A Head Start

I've built this space to host a portfolio of my previous, current and upcoming work. It's also somewhere to share my thoughts on film and literature — and possibly anything else I think is worth a discussion.

For the past 15 years I've been heavily distracted trying to make the UK a more comfortable place for people living with chronic health conditions.

I never intended to get involved in politics. But that particular detour took me on a journey that showed me things I couldn't have paid to see or learn.

It wasn't entirely a departure from filmmaking, either. When I left university, I intentionally took what I'd learned — particularly about producing — and used those skills to build a campaign organisation from the ground up. Storytelling and framing became two of my main weapons. If people couldn't understand an issue through facts and arguments alone, I learned to find a way of telling the story that allowed them to see it differently.

My degree in Filmmaking had taught me some of the technical abilities. Life gave me the lessons that filled in the gaps.

I worked with people from all over the UK, from all walks of life, of all ages and at very different stages of their own personal development. Somewhere along the way they inspired stories. Some have sat in the back of my mind for years; others survived as pages in notebooks or draft files scattered across multiple laptops, phones, hard drives and clouds.

In 2023 I was made redundant from a medical cannabis clinic, where part of my job was writing medical content. It happened around the point AI became pretty damn good at producing in seconds the kind of medical article that could take me days to research and write.

My grandfather once gave me one particularly strong piece of career advice: "Do a job that can't be replaced."

He knew something about that. He had been a horologist until the quartz watch came along. Before that, he'd repaired watches belonging to Charlie Chaplin and Winston Churchill.

I never imagined writing would be the thing facing the same problem. Apparently we can't all see over the horizon.

After two years of trying to find suitable work, I ended up in hospital twice in two months, eventually being kept in for 15 days. For perhaps the first time in years, I was forced to stop.

I'm not sure how much credit belongs to the morphine they had me on, but my imagination started running wild with film ideas.

Being stuck at home afterwards and unable to get out much left me with something I hadn't had for a very long time: space. I started pulling at some of those old creative threads, developing stories I'd been sitting on for years and finding a few completely new ones along the way.

I've wanted to make films since I was a little boy playing with my dad's camera, making movies with my two brothers using teddies and cardboard boxes.

Now I've studied film and had a delicious taste of the bittersweetness of life, I think I'm finally ready to put some of those stories into the world.

I'm not particularly interested in staying in one genre, format or style. Part of the joy of writing, for me, is its breadth. I want to explore different worlds, periods, characters and forms — to write something funny and something uncomfortable, something historical and something entirely invented. Film and television are a big part of that, but they aren't the boundary of it.

There is poetry too. That might take a little more confidence before I start putting it here, but it'll come.

One of my university film tutors once told us:

"If it's sat in a cupboard, a notebook or your head, it doesn't exist. Put it out there."

So this website is me finally taking his advice.

I'm doing it a year before I turn 40 — which is when life begins, right?