This is a story about escape velocity...

A happy healthy life is a fairly simple prescription. It's not hard to look for slightly happier people and imitate their magic formula.

In essence, what I have distilled things down to is this:

• Home - so you can be warm and dry and your stuff isn't stolen
• Job - so you can pay your rent/mortgage, bills and buy food & clothes (yes, clothes wear out)
• Family - not blood relatives, but anybody who loves and cares about you
• Friends - social media doesn't count; you have to see friends face to face
• Disposible income - get deeper and deeper into debt and you'll lose your home
• Goal or passion - this can be work, this can be your kids, this can be a hobby; you need something.
• Girlfriend/boyfriend - everybody's gotta get laid, and it's important to have intimacy and companionship

At the moment I have 3 out of 7. Assuming that you need 50% or more to be OK, it's no wonder that I'm depressed as hell and have a lot of suicidal thoughts.

Yes, I have friends who I see less than once a week, so I do have friends. Yes, my sister and I do occasionally exchange text messages, even though we haven't seen each other for the best part of a year. Yes, my goal has been to get myself into a position of financial security, and I've been making great progress, but it's not really my goal... it's just a necessity because of needing to not be homeless and destitute.

So, all I really have is a home, a job, and I'm making more money than I'm spending, which is digging me out of debt.

I love my friends dearly, and it does help that people are in contact via social media, email, text message. I have the offer of speaking to a few friends on the telephone, which I'm grateful for. I also make the effort to travel as much as I feel able to, in order to see people face to face, and I'm glad when I do it, even though it's expensive, exhausting and time consuming to zoom all over the country, if not the world.

I just don't have a group of buddies you know? People to go to the pub with. People to go out for a meal with. People to play frisbee with in the park. I'm lacking a social group.

I'm also lacking that significant other. Somebody to just hang out with. Have sex with. Make food with. Watch movies with. Play games with. Go sightseeing with.

I've stitched together a patchwork quilt of whatever I can get, in order to just about cling to life with my fingernails, but it's inadequate. That's not to say I'm not ungrateful for those occasional invites to hang out and do stuff. It's just not enough. I thrive on face to face social contact, and I'm not getting enough.

To further compound problems, the team I've been managing at work are all in the Far East, so I don't even get proper face-to-face social contact at work. I sit at my desk, lonely and bored. I've helped to create a great culture in my team, but I don't really benefit from it, because they are quite literally 6,666 miles away (I just looked that up - I love that fact!).

In desperation, I made compromises that are just not acceptable, sustainable. I took a job that pays well and is very easy, but doesn't provide anything other than the money that I need. I made other choices because of the desperate need for something rather than nothing. There's an opportunity cost. If I'm in a job that I hate and drains my energy, then I don't have the time and the motivation to get something better.

In a way, it's good that a couple of things are coming to an end, because it's prompting me to go after the things I want rather than the things that I took through desperation. Of course, I'm grateful to have the money, and the support that I've received, but you make different choices when you're in deep shit.

So, on Thursday 22nd September, 2016, I will have completed a year of blogging, 6 months 'clean' and my 6 month employment contract will be over.

On Thursday 22nd September, 2016, I will have 1 out of 7 of the things that I need, with the threat that I will quickly lose even that one single thing.

Without a job, I'll have more expenditure than income. I need to pay rent, bills, service debts. I need to replace worn out clothes and things that break. I need to buy food and toiletries. Life is not sustainable in Western society without income.

I don't have savings, but I do have creditworthiness. Yet again, I will have to borrow money in order to keep my head above water. I have no financial safety net. What I have instead are commercial lenders who are prepared to extract their pound of flesh so that I can avoid homelessness and destitution.

If you think I could have saved more money than I have done these past months, you are mistaken. Without a short holiday, I would never have lasted the extra months. Without alcohol, I would never have coped with the stress and anxiety. I could have penny pinched on my accommodation, but can you imagine how awful it is living in a hostel when you're working full time? I worked, slept and ate. How far has it got me? Well. Probably about 50% of the way towards financial security.

I need to take a break, because my nerves are frazzled and I'm exhausted.

I doubt any contract could be as bad as the job I'm about to finish on Wednesday. For my next contract, I'm going to look for something where I'll be working with a team in London. I need a much more interesting workload. Being bored to death is no way to die.

With money comes the opportunity to travel, socialise, make the investment in a new hobby. With a more tolerable day job comes energy and enthusiasm for each day. With a more liveable life comes the freedom from drink, drugs and medication, in order to simply get through the day.

It's a fucking nutty strategy, to go for the big win. What you just don't understand is just how close to irreparably broken my life is. You just don't understand what it's like to not have so many of the elements that prop up your life. Look again at the bullet pointed list above, and score yourself. How many of the things you need do you have?

Look back at the last 4 weeks of your life and ask yourself this:

• How many nights were you homeless? - zero, I presume
• How many days did you work? - I'm guessing somewhere around 12, on average
• How many times were you in contact with your family? - I'm guessing at least 4
• How many days did you see friends face to face? - I'm guessing at least 8
• Did you make more money than you spent? - I'm guessing at least breakeven
• How many times did you do something 'fun'? - I'm guessing at least 4
• How many times did you have sex or snuggles? - I'm guessing at least 8

Those would seem like adequate answers to me. If you're hitting those numbers, your life is probably just about OK. Less than that in one area, maybe you can make up for it in another. For example, you might have been out of work and losing money, but at least you were surrounded by your loving family a lot more of the time, because maybe you were staying at home looking after the kids.

I'm certainly not saying it's easy being a stay at home mom or a househusband, but suicidal depression can come about through death by a thousand cuts. All the little things that are wrong in your life add up to an unbearably horrible situation.

In some ways I'm relishing next Thursday, because I can sleep and recharge my batteries. With spare time that's completely free from artificial structure, such as having to be in a certain office at certain times of the day, then I can start to relax and decide what I want to do next.

The obvious thing to do is to get another lucrative contract, and work for at least another 4 months, so that I can get a cushion of savings to support me in pursuing a passion. Without being able to underwrite my own risk, I have zero faith in my family or government to support me if I fall on hard times. I have a friend who's offered me some financial support, but I think it's unethical to accept it because then I'm borrowing from their safety net.

In this individualistic society, nobody parachuted in to rescue me when I was homeless, destitute. Nobody came to rescue me. Nobody came to my aid. Help was not forthcoming. Even when I had letters from my doctor, my psychiatrist, my social worker... all begging for the government to support me as a vulnerable person with mental health problems, the people I dealt with were unhelpful, obstructive and ultimately just wasted my time and effort even asking for the support that I was entitled to, because of their legal and moral obligations. Those public servants' salaries are paid for with my goddamn taxes. I've paid a lot in, and when I needed it, I could get nothing out.  It's down to me to support myself. I might as well be living in some developing world country, where at least the cost of surviving is lower.

People who warn me to stay within easy reach of the National Health Service for mental health reasons, are just naïve. I've been round and round the system many times since becoming clinically depressed in 2008. The system is bullshit. There is no safety net if you're a single man.

And so, I must play russian roulette with my life in order to support myself. The upside is OK: I might become wealthy and comfortable again, in a relatively short timescale of just a few years. The downside is horrible though. Can you imagine how much time I've spent thinking about how I'm going to kill myself? Can you imagine what it's like to spend a significant proportion of your waking hours feeling so awful that you pretty much want to die?

I swear if one more person tells me to go to my doctor and get some magic beans I'm going to scream. STOP MEDICALISING NON-MEDICAL PROBLEMS. The problem is clearly outlined above. I don't have broken brain chemistry. My brain has correctly identified the problems in my life. There are no short cuts. There's no way to cheat the sytem.

Of course, there is a short cut.

Drugs will tell your brain you feel loved. Drugs will make you feel relaxed. Drugs will make you feel happy. Drugs will make you feel contented. Drugs will tell you that you don't need friends. Drugs will tell you that you don't even need to eat or drink. Drugs will tell you that everything is fine.

Everything is not fine, so I don't want drugs - and by that I mean medication too - to tell me that things are fine. Things are not fine. I almost need these awful feelings to prompt me to get a better job, find some new friends, get a girlfriend, get a hobby. It's just that financial circumstances have constrained me more than you can possibly imagine.

Imagine if I'd declared bankruptcy at the start of the year. That would have been a stupendously dumb decision, in hindsight, wouldn't it? I'm presently not bankrupt. Presently, I have enough money to clear my credit cards, my overdraft.

Of course, my position can't last. You have to run just to stand still. I'm losing my job, and that means I will quickly go into debt again.

"Get another job then"

Guess what, Einstein... that's what I'm going to do. Even though I'm suicidally depressed, overcome with anxiety, I'm going to go and get another motherfucking job you c**t. Even though I'm technically entitled to disability benefits and a council house because my mental health is so debilitating, I am able to do these crazy raiding missions to go and gather nuts before my brain explodes and it all comes crashing down again. I'm locked into this boom & bust cycle. No wonder my bipolar disorder is so exacerbated.

And so, round and round I go. Up & down. Boom & bust. Highs & lows. It's not a medical problem. Its the motherfucking dance I'm forced to do by this farcical society. This is what you get when you don't support people. This is what you get when you isolate people. This is what you get when you only look out for number one.

"The pills will help you stabilise"

No, they won't. Have you looked at the long term studies? Have you studied the data, the clinical outcomes? Have you done the research? No. Of course you haven't. You just have this bullshit belief in the power of medical science. If I had an infection, I'd go to my doctor for antibiotics to treat it. I don't have a fucking infection. I have an allergy to shitty unbearable unliveable life.

I've tried all the meds under the sun. I know what life on medication is like. I've had tons of doctors and psychiatrists. I've tried tons of therapies. It's all a crock of shit. The fundamental problem is the fucking shitty world. Look around you; do you like what you see?

I'm not going to change the world begging on the street with a cardboard sign. I'm not going to change the world by impoverishing myself. I'm not going to change the world by trying the same things that people have tried for hundreds of years, without success. Only an idiot tries the same things expecting different results.

So, I'm on this crazy journey. I'm hoping that by next Wednesday I might have managed to write 365 blog posts, and probably around 450,000 words. That might not make a difference to you, but it's surely making a difference to me. It's probably making a difference to somebody, somewhere. I have visitors from around the world, reading what I write. Even if it's absolute garbage, it's better than just being a helpless spectator. Even if you think I'm an irrelevant bleeding heart lefty liberal who doesn't amount to a hill of beans, at least I'm composing my thoughts. At least I have a belief system. At least I have values and things that I passionately believe in.

It's very hard for me to come up with a reason why I'm struggling along at the moment. Why am I putting myself through this awful shit? Why don't I just kill myself, and then the pain will be over? Why don't I just give up, and relapse back into drug addiction?

Actually the second one is fairly easy to answer: somebody who dies of drug addiction is easy to discredit as a 'dirty' junkie. Somebody who's 'clean' and has just completed an important project for a major corporation, in a valuable role, and has set their financial affairs in good order, is a rather more inconvenient and difficult problem to find a soundbite to toss them into the gutter.

I want to be a thorn in the side of every selfish c**t out there who wishes their fellow humans dead. I want to shame people into action, from their comfortable existence where they don't even lose sleep over every homeless, hungry struggling person in pain and suffering out there.

Where the fuck are people when those around them are in distress? Who the fuck do you think is going to sort problems out, if it's not you?

Even though I could have put my tax money to far better use supporting myself, rather than paying the salaries of people who tell me they're not going to help me, I'm still glad to give away a substantial proportion of my income. However, I'm not buying a clean conscience. It's not like I pay my taxes so I can watch my friends become homeless and mentally ill, and assume that the council and some doctors are going to wave their magic wands and make it all better.

What the fuck happened to the empathy? I think I would offer to let somebody sleep on my couch, lend somebody money or go and visit somebody in distress, before I even experienced horrible things first hand myself. I had quite a comfortable existence up to the age of 32 or thereabouts, but I didn't think it was big OR clever to sit on my fucking arse not doing anything when people were suffering.

Those who have been kindest are those who have suffered the most, which makes me detest the comfortably off for their lack of empathy, their lack of humanity.

If humanity is destined for a situation where we let even our own family members and friends flail and drown, then I'm pleased that climate change is going to wipe you miserable c**ts out of existence. You don't deserve to survive, if your "I'm alright Jack" attitude is the prevailing one. I hope you and your kids and grandkids die slowly and painfully if you spawned more mouths to feed with not a single concern for anybody else.

Believe me, I do observe how happy and fulfilled my friends who are parents are, even if they complain how hard it is being a parent. Did you forget that we live in the age of birth control and abortion? You chose to have kids, and no matter what you say, you do get immeasurable benefit from having them. You have happiness and security, knowing you procreated. You have a flood of oxytocin when your cute kids throw their arms gleefully around you.

Believe me, I do observe how happy my friends are to own a dog, even if they complain about having to pick up the poop and hoover up the hair and other mess. You chose to have another carnivore on the planet, eating meat that meant that food for livestock was grown, rather than having more food for those who are starving, and depriving the planet of those extra trees that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Having a pet dog is selfish as fuck, but I do see how nice it is to have your dog playfully jumping with joy to see you, and throwing sticks in the park for them to fetch.

I can see that there are choices that benefit me as an individual hugely, but I choose not to take them, because I'm responsible for more than just myself. I don't believe that collective responsibility is something that naturally follows from individual responsibility. In fact, I see that the two things are naturally opposing.

Can't you see the fucking trends? Of course you do, but you just don't want to believe it.

You don't want to give up eating meat. You don't want to adopt instead of having your own biological children. You don't want to stop driving your precious little darlings around in a gas-guzzling 4x4 "because it's safer for our family". You don't want to plant trees instead of having a pet dog. You don't want to do anything different at all, in fact, even though you're fucking everything up for your kids and your grandkids.

That's why I'm depressed. That's why I'm suicidal. That's why I'm stuck in a hole I can't get out of. That's why I'm desperate and driven crazy by all this bullshit. That's why I'm doing things that are atypical... because the typical is what got us into this fucked up mess in the first place.

I don't care whether you're religious or not, but imagine some future judgement day, when it's obvious that the planet and the future survival of the human race is clearly doomed: will you say that you went along with things, supported the status quo, or did you try and change things? Did you at least act differently? Did you at least try and help in a way that's less pathetic than recycling your bottles? Did you help anybody other than the fucking clones you spawned to replace yourself?

Note: I'm not anti-parents. I don't hate my friends. I'm not some "wake up sheeple" fucktard. Dismiss me if you like using some convenient label that you were taught to use by those who wish to perpetuate the status quo.

If you're not acting with your conscience, or at least kept awake at night worrying about this shit, that's unconscionable.

You probably should worry about me. No doctor in a white fucking coat is going to make everything OK. It's not a medical problem. It's not a government problem. It's everybody's problem, including mine, but it's more than I can handle on my own.

Tags: #suicide #depression #mentalhealth #climate #politics #capitalism #homeless

This is a story about quicksand...

After being discharged from psychiatric hospital, what do you think you'd do next? Well, imagine that for months you have been travelling but you haven't been moving.

Things are not stable for me, no matter what my senses tell me. I go to the same office, looking at the same computer screen, surrounded by the same people, for months if not years on end. According to my senses I'm not moving anywhere.

However, my bank balance would tell a very different story. Just sitting mute in a chair, keeping my head down and being a perfect corporate drone who never rocks the boat, means that I am very rapidly travelling... financially. My body and mind don't really agree though.

My moods tell a very different story again. I don't necessarily notice seasonal effects and depression taking hold. I'm not fully able to tell when I'm getting hyped up and excessively involved in work or other projects. I'm not great at judging when it's time to take a break, either because I'm too down or too up.

It is unhealthy and unnatural that I work in the same place, doing the same thing, and working a job that moves at snail's pace. I just don't have the social life and hobbies at the moment to get any balance, let alone the financial means to travel, socialise and pursue pastimes with the usual gusto that I apply to everything.

What happens is that I become like a champagne cork. The pressure builds and builds, and then I explode with frustration.

My journey began with a two week stay in a psychiatric hospital, because I was so beaten down by the task of getting myself off the streets, back from the brink of bankruptcy, beating addiction, working on a massively important high-pressure project, renting an apartment, moving house for the zillionth time, and then realising that I was in an unsustainable situation: I needed to get rid of a 'friend' who thought he'd live with me rent free and get pocket money: for what reason he thought he deserved that, I'm not even sure. I also needed to quit a horrible contract that just wasn't worth the sleepless nights.

Next thing I knew, I was sleeping in a Mongolian yurt in Devon.

Then, I was surfing and hitch-hiking in Cornwall. Hitch-hiking is surprisingly hard, it turns out. Hitch-hiking is a bad way to get around if you have to be in a certain place at a certain time. I'd hitch-hiked once before, earlier in the year, in Ireland, but it turns out the Irish are a lot more friendly, helpful and trusting than the British, based on my anecdotal evidence.

Back in London after my Westcountry adventure, I still felt overwhelmed by depression and the feeling that I was trapped by my job. I had a lovely trip, but it had been very short and coming home was very anti-climactic. I knew I needed to quit my job, but I didn't quite have the guts to terminate a very lucrative contract.

I had made a plan a couple of months prior, to shame HSBC by sleeping rough in Canary Wharf, right by their headquarters. I found it deliciously ironic that they had inadvertently helped one of their customers to avoid bankruptcy, escape homelessness and generally improve their financial situation. I had no doubt that if they'd done their due diligence on me, then I would never have been employed to work on their number one project. I was planning on getting my contract terminated for no reason other than I cared about my job and was trying to do the right thing: acting with ethics and integrity.

But, I still had the contract like a millstone around my neck. I was desperately trapped and depressed about it.

I decided to fly to San Francisco and go to the Golden Gate Bridge. I wanted to illustrate how the desperation of my situation had driven me to contemplate suicide. I also wanted to go because I had planned to go 3 years earlier, but my parents had reneged on a promise and generally conspired to pull the rug out from under my feet at a time when I was terribly vulnerable. What they did was an awful thing, and I wanted to take that trip that I never got to make, because of their horrible behaviour.

I booked a flight for approximately 4 hours' time, packed a bag and left immediately. It's the most impulsive thing I've ever done in my life.

In San Francisco, a friend kindly picked me up and I dumped my bags at her house. I then borrowed a bike and rode to the Golden Gate Bridge. Less than 24 hours had elapsed since deciding to travel 5,351 miles. I stood in a jetlagged and travel weary state, peering over the edge, looking at the perilous drop to the sea below.

Travel, novelty, adventure, excitement, old friends, social contact, good weather... all of these things are the perfect antidote to depression. Who knew that the prospect of being chained to the same damn desk, in the same damn office, doing the same damn work you've done for 19 years, could lead to a tiny twinge of "Fuck My Life".

Obviously, the whole dumping your bags at your friends' place and then going off and killing yourself thing would be poor social etiquette. Plus I'd arranged to see an old schoolfriend while I was in San Francisco. The potential for positive experiences was massive. In the office, I had found myself hoping for a fire drill just because it would be slightly novel.

I'm no dumbass. I know it's important to stop and smell the roses. But, there isn't the time, energy or motivation to do so when you're trapped in the rat race.

In San Francisco I took delight in the simplest of things, like taking a selfie of myself by a road sign that matches my surname. I didn't even do any specific sightseeing or look at a map. I took a trolleycar because I saw one passing. I found myself by landmark buildings, just because I stumbled on them. I walked miles and miles.

My AirBnB host invited me out to a Halloween party. I dressed up. We drove to some house near Mountain View, where there were fascinating Silicon Valley tech people to meet from Google and Apple. That kind of shit generally doesn't happen when you're depressed working your desk job.

I got a tattoo to piss my parents off. My sister has several tattoos and my parents are always giving her a hard time about them. I thought that getting a tattoo would be some gesture of solidarity with my sister, and my parents would have to give both of us a hard time for having one. It was also a kind of souvenir from the trip, and a bit of reminder that I was going to try and stay in the land of the living for a little longer.

I caught up with a schoolfriend who I hadn't seen for years and years. He was supposed to be a mentor on a startup accelerator that I did in 2011, but he'd had to move back to California. It was great to see him, in the Mission district of San Francisco, even if we only had the briefest of time to catch up. Precious moments.

Meeting my friends' second child, and hanging out at their house reading stories to their eldest. Going with the kids to the science museum and playing with the interactive exhibits. Still etched in my mind.

Getting a glimpse into family life, valley startup life, California life... special.

Hanging out with some of the people who I have so much respect and love for... priceless.

I tried to provoke HSBC into terminating my contract immediately, by sending truthful emails, saying things that needed to be said, but were blatantly above my pay grade. Sadly, the mark of a corporate drone is somebody who's completely gutless and two-faced. They emailed me to say they just wanted to have a "routine chat" with me when I got back. No matter how hard I pushed, they wouldn't admit that my contract was effectively terminated, which is what I wanted so I could stay in the USA longer.

I came home. I went into the office and exploited the fact that nobody would be straight with me. I kinda got my goodbyes from everybody, even though they were "great to see you back in the office" but only those who were nice genuine people seemed to be unaware that the long knives were drawn. I loved the look of shock on the faces of those whose incompetence I had exposed.

I shaved my stupid beard and kept my moustache, because it was now November. There's no greater pleasure than having your contract terminated from a 'straight' job, when you're wearing a stupid moustache and you have a tattoo. This was all part of the plan in preparation for the sleeping rough by HSBC headquarters anyway.

Then, I was deflated again.

It'd been a helluva journey. Psychiatric hospital, Devon, Cornwall, Mongolian yurts, surfing, hitch-hiking, sleeping on the floor of New York's JFK airport, cycling over the Golden Gate Bridge, sightseeing in Silicon Valley, old friends, nice work colleagues, miserable office drones, contract termination... relax!

Bonfire night - November 5th - I was still pretty hyped up. For some reason I decided that I wanted to whizz around London giving out brightly coloured cardboard stars. I think I spent 90 minutes from conceiving the idea, to then whizzing round London sticking stickers on stuff, giving out stars, losing my luggage and generally careering out of control somewhat. That was classic hypomania. What gets held down must go up. It was such a relief to be released from my soul-destroying contract that the nervous energy almost demanded to be released by doing something crazy.

I decided I needed to see some neglected UK friends. I zoomed down to Bournemouth and stayed in the Royal Bath Hotel by the pier. I met up with one of my most loyal friends, and met his son, caught up with him and his wife, saw their house. I caught up with another friend. Friends who had offered to take me kitesurfing didn't materialise, but it didn't matter... I'd already had a very action-packed trip.

Then, finally, the night of the sleep out came. Lots of things got conflated in my mind: "Hacking" humanity, Techfugees, homelessness, bankruptcy, HSBC's unethical behaviour, soul-destroying bullshit jobs and the unbelievably erratic, exhausting, stressful path I had taken to reach that point.

I always knew that keeping moving is the answer to staying alive, but there's so much financial incentive to be trapped into a chair, chained to a desk, not moving anywhere, not doing anything, not talking to anybody.

As I burnt through my money on rent and bills over the winter months, I knew the day would come when I'd have to go back into the rat race, and it depressed the hell out of me. By Christmas Day I was in a pretty shitty state. By New Year's Eve I was cutting my arms with a razor blade.

For the last 4 months, I've sat at my desk, not saying anything. For the last 4 months, I haven't rocked the boat, I haven't tried to improve anything, I haven't tried to do a good job. For the last 4 months, I've kept a low profile. My bosses couldn't be more pleased. My bank balance is much improved. In theory, my mental health should have done something but it doesn't feel like my mood's done anything but sink.

How am I supposed to reconcile the drudgery of the rat race with the excitement of the crazy tale that led me here? When I look back 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, things were very different. Are things better? It doesn't feel like it.

I'm still not moving, I'm not travelling. I still don't have my needs met.

If I want to survive, I need to be moving. It's not sustainable for me to stagnate. I wasn't built to just sit and rot at a desk.

If I stop moving, I sink into the quicksand.

Tags: #depression #suicide #bipolar #career #startup #computing #homeless #addiction

This is a story about being chewed up and spat out...

London might only be the 17th most expensive city in the world to live in, but it's still in the top 20. I call it home, and I have nowhere else I can saunter back to if things don't work out. Where would I go?

The work that I do demands that I have my bum on a seat in an office a stone's throw away from the Bank of England, 5 days a week. It's not like I'm one of those fabled tech workers who can just idly tap away on a keyboard from some remote location. I get paid to be in the same room as my colleagues, face to face. I need to be in London for my work. It's not like I could just pop into town for meetings. I spend at least 40 hours a week immersed in my job.

How bad do you want it?

In order to remain in London, I've slept on night busses, in parks, on heathland, in squats and in hostels.

Nobody is underwriting my risk. When things have gone wrong, it's meant homelessness. I don't mean the kind of homeless where you sleep on your friend's couch. I mean the kind of homeless where you're dirty and you're getting robbed in a park, freezing cold, snatching some fitful sleep in a bush.

Lots of petulant children will run away to London, get tired, hungry, dirty and find out that being homeless is pretty shit. They will slink off back to their families. I don't have that option. Homeless means homeless, in my case.

Sometimes being homeless means living in a dormitory with 15, 20 even 30 people, all snoring and farting. People come into the dorm and make a racket all night, and then they cause an almighty disturbance in the morning, as they fuck about with their luggage. Theft is a constant problem. People have taken my wallet out from under my pillow while I slept. None of your valuables are safe, even in the lockers, which are often prised open with crowbars. It's exhausting, being in such close proximity to so many other human beings, night & day, 7 days a week. It's relentless.

Sleeping in the parks and on heathland is welcome relief from the stress of having to live in such close quarters with other people. The weather is a problem though: fine summer evenings are all well and good, but rain and cold weather are miserable. Muggings and thefts are a nightly occurence, as well as fights and generally being preyed upon by other homeless and vulnerable people. To keep clothed and clean is hard enough, let alone keeping a few possessions safe.

When I was in the position where I knew that homelessness was a very real threat, I prepared. I would sit with homeless people and talk to them for hours, making notes on how to survive. I found out which night busses you could sleep on. I found out what the laws around squatting were. I learned how to spot overgrown back gardens of houses that were unoccupied, that could be used as campsites. I learned where the soup kitchens and Hare Krishna gave out free food. I learned how to spot friend from foe. I learned how to stay away from trouble. I learned where the cheapest hostels were. I learned how to stay reasonably clean and presentable, using showers in railway stations and such like.

A friend stayed one night in a youth hostel, and asked me where you could get a shower when you were homeless. He was clearly considering the possibility of homelessness, as if it was some jolly adventure, a silly fun game, When the day of reckoning came, his parents paid for him to go home and stay with them rent free. He knew which side his bread was buttered. His risk was underwritten. He didn't want to stay in London badly enough. He had backup options.

My backup option is a tent and a sleeping bag.

I've lived in doss houses, with 8 people in a room, all working black market jobs and spending all their money and spare time messed up on drugs. I've seen the grimmest possible working and living conditions. I've been bitten to death by bed bugs. I've experienced the cold and the damp of London's shittest accommodation, where people just about eke out an existence.

Now, I live in a lovely apartment, but it comes at a price. Not only is the rent extortionate, but I also have to drag myself into a job that I hate, 5 days a week. There are few words to describe just how incompatible my job is with my mental health. There is so little stimulation and challenge, that the hands of the clock seem almost stationary. I'm battling severe depression and 'recovering' from addiction. Do you think it's a great idea to be so alone with my thoughts, with no distracting tasks to hurl myself into? Do you think it's a great idea that I have to be a steady dependable worker, turning up on time and working all the hours, when my moods are unstable and I'm exhausted from all the stress and anxiety of getting myself off the streets and off the drugs?

It's a fucking miracle that I'm paying my rent, paying my bills, servicing my debts, working my job, pleasing my bosses, putting on my suit and looking like I've got my shit together.

I really haven't got my shit together, and I'm not taking passengers or carrying any dead wood, because I don't have the spare capacity to do that. It wasn't that long ago that I was hospitalised with the stress of it all. It's still a pretty desperate situation, even if it doesn't seem that way on the surface.

What more do you want from me? What more can I give?

Why don't you get a job? Why don't you try working full time? Why don't you try taking responsibility and paying the rent, the bills and paying off your debts?

It sickens me that anybody would suggest that I could be doing something more fun and in line with my values. It's a joke that anybody suggests that I could take my foot off the gas, take some time out. How the fuck could I do that, when it's me who's the responsible one round here, holding down a job and paying the rent & bills.

Yes, it's OK if you can go back and live with your family. It's OK if somebody's there to pick up the pieces of your failed idle fantasies, when they don't work out. But a fuck up for me means homelessness and destitution. Nobody underwrites my risk.

It's not that hard though: get a fucking job and work it, or fuck off back to mummy. Don't hang around in my fucking home town, mooching off people and talking about your grand plans, when really you're just sponging off those who are genuinely working hard. I'm sick of the bullshitters.

I know the difference between those who are genuinely industrious and hardworking, and those who expect to get paid for nothing. I know the difference between those who are genuinely facing homelessness and destitution if they don't get off their backsides and work their way out of a bad position, and those who have a comfortable position to fall back on, if they hit [not very] hard times.

My charity seems to have attracted more than a couple of idle wasters, but thankfully, I also have some other people who recognise that I'm vulnerable and can be taken advantage of. I'd go mad if I didn't have the counsel of true friends, who can tell me the truth, when people are looking for a free ride at my expense.

I don't mind giving people a chance. I don't mind taking a risk. I don't tend to lend more than I can afford to lose. Everybody deserves a break.

I would never ask anybody to work harder than I'm prepared to work myself.

But, if you don't share in the risk, you don't share in the reward.

Tags: #homeless #london

This is a story about being homeless...

This first map shows everywhere I lived, as I was dragged around all over the place by my fucking parents. The stupid cunts then decided to move back to the village where I briefly first went to school. I went to 8 different schools. What a shower of shits. I cried and cried that we were leaving the sweet little village in the Cotswolds where my parents now live again. What a pointless waste of time & money, as well as being totally destructive of a stable and happy childhood.

This second map shows the 25+ places that I have attempted to make my home. From number 5 to number 25, this was all a consequence of my parents reneging on an insistent demand that they should be involved in 'helping' me, only to find that they then didn't honour their promise at all when I was in a vulnerable and precarious position. A stitch in time saves nine, as they say. Cunts.

I now live on the Isle of Dogs and my home is very nice. I'm reasonably settled and stable, but I am quite far away from any friends, and there isn't really much on the 'island'. I would much rather live in North London, where most of my friends are, and there is more going on that I'd be interested in getting involved in.

However, having had such a horrific time the past few years, I'm happy to just have some stability in where I'm living. Can you imagine how exhausting it is, moving between all those different places with all your worldly possessions? It's only because I had good training with the Dorset Expeditionary Society that I have been able to just about cope. I'd call it an adventure, but it's been more like a nightmare.

Anyway, perhaps this snapshot gives you some appreciation for the shit that people are going through in their private lives. We are quick to condemn people as not making smart life choices, or being deserving of the consequences of some decision they supposedly took with free will. The reality is that one small thing can create absolute chaos in somebody's life, and destroy them.

Much like the butterfly that flapped its wings in Japan, causing a hurricane in America, seemingly small insignificant things can have a big impact on the stability of a person's life. That's why it's important to keep your promises and honour your commitments. That's why it's important to act with integrity. That's why it's important to treat your kids with decency and respect, and not just be a drug addict drunkard waste of fucking space, fucking up their life in pursuit of your high.

As you can tell, I'm thoroughly exhausted by all the stress, and fucked off by the suggestion that it was in any way my free will that took my on this torturous path through life. Survival and stability is all I ask for.

Tags: #homeless #parents #childhood #london

This is a story about fact vs. fiction...

It's hard to defend yourself when you're sick. It's easy for people to take advantage of a soft target, and invent their own version of events. It's easy to discredit somebody, when you've left them dead and buried. The dead can no longer speak up for themselves.

I needed to break up with my abusive ex-wife and rebuild my life in London. London is where all the good IT contracts and jobs are. London is where I have a good chance of reconnecting with significant numbers of friends and business contacts. London is where good stuff happens.

I had an excellent credit rating. I was going to arrange for a bridging loan to cover the expenditure of relocating back to London from Bournemouth. The loan was risk free, because I had such a large amount of equity in my house. The credit risk was underwritten by the fact that as soon as the house was sold, the loan could be repaid.

I was going to arrange credit with a commercial lender, so that I had the security of knowing that I had the funds to cover me until I got a new job back in London. However, my parents insisted that I could count on them. My parents told me that I didn't need the extra stress and hassle of arranging credit, and worrying about money and administrative affairs, when I had the extremely upsetting task of leaving my home and setting up life again in London.

However, when I then said that I needed to borrow the money - secured against the large lump sum of equity tied up in my house that was being sold - they then reneged on their promise. They left me high and dry. They dumped me in the shit. With no excuse, they fucked me over. Unacceptable.

Don't make promises you have no intention of keeping.

Don't offer to support vulnerable people, and then screw them over.

It's not a fucking joke.

It's not fucking funny.

It has consequences.

Far reaching consequences.

I never got an apology or an explanation from my parents for fucking me over like that. I can only assume that they liked the idea of sounding like real parents, but actually they don't have a single shred of decency. They don't have an ounce of honesty. They are untrustworthy. They are liars. They are utter c**ts.

It wasn't like I'd asked them for support. I was putting my own commercial borrowing arrangements in place to cover my relocation. My parents insisted that I could count on them to bridge the gap. It made sense... there was no risk, because the debt was underwritten with the equity in my house, which was vacant and being sold. It made sense that they should profit instead of a commercial lender. I was doing them a favour, because they would earn a better rate of interest off me than they would from any savings interest.

But.

Let's assume that they decided I was going to blow all the money on drugs.

My drug of choice - the one I got mixed up with by accident during the agonising destruction of my relationship and my business - is something that I've jokingly nicknamed "supercrack". As the name suggests, it's highly addictive. It used to be legal, not so long ago.

A strong dose of supercrack is 15mg. That's 0.015 grams.

The length of time that a dose of supercrack will last is about 18 hours. It's an incredibly potent stimulant.

On the dark web, you used to be able to buy 5 grams of supercrack for $150, including postage. That's enough to last 333 days, assuming you sleep 6 hours a night.

If you take supercrack around-the-clock you will not sleep, and therefore your immune system will get very low and you will soon die. The longest I ever took supercrack in a round-the-clock binge was 10 days. That's 10 days without sleep or food. I don't think you could go much longer without dying.

When I moved back to London, I was no longer using supercrack.

If I was using supercrack, from the day I moved back to London to today, I would have spent the princely sum of $450.

In fact, to use supercrack for 50 more years - long past my natural life expectancy - would only require 274 grams of the dangerous drug, which would easily cost me less than $10,000. In fact, I could probably have bought 1kg in bulk for $5,000, which would have been enough for 200 years of drug abuse.

So what did happen to all my money?

Well, I made it to my first Christmas back in London by buying Bitcoins on my credit cards and with my overdraft, which then increased 1,200% in value. I hadn't been able to work, because the stress of not having any money, and having your parents and ex-wife completely dicking you over, while also having to move the contents of a 3 bedroom house into storage and rebuild your life again, was rather too much to ask.

My parents expected me to go to their house for a jolly fucking family Christmas, when they had royally fucked me over. What a joke.

December was all too much, and by the 27th I was in full-blown relapse (which only cost a few dollars in drugs).

However, rehab doesn't come cheap... and guess who was going to pay? ME!

I've paid around £30,000 for private treatment. Guess what? It doesn't work.

Unless you have a supportive environment, treatment doesn't work. Don't bother going into rehab, unless you're going to get rid of toxic people, toxic places and toxic jobs from your life.

My first stay in rehab (The Priory) was long enough for me to see that I was being abused by my ex-wife and we needed to break up. My next stay in rehab was long enough for me to get over being dicked over by my parents. My last stay in rehab gave me just about enough strength to make a plan to cut my toxic parents out of my life altogether.

Since then, I now know the knack of quitting drugs.

Amino acids such as 5-HTP, L-Tyrosine and Phenylalanine replace the depleted neurotransmitters in your brain. Bupropion and amphetamines (like dexedrine) can cushion the cravings and depression, lack of energy and cognitive impairment.

Benzos and Z-drugs are a great way to amplify an addiction. Sleeping off the comedown by taking 'downers' to take the vicious edge off the 'uppers' means that you start to believe you are able to get all the upsides without any of the downsides. However, all you're doing is storing up the mother of all comedowns for a later day.

Coming off benzodiazepines is the single most awful thing you are likely to ever experience in your life. I'm not sure if you've ever had a panic attack or insomnia. Certainly, you must have experienced stress and anxiety. Imagine having a round-the-clock sense of horrible unease, fear, dread. If benzos calm you down, the payback is in rebound anxiety. What goes up must come down, and living with anxiety is terrible.

Something like diazepam is very long acting, so you find it's in your bloodstream for ages even after you stop taking it. The withdrawal from it lasts weeks: insomnia & anxiety.

Coming off stimulants isn't that bad. You're exhausted, suicidally depressed, physically weak, uncoordinated, slow witted, and cognitively impaired. You might be in terrible physical shape from lack of food, lack of sleep and over-exertion. It's nothing that a month in bed can't fix.

Obviously, coming off all drugs at the same time is a clusterfuck, because you'll have anxiety and insomnia, keeping you awake through your exhausted suicidal depression. But, this is the payback for polydrug abuse. What goes up must come down.

In September 2013 I escaped addiction by swapping from supercrack to dexedrine and then tapering my dose down. I further cushioned the blow by using zopiclone to get my sleep back on track. It was relatively easy and painless, especially as I also completely changed my whole environment by moving to London and reconnecting with old friends. I got a new girlfriend and started helping my homeless friend, Frank.

Drug addiction is a teeny tiny bit about the brain chemistry, and it's a whole lot more about toxic environments. Believe me, the more stress, disruption, isolation and mistreatment is perpetrated against me, the more I'm itching to pull the "fuck it" trigger.

Drug addiction is both an easy and a difficult existence. If you haven't got the guts to actually end your life quickly and cleanly, it will get you to your grave faster than you think. I think every addict knows where they're headed, but they don't give a fuck because everybody else is pushing them down that road too.

You would have thought that addicts would be our most cared for and nurtured members of society, because they're pretty much walking around with a noose around their neck, advertising their intention to kill themself. However, my experience was that my own parents and ex-wife couldn't wait to see me dead and buried.

When I eventually accepted that experimentation had become addiction and I needed professional help, I said to my ex-wife that I needed a 28-day detox. She said she would rather that I died. She actually categorically said that she would rather be a widow. These were her words. This was not a general comment. This was her saying that she would prefer it if I didn't have 28 days treatment and get better. This was her saying that what she wanted was for me to die, not get better.

When I got clean and moved back to London, my parents essentially made the same choice. Rather than honour their unsolicited offer to profit from my need for a bridging loan, they saw the opportunity to pull the rug out from under my feet and plunge me back into chaos, stress and destruction.

When things are going wrong now, I assume that I'm totally alone, and that everybody is totally hostile. I assume that doors are going to be kicked in by an abusive and violent ex or parent. I assume that treatment is going to be withheld. I assume that people would rather that I was dead.

Abuse leaves psychological scars. Calling somebody a liar, and treating them disrespectfully denies them any self esteem. Pulling away a person's means of supporting themself, and generally attacking their opportunities to escape and recover is not proof that the person is a failure and vindication of your decision to fuck them over. Let's take a look at cause and effect.

Drug addiction is a place that a person turns to when their life is unliveable. The more you mistreat a person and deny them any opportunity to recover, the more they're going to say "fuck it" and go back to killing themself slowly.

Recovery can be quick and painless if action is swift, decisive and early intervention is taken. Addiction is like a house on fire. The sooner you put out the fire, the more of the house you save. There's no point sitting around to see if the fire goes out, and then putting out half the fire. "The fire is mostly out" or "we'll just put a bit of water on the fire and see if things improve" is just utter bullshit. You're looking for an excuse to fail that person if you act like that.

I'm angry.

I don't know if this is coming across. I'm really fucking angry.

I'm spinning everything like I'm a victim. Well, that's because I'm sick of victim blaming. I know that taking the position of the victim is not a good place to start, but it's maddening because the facts are clear: the strong have exploited the weak, and tried to kick a vulnerable person into an early grave. Secrets die with a person, and it's a lot easier if a victim is dead.

I made plans for my business and my future based on the idea that I had a loving, supportive partner. I made plans based on a "for richer, for poorer" and "in sickness and in health" marriage vow that we made to each other. I made divorce and recovery plans based on an unsolicited offer of support from my parents. Parents are supposed to support their children. People are supposed to honour their word. Plans are based on agreements.

How can you make any plans or do anything if nobody keeps their word? How can anything function without people acting with a shred of integrity.

I paid for nonjudgemental reliable support, at great personal expense. The rest I did on my fucking own. Who the fuck got me out of the park and into a hostel? Who the fuck got me out of the hostel into a contract and a hotel? Who the fuck got me out of the hotel and into a flat? Who the fuck got me more contracts when the previous ones didn't work out for long enough for me to get ahead?

Recovering from depression, bipolar disorder, the destruction of your business, ruining of your career reputation, divorce, the selling off of your home and the giveaway of many of your precious possessions, having to relocate across the country, having to re-establish your life again. You think that comes easily? You think that comes cheaply? You think that can be done all on your own? You think that can be done while people jeer and take the piss from the sidelines, calling you horrible names and creating additional obstacles for you?

Now, sprinkle in substance abuse.

Drug addiction is the easy part. I should be getting a fucking ticker-tape parade for what I've been through. I should get a fucking gold medal. I should get my picture in the motherfucking paper, with lots of quotes from all my adoring fans.

Some drug addicts are driven to lie, cheat and steal. We are told that addicts leave dirty needles in children's playgrounds and try to sell drugs to your kids to get them hooked.

What exactly could anybody's problem be with me? I've paid for all my own treatment. I've never stolen any money to buy drugs. I never even bought drugs from anybody who could conceivably be accused of putting money into crime and terrorism. All I've ever wanted to do is get back to London, and restabilise myself.

What does stability look like?

Like this:

• Place to live
• Income to pay for food & accommodation
• Social contact
• Free from debt and financial stress

And I've come to realise it also means:

• No more toxic people in my life: especially my parents
• No more klingons: I can't carry any dead wood
• No more arbitrary measures: being teetotal is unnecessary. I'm going to do whatever works.
• No more shame: I've got nothing to be ashamed of

The compromises, sacrifices and things that I put up with to keep hope alive are not inconsiderable. My adherence to integrity and personal standards means that I am taking on additional challenges that I could easily circumvent by simply declaring bankruptcy and depositing myself in the care of the welfare state.

I've paid an absolute fucktonne of tax in my life, so I should feel entitled to a handout, but I don't. I don't want a life that's dependent on the state giving me a small amount of the money back that I've paid into the national purse. I'm proud and I've worked hard all my life. I've worked hard to dig myself out of a very deep hole, and I deserve a fucking break.

I'm writing this now, completely free from any drugs. My mind is my own. I have let my brain recover, and now I have nothing but pure rational thought.

Where's my money gone? It's been spent on surviving. It's been spent on keeping the possibility of recovery alive.

Recovery from drugs?

No.

Recovery from the shit that drove me into the arms of addiction.

Will I be able to recreate the past, and get back the things I lost? No, never. Of course not!

So, am I bitter and full of regret?

Actually, I'm working my bollocks off just as hard as I've always done throughout my life FOR THE FUTURE. In 4 or 5 months I could be back in the same financial position that I was in before everything imploded, except I will be in pole position to continue at a much accelerated pace. I have a much greater chance of building a happy new life, now that I am rid of the toxic people who sabotaged everything I had worked so hard to build.

Every day in the rat race is an unpleasant reminder of the fact that I got screwed over, and this is the source of my bitter rants. I am tired. It has been exhausting to rescue things.

But, it's in my nature to build and repair. It's in my nature to look to the future, not look to the past. The only reason I do look to the past, is that I'm saddled with the consequences of being dumped in the shit by people who let me down and broke their promises.

In the world of startups we talk about a pivot. Take your lessons learned from going in one direction, and take them in another to find your sustainable competitive advantage.

Through this fucked up world of pain that I've been through, I've found several important stories that need to be told.

There is the story of the people who are disadvantaged. Those who are discriminated against because they have mental health problems or who have struggled with addiction. There are society's undesirable members. There is the issue of homelessness, and the harsh and uncaring world that waits for single people who fall on hard times. There is the arms race in the war on drugs, with legal highs and the cat and mouse game between chemists and governments. There is the battle that rages inside our heads: mania and depression. There are the differences in perception: who is mad and who is sane.

A rich white middle class investment bank employee, IT consultant, software engineer, homeowner, husband and neatly presented boy with good manners, well educated and well behaved. Young, fit and active. Adventurous, outgoing and gregarious.

If it can happen to me, it can happen to anybody.

The stories have got to be told.

Tags: #addiction #drugs #divorce #parents #legalhighs #mentalhealth #homeless

This is a story about getting rich or dying trying...

People come to London seeking their fortune. I went to Ireland seeking my salvation. In a way, I kinda found it.

My life had fallen apart. I had lost a lucrative contract with Barclays through no fault of my own (the guy who terminated my contract was then sacked because of his stupid decision) as well as breaking up with my girlfriend, being evicted from my apartment in Swiss Cottage (again, through no fault of my own) and had once again found myself homeless and unemployed. Many friends took sides during my breakup, and I ended up suddenly alone.

It was January, in the depths of a depressing British winter. No job, no money, no friends, no girlfriend, no nothing. I was fucked.

A friend who I met in the summer, when I first became homeless, had returned to the emerald isle. He had generously made an open offer that I could go and stay with him and his family if I ever needed it, and oh boy did I need it. I was suicidally depressed and a big danger to myself. Camden council had been supremely unhelpful to a resident who they owed a legal duty of care, but they didn't give a shit whether I lived or died.

I guess a lot of unimaginative runaways go to London, and a huge proportion of them will end up in Camden Town. Camden is cool, undoubtably. Camden is full of wide-eyed young people, tourists, and huge amounts of recreational drugs, casual sex and music venues. It's a great place to spend a summer on a shoestring, smoking strong cannabis and chatting up girls.

I had made a couple of similarly Peter Pan-esque pals in Camden, in their mid thirties and working dead-end jobs on low pay, forced into living in hostels and dreadful squat-like houses with several people sleeping in every room. For me, it was a hugely novel experience, having been a wealthy IT consultant working in banking since I took my first big money contract at the age of 20, for Lloyds TSB in Canary Wharf. After 17 or so years of fabulous wealth, slumming it for a summer was almost fun.

My girlfriend at the time was a waitress at an Italian restaurant. Despite having a degree in economics from the University of Bologna, she had rejected the rat race in favour of a minimum wage job and getting ridiculously stoned every day. She was fun and easy going, just so long as all you wanted to do was sit around while she chain-smoked joints, and have great sex of course.

I wouldn't say I outgrew my circle of friends, because I loved them dearly, but the stresses and demands of my contract at Barclays were not really compatible with the lifestyle of casual labour and the pursuit of recreational drugs. At some point, the worlds were going to collide.

My girlfriend and most of my friends felt that I had arrogantly snubbed them, but in fact I was desperately dependent on our social circle for my wellbeing and happiness. When things all fell apart, I did too. I was devastated by the collapse of my social life, as well as losing the structure and routine of my employment.

I ran away to Ireland, and my friend picked me up from Cork airport and took me back to the little village of Killavullen, that he and his family call home. Nestled in the hillside above the village, looking over the valley below and just at the edge of a vast forest, my friend's family home is a peaceful idyll that is completely unlike the rat race of London.

The timing was not ideal, and I arrived in the middle of various challenges facing the family, but they welcomed me and treated me with incredible warmth, kindness, care, despite the crises that they were dealing with. It's not my place to be indiscreet about the family matters that I became aware of, but suffice to say the last thing they needed was some sick burnt out heartbroken citydweller suddenly thrust into the mix.

My state of mind collapsed still further, as it became clear that there would be no reconciliation with my former friends: I was a pariah. There was nothing for me back in London, except a certain collapse in my will to live. My friend's family insisted that I should stay with them until I felt fit and well enough to return home. I missed my return flight and didn't book another.

I tried to go along with the flow of family and village life, getting to know the people that my friend grew up with, and his family.

My friend and I went panning for gold - I had bought him a kit while in England and had brought it over to Ireland for him - as well as climbing to the top of the 'mountain' that he lived on. We drove around the vast forest that covered the hillside, and explored the neighbouring villages, as well as nearby Cork city centre. Although I had visited Ireland twice before, I had missed the point about stopping to smell the shamrocks. I'm always in the mode of rush, rush, rush.

We travelled to the huge cliffs at Old Head, and I stood there on the edge, having had a haircut, a shave, a bunch of hot meals and having slept in a warm comfortable bed in a welcoming family home for some time. Instead of wanting to jump off the edge of the cliff, I was actually happy to be alive.

Tags: #friends #homeless #london #ireland #family #suicide #depression #career #banking #computing

This is a story about taking responsibility...

What did you do to get fat, poor, alcoholic, addicted to drugs, mentally ill, bored and unfulfilled in your job and your life, into an abusive relationship, trapped onto benefits or otherwise cornered?

Those who think of themselves as having made smart life choices are quick to criticise those less fortunate than them, believing that the difference between them was simply one of choice.

A fat person simply chose to eat more calories than their energy requirement. If you mostly sit around watching TV, you don't need any more calories than those required to pump the muscle of your heart, move the diaphragm of your lungs, and for your cells to create enough heat to keep your blood at 37 degrees Celsius.

A poor person simply chose to not study very hard at school, and to not seek a lucrative career. If a poor person wants to become richer, there is an established path of acquiring academic qualifications, and then working your way up through the ranks to gain the experience you need to get a better job.

An alcoholic simply chose to not stop drinking before their body entered a state of alcohol dependence syndrome. The first time that you get the shakes after drinking, you could quit and possibly avoid delirium tremens and having a seizure.

A drug addict simply chose to continue to seek whatever escapism and pain numbing they found comforting in their drug of choice. A drug addict could simply choose to live with the pain and issues that they're trying to escape, or kill themselves in a much quicker way.

Mentally ill, stressed, anxious, depressed people simply chose to put themselves into an overwhelming situation that doesn't meet their needs and constantly bombards them with things that they have to do that they can't cope with. A depressed person could simply stop working, draw the curtains closed, and wait to be sacked and evicted onto the streets.

People in abusive relationships are simply choosing to not give up on their partner and remain optimistic about things getting resolved, or are simply choosing to be trapped into a cycle of abuse that fills them with so much fear that they feel unable to remove themselves from the situation. People in abusive relationships are simply choosing to not run away from the family home with their children, and live where? On the street?

People on benefits are simply choosing to not take a zero hours contract McJob on minimum wage that would see their benefits slashed as well as also having to spend all their paycheque on childcare so that some stranger can raise their kids, who they never get to see anymore because they're at work the whole time. People on benefits are choosing to live on a government handout that is not enough to pay for the basic essentials that they need, and puts them into a hand-to-mouth stressful existence with no hope of escape.

Maybe you could combine all these things, so that somebody is an overweight drunk with a drug habit, depressed, anxious, under-qualified for any decent job, and wedded to both the welfare state and an abusive partner, both of which have their claws into the person such that they can never escape.

Do you think it sounds appealing, the idea of living life without the comfort of food and eating? Life without the simple pleasure of sugary and fatty snacks. Do you think it sounds appealing, being stone cold sober and straight, with absolutely zero chemicals to alter your perception of the world, when your world consists of collecting benefits cheques that disappear like sand running through your fingers, with no hope for any kind of different future? Life without the numbing power of intoxicants, and the brief moments of joy that might be brought by other drugs, in an otherwise bleak and depressing existence.

Imagine having to give up your home, your partner, your family, your chemical crutches, your favourite food, and live in the cold harsh light of a reality of being single, alone, homeless, withdrawing from drugs and alcohol, dealing with depression and anxiety with nothing other than this magical bullshit thing called "willpower" alone.

Yes, it's all very well criticising the poor and unfortunate from your villa in Tuscany or the deck of a yacht. Yes, it's all very well talking about poor life choices, while you sit in your second home counting your money.

The truth of the matter though is this: the difference between successful people and unfortunate ones is pure blind luck.

We don't pick our shitty irresponsible lazy parents. We don't pick how wealthy our family is. We don't pick our schools. We don't pick whether we will have academic aptitude or not. We don't pick whether we can apply ourselves to the task of getting a lucrative job, or whether we hold onto unrealistic fantasies of becoming a pop singer or a Premiership footballer for far too long, before reality finally dawns on us. We don't pick whether we get to throw ourselves into our careers, our homes, our families, our pets, our hobbies... or whether we end up running to the bottle, the pills, the powders and the needle, in order to deal with the extraordinary shitness of daily existence.

Life is short. Life is shit. If your life is not shit, you're in no position to tell other people that it's because they're lazy, irresponsible, stupid and they made bad life choices. If your life is not shit, it's because you were lucky enough to be born into a family of reasonable wealth and education. You were lucky enough to fall into something that was lucky enough to work out. Yes, you made choices, but there was a huge component of luck that it worked out. Plenty of people made the same choices as you, but through no fault of their own, things didn't work out well for them.

In the blink of an eye, you can have an accident that will have life-changing consequences. In the blink of an eye, your one golden opportunity can pass you by, and you'll be shunted off the smooth tarmac and onto the rocky road. In the blink of an eye, your fortunes can change, and you find yourself cast into the seething mass of humanity, all crawling over each other like crabs in a bucket, trying to escape.

Just because you were lucky enough to make your escape, doesn't mean that anybody else can follow your special recipe, doesn't mean that anybody else can find their perfect job, can find fulfilment, contentment. Just remember: one slip and you're just as fucked as all the other people who weren't lucky like you were.

One slip and you're fucked.

Tags: #politics #homeless #abuse #alcohol #drugs #addiction #mentalhealth #depression

This is a story about pets...

I love cats. Cats love me. My cat, Frankie, is so comfortable with me that I can zip him inside my jumper to keep him warm and he just happily snuggles up.

I read the other day that it took less than an hour to raise thousands of pounds for a cat that needed an operation at the vet. I've always taken the precaution of having pet insurance, because I would never want to have to make a cold hard financial decision about an animal that I kept as a pet, because I'm very emotionally attached - bonded - to Frankie.

A friend of mine has cycled thousands of miles across Europe to raise money to buy bicycles for impoverished families in Africa. These are not bicycles for leisure. They are an essential mode of transport for rural dwelling people, in order to be able to access education, employment and markets, without having to walk for hours and hours in blistering heat. Each bicycle can literally transform the prospects of an entire family overnight.

My friend who has so far covered about 2,000 miles, in over a month, has raised less than 25% of what the needy moggy managed to raise in less than an hour. I'm sure you'll agree, that cycling thousands of miles in some of the steepest parts of the Alps, surely shows that it is not through lack of effort that his fundraising attempt has not been more fruitful so far.

It's certainly not my intention to criticise or take anything away from his incredible feat, working so hard for such a good cause, to raise money for World Bicycle Relief by cycling across Europe. I'm totally in awe of what my friend is doing.

However, what saddens and disappoints me is how readily people will reach for their wallets when they think of a poor suffering furball, rather than a fellow human being.

Both my friend and I have been homeless. There seems to be an assumption that human beings are architects of their own demise, and animals are innocent creatures that need our protection. There seems to be an assumption that charity and governments are somehow working, to redistribute wealth and protect the needy and vulnerable. That simply isn't the case.

Why do people wait, until their friends and relatives are in hospital or dead, before they say "I wish we knew what to do, before it was too late" and "if we knew things were that bad, we would have done something"?

Frankly though, this is horse shit.

We have a culture where we believe we are engaged in a desperate struggle just to "look after our own". It's simply not true.

It might feel like a desperate struggle, to prepare the kids packed lunches and hang the laundry out. It might feel like a desperate struggle to think that you might not get to take 3 foreign holidays this year if you or your partner loses your job, which you're not going to. Things might feel like a desperate struggle because you've been reading too much damn tabloid journalism.

Until you've slept rough, barely been able to keep yourself clean, except with the occasional public shower, and barely been able to keep the clothes on your back from turning to dusty rags, you know fuck all about desperate struggle. However, even when you're homeless in the UK, you still don't tend to go without at least one hot meal a day: there are always soup kitchens and the Hare Krishna.

I don't know what it takes to trigger some empathy, and the goddamn impulse to get up and do something but I'm fairly outraged by the pocket change that gets stuffed into a charity collection bucket, simply to salve a middle-class conscience.

You've probably completely misread my own situation. I live in a flat that costs me twice as much as a hostel bed, which is totally excellent value. I work a job that brings in enough money to pay down the debt that I ran up supporting myself when I was sick. Yes, that's right. Instead of claiming incapacity benefit, housing benefit, council tax deductions and every other kind of government handout that I'm totally entitled to because I have major mental health issues instead I've funded it all out of my own pocket, and impoverished myself in the process.

Why would I do that? Well, because it's easier to get the money you need to survive when you have fur, whiskers and paws.

I mean, for fucks sake, Syrian children are having to print out pictures of themselves with Pokémon so that we give a shit about them.

Sorry for the condescending tone. I'm just a bit pissed off that our idea of "helping our own" is a few likes and shares on Facebook.

The end.

Tags: #charity #frankie #homeless

This is a story about perspectives...

Relativity. The difference between different observers, for a given frame of reference. Who can say that the reality that I experience is more 'real' than that which you experience?

As if by chance, a friend of mine who I used to be homeless with - sleeping rough - in the London parks, visited me this evening. Now, instead of living destitute in a bush, I was able to entertain him in a luxury Thameside apartment.

Do you think that this disparity, this clear 'upswing' in my social status and prospects, makes me think "ooh! how terribly fortunate I am!"?

In actual fact, when the Government had ignored my doctor and psychiatrist's imploring letters to support me during a particularly vulnerable period in my life, and I had been denied welfare and housing, I felt liberated. I lived within a stone's throw of a Royal Palace and was relinquished of the responsibilities of attending demeaning ATOS assessments, completing form upon form of personal information, and digging through vast archives of paperwork to find bullshit documents to satisfy some blank-faced bureaucratic drone.

Do you think I'm glad not to be homeless? Don't be so ridiculous. Everything comes with a cost.

I'm really in no position to be working at the moment. I feel like I'm going through one of the most prolonged periods of depression that I have ever experienced, and the stress and anxiety of my situation is so unbearable that I am closer to taking my own life than I have ever been before.

The fact that I am working is very different from being able to work. The cost to me is virtually immeasurable. If this brief period of stuffing cash in a mattress appears to be a success for those who believe that work will set us free at bayonet point, they are probably ignoring the historical precedent and likely long-term outcomes.

I note that those who criticise me for being ungrateful for my position may be doing so whilst on holiday in Barcelona, or perhaps on a yacht in La Rochelle. This seems to be the ultimate in ignorant hypocrisy, when these people have probably never known the hardships of homelessness and destitution.

If you imagine that a homeless person should be grateful when they are finally off the streets and into a stable housing situation, you are a buffoon. Housing, food, hygiene and an opportunity to put your skills to productive use, are the bare minimum for human dignity. These are human rights.

Instead, I feel like a prostitute. I have sold my mind to the highest bidder. My analogy is probably insulting to those who are genuinely compelled to sell sex, but in this way, you might understand the lack of empathy that my wealthy friends have shown towards my own situation.

Get rich or die trying. It's not even that simple. There are so few ways to dig yourself out of a desperate situation. Prostitution of the body or prostitution of the mind. If somebody wishes to shoot me down for such a melodramatic analogy, go right ahead, I probably deserve it and I'm an easy target, but this is how I feel.

I have made a bitter choice: work for three times as long, and have a somewhat easier time of it, but know the whole time that I'm being underpaid for my skills. Or, to be highly paid but accept the very worst work. The most soul-destroying and de-skilling work that is wholly unsatisfying and only the hardest, meanest, most desperate mercenaries would tolerate in the interests of getting rich quick.

My days are a completely calculated gamble. I put my mental health on the chopping block, hoping that I can struggle by for long enough to put a few dollars in the bank before I explode with stress, frustration, depression and having been completely exploited by a ruthless industry intent on burning people out in pursuit of pure profit.

It's hard to express how hard it is to do something that you mastered nearly 20 years ago, and has now become excruciating mental agony, but also an extremely well paid profession. I'm paid to be professionally bored, stressed, anxious and unfulfilled. I'm paid to put up with stuff that would have most sane people running out of the office saying "fuck this shit".

Yes, the majority of people hate their jobs. Yes, the majority of us would not work given the choice. This is different. I can compare and contrast. I can tell you what the difference is being an electrician from being the manager of an IT project. I can tell you which one destroys your soul and your mind more.

You know the best job I've ever had? Delivering newspapers on Monday to Saturday for £10 a week.

Tags: #homeless #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #career

This is a story about body shopping...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is where the difference in mindsets comes in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hospital was a safe place to do it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silver linings, eh?

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

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