Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

15. The Chase

Ten days had elapsed since he'd collected his first envelope from the post office. He'd slept twice, eaten all the food and drunk all the water. He needed to restock but his mind was fixated on collecting one of the other two envelopes.

Checking his appearance in the mirror on the back of the bathroom door, Neil decided that he would look OK if he wore his baseball cap to hide his dirty hair. Giving himself a liberal spray of deodorant and donning his clean clothes, he set off for town.

In a convenience store, he bought a few snacks and some bottles of drink. The post office handed over his letter with minimal fuss and Neil started his journey home. He had planned to stop at a village shop on the way home, in order to buy more supplies, but he was in too much of a rush to get back to the caravan.

While he had been staying in the caravan, he had felt exposed with the gaps in the curtains and the lack of window coverings anywhere else. He wanted privacy when he left the bedroom. He started to make a mental list of things he needed from a hardware store in order to better obscure him from prying eyes.

He hesitated for a moment before opening the second envelope. Was he already too sleep deprived and hungry? Had he been careless in not drawing attention to himself on his visit to the other town? He felt perfectly awake and alert. He didn't feel hungry. He'd made a reasonably rational appraisal of his appearance and ability to drive, to interact with people. However, he knew that the small worries would soon mushroom as he got more tired and hungry. He knew that he should have taken the time to buy more food and drink, as well as making the caravan feel more private.

Feeling slightly nauseous and nervous, he tore open the envelope and pulled out a leaflet advertising soldiers made of pottery. With absolutely no interest in or ability to read the Chinese text, only the vacuum sealed foil packet sellotaped into the back of the leaflet was of interest to him. Tearing the foil, there was a resealable plastic bag inside. He grabbed a bottle of drink from the kitchenette worktop, went into the bedroom and closed the door.

Minutes later, he was flooded with worries that he might have been followed back to the caravan. He started to worry that there was no way to lock any of the doors and an intruder could walk right in. He picked up a pair of tracksuit bottoms and tied one of the legs to the bedroom door handle. Now where would he tie the other end? He was afraid to release the tension that he was applying on the door handle with the tracksuit bottoms, as if somebody was about to attempt to try and open the door at any moment. He fumbled in the darkness, trying to find something at the right angle to secure the door closed.

There was a small amount of hanging space in an open wardrobe on one side of the bedroom and Neil tried to make the untied leg of the tracksuit bottoms stretch to the flimsy metal rail, but it was just too far away. He could tie the leg onto the curtain rail, but it was only made of plastic. Neil wanted the handle to be pulled upwards, so it couldn't be depressed, as well as pulling away from the door so it couldn't be opened.

After a considerable amount of time battling with the different angles and options, the knot on the handle came undone and Neil tumbled back onto the bed. The caravan rocked slightly and made a loud creaking noise.

"Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!" he whispered to himself.

"Stupid. Stupid. Stupid."

Then, he reattached the tracksuit bottoms with a double knot - making them even shorter - and reapplied pressure to keep the handle pulled upwards. His heart raced and he was sweating profusely. Spying the tracksuit top, he tried to reach it while awkwardly trying to maintain tension on the handle. With his left hand held aloft while his right hand reached down to pick up the other garment, his muscles were tense and his body contorted as he struggled comically with a task that he had needlessly overcomplexified.

At the limit of his strength and endurance, his arm weakened and buckled and he accidentally pulled the handle down with the tracksuit bottoms. The handle sprung back up with a loud clunk. He picked up the tracksuit top. His muscles ached and he was breathing noisily.

"Stupid fucking idiot" he whispered very loudly.

"Shut up! Shut up!" he whispered more softly but with a very angry tone.

Now he knotted the leg to one arm of the tracksuit. The other arm he looped around the rail in the wardrobe and started to pull. The rail sprang from its mounting and there was a a metallic crash as a pile of coat-hangers tumbled onto the bed. Neil was suddenly unbalanced and stumbled backwards, having to steady himself on the opposite wall and disturbing the curtains. The caravan rocked, creaked and groaned.

"STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT" he breathlessly whispered, fussing over the curtains to make sure they were still closed. He returned to the bedroom door and held the handle, as if somebody was about to burst in at any moment,

Neil's heart was thumping in his chest with his pulse throbbing at his temples and in his throat. He was breathing rapidly and wheezily. Sweat was running down his forehead and into his eyes, stinging them. He tried to calm himself down while still holding the door handle with a vice-like grip. His legs and back ached from standing awkwardly. He was shaking.

He lay down on the bed and held the door handle up with his foot. He was more relaxed and comfortable than he had been and the change of position gave his aching muscles some respite. He started to relax and calm down a little bit, even though he maintained pressure with his foot to make sure that nobody could press the bedroom door handle down.

After a while, holding his leg in that position started to hurt. He moved his foot so that his heel was on the door and the underside of his foot was supporting the handle underneath. Then, his heel slipped and his toes pulled the handle down. The bedroom door banged open with considerable force.

"SHIT."

Neil leapt up, slammed the door closed and lay on the bed with fear coursing through his veins. He tried to calm himself down again. It was dark now but shadows danced on the ceiling above him, where the curtains didn't completely block out all the light. He was hyper-alert now, hearing every tiny noise of the forest and studying the shapes that he could see moving in the darkness.

As time wore on, he was convinced that there was a bluish tinge to the light he could see and it was flashing. He felt rising terror. The police had either followed him back from town or his noisy exploits in the caravan had alerted somebody to his presence.

There was nothing in the caravan to connect him with his real identity. He needed to hide.

Quietly he unknotted the tracksuit and put it on. Then he opened the bedroom door and slipped on his trainers. There was no sign of blue lights but he was now intent on escape. He was convinced that police officers were now fanning out in the forest, trying to find him. They had probably switched off their blue lights so that he didn't see them and try to run away.

Opening the caravan door there was an awful creak which panicked him. His pulse started to race again and he was breathing heavily as he pushed through the branches of the trees out of the clearing. He wasn't being quiet at all, because he was so terrified.

Sprinting through the trees, he realised that he had been heading towards the edge of the forest where it thinned out. He could see open fields lit up by moonlight. Hiding behind a tree trunk, he surveyed the landscape and tried to calm himself. Dark shapes seemed to be hugging the hedgerows and making their way towards the forest from that side of the hill.

Now with more self-control and purpose, Neil moved soft-footed between large trees and paused to put his back to the thick trunks while he caught his breath and decided which tree he would move to next. Making his way back deeper into the forest, it became darker and darker as the trees were more densely planted. He found a tree that had branches that almost reached the ground and made his way to the trunk, hidden in the gloom.

At first, he held his breath and tried to move noiselessly around the tree, checking all angles to see if he could see anybody. He couldn't see anything moving in the forest, but he decided to try and be as still and quiet as he could, and silently observe.

He intently watched the trees around him for any movement and listened for any sounds. He saw torches flashing and saw men wearing black uniforms, sweeping the forest several hundred metres away. Then, behind him, he heard twigs breaking as a man walked right past his tree. He tried to keep his breathing as shallow as possible and stood as still as a statue. He knew that it would be very unlikely that somebody would see him unless they approached from precisely the right angle. He turned his head away from the man so that his pale face would not light up in torchlight and closed his eyes so they didn't shine in the darkness.

Standing so still and tense became extremely uncomfortable and his muscles started to cramp, but he was calm and patient. The sounds and movement seemed to subside, but Neil was still very afraid. He decided to climb the tree.

The tree that he was stood by had a thick trunk and lots of branches that would support his weight. Climbing was easy and relatively quiet because most of the foliage was at the end of the branches. Provided he kept his weight close to the trunk, he didn't cause the branches to sway too much. The sound of his clothes brushing the rough bark was the loudest noise, so he would climb and then pause for a few minutes before resuming.

In the darkness he had little way of gauging how far up the tree he was, but he climbed until the branches felt dangerously thin. He imagined that the canopy would give him excellent cover and anybody searching for him would be likely to be looking at ground level anyway.

He was worried about falling to his death if he fell asleep, but he was wide awake and it started to get light sooner than he thought it would. As dawn broke, it became apparent that he was not particularly well hidden in the treetops and he was much higher than he had imagined. The climb down was going to be terrifying and he could barely bring himself to begin. Reaching the ground became a much bigger concern than evading police capture.

Neil's descent was noisy and destructive. He was exhausted and had little strength to lower himself down from each branch. His choice of where to put his feet was much harder going down and he snapped several dead branches, sending them crashing to the ground. If there was anybody within earshot, they would be in little doubt where he was, but he was concerned that he might lose his grip completely.

Dropping to the forest floor at last, he was covered with bark, moss and tree sap. His body was bruised and grazed; his hands were scratched and sore.

There was a thick mist of low-lying cloud making everything damp and cold. Not a single animal or bird stirred throughout the forest. Neil stumbled through the undergrowth and soon he saw the trees that surrounded the clearing. He was surprised at how little distance he had covered in the night. Everything looked very different in daylight and he wasn't sure if there had been any police at all.

In the caravan, he collapsed in bed and managed to fitfully doze, relieved to have made it back in one piece. He resolved to buy the things he needed to make things secure and private, when he went to the third town for his remaining envelope. For now, he had everything he needed. He just needed to be more careful so that his own mind didn't get the better of him.

Next chapter...

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

11. The Shadow People

It had started out as a joke. Had he read about The Shadow People somewhere or had somebody said something to him? Neil couldn't remember. However, they seemed very real when they turned up in his life. It was always "they" or "them". When he started to try and explain who they were and how he knew that they were watching him, antagonising him, he struggled to put things into words. It was such a strong feeling, being stalked by them, but yet it was something that could not easily be expressed to people who had never felt so persecuted.

Neil had grown immensely frustrated, first with Lara, then with concerned family members and later with his doctors and other healthcare professionals. He quickly figured out that he couldn't very well say "The Shadow People are out to get me" without being locked up in a mental institution for the rest of his days, but he remained convinced that there were very real malevolent forces that were targeting him. It was difficult for him to try and explain things to people, when he himself saw that The Shadow People had just melted away in the cold light of day.

Earlier in the year, Neil began to believe that Lara was becoming hostile towards him and he started to become afraid and mistrustful of her. He started locking himself in the bathroom. Then he started barricading himself in rooms. He even locked the doors to the house. Lara's parents had come to help her to move out for a short time, to look after her while the couple was going through this crisis. Neil was convinced that they were all conspiring against him. When his doctor and his own parents showed up at the house at the behest of Lara, Neil felt totally besieged and betrayed.

The involvement of the police at times meant that Neil often imagined officers kicking the door down and dragging him away against his will. The escalating crisis had meant that the police were concerned about Neil's welfare. He knew the police had been looking for him and trying to get in contact whenever he went missing, but his very worst fear - apprehension by the long arm of the law - never actually happened. However, Neil was sure that he saw blue flashing lights outside his house and he could hear police officers communicating with each other via their radios.

As the crisis dragged on, everybody seemed to be antagonising him even though he wanted to be left alone. He wanted to be isolated in privacy, barricaded in a safe cocoon. Lying in the bedroom, he thought he could hear his mother speaking to somebody on the street outside. He heard car and van doors slamming and boots that sounded like the police force about to mount an assault on his home. Pretty soon the front door would be battered off its hinges and somebody would shout "POLICE! STAY WHERE YOU ARE". Then, he heard the TV in the lounge turn on. The TV wasn't tuned in to any channel and he could hear the hiss of static roaring out from the loudspeaker.

It took a long time to build up the nerve to go and investigate the TV, because Neil was sure that the police were going to storm the house at any moment. He crept down the stairs. He thought he could see people moving around on the porch outside, through the frosted glass above the front door. They would surely break the front door down at any moment. Growing impatient, he made his way to the door of the snug. He could hear the TV hissing with static quite loudly now. Stepping into the room, he looked at the TV screen. It was black. There was no sound of static anymore. He switched it off at the wall just to be sure.

Having returned to the relative safety of the bedroom, he heard the radio in the kitchen start to blare out static hiss. Entering the kitchen, the radio seemed to be off but it was still crackling and hissing. He turned it off at the wall and there was a kind of popping noise and the hiss stopped.

Later, the TV started up again. He knew that was impossible because he'd switched it off at the wall. The sound was unmistakable though. He wandered around the bedroom, trying to figure out precisely where the sound was coming from. It was definitely the TV in the snug. Creeping down the stairs and into the room, the TV was silent and there was no red standby light glimmering in the darkness. Who the hell was playing tricks on him? Neil was certain that the TV had definitely been turned on a moment before he came into the room. He unplugged it from the wall so that it was impossible for any power to flow down the cable. He assumed that the socket switch must be faulty.

The radio started hissing with static and Neil rushed to the kitchen to unplug it. This was becoming hard to explain. It had to be somebody playing tricks on him.

That was how The Shadow People slowly entered his life. They would come when he was tired and it was dark. He knew they existed because he could hear them whispering to each other, he could see them moving around as his eyes adjusted to the darkness and he watched the faintest light dancing on the walls, on the curtains, underneath doors, through cracks. Neil didn't dare throw open a door or switch on a light, because he was worried that other people were watching too. What if the police were there, waiting to make their move? What if his neighbours happened to be looking at that particular moment and saw him wild-eyed and sleep deprived, acting strangely?

Neil crept around the darkened house. All the curtains and blinds were pulled closed. Sometimes, he didn't know whether it was early morning or late evening. He didn't know what day it was. During daylight hours everything seemed a little more normal and he relaxed. Sometimes he would doze for a few hours. Daytime was confusing, because many of the threats seemed to have vanished. The police had given up and gone home. The Shadow People had disappeared. His persecutors seemed to know when he was at his most vulnerable.

Using his expertise as a CCTV engineer, Neil rigged up cameras to watch the front of the house and the back garden. The cameras had night vision, which gave blurry monochrome images in low light conditions. Watching the monitor screen intently for hours on end, Neil never saw anything that conclusively showed evidence of any untoward activity. He set up motion sensitive triggers and recorded video footage 24 hours a day. The only thing he captured was the postman delivering letters. This gave him little comfort. Instead, he wondered if The Shadow People had gotten more sneaky. Perhaps they had figured out a way to get into his house without needing to come in the front or back door.

Venturing into the attic, Neil knew that there were gaps into the attics of the terraced houses on either side. For hours, Neil crawled around in the roof. He spied into his own house through gaps around the lighting fixtures in the ceiling. He looked down through the hatch and imagined that he could escape the police if they broke in, by hiding up in the attic.

Covered in dust and fibreglass insulation, he finally descended down the ladder from the attic. The town and the street were too "hot". There were so many noises of human activity around him and people knew exactly where to find him. If he truly wanted privacy and to avoid being found, he would have to come up with an escape plan. Neil started to imagine how he could slip away and find some remote corner of the world where Lara, family, police and The Shadow People wouldn't be able to track him down and harass him.

Having a few good meals, getting some sleep, thoroughly washing and putting on clean clothes, Neil was in good shape for the journey down to the caravan. He looked after himself better than he had been doing for weeks, if not months. It was important to look as presentable as possible if he wasn't going to draw attention to himself when he ventured out into public.

When he was well rested and well fed, The Shadow People retreated, but it was important that he put his plan into action so that they wouldn't bother him when he was vulnerable. He knew that his fears of being dragged out of his safe space by the police, or persecuted by The Shadow People, would diminish whenever he slept, ate and took his medication, but those things conflicted with other strong forces that were driving him.

It had taken patience to execute his escape plan. As soon as he was freed from the clutches of psychiatrists, police and The Shadow People, he was sure that his life would be amazing. It had been exhausting, fighting the forces that conspired against him and living in constant fear.

At first, living in the caravan had been everything he'd hoped for. For about a fortnight, his plan had slotted into place perfectly. Then, everything had slowly crumbled. All his well laid plans seemed to fall to pieces and he felt as persecuted and afraid as he ever had done before.

When wind and rain lashed the aluminium skin of the caravan and the branches of the surrounding trees brushed the walls and the roof, Neil found the noises soothing, but soon he started to hear things that sounded like dog walkers, horse riders and nosey neighbours, all intent on discovering his private hideaway. Every trip out for supplies brought worries that he was leading people back to his secret sanctuary.

Now, he felt just as besieged as ever, but also dangerously isolated given the precariousness of his life and his survival prospects. The Shadow People would let him rot and die in that caravan, knowing they had successfully hounded him to his death. Nobody else would ever understand what had driven him into his current situation.

Next chapter...

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

9. The Villages

Within 20 minutes drive in his van, Neil could reach a number of village shops, roadside convenience stores and petrol stations that sold food and drinks, as well as a few other useful items. He wasn't able to carry everything he needed on his coach journey to the caravan, so being able to buy things locally was vitally important to his plan.

Because he wasn't driving a road legal vehicle, Neil had to stick to small country lanes. Where there was a major road, Neil would find a crossroads so he never had to drive any distance on a route where he might encounter police.

It hadn't been Neil's intention to stay so long and he had planned to avoid visiting any establishment more than once. It was winter and there were few tourists in this remote rural area anyway, except further towards the coast. Inland, it was quite possible that residents would start to discuss where he was living, if he started to be recognised more and more in the local viscinity. However, he had been getting more and more tired and sick and had little option other than to visit the places that were most likely to stock whatever he needed at the time.

Living in a caravan without running water for weeks and months, posed some practical issues when Neil came into contact with the general public. The caravan's water tanks were empty, so he washed with bottled water. In fact, buying and carrying back as much water as he could, without attracting undue attention, was his main problem. Washing himself used a lot of his precious drinking water, but it was necessary because his appearance and odour would otherwise betray the conditions of his existence.

At first, Neil had set aside some clothes to be kept clean and only used for his forays into the civilised world. With wet wipes and deodorant spray, he spruced himself up adequately. However, he had become thin, pale and sickly. He looked exhausted. He was dirty and smelly. Washing his hair and cleaning his body became necessary to attain the bare minimum standard of presentability to allow him to even enter shops without risking shock, fear and mistrust.

Knowing that there was a wild and dangerous looking vagrant sleeping rough somewhere in their community, the local residents would be on alert to find whereabouts this frightful creature kept appearing from. Neil was afraid that somebody would tail his van, as he made his way back to the caravan, to see him disappearing deep into the forest.

Buying larger and larger quantities of food, drink and other supplies from small local shops meant that he had to make fewer trips, but it drew considerable attention when he would clear the shelves of all the bottled water and a substantial proportion of the tinned goods. Neil's diet consisted mainly of cold beans, cold spaghetti hoops and cold ravioli, all in sweet tomato sauce. He ate very little anyway. He was increasingly gaunt and malnourished each time he went out for supplies.

Neil considered various cover stories he might use if confronted by 'innocent' smalltalk with the shopkeepers. Every story he could conceive of was likely to generate more questions that he didn't want to answer. At some point he might give a hesitant or regrettable reply. Instead, he chose to say that he was "just restocking" to which he had received mirthful replies to say that the shop would have to as well after his visit.

"Restocking again?" one woman had asked him, worryingly. He vowed never to return to that particular shop, which was frustrating because it was conveniently nearby and had most things that he needed.

Being deliberately vague was becoming increasingly hard.

"Have I seen you around here before?" asked a man.

"I don't think so" replied Neil, although he had seen him before.

The man hadn't pressed him further, but he knew that the questions would not always be so easily dodged.

"Do you live locally?" asked a female shop assistant.

"No, I'm just visiting friends" replied Neil.

"Oh. Where abouts?" she said with raised eyebrows, studying him.

Neil said that he had friends in a couple of the nearby towns. He had started to get to know the area quite well, and was able to name two towns that meant it was plausible he was travelling between them. The towns were larger than any that he would visit and outside his area of operation.

"I know Harminster quite well. Where abouts do your friends live?" she pressed him.

"I'd love to stay and chat, but I've really got to hit the road. I'm running late, sorry" he said with an apologetic smile, picking up a couple of bags of shopping. Embarrassingly, he had to return to the shop a moment later to collect the bottles he had bought, which he carried loose. The shop assistant held the door open for him, watching him load everything into his van and waving as he drove away. Another source of supplies was off-limits. His paranoia grew.

Neil cursed not using his expertise in CCTV and intruder detection to allay some of his fears of discovery. There were battery-powered motion sensitive cameras that had night vision, that could transmit their pictures wirelessly. Installing one of these cameras, hidden in the trees, would be able to monitor the track. It would be an early-warning system to know if anybody entered the forest while he was inside the caravan. When he parked his van, Neil would walk down the track to see if there were any tyre tracks or footprints indicating activity other than his own, but it didn't allay his fears, when he had only the sound that penetrated the walls of the caravan to alert him of approaching danger.

How much sleep had he lost? How many meals had he skipped? He reckoned he slept only a few nights each week. He would go days without eating. His stomach had shrunk and he didn't feel hungry very often. He was hypersensitive to noise and movement in the shadows. He was on high alert, despite his exhaustion and malnourishment. He had stopped sleeping in the conventional sense and instead started to micronap with his eyes open. The real world and the dreamworld sometimes melted into one. He would have blackouts and jolt suddenly back into consciousness, suffering confusion about where he was and what was going on.

It was thirst that usually spurred him into self-preservation activity. Despite a sense of hopelessness accompanying his pain, discomfort and suicidal thoughts, he was desperate for something potable to drink.

Neil wondered if he should waste time and energy trying to rescue some knotted and stretched clothing, damp and dirty, lying on the floor. The urgency of his thirst drove him to abandon his worries and make his way painfully to the outside door or the caravan. An immense fear of what was outside caused him to hesitate, swaying as he tried to support himself on his damaged legs.

Finally finding the nerve to open the door, Neil was blinded by daylight even though it was grey and overcast. The clearing was shady, but his eyes struggled to adjust from darkness inside the caravan. His temples throbbed with pain.

Deposited by the entrance was a shopping bag. Neil reached down, grabbed the plastic handles and hauled the bag into the caravan. He shut the door to stop heat escaping and the warm moist air inside being replaced by the cold dry wind that blew through the treetops outside. Depositing the shopping on the kitchenette work-surface which was covered with dirty food wrappers and empty plastic bags, he began to rifle through the contents in search of something to drink.

Bright blue mould completely covered a loaf of bread inside its plastic wrapper. Sliced ham and chicken were well past their sell-by date. Neil couldn't possibly risk food poisoning in his fragile state. He had purchased these food items when his eyes were bigger than his belly. Eating had become a sporadic thing where he greedily gulped down the contents of a can before curling up in a ball and falling asleep, with uncomfortable sensations of nausea and indigestion washing over him.

There was a bottle of Worcestershire sauce that he had purchased in order to add more flavour to his bland diet of canned food. There were bags of jelly sweets, containing high quantities of glucose that his body desperately needed. There were salted crisps intended to keep up his salt intake, but he had previously found these to be inedible with his mouth dry and full of sores and ulcers. Then, finally, Neil spotted a can of cola amongst the food that he had bought. Grabbing the can, Neil didn't allow his hopes to soar too soon. Too many times he had picked up a container with joy, only to find it opened and the contents consumed.

The sweetness and the refreshment of the liquid in the can was divine and Neil guzzled as fast as he could without burping or throwing up. It was unfortunate that the cola was fizzy, as it meant he had to take small hiccuping gulps rather than quickly pouring the can down his parched throat into his empty stomach.

Neil paused to momentarily examine the rest of the contents of the shopping bag, but he knew he had purchased only this one can of drink, as a treat that he had intended to consume on his drive back to the forest.

After his last trip for provisions, Neil had hastily made his way back to the caravan after parking the van, only bringing with him a single bottle of water, bag of shopping and the precious envelope that he had collected. With his heart pounding with excitement, his body shaking with anticipation, his palms sweaty, he dumped the shopping bag outside the caravan and went inside with only the bottle of water. How long ago was that? A week maybe?

The envelope was now torn open on the floor with a leaflet for a tourist attraction half unfolded next to it. The writing on the leaflet was in Chinese.

Next chapter...

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

7. The Journey

A large black expedition duffel bag contained a red rucksack, which had a thick winter sleeping bag and a few other items inside it. The bags were virtually empty at this stage. The journey was just beginning.

His house was silent but Neil was being extremely cautious to avoid being followed, traced, or anybody interfering and attempting to derail his plans. He left after the morning commuter rush had quietened down. On foot, he made his way to the coach station. His appearance was very much in keeping with the usual way he dressed. In clothes that he'd often been seen wearing by his friends, neighbours and family, the floppy half-empty bag was the only thing that was out of the ordinary, if somebody were to recognise him walking down his local streets.

Coaches to London were regular and there was already one at the station. The coach had offloaded any passengers who wanted to alight and was now awaiting its scheduled departure time. The coach door was open and the driver sat in his seat reading a newspaper. Neil bought a one-way ticket to Victoria station from the coach driver and paid in cash. There were only three other passengers on board, who were sat well apart from each other. Neil stowed his bag above an empty pair of seats and sat down.

The coach was relatively new and clean, but there were common features of coach travel that had been preserved for posterity. The upholstery was grey with streaks of orange, beige and red in a pattern that ran down the centre of each of the seats. The luggage racking above the seats was black plastic with a moulded texture that poorly imitated leather. There were black plastic handles on the seats lining the gangway up the middle of the coach. The carpet and fabric covering the interior roof and underside of the luggage racking, matched the colours and patterns of the seats. Black plastic strips trimmed every edge. More black plastic was used for the air vents and reading lights that were above each seat. The windows of the coach had smoked glass and grey curtains also impeded some light, even though they were tied back. The inside of the cabin was quite dark, despite the bright daylight outside.

There was a hiss of compressed air as the coach door closed and then the engine rumbled into life. The coach would be stopping at several towns on its way to London, to pick up and drop off. The journey was scheduled to take a couple of hours if the service kept to its timetable. Neil had elected to use the coach because the quality of the CCTV coverage on coaches and at coach stations was far inferior to that of the rail network. The first challenge he was setting for anybody who was trying to find him, would be to discover whether he got off at any of the stops before the coach reached London.

By the time the coach reached London, many more people had boarded, but Neil still had two seats to himself. Getting off at Victoria took a little time as bags were retrieved from the overhead racks, but Neil was happy to blend in with a group of fellow passengers. The coach station was crowded with tourists and their luggage. Neil felt comfortably anonymous as he slipped away from the transport hub and onto the nearest busy main street, lined with many well known high-street shops.

Walking away from the coach, tube and rail stations, the shops started to change from national chains to smaller independent businesses. Neil was looking for somewhere that bought and sold second hand and refurbished electronics. He came to a street that had a number of mobile phone repair and accessory shops, along with family-run stores that sold cheap imported goods and had appropriated part of the pavement for the display of their extensive stock.

There was a shop that was painted with garish red gloss paint and had a metal grille permanently affixed to protect the windows. Through the mesh, Neil was able to see a range of electronic goods laid out for sale on glass shelving with prices handwritten on bright yellow stickers underneath each item.

Neil bought the cheapest laptop that the shop had on sale after checking it had the right version of Windows and it booted up OK. The shop owner was most bemused by Neil's request for a very basic phone that only had a monochrome screen and no camera or Internet browsing capability. Imploring Neil to spend an extra fifteen or twenty pounds in order to obtain a far newer and more feature rich phone, the man could not understand why Neil would not want features such as GPS, which would allow him to navigate using a maps application. Neil was firm and resolute: he wanted the most basic phone that the shop had. He purchased both items with cash.

From an electronic accessory store he purchased an inverter, that would allow him to charge his laptop and phone from the 12 volt cigarette lighter of a vehicle. From a newsagent, he purchased a pay-as-you-go mobile phone SIM card and several top up vouchers. Each top up voucher had a silver part that was scratched off to reveal a unique code. Every transaction was made with cash, making the laptop and mobile phone virtually untraceable. There would be no record of serial numbers and identifying codes that was recorded anywhere that could possibly lead back to Neil.

Entering a sports clothing discount store, Neil bought a navy tracksuit and a grey tracksuit with trousers that could be easily removed by undoing poppers down the length of each side. He also bought a black baseball cap and a pair of grey trainers that had black parts on the top and sides. After much deliberation, Neil had selected the trainers because it was hard to decide whether the colour of the trainers could be described as predominantly black or grey.

In a public lavatory cubicle, Neil got changed into the navy tracksuit, and then put on the thinner and baggier grey tracksuit over the top. He pulled on the baseball cap and put on the trainers, stowing the outfit he had been wearing in his rucksack. He then put his rucksack back inside the black duffel bag.

Killing time reading newspapers in a busy fast-food restaurant, Neil waited until night time before returning to the coach station. Arriving a short time before its scheduled departure time, he boarded the last coach to Bristol, which would arrive in the small hours of the morning.

After an uncomfortable night's sleep in the waiting room at Bristol's main coach station, made a little warmer by the fact that he was wearing two tracksuits, Neil now boarded the first coach to Exeter. There was a small cramped toilet on board the coach, but there were no other passengers for the first part of the journey so he was able to unbutton his tracksuit bottoms and stow them in his rucksack along with the tracksuit jacket, baseball cap and the black duffel bag, without the driver noticing.

As Neil stepped off the coach the driver asked "didn't you get on with a big black bag?"

"Nope" said Neil, walking off with his rucksack slung over one shoulder.

Walking safely out of earshot from the coach driver, Neil knew that he hadn't shouted or chased after him. That was the kind of minor incident that would be memorable if anybody was trying to trace his movements, but he knew that he had taken so many safeguards in his journey to this point that it would be virtually impossible to join up the dots.

It was late morning in Exeter, but Neil still had plenty of time to find a van to buy.

In the caravan, on the bed, naked and in pain, surrounded by filth and damp air filled with noxious smells, Neil struggled to reconcile the danger he was now in with his original and meticulously planned desire for total privacy and anonymity: to be in an isolated, remote location. He was virtually impossible to find and it was highly unlikely that anybody knew where he had gone.

It was certain that with inaction his organs would soon fail and his dead body would be discovered by chance months or years later. Decay would set in almost immediately and the smell of rotting flesh would attract flies as soon as spring arrived. Maggots would strip his corpse to the bone in a matter of weeks. The police would quickly discover that his Estonian driving license was counterfeit. Identifying his body would be impossible except using dental records.

With the available evidence, it would be nearly impossible for a coroner to conclude anything other than misadventure or return an open verdict. Neil started to feel frustrated that the secret of the well planned sequence of events that had led to this point, would go to the grave along with him. A fate that was finally sealed by his own inaction, resulting in nothing more than an impenetrable mystery, would be horrible. He started to wonder whether a written note would survive decay in the caravan for long enough to still be read whenever he was discovered.

What on earth could he possibly write in a note to convey the complex reasons why he had started this journey and reached this point? What could be achieved by connecting his last movements at home with his final resting place? It was an impossible task, to try to put things into words with his remaining time and energy.

It seemed important that his death should be understood as a result of deliberate action. Neil started to think about the razor blade he had brought with him. He wondered if the blood stains in relation to where his body and the blade were found, would leave enough clues to show that he finally chose to exit the world through suicide.

Suicide had not crossed his mind recently. He had been thinking about getting to hospital or at least getting to the road, where somebody might find him alive. Before that, he had been consumed by fear that he had been discovered and that his private bubble was about to be burst. He had been so desperate to never be discovered in such an appalling state while alive, that he had never stopped to think about being discovered dead.

Linking his name to the disgusting scene of his final resting place was something he wanted to avoid at all costs, but also, he couldn't bear to think that people would conclude he died by accident.

Next chapter...

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

6. Into the Unknown

Going to university as a mature student had been hard work but a lot of fun. Lara was only a few years older than most of the other student nurses and their training wasn't like a normal degree course. 50% of the time the nurses did their university work in a building that was a long way from the main university campus. The other 50% of the time was spent in the clinical environment of the local hospital. Lara's university days weren't spent partying and skipping lectures - the workload was relentless and she was soon doing long shifts to gain all the necessary hands-on experience she needed to qualify.

With Neil's salary, savings, some money from her parents and a bursary, Lara and Neil managed to keep their home life relatively unchanged after Lara quit her office job to retrain. A little bit of belt tightening was necessary, but the couple managed to struggle through 3 years without Lara's salary.

Although she avoided living in a dirty and messy student house, Lara didn't miss out on any of the social bonding with the rest of her course-mates. During those three years at university, she made a lot of good friends.

After qualifying Lara's friends had been scattered all over the country. Some of them wanted to specialise. Some of them wanted to get jobs in particular cities or closer to family. There were a lot of jobs in London, which attracted many friends to move there, but Lara wanted to stay in the local area. For a lot of her friends, they were bored of the unremarkable university town they had spent three years in.

Working at a big hospital as a general nurse, there was a lot of variety in the day-to-day challenges. There were a lot of staff. There were a lot of departments. There were a lot of different procedures that could all happen within that large hospital building. The NHS had been closing smaller local hospitals, in preference for larger facilities, so that fewer items of expensive equipment had to be purchased nationally.

One of the few things separated from the general hospitals was mental health care. While the hospital had a handful of mental health specialists, they were in a psychiatric liaison role. Any physical health issues would be treated at Lara's hospital and then the patient would be transferred if they required inpatient care for mental health issues. There was a clear demarkation between general medicine and mental health and the few people Lara knew who had specialised in that area had followed a very different career track from her.

As a medical professional, Lara felt frustrated that she didn't know more about mental health issues and there was little opportunity at work to have a casual conversation with any of the doctors. The doctors in the hospital had specialised in the treatment of physical ailments, disease, surgery. She only knew a few doctors who she should speak to if a patient was behaving strangely. In Accident & Emergency the hospital would treat drug overdoses, alcoholics and people who had physically injured themselves while in a crazed state, quite often accompanied by police officers. The police normally had a better idea of what psychiatric issues the patient suffered from than the hospital staff. It seemed as though the police were at the front line of mental health issues.

Although she had bandaged lacerated wrists and dealt with patients who had swallowed handfuls of pills or poison by treating them with activated charcoal, Lara never really knew the story behind what had brought them to the brink of suicide in the first place, or what happened to them after they were physically healthy enough to be moved to a psychiatric facility. The patient notes for the nurses contained details such as blood pressure and medications. Very few details about the psychological problems that troubled these people were in the notes she saw.

When the weekend arrived, Lara found herself turning to the Internet to find out more about depression and how it was diagnosed and treated. It seemed strange that despite her training and experience, she should have to turn to websites for information, but she didn't know who to speak to. She knew friends had suffered bouts of depression, but it felt insensitive to phone them and say "Hey! You've been down before. What can you tell me?" Those friends who had become depressed never discussed the details of their prescribed treatment openly.

Lara knew her mum had become depressed after giving birth to her little brother. Her mum had sought help from the family doctor. Lara's mum said that a little time talking to the doctor about her feelings had been exactly what she needed. That was over 20 years ago. GPs didn't have much time to talk to their patients anymore. At the local doctor's surgery, Lara seemed to see a different doctor every time she visited.

Therapy conjured up images of whiney New Yorkers, self-indulgently talking about how their daddies didn't love them enough, on a psychotherapist's couch, spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Lara thought that to suggest counselling might make Neil more upset. Many people derided therapists as "quacks".

Having spent the week without socialising amongst their usual circle of friends, Lara now faced further isolation all weekend, as the couple cancelled their plans. There was little that Lara could do to help at home. Even asking Neil "are you OK?" could be a barbed question, when clearly he was not. It was very British to say "I'm fine thanks" as an automatic response whenever anybody asked how you were, no matter how dreadful life was feeling at that moment. Neil and Lara's parents had been raised in an environment of post-war austerity, where stiff upper lip and concealment of any inner emotions was considered the preferred way to conduct yourself. The touchy-feely stuff was not dealt with well by either family.

By Monday morning, Lara was relieved to be able to immerse herself back in her work. Throughout her shift she barely had a moment to herself to dwell on personal issues. For the sake of the patients and her team, it was imperative that she was positive and upbeat, concentrating, not distracted. She was expected to be a pillar of strength and exude confidence when patients were scared, in pain and discomfort. Context switching was surprisingly exhausting, but it didn't hit Lara until she left the hospital.

As the week wore on, Lara found that she was less and less able to carry the caring face she wore all day at work into her home. She felt like she had lost the support of both her partner and her social group and she could barely keep her own head above water. By Friday, some tiny slip of the mask must have betrayed how truly drained she felt, because the Ward Manager called Lara into her office at the end of her shift.

"Is everything OK, Lara?"

"My fiancée hasn't been very well for a couple of weeks, but I really didn't want to bring my problems with me to work, Judy, sorry" replied Lara.

"It's OK. You just look a little under the weather. I hoped you weren't coming down with something. Your work has been fine this week. No complaints from me" said Judy.

"Yeah, I'm fine. I'm just going to sleep all weekend and let my batteries fully recharge" said Lara.

"Well, look after yourself. Are you getting the support you need at home?" asked Judy.

"Yeah. We're getting by. I'm sure Neil's going to be feeling better and back to work soon" replied Lara.

"Neil. That was it. I remember you saying you'd got engaged, but I must admit I'd forgotten your fiancée's name. Any news on the wedding?" asked Judy, turning the conversation more light and casual.

"No, we haven't even started planning yet" replied Lara.

"Oh well. No rush" said Judy, glancing down at some paperwork on her desk.

"See you Monday. Have a good weekend" said Lara.

"You too" replied Judy, busily scribbling notes onto a yellow form she had been filling in when Lara had entered the office.

Lara fetched her coat and bag with some sense of relief, but also the nagging feeling that she had somehow trapped herself. Next week at work, she would have to work hard to keep a brave face on things. It would be harder now to admit that she wasn't coping well. All she could hope for was that things would be getting back to normal sooner rather than later.

Anne was hurriedly pulling on her coat as she jogged along the corridor to catch up with Lara, who was making her way to the lifts.

"What was that all about?" Anne asked.

"Oh, she was just asking if I was OK" Lara replied.

"And are you?" Anne asked.

"Not really" said Lara.

Next chapter...

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

5. The Van

The freedom of the open road; the remote isolated locations that could be reached anywhere in the country; the ability to up sticks and move at a moment's notice; the anonymity of a mass produced vehicle; the privacy of metal walls. Buying a van seemed like the perfect "plan A".

However, the plan didn't bear close scrutiny. With cold hard rational analysis, there were a number of flaws.

In order to buy a street legal van, it would have to be taxed and have passed an annual safety inspection to certify that it was roadworthy. This would increase the asking price considerably and make a cash transaction unworkable. A sizeable bank transfer would be something that would catch somebody's attention and warrant further investigation.

There was a risk of being caught driving without insurance. There was the question of the name and address where the van should be registered. Both of these posed a significant problem, as the insurance company and the vehicle registration agency would both send postal mail and anything undeliverable would alert them to the fact that a false name and address had been given.

By doing things legally, the police could search the vehicle registration database and then alert the national force to look out for a van make, model, colour and a certain numberplate.

Public roads were a hazardous place to be. An accident would trigger an avalanche of issues. Even finding safe places to park a van would be extremely difficult. Anywhere that could be reached by public road was hardly isolated and remote.

Neil decided to relegate the van idea to "plan B".

When he remembered the caravan Neil's new "plan A" began to take shape in his mind, but he still needed some way of travelling around when he reached the caravan. Initially considering cycling, he dismissed the idea because he knew it was a remarkable sight to see somebody on a bike in winter on steep hills. A vehicle seemed to make sense, because he could drive to local towns and villages on quiet country lanes, park on the outskirts and walk the short distance to get what he needed.

By buying a vehicle that was declared as an insurance write-off, scrapped or otherwise off the road, Neil wouldn't have to worry about the vehicle registration. He would just keep to the back roads and only make short trips. He would buy a van, so that he could use it as accommodation if the caravan was no longer there or useable.

Neil's journey to the caravan had brought him to the city where Westbound motorways ended. From there, only smaller roads continued deeper into the Westcountry. His first task had been to buy the local newspapers which had classified adverts in them.

Walking away from the city centre, Neil found a quiet residential area and an empty bus shelter. Here he got out a local area map, notepad, pen and his mobile phone. He started dialling the numbers of any advert for a van which was marked "No tax. No MOT". He started with the ones at the top of his budget, hoping that they would be more likely to be reliable good runners.

After a few calls that weren't answered and sellers who abruptly told him the van was sold and immediately hung up, he found a more promising lead.

"'Lo, s'Andy" said a male voice as the phone was answered. He spoke with a broad Westcountry accent. This was a good start.

"I'm ringing about the van" Neil tentatively began, not saying much other than the bare minimum to establish whether it was still for sale.

"Yar. Still got 'em." the man said.

"Is it a runner?" Neil asked.

"Yar. Use 'em every day to get around the farm see" the man replied.

This was great. Neil wanted this van.

"What d'you want 'em for?" the man asked.

"Just getting around on the back roads, the lanes, cheap like, you know?" Andy replied, put on the spot by a slightly unexpected question.

"Well if you ever broke 'em for spares, you should know the tank's no good" the man said.

"Fuel coming out a bit rusty, is it?"

The man laughed heartily at this.

"Yar. Yar. Sure is" the man said, chuckling again.

This codified exchange confirmed something far better than Neil could have possibly hoped for. The 'rusty' colour of the diesel meant this man was a farmer who was running the van on fuel that had been marked with red dye, because it was untaxed and intended only for farm equipment. It also meant that Neil would likely be able to purchase a tank of fuel from this man for cash, without having to visit a petrol station.

"The van is just what I'm looking for" Neil said.

"Yar. I speck 'tis" the man chuckled, knowingly.

"What's your name?" Neil asked.

"Andy, like I said"

They made arrangements for Neil to travel to a large village about 20 miles outside the city. Neil would take a local bus to the village and then walk up one of the lanes for about half a mile, where Andy would be waiting to pick him up. Neil would drive the van back to Andy's farm, to check it was running OK, then he'd buy the van and a tank of red diesel too.

Everything went smoothly. The van was quite small with faded red paint that was almost pinkish in places. There were patches of paint that were a much deeper shade of red and still had some shine, where stickers had been removed. It was clear that this van had formerly been owned by the Royal Mail, for a postman to do delivery and collection rounds. How ironic, Neil thought.

Neil drove out of Andy's farm gates just as it was starting to get dark. Finding the caravan and checking it was still OK to use would have to wait for daylight the following day and Neil would sleep in the back of the van that night. Driving through the forest with his headlights blazing was a risk, but it would only take a few minutes for him to be buried deep in the maze of tracks before he parked, isolated and remote.

How long ago was that? Neil had no idea. He knew it was weeks ago, but he didn't know exactly how many. Had it been months? He couldn't be sure, but he had the vague sense it was probably between two and four months. He'd arrived in the autumn and there was no sign of spring, so he felt certain that it was less than five months.

Although he had parked close to the caravan, Neil's damaged body felt as though it could barely carry him a hundred metres, let alone down the steepest part of the hill and through the trees to the gravel track where the van was. Escaping his predicament seemed unimaginably hard. He knew that his mobile phone had no signal. This part of the rural countryside was remote and black spots for phone coverage were common. Reaching the van was his only hope.

Pushing himself upright, he shuffled to the end of the bed. Bending his legs was incredibly painful, but if he kept them completely straight the pain subsided to an ache which was tolerable. He grabbed at the doorway and pulled himself onto his feet. Sharp shooting pains in his back caused him to yell aloud, wince and jar his body from the shock. He could do nothing more than stumble out of the bedroom, hunched over. He propped himself up on the kitchen worktop, opposite the bathroom door.

Neil really didn't want to open that door. Around the edge of the door, moistened toilet tissue had been used as improvised papier mâché, hardening as it dried to create a better seal. Instinctively Neil drew a deep breath and held it as he pulled the handle. The door creaked open. Inside the bathroom, the chemical toilet was filled to the brim with unspeakable filth. It was regrettable that the only mirror in the caravan was on the back of the bathroom door, but Neil wanted to know what his face looked like. The smell from the toilet had been unleashed and it was disgusting, but Neil was in such physical discomfort that he barely retched.

His eyes shone brightly: two glassy baubles in the murkiness of the caravan. His pupils were fully dilated in the half-darkness; two inky black circles taking in all the horrific detail. His eyes seemed sunken into dark blackish-purple skin, which served to further emphasise the deathlike pallor of the rest of his face. Facial hair sprouted unevenly from sideburns, top lip and chin, as well as other patches on his face. The hair was coarse and wiry. The bridge of his nose bore a scab. Perhaps he had broken his nose at some point? He couldn't remember. There was a scab on his right cheek and one on his chin, which caused another patch of missing hair on his unkempt and unruly beard. The hair on his head had grown untidily and surprisingly long, and it was greasy.

Able to better examine other parts of his body with the help of the mirror, Neil noticed that there were deep hollows above his collar bones and the contours of his ribcage were clearly defined as they ran down the centre of his chest. He was clearly malnourished and his muscles were wasting away. Things were worse than he had imagined. Seeing his own reflection shocked and scared him a little, although there was no sense of panic or alarm. He feared his own image in the same way he would fear any ghoul that surprised him in the darkness. He could barely recognise himself. He knew that his appearance would be extremely shocking to anybody who saw him. This presented additional difficulties.

Closing the bathroom door in the hope of trapping the noxious smell within the tiny room, he contemplated whether he should open the outside door in order to recycle the air in the caravan. He decided instead to keep the heat in, given that he was naked and everything was quite damp. Stumbling back to the edge of the bed, he clawed his way back to the position he had been laying in before. He felt exhausted and queasy, although he knew that he would not be able to vomit. His bile had dried up.

The momentary nausea passed and Neil reflected on how he would have found it easier to make his next move if he was in the back of the van, rather than in the caravan.

With hopelessness came apathy, calmness and philosophical thoughts. Neil noted with macabre amusement that he wasn't praying to any deity or whimpering for his mother.

Next chapter...

This is a story about slavery...

Do you have to run just to stand still? Does it seem like no matter how hard you try, you just can't get ahead? Why is it that the only time you're going to get to enjoy any leisure time, is when you're sick and old?

Even if I owned my own home outright, I would still need to pay council tax, gas, water, electric and sewerage. Even if I grew all the vegetables I needed and never left my plot of land, I would still need to raise a significant sum of money every single month.

Let's assume that I had solar panels, wind turbines and I heated my own water using firewood from my own trees. Let's assume I got water from my own well, and I operated my own miniature sewerage plant, so I could release my processed effluent back into the water table, without breaking environmental protection laws. I would still have to pay council tax.

I don't object to council tax. Council tax pays for the police, who will protect my self-sustaining home from being burgled. Council tax pays for the fire service, who will come and douse my house with water, in the event that it should catch alight.

If I never leave the house, I grow everything I eat and compost everything I waste, then I have no use for dustbin collection, and I have no use for street lighting or roads. I have no use for car parks. I have no use for regular parks and recreation grounds.

Furthermore, I have no use for schools or libraries. I certainly have no use for councillors, council officers and other civil servants.

Let's assume I surround my land with a 15-foot electrified fence, topped with razor wire. Let's assume that I install a sprinkler system, and have my own high-pressure hoses and firefighting training. I would still have no exemption from paying council tax. Paying council tax is my civic duty, because of the air that I breathe in a particular county.

This isn't a rant about how "taxation is theft". I'm just pointing out that there's no such thing as a free man in the United Kingdom. Somebody will always want something from you, even if you're minding your own business, being totally self-sufficient and working in harmony with nature and the land.

Very few people would be able to buy a sufficiently large plot of land to be able to grow enough trees to give them a lifetime's supply of firewood. Also, you're going to need somewhere to grow all those vegetables you're going to eat. You're probably going to need greenhouses and polytunnels to grow more frost-sensitive fruit & veg.

There's capital expenditure necessary to buy a wind turbine and a lifetime of spares for any repairs. Solar panels don't come cheap, and they have a finite lifespan. You're going to need a shittonne of batteries, so that you can store energy for when it's not windy or sunny.

You're going to need a well insulated house with a wood-fired boiler to heat hot water as well as to keep you warm in winter. Your home is going to have to be super energy efficient, because you don't have much electricity, so you'll use LED lighting and cook on a wood-fired stove. You won't be able to use a washing machine, dishwasher, tumble dryer, electric oven, microwave, electric hob, hairdryer, electric heater or other electricity consuming units.

Then, to keep your smallholding running, you're going to need tons of tools and machinery. Doing it all on your own means you'll want a petrol-powered rotivator, strimmer, lawnmower and a bunch of chainsaws to chop up all that firewood. You'll need lots of gardening equipment to make sure you're growing enough food to keep yourself nourished the whole time. You'll need lots of building equipment, to make sure you keep your house repaired and maintained.

If you don't have a well on your plot of land, you're going to have to dig a borehole and install a pump. Building a sewerage processing plant is no small investment of time, labour and materials, and probably not something you would do yourself, although you would be responsible for ongoing maintenance: a lovely job.

Remember, you're also going to need a lifetime's supply of petrol, engine oil and other consumables such as soap, toothpaste, spare lightbulbs etc.

So, after all this, your miniature self-sustaining estate has probably set you back the best part of £1 million, and you still have to work full-time to tend to your fruit and vegetables, and maintain all the equipment that generates power, pumps water, pumps sewage etc. etc.

Worst of all, you're going to have to sell some of the fruit & veg that you produce to pay your council tax, so really, you're not very free at all.

You may end up busting your balls in all weather, just so some council bureaucrat can take paid sick days and generally not work very hard at all.

Through economies of scale, farmers can harvest the crop in huge fields in a single day, when previously it would have taken men and women all summer to do it with sickles and scythes. Something as basic as a masonry nail is incredibly hard for a blacksmith to make, but in factories, vast quantities of goods like nails can be produced much more cheaply, in terms of labour effort.

"The good life" and nostalgia for a time of peasantry is nothing more than stupidity. Only a tiny handful of people blessed with inherited wealth can be idle in the countryside, doing the occasional spot of gardening, and otherwise spending their trust fund income in Waitrose and charging around the countryside in a gas-guzzling Range Rover.

Thus, I don't believe in communism, with its emblem of the sickle and hammer. Growing your own vegetables, or making ornate ironwork is a nice hobby, but we don't want to return to the era of blacksmithing and working in the fields. The combine harvester is a thing of great progress, as is the ability to mass-produce metal goods in factories.

The communes that sprang up in California in the 1960s and 1970s all failed, because they were set up by lazy bums who just wanted to sit around smoking dope. When they ran out of money, they found that they had been subsidising their stupid middle-class fantasies all along. Eventually power struggles tore the little hippy communities apart, but they were doomed to failure from the start.

In climates where the need for heating is less pronounced and the crop yields can be much higher, there are already population problems. For sure, you can go and buy a plantation in the developing world relatively cheaply, but aren't you then headed down the colonial path? When you employ local labour to till the fields, because it's too hot to do it yourself, you've then economically enslaved your workforce.

The division of labour is a hard problem to solve, but there is also dignity in labour, if you're doing something that you feel is productive and useful. Perhaps the high sickness rates in local government are due to the fact that their staff know that all they're doing is pushing paper around their desks and looking busy. It doesn't feel morally right, to tithe the estates of the hard-working men and women who are working the land, only to spend it on fancy offices, coffee machines and watercoolers.

Eventually, I decide that we must move to a model of state-owned enterprise for everything that's in the public interest: transport, education, healthcare. But where do you stop? What about housing, food and clothing?

Clearly the technocrats of the Soviet Union completely failed in their attempts at central planning, but can we be sure that there's less wasteful use of resources in private enterprise? My experiences certainly don't bear this out. Every company I've ever worked for has been full of idle incompetent fucktards. That's not supposed to happen in capitalism. Capitalism is supposed to lead to efficiency.

If we look at the vast amounts of food and energy that are wasted by the United States and Britain, we can be certain that capitalism is a failed model for the efficient use of labour and scarce resources, and the fair distribution of wealth. Capitalism has failed every single test, including its ability to weed out the 'bad apples'. One only has to look at the 2008 financial crisis to see that the idea of market efficiency has been replaced by monstrous monopolies: enterprises that are too big to fail, but are bleeding our economy dry.

The banks need to be nationalised. The railways need to be re-nationalised. No more council houses can be sold off. Any private parts of the National Health Service need to be re-nationalised, and a huge cull of middle-management dead wood needs to happen. Executive pay needs to be capped, and those who wish to work in public services should be proud to be performing their civic duty for their fellow citizens.

Of course, wealth will flee offshore. Investors will panic. Let them.

The assets are here. The workforce is here. We don't need the paper money created by the plutocrats. We can rebase our currency back to a sensible gold standard, forgive all loans and start over. Clean slate.

One only has to study the German economic miracle to see that these reforms can work, do work, and will transform a country into one of happiness and productivity.

The strategy of trying to print money to get out of economic trouble, and enforce bad policy with a police state and martial law, is always doomed to failure. We are at the tipping point. Things could boil over at any moment.

So, the Western world finds itself at a crossroads: to continue with the folly, down a path that has always led to ruin for past civilisations, or to learn from the lessons of history, and take the alternative route.

Tags: #politics #economics #capitalism

This is a story about spoon feeding...

There are a number of writing guides that suggest cutting out unnecessary words, shortening sentences and generally dumbing down what you write to appeal to the lowest common denominator. I personally think that would be an insult to the intelligence of anybody who takes the time to read my writing.

The academic equivalent of willy-waving is to try and pepper your text with obscure vocabulary and other curios. At best, you're going to impress some sneering pretentious elites. At worst you're going to write impenetrable text that's virtually unreadable without a dictionary. Somewhere in-between the best and the worst, you're going to trip yourself up and have those who are highly educated chortling at your clumsy use of language, while everybody else just thinks you're a stuck-up twat.

I write in a conversational manner, very much in the voice of my internal monologue. You, as the reader, must hear the stream of my thoughts, as a facsimile in your head as you read my words.

With editing, I could produce more concise text. With some rewriting, I could represent ideas and concepts, experiences and stories, in a much more concise manner. I could write to convey things with much more simplicity. But then, wouldn't you just be reading yet another yawnfest of Internet banality?

To try to be original is impossible: we are all just a product of our experiences. Monkey see, monkey do. However, to be authentic merely takes bravery... or is it stupidity?

I'm not writing a Wikipedia article. I'm not writing a self-help guide. I'm not writing a scientific paper.

This is a secret diary that has been made public. This is my psyche, laid bare so that my distress, confusion, isolation and the hideous complexity of the circumstances that I find myself in, are not obscured from view. I'm genuinely concerned for my safety, and without my detailed account of who I am, I might die completely misunderstood.

Don't we all fear that we might die misunderstood? Well... it's more complex than that.

If you have kids, you fear that you're not going to get to see them grow up. The fact of the matter is that you're unlikely to outlive your kids, but you've set yourself some unspoken milestones:

• "As long as I get to watch them grow up to the age of 18, I'll be happy"
• "As long as I get to watch them graduate from university, I'll be happy"
• "As long as I get to watch them get married, I'll be happy"
• "As long as I get to meet my grandkids, I'll be happy"

Perhaps you're concerned about how elderly your parents are getting, and you want to be around to look after them. Perhaps you're loved by your brothers and sisters, and your nieces and nephews. You're aware that you'd leave a hole in your family's life if you were gone.

Things are a bit different for me.

This is what my mum said to me, when I asked her why she never travelled the 45 minutes on the train to come and see me when I was in hospital:

"The police will tell us when you're dead and we can come and identify your body at the morgue if we have to"

I think it's pretty clear that my parents have faulty genes that need to die off. I can understand that you might not want to spend £5,000 on an operation to save the life of your pet hamster. However, I would spend thousands if my cat or my dog got sick. I would spend every penny I had, to save my child. My parents didn't think I was worth the £20 for the train fare from Oxford to London, and the 45 minutes of their time.

If you want to understand how or why I arrived at the notion that my family would not only be better off without me, but they actually actively want me dead then you only have to study that one example.

Whether you like it or not, you are responsible for your children's lives. Your children didn't ask to be born. Your children are not supposed to be grateful to be alive. You're supposed to be grateful if you have healthy children.

It's a risky decision to have a child: they might be born with birth defects, they might be disabled. Your child might be suffering and in pain. Instead of adopting one of the many children who don't have a family, instead you decided to create an extra mouth to feed on the overcrowded planet, and take a chance that your shitty genes might leave them with terrible quality of life. Instead of considering what you could give the child, you thought about what you could take in terms of feeling satisfied that you have procreated.

Being brought up to feel apologetic that you even exist is an awful thing. Being told you're a bad kid because you didn't pop out of the womb ready to serve your parents like some subservient sycophantic butler is an awful thing.

"I taught you how to use a spoon"

Don't make me fucking laugh. If you don't feed your kid you're a negligent parent. What do you want, a fucking medal for taking the bare minimum responsibility for the life that you chose to bring into existence? If my parents didn't teach me to eat using a spoon, I would have eaten with my hands, or somebody with more of a nurturing instinct would have taught me to eat using cutlery, or I would have died earlier and suffered less.

Yes, I've reached the point now where I'm basically saying "what's the fucking point?".

What is the point, really? Surely, it's a fucking gift to rear a child and be pleased you actually took some fucking responsibility. There can only be shame in neglecting your responsibilities. There are no medals and ticker-tape parades for parents, because you wanted to fuck, you wanted to experience the miracle of life, you wanted it... your kids didn't. Remember that: nobody asked to be born.

If your kids are miserable and want to die, you have failed miserably as a parent. Victim blaming is no use to sidestep the responsibility. On the day of judgement, can you say hand on heart that you acted in your child's best interests, given your decision to create that child in the first place?

We are not fucking fish! We don't just spew out eggs and sperm into the ocean in the hope that some of our spawn reaches adulthood. What the fuck happened to your brain? What the fuck happened to your education? My parents both had the benefit of free university places. My parents both think they're oh-so smart. It's not like you can hide behind the defence of saying you're just a dumb animal.

I'm smarter than an animal. I'm smarter than my genes.

I know that my genes program me to want to procreate, but I can choose not to. In fact, on the evidence of the behaviour of my parents, passing on their genes would be the most irresponsible thing I could possibly do. Clearly this line of genes needs to die out, because I detest parents who don't take responsibility for their choices, their children.

My parents are too stupid to even read, as it turns out. I suckered them in with some honeyed words, to get them hooked reading this blog, and then I dialled up the honesty. They could not have cut & run any faster. Like Usain Bolt, they sprinted for the hills. The truth is hard to deal with when the only way you can look yourself in the mirror and sleep at night is by pretending your son is already dead.

It's a bit strange to write and write and write like this, labouring a point, but until they die from old age, smoking and drug/alcohol abuse related illness, I feel there needs to be this constant reinforcement of the consequences of their mistreatment of me.

Instead of thinking "my friends would miss me" I think "what if my parents attempt to corrupt the truth after I die". In a way, I'm staying alive to defend my memory, but when the truth is fully told I can finally collapse with exhaustion and rest in peace.

Sure, my parents spoon fed me. I wish they hadn't. If you're not going to go the distance, what's the fucking point? Why even start? It's fucking cruel, to bring someone into the world who didn't ask for it, and then to fuck them over. If I'm here just to pass on your genes, guess what? I'm not going to.

Why am I seething with such anger about something in the past? Well, it's in the context of how much of my life I felt secure, happy, loved (not much). It's in the context of how suicidal I feel (very). It's in the context of how things will look, when I'm gone.

The most loved I ever felt was when a lovely family in Ireland took me in. That just ain't right... what the fuck is wrong with my parents? Is it because they're drug addicts and alcoholics? I doubt it's the drugs or the alcohol because I'm very loving and nurturing, so I must conclude that there must be genes in me that haven't yet been expressed. I fear that I may be a terrible father, if I had kids, even if I was a loving caring husband, and I cared for my pets more than I even cared for myself.

Oh well, maybe it'll all be over soon and I can leave the final analysis to somebody else.

Tags: #parents #suicide

This is a story about looking after yourself...

I'm an incredibly calculating person. When I take a risk, it's a calculated risk. If you want to be a sailor, a rock climber, a mountaineer, you've got to be able to weigh up multiple factors. You look at the difficulty of the route or passage. You look at the weather conditions. You look at your equipment. You think about your crew, your rope party. You consider your own abilities. Failure means falling to your death, or drowning.

Let me give you an example.

I was at a petrol station, and I was paying at the counter when a car that was on fire was driven up to the pumps and then abandoned by the driver and passengers. They fled for their lives. The car was there, going up in flames, right next to the petrol pumps.

What would you do?

There didn't seem much point in standing around waiting for the fire brigade. There certainly didn't seem like a moment to lose, as there were passengers sat in their cars, waiting for the drivers to pay for their petrol and come back to their vehicles.

Selfishly, the best thing to do would have been to stay where I was, at the counter where I was paying, or to flee out the fire exit at the back.

I didn't think "I want to be a hero". I thought "can I put that fire out?". I decided that I could.

I went out onto the forecourt and shouted for everybody to get out of their cars and get the fuck away from the petrol station.

Then I picked up a couple of fire extinguishers and went and put out the fire. It wasn't unbearably hot because the whole car wasn't yet on fire. The whole engine compartment was on fire, but with the wind behind me, it carried the smoke away from me, along with some of the heat. I managed to direct most of the foam from the extinguisher into the engine compartment, and the flames were quickly put out.

That was a calculated risk.

I'm currently working a job that is destroying my mental health. It was a 6 month contract, and I calculated that in that time I could reach financial security. Financial security is an important component in wellbeing, given how shockingly appalling the welfare state is. It's more important that I'm able to support myself financially, than it is that I suffer 6 months of depression, putting me at risk of suicide.

My assumption is that when I have reached the point of financial security, I can have a mini nervous breakdown, and then start to recover without sinking back into financial hardship. If I have financial security, I can recover without becoming homeless and destitute again.

If I have learnt anything about my mental health to date, it's that I can recover from almost anything, given enough time & money.

It's sad to see lives thrown away because we treat them so cheaply.

If I can do it, I will have proved that it's possible to plumb unimaginably awful depths and recover, if only we would take the chance and invest in people. If only we trusted people. If only we respected people.

So many people get written off as if they're as good as dead, and that's disgusting.

It should be a collective stain on our conscience that we prefer to prop up the ideas of the "lost cause" and to discriminate against people because of the mistakes of their past, rather than looking at their potential.

Instead of chucking me into some "care in the community" bucket as an incurable madman, or kicking me into the gutter as a hopeless addict, I'm looking forward to proving what an injust death sentence that is. My parents are reprehensibly disgusting people for abandoning their own son when I was vulnerable and alone. My parents had insisted that they would help, only to renege on their promises at the vital moment.

I've done nothing but try to improve the lives of others. I'm not a thief, a liar. I'm not a violent man. I'm not even a criminal.

My dad's a criminal. My dad has a criminal conviction for his drug offences. The police have seen fit to caution me 4 times for various things, but the police have seen that there is no criminal intent with me that would warrant prosecution. My dad has broken the law and he has a criminal record. Why would he treat me like a criminal? Why would he treat me as if I've committed crimes, when it's him who has the criminal record?

I suppose we judge people based on who we really are. If you're a bad person, you see bad in other people. I've always given people the benefit of the doubt. I've always helped people, and even forgiven them when they've screwed me over.

I don't think I'm necessarily a good person, but I try to be. I try to help people. I try to see the best in everybody. I try to invest in people's potential.

It's a calculated risk, being nice to people. Sure, I've lost loads of money as people have taken advantage of me. I doubt anybody thinks I'm a mug though. I doubt anybody feels proud or pleased that they profited at my expense.

One of the best ever moments I can remember was when a young addict couldn't believe that I'd forgiven him for - as he saw it - scamming me out of a load of money. In actual fact, my risk was hedged. It was a calculated gamble. I just hope that he benefitted in some way. My life certainly wasn't any the worse off.

Anybody who says "don't give money to an addict or an alcoholic because it'll do more harm than good" is simply wrong. If you're poor and you steal from the rich, you don't feel guilty about it. But if somebody is kind to you and trusts you, and you betray that trust, it eats you up inside like crazy.

By helping people to be solvent you can help restore their sanity. For many people who live lives of poverty, this can be surprisingly cheap. I could get my friend Frank a hostel bed so that he wasn't living on the street for £120/week. I could help get Frank a room in a shared house for £500. Nobody had taken that kind of chance on him before.

Fixing my situation has been more expensive, because I'm more leveraged. When my parents fucked me over, I borrowed what I could on credit cards, bought Bitcoins, and made 1,200% profit. That was a calculated gamble. When I was homeless living in the park, looking for a well paid IT consultancy contract, I was using my creditworthiness to stay alive and get back into lucrative work: that's leverage. The peaks and troughs of my debt and my solvency are erratic and stressful, but you'd be a fool to bet against me.

Obviously, the idea is to link two lucrative contracts back to back, or have one last long enough to give me a financial cushion to at last be safe from homelessness and destitution. I desperately need a break from these boom and bust cycles. I desperately need a run of good luck.

The luck is not forthcoming, as my 6 month contract has been terminated 2 months early, but I have a little time to rest before the stress and torment of having to find a new job.

If you put all this into the context of relentless depression, suicidal thoughts, threat of homelessness, bankruptcy, destitution, reputational destruction, and everything else that threatens to consume me, I'm surprised I'm still standing.

All I know is that I'm able to just about make a swap for my mental health and sense of wellbeing, for a chance at financial security. It's a calculated gamble.

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

This is a story about bravery...

How do terrorists win? By spreading terror. There's a video going round on the Internet of a prankster in Arab head-dress throwing a black duffel bag at people and shouting "Allahu Akbar!". His unwitting victims run for their lives. For me, this is anecdotal evidence that the terrorists are winning.

I tend to be a little irreverent and it's easy to miss my satire or irony sometimes, but I'm disappointed when people act as thought police, and act with more offence than is strictly justified by their personal involvement with a tragedy. Taking up the position of moral outrage is simply thought policing, when no outrage is warranted.

When I write about terrorism on 9/11 or 7/7, I'm always mindful that family members, friends or work colleagues of people who lost somebody during those attacks, might be offended. However, there are billions of Netizens and the chance of somebody directly affected reading my stuff is negligible. It's in the greater public interest that I should discuss the terror that obviously affects so many, instead of self-censoring because of the tiny risk that anybody might take legitimate offence.

Having grown up in the UK, from 1979 to present, I lived through the IRA's bombing campaign. Far more people died in 1985 through 1995 than in recent years, including 2001. I used to work near the Baltic Exchange and I live and work in Canary Wharf. Both of these places were blown up by IRA bombs.

So am I Irelandophobic? Am I afraid that every Irishman I meet is a terrorist? Do I detest the Irish, because they all carry some collective responsibility for the actions of a small handful of their fellow countrymen? No. Of course not. Some of my best friends are Irish. The Irish have shown me nothing but love.

Being brave doesn't mean dropping bombs on people from 30,000ft, safe in the cockpit of your $350 million fighter jet. Being brave doesn't mean killing civilians in a drone strike, pushing buttons on your joystick, watching everything remotely on a TV screen. Being brave doesn't mean being racially abusive - "build a wall" and "send them home" - while you teach your kids to fear and reject people who look different, and are from a different culture.

Being brave certainly doesn't involve shutting down people who appear to be desecrating the memory of the dead.

If we're going to move forward as a race, we've got to get over this whole "your tribe killed somebody from my tribe" bullshit. A couple of days ago there was great offence taken at a stag party taking selfies at Ground Zero. Hey! Guess what? Nearly every inch of the globe has had human blood spilt on it at some point, at the hands of another human. Get over it.

We need to move beyond the "brown/black/Irish kills privileged white shocker!" type headline trolling. There are underprivileged people who get killed in gang shootings and knifings every day here in London, but it never makes the national news. If you're not white caucasian and you're poor, attacks that are not overtly religiously motivated just aren't news outside London. However, a bunch of whites appear to be mocking some other whites, and that's global news? What the fuck is that all about?

An estimated 675 people have been shot and killed by police in the USA this year so far. There were 990 last year. If we say that in the 15 years since 9/11, on average 700 people have been killed by police each year, then over 10,000 people have died at the hands of the police. America, you had fewer than 3,000 killed in 9/11, but you've killed more than 3 times as many since then, just with your cops.

Grief is a kind of hobby. "You just can't say this stuff today... people are grieving" I hear you say. Well, who's grieving for those 10,000 people who got gunned down by cops? When is the day that you grieve for them?

Lest we forget.

Well you did forget, didn't you? You forgot that being afraid of black and brown people means that terrorism is winning. Terrorism affects your life. Terrorism is something you're afraid of, so the terrorists have successfully created terror. The terrorists have won.

You forgot that the biggest threat to your life is not terrorism, but guns in the hands of your fellow Americans. Toddlers kill more Americans than terrorists do.

Maybe I have no right to contribute to this debate, because I'm not American. However, Donald Trump waded in on the side of Brexit, and the UK has suffered a huge upsurge in racially abusive attacks on our own people, as a result of the referendum result. In a little under two months, the presidential election could possibly elect a racist into office, and cause a further wave of abuse and attacks.

Europe is a more dangerous place when anti-Islamic sentiment is allowed to foment. Europe suffers the consequences for America's rhetoric. The UK becomes a proxy target for anti-American attacks, when the phoney war on Islam is perpetuated.

Terrorism is just a phoney distraction. So few people are dying in terrorist attacks that it shouldn't even get any media attention. It's not relevant. It's counterproductive to spread terror for the terrorists.

I'm expecting to get shot down in a big way, for any number of reasons, in writing this piece. I'm not trying to be deliberately offensive. I'm not being insensitive. If you lost your mom in 9/11, I'm sorry, but I really don't think you personally know anybody who lost their life on that day. 0.0001% of the population were killed.

There were 372 mass shootings in the US in 2015. I should be far more worried about an American with a gun than an Arab with a bomb.

If we use this day for anything, perhaps it should be to reflect on how well the British and the Irish generally get along today. If ever there's an example of putting terrorism behind us, it must surely follow this model. I love the Irish. I don't see us as different. We were all Europeans, until Donald bloody Trump wandered into our debate and we voted to leave the EU.

The brave thing to do is to act irreverently. Don't allow the terrorists and the thought police to disseminate fear and mistrust.

Tags: #terrorism