How Do You Survive The Unthinkable? You Write It.

A memoir born not from choice, but from the need to survive - to reclaim a childhood lost to silence, and a mother who tried to shield me from it.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, they say… or is it that absence protects us from the fear of what comes next? I’ve not posted on here for many months, and well in large part that’s because I was putting the final touches to something permanent - a memoir of my life’s story. A story that’s always lived with me, quietly shaping everything, and now, it becomes my past.

The Unthinkable is a book I felt I would never write, but one I became compelled to, out of necessity, so to survive myself. You see, if you don't tell your story, it swallows you whole. Mine almost did.

Plucked from the obscurity of a middle-class leafy Surrey village, I was man meandering through life feeling lost and confused. Then my life was turned upside down. In 2010, whilst waiting tables in a high street restaurant, during a busy lunch service I was asked by my manager to go upstairs and to wait in the staff room. There I stood, waiting, pacing, back-and-forth for what felt like an eternity, trying with every f…