I’m writing down some memories.
You can start at Chapter One if you like or just keep reading here.

In 1968, Los Angeles was a mass of snarled traffic where dreams went to die. Perhaps inspired by the song, everyone moved to San Jose and they took their freeways with them. 50 years after Dionne Warwick fled to the beautiful Valley of the Heart’s Delight, it took an average of 90 minutes each way to commute 25 miles from Almaden Valley to Mountain View and all the orchards were gone.

LA is a great big freeway.
Put a hundred down and buy a car.
In a week, maybe two, they’ll make you a star.

I arrived in Mountain View in 1996 with big dreams after two wonderful years working on Wall Street. Downtown Manhattan is an amazing place to live but it’s no place to bring up a baby and after the biggest snowstorm in a hundred years, we decided we wanted to live somewhere warmer. 

Chris worked for a company based in Silicon Valley and said we should go live there and we all solemnly pledged to be out on the West Coast by the end of August. Of course, when July rolled around we had done nothing to advance our quest, so we renewed our promise over a beer. Three weeks later we moved into an apartment on the Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto. 

AlphaBlox was just across the street from Netscape and, on the day we arrived in California, Jeremy asked me if I had ever seen a cheque for a million dollars. Jeremy and Michael had just come back from their first meeting with Netscape’s CFO who, impressed with their pitch, pulled out his chequebook and wrote seven digits. The first few thousand dollars went on custom door handles in the shape of the company logo. A few more tens of thousands went on custom-built furniture to match the logo colours. The Dotcom Boom was underway.

I learned a lot at AlphaBlox. I learned that if you put together a team of twenty-something developers who hate each other you can reconstruct Lord of the Flies without the civilising influence of the conch. Version One of the AlphaBlox product taught me that you can fool a lot of the people a lot of the time if you spend vast sums on marketing.

I still remember the early promise and the excitement around our first product. We were going to build Personal Info Apps that would reconfigure themselves according to the microclimates of the Bay Area and the performance of NASDAQ. They would walk you through your data in three dimensions in shades of Christy Blue and dispense entirely with expensive software developers. Instead, we built a complicated charting package that if you were sufficiently competent in SQL, could draw you an attractive pie chart. 

There was one brief interval of sanity where the entire leadership of the engineering department got fired and we were left to our own intuitions for a period of about six months while they searched for a new VP of Engineering. When Bill finally arrived he interviewed all of the senior engineers and decided that, since we seemed to know what we were doing he would let us continue while he worked on important stuff.

We actually ended up with a pretty good product but that just led to more marketing folks and a flood of new VPs and SVPs until it became almost impossible to build anything of value. By the time we had burned through a hundred million dollars of other people’s money, we were pretty much unable to build anything much at all and I decided it was time to move on.

Weeks turn into years, how quick they pass
And all the stars that never were
Are parking cars and pumping gas

After that, I worked on my own product at home for a while. Extreme Programming was all the rage and I built a project management tool that captured the mood of XP. I sold a few copies but eventually, the loneliness drove me mad and the first Dotcom recession meant that no one had any money to buy stuff anymore. I put my dreams of a company of my own on the shelf and got a job with Agitar. 

Most people who work in tech don’t actually do much that is technically difficult. It’s mostly just login boxes and connecting to a database. Agitar by contrast, was really pushing the limits of technology. We built a tool that would help developers test their own software. We won awards and everything. Once we started to be successful, Agitar brought in new leadership who decided that, since developers don’t really like testing their own software, it would be better to have The Agitator generate tests for them magically. We were selling snake oil. Agitar ran out of money and I moved to Portland.

Some friends had moved there and I went to join them and work at WebMD. Mrs Clown didn’t love Portland like I did though and she moved us back to California. I spent the next few years flying up to Portland to drink beer with Matt and the rest of my time talking on the telephone. WebMD was quite small but it felt like a 100,000-person mega-company. There were high walls between the departments so salespeople couldn’t talk to developers and developers couldn’t talk to QA people. The software process was like a history lesson about the 60s. My job was to bring them into the 21st century and make them all agile. Mission accomplished but I’m not sure it really did any good. 

Portland is where young people go to retire.

Eventually, the loneliness got to me again and I got super-depressed. By happenstance, I got two calls asking me if I wanted a job back in Silicon Valley.

One offer was from Netflix. Netflix was just around the corner from my house. They had gleamingly beautiful offices, their product was super popular and the folks on my team were super smart. Software developers got paid hundreds of thousands of dollars and their stock price increased 50-fold over the next ten years.

The second offer was from a brand new start-up where I would be employee number three.

International movie company with a huge salary? Or a tiny little start-up with a huge salary cut? Rian persuaded me that I am more of a start-up kind of guy so I took the job at Smart Patients. 

Smart Patients was the first company that I truly loved. We started out borrowing office space from Singularity University inside NASA at Moffet Field where everyone was a genius. We hung out with people designing 3D printers for the International Space Station and handheld tricorders that would generate a medical report. Our weekly beer bash was a blast!

We soon moved into our own Silicon Valley-style garage that we shared with Chris the Photographer. Every day was filled with dreams of building the best online community for patients and our members loved us. We were like a family and it was worth the 90 minutes each-way commute to spend time in the office together. We were doing good, meaningful work.

But even happy families drift apart and eventually, the two founders fell out. First, one founder quit. Then the other. Then America elected the worst president it was possible to imagine and suddenly the charms of America felt less charming and it felt like time to go home.

Dreams turn into dust and blow away
And there you are without a friend
You park your car and ride away.

When Trump won the Republican primary the Clown Family made a deal: If Trump wins the general election, we are going back to England and the day after the election we started making plans. A year later, Pearl and I were on the plane flying back to the old country to begin a new life.

For all my complaining, I loved living in California and I left behind a long trail of friends along the way. We enjoyed our twenty-four years in America but it sure is good to be back home.

I’ve got lots of friends in San Jose
Oh, do you know the way to San Jose?

The theme of the series is that no one really understands what it is like to be neurodivergent, so they have to put on an act to make it through life. At the end of each episode, they each make a very personal movie to tell how their life is different to others’, and how they deal with that.

The ADHD stories could have been mine. Henry and Jo told us how they deal with their ADHD and how little other people understand — even their families.

Henry’s and Jo’s stories hit a nerve, so I thought I’d tell mine, too.

There was no such thing as ADHD when I was young, and I didn’t even know what it was until my son was diagnosed when he was eight.

The headteacher called us in.

“I think your son has ADHD. He is super-smart, but he can’t focus. He goes from As to Fs and back again. You should take him to see a doctor.”

We took him to a psychologist who confirmed his ADHD and put him on ritalin. When I told the psychologist, “My son is just like me”, he put me on ritalin too. The ritalin did nothing for me, but my ADHD was not really a problem at that point in my life, so I just stopped it and got on with living.

When I was my son’s age, I was just as smart as him, and I was just as wild. Wilder.

I snuck off to the river when I was nine. I got the bus to London when I was 10. I was always jumping from high places. And I was always in trouble at school. At primary school, the teacher made the naughty children stand outside the staff room door at playtime, and I spent all my playtimes there.

We didn’t have the ‘gifted children’ thing they have in America, but they pulled a group of about six of us out of class and into the Panda Club. The Panda Club took us on a tour of the local police station and entered us in a quiz that was like University Challenge for little kids. We were reading grown-up books while everyone else was reading Peter and Jane. We were doing long division while everyone else was learning their times tables. School was more fun when there was a challenge to enjoy.

I was always fighting, though. I can’t tell you how many times I came home with a black eye. And I was always in trouble.

Everyone in Panda Club passed the 11+ and went to grammar school, but my behaviour there was even worse. I broke the record for the number of detentions, and was given the cane multiple times. The everyday punishment was to ‘write 100 lines’. Or 200. Or 500.

“I will not talk in class”
“Le silence aide le travail”

I was always writing lines.

At least I was just writing lines, though.

My best friend Paul went to prison for raiding the chemistry lab and throwing stolen phosphorus at another kid. I think Paul had ADHD, too. After Paul was taken away, and after I had just been beaten around the head, over and over, by our biology teacher, our Form Teacher, Mr Gooden gave a lecture to the rest of the class saying that if they did not buckle down, they would end up like Paul and Kevin.

Julie and I took it in turns to come bottom of our class, and we got Cs for effort in every subject, in every term. We were both put on ‘homework report’ and had to go into school half an hour early every day and show our work to Mr Durbin. Mr Durbin told me,

“You are a smart kid, but you have to apply yourself.”

I always loved academic work; I just didn’t like doing it at school. It was so slow and so boring. I always read all my textbooks in the first week of school and never opened them again. I read my own books under the desk and taught myself programming, instead.

I always came first in all the end-of-year exams, though, but I still got Cs for effort.

In all those years of school, I never had a teacher tell me I was doing a good job or that I was clever or whatever. Except that one time in French class.

My friends used to tease me that Miss Mills fancied me because she was so nice to me. She was kind and beautiful. I certainly fancied her! I still did no work, but she noticed I was good at French and told me so in front of the whole class.

“You have such a linguistic brain”

My parents never helped me with schoolwork, except my Dad once told me I should write bigger. They never paid attention to my grades either. I stopped doing homework entirely when I was fourteen, and I never took another book home.

After about six months, Mr Lewis noticed that I had never handed in any chemistry homework, and he asked to see my workbooks. They were empty. I came top in chemistry, though. And physics. And biology. And English (almost). I was good at maths, too. My maths teacher didn’t spoke to me once in two years, but he entered me for a national maths competition.

Looking back, I don’t know why my teachers disliked me so much. Apart from being a little naughty and a little exuberant, I think I was quite likeable. I was clever. I had lots of friends. Maybe I would have been less naughty if they’d given me something interesting to do.

At the end of the fifth form (age 16), we did our O Levels (the exams that determine whether you’d be allowed to continue at school). I didn’t revise (except Latin), but I came equal first with Roger, Corinne and Alison, and we all won prizes. They all went to Oxbridge, but I didn’t know that was an option — so I left school at 16 and joined the Navy instead.

The Navy was fun. Lots of adventures. Gibraltar. Santander. West Palm Beach. A trip to the Falklands. It was fun until they put me on a nuclear submarine. I had five more years to go until I could get out, but the prospect of being under the sea with nothing to do for months at a time — it horrified me. To my good fortune, I found a loophole in the rules where, if you got promoted to officer, you effectively left the Navy and rejoined. So I got promoted and left but didn’t come back.

After the Navy, adventure called. I backpacked around the world and hitchhiked across Australia. When I got home, I was entirely broke, so I got a job as a programmer in London. That turned out to be a lucky choice for me, because I was pretty good at it, and have had a successful career in software engineering ever since.

ADHD never gave me much trouble after the Navy, but it took me on plenty more adventures. I loved the excitement of the City of London and Wall Street, and then a series of tech startups in Silicon Valley, but now it’s time to sit in my armchair with my philosophy books and put my feet up until the siren song of adventure calls me away one last time.