Diving or Drowning

An Autohagiography - Part I

Source code and user documentation to Fuzzyman

A tale of drugs, Ambient trance and Cambridge university - well sort of. (Ambient trance is a type of music mum).

A friend of James Joyce had a daughter who suffered from schizophrenia. He commented to James he often used the same tricks of language himself, one of the symptoms of her condition. 'Yes' replied James 'but where you are diving, she is drowning'. (apocryphal)

A sad saga... Tales of tribulation.... Years of yearning.... Ages of angst..... Decades of disaster..... ahem acres of awful alliteration.

I was born at a young age (you know I'm having trouble taking this seriously). Apparently I was conceived in a caravan in Scotland, which is an obscure fact you probably wished you didn't know. I basically grew up in Macclesfield, a lovely northern industrial town nestled in the shadow of the pennine hills, which are sometimes known as the backbone of England. In many ways I had a perfect childhood. We were a close loving family with both an extended family (cousins and grandparents etc) and an active church family that we were part of. In my younger years my brother was my closest friend and we explored the local countryside by bike together. I especially remember one summer that seemed to last for ever.... playing in the treehouse in our huge back garden and the nearby woods, swapping Star Wars action figures with friends (and nicking sweets from the local shops - my first forays into shoplifting). We used to get proper weather in those days, not like the stuff we get nowadays, and in winter you could go and get stuck in a snowdrift and school would be closed for at least a few days every year.

Not just an idyllic childhood but we were reasonably well off - a middle class family in what was generally a poorer area. I was brought up a Christian, my parents were around for the whole seventies charismatic revival thing and so I grew up a good evanjellyfish. I remember women in long skirts baking their own bread and bearded men playing guitars in 'house church' meetings in their living rooms [1].

I always had a good relationship with God, really feeling his spiritual presence in worship and feeling his love when I would pray alone at night [2].

Unfortunately I was also way too clever for my own good. I would read stacks and was obsessed with electrical junk and the computer my parents bought us. [3] I was never really the most socially capable of creatures - I usually had a best friend or two who I would spend most of my time with but I was never part of the 'in crowd'. A Christian, good at school, mouthy and not particularly good at sports I was soon marked out as a loner at school and bullied. I'm sure I brought much of it on myself - I didn't really relate well to people and could be arrogant - but some of it was vicious and made my school life hell, other than the lessons which were a breeze. In terms of work I never really had to apply myself which proved my undoing in later years.... I was an outspoken Christian but believed that I could convince people 'I was right' by arguing with them.... a tactic with a zero recorded success rate. Having been brought up believing it seemed so obvious to me that I simply didn't understand how people could not believe in God....

Did I mention that I feel lucky to have a Dad who I look up to and whose character I admire ? In a world of broken homes and alienation this is increasingly rare - not that we didn't have our arguments, stubborn old mules the pair of us. Other significant events in that early phase of my life I guess was my Mum discovering she had diabetes and falling increasingly ill for a few years and then moving from Macclesfield further south to the leafy suburban bliss of commutersville Harpenden, this time living in the shadow of a huge water tower ! Special shout going out to Stephen Bland and Roger Northwood of the pre-Harpenden days.

Right, to skip through a few traumatic, painfully teenaged and exam ridden years I moved from the agonising (and testosterone laced) boys only school to a more straight-laced but refreshingly mixed one and then left school having fallen shyly in love a couple of times and also acquired a few Amiga computers [4] - mainly obtained by lying about my age to get a Dixons storecard (and paid off with baby-sitting money) ! I never plucked up the courage to ask out any of the objects of my affection but I did write some poetry to one of them..... An honourable mention to Duncan Pryde, Richard Jarvis and Andrew Boucher from those secondary school years....

(Hee heee nearly forgot - [5].)

I had sailed through my GCSEs and A-levels with almost all As despite having nearly been thrown off the English course for lack of effort. All through this time I knew what I wanted to do with my life - I was going to go to Cambridge University to do a law degree and become a barrister - my Dad went to Cambridge where he met my Mum and it was the best..... I guess my parents suggested it as a career - but the combination of logic and creativity (twisting the facts to suit the framework of the law, which is itself a precarious and fluid scaffold) seemed to suit perfectly my warped mind ! Anyway, that certainty didn't help me understand my peers who more often struggled to know what they wanted to do with their lives.......

And so I sailed through my interview with Corpus Christi college [6], got accepted and took a year off to get some experience of life....

I got a job in a small local computer firm selling Archimedes to the education market. I was general dogsbody, answering the phone, fitting upgrades and organising computers that came in and out for repair. I was paid what was then standard dogsbody wage of three pounds an hour. I immediately failed to hit it off with the other staff members ! The two large and loud receptionist type girls asked me to make tea for them - not wanting to be taken advantage of I declined the opportunity.... and in the process failed some kind of test sigh from that moment on I was excluded from the office tea round.

This was my first proper job and I was still living with my parents. Naturally they asked for some rent, but never having had to pay rent to live in 'my own house' before the suggestion was outrageous - so I didn't bother. At the same time I had taken on an evening job doing telephone selling for a double glazing firm. For the first week I got nothing, just rejection after rejection and I was convinced they would have to fire me. Eventually on the Friday I got one response, one person who would make an appointment . From then on it wasn't long before I was getting the bonus for top 'telecanvasser' every week. I was earning as much from my part time evening job as I was from my full time day job.

At about the same time I met an old friend in the streets, we used to muck around on computers together and had tried to build a little pirate radio station - the only thing we could pick it up on was the telly and then we blew it up. Anyway, 'there is something you've got to try' he said to me. 'What's that ?' I asked. 'Ecstasy' he said; now I was very naive [7] but I must have known something about drugs because my response was 'well..... I might try some pot but I won't touch chemicals', 'no man, you've got to try it', 'no I won't', 'look its amazing'.... I was always brought up to associate the word 'drugs' with heroin and really heavy things - even so my firm resolve and moral fibre lasted about seventeen seconds before caving in.

My first 'E' was a small white pill costing twelve pounds that did virtually nothing to me. Almost every drug I have ever taken did nothing to me the first time, odd. The next time I tried was about a week later in a car with what was basically a new set of friends. I had taken the tablet about half an hour ago and we drove up to my house to pick something up. I dashed in, ran upstairs and grabbed whatever it was and ran down stairs again. I stopped at the car to catch my breath and this 'rush', a wave of 'feeling' rushed up my body and exploded in my head. Suddenly, I understood why they called it ecstasy.

With money then coming out of my ears I asked my Dad what he would think about me getting a satellite dish fitted. He said he would think about it, which was good enough for me. The next week the dish was fitted and I constructed an 'altar to entertainment' in the centre of my room - with a huge rented Nicam stereo TV, video and satellite dish..... around this altar the detritus of my existence was piled up.....

I was thrust into a social whirlwind of people and ecstasy - both of which were happy to devour a much money as I could provide. One member of the close circle I was part of had parents who ran a car hire firm - so each weekend we would have a new car or van to bomb around in and we had a reliable source of good ecstasy.

We would more often just bomb around in the car together enjoying the drug. A good ecstasy trip lasts 8-10 hours and takes you over with waves and waves of empathy and gorgeous sensations.... I adored it - a full on ecstasy honeymoon [8] that lasted a few months.

Shouts to Rob Tansley, Ben Holloway and Richard Bell from those pre-college days.

College time greetz - fond and fatal memories of Jack Turvey, John Morgan, Russell, Aparimana, Claudine, Dave Wood, Maria, Claire, Natalie (oops), Kim, Numbnuts, Adam (give me back my pot money !) and Janet and crew (to name but a random assortment of mates and mysteries from town and college)......

If you've got this far and are still willing to read on... you might be interested in Part II.

Footnotes

[1]

For those of you not familiar with the jargon, the charismatic revival of the seventies was the move of God and the holy spirit that broke the mold of traditional churches basically across the whole of the western world. Many young people, some from the hippy movement, joined churches seeking a genuine spirituality and not just dead traditions - relationship with God rather than religion. This was the start of the 'happy-clappys' with baptising in the spirit (a tremendous and often emotional experience of the power of God) and a return of the gift of tongues (Glossolalia). The sad fact is that often churches rejected these new, young and passionate converts and many were lost to Christianity altogether. Some decided to break from traditional Christianity and started churches of their own in their homes. This was the start of the house church movement which produced groups like the 'Jesus People USA' and streams of churches in the UK like ICTHUS, Pioneer and New Frontiers. Some people also experimented with Christian community as practised by the first Christians in Acts 2 and 4 - this produced the mja (modern Jesus army).

[2]

I had an active spiritual life as a young person and this was a shaping force on both my personality and the direction my life took. I was born into a Christian family and although I 'gave my life to Jesus' at the age of four and couldn't imagine not believing in God. Even as a child I always knew when I was 'backslidden' and not close to him - both in terms of relationship and the way I was living.

I remember particularly praying to God in bed, in the evenings before going to sleep, and often really being aware of the love of God - I used to call it having a 'spiritual hug'.

Another significant event I remember, is as a young teenager going to a 'mens breakfast' organised by the church. Towards the end of it the pastor of our church laid hands on me and prayed for me to receive the holy spirit (an experience I had had many times before). This time was different though, I felt amazing waves of energy going through me - like someone had flicked on an electric current through me. Everything was flickering like a strobe light was going off - as well as feeling great and thoroughly enjoying it I felt bemused. I was embarrassed that I was slightly out of control and wondered if other people could see that something strange was happening to me. That was the end of the event and so I left with my Dad - I remember walking out of the door with everything still flickering wildly. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before and I couldn't 'explain away' the experience and so I don't think I told anyone about it at the time. That evening, or possibly the next, I was praying alone before going to sleep as I normally did. I thought to myself if I can have that experience of God with someone else praying for me then I can have it when praying by myself. I prayed as I usually did but deliberately brought myself towards God and the same thing started to happen again - the same waves of energy and flickering sensations, great stuff !

The only thing I'd say about the spiritual input in my youth, is that English churches tend to focus on personal salvation and a personal relationship with God, but not so much on building the church (which was the focus of Jesus and Paul..). As a result you get a lot of people seeking self-fulfillment in their Christianity and a lack of real commitment..... A lot of people for example put their career before their church and when they get offered a better job with more money will even claim God has called them to move away ! God is calling people into a real commitment to building his church and looking for people who will really be the foundation stones of his work - in a real practical, local sense - not just a vague ephemeral commitment to some incorporeal body of Christ.... What this means is putting God and your spirituality first in your life and not enthroning money as the guiding force....Anyway - more about that later I guess... that focus was to become a key factor in the direction my life would take - in what seemed to be a quite negative way.

[3]

For those who may care, it was a BBC Model B with a cassette tape drive and 32k of ram. The processor ran at an awesome 1 megahertz if I remember correctly. (1 megabyte of memory is 32 times bigger than 32k, a Gigahertz is a 1000 times bigger than one Megahertz - that machine still played an awesome game of Elite though). I cut my teeth learning to programme in BBC basic. Of course my friends all had spectrums and we had endless arguments about which was better. We eventually got our first hard drive for it - a huge beast that held a whopping 10 megabytes and cost about 140 pounds I think.... If these 'machines' have increased in power a couple of thousand times in the last 15 years.... then what do the next 15 have in store ?

This is a cool opportunity for me to mention the 'computer generation'. I was part of the generation that 'grew up with computers'. When I was a baby infant, computers churned away in universities and labs - spewing out punched tape and needing regular component changes. As a child the first home computers came out and I learned BASIC at the same time as adults around me !

To kids growing up now, the computer has always been there and they have no reason to understand what actually happens inside them. Read Neal Stephensons 'In the beginning' article in the computer section. He explains very well how the WIMP culture (an acronym you don't hear very often these days...) has added an extra level of separation between what the user does and what the machine is really doing. It is inevitable really - but computers now, with all their plug-in and bolt-on enhancements, are too complex for the average user to even BEGIN to understand them.

The computers I first used were very basic and they worked on principles that could easily be explained. The individual components could (and still can..) be bought from maplins and programmed yourself. In actual fact modern PCs operate on extensions of exactly the same principles - but the operations the user performs are far removed from these principles...... so for most people the likelyhood of them ever having any understanding of 'how computers tick', the psychology of the computer, is only a remote possibility - which is a shame. As technology progresses it seems that our distance from what goes on 'under the hood' will only increase... and we ever more become the slaves of things we cannot understand.

My article HumanOS in this section looks at how this is an interesting metaphor for the human mind - how our perception of the workings of our consciousness is often distant from how we actually function... what goes on 'under the hood' of our minds.

(Footnote to the footnote - One of the things I used to do when young was spend hours designing my own computer - based on a 'build your own computer' project and reference books to processors and other chips. I never started it though.... typical of projects I used to get involved with. This is why Ecclesiastes says 'the end of a thing is better than the start of a thing'.)

[4]

The Amiga computer sigh not just a computer, but a vision, a dream, a community (ok - so mainly a community of geeks, but still a community). The Amiga was the worlds first 32 bit multitasking operating system and legend has it that the entire computer (including the microchips) were designed by hippies who wanted to build the sort of computer they really wanted to use. They say that when they first showed the Amiga publicly at an exhibition people kept looking under the tables and round the stand to find the 'real computer' that was doing those amazing things.

Part of its genius, other than real hardware multitasking which probably means little to most of you, was the custom built chips inside that did the graphics and sound and took the strain of the main processor - they had funky names like Gary, Fat Agnus and Denise and were very cool but also expensive to make. It was all based around the Motorola 68000 processor range which have always been far more powerful than the Intel range but they are obviously incompatible with each other. When the world went in the direction of PCs the Amiga, which was seen and marketed as a games machine, got left behind and Commodore went broke.

The operating system was a joy to use and very user friendly. When I recently ran the Amiga emulator 'WinUAE' on my PC and got the 'Workbench' screen back it was like seeing an old friend. Unfortunately its been left too far behind and is missing many features of a modern operating system. Bonus geek points for understanding the following : one of the reasons the Amiga was so much quicker and required so much less memory than an equivalent PC was that instead of passing data between programs and the operating system, processes would pass each other pointers to data structures instead. Very fast and very efficient. It does however make building in memory protection impossible because processes must have access to each others data structures. This was a technical problem they never overcame. The Amiga did find a niche market in graphics because of its power and relative cheap cost compared to high end graphics work stations. I believe the special effects for much of the sci-fi 'Babylon 5' TV series were rendered with networked Amigas running 'video-toasters'.

There was a great sense of community, both amongst the large community of 'shareware' coders, most of which was free, and the 'demo' coders who pushed the machine to its limits to outdo each other in producing audio and visual treats. I learnt to programme with the operating system in AMOS basic and went on to do some assembly language. Great fun and I have never since attained that level of knowledge about a computer. (That's no bad thing really and I've no intention of immersing myself in computers in the same way again either - they'll swallow your life if you let them). That Amiga community is a bit latent but there are still a large number of diehard and fiercely loyal Amiga fans out there.

I recently discovered an Amiga emulator for the PC called WinUAE. I guess every ex-Amiga owner has seen it; for those who might not have - on any reasonable PC it will completely pretend to be an Amiga - inside a window on the PC. Bizarre and somewhat ironic that the machine we used to see as a superior alternative to the PC can be fully run in the background in a window on one. It will however run most Amiga games - stacks of which can be found on the internet. Such classics as Captive and Populous, Speedball II and Stunt Car Racer can live again. To get these games running is very impressive - but WinUAE can only access parts of your hard drive that you specially dedicate to it, so I can't use it as an interface to work on my documents using Amiga programs on my PC; and as I don't really play games I have no reason to run it.

There are various projects to resurrect/reincarnate the Amiga in differing forms. The current official one which seems to involve something called 'Amiga Anywhere' is a bit beyond me and I don't understand it. However there is a very interesting project called AROS on the go. AROS stands for Amiga Research Operating System and aims to produce, in time, a modern operating system that will run on PCs and be 'source compatible' with the AmigaOS in its last incarnation. What this means is that programs written for the Amiga should run fine when 'recompiled' for an intel system. Programmers used to the Amiga operating system can write programs for AROS without learning any new skills.... in time it ought to have all the features necessary to qualify as a 'modern' operating system (TCP/IP stack, networking etc and even memory protection I am told). It is already a basically complete operating system with web browser that they claim will fit on one floppy - cool. Quite who will use it and what for I'm not entirely sure.....

Links to all these projects and more can be found on the Amiga page of the 'cool links' section. I am always keen to hear about the Amiga so if you have any news or links to interesting stuff on the net then please let me know. If anyone can come up with a way that I could actually find a use for AROS that would be particularly good......

I have a full online version of the Amiga user manuals and programmers reference books that I can post up here if anyone is interested.

[5]

This isn't strictly relevant but it amuses me when I remember it. After finishing my GCSEs at the tender age of 15 and like my compatriots I wanted to look for a job. Unfortunately I was young in my school year and most of my friends were already 16; they had received their national insurance number and had jobs as checkout boys at Sainsburys and the like.... The only job I could get was as a kitchen skivvy in an Italian restaurant. I earned £1.60 an hour working with a fiery Moroccan chef and various other illegal immigrants. The chip machine was right by the back door where all the rubbish was piled and the flies and rats swarmed ! One of my jobs was cleaning the maggots out of the chip machine every now and again..... yeeeurgh.... Most of the time me and chef got on very well - but every now and then we would have furious rows with both of us shouting at each other and him waving the meat cleaver around ! Ahhh... the good old days.. oh and for some bizarre reason there was a big black plastic dildo sitting up on one of the high shelves - very peculiar. Eventually I went on holiday having saved up some money and when I came back the manager had run off with the takings and one of the waitresses.... Now Harpenden is a poxy middle class commuter town and is filled with estate agents, pubs and Italian restaurants and pretty much nothing else - so the guy who owned all the other Italian restaurants took it over and its still there today....

On the subject of being off the subject as it were - this is as bad a time as any to mention the first times I got drunk. I had never really drunk much beyond the couple of glasses of wine with family meals. The first time I drank anything beyond that was in the sixth form aged about 16/17 which is quite sheltered by English standards. I went on a school English trip to the Yorkshire moors because we were reading 'Wuthering Heights' by one or other of the Bronte sisters. I was more friendly with the gang of girls than the couple of lads on this trip and so I went to this small but amicable Yorkshire pub with the lasses and got mildly drunk with them. Jolly pleasant and I've had a taste for malibu and pineapple juice ever since. Looking back on it its not surprising we got such a good response in the pub, eight attractive young girls and me !! Seriously, I don't know whether its the northern beer or what but they were very friendly.

After impressing my peers with how well I could hold my ale I was keen to try again and the opportunity soon arose when a small bunch of guys said they regularly got together in each others houses to get sozzled and did I want to come. I 'borrowed' a bottle of nice Vouvray wine, the remnants of a family holiday in France after my Dad emerged from his teetotal shelter to explore the realms of wine bibbing which had already been fervently charted for him by my maternal grandfather. The group of us five or six lads set about determinedly getting drunk - and I played my part with gusto. The first thing I learnt was that whisky and cider make a foul combination; it went downhill from there and culminated with me and another bloke having a race to down a pint each of this nice wine - what a waste. This, is when it started going hazy for me. I was convincingly slower at drinking the pint and remember the same bloke spitting a mouthful of water at me. I took a mouthful of water to spit at him and charged off after him. The next thing I know the other guys grab me and tell me I have just taken a door of its hinges. In order to impede pursuit he had closed a door in front of me. I have no memory of going through it but am reliably informed it happened, disaster. The mum and sister of the guy whose house it is now come downstairs to investigate - bizarre that they were even there - and the party is now over.

Several times since then I've seen several people in such a state of intoxication that they lose all power of thought and control over what they are doing - well that is what then happened to me. I had already consumed several times more alcohol than I had ever had and it started to take me over. A couple of the lads had the unfortunate task of walking me home. I could just about walk but had got to the stage where anything was ridiculously funny - especially staggering deliberately in the wrong direction or up someone else's drive. It must have been very frustrating for the two lads who by now just wanted to get me home and have done with me. I don't remember anything more of the evening but I'm sure I was very ill. Needless to say the next time I went to school I was highly embarrassed but surprisingly little was said about it. I've been in worse states since, drunk more, been more ill - but thankfully never lost control in quite the same way.

[6]

Cambridge University is made up of lots of smaller colleges and so you apply to the college rather than the university itself. I visited various colleges but fell in love with Corpus. That happened when after being shown round New Court, an impressive if rather imperious stone courtyard that forms the bulk of this small college and is a mere 400 years old, we were taken down a narrow alleyway past the dustbins. This leads to a small darker, crumbledown ivy-ridden courtyard called Old Court. It happens to be the oldest courtyard in Cambridge at about 600 years old and is simply gorgeous ! Hmmm.... shame I ballsed up my time there so badly.... but it all worked out for the best in the end. It was actually the college my Dad went to many moons ago and as far as I know there is still a photo of him hanging in the squash courts. When I went to visit we got shown round by this law undergraduate who told us about his interview and the question they asked him. 'You go to a hotel and put your umbrella in the stand. The next morning you leave in a hurry and can't see your umbrella so you just grab anyone's out of the stand. As you examine it later you discover its yours...... the question is are you guilty of theft, or indeed any other crime ?', 'Well' said this undergrad breezily 'its all about the nature of guilt of course'. When I went for my interview guess what the first question they asked me was... Yep... 'you go and stay in a hotel'.... 'well' I said breezily 'it's all about the nature of guilt of course'..... In actual fact its all about the nature of intention and the correct answer is that although you have the 'mens rea' the guilty mind of a crime (the necessary intention) there is no 'actus reus', guilty act, so no crime has been committed. There you go I did learn something, it helped set me at ease in the interview though....

[7]

Some of my most potent childhood memories are from big Christian charismatic (1) events called 'bible weeks'. Seemingly half the Christian population of the country would gather together to worship God in huge cattle sheds (actually agricultural showgrounds) and go to seminars. A sea of people all worshipping together. We would all live under canvas together for a week and get really excited and inspired about living for God. Then we would go home and over the next few weeks the buzz and excitement would gradually fade. The best description of these events I have ever read is Adrian Plass's fictional account of 'Let God Spring Forth into Royal Acts of Harvest Growth' - or something like that. Very funny and very incisive.

All this is by way of introduction to the irony that the first time I ever came into contact with drugs was at one of these events called 'Stoneleigh'. Stoned at Stoneleigh. I was with the youth group of the church - the lads of which had made overtures of friendship but I'd never really been in with them. I drank a bit with them that week but had no idea they were smoking pot together. This could be reassuring to the church I'm currently in that has a big 'yoof' scene and on and off regular problems with drugs - its not just us, even nice middle class churches have problems with lads and drugs !

Towards the end of the week one of the lads who I was closer to, and later formed a great friendship with, confided to me that the lads had been smoking pot together all week. I was keen to try it and in his drunken state he took me to an abandoned corner of the campsite to roll a joint with smallest blim of hash you have ever seen - the last of his stash. It was pathetic, I didn't feel a thing and it ended with him throwing up everywhere and me helping him to the toilets in the dark to get cleaned up. It was however my first experience with drugs and formed a bond with this guy that was later to cement into a deep friendship.

[8]	The film 'Human Traffic' has an excellent depiction of the ecstasy culture. Watch it, watch it again, then make your granny watch it.

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