This is a story about engaging your mouth before your brain...

Most of what I write is not stuff that is ordinarily shared by people. We bottle a lot of stuff up, and perhaps with good reason, but what happens if your general demeanour means you're a fairly open book?

Sure, it's true that some of my life experiences - mental health problems, drug abuse, homelessness, being arrested by the police - are not things that your ordinary middle-class professional will hopefully ever experience. It is therefore logical that I should keep all these things hush-hush. Pretend they never happened.

I don't think that privacy and anonymity is necessarily helpful, judging by the direction that life is headed for many people who I speak to. We know there is a mental health epidemic, with millions of people laid low with depression, anxiety and a huge spectrum of illnesses affecting the mind. If we don't talk about this, and share our experiences, we suffer in silence.

It seems to me as if Psychiatry has failed. Pills, powders and potions have failed to cure the ailments of our very souls. Something is wrong, broken, with society, and medicine hasn't yet come up with the cures... probably because we are treating symptoms, not root causes.

It's been a theory of mine that we were never evolved as a species to live in such close quarters with one another. Open plan offices and tiny cramped apartments in overcrowded cities certainly make me feel like a lemming: compelled to throw myself off a cliff. It really doesn't help that so many service sector jobs are so soul destroying. Moving paper or electronic money around for the mega wealthy is most of what we do in the rich nations. It's not growing carrots or building houses.

Sure, some of us are tortured artists and entertainers. Some of us create organic artisan jam, or dog's milk yoghurt, or run a creative digital agency where we wear unfashionable clothes and stupid facial hair and ride fixed-speed bicycles to work. These, most surely, are the last days of a dying civilisation.

They say you should never get too close to an iceberg, because they can flip over unexpectedly. You might be rather pleased to be part of the top 1% or even 5%, but while you're sticking up at the top, there's a huge mass under the water beneath. Sooner or later, the massive body of ice that's been held underwater rises up, and the top of the iceberg is plunged into the freezing sea.

The motto of Über is "everyone's private driver" but how can we all have a jet-set A-list celebrity lifestyle? There simply isn't enough landmass to create enough helipads for everybody to be flying around by private helicopter, chauffeur driven around the place, pampered and flattered at every turn. Technology can't make us all rich, famous and able to have an impossibly high standard of living, despite its promises.

With our MacBook Pro and our high-quality digital camera etc. we all feel like a writer, a photographer, an artist. Facebook gives us the impression that people love looking at photos of us, so we must be glamour models. Twitter turns us all into bloggers, preachers, with our followers... our congregation.

There was a time when you could quit your job and probably make a good living selling cup cakes, setting up a trendy delicatessen or being a life coach. I'm not sure if those people who followed their dreams and quit the rat race are happy, but there's certainly not any opportunity to do it today. Things are so competitive. How many cup cakes have you got to sell, in order to have a salary comparable with somebody who shuffles paper around their desk and tries to look busy and important in the office, but is just a tiny cog in a big wasteful machine that doesn't actually produce anything of tangible value.

I'm mortgaging my privacy. I'm selling my soul. By making public every little tiny detail about my private life, including my massive f**kups, I'm potentially headed up a one-way street. If I achieve any kind of infamy, then I'm basically screwed, in terms of re-entering the world of the wage-slave drones.

So, I've got the best part of 6,000 Twitter followers in the space of 6 months. Do you think that translates to pounds in my pocket? Do you think that taking the unprecedented step of writing nearly 200,000 words about a fairly spectacular life implosion, would change my life significantly? Well, the ship has sailed for anybody hoping to get an easy ride, I'm afraid.

I like what I've written. I would defend it, to some extent. It serves as a permanent public record of not only what I've been through in the past, but more importantly, there is a subtle recording of what I was going through during the whole time I've been blogging. You can read my emotions, my moods, the challenges, the stresses... in-between the lines of what's written down.

I'm starting to be accused of being self-indulgent, self-absorbed, but why shouldn't I have this? Why shouldn't I be allowed to scream and wail and tantrum a bit, if I had to be the sensible grey-suited career guy, with the good job and an impressive CV, who had the mortgage and saved money for a rainy day and got married and did everything by the f**king book like I was supposed to. I deferred gratification like a son of a bitch, and there was no f**king pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The cake is a lie.

How many people are discontented? How many people are struggling? Not only struggling with stress and poverty and unpleasant things happening in their lives, but also struggling with the injustice of things, the pointlessness of some make-work wanky job that's completely useless to humanity. Or perhaps the work they can get is just so completely degrading and poorly paid it's not even worth working at all. You might as well just get off your head on drugs and alcohol and dribble while you play computer games or watch terrible trashy TV.

How many kids are getting smashed out of their skulls on cannabis, skunk and legal high smoking blends? How many kids are consuming dangerous amounts of cheap alcohol, simply to become highly intoxicated? What is it about life that these kids want to escape? Why aren't they sharing the anguish, the inner turmoil? Why do they retreat inwards, under the heavy sedation of intoxicating drugs and alcohol?

Now Microsoft and Facebook are hitting headlines, saying they're working on chat bots. The iPhone has Siri, which is supposed to be a kind of artificially intelligent digital assistant, that can understand what you ask it to do, and try and help you. People are delighted when it turns out that you can ask Siri to beatbox, and it will kinda do it, in a weird kind of way.

Why would we be wasting our time talking to computers, when we could be talking to each other? I wrote before about us sharing 21% less on Facebook, in the space of a year. Do we not keenly feel the loss of that connection with real people, who can get in contact and try to make us feel less alone with our problems and our existential crises?

No person is an island, and the isolating existence of interacting more with apps and websites and software in general, instead of with each other is a worrying trend. Ok, so I'm bucking that by providing a veritable brain dump of sharing, which is much akin to verbal diarrhoea, but at least it's putting stuff out there, where there's a chance I can get some help from my friends.

There's obviously a bystander effect, where nobody knows quite what to do when somebody starts having a public meltdown. People just aren't supposed to act like this. Where is my stoicism? Where is my stiff upper lip? Where is my shame? Where is my embarrassment and my intense desire for total privacy?

Nobody wants to be first, and people also worry that they're going to end up feeling responsible. Everybody feels they're already struggling so much to keep their own shit together, that anybody else bleating on about their own struggles should shut the hell up. Look after number one and keep yourself to yourself. Don't you think that could be the root cause of this horrible isolated existence that causes so much damage to our happiness, our sense of wellbeing, our mental health... leading to depression, stress, anxiety, breakdowns, self harm and suicides?

We're in such a hurry to label, to judge, to jump to conclusions. We like to bracket people and problems as quickly as we can. Somebody becomes known as a drama queen, or we tire of their depressed demeanour, the dark clouds that follow them around. We start to stop inviting the killjoy out, or generally interacting with them. Let them wallow in self-pity, right? I'm sure social services or somebody from a government service will step in before they do something stupid. It's somebody else's job. Not my problem. I've got enough going on with my own stressful, meaningless, empty, unfulfilling life that I hate and I'm depressed about.

I'm just typing now. The taps are open and the words are flooding out. I have relaxed my anal sphincter and a torrent of liquid brown verbal diarrhoea is jetting out of my arse and into the toilet bowl of the internet, and nobody gives a shit, because we are all sinking with shit up to our necks. There is a whole World Wide Web of shit out there, and we're all just pumping out this useless effluent into the cesspool of human emotional pain.

Do you think I'm going to look back on this frantic period of writing and recoil with horror when I read it back? I certainly expect that I will be cupping my face in my hands, saying to myself "what the fuck was I thinking?" but it must be about as close as it's possible to get to knowing what somebody's thinking, reading this shite.

I thought to myself that I won't hold back, I won't censor, edit or filter, because I can always tear this down with a click of the mouse. A stroke of the keyboard, and all this is gone and I can deny all knowledge that it ever existed. It's the digital photo that you deleted off your camera or smartphone... those shameful ones and zeros are gone forever.

But you know what? I've not felt the urge to take anything down. I've not felt the pangs of regret at sharing stuff that makes me look really bad. I've given the world everything it needs to pigeon-hole me, to categorise me, to bracket me, to judge me, to dismiss me with a label or an over-simplification of my entire existence.

That's what we want, isn't it? Computer credit scores, and computerised personality profiling, and a computer simulation of a real person, that responds in a predictable and easy to understand way. We don't want real lives, with all their messiness and unfathomable complexity. We don't want to get to know each other, but have to live with the fact that we still don't really know each other. We don't even know ourselves, even if you're an irritatingly self-absorbed little prick like I am, who self indulgently wallows in a world of introspection and deep self-examination.

Show me some more videos of funny cats. Distract me from the banality of my existence. Please don't remind me of the humanity that my fellow Earth residents possess or incite any kind of sympathetic or empathetic response in me. I'm quite wrapped up in my own world of pain and disappointment, boredom and stress. I want to pretend like technology and the advancement of civilisation is going to wave its magic wand and even though I'm fornicating with a person I'm nearly totally revulsed by the more I get to know them, in a filthy home in an overcrowded town, on a hopelessly poisoned planet, everything will be fucking rosy for the screaming brats that end up getting spawned.

What the hell is this anyway? This is what happens when the filter gets switched off. This is my life, with no filter.

I think I was born with no filter.

Look: I bought new socks. I'm sharing the private details of my socks life. Every time I have socks, I'm going to post it up on social media. Socks is supposed to be a taboo subject. Always practice safe socks.

Tags: #privacy #depression #mentalhealth #suicide #career #socialmedia

This is a story about warped perceptions...

The world in which I inhabit is vastly different, depending on the state of my broken brain. Mood fluctuations cause me to interpret things very differently than a supposedly 'normal' healthy individual would.

I've written a lot this year about drug abuse, but I'd like to talk about a time before drugs even entered the story and made the water muddy. I'd like to talk about what it was like from 2008 through to 2012, when my brain was just doing its own thing, without drugs or medication.

If you're a person of prejudice, it won't surprise you to learn that drugs mess you up, but you might be surprised to learn that my mental health problems predated any drug abuse. You might also be surprised to learn that people can recover too, and go back to ordinary life, with nobody any the wiser as to your dark past.

But this really isn't about drug abuse, remember? We're talking about a period of 4 years that predated any psychoactive substances making things all messy and confusing. We're talking about when I first went to my doctor, because I was struggling with my mental health.

I spent just over a minute of explaining to my doctor that I felt completely exhausted, overwhelmed and unable to face friends, family, work or anything... I had drawn the curtains and switched off my phone, and retreated under the duvet, and could barely make it to the doctor's surgery.

"Have you heard of Fluoxetine?" my doctor asked. I said that I had, and that I knew that the trademarked name that it was more commonly known as was Prozac. I said that I had read very bad things about emotional blunting and ruined sex lives of those people who were taking Prozac. I had read Elizabeth Wurtzel's biography, Prozac Nation, where she didn't exactly speak highly of the 25 year old medication.

How sad that the National Health Service (NHS) would be offering some cheap generic pills after only a minute of getting to understand a patient's problems. It takes 6 weeks before an anti-depressant SSRI medication like Prozac takes effect, and it's a fairly serious decision, to put somebody on long-term medication. I think it's a little ridiculous that we don't offer more talk therapy, as a first line of defence.

So, I was diagnosed as having Clinical Depression, within just a few minutes. Something I also knew, but didn't have the time to discuss with my doctor, was that SSRIs can be very bad for people with Bipolar Disorder. I knew my moods fluctuated up as well as down, so I had my suspicions that I was Bipolar, and that was another reason to avoid Prozac.

When you're depressed, everything seems hopeless. I had decided that I was useless at my job, that I hated working in offices, that I hated computers and software, and that I couldn't handle a career in IT anymore. I also lost interest in going out, sex, food... I pretty much just slept, or lay in my bed feeling anxious about the fact that I was off work sick.

After a couple of months feeling like this, I hit upon the idea that I was going to write a computer game for the first generation iPhone, to be ready in time for the launch of the App Store.

Although I had decided that my office-based IT career was over, the idea of programming on my laptop in my garden in the sunshine didn't sound too bad. I knew that the early limitations of the first iPhone meant that I could make a fairly basic game, and compete with other developers. I decided that if only a few people bought my game, it was still a fun experiment.

And so began a period of intense activity. I would work for 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, in order to capitalise on those precious early days of the App Store when there were hardly any apps on there. It seems incredible now, that there were only a few hundred or few thousand apps for the iPhone. There was no Android. There was no iPad. There was just one smartphone that created a billion dollar market, overnight.

When we look at that crazy period of my life, when I was churning out apps, it's pretty clear to see that my mood had swung to another extreme. I didn't have time to explain things to people. My thoughts were racing, speech seemed like a frustratingly slow way to communicate, eating and sleeping were an inconvenience, certainly I didn't want to do anything other than work on my apps. I was single-minded to the point of obsession.

In economic terms, things paid off. I got a couple of my apps to number one in the charts, briefly. One of my apps was downloaded 8,000 times in a day once, and another one racked up 500,000 downloads in a month. This was clearly a brilliant gold rush.

I knew that the quality of the apps being released was increasing steadily, and the opportunity for one fast burning out dude in his garden were rapidly diminishing. I started to really hate the work anyway. I had a whirlwind affair as an indie games developer, and it happened so fast that I started to hate it, just like you start to hate any job that you've mastered and has become easy.

Possibly this was a sign of my mood turning again. I had managed a period of several weeks, working at a ridiculous level, and what goes up inevitably must crash down. I hadn't been able to exert myself to such an extent since the school holidays in childhood. There's no way you'd ever be given 6 to 8 weeks to concentrate and just get on and hammer out a project, in a corporate environment.

My mood started to alternate between depression and hypomania (as described above) and I would turn each episode of frantic activity into a period of opportunism, to make money or produce something tangible.

Getting myself back into an office environment and doing some IT contracting re-stabilised me a little bit, and getting a boat so that me and my friends could go wakeboarding was something I was passionate about, and consumed my lunchtimes, after work in the summer, and weekends. My life got back to normal, for nearly 2 years.

During that first depression, I had set certain wheels in motion, however. One particular scheme was retraining as an electrician, while I was working as a programmer still. When I had finished my training, I quickly quit my job.

Going back to an unstructured form of making money, I started working too hard again. Building a business from nothing, to breakeven and hopefully to profitability is not quick and it's not easy. I managed to start getting good clients and increasing my turnover very quickly, through some shrewd partnerships and advertising choices. However, I was extremely inexperienced, and took on way more work than I could manage, sustainably.

I got my new business to the point where it was profitable, and had paid back the initial capital expenditure on training, van, tools etc. but I was burnt out again. I had lived and breathed my business, and only because it was hard physical work, had it lasted slightly longer before my brain was finally frazzled.

Depression reared its ugly head again in 2010, and I realised that I had made a mistake in cutting away from the easy money that a career in IT had to offer. I failed to recognise the importance of a stable working environment though: restricting your hours to 40 or 50 a week, giving yourself weekends off, having the occasional holiday, working with other people who share some of the responsibility and workload... those things are important.

My hypomania started to get a bit more extreme. After reading an enormous pile of books on Particle Physics and Quantum Mechanics and other theories & models of theoretical Physics, I started to read huge amounts of academic papers from Cornell University's online library.

Some of the academic papers that I read were extremely interesting to me, and I emailed the authors to ask them questions. To my surprise, most of them responded, and we started to correspond via email.

Spurred on by this, I started to believe I could author my own paper and get it published, and I developed a hare-brained idea of my own, around a thought experiment that was particularly hard to test in the real world. I eagerly sent my paper off to several academic journals. A couple of the journals even responded... unsurprisingly to say that they wouldn't publish something that hadn't been peer reviewed.

Obviously, it's on the border of a delusion of grandeur to imagine that you might have anything of merit to contribute to a field, after only a few months reading the literature and educating yourself about the deepest mysteries in the Universe.

These delusions are something that I've always been wary of, and I try to be self-aware, but it's fairly clear that there was a progression in the difficulties that I was having with Bipolar Disorder, and the regulation of my moods. I wasn't imagining that I was the next Einstein, but I was having to say to myself "be careful, you're not the next Einstein" and give myself regular reality checks.

I still cringe when I think about some of the emails I sent to very important academics, and how, even though they indulged me, it must have been with slight tongue-in-cheek, to respond to a complete layman such as myself.

After yet more time lost in a pit of despair and hopelessness, where I did very little except for mow the lawn and feed the cat, the iPhone App gold rush cropped up again. This time I decided to sell picks & shovels.

Depressions are very similar to one another. You sleep a lot, you don't do much, everything looks shitty and you hate yourself. My depressions were clearly getting worse, as I started to think about suicide more and more. I started to accumulate more and more paraphernalia with which I could kill myself: inert gas, razor blades, Barbiturates, Cyanide etc. etc.

Periods of hypomania are easier to tell apart, because I can tell you what I was obsessed about in each one: iPhone Apps, boat, megashed, electrical business, physics and then my picks and shovels for the iPhone App gold rush.

I formed another company - Roam Solutions - which was later to become MePublish.com and Hubflow.com. I talked a couple of friends into joining me on my mad escapade, and generally threw everything and the kitchen sink at this particular endeavour.

My new company put on an exhibition stand at London Olympia, Learning Technologies conference, only months after I first conceived the idea for the service we sold. Delivering eLearning was something I knew nothing about, but that wasn't going to stop me.

By the time the winter was over, I had managed to get the company involved with the TechStars network, and we relocated to Cambridge in order to do a 13-week technology accelerator program, where we would be introduced to billions of dollars worth of investors.

13 weeks is just longer than the sweet spot for one of my hypomanic periods, and I was really struggling by the end of the program. Suicidal thoughts were quite intrusive, and I was drinking like a fish. I hated myself, and what felt like lies that I was telling to potential investors. It was a struggle to keep going to the end of the program.

I feel bad that I let 2 co-founders and 11 investors down really badly, when I imploded in September 2011. I never got back on my feet, because of relationship problems and a number of things that eventually led to very bad life choices and a whole world of pain, destruction, devastation.

I don't feel too bad because I'm clearly unwell and because nobody risks their money and a stable job unless they want to try and get rich quick. I genuinely didn't pull the wool over anybody's eyes. There was a big opportunity there, and I'm only partly to blame for everything going tits up. The biggest part, perhaps, but still only partly.

Writing code for iPhone, iPad, Android and BlackBerry, as well as the back-end (serverside code in PHP, Linux administration, database etc. etc.) plus rebranding, raising money and everything that goes with a startup is a hell of a lot to fit into 13 weeks. A crash was inevitable for me: I was too close to the detail, too close to the coal face, too close to the customers, too honest with the potential investors.

At the end of the day, I got my arse handed to me. I was completely spent. I've never experienced such hard work and stress and pressure in my life, although there was a lot of fun too, and I had an incredible time meeting some of the most inspiring people I have ever had the good fortune to cross paths with.

The main lesson I learnt though, was that I really can't ignore my mental health. Even if I avoid clinical labels, like Bipolar Disorder, I definitely have a predisposition to mood instability if I make bad choices. I can't ignore the number of times I've swung between extreme depression and extreme 'highs' which are characterised by massive productivity, and increasingly delusional hopes of being rich and famous.

Things are obviously still very 'up and down' for me, but there is seemingly no end to things that spur on my hypomania. Most recently I ended up working on HSBC's number one project, and being made responsible for a really critical part of that project, by the CIO at the project townhall, in front of the entire team. The facts as they are presented to me, do little to discourage a kind of boom & bust lifestyle.

I guess I could reshape my life around working for 3 to 6 months, and then taking 3 to 6 months as a break to recover from my over-exertion, but I don't think it's very healthy. I'm now faced with the challenge of how to manage my own mental health in a more sustainable way, before I really run out of luck and tread on some toes that get me in super big trouble.

Wish me luck. I'm going to need it.

I really didn't sleep very much while I was at HSBC. Naturally, this started to be detrimental to my mental health. Eventually, I was very sick indeed, and it was hard to continue... I had to go into hospital

Tags: #bipolar #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #career #banking

This is a story about impaired memory...

I actually have very patchy memories of the last 3 months, because I had unfortunately been consuming at least 255 strong Benzodiazepine type tablets. These would be commonly known as sleeping pills, or 'downers'. Amnesia is one of the known side effects.

If you're suffering from stress-related anxiety, insomnia or a comedown from stimulant drugs, Benzos are manna from heaven. However, after a few months of taking them, you are risking a withdrawal syndrome that could kill you, if you abruptly stop. It's important to taper off slowly if you have become physically dependent on these drugs.

I had no idea that I had taken so many pills: a common side effect being the fact you can't actually remember taking them, so you end up taking more. In fact, the last few months are scarily patchy. I read many emails that I don't even remember sending. I only have vague recollections of doing things that must, presumably, have required quite a bit of thought at the time, like publishing an eBook on Amazon Kindle.

Anybody who is familiar with junkie folklore will know about the speedball, which is a mixture of heroin and cocaine, injected, or basically the combination of an 'upper' with a 'downer'. Combining Supercrack with Benzos is kind of a Speedball, and inflicts the same kind of problem on your brain: it makes you kind of sleepwalk, until either the stimulant or the depressant wins the fight.

It was not my intention to ever mix uppers and downers, but the mean elimination half-life of Benzos tends to be a lot longer than that of stimulants. You can still have a load in your system when you wake up and start using stims again.

This is how most overdoses happen. It's not normally a single drug that's found in the bloodstream, but polydrug abuse is by far and away the most common reason why addicts die of overdoses. The interaction between drugs can cause dangerous respiratory depression: shallow breathing and even stopping breathing altogether.

The life of a successful 34 year old barrister was destroyed when his boyfriend died of asphyxiation in his sleep. They had been fans of chemsex, and had taken Meow Meow (an upper; Methcathinone) with GBL/GHB (a downer; sometimes called Liquid Ecstasy). The fatal combination was with alcohol, and it is likely that the 34 year old legal star's boyfriend choked on his own vomit, while he was unconscious.

BBC coverage of the news story is here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35976705

Seeing as these drugs were already criminalised, I can't see that the new laws would have had any effect to save the lives that are already being blighted by addiction and drug abuse.

There are a large number of men, in their 30s and 40s, who've come to drugs late and are now doing it regularly

There are so many things that sound like familiar echoes of the chemsex world that my ex-wife and me entered. There was a fairly long period where we wouldn't have sex unless we were high on Ecstasy, amphetamines, cathinones or GBL/GHB. It became an accepted and normal practice to lose at least an entire day of the weekend to these kind of sexploits.

I say we were careful, because I have always educated and informed myself, and we used to use super accurate measuring pipettes and miligram scales, as well as following golden rules about not exceeding certain dosages, and definitely never mixing drugs.

When you enter the dark and deadly world of an all-consuming addiction though, you're in things on your own. You're fumbling around in your pit of despair and one packet of pills looks the same as any other bag of white powder, which you indiscriminately crush up and snort up your nose, rub on your gums or otherwise desperately try and shovel into your body somehow, chasing your lonely isolated high.

By making drugs illegal, we set up a division in society where the law-abiding middle class citizens go about their business in complete ignorance of the life experiences that are being racked up by those exposed to a degree of drug experimentation and use of 'soft' drugs.

If one of these ignorant, drug naïve people gets caught up in the world of chemicals of abuse, then they are ill-prepared for the hard lessons ahead. The first comedown from Crystal Meth without anything to cushion the landing is something that you're unlikely to forget.

In this dangerous new world that is being discovered by middle class professional thirtysomething gay men, and the occasional open minded hetro, we are likely to see many more tragedies like the one in the news story above, and many struggles and unexpected car wrecks like my own.

Who knows, maybe my own story ends with a fate that is unfortunately all too familiar to the coroner: drug overdose due to polydrug abuse.

All I've got in my favour is the fact that I remain well educated, well informed. I knew that this new legislation was coming, so I got myself off the little blue & pink pills that were threatening to become a physical dependency.

It's not like a change in the law is going to make any difference to the easy availability of drugs of abuse though.

These are the Central London meetings of Crystal Meth Anonymous. The one time I went to attend one I ended up relapsing onto legal highs instead. Was never a Meth addict though, but there's no Supercrack Anonymous, yet

Tags: #addiction #drugs #alcohol #politics

This is a story about abandoning ship...

I went down to Bournemouth to decide what was worth saving from my old life, which I had hurriedly left behind in an attempt to move on and start again back in London.

These are some of the photos I took. I'm not going to write much.

The stuff was mostly in cupboards, under the stairs or in megashed. I didn't have time to go up in the attic. I must have literally spent less than an hour quickly snapping before I had to get out, and not get dragged back into the past (ha ha! Not really winning, I know).

Here's everything that made it to London in the car:

And here's what I brought on the train, when I first ran away:

And here's everything I salvaged put into storage:

That's it, a life dismantled. The contents of a 3-bedroom house, attic and megashed, refined down and locked away in a rented cupboard.

This is a blog post with pictures of my house taken in the daytime, for your interest: https://www.manicgrant.com/2015/stress-test

It's only stuff, but words fail me for some reason. Perhaps because I have never since quite managed to get all the same pieces at the same time ever again: the friends & family, the girl, the hobby, the job, the house, the car and the stuff.

Tags: #divorce #london

This is a story about going round in circles...

The mistakes of the past, the pitfalls, the traps, and the warning signs and the other things that can be learnt by experience, are not hidden from me. The 'right' way to live your life is not alien to me. There was a period of many years where I worked regular hours, paid my mortgage, bills and went about my daily routine with familiar normality.

Now, it's easy to point at many aspects of my life and say "that's not right" and "you need to fix that". I'm not blind and I'm not stupid. I can see what needs to be done. I know where I need to get to. However, there is no short-cut to moving from dysfunctional to productive regularity. There are no fast fixes for the myriad little things that break down and need attention.

The accumulation of this backlog of little broken things and time spent trapped into a dysfunctional existence, leaves very steep sides to a very deep trench that you get stuck in. There are limited opportunities to make your escape.

Please don't think this is a case of poor me, poor me, pour me another drink. I'll either get out of rut I'm stuck in, or else I know quite precisely where I'm going to end up.

It's true that at a certain point, it becomes attractive to just give up, to capitulate, to self-sabotage. When the task ahead just looks so daunting and you have none of the resources you need to complete it, why not use what little remaining life force you have in reserve, in a hedonistic exit from your miserable existence?

I'm certainly not in that position at the moment. I have a couple of excellent lifelines, and to throw in the towel now would be churlish. When I scratch the surface, things are so much worse than I could even imagine, but at the same time, I have some assistance and opportunities that I'm ridiculously lucky to have.

For those who have to imagine the many parts of the picture that remain obscured to anybody except the mind-reader, you will struggle to see much difference between your own functional life, and my dysfunctional one. It doesn't look like it would take much to restore normality.

However, it has been a long time since I was 'in the saddle' as it were, cycling along with good balance and steady pedalling rhythm. 3 meals a day, a hard day's work and a good night's sleep. Week after week, month after month, year after year. My life simply has 'episodes' now, where I switch between different modes.

I'm stuck in an episode of low mood, low energy, high anxiety, high stress, low productivity. Things that aren't exactly peachy for getting your life back on track. It's hard to imagine why I'm not up at first light, fixing everything up and pushing hard to get back into the swing of things. Hard to imagine if you've never hit a brick wall of depression or anxiety.

It's a bit of a waiting game. Moods fluctuate. The body and brain dictate the terms, and to artificially alter them with chemicals is partially how I ended up stuck in this rut, so it's not like I just need a few happy pills from the Doctor. Or that's certainly a route I'd like to avoid anyway, having already seen several iterations of that particular approach, with the same results every time.

It seems there's no cheating the system.

Doping in sport can lead to enlarged hearts that can suddenly stop beating, blood that's so thick that you can't fall asleep and have a drop in blood pressure, muscles that are swollen into vein covered monstrosities from steroid use, arthritic joints and inflamed tendons. Don't you think we're just pushing the human limits too far some times?

Using vast amounts of strong coffee to concentrate on work, and vast amounts of alcohol to switch off and de-stress after work, is perhaps the office worker's equivalent of being in the Tour de France, surrounded by other people who are using the performance enhancing substances, who are your peers and you need to keep pace with.

My body is screaming "where are the stimulants?" as I deny it caffeine. I could start drinking coffee and cola again, but I have no idea how far away from my true self I really am, I've been so out of touch with my chemically unaltered moods for so long.

I've started drinking alcohol again, and it's alarming how insidious it is, rushing back into my life, to tranquillise my jangling nerves and put me to sleep. There is some moderation, self-control there, but not much. There is sanctuary to be found at the bottom of a bottle. Intoxication is sweet relief from otherwise never-ending relentless exhausting stress and anxiety.

Without alcohol or some tranquillising medication, or even an herbal sleep remedy, I will just spend a night awake with my fears, my negative thoughts, my anxiety about the sheer volume of things that need to be fixed up, repaired, my stress about the workload ahead.

Things are getting worse before they get better.

Ok, so we have London, and we have bicycles. Some elements look consistent. However, we still have the seasons, and the dark and the rain and the cold are all fairly debilitating unless I'm in a well-established routine, or I can get away somewhere hot and sunny for a couple of weeks respite.

I know that Spring has sprung, and that we are on British Summer Time (BST) now, giving a whole extra hour of evening light. However, my body's not fooled, because I don't have a routine that is particularly dictated by clocks and calendars. I have moods that are dictated by sunlight and warmth.

Over the years I learnt what my body and brain needed, and when. It was important to establish an annual routine, as well as the daily workweek routine. How else could I lay down periods of up to 4 years in the same job, for the same company?

All that's been washed away in recent years. I've shown I know how to survive and get by, but not how to thrive and make things have any longevity anymore it seems.

I would say though, that I haven't forgotten the vast majority of what I learned in 20 years attempting full-time employment. It's only been since 2010 that everything went very much out of kilter. I guess it's like spinning helicopter blades. It only takes a little bit of damage to one of the blades, and the machine will shake itself to pieces.

Just popped round to see Liz and Phil for a spot of tea

Tags: #bipolar #depression #mentalhealth #london #career

This is a story about dress sense...

I'm interested to see that the BBC are running a series of programmes about identity. It's a topic that I think about a lot.

While watching a documentary recently, a man who was being interviewed said that he never realised that children were just little people, with their own unique thoughts, tastes, opinions. feelings and experiences. It wasn't until his own children had grown into adolescence and adulthood that the penny had dropped that they weren't dollies or toys.

Occasionally, I worry that men who have owned dogs may become frustrated with children, given that a child has human genes, which don't predispose it to respecting the alpha of the pack, like a dogs genes would. Once a dog knows its place, it goes wild for praise and affection from the top of the pyramid, or will lower its head and tail in shame, if the alpha is apparently displeased with it.

To the dog owner who has taken time to establish the pecking order with their dog and train it somewhat, children look unruly, argumentative, difficult, badly behaved. We're talking about a fairly major species difference though. A dog may feel like a surrogate child, in that it invokes a caring, nurturing response from you, and the release of the bonding hormone, Oxytocin. Children are far less likely to jump on you and try and lick your face or hump your leg. They'll probably wander off to play with their toys once they've been fed.

Parenting must be incredibly difficult, and especially so if you haven't studied evolutionary biology to even a basic level. It's probably not until you're outnumbered by your offspring that the penny would drop that you are just a blob of trillions of cells, all expressing the same DNA. The blob constitutes an organism designed to replicate copies of genes. Once you've reproduced more than a couple of times, it becomes clear that your purpose is spent. You've carried out the will of your genes, in making more copies of them.

There are some wasps that can inject a psychoactive substance into a spider, to get the spider to weave a home for the wasp, before becoming a tasty snack. In much the same way, every gene in your DNA sequence is most likely to be there because it increases the probability that you as an organism will make a home for some genetic clones, and then become the food provider for your offspring organisms that carry your genes.

I remember when families used to wear matching tracksuits (or 'shell' suits as they seemed to be known then) and it's still uncommon to find families wearing matching outfits. I believe it's quite a common trend in the United States.

We quite like belonging to family, clan or tribe, as social animals. It's a more complex form of group behaviour than the wolf or dog pack, and all wearing the same identifying clothes can increase your security, your sense of belonging to the group.

And so it is, we might continue to wear the family shell suit, while it suits us to belong to the family. Getting your meals provided, a roof over your head and maybe your shell suit washed is a big bonus when you're a child without the means or maturity to support yourself. However, certainly as a young adolescent male, you're going to have to get pushed out of the childhood bosom of the family and tribe, in order to maintain genetic diversity and avoid the risk of incest.

A girl who stays close to home, and maintains strong and close family ties, is quite normal, and fits with everything else we see in nature. However, boys should at some point become men, and become more distant from their blood relatives in the interests of finding a mate and starting their own family, and hopefully a long bloodline in a clan or a tribe. This is what we are evolved to do.

Jumping ahead to the modern day, we are still governed by the same genetics and evolutionary advantages of organising ourselves into families, clans and tribes, but we have much extended the period of childhood and adolescence, as well as making the gene pool vastly more diverse, especially in cities. Road travel, rail travel and air travel have meant the intermingling of people from all continents. The transition from village living to commuting or city living means the modern tribe is all but extinct in the wealthier nations.

However, boys still need to become men at some point, and this requires the acknowledgement of a unique identity. You can't choose your son's clothes and dress him forever. You can't expect your son to live at home forever, despite the financial convenience.

In some ways, dress sense is a measure of maturity, or at least how long that person has been allowed to develop their own identity, free from parental influence. I know that the idea of giving gift vouchers is vulgar to some people, but the idea that somebody could know the subtle nuances of my tastes and pick out an item of clothing that I would select myself seems highly unlikely.

Because of highly unfortunate circumstances surrounding the collapse of my marriage and subsequent divorce, I have had to go cap in hand to those with money in order to bridge gaps in my income. Does it seem right that creditors would dictate how a 36 year old man dresses, or where they live, or how they furnish their home? Aren't those things part of an adult's identity, and wholly unique and owned by that individual?

It might seem ungrateful to not want to live back in the family home, and be fed and dressed by my mother, and have my lifestyle under the close scrutiny of my father, but I can't stress enough how destructive that is, when you're in a house in a village where you don't have any of your own friends, where you've never lived, where you've never worked.

There should be gratitude to just have a roof over my head, clothes on my back, right? Is it pride that keeps me from capitulating, and regressing to a state of childhood adolescence, turning up at my parents door, destitute?

I've barely been able to afford more than a pair of new shoes, in my non-work wardrobe in the last year. A relatively vast sum of money was expended on getting myself a flat, even though it represents excellent value for money in London, where the jobs are. Do these things seem like profligacy to you? Does it seem arrogant, spoiled, greedy, to expect to have a home (or a share of a home) I can call my own and to dress in a manner of my choosing?

I bought my glasses with money my parents gave me as a housewarming gift, for which I'm incredibly grateful. The T-shirt was a birthday present from a girl nearly 2 years ago. The bicycle is on loan and the fact I'm in San Francisco is a business expense

Tags: #parents #childhood #oxford #london

This is a story about a desire for privacy...

I've pretty much given up on the idea of having any personal privacy and instead swung to the other extreme of making most of my life completely public. Our family has never had any locks on bathroom/toilet doors and finds the notion of knocking before entering another family member's bedroom to be a baffling concept.

It might sound odd, but this issue grew and grew to become psychologically traumatic for me, and when I'm unwell, I can become obsessed with the idea of people bursting into my bedroom or bathroom at random, leaving me feeling vulnerable and under threat. I appreciate that this is not exactly rational thinking.

My ex-wife had demanded that my parents take me away from the home I owned, the bedroom that my parents put me in had one half of the door lock, but not the other half. I fashioned something that would fit in that lock from a roll of sellotape and had made myself a crude 'front door lock'. Something I was quite used to having from 7 years as a homeowner, and several other years with my own flat.

When my Dad came to randomly burst into this bedroom, he found that the door would not immediately open. Instead of saying, "Hello, can I come in?" or even "Hello", he marched downstairs and phoned the police. It was me who tried to initiate a conversation with him, which he roundly ignored. It wasn't until the police arrived that I found myself having a normal human conversation.

For anybody struggling with the concept of human communication, it goes like this:

• First, greet or otherwise attract the attention of the person you wish to communicate with, using their name or saying "Hey!" or "Hello!" or some other form of greeting or conversation initiator. This avoids saying things when nobody is expecting to be addressed or otherwise communicated with - they might be distracted or busy talking to somebody else.
• Secondly, once you have succcessfully established a dialogue, you may then raise your topic of discussion: ask a question, make a statement.
• Finally, if a response was expected, you should receive one. Otherwise, after a reasonable wait, you may ask if you were heard and understood correctly.

It doesn't seem that complicated for the vast majority of the 7 billion souls who crawl over the surface of the planet every day.

Also, there are fairly universal taboos that are not times when communication normally takes place, throughout this large human population: when a person is bathing or showering, when a person is getting dressed or undressed, when a person is having sex or masturbating. Those are normally not acceptable times to expect to hold a normal conversation or interact in a communicative way.

I honestly don't think that it was the fact I didn't grow up in the Swinging 60's that means that I follow the human communication protocol and respect the taboos of most people. I'm fairly certain that most people would have some problem with my parents entering your bathroom while you're taking a shit, for example.

You might have heard about acid flashbacks people get, when they have a really bad trip on LSD. One example might be feeling like ants are crawling all over your body, and then that imagined event might occur again, purely psychologically with no drugs in your system, simply because it was so traumatic when it happened.

Similarly, now I'm in my own flat again, and I have a lock on my en-suite bathroom door, I still have attacks of paranoia about people bursting in randomly, unannounced. This has led me to screw 6" screws into the door woodwork, and other acts of keeping my bedroom door physically closed. This has become obsessive and frantic, at times where my underlying psychological trauma has been exacerbated with drugs and lack of sleep.

My flatmate is actually the first person I've ever met who can calm me down and get me to realise that there is no threat, and it's all imagined, and put down my tools and whatever else I'm fashioning a barricade out of and start to relax and feel safe in my own home again.

I don't think it takes a professional psychologist to understand that if somebody feels under threat in their own 'safe' space, it only takes fairly limited reassurance that the human protocols of knock before entering are going to be observed, before the distressed individual starts to feel better.

That's the view looking down from my attic in my old house. As you can see, there is no ladder or steps lowered to ascend or descend. I climbed into the hatch without the aid of either. The more you shout at a person and corner them and traumatise them and use the police to do the human part of speaking to somebody, knocking, talking etc... the more you drive them into a state of complete psychological trauma, fear, madness.

The psychological damage can be repaired, and the self-protection response doesn't have to be triggered to the full extreme, and it gets better over time. My friends Will & Jess, who had let me stay in their guest bedroom, pretty much left me alone until my leg was mostly healed and I was sat in their lounge, before having a normal human conversation about how it was probably time I started looking for my own flat. They were very delicate and considerate with my feelings. They were kind and considerate. They helped and repaired psychological damage.

I have no idea how 5 people can co-exist with a total loony in the same house, and nothing was really said, but they were very discreet and I'm sure they were kind enough to tell a few white lies to save my blushes. I can't thank them enough for doing that for me, although just like applying the brakes on a supertanker, it takes some time before a person can start to feel safe and unthreatened after a long period of trauma and stress.

You certainly won't get an aggressive response back from me, however you choose to deal with me, but you may find me trying to burrow my way under your floorboards or pretending to be a pair of curtains or something else equally bonkers, as an absurdly twisted response to the extreme threat that I wrongly perceive.

Aggresssion rarely solved any problems in the world.

Direct action might be disruptive, but you can never be sure that the consequences will be positive, and not simply drive behaviour underground and close off open and honest dialog. You can also never be sure whether a person is trying to disrupt/interrupt their own behaviour, unless you really know what you're looking at, when you peek into their private world.

Tags: #addiction #mentalhealth #friends #divorce #parents #london #oxford #police

This is a story about comebacks...

I have very little memory of the last couple of weeks, or maybe even the last couple of months. I've basically been backed into a corner, shaking with the stress and feeling of being totally overwhelmed by the task of having to deal with all the things that couldn't be put off any longer.

The 'pinnacle' or culmination of this breakdown period, was when bailiffs entered my flat in order to cut off my gas & electricity, for non-payment of bills. The bills, naturally, had remained in a pile of unopened post, with me none the wiser as to the growing threat of this debt collection. Of course, I knew that the bills had to be dealt with sooner or later, but the crisis point happened to be reached just as I was sleeping off the 'hangover' of the last three months silliness.

I've basically been asleep for about 2 weeks, because I started taking Mirtazepine, which is an atypical antidepressant which was prescribed to me years ago, and I thought was OK at the time, but addiction issues kinda derailed me from taking it on a proper regular basis. This time around, I found that it helped me to get to sleep, and then carry on sleeping as a stress avoidance tactic, for much of the following day, until there were only a few hours of evening to fill before I could take my next dose.

This medication was not prescribed to me for depression. It wasn't prescribed to me at all in fact. I prescribed it to myself to treat drug withdrawal symptoms, after a hefty period of abusing legal benzodiazepines and Supercrack. I'm not exactly sure when this crazy new UK law comes into place, pretty much banning anything that's psychoactive, but I don't want to be trapped into being dependent on something that's illegal.

As it stands at the moment, it has been over a year since I have accessed the Dark Web and I'd like it to stay that way. The Dark Web can end up being unhealthy window-shopping for a former junkie, and then eventually, in a moment of weakness, disguised envelopes containing all manner of disruptive troublemaking can be wending their merry way to you through the postal system. That's a situation I definitely want to avoid.

Withdrawing from Mirtazepine was extremely unpleasant. I was overwhelmed with anxiety and insomnia. I'm hoping tonight will be better, but today, at least I didn't have the daytime sleepiness and lethargy that allowed me to spend the best part of 2 weeks in bed. I even made the bailiffs come and collect a credit card from my grubby mitts, while I lay in my pit of despair.

You see that slight upswing at the end of March? Hopefully that delimits the end of months of depression and drug abuse, and the beginning of a period of productivity. I've tackled some of the most pressing stuff that had to be done today, and if I can steer clear of the medications/research-chemicals that seem to make all your troubles go away, then things can continue, provided I don't become totally overwhelmed by stress and anxiety.

It feels like the Government is testing us, risking our lives, to discover what happens when they pull the rug out from under our feet. The shoddy, hole-filled 'safety net' has finally been so undermined, that nobody could possibly consider it an option, no matter how dire their circumstances. Get better or die, is the Government's unspoken mantra.

Personally, it is long overdue, me pushing myself to find more contract work or even something permanent, provided it isn't going to grate and gnaw at my soul so intolerably, that there's little point as the outcome would be entirely predictable.

I say "long overdue" but that's a little unfair on myself. The winter, plus the timing of losing my contract were particularly hard on me, coupled with the fact I was completely exhausted from efforts expended on the doomed HSBC Customer Due Diligence project anyway. I did need some time to rest and recuperate. There were chances to get straight back on the horse, and I would have done if fortune had favoured those opportunities, but the optimism of November of last year quickly turned into resignation about the wasted 6 or so weeks of Xmas build up and early New Year 'dead spot' in the recruitment calendar.

I actually feel reasonably awake and alert, and not totally overwhelmed when my thoughts turn to my todo list. I know that my suit and shirts are dry cleaned and shoes are shone, ready for action, and even that doesn't worry me now that the clocks have sprung forward and the weather can surely only improve from this point (famous last words!).

I know that I'd dearly like to see my Sister & Mum, now that I'm a bit more well. Too many broken promises and wasted good intentions in the last few months, so I'm not going to rush at anything, especially as my sister was really cross at me recently, using my parents words. It's easy to discredit and undermine a person's character when they're keeping themselves a safe distance away from yourself.

I know my blog has been my refuge and something solid to grab onto during some pretty wild storms, and it upsets my sister that I have seemingly had so much time to blog, but I hope you'll be seeing a return to consistency and continuity that went awry during the turbulent first months of 2016. Let's see where it takes me next, and I hope it's informative and entertaining for those following at home.

So deep think. Much complicated. Very story to tell. Wow!

Tags: #recovery #depression #stress #anxiety #drugs #addiction

This is a story about destructive relationships...

I stood up my most respected and one of my most sorely missed friends for the third time yesterday.

I was supposed to see him and his family just before Xmas, then we were going to have Tea at the Ritz, then we were going to travel to Heathrow, catch up on the train and in in the ample time before his flight.

WHAT'S GOING ON?

Well, I've never not had a girlfriend. I'm too addicted to sex. After the most almighty row at my ex-wife's brother's wedding, we took a break from each other for a few days. While she discussed my faults and possible solutions with her parents, I found a way out of one destructive relationship and into another.

I have written before about our unhealthy co-dependency on sex, and sex on drugs. "NRG-3" had no ingredients listed, but it was the last untried chemical on a legal high & research chemical website where each weekend, my ex and I would fuck on a different drug.

I would spend a bunch of spare time at Cambridge, reading about research chemicals, and then I would order one, ready for when I next saw my ex. I saw us like Alexander and Ann Shulgin, and had read their candid co-biographies about synthesising about 3,500 psychoactive drugs, and testing them all on themselves. The ones that seemed safe and interesting, as an aphrodisiac, Alexander took with Ann and they compared notes in their famous books PIHKAL and TIHKAL, which I read when I was 17/18 years old.

Only "NRG-3" was going in the bin. I did some snooping and found that "NRG-x" was the name for the old stock of unsold 'legal' highs that weren't legal anymore. Most people speculated that it was Methylenedioxypyrovalerone, which Crystal Meth and Crack users were switching to because it was 1/1,000th of the price per dose. Except MDPV had terrible extrapyramidal side effects in people not regularly abusing stimulants: panic attacks, palpitations, tachycardia, hyperthermia and said to be more addictive than the illegal drugs.

John McAfee, the famous billionaire software engineer became addicted to MDPV and started posting videos of himself pointing a loaded gun at his head on YouTube. The more I read, the more convinced I was that I needed to add the pyrovalerones to my 'never try' list (heroin, crack, crystal meth, PCP).

Only, in a suicidal state after the aforementioned temporary separation from my ex-wife, I thought "fuck it, what harm can 15mg do?" 15 milligrams is 10 to 20% of the size of a dose of 'most' stimulants. The line of white powder is more of a short, thin, hyphen. Your eyes can't believe that 15mg is so tiny.

My affair started immediately. I loved this drug. I loved the effects of this drug more than the pleasure I derived from my destructive relationship with my ex-wife. I had a mistress. I was having an affair. I was also free from the fear of losing my co-dependee.

I took 800mg over 4 days when I had intended to only take 15mg, for the duration of it's effects, which could be between 3 and 24 hours. It's not a stable and predictable compound. My behaviour had always been stable and predictable: I would take a single accurately measured dose, orally, and I had never ever broken my rule.

I had tried maybe 50 drugs up to this point, so I wasn't naïve, but I found myself saying and doing things I knew were addict clichés. "I'll just have a little bit more", "that looks underweight/small, I'll just increase the dose slightly", "I'm going to have one last dose then I'm going to stop", "OK, this really is the last one".

I didn't eat, I didn't sleep until the 3rd night. When I woke up I was having a terrible panic attack. Time inched by. My pulse and blood pressure were maxed. I was convinced I was going to die. I wasn't naïve though. I downloaded a computer game called Samorst, and played that for 12 hours. I felt a bit better.

This happened a few weeks after Springboard ended. I knew I had to pitch in London a month after demo day. I remember almost turning back home as I was almost on the train to London, because the thought of leaving my drugs for a few hours was scary. Way scarier than giving a pitch while high and hoping nobody from Springboard noticed I was high, sleep deprived and I had lost weight.

Everyone said that my London pitch was better than my Cambridge one (practice? home town?  drug-induced confidence? Smaller audience?).

Maybe I just didn't care so much. Jason Trost of Smarkets spotted the founder problem I had right away. I picked a startup that would be cashflow-positive, I could code in on my own in no time, and we already had a customer (5 or 6 household names by the time we started Springboard). The problem was this: I'd solved the problem in my head, written it: boring work only now, and I had no founder passion except pride in our startup.

David Hazell should have been the CEO from day one, and it took him well out of his ColdFusion comfort zone, but he can code Java and Objective-C as well as running a well administered business.

So how do you cure an MDPV addiction? Simple. Stop taking it. My ex took it as personal that I got addicted and she thought I wouldn't quit out of stubbornness  and I just needed shouting at and abusing.

I had a 'man cave' (office/lounge/bedroom) built in the summerhouse I built, but she would still walk down the garden path to shout at me there.

As if this wasn't enough, my parents were ordered to come and take me away. Things didn't get off to a flying start when my ex lets my Dad in and he's been primed to start shouting "you're a junkie" too, the moment he got in my front door. I was in the middle of an email about admission to a specialist drug clinic in London, and I should have told the hypocritical c**t to get the fuck out of my house that I paid for, back to his house which was bankrolled by my mum, and the money that came from the profit of the little cottage that my granny bought her.

My parents then insisted that we get some fresh air (it was January and I was not in a good state). Even though I wore dark glassess and a coat with a big collar, it was still mentioned at work that somebody had seen me out on the clifftop while I was off work sick.

My GP kindly gave me 5 weeks so I could attend the 28-day detox program at The Priory, where one of the country's best psychiatrists specialising in dual diagnosis (Bipolar & substance abuse) was based. A few white lies were told to protect my professional reputation and my health insurance would pick up the £12,000 bill.

My ex-wife said if I went into private hospital, she would divorce me. My psychiatrists said dual diagnosis mortality rates are very high, they disagreed that it was lack of willpower that had meant I hadn't quit by means of being shouted at, and professional care was needed, even just to see what was going on with my comorbid Bipolar II.

3 and a half weeks is what I lasted in hospital, before it dawned on me that I was going back to the same life. 3 weeks became a kind of benchmark. I could quit for 3 weeks, but never any longer. Ignorant people will say that proves a lack of willpower. Fuck you ignoramus.

When separation and divorce finally started to happen, my friend Will rescued me back to London, where I managed 2 months abstinence before my lazy ex wife insisted I travel 240 miles to get 3 valuations on a house she lived and worked less than a mile from.

I had just founded a new startup, was in advanced discussions about raising money, had built a working prototype, cycled to TechStars London every day, had a beautiful girlfriend and lived with one of my oldest friends and made new local friends as well as reconnecting with old.

Paying the mortgage on an empty property ate my savings, especially when she rejected a cash buyer who wanted to move in 6 weeks. Instead she chose an agent who didn't know the area or have any clients looking in that area, and accepted an offer from a couple in a chain who didn't even have an approved mortgage. They took 6 months.

When my parents refused to help ease the cashflow burden like they had repeatedly promised they would - not wanting stress to cause a relapse - it took me a hell of a lot of effort & distraction to raise money that I would have prepared in advance, if I knew their offer was just hot air.

I relapsed back in Bournemouth, with the idea of turning the house into a homeless shelter or something else to piss my ex off. Rang the family solicitor after all the other laughed at me, because I had trashed a hotel room in a drug-fuelled rage, and I wanted to prepare them before I handed myself in to the police.

Strangely my friend Tim turned up, got me out of there, then my Dad got me back to Oxford. Turns out the family solicitor had phoned my mum and begged them to help their son. I was very keen my dad contact the hotel and let me settle the matter with them directly. He didn't care. He doesn't have my ethics.

I had told Will (most innocent and naïve man ever) to chuck me out if I ever got any mail from Spain or Germany. Luckily I managed to find MDPV in the USA, but it still feels shitty using drugs in your friends house, even if you're trapped on the first floor with your leg in plaster in agony because the docs won't give you anything stronger than Tramadol (in case you abuse it).

Camden Town is not a good place to be a drunk or a drug addict. I would meet with Frank every day for weeks until he got a paid hostel bed. While I was making notes, to tell his story, I unwittingly took down the addresses and contacts of everywhere I had to go to try and get help from Camden.

Eventually Will did chuck me out, because of lies my Dad told him. Will did it very nicely, but my Dad destroyed the relationship we had. I remember lying in hospital, 2 canulas, torn liver, burnt abdomen, failing kidneys, and not only did Will ask for his keys back, he asked if I had made any other copies.

This is what happens when a drug addict hypocrite c**t like my Dad starts 'helping' instead of helping like he originally falsely offered to do with a modest bridging loan.

(as an aside my parents lied to my sister and said they'd lent me 250% More money than they actually did, and that I was 'emotionally blackmailing them' by being in hospital, even though they're not my next of kin anymore and I would never bother telling them if I was in hospital. No, my mum said it's ok because it's only worth making the coroner's if they need somebody to identify my body)

I survived homelessness and further hospital admissions, so I saved my mum that train fare, but Camden Council kept reneging on their promises. I got a one line email from Camden Council Housing, saying I couldn't even get a hostel bed

"On the basis of the information you have provided I am afraid that you do not meet the residence criteria to be considered for our Hostels Pathway Scheme."

What the fuck? Do you only accept people with money and houses and nice parents?

If you ever want to speak to a psychiatrist in hospital here's a little trick. Ask the the receptionist if you can borrow her phone and then dial the switchboard. Say "can I speak to the bleep holder for psychiatric liaison please?" Make sure you don't let on you're a patient until you absolutely have to. Saying "I'm trying to locate a bed in a psych ward or crisis house in London for a voluntary admission" doesn't actually contain any lies.

In this way, I was able to get 2 whole weeks of accommodation out of the council tax I pay Camden Council. I don't feel bad, because I had a massive wound in my leg and my penis was hanging off.

At the end of the two weeks, Camden Council said "here's a number for you to phone [if you haven't been mugged or stabbed, and still have your phone]  in the morning for us to come check on you". I said I wanted to stay in a a derelict tennis court maintenance shed to stay dry. They said, "we need you to stay where [muggers are and people have pissed]".

So I booked myself into a suite at the Royal Camden Golf & Spa Resort (a 14 bed dorm in a hostel) and proceeded to go into drug withdrawal. The think about London hostel dorms is, there's bunks, and there's a bathroom, and then outside there's the capital city of London, but if somebody is going through drug withdrawal in one of the bunks, fuck London, you should stay and watch them cos there's no privacy. It's like "Trainspotting" as a live play with one of the best actors you'll ever meet.

Fuck rehab at £430 a night... a hostel is a great place to get clean, provided you have a Laurence. Laurence could see that this was a dress rehearsal, and opening night would be never hopefully, and ushered a disappointed crowd of rubberneckers off around the sights of London. 

I'd managed to hang onto enough money to put myself through the cheapest rehab in the country, which is in Bournemouth believe it or not. I told my mum to hang on though (could hae been yet more lies anyway) because I needed to finish my round of golf and I had a massage booked for later [as in, hostels are like cheap rehab anyway].

Before long I had a group of friends. Laurence from the mountains. Rory the Lidl vodka stealer. Jody the poet. Definitely not French Jack. Psychic Laura. "I just want a baby" Priscilla. "Quite Old But You Still Would" Marla, Gorgeous Flavie, My later ex (banned) Antonella. DJ Kristos.... and many many more, including Paolo who had previously been acting tourguide, but with about 8 times as many years in the Big Smoke than him, I accidentally stole that role.

The thing about a hostel is, if you want drugs, everybody else wants to share, and you have to be high in public. Also, there's none of this pious "not a drop of alcohol shall pass my lips bollocks", and it's a lot easier to get clean with a beer in your hand than an herbal tea being told by some ex-junkie "drugs are bad mmmkay".

It took me a month to get clean and another month to get a job (and stay clean) and then I stayed clean until I dumped Antonella for being abusive, and then Laura got all mumpy that I didn't move onto her. Jody, who was in Love with Antonella, also was angry with me. My entire group of friends in London (except Rory) fell apart, and then my contract ended.

• Abusive relationship = multiple relapses
• No money + massive stress = relapse
• No job + no friends = relapse
• Innocent/naïve middle class person + lies about drug addiction = no friend

So I was nursed back to health by the nicest family in Ireland. The O'Riordan's of Killlavullen, Cork [The Rebel County]. I owe them my life.

The thing about the O'Riordans is that they're the smartest most hard-working and make do people you'll ever meet. Eddie, Laurence's dad's climbed 8,000m peaks and can sail, as well as repair just about anything. Breda, Laurence's mum is just so full of love & care, without all that œdipus complex bollox that my mum needs to deal with. There's sister Maria the nurse who all the boys in Magners drink in to look at and chat to, but they know they'd get the beating of a lifetime if they touched her. Then there's Danielle, with her scholarship, but she's practically already [unofficial] #2 in a company that's about to IPO. She's got Dublin culture but no arrogance.

Anyway, seeing and staying touch, and not falling out with friends is hard. Imagine if all your money just takes you deeper into debt, and keeping your mind quiet is harder than working any job... and it used to say lots of interesting things, but now it just says one: "MDPV"

Just about anything and anything that could have hurt my self esteem has happened. Showing a nurse your penis hanging off is a good one. How's about the police leading you out of a hotel, handcuffed, just wearing boxing shorts ["I'm sure you deserved it, you devil"].

And I keep having to go back to doing what I have done since the age of 17 to stop myself from going bankrupt, but I hate it and it's so easy I can type and have a conversation at the same time. And then when I've got just enough money, I'll walk into the boardroom and I'll tell the board exactly what I think, and I always get fired, but they're too scared I'm going to whistleblow to not give me a reference, so they just quietly sack whoever needs to actually go.

So, I came up with a couple of lists of things I like doing and don't like doing, and I've come up with a bunch of ideas that bring in money, keep me busy, and doing the things I like not the things I don't.

I'm sending it to Jakub, because he's the only man alive who can judge whether I'm talking pie in the sky bollocks or it might be worth a go (maybe with some discussion with his dad).

I have a practical speculative list too, which I might send to Rory, as he's the only man alive who'd come in on me with some mad scheme to stop both of our minds from driving us mad.

Jakub, it just remains to say, I'm so sorry for standing you up, but I was 6 months clean in San Francisco, but I had to ethically walk away from the HSBC corruption and incompetence. Since then, it's been promises, promises and false starts, but I'm waiting for the day when I either die cos I'm dumb enough to figure out how to get high for 14p a day, or smart enough to do something I can be proud of and it was my destiny.

So cute (9 October 2013)

P.S. - Sansa (Happy Birthday!), Lydia, Margaret, Nicola, David, Willian, Will, Jess, Cameron... I'm going as fast as I can. It's like trying to get a 10,000kg ball rolling.

Tags; #startup #addiction #friends

This is a story about the choice you didn't make...

There is an arrogance amongst ageing Westerners that I detest. There is a sense that these people somehow earned their wealth, that they worked for their place in the world, that they made smarter choices, that they avoided bad choices, that they made their own destiny. This delusional belief makes me spit with fury, rage.

I wrote a Facebook post entitled "Dear Baby Boomers" some time ago, and it really raised some heckles, but let's re-examine the whole thing, because it appears that the message really is not penetrating some very thick skulls.

The single most important deciding factor in your entire life happened before you were even born. If you were conceived in the Baby Boom generation, in the UK or USA or some other wealthy western nation, to a reasonably wealthy family (i.e. one of your parents was working, and maybe you even had a mortgage on your house) then you were quite literally born with a silver spoon in your mouth.

Let's put this in context. If you were born a hundred years earlier, if infant mortality didn't kill you, then preventable disease probably would have taken you to an early grave. Did you choose to be born after the discovery of Penicillin and the eradication of Smallpox and Polio? Did you choose to be born after the mass production of fertiliser and pesticides meant that farming yields give the West huge grain surpluses? Did you choose to be born after modern surgical techniques, such as the ligature of blood vessels and blood transfusions with the correct blood type had been developed? Did you choose where in the world you were born? Good job you didn't choose to be born in sub-saharan Africa, right?. Being born in Ethiopia would have been a pretty dumb choice wouldn't it? Good job.

Let's put things further into context for you. As part of the post-war Baby Boom generation, meant that you could expect to have a job, buy a house, get married and start having children, all with a single salary. And there would still be money left over for the flourishing practice of tourism. Yes, with each passing year, airfares as a proportion of your disposable income got less and less expensive, and the destinations got more and more exotic. Your disposable income meant you could save up money and buy a car, outright. You could own your car, and after 25 years, you could own your house. And you probably wouldn't need to be on any kind of property ladder... most Baby Boomers were able to buy family houses as their first home.

But you're grasping, and greedy and arrogant. You wanted more. You wanted an extension. You wanted two cars. You wanted three foreign holidays a year. You wanted premium bonds and high-interest savings accounts and a stock portfolio. You wanted world-class healthcare and education, provided by the state. You wanted the best of everything, and - being frankly honest - you didn't really work for it at all.

I find a 35 hour working week just a laughable concept. The fact that a whole generation were able to commute either by car or aboard uncramped public transport where they would get a seat in order to read their newspaper. A whole generation would work their 7 hours a day, with a whole hour for lunch. They would actually eat lunch and not just stuff a sandwich in their mouth while continuing to hunch over their keyboard. Then everybody would leave, en-masse at 5pm, and return home in the comfort of their car or their usual train carriage, thinking about the meal that their housewife would have prepared for them on their return. What a joke.

The Baby Boom generation is responsible for nuclear arms proliferation, an unmitigated climate catastrophe of global proportions which may condemn billions to their death, and financial profligacy of such wanton excess that the entire capitalist system, if not indeed the entire western civilisation, is teetering on the brink of collapse.

And these are supposed to be be fine minds, are they not, these arrogant fuckers? They got to go to University with full grants and no tuition fees. They got to fuck about studying to their heart's content, with somebody else picking up the bills. Yes, didn't the Baby Boomers choose to have a free University education, at the expense of future generations?

Didn't the Baby Boomers choose to drive around in those big engined cars and take all those foreign holidays, and have lovely warm centrally heated houses with crappy insulation, at the expense of future generations?

Didn't the Baby Boomers choose to grasp and grab the maximum that their greedy little mitts could get their hands on, leaving little in the pension funds for any future generations?

Didn't the Baby Boomers choose to elect politicians, and buy products from companies, that put profits and short term comfort and luxury ahead of any kind of long-term planning? Didn't the Baby Boomers choose to cover themselves in glory and pat themselves on the back, and make premature proclamations about having improved the standard of living? In fact, didn't the Baby Boomers choose to inflate their own standard of living at the expense of future generations? Yes. Yes they did.

Living standards are in decline, and it's not because young people make bad choices. It's not because young people are not smart. It's not because young people don't work hard. It's not because young people are not resourceful. It's not because young people have unreasonable expectations or they're spoilt. There is simply less opportunity, less on offer, more stress, more obstacles, more competition, fewer resources, higher costs, slimmer chances and young people have to work much much much harder than you can even imagine.

When I talk to people about how far they have to travel to get to their jobs, the conditions of public transport... it's atrocious. When a nurse has to get up at 5am, take 3 busses travelling for nearly 2 hours, to then work a 12 hour shift, and then has a journey home that's just as hard as the one they took in the morning, that's an unacceptable drop in the standard of living. When over 50% of their wage goes on rent alone. When they just quite simply don't have any disposable income because all their income goes on rent, council tax, electricity, gas and travel... how THE FLYING FUCK can you criticise them for choosing not to save money for a 'rainy day'.

Yes, you got to put money aside, because you were part of the arrogant smug generation of cunts who had your hand in the till stealing all the money. Because you didn't pay for your University eduction. Because you will be taking far more money out for your pension than you paid in. Because you didn't work very hard, and when you did work, the working conditions were slack as fuck. Yes, I'm angry about this. I'm angry that there are a whole load of sneering ignorant arrogant smug awful awful people who think that the reason why they mostly paid off their mortgage, maybe have some savings, maybe own their car, maybe have some disposable income each month... they think they fucking earned that, through smart choices and hard work, and they didn't.

Here's a smart choice for you: give away your wealth. Give it away as fast as you can. I doubt you'll even be able to give it away fast enough, because you've pissed off every subsequent generation that you stole from. You might sit in your armchair with your crappy rag of a newspaper, watching shitty TV, wallowing in your ignorance, luxuriating on your bed of lies, but there's an entire subcontinent who were economically enslaved to give you your ill-gotten lifestyle, and that wasn't enough for you... you even mortgaged the kids and the grandkids.

So, when you come to try and retire. When you come to try and cash in some of those casino chips you've been hoarding. When you ask the kids and the grandkids to carry you on their back, despite the fact that their life is shit when yours was lovely, do you think they're going to do it?

Given that we're talking about choices being the things that we're responsible for, do you think the millennials are going to choose to be responsible for your profligacy, your arrogance, your ignorance, your myopia? Are they going to pick up your trash and wipe your arse, when you kicked them and beat them up as scapegoats for your own shitty short-term gains and comfort?

Young people are being driven to emigrate, in search of a better standard of living, while at the same time, vast numbers of refugees and migrants are trying to get into the West for a better life. Meanwhile, you still expect to retire on your full pension having barely broken a sweat your whole working life? In your massive house that is far bigger than you could possibly need? Reading books, with your superior intellect from that University education that you never paid for? Overweight and full of obesity-related diseases from all the luxury food that you relentlessly push into that greedy hole in your face, but you just want more savings, more investments, more 000's on the end of your bank balance.

It's you who chooses more. More more more. More for you, less for everybody else. You're part of it. Collective responsibility.

Spend a bit less time talking about people's bad choices and a bit more time thinking about somebody who doesn't even have a choice, because of when and where they were born... which last time I checked, wasn't something you could choose at all.

Tags: #parents #politics #childhood