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 baby's ruin...

I don't really believe in 'addictive personalities'. Sure there are people who go through periods of sensation seeking or hedonism, but all our brains have the same reward mechanisms that can be short-circuited by all manner of things, not all of which are psychoactive chemicals.

One of the first things that I became addicted to was sugar. Now, I have all kinds of problems with this statement. Glucose is one of the 3 things that every cell in your body requires to function, along with oxygen and water. Sure, as an organism, you're going to require all kinds of amino acids, proteins, salt etc. etc., but you're not going anywhere without sugar.

Sure, we can gorge ourselves on sugar. We can have too much of a good thing. Soda containing high fructose corn syrup contains ridiculous amounts of sugar, and we can slurp at huge paper cups containing many fluid ounces, with little difficulty. Our bodies have a seemingly insatiable appetite for sugar.

It rots our teeth and makes us fat and gives us diabetes, but still, we can't get enough of it, especially when we're young. Show me the child who doesn't have a sweet tooth and I'll show you a lying parent, or a parent who has been a particularly mean and brutal disciplinarian in training their child to lie.

The faster a child can grow to full adult size, the less chance there is of it being eaten by a predator or succumbing to a survivable disease. Of course children are going to be programmed to seek out sugar. They're the easiest calories for the body to convert straight to energy, to power those restless limbs.

Our ability as a species to provide fruit, honey, cane sugar and sugar beet refined into pure sugar granules, at all times of the year and in virtually limitless quantities, has resulted in huge numbers of overweight blubbery children, probably with rotted teeth. However, that's not to say that nature would exactly deem them unhealthy. The first set of teeth that a child gets are deciduous and a good thick coat of blubber will keep them warm in winter, meaning less chance of catching cold.

So it was, that I came to become addicted to lemon Polos. You know, the mints with the hole in them that come in the distinctive green wrappers with silver foil. Yeah, at one time they made some sweet lemon alternatives to the mints, and I used to buy them using some lunch money that I set aside, so I could feed my daily sugar habit.

To use the parlance of ignorant idiots, I was a sugar addict. I used to love the refined sugar of sweets. Lemon Polos were my drug of choice, and I used to get some of the daily calories required by my body, by eating these sweet drugs. My teeth are fine, my pancreas is fine, my weight is fine... I don't seem to have come off badly from this addiction, but maybe lemon Polos were a gateway drug for later addictions. We may never know.

Just like the infamous Lemmon 714 Quaalude from The Wolf of Wall Street these lemon Polos are so rare that Google Image Search doesn't even have a decent resolution picture for me to plagiarise.

But that wasn't my only childhood addiction.

Dark Castle on my friend Joe's Dad's Macintosh, was probably the beginning of a love affair with computer games, that was to last my entire childhood, and only tail off in my late teens. Some would probably say that computer games were an addiction, but I couldn't get my fix whenever I wanted until I had my own computer.

To begin with, Joe used to make the character in Dark Castle run and jump and climb up and down. I used to control the character's aim and make him throw rocks to take out the bats that would wake up and fly at you to try and bite you and kill you. It was the first example of a co-operative computer game, that I know of.

And that was how it began, the relationship with computer games. It was always a social affair. You need somebody else to play Pong against or else it's no fun. It's more fun when you're taking turns to play a computer game, and you're competing with one another to beat the same obstacles and each other's scores.

I remember enjoying watching other children play arcade games immensely, although I don't recall having any coins of my own to be able to play them. I used to like just hanging out by these machines, watching the demo sequence, seeing the high score table, listening to the music. I can even kind of hum the little melodies for some kind of helicopter shoot 'em up and a driving game that seem to have gotten stuck in my head for the best part of 30 years.

I loved the demos. When I eventually had my own computer - The ZX Spectrum +2 128k - and I could fully indulge my addiction, I seemed to prefer the demo games that you got 'free' with a copy of a computer games magazine, to the full games. These little bitesize tasters were always just hard enough to hold your intrigue, and you could amass a huge collection of different minigames very quickly.

QAOP and space bar were the controls for everything from Olympic Games 'simulations' where you had to bash alternating keys as fast as you could to make your character sprint or row or cycle, to flight simulators and racing games, and of course the many shoot 'em up variants.

Ok, so there were violent undertones to nearly every game that there was out there. Whether you were shooting aliens or people, or doing Kung Fu or whatever, there was usually some kind of baddie that was getting shot or bashed or otherwise killed.

Seeing as I haven't carried these murderous, violent tendencies over into adult life, I'd say that being brought up on a diet of computer games hasn't reprogrammed me as some kind of killing machine, but I'm just one data point.

I do sometimes worry that with the rise and rise in popularity of the Call of Duty franchise as well as its incorporation of drone control, and general glorification of warfare and combat, that there are a generation out there who would love nothing more than to be killing real people at the push of a button.

Lots of unimaginative kids have got the idea that being a computer games tester must be the ultimate job, from the incorrect conclusion that all it must entail is sitting around playing your favourite computer games but getting paid to do it. However, being a drone controller must be a bit like playing Call of Duty, blowing people up using a joystick. Only those people are real.

Anyway, computer games were a very real addiction for me, for a while, with me having cravings to play them, and staying awake for far to long in order to 'binge' play a new game. Good computer games have been designed in such a way that they are just hard enough to keep you coming back again and again to try and beat an obstacle that was just out of reach on your previous go. They are engineered to be addictive. The more addictive, the more a game is considered to be a classic or of high quality.

But it's from this addiction to computer games that I fumbled my way into programming, and into a lucrative career. I started to become disinterested in games when I started work as a full-time programmer, and I was doing real life battlefield simulations for the Ministry of Defence. Perhaps the lemon Polos and the computer games had set me up though, to turn into the 32 year old drug addict that I later became.

Or perhaps we all have the same weaknesses, the same hardware, the same software. Perhaps we can all become reprogrammed by things that press our buttons.

If you're geeky like me you'll be able to see that "O" and "P" have been coded as buttons you can press. Presumably "Q" and "A" appear later in the program. I have no idea what this code does except print a score.

Tags: #computing #childhood #addiction

This is a story about grinding to a halt...

I have been enjoying writing immensely, and continuing this blog is certainly no chore. Words still flow effortlessly, but I am floundering a little, as I try to avoid repetition and decide what direction to go in next.

I really need to get another job/contract, and the easiest work to find would be as a programmer. I hate programming other people's systems. They usually haven't stopped to answer the simple question: are we solving the problem in the right way?

Most computer systems that ever get created for a company are CRUD systems. That means they can Create, Read, Update and Delete data. Think about it... how many companies know your name and address? They all want that exact same data. Think how hard it is when you move house, change address, to update all those companies to send their correspondance to the right place.

The thing about creating CRUD software, is that if you've done it once, you've done it the same as you're going to do a million times after that. They're all the same. Garbage in, garbage out. Ok, user interfaces have gotten prettier, and we now employ people specifically to work on User Experience (UX) but it's solving the same old problem in the same old way.

I specialised in something called Straight-Through Processing (STP). The idea that the processing of transactions should be fully automated, wherever possible. This at least means that you're not doing yet another CRUD user interface, and you're building elegant pure software solutions, not just trying to stop a halfwit user from doing something they're not supposed to in the system.

Software still gets boring and repetitive. Most of the software challenge is change management. If you can control the change so that the software is well versioned and releases are well managed, then everything gets much more stable. The amount of time actually spent programming is minimal. It's actually kicking arses and taking names that takes the time. Most corporate systems have been over-complexified by the cowboys and the have-a-go heros.

If I had an hour to spend writing an extra feature, or an hour to analyse some rats nest of a mess that nobody's owning, I'll go for the mess every time. Still, it's all thankless work though, and there is no novelty, no sense of achievement in doing something you've done a zillion times before.

Bitcoin and Blockchain really fascinated me, since 2011, when I read the famous paper "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".

Bitcoin has everything the frustrated programmer could possibly wish for. The original source code is in C++ for a start, which is just a joy to behold... the seemingly impenetrable world of templatised code, where the templates are a complete black art, developed into a style completely unique to each developer.

Algorithms are enticing little puzzles. The one-way hash is particularly interesting to anybody who likes the idea of being a codebreaker or hacker. Trying to find the weaknesses in encryption and hashing is a mathematical, formal logic and computer science challenge. I love thinking about how to reverse engineer a problem like that.

But it's brain-exhausting stuff, having to think about bit shifts, and the endian-ness of your numbers, and all the myriad complexities of a hardcore problem. I can't spend too long thinking about things before I start to worry I'm going to need to take a drill to my skull to try and relieve some pressure.

Using statistical analysis to reduce an important algorithm to an equation with known co-efficients, could make you rich and famous, at least amongst geeks. However, it's the challenge for your mind that's the reason why you'd tackle such a problem. The intellectual stimulation, the incurable curiosity.

Once you start thinking about Bitcoin though, it's hard to stop. It's hard to leave a problem that hasn't completely defeated you. When you know there are still things that you want to try, approaches that might work, it's like an addiction... you keep going back to the hard problem, again and again. Pandora's Box is open and you can't unsee the things you've seen.

Mining never really made me much money, but speculating on the cryptocurrency brought substantial rewards

Tags: #computing #career

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 not being anonymous...

I'm not powerless over drugs and/or alcohol. My life has become pretty unmanageable, but I don't need a higher power to return me to sanity. I don't consider myself an alcoholic or an addict and I don't go to meetings.

I certainly have trouble turning down subsequent drinks, after I've had my first 2 pints of strong European lager and I'm enjoying the company of friends or work colleagues. It's probable that I will keep drinking until I've had 6 or 7 pints and I'm reaching an intoxication limit where I'm starting to slur my words and be unsteady on my feet. I won't keep drinking though... I'll normally bolt for home & bed when I've hit my limit.

I don't think I've had an alcoholic drink before midday on any day except Christmas Day, and even then, only a handful of times. I'm pretty sure I never went more than about 10 consecutive days where I got drunk. I know I did 115 days without a single drop of alcohol. I didn't cheat once, even though there were times that I was very tempted to bend the rules.

There have been times when my drinking was getting out of control, with beer every lunchtime, long Friday afternoons in the beer garden, drinking again when I got home, drinking all weekend. I'm not sure it ever qualified as 'problematic' though. Drinking was quite ingrained in the lifestyle of my friends and the work culture, to the point that despite many years of being half-cut in the office, nothing has ever been said, except for one day I was so hungover I didn't make it to my desk until 2pm.

But alcohol really isn't my problem. Supercrack is my poison of choice. Certainly if I have this drug in my possession, there is limited chance of me doing anything sane or rational. There's the added problem of unplanned binges as well. Once you pop, you can't stop.

When I am struggling with active addiction, I tell myself all sorts of lies. The main one is that I will act in some kind of reserved, controlled way. Once Supercrack is coursing its way through my drugstream, there is very little chance of me seeing onrushing death and health damage as any reason to curtail my foolish actions.

Do we think that the many relapses that I've had mean I'm an addict for life, and as such, should always attach that label to myself, even when I'm 'clean'? Well, it's certainly true that once experienced, things cannot be un-experienced, and there is disappointingly little dissipation in the desire to continue to use a drug that one has been addicted to, if there were no consequences.

Aversion therapy, is using negative reinforcement to break the addiction to something. If you link and associate enough unpleasant experiences with your addiction, the downsides start to outweigh the upsides, and it's not so difficult to stay 'clean'. Could you be said to no longer be 'addicted'?

Human memory is a strange thing though. Negative memories seem to fade faster than positive ones. When you recall some event that was extremely harrowing at the time, each time you think about it, it loses some of its pain and regret. Humans are programmed to be optimistic and take risks. Otherwise, we would never have risked leaving our caves to hunt and domesticate sharp-toothed & clawed predators.

Another lie that I tend to tell myself when I'm slipping back into active addiction, is that there will be some way to satisfy my addictive demands with some harm-reduced and risk-managed 'lapse' that will stave off a full relapse. In actual fact, this then gives the excuse for the next addict lie, which is that the use of drugs can then no longer cease until I'm fully satisfied that I have extracted the maximum possible from the experience, even though the trend is clearly destructively spiralling downwards.

This drive to end a period of addiction on your own terms is kind of laughable, if I look at myself with a harshly critical eye. I can see that there is never any recapturing the initial high that you experience when your tolerance is low and your body in a healthy state. Your days are literally numbered while you're in the grip of a dangerous addiction, and refusing to acknowledge that continuing is futile and foolish.

Most people run out of money or run out of luck before they have exhausted their demand for their drug of choice. The common street drugs have been on the market for long enough to find a price point that has been optimised to fit the addictiveness of the drug to an affordability that ensures steady demand.

I feel very grateful that I never became addicted to Cocaine, Crack Cocaine, Heroin, Crystal Meth or other street 'hard' drugs. They say a fool and his money are easily parted, and so, the street drug addict must be the biggest fool of them all.

Or is it so clear cut? With street drugs, at least you have some direct human contact with your dealer, who has a symbiotic relationship with you, and therefore a reason to not let you tip over the edge into total self annihilation. Often, social groups might form around drug use, and there's a kind of safety in numbers. Even an addict might heed the advice of another addict when somebody says "I think you've probably had enough".

Having essentially unlimited access to the drug you're addicted to, with virtually zero oversight or social ties, is like playing a game of chicken where you're invisible to an oncoming bus driver. Only you can jump out of the way of the bus. The drug will never blink, never back down.

And so it is, I find myself able to relate to most of the stories I hear addicts and alcoholics tell, but there is something terrifyingly unknown and isolating about being amongst the first addicts to have become ensnared by mass-produced Chinese legal research chemicals, and with unlimited access to the world's hardest drugs, with a few mouse clicks on the Dark Web.

Governments have no idea what the consequences of trying to head off the cat & mouse game of criminalising novel chemical compounds will be. The invention of the Dark Web and the synthesis of these new 'designer' drugs is surely a reaction to laws and prohibition. Who could have foreseen that this would create new drugs, new markets, trap unintended types of people into the horrors of addiction and criminal justice?

That's a rock of Crack Cocaine that I was offered on the street soon after moving from North London to East London. Disruption in somebody's life can expose them to things that they've never experienced before.

Tags: #drugs #addiction #notanonymous

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 late starters...

The way that girls enter and leave my life is fairly strange. Often I find myself dating somebody who was firmly in the friend zone. It never seems to pan out with the girls I've picked myself, so far.

I seem to be inescapably hopeless at reading hints that are dropped, or other indications that the opposite sex has taken an interest in me. When I replay past events, conversations, sometimes it seems obvious that there was flirtation, and I slap my palm to my forehead, but other times I seem to completely get the wrong end of the stick.

While some people might mourn the loss of the games, the ambiguity, the 'chase', playing 'hard to get' and generally feeling insecure and uncertain, I'm very glad that we're entering a more modern phase in the development of society, where we tell each other what we think and girls are allowed to be as forward as boys are. Hopefully, everybody gets what they want a lot quicker and easier than the old fashioned way.

It would seem to me though, like matching people's self-esteem levels is as important as matching people who are attractive to each other. Getting together with a girl who you feel is 'out of your league' when she confidently let you know she was attracted to you is one thing, but can you handle those little deliberate or accidental blows to your sense of security? When one partner clearly feels they have the upper hand, is the relationship doomed?

In your mid thirties you can't deny that the stakes of the game change substantially for the sexes. For women who haven't yet had babies but would like to be a mother at some point, the biological clock doesn't have that many more years to tick. The race to find the few remaining single men who haven't become fathers, adulterers or terminal imbeciles, is a challenge that I don't envy the opposite sex.

So, the photo-message of bodily parts is the new pre-date paradigm, apparently. After the exchange of phone numbers, WhatsApp'ing can commence, and for many men, the urge to send the object of their affections a picture of their 'junk' is too hard to resist, apparently. Perhaps shorthand for all that conversational 'getting to know you' waffle, the sending of penis photos is quite normal now, I'm told.

I don't think I've even photographed mine, let alone entrusted the digitised image to the internet for delivery.

I know that my ex used a no-strings sex website for a hookup, and photos of genitals were positively and eagerly sent and received there, but I can't see how it could have made a transition to traditional dating, although I guess it's the next logical step now that we are doing away with the hint dropping and more subtle flirtation.

I feel quite glad to have had a few relationships end amicably, or fizzle out naturally, to reassure me that things don't have to end as badly as they did with my ex-wife. It's true that with one fiery Italian, things were a bit too similar for comfort, with plates and other kitchen implements being hurled at my head. When she stormed out of my flat, I was all too pleased to lock the door behind her. She was surprised and disappointed I didn't chase after her.

Finding a girl who'll sunbathe on a windswept beach for an entire week, taking photos and videos of you kitesurfing, is jackpot kind of stuff, but holidays are only brief respites from daily drudgery. If you're not getting along in your regular everyday life, at some point the relationship is going to fall apart.

The modernisation of relationships is great in terms of transparency and getting what you want, but personally, I can find myself going along with things and ending up somewhat embroiled in situations that I never intended, simply because I still lack self confidence and don't assert myself sometimes.

Being polite, courteous and generous when buying drinks or food can often be mistaken for shy guy flirtation, and I know I've sent some girls confusing signals, when I've done little more than conduct myself with good manners, or so it seems to me.

I read something the other day that suggested men have sex whenever they can, and women have sex whenever they want. I guess I must be quite the freak if the article rings true with most other people, as I myself have found myself faking illness and even faking climax, although that one is slightly harder to pull off without a condom.

If you've read much of my blog, you'll know I'm exceptionally weird anyway.

Not having sex or at least trying to kiss the girl on the first date is seen as saying you're not interested and there's no 'spark' so far as I can tell. Taking things slowly with girls I've really liked has always been misread as me not being interested, and so it is that things tend to move pretty fast in the London dating scene.

Pulling in a nightclub is still a black art to me, but perhaps I shouldn't flirt so much with my gay friends. Probably sends out the wrong kind of signals.

What's the proper protocol to observe when trying to pull a girl in a club? I know there's something about meaningful glances being exchanged, and then you dance closer and closer, until you're definitely unnaturally in each others body space. Then I guess there's a point at which you just grab each other and start getting off. Either that or you get knee'ed in the bollocks and some kind of sexual harassment change is brought against you, presumably. I haven't really had the guts or the stupidity to try it.

Men are pretty lazy and content to go with the flow. I wonder how many relationships have continued to the marriage and children phase, simply because a guy couldn't face the tears and practical task of actually separating. According to the James Bond movies I've seen, women seem to make their selection of partner based on someone wh0 pushes themselves upon them most forcibly, before then becoming limp and compliant.

Personally, I seem to not have benefitted at all by trying to be the gentleman, doing things in a slightly old-fashioned way, even if I do benefit from the fact that at least I know where I stand with most girls now, and opportunities for promiscuity are there even if I'm still pretty much a serial monogamist.

I guess London has always had its seedier side

Tags: #london #divorce #friends

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 being isolated from the real world...

I remember an ex-girlfriend had lived her entire life in the village centre of Haslemere, Surrey. She was completely oblivious to the existence of the struggles of lower social strata. I remember my washing-machine repairman friend, Justin, being absolutely speechless when she casually talked about her parents retiring to Beaulieu, so they could be closer to their yacht. She was completely clueless. Not her fault.

One of my friends from school said he used to like coming to play over at our house, because at mealtimes there was lots to eat and it wasn't just potatoes. I liked playing at his house, because we would be messing around on decaying railway infrastructure, climbing huge mountains of coal or precarious games that involved the canal. Oxford might have become gentrified in parts, but there were still areas that were incredibly deprived.

The number of my friends who have spent time in jail, have some kind of criminal record or have at least spent time in the criminal justice system, is surprising, given my background could have completely isolated me from the 'bad crowd'. I did go to state school, but central Oxford has enough sons & daughters of lower ranking academics to mean that in the top sets of streamed subjects you would be unlikely to find a proper 'working class' child. Our form groups were also chosen quite specifically to try and stop the ruffians getting mixed up with those destined for greater success.

I hope that I'm fairly 'class blind' and don't judge people on their socioeconomic background. I also hope that I'm sensitive to the fact that I've had opportunities which are quite simply barred to a huge proportion of society. Being taught to speak like I was to the manor born, having posh sounding schools (although entirely ordinary state entities) and being quite relaxed speaking to adults of any rank or status, means that many doors have been open to me.

In some cases, money simply prices any ordinary people out of the market, so you'll find that all your neighbours are wealthy, successful and educated. There might be gates or a gatehouse or some kind of obvious border to the pocket of wealth you find yourself in, but often there isn't such clear demarkation. In London, for example, things are very subtle most of the time. The part of a London area that has the chic delicatessen, nice restaurants, a Waitrose, tastefully in-keeping shopfronts, colourfully painted townhouses or monolithic blocks of grand Georgian terrace... these things are pretty obviously what happens over time to an area after the hipsters have increased rents which drives out those who wish to shop at Cash Converters, Argos and Lidl.

Camden Town is a strange melting pot. A stone's throw from Regents Park and Primrose Hill, where some top dollar rent is demanded, but yet the high street has more than its fair share of pawnbrokers and low priced food outlets. I guess nobody really wants to live by the market, where drugs are dealt openly on the street at night, and in the daytime is crawling with tourists and pickpockets.

S0, I find myself now living somewhere that seems to only have an abstract connection with London. I live in a gated community with a concierge who is only too happy to take delivery of online supermarket shopping, if I never wished to leave the comfort and security of this well-insulated riverside apartment at all. There is water on 180 degrees of one side of the apartment... not even any roads, with the capital's incessant sirens as emergency services vehicles make their way from one incident to the next.

Only, where there are navigable waterways, there is always the chance for social mobility. Boatloads of people on the Clipper, party boats and speedboats come joyriding and commuting along the Thames. The police boat can even be regularly be seen jetting off up-river somewhere, with it's blue lights flashing. Tugs removing barge-loads of trash, or bringing containerloads of goods, chug their way up and down through the semi-tidal water.

I used to be content to watch a massive storm batter the coast, even if I had driven for many hours in the hope of being able to kitesurf, but the conditions were too rough and wild. As my equipment improved, I was able to afford a range of kites that could handle high winds as well as light breeze. I was able to actually get on the water in a storm, but that's right at the limit of survival and you don't have any time to actually think about what's going on around you.

I don't recommend you try it, if you've never been in the water when the wind is plucking you up, and depositing you several hundred metres downwind, as a 60-70mph gust comes through, turning the top of the water into stinging spray and foamy froth.

I don't recommend you try it, if you've never been in the water when breaking waves are the size of 2 or 3 storey houses, and all you can hear is a deafening roar as they're breaking behind you, as you try to outrun them. When one of these monsters catches you near the shore, it pummels you underwater into the seafloor, which hopefully is made of sand, not rocks or coral or something else sharp. Without your kite to pull you back to the surface and back onto the beach, you're as good as dead.

Kitesurfing used to be a fairly level playing field. Now, the equipment is so expensive I can't see how anybody of ordinary means could enter the sport. I guess surfing is still low cost-of-entry but who has enough time to bob around on a floaty thing waiting for a wave big enough to be worth paddling for? The English Channel is about the 3rd windiest place on the planet, and living on an island means you can't be too many degrees of separation from somebody who has at least some sense of how to move on water.

But here I am, inland, although only a stones throw from a river which would quickly carry me to the seawater of the Thames estuary. I used to kitesurf on Canvey Island and at Whitstable, which have reassuringly brown estuarial water. The water there very definitely came from the arsehole of midlands.

It's been so long since I had to rub shoulders with the proletariat. I'm not sure it's exactly made me forget the struggles of ordinary people, to lose perspective, to feel entitled or not realise that most of my worries and stresses are pretty much first world problems. Not travelling also means not seeing people who are not just a social division below, but an entire national or continental division below my own standard of living. When you're kitesurfing you tend to be in the poorest fishing villages in some of the remotest parts of the world, and when a fisherman saves your life, you definitely can't avoid feeling humbled.

It's a strange existence, being able to glide across the surface of the water on a thin little tray, and fly into the air as if you didn't weigh so much as a bird, but at the same time, your equipment, your choice of leisure activity puts you in a very exclusive club indeed.

It takes a certain amount of insanity to shackle yourself to a kite big enough to pull you bodily out of the water and into the air

Tags: #london #kitesurfing