The Invisible Boy

I’m a dustman. Not a columnist. Not a “content creator”. Not a bloke who sits there with a flat white talking about his feelings in long paragraphs. But I’ve got a voice. And I’ve got a life. And I’ve got things to say that don’t usually get let into certain rooms. For years, those rooms belonged to other people. The Guardian long reads. The clever blogs. The places where you need the right tone, the right education, the right kind of sentences. You can be smart as you like,

I read something the other day about a bloke called Perez Hilton. I'd never heard of him. Apparently he's some sort of celebrity gossip blogger, which probably explains why I'd never heard of him. I'm not entirely sure what a celebrity gossip blogger does, and I'm even less sure I want to find out. Anyway, he'd been in the news after harming himself while live on TikTok. My first reaction wasn't particularly sympathetic. Publicity stunt. There ya go, I said it. It was probabl

The worst thing I ever forced myself to believe was, "It never did me any harm." It's taken me nearly fifty years to admit that was a lie. Not a deliberate lie. More like one of those things kids like me repeated because that's what everybody else said. We wore it like a badge of honour. "I got a punch in the mouth" "I got dragged around the floor" "I got clipped round the ear." "I got the slipper" Everybody bangs on about the slipper as though it was the defining punishment