On the streets of my mother’s house, St Augustine’s Road, Camden, circa 1974.
About Me
I was born a Cockney. Not that it made much difference to me as we moved out of London three months later. To Essex and then later to Cambridge where my dad had a job at the university.
I studied literature at Edinburgh where I first grew ill. I remember the university GP telling me ‘to get a grip’. I finished my degree and moved to Rome with a teaching qualification. After a year I moved back to London and got an entry level job in publishing. I was seriously sick by now but too scared to seek help (would they lock me up?) but it was nothing compared to the crazy paranoid schizophrenia I went through in the late nineties. That was the worst period. I indulged in high-risk behaviour (see my books Off My Meds And Other Stories and Latona) and attempted suicide.
Three hospitalisations later I was drugged up and felt safer. In the late noughties I taught myself to draw and did a foundation year in art. Then I got sick again and after two more hospitalisations gave up all hope of being creative. Now I am drawing again and producing books – comics and poems – and have an exhibtion planned in September 2020. Watch this space!