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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,

Back in the 70’s horror films were a great late-night pastime for kids like me . Not officially, but nobody gave a shit what I was doing most of the time.

My mum was a keeper of secrets. A master of it. Nobody ever had a clue what she was up to from one day to the next. She had a secret weapon. A way of organising her life in a little black book. Not words. Just lines and squiggles. Some strokes thin, some thick. All of it unreadable. Shorthand, she called it. Now to younger people reading this, shorthand was a proper skill once upon a time. Secretaries learned it, office girls learned it, receptionists learned it. People sat i

I grew up fully expecting to be rebuilt. Not fixed. Not patched up. Rebuilt. We were promised that, weren’t we? Properly promised too, not in some vague politician way where everything comes with a disclaimer and a budget cut attached. This was telly, comics, Saturday tea-time certainty. Blokes getting smashed to bits and coming back better than ever. Better, stronger, faster. The Six Million Dollar Man told us straight: “We have the technology.” Not “we might have it one day

Everyone was getting involved. Or at least, that’s how it looked. There was a Cub Scout parade as part of it. Proper little march, uniforms, scarves, the lot. I wanted to be in it. Course I did. Every kid did. Only problem was, I wasn’t a Cub Scout.

I was nine. He was eighteen. We didn’t know each other… and my mum sent me to the fair with him anyway. The summer of ’76. Heatwave. Finsbury Park. And a ride where the floor disappears and you get stuck to the wall. Then a bloke walks in, tells everyone not to do something… and does it anyway. I’d never seen anything like it.

The dust cart taught me how to work. Love taught me how to write it down. This is the story of a different kind of education.

A property listing on Zoopla made my fucking blood boil. To them it’s a “hidden gem”. To me it was something else entirely.

There’s a railway bridge on the Cally where trains thunder overhead while others earn a crust under em. Just a couple of little workshops. Most people walk under it now without a second thought .Brick. Steel. Traffic. Phones. But once, underneath those arches, there was a welding shop. And for a short while, I worked there. A pound an hour. Forty quid a week if you did the full stretch. Cash in hand. At the time I thought I was being robbed blind. But all my mates were on th

My dad always told the story of the first time we met. December 1967. Stepney Women’s Hospital. He’d sit me down, grinning, and tell me how he trudged through the snow and ice that bright, bitterly cold day in London’s East End.

I went back to work today and found I’d been erased. Three months off. Twenty-three years on the job. And somehow… gone from the system.

So we know the story by now. I won’t labour the hard-luck details, but in the late 70s and early 80s I was a hungry little kid. One thing I’d always look forward to was a trip to mothers boyfriend's gaff in West Croydon . Not for the house itself, oh no . That was just another filthy dimly lit shithole and held no interest for me at all. I was interested only in the outside, the main road near Graham's house, London Road. A great long sprawling high road that basically ran fr

Within the sprawling architecture of human discourse there exists a peculiar and persistent tendency toward linguistic hypertrophy. Scholars, philosophers, poets, and professional explainers of the human condition have, for centuries, demonstrated an almost devotional commitment to the accumulation of increasingly elaborate vocabularies in their attempts to articulate the fundamental motivations of our species. Libraries groan beneath the weight of these efforts. Whoa… hold o

Tuesday February the third. 1981. 03:45, I think. Who knows? Could be any date, any time, how would I tell? Laying awake in bed, again. On bed really, filthy skinny sleeping bag covering my freezing battered body. Hunger is keeping me up again. Pain in my hips from the cold metal bars of the bed is keeping me up again. Voices from the previous day at school are keeping me up again. The taunting of the other kids. The safe kids, the warm cosy kids who laugh and mock me day in

I believed the little boy in me was dead. I was wrong. This is the true story of the day I found him again, and everything that changed after.

The year was 1986. I took my lovely new girlfriend Alison to meet my dad, not to his house, he didn't have one. I took her to a park in Thornhill Square where we walked straight up to a bunch of tramps sitting on the benches. She shied away and said maybe we should go the long way around and avoid that nasty bunch of tramps. I said don't worry, that's my family, that's my dad, and I could often be found sitting with these people and people like them for the last 10 years, d

Did you hear the one about the dustman who had dreams of being a writer? An author. A blogger. A man of letters. I did. I heard it every single time my inner monologue took the piss. Every time I sat down at a keyboard to write a story – a memory, a little slice of life – he’d pipe up. “What on earth are you trying to do, you thick cunt?” “Ooooh, look at you with your big fancy words. I’m pretty sure there aren’t 28 letters in ‘monologue’, mate.” “Pack it in, Phil. No one’s a

My dad was a bastard. A vicious bastard. A friend to very few people. A man’s man. An alcoholic. A mistreater of people. Everything I vowed, very young, I would never be. When my kids were born, I was sure it was going to be different for them. And it was. No violent rages. No smashing the place up because I was pissed. I never once put a hand on their mother Love and respect reigned supreme in our house. So how did I end up realising I wasn’t as different from him as I thoug

A message from the blue opens a journey of reflection — from childhood friendship to love, illness, ageing, and the quiet shock of losing a friend. Let me paint you a picture. I’m downstairs in my living room on a Friday night, a glass of single malt in my hand, half-watching YouTube videos of skateboarders falling off things. Just another ordinary evening, killing time thinking about going to bed. Then a message arrived on my phone. A very old friend of mine, someone I’d los

One wet, tired evening in front of the telly. A five-second clip of Albert Tatlock giving Ken Barlow grief – and suddenly a lifetime of thoughts about fathers, sons, class and progress comes tumbling out. I got in from work the other day wet, exhausted, fed up and tired. Nothing new there. Just a normal day at the office — which is actually a road sweeper. I changed into my comfy afternoon lounging-about clothes, put the kettle on, and settled down with the cat to watch som