The Invisible Boy

I’m a dustman. Not a columnist. Not a “content creator”. Not a bloke who sits there with a flat white talking about his feelings in long paragraphs. But I’ve got a voice. And I’ve got a life. And I’ve got things to say that don’t usually get let into certain rooms. For years, those rooms belonged to other people. The Guardian long reads. The clever blogs. The places where you need the right tone, the right education, the right kind of sentences. You can be smart as you like,

Back in the 70’s horror films were a great late-night pastime for kids like me . Not officially, but nobody gave a shit what I was doing most of the time.

My mum was a keeper of secrets. A master of it. Nobody ever had a clue what she was up to from one day to the next. She had a secret weapon. A way of organising her life in a little black book. Not words. Just lines and squiggles. Some strokes thin, some thick. All of it unreadable. Shorthand, she called it. Now to younger people reading this, shorthand was a proper skill once upon a time. Secretaries learned it, office girls learned it, receptionists learned it. People sat i