This is a story about 140-character soundbites...

Who has the time for the long read? Just read the title and guess the rest. If it can't be summed up in a tweet, it isn't worth reading. Jump straight to the comments section: that's where the real action is.

I bought a book that was based on a series of tweets. Worst book I ever read.

One of the best tweets I ever read was in 9 parts. Infographics are good, but they often have more text on them than would be permitted by the 140-character limit. If you put text on a graphic, it's not searchable.

Do you realise that everything you write on Facebook is completely unsearchable from anywhere except within the walled garden?

You're slowly being erased.

So much discussion has moved to Slack and most of that is just meme sharing anyway. In fact, most of what goes on anywhere on the Internet seems to be meme sharing. Are we being discouraged from in-depth online discussion? The rise of microblogging and the domination of the social media space by Facebook, is ridiculously successful at recirculating trivial distractions, which discourages us from creating original content.

When you think about all the words you've written into messenger apps, they're lost in the ether: it's not like those discussions are held in topic threads, indexed and searchable. All those words are throwaway. There's a cheapness to words. Imagine what happens when Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp cease to exist. All that text that was transmitted all over the planet will disappear into nothingness; gone forever.

What would a historian of the future make of your digital footprint? Could they infer who you were as a person from the animated GIFs that you chose to share? Could they gain any insight into your worldview; your politics; your philosophy; your personality?

Have we not been cheated out of owning our digital identities? We could all be famous bloggers and valued discussion forum contributors, with our online persona well known to fellow Netizens around the world, but instead we are confined to small groups of Facebook friends and Twitter followers: the people we knew before we entered the walled gardens.

Nobody is going to discover you and find out anything about who you are and what you believe via the mainstream platforms. Facebook wishes to keep you as a captive audience, to feed you adverts while you browse through baby photos. Twitter wants you to worship the cult of celebrity, or provide convenient soundbites for journalists, while you tweet in total obscurity.

Nothing you ever do online is going to go viral. Well orchestrated marketing campaigns have huge teams of people to sow the seeds. It's like a Mexican wave: you need to coordinate a critical mass of sufficient numbers if you don't want to look like an idiot, waving your arms on your own in a stadium grandstand.

You're not going to be the next online video sensation, because nobody's solved the problem of video discovery yet. If you broadcast a Facebook Live video, you're just going to be spamming your friends and family. If you put something up on Youtube, how are people going to find it in that sea of noise? Videos only have a title, description and a few tags. People are only going to watch things that are popular, and popularity is achieved through marketing, which is expensive and time-consuming.

The idea that the Internet is democratising opinion sharing is disingenuous. Most of the opinions I read online are either from the mainstream sources, or from my existing network.

I'm exceedingly unusual, because I bought into my friend Ben's vision of a social media platform that allows me to retain control of the original content I create. Instead of wasting effort on tweets and Facebook status updates, I put it all onto a website that's fully search indexed: anybody can find the fruits of my labour.

"But what about privacy?" I hear you ask.

I can email, private message and talk to people face to face, about things that I want to keep private. I really don't consider Facebook very private, when I have hundreds of Facebook friends and I have no idea who's reading what. I could waste loads of time sharing things with selective audiences on Facebook, but why would I go to all that effort?

Why do I write hundreds - if not thousands - of words every single day and make them publicly available? Well, the Internet is responsible for lifelong friendships, fruitful discussions and a network of people who help me feel connected to humanity, when I'm otherwise roundly ignored. Occasionally, some complete stranger will reach out to me and say that there was something I wrote that resonated with them, and that's the nicest feeling in the world.

Why does anybody write? Why write a fictional novel? Why tell people what you thought about that movie you just watched? Why do anything? You could just curl up in a dark hole and die, quietly.

In a world of urban solitude, loneliness and living lives of quiet desperation, don't you want to feel a little anchored to something; somebody? Don't you want to feel that you made your mark; left a legacy?

Writing this blog is like carving my name on a tree. Writing is like spraypainting my 'tag' on the Internet. It's "Nick woz 'ere" writ large.

Of course, you can sneer at that, but what's your mark on the world? Your children? That dissertation you wrote that never got published? Your job? What you consumed during your life? Should we chisel a list of all the books you read onto your headstone?

I came back to London, partly because I could be anonymous. I could fuck up and burn a few bridges, and nobody would care. I came back to London to be a nobody.

Now that I'm cleaned up and back in the land of the living, I no longer want to be a faceless nobody; I don't want to be alone; overlooked; forgotten. I'm trying to rediscover my value; my place in the world. At times of great stress, I've reached out to the Internet for validation: validation that I exist, that my opinions are well regarded and that I have a place in the community. It's given me great confidence, to have an online persona when the rest of the world largely overlooks and shuns me.

There is no short-form version of what I'm going through. It might be the same as every other person on the planet, but this is how I choose to express myself; this is how I vent and attempt to cope in a healthier way than drink and drugs; this is how I attempt to ward off the fear of being mischaracterised as some kind of evil na'er do well.

Perhaps, the more you read, the more my mask slips and you can see some underlying character flaws. Certainly, the more I write, the more narcissistic and self-absorbed I must be. The justification I have for this self indulgence, is that I feel suicidal every day. Do you begrudge me leaving this digital legacy, for anybody who cares to know who I was and what made me tick?

I can write 140-character retweetbait, but I choose not to. I choose to write with depth and meaning. I choose to offer more than just a fleeting distraction. I choose to offer the whole story, not just the headlines.

Tags: #writing #socialmedia #suicide

This is a story about treatment for drug addiction...

Having been to four different rehabs, I feel fairly qualified to give a few insights into what happens behind closed doors. Residential rehabs often hide away in leafy suburbs, where there are large houses that can accommodate human trash: dirty junkies and nasty alcoholics.

"Death's too good for 'em! String 'em up!" I hear you say.

Yes, yes, don't worry. We'll get to the idea that an addict will always be an addict, and that we should just write them off as a lost cause.

Boscombe in Dorset - an area of Bournemouth - is where many councils choose to send their difficult members of society, from all over the country. Supposedly, being by the seaside will be good for recovering alcoholics and former drug addicts. There are certainly plenty of rehabs in the area. Even Paul Gascoigne has found himself shuffling around Boscombe's streets, buying bottles of gin from the local off-license.

Ironically, many years after moving to Bournemouth, I became addicted to drugs and found myself in the perfect place to get treatment for my addiction.

Let's talk a little bit about drug addiction.

Having a 'drug habit' is not the same as drug addiction. 'Experimentation' is not the same as addiction. Partying is not the same as addiction. Addiction will rapidly destroy your health, wealth and prospects. Hospitals, police cells and prisons are the institutional stomping grounds of the addict, on their rapid descent into the fires of Hell. If you're successfully hiding your habit from your friends, partner and boss, then addiction hasn't fully taken hold. Addiction is destructive.

What about detox?

You can't really rehabilitate while the drugs and alcohol have got their hooks in you. If you abruptly stop drinking, you might get the shakes, become delirious, have a fit and maybe even die. If you stop taking heroin, you're going to feel sick and in pain. If you stop taking cocaine or amphetamines, you're going to be unbelievably exhausted and depressed, to the point where you're in real danger of killing yourself.

"You should kill yourself if you're a junkie" I hear you say.

What you haven't understood is that drug addiction is slow suicide. Do you think the addict or the alcoholic isn't aware that their body is getting utterly fucked up, and they're going to go to an early grave?

Detox is about breaking the physical addiction that the body has to drugs and/or alcohol. Detox is about suffering the worst of withdrawal, in an environment where substitute drugs can be administered to make the process safe, humane and tolerable. An alcoholic literally risks death if they stopping drinking without Librium. Is it ethical to ask people to die just because you're hung up on ideas like "willpower"?

There's the term "psychological addiction" that needs to stop being used. It's better to think about addiction like this: why did somebody get addicted in the first place?

"Because drugs are fun" I hear you say.

There are shitloads of people who take drugs all the time but they aren't addicts. Every weekend, raves and nightclubs are packed full of people taking Ecstasy (MDMA). Vast quantities of cocaine gets hoovered up by the eager nostrils of young professionals in cities around the world. Every day, a huge proportion of humanity smokes cannabis or drinks alcohol. Why aren't all these people raging addicts and alcoholics?

If you ever feel like quitting, remember why you started.

Most addicts' lives were truly appalling before their addiction took hold. For sure, addiction doesn't improve anybody's life, but it's not like there's any hope of a better life just because an addict quits drugs. The cycle of petty crime, scoring drugs, getting sick, being hospitalised and being locked up... it doesn't look great, does it? But what's the alternative? Flipping burgers and still not having enough money to make ends meet?

So, it's obvious that the rehabilitation process will only be successful if it can return a person to a better life than the one they were trying to escape from with drugs and drink.

The first rehab I attended was in Bournemouth, situated in a grand house at the end of a sweeping driveway, surrounded by mature pine trees, on a road of millionaires' mansions. The place was full of people from Greater London and the surrounding counties, ejected by their councils to make room for more rich middle-class people.

The biggest issue amongst my fellow rehab residents was housing. Boscombe has vast numbers of crappy bedsits that can just about be afforded with housing benefits. London and the South-East has no cheap housing for undesirable members of society. My fellow rehabbers were gleefully pushed away from where they were born and bred - and their families - because they were written off.

A typical day at the Bournemouth rehab would consist of a breakfast of baked beans, white toast and cheap sausages, followed by many rounds of tea, coffee and biscuits, until the 'therapeutic' day began. There were two or three sessions a day, where everybody sat in a big room, slouching on comfy sofas, vaping on e-cigarettes and slurping drinks. It was supposed to be group therapy, but it was basically just listening to heartbreaking tales of people's children being taken into foster care.

Most of the day in Bournemouth rehab was given over to matters of court appearances, housing office appointments, social worker visits and attempts to obtain various forms of welfare benefits. Almost everybody in rehab was in poor physical health, due to a life of drug abuse. Almost everybody in rehab had some underlying mental health disorder.

Those were the dregs of society, but they were warm and welcoming and they accepted me as one of their own. I was warned by staff to leave my iPhone at home and watch my wallet, but I never felt for a single moment as if my peers were going to rob or take advantage of me. I was somewhat appalled by the staff members' low opinion of their service users, but I suppose there's an element of the gamekeepers and the poachers: anybody who's keeping you under lock and key is kind of fair game, because resentment is going to build about the power that staff exercise over people in treatment.

Over the course of the 28-day program, my fellow rehabbers and I would build up special privileges for good behaviour, such as being allowed to go to Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous or Cocaine Anonymous meetings. Being allowed to go into town, accompanied by a staff member, was the next privilege that accrued. Then, trips to town were permitted when accompanied by a peer who had attained 3 weeks of good behaviour. Finally, you might prove yourself to be trustworthy enough to go into town alone or as a chaperone.

Transgressions could include: not getting up in the morning, not doing your assigned chores, not attending group therapy, being caught with contraband, failing a drugs test and - most serious of all - going somewhere without permission.

Being expelled from rehab for going into town on your own might not sound like a terrible consequence, but almost everybody was there because treatment was mandated by the courts, as part of parole or an attempt to retain contact with children. Being chucked out of rehab could result in going back to prison, or never seeing your children again. The line between treatment and punishment was rather blurry.

My next rehab was 5-star luxury by comparison. You might have heard of it. It was The Priory.

If you're paying £12,000 for a 28 day stay in the countryside, you'd expect it to be pretty nice, wouldn't you? The Priory certainly delivered on making me feel special and cared after... for a high price. Therapists outnumbered patients, the bedrooms were very well appointed and comfortable, the food wasn't bad and there were luxuries like a gym and grounds to take a stroll around. Nobody was made to feel like a prisoner under house arrest.

Unsurprisingly, my fellow Priory rehabbers were rich compared to the Bournemouth lot. There were six-figure salary earning executives and heirs to multimillion-pound fortunes. Alcohol was also the predominant poison, as opposed to heroin.

One girl was so desperate for a drink, that she filled a mug with hand sanitising gel - which contained alcohol - and sweetened it with orange squash.

Therapeutic days were packed full of yoga, mindfulness, art therapy, educational videos, as well as group therapy. Supposedly following the 12-step program we only had enough time to complete the first two steps. AA and 'aftercare' meetings were held in the evenings at The Priory, which we were encouraged to attend, but most of us just watched DVDs in our bedrooms.

In my final week at The Priory, I asked "what next?"

Turns out that 28 days just isn't long enough to turn your life around. 28 days is just about long enough to get over the worst of the drug withdrawal and start thinking about how awesome the drugs are going to feel after a little break and three square meals a day. Aftercare programs are almost as expensive as rehab and last 3+ months: who's got that kind of money and can afford to take that long off work?

Having been through an acrimonious divorce, sold my house, rescued a tiny fraction of my most treasured possessions, boxed my life up, put everything into storage and suffered a horrible family Christmas, I was pretty fucked up by the whole ordeal. I needed to get cleaned up and straightened out again.

The next rehab I booked, I asked for a detox. I didn't want to have to get up in the morning and go to stupid group therapy. I hadn't slept or eaten properly for weeks. I'd been taking benzodiazepines for months and it was possible that I'd developed a physical dependency that could be life-threatening. I needed professional medical care.

The rehab I ended up in was like an alternative therapy spa break. There was a hot tub - called the sex pond - and a vibrating massage table, with whale music playing in the pitch black room. The main thing I was there for was sleep, food and a doctor on hand in case I had a seizure. Reluctantly, I consented to have acupuncture and to do some mindfulness: both of which I fell asleep during.

Most of the staff were kind and caring, but the guy who owned and ran the rehab was a complete egomaniac who clearly wanted his own cult. This idiot tried to force me to attend 'group' therapy, which was basically him giving interminable boring monologues about the time when he went into a Native Indian sweat tent. Believe me, the last thing you want when you're recovering from a near-fatal toxic combo of drugs, is to be a captive audience for some total moron.

While I was at that third rehab, a man was brought in, smashed out of his mind and covered in red wine. He'd been transferred up from the first rehab I'd been in down in Bournemouth. He'd walked out and gone into town to get pissed. Revolving doors.

I had to get away from that place. It wasn't therapy. Fuck knows what it was. Probably just a bit of respite for both family and addict alike.

Finally, I achieved what I wanted: I got back to London. Bullshit family Christmas was over. Divorce and house sale was over. I was free from horrible destructive relationships and nasty people, but I had picked up an addiction and failed to deal with it. My life to that point had been dictated by people who didn't care about my welfare.

I got myself into my fourth and final rehab: a 13 week residential treatment program in Kensington, West London.

Immediately, the place felt right. Rehabs are supposed to be run by former addicts and alcoholics. The guy who I met on my initial assessment had gold teeth and mean tattoos. The guy who ran the place had a massive scar across his face. These were people whose opinion an addict could respect, because they'd been all the way to rock bottom and back again: they'd seen friends die from overdoses and a lot of other rough shit too.

My most important lesson in rehab was how to do time. I had already been heavily institutionalised by working my whole career for massive corporations - with the limits that full-time work and education imposes on your freedom - but I still had lessons to learn about liberty. It helped a great deal that one of my fellow rehabbers was a young lad who'd been in prison twice by the age of 21.

Rehab is literally a kind of house arrest. You can leave anytime you want, but there will be consequences. It was fun to walk up to the gate (pictured above) and put a foot out over the pavement... just stopping short of taking a single step off the property.

It's not too hard to white-knuckle 3 or 4 weeks of abstinence. The first couple of weeks you'll feel awful, but your body is so abused that it's grateful for the sleep and the food. The next week or two are hard, but you know there's light at the end of the tunnel: you'll soon get your fix. You just have to count down the hours, minutes and seconds.

I don't believe you can rehabilitate somebody in just 3 months. So many things get fucked up when you're an addict. You need to get a job and go back to work, pay your bills and any debts that got racked up, repair and replace broken stuff and get a place to live. Everything got fucked up by my addiction: my shoes and clothes were wrecked and everything in my life was in total disarray.

Imagine being a company director through a period of addiction. My accounts and taxes were all messed up, and important paperwork was lost or misplaced.

What about my CV? How could I explain those periods of absence from work?

What about my routine?

Do you realise how much of your life runs itself on autopilot? You pay your rent/mortgage, council tax, electric, gas, water, sewerage, broadband, mobile phone, home insurance, life insurance, car insurance, road tax, MOT, TV license and a zillion other things. You get up every day, have breakfast and go to work. People know and respect you at work and you know how to do your job. You see your friends and socialise. You have your hobbies and you exercise. Do you think you can put all that stuff back together, running smoothly, overnight?

When you're an addict, everybody distances themselves from you. It's obvious that if you even so much as speak to an addict, they're going to steal your newborn baby and sell it to buy crack cocaine. It's obvious that anybody who injects marijuana or sniffs glue is a worthless selfish nasty person who's out to kill you.

Rehabs are necessary because family and friends are judgemental gossips who offer you useless advice like: "have you tried not taking drugs?" or "maybe you should just stop".

Rehab was a holiday from being judged to be an evil failure, morally weak and simply lacking in willpower.

Rehab showed me that I do have the willpower to stop taking drugs whenever I want. Rehab showed me that I'm not weak and I'm not powerless.

By the time I finished my four stays in rehab, I still hadn't run out of money, I had never been arrested, locked up, hospitalised or homeless. I had been nowhere near rock bottom.

I never actually reached rock bottom though. I experienced things that were awful at the time, but I needed to have those experiences.

Stopping drugs is the least of anybody's concerns. Drugs actually help when your life is unbearably shit. Just ask anybody who suffers from depression or anxiety if they'd like to give up their antidepressants or tranquillisers.

Obviously, I'm glad I never got a criminal record or sustained any life-changing injuries, but maybe I needed to come close. Being locked up in a police cell a couple of times and spending weeks in hospital, were not things on my bucket list, but I think they were necessary experiences to complete my adventure.

When the time was right, I got a place to live, a girlfriend and a job. Without those things, life isn't worth living, but equally, those things don't create recovery.

Bullying was relentless and intolerable at school for 11+ consecutive years. Nothing I did was ever right or good enough for my parents. My parents' relationship was appalling - full of verbal abuse and hostility - and I got involved with a girl who physically and mentally abused me, who I stayed with for many years. I got so used to broken, abusive relationships. Do you think that kind of stuff can get healed by 28 days in rehab? Do you think that all my problems came about just because I sniffed a bit of white powder?

You might think I act normally and sound perfectly reasonable, rational and able to string a sentence together, but it's the opinion of the medical professionals who've treated me, that I'm dealing with depression, bipolar and even borderline personality disorder. Clearly, I've had many episodes of mental health issues... including a period of many years before drugs even entered the picture.

This is called dual-diagnosis: the clusterfuck that is both addiction and mental health issues combined. The tail that wags the dog.

I've cherry-picked the best treatment and the most humane and compassionate approach to fixing my addiction and now I've arrived at the situation where - joy of joys - I'm 'just' dealing with depression and anxiety.

I'm itching to press the 'fuck-it button' because life is intolerably stressful, unrewarding and my depression is refusing to lift. What's the solution? Drugs? Been there, done that.

Rehab taught me how to quit drugs cold turkey. Rehab taught me that I'm in control, so long as my life seems worth living.

Addicts and alcoholics are taught on the 12-step program that they're powerless. I'm certainly powerless, but it's over things like whether I get offered a decent job that pays enough money to be able to live. Being powerless to influence the things that really matter to me in life, such as whether I can live with dignity or not, creates incredible stress and anxiety.

I can choose to stop drinking or taking drugs, but why would I, if the alternative is ESA assessments and having my inadequate welfare benefits cut off by somebody who's not even a qualified doctor? Why would I quit, if I have to prostitute my mind and body, to go and work some pointless bullshit job for somebody promoted into a position of incompetence, if I'm 'lucky' enough to be offered a pittance to do the job?

It's so hard to escape the things that drove us to drink & drugs in the first place.

Rehab was important for me to forgive myself for things that weren't even my fault. I didn't make a mistake, getting addicted to drugs: it was a deliberate act and I'd live my life exactly the same if I got to start over from scratch. Rehab was respite from those who wish to scapegoat sick people.

Fundamentally, rehab connected the 'clean' and the 'dirty' world and allowed me to see that they're two sides of the same coin.

Every saint has past and every sinner has a future.

Tags: #addiction #drugs #alcohol

This is a story about the rat race...

I was working out how much time I've had away from the coal face and I figured out that kind of thinking just ain't allowed. If you start figuring out that you don't have to work every hour God sends, then you're an enemy of [status quo] society. What happens when people start rocking the boat? What happens when people start asking if there's a better way?

Obviously, I'm immensely fortunate that I didn't get some childhood sweetheart pregnant and I don't have to run around doing shitty jobs in order to feed and clothe my squawking infant offspring. I'm very lucky that I'm not enslaved to the system, in order to be just about managing.

I came really close to suicide and drug addiction relapse - which are one and the same thing - during the last week or so. I'm not out of the woods at all, but I had a slightly better day today. Some good luck went in my favour.

You know, having a few years of living hell isn't something I would rather not have experienced. Whether it's homelessness, hospitalisation, being locked up in a cell or whatever... my life has been enriched by everything that's happened to me.

Being desperately depressed, stressed and anxious ain't no picnic, but I still live a pretty charmed existence.

If and when I get back into the 9 to 5, Monday to Friday routine, the blinkers will go up and I won't be able to see the wood for the trees. Who has time to stop and smell the roses when it's rush, rush, rush, to get across town and get to your desk? Last summer I sat by the River Thames eating my lunch, looking at HMS Belfast, Tower Bridge and The Shard, but I didn't really appreciate the view: I was glum that I had to go back to my desk within the hour.

I've been doing my full-time career for 20 years, and I've been bitter, jaded and resentful for the working world taking the prime years of my life, the whole fucking time.

"Get over it. We all have to do it" I hear you say.

Yeah, but why? Why the fuck are we stuck in dead-end bullshit jobs when we're young, with no money? When we're old and tired and our health is fucked up and we're about to die, that's when we finally get to supposedly enjoy the fruits of our labour. Isn't there something back-to-front about that?

The biggest crime against humanity, is that when we're innocent, optimistic, sensitive, passionate, full of energy and joy... that's when we're squeezed into little boxes and forced onto the treadmill. For sure, when I'm old and infirm, I'll be grateful to be sat at a desk in a nice warm office, but why the fuck do we chain our young people to their books and to bullshit menial jobs?

I've been over this again & again, but the more that I zig when everybody else zags, the more I feel like a madness is lifting and I can see rationally.

As I travelled through Bank underground station at 9am this morning - making my way home just as 400,000 City workers descended on the Square Mile - I thought: "this is insane".

Of course, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em... but I need to remember to fight the system from within, and to try to protect my mind when all around me people are losing theirs.

Who, honestly, has the time to stop and take in the beauty of their surroundings and marvel at nature? Aren't we all so swept up in the school run and the daily commute? What the fuck point is there in that? To pass the baton of misery to the next generation?

"We can't all be artists and dreamers, skipping barefoot across the grass and daisies" I hear you say, gnashing your teeth.

True, but if there's no time to be carefree and unburdened from the pressures of this modern world we've created, are we building any kind of world you want to be part of? What's the fucking point, if it's all stomach ulcers and stress and exhaustion?

The relentless depression I experience is awful and I live forever with Damocles' sword hanging over me, in the form of endless suicidal thoughts, but at least it forces me to consider an important question: what's the fucking point of being alive?

There's probably no opportunity for me to be an artist, a writer, a poet or anything else authentic, without robbing a bank or making myself penniless and destitute, but the closer I get to death, the more I gravitate towards authentic experiences, rather than the soul destroying life of wage slavery.

Give me liberty or give me death.

Tags: #suicide #depression

This is a story about changing beliefs...

Imagine being marooned on a rock in the middle of a vast ocean that's so deadly to life that you couldn't survive for more than a few seconds if you fell in. The ocean is lifeless and has no utility: it can't be purified or harnessed to generate energy. The rock has a fragile ecosystem that keeps you alive, but there is a relentless wind that threatens to blow away all the life-giving nutrients at any moment. You don't know how you got there, why you're there, or how the hell you're going to get off the rock if it can no longer keep you alive.

Welcome to the world according to science.

Isn't it much nicer to imagine an anthropocentric world, where some kind of paradise was created by an imaginary sky monster, just for us. Imagine there's some invisible guiding hand, making things happen, always with us Earthlings in mind. Imagine there's an all-seeing eye that only gives a shit about one particular species on one particular planet. Imagine that this universe isn't all there is: there's also some kind of afterlife. There... that's much more comforting, isn't it?

You could say that scientists believe in nothing. They don't think we were put on Earth for a reason: it's just a cosmic accident. Energy condensed into matter; quarks combined into protons and neutrons, which were fused into atomic nucleii; atoms bonded into molecules and reacted to create amino acids and proteins; the primordial soup created life, through pure chance. There's no reason for us to be here, except that given enough time - 14 billion years ought to do it - life as we know it becomes inevitable, given the laws of physics laid down at the birth of the universe.

When you start to study cosmology, you get some perspective on just how insignificant we are. When you start to deal with things on a cosmological scale, the numbers boggle your mind. There aren't even rulers that can measure the distances between objects in the night sky, because space and time are warped by matter and energy. Things are so far away, and we only have a tiny planet to move around on, so it's not like we can triangulate the position of anything. Everything in the universe appears to be just a point in space to us: the twinkling dots of light in the night sky.

If you think about time and evolution, you begin to see the staggering number of living creatures that died - our ancestors - so that we could be alive today in our current form. Take a look at an ear: it's a fucking weird looking thing, isn't it? Why the hell would it look like that? I can't tell you, but I know that I can take a shower without getting water in my ear canal, which is pretty awesome for listening out for any approaching sabre-tooth tigers while I'm washing myself.

Then, what about consciousness? Why is it that you are you? Why were you were born at the exact moment you were born? Why are you alive, right now, and not a hundred years ago, or a few thousand years ago?

So far as you know, you're the only you. Everybody else is somebody else. You've got your own unique set of experiences. You've got your own unique set of senses, and your own consciousness processing the sight, sound, smell, touch and taste of everything around you.

Ultimately, we can reach the conclusion that each universe is actually tailored to a single individual. The reason why there are lots of other people around who look very much like you is an inevitable consequence of the universal laws of physics. If I tweak the numbers one teeny tiny bit, we might get an almost identical universe, but there's a different person whose mind is "the one" that is truly conscious.

You feel pretty conscious, don't you? You feel like you've got free will and memories and you're seeing the world, right now, for what it is. But, that's only in your own universe. In your universe, I have no free will or consciousness: my world is dictated by your actions. In your universe, I'm not deciding to write these words... I'm not even aware of what I'm doing, even though I think I am.

The test is this: what would happen if you killed yourself?

Right now, there are about 7 billion people in the world. If I was to kill myself, 7 billion people would agree that I was dead and buried. 7 billion people would say that I just killed myself. But what about me? What about my opinion?

Here's how it goes: I get a gun, aim it at my head and pull the trigger. Guns are pretty reliable these days, so lets say I have only a one in a million chance of surviving a point-blank gunshot wound to the head. This is my free will, right? I make the decision to commit suicide, because I'm a conscious being with free will and that's my prerogative to do so.

So, what happens if the gun misfires? What happens if I put the gun down, pick up a different gun and that one misfires too? What happens if I pick up a machine gun, aim it at my head, pull the trigger and it just goes click-click-click-click-click as it keeps misfiring?

Essentially, if you take our very best scientific theories and follow them to their inevitable conclusion, this is what is predicted. If you keep asking "why?" over and over again, until you get to the deepest possible understanding of the universe as we observe it, you will conclude - from reproducible experiment - that the world is influenced by us, as observers. Our very consciousness is inseparable from reality and the laws of physics.

It's quite possible to answer the question "why are we here?" with the answer: so you can ask that question.

That might sound like begging the question, but it's actually perfectly logical.

Without consciousness, the examination of the world around us is not possible. Arguably, without being conscious of the existence of the universe, does the universe really exist?

Taking this reasoning a stage further, you can start to argue whether anybody in the universe in which you inhabit has ever truly been conscious. The evidence would suggest that they haven't, given that they are not able to experience the universe as you do: they are not able to answer the quantum suicide paradox, so they are unable to prove or disprove the reality in which they inhabit.

You and you alone are truly conscious, and everybody else is just an inevitability of the laws of the universe: entropy will destroy anything so ordered and sophisticated as a conscious being like you, but once you get one (you) it's inevitable that there will be billions of knock-off copies that didn't quite make the grade in your universe.

Ultimately, you are immortal and you will witness the end of the universe. It's the only logical reason why you were born when you were born.

"But what about all those people who die before me?" I hear you ask.

Well, they were never really conscious. I'm sure that in their own universes, which were nearly identical to yours, they were perfectly conscious, but the one universe in which you live, is made just for you: you're going to witness the death of everything and everybody, even if you try to kill yourself.

Taking this a stage further, we then wander into the territory of the theological.

What about heaven and hell?

If you're immortal, how do you think the world's going to be shaped by your actions?

Once you realise you're immortal, are you going to be naughty or are you going to be nice?

How's anybody going to stop you doing anything you want, if they can't kill you? You might as well be a thief; you might as well rape and murder; you might as well take anything you want and enslave all of humanity. As you rape and pillage, the world will become scorched and barren: Hell on Earth.

Alternatively, you could live virtuously, impart your wisdom and not abuse the discovery of your immortality. You could influence the people of the world to look after their home planet and try to preserve it beyond the longevity of their mortal lives. Over time, the world will become a place where everybody benefits from the generation before them, and it becomes received wisdom that it's better to co-operate and act with restraint, rather than act selfishly: Heaven on Earth.

Thus, we have arrived at a scientific reason for morality, as well as the negative consequences for 'sinning'. Science has drawn the same ultimate conclusions as religion: don't be a dick.

The chances are our species will wipe itself out before we are able to terraform nearby planets. The idea we're all going to fuck off to Mars on one of Elon Musk's SpaceX rockets, is actually just a massive excuse to continue raping and pillaging. The billionaires think that they've got an escape capsule, so there's no reason to rein in the corporate excesses and end the inequality that's destroying the planet.

Scientifically and through historical study of past civilisations, we're utterly fucked. The pursuit of pacifism, debt forgiveness, abolishment of usury and the creation of a fair and equal global society, has been completely abandoned in favour of rape and pillage. Capitalism must inevitably lead to the destruction of the natural world, overpopulation and enslavement of the developing nations, in order to fulfil its insatiable demand for unnatural growth. Things can't grow forever on a planet of finite resources: the laws of physics say that we can't just magic all our problems away.

We're acting like a blackjack player who's got a score of 20 but asking for another card, hoping to get an ace. Chances are, we're going to bust.

I really don't want a Tesla electric car: I'd rather not have to go to my bullshit made-up job. I really don't want a rocket ride to Mars: I'd rather people in Africa had some bicycles. I really don't want a NutriBullet food blender: I'd rather we abolished economic policies that leave nations starving, while others waste vast quantities of food. I really don't want an iPhone 8: I'd rather not have wars over mineral resources needed to make throwaway electronic gadgets. I really don't want private schools and top universities: I'd rather educate young women so they can make smart family planning decisions.

Just remember where the fuck you are: you're floating on a rock in the vacuum of space, with an incredibly thin layer of atmosphere just clinging to the surface because of the extremely weak force of gravity. The only reason the air isn't blown away into space - leaving you suffocating - is because planet Earth has an iron core which generates a magnetic field, diverting away the solar wind. Only 29% of the planet is land, and the rest is salty water you can't drink or use to water the crops. Have some fucking humility.

"But I'm some hot-shot CEO of a massive global corporation"

Yeah, right buddy. Try counting your money while holding your breath.

"But Elon Musk is going to fly me to Mars"

Yeah, and what are you going to do when you get there, you fucktard? There's no breathable atmosphere. There's no fertile soil.

"Scientists and engineers will find a way"

You mean the guys and girls who are telling you that the climate is fucked?

"God will guide us"

Good luck with that.

Tags: #economics #capitalism #politics #physics

This is a story about body shopping...

Because I'm a genius, I've figured out a brilliant business plan: buy low, sell high.

It used to be the case that companies would have their own IT staff, because it made sense to have people trained up and retain their skills, given how integral information technology is to every business in this day and age. Businesses would recruit technologists as permanent members of staff, and pay them a professional-grade salary.

Then, the IT crowd figured out that there was a skills shortage and that they were being underpaid for the amount of value that they were generating for their paymasters. Some IT professionals became technology entrepreneurs and others became IT contractors, selling their skills to the highest bidder.

As the year 2000 approached and panic spread about the millennium (Y2K) bug, IT contractors could pretty much name their price. It was quite clear just how valuable IT had become to big business and the running of the technological world around us.

Consultancies started to hoover up all the graduates coming out of the Computer Science degree courses at university, and also maths, physics, engineering and other technical disciplines too. There seemed to be an insatiable demand for anybody who had an aptitude for programming, so why not corner the market in anybody with the slightest ability to write software?

If you can hire a graduate for £25k per annum, how much do you think you could charge a client for a day of their time?

IT contractors probably charge circa £500 a day. The best get £700 to £1,000 per day. The worst get £300 per day.

£25k per annum equates to a cost of less than £70 a day, but you can't ask your fresh uni graduate to work weekends, you're going to have to give them some holiday and you're going to have to train them. Let's assume that our graduate is only billable for 26 weeks of the year and they cost a shitload to train and for taxes and other overheads. That means they cost the 'consultancy' (a.k.a. body shop) about £250 a day... in the absolute worst-case scenario.

A recruitment consultant will charge a 30% mark-up on an experienced IT contractor who's been working for 10+ years and is an absolute expert in their field: the best of the best. So, assuming the contractor is getting £700 a day, the company who needs them is paying £910 a day.

How much do you think our fresh graduate is charged to clients for, given they only cost the consultancy £250 a day? Answer: £1,200 a day and upwards.

This is the consultancy model: place a shitload of inexperienced people on client sites and charge a whopping 400%+ mark-up on them. Leave them to flounder and figure stuff out at the client's expense.

The IT contractor's role is now to go around cleaning up messes left by the poor kids who have the unenviable task of doing a job that they don't have the knowledge or experience to do, while getting underpaid to do it. The IT contractor's role is that of the grown up, the nanny, the only person who's even remotely worth the money.

Most companies are trying to trim their IT budgets and they got their fingers burned by offshoring a load of roles to India and other parts of Asia. You get what you pay for, unless you're paying for inexperienced graduates in this case.

For sure, graduates are smart nice people, strong communicators and they learn quickly. For sure, when "all that IT stuff is done" then you can say goodbye to all those pesky technology people without having costly redundancies.

The reality is that there's a load of crap software out there that's been developed by a bunch of amateurs, and it will fall to bits... if it even works in the first place.

It's professional suicide to write this stuff, but everybody's too busy making easy money doing bodyshopping that nobody important is going to read this. My IT expert friends might read this and chortle "yes that's so true!" but the consultancies are only interested in bums on seats. They don't care who I am or what I have to say: they only want me when the shit hits the fan and they need somebody to come and mop up the mess, as inevitably happens.

It pains me to see IT go from being a profession filled with experts and people who take pride in doing a good job, to being seen as some kind of dirty necessity. It fucks me off when the consultancies suck up to their clients and seemingly agree that there's no long-term value in having software experts in their firm.

"Get the job done, fuck off and let us go back to doing our business" seems to be the attitude. That's why the dinosaurs are dying and the startups are taking over. IT is your business, fools. Look at Amazon: are they a retailler or a technology company, first and foremost? Do you think Amazon is going to sack all their software developers now that they "have a website that works"?

The era of offshoring was a costly mistake that was brilliant for the consultancies, because they got to build huge development centres and skill up their own graduates at the expense of greedy Western corporations. Now the body-shop 'consultancies' in the UK have monopolised the IT contract market, flooding it with inexperienced people and charging top dollar for them.

I'm hoping - and not just for personal gain - that the whole thing comes full circle, and we'll revert to an era of experts being in demand and companies recognising that they need technologists as much as any other business critical function. Software's not some crap you can get on the cheap... it's an investment in the future of your company. One day, all businesses are going to be technology companies.

Tags: #career #computing

This is a story about the pecking order...

Respect my authority. I did well in school and I've risen up the chain of command. I have stripes on my epaulettes and letters after my name. I've got a fancy job title and I'm very well paid. Don't-you-know-who-I-am and I'm oh-so-superior to the likes of you. Back in your place, underling. Get back in line.

Our systems of population control breed subservience. Why don't the workers rise up and seize the means of production?

"I'm not good with numbers"

"I've got no interest in politics"

"I just keep my head down and do what I'm told"

Could there be anything more degrading than having your fellow human beings sitting in judgement over you? Who are they to say "yay" or "nay" on the question of your utility? How dare they decide your fate!

Job insecurity keeps wages down, because workers develop a misplaced sense of gratitude for their income. In hard economic terms, workers get a terrible deal: they do all the work and they only see a tiny fraction of the profit. Why on earth would they do that?

"You're easily replaced"

Yes. While I dislike people who attempt to make themselves into key-man dependencies and build little fiefdoms of complexity to make themselves indispensable, I also think that the commodification of human beings is one of the most awful things that's happening in the modern world.

What happened to the artisan; the craftsman?

Small is beautiful, in a way. Think back to a time when each village had a butcher, a baker and a candlestick maker. There was the blacksmith, the miller, the cobbler, the tailor, the farrier, the thatcher. There were apprentices aplenty and sons followed in their father's footsteps.

Of course, it's easy to bring up infant mortality and the large number of women who died during childbirth. Infections and treatable diseases used to be fatal. In the past, manual labour, poor diet and poor healthcare, meant that life expectancy was much lower. People were superstitious and afraid of death and disease. Nobody went skydiving.

Now, nobody has any place. We live with terrible insecurity. We could lose our jobs and have our homes repossessed at any moment. If your job becomes redundant due to ever-advancing technological changes and globalisation, you're unlikely to be able to afford to retrain. Besides, how would you ever even compete with all the people who are already trained and vying for the few available jobs?

What's the purpose of anything? What meaning is there to anything?

It was pretty clear why you got up at the crack of dawn to light the fire in the ovens: because if you didn't, people wouldn't have any bread and they'd be pissed off about that. In the village, everybody would be like "no fucking bread" and "yeah, I know. Shit isn't it!"

Now, why did you work hard at school, go to university, battle through those job interviews and kiss arses as you squirmed your way up the greasy pole; the career ladder? So you can punch numbers into a spreadsheet and give powerpoint presentations? So you can go to meetings and sit on cramped commuter trains? So you can eat pre-packaged sandwiches at your desk, getting crumbs all over the keyboard? Why the fuck are you even alive? What's the point of your existence?

If you're trying to get a fancier car so you can impress your friends and neighbours, or if you're trying to get a pay rise and a promotion, so you can 'win' and brag about how rich and successful you are, then perhaps you've found your purpose. Perhaps status symbols and meaningless job titles are the answer to the big question: why are we here?

What happens when it all goes bang and the whole fucking mess comes tumbling down? What happens when you realise you wasted your whole fucking life? You can't eat university diplomas or bonds or banknotes. You can't keep a house warm with supply chain statistics or flow diagrams. You can't live in an insurance certificate or legal contract. You can't clothe yourself with tax returns, essays, dissertations or theses.

Our world has divided into two camps: the celebrities and the nobodies; the powerful and the powerless; the rich and the poor; the smart and the stupid; the valuable and the valueless.

Did you ever notice how anybody who's anybody is rich, famous, powerful, smart and incredibly valuable to humanity, and everybody else is a worthless nobody who can go to hell? "Everybody else" accounts for 99% of the world's population, by the way.

Who wants to read the autobiography of Ahmad who sits behind the counter at my local dry cleaner? He must be pretty stupid if he's not powerful or rich. He's not famous so he can't have any value. He knows his place, which is about the only good thing we can say about him, right?

Modern society has led to city living because of economies of scale. It makes sense to have a multi-billion dollar mass transit system in a city, to make it easy for everybody to get to work efficiently. It makes sense to build all the high-rise head offices that can hold thousands of people, in one place. The net result is urban solitude and anonymity. Nobody knows who their neighbours are. Nobody knows who the local shopkeepers are. Nobody knows anybody, except the rich famous people who are the only ones with any value: they're indispensable.

One face is the same as another. Two workers who've held the same job title are interchangeable. Hire and fire. Who gives a fuck... human lives are cheap. Make the balloon go higher by chucking more bodies onto the fire.

We are running our economy by the numbers: we're wedded to our spreadsheets and all we care about is that this month's numbers are bigger than last month's numbers. Growth! Growth! Growth! More! More! More!

The top tier - our rulers, our managers, our executives - look at the graphs: are they going up? Who gives a fuck what's going on at the bottom. The tip of the iceberg is in charge of the rest.

You're drowning and freezing cold in the icy depths. You're part of that huge mass of ice beneath the surface, but you'd better not try and climb out of the water or else you'll topple the whole system and plunge the tiny tip into the depths... and nobody wants that, do they?

Chances are that you could do a better job than those in charge, because the country couldn't get much worse: inequality is a disgrace, poverty is rife, depression and suicide rates are skyrocketing, life is miserable and there are few prospects.

We're supposed to be ruled over by a house of commons: ordinary people from all walks of life. In fact, career politicians and massive political parties supported by wealthy donors & commercial interests, completely dominate the political landscape. We live in a plutocracy, as evidenced by the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

I count the middle class in the 'poor' bracket.

Of course, it seems ridiculous to suggest that well paid educated professional people in the middle class are poor - they have the best jobs, high quality housing and disposable income - but within a generation or two, the middle class are going to be utterly fucked. Skyrocketing house prices just don't work: they will erode your wealth, because you want somewhere for your kids and grandkids to live, don't you? Unless you live in a castle big enough for all future generations of your family, you're going to need some affordable housing at some point.

University tuition fees and the cost of student accommodation, comes on top of the private school fees you paid in order to get your little darlings the straight-A grades they needed to get onto the few degree courses that might lead to an actual job. A job doing fucking what exactly?

OK, so your silver-spooned little shits got themselves a degree and a professional qualification in law or accountancy or something, but you're going to have to fork out £100k+ to get them onto the housing ladder. Your terribly bright and brilliant kids now need a place to live near their job - London and the South-East - which means top dollar house prices.

Wealth has been hoarded by the baby-boomers who were gifted it by good luck and the inflation that eroded their debts relative to their incomes. The baby-boomers are now having to fork out all that filthy lucre in order to support their children and grandkids. There just aren't any well paid jobs that allow our special snowflake millennials to support themselves financially, no matter how hard they work.

So, the only group who have a place are the ones at the top of the pile: the ones who already control more wealth than they could ever spend in a hundred lifetimes, and who can easily generate some more because they already have the money, the fame and the power to make a success out of whatever the fuck they want to do. I mean, Paris Hilton is a DJ now, for fuck's sake: she presses the play button on a CD player and people pay to see that fucking shit.

All in all, why bother? Why the struggle? Why the stress? Why the anxiety and and the insecurity and the hideousness of battling over the crumbs from the cake?

We're all fighting with each other at the bottom, like crabs in a bucket, pulling down anybody who tries to escape.

Just stay in your place though. Don't complain. I'm sure those in charge know best.

Tags: #politics #capitalism #economics

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

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

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

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

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

I wrote a letter to myself.

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

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

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

Everything you never wanted to know about addiction.

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

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

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

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

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

Happy New Year's Eve.

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

This is a story about insecurity...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Suicide is so selfish."

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

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

Tags: #suicide #depression #relationships #divorce

This is a story about social media suicide...

Too long; didn't read? Those 140-character status updates exhaustively summarise my entire state of mind at any given moment in time. Join them up and you capture an entire person. Is their heart beating? No need to worry... they're still tweeting.

OK, good, we got the summary text bit out of the way.

For those of you still following along at home, I have some news: my little social media & blogging holiday seems to have put me back in contact with a few friends. I'm about to have a record-setting month of meeting up with people and going out for social engagements in real life.

Social media - by which I mean everything including group text messages - is enormously valuable in my life so I'm never actually going to quit Facebook. Anyway, this serves as a talking point tomorrow when people ask "didn't you say you were going to quit Facebook?"

As we know, clickbait is a real problem, so people tend to just read the title of anything on Facebook and assume they know the rest. When you assume, you make an "ass" out of "u" and "me".

"So close but yet so far"

We're all hyperconnected. I wake up and start having a conversation with a friend in New Zealand, who's about to go to bed. After lunch I start chatting to a friend in San Francisco, who's just woken up. Round and round and round we go; follow the sun. The sun never sets in the world of technology. Is this a good thing? It's certainly a bit weird, having a load of people who I'm in regular contact with, but I also spend the vast majority of my time physically alone in just two rooms: my bedroom and my lounge.

Somehow, by reducing the amount of energy I put into social media outpourings, it's created a bit of space for other people to come into my life. Either that or it's coming up to Christmas and people are simply feeling a bit more social.

Anyway, what about social media suicide?

I've been blogging extremely candidly for 15+ months. I've given a fairly unflinching account of all kinds of personal matters and it wouldn't make for great reading for any prospective employers or ageing family members of a sensitive disposition. Basically, it's the kind of stuff that people just don't talk about. Do I regret it? Not really. Brain dumping has been quite successful, I think, in terms of getting rid of a load of baggage.

What next? I'm really struggling to re-adjust having achieved my three major milestones:

• Blog every day for over a year
• Write a novel
• Write half a million words

As you can tell, my thoughts are scattered; disjointed. I'm struggling to get back into blogging, having spent a whole month writing fiction every day. Context switching is hard. Blogging got me through an incredibly boring contract, as well as providing structure and routine throughout a very unstable period of my life. Perhaps it's good to pick up the blogging again, but I'm squeezing it into a life which is hopefully going to be more balanced, rather than having it as such a major component.

It's all so terribly meta but that's part of finding my voice again, I think. Hopefully it will be a different voice: less bitter and stuck in the past. However, I've written that before and then found that there were things I was still really pissed off about that bubbled up and needed to be written about.

Finally, I'm super pleased that all my creative output is not trapped within the walled garden of Facebook or Twitter. Google is bringing me some delightful characters who have found my website. Apparently the search term "cat drug make me horny" will bring you here, so at least there's that.

Tags: #socialmedia #writing

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

25. The Scales

The crisis team - part of the community mental health team - social services and the police had all been quite helpful when Neil had originally gone missing. The police had quickly discovered that Neil had left his phone, wallet and passport behind. All the services were very concerned about Neil's welfare and had attempted to establish his last known movements as well as searching for him. Because Neil was considered a vulnerable person at risk of suicide, there had been a lot of initial effort, focus and attention on helping Lara, Colin and the family to make sure he was found safe and well.

With all avenues exhausted, there was little more that any of the services could do unless new information emerged. Lara and Colin were main points of contact, liaising with a police detective who was in charge of the ongoing - but parked - investigation.

Frustrated with a lack of progress, two highly regarded private investigators were contacted by Colin. After initial discussions they decided that there was insufficient evidence for them to be able to pursue the case. The truth was that nobody really wanted to touch the case, because of the number of government bodies already involved: National Health Service, mental health services, the police and social services.

Colin had eventually taken matters in to his own hands and gone to the house to look for more clues, when he found the transactions that had led him to the ongoing prosecution of the businesswoman and her associates. Once he'd found the names of the defendants, it was a simple case of searching the register of directors and finding the trading address of their company in the public records.

Now, he was back at the house once again. He regretted involving Lara so closely, but she wanted to play an active role and had discovered vital information that he himself - a grey-haired man in his sixties - would have been unlikely to have been able to extract from anybody embroiled in the court case.

Colin had sounded out friends - retired police officers, solicitors and even a judge - about bringing their own case to court. "Not a hope in hell" were the exact words of one former Justice of the Peace. His sentiments were pretty much echoed by everybody else Colin consulted informally.

"Imagine if a person was selling rat poison as heroin" said Bill, the retired judge. "Now, if that person was to sell rat poison in place of sugar, they might be convicted of murder or manslaughter. But as soon as they sell it as heroin, they'll be convicted for supply of a controlled substance, even though rat poison is not illegal to sell per se."

"But that's insane! Surely the charge of murder should take precedence over the charge of supplying a controlled substance" protested Colin.

"Well, it's about the buyer. If the buyer thought they were buying heroin, then nobody really cares whether that junkie dies. The seller will be convicted as a drug dealer, not a murderer."

"So the law really doesn't care whether you sell a junkie sugar, caffeine, heroin or rat poison?" asked Colin.

"Yep."

"What if the buyer didn't know what they were getting?"

"What did they actually buy?" Bill asked.

"A controlled substance."

"What was it sold as?"

"A chemical for laboratory research."

"There's no chance it could have been confused for a foodstuff? Was it marked as hazardous? Unfit for human consumption?"

"Yeah. It's not like it was sold as sugar or anything" Colin replied.

"Well then, the only conviction you could possibly get would be for supply of a controlled substance."

To make matters worse, everybody advised Colin not to mention the drug use to the police. One whiff of drug abuse and the case would be filed in a dustbin marked 'lost cause junkie'.

Back at the house searching for more clues, he looked high and low before finally he decided to search the attic. Boxes of Christmas decorations and long-neglected exercise equipment, the attic contained very little else except for a disused hot water cylinder and a galvanised metal cold water tank. There was a chipboard lid on the tank and Colin noticed that it was an inch or so out of place, overhanging on one corner. Lifting the lid, there was a green plastic box floating inside with a black plastic handle.

In the kitchen, Colin towelled off the green box so it was clean and dry and took it through to the dining room. Unclasping the two black plastic latches, the lid was stuck tight until the airtight and dust proof seal released the pressure. Inside the box was grey foam to protect the delicate instrument contained within: a laboratory-grade weighing scale.

Normal kitchen scales might tell you the weight of something in grams, but not very accurately. If you needed to weigh 10 grams - approximately the same as a one pound coin - then your kitchen scales would be woefully inadequate. Even fine balance scales with small weights would struggle to weigh anything lighter than a gram. Some digital scales could weigh one tenth of a gram with reasonable accuracy: 0.1g. The scales that Colin had found could weigh at a sub-milligram accuracy. Less than 0.001 grams. Even breathing on the instrument or standing too near the table on a wooden floor would cause measurement fluctuations, so there was a special stand, cover and calibration weights to ensure the readings were accurate. The "quick reference" instruction manual inside the case was a hefty pamphlet.

There were some spatulas and a metal dish inside the green box. A tiny amount of light brownish powder residue was visible on the foam that held the dish and the spatulas. There was also a very small plastic resealable bag which was almost empty except for the tiniest residue of powder in the corners.

Colin spent the whole next day searching the Internet and phoning testing facilities, before he finally located a laboratory that would be able to swab and test the tiny traces of drugs that he had found. Using gas chromatography mass spectrometry, the lab was able to then search the 'signature' of the chemical compounds and to find a match in their database.

After sending the scales by courier to the lab in the Netherlands, it took 3 weeks before he got the results emailed to him. There was no conclusive match, but there were several compounds that were 97% similar to chemicals that were held in their database. He had been warned that a 99% match was the highest that he could expect anyway, so it was a good start.

Searching the Internet, he found detailed online encyclopedia entries for two chemicals, as well as a brief summary of a third. The compounds were stimulants from three different families of drugs. Two had been developed and patented in the 1950's and 1960's, but had never been marketed to the public because of serious side effects. Colin found a shorter acronym form of the full chemical name of each of the three compounds and started to search the Internet for more information.

Quickly, Colin was immersed in a world of online discussion forums. Thousands of Internet users from around the globe were talking about their experiences of self-experimentation with chemical compounds that had been abandoned by pharmaceutical companies or not even patented. Some of the chemicals had only been thought of as theoretically possible, but a laboratory somewhere in the world was cooking up these drugs for people to buy and try on themselves.

He couldn't read any more. What he saw was immediately horrifying. Hundreds of stories of addiction and horrible psychotic episodes, health damage and hospitalisations. Internet users were swapping stories about how awful these chemicals were and that they were the most addictive drugs they'd ever tried. Many lamented the day they ever first experimented. One message stood out as clearly as the obvious warning to never take these substances: accurate measurement was the difference between desired effects and overdose.

Perhaps Neil had two sets of scales, but one set alone was worth almost £1,000. If he had overdosed at home, surely he would have been found there along with his scales?

From what Colin had read, a powerful dose of those drugs was just 0.005 grams. If Neil had half a gram delivered from China, that would be 100 doses. The effects would last well over 12 hours. That meant Neil would have been on a nonstop drug binge for 50 days with just one free sample, assuming he was measuring accurately.

He felt sick. His son had got mixed up with something so dangerous that it had overwhelmed him and taken his life in the blink of an eye. There was no way to sugar coat this. Was there even any point in telling Lara and the family that Neil had been completely consumed by addiction and stimulant psychosis? In less than 6 weeks these powerful Chinese drugs caused him to flee his home to his final resting place.

Next chapter...