This is a story about the seasons...

I'm not just a city slicker. I'm actually reasonably tuned in to nature. I have studied weather patterns and the seasons. I have studied tides and rivers. I'm pretty adept at spotting patterns, and I can be a good data scientist to prove it.

Tomorrow - Sunday - I'm going on a climate march in the capital of the UK, London. It will be the first ever political march I have ever taken part in. That's pretty shocking. I have been remiss in my duty as a citizen in keeping UK politics honest. I've been one of the silent 76%. I will be writing about the reasons for why I was so quiet during the last General Election in later blog posts.

I had the pleasure of taking a plane ride home chatting to a couple of millennials a couple of years ago, and oh my God do they work hard. They wanted to go to University, but they quite rightly saw it as a huge privilege to go, and were exceptionally grateful for the opportunity. They laughed at the idea of spending a precious penny of education money on frivolities like partying. They gawped at the idea that the baby boomers paid no tuition fees, got grants and had plenty of money for drugs, drinking and smoking.

Yes, there is a huge generation gap. One generation got to drive around in gas guzzling cars and have heaps of foreign holidays where they travelled all over the globe by jet aircraft. That generation guzzled all the profits, the equity of the nation.

Baby boomers have bankrupted the UK with an unsustainable pensions model based on passive asset management. These lazy people were asleep on the job... never attending any shareholder meetings, while blue chip companies paid huge salaries and bonuses to lazy executives, and the massive enterprises were asset stripped in order to keep paying dividends into pension funds that were managed for short term growth.

The next round of asset stripping is now taking place, with round after round of redundancies, with all the jobs going offshore to China and India, plus the multinationals are restructuring to make sure they hardly pay a penny in corporation tax.

This won't work. We are expecting the millennials to prop up the pension funds, like a ponzi scheme, but we are getting rid of their jobs at the same time. How are they supposed to work to support the baby boomers in their retirement, if the same baby boomers have offshored all the jobs? There won't be any tax receipts either, because everybody will be either retired or unemployed and the multinational corporations won't be paying a penny in tax to the UK.

We are governed - politically and in our jobs - using a top-down approach. A pyramid scheme. The problem with that model is that if the guys at the top are total psychopaths, megalomaniacs, myopic losers... then the whole world is screwed.

The only antidote is grass-roots activism. The power of the unions was destroyed by the Tories, but we thankfully still have the right to peacefully protest about our lives and planet being destroyed by greedy fat cats.

I don't really care whether you believe man made climate change is real or not. If you want to deny the existence of the overwhelming body of evidence that shows that things are probably way worse than we could possibly imagine... get to the back of the queue for the water tap when the drought hits. Why don't you move to the edge of the Sahara... that'd be lovely and warm for you?

Yes, why don't we do that? Instead of taxing a tiny bit more for people who drive polluting vehicles, why don't we suggest that them and their family are therefore put lower down the priority list for assistance, when climate catastrophe hits. When there's a flash-flood, wildfire or a hurricane, you'll be last to be saved. How's about that?

If you're putting yourself first and ignoring the wellbeing of humanity and the planet, that seems fair, doesn't it? If you're so busy watching TV and reading crappy newspapers that print lies and pandering to your spoilt children and teaching them the same ignorant crap that you've bought into, I don't see why you and your lot shouldn't drown in the rising sea levels that you've caused.

We are a nation of sailors in the UK, and we are an island nation with the 2nd biggest tides in the world. The English Channel is one of the windiest places on the planet. Also, the UK is only able to enjoy its mild climate because of the anomaly of the Gulf Stream. The sea might look tranquil at times, but it can rage and storm and smash everything to bits too.

If you are a sailor you must master the state of the sea (waves) the tides and the wind, which can gust and squall out of nowhere. You have to look at the clouds and the surface of the water to see what's happening in the invisible currents of the air. You have to look at any points of reference on any land that you can see to guess what's happening in the invisible currents of the sea. The tide can carry you far faster than the wind sometimes.

It's a similar thing with the planet. You have to get way up a mountain or look from the basket of a balloon or the window of an aeroplane, in order to gauge the state of the climate. If you can see melted glaciers, dry river beds, empty lakes, dust bowls, deserts... the planet might be trying to tell you something.

Everything might feel OK in your double or even triple glazed house with air conditioning and other refinements that are designed to shut nature out and maintain a degree of microclimate control. Everything might feel OK in your air-conditioned car with tinted windows. Believe me, things are not OK.

The oil/energy industry is bigger than you can possibly comprehend. Their lobbying power is immense. They have bought politicians and media outlets around the world. They have controlled almost everything that is printed and has been broadcast, for a very long time. It's only with the advent of technology like the Internet that these monopolies are being eroded, and honest people are allowed to be heard for once.

You see that hole in the cloud cover, which is like a lovely dappled blanket over most of the area you can see? That hole is caused by a power station. Its heat output has actually vaporised the cloud cover above it. That means that not only the energy output of the power station is being pumped into our greenhouse, but also less of the sun's energy is being reflected back into space.

Can you  see how nice and white the clouds are, when you look down on them from an aeroplane? That's because the sun's energy is bouncing back into space. Clouds are fantastic at keeping the planet cool.

You know what isn't good for keeping the planet cool? Water. Yes, as a sailor you learn about something called sea breeze. This is wind that is created because land heats and cools very rapidly, but water absorbs and stores the sun's energy. That means that when the land starts to cool when the sun goes down, you get a big rush of warm air out at sea, back towards cold land. You always get a nice on-shore breeze in the evening during the summer.

Imagine if much more of your planet is covered by water, and much less by snow and ice (which is white, so reflects sunlight) and you have way less cloud cover because the temperature is raised so high that water droplets are not forming. Imagine if what little land that remains has been covered by power stations, roads, airports, offices and houses, which pump out huge amounts of energy. Imagine that.

What I think would happen would be very extreme weather. Cataclysmic storms, bush fires, mudslides, expansion of the deserts, inhospitable temperatures, flash flooding. Yeah... pretty much what we're seeing.

The oil/energy men will say that it's not true. They won't refute it with good science. They'll just say it's not true, and tell you to keep buying their plastic crap and driving around in your gas guzzling car and having heaps of foreign holidays in aeroplanes.

Yes, it's true that I flew all the way to San Francisco to have my photo taken at the Golden Gate Bridge. It sounds like I'm the ultimate hypocrite. However, it wasn't a holiday. I was going to kill myself.

That's right, I have reached the point where I can no longer stand what I see in the world. I can no longer bear wars being fought in my name, people being oppressed in my name, the planet being destroyed in my name. Politicians need to stop using me - their citizen - as an excuse to perpetrate war and suffering.

There is talk of austerity. How's about this? We don't bomb Syria. I will take a 'cut' in the amount of bombs that I buy. I don't want to buy any bombs at all, let alone have them dropped on anybody's head. Zero bombs for me, please. That goes for bullets and shells too. Yes no bullets for anybody's guns and no shells for anybody's tanks and artillery. I don't want any. None, zero, zip, nada... I don't want any. Not for me no. Never.

So, I'm a member of the majority of people in the UK. I'm one of the 76% of people who didn't vote for the Tories. That means that no war should be waged in my name by an unelected minority. Unelected? Yes... 76% of people in the UK don't want the Tories.

So, don't let these unelected wankers, these Eton toffs, these psychopathic warmongering twats... don't let them commit war crimes and global destruction in your name. You didn't vote for these awful awful people. We need to get out into the streets and let the arrogant little shits know that we won't put up with their awful policies.

The Tories will try and bolster their power to subvert and oppress the UK citizens. They will try and keep the police and the armed forces on side with flag-waving nationalism and warmongering, plus ostracising the poor and underprivileged. They will try to divide and rule. It's so painfully obvious that they have all studied the 'success' of the Falklands war and the growth of the City and financial services, in terms of Tory popularity. They seem to have lost sight of the fact that they caused the recession and the Poll Tax Riots.

Please remember that I'm promoting civilised nonviolent protest. No vandalism, no abuse and please be mindful that the police are just doing their job, and doing it in really tough circumstances. We do need law and order. We just don't need the kinds of laws that the Tories would really like to sneak through Parliament using their plutocracy.

I think the Queen and the House of Lords are actually doing a reasonable job of keeping a muzzle on the dangerous dog that is the Tory party. I was reading today about what a bunch of bullies and psychopaths are at the very heart of a party that will gladly drive people to suicide to further their political agenda. These dangerous megalomaniacs need to be treated with the contempt that they deserve.

So I know that many people are turned off by politics and probably will not have even read as far down as this. I will try and dumb things down for people and keep my political message coated in sugar and generally hidden from sight, like peas hidden in mashed potato to get a fussy child to eat some green vegetables. I'm sorry that's a little patronising, but you're letting the country and the planet get ruined by people who are political... but they're horrible.

I seriously recommend that you get some people who are nice and honest and caring, into the political system. All the psychos are really making the whole nation, the whole planet, very sick indeed.

That is all.

It's time to make the call to action right now. Christmas is going to be a big distraction, but when the credit card bills start hitting people's doormats in January, the suicide rate is going to soar. It's also going to be a bitterly cold winter because of climate change (October 2015)

Tags: #politics #suicide #mentalhealth #civildisobedience #notanonymous

This is a story of a growing problem in people's lives....

I can't get no sleep. That's a double negative. What I mean is, that I have a problem with insomnia, because I stare at backlit devices around-the-clock. The problem with backlit devices is that they output light that hits your retina, telling your body "it's daytime, get up".

When I'm awake, which is most of the time, I'm either at work on my laptop or working at a double or even triple monitor, looking at my phone, or looking at a TV, tablet or some other backlit device. I had even taken to reading books on my phone, which means that my body had absolutely no light-based clue as to what the f**king time is.

Unsurprisingly, this messes with your circadian rhythm, even if you eat your meals at regular intervals, and attempt to get in and out of bed at normal times. I generally keep at least 3 electronic devices within grabbing distance of my bed anyway (phone, laptop, smartwatch) and often times I fall asleep with either my laptop on my lap, or still wearing my smartwatch (which helpfully vibrates, so I can briefly wake up to check any alerts).

Photographing stuff on my phone and uploading it to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, posting check-ins and status updates, and making snide or sarcastic Tweets - from 4 different accounts, at least - has grown and grown, leading to a kind of live-blogging of my life.

To say that I was obsessed with social media would be a massive understatement. It's actually an addiction that is affecting my health. That's the generally recognised definition of an addiction: when something you enjoy is negatively affecting your life, but you are struggling or unable to reduce your dependence on the thing you are addicted to (water, oxygen and sugar don't qualify, you see, because you die without those things).

The inscription around the woolly head of our sheepie friend reads: we are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep. Shaun would be well advised to make sure he gets enough sleep, as our immune systems can get dangerously low if we aren't giving our brains and bodies the rest they were designed to have.

Modern life gives us surprisingly few environmental cues as to what we should be doing. Here in London we have artificial lighting 24 hours a day, and there is barely a wall that doesn't have some kind of flat screen attached to it now. We really are a City that doesn't sleep. When all the bankers, lawyers and accountants go home in their taxis, just before midnight, an army of cleaners and trash collectors sweep in behind, to collect all those discarded coffee cups and sandwich wrappers.

Most offices are now 24 x 7 x 364 (you get Christmas Day off - this is the only real Bank Holiday) which have cost-saving motion sensing lighting, so you only have to glance up at one of the tall office blocks at an unusual hour, to get a rough idea of just how many people are working on some unrealistic deadline for their client.

Delivering a deal, getting the Thank Yous from your bosses and clients. High-fiving your colleagues, and adding another tombstone to your impressive collection of deals or projects that you have delivered... that's addictive too. You get a little dopamine hit every time one of those things happens, and before you know it, you find yourself going into the office 7 days a week and answering the phone to your bosses whenever they call.

In a global business, we operate a follow-the-sun model, where Europe hands over to the Americas, and then onto Australasia, and then Asia-Pacific, and then Middle East and North Africa and all too soon it's dawn again. Where those business centres are unable to fully support themselves, some poor sod carries their phone and/or BlackBerry everywhere anytime. We used to call it Crackberry when we first got our BlackBerries, and you found yourself checking email at 4am, even when you officially weren't on call.

We can't actually help ourselves anymore. Whenever we hear that bleep and see that message notification light blinking, we have been habituated into reaching out and grabbing it, no matter what time of day it is, no matter how socially inappropriate it might be, no matter what else we are attempting to do at the time.

I find myself looking at my smartphone, one-handed, while cycling along in front of 3-lanes of red London busses and trucks... what could go wrong? I find myself finishing typing a message, one-handed, while descending steps and even a ladder that leads down onto the 'beach' outside my flat. That ladder is about 80ft high. It would hurt if I fell, or maybe even kill me.

It's a similar deal with selfies. People will go to extreme lengths to get the shot. They won't even let you skydive with a camera until you have done a certain amount of jumps, because of the sensible precaution that people should concentrate on the hard ground that is approaching at 125mph, and not the killer shot that will make their Facebook profile look super awesome.

So I tried to photograph 64 painted sheep in Covent Garden yesterday. Should we be quite worried, in a pathetic hand-wringing Daily Mail reader way? Why? In the above image, some adults might have been accidentally been photographed obsessively taking photos of their children. The image is low enough resolution that you can't actually recognise people, but some idiot will still declare that their privacy has been invaded. Welcome to London, you muppets. We are one nation under CCTV.

(NOTE: I took particular care to avoid taking a photo of anybody's child, and no, that really is not your kid in the image... it's someone else who shops in Baby Gap or Mothercare or wherever, and has a blonde/mousey/dark-haired kid. Can you imagine how hard that is in Covent Garden?).

So, for my part, I am pretty much putting my entire life - not including anything I am under contractual and professional obligation to protect - into the public domain. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear.

Is this brave, or stupid? Will I come to regret doing this? Am I embarrassed? Yes, there is embarrassment at first, and then this grows into a feeling of being liberated. Nudity, sex etc. are still taboos, so I'm not going to take things that far, and I am mindful of other people's need for privacy so I won't be exposing anybody else to my public life laundry. Ask yourself though, why do you feel uneasy about something leaking out?

So, I believe that Cannabis is a very dangerous drug that has been allowed to enter popular culture (some conservative estimates say that 1 in 10 people are regularly 'stoning' themselves). My biggest concern is that prodromal Schizophrenia is being turned into fully blown psychotic episodes in young people. The paranoia and disordered thinking that I have witnessed in friends and relatives is disturbing.

The strains of Cannabis that have been developed with very high Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) content are ruining many lives. People just sit around, eating, playing computer games, and p1ssing their youth away. These are smart and enterprising people. We are losing a whole generation, and I'm pretty angry about that.

If you walk around Camden Town, you will realise how the Marajuana plant has become a ubiquitous emblem for a huge powerful narcotics industry. The revenue and turnover involved is many many billions, in the UK alone. The corruption involved, the bribery of government officials, is a multi-agency problem that spans Border Controls, Customs, Police, Local Government, and of course, Parliament. Professor David Nutt was run out of government for trying to bring some sanity to the issues which threaten to tear our society apart.

We can't have an entire generation, whose ideas and energy have been repressed by a chemical 'straight jacket'. These stoners are too intoxicated to see that they have been conned. They might think they are part of a counter-culture revolution. From my first-hand observations, they are actually spouting complete rubbish, gawping at the TV, surrounded by empty junk food wrappers, in the stained clothes they have been wearing for days.

It sounds like I'm having a go at young people. I really am not. This is a major sadness in my life, that brilliant, bright, intelligent, energetic, beautiful young people are selling themselves so short, because they have been trapped into a cycle of poverty and intoxication, addicted to strong narcotics. What other hopes do they have? Getting a job as a young person is almost impossible.

Can't get a job without the experience. Can't get the experience without the job. That's the spine-chilling Catch 22 that is destroying a whole generation. These are your children who are being frozen out from the employment market. Take a bloody look at yourself, stop looking at the profit and turnover for your company, and ask yourself how many apprentices have you trained? How many entry-level positions have you created in your company? What are you doing to help the next generation?

Give young people the break they need in life. It could be as little as a small business loan, of a few hundred or few thousand pounds. That kind of money is pocket change compared to the value of your savings and assets. If you don't give away more than 1% of your total personal wealth (value of your house + value of your salary + value of your savings + value of your pension) every year, for the lifetime of each child that you have spawned, then you are a pathetic spineless leech on society.

My parents, tried to be as supportive as they were capable of being, and I love them. They have made mistakes, just the same as all of us, and I do recognise that being a parent is hard, and everybody is just winging it.

Tags: #childhod #addiction #mentalhealth #drugs #privacy #london #banking #career