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The beautiful young newlywed, riding pillion on the Triumph 650 on an unlit A-road, laid her head on her husband’s shoulder as, on the black horizon, fireworks sprayed and fizzed in the November air. Elated, she sang a joyful song in his ear. Moments later, her life came to a violent, terrifying end.

Winding down country Lichfield lanes – on their way back to London from Liverpool – the pair had their whole lives ahead of them. Or at least, they should have done. 

They were about to literally cross paths with the man who would unwittingly prove my aunt’s killer, and whose identity – whose fame – I wouldn’t discover until 2021. 

Aged 21 in 1956, the young bride – married just months earlier – was wearing a three-quarter length orange-red jacket, borrowed without asking from her 19-year-old sister, who had yet to wear it herself, but who would not have minded; sharing each other’s clothes was normal. 

Bonfire night, the passenger was also sensible enough to be wearing a crash helmet, though little help it would prove to be. 

Her husband, riding the bike within the speed limit of around 30-40mph, moved unwittingly onto a scrappy road surface as he took a slight left-hand bend: a less well-maintained stretch of road, upon which rain still lay from earlier in the day, having evaporated on the previous, well-kept stretch of the lane. 

The sudden inevitable skid on the greasy surface turned into a near-90º uncontrollable slide. 

Sparks from the motorcycle’s metalwork as it gouged the road were as bright as the fireworks that popped in the dark sky. 

That was all the driver of the car heading in the opposite direction, on the correct side of the road, could see: a mobile Catherine wheel, hurtling towards him, with a strange single light shining from the middle.

The driver of the car swerved a little, but there was nowhere for him to go, as the object spraying sparks continued to move further onto his side of the road; the stretch of country lane had a hedgerow to the side, on the perimeter of farmland, so he had to be careful not to careen and perhaps flip it over into the fields. He also had no idea about what it was he was trying to avoid.

The woman who owned the coat was my mother. The woman on the back of the bike, which skidded into the oncoming car, was her elder sister. My aunt died instantaneously, albeit only after a few unimaginably terrifying seconds – how many were there? – as the bike skidded into oncoming traffic.

The man driving the car? Well, he was unknown at the time, despite having already achieved something monumental that, as its relevance only became clear to the world outside the science community decades later. He was a man who worked with Alan Turing, who quickly took advantage of the computer’s invention.

Until late 2021 I knew little of my aunt’s death.

My mum never mentioned it. She flipped out on me when, as a kid, I said I wanted a motorbike when I grew up; I had no idea why I got the reaction I did.

My nan and grandad, working-class Londoners – never mentioned it. My nan began the very slow process of drinking herself to death instead. Part of the silent generation, they said nothing. There was no therapy, just the numbing properties of alcohol. 

All I knew, when I was old enough to at least get some answers, is that it occurred in Lichfield, near Birmingham, sometime in the 1950s, and that my aunt’s husband survived the crash relatively unscathed.

I had an impression that it happened on a roundabout, which proved untrue, and that a lorry was involved, which was also untrue. My cousin thought it involved crashing through a shop window. 

Such was the pain, none of my family attended the coroner’s inquest. They didn’t want to know the details at the time, and so, three years ago, I was shocked to find relatively informative write-ups in archives of the local newspapers; even if the coroner’s files were sealed for a firm 75 years. 

The entire family had suspected my aunt’s husband – my uncle, I suppose, albeit I never met him – of speeding, because that’s what he did around the roads of London, where they lived. 

Then, a week after discovering many surprising details of the story on an online newspaper archive, I found something extremely surreal; the strange detail about the hitherto unknown driver that made the story so bizarre. 

A series of coincidences sprung up, in keeping with the novel (London Skies) I was writing.

The week after first reading the reports I’d been speaking to my family members, like my mum and her younger sisters (both now in their 80s) – still too sore to talk about it beyond a few minutes – to find out what details they could recall. 

At that point I was just trying to find out more about my aunt, and the events surrounding the fateful trip – which had been to see her brother-in-law, who worked as a policeman in Liverpool.

(Another weird coincidence: one of my favourite songs and videos from the late ‘80s was Julian Cope’s China Doll, which I recorded off ITV’s Chart Show and watched repeatedly. Pete de Freitas, drummer of fellow Liverpool band Echo and the Bunnymen, played the motorcycle-courier love interest in the video, but had died on his bike back in England soon after. So, while I was always aware that he’d died on his motorbike, I didn’t realise it was on the very same stretch of road, within a few hundred yards, as where my aunt’s life ended. In his case, however, it sounded like he had a death-wish and drove at great speed.)

That night in 1956, my mum and another of her sisters had returned from the cinema – having just seen the critically acclaimed film Picnic – to find the police at their house. Upstairs, my grandad’s head was slumped on the kitchen table, buried under a towel, as his newly deceased daughter’s mother-in-law said “I hope you’re not gonna blame my boy for this”. 

Of course, they did.

My aunt’s husband died thirty years later, in 1986, still a relatively young man himself. 

My grandparents died soon after him, in 1987 (my nan) and 1989 (my grandad), in horrible NHS-neglect related ways, never having forgiven him; in the absence of any kind of grief counselling at the time, and with no one able to even talk about it, my nan took the drink, and after 30 years, the drink took my nan. 

None of them were ever the same again. I was close to my grandparents (those on my father’s side died when I was too young to remember them), but looking back I only knew two people hollowed out by grief. It wasn’t that they were solemn the whole time, but you just don’t get over something like that. I didn’t even comprehend, as a kid, what it would be like to lose a child; you don’t, until you become a parent yourself. 

Now it seems, by all official accounts, my aunt’s husband was not speeding on that fateful night nearly 70 years ago. Knowing that would not have eased their grief, just some of the anger.  

The unfortunate man driving the oncoming car on that Lichfield lane was not at that point considered notable. I had no assumptions about him; concluding, as you would, that it was just some utterly random member of the public, like my aunt herself.  

Even then, seeing his name in the paper meant nothing to me. I’d never heard of him, or even anyone with his surname. 

It was a week before I even thought of googling him, to perhaps, at best, find some family on Facebook. I wanted to ask some questions, about what happened. See if they knew anything. 

The results that popped up took me by surprise, to say the least.

He just happened to be the man who, along with two others, essentially invented something now inherent to every single PC. He had been a co-creator of the world’s first electronic stored-program computer. 

This was achieved in 1948, soon after World War II. Alan Turing had relocated to Manchester, to join the man, to work on the machine that he’d helped inspire. 

The man, alas, died just seven years ago, aged 95. Had he been ten years younger at the time of the accident, or had I discovered the information a decade earlier, I may have been able to ask some questions, were he open to revisiting what must have been a great trauma to him, too. 

At the time of the accident, that computer scientist was a mere “civil servant”, according to the newspaper report on the inquest. He had been driving north when the bike left the correct side of the road and skidded under the wheels of his oncoming Standard Vanguard estate car. 

That car was driven by a man in his 30s: one “Geoffrey Tootill of Farnborough”, according to The Lichfield Mercury writeup of the coroner’s inquest, which agreed that Tootill was also travelling at an acceptable 30-40mph, on the correct side of the road. 

Aside from adding that Tootill was a civil servant, and giving the exact address where he lived, there were no more details about him.  

Yet eight years before the fatal accident, Tootill had been one of three men – along with Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn – to create the Manchester Baby, and then work on the Ferranti Mark 1, “the world's first commercially available electronic general-purpose stored program digital computer,” which followed. 

Googling Tootill, the first two results were his lengthy Wikipedia page and a large Times’ obituary. It said he worked as civil servant in Farnborough. 

None of my family were allowed to see my aunt at the hospital or morgue, given the extent of her injuries. None attended the inquest, the details of which, I discovered, will finally be fully unsealed in just a few years’ time. Will there be any further details of the events listed? 

Do I want to know them?

I do of course.

(And then I may wish I didn’t.)

Also, did Geoffrey Tootill tell his family about the crash, with his three sons all aged under ten at the time? 

The accident was not mentioned in his obituaries or on his Wikipedia page, or anywhere else since the newspaper articles in the 1950s; albeit it’s not exactly a crowning achievement to crow about, even if, without doubt, no blame can be put at his door. 

But did anyone ever put this together? 

(I reached out to his sons via Facebook in 2021, for comment, but received no replies. I don’t think I’d have written this had their father still been alive and refused to speak about it.)

I recently read a book on the history of British computing, Electronic Dreams by Tom Lean, in order to reminisce about my days as a ZX Spectrum addict.

(When I should have been doing my O’levels in the mid-‘80s I mostly bunked off from the rough comprehensive school, and wrote a terrible computer game, that got a couple of kind-on-the-kid reviews. I ended up failing all my exams – the ones I turned up to – bar Art.)

The first chapter in that book deals with Tootill and his colleagues, working on the Baby. Tootill is frequently quoted. 

It’s just so strange to me that in 1956 Tootill was unknown; like other computer scientists of his time, his achievements were arcane, and not part of daily life. Had he been well known, it would have surely been a big story, instead of a few paragraphs in the local news.

But it was definitely him; he started working in Farnborough in 1956, according to his Wikipedia page. There can’t have been many Geoffrey Tootills in England, let alone in their 30s, living in Farnborough that very year, working as a civil servant. 

I'd loved to have asked him some questions, not that it could have been a pleasant memory, standing over the body of the woman he’d just accidentally killed; a woman who, the coroner noted, suffered lacerations of the brain, despite her crash helmet. 

Maybe he never spoke of it again, just like my nan and grandad, and for most of the time, my mum, who still, nearer to the end of her own life, cannot bear to talk about it for more than a minute or two.

The details of the crash also provided some very strange coincidences with the novel (now published) that I had been writing since 2015, and which itself was based on something I started researching way back in 2004, a year before my sportswriting career took off. 

It is a novel that involves coincidences over the generations, and its writing also proved full of them. 

Part of the novel is set in 1956, and involves an air-crash investigator. 

Called Geoffrey. Based in Farnborough. 

I’d created this character in 2015, six years before discovering the family story.

As I noted in a post about the book, I was inspired by a misunderstanding of my father fixing planes at Heathrow; instead, he was a mere sheetmetal worker (who patched up the metal on planes). 

I grew up in Hayes on the outskirts of West London, in the literal shadow of the EMI factory, and aviation was a big part of my childhood; not flying (I didn’t do that until I was 20), just being close to aircraft.

The coincidence of Geoffrey, working at Farnborough, seemed incredible.

According to the Guardian’s obituary,

“in the mid-1950s he leapt at the offer of a research position from Stuart Hollingdale, head of the mathematics division at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough.”

(He also worked on radar during the war, in Malvern, where the Tomkins’ clan originally hails from, traceable back to at least the 1850s. I went there in 2016 to see the road where my ancestors used to live; instead, the road has gone, and it’s now all modern houses.)

My grandparents also nearly lost a second daughter – my mum – in the 1960s. Less than a dozen years later had their home, which my granddad, as a labourer, had bought and spent years restoring after major bomb damage (my mum’s school was also bombed … but on a Saturday), compulsorily purchased by the local government, to knock down and build a vital road. A townhouse, he made it a home for the the seven in the family and rented out the top floor. (My granddad was also the youngest of seventeen.)

My granddad smelt a rat. No road would be built, he protested. They were given what equates to £40,000 in current day money (a few thousand back in the 1970s), and today the townhouse – still there, of course – is part of a newly gentrified Peckham, and split into three flats, worth a combined £1m.

What little money my grandparents had left was used up on nursing homes in the final horrible years of their lives, after suffering a combined leg break, hip dislocation and leg amputation (due to gangrene from not getting any physio after a stroke) whilst already in overcrowded and understaffed hospitals.

(My other grandparents only ever rented, on a railway estate, and died when I was young, so there’s no generational wealth; so much for privilege, etc.)

I’d also known from childhood that my mum also died, before I was born; as such, I’m lucky to be here. Again, only in 2021 did I find out the actual details.

The other major coincidence is that, back in 2004, I had started researching the work of Sir Archibald McIndoe, and his work at East Grinstead in the early 1940s, where, as the country’s preeminent plastic surgeon, the New Zealander developed various incredible techniques to rebuild the faces of burned and broken pilots.

I planned to use it in a novel I ended up abandoning, but reworked part of it for London Skies.

(Brief relevant excerpt below, before article continues.)

1941

Countless blurs of war: memories merged, condensed, concertinaed. Time distorted in both directions in reminiscence, with mere moments living long in the mind and entire weeks lost to the spark of synapses, as if the wiring to a vacuum-tube computation machine frayed and severed, all inputs lost.

In hindsight, East Grinstead, for Charlotte, seeped into an indistinct cloud of several visits, in the half-year between Viktor’s transfer from Brighton and his eventual summer discharge. Icy lawns soon gave way to spring’s banks of daffodils, which themselves wilted in the shade of the budding blooms of buttercups and primrose and bluebells, as summer silently snuck in.

In his midst –– surrounded by the wonders of nature –– were many of the worst burns cases in the country, with airmen at various stages of reconfiguration and restoration and rehabilitation, via pioneering plastic surgery. Like the daffodils, some would quickly die, to be replaced by a more hopeful patient in the assigned plot; a bed, too, in which to flourish or wither. 

Charlotte thought she had seen the worst the war could do, but the sights at East Grinstead haunted in a new way. These were patients who, in truth, should not have been alive; a slightly Frankensteinian air of life sparked into deceased flesh, as rapid advances in medicine restored the hitherto too-far-gone.

Men, cursed with crooked smiles and rubbery yellow faces, beset by the droop and list of savage palsies; eyebrows singed away, scabrous scalps where hair had once grown. Men, without eyelids, gazes permanently set to the widest-eyed stare, that left them appearing constantly alarmed, even when smiling. Men, noses as long and pointed as the dishonest Pinocchio, but made of flesh, not wood. Men –– burnt and blistered, patched and plastered –– with the probosces of Bornean monkeys, fat and thick and surreal beneath their eyes. And strangest of all, men, with the trunks of elephants, hanging from the centre of their warped faces, with the tips –– the spouts –– sewn tight to their forearms. 

Cheating Death

I hadn’t known that, during the 1966 World Cup – the final of which my dad attended at Wembley (I still have his batch of tickets for all the games, found in his possessions when he died in 2011) – my mum was in traction at East Grinstead, after a near fatal car crash.

As with her sister’s death, it wasn’t something that got spoken about a lot. 

She and my dad were no longer together at that point, and she was on a first date with another man (weirdly, an air steward). He impatiently and recklessly overtook some slow traffic in Croydon and went straight into an oncoming car. 

(Another coincidence: Croydon was where I eventually studied at the art college, and lived for three years in the early ‘90s, again without knowing my mum’s crash was there. I would have driven through the same junction countless times with no idea.)

My mum wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, but had one arm crooked behind the seat. Knocked unconscious, she suffered a broken cheekbone, nose, jaw, arm and two broken bones in her back, amongst other injuries, and required several operations and skin grafts. She spent six weeks in East Grinstead, her faced clamped up like the character in the novel I was writing. 

With her sister having died wearing her jacket a decade earlier, she felt, even as an atheist, that she was being punished for something. 

As with her sister, the man driving walked away from the crash, and my grandparents, having lost their eldest daughter, were put through the stress and strain of worrying that they might lose their second-eldest. 

Upon waking in their presence, my mum couldn’t stop apologising to them. 

The air steward brought my mum some flowers (the de facto gift, clearly, for someone you nearly just killed), but thankfully she never saw him again.

My dad also sent flowers, given that the two had dated in the past, and they eventually got back together, without which you’d be reading something else right now.

The compensation from the crash meant that, a couple of years later, she and my dad could marry and buy a house, right next to the rough estate, instead of in the rough estate, possibly only renting. 

I don’t know if generational trauma is passed down in any genetic way, but my dad’s dad spent three years in the Somme in WWI, and returned a shell of a man, before my dad came along a decade later. My maternal grandparents and my mum had the trauma of the death of the eldest daughter, and my mum had the near-fatal car crash.

During her pregnancy with me, my mum couldn’t eat much at all (bar wheaty cereal), and I was born with asthma, eczema, various allergies, and an immune system that probably contributed to my 30 years of chronic illness.

(It used to be a given that the greatest privilege you could have is your health; it’s priceless.)

My mum was ‘lucky’, in a roundabout way. My aunt, less so.

And so I click ‘save’ on this article, and it stores neatly and reliably on my computer hard drive.

Thank you, Mr Tootill, Sir. 

London Skies

“A Remarkable literary novel.

A gorgeously written, evocative saga that beautifully explores the enduring impact of fate and coincidence on our lives. 

... An utterly compelling literary tale that lingers long after the final page is turned.”

The Prairies Book Review

“An admirably ambitious … and beautifully told story of intersecting lives and histories. Poetic and beautiful prose. The connections across space and time are what really spark and make the novel fly.”

Kirkus Reviews 

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“An admirably ambitious … and beautifully told story of intersecting lives and histories….”

"Poetic and beautiful prose … The connections across space and time are what really spark and make the novel fly.”

Kirkus Reviews

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Coincidentally…

A series of very weird coincidences surrounded the writing of my second novel, London Skies, which itself centres around some strange coincidences.

Sometimes, truth is indeed stranger than fiction – but let me explain some of the fiction too.

While the novel is in no way autobiographical in terms of story (albeit it relates to feelings and situations I could connect with, and deals in what I can relate to), it is definitely geographically autobiographical.

And some of the interconnected stories were inspired by things I grew up around.

Though I had little interest in his job at the time, all I knew as a child was that my father ‘fixed’ planes at Heathrow Airport. I didn’t realise that he was merely a mid-skilled metalworker, patching up sheetmetal, and nothing more exotic.

(That said, he worked the cabaret scene for 50 years on weekends – up until his late 70s – and some weeknights as an impressionist, under the stage name Tommy James; and appeared on ITV’s ‘New Faces’ in the 1970s – doing okay on the show, but put off his stride by being asked to drop the best part of his act – Ken Dodd – minutes before taking the stage.)

I loved aircraft and helicopters. There used to be a heliport just beyond the railway tracks behind our house; and planes from Heathrow would fly overhead, albeit we weren’t in the direct flightpath for takeoffs and landings. From our school window, on the Bath Road, we could see one of the runways.

My friends and I, when we weren’t playing football, used to go to the viewing gallery in the Queen’s Building aged 10-12, as eager plane-spotters; a grotty place, by the 1980s, that I was surprised to discover (like all things) had once been shiny and new.

While not a glamorous hobby, we obviously saw as massively superior to the dowdy train-spotting, albeit that term got jazzed up a decade or two later.

(Maybe London Skies should have been called Planespotting? But it might have implied more drug taking, whereas most of our highs were due to kilos of Cherry Bonbons.)

I remember being jealous and feeling excluded when my friend Jason, small and blonde, was asked by an older man to join him on a trip to the Biggin Hill Airshow. Why was Jason considered the better plane-spotter, I wondered, with wonderful naivety?

Neither of us went to Biggin Hill, but the man did eventually go to jail.

As a family we never made use of the free flights British Airways afforded us, albeit years later I did fly to places like Mexico, Spain and the Canary Islands as a student on free or cheap standby flights. (I never flew until I was 20.)

My mum, no stranger to tragedy, had grown terrified of flying. She’d flown a few times in the late 1950s on her bank clerk’s salary (to places like the Portugal and Spain with her friends), as one of only four people in her inner city London school to do a maths O’ level (they all failed). But once she had children, which itself followed a near-fatal car crash in 1966, she never flew again for almost 40 years (under heavy sedation!).

Even that car crash ended up having a weird connection to London Skies, as the more I researched, the more coincidences I found.

The incorrect idea that my dad somehow fixed broken planes stuck with me, and was a partial inspiration for the character, Geoffrey; only with far more expertise.

I’d already researched a lot about WWII over the years, and wanted to expand on some chapters I’d written 20 years ago (for another novel that I’d started and abandoned), which centred around the diary of a young RAF nurse.

The flying theme fit in with the new novel, and my fascination with the glamorous modernising of London Airport in the 1950s, before it became Heathrow.

I’d always liked Charlotte’s diary, but could never make use of what I had.

For London Skies I revisited it, and expanded it in many new ways. Her character, now mostly third-person and more idiosyncratic than I’d originally drawn her, is at the heart of the story (albeit someone else suggested the allegory of Charlotte’s Web, which never occurred to me).

In April 2015, inspired by Sigur Ros’ beautiful musical film Heima, which I fell in love with in 2007, I went to Iceland for a week, to do some research (and meet some online friends), as the shutdown of aviation in 2010 due to the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull gave a good way to connect to what I was writing.

That said, my illness kicking my arse meant I had to cancel half my itinerary.

Still, I got to see a few places, and, with my camera, spent time in two different main locations; and, having had to cancel my trip to a glacier, two of my readers kindly drove me all around the Golden Circle, and then on to the edge of a glacier.

So, 2015 was when work properly started on the novel, albeit I mostly wrote it in bursts of a month or two here or there, over the next nine years.

Where it wasn’t geographically autobiographical, such as with Iceland, I went there to research.

Indeed, I wanted to do something ambitious; to do so because it was hard, not because it was easy.

I also realised that I wanted to write about Hayes in Middlesex, the then-bleak town I hated growing up in, but which, looking back, was fascinating in its unique industrial way; with Heathrow on the doorstep, too, along with key locations for the Battle of Britain (RAF Uxbridge, Northolt) and the massive EMI vinyl factory on my doorstep for my entire childhood, where stereo sound was first recorded, and where Beatles records were pressed.

Indeed, having just this week read David Hepworth’s A Fabulous Creation: How the LP Saved Our Lives it made me recall that I was originally going have Stanley working at EMI.

Roy Matthews was born into the record business. He came from Hayes in Middlesex, in the days when that was a company town. His mother, like most people in Hayes, worked for EMI. “We had no electricity in the house until I left school. We lived on a big estate. We didn't have a radio. Radio came via a cable system. When I started at EMI I was working on 78 presses. At that time we were moving over to 45 rpm singles and 33 rpm LPs. I was trained as an engineer. I could just as easily have been working with pots and pans. I was lucky to be working on something so alive. I had a little while away and then came back in 1967 as General Manager of the factory. At that time we had over eight hundred people there. The factory was running twenty-four hours a day five days a week. We had a hundred men working the presses. They were all men. It was heavy manual work. We were preparing the plastic which was specially mixed on site. We had our own chemists. We even had ink manufacturers working for us. You couldn't use just any paper for the labels. Everything had to be done specially. It was all done by hand at first. During my time there we grew from producing 50,000 LPs a day to 250,000 a day.”

As often seems to be the case, I had no idea about half of the history of the town I grew up in, and the stories behind what I simply saw as normal and ‘everyday’; albeit I did know that George Orwell taught in Hayes in the 1930s (and thought the place was a shithole, basically).

I also found out only after he died over a decade ago that my father spent a year at Fairey Aviation in Hayes. Fairey was long-gone before I came along. I didn’t even know about the Fairey Rotodyne before I started researching London Skies, but in the end I wished I’d travelled in one. There’s a tragedy there, about a project, not a disaster. I wish I’d be able to ask my dad about stuff like that, but often it’s only when your parents are gone that you think of the best questions.

From ages 16-20 I worked as an office cleaner after school, and later after college (before upgrading to a security guard at Blockbuster Video’s European HQ*), at various buildings (mainly Safeways HQ, adjacent to the EMI vinyl factory), and one of those was Mercury House, which I didn’t know had been part of the Fairey office complex.

(* One lazy Sunday morning in 1991 a northern man wearing only bright red underpants ran to the front desk. Someone was breaking in around the back, he said, having dashed from his HGV cab, with drivers using the industrial estate to park overnight. With my trusty clip-on tie I ran around the back accompanied by the man in the tiny-reddies, only to see that, rather than break into the huge warehouse, they’d broken into the gardener’s tool shed and stolen his lawnmower. Looking back, I’m not sure why I ran anywhere for £3 an hour. On another job for the same security company I spent the night in a needle-strewn abandoned house which squatters had trashed, with no electricity, and reading Ian McEwan’s discomforting The Comfort of Strangers by the light from the streetlight and the moon. When my 8am replacement hadn’t turned up by 10am I knocked on a neighbour’s door to ask to use his phone. It turned out to be Johnny Speight, creator of Alf Garnett, who became Archie Bunker in the US. He let me use his phone. As another connection, my dad had done an impression of Alf Garnett on TV in 1976, and is the middle-left frame on his promotional material.)

I also didn’t know that Fairey’s wartime airstrip was in a small village called ... Heath Row, and that they lost the valuable land to the government as a wartime requisition (whatever became of Heath Row? Perhaps we shall never know.)

My original idea for the Charlotte, going back to 2004, centred around the facial reconstruction work at the Queen Victoria hospital in East Grinstead, pioneered during the war by Sir Archibald McIndoe; fixing the faces, and more, of broken airmen. I’d just seen a BBC documentary about what was termed the Guinea Pig club by the men having their faces rebuilt.

At that point I had no idea that this was the very place where, 25 years after the WWII pioneering (starting during the 1966 World Cup), my mother would spend months in the very same Queen Victoria after a near-fatal car crash that left her with a broken back, jaw, cheekbone, arm, leg, and all manner of other injuries.

It never occurred to me she’d be there, down towards Brighton, as I assumed the accident happened in London. But it turns out the accident happened in Croydon, albeit I didn’t even know that when, in 1991, I went to do a degree in graphic design in Croydon, travelling back to do my weekend shift at Blockbusters’ HQ in Uxbridge.

I also only even more recently discovered that the insurance payout, via the negligent driver, amounted to a couple of thousand pounds. In the ‘60s this paid for a good chunk of the house I grew up in, adjacent to some fairly rough council estates – and no longer in the nearby railway estate where they were living with my grandparents. But for that money, we’d never have lived in a nice enough end-terraced three-bed house adjacent to the druggy flats at the end of the road (albeit next to a rowdy pub), but probably in them. While we remained working-class – I was the first in the entire family to go to higher education – it was less squalid than it might have been.

Even more weirdly, I’d created a character called Geoffrey for the novel, who worked in Farnborough in 1956. In 2021 I signed up for newspaper archive site to research aspects of 1950s life, and while searching, did some digging on my family history, and ... discovered a Geoffrey connected to Farnborough who had greatly impacted my family’s life before I was born, which will be article all of its own.

(The reason I didn’t know any of this was, in part, that it was one of those tragedies no one of that time ever spoke of, like the silent generation after the war.)

It all showed the weird coincidences that can pop up, and how lives intertwine; and that proved the point of what I was writing, and the connections that exist, even if we can’t always see them.

In my mid-20s, despite some clear health problems emerging, I played as a semi-pro footballer for Harefield United (Middlesex’s oldest club, established in 1868), near to the pioneering heart hospital.

Again, that had a far more interesting wartime backstory, before the heart replacement specialisation, than I could have imagined, and which proved inspirational for London Skies.

I never ended up in Harefield Hospital, but I had a fair few trips to Hillingdon Hospital (broken leg, broken arm, various asthma attacks, and seeing all manner of specialists as a kid).

For a place I hated at the time, it turned out that Hayes has a lot of interesting history. As for Iceland, I’d love to return one day, but it’s now five years since I last flew anywhere – and the turbulence on that 2019 flight was so terrifying even the cabin crew said it’s as bas as they’ve known. I wasn’t scared of flying – but I think I am now.

London Skies can be bought via all Amazon outlets, in Kindle, hardback and paperback formats, subject to availability. (Search if you’re not in the UK or US.)

Click Here To Buy (UK)

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*A version of this article was originally published in November 2014, on my old website. I have updated it where appropriate in 2024, albeit with only a few minor additions.*

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It is torture, of a kind. The unrelenting jab of needles into the spine. The vice clamped to the temples and tightened. The syringes slowly draining blood from the thighs, injecting concrete into the calves. Poison swelling in the stomach, pumping to the veins, tying knots in the guts.

You shake, but not in terror. Even the twilight is too bright. Movement sets flotsam and jetsam tumbling about the head; simply sitting up can be a struggle – postural hypertension sending you giddy. Sights and sounds take longer to travel to the brain, the neural pathways fogged and furred with white noise and static. You are death, ever so slightly warmed up.

This is M.E. as I sometimes experience it, and I’m not one of those acutely affected. I only occasionally feel this ill – usually after any kind of socialising or travelling, or perhaps following a sleepless night – but for some people this is a daily occurrence; indeed, for many it’s a lot more severe and unrelenting. I’m relatively lucky, in the way that a man who has lost one leg is luckier than a man who has lost two.

The symptoms – or sensations – outlined above are some of those I experience when at my worst, but at my best I can walk the dog over relatively short distances, and resemble a normal, fully-functioning human being, so long as I’m not asked to do anything that involves strength and stamina, or standing up for too long. When I’m well enough to be out, I look well enough, full stop. But I’m often somewhere in between the two extremes. I rarely feel good, but sometimes I’ll notice an absence of aches, pains and fatigue.

M.E. is a complex condition with many varied symptoms. A recent statement [back in 2014] from the Stanford University School of Medicine said of the illness:

“Its symptoms often include not only overwhelming fatigue but also joint and muscle pain, incapacitating headaches, food intolerance, sore throat, enlargement of the lymph nodes, gastrointestinal problems, abnormal blood-pressure and heart-rate events, and hypersensitivity to light, noise or other sensations.”

The unpredictability of the condition – which always strikes after exertion, but sometimes flares up for no apparent reason – makes life hard to navigate. It messes with your mind, blowing hot and cold; giving hope and then withdrawing it. You think you might be getting better, but you’re simply having a good day. You fear you might be getting worse, and suddenly it’s hard to remember what a good day feels like.

Conversely, on your good days you forget what it’s like to be ill – so you push things, just a little – and then it returns, and you kick yourself for blocking out the suffering; like a woman forcing out a second baby, having screamed Never again! during the birthing of the first.

And this is just me; not someone who is bed-bound or only able to get about with someone pushing the wheelchair.

Lapsed

Much to my frustration, I don’t know how I became ill. For some people M.E. hits them like a speeding train at a level crossing. One day they’re fine, the next they are wiped out.

Mine, however, approached more stealthily, like a carbon monoxide leak: the slow, insidious creep, spreading over me in imperceptible increments, until, after a number of years, I found myself faded and foggy.

For the longest time I knew that something wasn’t right, but neither I nor a number of physicians could put their finger on it. Still only in my mid-20s in the mid-‘90s, I was far more tired than I should have been for someone so athletic; had more muscle aches and head pains than anyone I knew; had a sleep pattern that had gone haywire; and, to my horror, experienced rapid hair loss (although it transpired that that was merely the onset of male pattern baldness).

When did the problems start?

Well, I was born with clear immunological issues. I had asthma, eczema and various allergies, none of which, as a baby, were put down to my imagination. (I more recently discovered that all my mother could keep down during the pregnancy was milky cereal. So I wasn’t developing on a balanced diet!)

Playing sport several times a day throughout my childhood kept me fit and healthy – if occasionally reaching for the inhaler (in the days before it hospitalised me) – but I recall lethargic spells, and according to later blood tests, it seems that at some point I had an undiagnosed bout of glandular fever.

I spent my teens and early twenties being fed course after course of antibiotics; at a conservative guess I’d say 50-70 different prescriptions, some for tonsillitis, some for chest infections, some for sinus infections, but many for what were probably just heavy colds and upper respiratory tract viruses, and therefore not treatable by the various ‘cillins’ eagerly pushed my way. I’ve probably had just two courses in the last 10 years, but I fear the damage was already done.

There’s only one single event I can recall that might have been a trigger. In December 1990, at the age of 19 and living in a new student flat (after several months in a manky one with mould on the walls), I awoke at 3am with an asthma attack so severe I couldn’t breathe; as hard as I tried, and without a hint of exaggeration, I felt that I was getting no more than 1% of my normal oxygen intake (try sucking on a blocked straw for a vague analogy).

My flatmates, awoken by my panic, rushed me to the nearby Derby Infirmary, where I was nebulised, given oxygen and intravenously administered steroids. I recovered, but only after a serious chest infection. I sometimes wonder if this was a contributing factor.

By the time I was in my early 20s I started struggling after playing sport, but could still take part.

Weirdly, I noticed that my vision was much worse on the days when I had less than eight hours sleep or felt fatigued (and eye-muscle problems are also symptomatic of M.E.). Around this time I found that I could no longer tolerate alcohol – I wouldn’t feel drunk, just strangely ‘foggy’ after half a pint, as if slipped a Mickey.

I spent some time in my mid-20s as a semi-professional footballer, but could never quite get as fit as I felt I should be – as fit as I remember being – and between games I felt horribly lethargic, to the point where I was unable to train properly.

Often I felt ill for 48-72 hours after a game, which included a three or four hour sleep within an hour or two of the final whistle. However, if I missed midweek training I felt less ill on the morning of match-days, but this was clearly not sustainable in terms of my general fitness. Needing to drink two Red Bulls in order to play football at the age of 25 was not a good sign. Within three years I’d have kicked my last football, at the age of 28.

Over the past decade and a half I’ve given up, in stages, most of the things I enjoy, because the payback isn’t worth it. With every passing year I am able to spend less time at the computer, writing, before my head fogs up and my eyesight blurs. But at the same time, the distraction helps keep me sane, and it pays the bills.

By comparison with some I am lucky, but I have become fairly reclusive, and definitely feel isolated. I work alone, from home (albeit running a website with a great community).

It’s tough to maintain a social life and keep up with friends; while relationships, as well as being rewarding, can also be draining and doubly difficult.

If I do a few hours’ work during the day I’m usually barely functioning by 6pm. If I ever want to go out in the evening, which is rare, I have to keep away from a computer and spend the day resting. Indeed, I feel analogous to my faulty iPhone 5 [the same now applies to my iPhone 13], which needs several charges a day. It can do the basics okay, but try anything that requires proper processing power and the ‘I need electricity’ warning appears.

With M.E., everything has to be planned; to be spontaneous is to jump from a plane without a parachute, eyes blindfolded, and with no idea when the impact will occur. The crash will come, sooner or later. (Probably sooner.) You’ll be spreadeagled on a bed again before you know it.

For those who are severely affected, just getting to the toilet can represent a true daily achievement. No one chooses to have this life. None of us are happy existing like this, because none of us are lazy or lovers of pain.

[Some people with M.E., or claiming to have it, may be seeking attention, but most ‘spoonies’ are not the high-visibility online trouble-makers and unhinged social media posters – of which any group of people has its share – but lost in their dark rooms, for months on end. Also, if you post a picture of yourself ‘looking’ healthy, people think you must be fine. If you post a picture of yourself looking like death warmed up, it presents a kind of aesthetic that I sense people see as self-pitying, as otherwise who the hell would share stuff like that? You can’t win either way.]

Serious M.E. is suffered by people alone at night, their body clocks set to a far-flung timezone. They sleep fitfully, or not at all, and then lapse into unrefreshing daytime slumbers punctuated by fugue states.

It is a ghostly illness, all but invisible to the eye, and eager to turn skin to an equally spectral shade due to lack of sunlight. It takes healthy, active people – almost always those with great drive and motivation – and plants them as bed-potatoes. They themselves become ghosts, seen only by those who enter rooms darkened with blackout blinds. These are the lost people, obscured in the shadows. They feel helpless, hopeless and depressed.

And while my condition is not as serious as many sufferers I know of, it’s still very dispiriting. On my bad days, I get to see what it’s like, before I click bad into the mid-zone.

Indeed, it’s depressing. But we are not merely depressed, with some people thinking that’s all it is; we simply have a natural reaction to frequently feeling awful, and get understandably low from giving up most of the things we enjoy (and in return, benefiting from none of the natural highs of endorphins and other brain chemicals).

I would give up my career as a writer in a heartbeat to play football again (the one activity in which I’d totally lose myself), or do more energetic pastimes with my son, or to visit my family in Australia. But at least I am not totally housebound, or worse, bed-bound.

[Now that I’m nearly 53, the idea of trading everything to play football again is less pressing – but it would still be nice to try.]

We’re not lacking energy and motivation because we’re depressed; we’re depressed because even the basics can be a drain.

Our condition doesn’t go away when we are happy, or on those occasions when we’re able to have fun. And yet obviously anything in life seems a little easier if it’s enjoyable. Adrenaline will get us through on certain occasions, but the bigger the rush the worse we feel afterwards.

With inactivity our bodies grow deconditioned, but the alternative – to exercise, even gradually, to a set activity plan – is painful, and often leads to exacerbated symptoms. I began such a plan in the autumn of 2013, but more than a year on I’m not sure it has helped. I’ve had a few days when I was certain it was of benefit, and plenty more when it felt like a grave mistake. Overall I feel ambivalent about it.

Over time I managed to incrementally increase activity, convinced that I would get better, but it led to a worsening of pain and headaches, less refreshing sleep, and a return to the constant sore throats I had when I was younger.

Every forward step in getting fitter – and I did feel some improvement in that sense – led straight to an immediate backwards step. I was getting fitter, but paradoxically felt more ill. It felt akin to doing fitness training in a gym next to chemical factory that has sprung a leak; the muscles and stamina improve, but the skin burns and the lungs inflame.

[And it wasn’t a case of feeling the burn or the pain, to get the gain; as an ex-sportsman I know that feeling. It’s nowhere near as pleasant as post-workout ‘pains’.]

To ease off the activity plan is to lose conditioning once again, and with a loss of conditioning come symptoms similar to those of M.E. – and the vicious circle is complete.

If you – the healthy reader – do nothing but lie in bed for a month you will feel like we do, grow weak like us. Just look at the astronauts returning from months on the international space station, and how they’re too weak to walk. They have to be carried from the return module like newborn babies. But if, like them, you try to get better, you will. We won’t. We know, because we’ve tried.

[Ten years on, I haven’t continued with graded exercise as I hit a wall in 2014, and could not get past it. But I try to pace myself better. I’m older and wiser, but nothing I’ve tried in the past ten years has helped, beyond switching to breathing through my nose only, which I began doing a few years ago after reading Breath by James Nestor, and that raised my ceiling by about 10%, but then that became my new limit.]

If, as a sufferer of M.E., you can avoid stress, depression, anxiety, poor dietary habits, late nights, alcohol and overexertion then you might fare relatively well. But how do you live without those pressures? Preparing healthy food takes more energy than zapping a microwave meal. If you work you will suffer from stress, and if you don’t work you will have no money, and suffer from stress.

The last time I tried to claim Incapacity Benefit I was asked to touch my toes, and reach into the air. Could I walk 400 yards? And finally, could I climb a single set of stairs?

Such simple questions proved I was entirely fit to work, and the benefits were denied. Which would be great, if a day’s work was as simple as touching my toes, reaching into the air, climbing one set of stairs and then walking 400 yards.

Since then I’ve managed to make a living as a writer, but only by working for myself, at my own pace; and even then it took many years to make it pay.

But running your own business is stressful, and while I am able to control some aspects of my work output, I can’t escape a lot of the difficulties that come with the territory. It also doesn’t help that I’m a creative ‘obsessive’, in that I need to be doing things with my brain otherwise I don’t feel like I’m actually existing. Writing a novel has helped me retain some motivation, as well as providing some catharsis through art, but it has come at a cost.

[It took me ten years to finish writing a second novel! Albeit I wrote a few other books in that time.]

At times I feel like a cardboard man propped up by strong coffee, but its power to revive wanes with each subsequent morning, and before long it just brings tremors and headaches, and zero boost.

In the days leading up to some social activity I’ll lower my intake, and spend the time resting (albeit with a guaranteed migraine); and then reintroduce the caffeine to boost my way through the event, along with natural adrenaline. But in general it gets harder. I’m not in my 20s anymore. [I’m not in my 40s anymore.]

At times it’s easy to forget that ‘normal’ people feel tired too, although, of course, they often like to remind you.

The key is the word chronic in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (although we don’t tend t like that name as the illness is not just about tiredness).

No one says to someone with arthritis, “Yeah, but I also get aches and pains.” Everybody gets aches and pains. That doesn’t mean they have a chronic condition. Everybody gets headaches, but that doesn’t mean they have something seriously wrong. No one says “I get headaches too” to someone with a brain tumour. People with M.E. get tired, and get headaches, and have a lot of pain, and their experience of them is frequent and ongoing.

None of this is written as a plea for pity; merely a request for some understanding of perhaps the most misunderstood of all illnesses.

There are people far more acutely affected than me; many of them with other illnesses, but also many with a horribly debilitating severity of M.E..

But they’re often not able to write about their plight, perhaps because they’re too poorly, or not a wordsmith, or simply have no platform on which to tell their story. I can share a taster of what it’s like, but unless you are feeling the same symptoms at the exact same time, it can be difficult for anyone to appreciate what someone else is going through.

How do you imagine a pain greater than you’ve ever experienced, or a torment wilder than your own mind has endured? I’m not sure that you can. But it never hurts to try.

Postscript

A lot has happened in terms of research into M.E., along with the advent of both Covid and Long Covid.

There are innumerable studies showing the science behind M.E., but no overarching diagnosis or treatment as yet, as all these studies await the joining up it requires.

A 2014 medical article on M.E stated some science that still seems to hold true:

“Studies on metabolism and CFS [M.E.] suggest irregularities in energy metabolism, amino acid metabolism, nucleotide metabolism, nitrogen metabolism, hormone metabolism, and oxidative stress metabolism. The overwhelming body of evidence suggests an oxidative environment with the minimal utilisation of mitochondria for efficient energy production. This is coupled with a reduced excretion of amino acids and nitrogen in general.”

I’ve given up any hope of being cured, and that’s fine. Studies have shown that those who are given life sentences with no chance of parole are more content than those with an outside chance; and those who have to use colostomy bags for the rest of their lives accept it more than those who hope to one day be free of it.

A cure or treatment would be incredible, but I just don’t dare dream of it. One day it might prove a wonderful surprise.

NOTE: I’m not allowing comments on this Substack in order to keep life simple!

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I created this personal Substack a while ago, to replace my old personal WordPress website (R.I.P.) and to coincide with the launch of my second novel, London Skies; but life got in the way.

As you may have noticed, I don’t really use social media anymore, other than to occasionally post links and share updates, but I feel a kind of icky nausea when on any of the sites, for various reasons.

Despite nearly 100,000 Twitter/X followers, any Substack content I share on there is essentially shadow-banned since things got Musky, and I don’t tend to post the kind of engaging/inflammatory stuff that gets clicks – and so my accounts on all platforms don’t generate the heat on which the algorithms thrive.

It’s also depressing when, occasionally driven to rage-tweet, it goes viral, but anything considered, or article links, are like tumbleweed.

I try to stay logged out of all social media, as it’s so full of rage, bullshit, bad-faith takes, and ever-extreme views, that seems like an assault on the senses. Plus, obviously I always used to get a lot of abuse on Twitter, including the regulation death threats and accusations of being every kind of unpleasant type of person imaginable, and the cons ended up outweighing the pros.

Then there’s just the weight of replies, and feeling bad if I don’t check in with people who have gone out of their way to respond. I just don’t have the time or the energy, nor the desire to wade through the bile, nonsense and ignorance that clutters the good stuff.

And sometimes even seeing the nicer news or photos, on Facebook or Instagram, leads to FOMO; I’m not entirely housebound but I do spend most of my time at home, indoors, and most evenings are spent in/on bed with music, podcasts and audiobooks.

If I have plans for the evening, which is rare, I rest during the day.

Life getting in the way also included new medical diagnoses, to go along with my longstanding M.E. and more run-of-the-mill ailments (I was born with a compromised immune system), to now include the discovery of congenitally deformed lumbar vertebra, whose existence came home to roost in middle age; with the MRI detecting fractures on both sides (bilateral pars defects, aka spondylolysis), ligamentum flavum, bilateral foraminal stenosis, anterolisthesis, broad-based disc bulge and nerve root impingement.

(The technical term is “fucked”.)

On their own, none of these were major, but combined, it caused a lot of pain and concern, and required months of specialist physiotherapy going back to last autumn. Given that my L5 vertebra is simply too small, the situation needs managing (and some of the issues will worsen with time), but I’m not eager to have spinal surgery, for obvious reasons, unless absolutely necessary.

At the same time my vision in my right eye seemed oddly blurry, and scans at a specialist eye hospital showed that a good chunk of the optic nerve had atrophied, and thus arrived the diagnosis of glaucoma. Thankfully my left eye still seems relatively okay, albeit my vision in both eyes weakens when I’m fatigued.

Having been born with eczema and asthma, and various allergies (all perhaps because my mother could only keep down milky cereal during the pregnancy), I was still able to be incredibly sporty as a kid, but life is more challenging in my 50s.

I don’t feel particularly sorry for myself; just frustrated at times, and irritated by things like being told I am (or represent the) privileged, when good health is the most important blessing in life.

(Plus, next on the list is good hair, and that went in my 20s, along with my health.)

It all made me realise that I need to scale down my life, and plan towards selling my basic three-bed semi, which is now too big anyway, and where the stairs can be a challenge on some days. Plus, my mortgage has doubled since September 2022, as have my bills (this is the way of life for many), and I have to focus on managing my health.

Equally, my mind refuses to slow down (except on brain-fog days), and I can have an overflow of ideas and creative urges.

I’ve come to realise that I don’t think I can shut off the generation of ideas, or the delving into data for my sportswriting, or researching a topic for fiction, as it’s what gives me a buzz, as I mostly live the life of the mind (and mind only) these days; certainly 80% of the time. But I do need to find ways to manage it all better.

The new novel was started in 2015, and mostly finished by 2023, bar some editing. I’m not expecting it to sell in large quantities, but I very much enjoyed the process of writing it and I’m hugely proud of the final results. The feedback from my local bookclub, as beta testes (I typed testers but ‘testes’ is worth keeping in), was excellent, and Kirkus Reviews had lots of nice things to say about. But it’s not designed to be commercial.

I’ll share details about it on here soon, with the release pending, but I will also use Off Piste as a place to share thoughts on things that don’t cross over with my sportswriting; including writing about my life with M.E., but also things that interest me, from the realms of music, art, film, literature and dwarf-tossing.

(This last one, including the outdated term, is clearly a joke, for those who take things too literally. Plus, I’m not even talking about the throwing of people of smaller stature.)

I probably won’t allow comments, as I don’t need one more platform to check and moderate. None of the articles will be paywalled, as this is just a mailing list/newsletter/opinion site for me.

If anyone replies to the emails via the mailing list I may read them, but I don’t guarantee reading, let alone replying (albeit I may, depending on my mood, energy levels, etc.)

Thank you.