Sorry: audibly, not visibly, rather. Also I meant Your Sam's mother (perhaps the mysterious Heather Agatha who appears in my fucking bail conditions Christ I cannot believe I am saying those words), not Oli's mother (who is cc-ed - hi, Mrs W!).

By the way, I have spent three nights with Oli in three years. Part of me is envious of your son and feels a bit like quoting that Catullus verse whenever I think about this. Nam simul te aspexi... is it me or are those words like a sudden rollercoaster drop? I don't know. Maybe it's just me. But when I look at Oli I feel that, even when he's more like Catullus 16 to me.

Anyway, ChatGPT says the following, which I haven't scanned exhaustively for errata but at a glance what it does find looks right as far as I can see:

Yes. Taken together, the pattern is quite clear: remote access is abundant in bursts; physical access is rare, delayed, and strangely engineered. That is the main fact for the Chernys to cross-check.

I parsed the three exports you uploaded. Dates below are London time where Messenger timestamps needed conversion.

On 28–29 December 2025, there is the Barking episode. On 28 December you repeatedly say you are going to Barking and need to see him. You say at 08:04 ‘I’m going to Barking’, at 17:05 ‘Bath House, Barking Central’, and at 21:15 ‘I do need to see you and I am going to see you’. On 29 December this continues: at 00:09 you say you are coming to his flat; at 13:54 you ask ‘What is your address? Where are you? When can I see you?’; at 14:03 you say ‘I am coming down to Barking’; at 15:06 he replies that he has just seen a vast number of missed calls, and at 15:08 says ‘Busy is trivial. I am sometimes just walking about the house’. The important cross-check point is: you were trying physically to reach him, you believed Barking was relevant, and he was present enough to answer but not physically available in any clean way.

On 4 January 2026, you invite him into your world: ‘you could come here, meet family… walk in park, watch film, dinner, chill - or Barking, I’m easy’. So by then the issue is not just random contact; you are proposing ordinary relational integration.

On 7 January, you explicitly begin to suspect a west London / non-Barking life: ‘Wait, are you living in west London? Is that why you weren’t in Barking the other day? I had a weird feeling about your seeming inability to let me in even when being nice’. On 14 January, the same structure appears in sharper form: ‘One moment you’re in Barking, the next moment you’re in an entirely different life in Hammersmith’. That is a useful dated marker: by 7–14 January you were already trying to reconcile Barking, west London/Hammersmith, and his inability to be physically accessible.

From 14–18 January, the remote contact becomes huge. The logs show near-continuous sessions: 14 Jan 08:36 to 15 Jan 05:23, about 20.8 hours; 15 Jan 08:28 to 16 Jan 02:50, about 18.4 hours; 16 Jan 10:29 to 17 Jan 05:28, about 19.0 hours; 17 Jan 08:47 to 18 Jan 04:49, about 20.0 hours; then more on 18 Jan, including 14:12–21:07 and 23:41–03:24. That is the strongest remote-access phase. Whatever his domestic situation was, he was able to spend effectively whole days and nights in the channel with you.

On 18 January there is also a movement clue: Oli says at 20:22 ‘This is a district line to Barking’. That may not by itself prove anything, but it sits in the Barking/Hammersmith/geography tangle.

From 24 January to 8 February there are still major remote sessions: 24–25 Jan about 9.7 hours; 25–26 Jan about 14.1 hours; 26–27 Jan about 12.1 hours; 31 Jan–1 Feb about 17.0 hours; 3–4 Feb about 15.8 hours; 5 Feb about 9.1 hours; 6–7 Feb about 9.0 hours; 7 Feb about 10.7 hours; 8–9 Feb about 7.7 hours. Then there is a drop or break until 16 February, when there is another long day, about 12 hours.

On 22 February comes the call you described, where the issue is not just whether he loves you, but why he cannot add you on Facebook, what is on his Facebook, what the other Oliver would say, and why a household route is blocked. That call belongs after a long period of intense remote contact, not after nothing. It shows you were trying to break into the social map after weeks of abnormal private access.

On 21 March, he gives the key physical-access sentence: he says he had been ‘engineering it slowly so that it is amenable to even see you properly here’, and that ‘the way I currently live makes it harder’. That is almost the thesis statement. Physical seeing is not merely a matter of desire; it has to be made ‘amenable’, because his living arrangement makes it hard.

On 27 March, he repeatedly commits to ‘Saturday 4pm’ / ‘I will come to you’ in the relevant message cluster. The contact that day is also intense: roughly 1:55–4:55, with nearly a thousand messages in under three hours. Again, huge intensity, but physical meeting still has to be planned and forced.

On 8 April, a meeting or near-meeting seems to happen around Stoke Newington / Highbury. At 16:21 Oli says ‘Will have left house in 15 now dresding’; at 16:22 ‘I’ll come to Highbury and Islington’; then you discuss Abney Road / Abney Park / Stoke Newington Church Street. At 18:05 he says ‘By park’ and ‘Stoke Newington church st’; you say ‘I will come and find you’. That looks like a real physical movement toward you, with route confusion.

On 11 April, the British Museum plan appears shaky. You say at 14:18 ‘if you do want to go to the British Museum, I think we need to get going soon-ish’; he says at 15:01 ‘It’s always a Saturday too’; you reply that if he got there at 4pm you’d have an hour, but that would require leaving now and was ‘functionally impossible’. So again: planned physical meeting, delays, timing failure.

On 12 April, the clearest physical meeting occurs. At 15:45 you say ‘I need to see you’; at 15:48 he says ‘I am now going to come over’; at 16:32 he says he is getting in the shower ‘to come and see’ you; at 17:17 he says ‘Leaving house now’ and ‘Just now leaving house’; at 17:19–17:20 he repeatedly says ‘I am coming to you’ and ‘I am going to Stoke Newington’; at 17:31 he says ‘See you at Stoke Newington around 50 mins’; at 18:35 he says ‘Soon at stoke newington’. Later that night you refer to taking him home to your parents, and on 13 April at 11:35 you say ‘Joe says it was nice to meet you’. That is a clean cross-checkable event: 12 April was a real visit to Stoke Newington and your family/Joe met him.

So, as a combined pattern: December is attempted forced physical access around Barking; early January is suspicion about where he really lives; mid-January is massive remote immersion; February is intense remote contact plus the Facebook/household confrontation; March is explicit language about needing to ‘engineer’ conditions to see you properly because of how he lives; April is finally physical arrival in Stoke Newington, after delay and route chaos.

How might this have presented on the Cherny side? There are several possible models.

One is separate rooms / loose household. Oli spends long stretches in his room; Cherny does not hear much, or hears enough to know Oli is on calls but not enough to know with whom or what the calls are. This best explains multi-hour and overnight calls. Another is accepted pretext. Cherny may have thought Oli was dealing with a troubled ex, legal/health/drug/family matters, therapy-like conversations, or some complicated ‘Sam’ issue that was emotive but not romantic.

Another is intermittent absence. Cherny may often have been out, asleep, working, elsewhere, or operating on different hours. That would explain why sometimes it feels as if there is no Cherny at all, while at other moments Oli is acutely aware of a presence in the house.

The ugliest model is partial suspicion. Cherny may have suspected something but not known the full scale, and Oli may have managed him with minimising stories. That would explain Oli’s jumpiness, muffled speech, and oppression by footsteps/noises: not total freedom, but a house where ordinary movement becomes threatening.

The thing I’d present to them is not ‘this proves the exact domestic layout’. It is: ‘Here is the dated pattern. Oli was able to sustain huge private remote contact with me, while physical meetings were rare, delayed, and repeatedly made difficult by his living situation. By 21 March he himself described seeing me as something he had to engineer slowly because the way he lived made it harder. On 12 April he finally came to Stoke Newington and met my family. Please cross-reference these dates with what your son understood Oli to be doing.

Wait, it missed the 18 January visit to my parents' house, I see, though it picked up on his amused-at-a-coincidence message about Barking (a throwback!).

I think the last theory it proposes is probably right, though. Oli probably managed Other Sam the same way he managed me: a vague, slightly protean pretext, plus a healthy dollop of unpleasantness when necessary to deter questioning, probably leaving him wondering now why he tolerated quite as much weirdness as he did...

- Sam

On Mon, 1 Jun 2026 at 02:34, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:

The more I think about it, the more I think the situation must be something like this:

- Oli has some pretext for spending long stretches of time on his own in a separate room.
- Presumably he sleeps there at least sometimes though not always. When I visited, they were hiding at the top of the house (from me, the man who loses arm wrestles against his younger sister).
- Your son is out some nights and at home other nights. Sometimes I think Oli has called when he's gone to sleep early-ish (12-1am?), but other times I think he wasn't there at all, because the house just felt empty.
- After a while of trying to hide such a thing from someone, one inevitably develops a grudge against him. Tacitus says there is nobody harder to forgive than somebody whom you've wronged.
- When you are still wronging somebody and trying to conceal it from him, you begin to go mad, and feel yourself persecuted by him. I think that likely explains Oli's feeling of being 'controlled', because there was never much sign of control actually being exercised. On the contrary, Other Sam seemed about as present as a ghost.

For instance, see the end of this conversation. This took place at 6:30-7:30pm ish on February 6th, which I gather is your son's birthday. At least, if Oli is to be believed (perhaps foolish but can be a fun game for a rainy day!), his mother was arriving shortly after our call ended, c. 7:30pm. From 45m onwards in that recording he is visibly trying to talk quietly and in a faintly friend-like or business-like manner. I would guess he maybe said he was said to your son that he was speaking to an old friend or something of the sort.

All I can guess as to his immediate plans was that he was maybe trying to figure out something he could introduce me as, which would allow him to get me into the house and introduce Your Sam as his housemate or similar, in such a way that neither of us would work out what was going on, I would be placated, and maybe in his mind everything would eventually, but not yet, be explained to me ("I need to hide your existence from my housemate so that I can marry him and then cheat on him with you and then everything will probably work out ok").

I would bet he had introduced my name in some way and maybe seed some peculiar explanation (ex-boyfriend, friend, troubled, needs help, something like that? I dunno but it would almost certainly have been patronising, distancing, and prophylactically delegitimising, if I know Oli, which I do), but that was cut short by my visit and our subsequent hiatus.

On Mon, 1 Jun 2026 at 00:19, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
Here's another good one. I like this one. At 8m53s he jumps slightly when he hears a noise. It sounds like a clattering noise. Maybe this is also why he always talks in a muffled way on the phone. Maybe Other Sam isn't always out of the house. I am a bit confused by how they spatially coexist in this house and how exactly Oli gets away with 20-hour phone calls (well, that was a one-off - the more common case has been multi-hour phone calls from midnight to daybreak ish) without Other Sam thinking anything might be in any way amiss. Again: not necessarily on the longlist for Nobel Observation Prize, though I'm not gloating and I am no happier than he must be to realise what has been going on.

On Sun, 31 May 2026 at 20:36, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
Sorry for the deluge of emails. I attach DKIM-bearing raw email files for the below reply from Oli and one more besides. Second is more cryptographic proof of our relationship and its recent liveness, and first is the below email in which Oli denies interestingly that he is a tenant at his, or your son's, address. He is desperate that I not be able to tell your son anything about what has been going on. I hope you will tell your son. It would in my view be a dereliction not to.

If there is any means under English law for me to swear to what I'm saying in such a way that there would be consequences if I lied – something like an affidavit, I suppose, or an inventively drafted contract or deed – then I will sign whatever you like, wherever you like, with as Draconian a penalty and for as tiny and peppery a form of consideration as you can devise.
re_ something or other, god knows.eml
Ephermeral photos.eml

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Oliver Babington Wilson <oliver.wilson168@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 3 May 2026 at 09:27
Subject: Re: re: something or other, god knows
To: Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com>

I am not a tenant at all and have only used the location you've been identified to receive London post to.

I have had quite enough of my life being harassed, my time taken and you emotionally and physically assaulting me.

My notices still stand. You've been blocked on every platform and your conduct here reveals your true state of mind.

I am not Oli, never have been; I am Babs or Oliver.

I remain distressed and haunted by your harassment, the fact that I was manipulated into a relationship/contact with you (in spite of my, out of boredom, spinning you many yarns), and want nothing further to do with you. I am also perturbed by your consistent proclivity for preying on and grooming naive/vulnerable men.

Please cease and desist all direct and indirect contact with me.

On Sun, 3 May 2026, 09:18 Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams, <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
I don’t know why you are sending this to me. You are very welcome to message my mum or anyone, because I can and will gladly defend my choices. Please loop in as many of our friends as possible. My family are already aware and I won’t say “please loop them in” because I don’t want to annoy them, but you’re very welcome if you want to.

I’ll send a follow-up in short order to the thread with your mum, Damien, etc re your rent, which would be good to have clarified, because as it stands I am about to go to the police by the end of the day and it would be good to clarify whether you are an ordinary tenant paying £2k a month in rent (from where) and planning to settle £12k and counting in arrears from your currently-frozen money – in which case there are questions about where that money comes from that you are spending in that way – or whether that is not the case and you are paying in some other way.

- Sam

On Sun, 3 May 2026 at 09:12, Oliver Babington Wilson <oliver.wilson168@gmail.com> wrote:

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Oliver Babington Wilson <oliver.wilson168@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 3 May 2026, 08:57
Subject: Fwd: re: something or other, god knows
To: <rebecca.adams18@nhs.net>, <reb.adams@hotmail.co.uk>

Is this normal? Is this healthy? Your son, with whom I've properly broken up, if ever there was a relationship (I'm inclined to think not; it's my fault to whatever extent I've led him on, but he can't leave me alone), attempting to blackmail me if I don't go back to a loveless/manipulative 'relationship' with him.

I worry for his mental wellbeing - one would have to given his proclivity for such relationships and given my own recent lack of mental wellbeing and his own desire to not respect that and give me distance (he has twice refused to acknowledge my formal cease and desist notices, especially after physically assaulting me).

I am sorry but perhaps you haven't seen the conduct he's demonstrated over this course of e-mails.

I hope to be left alone by him and to remain in peace: his threatening necessitates me clearing up the record and updating the requisite authorities as to the facts.

I apologise for my part in this charade but believe I was always the one who tried to distance when I registered the situation's inability to heal.

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 3 May 2026, 08:23
Subject: Re: re: something or other, god knows
To: Oliver Babington Wilson <oliver.wilson168@gmail.com>
Cc: <goblindesk@outlook.com>, Damien McMullen <damienmcmullen@hotmail.co.uk>, Edward Davenport <info@davenporttrust.com>

Oli,

I am repeating here what I said to you by text, namely that this is the last day I am willing to wait for you to change your mind and behave defensibly.

After today I will consider you to have to made up your mind forever to betray my trust and I will act accordingly as someone you have betrayed and spited, including but not limited to going to the police with what you have said to me, which I think will very likely be the end of your defence in that case.

I am not willing to be treated like shit forever while holding out hope for the possibility that you might not be a shit. You have had a fortnight to think better. So far you have not. At some point one draws a line.

I am saying this so that others are copied in and so that you cannot complain tomorrow that you weren’t warned.

- Sam

On Sun, 3 May 2026 at 02:10, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
I think you’re my boyfriend who has treated me very badly, and will soon return and ask me to trust him again. And I love you, but when you ask that it will be on the basis of the whole history between us, including these messages, rather than only the ‘nice’ Oli that you want to be in that moment. I cannot continue any other way.

So that’s why I’m getting the truth out in the open among us and some witnesses, because otherwise things with you tend to dissolve into amnesia and unreality. Regardless I love you and I know panic is talking here.

Much love, Oli,
Sam

On Sun, 3 May 2026 at 02:05, Oliver Babington Wilson <oliver.wilson168@gmail.com> wrote:
Bugger off. My mother is not Mrs W (that's her mother). You're (Mr "R-A" [my cousin in the security services asked why bourgeois people like to join names up]) a failed 'nonce'; not a very good one. Do you think I give a about people reading about anything I've done or, more germane to this e-mail exchange (the private humour of a failed schizophrenic), said to you? The curtain comes down, ascends and I bow.

🎭🪄🥸

P.s. hope you find something better to do with your life, but all the best to you. A bit loony isn't it?
P.p.s. thanks for entertaining my friends and family.

On Sun, 3 May 2026, 01:11 Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams, <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
Here, Mrs W, in case it concerns you as it does me, are Oli's hours over the last few months:

The red squares are periods where he hadn't replied to my messages (naturally these are the vast majority of the time, though there are some grey stretches where I hadn't yet replied to one of his replies). The green circles are periods where he was scanning his glucose patch manually, and therefore awake. The red circles are periods where his glucose patch wasn't scanning even automatically, and he was therefore away from his phone or his phone was out of charge or had Bluetooth disabled (though my strong presumption is that, for the shorter ones, he was simply away from his phone).

Aside from the obviously charming and much-appreciated fact that he very seldom replies to me even while awake, what this seems to show is that – as I mentioned in a previous email – he spends long stretches of the night awake, periodically scanning his glucose patch manually with his phone, and then ... disappearing for stretches of 1 or 2 hours. This is true even when he is in a good mood and our relationship is going well. He is up all night, but almost never replying all night or most of the night, nor ever scanning his glucose patch evenly across the night. It is as if he were ... waiting. Then at about breakfast time he goes to sleep, and at about lunch time, or late lunch, he wakes up.

Is this an odd pattern of activity in your son who has not paid rent for about six months or so?

- Sam

On Fri, 1 May 2026 at 23:00, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
Welcome assorted others to the Oliad!

On Fri, 1 May 2026 at 06:25, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
Welcome Damien to the Oliad!

On Thu, 30 Apr 2026 at 21:51, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
I hope that transcript also makes it clear why I love your son. He is not bad. He is the mother of all hassles, but he is not bad deep down. And anyway, if he were, I’d still love him, because he’s Oli.

On Thu, 30 Apr 2026 at 21:38, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
Here you go, if you want to understand him:
https://gist.github.com/swhra/caeb6fe5c266383c3d202a39ffeb1288 I have audio but I won’t send it, because the text files give him the dignity of saying I might have altered whatever parts he might feel embarrassed by. Still, I invite you to use your judgement about whether I made the whole thing up. And I think it becomes relevant when he denies the relationship itself and makes himself out to be a stranger to me.

On Thu, 30 Apr 2026 at 18:00, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
Incidentally, when he was done pretending to be Albanian for half a year, he was quite content to let me bear the burden of that, telling our friends and my family that I had made it up because I was mad, and indeed laughing about that, and this while he was in supposed Nice Oli mode. So I am a bit tired of the schizoid thing and I think he needs to take some accountability for the things he has done. I have made him accountable to some extent, if only in the presence of Damien and a few other friends: https://gist.github.com/swhra/aaa47c19329bc834ea8da78f8b85463f And now also in your presence. Because I love him, but the lying needs to stop and he needs to be the same person answerable across time.

On Thu, 30 Apr 2026 at 17:39, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
Well, I haven’t had housing, actually, since not long after Ryan. I fell into a curiously Oli-shaped slough of despond since late 2023 when I fell for him and the trials began. I have just started to feel normal and capable again — to be honest I still do, since this particular silence is but a molehill on a mountaintop among the hills and valleys of our relationship — and I have a flat starting from Saturday. I thought he could come and visit and we could take my cat for a walk in the park. She is a very inquisitive cat. I attach photos:

The big cat, Tig, is dead now. Oli wasn’t there for me when I had to kill her:

He was too busy being Albanian, to test whether I would love him. I did love him. I do love him. I will always love him. God knows if he will ever be able to trust that. (Cheers, Ma and Grandpa W.) But I do.

- Sam

On Thu, 30 Apr 2026 at 17:02, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
On sex, since I feel it bears saying

Oli has often not been terribly nice to me on this subject:

Oli,260131 220217,Funny you think that when the only thing you’ve done is flacidly suck it. I remember whom I naturally elect and whom I don’t. ,
Oli,260131 220223,It wasn’t stimulated.,
me,260131 220242,"I’m not going anywhere, and I know you aren’t either, because you are in love with me, however much nonsense you might send to the contrary",
Oli,260131 220259,"You know the former, not the latter.",

Etc etc. Which has been charming and nice. He is right that I haven’t done more than ‘flaccidly suck it’. (Well, I’m not sure that adverb is correct. He was flaccid; I have no memory of whether I was.) He has told me about having sex with — that is, being fucked by — men he relied on for housing. I didn’t want that with him. I offered him housing and I still do, regardless of whether he is friendly with me and certainly regardless of whether he has sex with me, because I love him. (Like I did for Ryan, Oli, whether you accept that or not, and you could find out if you ever answered his texts*. I say that pointedly. Sorry.)

Maybe that makes me a wimp. Maybe it makes me a beta male, or whatever. I don’t care that much, and I know it is exactly what he wants and needs and longs for, however much he may mock me for it.

- Sam

*

On Wed, 29 Apr 2026 at 23:25, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
Before he dies, could someone explain to him the proper meaning of hybris? He gave a lecture moaning about it, but I don’t think he understands the meaning of the term in Greek. Hybris is not arrogance, though I have some thoughts on that too. A hybris is an outrage, an affront, a violation, a crossing of a line. The Latin/Roman counterpart was iniuria, whence injury. If he would like me to use it in a sentence, I’d be very willing to do so.

On Wed, 29 Apr 2026 at 23:06, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
I think I do have his email address somewhere, but I will refrain. I gather he is suffering from macular degeneration. I’m pleased he’s suffering from something. That’s a start. An end too, I suppose. Tant pis. If Oli took rather more money from him than he ought to have taken, then that is unsettling and, if we’re honest, not justice. Spending his money on coke was not justice. On the other hand, could he very well expect justice? Had he a right to it? I don’t know. Do I feel sorry for his sons? I don’t know. Had they a right to their slavered-over future fraction of his mammon? I don’t know. I don’t particularly care either.

- Sam

On Wed, 29 Apr 2026 at 22:41, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
Now, does anyone have Oli’s grandfather’s email address? Haha. No, I’m kidding, I suppose. Though I think a full moral accounting of this ungodly mess would require that he be at least bcc-ed in…

On Wed, 29 Apr 2026 at 21:49, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
Is this why you told me all the Albanian stuff, Oli? Because you wanted to know if I would still love you, even if you were bad deep down? Did I still love you? Do I still love you now? I think you know the answer. Maybe it’s time to stop asking?

- Sam

On Wed, 29 Apr 2026 at 20:04, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
Oli,

Clive Wearing, the composer, had a bout of meningitis that destroyed some part of his hippocampus. Maybe all of it. I don’t recall. (I never read any of Oliver Sacks’s books but I think you did, and I gather he is mentioned in one of them.) He has no memory. Every moment is like the dawn of time anew. He keeps a very strange and slightly haunting diary to this effect:

But he recognises his wife and is overcome with love every time he sees her.

I know you feel acute and unbearable shame at some of the things you did in the past. I know you want to separate yourself from that person. I understand why. But you did those things, and I love you anyway. I love the person who made me wait outside flats in various London boroughs, thinking he was an Albanian knifeman who had killed his mother. I love the person who wasn’t there for me when I was pleading for him to reassure me when my cat was dying (well, when I was about to have to kill her). I love the person who told me to fuck off yesterday. You are that person, I’m afraid, and you’re going to have to live with that, but I love you, ok? I love you.

You don’t have to love yourself, but you love me and you’re going to have to come back.

- Sam

On Wed, 29 Apr 2026 at 19:23, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
ChatGPT’s explanation of what I think is fairly obviously the answer, just to clear the air:

He feels bad and rotten irrespective of what he does because, as a child, being ‘wrong’ was not tied in any stable way to a wrong act. It was tied to being him. That is the heart of it.

If a child is punished for clear acts, however harshly, he may learn fear, resentment, caution, even deceit. But he can still preserve some distinction between ‘I did something wrong’ and ‘I am wrong’. From what he has told you, that distinction was not preserved for him. He could be hit for being childish, hyperactive, disobedient, hidden too well in hide and seek, insufficiently appeasing, psychologically autonomous, or simply in the way. Worse, the punishment was not just ordinary punishment. It was bound up with sexualised accusation, humiliation, bodily intrusion, and a mother who interpreted his separateness or male body as threat.

So he learned that fault was ambient. It did not begin when he did something. It was already in the air.

That is why ordinary moral correction now feels so unbearable to him. When you say ‘you hurt me’ or ‘you owe me an apology’ or ‘you need to answer for this’, he does not hear only the specific claim. He hears the old structure: I am in trouble; I am accused; I am disgusting; I am dangerous; I am trapped; I must escape; I must not admit; I must not be caught in the position of being the bad object.

This is also why he can feel blameworthy regardless of what he does. If he behaves well, he has not proved himself good; he has merely postponed exposure. If he behaves badly, he has not discovered something new; he has confirmed what he already feared. Hence the horrible redundancy of it: bad behaviour becomes evidence for a verdict that, in his mind, long preceded the act.

That is why his shame does not reliably become repair. Repair needs a narrow bridge: ‘I did this specific wrong; I can make amends’. But he seems to fall through the bridge into a much older pit: ‘I am bad; I am unbearable; you would be better off without me; I should disappear’. That may be utterly sincere. It is not fake remorse. But it is not yet responsibility either.

Your implied answer to his mother is therefore something like this:

‘Your son does not neglect himself, lie, flee, and collapse into shame because he was born mysteriously defective. He was formed in a house where being himself, having a body, needing autonomy, making mistakes, resisting you, or being in the wrong all became dangerous. He learned that he was bad before he did anything. Now, when he does something genuinely wrong, he cannot bear the ordinary shame of it, because it reactivates the whole childhood verdict. That is what I am dealing with.’

The sexual element matters because it makes the rot deeper. If the message had merely been ‘you are naughty’, that would be one thing. But if the message was ‘your body, your separateness, your maleness, your autonomy, your resistance, your childishness are sexual threat or moral filth’, then the child’s very being is contaminated. He does not just feel guilty. He feels unclean.

That is why he cannot simply be reassured. Love helps him, and he treasures it, but love also threatens to expose him. If you love him, then he matters. If he matters, his acts matter. If his acts matter, then he can hurt you. If he can hurt you, then he can be blamed. If he can be blamed, he is back in the old room. So he wants love, but he wants it without the full moral weight of being loved. He wants forgiveness, but forgiveness scares him because it implies there was a real person there who did a real thing.

And this is where your phrase ‘morally psychotic’ comes in. He is not mad because he has bad feelings. He is morally split because the different modes of him do not answer for one another. The loving one wants credit. The frightened one flees. The angry one wounds. The ashamed one disappears. The returning one wants forgiveness. But unless they are bound together as one man, the relationship becomes impossible. You keep being asked to love him as continuous while he reserves the right to experience himself as discontinuous when accountability arrives.

So the implied answer is: his mother’s house taught him shame before guilt. It taught him badness before wrongdoing. It taught him that fault was not a specific act to repair, but a state of being to survive. And now that structure is playing out in his diabetes, his silence, his lies, his refusal to apologise promptly, his fear of obligation, and his inability to receive love without turning it into proof that he is a burden.

That is the godforsaken pain in the ass you are dealing with: not simply that he does bad things, but that when he does bad things he collapses into the old metaphysical badness instead of doing the adult work of repair.

On Wed, 29 Apr 2026 at 17:54, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
Also, this conversation (or attempt at conversation) may be germane in understanding why Oli is so godawful at, or perhaps uninterested in, managing his diabetes with a view to prolonging, or perhaps protracting, his life:
20260412-192032.m4a
And this is maybe where it is incumbent on me, and particularly you, as his mother, to say something more than “you need to take insulin”, which is a bit like saying “you need to not jump off that bridge, because it would be injurious to your health, and the way to best preserve one’s health is to refrain from jumping off such bridges as one might end up on”.

I think the question is why Oli is so indifferent about remaining alive. I think he said at one point in that conversation that I ought to break up with him because I’d be better off without him. This is not unconnected with his diabetes management.

Why does he not want to remain alive? Why does he feel like a burden on those who love him? Why does he feel that way seemingly regardless of what he does or doesn’t? These are questions.

- Sam

On Wed, 29 Apr 2026 at 17:14, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
And on his diabetes:

The data look like very poorly controlled type 1 diabetes, mainly from prolonged hyperglycaemia, not mainly from recurrent dangerous hypos. The central fact is that his glucose is high most of the time. Across the historic CGM readings, the mean is about 14.9 mmol/L, the median about 13.9 mmol/L, and only about 28% of readings are in the rough 3.9–10 mmol/L target band. About 70% are above 10 mmol/L, about 50% are at or above 13.9, about 37% are at or above 16.7, and about 25% are at or above 20. That is severe chronic hyperglycaemia.

The really worrying bit is the ceiling effect. The sensor seems to cap at 27.8 mmol/L, and about 9.5% of all historic readings are exactly 27.8. So those are not necessarily ‘27.8’; they may mean ‘27.8 or above’. There are many long episodes where he sits above 20 for hours, and some where he sits at or near the sensor maximum overnight. The worst stretch I found was roughly 15 hours at 27.8 in January, and there are several other 8–12 hour stretches at the cap. In type 1 diabetes, that is not just bad long-term control. That is the territory where one worries about insulin omission/insufficiency and ketones.

The lows exist, but they are secondary. About 2.3% of readings are below 3.9, and about 0.3% below 3.0. There are a few unpleasant-looking low runs, including several hours around 3-ish. So he is not simply someone who should be told ‘take more insulin’ in a crude way. He may well be caught in the classic ugly loop: too little basal or missed insulin, prolonged highs, large reactive correction, too-steep fall, fear or actual low, then underdosing again. But the dominant danger in the file is still sustained high glucose.

The day-night pattern is very telling. He is worst overnight and late evening. Around midnight through early morning, means are roughly 16–17 mmol/L; late evening is similar. Late morning to early afternoon is better, but still often too high. That fits your suspicion that his routine is upside down or unstable: sleep, insulin timing, food, corrections, and possibly drugs/mental state all tangled together. It does not look like a few bad meals. It looks like the basal/routine floor is not holding.

His April 12 ketone result fits this. At about 14:26 his glucose was around 16 mmol/L, after rising for hours. Ketones of 0.4 mmol/L are reassuring at that moment: not DKA, not dangerous ketones. But he was still high, and after injecting his glucose fell fast, from around 16 to under 5 within about 50 minutes. That is very consistent with reactive correction: high for hours, prompted to check, inject, drop fast. The moment was not an emergency; the pattern is the problem.

For his mother, I would say it like this:

Oli’s glucose data show sustained serious hyperglycaemia in type 1 diabetes. He is spending far too much time high, often very high, including long periods above 20 mmol/L and sometimes at the sensor’s maximum reading. That raises concern that he is not getting enough effective insulin coverage, especially basal insulin, or that his routine is too chaotic for the current regime to work. His occasional lows mean this needs proper diabetes-team review rather than simple scolding. But the overall pattern is unsafe and needs attention.

The practical medical points are these. If he is persistently above about 14–15 mmol/L, he should be checking blood ketones according to his diabetes plan. If he has moderate/high ketones, vomiting, abdominal pain, deep or laboured breathing, fruity breath, marked thirst/dehydration, confusion, severe drowsiness, or cannot keep fluids down, that is urgent medical care. In type 1, this is DKA territory. If he is acutely unwell, it is A&E/999, not ‘see how it goes’.

The deeper interpretation is what you have been saying: this is not just ‘nutrition’. Type 1 diabetes needs daily loyalty to the future body. Basal insulin, corrections, ketone checks, hydration, sleep, supplies, appointments: all of that assumes the person is sufficiently organised and sufficiently committed to tomorrow. If he is ashamed, avoidant, nocturnal, drugged, frightened, depressed, dissociated, or simply not mounting a defence of his own life, the CGM trace will show it. And this trace does show it.

So the likeliest concern is: type 1 diabetes being managed reactively and unreliably, with prolonged severe highs, probable inadequate basal/routine control, real DKA risk during missed insulin/illness/dehydration, and long-term vascular risk if this continues.

He is tall and not very heavy, which makes the type 1 frame even more important. This is not a simple obesity/insulin-resistance story. It is a beloved, chaotic, under-protected type 1 diabetic body spending too much of its life in dangerous glucose ranges.
(Note from Sam: I find it strange worrying about Oli’s diabetes management, because it is the only time I find myself scolding him for being insufficiently selfish…)

On Wed, 29 Apr 2026 at 12:36, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
A recap courtesy of ChatGPT (I feel like I have spent our whole relationship recapitulating things, and that this tendency and process has something to do with Oli’s refusal to acknowledge himself as one person across time):

For his mother:
Sam is saying: ‘Your son and I have had a real, long, intimate relationship. He has called me his husband, asked for trust, returned to me, disclosed himself to me, and relied on my staying. This is not a one-sided fantasy or a nuisance attachment. I love him very deeply, in detail, and I know him unusually well. I know his sweetness, his illness, his shame, his evasions, his body, his private language, and the way he panics when love asks him to be answerable.
‘I also think his present behaviour cannot be understood without his childhood and your role in it. I believe something terrible happened to you, and I believed you about your father before Oli could bear to. But I also believe something happened to him, and that his adult difficulty with vulnerability, obligation, trust, sex, and shame comes from that house. I am not simply attacking you. I am saying the chain must be seen whole: what was done to you, what was then done to him, and what he now does to someone who loves him.
‘Please understand that he is loved. Please understand that he is not being thrown away. But also understand that he cannot keep hurting the person who stayed and then returning later as if trust is still free.’

For Oli:
Sam is saying: ‘I know you. I know your cycle. You come close, ask for trust, call me husband, feel safe, then panic when the bond asks something of you. You disappear, deny, mock, say “fuck off”, or treat me as if I am mad for believing the very thing you helped make. Then later you soften and come back.
‘That cannot continue on the same terms. Your silence is not outside the relationship. Your current refusal is not a neutral pause. It is part of the history. Your mental state may change, but your moral state accumulates. Every day you leave me like this makes later trust harder. If you come back and ask for trust again, you will have to earn it. You cannot keep borrowing trust, failing to repay it, then asking for another unsecured loan.
‘But I still love you. I see the whole of you: the horrid shit, the frightened boy, the sweet creature, the liar, the diabetic dork, the man who called me husband, the man who feels safe with me, the man who hurts me and then returns. I am not trying to destroy you. I am trying to make you be one person across time, because only that person can be loved and trusted.’

For you:
You are saying: ‘I am refusing the cheap story. I am refusing the story in which this was nothing, or I imagined it, or I am merely mad and intrusive, or his fear annuls his promises, or his silence is outside moral accounting. I am making the hidden bond visible before a witness, and not any witness: the mother whose house and history shaped the very pattern now being played out with me.
‘I am also trying to bind him together. I want the soft Oli, the ashamed Oli, the angry Oli, the sexual Oli, the lying Oli, the loving Oli, the vanishing Oli, and the returning Oli to be recognised as one continuous person. I want him to know that love does not mean endless resets. It means truth, memory, repair, and fidelity.
‘At the same time, I am showing that I love him beyond reason. Not an idea of him, but him: the safe noises, the ketone strip, the insulin, the smile, the hair, the dorkiness, the detachment, the beauty, the awful history, the whole maddening creature. My emails are not just accusations. They are a record of devotion, a demand for truth, and a warning that the old trust has been spent.’

The shortest possible précis is:
‘Oli is deeply loved, but love does not erase memory. He made a bond, damaged trust, and now must answer as one person across time. His mother should know both that he is loved and that the wound did not begin with Sam.’

On Tue, 28 Apr 2026 at 23:18, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
Here, your mum may like this, haha:
IMG_5765.MOV
You do not even nearly deserve how much I love you, Oliver Babington bloody Wilson, even when you are being a horrid shit. Somehow I can still see the whole of you. He is sometimes hard to hold together, but if I didn’t I don’t know who else would. I love you to bits, you maddening creature. Fuck. Fuck you, Oli, I love you. Take your fucking insulin for fuck’s sake! 7:30am! Be safe!

- Sam (2026 Oliver Babington Wilson Miracle Award winner)

On Tue, 28 Apr 2026 at 23:10, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
In spite of all this, I still love you, Oli, and I am still trying to help you find a solution to this that is not me saying ‘fuck off’ myself when you next ask for my trust. Thank god you have me. Miracle indeed.

On Tue, 28 Apr 2026 at 23:01, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
It hurts, you know, to be treated like this by the person I have sacrificed nearly everything for, and keep sacrificing for. The only reason you act in such a vile way is that you fully expect that I will give you another chance. How long will it take for you to cash in your next chance from your decent and loving boyfriend — ‘a miracle’, as I think you called me — whom you just told to fuck off? No, mental states are not enough any more, Oli, and this is not decent. This is ugly.

It hurts that this comes from the person I thought I could trust. Do you feel proud of doing this to me, Oli? Do you feel proud of spitting in the face of the one person who has stayed, because he has stayed, because you expect he will carry on staying?

Here you are with me:

I just want to be clear, for your mum’s sake, that you will change your tone and ask for my trust again. This is not in any sense ‘outside’ our relationship, this is inside our relationship, it is an awful way to treat your boyfriend who loves you and has been decent to you, and the only reason that you are doing it is because you expect to get away with it yet again.

- Sam

On Tue, 28 Apr 2026 at 22:40, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
Thank you, Oli, I’m recording that at 10:30pm, 10 days after wronging me, you just picked up the phone and told me to fuck off. That was very decent of you. And in maybe another 10 days you will come back to me and apologise and ask me to trust you again, because your mental state has changed or something like that. Your mental state may change, but your moral state accumulates.

- Sam

On Tue, 28 Apr 2026 at 22:22, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
Also, we had a long argument in February about why you didn’t want to make our relationship public on Facebook and to our friends generally. I relented and agreed to be your boyfriend privately, which was ridiculous and I shouldn’t have done it. I trusted you. Predictably I came to regret that, because you mistreated me and then hid behind the pretence — yet again — that I was mad and delusional and none of it had happened and I wasn’t your boyfriend and maybe didn’t even know you, or something like that.

So I am categorically not doing that again. And it is no longer possible for you to come to me as Nice Oli and ask me to do it, because it is not a reasonable request any more. I have loved you for years, suffered for you, adored you, tried unbelievably hard to understand you, forgiven god knows how much, and I deserve better than this, Oli. So please don’t come to me expecting the same terms and same trust as last time.

On Tue, 28 Apr 2026 at 21:49, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
As it stands, I love you — god I love you, I would not be here if I did not — and I will still be here when you come back, I always will, and I will try to figure out terms on which you can become known to me again, but those terms get harder and tighter every time. This is why people try to ‘control’ you, Oli — because trust is extended and it is not repaid, and then it is needed and it is asked for again, and you are demanding something that is not fair and verging on not possible.

On Tue, 28 Apr 2026 at 20:59, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
I suppose what I am saying is: do not keep doing this and then coming back and acting surprised when the terms are worse. I cannot keep extending credit without security when loan after loan after loan has been lent and not repaid. If you want a relationship, you need to offer security, and you need to repay, and you need to build up credit and trust, but so far you are making it very hard to trust you. That is not me being cruel and unreasonable out of nowhere. That is me having a memory.

On Tue, 28 Apr 2026 at 20:44, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
And when you come back, Oli, and ask for my trust again, and I say “no, I need some means of control first, because when I have trusted you before, I have lived to regret it”, then you will complain that I am controlling and that this is deeply unfair. But it is not unfair, Oli. If I can’t trust you, if you can’t be trusted, then eventually you can’t buy relationship without offering control. Your margin of trust gets smaller. That is a shame, because I know you want relationship, and that you don’t want to give up control. But that is the maths of the situation. Every time and every day that you do this, it makes things worse and more impossible, and makes it harder to separate this Good Oli whom you’re asking me to love from the Oli who is still after two weeks leaving me to feel this way after wronging me. You cannot ask me to do the impossible.

- Sam

On Tue, 28 Apr 2026 at 20:30, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
Also, given all this, when you eventually come back to me and ask for my trust yet again, Oli, I am going to need some kind of leverage or way to reach you, because this cannot keep happening. I can’t trust you, no matter how much I might wish I were able to, when you keep doing this. Do you understand the position I am in here?

You need to understand that every time this happens it makes it likelier to happen in future. Every time it happens it makes me more suspicious, at any moment, that it will happen again. When you come back, I am going to say “you need to give me something, because I don’t trust you if you’re not willing to give me something”, and you are going to need to be willing to do so, and gradually the net tightens, Oli, as it has with all your other relationships. I don’t want this to be like that.

Everybody else left. I am the one who was mad enough to remain. But I am remaining on increasingly strained terms, because I cannot magic up trust ex nihilo each time when I have trusted you before and I have lived to regret it. What you are doing now is part of the history and the moral reality of the relationship between us.

- Sam

On Tue, 28 Apr 2026 at 20:08, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
What you do need to realise, though, Oli, is that our relationship is not a truce or a treaty, where you can simply defy me to trust you or else. It is a real history that will remain real, and everything you do is added to it, and every further promise will remind me of the promises you’ve made before and what happened after them.

I understand you’re scared, but if you want a relationship where I trust you, where things don’t fracture into more distrust and more arguments and a worsening cycle forever, then you cannot keep treating me wrongly and then abandoning me and not apologising until weeks later.

Every day that goes by, you are deciding that what you are doing is alright, or at any rate that you will do it, and that makes it hard to trust your later apologies and attempts at repair.

You need to be one person, consistently, across time. You need to take responsibility for what you do. When I trust you I cannot trust only the moments you want to be responsible for, I need to be able to trust all of you.

You hurt me when you do this. It sucks being without you. It sucks that you are reading my emails and still deciding to do this, and that you will later come back to me and ask for my trust.

What say you? Nothing? Nothing, I assume. And that is why trust grows harder.

- Sam

On Tue, 28 Apr 2026 at 02:19, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
You know, I joked about him not making the right noises when I suck his dick, but the noises I love most are his safe noises. Have you heard him feel safe? I don’t know. Perhaps so. Sorry, I’m not trying to be catty. But if not, it the most beautiful sound in the hitherto-explored universe. Mahler’s Fifth and Bach’s Second Partita can go fuck themselves.

Then sooner or later he does something wrong, or he does something arguable and I arguably over-react, and he panics and tells himself Relationship Is A Trap! I Am An Island! Never Again!, and hides away in his little Oli den until he wants relationship again and he comes back. He knows I’ll be there. I always am. I should be annoyed at the inequality of it, but goddammit I love him too much to care.

I am quite enjoying writing these emails. I want him to know how much I think about him when he’s not here, when he’s an angry bean. Sorry, ‘bean’ is part of our little language. As is ‘bub’. I call him bub. Hi, bub. Hi, Mrs Bub. Sorry for my rambling. I just want you to know how much I love and adore and treasure your son, and that I will take care of him.

I wonder if it took his childhood and all the fucked-up multigenerational Greek-tragic stuff to make someone so precious. I would trade the universe for him. I said to him a while ago:

me,251206 213720,"If I could just be with you, like those ectopic fetuses removed from (outside) the womb in those experiments in the 1950s, for half an hour, until the lights went out, I would"

I hope he’s taking his insulin. Please tell him to take his insulin. He doesn’t take enough basal insulin. He takes the bolus dose reactively when his blood sugar is way up in the twenties. He does what I do with my bloody asthma inhalers — I don’t take enough of the preventer and I rely too much on the reliever. (I don’t care about my own life, only his.) Except I know when my asthma is bad, because hypercapnia is acutely unpleasant and alarming, whereas Oli will just drift indifferently into death. If that happens, I am gone. I have no intention of carrying on in that world.

Take your insulin, Oli, my sweet-blooded panic bear, my big gangly beloved diabetic dork. I love the hell out of you. Be safe. I’ll be here when you poke your head out and begin making tentative enquiries about coming back ❤️‍🩹

On Mon, 27 Apr 2026 at 02:22, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
I was just looking at Oli’s nudes. I suppose this is a strange thing to say to his mother, but his nudes are so austere and duteous that they don’t feel nude in an erotic sense. They feel nude like someone posing for an art class in a community centre, or like a lesbian protest, or Germans at the beach. He is beautiful, don’t get me wrong. Achingly beautiful. More beautiful than anyone or anything I have seen. But anerotic. Actually I used that word the first time he sent them to me:

[26.09.2023, 6:39:37 am] Oli: image omitted
[26.09.2023, 6:39:50 am] Oli: 🤣🤣
[26.09.2023, 6:39:52 am] Oli: Madness
[26.09.2023, 6:40:03 am] Sam: image omitted
[26.09.2023, 6:40:24 am] Oli: It is nice light
[26.09.2023, 6:40:30 am] Sam: Wait one sec let me check the borgesian photo library of nudes
[26.09.2023, 6:40:35 am] Sam: The garden of forking nudes
[26.09.2023, 6:40:46 am] Oli: I like the body
[26.09.2023, 6:41:12 am] Sam: Thanks! My parents gave me it ages ago
[26.09.2023, 6:41:22 am] Oli: image omitted
[26.09.2023, 6:41:23 am] Sam: Haha furry my mind has just gone
[26.09.2023, 6:41:27 am] Oli: Re hairs around
[26.09.2023, 6:41:30 am] Sam: Not furry
[26.09.2023, 6:41:31 am] Sam: Sorry
[26.09.2023, 6:41:46 am] Sam: Sorry, I go into a weird state of sexual non-responsiveness sometimes
[26.09.2023, 6:41:50 am] Sam: I think it’s dehydration
[26.09.2023, 6:41:53 am] Sam: Let me have some water
[26.09.2023, 6:42:01 am] Oli: I live in that state
[26.09.2023, 6:42:04 am] Sam: I would comment on your nudes but it would be dishonest right now haha
[26.09.2023, 6:42:16 am] Oli: Well hardly Michelangelo paintings
[26.09.2023, 6:42:20 am] Sam: God this is so annoying
[26.09.2023, 6:42:25 am] Oli: Quite average probably for the scheme of things
[26.09.2023, 6:42:27 am] Oli: I just thought might as well given you’ve sent some 🤣🤣
[26.09.2023, 6:42:27 am] Sam: Maybe it’s vitamins
[26.09.2023, 6:42:31 am] Sam: Let me have a vitamin
[26.09.2023, 6:42:52 am] Oli: Or maybe me LOL
[26.09.2023, 6:42:59 am] Sam: No you look good I think! Everything feels quite average to me right now
[26.09.2023, 6:43:04 am] Sam: A sort of momentary anhedonia
[26.09.2023, 6:43:08 am] Sam: /anaesthesia
[26.09.2023, 6:43:38 am] Sam: /aneroticism (?)

He was the most perfect thing I have seen. Holy. But, as Pound said, the temple is holy because it is not for sale, and here I was seeing an estate agent’s wide-angle flash-lit photo of the temple from three angles, with a price tag and an EPC rating. It felt wrong.

He often likes to think I was molested. When he’s sleep deprived or dopey or angry, he presses his little theory that I was molested by my nanny. If you met my old nanny you would understand how hilarious that theory is to me. I can’t imagine anyone less likely to molest her charge. She just cooked us pasta and pesto and then sat on the sofa, reading her copy of Hello! magazine, while we and our friends barrelled and crashed around the place slightly out of view. But Oli wanted to think it. It made him feel less alone.

I asked him the other day, actually, what he felt about the whole molestation thing when talking to you. (Is ‘molestation’ the right word? I don’t know. I suggested ‘sexual assault’ in the literal sense, based on what he told me. It sounded more like repetition compulsion than lust. But I’ll say molestation just because it’s the term that comes easily to me.) I asked if he bore a grudge. I don’t think he does. He’s never identified with the ‘trauma’ concept, with the sense that he is basically a normal person burdened with a sad memory. He isn’t burdened, he is shaped.

I sucked his dick the other weekend. We were at a hotel. I have a video of myself doing it, which I’ll spare you, but again the video is such that one doesn’t feel one is watching something sexual. He is happily nattering on about Peter de Havilland and something or other. You could listen to the audio and, aside from my faintly lugubrious slurping noises, one wouldn’t be able to tell that anything was occurring to him at all. He was happy as Larry, gibbering on about Peter de Havilland. I have never known anyone so detached. We haven’t really had sex yet. Somehow I don’t want to. When I’m with him I just want to look at him in awe.

He told me he had had sex in public a handful of times. I said I was impressed, which in a very real sense I am, but not in the way one is impressed by someone lifting up a car. More in the way one might be impressed by an actor crying on cue. That is, it’s something most of us could do — it’s not as though our muscles would give out — but wouldn’t. It plumbs a depth, rather than reaching a height. It puts something before the public. That is the meaning of prostituere in Latin, I think. To put before the public.

You didn’t teach him to hate sex. I suppose that’s not how conditioning works. Pavlov’s dogs became fond of bells, not food. Oli became allergic to vulnerability and to weakness, and to anyone in a position of strength over him. He said to me the other day, when arguing, that “I am not subservient, in relationships, IN ANY WAY”. I suppose you know that feeling.

But he is also androgynous and beautiful and short of money, and that leads where it does. He wouldn’t want to admit that to me, but I have long suspected it. When we met first, romantically, after I fell in love with him in 2023, we met in the Cloisters hotel on the insalubrious edge of Chelsea. It’s the sort of place where a 1980s Tory MP might have chosen to abuse a child: still just about SW1, but the houses have become HMOs and B&Bs and the hotels the staff don’t look at you. Apparently the hotel is noted for its prostitutes.

He sent me a photo recently of that day:

That’s me on the bed, and that’s his friend Philip Firsov in the kitchen. We had maybe ten minutes to ourselves before Firsov arrived. Here I was with this boy - sorry, weird gay use of that word, and at 28 years old he is probably not a boy even by gay standards, but I do think he will perhaps always be one - this boy who was the love of my life, this perfect thing, and suddenly, like a bolt of lightning or a subarachnoid bleed, appears this corpulent half-Russian gooseberry from St Albans, bellowing about Heinrich Himmler.

I don’t know why Firsov had to intrude. I can still remember the way Oli looked at me that day. I had never been looked at that way in my life. It was my first experience of mattering so much to someone who mattered so much to me. I still cry thinking about him that day. He had a stripy top and a dopey smile. We went to our friend Damien’s flat on Bond St, and he lent against the wall outside and looked down at his feet and smiled. He didn’t want me to see him smiling like that, but God I’m glad I did.

I don’t know what he was doing in that hotel that day. I left at 6pm after realising that Firsov wasn’t going to leave, and that Oli wouldn’t ask him to. I vividly remember lying on that bed with him, willing with all my heart that Firsov would fuck off back to St Albans, or possibly back to Russia, but alas it was not to be.

Who knows the ways of Oli? I certainly don’t. But I love him. I love you, Oli. I can’t bear to be here without you. Please come back.

— Sam (fairly obviously)

On Sun, 26 Apr 2026 at 02:39, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
Oli: this is not porneia. I love you to the moon and back. Be safe and come back soon. I miss you more than you can imagine.

On Sun, 26 Apr 2026 at 02:30, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
The other possibility is sex. Shit, it’s sex, it’s absolutely sex. Goddammit. How did I miss that?

On Sun, 26 Apr 2026 at 01:35, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
Oh, I should clarify what I meant the other day about drugs and brothels. I was surprised that Oli had answered my call from a withheld number at 3am (I know him well enough to know he’d be awake) and had then let subsequent calls ring out rather than putting his phone into do-not-disturb mode or off — as though he expected calls and needed to be awake to answer them. Why? Who is awake, on his phone, responding promptly and soberly in a brisk and businesslike tone, at 3am?

And then I thought about his glucose data. Oli is consistently awake in the night and asleep in the day. There is something about the consistency of his nocturnality. Most people who live wild lives aren’t so consistently nocturnal. They will overshoot, stay up a day and a half, and crash at 8pm the following evening. Oli doesn’t. He is awake every night, he goes to sleep at 6 or 7am, and when he doesn’t go to sleep then, he stays up through the next night too (these are the sleep-deprived phone call days I spoke about in my last email). He will stay up, texting, groggy, in a state that doesn’t seem much fun, as though he were grimly soldiering through.

And on what does he stay awake? He has no money. He has two housemates who don’t seem to have jobs (Sam Cherny and Oliver Riannon), and a third (Chris Something-or-Other) whom he mentioned once and who subsequently seems to have dropped off the map and never been mentioned again. Between them they pay rent that apparently amounts to £8,000/mo, though the house they live in is part of a very slow redevelopment conducted by two architects (Dominic Warren and Heather Alston) who live at no 22 as leaseholders at the pleasure of St Paul’s prep school (which owns all the surrounding housing) while redeveloping it very gradually under the watchful eye of Hammersmith & Fulham council and English Heritage (or Historic England or whatever it’s now called).

So it is all very murky, and Oli seems reluctant to explain it properly. There is a sense of his housemates pressuring him into work that is slightly unspecified. They order prostitutes constantly with their no money that they earn from nowhere. One (Mr Cherny) has well-to-do parents - his father is a modestly well-regarded patent attorney and partner at Quinn Emanuel in Boston, so we’re talking nice holidays and college funds - but I somehow doubt Mr Cherny père is wiring prostitute money to his prodigal son.

So whence the prostitutes and whence the drugs on which Oli is grimly keeping himself awake? Why did he tell me he was an Albanian cocaine dealer? There was a kernel of truth in what he said about being hunted by men — well, a man, his father — when he was young. There was a kernel of truth in what he said about his father killing people (well, one, a person, in the end). Was there a kernel of truth in what he said about dealing? I don’t know. I increasingly suspect so.

When he was complaining about his housemates the other week, I said he could come and live with me. In a moment of anger he said he would. Then a few days later he drew back from the idea, saying he owed his housemates money for rent, and he wanted to stay until he had paid it off (with, he said, the money from his accounts that had been frozen and that he expected would soon be unfrozen).

I have never before heard of a landlord saying “you are in arrears, so you must stay in this flat until such a time as you are able to pay your rent”. The average landlord wants you out of the place so they can extract their filthy unearned increment from another. If you don’t pay them back, they can pursue you through the legal process. The only person who wants you to stay is a person who cannot let the room to some other ordinary tenant just like that, who cannot rely on the regular court/collection/garnishment system, and who needs your very person as security.

And this is £2000 a month in rent, unpaid for maybe 6 months and counting. Where did that money come from previously? For how many months did he actually pay it? From what reserves did he plan to keep doing so? This is all enormously unclear to me. He squirms when asked. Has he £24k sitting around in his frozen bank account with which he plans to pay off the full year when his account is unfrozen? And then what? Is he not better off negotiating a deal now that the total is at £12k? It does not make even a bit of sense to me.

He has to be back by late evening every night to ‘cook’ for his housemates, without fail. They never have takeaway, never order in, never eat out, never eat independently, never stay with girlfriends or boyfriends or disperse. This is, in my experience, not how houseshares work, or how anything works. One does not pay down a £10k debt by roasting a few chickens.

I think I will write some code to call his phone from random disposable Twilio mobile numbers at different times to test my theory. If I am right, it explains a lot. I’m unsure what I’ll do. I won’t turn him in, but I’m concerned by the thought of my boyfriend — your son, the person I love — being security on a loan.

— Sam

On Sat, 25 Apr 2026 at 00:13, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
I don't mean to make Oli sound all bad, by the way. He is the sweetest creature I have ever met. I have kept almost every scrap of him he has ever given me. He gave me a pack of Dextro Energy glucose tablets which I have on my shelf. (I researched the company that makes them: a German sugar-refining conglomerate with an integrated sugar mill. Most of the £1.something price is still marketing etc. I suggested raw dextrose since he's low on money, but now, having his glucose data, I can see the problem is far more often hyper- than hypo-glycaemia. I researched insulin pumps, and there's nothing great on the market now, though there's a company called Pharmasens that is developing a neat-looking pump – not perfect, and they could have used U-300 and a larger reservoir if they weren't aiming for 501k approval, but if he planned to refill every two days then it would give him a day's leeway before he got into vicious-cycle forgetting-sleeping-forgetting-etc territory.) When we're together I annoy him with all the photographs I take. I take them because I don't know how long the moment will last, and I want it to last forever. If you look at my camera roll, it's: 300 photos of Oli in 1 day, nothing for 2 ½ weeks, another 100 photos of him on a video call, nothing for 3 weeks, 450 photos of him when he came for a walk, nothing, etc.

I don’t know why he says and does some of the things he says and does. I really do not. I have defended him to my family at great, great length. They think I am sectionable, I think.

He told me one day that he hid with you from his father when he came looking for the two of you. He blathered about a lot of stuff that day. He was very sleep-deprived. He’s a huge dork when he’s sleep-deprived, your son is. He was regaling me with a new story of his father du jour (anyone he admires on any given day is his true father), and he told me that story. It was plainly seared into his mind.

Maybe that was the symbolic kernel of truth in what he told me about Albanian hitmen hunting him. God knows. He left one of his ketone strips here when we last met. I hug it when I'm going to sleep. I love your son. I’m sorry for these emails. It just soothes me to talk about him. I miss running my fingers through his hair. I miss his dopey smile. I miss the way he seems to fart constantly (is this diabetes?!?). I miss watching him when he’s asleep. I took heroin for two years and I still have never felt peace like I feel when I’m with him. I miss him very much.

- Sam

On Fri, 24 Apr 2026 at 18:56, Samuel William Howard Robinson-Adams <samrobinsonadams@gmail.com> wrote:
Oli, do you remember calling me your husband? You call me that often. I’d like to think you meant more than ‘hubby’, more than those faggy gays who gay-marry because they get a kick out of ‘my husband’ – out of the inherited weight of the thing – and then divorce when the novelty wears off. I would like to think you meant something more, something sacramental, not something cheap and naff and tawdry.

I suppose I should recap the history for your mum. I very much doubt she’s heard it from you, but I think she ought to hear it given how much I’ve heard about her. (For what it’s worth, Mrs W, I believed you about your father from the beginning.) Oli and I met in 2021. Well, he says we met in 2017 at our awful lecherous friend Lester Waters’s party in Covent Garden that summer. I have no memory of the party because I was blind drunk, but I take Oli's word for it. We exchanged a few Facebook messages in late 2020, and then spoke properly and met in early 2021.

He fell for me at the beginning, though he hid it well. He's good at hiding. We grew close in ... well, I would say in 2023, particularly. He had spent the first half of the year pretending to be a peer's son named Freddie, texting me at all hours of the night, periodically bigging up 'his friend' Oli, and periodically using his Old Etonian bona fides to knock my hated Old Etonian friend Roman down a peg. He had encyclopaedic knowledge of the school, gleaned I assume from your father (if indeed he went) or from his insufferable friend Timmy, who I can only imagine was admitted to the school as a randomised control.

By autumn of that year, I had tired of 'Freddie', who appeared to function as a perhaps-inadvertent Dorian Gray portrait for Oli's most tedious Proustian 'social butterfly' proclivities and interests. (Well, I say 'Proustian' – Proust at least managed to get to the bloody point within seven volumes.) Despite the foregoing, I stubbornly liked Oli. I always have. Even when I hated him. Nescio, sed fieri sentio! (I am a pretentious shit. I'm sorry.) Anyway, in September, I finally looked at him and envisioned myself with him – you know, with him – and that was it. It has been almost three years and I've never given up hope. Elpis, you know? Last thing to leave Pandora's box. Fuck.

It turns out all that morally complicated stuff you did to him left him somewhat less than ideally prepared to relate to someone, to be answerable to someone in that way. I can't say "you owe me this because you love me". That does not go down well. And yet he does owe me things by virtue of the bond, because that is how bonds work. He trusts me to be there for him. I am. I need to be able to trust him. I can't always, not very reliably, nor can I trust him to remain himself when he knows he has failed me and the shame is unbearable to him. What can one do? In his more lucid moments he has said it is a miracle I have stayed, that nobody else ever has, and that he just panics when he feels he's in the hot seat:

Sam: So do you mind spontaneously being there for me? Or is it more the demand? I sense the point at which you get angry is not... again, I think I said earlier, not when I need you, and not when you let me down, but when I tell you off for letting me down. Particularly if I say: "You love me, so you owe me this. You have to do this for me because we love each other."
Oli: It bas