This is a story about bang for your buck...

The churches have their tithes. The government have their taxes. The world has charities. It's pretty clear that these systems of wealth distribution and assistance for impoverished and vulnerable people, have spectacularly failed.

Tonight, I'm going to eat my dinner. Eating my dinner is something I want to do. Eating my dinner is something I enjoy. I get a kick out of eating my dinner.

So, why don't I start a Just Giving charity fundraising page, so that people can sponsor me to eat my dinner? You can sponsor me to go to work. You can sponsor me to go for a little jog around the park, having a lovely time waving at everybody. You can sponsor me to jump out of an aeroplane. You can sponsor me to abseil down a cliff. Even though you'll be donating to whichever charity I've chosen, it won't make any difference to the world.

You want to make a difference, right?

You buy Fairtrade coffee, bananas and chocolate. You recycle your bottles, plastic containers and cardboard. You give £10 a month via direct debit to the Red Cross. You throw your loose change into a collection bucket, when somebody jangles one in front of your face. You went to a pop concert one time, that was supposed to end poverty once and for all.

Maybe you work for a charity. Maybe you do volunteering. Maybe you organise bring & buy jumble sales. Maybe you bake cakes and sell them to raise money. Maybe it's you who is chugging the collection tins and getting people to reach for their wallets.

However, have you considered whether what you're doing is effective?

Clearly, whatever you're doing, it's not effective. Poverty is not history. In fact, wealth inequality is growing to unprecedented levels.

There are a number of ways we justify our inaction:

• "I do my bit"
• "I already give what money I can afford"
• "I already give what time I can spare"
• "I can't help everybody"
• "It won't make any difference. The world is a cruel place. Life is hard"
• "The world is overpopulated. Africans should stop having babies"
• "That's just the way things are"
• "We've got to look after our own"
• "Charity begins at home"

On closer examination, these beliefs are delusional, and only serve to prop up the status quo. All the reasons for inaction boil down to the same thing: "I'm not going to do any more until other people do too".

We are in a rat race. We are desperately trying to not lag behind the other rats in the race. We are desperately trying to keep up.

The mega wealthy race ahead, while our incomes stagnate. Since the 1980's the average wage increase has been just 40%, but for the wealthiest, their income has increased nearly 300%. As a proportion of their income, the wealthiest share less than ever. The wealthiest guard their income from taxation. The wealthiest spend a very small proportion of their income, meaning that it never enters the economy.

All humans need clothes. A poor person buys a £30 pair of jeans. 20% of the ticket price of those jeans is VAT, so the poor person paid £5 in tax. Let's say that the poor person earned £100 on the day that they bought the jeans. That means their effective tax rate was 5%, on clothes that they needed to buy. If a rich person bought the same pair of jeans, and they earn £1,000 a day, then their effective tax rate is 0.5% for the clothes that they need. A much smaller proportion of the rich people's income goes on essential items like food and clothing. As a proportion of their income, the amount of tax that the rich pay is tiny.

We can't afford the rich.

The rich are responsible for an expensive army and police force, in order to maintain the status quo and protect their wealth. The rich are responsible for deciding to bomb brown people to bits, in order to maintain conflict, to sell them weapons and stop them from ever reaching prosperity. If we let the brown people ever become prosperous, they might be unhappy about growing our food and manufacturing our goods, while we sit around idly doing nothing.

We spend more on 'defence' than on education.

If we were to spend more on education, then people would realise that our struggle is for nothing. Our labour contributes to nothing more than our own enslavement.

Capital growth, through effortless income from interest, dividends and increased asset prices, far outstrips our ability to earn money through work.

Our whole society is topsy-turvy. The old people who are dying are the ones who own all the dividend earning shares, through the pension funds. The old people who are dying earn all the property. The old people who are dying do not work, and they demand to earn money for no effort. The institutional investment managers who look after huge pension funds also do no work. Pension funds simply own huge portfolios of stocks & shares, interest bearing financial instruments and property. Instead of society being run to benefit our children, our workers, and protect the vulnerable, instead we toil so that an ever-growing number of retiring baby boomers can be idle.

I don't begrudge people some time off if they've earned it, but baby boomers are responsible for the proliferation of nuclear weapons, climate change, pollution, deforestation, war, famine, economic ruin, the end of free university education, no jobs, unaffordable housing and keeping politicians in power who are intent on destroying all life on earth. Instead of protesting at the planet being raped, these insufferable hippies sat around taking drugs and passed on all the problems to their grandchildren.

For me to teach a starving African to write computer code is ridiculous. The world doesn't need any more websites or apps. We've had programmable electronic computers for 60 years, and the world has become a more unequal place, still full of suffering and pain.

For me to volunteer at a soup kitchen is ridiculous. We are manufacturing homeless vulnerable people faster than we can feed them. The Salvation Army was founded in 1865, and there are still shamefully large numbers of people who are homeless and hungry.

For me to work for a charity is ridiculous. The charity model of fundraise & spend has completely failed. The church model of a tithe on our income has completely failed. The government model of taxation has completely failed.

We live in a pyramid scheme, and those at the top of the pyramid want to be idle and earn money effortlessly. There is no dignity in labour. Through work we only impoverish ourselves, because the wealthy get more wealthy while not doing any work. We expend our energy and the finite years of our life, but our wealth is eroded faster than we can earn money.

We shape ourselves in the image of those we are trying to keep up with. We imitate those who we aspire to be. We aspire to be wealthy, and in so doing, we protect our wealth from taxation and tithe. We believe we are being virtuous by being thrifty. We believe we are being smart by saving our money instead of spending it.

In actual fact, the financial system has broken down and fails to serve 99% of the people who are trapped within its confines.

The most effective thing that we can do to fight poverty, income inequality, injustice and the enslavement of the 99% is to campaign to flip the iceberg upside down. We can't afford the rich, and the plutocracy has to end. Our political system is overrun with public schoolboys who earn their money from trust funds and offshore investments, meaning that they pay nothing in tax. We can no longer be governed by people who don't play by the same rules as the rest of us.

The House of Commons was supposed to be a democratic instrument. The House of Commons was supposed to be representative of ordinary working people with a conscience, not Bullingdon Club Tory toffs who've only known a life of wealth and privilege.

I'm not waiting for my neighbour to be more generous before I decide to contribute more to the greater good. I'm looking for my opportunity to topple the cruel elites who have their snouts in the trough, greedily stuffing their ugly faces.

The most effective thing you can do with your time and your money? Campaign for political reform. Campaign for economic reform. Campaign for societal reform.

It makes no sense that the whole of the planet and 99% of humanity is there so that the baby boomers can have an idle retirement. If it was up to me, I'd ban the over 65s from voting until the climate and the economy start improving. You can't leave this kind of bullshit fuckup as a legacy, and expect to reap any rewards or have any say in a future that you ruined.

Here's my golden rule: leave things better than you find them, or else you are antisocial and you should be excluded from society.

Tags: #charity #politics #climate #capitalism

This is a story about how to fuck up a kid...

I love the symbolism of this image. What it means to me is this: we have to jump through hoops, like some kind of trained circus animal.

What made you decide that you could give your kids a brilliant life? What made you decide that creating new life on an overcrowded planet was a great idea?

Was it the fact that climate change is an undisputed problem, and your children will inherit a drowning world?

Was it the fact that neoliberal capitalism has given us a cruel ruling elite who have enslaved most of humanity in menial jobs, and left the rest to starve?

Was it that a small handful of oligarchs, monarchs and plutocrats control all the world's wealth, and the chances of being elevated from poverty are the same as being hit by an asteroid, twice, on the way to collect your lottery winnings?

Was it that the social structure of the tribe, the clan and the extended family has now all-but ended, as we are forced to roam the entire planet in search of a golden opportunity that does not exist, and we are forced to content ourselves with social media, text message and video-chat interactions, that are in place of actual face-to-face human relationships with our nearest and dearest?

It won't be long before our babies are whisked away from us at birth, and we can do nothing but follow their progress on a Twitter page, as they forge their way through an educational system designed to produce compliant drones, who have no hope but to join the enslaved masses in some soul-crushingly dreadful job. And the reason why we never get to see our children? So we can continue to pursue our unfulfilling jobs for as many hours as we can possibly work before collapsing with exhaustion.

I have this little fantasy about being a dad. In my fantasy, me and some imagined partner are woken up early in the morning by our two children. One child is a toddler, and the other is slightly older but still a preschooler. The kids clamber into bed and we all spend the morning watching cartoons together. Then we all get up and dressed and eat pancakes together around the kitchen table.

Then, I also have this imagined version of reality.

I wake up before the kids, get showered and dressed although I'm desperately tired. I then have a stressful commute through traffic and endless crowds of people. I arrive at a job that I hate, because it's boring and stressful, underpaid and my bosses have nothing but contempt for me and the capitalist scum who run all the corporations have no gratitude or respect for the workers who toil to line their pockets. I get to look at a photograph of my children on my desk, but this is merely a form of emotional bribery. Without the picture of my kids on my desk, I would question what the hell I was even doing, and just quit the awful job.

In my imagined version of reality, I work extra late to try and impress the bosses and get a precious promotion that may allow the basic essentials of life to be bought without constant financial struggle to make ends meet. Every time the car breaks down or some home improvements are needed, it always costs more than any savings that have been put away as contingency for these eventualities. A debt spiral has been happening because of having to use short-term borrowing to simply meet the cost of living. Then more debt was incurred servicing the first debt. This wasn't money that was spent on frivolities, but on such things as fixing broken plumbing and essential child-rearing equipment like cribs and pushchairs.

My imagination tells me that, in reality, I would then struggle home late through yet another stressful commute, only to find that the kids are already in bed. My partner is exhausted from the demands of working a part time job that brings in marginally more money than the cost of the childcare that we must pay for so that she can have her very badly paid job. Juggling work and childcare arrangements, she must travel twice as far as a normal commute, in order to pick up and drop off the kids at their daycare facilities. The household budget is super tight, and extremely diligent use of discount coupons, shopper loyalty schemes and knowing the cheapest supermarket to obtain our groceries for each product, is the only way that a few extra pounds can be found to balance the books.

Exhausted and stressed - in this imaginary reality - we collapse into bed. The pressure that me and my imaginary partner are under means that we are arguing all the time, so we aren't having sex or any kind of physical intimacy anymore. We are just two exhausted scared and anxious people, trying to survive and hide the desperation of the situation from the children.

The children - I imagine - are browbeaten into believing that they have one shot at getting good school grades and not fucking up their lives. Me and my imaginary partner tell our kids how important it is that they study hard and try their best, so that they can go to university and get a great job. We repeatedly tell our kids that life is a struggle, and the world is a mean place, and that they should stop laughing and playing, and knuckle down and do some damn homework.

Grow up! Concentrate! This is important! Pay attention! You have no idea what the real world's like! We rebuke our little kids. We are desperately anxious that our children should not suffer the same fate that we endure. Endless arguments over schoolwork and bad grades. Endless stress about whether or not our kids are thriving in the rigid educational system. Every bit of spare time we have goes into educational activities. We can't just make a fort out of cushions... we have to turn it into a history lesson, or a lesson about the physics of why buildings don't fall down. Everything is twisted into an opportunity to try and cram a bit more knowledge into our little kids' craniums.

Your kid drives themselves nuts with the pressure and expectation placed upon them. Kids are sensitive to their parents anxiety. Kids are like sponges, and they're getting the message loud & clear about how important it is that they apply themselves and try their hardest. Some kids will respond, and will allow themselves to have their personality dissected, sifted and sorted. Some kids will quietly allow themselves to be judged and graded by complete strangers who couldn't give two fucks about who they are as an individual.

Then, finally, it's time for the big wide world that we've promised our children is the whole reason why they can't have a childhood. The whole reason why we didn't let our kids play in the dirt, or spend time with their friends, was so that they could have their noses in books, writing essays or taking mock examinations. Now, it's time for your kids to spread their wings and be whatever they want to be.

Use your imagination! Follow your dreams! Find your passion! We tell our precious children.

What we really mean is: go get a sensible job for a reputable corporation, shovelling shit for the capitalists.

Childhood was jettisoned in favour of academic achievements. We told our kids they couldn't be friends with some of the other children, because they were too stupid and a bad influence. We told our kids they couldn't laugh, play and have the simple joys of their childhood, because there was too much at stake. Our kids' precious future was on the line. It was life or death.

And now, your kids have the same shitty job that doesn't pay the bills and is inadequate to support a family. Your kids busted their balls to get their grades, go to university, follow their dreams. Guess what? There aren't any jobs for historians or philosophers. There aren't any jobs where you need to speak dead languages like Latin or Ancient Greek. There aren't any jobs for artists.

Your kids are going to have to get a job keeping score for the capitalists, while they wait for the planet to become totally uninhabitable. It's a football game with 21 referees and 2 goalkeepers. It's a rowing race with 20 coxswains and 2 rowers. Over 80% of the 'economy' is made up by service sector bullshit.

This is it? This is what you you wanted to give your kids? This is the life that you thought your children would be so happy to live? Did you think about this stuff? You did think about this stuff, didn't you? No? Why didn't you think about this stuff?

"Everything will be alright in the end"

No. It probably won't be.

Things probably won't be alright in the end, because everybody has that attitude. Through collective wilful stupidity, and a desire to ignore the evidence in front of our eyes, we spawn yet more children in the hope that one of the little fuckers is smart enough to solve the world's problems. It's like setting alight to the basement of your house, in the hope that it will put out a fire in the roof.

Don't get me wrong; I love kids. I think kids are cute and I love the way that they make me feel happy when I look after them. I definitely feel very fulfilled as an animal, when I'm playing make-believe daddy, and imagining that I might have kids of my own. There's definitely something biologically right about reproducing one's genes. However, ethically it would seem to be the wrong thing to do.

You know, you made your choice, and I like you and your kids. But collectively it's fucking insane.

I would say that the only way to redeem yourself now would be to pull your kids out of school. Go and live near your parents, uncles and aunties. Form a little village of your relatives. Let your kids play and be children. Teach your kids about the grave responsibility that faces them, but don't fucking bullshit them. Stop selling this lie that hard work and a lost childhood will somehow pave the way for a happy adulthood.

Just look at the goddam stats. Soaring rates of mental illness and suicide. Almost everybody hates their fucking job and doesn't get to spend enough time with their families. Almost everybody is stressed as fuck about money, job insecurity and the uncertainty over whether they will be able to provide housing, food, clothing and everything else they need for them and their children. It's fucking awful.

But, you know what? There are more of us than the goddam capitalists who want to maintain the status quo. Sure there are police and the army, who are there to make sure that the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. However, the system only continues to function while we all collectively help to prop it up. Are you happy? Is this what you want for your children? Is this it?

Is this it?

Tags: #capitalism #childhood

This is a story about being on the run...

When you're no fixed abode, the systems can't really cope. It's hard to even rent a VHS video cassette without two forms of identity that prove your address, let alone get a job or in any way re-enter civilised society.

Nowadays, when you come to rent a house or a flat, you will need to do a credit check. How are you going to pass a credit check if you don't have two recent utility bills? How are you going to pass a credit check if you're not on the electoral roll anywhere? Often times, even jobs require a credit check.

Can't get a job and a place to live without a home, and can't get a home and an income without an address: Catch 22. Game over.

I'm now on the electoral roll again. I'm now the bill payer for council tax, electric, gas, water, sewerage, telephone and every other service that leeches away your hard-earned cash every month, along with your rent or mortgage. Interestingly, you can't even get electric & gas without a credit check sometimes. Sometimes you have to buy electric & gas on a key meter, so that you don't rack up big bills that you're in no position to pay.

When I went off grid, I disappeared out of the system.

Without the system knowing that I was paying utility bills somewhere, the system assumed I was a no-good worthless piece of shit. I would have been unable to rent my apartment, except for the fact that I'm a blagger and a hustler, and I kicked off a big stink with the letting agent about being a non-dom and wanting to keep my financial affairs private. They seemed to buy it and let me get away without doing a credit check.

Interestingly, I just about managed to sneak onto the HSBC contract I did last year, because the system hadn't quite caught up with the fact that I'd disappeared off the grid. HSBC is not in the habit of employing homeless junkies and giving them the opportunity to improve their lives and get ahead. Thankfully they are also truly appalling at due diligence, which was the project I was there to work on, ironically.

This year, I'm now security cleared to a level that would allow me to get onto nuclear sites, most probably. That's not unusual for me. I signed the Official Secrets Act when I was 17, and I've been on several nuclear submarines, as well as working on some highly classified projects. God only knows how the vetting works, but they didn't seem to pick up that I have 3 criminal cautions from the police, or the fact that I've spent the best part of the last 3 years hustling like hell to try and save my own life.

The system has very much worked against me, to try and keep me trapped into poverty and homelessness, but the tide has turned.

Today I received a letter. On the back it was marked "ProSearch". I thought "oh no! what horrible thing from my past is now rearing its ugly head to come and bite me on my arse?".

Upon opening the letter, it appears like ARM Holdings Plc - which is a company I invested in back in the 1990s - has been trying to track me down to give me some money. The last address they have on file is from 10 years ago. They spent some money trying to find me, so they can give me some money. That's quite cool.

People don't generally track me down to give me money. In fact, a lot of the people who owe me money tend to go out of their way to avoid me. Not because I would ask them for the money back, but because they probably don't have any intention of paying me back, and perhaps they feel bad about their debt. I expect a few people who owe me money would pay me back if they could, but they're never likely to escape the grinding poverty that they're in. I'd rather write the money off anyway. I can always earn some more money, but making new friends is hard.

Anyway, this is quite a nice change. Instead of bloody bean counting idiots chasing their pathetic paltry sums of money that apparently I owe because somebody sold me into slavery before I was born, I'm now having people trying to find me to give me money.

I don't feel owed this, you understand? I don't feel entitled. But it's good when the tide turns and it feels like hard work is actually getting somewhere.

I wasn't born to just pay bills and then die.

Tags: #capitalism

This is a story about fear of death...

I had 3 major admissions to the Royal Free Hospital on the hills of Hampstead, overlooking central London. I snapped this shot after waking up with canulas in both my arms, 10 cables attaching me to an ECG machine, a motorised drip pump shoving fluid into me as fast as it could go. I was a pincushion from all the blood samples that had been taken.

Doing a quick body scan, my right leg was horrifically swollen. My right knee was damaged. The operation to reunite the two halves of my calf muscle, repair 4 severed tendons and reconnect 2 nerves, was still healing. I had a big burn on my lower abdomen. There was throbbing dull pain just under my ribcage at the front, and either side of my back, where my liver was torn and my kidneys were failing. There was fluid on my lungs. My chest was tight and constricted.

Was I scared? Did I call out for a loved one? Did it bother me that my prognosis was pretty grim? Do you think it even crossed my mind that I might die alone, except for one or two strangers in the mostly empty ward?

The photo captures the sun low in the sky, not long after dawn.

As long as I die in London, I know I tried my best to find my way back to the land of the living. I have no fear of death in London. Nobody dies of shame in London. If you can't find your will to live in London, you can slip away peacefully. You're never truly alone in London.

I had a 4 hour operation under general anaesthetic to fix the injury inflicted upon me by my parents. I travelled home on the bus on my own after a few days recovering in hospital. My leg was in plaster cast, held in severe dorsiflexion and was not weight bearing. I was as weak as a kitten. I let myself back into my friend's house, hopped up the stairs to the guest bedroom and collapsed in bed.

I had already spent several days in Oxford John Radcliffe Hospital in their high-dependency care unit, while they tried to stabilise my muscle damage and save me from kidney failure. I'd made my way back to London with a blood sodden bandage that was little better than the field dressing that I had improvised with sanitary towels and a dressing gown cord, before paramedics arrived. I had assumed that despite the wound being down to the bone, it was nothing that a couple of stitches at a minor injury clinic couldn't fix. It wasn't me who called 999. I was just trying to get back to London.

Back in London and finding myself with a spare evening before my operation, I had gone to a adventure sports film festival, hobbling along with my lame leg. The severed tendons meant that I was not even able to raise my foot any more, and it dragged and caught on kerbs and steps, causing great pain.

Having never experienced a general anaesthetic, I felt the same trepidation that I felt before my first skydive or another extreme leap into the unknown. However, there was never any doubt that it was something I couldn't face on my own. Just go along with it. Trust to fate, skilled professionals and technical equipment. Blind faith.

You should see the way I ride my bike. One slip and you're a goner, when you thread your way in-between the massive heavy goods vehicles, transporting steel beams for the construction of Crossrail. The double-decker bus drivers are amazingly skilled and seem to manage to not squash too many cyclists. However, when you mix together the debutanté Über drivers in their Toyota Priuses, hard-up black cab drivers, various small delivery vehicles, plus the unpredictable mix of abilities of people driving around central London, it's no wonder that paramedics call bike riders "organ donors".

When I hear that yet another of my fellow commuters has hurled themselves under a tube train, I burst into tears. It's too much to bear, thinking that some of my fellow Londoners have reached the end of their rope too. Perhaps those less personally affected by suicidal thoughts are the ones who tut about how selfish it is that a huge underground station has to be evacuated so that the human remains can be bagged and carted off to the coroner. The disruption to the capital's transportation network seem huge, but there are so many other veins and arteries in the heart of the nation, that people find alternative routes quite easily, with minor delays.

I'm not emotional when it comes to my own death.

I have fantasised about going on a scouting mission to a nearby tower block that has an open-air balcony with a 40 floor drop. My only concern would be landing on some poor unfortunate on the pavement below - hence the need to check the drop zone in advance.

I would never throw myself in front of a train. It would be too traumatic for the driver and the people on the platform. Even people on the train would feel a bump and judder as the wheels crushed bone and flesh. I know they would. People have described to me exactly what it's like for a tube train to run over a passenger, and I've had to run out of the office crying. Strangely, I don't cry for myself.

Jumping off a bridge in London would be pointless. None of the bridges are high enough, unless you were able to scale Tower Bridge.

Killing yourself in a public place is a bit selfish though. It's bound to leave a big mess to clean up and cause distress for an unpredictable number of people.

I didn't want to commit suicide while I was staying with friends. I felt that it might have been seen as some negative reflection on their hospitality, and would leave bad memories in the guest bedroom where I had been staying, which would tarnish their home.

I'm mindful that whoever I'm living with is burdened already with the uncertainty over whether my resolve to keep myself alive and well is not slipping.

When I am seized by the sudden urge to take myself and a sharp knife to the bathroom and open my radial arteries into the bath, I worry if I would cry out in pain as I dug into the joint on the inside of the joint of my arm, searching for the blood vessels with the sharp point of the blade. Then I worry whether I would be able to contain the mess within the bath, as my heart pumped my circulatory system dry.

Before I have gone any further with these thoughts, I realise that it would be grossly unfair to leave the discovery of my body and handling the police to a friend who doesn't deserve such a responsibility.

I think about setting myself aflame with petrol, in political protest at capitalism, inequality and social injustice, right in the centre of Canada Square. I think about how desperately agonising it would be to be burnt alive. I think about how suffocation would be as deadly as the heat, as the flames consumed all the available oxygen. Gasping for breath, and in unimaginable agony, death would be neither swift nor immediately assured. Dying of the burns over the course of the coming days would not be a great way to contemplate any last regrets.

It's the halfway situation that's the problem. A failed drug overdose so often results in organ failure and a much slower and more painful death than originally intended. Being knocked off your bike while wearing a helmet could mean paralysis rather than death. I know what it's like to score my arms with a razor blade. I know what it's like to wonder what the scars are going to look like when they heal. I know what it's like to experiment to see how deep you have to cut to reach the veins. However, so many cuts will stem the bleeding enough to preserve life, despite leaking profusely at first.

If you spend any time in psychiatric instituions, you meet suicide survivors. Most have had their stomachs pumped or filled with activated charcoal. Many will have their wrists bandaged. Scars from previous half-hearted failed attempts and self-harm, indicate a certain revolving doors nature to our treatment approach. Some of my fellow patients confide in me that they are saving up the very pills that were prescribed to them to prevent their suicide, so that they can have another go. One guy saved his tablets for 8 months and had things well planned except for an unexpected visitor. He was in intensive care for several weeks. He now faces a life of dialysis because his kidneys failed due to the toxic load. He was planning on attempting suicide again at his earliest opportunity.

I met a beautiful young Australian paramedic in hospital. You would have thought that she would value life higher than anybody, but the lesions to her neck indicate that she'd used her medical training to attack her jugular veins.

I read that media coverage of suicide can trigger a spate of copycat suicides. Newspapers are discouraged from reporting on the suicide method used. It's said that jails are like universities for criminals to swap tips and make connections. Could it be that mental health institutions are the same for the suicidally depressed, with more people being likely to end their lives using ideas gleaned while in hospital?

Frankly, there isn't much stopping a resourceful person from finding a way to kill themself. I've considered everything from inert gas to the application of an electrical current across my chest to send me into ventricular fibrillation. The one that is most appealing is drifting off to sleep and not waking up.

There's a famous quote by one of the few people who survived jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, where they said they regretted it as soon as they had let go.

When I once took a drug overdose, there was a momentary twinge of regret that could have lasted about as long as it would have taken me to fall and hit the water, having jumped off a high bridge. There was a period where I would have been able to eject the toxins from my body, if I was suddenly determined enough to save myself. Instead, I then found myself accepting my fate, and a strange calm came over me before the chemicals hit my bloodstream. I was resigned and relaxed about whatever happened next. Death or organ failure. I didn't care.

It was only after a couple of days when my paralysis temporarily lifted and it was clear that the only way I was going to die was very slowly through the accumulated damage to my body, malnutrition and dehydration. I was pissing copious amounts of blood, and I knew I had to make a choice: an agonising slow death where I could be discovered, but it would definitely be the end of my kidneys, or a trip to the hospital and re-evaluate the situation.

I tidied my room. Took a shower. Packed my bags. Called a taxi. Sat in Accident and Emergency for hours.

When I was examined I was immediately admitted and I spent nearly 3 weeks in hospital.

It wasn't the right time to die. This was before I had worked my contracts at Barclays, HSBC and my current client. This was before I had somewhere nice to call a home of my own again. This was before I put together a 370,000 word document that explained who I was and how I arrived at the decision to take my own life.

I lay on the floor, semi-paralysed, and I thought about what kind of message I could scrawl in my incapacitated state, that would make it clear that I knew what I was doing. The circumstances leading up to that moment were a mess. It was too ambiguous. Even a suicide note would be seen in the context of great misfortune and stressful events in my life leading up to that point.

I had planned on starving myself to death or in some way doing myself in on the 1st of January, as some kind of protest at the way that we surmise a suicide with a neat soundbite that's supposed to explain all the reasons why somebody took their own life:

• "depression"
• "financial worries"
• "drug problems"
• "broken heart"
• "loss of status"

Take your fucking pick.

Without a conversation, we desecrate the memory of a dead person, by trying to oversimplify the complex problem of what could drive a person to arrive at the decision to kill themself.

In Japan, suicide is an honourable thing. The act of seppuku might be a protest over a decision or a preferable fate to torture. Preparation for the act includes writing a death poem.

Do you really want to be that crazy old homeless guy, yelling "I used to be somebody" as the world pays no attention and the streets finally swallow you into anonymity?

All glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.

Tags: #hospital #nhs #suicide #injury

This is a story about self sabotage...

What the hell am I doing, blogging about stuff that could get me fired, sued and make me unemployable? Why the hell am I burning so many bridges, and destroying my own reputation? Is this simply self-sabotaging behaviour?

If we look at the wider context of my story, the rat race has made me unwell. The boring office jobs propping up the instruments of capitalism so that an idle wealthy elite can ride roughshod over the proletariat, has made me unhappy. Compromising on my moral, ethical position, five days a week is not healthy. Working in an unstimulating environment that is unchallenging and uninteresting is a fate worse than death.

It's very easy to keep doing what you do because you fear change and it's the path of least resistance. I've been moulded into a certain career and industry sector. I'm the perfect guy to have join your massive corporation and quickly get up to speed with the bureaucracy, systems and processes. The bulk of the hard work in a big organisation is not the actual skilled thing that people are qualified to do, but just dealing with the crap that gets built up by a zillion little Hitlers all micromanaging their tiny empires they're building and trying to justify their pathetic jobs.

It's interesting who I'm friends with on Facebook, and who follows me on Twitter. In fact, with very little digging you can even find this vast cache of dirt, on Google. This is not about how important and influential I am, because I'm not. This is about public exposure. I took a decision to lay my soul bare, and I stand by that decision. But, for a moment, let's consider the kinds of people who I know or suspect have at one time dipped into my social media and online accessible over-sharing:

• Ex colleagues from JPMorgan
• Ex colleagues from HSBC
• Cohorts from a technology startup accelerator
• Two influential and well respected directors of startup accelerators
• Mentors from startup accelerator
• My accountant
• People who are influential and well respected in the technology sector
• Friends who work in tech and/or industry sectors that I work in

I've stopped short of actually tying my LinkedIn profile back in this direction, towards my blog. I've stopped short of in any way linking my limited company back towards this new alter ego of mine, although I did briefly get myself in a muddle over some suicide watch startup idea that I had. That was on September 21st... right when I started this journey of deciding to go public with every struggle I faced when I finally lost my grip on my career, my company, my reputation, everything.

For sure, I'm a nobody. However, people still talk. There is a rumour mill, no matter how small and insignificant you are. And people who work in offices are particularly interested in lurid tales of people who're doing anything that is out of the ordinary, even if that's losing your mind and ending up in the gutter.

By now, my tale of the toxic combination of stress, abusive relationship, mental health problems, heavy drinking, drug abuse (in that order) leading to suicide attempts, hospitalisation, homelessness, destitution and even police involvement, is well documented.

Well, I guess it's not that well documented, but it's out there in the public domain.

I have no idea how much was known before I decided to embark upon a mission of full disclosure, but I know that my abusive ex-wife was particularly indiscreet and insensitive. I'm sure that my friends did their best to save my blushes and protect my reputation as much as they could, but people still knew that I was getting more and more unwell.

Obviously, at times during my descent into melancholy and the infinite madness, I sabotaged my own reputation amongst my Facebook friends. I once shared a picture of some potassium cyanide that I had bought with the express intention of ending my life quickly and cleanly. The lethal dose is about 250 milligrams. I bought 2 grams of the toxic chemical: 8 times more than was strictly necessary.

Depression now has less stigma associated with it. We pretty much all know somebody who suffers with depression, and takes anti-depressant medication to help them with their low mood. These things are no longer taboo to talk about, and many people are able to still continue to hold down good jobs and be in positions of responsibility. Suffering from clinical depression is not a death sentence, certainly as far as a person's professional reputation is concerned.

Bipolar disorder has almost become cool to have. There are a list of celebrities and politicians as long as your arm, who have come forward and declared that they are living with the condition. Obviously, the ability to turn your hypomanic episodes into hyper-energetic flurries of productive activity, means that you can get shit done. In a way, we celebrate the person who has these mood episodes, because they can produce the 'overnight' successes we so revere in society.

Alcohol is everywhere, so unless you're swigging from a bottle of vodka hidden in your desk and reeking of liquor fumes as you breathe on people, just about any amount of drinking is socially acceptable. It's only if you declare yourself an alcoholic and have a stay in rehab that people start to stigmatise you. You can cover up your 28 days in The Priory, by saying that it was private hospital treatment for stress and anxiety.

Drug abuse is the last taboo. You pretty much don't want to put that one down on your CV. Cocaine use is widespread throughout London, and coffee gets stronger and stronger to the point where you're practically swallowing amphetamines. A few cans of Red Bull is the socially acceptable equivalent to snorting a couple of lines of some stimulant. Students are increasingly using Modafinil, Ritalin and Adderall to improve their concentration span and fact retention, as well as to stay awake during long revision binges.

If you think that these things feature in my daily life, you're wrong. These issues are simply incompatible with day-to-day existence. Depression robs you of the energy to get out of bed and face the day. Bipolar hypomania robs you of the contents of your bank balance, as it all gets ploughed into crazy schemes. Alcoholism is hard to hide, not that I've ever been physically dependent on booze, thank God. Drug addiction is all-consuming: there's no hiding it when you've lost the battle with addiction and it's taking you on a white-knuckle ride to an early grave.

So, if I've won the battles, why would I make it public knowledge that I fought them? Why would I take the time to declare, beyond all reasonable doubt, that I'm a flawed individual? Why would I spell it out, that I could relapse into any number of life-destroying illnesses at any moment?

Well, we could all succumb to these things at any moment.

I was 28 years young when I was knocked flat by clinical depression. I was 32 when addiction got its hooks in me. Just because I'd been a good student, a well behaved polite boy, a model employee, a career go-getter, and on the face of it I had a perfect little life, it doesn't mean that I was immune from anything.

But "it could never happen to me" right?

We believe that smart life choices will keep us safe. We believe that we have free will, and that therefore we would never choose to do something stupid. We believe that past performance is indicative of future results, even if the disclaimers always tell us the opposite.

There's something ugly about academic and corporate life, where we put a black mark against people's name if they fuck up even once. Screw up your school exams and you'll never get a chance to go to university. Screw up in your career and you'll be frozen out of the good jobs forevermore. Screw up in life and you'll be a dirty leper who nobody will want to know or to help.

This is the bleak outlook for so many people, who were simply unlucky or made a decision that was obviously regrettable, but life is continuously setting us traps and pitfalls. Why do consequences have to be so long lasting? Oh, you got in financial trouble? Here, let us help you by now charging you fines and punitive rates of interest, plus denying you opportunities and making the cost of living sky high because you have a poor credit rating.

The punishment for not having any money is that you have to pay more money. The punishment for your crimes is the deprivation of your liberty and the destruction of your future opportunities.

Apparently people are mocking those who have chosen to get a semicolon tattoo, but let's think about this for a minute.

I work in a big office and I see hundreds of people every day. In all likelihood they have seen that I have a semicolon tattooed behind my ear. If you were to Google "what does a semicolon tattoo mean?" then you will see that it's mostly to do with struggles with depression, addiction, self-harm and suicide attempts. I wonder how many people are thinking "why the hell did we employ this guy?".

When I did my interview, I sat so that my interviewers were on my right-hand side. The people who interviewed me never saw that tattoo, until soon after I started in my new job. I wonder if they'd have hired me if they had seen the tattoo.

Tattoos are actually uncommon amongst investment banking IT consultants. Certainly visible tattoos are even declared as not permitted, in many banks dress codes. I even thought about putting a sticking plaster over the mark on my skin, for my interview.

However, that's all I ever did for years and years. That's our whole approach to mental health and the problems that people face in their private lives: put a sticking plaster over it.

I've written at length about how angry I am that our first line of defence for people who are stressed out and depressed by their shitty unfulfilling office jobs, is to give them powerful psychoactive medications that artificially alter their mood so they can continue to work their dreadful jobs.

I'm angry that I'm so pressurised by wider society to cover up my problems, in order to retain a blemish-free reputation. I feel like the need to appear pristine and infallible to potential employers, fellow work colleagues and bosses, is largely to blame for why I had a massive breakdown and implosion, instead of things getting fixed before they got out of hand.

We are brainwashed to believe that we can't have any gaps on our CV that we can't explain. We are brainwashed to believe that we can't take our foot off the gas pedal for a single second. We are brainwashed to believe that a stain on our reputation will hang around for the rest of our careers.

You know what the problem is? It's our fucking careers. The treadmill. The rat race. It's making so many people mentally unwell, as well as causing physical health damage due to the sedentary nature of the work. No amount of standing desks or free gym membership is going to compensate for the problem.

I backslid into office employment because it was easy and I was desperate. My back was against the wall, and it made perfect financial sense to go and suffer another stretch of agonising misery back doing the shit that I'm most qualified and experienced to do, but it's fucking killing me.

It's important to be values-aligned, but it's also so easy to be tempted by 'easy' money. The cash rewards for doing the kind of mind-bogglingly boring work that I do are substantial. In theory, I only have to do this work for short bursts, and then I have spare time and cash to do whatever I need to do to balance the books, psychologically. However, in practice, all I'm doing is servicing debts that were built up just staying alive.

The welfare state took a dim view on my situation. Why do I need help, when I can go and get a job that pays fabulously well? Well, guess what? I tried it. I tried getting one of these shitty desk jobs that kill me, while I was homeless living in a hostel. And guess what? Working one of those jobs that made you unwell in the first place while you are still unwell really fucks you up.

This whole exercise of blowing my existence and private life wide open serves to document the ridiculousness of the mental health destroying lives that we are forced to live. If this whole experience ends up killing me, at least I've left the evidence: the smoking gun.

Nobody really cares when white middle class, well educated men in good jobs kill themselves. Why would they? Well, look around you. Do you see people getting happier? Do you see mental illness declining? Do you see suicide rates declining? Do you feel secure, fulfilled? Do you feel like the human condition is improving?

I look around and I see war and I see poverty. I see ordinary British people being forced into zero hours contract minimum wage McJobs, and still unable to afford basic amenities. I see loneliness and depression. I see a lack of real local community. I see families pulled apart by the need to go to large urban centres to seek your fortune. I see people locked into their own little world: headphones plugged in, eyes cast downwards at their smartphone, not talking to anybody face to face except to ask for their morning coffee.

Is this just a London thing? Is my view tainted because I'm struggling with depression myself? Actually, London is the canary in the coal mine. The sensitive people who have their head up looking around, sensing for danger, are usually on to something. Everything is pretty shit and fucked up right now.

And so, I am rejecting the conventional. I'm rejecting the sensible, rational and tried-and-tested. I'm burning the bridges that lead back to places I should never return to.

Yes, I might be making a fool of myself. Yes, people might be sniggering at me, safe behind their computer screens. Yes, important people are judging me and they have the ability to thwart me because of their prejudice, and make my life hard and even impossible. I could find myself unemployable, but not know why, because nobody has to tell me. I'm giving away all the ammunition you need to destroy me, and people are eagerly taking it.

But you know, who's the real winner? If you take what I gave you and use it against me, how are you going to feel? We're all doing that. We're all exploiting weaknesses that we discover in each other, in order to get ahead in the rat race.

How do you win a rigged contest? If everybody is cheating, do you cheat too?

The other option is to martyr yourself. For sure, you'll be hated and excluded. Nobody will thank you. But at least you can sleep at night, in the gutter.

Prisons can mean anywhere you feel trapped and your liberty is restricted

Tags: #career #london #computing #banking #depression #suicide #mentalhealth

This is a story about destiny...

I've been writing short stories all this week to fill my boring days at work. I wasn't going to share them, because I already share thousands of words every week, but this is one of my better efforts.

Anyway, without further ado, please allow me to introduce The Factory:

* * *

His mother had warned him that if he didn't try hard enough at school he would have to work in a factory, but this conflicted with Alan's day-to-day experience with his teachers. Alan's teachers always told him that he had amazing potential. Alan's teachers always told him that if he just applied himself, he would be a brilliant student. Perfect! No effort required then, until the exams actually counted for something. Why burn yourself out over mock exams and other work? Keep your gunpowder dry until the real battle.

Was it lazy? Was it arrogant? It seemed smart to Alan to not bust his balls on extra homework and every essay and assignment. School was going to go on and on for years and years, and then there was university after that. Yes, it was generally assumed that Alan would be going to university, because he was a sharp cookie. Just needed to apply himself. Just needed to try a bit harder. Why bother trying until the day of his GCSE exams, his A-levels, and his entrance examination for Oxford or Cambridge? Why break a sweat until then? Why get anxious about tomorrow's problems, today?

Whenever Alan did turn it on, concentrate, try hard, he found that he was showered with praise and good grades. His experience bore out everything that the world told him every day, except his mother's prophecy that he would end up working in a factory.

But now he worked in a factory.

In the factory, there were warehousemen who drove fork-lift trucks, ferrying pallets of supplies around the factory buildings, or loading the boxed up products being dispatched to the wholesalers. There were machine operators, who pressed oversized industrial buttons, to start and stop the various plant that mixed chemicals in huge vats, pumped liquid, or carried things on conveyor belts. The machine operators were responsible for hitting the big red STOP buttons in the event of an industrial accident, so they were slightly higher paid than the warehousemen, who only had to have a fork-lift truck driving license.

The lowest paid workers in the factory were those who performed repetitive manual labour that could not be easily automated. The manual workers took cans off the conveyor belt, stuck a sticky label on them, and then loaded them onto another conveyor belt. The manual workers picked out any cans with dents or loose lids, and put them onto large trolleys marked "Quality Control" which were wheeled to another area, where somebody else would check to see if the product could be salvaged or not.

There were the supervisors, who had risen through the ranks by doing one of the many jobs in the factory for 25 years or more. That was about how long it took to get promoted. If you had stuck it out for 25 years, and you'd managed not to make a fool of yourself, you were pretty much automatically promoted into a supervisor role. It was well understood, and it was the reason why many people were sticking with their low paid jobs, holding out hope for that promotion. The supervisors were paid marginally more than their colleagues, but the big bonus was that they didn't have to do any work anymore. The supervisors would march around, clean and smelling fresh, putting ticks on a checklist clipped to their clipboards.

Supervisors would escalate issues to management. Management were all the sons, daughters, husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends and close friends of the family who had originally owned the factory, or another factory. To enter into management, you had to be born into management, or marry into management. There was a legend, often told, of the boy who used to sweep the factory floor who got promoted to be a manual worker, then a supervisor, and then a manager. This legend was the lottery-winning chance that everybody in the factory secretly hoped for, but of course it was a myth. Whenever new managers were needed, only people who were already managers would be eligible for the role. Can't get the job without the experience, can't get the experience without the job. That was the Catch 22 that kept the riff-raff out of the boardroom.

But, there had been a new role that had been created, that nobody felt qualified to do. Some of the managers had hired family members, friends, to try and do the role, but nobody had been able to perform the duties required. There had been several rounds of telephone interviews to screen candidates. Human Resources had then called in promising candidates to understand if they had the right cultural fit and commitment to the mission of the company, to be suitable. Then junior management had held some day-long sessions where candidates fought it out with each other, in some real-world scenarios that had been set as a test. Then, finally, there were several more face to face interviews with senior management, before at long last the CEO personally vetted the remaining handful of hopefuls, and selected a winner. A job offer was dispatched and the factory's newest recruit joined the team. However, every person they had recruited to date had left, soon after starting their new job.

It was time to try the open market. Jobs were routinely advertised on the open market, but invariably it would be somebody known to somebody else who would be recruited. You had to know somebody. Any candidate from the open market was there just to make up the numbers, and to pay lip service to the idea that there was some meritocracy to the process, but everybody in management knew that unless you were already in management, your face simply didn't fit: you weren't part of the club.

And so, the unprecedented step of hiring somebody on the basis of their Curriculum Vitae was made. Their aptitude and qualifications were actually considered on merit, and the interviewers actually mulled over the answers to the questions that were asked. The management team was getting desperate. It was time to hire somebody who might be capable of doing the job, rather than simply recycling the same pool of people who had been born into privileged positions. Management were out of ideas, because they had only ever taken their ideas from an insular pool of people with the same background. It was time to try an outsider.

Alan had been through the same gruelling rounds of telephone interviews, HR grillings and face to face meetings with various junior and senior managers. Alan had suffered the same dismissive attitudes, because he had never held a management role, because his family had never owned a factory and gifted him a job. Everybody who interviewed him let him know, subtly, that he wasn't cut out for management because he wasn't part of the club. However, begrudgingly they had been forced to recommend their favoured outside candidate. Alan had been chosen for his strengths, not because of nepotism. Management were not happy about this. This was not the way things worked.

Finally, the CEO had awarded Alan the job. The CEO knew that the factory had little choice. It had an unfilled role that was very important. Nobody from the pool of those with managerial experience had proven able to perform the duties. Of course none of the supervisors could be promoted. That would be ridiculous! Alan had good grades and had studied at Cambridge, so on paper he was a cut above everybody else that they had interviewed, except the one thing that would normally disqualify him from ever entering management: that he actually had to apply for a job, rather than just being gifted one by his family.

Alan's roles and responsibilities had been explained to him at length during the interview process, but now he had an HR meeting to discuss his salary and his final job description.

"There's been a slight change" said Sandra, the HR woman. "There's actually just one thing we need you to do" she explained. Sandra pushed a piece of paper with some text printed on it over the desk towards Alan. "Is this some kind of joke?" Alan asked.

The salary negotiations had taken a new direction now that Alan knew that his intended role had somewhat changed. Normally, candidates enthusiastically accepted pretty much whatever was offered in terms of remuneration by the time that they had reached the point of a job offer. The purpose of the interview process was to make a candidate so relieved when the stress and the anxiety of the whole awful ordeal was over, that they wouldn't want to risk losing the job offer when it was on the table.

"I want twice as much money" Alan plainly declared.

"Ridiculous!" Sandra had replied. "You'd be paid more than the CEO if we gave you that much" she spat, contemptuously.

"But look at what you want me to do" Alan pleaded. "What you're offering just isn't enough to do that".

Eventually, Sandra had backed down. She was shocked. She'd never actually had to negotiate with somebody before, and even when candidates had tried, she just held her ground and they gave in. She'd met people like Alan before, but she'd never come up against such stubborn determination. His attitude had seemed to change completely when she told him what his new role would entail.

Alan started his new job with something of a sense of happiness. He was going to be paid an obscene amount of money. He couldn't believe his luck. Even though Alan knew that the size of his paycheque bore no relation to his actual value as a person, he still felt special and appreciated to be receiving such healthy remuneration for his efforts. Alan was almost cocky and arrogant, knowing that he was the highest paid person in the factory. He was the highest paid person he knew. He calculated how much he was going to earn every hour, every minute, every second... it was a lot.

Three supervisors met Alan at the factory gates and gave him a brief tour of the facilities. Alan was soaking up his surroundings with glee. It was nice to feel part of something. It was nice to see the efficiency of everything, as cans and boxes, and crates and vats of liquid were ferried around the warehouses, and vast quantities of products were stacked up ready to be dispatched to customers.

Alan was shown to the testing room. Everything had been prepared for him.

The testing room was a cube in the corner of one of the cavernous warehouses, with a door labelled "TESTING ROOM" in bold black text. The testing room had a round silver door handle, and a piece of plastic that could be slid so that the words "IN USE: DO NOT ENTER" could be displayed, or hidden when the room was unoccupied.

"Yes, it's ready to go. Please start when you're ready" one of the supervisors said, gesturing towards the door.

Alan slid the plastic so that "IN USE" was displayed, and stepped inside the room, closing the door behind him.

Inside the room, there was black folding chair in the centre, and 4 blank walls. The walls had a slightly glossy shiny look to them. There was a sharp chemical smell in the air. An extraction fan whirred above, sucking away the fumes. Alan sat down in the chair, and begun to look at the walls.

After 12 hours, a loud whistle blast could be heard throughout the factory, including inside Alan's room. The factory workers queued up to clock out of their shift, and then disappeared out of the exit to the car park and bus stop. The supervisors jumped in their battered old cars and drove home. The manual workers queued up in the rain to catch the bus. Alan queued up for the bus too: he would have to wait for his first paycheque before he could think about buying a car.

The next day, Alan arrived and made his own way to the room. He opened the door and there were a couple of men in there who were just packing up their things. One of the men said "all ready for you" and then the room was left vacant. Alan slid the sign to show "IN USE" again, closed the door and sat in his chair, waiting for the factory whistle while looking at the glossy walls.

After 11 or so hours, Alan started to wonder if his eyes were playing tricks on him. Were the walls slightly less glossy? There certainly seemed to be patches where the walls looked somewhat more matt. There were areas that were still shiny and reflecting light, but there were large parts that seemed to no longer have the same sheen. Before he could think about this much longer, the factory whistle blew and everybody left for home.

Alan had a troubling night of sleep, wondering what he was doing. Had he made a mistake in taking this job? It was certainly very well paid, but it wasn't at all what he imagined he would be doing for a living. He started to think about the nice new car he was going to buy himself with his first paycheque. Yes, just focus on the money, he told himself as he drifted off to sleep.

The following morning, two men were just leaving the room as he arrived. They were carrying rollers, brushes and cans of paint. "Morning!" they cheerily called to Alan. "Morning!" Alan enthusiastically replied. It was nice to be greeted by his colleagues. They seemed happy to have him there.

Inside the room, it had been repainted in a wonderful bright new colour. This made Alan joyously happy. This minor change in his environment and routine was well appreciated and his whole 12 hour shift passed quickly. Alan felt noticed, cared for. Perhaps his doubts about this career were misplaced.

In the evening, Alan considered taking out a car loan. I mean, now that he had found a job that he enjoyed and was well paid, surely there would be no risk in taking out some finance to allow him to have a reliable vehicle to transport him to work? It would be a nice treat that he could have now, rather than having to wait until his paycheque. He would be able to drive to work rather than taking the bus. That would be a big improvement in his quality of life, not having to stand and queue for the bus in the rain.

Now the working week was nearly done. Alan felt really happy about the approaching weekend as he rode the bus on his way to work.

The painters were leaving his room again when he arrived, carrying their brushes and rollers. Wow! This was exciting, Alan thought. "What colour have they painted my room today?" he wondered.

Inside the room, the walls were the same colour as the previous day, Alan felt sure. What the hell? Were his eyes playing tricks on him? Was his memory fading? Maybe the paint simply needed a second coat, but it had looked pretty good yesterday, he thought.

Alan's 12 hour shift was spent pondering the conundrum of the paint colour. Strangely, he was almost but not quite able to enjoy watching the glossy sheen of the wet paint change to a matt texture, as it dried. He made a little game, of checking each of the slower drying areas intermittently, to see if they were still shiny.

Friday brought another almost identical day. The painters were leaving as Alan arrived, and the colour was unchanged. The only thing that was different was that Alan was now certain that no further coats of paint had been required in order to give even coverage. The walls had been adequately coated with paint the day before. This extra coat of paint was wholly unnecessary, for even the most diligent decorator.

Clocking out of his shift, Alan was troubled and locked into his own mind, questioning what he was doing and why. His eyes were glazed over and not engaging with the faces of his colleagues as they left the factory. On the bus ride home, Alan started to shake off his doubts and just enjoy the fact that work was over until Monday. It was the weekend and he could relax, knowing that he had successfully got though his first week, and he was a little closer to his first paycheque.

The weekend was overshadowed with niggling doubts. Alan had been planning on going to the car dealership to enter into a finance agreement and arrange to take delivery of a brand new car. Instead, Alan was almost in a daze, unable to shake off the feeling that his new job was not quite what he had bargained for. Were things going to change? For sure, on that day that the walls had been repainted, he had felt that things were going to be OK, but then the end of the week things had made no sense.

By Sunday evening, Alan had started to become quite anxious about the week ahead. If the colour of the walls changed again, that would be better, but it still didn't really answer the question of what he was doing there. If the colour of the walls didn't change, he would be forced to question what the purpose of his role was. He knew that it was important that he didn't ask difficult questions or voice his doubts, and he didn't want to risk that big salary. How long could he hold his tongue?

On Monday morning, Alan felt extremely tired even though he had not stayed up late or slept especially badly. He felt tense. His muscles ached. He felt butterflies in his tummy. Why would he be so anxious? His job was easy and he'd made it though the first week with no problems. There was no reason why he couldn't continue day after day, week after week, year after year, decade after decade. Think about all that money he could save up for retirement. Think how rich he was going to be.

Alan arrived at work with seconds to spare. He was almost late. The room was empty, but the walls were shiny and wet with fresh paint. The painters had obviously left shortly before Alan had arrived.

For the first three days of the new week, the paint remained the same colour but it was always freshly repainted. Alan never saw the painters again because he was arriving later and later to work, questioning what on earth he was doing and how he could carry on without understanding the purpose of it all. It was so meaningless, so purposeless, so lacking in rational explanation, so wasteful. He was the highest paid person in the factory, and yet he didn't understand the importance of his role. In fact, his role seemed pointless to him. He persevered, thinking about the money and the new car.

On Thursday, he was torn between just quitting his job or marching into the boardroom to demand answers from the senior management. He knew that either option would pretty much spell the end of his career.

Arriving exceptionally late, Alan turned the handle and opened the door of the testing room a fraction. Inside, the walls had been repainted a different colour. Alan was flooded with a disproportionate amount of relief that something had at last changed. It had been more than a week since the colour had been altered, and even though it had happened once before, he was now overjoyed that it had happened again. It had seemed like forever that he had lived with the same colour of fresh paint, day after day.

On Friday, the wall colour changed again, and now Alan was almost ecstatic. He felt giddy with the waves of emotional relief that swept over him. He was almost drunk with feelings. Everything seemed to make sense, even though they didn't. Everything seemed to be slotting into place, even though they weren't. Alan spent his whole shift daydreaming about driving his new car, and resolved to rush to the dealership first thing on Saturday and sign the car finance papers.

Alan's sleep was very disturbed with excitement about getting a new car. Of course, he would not be taking delivery for some time, but that's not what he was thinking about as he fitfully slept until the earliest possible opportunity he could get up and rush to the dealership when it opened in the morning. At the dealership, Alan borrowed far more money than he had originally intended. Buoyed with the optimism of last couple of days at work he'd just had, in stark contrast to his misery and anxiety at the start of the week, Alan felt that he must purchase the very best car that he could afford, in order to give everything some meaning.

Then, as soon as the door of the dealership had swung closed behind him, he felt a sense of regret, rising panic. What had he done?

Now his weekend was doubly anxious. What if he had another week where they didn't change the colour of the walls? What if he lost his job before he got paid? What if the new car was not as wonderful as he hoped it would be.

Alan tried to console himself in daydreams about him driving the new car. Alan tried to picture how much happier he would be, owning and driving a new car. It didn't seem to be quite enough to settle his deep sense of unease, that he was now trapped into his job in order to keep up the repayments on the car finance. The thought that he now had no option but to stay in his job, or else face both unemployment and insolvency, was a terrifying amount of pressure.

The following week was sheer agony. The colour of the walls remained the same every day, even though they were freshly repainted for all five days. Alan tried to lose himself in daydreams about taking delivery of his new car, and driving it for the first time. He tried to imagine the new car smell. He tried to imagine tearing off the plastic that protected the brand new seats, like tearing of wrapping paper at Christmas. But it didn't work. Time dragged incredibly. Every second felt like a minute. Every minute felt like an hour. Every hour felt like a day. Every day felt like a month. The week felt like a year. A year of pain. A year of staring at the blank walls, wondering what he had done, but feeling completely trapped by his finance agreement.

Alan made it through a second week that was much the same. He dare not arrive late, for his financial security depended on him keeping this job. He dare not raise his concerns with senior management, for he needed this job. He was locked in. He had to keep quiet and just keep doing what he was doing.

When he woke up on Saturday it was 3pm in the afternoon. He hadn't gone to bed late, but the stress and anxiety were exhausting. He was wrecked by the constant tension, the constant worry, the constant doubt. He was lolling around in bed, not really wanting to face the day because he was too emotionally drained. And then he remembered: he could collect his new car today.

Instead of joy, Alan felt trepidation. He procrastinated in getting ready and travelling to the dealership. There was too much riding on this. If he didn't enjoy his new car, his life was over. How on earth could a new car solve the misery of his day to day existence? No material object was capable of resolving his crisis, surely?

Arriving late, the car dealer was only just able to complete all the paperwork in time to let Alan have the car that day. Alan thought he was going to literally collapse and die when he was told that there might not be enough time before the dealership closed, and he'd have to come back another day. Perhaps the dealer had seen the grimace on Alan's face, and had been taken aback. Instead of being fobbed off, the dealership had pulled out all the stops to get Alan his car, while he sat exhausted in the waiting room.

At last, Alan was handed the keys and led to the car park where his shiny new car was ready to go. The paint colour wasn't quite the same as the one he specified and the dealer had forgotten the upgrade to the wheels that he had been promised, but he didn't care. Alan wasn't going to refuse to take delivery now, when he'd been working for so many years to get this prize; or so it felt. Alan signed his name and stepped into the driver's seat. This was finally happening.

It was certainly nice, like he had imagined, being in a brand new car with the smell of plastic and foam. Everything was unmarked, blemish free. Alan had to pinch himself to be reminded that this was not one of his many daydreams he had been having in anticipation of this day.

Driving to work, Alan drew envious stares from fellow work colleagues who he had previously taken the bus with. He apologetically cringed, knowing that they were thinking how flash he was, displaying his wealth so obviously like this. He felt like a traitor, having taken the bus with the ordinary factory workers, and now flaunting his privilege, while his co-workers were soaked from the rain. However, it had been a remarkably enjoyable journey to work despite the traffic. Alan arrived at his room feeling remarkably relaxed and happy.

Now, Alan spent 12 hours waiting to be able to enjoy his drive home. The anticipation of it almost seemed to make the time go slower, but at least he was carried through the first half of the day with a bit of happiness from his drive to work. He fantasised about perhaps going on a long drive at the weekend.

The week dragged, but it was not too bad. As an added bonus, the room had been repainted on Thursday in a new colour. Alan's week was almost tolerable. This could be sustainable, he thought.

Another couple of weeks passed with Alan's car getting a little bit dirtier, scratched and dented from the daily commute and people carelessly opening doors in the car park, or brushing past his vehicle with sharp protruding zips or studs on their clothing, damaging the paint. Inside the car, it was littered with discarded coffee cups from Alan's commute, which now seemed painfully slow as he queued in traffic. The bus zipped past him in the bus lane, as he sat fuming at the wheel. Driving to work was an added pressure, an added anxiety.

The same nagging doubt about what he was doing, became bigger than the novelty of driving to work, which had quickly become the norm. The changes in wall colour were as routine as anything else. Alan simply spent 12 hours sat in his room questioning his very existence, and trying to will himself to think about the money, which was very much less than before, because of his borrowing obligations. Working to pay off his car loan really did not seem to make any sense except in the context of his job, which also didn't make any sense.

In a way, Alan hankered for the days when he used to take the bus, because he didn't have the pressure of having to drive himself and the crippling financial burden of the loan he had taken out to buy the car. Of course, the car was now well careworn and uncared for and was worth a tiny fraction of what Alan had paid for it. He would never be able to repay his debts by selling his car. He would have to keep the job, in order to keep up his loan repayments. He was trapped, and it was destroying him, knowing that he was damned if he did, and damned if he didn't.

Alan started to drink heavily. At first in the evenings, to deal with his anxiety at facing the working day. Then he started to drink at the weekends, to deal with his anxiety at facing the working week. Then he started to drink in the mornings in the car park, so that he would be drunk at work and the day would pass quicker. Alan had no problem hiding his drunkenness at this stage, because he was inebriated around-the-clock. He would never let the alcohol levels in his bloodstream drop, because he would start to get the shakes and start throwing up. He had woken up in the night, soaked in sweat, when he had suffered an epileptic fit in his sleep.

Now physically dependent on alcohol, Alan's his body would complain with horrific withdrawal symptoms and seizures if he stopped drinking. He was also psychologically dependent on intoxication to be able to cope with the monotony of his job. Sobriety was barred to him, because he was unable to continue to work without alcohol, and he needed the job to pay for his loan. Alcohol numbed the stress and anxiety of the situation.

His mother had warned him that if he didn't apply himself at school, he would amount to nothing, and would be a manual labourer in a factory. He was now the highest paid person in the factory, and higher paid than even the CEO. He had a lovely car, and he was on top of his finances. His credit rating was sky high. He could borrow as much as he wanted, to buy a house, a boat or whatever he wanted. However, he was now wary of borrowing any more, knowing that it would shackle him more to the job that had driven him to alcohol. There was no way out. Material things brought temporary relief, but only at the expense of further tying him to a pointless job that denied him any sense of purpose.

People asked Alan why didn't he just retrain as a circus juggler, or a bricklayer? Perhaps he could be a flower arranger, or a concert pianist? Did these people not understand that those salaries would never allow him to service his debts? Did these people not realise that it costs money, on rent and tuition fees, to be able to retrain, and all Alan's money went on rent, debt and alcohol. "Why don't you save up some money and go travelling?" people asked. Saving money meant less alcohol, and it was only through alcohol that Alan could make it through the day. He was mortgaging his health in order to keep his job, in order to repay his debts. Couldn't people see he'd love to dream. Alan was not short of dreams and ideas, but how could he pursue them when he was so trapped?

Riding the wall of death, faster and faster, round and round. Alan had to keep drinking more and more in order to maintain his intoxication, as his body became more and more tolerant to the copious amounts of alcohol he imbibed. Three bottles of wine every day. Cans of super strength lager to keep him topped up. Then a bottle of whiskey every day. Then two bottles of vodka every day. Then he lost count. There were bottles in his gym bag, in his car, littered throughout his flat. He had hip flasks in every pocket. He lived in constant fear of running out of alcohol and getting the shakes, having a fit at work that would cost him his job.

Nobody seemed to notice that Alan was tanked up on alcohol the whole time. He was functional. He was turning up to work and doing his job just like he'd always done. He was reliable, dependable. He was uncomplaining. He didn't ask any questions. He was the perfect employee. Moulded to fit his job perfectly. He had filled his role better than anybody in senior management could have possibly hoped for. The CEO was overjoyed with Alan's appointment, and the work that he was doing. He was worth every penny of his salary, even if Alan felt worthless.

Knowing that he was an alcoholic and unable to function outside the narrow remit of his role, Alan was even more trapped than before. There was no way that he would find another job. There was nobody who needed somebody with such specific skills and experience. There was nobody who could afford to pay Alan the salary that he needed. There was no way that a functional alcoholic could hide their problem throughout the gruelling interview process. There was no way that a functional alcoholic would be able to start doing something new. He was just surviving on muscle memory, on practice and routine. Alan's brain was shot to pieces.

Alan wondered if suicide would be preferable to his existence. He knew that he was slowly committing suicide anyway. Soon his liver would be destroyed. Soon his health would fail completely, and he would quickly die. Wouldn't it be better to do it swiftly, before he got hospitalised and he painfully slipped away? Death would be unpleasant, as his organs failed one by one and his body gave up due to the ravages of alcohol. Surely it would be better to just kill himself quickly.

Stockpiling paracetamol from the chemist, buying boxes two at a time, Alan gathered hundreds of pills.

There was no moment of doubt when he did it, swallowing handful after handful of white tablets, washed down with whiskey. Alan had selected a fine single malt to end his life. Leaving no suicide note, he had however tidied up his flat and set his financial affairs in order. Everything would be found neat and tidy, when the police were sent by the factory to see why he hadn't turned up for work at all that week.

Of course, people were sad when he'd gone. "He could have been anything he wanted" they said. He had amazing potential. He just had to apply himself to something. The world was his oyster. There were so many opportunities.

Nobody saw how trapped Alan was, and he had known that he could never explain. People would never understand how he could be so trapped, when he was so well paid and so good at his job. He was steady and dependable. He never rocked the boat. He never complained. He just got on with his work.

His mother didn't mention her prophecy about the factory at the funeral. Many of his work colleagues attended the burial, and it would have been insulting to talk about factory work as undesirable. There was also a subtle point that Alan's mother had missed: he had ended up working at a factory, just as she had warned, but she had been proud of him because it was a prestigious role.

What Alan's mother had failed to understand was that the men who manually laboured in the factory felt like they made a difference. Every full lorryload of product that left the factory felt like some small achievement. Even a full day spent sticking labels on cans and transferring items on conveyor belts felt somehow useful.

However, Alan had never figured out what the purpose of his role was. He knew that he was well paid, and that he was a valued employee, but he didn't know why. Alan had been unable to place himself anywhere in the grand scheme of things. Alan had never been unable to get over the most basic reduction of his job description to the simplest possible explanation, which was now chiselled into his gravestone in commemoration of his great work: 

"He watched paint dry"

* * *

Tags: #writing #shortstories #alcohol

This is a story about what people do when they think nobody is watching...

Integrity. What does it mean to have integrity? Let's explore a hypothetical example.

The year is 2011. I'm running a profitable tech startup called Hubflow, and we have just been through a 13-week TechStars network technology accelerator program in Cambridge, run by Jon Bradford and Jess Williamson. We have a bunch of investors who are ready to help us raise a seed round. Mike Butcher has written about us in TechCrunch. We are kicking arse.

The sticking point that is stressing me out is that my partner won't support me. My company needs to relocate to London, Cambridge or somewhere on the M4 corridor so that I can hire the talent I need and get to my customers and investors whenever I need to see them. My partner is a teacher. She can literally work anywhere in the country.

***

I financially supported my partner through her retraining to be a teacher. She had a huge income drop, when she left the investment bank where we both worked, but I made sure that she still enjoyed the 5-star luxury lifestyle that she had gotten used to with me.

Even when I quit my salaried job so that I could build my startup, I had substantial savings and profits, to allow us to maintain the same standard of living. I had bankrolled her when she wanted to make a career change, and she'd never had to tighten her belt or compromise.

This was now my turn to shine. I had done it. I had built a profitable company with a good valuation that was ready for investment to take it to the next stage. It was now time to leave the sleepy little seaside town where we lived and move things closer to the action.

My co-founder had left his pregnant partner behind in his home town, to come and live with me in Cambridge for several months, while we built our business together and got ourselves ready for investment. He had made sacrifices and compromises with his growing family. Now it was the turn of my partner to step up and make a small compromise herself.

However, she wouldn't budge an inch.

I could have left her. And perhaps - in hindsight - that's what I should have done. She had never been very kind or supportive. In fact, she was pretty mean spirited and selfish. I don't know why I stayed loyal to her. I'd had opportunities to fool around while I was working away from home, in Boulder, Colorado, in London or in Cambridge, but I stayed faithful. I stayed faithful because I have integrity.

I then got very depressed. She had refused any kind of compromise. I had to leave her, or my business was screwed. There was no way that me and my co-founder could make it work over such a geographical hurdle. We needed to be together, on the ground, raising money and winning more customers. And we were so close. It was heartbreaking.

By the time Christmas rolled around that year, I had gotten so depressed and suicidal that I was hospitalised. My unsupportive mean ex had instructed my parents to come and take me away, and had involved my doctor, all against my wishes. This was an incredible betrayal. Now she wanted me removed from my own home, that I had bought and paid for. This was a horrible act of selfishness.

Before I was literally dragged away by my Dad, I decided to install a keystroke logger on my personal laptop, which was running my personal account & password. This was clearly an act of paranoia, due to the fact that I was extremely mentally unwell, having recently been released from a mental hospital. Clearly I was out of my mind.

I was driven away from my home, my business, my friends, my possessions, to a village where I had never lived since the age of 4, where I have no friends. Miles away from any cities where I had business contacts, investors, customers. I had just been totally fucked over. This was not in my best interests. I didn't even have a doctor or a psychiatrist nearby.

So then, was my partner interested in my wellbeing? Did she call to see how I was? Was she concerned about me getting better?

I thought it rather strange that she wasn't at all involved in trying to 'help' me, now that I was out of the way. In fact, it was rather strange that all the 'help' was simply to tell people to remove me from my own home. Must have been more paranoia though, right? I was mentally ill, remember?

I levelled my accusations about being dumped like this, and dragged away from everything I held dear. My partner and parents conspired to keep me trapped in this shitty village in the middle of nowhere. They even involved the police "for my welfare".

Anyway, after about a week of this shit, I decided to see if anybody had been using my laptop with my username and password. Strangely enough, and totally co-incidentally, they had been.

On examination of the logs, it looked like somebody had used my laptop and username to set themselves up an online dating profile and start messaging men. How strange. How curious.

Surely this could not have been my partner, for if she was using a computer at all, I'm sure it would have been to research the best possible treatment available for me, or to better understand what had happened to me, so that she could be as loving and supportive as possible, no?

My partner continued to treat me like utter shit and told me that any suggestion I made that she was not acting in my best interests, was purely in my imagination and fuelled by mental illness, paranoia.

Finally, I showed my hand, and she back-pedalled rapidly, begging my forgiveness and swearing that it was all a misguided mistake. She suddenly became nice as pie and started treating me with a tiny fraction of the respect and decency that I deserved.

I then had a brief taste of how I should have been treated all along, and it was nice. My stupid mistake was to then marry the evil *****. A leopard never changes its spots.

Be careful if you get mentally ill with a vindictive, selfish, mean-spirited little **** of a partner, because they might just try to chuck you out of your own house and replace you.

Tags: #divorce #mentalillness #startups #career #suicide #computing

This is a story about getting rich quick...

Don't get high on your own supply, they say. It's good advice, because weed seems to dull the wits of my friends, and to curb their enthusiasm for anything more than the getting of more weed, and the consumption of shit food and crap TV.

When I meet young people who feel like they're part of a counter-culture revolution, because they smoke a bit of marijuana, I think how easily they have been duped. How foolish you are, to think that you're fighting the establishment, through your choice of intoxicant.

Governments and the police are mightily pleased to have a stoned population, who are too doped up to be bothered to get off their arses and do anything about social issues, or involve themselves in politics. Chuckling at low-brow humour that is designed to appeal to the stoner brain, is never going to change the world.

The energy and passion of youth has been quashed by the dreaded weed. You're not cool or "fighting the power" by smoking dope. You're actually playing into the hands of the establishment. The cannabis leaf - that ubiquitous emblem - sells tons of merchandise. Camden Market is London's second most popular tourist attraction, and it's mostly because of drug culture.

But what hopes have young people got? They're never going to be able to afford a house, pay for a wedding and be able to support a family, without topping up their income somehow. For those kids with wealthy parents, they might be able to go with their begging bowl to Mum & Dad, but it's hardly the independent self-sufficient life that we should all be entitled to live, is it?

You bust your balls all through school, get some grades, and now what? You can get a massive student loan that will only cover your tuition fees, and you still have to figure out how to pay for accommodation, food & books for your 3 years of undergraduate studies.

Maybe you can save up money before you go to University, but under-18s will be paid £3.87 per hour. Do you think a 17 year old is less capable of stacking a supermarket's shelves than a 64 year old? Why on earth should a young person be paid just 54% of what an old person earns, for doing the same job?

While you're at University, you'll be paid slightly more for your bar work, waitressing or whatever part-time job you can get. You'll get a whopping £5.30. That's still 26% less than somebody with arthritic joints and early-onset dementia. Who would you want working behind a bar? The young attractive, energetic student, or the miserable old codger who shuffles around?

So, what do the most enterprising individuals do, to cope with the crippling debt burden that they face, with little hope of elevating themselves from a position of poverty? Well, some of them will sell their bodies, and sell drugs.

If you deny people a legal route to pay for a quality of life that they're entitled to, they will turn to a life of 'crime'.

The two bestselling commodities, in the history of humanity, are sex & drugs. Ugly people need to fuck, and people want to get high and forget about their shitty lives. The drive to get intoxicated is not even a uniquely human thing. There are plenty of examples from the animal kingdom of non-human species that get off their faces, using various substances.

You might think that demanding plenty of interest on your life savings and wanting a nice fat pension, is OK, because you're entitled to a cushy retirement. However, your young, beautiful and fresh faced daughter or grand-daughter might have few options to live independently, other than being a stripper, escort or 'flatmate with benefits'.

If you browse the London property adverts, you will see a shocking number of offers of free accommodation in return for sex. This is the society that has been created, by structuring everything around the pension funds, instead of investing in young people.

Can't get the job without the experience, can't get the experience without the job. That's the Catch 22 that entraps most young people into minimum wage jobs and living in shared rooms in atrocious quality housing in big cities. It's no fucking picnic being young at the moment, and weed is probably the only thing that allows people to forget the hopelessness of their situation.

A pint of beer in London is £5 or more. That means I can buy two pints for £10. For the same amount of money, I can buy a gram of super-strong skunk weed, and get dribblingly intoxicated for at least a day. Two pints would make me slightly tipsy, and because I'm well-off, I could then easily afford to have 3 or 4 more pints and get violent, abusive and urinate and vomit in the street. However, it's more economical - as a young person - to get stoned out of your mind and not do anything.

The girls who have sugar daddies, hustle for tips as waitresses and strippers or even sell their bodies - these aren't fallen angels, forced to prostitute themselves because they have a drug habit. Often times, the drug habit is a result of having to use what mother nature gave them, as a means to make money. These girls have a plan. They're smart. They've figured out that no amount of shelf stacking for a supermarket will allow them to ever escape poverty.

Our prettiest daughters and grand-daughters are living in luxury apartments in the city centre, taking taxis, eating in expensive restaurants and ordering cocktails at the bar... but how is that lifestyle funded? Every gorgeous pouting selfie you see on Facebook or Instagram... doesn't that say something about the sexualisation of an entire generation, through economic necessity, to you?

The boys will grow weed, or cut coke. The girls will strip or fuck. This is what we've wished for. The olds sit idle in their big empty houses, while their sons, daughters and grandchildren have no option but to pursue the most economically profitable path they can: drugs & prostitution.

I'm painting a bleak picture, but I don't think it's inaccurate.

"It's only a bit of harmless dope" right? Wrong. Can't you see that people's eyes are dulled. The fire has gone out of people's hearts when they're just sitting around stoned. Where is the energy and enthusiasm to change society for the better?

Tags: #drugs #addiction #society #politics #capitalism #sex #police

This is a story about body shopping...

What's the difference between a temp, a freelancer, a self-employed person, a contractor and a consultant? What's the difference between an employee and an entrepreneur?

Last year I was working for HSBC, along with a bunch of nice folks from several different consultancies, plus a handful of permanent members of staff. The teamwork was brilliant, but the surprising thing was that we all had different agendas.

Given that I had gone back to HSBC as a contractor, having been a permanent member of staff there for over 4 years, it was somewhat of a mindset change. I was also homeless and still very much in the vice-like grip of drug addiction, which wasn't a good start.

I was exhausted, and I had somewhat induced within myself, some fairly major symptoms of mental illness, which caused me to make some rather outlandish interpretations of the reality I experienced.

Imagine being plucked from the park, where you are living and contemplating bankruptcy and the coffin nail that will drive into your career, your business. Imagine facing up to the reality that everything you're qualified and experienced to do, since you started IT contracting at age 20, is now going to go down the shitter, and you're homeless, abandoned by the state - the council have sent you a one-line email saying that you're not even worth a hostel bed to them.

Then, imagine that almost overnight, you're working on the number one project for the biggest bank in Europe. You're so exhausted that you are sleeping in the toilet. Everything seems surreal, from the moment you put on your suit in the morning in a hostel dormitory paid for with a credit card you can't afford to pay off, to the moment you turn up in the headquarters of a prestigious Tier 1 bank that you used to work for, when you were clean, sober, young, happy, ambitious, energetic, enthusiastic and respected.

The challenge was to get through 60 days of working, without running out of credit completely. I had to get to work every day and pay for my hostel bed, for a whole month before I could submit my first invoice, which would be paid 30 days later. Obviously, it also looks rather unusual to your colleagues if you can't afford to eat lunch or socialise. The pressure was immense.

What does a poker player do, if they have a weak hand? They bluff, obviously.

To compensate for my fear, and the odds that were stacked against me, I turned the dial up to 11. I tried hard. Far, far too hard. I told the team that I'd take responsibility for a critical piece of work, and deliver it in a short space of time, along with an extremely capable colleague, who actually knew that it was a monster piece of work.

I should have been laughed out of the door. I can't believe that nobody particularly picked up on the fact that I was shooting from the hip, out of a combination of fear, exhaustion, drug withdrawal, mental illness and a touch of arrogance.

How on earth was my ego not going to be stoked? I had just cheated death, bankruptcy, destitution, and now I had the CIO of the number one project in the biggest bank in Europe surprising me, by naming me in person, as the team member responsible for one of the pivotal pieces of the program, in front of the entire town hall. I looked around - "is he talking about me?" - yes, it appeared he was. How surreal.

As a drug addicted homeless person, you're kind of invisible. People would like it if you just crawled into some dark hole and died, quietly. You're nobody's problem but your own, and everybody pretends not to notice you, as you drag your bags through the street, swatting at invisible flies and talking to yourself incomprehensibly.

Suddenly, people not only seem to value you, listen to you, but also look to you for some kind of professional guidance, leadership. Is this the state that important IT projects have reached, where the hobo junkie is the one calling the shots? I realise that I wasn't actually calling the shots, but that's what it feels like when you've been scraped up from the pavement, stuffed into a suit and now you're working in a fancy office full of glass, steel and granite.

It embarrasses me, but also pleases me that I'm still on good terms with a few respected colleagues, and they can tease me about "the time when you said you were going to deliver X by Y". However, not everything I said was worthless tosh.

This is where the difference in mindsets comes in.

As a permanent member of staff, your best shot of getting pay rises and promotions is to raise your profile. Given an hour to do some work, you might as well spend 50 minutes writing an email about what a brilliant person you are and how clever you are, and 10 minutes actually doing some work, rather than the other way around. People who just knuckle down and get on with the work they're supposed to be doing, tend to be overlooked when it comes to the end of year review.

As a contractor, you're all about contract renewals. When your contract is coming up towards its end, you're on best behaviour. You try to shine and make yourself a key-man dependency, so that you can demand a big rate increase, because you're indispensable. Personally though, I hate making myself a key-man dependency. It's unprofessional, however you are economically incentivised to do it, so many contractors dig themselves into little fiefdoms.

As a consultant however, you have the worst of both worlds. You have to kiss the arse of both the client and your consultancy. There's a huge conflict of interests. The consultancy want you to stay on your placement, and for as many headcount as possible to be working with you on the client project, if you're working time & materials. What exactly is consulting about being a disguised employee? Where is the value-add from the consultancy, when the client wants you to be embedded in their organisation, like a permanent member of staff?

The reasons for using consultancy staff, contractors, temps, freelancers, is that you can get rid of them when the project is done. However, the other reason is that you don't have all the headache of having to performance manage underperforming and difficult staff members out of your organisation. In theory, it's a lot easier to hire & fire... with the firing being the desirable bit.

It used to be the case that you could get a job as an IT contractor with just a 20 minute phone interview and start the next day. If you were shit, you'd just be terminated on the spot. Never happened to me, but that was the deal you struck... you'd be on immediate notice for the first week. Then you'd be on a week's notice. Then you'd be on 4 weeks notice, just like a permie. However, I always used to get my contract renewed, because I know how to play the game, kiss ass and keep my lip buttoned at the right time.

So, what happened? Well, stress, money, recovery from addiction, relapse, housing stresses and everything in-between conspired in my private life to mean that I was living life by the seat of my pants. I was running for my life.

After only a week in the new job, I decided that it was an impossible mountain to climb, and that there was no way that I could live in a large hostel dormitory and work on a stressful project, plus get myself clean from drugs, plus dig myself out of near-certain bankruptcy. There were just too many problems to face, working full-time in a crisply laundered shirt and a nice suit, while hiding the crippling problems in my private life.

You can't just go to your boss and say "I'm sorry I didn't mention this before, but I'm a homeless recovering drug addict, who suffers mental health problems at times of extreme stress and exhaustion, and I'm practically bankrupt as well as barely able to keep myself clean, sane, out of hospital and off the streets". Contracting doesn't work like that. Your personal life is nobody's problem but your own... you've signed that deal with the devil. You get paid more, but you're also expected to not get sick and not bring your personal problems with you to the office.

I disappeared on my second week in the job, getting mixed up with the police, thrown out of the hostel where I was living, and ending up in hospital, as the pressure was simply too much to bear, I thought that my lifeline was pretty much spent. The odds of being able to get off the streets were too slim anyway. It couldn't be done. I gave up, and relapsed.

Do you think you can just pick up the phone and say "errr, yeah, I need two weeks off to sleep, an advance of several thousand pounds, and I'd like to come back to work part-time for a little while until I'm up to full strength, because I've been dragging bags all over London, living in parks and on heathland, in and out of hospitals, rehabs and crisis houses, addicted to some deadly shit and battling mental health problems. It seems silly that I didn't mention this at the interview, as I'm sure you would have been just fine with giving me an opportunity to get myself off the street and back into the land of the living"?

You know what though? I did get a second chance. There's no denying that certain allowances were made for me. A blind eye was turned to the fact that I was basically either shouting at people or nodding off in meetings for the first week. I went AWOL twice. Once for a whole week where I basically decided that everything was f**ked and there was no way I could ever make things work, and once for nearly a whole day, when I was swept up in the euphoria of working with nice people and got paralytically drunk with my colleagues and couldn't face telling my boss that I was sick again.

Through my divorce, I lost heaps of friends who were shared with me and the ex. I decided to move back to London, because I knew I could find lots of work. However most of my London friends had moved out of town, in order to start a family. Also, you don't make many friends when you're living in a park sniffing supercrack, and getting hospitalised for 14 weeks a year. I can tell you more about the private life of a friendly police officer that I know, than I can tell you about some other acquaintances from that turbulent period.

Anyway, I was desperately trying to cement things - get my own flat, get some money in the bank, get into a working pattern that was sustainable - but it was too much to ask. 'Friends' sensed that I was recovering, and decided to come asking for favours : lend me some money, let me live with you, give me a job etc. etc.

When you're desperately lonely, because you've split up with the two loves of your life - your wife, and supercrack - you're vulnerable to wanting to people-please. I risked my reputation, when I got a so-called friend an interview, because he pressured me. I overstretched myself, renting a flat that swallowed up all my money, which was my safety net. I didn't even pick my flat... my friend did, and he thought he was going to get to live there rent free. I put up with a lot of shit, because I was desperate for friends, for acceptance, to be liked.

If you think all this can be boiled down to a 'drug problem' you're wrong. In order for a person to feel whole, they need friends, they need a job, they need a place to live, they need to feel that they're living independently : paying the rent, earning their money, able to pay for the essentials of life, and not always just hustling, on the run.

There are quite a lot of pieces to the puzzle that is a complete life that's worth living. Do you really think I just want to be kept alive, in a straightjacket in a padded cell. Is it unreasonable to want to work, to want to feel like I'm making a contribution, to want to feel like I'm liked, loved, to want to feel like I exist, and that I'm valued somewhere, by somebody?

I loved the instant social connection I had with the "winners" who were a group of fellow consultants at HSBC. There was good camaraderie, and they were young and enthusiastic, not bitter and jaded like me. Their enthusiasm for their job and inclusive social circle was exactly what I needed, along with cold, hard cash, and a place to go every day that wasn't a bush in a park, with a wrap of supercrack.

Somewhat unwittingly - although I don't know how much people were able to guess or find out behind my back - the Winners bootstrapped my life. Even though there were the usual commercial rules of the game, about being a disposable contractor who's supposed to keep their mouth shut and not rock the boat, there was still bucketloads of humanity there. People were kind to me. They invited me into their lives, and in doing so, they saved mine.

When a colleague texted me while I was in California, to say that we had to go back to work doing the shittiest possible work for a scrum manager we didn't have a whole heap of respect for, it was pretty clear that it wasn't sustainable. I busted my balls to get cleaned up, off the streets, into a flat of my own and to restabilise my finances. However, I've never been the best at buttoning my lip and allowing myself to be 'managed' by somebody I have barely concealed contempt for.

I knew that all I had to do to get my contract terminated was to send one or two fairly outspoken emails to the project's management team who were insecure and relatively incompetent. They'd actually started to listen and change things though, so there was no purpose to the emails I sent, other than to try and elicit an email saying "don't bother coming back to work" so that I could spend some more time with my friends in San Francisco.

The pressure of having to try and cement the gains that I had made, while still carrying some of the burdens that had been accumulated, was too much. I was in no position to be the responsible guy, picking up the phone every time things went wrong and having to mop up messes. I was in no position to be paying 100% of my rent, with a lazy flatmate who shared none of the risk and none of the financial burden or responsibility for making sure the bills got paid and the household ran smoothly. I was in no position to face months and months more, working at the kind of breakneck pace that was inevitable on a project that I had been forced to take out of desperation.

I had done far too many 12 or 14 hour days. I was on email around the clock. I never switched off. I had driven myself insane, pressurising myself to fix all the broken things in my life, and shore up the gains that I had made. Insecurity and fear had given way to delusions of grandeur. I wanted to do everything, for everybody, immediately. I was very, very sick, because of the enormity of the task of not only the project, but the problems I was overcoming in my personal life. A breakdown was inevitable.

Managing things elegantly was unlikely to happen. I dropped hints about needing a holiday, but I needed to be firm, to assert myself. People expected me to manage my own personal needs, but what they didn't realise was that my needs were conflicted: I needed a financial safety cushion just as much as I needed some time off. When the offer of overtime was wafted under my nose, and the management team wouldn't stop phoning me up at weekends, they didn't have to twist my arm very hard to get me to work Saturdays, Sundays, nights. I needed the money, and I needed to feel like I was important and valued again, having only just escaped being an invisible homeless bum, tossed out of civilised society, never to return.

My experience as an IT contractor, my seniority as somebody who's run large teams, as a Development Manager, an IT Director, a CEO... I'm no fool. I knew that I was working at an unsustainable pace, making myself sick, but what choice did I have? I had so much to fix, and money and hard work can fix most problems. I knew that I needed a holiday, but I was vulnerable to being pressured into doing things that I would never do, under normal circumstances, due to the fragility of my situation.

My colleagues were kind enough to drop hints, and to tell me the tricks that they were employing to avoid management pressures and the general panic that was endemic on the project. They could see I was tired, and going slightly mad. They were worried, and it was kind of them to think of me, on a personal level. However, they didn't really know just how bad things were in my private life. They didn't know just what a journey I had been on. They didn't know what I was running away from.

When I snapped, I didn't know where to run for safety. I thought the safest place would be hospital. I was desperate. I could easily have run for drugged-up oblivion again, even though I was 5 months clean at that point, and one month sober. I could easily have run for the kitchen knife, and slit my wrists in the bath. I was desperate. So close to recovery, and yet so far.

I needed to chuck my freeloader flatmate out of my apartment. I needed to quit my contract and get something easier. I needed to not have the expectation, the weight of responsibility I had unnecessarily brought upon myself, in my desperate insecurity and desire to feel wanted, needed, useful, important, after my entire sense of self had been smashed to a pulp by the dehumanising experience of destitution.

Hospital was a safe place to do it.

Then, unable to grasp the nettle of what needed to be done, which could have been as simple as saying "I need another two weeks off work, to go on holiday, because I'm fucked", I decided to just run away. I booked a flight to San Francisco, leaving myself just a few hours to pack my bags and get to the airport. What was my plan? I had no idea. Even suicide seemed preferable to continuing to live with such crushing pressure, fear and hopeless odds stacked against me.

After a few days amongst friends, I decided that I wanted my contract terminated, immediately. I fired off a provocative email to the CIO. Jackpot! The guy who was responsible for us consultants emails me to say that he wants to see me... in Wimbledon, miles away from HSBC headquarters. I mail back to ask why, but he deftly avoids telling me my contract is terminated via email, despite me pressing him on the matter. Does nobody get the hint?

I come back to London, pissed off that nobody has had the guts to actually call me out to my face, or even by email, and that I've not been able to extend my stay in California. Out of spite, I decide to embarrass the consultancy and the management team, by going into HSBC HQ, blagging my way in even though my security pass has already been deactivated. I march up to the program director and ask him if he's happy with my work, is there a problem? In front of the whole team, he says he's happy with my work and there's no problem, he's pleased to have me back at work.

I milk a few hello-goodbyes with colleagues who I like and respect, while watching the people who want me gone squirm with discomfort. I'm loving every second of watching who's got integrity, humanity, and who's decided that I'm no longer flavour of the month. It's a masterclass in office politics, even though we're all contractors, all consultants. I'm committing every exquisite detail of my final minutes in the office to memory, as I deliberately waste time having my breakfast, before making my way to Wimbledon to wind up the poor messenger whose job it is to try and help the consultancy and the management team save face, by terminating my contract.

By this time, my access to email has been revoked, even though a colleague who accompanies me out of the building, pretends like everything is normal and like we're just having a friendly chat - as opposed to being escorted off the premises by a security guard. I know. Do they know I know? Surely they must.

Unable to send a goodbye email, I ask a colleague who is also called Nick Grant, but who works in Leeds, to send an email on my behalf to a mailing group that contains everybody on the project. It's naughty as hell, but I'm enjoying twisting the knife. What is it that I've really done wrong, other than getting sick and having to go to hospital? What is it that I said, other than what needed to be said, the truth? But I know the game. I know that nobody wants a loose cannon. Nobody wants anybody rocking the boat. I didn't play by the rules. Does anybody realise that this is my way of quitting with immediate effect, and without having to work my notice period?

It might seem like sour grapes. I needed that job. I liked my colleagues. I loved that social scene. That contract saved my life.

However, how do you reconcile your social life, your personal difficulties, your needs, with the role you've been forced into?

What's the difference between a contractor and a consultant? A contractor knows they're a mercenary. They're there to earn as much cash as quickly as they possibly can, and they accept that they can be terminated at the drop of a hat. A consultant just doesn't realise they're getting a bum deal. There's no such thing as an IT consultant. It's just a made-up thing now that software houses and long-term IT contractors have fallen out of favour, with the dreadful rise and rise of outsourcing and this stupid idea that software is ever going to be cheap and easy.

So, to the Winners. Thank you for saving my life. Thank you for putting up with my rocky start, my dreadful ego, my shouting. Thank you for putting up with my arrogance, and for laughing at my over-ambitious ideas. Thank you for trying to keep me humble, and remind me of the rules of the game. Thank you for taking me into your lovely social world. Thank you for the emotional support. Thank you for treating me like a human being, not a software robot. Thank you for dealing with the fallout that I inevitably caused, when implosion happened. Thank you for not hating me, as I wandered into the territory of delusions of grandeur and heroics, and self-important jumped-up craziness.

You might not realise this, but you saw a rather twisted, weird, screwed up version of me, as I clawed my way up a cliff face of recovery, from the bankrupt, homeless, junkie, friendless, single, lonely, unhappy, insane husk of a man that I was, in mid-June last year.

It's been quite a year. God knows what happened with the Customer Due Diligence project, but I'm glad the due diligence on me didn't work, because the Winners and HSBC ended up unwittingly saving my life and getting me back on my feet. I don't think I would have ever had that opportunity if my dark private life was known in advance.

I'm sorry if it feels like I used you. Hopefully, it feels like a good thing happened. Hopefully you feel happy to have played a role in bringing a person back from the brink, even if I was a sneaky bastard, and somewhat underhand about the whole thing, as well as going a bit bonkers at times.

Silver linings, eh?

The photos I've put up include some rather unflattering images of a rather battered and bruised body, that just about hung together with sticky tape to somehow carry me through some brutal times. My private life wasn't exactly 'healthy' leading up to last June.

Tags: #career #banking #hsbc #computing #london #suicide #addiction #homeless

This is a story about national identity...

I will never be accepted in my place of birth, because I can't speak Welsh, I only lived in Wales for the first few months of my life, and I have English parents. I will never be accepted as a Yorkshireman like my Dad, or a Lancashire lass like my Mum, because I've never lived in the North of England, and I have a posh Home Counties accent. I will always be a Grockle (tourist) in Dorset, because I wasn't born there, just as I will always be a 'blow-in' in London, because I wasn't born within the sound of the Bow Bells.

So, I find all this talk of British national identity a bit laughable. This talk of a UK Independence Day, and "take our country back" is a joke. If you were to look at my passport, you might think I'm descended from Gauls, given that I was born in Wales where some of the oldest ethnic inhabitants lived... who perhaps escaped genetic mixing with Vikings, Saxons, Romans, Normans... but we know that's ridiculous.

The thing I like about London is that most people don't care who you are or where you've come from. It's a fairly meritocratic place where you can seek your fortune without being too held back by too many prejudices. It's a big enough place that any mishaps and misdemeanours can be overlooked.

I hate small-minded localism. I hate that "you're not from round these parts, are you?" idiocy... like it really matters where the hell you're from. I hate people who aspire towards some kind of backwards step, to a time when we lived in tiny villages and hamlets, in pockets of blissful ignorance. It's a nice fantasy, but it's never going to be a reality.

I've been that immigrant kid, bulking up a classroom that's already full. I've been in the minority, with a different skin tone from all the others in the classroom. I've been in the family that talks in their mother tongue, whilst living in a community that doesn't speak our language, and not observing local customs.

I know that while things are economically prosperous, there is joy in welcoming people of other cultures into our communities. There is novelty in observing and interacting with the outsider, and exploring the interesting differences between each other.

But when things turn sour and you're afraid for your job and you can't afford a house, and you start feeling pretty hard-done-by, it's natural to start picking on the odd-one-out. We're programmed to weed out the members of a herd that are different. As predators we look for the weak, the elderly, the young. As asexual beasts, we look for those who are most genetically normal, and reject the oddballs who might have undesirable mutations. We want those who share our genetic material - those who look the same as us - to survive at the expense of those who look different, who probably aren't part of our extended family, and therefore share our genes.

I get it. I understand this "look after our own" thing from the point of view of the selfish genes. There is no altruism, when push comes to shove and we feel threatened. And we feel really threatened at the moment. Housing, education, jobs, transport, healthcare, the economy... everything is screwed.

But you know what? You know who's really pushing you around? You know why you really feel threatened? It's because London is disproportionately represented. There's this little microcosm of politicians, lawyers, accountants, consultants and other highly paid professionals, who pretty much decide the fate of the rest of the country... not some bureaucrats in Brussels. You think the EU is why we have such a ridiculously financial-services centric economy? Is it fuck.

I know that in London I'm going to have the best of everything. All the tax breaks are going to go in my favour. All the infrastructure investment is going to be for me. All the political attention is going to be focussed on my concerns.

Yes, housing is a massive issue in London, but it's going to get addressed. Nobody dare let the concern of the City worker go overlooked, lest our precious position as a major centre for floatations, international litigation and the headquartering of some of the world's largest enterprises, be threatened.

However, 5 out of 6 people in the UK are not well represented, because we are so London centric. Do you think anybody much cares about the NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) on some God-awful sinkhole estate on the outskirts of a depressed Northern town, who is pissed off about their lot in life? Of course not, because they're neither economically nor politically active.

In actual fact, the tracksuit-clad pasty white housing estate resident, who drinks too much, smokes too much and abuses drugs, whilst having too many children that they can't afford to raise, is perhaps far more representative of the average citizen of the United Kingdom, than the suit-wearing, briefcase carrying City worker, with their well remunerated job in the service sector.

Yes, it's a liberal cliché to wring my hands with worry about the great unwashed masses. The voiceless angry mob outside London, who are in socioeconomic groups that mean that not even the advertisers care much about them, let alone the policy makers. However, something has captured the imagination of a much broader spectrum of British society, in this EU referendum.

Just as the killing of Mark Duggan was the catalyst for rioting in Tottenham, then in Croydon, and indeed all over the UK, it's clear to see that the motive for the vast majority of the rioting and looting was not to do with police action and race issues at all. It only took a trigger, for a wave of violence, vandalism, looting and rioting to be unleashed. People who would never think of running for Parliament or lobbying their local MP were literally voting with their feet, as they kicked in the windows of their local consumer goods vendor, and helped themselves to the merchandise.

I want London to feel as close to Berlin or Paris, as it is to Newcastle or Swansea. I want Europe to be united, but we are ignoring the fact that London feels very different from depressed towns and cities across the United Kingdom that are severely economically distressed, and politically ignored.

London cares more what the leaders of fellow European nations have to say, than what the mayors of other major cities do. What, for example, is the position of Liverpool in the whole Brexit/Remain debate? Nobody cares, in the newspapers that are written by London-dwelling journalists, nor in the benches of a parliament that sits in Westminster.

Distancing ourselves from Europe is the wrong thing to do. Bringing the rest of the UK into the decision-making that centres almost exclusively on London and financial services, is the right thing to do.

Tags: #europe #politics