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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,

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

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

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.