This is a story about getting airborne...

In startups, we talk a lot about runway. That is, how much money you have left to pay all your bills before you go bankrupt. The thing about doing a startup is, you don't make money from day one. You raise some money, build a product then try to get the revenue up higher than the bills... and you need to do all that before you run out of runway.

Most ordinary working-class folks know a lot about runway. They know that they have to pay their rent, bills and then make the remaining money last for things like food and transport, until payday. Every single month there is uncertainty about whether they're going to be able to get to work, if their money runs out before payday. That's called running out of runway.

A lot of low-paid jobs pay weekly. That's useful for something called cashflow smoothing. It means that your cashflow looks like lots of little peaks that aren't very high. If you got paid the same money on a monthly basis, you'd see a massive spike on payday, and then cash would slope down, down, down for a whole month, before spiking again.

If you run a limited company or a public company, you could pay yourself wages, weekly, monthly, whatever, but wages attract income tax. Income tax is 45% for people in the highest tax band. So if I wanted to do some cashflow smoothing, it's going to cost me 45% of the money I worked hard to earn. That's quite a waste of money if there's another way to pay myself that doesn't attract such high taxes.

Generally, I have to work for a month, then I can invoice my client for the days worked. My invoice is payable within 30 days, but it basically takes a whole extra month to get the money into my limited company.

Ok, great. Now I can pay myself wages... but I'll have to pay 45% tax and loads of national insurance. On the one hand, I really need some cash, because I've already lived for over two months without a single penny of income, but the main person who's going to get rich out of that arrangement is the taxman.

So I work another two months, plus the month for the invoices to be paid. That means that I have three months worth of invoices paid into my limited company. Now it's time to pay myself a dividend. Limited companies can pay dividends from their profits once every quarter. So, to maximise your dividends, you need to have 3 months of invoices paid into your limited company.

But that means that you've been working for 4 months, and not been paid a penny. Harsh man. However, the tax savings are considerable. This is not about me being a tightass with taxes. I always paid full taxes, and then when I got sick, there were no state benefits available to me, despite being under the limit for savings etc. etc. The state safety net just didn't exist when I was homeless and penniless, so fuck the government. I now save the tax and try and set it aside for when I'm sick.

Now, OK, you have your dividend... 3 months pay. You're feeling pretty rich, right? Well, if you've been living in a hostel, you might like to now get a flat. That'll be 6 weeks rent as a deposit, a month's rent in advance, and probably about £500 in estate agent fees. There goes £6,000 of your hard-earned cash.

What about how you lived for those 4 months with no income? How did you do that? I guess you probably had to borrow money. So, you use your remaining dividend to pay off all those debts you ran up, staying alive.

So, what now? Well, you'll have to work for another 4 months, and then pay yourself another dividend, and live off what's left after you got yourself a flat and paid off your debts. Oh, there isn't anything left? Oh dear.

The thing is, the system is fairly well tuned to fuck you. I can borrow money more cheaply than the tax, but the interest is compound, so it works out about the same. I could take a wage and pay the tax, but then I'll have less money left to pay off the debts. Between the banks and the taxman, you're f**ked.

It's true, each quarter things get a little better. I was planning on working for about 9 months, and then I would have been quite nicely sorted, but if you think that it's stressful waiting for payday, try waiting for 4 months for payday.

That's the life of an IT contractor. I'm an IT contractor. That's what I do, for a living. Yes, I could bake bread, stack shelves or work in a warehouse... are you fucking stupid? There's nothing wrong with those jobs, but if I wanted to burn money surely it would make more sense for me to do some IT contracting and then literally set fire to £50 notes. Jeeps, you must have a degree in Economics from Oxford if you think that it's a smart idea to not work the highly paid job I'm qualified and experienced to do, and instead work a job that doesn't cover my cost of living and is stopping me from getting the highly paid job that I'm qualified for. I'm sure that you'll be getting a tenured professorship any day now, with original thinking like that.

My cashflow is lumpy, and I don't have much runway, but at least this time I have the flat already, and a friend who can count higher than the 3 deformed stumps on their retarded hand has helped me to make sure I don't end up driven to suicide by the stress of being let down by liars again.

My plan was to start the contract hunt in the second week of January, when people were coming back from their holidays. I'm over 2 weeks late and sick as hell, but it'll be OK. I somehow got the HSBC job looking like this:

Yes, that's a hospital wristband. Arms are pincushions as usual from double canula and providing a gazillion blood samples (June 2015)

Tags: #career #london #computing #hospital #nhs

This is a story about modern life...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.

Can't be bothered.

Why bother?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck life

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

This is a story about the willing suspension of disbelief...

People think that beating drug and alcohol abuse is about abstinence, sobriety. It's not.

Are you familiar with experiments where rats were given bottles of water laced with drugs, as well as bottles of clean water and food? In cages that had a placebo, the rats obviously ate, drank, slept and lived until they died of old age. In the cages with heroin in the water, the rats would drink some heroin, fall asleep, wake up, eat, clean themselves, drink some more heroin, sleep some more... until they too died of old age. In the cages with cocaine in the water, the rats would drink and drink and drink from the cocaine laced water, until they died prematurely.

These were barren cages, with nothing to do but drink from a bottle, eat some plain food pellets, or sleep. No other rats to socialise with. Nothing to explore. Nothing to play with. No stimulation. Not really much of a life, even for a rat. What do you think you'd do, behind bars with nothing to do except drink from a bottle?

Did you know that they ran those experiments again, except this time they created Rat Park, which was packed with everything a rat could want from life. There were other rats to socialise with, and have sex with of course. There were tubes and slides and places to hide, and nice bedding and toys. The food was varied and tasty. Of course, there were still two water bottles, one of which was laced with drugs or a placebo.

Do you know what happened? The rats weren't interested in drugs. They were happy in their little ratty lives, and drugs had no place in those happy fulfilled rodenty days.

So what does that tell us about addiction? What do you think would happen if you took away somebody's self-esteem and pushed them out of society? What do you think would happen if you labelled somebody a junkie, a druggie an alkie, and demonised them? What do you think would happen if you mistreated your fellow human, your family member, your partner, your friend? Do you think that would cure them of their addiction?

Rehab is for quitters. Ha ha ha! No, not really. Rehab is a bit of a joke to be honest. The relapse rates are appalling. It's really not working. Do you know why it's not working? Because rehab is the place we send the black sheep of the family to beat themselves up, and to make us clean-living superior people feel better about ourselves.

What's the difference between an addict and a normal person? One puff on a cigarrette, one gulp of tea or coffee, or one sip of liquor.

Yes, it's true that addicts and alcoholics are on a death-spiral downwards that they can't stop on their own. The destruction of their life has begun, and they're going to ride that helter-skelter all the way to rock bottom, unless there is intervention.

Intervention means locking them away from their poison of choice, right? Wrong. Everything in that person's life that caused them to become addicted to drink or drugs is still there. Their environment, their social group, the pressures, the stresses, the broken life that they have... all those things are still there.

Finding the key that unlocks your addictive potential is not easy, luckily, but finding the key that unlocks you from the trap of addiction, that's easy: you just need a life that's better than living on the street in complete destitution, begging and stealing enough money for your next fix, while the whole of society thinks you're a piece of s**t and wouldn't p**s on you if you were on fire.

But that can't be right, can it? Lots of rich people get addicted and die young, and their lives are amazing. Well, let's examine that claim a little more carefully.

Having been down-and-out on the streets of Camden Town, London, it seems apt to talk about Amy Winehouse.

They tried to make me go to rehab but I said, 'No, no, no.'

Yes, I've been black but when I come back you'll know, know, know

I ain't got the time and if my daddy thinks I'm fine

He's tried to make me go to rehab but I won't go, go, go

Everybody wanted her to sing that song. Over and over and over again. Can you imagine that? Being a human jukebox, a human CD player, just performing the same song, over and over and over again.

Imagine being an amazingly talented creative artist, but nobody wants to hear any of your new material, they just want you to stand on stage and repeat the same old s**t, again and again and again.

Dancing bears get driven insane, and will dance and dance, even when they're not performing. How do you think the human psyche is affected by similarly being whipped and cajoled into performing the same act, repeated and repeated and repeated again.

But Amy Winehouse was rich. Tina Turner was rich. I've been relatively rich. How can these rich people complain or get messed up, when they're so rich? Rich people's lives must be amazing. Well, actually, the rich cry too. Rich people need the same emotional sustenance as anybody else. Rich people need to feel fulfilled too, and just being rich doesn't make you feel fulfilled.

It's less of a "how can they be sad" and more of a "how dare they be sad". People are incensed by the fact that they think they want the life of a wealthy person, but they haven't considered the sacrifices that that person has had to make in order to become wealthy. You haven't heard about how hard Michael Jackson and the Williams sisters fathers drove them, for them to attain success, for example? It's well documented.

This could very easily turn into a Monty Python sketch, where I implore you not to donate any money to help save the rich, so I had better re-ground things. The point is, we're all human. Wealth doesn't really touch the soul. Wealth is just a silly made up game that's external to all of us. Sure it seems to control much in our lives, but the really important thing is human connection, and money can't buy you love.

Sure, it's true that money is a major stress factor in most of our lives. I have got less than two months before I'm financially screwed, but it takes 60 days before I get paid on a contract and I don't currently have a contract anyway. Does not compute. Doesn't add up. I'm going to be out on the street whether I work or not.

Surely that's down to self-sabotage? Surely that's down to a lack of planning, of cashflow forecasting? Well, there's only so much you can do. I worked my arse off, got paid a lot of overtime, but it made me very unwell. It's a Catch 22. I can 'sing that popular song' over and over and over again in order to plump up the bank balance, but it makes me sick... literally.

Yes, mental illness is invisible and poorly understood, but you feel it just the same. You feel it in your dark thoughts, you feel it in the pit of your stomach, you feel it when you deliberately hurt yourself to try and let the pain out. Isn't suicide the ultimate in self sabotage?

My days currently consist of lying awake anxiously all night, then sleeping until I force myself to get up and have something to eat, then I try and distract myself from the anxiety until it's time to pretend to go to sleep, but just lie there anxiously all over again. Lovely life, huh?

I started to fantasise last night, not about taking drugs, but about doing a backflip off the 48th floor of a nearby building. I thought about the slow rotation of my body, head over feet, as I accelerated through the air towards the ground. I thought about the collision with the pavement below, and how it would bring instant relief. No more stress. No more anxiety. No more depression. No more isolation. No more demonisation. No more pain.

I then started to think about BASE jumping from up there, and you know what? I started to get stressed. I started to think about getting caught by security. I started to think about having line twists or colliding with a streetlamp or some hard object. I started to think about how much it would hurt, to survive. I got sweaty palms and my pulse started to race, my body became restless. The thought of staying alive, with all this stress and pain and anxiety is not a pleasant one.

That's how people get pushed into addiction. When their life becomes stress and anxiety and depression, and all of their human connection collapses. You're driven inwards by stress and anxiety when nobody is there to help you. When people who care about you start to label you, demonise you and refuse to assist you, you retreat into yourself, you have to be self-reliant and you no longer trust people around you.

I know that all I need to stay alive is the food from soup kitchens and the Hare Krishna, plus my good sleeping bag and my bivouac. Yes, there's a certain amount of pride that stops me from crawling over broken glass back to my parents. I'd rather be homeless and destitute than live with their abuse. Without any self-esteem or identity I might as well just slit my wrists now.

I knew things were going to get tight if I didn't find work right away in November, but I didn't care. I couldn't work. I was exhausted and depressed, and my mood was sinking lower and lower. With retrospect, there was no way that I was ready for another contract. I wouldn't have lasted more than a week.

Now I'm looking down the barrel of financial armageddon, but I can't care. There's literally nothing I can do about it. I'm swamped with stress, anxiety and the feeling that I might as well give up. Where do you think those feelings lead?

What do you think happens when you swamp somebody with anxiety, stress? What do you think happens when somebody has no opportunities? What do you think happens to cornered rats?

The motherf**king cycle continues.

There's my old bike at Silicon Roundabout. I could tap up Tech City for some work, but it's the last bridge left unburnt and I'm definitely not having my finest hour

Tags: #drugs #alcohol #addiction #suicide #depression #career #london

This is a story about unusual techniques to stay alive...

I once filled up a law firm's email server with pictures of myself. I was quite concerned that I was dying and wanted to get the attention of the family friend who was mediating on a matter that was very stressful - an acrimonious divorce was threatening my life & livelihood. Still, very strange behaviour.

When I was getting completely nonsensical replies via email from somebody, I started CC'ing more and more people, so they could see that none of my questions were being answered and an ulterior motive was being pursued by this other person.

Obviously, letting people know when I was in hospital was a bit 'attention seeking' apparently, but messages of support were gratefully received. I know I still have to reply to quite a few people who were kind enough to reach out, but you can believe me when I say your messages did really make a difference.

There was a guy in London who was going to kill himself, but he decided that if, as he walked along, one person looked him in the eye and smiled at him then he wouldn't go through with it. The urban solitude of London had made him feel invisible, uncared for, alone. Thankfully, somebody did look him in the eye and smile. Human connection is important. Somebody saved that man's life with the simplest of gestures that cost nothing.

Urban solitude is a problem for many new arrivals in the capital. People have their headphones plugged in, reading a book, or their kindle, watching a movie on their tablet or perhaps just idly playing with their phone. Especially in the morning rush-hour, nobody is talking or in any way acknowledging that you're all crammed together like sardines in a stuffy tube carriage, on the way to that job that you all hate, from some far-flung flat that you can barely afford.

Anybody who shops in a town centre is probably expert at avoiding the people with clipboards who "just need a moment of your time" to fill in some survey or sign up to direct debit some regular donation to a particular charity. We have become experts in walking right through people giving out leaflets, who aggressively thrust them into areas of our body near our hands, but yet we avoid actually taking a damn leaflet. We can walk right past the beggar and the Big Issue seller without even acknowledging their existence. 1,000-yard stare, off into the distance, and pretend like you didn't even hear them, didn't even see them.

I was thinking today about the improvements that Frank made to his story he told me, in order to seem like a more worthy cause. He shaved 4 years off his age, and showed me his forearms and asked me to inspect for the track marks of an injecting drugs user. It makes me feel bad that I've told my own story of homelessness, if people are going to dismiss it because of my drug use that I'm being completely honest and open about.

When you meet homeless people, they are often very keen for you to know that drugs and alcohol play no part in their homelessness. To be honest, I was very surprised, when I sat down to have a chat with a homeless person, Matt, underneath the bridge outside Chiswick underground station. Matt was extremely articulate and erudite, and I owe him a big debt of thanks for some of the nuggets of information that were later to serve me well on my own journey through homelessness. I have to admit that although I believed him, I was extremely shocked when he told me he had no drug or alcohol abuse in his past. He was simply p**sed off with the system.

If it looks like I'm dropping all this stuff about getting to know the homeless, and trying to help Frank, into this narrative in order to big myself up as some kind of philanthropist, you're wrong. Actually, I found it fascinating, informative, later useful and certainly helping Frank helped me to avoid dealing with my own life at the time, and feel better about myself. There was no alturism there. It was escapism.

Every fun-run that you go on. Every sponsored walk or abseil, or parachute jump or whatever it is... you probably did it because you wanted to do the activity, to feel part of the event, to feel like you made a difference. Sadly, you didn't, except to your own sense of wellbeing and achievement. Yes, we salve our middle-class guilt by making paltry charity donations and taking part in fundraising. Charity doesn't work. It's failed.

We are arriving now at a situation where we are in the middle of a refugee crisis, a housing crisis, a benefits crisis, a pension crisis, an economic crisis, a mental health epidemic. Cancer, AIDS, Multiple Sclerosis and a heap of other diseases are still rife. Poverty has not been made history by any rock concerts.

I'm absolutely not discouraging you from getting involved with philanthropic work, and if you're a volunteer or you're doing your bit to directly help in the lives of others then I applaud you... not that you want or deserve such condescension. Sorry about that.

Everything's just so damn broken. Life's really not working well for the vast majority of people on Planet Earth.

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem, and I feel very guilty indeed.

Here I am being driven to work through a massive slum in Mumbai from my 7 star hotel. I'm off to help JPMorgan process $1.16qn of Credit Default Swaps, with a team of underpaid Indians who travel for hours on dangerous and overcrowded busses and trains to get to the office. Do you think I was helping this nation of 1.1 billion souls?

I was there in the middle of Ganesh Chaturthi and the monsoon rains. The streets were crammed with trailers with idols and flowers being towed to the sea, with dancing neighbourhood groups beating drums and dancing in the road behind them. The roads are pretty much gridlock anyway, without some gawping tourist of an investment banker sitting in the middle of the chaos with his private driver.

We can feel very special being driven around in the developing world, and living like a king relatively speaking. Many people fall for it. Many people fall for the trick and start believing they actually are special and they deserve their place in the world. That, for me, is where a person can cross the line and stray into narcissism and a sense of entitlement.

Several friends have told me virtually the same story, about thinking they were a hit with the ladies in South Asia or South America, and having 'pulled' a local girlfriend, they were surprised when later asked for cash. Just because you're not obviously in a whorehouse, doesn't mean that you're not participating in prostitution. Just because you're not obviously on a cotton plantation, doesn't mean you're not participating in slavery.

Economic slavery means using your hard currency (Dollar, Sterling, Euro, Yen etc.) in order to buy labour (and all labour's fruits) far more cheaply than you would be able to in a country with a hard currency. You can't get pedalled across a European city in a bicycle rickshaw for less than $1. In London it's £10/minute to be ferried around in this manner, and you can be stung with a £200 bill for a journey that would take 3 minutes by bus.

So, I'm able to sit about on my arse writing the equivalent of two novels all about myself on a blog, peppered with photographs of me. This can only happen at the expense of everybody who grew my food, stitched my clothes and manufactured the expensive laptop on which I type these very words. You could say I'm the ultimate narcissist and profiteer from the hard labour of others.

However, modern life can make you very sick. My friend Klaus often says "it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a sick society". I think he's right. Just because we are dry and warm and well fed and comfortable here in the UK, doesn't mean that our island is now 'full' and we should 'look after our own'.

We are beginning to pay the price for Imperial aggression and an unwillingness to share. That we don't even redistribute enough wealth to end homelessness and poverty within our own borders, shows just how far we have taken small-minded 'look after number one' attitudes. The tabloid reader's belief that immigrants are not an integral part of our society, is ironic when a great many of Britain's working class are clustered together on sink-hole estates that they can never escape. Nobody from higher social strata would ever have cause to venture into the isolated community of poor white Brits.

Do I think I'm better than those people? Am I above living in a council flat, claiming JSA and integrating with the [not] working class? Actually, I feel rather angry that these people have been manipulated by the media into scapegoating the wrong group of people. It's the moneyed political elite who are the reason for economic inactivity and stressful hand-to-mouth existance of the ordinary British public, not the immigrants and refugees.

Yes, I'm privileged. Yes, I still have some shred of self-esteem. Yes, I'm somewhat conceited in writing so much about myself and plastering photos of me all over it. But am I unaware of my actions? Am I unable to perceive the self-absorption of it all? No.

The fact of the matter is that I just don't want to be trodden underfoot, so I'm yapping like a little dog. I don't want to end up dying young, with everybody wondering what happened and whether they could have helped at all, whether they could have intervened.

Suicide might be a sane response to an insane world, but I do appreciate that it's not a pleasant thing for other people to have to deal with, when you're gone. I've written before about compassion fatigue, and it must be hard when one of your friends or a family member becomes unwell with something so poorly understood as a mental disorder.

Drinking yourself to death, or slowly killing yourself with drugs... these things are clearly part of the spectrum of mental disorders. Substance abuse is just part of a complex picture of declining mental heath that is tightly bound up with prejudice and urban myths.

I had to quit drinking for 101 days, and all drugs and substances for 6 months, in order to be taken seriously. I suffered for my art and my cause: to draw attention to the plight of ordinary human beings who are suffering, not because they are corrupt and immoral, but because our very society is sick, and we are turning our back on our own friends and relatives, because of stupid media bulls**t.

Things have to be pretty bad in somebody's life for them to take a risk with a deadly substance. Things have to be really bad in somebody's life for them to be driven into the arms of a chemical dependency, in preference for choosing life.

Why did I choose not to choose life? Why did I choose something else?

Tags: #drugs #addiction #homeless #frank #career #divorce #politics

This is a story about doing more faster...

Startup accelerators are a good thing, don't get me wrong. But what's to be done with the wayward founders, the ones who burn out? How does somebody decompress, decelerate from the high demands of an intensive program like an accelerator?

Here's something I wrote on day 28 of the 13-week Springboard program, which is part of the global TechStars network: https://springboardcambridge.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/day-28-guest-post-validated-madness/

My company was shortlisted for TechStars, Boulder, CO, USA. I got the news at 6pm on a Wednesday evening. I needed to be in Boulder for about 10am the next morning. Solution? Get on a plane to Denver that night and drive straight to Boulder in the morning. No problem.

When I arrived at London Heathrow airport and went to check in for my flight, it turned out that the visa waiver program had changed since the last time I was in the USA. I needed an ESTA. This was a problem... the embassy was now closed. However, I managed to apply for my ESTA and get the all-important number in about 15 minutes, standing at the checkin desk, via a US government website.

On the plane, I read a book from cover to cover: Do More Faster by Dave Cohen and Brad Feld, founders of TechStars. It seemed apt, and I had finished the book by the time we landed in Colorado. I then met Dave Cohen later that day, along with Nicole Glaros who was heavily pregnant at the time, but still running the Boulder program.

I guess I shouldn't really associate myself with the TechStars network, given my precarious professional position, and the nature of this blog, but it's impossible to tell my story without somehow including the post-accelerator implosion that I went through. Certainly it's important to state that I always had the support of the network and fellow founders at all times though. Things would probably have ended up a lot worse without that safety net.

Anyway, I didn't really love my startup. I didn't have a lot of passion for the industry sector it was in and the software challenge had already been overcome. We started the program with a cashflow positive business, working software and an established customer and reseller base. I definitely took the wrong startup through the Springboard program. We should have pivoted more aggressively, but you live you learn.

I should have ceded control to my co-founder, David, a lot earlier. The acting coach that Jon got - Annette - to help us with our pitches, suggested that we give David a shot as the CEO. It was good advice. However, ego got in the way. I liked having those three little letters as my job title, even if I wasn't any good at the job and hated all the roles and responsibilities of it.

The problem is, I'm an engineer, and engineers just want to solve problems. In sales meetings, I would be far more concerned about the customer getting the solution that met their needs, than trying to extract a commercially sensible amount of cash from them. It was more important to me that my software was being used, rather than it bringing in sustainable revenues.

Looking back now, it makes much more sense that David and I should have switched roles. He's really good at the whole business administration and driving a hard sales bargain thing. He's really good at making sure that the whole business runs smoothly and is well administered. I only care about the software.

Jon did an interesting thing to try and save us from ourselves (or rather, from me). He got in a bunch of psychologists to come and tell us that we should be consultants, not running a startup. He had tired of nursing us through the growing pains of founder conflict, and joking about our "mutually assured destruction (MAD)" pact, which he wrote on the whiteboard above our heads.

Between Jon, Jess and the other founders we somehow managed to muddle through to the end of the program. There was only one time that I was so offensive that I nearly got my head kicked in. I would have deserved it. I was wrong, David was right, and my beef was with the browser, not him. I was upset that some technical detail wasn't quite measuring up to my preconceived notions, and refusing to try David's suggestion, which wasn't to specification. Of course, it did work, but being a stubborn engineer, I just didn't want it to work like that.

The weird thing is that David and me didn't have a very startup-y lifestyle. After I had finished with TechStars in Boulder, I jumped in my hire car, drove to Vail and went snowboarding. David used to be a ski instructor and sometimes do programming work in Arinsal, Andorra, inbetween forays onto the piste. We both had a pretty nice life. We didn't really need startup stress, hassle and belt tightening.

Apart from living away from our girlfriends in Cambridge for 3 months, there wasn't a lot of hardship that we really suffered, apart from the sheer workload of Mentor Madness and having to try and run a business at the same time as participate in a startup accelerator. I'm glad we did it though. Those experiences and contacts are very precious to me, even if I've not exactly made the most of them, yet.

Our intake must have been a record one for babies. There were two founders - including my co-founder, David - who had girlfriends who were pregnant. The first Springboard babies were born only months after the program ended. How those guys did it, I have no idea. Hero dads.

Obviously, David wanted to maintain a stable family home near Bristol for his first-born child. The end of the program marked the culmination of the intractable problem of where to locate the business. My ex-wife certainly wasn't giving any ground or prepared to compromise even an inch. I was rather caught inbetween a rock and a hard place. Naturally, I just had a meltdown rather than dealing with things in any sensible way.

The sensible thing to do would have been to ditch the girl who never supported me in any of my endeavours and was simply an ungrateful drain on my time, money and resources. She expected zero impact in our lifestyle, from me choosing an entrepreneurial lifestyle. Funding lavish holidays for her on a startup salary is quite hard to budget for.

But an unstoppable change had been started within me. I found Cambridge life to be exciting, exhilarating, even if it was only by some tenuous association with the University of Cambridge. I loved being around smart people. Startup founders are great to hang out with because they say "yes, and" rather than "no, but".

I really needed to go through a breakup, but I don't really handle failure very well. I knew my startup was going to fail with me at the helm. I had failed as CEO. I had failed to make my relationship work. I wanted to change my entire life, but I felt trapped.

My word is my bond, and I take commitment very seriously. I'm also a completer-finisher. I would rather finish something to a terrible shoddy standard, than leave a job uncompleted. I have lots of finished projects, but most of them are not to a very high standard. I'd prefer something was done, rather than perfect.

So it was, that I came to be trying to meet the screamed selfish demands of a spoiled partner, whilst also unable to bite the bullet and step down from my position as CEO, and also accept that I needed to chuck away and change most pieces of my life. They were challenging times, in the couple of months following Springboard.

During one trip back to Cambridge, in an attempt to secure a seed round of funding, I pretty much told all our potential investors that there was no interesting intellectual property in our business and it was a completely copyable business model. Not a smart move. I could almost see my co-founder facepalm when I told the panel this. Engineer's problem. I cannot speak a lie on technical matters.

Anyway, perhaps I wanted the thing to die, because my life was pretty miserable post-Springboard. Back in my spare-bedroom office, over a hundred miles away from my co-founder, and over a hundred miles away from London, and the wrong side of town to get to Cambridge. It felt like I was in the middle of nowhere, which I was.

Just about the only thing I've done too slowly in my life is to ditch a dead relationship. I tend to pick the wrong partners and allow klingons and coat-tail riders to try and hang on for a free ride. I tolerate fools too gladly. David is certainly no fool, and I feel very privileged to have gotten to work with him. However, he quite rightly stood his ground and didn't compromise on matters that were my responsibility to resolve.

The pressure to provide a luxury lifestyle for an ungrateful and unsupportive partner, and give up on my hopes & dreams was too much to ask of me. I was sinking fast into a depression, as my all-too-brief foray into the liberating world of running a business and being an entrepreneur, plus my time in the company of startup founders, mentors and academics, was looking like it was over forever.

I tried to prop things up, getting a job back in corporate bankerland. Shovelling other people's s**t for a living. It broke my heart. You can have the most lavish lifestyle in the world, but if what you do for 50+ hours a week is basically total bulls**t that you hate, then it won't be any compensation at all.

My ex-wife and my Dad really worked very hard to pull the rug from under my feet, and I'm really upset about it. However, I know it's my fault for not pushing those toxic people out of my life and following my dreams. They've been wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong again, but they still can't see that their small-mindedness and lack of vision has caused so many golden opportunities to be wasted. I actually have hard numbers showing that investment ideas of mine that they vetoed have now turned out to be ridiculously profitable. Never mind.

I actually feel as though I've never been allowed to dream. I've always been expected to just shovel shit for everybody else to prop up their dreams. I didn't go to University when all my friends were going, because my Dad made such a big deal about what a waste of money it was. I didn't follow my startup dreams, because I was pretty much forced to provide a luxury lifestyle, and chain myself to a remote seaside town for an ungrateful partner who didn't appreciate a single cent of it.

Anyway, moan moan moan. That kind of negative attitude is not going to get me anywhere. I've watched it all burn down, while my Dad and ex have stuffed their pockets and then distanced themselves from me. It should have been vice-versa. I should have shut those toxic people out of my life a lot sooner.

Shoulda. Woulda. Coulda. That's not going to be my epitaph. There's no sense in living in the past, and I apologise that this blog has been firmly rooted back in time, as I struggle to move forwards with my life.

You probably can't understand why I've left highly paid jobs and contracts, and put myself through all the stress of founding a business. I know I complain about the overhead of business administration sometimes, but I really have few complaints about the entrepreneurial lifestyle. I know that Jon's psychologists told me that I'm not cut out to be an entrepreneur, but it's something that keeps coming back to me... that desire to found and shape businesses, to lead, to create.

You don't see the sacrifice that has enabled me to enter the corporate world on a decent wage. You don't know how much of an isolated lonely existance that a geek had at school, programming their calculator and designing sprites in the back of their exercise books, when they should be having schoolday antics with the group of friends that they didn't have.

The loners, the eccentric introverts, the odd-ones-out are thrust together out of a necessity for safety in numbers, and sure those people become friends, but you're all still prisoners in your own mind to some extent. You might be able to see your friends get bullied too, but when it's your turn, you have to endure it all on your own.

Suddenly, being a techie geek startup guy becomes cool, and you are hot property. You can earn big cash selling your soul to the corporate sector, or you can sell lies to investors and have a super cool office of your own. Fake it until you make it, but you never faked it. You just woke up one day, and you're one of the highest paid people, because of stuff you did because you had a lonely childhood, with your head buried in books, or hunched over a keyboard.

Look, there are those sprites I designed in the back of my school exercise book, now on the wall of a global bank's office. You can't see how hard I've worked. You have no idea how much suffering there has been behind the bored looking exterior of the guy asking awkward questions on a conference call, slouched in his chair at his desk.

I can't hark back to 3 or 4 years of my life when I had very little to do except read books and write essays about things I found interesting. I never got to spend my investor's money on cool mosaic decorations on the wall, and bean bags and a table tennis table for my team. My startup life spans pretty much 3 months in a startup accelerator. That was the only time in my life when I really believed in what I was doing. When I was surrounded by smart people who I liked and respected. I was forging my own path through life.

So, what's to be done? Well, I'm running low on cash again, so I guess I will have to do another stint at the coal face. I will have to go on a raiding mission into corporate crazy-land and shovel s**t for some more dollars. I don't really have enough capital to risk chasing my dreams, as usual. As usual, I have been nickel and dimed by the klingons, coat-tail riders and the toxic people in my life, and I'm the one who feels bullied and alone.

I'm kinda used to it. I guess you could call this regression therapy. I've gone back to my childhood, where I had my head in the clouds and I was just writing programs and designing sprites, to distract myself from the crushing loneliness and brutality of the daily bullying.

It looks like there are a lot of open doors to me, but you've got to believe me when I tell you that it's virtually torture to go back into the corporate world, having had a taste of freedom.

I'll do what has to be done, and I'm sure you hate me for acting all spoiled and privileged, but you have to understand just how heartbreaking it is to sell your soul so cheaply.

Tags: #career #startup

This is a story about wearing a straightjacket...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: #career

This is a story about discovering yourself...

Nostalgia is a liar that tells us that there was a bygone era when things were better than they are today. It tells us that despite a lack of antibiotics, immunisation, modern surgical techniques, telephones, internet, jet aircraft and reliable fuel-economical automobiles, there is something that we're missing from the pre-war years.

The fact is, that most people didn't have enough to eat, struggled to stay warm & dry and lived in fear of preventable diseases, which killed a huge proportion of people. Manual labour and low standards of health & safety killed men early. Childbirth and a lack of family planning killed women early. Infant mortality rates were stupendously high. Life was short & shit.

There's no point in looking backwards to those times. There's no point in stuffing your house full of antiques and dressing your children like some Dickens pastiche. There's no point in preaching a values system that probably never existed. You might like to believe that there was a time when there was more respect, more order. Do you think that the whip, cane and the gallows were never used? Even with corporal and capital punishment as deterrents, people still stepped out of line.

You might bemoan unruly or even ferral children, and imagine that there was a time when kids "behaved themselves". In fact, it is you who is delusional. Children are not dollies and mannequins. Children are not there for you to play dressing up games with, and to robotically comply with your instructions. They are little people, with their own identities.

The sooner that you accept that we live now, not yesteryear, the better. Your child does not have some imagined Victorian values stored hidden inside them. Your child exists as they do, today. They are shaped by this very moment, not your flights of fancy, nor your imagination.

Sure, as a parent, you have some preprogrammed delusions. You will always believe your baby is the bonniest. You will always think your child is the most adorable, the smartest, the one destined for success. No, probably not.

It's a good idea to back your kid up, to be on their side, to fight their corner. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. It all goes a bit skew-whiff when you start using your kid to live out your own fantasies though, getting your kid to compensate for your own inadequacies. If you didn't do well at school, pushing your kid too hard to be the academic that you failed to be will never fix your past failure.

And so it came to pass, that I arrived at the age of 17 without the foggiest idea of who I was as a person. I was quite clear about two different imaginary people that my parents wanted me to be, and just how much contradiction and impossibility there was in realising their fantasies. However, I hadn't the faintest idea of what shape my own personality took.

Discovering the drug, Ecstasy, allowed me to feel self-love and explore my feelings for myself. It also gave me a strange identity, bound up with drugs, dancing and music. I was a clubber/raver. I knew who I was on a Saturday night, in a sweaty railway arch, cutting shapes in the air and with pupils like saucers, high as a kite on MDMA. The rest of the time was dead to me. I was just counting down the hours, minutes and seconds until the next weekend.

This was clearly not a sustainable and complete identity, and my self-esteem was still at absolute rock bottom. In this vulnerable phase in my development, I slept with my male boss, believing - hoping even - that I was possibly gay. Turns out that I'm not gay. Shame. Life could have possibly slotted into some order, as at least there is some strong identity in being camp and effeminante, as a man.

The next cruel twist of vulnerability was to see me get involved romantically with an achondroplastic dwarf. She's one of the nicest girls you could ever hope to meet, and I really hope her feelings aren't hurt if she reads this, but she was quite aggressive in her advances. As I was completely lacking in self-confidence, I struggled to assert myself. I went along with things. I complied.

It's a bit strange, dating somebody that you're not attracted to, but I guess it's no different from my experiments with homosexuality. It's just that she was less unpleasant to kiss than somebody whose face is covered in stubble. Being f**ked in the arse is tolerable, but not exactly pleasant. This girl at least didn't want to penetrate me with some part of her body.

This strange little life had formed itself. I switched myself off during the week and went into hibernation. Then at the weekends I would take Ecstasy, and under the influence of this chemical, my feelings became much more fungible. It's easier to believe you have fallen for somebody, under the influence of the 'love drug'.

I guess I always maintained some toe-hold in reality though. I always knew that my feelings were being psychopharmacologically pulled this way and that, and I knew deep down that something felt very wrong.

It takes a long time to fix broken self-esteem and for you to emerge from the oppression of people who never allowed you to have your own identity. My own tastes had never been allowed to develop. I had never gained the skills of choosing my own clothes and outfits. I didn't know how to dress.

My hair was unruly and an inconvenience. I didn't like its style, but I had no idea how I wanted it to be cut. I had no idea how to tame my wavy locks. It's only because of an outdoors lifestyle, that I arrived at the shorter cut that I wear today.

IT contracting gave me the money to attain status symbols like a nice car, which I'm ashamed to admit, helped my self-esteem to some extent. Becoming some twat who is rather pleased with himself because he's rich and successful in those materialistic measures was not a road that I would have liked to continue down though. It was rather offensive to be flashing the cash to compensate for crushing inadequacy.

It was London that eventually gave me the space and the time to develop my own style, my own precious identity. It was tough going. One very bullying housemate drove me to the very limit of what I could endure, before she finally pissed off. Oh, what sweet relief! To finally be living in the Angel Islington, as a well dressed young man in a job that I was good at, with a healthy circle of friends and acquaintances. It was bliss.

The combination of corporate identity midweek - nice suit and crisply pressed shirts - with a surf style at the weekends, coupled with my newfound love of kiteboarding, really sealed the deal. I felt like a complete person, and for the first time in my life, age 23, I actually asked a girl out on a date.

I was still crushingly insecure, but I mostly muddled through because I was busy and I was optimistic and positive. I bungled a lot of the growing up, and failed to see the opportunity for bed-hopping for what it was, and instead continued to think I was falling in love at the drop of a hat.

I was hopeless at reading even the most un-subtle of advances by the opposite sex, and screwed up opportunities to trade up with some girls who I fancied the pants off. I was a faithful monogamist, but perhaps only because self-esteem and experience were still quite lacking in my love life. I kick myself now, when I think of some of the gorgeous women who advertised their availability to me.

In London you can find people whose style you wish to emulate. You can find those few inspiring fashion pieces, which can prop up your fragile self-esteem. You can start to develop your own identity, your own style, your own wardrobe. You start to feel good in your clothes, and then later in your body.

My broken self-esteem was restored to the point where I was confident enough to make a permanent mark of ownership on my body, in the form of a tattoo. I'm now so self-confident that I made the mark in a place where I can't even see it. From the photos that I've seen, it's not even quite in the right place but I don't care. It feels nice to have disfigured myself, deliberately, through my own choice.

I even grew a moustache for Movember, which is something I never thought I would do, given my lack of ability to grow decent stubble or a beard.

There's this tightly-bound link between London, outdoor/adrenalin sports, working for a corporation and being a secret raver/clubber, that is instricically linked to my identity. It's hard to shake those foundations as the things that I will run to in times of stress.

I know that MDMA will release me from the shackles of shame, regret and self-criticism, when I become paralysed by those oppressive thoughts. I know that the chemical will help me to have an epiphany of sorts, and move on with my life when I have become stuck in a rut. It's like taking a brief holiday from yourself and all your baggage. It's pretty hard on your body & mind in your thirties though! Quite a hangover.

I know that adrenalin sports will remind me that I'm alive, when I feel dead or dying. Just riding across London on a bicycle is enough to reaffirm that you still have some self-preservation instincts. You always end up having a moment where you nearly die, which puts things into perspective.

I know that immersing myself in corporate culture is occasionally good for my identity. It feels good to put on a suit, and know that the public are somehow looking at you as somehow more respectable, more mannered, more civilised. It feels good to puff your chest out with self importance and pretend like being part of the big money machine means that you have some value, even if the bubble soon bursts.

I know that being part of the heaving mass of bodies that make up London is a very cool part of somebody's identity. When you are somewhat hardened to it, used to the noise and the invasion of personal space, and the offence on your senses, you then start to get enjoyment from gliding serenely through the carnage. You know that people are looking at you and wondering how you managed to cut through the crowd and anticipate the seemingly random movements of individuals, so that you dance around the dawdler and dodge the ditherer. It feels good to have mastered the capital city, to know these mean streets.

Put it all together and you have quite a strong identity, quite a distinct personality. It's quite nice that a 'me' has emerged after a rather difficult upbringing, and further struggles to break free from parental oppression and some relationships which preyed upon my vulnerability, my insecurity.

If you wanted to try and get me outside the M25 now, you'd have to put my dead body in a pine box.

I love this dirty town.

Tags: #london #career #childhood

This is a story about brain damage...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a story about our perception of time...

Watched pots never boil. Drying paint isn't very interesting. The bus always turns up just after you decided to walk. You think you're always going to be single and then you're fighting girls off with a stick.

I forgot to do a blog post yesterday, or maybe I was ill. I can't really remember. I'm getting a lot of blackouts from the legal benzodiazepines I'm taking. Life is a lot easier if you're unconscious while you wait for the world to catch up with you.

Yes, my single bit of career advice would be, get really good at a job, and then cryogenically freeze yourself until a load of time went down the shitter, so you're now the same age as other candidates for the same role, and then it's really easy to get a job.

You can fill in the bit when you were in the cryogenic freezer by saying you were doing a startup or something. Don't say you went travelling. People will think you like travelling the world meeting new people and experiencing new cultures, and those aren't the sorts of people who are very employable.

Don't whatever you do let your prospective employers know that you're human. That's the worst mistake ever. Just give people the computer readout of your calculation processing power, and problem solving algorithms and the standard deviation and other statistical measures to show consistency, and then they'll know you're an excellent quality cyborg.

Make sure you memorise all the standard answers to all the standard interview questions. They're not actually questions. It's just a means of proof that you do a lot of interviews so you must be very bad at getting a job, or you're very desperate, so they can make you a shitty salary offer.

What a silly game.

Tags: #career

This is a story about running out of ideas...

That's a light box. It's supposed to be a way of treating Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). It's the final thing I thought I could try, as a natural remedy for depression. The regimen that I have followed for 6 months is:

• Varied diet, including plenty of fruit & veg
• Sleep hygiene: strict bedtime and getting up after 7 or 8 hours, even on weekends
• No caffeine
• No alcohol (actually only 3 months)
• No medication
• No drugs
• No legal highs
• Amino acids
• Vitamins
• Minerals
• Exercise
• Making new friends
• Trying to have a stable place to live
• Trying to have a job
• Reconnecting with old friends
• Getting some professional help (only had a whole week in hospital)
• Being disciplined and self controlled
• Wearing blue-light filtering glasses after 4pm (for the last few months)
• Using the light box for at least an hour every morning (for the last month)

Guess what happened? My mood was able to react to things, and I reacted to my mood. There was no stability. In fact there was no coping mechanism. Everything I used to do to regulate my mood was removed, so I did other things that were detrimental to my overall wellbeing.

Being hung over or drunk at work is quite good if you hate your job and think that the management are idiots. Because I was sober, I told the HSBC management team that their project didn't stand a chance in hell of being delivered, because it was being run by people who are terrible at Agile Project Management, and seem to be completely lacking any relevant software development experience. I said I didn't want to be any part of it unless some big changes were made. I said I wasn't comfortable doing the wrong thing.

Being hopped up on coffee is good if you want to rescue a project. I recoded Barclays entire Corporate Pingit system, in 30 hours, with no sleep. I kept the existing public API, but everything else was thrown away. Instead of spaghetti code, full of copy & paste, and buggy as hell, poor error handling, poor logging - unsupportable - I just rewrote nice clean code. Lots of coffee, 30 hour hackathon, all the bugs solved, code reduced by 80%, production grade error handling and logging. The team leader felt important because the old system barely worked, so he spent a lot of time understanding the spaghetti. There wasn't really anything for either me or him to do after I wrote a decent system. My boss was happy, the team leader wasn't, I got my contract terminated, Barclays customers were happy, I was happy that I'd delivered the software that meant I no longer had any work to do.

Corporate software is boring. The projects I'm asked to do are child's play. 48 million customer's metadata? That's only 48 terabytes, if we store a megabyte per customer. A low res scan of their passport and maybe a utility bill, plus a few thousand characters for their name, address, phone number etc. etc. At JPMorgan we stored about 3 petabytes of document scans. That's about the same amount of data in the entire Library of Congress.

AI, games, simulation, data analysis, physics & cosmology modelling, codebreaking... those are the hard problems. I remember I wrote a program that calculated every single possible checkmate. Then I wrote a program that found all the moves that led to those positions. It ran out of memory before it got back to the early moves. Then I wrote a program that could take the position of the pieces on the board, and find the moves to checkmate, where there is no opportunity for your opponent to win. Most of the time the program couldn't find a path where the opponent had no chance. In theory, with enough processing power and storage space, chess could be solved by a program. However there are 10 to the power 80 (10 + 80 zeros) atoms in the universe, and there are 10 to the power 123 (10 + 123 zeros) moves in the chess game tree. We should probably concentrate on modelling the cosmos at subatomic scale before wasting our time on a silly game.

So, that's my quandary. I'm not very challenged or interested by anything in the corporate world, and my solution of just being drunk all the time can't have been doing my liver much good. However, without alcohol/benzodiazepines I think too much, and without caffeine/bupropion/stimulants, I can't get motivated to keep solving the same easy problems that don't even need solving.

In fact, when I think about it, I must have made a lot of people redundant. I've automated a lot of stuff that people used to be employed to do. I've made corporations very rich, by allowing them to lay off loads of their workforce, but increase their productivity and profitability. My main specialism is Straight Through Processing (STP). I know how to get $1.16qn processed with just a few programmers, database administrators, infrastructure engineers, network specialists and system administrators. You don't need project managers, because they just put the lies you tell them into a spreadsheet and tell everybody that everything is going really well. You don't need testers, because good programmers write good automation tests, and they don't write bugs. There's no difficult logic or calculations in a corporate system. I do get spooked out when my code works first time, but it's quicker to do it that way.

Human workflow and user experience. Here's a better use of your time and money. Fill out paper forms and then set fire to them. Nobody gives a shit about having to go through your life story just to become a customer or get a government service. If I want broadband, just send somebody to install it and set up a direct debit. If I want to rent a flat, I'm going to pay you 6 weeks deposit plus a month's rent in advance, plus letting agent fees. Just give me the keys as soon as I've put the money in your account. Don't even bother with the contract. Burn it. The contract is simple: I pay you rent, I live in the flat.

You send a person to read the electricity meter. They can take my card payment for whatever I owe when they are in my home. You send a person to read the gas meter. They can work out my bill and I'll pay it on the spot. You send armies of traffic wardens. They can spend less time hiding in bushes and more time knocking on doors taking card payments for the rubbish collection, street lighting, police, fire service, libraries, schools and other things that I quite like rather than hovering near cars whose meter payment is about to expire.

My bank sends me a letter saying that they've paid a bill for me, but I didn't have quite enough money, so they're going to charge me even more money. My bank's only function, so far as I can see, is to make my problems worse. Rather than ringing me up and saying "Hello, Mr. Grant. We can see your income has suddenly stopped. We're not going to charge you any interest until you start earning again, because otherwise we are going to stress you out and make you bankrupt, and then we won't get our money back". 

You see, everything trundles along fine when you play along with the game. Keep working doing that job you hate, at a company run by imbeciles, on a project that just needs 5 decent full stack developers to get on with what they do best, for 2 weeks, with no project managers who couldn't organise a piss up in a bar, and no 'architects' who just draw on whiteboards and produce documents that nobody reads, because they were rubbish at actually producing real working software.

The worst code I ever wrote was my first iPhone game. Games are awful as a single indie dev. You have to do all the graphics, sound effects, music, plus design the user interface, and then there's the game itself which has to run at at least 30 frames per second. The calculations are hard. Doing it in Objective-C was a nightmare. I've never know a language with such whacky syntax. I can probably write code in about 20 languages (BASIC, Pascal, Assembler, C, ADA, C++, Java, Javascript, C-shell, Korn-shell, Bash, Perl, PHP, C#, SQL, AWK, Batch, Google Apps Script, Logo, VBA, XSLT) and there's a bunch more I know enough of the syntax of to read and edit.

I can glance at some data and tell you if it's XML, JSON, Base-64, HEX, key-value pairs, fixed position, CSV. I can probably guess how the programmers of your favourite game store the high score table, and insert myself as the number one player with an unassailable score.

Yes, playing the games that everybody else does, competing... it seems a bit pointless when you know the game is rigged, and if I really wanted to, I could tweak my bank balance. Fraud is not hard, and banks make so much money they don't even go after the small fraudsters. It's easier to charge honest hard working people exorbitant rates of interest and fees rather than doing their actual legal & moral duty to Know Your Customer (KYC). I could buy a digital identity for about $100, open a bank account, get some loans, use the money to buy a real passport from a European country that's a bit more relaxed about staff members making identity documents in return for a cash bonus.

Once you're in Europe you can just keep heading east until you find a country where people don't read too many newspapers and watch too much TV. You can find somewhere you can afford to eat and sleep for a couple of years, while you wait out the storm. You can take some time out from the rat race, because you deserve it.

My iPhone app business was a hit, my first IT contracting company made loads of money, my electrician business was profitable, but the building trade is hard, my enterprise mobile apps business was too ahead of its time and never made much money, my Bitcoin trading and mining was hugely profitable, my second IT contracting company made loads of money. I don't really want to sell out and get another contract just yet. I've got some cool software ideas.  Instead of doing what I normally do and start with a profitable business model, I want to do something I'm passionate about.

I don't work at MIT or Stanford. I don't work at CERN or the UK Atomic Energy Authority, but I can tell you that the strong nuclear force is the energy that's released when a heavy element is split into two lighter elements. But what does "heavy" even mean when we haven't managed to get the Standard Model of Particle Physics to be unified with Special and General Relativity. Special Relativity tells us that energy and mass are two sides of the same coin, and General Relativity tells us how mass stretches the fabric of spacetime. Gravitational lensing has proven the theories predictions. The Standard Model had it's wartime and industrial applications. The transistor radio and faster computers. Every experiment discovers new weirdness though, rather than proving the model is complete. The particle zoo grows and grows, every time we smash protons together at higher and higher energies.

What does Quanta mean? It means "how much". A photon - a packet of light - comes in a specific frequency, which tells you how much energy it has. Let's imagine that a red photon is 2, green is 4 and blue is 6. We can also imagine that an X-ray might be 20 and a gamma ray 50. Do you notice that all the numbers are even? That's because you can't see anything odd numbered. A photon with the wrong energy won't interact with an atom that needs a higher energy to absorb it, and then emit a new photon. The only way you know anything exists is because of the photons that are emitted from atoms.

So we can only work with things we can see, and those things will only tell us about the photons that have the right energy. We can build a machine that measures microwaves, but what material should we use to listen to the frequencies that no known material interacts with. How would we even find elements that our eyes and our radios and our photographic chemicals can't detect?

Well, cosmologists reckon there's loads of it, whatever it is. They call it Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Nobody can see it, but they've done the math, and there just isn't enough visible matter to glue the galaxies together. Imagine if Dark Photons came in frequency 1, 3, 5, 7 etc. but our visible universe is governed by the Planck Constant, which means multiples of 2, in this  simplified example. If you can only see 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 etc. then you can't see the Dark Photons and the Dark Matter that can only be seen with the materials that we only hypothesise to exist.

General Relativity is normally right, and GR isn't fussy about the matter that it accelerates. It doesn't deal in packets of energy. GR doesn't do probabilities. Quantum Mechanics says that if we stop observing something it loses certainty and spreads out into a probability cloud. If you know the location of something, you can't know it's momentum. If you know something's momentum, you don't know where it's located. It's like saying that if everybody stops looking at the moon, it won't be where you predicted it to be when you look back. But GR doesn't care about that. GR has predicted the moon's orbit with incredible accuracy, and the moon always obeys the law of gravity.

If you ignore gravity in your subatomic world, you permit matter to behave unpredictably. If you ignore special relativity, you permit massive particles to fly around faster than the speed of light, in order to uphold the uncertainty principle.

If we think about the duality of light. Both a particle and a wave. We think of photons as massless, but they have energy and finite speed so General Relativity applies. The speed of light is too fast to get caught in orbit but light will bend around massive objects. Let's use the Pilot Wave Theory instead of all that Quantum weirdness. Imagine our photon being carried along by the gravitational waves that it's making. Gravity waves can travel as fast as they like and can even escape black holes. You can't detect them, because your ruler will stretch and compress as a wave passes. You can't take a timing of how long it takes for something to travel from A to B because time and space are different for different observers. Just by carrying my atomic clock to my fellow experimenter, to compare the time I measured and the time they measured, my clock will run slower because I'm moving in space. Time is not distance divided by speed.

Time measures how much slower you're moving than the speed of light. If you could travel at the speed of light, and tried to shine a torch forwards, no light would come out and your watch would be stopped. You wouldn't even be conscious, because you'd be frozen in time. If you slowed down to 99% of the speed of light and shone your torch, you'd see it beaming off just as fast as normal. That's because time is passing more slowly, so you don't notice that your light is moving at 1% of its normal speed. When you get back home, you'll probably find that everybody is dead, because time didn't slow down for them. Your clock is right, but so is theirs.

So what's going on at the subatomic scale then? Well, you can't really detect a single particle. When a photon hits the Charged Couple Device in your digital camera, it's absorbed. Enough photons have to be absorbed to trigger the discharge of a capacitor. Only the amplified signal is strong enough to be measured. The thing about amplification is that you get noise. You're trying to measure a signal, but a percentage of what you measure is noise. That's the signal to noise ratio. It gets worse. Because instruments are digital, they have limited precision. If you measure colour with 8 bits, you can only pick the closest of 256 colours. A CD can only store 16 bits of air pressure: 65,535 possible values. It does this 44,100 times a second. Pretty good, but only an approximation.

Because all digital equipment depends on an effect called Quantum Tunnelling, it's hard to know if the Quantum phenomena are being observed, or whether it's the instrument's noise that is being amplified. Early computers sent signals in parallel, but sometimes the data got 'skewed', with some bits arriving later than others. Now data is sent in serial, with very fast modulators and demodulators, but that means that a lot of buffering has to occur. If you imagine the time it takes for a detected signal to be amplified, that amplified value to be measured, the value stored in a buffer, a modulator to turn the value into electrical pulses, the time to travel down the wire, a demodulator to measure the pulses and store a value in another buffer, a memory controller to load that value into the computer processor's register, the processing instruction has to be loaded from the cache, and then the calculation is performed, the result is copied from the result register to memory, the I/O controller sends the result to the storage device.

Then, ages and ages and ages later, a scientist comes and looks at the values. According to Quantum Physics, every piece of measuring equipment, power source, data transmission cable, the computer and it's storage device, are all part of a quantum superposition, and the value is not determined until the scientist observes it, at which point the wavefunction collapses. Computers are great at doing calculations and for sharing research, but by their very nature as machines that exploit strange subatomic behaviour - semiconductors - they are also not very reliable when measuring the very properties of physics that they themself are built on.

It's useful to think of the Pilot Wave theory, because it explains observations like the double-slit experiment, in a nice deterministic way. Photons don't travel through both slits, but the wave does, and then the two waves interfere. Interference disappears as soon as you polarise the particle, because the peaks and troughs are no longer in phase. We really don't need to mess around with probability waves.

Yes I really hate probabilistic theories. Because subatomic things are smaller than the wavelength of light, we can only make statistical measurements. The size of the atomic nucleus was estimated by hammering a sheet of gold really thin and then firing electrons at it. Based on the number of electrons that bounced back and got detected, an estimate was made of how much empty space there is in an atom. However, you might know the weight of the gold, and the surface area, but you don't know how thick it is. It might be 5 atoms thick, it might be 50. Where did you get your measurement for the weight of a gold atom? How you know its density? How do you know how tightly packed the atoms are together?

At some point you're going to have to rely on some old science. The periodic table gives us the atomic weight, based on a presumed number of protons, neutrons and electrons. But what about the strong nuclear force that's holding the nucleus together? What about the energy of the electrons in the biggest orbits? Does a 1g diamond have as many atoms as 1g of Carbon dust? Prove it.

So we know that heavier elements are unstable, radioactive, and decay into lighter elements. We know what amount of what element, in a certain isotope, will give a self-sustaining fission reaction. We guess that fusion in stars creates all the elements up to iron, and all the elements after that we guess are created in supernovae. We haven't done much apart from a bunch of chemical reactions and some atom smashing yet though. We've done pretty well with electromagnetism and radio waves. Semiconductors and transistors are completely ubiquitous. It's all useless junk if the Van Allen belt blows away in a coronal mass ejection and we're all bombarded by cosmic rays and the radio waves are filled with static noise.

I can tell you something that's fairly easy to observe. Hotter air takes up more volume than colder air. Also, there's an altitude where Earth's gravity can no longer hang onto its Nitrogen, Oxygen, CO2 and noble gasses. Also, if you suck up dense polycarbons from deep underground, where they have been heavily compressed, and then set fire to them, the result is less Oxygen, more heat, and the expansion of liquid into a big volume of gas that's heavy, so it lies close to the ground, while the useful Oxygen is pushed into the upper atmosphere, where it thins out and drifts off into space.

If you have more CO2, you should plant more trees. However, we're doing the opposite. Deserts are spreading, rainforest is being cut down and fire sweeps through vegetation in California, Australia and Borneo.

So many people work in banking, insurance, accountancy, financial services, paper pushing jobs of such woeful uselessness that probably the bulk of humanity's job description is: sit at desk in front of computer, wear telephone headset, read the script on the screen to people on the phone and type their answers on the keyboard, drink tea & coffee, go home.

Why can't I do something to help feed some people, spread the wealth, speed up the conversion to clean energy, get more computers doing more useful calculations and modelling, rather than just massaging sales figures and marketing crap that nobody needs?

I'm going to risk running out of money for another few weeks at least, and that means I definitely will run out of money, because it's usually 60 days until I get paid. For the amount of money I'd get selling my depreciating electronics, and the time and hassle involved, I might as well get a job stacking shelves in a supermarket.

I'm just going to do the type of work that I'm passionate about and good at for a few weeks. I know HSBC are going to need a Customer Due Diligence system before February. I like my ex-colleagues, but my god nobody had the balls to just bin the junk and start again. It doesn't scale, it's not maintainable, it's so hard to roll out in-country, the pilot was a disaster, all the good people are leaving, and 85% of the work still has to be done.

I remember getting really angry at an all-day meeting with about 40 people. I didn't know at the time, but the CIO was there, and head honchos from Retail Bank & Wealth Management and Corporate Banking, plus the best in the software business trying to save Europe's biggest bank, on their number one project, money no object. It maddened me that we spent 2 and a half days estimating how much work there was to do in 3 weeks, but nobody knew what our productivity was. Nobody knew what the backlog was. Nobody knew what Minimum Viable Product was. Nobody was bothered about Continuous Deployment. Nobody had thought about the godforsaken task of pumping thousands of questions and rules and logic into a spreadsheet that you needed to know 3 programming languages to even make a stab in the dark.

I said I'd do half the questions on my own. I then had to spend an absolute age reprogramming the core system so that it would spit out meaningful syntax errors. There were about 500 things wrong before I even started. Then the architect admitted that he hadn't even thought about some fairly fundamental things and his solution took days to get right, while my suggestion was roundly ignored. Then the data architect started changing everything, even though it was tightly coupled throughout the entire system. I had to give loads of people lessons on Git and Maven artefact versioning. It was madness, and I had to call time out: I asked for a code freeze while we got everything stable. To everyone's credit, they listened to me, trusted me and supported me. I think it was only 5 straight days of midnight finishes. The work wasn't hard, but there were major bugs in every single component of the system. The pressure of knowing that hundreds of people are effectively twiddling their thumbs, and if you don't get it all working, you've damaged a huge amount of productivity.

A little cheer went up when everything integrated and the screens went green for the first time in weeks. It was also just in time for the CIO to announce that we'd achieved a significant milestone at the Town Hall. It was false optimism though. I had unearthed an absolute mountain of buggy code and dodgy config. My worst fears about performance were confirmed too. It took 5 minutes for the homepage to load.

I found a Scrum Master I liked and gave him a list of names that I wanted to work on a new version of the application. We picked good tech, designed a simple system and had something to demo in a week. They sacked my scrum master, me, and the longest serving member of the development team. People were getting jumpy and we were making management look pretty incompetent. I was also leaving a paper trail that was inconvenient. I was quite explicit about the urgency of the situation and what the simple remedies were. I didn't sugar coat it, because I'd been giving the same advice for 5 months.

I had plenty of warnings to keep my head down, and toe the line. I knew my days were numbered, and when I found out my old scrum master wanted me back because everything was tanking, I fired my parting shot. I knew I'd get terminated. Quicker than having to work a notice period. No need to lie about your reasons for leaving. No 4 weeks of hell working for a micromanaging idiot.

There's no challenge for me in corporate software. I ran the IT for a nice medium sized company. The board asked me for a data warehouse and a new phone system. Instead I gave them a new card payments processing system and an accurate set of accounts, with the correct ledger for all their customers. It's the only reason why the Office of Fair Trading didn't shut them down when they sent their forensic accountants to see why the books didn't really balance. Oh, and they were in breach of card data protection and were going to have a data theft until I tokenised all the card numbers. I had such a hard time in convincing the CEO of the right technology strategy that when he said "fit in or fuck off" I was more than happy to leave that rudderless captain.

When JPMorgan needed somebody to figure out why their FX system was running like a dog and they were going to cause a market liquidity disaster on International Money Markets Day, they'd had 10 Oracle consultants and none of them could find anything wrong. I found a DBA I liked in London, who didn't even work in my department, and we went through everything with a fine tooth comb. I also harassed the sysadmins until they got my disk I/O up to scratch and tweaked every kernel configuration value, applied every patch and generally wrung every bit of speed we could muster out of the hardware. I then had to take the vendor's code to bits and tell them where they had multithreading issues. They didn't believe me, but I kept sending them the measurements I'd made and pretty graphs, until they put a dev on the phone to me, and we talked through the code, and found a bug. Then the marvellous DBA found the setting that was causing the latency. With the new code and the much faster database, I could hardly believe the timings from the performance tests. When IMM day came, we blitzed it. We absolutely wiped the floor. Fastest FX platform in the world. There wasn't much appetite for developing our own in-house system anymore, I really didn't want to sit around looking busy. I liked my friends and the culture, but I still need interesting work.

And that's how it goes. Hire me to fix your technology problems, and I will, but then I'll want to leave if new challenges don't come along. I hate just keeping a seat warm. I guess that's Bipolar. I work like a son of a bitch for 3 or 4 months, then I'm really struggling to stay motivated for another month or two, and then I'll just stop coming to work.

I could try and pace myself, but invariably I find myself drawn to the impossible challenges. Normally you hire somebody who turns out to be rubbish, but refuses to leave. They literally stick to their chair like glue, because their main motivation is job security, not being good at their job. When you hire somebody who's really good, you can't let them know what a hideous stinking mess everything is in, and that they're going to be under relentless pressure to do horrible work. People who are really good will just go and find somewhere better to work.

I'm an idiot. I want to finish the job I've started and leave feeling proud of delivering stuff. I never ask for the poor performers to be fired. Most of the time I'm able to calmly filter out the new guy I'm training, when they're trying to impress me, but they don't know what they're talking about, and I've got an absolute bitch of a schedule to keep. I had to keep just saying "no" when 3 people were shadowing me, and they were all saying you forgot this or that, or you did that wrong... then I press a button and it all works first time and I can start to be more amenable again.

I'm absolutely not perfect. The first implementation is normally a dog. An ugly dog. But it works, and then the pressure is off so I can refactor for elegance. It's a bit of a thankless task though. When you start refactoring you then start looking at other code, and you end up having to change more and more and more and all the tests break because everything is so fragile, and then people start complaining that they can't find their bit of code anymore, and they have to merge their bit of work into an unrecognisable new world, because people don't pull, commit and push often enough.

I don't even write much code. Ask me for a bit of code that does something, and I'll give you a little bundle that you can plug in wherever you want it. When everybody is developing features but the application doesn't work, I'll concentrate on bug fixing and stabilising the build. When everybody is trampling on each other's toes, I'll concentrate on release management and versioning. When an important demo is coming up but people are committing code that doesn't work, I'll roll it back and tell them to put it on a branch until it integrates. When code starts getting promoted from DEV, to UAT, QA and PROD, somebody has to make sure the database is created with the latest schema, test data is loaded, Business Process Management tasks are cleared down, and all the little microservices are up to the right versions. That can take 3 hours on a bad day.

Software is not hard. Managing a huge team is hard. I haven't had a management role since 2013. However, I know that every untalented email forwarder who thinks they can manage a big project says "features, features, features, we're late, features, features, oh my god we are so late, let's just get it working, get it working, oh my god so many bugs, performance is terrible, let's try and go live anyway, oh my god it's hard doing a production rollout, and the users hate it even more than the testers, what do we do? what do we do? everybody panic, work 25 hours a day 8 days a week, 366 days a year, what do you mean we don't have any metrics? what do you mean we don't have any reporting? what do you mean it's not multilingual? why are all the good people leaving? why do things seem to get done a lot slower now we're supporting 3 or 4 more environments, instead of just one? who could have predicted such a thing? why didn't any highly paid consultants tell me? oh, they did? get me the mail server administrator immediately, there's some junk mail I don't seem to be able to delete permanently. Just get it done before the regulators come asking why we've failed to meet our timetable commitment".

And that's why I hate corporate bullshit.

It's the engineer's curse: we want to just solve problems, to make stuff that works, to make things better. I don't care that it hurts your feelings when I say your idea's rubbish. Your job is to listen to the experts, motivate people and sign the paychecks. My job is to come up with the ideas and make them a reality for you.

I don't really think I'm cut out for having a boss. I don't really think I'm employable anymore. I just completely ignore all the management, then they love me, then I tell them I'm not doing it again unless things change, then they hate me, then I get fired, then they get fired.

I probably need to figure out a way to get paid for more than 5 or 6 months of shouting and swearing at everybody and just doing whatever the hell I want. But it's so soul destroying to go to work and think that you made absolutely no difference. In fact you were complicit. Your day rate bought your silence. You were more worried about losing the stream of big invoices than your ethics. You put financial benefit ahead of professional, moral and legal obligations.

A bunch of white collars have got to get prosecuted soon.

Bankers have had their hand in the till for far too long.

Tags: #banking #bipolar #physics #career