In Northampton, on UK time.
Every night in my book opens the same way. The hour, the body, what’s in the room. It’s 21:07. Very little pain today. Haven is unsettled beside me. Dr Louie Gardiner’s Presence in Action taught me to do that on purpose. What are the facts? What are the feelings? What are the fictions? What am I here for? Ask, and the next thing changes.
All of it is in this hour with me, and the next thing starts from here. So here is what my days are made of now, and the place each one lives in.
Community
The Forward Trust, North Northamptonshire, since July 2026
A Lived Experience Recovery Organisation is recovery run by the people who’ve lived it. I support their development across the county. The people who come forward are experts by experience, and the culture gets set in how we treat each other. I’m also on ImROC’s LERO mentoring programme, and a member and volunteer of Community Recovery, a distinct organisation here with its own leaders.
Community
Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, since February 2026
I run Living with Bipolar, for people living with bipolar and those around them, with more dates being published soon. I’d already co-delivered it here before I joined. I also co-facilitate other courses and workshops, and co-write what gets taught, on the principle that services are best designed and delivered by people who’ve used them.
Community
International Society for Bipolar Disorders, since November 2025
People who live with bipolar, working with researchers and clinicians around the world on education, research and clinical care. It followed Chiba, where Dr Andrea Vassilev gave me the chance to apply and I spoke about bipolar and substance use.
Community
West and North Northamptonshire Councils, since April 2026
Co-production. Adult social care asks people with lived experience in to help shape its services, and I’m one of them. I’ve worked the same way with Northamptonshire Mind, Mental Health Northants Collaboration and Voluntary Impact Northamptonshire.
Work
Since April 2022, and UK and Europe representative for 5th Place
One to one with people living with bipolar: patterns, stability, what to do with a feeling on an ordinary day. With 5th Place I take Shape of Emotion and the Emotional Fitness Model to organisations, schools and communities. I first learned to ask what shape a feeling is at my own dining table.
Community
Intentional Peer Support practitioner, ImROC Peer Support Worker
It moved me from what’s wrong with you to what happened to you. More a relationship than a service. What lingers is the feeling of sitting in a room with people who share a quiet, intuitive understanding.
The place within
Practitioner, trained with Dr Louie Gardiner
I rode a red Honda seven hours from Northampton to Portobello to train with her. Four days. I arrived carrying a heavy load, and left able to untangle my facts, my feelings and my fictions. The people I met there didn’t reflect me back. Not mirrors. Windows.
The place within
With Occurrity, since 2023
Raising awareness of how natural inclusion makes sense of our life experience, through art, science, writing and discussion, in the circle of writers I’ve belonged to for years.
Cyberspace
Apps and tools for different people, and Pscale with David Pinto
Nesta’s Our Tech, Our Future talks about “tech as a tool, not an end”. That’s how I work. I make apps and tools with AI, with the people they’re for, around what matters in those people’s lives. A website and an app for a recovery community, co-produced with its leaders, with privacy first. An offer to Lived Experience Recovery Organisations, where a member keeps their own days, and with their yes those days become their organisation’s evidence. Sundial, where you talk, it keeps your day with you, and nothing leaves the phone. And Pscale, with David Pinto, where people keep their own account in their own words. It all draws on twenty-six years of taking a technology into a room of people and making it work for them.
Cyberspace
In the Zone, since March 2026
Shared care for bipolar: the person, the people who love them and their clinicians, in it with each other. Idan Spund founded it.
The place within
Wholeless Nights, written as Mathew Pay
Every watch in first draft before Christmas 2026. That’s the plan.
What I write here is my own, and doesn’t speak for any organisation I work with.
Anyone can read what’s left here. Nobody watches it as it comes in, so it’s not the place for an emergency. Finding support is there for that.