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 never won anything in my life. Until the day I won everything. The day I found love. May 4th 1986. It was a hot sunny day, a bank holiday and I was bored… So fucking bored. London had lost its lustre as far as I could see. I'd been knocking around in the pubs and clubs since I left school in 1984 and standing outside them since I was old enough to remember. I was working in north London, and I'd finally sorted a proper place to live, and I was working, had money in my pocke

How AI gave me back a mother, then told me what I wasn't allowed to remember. There is no photograph of this moment. There couldn't be. Nobody was standing outside the Edinburgh Castle on the Caledonian Road with a camera when I was eight years old, watching me talk to the woman who, for a while at least, was the closest thing I had to a mum. Yet somehow, nearly fifty years later, I have the picture. I say somehow, what I mean is AI made it for me . I don’t have photos of tho