This is me

For my first post I thought I’d share my life story. I hate writing about myself but this blog has to start somewhere and an introduction to me. my journey and what led me to this point in time seems a good place to start.

My mother was a single parent in the late 60’s and was one of the women caught up in the adoption scandal, She was shipped off to a hospital in Guildford to give birth and upon realising the plan was to have me adopted absconded back to London with me. She married when I was six and there was never any question that this new man in my life was Dad. He is a wonderful man and I owe a huge amount to him. However the question of identity is one that has haunted me my whole life and something I have only come to terms with in recent years. I failed miserably at school, although I did somehow get through to my ‘A’ levels which were a complete disaster. Then life threw a curve ball at me. My girlfriend at the time fell pregnant, and given my earlier life experience walking away wasn’t an option. I was married at 19 and had two kids by the time I was 23. Life was tough and after a series of jobs eventually went back to university to study architecture at 28. Then came 15 years of fairly mundane family life. When the kids reached their late teens the marriage started to fall apart. I guess it’s not an untypical story. We had moved on and changed and were left with little in common. Then followed a bitter, traumatic divorce which left me in the wilderness. I needed something to fill the void in my life and cycling filled that void. I was a reasonably successful amateur road racer, but somehow that still wasn’t enough. During this period my mental health started to decline. I have always had a tendency towards depression and this started to become much more pronounced with the occasional period of self harm. Then I found yoga and that changed my life yet again. I have always had an interest in eastern philosophy and yoga helped develop that. A yoga retreat in Goa sparked an interest in travelling and a desire to explore India. At about the same time Extinction Rebellion came onto the scene and I felt I had found my tribe. I my usual all or nothing manner I sold everything I had, pocketed the proceeds and set off to Nepal and India to find myself and star the next chapter of my life.

Travelling was an eye opener, I became a Buddhist and eventually found myself in Lockdown in Kathmandu during Covid. By complete chance I became involved with a group of fellow travellers and Nepali friends who were cooking and distributing food around Kathmandu. Going out around the city on the back of a motorcycle laden with crates of food we were often mobbed by hungry desperate people who had no means to support themselves in Lockdown. This was not something I could walk away from and I turned down my last chance to leave the country on an embassy flight and stayed on to help continue the project. This became my life for the nest six months, and fatherhood aside was one of the most rewarding periods of my life. I felt I was making a real difference.

Eventually life started to return to some semblance of normality and those of us on extended visas had to leave the country so it was back to lockdown in the UK and further isolation. Again my mental health started to decline, in part because forced to earn a living and support myself I fell back into the life I was running away from in the first place. After a misdiagnosis of Bipolar 2 and a period of powerful but wholly unsuitable medications I had a breakdown. Finding yourself in A&E in a ‘safe’ room unable to keep yourself safe is a horrible experience. Given the choice of a voluntary admission to a psychiatric ward or a crisis recovery centre a choose the latter. It saved my life! However I was still at the mercy of a very broken mental health system and struggling to make sense of what had just happened. At least I was until one of my recovery team actually took the time to listen to me rather than just tick the boxes on the forms to ensure I wasn't;t about to top myself. I can quite clearly remember her just looking at me and asking whether I had ever been asessed for ADHD and Autism. I hadn’t although it was always a question in the back of my mind. many friends had described me as being on the spectrum, but I just dismissed the idea as absurd. Then came the assessments and the dual diagnosis. The diagnosis for autism was a mixture of shock and relief. I broke down in tears. Finally I had an answer that made sense. It was also the first time my family fully accepted the diagnosis which was a major issue. I no longer had to fight to get them to accept this diagnosis as I had with BP2. They just looked at me and said ‘yeah, that makes sense’.

I now look back at my life and much of it starts to make sense. I am now coming to terms with life as a neurodivergent person and what I need to do to survive in a neurotypical world. It’s a journey, a new chapter and there are lots of questions. I still struggle to accept that I am autistic, that is a work in progress.

So what led me to activism? I can remeber vividly one of the sixth formers on the school bus being covered in badges from CND, Amnesty International etc. and wondering how the hell you find out about these things yet being too shy and embarrassed to ask. This was the 80’s with the threat on nuclear war was an ever present spectre and something that dominated my thoughts. But pre internet how did you ever find out about these things? Especially when you had a nice comfortable middle class existence in a village in Kent. This had sparked an interest that was to stay with me but didn’t find an outlet until later life. The 90’s were a decade of apathy. I can remember one of my university lecturers arranging a protest in Trafalgar Square, no particular issue, just whatever was important to us at that time. It was an effort to force us to engage and actually do something. And that sat festering in my mind for another decade for so until Extinction Rebellion jitters the headlines. Finally someone was doing something, taking the fight to the establishment. Here was something I wanted to be part of. This also sparked my journey as a photographer. I had dabbled in photography at university but never took it any further. This was something I wanted to document, and also a way of dealing with the noise and chaos of a protest which was often overwhelming. It was also a reason to keep myself safe. if I had my camera I wasn’t arrestable, I used it to negotiate with myself when I was up for arrest and when not. For the record I have four arrest to my name! Out of this rang a wider interest in social issues and a desire to record protest. I would roam the streets of London looking for any action to document, which led me to the Pro-Palestine movement. The oppression of Palestinians has been constant through my whole life and something I have always felt very strongly about. The explosion of the movement was something I wanted to get involved with and document. I felt I could use photography to good use documenting and commenting on the issues. It finally gave me a voice. My photography has developed and continues to move forward. No action is too small, they all need to be recorded although I do have to balance this with a day job. Documentary photography only pays the rent for a few. But it’s not about making money, it never has been. It has always been about the cause. I do it because it’s something I believe in. I always look back at the Vietnam protests in the 60’s and think what a time that must have been to live through. However I don’t think we see that at the time. It’s only in hindsight we look at the photo’s and grainy archive film footage and realise what an extraordinary time it was. And that is what we are living through now.

That’s enough about me, my life has been quite boring realy and you’ve done well if you’ve made it this far. Next time there will be less text and more pics, I’m all about the photo’s after all.