Nick Grant

This is a story of a sabbatical that I never got to take...

Anybody who says I'm ungrateful for my life needs to have their head examined. My life has been paired down to the nth degree. Anybody who has lived aboard a 22ft boat for weeks knows how to live a small life.

In 2003, I asked HSBC if I could take a sabbatical, so that I could backpack around Australia, New Zealand and South-East Asia. The important thing about the trip, for me, was that I needed to make more friends and do a bit of independent growing up, away from the Angel Islington and Canary Wharf, which my whole life revolved around.

My old boss, an Exeter graduate who had completed an M.Phil (Master of Philosophy degree) in Epidemiology at Oxford, was a brilliant guy and did his level best to get this agreed with Human Resources. The rule at the time was that you had to have been an employee for 2 years, which I had been. It had been agreed and I started to get excited about tying my knapsack to a stick and setting off on the road to secure and happy adulthood, with some brilliant travel stories to tell when I got back.

Sadly, HR decided to change the rules under our feet, and the trip of a lifetime became a choice between resignation or cancelling my trip. I chose the latter, as I had a secure job with a conservative bank that I have loved since being a Griffin Saver, in the days of Midland Bank. Working for HSBC was very personal for me. Also, memories of the Dot Com crash and 9/11 were fresh in my memory. I valued my job, and I liked working for my boss. He's a great guy: so disciplined and inspiring.

Possibly as some kind of compensation (I'm totally speculating here) my boss allowed me to ride his coat tails into a very important project, whereupon I sulked for months and months, because I hadn't fully comprehended what he might have done, in light of the clear importance of the project that I was a part of. My boss exposed me to the very best people within HSBC, and perhaps tried to pair and mentor me - perhaps deliberately, who can say? - with people who are still to this day an inspiration in everything I think and do. I can't help but well up with tears thinking about what an amazing time that was, even if I was sullen and sulky for so much of it.

When the pressure really ramped up on the project, towards the go-live date, I flicked the switch from 'zoned out' to 'warp drive' and started putting in the hours I should have been. I had wasted a lot of time, so this was hardly anything more than working as hard as I should have been all along, but nobody should underestimate the effort that was put in, either.

Anyway, I was eventually ranked - quite fairly - on my average effort over the whole year, rather than just on the 'heroic' efforts towards the end. There was one issue that I was very very tenacious with, having to work with operations, software vendors, networks, sysadmins and security to track down a particularly nigglesome problem. This taught me some well-needed discipline, but not, however, much humility.

My boss did his very best to knock a streak of arrogance out of a jumped-up young upstart: I found it very easy to do the work that was asked of me, but I was lazy, sloppy and work-shy, to be honest. Nothing was much of a challenge, so instead, I filled my time reading the BBC News website, chatting with my friends on the Kiteboarding forums and planning my next weekend trip to the beach or overseas Kiteboarding trip.

I suppose you could say that I had my cake and ate it. I got to continue my career in London, and I also got to travel the globe and meet a set of friends who became a part my life, almost like University or "gap-yah" friends (gap year to those who don't speak posh) would be in the lives of my rich upper-middle-class white spoiled brat peers.

However, I still harboured a bitter resentment against the world for having 'conspired' to deny me a year of diminished responsibility, casual sex with sun-kissed young women with sand in their hair, and generally having fun in the playground of World's backpacking hostels. I felt I was entitled to this, like all the University-educated upper-middle-class twentysomethings in Banking.

I couldn't see that I had kind of won. I had kind of gotten both. I couldn't see that my life was awesome already.

When my boss told me that I been ranked just below the very top performing employees of the company that year, I was mighty p1ssed off. He did a very good job of staying calm and not telling such an arrogant little sh1t to p1ss off. Partly at issue, was that entitlement is bred into us by our upbringing and society around us.

We are told what to expect depending on our position in the World. Perhaps we also misunderestimate (sic.) the effort that is going on beneath the serene surface: some of us are wild swans, with our legs frantically paddling under the surface, while we glide along the surface looking cool, calm, collected & awesome.

Tony Blair told the world that 50% of people should get to go to University. I wanted to go to University, but always felt such a deep sense of responsibility to be self-sufficient and work hard, it seemed decadent and profligate to spend so much money, geting into debt, just drinking and reading books. I have always been excellent at cramming for exams and words seem to flow out of me like so much water in a sieve, so that part didn't exactly worry me.

It's always been a bugbear of mine that people think that education is a right. It's not. It's a privilege, but it is also essential to advance civilisation and humanity. It can improve lives and society more than any other gift that we can give to the developing nations. Teach a man to fish etc. etc.

People have tried to gently, and not-so-gently steer me towards teaching. I loved my teachers and I love teaching. I can remember all the names of my teachers, and I still fondly recall so much of what they taught me in life, and how they inspired me. I hated school though, because the bullying was so unbearable. But then again, I was always terrified of electricity and ended up becoming an electrician, so fears can be overcome.

I think I know now that, when I'm done with wearing a suit, I want to teach - so much that it makes me absolutely sob my eyes out as this realisation dawns on me - Physics, Maths and Design/Technology/IT working with underpriviledged kids in state comprehensive schools in Inner City London. This doesn't have to be soon. It's something to aspire to for semi-retirement, I think.

The only way that I can think to make that a reality from my current situation of zero cash, zero assets and massive debts, is by draining the swamps in banking, as an IT contractor, and by changing the political landscape of the UK so that we pay Teachers a decent living wage and top up the salary of those working in London so that they can afford to live here.

Ideally, I would like to finish the project I'm on, and deliver of a stint of many months and years of steady high-quality work for the global bank I have always loved admired and respected the most. HSBC really is a great place to work, and you really can be reassured that when we are all done, it's going to be good for another 150 years of helping people and businesses to achieve their full potential.

Maybe I'm just a hopeless dreamer. Answers on a postcard if you've got a better idea.

Anyone who says 'narcissist' to somebody who has decided to wear a grey suit for 18 years is going to get a punch in the mouth (Winter 2014)

Tags: #career #london #banking #university #hsbc

This is a story of the people who see you at your most tired, afraid, and in the most pain and discomfort...

I owe the hard-working, caring and dedicated nurses of the National Health Service my life, along with the Radiographers, Cardiologists, Phlebotomists, Psychiatrists, Social Workers, Psychologists, Nutritionists, Physiotherapists, Pathologists, Porters, Caterers, Cleaners and of course the Doctors, Consultants, Surgeons and Anaesthetists. It would be ridiculously selfish of me to not continue living after all the hard work that a huge team of people made in putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.

I always seem to expect that things will heal overnight, and indeed I rushed everything after a fairly major leg injury. After the accident, which luckily seemed to avoid any major blood vessels, despite severing a load of muscle, tendon and nerve. I hastily cobbled together a 'field dressing' with sanitary towels and a dressing gown cord, and wanted to make my own way home, but paramedics insisted on checking me out. It was them who discovered I couldn't actually raise my foot anymore, due to a severed tendon, and had lost feeling on the top of it, due to a severed nerve.

The operation took a long time and must have cost a lot of money. I have paid a lot of tax and National Insurance during my career, but that does not make me entitled. I need to repay my debt to society somehow. I haven't thought how I'm going to do that just yet, but I do think about it. I do have a list I'm working through, although I'm obviously never that mindful of the "one step at a time" mantra... I tend to sprint everywhere.

Running before I can walk, running with scissors (not how it happened, just a metaphor) and all the other things my Mum warned me not to do never ended in tears because I was always told to MTFU (Man The F**k  Up). A kind friend told me the other day that excess mucous and swollen mucous membrane might indicate a backlog of tears. I guess my tear ducts are fairly full.

But let's keep this about those in the caring professions. These people have to mop up your blood, pooh, pus, vomit and mucus, while you wince and generally try and hide your discomfort and be as polite and courteous as you can under the circumstances.

We should pay people in the caring professions a living wage, and more to reflect the important role they have in society.

I, for my part, am going to ensure that I pay full income taxes on my earnings when I am inside IR35, which is anytime that I have a regular place of work and commute to the same office on a regular basis... like now.

Coming from a startup and small business culture, I have always re-invested any profits into Research & Development projects in my time between contracts, but I think I need to just get a regular hobby... probably a safe one, given my accident prone nature!

I also think that a socially responsible proportion of my disposable income that I have should go as Gift Aid to Macmillan Cancer Support, because Cancer is a disease which blights all our lives, and the nurses in Palliative Geriatric care are really doing an extremely tough job and should receive all the support that we can possibly give them, as highly qualified professionals in a job that demands them to be kind and caring, loving and supportive, dealing with the inevitable painful loss of loved family members.

This by no means absolves me of my social conscience, but it's a public declaration of starting as I mean to go on. Some might see this as pathetic hypocrisy. Fine. Send me a postcard with a better idea.

Tags: #NHS #injury #startup #charity #career

This is a story of the people behind the camera; the unsung heros....

As I was having a "brand interaction" with Shaun the Sheep, I observed that there was one gender that was statistically more probable to be behind a camera, photographing a little person.

Mums are our unsung heros, Grannies are the nonjudgemental free babysitters for mollycoddled mummies boys, Aunties are the eyes that see everything from afar, Cousins are the ones who are 'Goldilocks'... not too close but not too far. You shouldn't marry your cousin though. Not enough genetic diversity.

Men are arseholes. Powerful men are entitled, bullying, cruel and myopic arseholes. Men are warriors, but we are supposed to be civilised. There is nothing civilised about war. There is nothing civilised about bullying, pain, human suffering, hunger and feeling unloved.

Mums are the antidote to men's raging testosterone. When women give birth, maternal instincts are programmed into the mother, which are necessary for the survival of the species. However, human babies have very large heads (ouch!) and are totally unable to support themselves and their alien head until they have drunk lots of mother's milk from the mammary glands of their mother.

Oxytocin is released into the bloodstream of nursing mothers, as part of bonding, but there is a sympathetic reaction, which is not in the mother's body, but in the father (if he stuck around for the birth). The release of this hormone is critical, to change the mode of the male, from fight, fuck and flee, into a responsible adult who deserves to have his offspring survive for long enough to possibly pass on 50% of his genes.

This is not so much the 'selfish' gene, as the 'anti-freeloader' mechanism. I'm sorry buddy, but you don't get to sow your wild oats and expect to reap what you sow. That's called rape.

I'm sorry to say it, but there are far to many rapists in the world. Men who think that they can get away with taking what they want, and not sticking around to face the emotional and physical consequences. The price for your 3 seconds of copulation could well be a pink/brown/yellow/red, screaming, incontinent midget, which can't feed itself, but yet you find yourself doing a weird dance in worship of this blood and mucus covered alien that just exited the mothership.

The "summer of love" was merely a chemical blip that nature would inevitably find its way around. The powerful drugs that have been synthesised in Bayer, Roche, Lily, Pfizer, Myers-Squibb etc. etc. which were tested on animals, including many of society's undesirables is a holocaust that we have conveniently forgotten. Baby boomers should not be nostalgic for being doped up in a field having unprotected sex, because that's f**king up society.

Many well meaning Physicians have entered Psychiatry, believing that it was a new Science, motivated by the desire to improve lives. Nobody did the long-term studies to find out whether the outcomes were better or worse. Where data has existed - for example, with Heroin, Cocaine, Laudenum, Snuff, Cannabis - the long term outcomes only look OK for the extremely wealthy. Are you the Queen of England? No? Then perhaps Cannabis is not for you. Big Pharma gets very rich indeed of patent royalties, which is completely at odds with the needs of sick people.

Psychoactive substances have always been the means of controlling society. Whether it was the Coca leaves of Peru and Columbia, Betel nut of Africa, Paan of Southern Asia, Tea of North India and China, Coffee and Cocoa of South America... and of course, Tobacco of the Americas. Older than all of these, is of course, alcohol which was brewed by monks in order to addict people to something that would fill their congregation pews.

As shamanism, witch-doctoring and magic declined in Europe, so organised religion rose to fill the void, as child mortality and and an early death were guaranteed to feature in the lives of Medieval people, along with hunger and bitterly cold winters. Life was short and sh1t.

Civilisation has advanced. We now have the resources to treat diseases, making them go away and people live instead of dying. In a hell of lot of cases that's a mosquito net and a sachet of salt & sugar, which will save the life of a person with runny pooh, provided they have access to clean drinking water. It's as simple as that.

Add food into the mixture and you're improving lives immeasurably in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Sahara is a bleak and desolate space that separates almost an entire continent from having access to civilisation. Do we travel there to distribute clean water, medicine, bicycles? No, we go there to steal gold, diamonds, uranium ore, dam their rivers, steal their resources and take what little crops the African people grow to feed themselves, paying barely enough for them to survive the winter. This is rape.

I don't know if this is coming across, but I'm quite angry about this. I have been for as long as I've been able to hold a complex thought and set of feelings in my young mind. I'm sorry I wasn't a right-on lefty liberal, born with a copy of The Guardian clutched in my hands, as I was ejected from my mother's womb. I'm sorry that you're too far up your Islington Blairite Hypocrite Champagne Swilling Holier-than-thou F**king A*se to see that the working classes care too... but they didn't have the benefit of your privileged education. But then you're so smart that you knew that? No?

Thankfully, Oxford is a think-tank, where burnt out Blairites decide to raise a family. It used to be an affordable commuter belt City with enough culture and academic interest to make the trip into Paddington on the train, worth jostling with other suits in the morning.

Oh yes, Oxford has its fair share of people who look down their noses at the great unwashed masses. Thankfully though, some of them couldn't avoid actually encountering some grubby street urchins, and having their perceptions shaken up.

There was a joke shop in the heart of Jericho, where you could buy water balloons, smoke bombs, whoopee cushions, firecrackers/bangers and other things that could shock a smug mummy's boy out of his self-obsessed preening, admiring themselves in their gowns in shop windows as they walked through the cobbled streets of Oxford's dreaming spires.

My Parents never really reprimanded me for launching a "Swallows and Amazons" style attack on the punters, from the high boughs of trees and bridges in the University Parks. We were little monkeys, who tore around town on our BMXs and skateboards faster than any Park Ranger or officious old fuddy-duddy could chase after us. We used to ring doorbells, egg houses, put treacle on door knobs. We were working class kids thumbing our noses at the establishment and everybody loved it, except for the arrogant elite.

Luckily, all the 'warrior' men were all in London, hunting big game and beating their chests. We knew our mothers would tell us off and say "wait until your father gets home" but we also knew our fathers would be exhausted from full-on days of p1ssing contests in the Big Smoke, followed by horrendous rat-race train journeys from hell.

This kind of matriarchal society took the sting out of any beatings that the kids got, and us kids bonded a lot more with our mothers than would be ordinary at that time. Did it lead to a load of mummies boys? Actually, it might have led to a group of people who feel so loved and cared for that they feel invincible. Is this a bad thing? Well some of my friends have died young, making unwise decisions when fuelled by alcohol.

There was one friend who shone bright in all our lives, and the circumstances in which we lost him were close to my own childhood experiences, of playing on railway tracks unsupervised by adults. I could totally picture exactly how it happened. It was chilling, and still is today. I am not imagining myself doing that, I am actually able to perfectly empathise with the mindset that would have led to a tiny mistake, which cost my friend his life.

I hope that his Mother and family is OK, if they read this. I'm trying to write it as sensitively as I can. Our friend is still very much alive in our hearts, and I'm crying as I write this. Tears are rolling down my cheeks and splotching onto my keyboard. I can remember how he touched our lives, as clearly as if it were only yesterday.

The cruellest twist of all, was that we had reconnected just as we were leaving adolescence; and embarking on our journey into adulthood. It robbed us all of the chance to see just how great that young man was going to become. Life can cheat and short-change us still, even at the end of the second millennium.

The challenge that life set our group of friends, was how to cope, in the modern age that had scattered us to the winds. We couldn't really grieve properly as a group. Even though, by total coincidence, this young man had ended up in the same City in Hampshire as me. Most of our other friends had remained in Oxford, where we grew up in.

I used the Internet to try and reconnect with these friends, but it was still very early days, and I felt very damaged and bitter about having been taken away from this group of beloved people. My parents were always moving me away from my friends and schools I loved. I didn't undertand why this had to happen. It was heartbreaking.

We left Aberystwyth for Kidlington, we left Kidlington for Tackley, we left Tackley for Oxford, we then had an abortive attempt to leave Oxford for Cinais in France (thankfully my teachers stepped in and stood up for me, explaining that my life was getting f**ked up by this wanderlust) but we still left for Harcombe, and then the family left Harcombe for Charminster.

By this point I had gotten f**ked off and left home at age 17/18, for Dorchester and my first job. I had barely settled in when British Aerospace then had the lovely idea of moving me to the Portsmouth/Fareham/Gosport area. Eventually I got f**ked off with that company keeping me away from my friends (and being responsible for making weapons that were used to kill people) so I moved to Winchester, where unsurprisingly I didn't have the most developed set of social skills or any ability to relate to my peers... unintended consequences, but it certainly hit me right in the feels.

I had a very weird time in Winchester, but I made 2 key friends, one of whom has recently re-entered my life, which restabilised it temporarily. Friends are important. Continuity is important. Stability is important. Trust is important. Truth is important.

I'm still working through thorny feelings about being taken away from my peers. It left me feeling I had to be fiercely independent and do everything early, in a rush. I've always felt like I had to take care of my Parents. When we were in Ireland when I was a little boy, I remember staying awake all night so that I could go and fetch the coal in the morning. I got myself dressed at dawn, and was just heading out with the coal scuttle to fetch the coal, when my Dad woke up and asked what I was doing.

Yes, you can raise your kids in a Victorian way, and they will turn out OK to outward appearances, but they may have problems reconciling your nostalgia for a time that probably didn't exist and you are over-romanticising, with reality in the 20th and 21st century. The projection of your inadequacies will have unexpected consequences. "Children should be seen and not heard" is one of the most offensive things I have ever heard in my life. F**k you, you dinosaurs.

It's not your fault. You were the best Mum & Dad (I wasn't allowed to say "Mum" or "Dad" for some reason) that you knew how to be. I did have an interesting time in my not-really-allowed-to-be-child-hood, being your experiment in denying the infantilism of an infant. It's benefitted me in the long run... I've had a great head start in many aspects of my life. I'm just not what you might call, a rounded character. For every yin there is a yang.

I'd probably make a good butler. I like dressing up and I sound posh. I can be anything you want me to be. I aim to please, Sir.

Tags: #childhood #career #london #oxford #parents #drugs #addiction #alcohol

This is a story of a growing problem in people's lives....

I can't get no sleep. That's a double negative. What I mean is, that I have a problem with insomnia, because I stare at backlit devices around-the-clock. The problem with backlit devices is that they output light that hits your retina, telling your body "it's daytime, get up".

When I'm awake, which is most of the time, I'm either at work on my laptop or working at a double or even triple monitor, looking at my phone, or looking at a TV, tablet or some other backlit device. I had even taken to reading books on my phone, which means that my body had absolutely no light-based clue as to what the f**king time is.

Unsurprisingly, this messes with your circadian rhythm, even if you eat your meals at regular intervals, and attempt to get in and out of bed at normal times. I generally keep at least 3 electronic devices within grabbing distance of my bed anyway (phone, laptop, smartwatch) and often times I fall asleep with either my laptop on my lap, or still wearing my smartwatch (which helpfully vibrates, so I can briefly wake up to check any alerts).

Photographing stuff on my phone and uploading it to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, posting check-ins and status updates, and making snide or sarcastic Tweets - from 4 different accounts, at least - has grown and grown, leading to a kind of live-blogging of my life.

To say that I was obsessed with social media would be a massive understatement. It's actually an addiction that is affecting my health. That's the generally recognised definition of an addiction: when something you enjoy is negatively affecting your life, but you are struggling or unable to reduce your dependence on the thing you are addicted to (water, oxygen and sugar don't qualify, you see, because you die without those things).

The inscription around the woolly head of our sheepie friend reads: we are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep. Shaun would be well advised to make sure he gets enough sleep, as our immune systems can get dangerously low if we aren't giving our brains and bodies the rest they were designed to have.

Modern life gives us surprisingly few environmental cues as to what we should be doing. Here in London we have artificial lighting 24 hours a day, and there is barely a wall that doesn't have some kind of flat screen attached to it now. We really are a City that doesn't sleep. When all the bankers, lawyers and accountants go home in their taxis, just before midnight, an army of cleaners and trash collectors sweep in behind, to collect all those discarded coffee cups and sandwich wrappers.

Most offices are now 24 x 7 x 364 (you get Christmas Day off - this is the only real Bank Holiday) which have cost-saving motion sensing lighting, so you only have to glance up at one of the tall office blocks at an unusual hour, to get a rough idea of just how many people are working on some unrealistic deadline for their client.

Delivering a deal, getting the Thank Yous from your bosses and clients. High-fiving your colleagues, and adding another tombstone to your impressive collection of deals or projects that you have delivered... that's addictive too. You get a little dopamine hit every time one of those things happens, and before you know it, you find yourself going into the office 7 days a week and answering the phone to your bosses whenever they call.

In a global business, we operate a follow-the-sun model, where Europe hands over to the Americas, and then onto Australasia, and then Asia-Pacific, and then Middle East and North Africa and all too soon it's dawn again. Where those business centres are unable to fully support themselves, some poor sod carries their phone and/or BlackBerry everywhere anytime. We used to call it Crackberry when we first got our BlackBerries, and you found yourself checking email at 4am, even when you officially weren't on call.

We can't actually help ourselves anymore. Whenever we hear that bleep and see that message notification light blinking, we have been habituated into reaching out and grabbing it, no matter what time of day it is, no matter how socially inappropriate it might be, no matter what else we are attempting to do at the time.

I find myself looking at my smartphone, one-handed, while cycling along in front of 3-lanes of red London busses and trucks... what could go wrong? I find myself finishing typing a message, one-handed, while descending steps and even a ladder that leads down onto the 'beach' outside my flat. That ladder is about 80ft high. It would hurt if I fell, or maybe even kill me.

It's a similar deal with selfies. People will go to extreme lengths to get the shot. They won't even let you skydive with a camera until you have done a certain amount of jumps, because of the sensible precaution that people should concentrate on the hard ground that is approaching at 125mph, and not the killer shot that will make their Facebook profile look super awesome.

So I tried to photograph 64 painted sheep in Covent Garden yesterday. Should we be quite worried, in a pathetic hand-wringing Daily Mail reader way? Why? In the above image, some adults might have been accidentally been photographed obsessively taking photos of their children. The image is low enough resolution that you can't actually recognise people, but some idiot will still declare that their privacy has been invaded. Welcome to London, you muppets. We are one nation under CCTV.

(NOTE: I took particular care to avoid taking a photo of anybody's child, and no, that really is not your kid in the image... it's someone else who shops in Baby Gap or Mothercare or wherever, and has a blonde/mousey/dark-haired kid. Can you imagine how hard that is in Covent Garden?).

So, for my part, I am pretty much putting my entire life - not including anything I am under contractual and professional obligation to protect - into the public domain. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear.

Is this brave, or stupid? Will I come to regret doing this? Am I embarrassed? Yes, there is embarrassment at first, and then this grows into a feeling of being liberated. Nudity, sex etc. are still taboos, so I'm not going to take things that far, and I am mindful of other people's need for privacy so I won't be exposing anybody else to my public life laundry. Ask yourself though, why do you feel uneasy about something leaking out?

So, I believe that Cannabis is a very dangerous drug that has been allowed to enter popular culture (some conservative estimates say that 1 in 10 people are regularly 'stoning' themselves). My biggest concern is that prodromal Schizophrenia is being turned into fully blown psychotic episodes in young people. The paranoia and disordered thinking that I have witnessed in friends and relatives is disturbing.

The strains of Cannabis that have been developed with very high Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) content are ruining many lives. People just sit around, eating, playing computer games, and p1ssing their youth away. These are smart and enterprising people. We are losing a whole generation, and I'm pretty angry about that.

If you walk around Camden Town, you will realise how the Marajuana plant has become a ubiquitous emblem for a huge powerful narcotics industry. The revenue and turnover involved is many many billions, in the UK alone. The corruption involved, the bribery of government officials, is a multi-agency problem that spans Border Controls, Customs, Police, Local Government, and of course, Parliament. Professor David Nutt was run out of government for trying to bring some sanity to the issues which threaten to tear our society apart.

We can't have an entire generation, whose ideas and energy have been repressed by a chemical 'straight jacket'. These stoners are too intoxicated to see that they have been conned. They might think they are part of a counter-culture revolution. From my first-hand observations, they are actually spouting complete rubbish, gawping at the TV, surrounded by empty junk food wrappers, in the stained clothes they have been wearing for days.

It sounds like I'm having a go at young people. I really am not. This is a major sadness in my life, that brilliant, bright, intelligent, energetic, beautiful young people are selling themselves so short, because they have been trapped into a cycle of poverty and intoxication, addicted to strong narcotics. What other hopes do they have? Getting a job as a young person is almost impossible.

Can't get a job without the experience. Can't get the experience without the job. That's the spine-chilling Catch 22 that is destroying a whole generation. These are your children who are being frozen out from the employment market. Take a bloody look at yourself, stop looking at the profit and turnover for your company, and ask yourself how many apprentices have you trained? How many entry-level positions have you created in your company? What are you doing to help the next generation?

Give young people the break they need in life. It could be as little as a small business loan, of a few hundred or few thousand pounds. That kind of money is pocket change compared to the value of your savings and assets. If you don't give away more than 1% of your total personal wealth (value of your house + value of your salary + value of your savings + value of your pension) every year, for the lifetime of each child that you have spawned, then you are a pathetic spineless leech on society.

My parents, tried to be as supportive as they were capable of being, and I love them. They have made mistakes, just the same as all of us, and I do recognise that being a parent is hard, and everybody is just winging it.

Tags: #childhod #addiction #mentalhealth #drugs #privacy #london #banking #career

This is a story of a dinner out with friends, planning my retirement...

I went to the book store with my friend Lesya. I bought 2 books. I was pretty insistent that I buy one of them. Out of all the books in that book store, I couldn't imagine walking out of there without this one. I knew that it would haunt my idle thoughts and dreams if I didn't have this book.

But, strangely though, as I leafed through the book, trying to build up the courage to buy it - and not repress my general urge to p1ss all my money away - I found a deeper and deeper connection with it. Every page I opened, I fell more and more in love with the content... perhaps I have always loved it?

So, a headhunter recently asked me what I really want to do with my life. I was surprised how unhesitatingly I answered that I want to retire at the age of 45 and become a Therotical Physicist. It just tripped right off the tongue, even though I hadn't made that plan - at least in my concious mind - until that point in time.

But what is time? What is conciousness? At dinner later that evening, we conducted a kind of experiment which was quite enlightening...

There are 1,099 pages in Penrose's book. I asked my friends to open the book at any page, and I would attempt to explain the theory on the page that the book was 'randomly' opened at. Why do I put 'random' in quotes like that? Well, I have a working theory that there is no such thing as a random number, in reality as we can possibly experience it... which leads on to the first page.

The Anthropic Principle is where the book was first opened, by Lesya, which nobody wanted me to explain, as John believed I had rigged the game. Anybody with a reasonable grasp of Greek or Latin or whatever the f**k language that poncey word "Anthropic" is rooted from, will know that basically what this is saying is Humanity is at the centre of the reality we all experience. In the catchphrase of the Moneysupermarket Meerkat.... SIMPLES!!

I did a quick Google search for "number of books in a book store" and the first simple answer I came up with that doesn't sound unrealistic was "upwards of 1,000" which is a bit of a sh1t answer, because 1,160,000,000,000,000 is a number which is upwards of 1,000 so let's use 999 as the answer to be on the safe side.

So, there was a 1/999 chance that I would pick that book, and a 1/1,099 chance that Lesya would pick that page, which means there was a 0.0001% chance that I could have preplanned that 'stunt'. Not likely, but still a chance.

So, then John had a go opening the book. I'm going to try and write the formula that was on that page, from memory:

Δp Δx ≳ ½ ћ

Now, I'm not sure, but I'm just going to go with my gut instinct and avoid cheating, but I'm pretty sure that looks like the Uncertainty Principle to me. The first symbol is easy - delta - the little triangle means 'the difference between two values'. So the first side of the equation says "what is the total area that could be covered by something with a known momentum AND a known location"... where in the world could the thing we are looking for be found?

So, I'm going to explain the other side of the equation in a minute, but for now let's just work out the odds of me being right. It's another 1 in 1,099 chance that John could have picked the page I wanted him to, at 'random'. That makes a statistical probability of 0.00000008% that the events of the evening went in my favour.

So, the other side of the equation is super easy. It's half the Planck constant. I reconised the h-bar symbol and what it meant immediately. We can work out the odds of that. There are 26 letters in the Roman alphabet, and let's imagine that there are 26 kinds of mark applied to them, each with a specific meaning in Physics (this obvious simplification ignores all the Greek characters... but it will suffice). So that's 1/26 times 1/26, which is 0.15% probable that I would match the correct meaning (assuming I knew them all) with the character.

So what kind of probability have we gotten to now?

0.0000000001%

I'm not sure, but I hope that is Six Sigma statistical significance. I was never that great at Maths.

Tags: #physics #friends

This is a story of a seemingly simple equation...

1 + 1 ≠ 1. I have been trying to make a single 'perfect' life by finding 'the one' but this has not led me or anybody to nirvana.

I was once so desperate for 'love' that I tried to make a relationship work with a girl I didn't fancy and a male boss, who was gay. You can't say I haven't tried everything!

I've had some lovely girlfriends, but it's been rather hard for them. I think I started 'clingy' and then progressed to 'intense' and then didn't really develop much from there. Not sure why it's taking me so long to realise that these things can't be rushed.

So, I got married, and we had our first test of in sickness and in health almost immediately, but we got married in Hawaii, so I'm not even sure if that was part of the vows. I certainly feel like it's a pretty crucial part of a loving committed relationship, but I don't know what the correct formula is.

When I had to go into hospital, soon after getting married, my wife said I would have to choose between her and treatment. I was pretty sure I was going to die if I didn't get treatment, and it was the reccomendation of my doctor, so I was kind of caught between a rock and a hard place.

I had pretty much offered my wife my head on a platter, as some kind of crazy symbolic gesture of how much I loved her, but that I felt I needed to demonstrate my love in this way was most confusing and distressing to me. I can see that this was my problem, not hers.

I left London to live the dream of having a place near the beach and kitesurfing every day. While I was down at the beach one day, my then girlfriend went through my stuff and when I returned to my car to warm up, I saw that I had a message demanding that I return home immediately... I was being summoned to court. Not a real court, but I had been summarily judged to be various things. I had to scamper back as quickly as I could to face my charges.

I don't blame my ex. She had added up 2 + 2 and made 5. She only cared about me, and about our relationship. She was worried I was a drug addict, because she had been through my internet search history, and found that I had Google'd "Nutmeg" after our friend had said that it had psychoactive effects comparable with strong narcotics. Frankly and truthfully, I merely wanted to find evidence to repudiate these unlikely claims.

My ex had good reason to feel insecure though... our friend had kinda gotten my attention. Not to do with the drugs, but she was and still is a larger than life character who defies being ignored by any and all male attention. That does not mean I wanted to cheat on my ex. It means I can still look at a cheeseburger when I am eating a steak.

The company that my ex was working for at the time sent her away from my beach dream life quite often, and I was lonely in the flat that she had insisted that I rent to be close to the office that she never spent any time at, in Poole. I had offered to move to Oxford, where she was working most of the time, but she had promised me that her contract would not be extended. Having worked for the same client and received several extensions myself, I could see that this was unlikely.

So, my friends looked after me, when I was all lonely in our huge apartment that was nowhere near any of my friends. We went out and sang Karaoke. We got drunk together. My certain female friend in question even offered to try and help me with my lifelong dislike of blowjobs... I declined, because I was in love with my ex. It was a thoughtful gesture though.

My ex could see that there was a certain chemistry though, and I guess she grew insecure. She tried to break up with me, without an explaination, and I was confused as hell. I stuck with it and she could see that I cared about her very much and so she gave it another go, but I never really understood what that was all about, until I just wrote these words right now.

The thing that she never seemed to realise is that I only had eyes for her. She lit up a room when she was happy. I remember walking with friends down at Ringstead Bay, near Weymouth, and the girls were walking along together in a line, when I turned back and shot my ex a smouldering look, completely by accident. I was so in love with her, it was so visible to everyone else that the girls either side all went "aaahhhhh" simultanously.

I hope my ex is happy now. I hope she has moved on. I hope that I made enough space and gave her enough closure that she has been able to pick up the pieces of her life and carry on. I'm really sorry that things didn't work out, but I hope the breakup can somehow be for the best in the long run.

So, one of my best friends reminded me last night of the rule of thumb for getting over someone. Seeing as me and my ex were off-and-on from 2005 to 2013, I guess that means there will be a situation vacant in 2017, but until then women should steer clear of this particular emotional juggernaught.

Show me the way to Mordor (October 2013)

Tags: #love #divorce #LGBT #friends

This is a story of a night where I fell asleep and didn't know if I was going to wake up...

God bless the NHS. This is the view that I couldn't really appreciate, from my hospital bed, where I was quite surprised to wake up. I wasn't surprised that I was in hospital, as I remember going there, but I don't remember caring whether I lived or died. I certainly was not afraid of death. I was surprised to still be alive. Was I grateful to be alive? No. Was I grateful for the hard working people of the Royal Free Hospital? Yes.

On another occasion, I had sliced my wrist open, which was a fairly calculated cry for help, and as my distress grew, I posted a picture on Facebook of some Potassium Cyanide which I had obtained through the Dark Web, which was perhaps a final warning. The responses to both were rather confusing and disturbing. People reacted angrily. I became the bad guy somehow. I'm not sure how or why that happened.

It was World Suicide Prevention day on September 10th, but I was too consumed with work to notice that day had passed. That means I survived, for now. However, I am scared that the darkness may return one day.

That's why I decided to build something that I thought would have been useful to me, when I was going through tough times. I didn't even stop to think that somebody else might have built something similar. I just threw something together (areyougone.org) in the matter of a few hours.

If it only takes me a few hours to build a suicide prevention / missing persons service, but it only takes you a few moments to dismiss somebody as a "Melodramatic Emo" or some kind of "Lost Cause" then F**k You, buddy.

None of my friends came to visit me in hospital. None of my family. That's a pretty poor show.

Do you really want to pick over the details? Who made you God? Why should you sit in judgement over those lives you want to care for and nurture and protect, and those who you deem unworthy? When is it OK to label a person as a lost cause, and just leave it to the Police, Nurses, Doctors and Coroners to pick up the pieces?

We are kicking human lives into the gutter, and I'm upset about that.

I had to ring an ex-girlfriend to bring me some clothes. Weeks in hospital with no physical support from partner, parents or friends is pretty shitty (May 2014)

Tags: #suicide #mentalhealth #depression #NHS #london

This is a story of a culture that lives in the hearts and minds of people, not a place...

Look how happy this burger flipper is! Look at him! He's so happy! There isn't even any ham in his hamburgers! He flips his burgers to D. I. S. C. O. music, and he is HAPPY!

What a lovely lovely thing the American Dream is. I totally buy into it. I've had the very best of it. I've flown in Boeing jets, driven Ford Mustangs, eaten McDonalds drive-thru, spelled words like "color" and "center" deliberately when in an American English context. I love the way that American culture has enriched every part of my dull beige British life.

I like British culture too. Some of it is cheap and tacky, like Spice Girls and the St. George's flag, but some of it is edgy and just downright edge-of-your-seat unmissable. Who can tear their eyes away from the tormented souls, the mumbling, bumbling, sexually repressed and oh so terribly polite British demeanour, where we start and end every sentence with a "Sorry".

You can't beat the brash snarl and roar of an overdriven electric guitar. However it's the British homage to American stadium rock that somehow lasts, beyond the brilliance and inspiration of Hendrix and a rock-and-roll 60s generation, who burnt out in a blaze of glory.

Let's see how many clichés we can pack into a single sentence about The Americans, who are the candle that burns twice as bright but burns half as long. Like a moth, we are attracted to their bright flame, but like Icarus, we need to be careful that our wax wings are not melted. You can't stare at the sun for too long. There's a little black spot on the sun today, it's in the same old spot as yesterday... yes The Police, and their illegal alien in New York are pretty clear about where they would really like to be Citizens.

I would love a precious Green Card, but I fear rejection by the prettiest girl on the planet... by which I mean the United States of AM-ER-IC-AH, F**k Yeah! I'm not even kidding. When I'm there, I feel like I just stepped onto a movie set. I find myself just gawping at road signs, or pinching myself when I'm driving down the freeway.

So, it's true. If you make great music, great movies, and you are contributing volumes and volumes of literature, art, music and amazing companies, technology, and thought leaders... how is it surprising that everybody wants to live there, and have a slice of the American Dream

That's the true "trickle down" effect, in my not-so-humble opinion.

Please let me in. I'm a refugee of the humdrum boring life that is not at all what I was brought up to expect from Hollywood and the adverts that told me I need to consume consume consume. I'm not even joking. Or maybe it's my dry British sense of humour. Dare I say... irony?

America, I love you x (I really do)

Tags: #america, #NHS #culture

This is a story of ambiguity and interpretation...

Does anybody remember the computer game Lemmings? It was probably one of the most influential games of my childhood. The Psygnosis development house was also responsible for Shadow of the Beast; and even today that game remains a piece of great artwork, which spans the visual and auditory mediums. Wot I mean iz the graffix and music is pure brilliant too, innit!

So what's that got to do with a rather camp picture of me from 2006? You tell me, Einstein.

Tags: #computing #LGBT #computergames #sailing

This is a story of a noncompetitive person who became a winner...

In September 2008 I won the Poole Animal Windfest. I then got into a waiting taxi and flew to India to work with my team on the DTCC project for JPMorgan. I didn't even have time to collect my prize or wash off the salt from my skin.

I didn't even realise I had won. When I reached the shore, I had travelled far downwind from the spectators, and it wasn't until I dragged my board and kite back up the beach and started to pack up that people said I had won the final heat

That year, I wrote a software testing framework called Message Oriented Testing (MOT... a pun on the UK's certificate of roadworthiness test for cars and other motor vehicles) as well as designing and leading the coding of the confirmations engine for Credit Default Swaps, that would work with the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation's API and the Financial Products Markup Language.

This test-driven approach delivered the project on time, despite me having to do it with completely inexperienced offshore resources, and the low number of defects left my bosses gobsmacked. I didn't realise any of this until somebody told me this a long time afterwards.

The truth is though, that was the last good code I wrote, and even that was a bit hacky. I don't really go in for Rolls-Royce solutions. Generally I'm useful when the client or customer needs something doing yesterday. When all the 'architects' have done fart-arsing around and the project is really late, that's the time that I ususually wake up and start hacking something together to get things over the finishing line.

Does that mean I'm a good hacker? In truth, not really. Doing these 'heroic' acts generally leaves me burnt out, and leaves the team with a pile of code which I'm the only person who understands. The deadline is met, but everybody else is left holding the baby, while I sleep off the 'hangover' from a work binge.

So what am I good at? Well, I'm honest - brutally honest - and I also really dislike the salesmen in software who promise the earth and then go back to their development team to give them the 'good news' that they have made the sale... provided the whole team can work for 25 hours a day, 9 days a week, for the next 17 months, and deliver in a year. We just need to make a little adjustment to the Gregorian calendar, no?

I do have a good background in Mathematics thanks to incredible teachers (my maths teacher at school taught me Matrix Mechanics after school, so I could write a 3D ray-tracing algorithm) and Computer Science (the same maths teacher also taught me and a few friends an extra GCSE in our lunch breaks) and I'm enough of a fast learner to pick up any new technology that's required of me to learn to a 'competant hacker' level... a colleague once kindly said I "hit the ground running like Linford Christie" but I think I will probably also fall over like Usain Bolt, unless I stop taking on these sprints.

I also love design and technology. I had the most brilliant D&T teachers throughout my school years. At age 15 I designed and built a motion-tracking device that fitted over a person's arm. I demonstrated it, along with the software I wrote, at Brunel University, as part of the Young Inventor of the Year competition. I think I got a prize, but I can't remember! I definitely think I have a certificate from the competition - which was awarded to me by the Rotary Club, in Lyme Regis - somewhere in the archives.

Now, what would be the perfect job for such a person? I actually have no idea. I've been trying everything I can possibly think of. I actually think, I'm pretty good at pursuading people to back other people's ideas. I guess that makes me a salesman?

The logos displayed are companies that the Hubflow platform was demo'ed to. We partnered with Video Arts, who then took it to their large customer base. Standard sales bullshit (July 2011)

Tags: #kiteboarding #kitesurfing #startup #entreprenuer #computing #banking #career