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,

How AI gave me back a mother, then told me what I wasn't allowed to remember. There is no photograph of this moment. There couldn't be. Nobody was standing outside the Edinburgh Castle on the Caledonian Road with a camera when I was eight years old, watching me talk to the woman who, for a while at least, was the closest thing I had to a mum. Yet somehow, nearly fifty years later, I have the picture. I say somehow, what I mean is AI made it for me . I don’t have photos of tho

I read something the other day about a bloke called Perez Hilton. I'd never heard of him. Apparently he's some sort of celebrity gossip blogger, which probably explains why I'd never heard of him. I'm not entirely sure what a celebrity gossip blogger does, and I'm even less sure I want to find out. Anyway, he'd been in the news after harming himself while live on TikTok. My first reaction wasn't particularly sympathetic. Publicity stunt. There ya go, I said it. It was probabl