1982
Northampton
Born in the town, raised on its estates: Kingsheath, Bellinge, Blackthorn, Thorplands.
One stroke of the pen
Some of it is here. The rest is in the book.
People have called me Jackanory. Walter Mitty as well. I don’t blame them. Some of this sounds made up, and I’ve spent seventeen years trying to write it down. I’ve had eighty thousand words open on a screen and pressed control, shift, delete. So here’s the short version, the way I’d tell it to you on a walk. It starts where it starts, and it hasn’t finished.
Early teens
A house full of other people’s children
My parents started fostering when I was in my early teens. Over a hundred children came through the house. I learned what feelings do to a home.
1997
Fifteen, an iron gate
A fractured skull, the day after Diana died. One of many times drink and drugs nearly finished me. I realise now I was trying to settle a nervous system in chaos.
2000
The Royal Signals
Seventeen and a half, having failed my exams. Encryption keys and secure links. One of a few chosen for the Cormorant project, showing the British Army’s new network at St James’s Park. The Leadership Award for Best Recruit. The first time I heard the words bipolar disorder was on leave, in a GP’s surgery in Northampton, with my mother beside me.
2004
Data
Out of the army and into production monitoring: designing the networks that carried a factory’s data, across the UK, Europe and the USA, then training the people who used them and advising the people who ran them. Charleston. Atlanta to Oklahoma in an orange Dodge. 8 Mile Road. I was inside the Detroit car plants as that industry came down, and in the motels at night I sent poetry to American radio stations. Outwardly fine.
2008
A motel room in Michigan
I sent two emails. One to my boss. One to Chris Ringrose at the University of Northampton. That September I arrived to study creative writing, twenty-six years old, with no GCSEs. At university I was in print for the first time, in the Journal of Applied Arts and Health. I founded ArtBlast, student volunteers taking the arts out into the town, and won it a £20,000 grant and a national award. When the council didn’t renew the Fishmarket Gallery’s lease, I led the campaign that found it a new home, and I spoke to Nick Clegg about it.
2011
A diagnosis, a kitchen floor
By the time I graduated I was married, and I had a diagnosis, from the fourth psychiatrist, ten years after I first heard the words. During my exams I ended up on the kitchen floor. That July I started on the brain injury wards at St Andrew’s, to understand the mind in the body, and went on to lead a research project on activity monitors there.
2015
Tree Zero
I started photographing trees, and facilitating the Bipolar UK peer support group in Northampton. At the county archives I led the digitising of Northamptonshire’s archaeological records and held my own birth register in my hands. Sitting in a room of people who understood changed what I thought was possible.
2016
Back into IT
I struggled to find my feet, and went back. A blinds company in Northampton, taken through a rebrand and a new software system. Then BlindMatrix, a software platform with colleagues in Chennai, and Sqale, coaching open business practices with David Pinto.
2020
Walk With Me
A short video of me walking and talking, in the worst of it. People joined in. That September I started co-hosting the Bipolar Now podcast with Mike Lardi, 150 weekly episodes and 7,000 Apple downloads a month at its peak, and helping to run its Facebook peer support community, close to a thousand people.
2021
A hotel room, smiling
Deeply depressed, and about to leave IT for the second time. I left that October. Soon after, a comment on LinkedIn from a man who shared my name became emotional fitness.
2022
The Knife Angel
I looked up at it, glad to be alive. I qualified as a therapeutic coach over the next two years, trained by Frances Masters, and joined Action for Happiness in Northamptonshire. People held me up along the way and let me be human.
2025
Johannesburg and Chiba
A week with Matthew and Chantal at 5th Place, a bookshop, an inscription, then a stage in Japan with the International Society for Bipolar Disorders. I’d written the abstract in the third person, and it felt safe. Mr. Bushell struggled with self-stigma. It was all true, and it had happened to someone else. In Chiba I had to stand up and be him.
2026
Now
Lived Experience Recovery Organisation Coordinator, Recovery College Peer Trainer, the Lived Experience Council, the councils, Community Recovery, building on Pscale with David Pinto, and a book being written in the dark hours. Still in motion.
This is the building of a new house. I don’t know where it’ll end.