childhood – Nick Grant

Nick Grant

Tag: childhood

  • Bad Decisions

    This is a story about getting into debt…

    Bike

    I was desperate for a halfway-decent car when I was 17 years old. The car I had when I first passed my driving test was the most disgusting horrible thing you’ve ever seen in your life, and that was before my mum crashed it, and then a blind man was paid to repair it using household paint of the wrong colour, which was daubed thickly onto the crumpled bodywork, and left to drip and generally look worse than it would have done if somebody had simply lowered their trousers, curled out a shit onto the bonnet, and then smeared the excrement.

    The car, absolutely, was not a gift. In fact, the car was a curse. Firstly it was extortionate to repair, because nobody has a disgusting shit car like that for their first car, so no insurer would offer me an affordable policy. That wiped out every penny I had. Then, it was ruined: my mother crashed it, and it was shit in the first place. It was so old, that basically, it was mechanically fucked in every conceivable way. So, the insurance financially ruined me, then repairing it left me with a gigantic debt to the garage. Then, after all that, it was a hideously ugly shit unreliable horrible, horrible, horrible car.

    So, I was keen to have a car that was not shit.

    I got a bank loan. I got a bank loan to buy a car, which wasn’t a piece of shit, looked like shit, drove like shit… I took out a bank loan to buy a fucking OK-ish fucking car, alright?

    In actual fact, it was a good decision to get that bank loan, because I was happy with my not-shit car. In fact, I was fucking ecstatic to have a car which wasn’t a complete pile of shit, that was financially crippling me.

    Predictably, my OK-ish car was not a pile of fucking horrible ugly shit, and consequently cost me far less in garage repair bills. Predictably, my OK-ish car did wonders for my self-esteem, and I was quite proud of my OK-ish car. My OK-ish car was very enjoyable to drive, and I was very glad that I had taken out that bank loan.

    Of course, I hated being in debt, but I paid it off pretty quickly, especially as the garage bills were a fraction of what they were for the horrible ugly old piece of shit, which was good for nothing but the scrap yard.

    So, where am I going with this?

    Today is payday. Actually, I don’t really have payday, to to speak. I don’t have a salaried job, in any sense that you’d understand. I run my own company, so it’s not like payday is really a thing for me. But anyway, for the sake of simplicity: imagine that today is payday for me.

    I’ve been trying to buy a new bike for a little while. Pictured above is my city bike: designed for zooming through traffic in London. I love that bike. It’s great.

    I don’t live in London anymore. I live somewhere where there’s hills.

    The new bike I’ve been trying to buy is a mountain bike. I don’t live super close to any mountains – maybe 45 minutes away – but it’s pretty hilly where I live, so I need gears. As it happens, I already have a mountain bike, which I bought on motherfucking credit, OK, motherfucker not long after I got my OK-ish car. My 22 year old mountain bike is brilliant and I love it, but I want one which is better for going up and down hills. I mean, that’s what my old one is designed to do, but I want a better one.

    So, I’m buying something that I don’t need but I want and I can afford because it’s payday. I can pay cash. I don’t need to borrow money or otherwise get it on some kind of credit agreement. I can just walk into a fucking shop, hand over the cash, and walk out with the brand new mountain bike.

    I’m getting one.

    Actually, it looks like I’m getting one which is going to cost twice as much as I had budgeted for… but I don’t care. I want the one that I want, and I want it now… or rather, I want it tomorrow, because the shop needs to build it for me.

    It feels – having been relatively recently homeless, horrendously indebted, and almost bankrupt – to be an incredibly bad decision. Sure, it probably is, but I’ve got the money – surplus – and I’m going to spend it all on this thing that I want; this thing that I don’t need.

    For sure, I’m not spending money that I don’t have; I’m not spending money before I’ve earned it. For sure, this could be the beginning of a spiral back into debt, but I really don’t think it’s going to be. Even if it is, I don’t give a shit. I’ve put up with too much for too long, to fuck around any longer.

    Sorry for the stream of expletives. I’ve had to justify myself and my very real human needs, for far too long. If you ask my dad, you can get a bike that’s just as good as a £30,000 full-carbon Tour de France pro-rider bike, so cheaply that somebody will pay you to take it off your hands, and buy you a fucking house too for your trouble.

    By the way, I am not buying a £30,000 full-carbon pro-rider bike. I am buying a mid-range bike: not the cheapest, and not the most expensive. Mid-priced.

    Okay?

    Happy now?

     

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  • Infamy

    This is a story about wanting to be noticed…

    Why I write

    This is not a pity party, and everyone has an equally valid claim to misery and depression, but it’s important – to me – that I relate this part of the most influential period of my life.

    At home, I could do nothing right, and was largely ignored other than as an ornament; a clothes horse; a performing animal, let out of its cage to delight the adults, as a party trick, and otherwise told to be quiet and keep out of the way.This, I think, is not unusual, but was greatly exacerbated my lack of a sibling until the age of 10, and my parents’ extreme anti-social behaviour, which left me isolated in the extreme: often in very remote rural areas; far from friends and schoolmates.

    At school, I could not avoid attention of the wrong kind. My parents’ obsession with training me as their performing animal, for their party tricks, meant that I was either alone, or doing my routine for adults. I had no relationships with children, before school. If you want to fuck up your children and ruin their lives, it’s quite easy: do everything in your power to make them different so that they don’t fit in; deprive them of every opportunity to socialise; force them to act like little adults, instead of allowing them to be children – that will guarantee that they won’t fit in at all at school, and they will be bullied from dawn to dusk, every. single. fucking. day.

    Good manners and confidence in the company of adults did, briefly, confer an advantage in the workplace. This supposed ‘maturity’ was useful for making a good first impression. Employers certainly mistook me for a person who was mature beyond their years, but this was entirely superficial: a party trick learned, because it was the only way I was able to receive praise as a child – from the small amount of adult company my parents kept; those rare occasions when I was trotted out and expected to perform. However, I had no maturity at all – the social isolation, the neglect and the deprivation, was masked and hidden behind impeccable manners and precise diction; expansive vocabulary, learned from books.

    As life has worn on, my age relative to my peers has become less obvious, less remarkable. Instead, those deep wounds inflicted in childhood have come to the fore. Exacerbated by extreme stress and intolerable circumstances, the socially isolated child, deprived of a social life and otherwise ill-equipped to face the world with the same skills and experience of his peers, has resurfaced. I feel as though I’m suffering the same horrors again.

    In extreme circumstances, we revert to ‘type’… our ‘true’ personality surfaces, and our mask slips.

    I wonder to myself, as I write stuff which is read by thousands of people who are suffering a life-and-death crisis in their lives, whether I am flirting with infamy. Why do I not implore them to seek professional help and bombard them with crisis counselling phone numbers?

    Maybe I’m evil.

    [Note: I lost a few hundred words here, because of an auto-save glitch, but I can’t be bothered to re-type what I wrote. I hope it still makes sense without the conclusion, as I originally wrote it]

     

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  • Give Me One More Chance

    This is a story about begging for forgiveness…

    Path

    Relationships are brutal battlegrounds. Relationships are full of push-and-pull; games; mindfuckery. Relationships are an energy-sapping, life-force-sucking, second-guessing, head-wrecking, confusing and altogether mostly time-wasting exercise.

    Sure, I love company. Sure, I love to socialise. Sure, I like my friends. Sure, I like companionship.

    However.

    I don’t need the hassle of anyone disloyal. I don’t need any backstabbers. I don’t need any parasites. I don’t need any spongers. I don’t need anyone who’s going to give me grief, when I’m just going about my business; trying to get on with my life.

    From what I see, including my own first-hand experience, an extraordinary amount of time is wasted on people who are undeserving of our time and attention; people who are manipulative time-wasters.

    I’ve screwed up a relationship, or maybe two, which were really worth saving. Through my own stupidity and foolishness, I’ve thrown away a really good relationship. I regretted it, for a short while, and I admit that I tried for a short while to see if it was salvageable, but I quickly realised that I was wasting my time… it was too late. I haven’t wasted any time on regret since then, but I do think it’s a shame. If I could live my life over again, perhaps that’s something I might do differently, but I can’t, so I don’t waste time on impossible hypotheticals.

    Not living with regret is liberating. Instead of being made to crawl over broken glass by despicable shits, who aren’t worth the time of day, instead, I move on with my life. Nobody’s got any hold over me. I don’t owe anybody anything, except a debt of gratitude to kind and loving friends, and exes, who offered their love and care unconditionally.

    I’ve been a very lucky guy. I’ve had some lovely girlfriends. I’ve been loved.

    Only a couple of my ex-girlfriends have been… difficult; unpleasant. I’ve been treated very well.

    I find myself estranged from my parents, which has been such a huge improvement to my life that I struggle to find the words to express how liberating it’s been to cut those sociopathic, antisocial, alcoholic, addict, selfish shits out of my life. I’m on good terms with my sister, so I can do family… provided it’s not toxic.

    I’m divorced, but I’ve had plenty of fulfilling, rewarding, happy long-term relationships. I can do relationships… provided I’m not getting punched in the face.

    I’ve fallen out with friends, which was sad, but inevitable given how chaotic my life was; how unwell I was. I’ve drifted out of contact with friends, which was inevitable given that they are consumed with spawning brats to replace themselves with. I have old friends and new friends, so I can do friends… providing we stay somewhat within sight, and within mind; I know from being moved around 8 different schools in my childhood, that no friendship really survives geographical hurdles.

    I don’t have enough friends. I don’t see my sister enough. I don’t have the social life and support network that I need. However, I’ve learned to cope. My shitty childhood taught me to cope with my relationships being ruined by my alcoholic, addict, waster, loser parents, who kept moving me around; 8 different schools.

    I think to myself “that’s a shame” when I think about “the one that got away” but… I’m used to rebuilding; I’m used to starting over again.

     

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  • Something to Take the Edge Off

    This is a story about crutches…

    Office chair

    Trawling through my photos from the past three and a half months, I found very few which would be suitable to accompany what I wanted to write today. The photos on my phone are mostly of my cat(s) and not much else. However, this photo does – rather cryptically – allude to what I am now writing about.

    When I started the lockdown, I decided that I wasn’t going to bother with a desk or an office chair at home; that I would muddle by with my laptop on my lap. I decided – wrongly – that it wouldn’t be worth the effort of setting up a proper office at home.

    As I already wrote a few days ago, I started the lockdown drinking copiously. Every day after work, I would pour myself a large glass of wine. I would estimate that my alcohol consumption was somewhere in the region of 8 to 10 bottles of wine per week.

    As I already wrote a few days ago, I started the lockdown physically dependent on medication. Every night I took sleeping pills. Every day I took tranquillising sedatives.

    Then, it became obvious that there would be dire consequences to my physical health.

    I didn’t want to finish lockdown as a fat alcoholic pill-popper with a hunched back.

    Because I delayed setting up my home office, I didn’t have a lot of choice for a desk and an office chair, hence why the ugly garish monstrosity – pictured above – has become part of my home office. The desk is super ugly too. However, it’s good to have a more professional set-up instead of reclining on my sofa.

    The health improvements to my life don’t feel like they’re paying dividends. I still feel overweight, unfit and I still crave alcohol. Ostensibly, I feel much the same as I did when I was guzzling booze, popping pills and spending 16 hours a day reclining on my sofa. However, we must acknowledge that there is a very significant difference between an alcoholic pill addict, and somebody who drinks in moderation at the weekends, and is entirely medication free. That I have stabilised myself and found almost liveable and almost bearable sustainable routine without my crutches, is not an achievement which should be underestimated.

    The backdrop to the past four months has been the global pandemic which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, and threatens the livelihoods and living standards of hundreds of millions, if not billions of people. If there was ever a time to feel insecure about money, work and housing, it would be now.

    I wouldn’t describe myself as a particularly anxious person, but the past 5 years of my life have been spent with the threat of destitution hanging over me. I’ve been forced to generate vast amounts of money each year in order to protect my credit rating and employability, as well as to simply pay rent, bills and service debts. The amount of money needed to escape my predicament was so vast that I was forced into high-risk high-stress situations, which were potentially high-reward. Eventually, perseverance paid off. There was no other choice: a crappy salaried job would have inevitably led to bankruptcy; the books simply didn’t balance with some crap paying job.

    So, I’ve suffered 5 years of incredible, immense stress. I’ve suffered 5 years of living on the edge of ruin.

    When the pandemic started to get very bad in Europe my mood improved considerably. The havoc wrought by the pandemic has brought the stress and suffering that I was enduring into the lives of vast numbers of my fellow people. Suffering collectively is far more bearable than suffering alone.

    At some point, I want to stop talking about the difficulties in my past and to talk about the future. I want to put some distance between my past and the present. I want to have a period of wealth and security, which clearly delineates ‘now’ from ‘then’.

    I note that my abysmal childhood became unimportant when I started to have success and get ahead in life, in my late teens and early twenties. My rapidly growing bank balance, exotic travel, status symbols – like houses, cars and boats – and adventurous hobbies, felt like I could forget about past transgressions against me: the bullies and abusers were rotting, and I was thriving, so I wasn’t bitter and angry; I had broken free from the misery of the past.

    My rage at my parents – which has been a repeated theme of the past 5 years – and sad memories of a ruined childhood, which has caused me vast amounts of problems… all becomes irrelevant again, as my health and wealth are regained, and my quality of life improves manyfold.

    Yes, my crutches are going to change from alcohol and medications, to be luxury holidays and other trappings of wealth, but I don’t care. Alcohol and medications lead to misery and death – they’re a dreadful trap, which leads nowhere positive.

    I still have suicide as my ‘retirement plan’ but that’s a simple matter of practicality, given that I’m now unable to be likely to accumulate enough wealth to enjoy a comfortable retirement before my health starts to deteriorate. It’s something I’m going to have to learn to live with. Or rather, it’s something that’s going to kill me. C’est la vie. C’est la mort.

     

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  • Toys

    This is a story about spending your paycheque…

    Freebord

    I think we have several distinct phases of our lives. We begin with no money and there are lots of toys we want, but we can’t afford them. Then, we get a Saturday job or some other seasonal work – perhaps during school holidays – and we’re able to buy some of the things we want, but these are pretty modest purchases. Then, we get a full-time job, but usually by this point we have to pay rent and bills, so we’re still not particularly able to make lavish frivolous purchases. Then, we start a family and all the things we buy from that point onwards are for our kids, although perhaps we get some vicarious enjoyment out of buying toys for our children.

    If you’re lucky, you’ll have a period of your life where your income significantly exceeds your expenditure, and you can buy whatever you want. During this period, you might buy the toys you could never have as a child, or you might buy the toys you were too young to be able to make use of, such as a sports car, a boat or a hang-glider.

    If you’re really lucky then you’ll have a sustained period of wealth, where you can pursue expensive hobbies, which allows you to buy new toys on a regular basis. Every hobby tends to need lots of specialist equipment, and vast amounts of money can be sunk into having the latest and greatest stuff – becoming a “gear” collector.

    If you’re lucky enough to be wealthy, you’ve probably managed to save up for a deposit and bought a property. Owning a property can be a nightmare, because of the expense of maintenance, but for the wealthy, there’s a huge amount of ‘toys’ to be bought for the house. No house is complete without being able to play music in every room from your iPhone. No house is complete without a massive flat-screen TV. No house is complete without a whole array of toys – even a vacuum cleaner is a desirable object now, marketed as something to get excited about buying, as opposed to something associated with domestic drudgery. The recent craze for cooking and baking TV shows has meant that our kitchens are filled with expensive toys, such as food mixers and pasta makers.

    My house might not have a dining table, chest of drawers, wardrobe, coffee table or other essential items of furniture, such as a bed for visitors, but it does have mesh wifi in every room – a gadget that I could hardly resist, given that I work as a technology professional. Having a reliable wifi connection everywhere in my house is really handy, because it was annoying where I used to live previously, when my smartphone and laptop would drop the connection if I moved from the lounge to the bedroom, or vice-versa.

    The toy pictured above – the thing that looks like a skateboard – has been gathering dust in storage for a long while, but as I’m now starting to feel more settled in my house and in this city, I’m beginning to start thinking about getting active. I got one of my bikes fixed, so I can cycle around more as the weather improves. The skateboard type thing allows a person to “snowboard on the street” – you can slide it and stop very easily, unlike a regular skateboard which has no brakes. I need to try to find some local hills with quiet roads, where I can take it out for a ride.

    Toys give my life meaning. I’m not working for the sake of working. I’m not working for the sake of putting more zeroes on the end of my net worth. I’m not working for children. I’m not working even to obtain status symbols. I work because it gives me plenty of money to buy toys. Of course, I enjoy a very high standard of living – I eat out and I take nice holidays – but I also like being able to have nice things. I was rummaging through my boxes which I haven’t unpacked, and I realised that I have some really cool stuff. I’m still attached to my stuff, even though it’s just material possessions that I’ve lived without for years – I worked hard to buy those toys and I spent a lot of time picking them out, so I’m glad that I’ve still got a lot of my stuff.

    As my health improves and I begin to feel happier and more settled in my new home and new city, I’m starting to think about how I might like to spend my leisure time. Of course, there’s always excitement in spending money on new toys, but it’s been great to rummage through my boxes and find things which I haven’t had the time to play with, because life got really difficult for a long time.

    It felt nice to buy new clothes last weekend, and I also feel glad that I didn’t buy any toys or gadgets, because I always feel buyer’s remorse for squandering my money on stuff, when I already own so many cool toys and gadgets. I might buy a coffee table and a hoover this weekend, which is plenty of retail therapy – it’ll definitely scratch the itch.

    I’m very spoiled, that I’ve been able to furnish my house with stuff I chose from Ikea, and it seems wrong to say that during a lot of that process I haven’t enjoyed it – I’ve been overwhelmed with the stress of moving house and getting myself set up in a position where I can live an ordinary life. I sat and slept on the floor when I first moved in, because I didn’t have a single item of furniture. My washing machine wasn’t delivered on time, so I was running out of clean clothes. Stress can ruin things which are supposed to be fun. Now I’m through the worst of the stress, I am now beginning to appreciate how lucky I am.

    When I attempt to make sense of life – why bother? – then it’s easy to reach one of two conclusions: either we should have sex, take drugs and get drunk as much as possible, to maximise our pleasure in a hedonistic way, or we should spend our money on things which bring us joy, such has holidays and toys. I appreciate that children are the traditional route to giving our lives meaning and purpose, but it’s selfish and unethical to bring children into this messed up world. Probably better to play with a few toys than to inflict the agony of existence onto a child who didn’t need to be brought into this world.

    I guess I’m just a child.

     

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  • So Embarrassing

    This is a story about over-sharing…

    Twitter likes

    I’m not really a self-conscious person or else I’d never write and publish anything, but I did have a moment of panic yesterday when I realised what a plonker I was going to look like, for writing about my most vulnerable insecurities, innermost sensitive thoughts and feelings, laying myself wide open for a moment of stunned silence, which would have been very embarrassing.

    I thought about deleting my tweet which accompanied the blog post. It’s been ages since I thought about deleting something. I very rarely self-censor.

    Being single transports me back to my frustrated and unhappy teens. Despite modest success in the world of dating and relationships, I still carry a huge amount of insecurity. I’ve never felt like “God’s gift” to women or that I have any particular attractiveness or charisma that means I don’t have anything to worry about. I’ve been told on plenty of occasions that I don’t have anything to worry about – that I’m good-looking – but I suppose whatever wounds were inflicted in childhood still haven’t healed.

    I’m basically one big twisted knot of overthinking and over-isolated overgrown man-child. Growing up without any siblings until the age of 10 was hell. Being stuck in the company of my parents as they dragged me through 8 different schools and all over the bloody world was hell on earth. I have plenty of reasons why I should struggle to form normal healthy relationships with my peers.

    I guess I got into technology because it seemed like a perfect microcosm that I could control. However, reality has asserted itself so fully that I can see that life is messy, and my reaction is to collate and publish all that mess for everyone to see. I’m using technology to gather together everything that I’m embarrassed about and really don’t want to be teased about.

    What I write is an absolute goldmine for anybody who wants to poke and prod at my insecurities, to antagonise me.

    The thing is, I write about this stuff as a pre-emptive step, so that it’s less of a big red button that people can press to get a reaction.

    I’ve been relatively successful at positioning myself so that I’m never on the back foot like I was when I was a child. I refuse to ever be somebody’s plaything. If I’m going to act predictably, it’s going to be in accordance with my own predictions, not anybody else’s.

    Pleasingly, the world has somewhat complied with my wishes. I’ve been able to enjoy social change, enabling me to be the passive one who has the enviable position of being able to reject, taunt, bully and tease, if I should so choose. It’s every bit as pleasant and comforting as I thought it would be, to have the tables turned and be the one with the power.

    Am I applauding the existence of the patriarchy? No.

    Am I very weird geeky guy who had a particularly disrupted childhood, which held me back from having a number of formative experiences, such as girlfriends at school? Yes.

    The net result is that things that are normal for you have a different level of importance in my life. My entire self-esteem is based on whether I’m getting laid or not. If I’m not getting laid, then I assume that I’ve been plunged back into my unhappy adolescence. I assume that I’m once again the awkward social outcast that I was during my schooldays. I assume that I’ve lost all of my adult development and I’m doomed to live out my days in lonely singledom.

    The net result is dating some very unsuitable women and having a lot of unwanted sex. The sex is symbolic. I have as much sex as I can get now, today, as over-compensation for the lack of it in my teens… as if I can somehow alter the past.

    It’s strange psychology, but also very basic and simple.

    Also, I shouldn’t write about it, but I do.

    I sometimes forget that I pour my heart out like this. The process of emptying my brain out onto the page has become normalised. The fear of embarrassing myself in front of the entire world has long-since been forgotten. The concept of a world that hasn’t seen every flaw and downside of my character is long gone.

    You’d think that my exposure would be problematic, but I find it easier to remain quiet and keep my mouth shut when I need to – such as in the office – by brain-dumping all of this stuff out publicly. I enjoy the open secret of it, although it does stress me out that one day I’m going to get into trouble.

    Dating with this level of exposure is problematic. Dating is a thing that puts people in a very vulnerable position, and having a large resource of vulnerabilities published publicly makes me doubly vulnerable. I have no idea whether to offer up this blog as part of the package of information made available during the early stages of dating, along with photos and descriptions of what I do for money etc. which are usually expected.

    Without too much digging, it’s possible to see me in a very unflattering light, but I also know that it takes bravery and courage to make yourself vulnerable, and I know that it’s rewarding to be brave and take risks.

    For now, I’m just going to proceed as normal. I was very reassured to see that some people who I really like and respect had acknowledged what I’d written yesterday, but I must admit that I was seriously thinking about deleting it, because I felt like I’d made a fool of myself.

    I find the world to be adversarial and hostile and I don’t like it. My reaction is not to be defensive, but in fact to do the un-intuitive thing and to lower my guard – making myself extremely vulnerable. “Do your worst” I incant.

     

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  • Some Of My Problems Are My Own Fault

    This is a story about responsibility…

    Suction cup

    Why does it matter that the toilet roll holder in my house is held onto the wall with a suction cup? Why does it matter that somebody cut some corners somewhere? Why does it matter that somebody did a sloppy, careless job? Why does it matter that people act without concern for the consequences? Why does it matter that some of us want to be idle?

    We bring up our children on a diet of propaganda about everybody having to pay their way in society – nobody getting a free ride – when our intention all along was to propagate sufficiently to be idle in our old age. We imagined that the older children would raise the smaller ones. We imagined that the more mature and adult members of our family would feel some responsibility towards their DNA donors, as they reached the end of their lives.

    I guess we hope that our children won’t know any different. If they’re born into a terrible world, they won’t be able to imagine a better one, so they’ll accept their terrible fate. Is that the logic? Somebody needs to explain it to me, because I don’t understand.

    My life lacks meaning and purpose.

    What if I met someone so amazing and beautiful that they convinced me it was a good idea to have children, because I knew how much happiness and satisfaction – peace – it would bring me as an animal, although very much in conflict with my own human consciousness.

    My body was evolved for the propagation of my genes. My body’s sole purpose for existence – in evolutionary terms – is for sexual reproduction. To act in defiance of my basic instincts is physically painful, like putting my hand in a fire.

    I stopped following the instructions at some point.

    I’ve lost my way.

    Loneliness and isolation should drive me to be social. Horniness and reproductive instincts should drive me to impregnate. Fear of death and extinction of my genes should drive me to seek to protect and replicate as many copies of my genes as possible. All the many millions of years of animal evolution have led to this point. Everything in my genetic programming tells me to carry on doing what every ancestor has ever done, since the dawn of life itself.

    However.

    I’ve gone off-script.

    I think that filial affection, sibling bonding, family ties, clan association and a genetic predisposition towards hostility directed at those of significantly differing DNA makeup – a wish to see those who don’t share common genes perish – somehow bypassed me. The thing that’s far louder in my head is the conscious voice that sprung into existence, perhaps as an evolutionary accident, but which has managed to narrate things to the point where that voice directs my behaviour far more than my bestial instincts.

    I suppose I’m what you’d call anti-social. Perhaps criminal and deviant. Society has generally decided that I’m dangerous and should be shunned and marginalised.

    Born into a household full of addiction and alcoholism, not feeling planned or wanted and not seeing any good role model in my parents, I found myself always somewhat the odd-one-out at school and in other social situations. I think I decided very early on that I’m unlovable. My life goals were always confused. The hedonism I saw my parents practice, with no regard for societal norms, conflicted with the nonsense they spouted in their state of intoxication, which claimed to be motivated by higher ideals: Values. I never saw any values, but I came to understand – conceptually – what values there were in the world, and why a person might hold a certain set of values.

    I can simultaneously hold in my head all the various reasons – such as social cohesion – that a group of individuals might subscribe to a common set of values, whilst also knowing the payoff for breaking the rules. I knew, for example, from a very early age that getting a drink or a drug into my system must be worth any amount of societally imposed consequences, for that is what I saw throughout my upbringing.

    My father talked openly about his criminal conviction for drugs, while my mother boasted about drug smuggling and encounters with the police, and both seemed proud and happy to have flouted the law and earned the disdain of wider society. They seemed to revel in their place as societal outcasts, earned because of their deviant behaviour and refusal to change their wicked ways.

    Yet, it seems better if I imagine myself to have been immaculately conceived and have lived my adult life with no unconscious bias left-over from childhood. It seems as if I should be judged on the basis that my values are identical to everybody else’s. It seems that every choice I’ve made should be viewed as having been made with complete free-will, and without the influence of my upbringing.

    I fess up.

    I done it.

    I done a bad thing.

    It’s all my fault and I’ve got nobody to blame but myself.

    There. Happy now?

     

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  • I Want To Have Nice Things

    This is a story about losing your home…

    Tackley cottage

    That little blonde boy in the pedal car is me. That thatched cottage is where I used to live, briefly. I loved that thatched cottage, because it was exactly what a house is supposed to be: It had a roof, chimney, windows with panes of glass criss-crossed, a front door in the middle, flowers growing in the garden. All it needed was a blue sky, some smoke coming out of the chimney, a couple of soaring birds, some white fluffy clouds and a big yellow sun with a smiling face, and it would be the picture that every child would draw, if you asked them to draw a picture of a house.

    My time in the “proper house” was very limited.

    When I briefly lived this proper life, there was a village green, a village shop, a village post office, a church and graveyard, a railway train station, a bus stop, a pub and a school.

    During my all-too-brief proper life, I went to the local school, played with the local children, bought sweets from the village shop, attended events on the village green – when people would literally dance around a maypole with coloured ribbons – and went to church.

    My life exemplified everything that is great and good about English countryside living. Former British Prime Minister, David Cameron, lives barely a few miles away from the idyllic Cotswold village where I had my proper life. Prince Charles and other royalty play polo on fields, barely a few miles away from this most quintessentially picturesque English village that you could ever imagine. The TV show Downton Abbey was filmed on location, a few miles away from this beautiful place, where I thought I would live forever.

    Life seemed to make sense to me – this was a proper life, and it all made perfect sense, even though I was just a child.

    The funny thing is that it still makes sense to me.

    All I want is to live in a little house, with a little garden, in a little village and do the things that normal people do: go to work, come home, watch TV, cook food, eat, do gardening, have a pet, feed the birds. All I want is an ordinary life.

    Presently, the only piece of furniture I own is a coffee table, which I repurposed as a TV stand. One of the few possessions I own which isn’t designed to be carried around easily, is the TV, which sits atop the TV stand. Other than that, everything else can be thrown into a bag… and there isn’t very much “everything else” left. Most of my possessions have been discarded, because my life was too chaotic and I was too unwell to cope with safeguarding my material things, when my life and my sanity were at risk and all too often nearly lost forever.

    Every time I was forced to move as a child – 8 different schools – it was nonsensical and disruptive; it was traumatic and damaging. Every time I found myself packing my bags, yet again, a pattern was being established: I was being psychologically programmed. The message my parents were sending me was loud and clear: “Don’t get attached to anything, anywhere or anybody”.

    I gave up on the idea of having a settled, secure, normal life.

    When I separated from my wife and an acrimonious divorce began, it really didn’t bother me as much as it should have done, to lose my house, lose my precious things and to end up sleeping rough – homeless and destitute. I camped in bushes, where I could hide my tent. I slept in a bivouac on heathland. I was invisible in a city with a daytime population of 10 million inhabitants. My home and my bed shrank and shrank, until it was simply the tiny patch of ground on which I stood or lay. My personal space shrank to be no bigger than the volume occupied by the extremities of my body.

    When I saw the chance to move from being homeless to living in a very luxurious apartment with amazing views of the capital city, the idea was too attractive for me to resist.

    I had two years bursting with pride about how I’d pulled myself up by the bootstraps, and was no longer sleeping rough; no longer homeless. I had to pinch myself every time I stepped inside my home, and was greeted by breathtaking panoramic views over London. That feeling never wore off… the whole time I lived there.

    I want that again. I want to live somewhere special. I want that special feeling that I’m living in a proper place, after the awfulness I’ve been through in life.

    Yes, I’m sympathetic towards those who are sleeping rough, and those who are living in a very dire situation. No, it doesn’t make me happy just to have a roof over my head.

    I’ve lived anywhere. I’ve slept rough all over London. I’ve slept in 14-bed hostel dorms. I’ve slept in psychiatric wards, hospitals and police cells.

    I do NOT want to live anywhere.

    It was a big deal when I got the keys to a gorgeous home with sea views, roughly ten and a half months ago. I still feel a great buzz when I visit that place, and I stand at the window admiring the views over the bay. I love that home, but unfortunately, it’s not my home… although technically I can sleep there whenever I want, for another month and a half.

    I shouldn’t be getting stressed out about moving. My life will be much better when I have a home again. Hopefully I can have a beautiful home which I can fill with lovely things. Hopefully I can stay there. Hopefully I won’t have to leave. Hopefully my world won’t be destroyed again.

    Currently, I have no idea where, when or how I’m going to get myself a home, let alone whether I’ll have the opportunity to fill it up with lovely things.

    My upbringing taught me one clear lesson, again and again: Expect nothing, except to lose everything that you get attached to.

     

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  • My Sex Problem – Part Two

    This is a story about overcompensation…

    Weymouth harbour yacht

    I wrote yesterday about having a sex problem. Not a sex addiction, or anything kinky, but that I have too much sex because my fragile self-esteem depends upon it. I use sex as a form of reassurance, that I’ve banished my unhappy adolescent and late teen years, as well as my early twenties, safely into the past. I use sex as a form of proof that those bad times are never going to come back to bite me. I can never go back to those unhappy times.

    There’s something I need to talk about.

    There’s something I need to mention.

    I’m not a fool.

    I’m not so stupid and gullible that I believe every boast and every lie that was told, at school and at college, about how much sex everyone was getting. I’m not swayed by the common misconception that everybody else was at it [fucking] like rabbits. I’m not convinced by the gossip and the bragging and the boasts of sexual conquests, which circulated widely in the pressure-cooker of the school and college environment.

    What I know are the facts.

    I only care about the facts.

    I don’t really give a shit how much sex, how many blowjobs and how many hand-jobs were being had by my peer group. I don’t really care how many sexual acts were actually carried out. These are facts that I’ll never truly know.

    What I DO know, without a shadow of a doubt, is that the vast majority of people’s adolescent schooldays included having boyfriends/girlfriends, and all the associated relationship learning and development that’s associated with that. The vast majority had crushes, thought they’d fallen in love, sent love notes, asked each other out, declared themselves to be couples, were known to be couples, called each other boyfriend and girlfriend, and had at least kisses and cuddles… intimacy and a relationship status.

    What I DO know for a fact is that the vast majority of my peers learned about jealousy, cheating, breakups, reconciliations, relationship arguments and all the other things which turned them all into well-rounded average people: One giant homogenous mass of people who’ve all had a more-or-less identical experience of teenage love.

    What I DO know for a fact is that my parents blocked my opportunity to go to university, where I might then have had the opportunity to start playing catch up. At school, there were too many thick-skulled knuckle-draggers, but at university I would have been amongst my own kind: The academic high-achievers; the bookworms; the geeks and the ones who were bullied outcasts, because our brains were highly developed, but something about us painted a target on our backs, making our lives a living hell, when mixed in with a vast number of no-hopers, with no aspirations.

    School was simply a holding pen, before prison for the guys, or pram-pushing for the girls. Those savages needed to be left behind, and university would have been my opportunity to heal some of the trauma, but my parents blocked and sabotaged my attempts to go, despite the ease with which I obtained generous offers from very highly regarded academic institutions.

    I’m incredibly bitter that I was separated from my dear friends in Oxford – a hyper-intelligent bunch who have achieved great things – and I was dumped into a school in the middle of fucking nowhere, where the best career opportunity was some kind of unskilled minimum-wage seasonal employment. The place we moved to from Oxford was a backwater dead end, because my parents are selfish dead-end loser alcoholic junkies, who never gave a shit about the consequences they were inflicting on my life; the opportunities they were actively denying me.

    The picture of me is of me aboard my yacht, age 21, with my girlfriend.

    Yeah, that’s right, I bought a yacht when I was 21 years old.

    I worked for a bank in Canary Wharf, London, earning £470 a day. I was 21 years old and I was earning £2,350 a week, and I owned a yacht, and I had a girlfriend. I was earning over £10,000 a month and I had a red sports car, a yacht… and most importantly, I had a girlfriend.

    Can you see how insecure I was?

    Can you see how materialistic I was?

    For Christmas presents I used to buy people Fortnum & Mason luxury hampers. I flew business class and stayed in 5-star hotels. I was 21 years old.

    I was a massively insecure, damaged, insecure person. I overcompensated by spending vast amounts of money on status symbols and living a making vulgar demonstrations of my wealth, because I was still a bullied kid… I was still a lonely bullied kid. I was still the kid who didn’t have those kisses behind the bike sheds at school. I was still the kid who didn’t ever have a girlfriend at school. I never asked anyone out, got asked out, fell in love, cheated, broke up…. I never had any of that, unlike almost everybody else in the whole entire world.

    I used my brain to get a good job. Then I used by brain to get a better job. Then I used my brain to get an even better job, until the point where I was earning six-figures annually and I got all the status symbols to pro-up my fragile self-esteem. I got a “penis extension” red sportscar. I got a yacht. I ate in fancy restaurants and went on luxury holidays. All of it was a massive “FUCK YOU” to those awful years when I felt so unlovable; so unwanted… so rejected.

    I don’t even care about the sex, but it’s symbolic for me. I have sex when I’m not horny – not in the mood – because it’s a test… I want to know I can always have it, because it proves that I’m sexually attractive. It proves that without the sportscar, the yacht, the luxury holidays and the other status symbols, that somebody loves me. I need proof beyond all reasonable doubt that I’m now a person who people want in their lives, as a lover, as a boyfriend… as a husband.

    Becoming a homeless, bankrupt, alcoholic, drug addict with mental health problems was a bit of a problem, but do you know what happened? I had some great relationships. I was homeless and living in a 14-bed hotel dormitory when I got together with an extremely attractive Italian girl, and we had a passionate romance. I was sleeping rough in a park when a wealthy Parisian woman fell in love with me and took me back to her fancy home in Notting Hill and nursed me back to health, despite my chronic drug addiction and incredibly unstable mental health.

    I present myself now as exactly what I am: a penniless, mentally ill, recovering alcoholic, recovering drug addict, who lives a very precarious existence. I’m never far away from becoming homeless again, or being consumed by drug or alcohol abuse. I have no wealth anymore. I have nothing to offer. I’m not a ‘catch’.

    Because I feel so insecure about being 39 years old and not owning a luxury home, full of expensive furniture, with a sportscar parked on the driveway and a speedboat moored in the marina, all I’m left with is some kind of physical proof that I’m loved: does somebody want to fuck me, even though I’m a loser. I’m not even young and hot anymore. My hair is going grey and I’m carrying a few extra pounds of weight. I feel like I’m every woman’s idea of a worst nightmare date: No cash, no assets, no flash car, no house… nothing to show for my 39 years on this planet. Why would anybody fall in love with me?

    Sex is the only thing that gives me any certainty at the moment. Sex is the only thing that props up my fragile self-esteem, because my life has fallen to pieces.

    I don’t care that I missed out on sex as a teenager. I care that I missed out on love.

     

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  • All I Want Is Everything

    This is a story about stubbornness…

    Country Home

    I try not to talk about my friends too specifically, but shall attempt to tell you about two friends who are notable for both their differences and their similarities.

    The first of my friends who I want to tell you about was undoubtably born into wealth and privilege. His father was a judge and the family has a number of homes around the globe in some of the most expensive cities to live in. His family is extremely asset rich and my friend grew up with servants in the household. Without being too indiscreet, my friend was called posh by even his upper-middle-class university chums, who attended the same Russel Group red-brick high-ranking academic institution, where the less intelligent privately schooled childen get sent when no amount of private tutoring and extra lessons are going to turn them ‘gifted’.

    The second of my friends who I want to tell you about is the polar opposite of the first in many ways. The other friend I want to tell you about was undoubtably born at a considerable disadvantage to 99.9% of other people, due to a life-limiting illness and relatively poor family. No private schools. No private tutors. Not much money at all, in fact. It would be too indiscret to say more, but it’s incontrovertibly clear from the evidence that this other friend arrived at a similarly highly esteemed university on merit alone.

    I wanted to tell you about these friends, because I feel as though I should give you – the reader – an idea of where I fall on some relative scale.

    I was not born into wealth, but because my parents were drug addict alcoholic losers who refused to get a proper job and work hard, my grandmother saw fit to buy a house for my parents, in which to raise me, her only grandchild at the time – my sister wasn’t born until I was 10 years old. The pity that my grandparents took on me – as an innocent small child being raised by druggie losers – meant that my parents received vast sums of financial assistance. This financial assistance meant that I attended better state schools than would have been possible if I’d been at the mercy of my selfish lazy layabout druggie loser parents. Those better schools happened to be in Oxford, where there happened to be many sons and daughters of many brilliant but underpaid academics who couldn’t afford to send their children to private school.

    We three friends ended up cohabiting briefly. My posh friend with the wealthy family had bought a £1.5 million house in London, thanks to a hefty deposit contribution from his parents manyfold more than most people would pay for an entire house. My friend from humble beginnings was a lodger. I was a house-guest of my friend, because I was selling the house I had bought entirely with money I fucking earned. My house was being sold as part of my divorce settlement.

    A running joke I have with my posh friend is that I earn more per hour than him. This was the case for a very long time, but there was a brief period when I parked my ambitions, when meanwhile his career started to finally gain traction and his earnings began to skyrocket. Despite my years of mental health problems, homelessness, drug addiction, alcoholism, near-bankruptcy and a horrible acrimonious divorce which pretty much triggered the whole thing, I’ve been very pleased to continue to earn more than him per hour.

    However, one should note that my friend from humble origins is now earning more per hour than both me and my posh friend. My humble friend has managed to make a property purchase, entirely with money generated by his hard work and dedication.

    I wonder about two things. Firstly, why would you sell your soul and become a wage slave if you’re born into obscene wealth? Secondly, why would you sell your soul and become a wage slave if your life is going to be short due to a health condition?

    The latter is easier to answer, because I’ve enjoyed a very high standard of living thanks to doing what my lazy fucktard druggie parents didn’t do, which was to get a proper job and work hard. The former is a harder question to answer. I have absolutely no idea why my posh friend works so hard when he could have had an amazing standard of living without lifting a finger. Equally, I have no idea why my own parents didn’t bother to get off their lazy druggie arses and work for a fucking living, instead of sponging off my grandparents and the state.

    This is the scale I judge myself on.

    I’m no working-class hero.

    I’m not from particularly humble origins.

    I can’t claim to have suffered dire poverty or incredible deprivation – my grandparents simply wouldn’t allow it.

    However, I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth either. If I speak with a posh accent and have a certain way with words, then all the credit for that is due to my school-friends in Oxford, who had professional and academic parents who were well educated and hard-working.

    I’m in awe of my friend who’s achieved so much more with so much less.

    We all sit somewhere on the scale, with the extremes being the starving African orphan, versus the billionaire son of a billionaire who lives exclusively on a diet of prize-winning bullock semen or champion racehorse stallion semen, drunk out of a freshly cut rhino horn.

    We all tell ourselves stories about how well we’ve done in life, or how hard our journeys have been. “Our life as a pair of hateful antisocial sponging co-dependent drug-addict alcoholic lazy layabouts was wonderful until this entitled baby came along, ruining our buzz” is what my parents say, even though contraception and abortion have been universally and easily available for their entire fucking lives.

    I feel a bit guilty about wanting to have secure housing, financial security, employment security and a reasonable standard of living, but at least I fucking work for it even though I’ve sold my soul and become a wage slave. My work is relatively easy and I’m certainly highly rewarded for comparatively little effort. For sure, there’s no justice in the world. There are people who work far harder than me in much worse conditions, who are paid a tiny fraction of what I earn. There are people who don’t work at all and who have a fabulous standard of living, which I don’t begrudge them, provided they haven’t perpetrated some terrible crime against humanity in order to gain their enviable wealth.

    If you want to categorise me as a spoiled, entitled shit, who has no perspective at all, you can use the presented evidence selectively to build your case. If you want to applaud me as an example of great success against the odds, you’ll be able to use different parts of the same set of evidence to build a completely different case.

    I really don’t know what to tell you, because I can see the advantages I’ve enjoyed but I’ve also had to struggle through adversity. My aspirations seem normal enough in many ways, but in other ways what I want seems to be an unreasonable expectation. Do I want an unrealistically high standard of living?

    The beauty of my situation – you must understand – is that I do not perpetrate the vile consequences of my selfish choices against any children who did not ask to be born, and I have exercised every opportunity to prevent pregnancies and maintained the backstop of pregnancy termination, although it’s not my choice to make – at least I have made worst-case-scenario plans where necessary. Can you criticise me for my choices, when I have no dependents?

    I think about my sister, of course, but the first 10 years of my life were spent alone… so very alone. When I think of childhood, I think of loneliness, bullying and neglect. When I think of childhood, I think how much my parents loved drugs and alcohol; I think how much they used to love lying around drunk, high or both, doing fucking nothing; unproductive and idle. How dearly I wanted to be loved and cared for properly. How dearly I wanted the security and protection that parents are supposed to deliver, but they were too intoxicated to give a shit about anything than their substances of abuse and their selfish wants.

    Why the hell am I writing about this stuff?

    I wanted to write something short.

    I wanted to write something fun.

    I guess I was scared I was going to write something smug.

    My life is going alright at the moment – pretty damn good – and I’m wary of getting carried away. I could quite easily lose perspective. I’m scared that I might forget how hard it’s been to get here, because it’s also been easy in some ways. My life has ludicrous contrast and comparing myself to my friends often does little to inform my judgement.

    Sorry if I seem smug and entitled in the coming months. I hope you’ve followed the story and you feel pleased that my life is very different from how it was when everything was fucked up. I hope you see I’ve worked hard to get where I’ve got even though I was never a starving African orphan.

     

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