Someone appears to be trying to screw me out of money I am owed and that never seems to end well

When I was newly 18 – just a couple of months after my 18th birthday – I tried to kill myself over a girl. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I’ve never regretted it.

But, being a novice at such things, I used drugs – aspirin, paracetamol and codeine. This was a mistake. I had always been shit at Chemistry in school. I always came last in Chemistry, except on one occasion when I came next-to-last. The Chemistry master wrote on my report A fair try and emigrated to New Zealand.

The reason I mention this is that people have always tended to mis-read me. For one thing, they misread nihilism for jollity: a very strange misreading, even if it is occasionally humorous nihilism.

But people (as always) read other people’s thoughts and actions based on their own psychological make-up. This seems to mean that most people think I give a shit.

And they assume that I will calculate consequences in the same way that they would. This is not necessarily true. When I get into a tussle of tiffs. I do calculate consequences, but I may calculate them (from other people’s viewpoints) unexpectedly, in the sense that a scorched earth policy or the Cold War nuclear concept of MAD (mutual assured destruction) does not worry me. I do try to warn people about this, but they seem to ignore the warnings.

They are so used to reading between the lines that they don’t really pay attention to what is actually being said.

If you have, at a point earlier in your life, assumed that you would cease to exist in 60 or 30 or 10 minutes time and if that was an outcome you decided was acceptable – welcome, even – then, trust me, risk calculation later in life may not be on the same measurement scale that other people assume.

The comedian Janey Godley has said of performing comedy: “If I ever stood in a room with 600 people and talked for 15 minutes and nobody laughed, then it’s no worse than having a gun held at your head and I’ve already had that, so it doesn’t really scare me.”

She speaks from experience.

In different circumstances, so do I, though I have never had a gun held at my head. Though there was that unfortunate incident with the young Yugoslav soldier sitting up a tree in a forest outside Titograd.

The fact I genuinely care very little about consequences may also have something to do with having had a Scottish – and Scots Presbyterian – upbringing. The world is full of greys. It is not black and white. But, whereas others may not see a dividing line between the shades of grey I see from my personal viewpoint, I do.

Most decisions and most things in life don’t matter. But, if I decide something DOES matter, then I know where I have drawn that line. One side of that pencil thin line is what is acceptable. On the other side of that pencil thin line is something that is unacceptable under all circumstances.

Up to that line, I am told I am very malleable. If that line is crossed, though, then I will attempt to rip your throat out.

My rule of thumb is three strikes and you are out.

Fuck the consequences.

Just thought I’d mention it…

Now, anyone got any money-making propositions they want to run past me?

Perhaps a job as a risk assessment advisor?

Ants, anarchy, chaos and progress

At school, science was always sold to me by my teachers as being about facts and I was crap at it. I always felt my chemistry teacher fled to New Zealand to avoid having to mark my incompetence and lack of interest any more. If science had been sold to me as a creative curiosity into how things work and why the world is the way it is, I might have been interested.

So it was potentially a bit intimidating going to yesterday’s European Science Television and New Media Awards Evening at the Institute of Engineering and Technology in Savoy Place which, in 1923, was one of the first homes of the (then so-called) British Broadcasting Company.

But I enjoyed the evening and did learn that, around the world, 60 volcanoes explode every year and that no one ant in any ant colony knows everything that is happening within the colony nor how it is organised over-all… No one individual ant controls nor supervises everything and yet colonies successfully thrive in an astonishingly complex way.

This would seem to be an argument for anarchy although I know from experience that to create anything which seems to be very anarchic you have to organise everything with immense care. I remember a production meeting for the children’s TV series Tiswas in which producer Glyn Edwards said he was worried that the shows ran too smoothly and nothing ever went seriously wrong; it looked anarchic but it ran smoothly. We never did figure out how to build-in real catastrophes.

Chaos and progress are two sides of the same coin in the same sense that you can only create by destroying what previously existed and, by destroying anything which exists, you are, by definition, creating something new. In Hindu mythology Shiva, the god of destruction, destroys creation in his Tandava dance; but, as he dances, out of the mists, he creates a new world.

My occasionally revived company is named Shivadance Productions for that very reason.

It might be a wanky name; it might not be. But at least it’s memorable. As is the view from the third floor Riverside Room at Savoy Place. That has to be one of the best views of London.