing of her pride and to publicly swallow her pride and for any reconciliation to take place, would be unthinkable when she thinks of herself as some kind of minor celebrity.

While that final paragraph might seem bitter and harsh, given the thankful tone of everything I've just written, perhaps it's just part of the baggage that I struggle with, alone. With any breakup, there will be unanswered questions and what ifs. With any breakup, it's hard not to look backwards until the next love of your life enters the picture. I really hope that nothing I've said would detract from my overall gratitude that I met her, shared time with her, had hope for the future with her, felt loved by her and ultimately had my life enriched by her.

It's rather tragic, but where in life can you say you don't find tragedy and regret: tragedy in what might have been if only things had played out slightly differently?

Tags: #relationships

This is a story about penny pinching...

Here's the friend I respect most in the world, for being able to balance having nice stuff - house, car, motorbike and other 'toys' - but he's also really careful with money, to the point of being able to live for a really long time doing some quick part-time work that brought in just enough to pay the bills.

He was also my business partner for a while, and I admire him for his attention to detail and pride that he takes in having his accounts immaculately kept, and for claiming every penny he's entitled to, in expenses and other tax reliefs.

We couldn't be much more different in character, I think, when it comes to money.

I remember being poor. Really poor. I used to run out of petrol. I used to have such crappy cars there was always a big stress about whether I'd get to work or not. Buying meat was a luxury and I would always have to budget down to my last £10 each month. The idea of saving money was as absurd as spending money I didn't have on things people take for granted - breakdown insurance, holidays, brand new tyres.

My wages started to go up fast, and I even doubled my wage in the space of a few days, when I went contracting. Finally I could save up some money - which I did - and buy a reliable car to get to work. However, I also started to enjoy some nice things, like a holiday to New Zealand and I admit that I used money to help my self-esteem, buying Harrods hampers at Christmas and the like.

After all the relentless bullying at school, I felt I was 'owed' two things, for all the daily suffering. I wanted sex and money, to validate my worth as an individual. Having these things made up for being an outcast, a pariah, isolated, unpopular and even seemingly disliked by most. All that time I should have been fingering girls in the bushes while drunk on cider, I was geeking out on my computer. It's not that I didn't want to have a group of friends doing normal teenaged stuff... it was that it was actively denied to me. I needed sex to repair the rejection and damaged self esteem of my teens. I felt like I was 'worth' the money, because of the hours I'd put in, alone in my bedroom hunched over a keyboard.

My friend, the money saving expert, bought sports cars and went through a phase of using sex to feel better about himself, but at some point, he started to take pleasure in being efficient with his money. Instead, I was relieved to no longer have to worry about money. I got to the point where I never had to check my bank balance, and that's how I always wanted it to be from then on: that was the objective for me... to make money almost invisible and unintrusive.

For many happy years, I didn't watch the pennies, but the pounds looked after themselves. I didn't fret about whether I owed the taxman £6 or £600 for the interest on my savings - I just made a guesstimate that was more than it was likely to be, and didn't bother with the detail. I didn't do my expenses: it didn't seem worth the time, fiddling with all those receipts. I didn't budget. I didn't try and keep my costs down. I just lived my life, and money wasn't a thing. Sure, I would give some paper or plastic to a waiter at the end of a meal. Sure, I would hand over paper or plastic to a sales assistant at the tillls, in exchange for goods. Sure, my mortgage and bills got paid via direct debit. But the actual money part - I couldn't have told you whether I just paid £1 for a loaf of bread or £3: I just wanted the bread.

Now, having been on a merry-go-round that's gone faster and faster, as I've needed to earn more and more just to stay on top of ballooning expenses and periods where I've been unwell, I'm faced with the sudden stark realisation that I can't keep going round and round like that - it's getting nowhere. I'm going to have to take a bite out of a big shit sandwich. Everything's fallen apart, seemingly overnight.

Whether budgeting and penny-pinching is a complete waste of time now, given how deep in the shit I am, I don't know, but I've got to face up to a future where my income is unlikely to ever dwarf my expenditure, and I'm going to have to live like the other 98% - carefully budgeting and financial planning.

Frankly, it might be a bit of a horse-bolted/stable-door situation, and I find myself in the far worse situation of not only having to budget, but also deal with an income-expenditure disparity that no amount of budgeting could solve. It's an unknown world to me: bad credit ratings, debt collection agencies and payment plans with unhappy creditors. I know that the stress of it can drive people to suicide, and I'm already in a bad way, so this fear of the hell that will probably be unleashed upon me, is pushing me beyond what I can cope with.

I've already got to leave my home, move somewhere I've never been before, figure out if there's some work nearby I'm well enough to do. There's everything I own to be boxed up. I need to leave the city where I've lived the longest I've ever lived anywhere. There's the apartment I've called home for two years to say goodbye to. These are not trivial things. In fact, they're traumatic.

My money saving expert has given me one bit of advice, to stop the rot, but there's problems everywhere I look. There are huge stains on the carpet that my ex-flatmate kindly left. There are other things around the flat that the letting agent will want to charge me for cleaning or replacing, no matter how good a job I do myself. If I don't get out of this flat that I can't afford the rent on ASAP, my letting agent on their own could financially destroy me, before I even think about a little part-time work to put some food in my mouth.

It wasn't supposed to happen like this. I had a supportive partner. That's what a hypomanic episode can do to you - stupid decisions, unrealistic beliefs. I don't even know what happened, but I have a vague recollection of feeling like I had LOTS of options and LOTS of time & support. I remember that I had projects I was excited about. I went from being too depressed to work, to suddenly being too interested in a project to bother with work... I was going to make money while I slept!

So, I feel like I was driving down the motorway on a dry clear day. The road was quiet. Then, suddenly, my car was barrel-rolling down the road, with me being thrown around like a rag doll, covered in glass and blood and with serious injuries when the obliterated car finally skidded to a stop, upside down. The shock of it feels just like that. I don't know where to begin.

I hope - even though it's nothing I've ever hoped for before - that I can follow my money saving expert's advice, and I can rescue myself from the worst possible consequences. I don't want bankruptcy, county court judgements and all the other stuff that will follow you round like a bad smell for years, and even ruin your career prospects.

You can't accuse me of pride being the problem though: I've already slept rough, sold my car and used public transport and my bike, lived frugally. I'm trying my best to sell off items that would be beyond the means of many of our least well off. I'm not too proud to eat value beans and supermarket own-brand goods, or even shop around for the undesirable fruit, veg and bits of meat that most consumers don't want. I'm no martyr; no hero. It probably won't be enough anyway. You can't go from having support and a plan, to nothing - overnight - and expect that everything'll work out. There's no way it can.

Just so you know: I spend a huge proportion of my waking hours just wanting to end it. End the stress. End the worry. End the effort and exertion that will result in what, exactly? The possibility of being ripped to pieces by the courts anyway? It's not much to hope for, is it?

I don't remember ever feeling so suicidal and desperate.

Tags: #suicide