30/07/2026
New Intro for my book - available here - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0H14W5ZBJ...
I was born in Jarrow and brought up around the Tyne Dock area
of South Shields, a seaside town in the North East of England.
It's a beautiful place in many ways, but like anywhere, it has its
rough spots. Tyne Dock was one of them.
My origins were humble, typical 1970s working class.
I didn't know anything else, the only posh people I ever saw were
on TV.
My parents both worked hard and always put the family first,
they made sure my two sisters and I rarely went without for
long. We were never hungry or cold,
Home was a small terraced house, with barely enough room for
a moment's peace or an ounce of privacy.
I can't remember much about my junior school years, but the
memories I do have are mostly good.
I remember learning songs in the school hall with Mrs Freeman
at the piano, and a large blackboard with the lyrics written on it,
and Mrs Manning, Bainbridge or Nolan waving a big stick conducting our ragged-arsed choir.
Mam was born in Ireland, and we were brought up Catholic, so I
had to go to church a lot, and even became an altar boy.
The church services were boring and seemed to drag on forever.
For a child with the attention span of a goldfish, sitting still for
that long felt impossible. To me, going to church wasn't something I wanted to do—it was something I had to do, another
chore that I simply endured..
Religious Education lessons at school filled our heads with Bible
stories, of miracles that were too far fetched for me, quite
frankly, I didn't believe them.
That created a real conundrum in my young mind.
Although religion gave me a good grounding and taught me
strong Christian values, I struggled to believe much of what I
was hearing in church and at school. If some of it didn't make
sense to me, what else was I being told that I shouldn't simply
accept as fact—or at least ought to take with a pinch of salt?
Those questions planted the first seeds of doubt about the education system and the way we were taught to accept things without question. They also left me one very confused kid, trying to
work out what was true and what wasn't. I decided I'd learn the
things that interested me and quietly ignore the rest, such as
trigonometry, that seemed like hocus-pocus too.
Looking back, my childhood was fairly ordinary. There were no
great traumas or life-changing dramas—just a normal North
East upbringing. That's why my story really begins at the point
where life started to get interesting.
I couldn't wait to leave school. In my head, life afterwards would
be plain sailing: get a job, earn some money, get married, and live
happily ever after.
If it was only that simple.
