The Artificially Educated Dustman

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, but if you don’t sound like them, you’re treated like you don’t belong.

Well now we’ve got a tool.

Not to pretend we’re someone else. Not to write like them. Not to iron out our edges and come out sounding like soya milk and HR.

We use it to get our words out. Properly. Clean enough to be read. Still ours. Still working-class. Still blunt where it needs to be blunt.

And here’s the important bit. This isn’t for the Jake Pauls of the world. This isn’t for the loud idiots and the trolls and the performative internet circus. They can fuck off.

This is for the rest of us. The men who weren’t trained to “express themselves” but have survived things worth hearing. The people who can tell a story on a doorstep but get shut down the moment it needs typing up.

AI doesn’t give us a voice. It just helps us carry it further.

When I wrote my first book, The Invisible Boy, it was with the index fingers of my two hands. I can’t type. I’m never going to enter a spelling contest. I didn’t know what prose was until ChatGPT taught me.

All the ideas, the concepts, the writing you’ll read on these pages are mine. All that’s changed is the structure works and the spelling is correct.

There was a time when I was a dustman aspiring to be an author. Nowadays, due to ill health, I’m an author aspiring to be a part-time dustman.

What this site does for me is help me take my passion for writing and turn it into something permanent. A record of what was, for when I’m gone, when I’m truly putting the dust back into dustman.

I hope what it does for you is entertain you while you enjoy your coffee break, or send you away with something to think about.

I won’t be offering advice. I won’t be turning this into a self-help group for the aspiring working-class writer.

Just a place to come, have a look, and read a while.

Enjoy.