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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,

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

I’ve stared death in the face a few times during my life and a trivial matter it ain’t. Things happen when doctors start using words like stroke. People stop asking what football team you support, what you're having for dinner, or whether you've remembered to put the bins out. Instead, they start asking questions that make the room go quiet. Questions like: "What would you want us to do if things went badly wrong?" At some point during the various strokes, TIAs, scans, consul

Roger Cook died this week. Eighty-three years old. Now before we go any further, let me make one thing perfectly clear. I didn't know Roger Cook. He wasn't my mate. He never popped round for a cup of tea. We never shared a pint. For all I know, he might have been an absolute twat to sit next to at a dinner party. But I was genuinely sorry to hear he'd gone. Not because he was famous. Not because he was a great journalist. I was sorry because Roger Cook belonged to a part of m

Chapter Thirty-Six: Goodbye Cally Road It was 1986, and everything in our world was wobbling at once. They say if it ain’t one thing, then it’s another, don’t they? No sooner had the old man got himself sorted, it was Nigel’s turn to act up. He’d been seeing a girl called Kay for a while since moving to Croydon, and had actually started to live a little. Going to the pub, going to the cinema with her, generally enjoying himself a bit more, and he was very happy with the way t

My dad lived on a bench. I mean that literally. He was an alcoholic, a tramp and a violent nutcase. Same bench, morning to dusk, watching the world go by with a roll-up on his lip and a bottle of VP sherry, or can of Special Brew, whatever, any super strong drink would do, and an opinion about everything. He'd have been classified as a nuisance today probably. An obstruction. Back then he was just a tramp in the park, part of a big group of tramps that lived in Kings Cross, L

The year was 2004. I'd been thinking about my dad quite a lot. What with the struggle of keeping a roof over our heads, and the cost of living being hard enough as it was, I was growing more retroactively angry. The effort I was having to put in, day after day, week after week, just to put food on the table for the kids, really made me angry about how little effort my "parents" had put in before giving up altogether and leaving me to starve and embrace the chaos until it almo

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