This is a story about political correctness gone mad...

The liberal metropolitan elites are on the right side of history, right? The neanderthal knuckle-draggers are simply poorly educated angry white men, who need to step aside and make way for the black one-legged Muslim lesbian immigrants to take all the jobs and go on the dole, right? I probably can't even say black. It's political correctness gone mad.

Right, I've probably successfully got your heckles up. Now, get your calculator out.

The average wage in the UK is roughly £26,000. The average house price is £260,000. Assuming you can borrow three and a half times your income, you can get a mortgage of £91,000. So, you'll need a deposit of £169,000.

For the current tax year, average take home pay is £1,737. Average rent in the UK is £900 a month, leaving £837 a month for council tax, gas, electric, water, sewerage, food & drink, toiletries, cleaning products, transport, clothing, mobile phone, Internet, home & life insurance, home maintenance, alcohol & tobacco, gambling & lottery, going out and saving money.

Let's assume that our average UK citizen is a super scrimpy person who lives on budget baked beans and never turns on the heating or any lights. They can probably save a maximum of £500 per month, which leaves them £337 a month to spend on everything else. To save up the £170k they need to buy a house, they'll need to be thrifty for the next 28 years... assuming house prices don't go up.

Of course, this also assumes that you can even get a job that pays about £12.50 an hour, when 80% of all new jobs being created pay less than £17,000 per annum. Most jobs pay less than the average, because the average wage is skewed by a small number of very high earners.

OK, but we can all just go on benefits, right?

Well, housing benefit doesn't pay enough to rent a place. Rents are higher than housing benefit. If you work more than 16 hours a week, your benefits will be cut off, so you can't use housing benefit to top up your income. If you're a 'snowflake' millennial, you'll have just £57.90 to live on each week, plus your housing benefit that isn't enough to pay the rent.

So, what's the solution?

Well, if you're an immigrant you might be prepared to live in an appallingly shit house, with several people in every room. Many of us grew up in houses with sitting rooms and dining rooms. If you have a look round a house full of economic migrants who are all working for minimum wage, you're not going to find any reception rooms: every room is a bedroom.

Who cleans the toilets? Who waits the tables? Who serves the coffee? Who picks up the litter? Who hoovers your office? Who washes your car? Who built your house? Who unblocked your drain?

When we want something, we demand rock-bottom prices. We believe all the bullshit about 'rogue traders' and 'rip-off Britain' when in actual fact we are mostly idle and spoiled. We wanted cheap goods, so the factories moved to the Far East. We wanted easy jobs, so the immigrants came to do all the shitty ones. We wanted big fat undeserved early pensions, so asset prices bubbled. The petit bourgeois rentier class is a parasite on young people who need somewhere to live.

"Build some more houses!"

Yes, but who's going to build them? You wanted people who work hard for peanuts, so you got Poles. It's a fairly established middle-class thing to do: to demand Eastern European builders, because your British counterparts are supposedly lazy and work-shy, but aren't you part of the problem if you're not rolling up your sleeves and getting on with the job yourself?

The UK population was 50 million in the 1950s. Now it's 65 million. If there were 30 children in a school classroom in the fifties, there would be 39 today. If there were 1 million cars in the fifties, there are 1.3 million now. Hang on! That can't be right, can it?

Yes, ostensibly our observations don't match the hard numbers. Our day-to-day experiences don't tally with the facts, data and opinion polls.

Of course, I picked a difficult example: car ownership has soared, along with our living standards.

Our living standards have soared, haven't they?

Well, why do so many people want to go back to some kind of golden era of yesteryear? Perhaps 1954 would be the perfect year for us to roll the clock back to: when rationing ended.

"Britain's full" we hear. Certainly, many of us perceive overcrowding, congestion, heavy traffic, problems making a doctor's appointment, problems getting our kids into the school we want our little darlings to go to. What the hell? And there's always some darkies in the queue too... it must be all those mozzies, right?

The liberal metropolitan elites [like me] will tell you that you're imagining things. You're just not colourblind enough. If you squint your eyes - like a Chinaman - you'll see that your crowded train carriage actually has plenty of seats, and the few passengers are white men wearing hats, reading broadsheet newspapers and puffing pipes.

There's clearly a mismatch between perception, reality and what the 'facts' tell us. How can Britain have filled up when the population has only increased by 30%?

Let's look at the example of the economic migrant.

I don't live in The City of London. I live out near Canary Wharf and commute into the Square Mile for work. I migrate each day, for economic reasons. The official population of the City is 12,000 people, but in fact the population on a miserable Monday morning is more like 400,000. That's a 33 fold increase. That's a helluva migration every day.

In the desperate struggle of the rat race, both parents are now working, when previously the husband's sole income was adequate for the household's meagre expenses. I'm sorry to be so heteronormative, but women were housewives and men were the breadwinners. With sexual equality comes a doubling of the workforce, taking up space on the trains and roads, struggling to get to work each morning.

If both parents are working, who's going to clean the house? We're going to need a Lithuanian cleaner. Who's going to look after the kids? We're going to need a Spanish au pair. Who's going to prepare lunch? We're going to need an Italian sandwich maker.

We cluster together where all the jobs are: London and the South-East. We all commute huge distances on horribly overcrowded transport networks, because it's cheaper for our employers to build massive office blocks. The more office blocks you get in one place, the bigger the pool of potential employees, creating a liquid market for commoditised humans.

Most of the UK is an also-ran. Who gives a fuck about job losses across the whole country, when London earns so much tax for the treasury and financial services dominates 80% of the 'economy'.

Of course, it's disingenuous to think that the coal mines are going to re-open, the demand for steel can remain constantly high forever, and there will always be a need for unskilled manual labour. However, didn't we forget that a lot of people have been thrown onto the scrap heap, because we only worship facts and figures, not lives?

Is it possible that the knuckle-draggers  -- who hanker for a yesteryear of homophobia, sexism, bigotry and an empire riding roughshod over the developing world -- also have a small handful amongst their number who are right? Their quality of life would have been a lot better when they could have afforded to buy a house, get married, have kids and earn a living without having to resort to government handouts, black market jobs, benefit fraud, drug dealing and other degrading things.

I feel like I need to be the liberal metropolitan elitist who empathises with the plight of the scrounger, the NEET, the JAM family, the council-estate dwelling na'er do well. It's terribly patronising, but what have the unwashed masses noticed that we haven't?

I'm not even allowed to raise the questions without tarring myself with the brush we lazily swish over the enemies of progress: bigot, xenophobe, homophobe, FASCIST!

I hate UKIP, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump and their ilk, but they're shrewd in their observation that people have detected a certain lack of greatness in their once-great nations. Perhaps they weren't great places to be an educated black gay woman, in those yesteryear eras, but isn't politics about the greater good, to some extent? We don't have to lynch the blacks for the benefit of the whites. Trump et. al. have emboldened the racists, and that's awful, but why are they so angry?

Until the liberal metropolitan elites can accept that "[poor ill-educated] white male" has become a pejorative term amongst a sneering set of arrogant, privileged people who rule over them, doesn't it seem obvious that the anger is going to boil over?

Football, X-Factor, Big Brother and all of the other distractions and titillations are inadequate to contain the dissatisfied masses: they don't have any prospects; they don't have anything to hope for, except for a life of miserable poverty; they're unwanted in 'their own' country.

That's what "take are (sic) country back" means... it means that through the Internet, the masses have figured out that they outnumber the rulers and their court, and they want their fair slice of the pie. They've been misdirected into blaming immigrants, because that's always the last desperate ploy played by the greedy people who control the country. The simple fools don't even realise that the rich get even richer during times of war and conflict. Who's going to fight this imaginary fight that we're being whipped into national hysteria over? It will be the poorest, least educated and least privileged who will lose out, yet again.

Sadly, unless income inequality and declining living standards are addressed, there's little to offer the angry people except a cathartic bloodletting. Obviously, it offends my liberal sensibilities to see anger misdirected at the hardworking immigrants who cook me delicious halal food and act as a kind of lightning rod, stopping me from getting beaten up as a yuppie... a gentrifier.

What happened to class warfare? What happened to the labour movement? What happened to revolution?

TV melted your brain, dude.

Tags: #politics

This is a story about keeping a diary...

I nearly wrote about what I had for breakfast. I used to write a blog post and then throw it away and write another one: it was a useful warm-up exercise. Now, there's less quality control: I'm dealing with a lot of competing pressures and I have to write when I really don't feel like writing. It upsets me.

The very last thing that I want to do is start writing about movies and TV that I've watched and other totally banal things that are happening in my uneventful life. I could share pictures of food. Maybe I could write about a really big pooh that I had. No.

There's so much that needs to be written about and so little time. I have no time for shitty diary entries about whatever's grinding my gears at a particular moment. I hate when my writing is so tainted by the immediate demands of bashing words out at a given moment, rather than a natural flow of thoughts that have been slowly brewing and bubbling to the surface.

I was feeling horribly hungover until about now, so I didn't feel like writing earlier. What's the point of doing something when you don't feel like doing it? It's hardly going to be my best work, is it? What's the point of spending your most productive periods watching shitty TV, and cramming your creativity into snatched moments when you've just woken up, or you're tired?

I don't know why I'm so cranky, but I was feeling super annoyed with myself for publishing what I wrote earlier and I deleted it. I actually rewrote my original blog post about not drinking. I'm a little happier with it, but it's a reminder that I want and need to take my pet project seriously. Who wants to read about what I had for breakfast? Who wants to read crap that I wrote when I'm tired or hungover? What's the point of churning out crap?

The Internet is full of crap, and I'm not saying that what I write is great, but you've got to at least try, haven't you? The whole point of my project is that it's something I can be proud of. It might be low quality, but if it's not the best that I can do, then I'm knowingly doing a shit job, which is shameful.

Ideally, I'd like to write at 3pm every day. That feels like the sweet spot. I don't know why, it just is.

But.

Sometimes I want to write at 11am, because there's something I really want to write about.

Also.

I want to write at midnight, because there's a thought bouncing around inside my head and I just have to express it.

And.

I want to write at 8am, because I can't stop thinking about something.

One more thing.

I want to write at 5pm, because I want to write every day and getting it done at five in the evening means that I can relax for the evening.

However.

I want to write at 8pm because that's when it suits me at that particular moment.

Essentially, I'd rather write when it fits naturally, because then I'll write something that I'm pleased with, rather than something rushed. It's not a case of writing for writing's sake, even though it is. Who can possibly say in advance, when they're going to feel like writing?

I've noticed that I have a load of half-finished ideas and forgotten titles: things that I would have ordinarily written about. Instead, those things are lost. I need to start carrying a notebook and to keep better notes. I make a note of the title of a blog post when an idea really speaks to me, but I've written up none of those ideas up because I've not been in the mood when I've sat down at the keyboard.

I feel like I'm losing my mind, because there are so many things rattling around in my head, but they remain unexpressed.

How can I get what I want if I can't express what I want? Am I impossible to please?

It's impossible to know, when my world has been travelling, socialising, fitting in, people pleasing.

Everybody's going to go back to work soon. Time to go back to your job. Party's over.

For me, TV goes off. Writing starts. Writing is my work. Thinking is my world.

Tags: #writing

This is a story about being drunk...

I've been consuming far too much alcohol, but I don't really believe in New Year's resolutions or pointless periods of abstinence. For a bet, I beat my friend's 100-day sobriety record, but it proved nothing.

For my liver and my bulging belly, drinking less would be beneficial, but I'm not going to quit completely, just like I'm not going to join a gym or destroy my knees and hips running.

To say "I'm going to drink less" is ridiculous, because I always get the thirst for alcohol after the first couple of drinks, and then all self-control is lost.

I was so hungover today that I almost felt like starting drinking again, just to feel better. I guess I have a natural instinct that it would be the beginning of the slippery slope to alcoholism if I were to do that.

I've been drinking every day for quite a while now, but I don't think it's getting worse, nor am I turning into an alcoholic. I'm drinking as a very unhealthy coping mechanism, which isn't good, but what else should I do? Cut myself? Take up smoking?

Alcoholism and drug abuse are symptomatic of a need to self-medicate. Alcohol is a useful crutch, so I shan't be giving it up. I've already extensively proven that I can have periods of total abstinence, when I put my mind to it. Why bother giving up something that's a useful stress reliever, that the vast majority of people use?

I'm starting to sound a bit defensive, and I guess that's because I know that I'm drinking more than I'd really like to be, but that will change as my life improves. Alcohol does improve my life, up to a point, although I'm drinking too much at the moment.

Twice during the festive season, I thought "I wish I hadn't drunk so much" and had a horrible moment where the room was spinning when I went to bed. I haven't thrown up or anything so vulgar and juvenile though: the bucket pictured above was never used as a vomit receptacle.

I'm not an alcoholic because I don't go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

Tags: #alcohol

This is a story about a year in review...

Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Then I'll begin.

For anybody following along at home, there are a few highlights buried in the 600,000+ words I've written to date. There's some required reading for anybody making a study of my psyche.

I decided I wanted to write something more popular and so I drew some graphs explaining mood disorders, like bipolar. It was my most read blog post of 2016.

Along the same lines, I wrote about the onset of depression and attempts to treat it.

I wrote a letter to myself.

I was an inpatient on a secure psychiatric ward, so naturally I came up with a bizarre thought experiment. I even did a drawing of my quantum suicide experiment.

When I was bored out of my mind at work one day, I wrote a short story called The Factory.

If you ever wondered why I have a semicolon tattooed behind my ear, this is half the story.

Everything you never wanted to know about addiction.

But, is it art? This is a good example of me rambling while strung-out. I'm surprised I could even see the keyboard. I just like the title and it's a bit of a private joke, sorry.

There's a 3-part account of the time I lost my mind and started hearing voices.

That'll probably do. There's a lot to get through there.

Of course, there's also the first draft of my novel if you have time to read 53,000 words. I'm going to start editing it tomorrow, so any feedback would be gratefully received.

I've slightly bent the rules, because I have a bit of a warped sense of time, but these are all significant pieces of writing for me, that I associate with the events of 2016.

Happy New Year's Eve.

Tags: #writing #bipolar #depression #suicide #physics #addiction #mentalhealth

This is a story about discipline & routine...

"You can finish that later" she says. Only, there won't be a later if I don't have some scaffolding - a framework - on which to hang the shreds of my life.

Writing isn't just an idle pastime for me. It's a project that gives me some control over my own life. It's something I can work on without some waste-of-space middle manager denying me the opportunity to let my creative juices flow. Who knows when I'll get another job: it's not my decision. What have I got to feel proud about? What reason have I got to get out of bed every day?

When you start taking the odd day off here and there, why not the odd week or two? Why not have a month off, or a year? It's a slippery slope. I know not many people are reading, but knowing that I write every day does give a reason to keep coming back.

When I was writing my novel, I was touched when friends would ask where my next chapter was. It was also really hard work to catch up on my target word count when I got behind. I hate feeling rushed, too.

Of course, you can't really get behind on a blog, but my target is to write every day, not to attain a certain word count by a certain deadline. However, both disciplines are important, if you're taking a writing project seriously, which I am.

Why am I serious about a non-commercial venture that makes me so vulnerable on the public Internet? Why am I so serious about sharing my innermost thoughts and feelings every single day, without fail? Well, it's because it's the only lifeline I feel secure about. People can let you down. Stress can get the better of you. Circumstances can conspire to make your life an unliveable Hell. However, I need nothing more than a screen, an Internet connection and a keyboard, in order to ground myself; to feel content that my story's still being told, by the most reliable source: me.

Obviously, I'm an unreliable source. I can go off the rails; relapse. But, when that happens I'm acutely aware that anybody who's been reading occasionally, will notice that I've gone quiet: I'm not keeping to my routine. It's an early warning system and it's also a role; a duty. I feel a little duty-bound to write every day, in the same way you feel like you have to get up and go to work, even though you don't want to.

You could skip work - bunk off - but you won't. There's something that keeps you going and going, in whatever you do. There are people who are counting on you. What will your boss say? What will your colleagues think?

I broke the spell and I have the kind of job where I can take long chunks of time off anyway. Contracting doesn't mandate that I spend 52 weeks a year flying a desk. If my contract has ended, who's gonna tell me that I need to keep working? The boss? I'm my own boss. The downside of being in charge, is that I'm free on my own recognisance. It's up to me to structure my life: find work and try not to relapse.

I can't leave my writing until "later" or "tomorrow" because it's not some job where I'll get paid my salary anyway. In the world of wage slavery, you know your job will still be there, waiting for you. Until you run your own business, you don't really understand what an opportunity cost is. Everything can wait until tomorrow, in the world of never-ending made up jobs and make-work.

I'm not saying what I do is important per se, but it's important to me. To prioritise writing a novel ahead of looking for a job sounds like madness, but I've worked full time for the best part of 20 years, and I was in full-time education for 13 years before that. There will always be more work, or something else to study, but there's only a finite amount of time and opportunity to create something new.

While the bulk of humanity is engaged in the rote-learning of facts, regurgitation of other people's words and slavishly following rules laid down for them, there's a tiny minority who look at that entire world as absurd and ludicrous. The herd isn't going anywhere and it won't be hard to track down when I need it.

And so, for now, to keep my sanity and preserve my progress, I have to zig when everybody else zags. I have no control over when I'll get hired and what the contract will be, so to give myself some kind of stability and routine, I write.

I write every day.

Tags: #writing

This is a story about insecurity...

The self preservation instinct varies by individual. In theory, we should all be equally risk-averse, because all genetically heritable traits must surely code for self-preservation, by definition. Any genes that would make an individual less likely to want to live, would literally die out. However, we know that people willingly jump out of perfectly good aeroplanes, while others are afraid to leave the house.

When life becomes one long unrewarding fruitless struggle - endless anxiety - then it seems logical that you'd give up hope of things ever getting better. "This will pass" people say. It doesn't. They're wrong.

I've done most of the stressful things in life: moved house, made new friends, asked a girl out on a date, got a job, paid bills, started businesses, balanced the books, paid my taxes, fixed a broken down car, fixed a water leak, fixed a gas leak, been punched in the face, got divorced, been arrested, been locked in a cell, been hospitalised, ran out of money, been homeless.

So, I've been through a lot of shit and survived. I've dealt with a heap of very stressful situations and I managed to get through them without having a nervous breakdown. However, I'm not exactly thrilled about having to start over.

I had become careless with my life, because I'd been suicidally depressed for so long that existence offered nothing but unrelenting pain.

My life attitude has generally been this: start today with whatever I've got, and make the best of it.

It's heartbreaking when you try your best for years and years, but you're thwarted at every turn. Imagine you've patiently observed, practiced and developed your skills. You're doing all the right things, but it's not working because somebody is working against you. I try to win people over. I try to get people onside. I try to convert the bad apples into good apples, rather than chuck them in the bin.

I'm named after a heroin addict: Mr Grant. I don't know his first name. If I took my mum's name, I'd be Nick Newton. If I took my dad's name, I'd be Nick Edmonds.

I had a blazing row with my mum when I was a child, over whether it was ever ethical to write somebody off as a lost cause. Unsurprisingly, my unshakeable belief - for as long as I can remember - has been that nobody is born bad, and nobody should be abandoned. Even the idea of casual dating is unpalatable to me: pick a partner and stick with them; be loyal.

My core beliefs have been tested to breaking point. I've lain myself wide open to be taken advantage of, and people have come and filled their pockets at my expense.

"Where are your friends when you need them?" my flatmate asked me a few times. "They're not there when you need them" he said.

In fact, I never phoned my friends for help. Ironically, the one time I phoned my friends for a favour, was to get rid of my flatmate - who owes me thousands of pounds in unpaid rent and bills - when he refused to leave.

Of course, my friends have been there when I've needed them, but I have a strong instinct to take my problems away from the people who I care about. I don't suck people into the turmoil of my decaying life. If I'm in trouble, I don't want that trouble to spill over onto my friends. If I'm going to kill myself, I'm going to throw up barriers - defences - to stop people getting too close to ground zero.

I haven't been ready to have anybody in my life, because I started to believe the bullshit: I started to think that I was a good-for-nothing write-off lost cause.

Now, a couple of people have stuck by me and been physically present through some of the horrors, and we've come out the other side. With every bit of loyalty, love and care that I've received, it's helped me to heal and repair a little more. It's hard to be objective, but it feels like things are getting better for once.

Everybody needs at least one person who believes in them. One person who'll be there when you really need somebody. One person who's trying to help, not thwart.

I find myself writing with consideration for their feelings and how they might perceive things. I'm starting to think about a positive future, rather than just brain-dumping before I die.

This blog was supposed to be a time-capsule; a smoking gun; a suicide note. This blog was supposed to contain all the things that hold some horrible people to account. It's so much easier if the target of your malice goes down without a fight and quietly dies.

She said to me "awwww, you wrote me a love letter" and it's true. In amongst the bitchy sniping at a bunch of arseholes who've screwed me over, there's a new theme developing: I care about hurting somebody's feelings and damaging a burgeoning relationship. There's something precious to me that I want to protect.

It's fairly hard to think "I hope we don't break up" and "I want to die" at the same time. Obviously, it'd be a logical fallacy to hold both thoughts simultaneously. Reason is a very poor way to tackle emotion, but it seems to be quite hard to be suicidal when you're cuddling on the couch... although not impossible.

When you care about somebody, you can feel insecure: "what if I lose her?"

It's progress, of a kind. I wouldn't say that dating is ever a reason to live, but having a significant other who you're crazy about is an improvement on a situation where your own emotional pain fills your world, to the point where you have no capacity to think or care about the people who would be sad if you were dead.

"Suicide is so selfish."

No, you simply haven't understood. It's you who is selfish, if you expect somebody to endure intolerable agony for your benefit. Believe me: people don't want to die because they're selfish; they want to die because they can't stand the pain and suffering anymore.

Guilt-tripping never works, but kindness, care, compassion and loyalty seem to be a winning combo.

Tags: #suicide #depression #relationships #divorce

This is a story about travelling...

Ah, back in the shadow of the towers of broken dreams, at long last. I was very well looked after over Christmas, but there's nowhere quite like home, is there?

I've fought hard to get back to London and make it work, so I'm somewhat superstitious about ever leaving the capital.

There are a lot of dreamers and runaways who try to come to London and seek their fortune, but they fuck off home to Mum if it all goes tits up. London is my home and I have no backup option.

I was made to feel very welcome in the home of my host, over Christmas, but we all need somewhere to call our own, don't we?

I never wanted to live near Canary Wharf, but I always wanted to live by water. Who wouldn't? Central London can be lovely, quiet and beautiful. It's the never-ending overcrowded suburbs that are the pits: zone 99 on the tube. Steer clear of the hoi polloi and tourist hordes and London has everything you could ever want.

It was enjoyable to get out into the rural countryside, but it's not sustainable is it? What the fuck would you do for work: to earn a living and pay the mortgage?

And so, I've got life the right way round in my opinion: walk to work during the week and then drive to the countryside at the weekend. Relaxing in quiet villages, enjoying the rural idyll, and then back to reality on Monday morning. I can never understand why commuters subject themselves to such misery and exhaustion.

Those village greens, cricket whites, country pubs, woodland walks, ancient oaks and British wildlife... they're reserved for rich retired people and lottery winners. To try and have it all would only compromise you; spread you thin.

For sure, it'd be good to have a huge detached house with acres of land, letting the kids play in the massive garden, having some dogs. But, the economy got fucked up by the baby boomers, who expect to retire in obscene luxury, while their kids and grandkids pay the price: job insecurity, low pay, overinflated house prices, long working hours, no respect, no prospects, fucked climate, over-competitive educational system and everything else that makes modern life miserable, depressing and anxiety-inducing.

I'm pragmatic, so my solution is to stick close to where the jobs are, not waste my time and energy on stupid pipe dreams that only those with inherited wealth could ever hope to enjoy.

Tags: #london

This is a story about waiting...

There are many things in life that have to be endured. Life's like a really shit amusement park, where you queue up for days, weeks, months or even years, so that you can have a thrill ride that lasts all of 90 seconds.

Tags: #depression

This is a story about compatibility...

Very often, when you're acutely aware that there's something that you need to avoid crashing into, you'll end up staring at it, unable to tear your eyes away. When riding a board or a bike, flying, driving or otherwise in motion, you tend to go in the direction you're looking. If you want to avoid a crash, you should look at a spot away from danger.

Is this the reason why we don't talk about taboo subjects, because we're worried about tempting fate? We turn our back on the ugly truth and try to pretend like everything's OK.

My Christmas stocking included some bath salts.

Clearly, Santa has the same dark sense of humour as me. That's great. I think humour is a fantastic way to exorcise the demons of the past. First comes talking, then understanding and finally you can laugh and joke about a topic that was originally quite painful and difficult to remember. Repressing memories and walking on eggshells is no way to move forward.

If we don't have honest conversations where we can talk about how we really think and feel, then we build up a load of sensitive topics. Secrets and lies lead to paranoia and weak relationships. Keeping schtum about my parents' drug use - when I was a child - was too much of a burden. Writing openly has been liberating and has allowed me to move on from shame and regret, to regain my self-esteem and confidence.

I remember a desperate scramble to cover up my admission to The Priory. My psychiatrist had made a referral to a "private hospital" for treatment of an acute episode of bipolar disorder. All perfectly true, but there was a certain economic use of the truth. What would most people think, if they found out that I was spending weeks in the UK's most notorious treatment specialist for drug & alcohol abuse? They would leap to the wrong conclusions, surely?

It's so bloody exhausting keeping up appearances. One must be aware of how things can be [mis]interpreted and people aren't likely to share their true thoughts and feelings: "better keep him away from the kids if he's mentally ill" or "I bet he's a raging alcoholic behind closed doors if he's been in The Priory".

We're brought up to believe that our reputation is like a balloon: one little prick and it goes pop. We're scared to take time off work, because we'll have gaps on our CV that need to be explained. We're scared to share details of our private lives, lest our employers decide we're unreliable and judge us on preconceived notions. Who wants to work with a madman?

When it comes to dating, the same applies. Who wants to date somebody with flaws; defects? Who wants to take a risk on a ticking time bomb; an unsteady ship? And so, I should have found myself unemployable and undateable. "Take your pills, sit in the corner and shut up" says society.

However, if you ever meet me in a work or social context, you may gain the [false?] impression that I'm pleasant company: a healthy, happy and capable member of society, engaged in productive endeavours. Strangely, you might have the wool pulled over your eyes so much that you actually mistake me for a normal human being.

Surely this is thanks to the excellent medication that I take?

Well, no. I don't take any medication. I don't do therapy. I haven't had a course of electro-convulsive shock treatment. I don't even have a psychiatrist at the moment.

"But you're going to murder everybody if you don't take your pills."

Yes, that's right. I'm your worst nightmare. I'm out there, on the dating scene, luring unsuspecting vulnerable young women into my web. I'm a dangerous fantasist; a con-man. I'm so good at living a lie that I've constructed an elaborate fable that looks, smells, tastes and sounds very much like an authentic real life, but it's all fake. It can't be real. What about the secrets we now know?

If you take your secrets and turn them into jokes, you defuse that ticking time bomb... or at least that's my working hypothesis.

I certainly feel a lot happier knowing that I've met somebody with enough of a good sense of humour to make a joke on Christmas Day about my chequered past. I feel less sensitive, paranoid and insecure than ever before. I feel like I'm myself, and that's OK.

Maybe it's just a getting old thing: the realisation that we're all flawed in some way. We're all human. We all have weaknesses and strengths, and we all have history; baggage even. It seems better to wear my heart on my sleeve than present myself as some whiter than white, holier than thou saint who never put a foot wrong in their life.

I doubt I'll ever unify my professional and private identities, but I certainly don't regret jettisoning the traditional approach to dating. Honesty seems to have been the best policy in this case.

Tags: #dating #sex #bipolar #addiction

This is a story about social lubricants...

This time last year, I was attempting 101 consecutive days of sobriety. I actually managed nearly 120 days without alcohol in the end. I'm pretty sure that the lack of 'crutch' meant that I wasn't able to self-medicate with booze when I needed it, which caused hypomania to flair up during a period of incredible stress.

I've been juggling the fine balance between stimulants and tranquillisers, in order to cope with a boring career that has lasted two decades. Tea, coffee, cola, wine and beer: it's a winning formula.

"An alcoholic is someone you don't like, who drinks as much as you do" -- Dylan Thomas

There are all kinds of middle-class rules that differentiate the right sort of people from those dreadful sorts who swig Special Brew in the park. No drinking before midday. Don't mix your drinks. Craft beers. Fine wines. Single malt whiskies. It's the snobbery of it that means that the wealthy can drink copious amounts and get away with it.

Of course, there are people who are alcohol dependent. If you consume huge amounts of alcohol every day, you'll suffer life-threatening withdrawal if you abruptly stop drinking. You might have a seizure and die.

I'm sure my liver was very grateful for that period of sobriety last year. I've gained a load of weight through drinking, which isn't healthy. My weight has fluctuated wildly this year. I was really thin and bony back in March. I drank loads to get through a dreadfully boring contract and I've been drinking heavily again to cope with the stress of evicting a flatmate, having to look for work again, worrying about cashflow, the pressure of Christmas and everything else that everybody in the entire world worries about too. I'm not unique and what about the starving Africans etc. etc.?

The big change in my consumption habits is that I no longer drink alone.

It's quite possible that I've entered into a kind of co-dependency, but equally there are safeguards when you drink with others: you know when you're drinking faster than everybody else and you know when you're drinking more than other people. It's remarkable how the social shame of guzzling booze when everybody else is sipping, means that you can moderate your behaviour somewhat.

"Do you want a drink?" my kind host asks.

"What's everybody else doing?" I reply. "I'll wait... don't open a bottle on my account."

It's clear from the size of the alcohol aisle in the supermarket and the clink of bottles being loaded into the back of cars, that a British Christmas is a boozy Christmas, for most households. Family traditions are varied, but everybody likes to pop a cork or two over the festive season. I can't imagine a sober Christmas, even though I had one last year.

The hardest thing about quitting booze was not the craving for alcohol - that subsided after only a few days - but how ubiquitous it is. My AirBnB host in San Francisco was visibly put out that I declined the offer of a drink at Halloween. On several occasions, there was relentless pressure on me to 'cheat'. I refused to even sip wine for the taste. If I was going to undertake the challenge, I was going to do it properly!

Go Sober for October was the charitable event that gave me a legitimate excuse to get through the first 30 days of sobriety. Without that, I'm sure I would have weakened under peer pressure. I'm sure I would have got into the habit of cheating.

That's why drinking alone is dangerous: once you pop you can't stop. So many times I say to myself "I'm just going to have one glass of wine/beer" only to then find myself finishing the bottle or the 4-pack. It's been a very successful strategy, to be a social drinker. I'm super self-conscious about being drunk or high, when those around me are 'straight' so I just don't do it. There's safety in numbers.

I drink too much and I'm alarmed by my weight gain, but I've made it to Christmas Day without total disaster. Things could be better, but they could be a lot worse.

Think about how much your day is structured around socially acceptable drugs: you want your morning coffee and then you're craving something to 'take the edge off' in the evening. Round and round we go, with our uppers and downers.

I'm embracing alcohol, because the desire to become intoxicated is inextricably bound up with the human condition. Coping with modern life is impossible without some kind of 'help'. Stress will drive you crazy: I can vouch for that.

There's an arms race - of course - where our employers expect us to be able to cope with unrealistic levels of stress and exhaustion, because they've gotten used to everybody being hopped up on coffee during the day, and drunk enough to sleep at night. However, that's not to say that alcohol and caffeine are bad, when used sparingly to cope with life's unpredictable peaks and troughs.

Anyway, I need to get on with Christmas Day. It won't be long before the Buck's Fizz starts flowing. The day will pass much more pleasantly with a warm alcohol glow and a fuzzy brain.

Habit of a lifetime.

Tags: #alcohol #christmas