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,

The worst thing I ever forced myself to believe was, "It never did me any harm." It's taken me nearly fifty years to admit that was a lie. Not a deliberate lie. More like one of those things kids like me repeated because that's what everybody else said. We wore it like a badge of honour. "I got a punch in the mouth" "I got dragged around the floor" "I got clipped round the ear." "I got the slipper" Everybody bangs on about the slipper as though it was the defining punishment

I’ve stared death in the face a few times during my life and a trivial matter it ain’t. Things happen when doctors start using words like stroke. People stop asking what football team you support, what you're having for dinner, or whether you've remembered to put the bins out. Instead, they start asking questions that make the room go quiet. Questions like: "What would you want us to do if things went badly wrong?" At some point during the various strokes, TIAs, scans, consul