The estates
Kingsheath, Bellinge, Blackthorn, Thorplands. From my early teens, a house full of foster children, over a hundred of them through the years.
Five places
Home, work, community, cyberspace, each in the other.
I live on a wide street in Northampton. More sky than bricks. If you stand outside and look left, you can watch the sun rise above the tree line on the other side of the valley. Walk far enough and the street gives way to mud, and the mud to water, and the noise in my head goes quiet.
A place is in me as much as I am in it. I learned that from Alan Rayner, in fourteen years of letters. Water shapes the land and is shaped by it. I’ve carried a sentence for years, and I’ve said it in rooms: Nature herself never excludes you. Only some people, in some places do.
It starts within. Ray Oldenburg, in The Great Good Place, wrote about home, work and the third place, where community happens. My friends Matthew Green and Chantal Dawtrey at 5th Place kept counting. Cyberspace is the fourth. The fifth is all of it, each in the other, being who we are.
The first place
Home
Where I come from, and who I come home to.
The names
Bushell and Pay. Mathew and Matthew. Six generations in the armed forces, and what that left me to work out.
Family
Married, father of two daughters, and walked most days by Haven, my Black Dalmador.
Northampton
One of the largest towns in England, on the River Nene. Woollen cloth, leather, shoes. It used to be called a market town. There’s no market anymore.
Back in the day
An amateur boxer, I often say: nine fights, one trophy, Best Come Back Fight. A lead rock climber. These days I walk, slowly, and ride a red Honda.
The second place
Work
What I do with people, and how I got here.
Therapeutic coaching
One to one since April 2022, with people living with bipolar. Trained by Frances Masters at the Integrated Coaching Academy, in the Fusion model.
Emotional fitness
Trained by Matthew Green and Chantal Dawtrey, and their UK and Europe representative. Shape of Emotion and the Emotional Fitness Model, for organisations, schools and communities.
Peer training
Recovery College Peer Trainer with Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust. I run Living with Bipolar, with more dates being published soon, and co-facilitate other courses.
Speaking
The International Society for Bipolar Disorders in Chiba. Two hundred young students, and a talk called What if nothing is wrong with you.
Before all this
- 2022–24Minderful, a health tech app for mental fitness. Head of Partnerships, taking workplace mental health to businesses across Northamptonshire, then wellbeing coach.
- 2022–24Mental health trainer and speaker with PVL.
- 2022–23Clinical actor at the University of Northampton, playing a patient so that healthcare professionals could practise.
- 2024Producer and co-host at Revolution Radio.
- 2016–21Blinds, software and business coaching.
- 2014–16The county archives.
- 2011–13Neuro-physiotherapy assistant and veterans’ advocate at St Andrew’s Healthcare.
- 2009–11Rehabilitation assistant at Christ Church Court, with people living with acquired brain injury.
- 2004–08Production monitoring across the UK, Europe and the USA.
- 2000–04The Royal Signals.
The third place
Community
Recovery is something we do with each other.
Peer support
More a relationship than a service. Trained in Intentional Peer Support and ImROC, with my own Wellness Recovery Action Plan.
LEROs
Lived Experience Recovery Organisation Coordinator with The Forward Trust, on ImROC’s mentoring programme, and a member and volunteer of Community Recovery, a distinct, lived-experience-led organisation with its own leaders.
Expert by Experience
Co-production with West and North Northamptonshire Councils, and the Lived Experience Council of the International Society for Bipolar Disorders.
Before all this
- 2022–26Action for Happiness Northamptonshire: volunteer, board member, hub coordinator, positive psychology trainer, and a community of practice that reflected its insights back in the moment.
- 2025–26Research Champion with Mental Health Northants Collaboration, and Project Specialist with Northamptonshire Mind.
- 2015–17Co-facilitating the Bipolar UK peer support group in Northampton.
- 2009–11ArtBlast, student volunteers taking the arts out into the town.
- 2008–10Northampton Arts Collective, and the campaign that kept the Fishmarket Gallery alive.
The fourth place
Cyberspace
People can be met here too, when the tools let them.
Digital social innovation
Twenty-six years of taking a technology into a room of people and making it work for the people in the room.
David Pinto and Pscale
David invented Pscale, and I’ve worked with him since 2010. It holds an open commons where people keep their own account in their own words. He calls me the pilot.
Apps and tools
Sundial on my phone. Work for Community Recovery. Digital tools for coaching clients, charities and communities.
In the Zone
UK Ambassador for shared care in bipolar: the person, the people who love them and their clinicians, in it with each other.
Cyber-psychology
At university, studying creative writing, I got curious about cyber-psychology. My dissertation was called The Spirit of the Internet Guru: a man in a room, exchanging messages with an avatar, never sure who or what was on the other end. That was 2011. Now I spend my evenings in a room, exchanging messages with AIs. I write about it in the book.
Before all this
- 2022–24Minderful, a health tech app for mental fitness.
- 2020–23Bipolar Now: a weekly podcast with Mike Lardi, 150 episodes, and a Facebook peer support community of close to a thousand.
- 2018–23Sqale, a social platform for collaborating, with David Pinto.
The fifth place
Each in the other
Being who we are.
The place within
It starts here. Where it all gets lived.
Writing for therapeutic purposes
A creative writing degree, the arts and health movement, and a long belief that we recover by restorying.
Presence in Action
A practitioner of Dr Louie Gardiner’s practice, where noticing facts, feelings, fictions and purpose changes what happens next.
Natural Inclusion
Alan Rayner’s way of reasoning, and fourteen years of his letters.
Wholeless
The word I’ve been working with, -less as in boundless. One axis, two ends. The ends are not edges, and there’s nothing outside.
Philosophy
Whitehead’s Modes of Thought, Hartshorne by way of Adam Blatner, the included middle, and the companions who wrote back.
Walking
Step. Another. One foot follows the other. I like to go slow. I often talk out loud as I go.
The Art of Natural Inclusion
My photographs. Roots, mist, water, shadows. Most of the pictures on this site without me in them.