Underclass Hero with Matt Taylor

Procrastination: Title Pending

Matt Taylor — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 07:01:32 GMT

Thanks for being patient with me. I’m hyper-aware it has been a while. I really appreciate you for subscribing to this newsletter and supporting my writing. To those of you who have subscribed over the past few months because of some very generous recommendations. I hope you like what you read and choose to stay.

This year was supposed to be very different. I set out to be way more active on Substack this year. Exciting series were in the works, and I set myself the goal of reaching the mythical 1,000 subscribers. Yet, here we are in June, and that seems elusive. Everything stalled except time. Truth is, I haven’t been able to write. I have tried to write. I have sat at my laptop with a Word Doc open, intending to write. But the cursor blinked at me.

I have been scared to be alone with my thoughts.

Being alone with your thoughts is the backbone of all writing. Without it, crafting a piece is like trying to play snooker with a rope. Every method I’ve learnt to smash a writer’s block barely grazed the surface. I couldn’t free write, I couldn’t do morning pages, I couldn’t bullet point, I couldn’t do anything. All because I couldn’t be brave enough to be alone with my thoughts.

The cursor continued to blink. Every day I opened my laptop, and it stood there squaring up at me. Every pulse dared me to tap out one thought. But when one popped up, my fingers found my phone instead. Cracking open a podcast, YouTube Shorts, or Instagram Reels to drown it out. Wrapped in cosy justifications of “research”, but I was preventing my brain from processing.

We call this procrastination. According to Wikipedia, it is the act of unnecessarily delaying or postponing something despite knowing there could be negative consequences. What negative consequences was I subconsciously avoiding from writing?

Usually, I would use writing to explore this. But not being able to write created a whirlpool of anxiety.

I moved house a couple of months ago. To most people, moving is a big deal. For me? Meh. By nature of going into and being in the care system, I moved around a lot. Even to different countries. I never felt bothered by it. As I grew older, this immunity stayed. Between 2016 and 2021, I lived in Buxton, Tideswell (while studying in Liverpool), back to Buxton, and Oxford (travelling up to Buxton), then returned to Buxton (while continuing to work from Oxford). Somewhere in this madness, I found stability like the lonely middle piece at the bottom of a Jenga set. I was used to what I knew.

But this move. To a bigger, nicer place, with a hallway and a nice garden, on the other side of town, with nicer neighbours, should have been great. I have been shocked at how much this has affected me. This was one Jenga piece too many, and no matter how much better the new placement of this piece was, I had completely fallen apart.

I am an addict. For many years now, I have kept myself in check. But I still keep conscious of the isolating, destructive behaviour lurking around the corner. Since the move, I’ve noticed I have lapsed into this behaviour again. Except this time, I have not been consuming an unhealthy amount of harmful substances; I have been consuming an unhealthy amount of content.

I would sneak off into other rooms for a cheeky doomscroll. As footsteps approached, I would pretend to work, throwing my phone to the other side of the room. On other occasions, I’d hide an AirPod in the opposite ear of someone in the same room, so I could sneakily down a podcast. While it looked like I was engaged in something else. In true addict form, I would tell myself I would actually start work in 5 minutes, but the problem I found was there is always another 5 minutes.

According to an article in Psychology Today, the opposite of addiction is connection. Therefore, addiction is a symptom of disconnection. Something in me had disconnected. Was it the house move? Had I somehow plugged into a place I had no idea about.

Amid the binge-watching, I saw an interview with Pete Docter, who directed Monsters, Inc., Up, and Inside Out. While creating Inside Out, he ran into a problem. His solution? A solitary walk, without devices or headphones, so he could be vulnerable in his thoughts. It hit me.

I realised this is what I was avoiding. I was scared. It was never the work, the writing, the walking. It was the vulnerability. If I wanted to write again, I needed to be alone with my thoughts.

Learning to Read - Pt. 1

Matt Taylor — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 09:57:26 GMT

The copy of The Prophet Jimmy Gillespie gave me back in 2008. The message he gave me knowing one day there would be a boy to listen to it.

2026 is the National Year of Reading in the UK: a banner year with a slogan and a mission and a neat little stamp: if you’re into it, read into it. Normally, I roll my eyes at these things. Gimmicks. Talking points. A ribbon-cutting for a problem that won’t be solved by an event.

But this feels different.

Learning to read cut my life open more cleanly than any set of scissors ever could.

Most people can’t remember a time before they could read. I can. For a long time, I was ashamed at the fact I couldn’t read by the time I was 18 years old. When I first stepped toward a creative life, I crashed into a wall of pretension, doors guarded by people with pockets full of references, little jokes that were little padlocks, spoke in names and titles and quotes like passwords. Cultural capital accrued like interest, like inheritance, like it was the most normal thing in the world to have been given a library at birth.

I had music. I had a very limited view of music. Nothing beyond the mainstream.

I had the feeling of wanting but not being able to reach.

When I say I couldn’t read, I mean I had the reading age of a 10-year-old.

When I say I couldn’t read, I mean I could recognise some words, but I didn’t know what they meant.

When I say I couldn’t read, I mean when the words I did recognise were strung together to make a sentence, I didn’t know what it meant.

When I say I couldn’t read, I essentially mean that, because my new vocabulary allows me to express it correctly, I was illiterate.

Thick.

A very simple reader who could only focus on the gaps between the words on the page, because I couldn’t understand what was being said from the words on the page.

Without being able to read, I couldn’t write either.

Obviously, things have changed since then. That sentence still surprises me when I write it, like I’m describing someone else. A few weeks ago, I handed in my final coursework for my Master’s Degree at the University of Oxford. That sentence still feels like it belongs to someone else, a different boy entirely, a boy in a different universe, a multiverse away from the snotty-nose eighteen-year-old version of me who didn’t believe there was a place in the world that didn’t end in a prison cell. To get to university, let alone an elite one, you have to be able to read and write.

Recently, I completed a reading speed test as I’m setting out to read 50 pages a day this year. My reading speed is 137 words per minute. This is SLOW. It turns out my current reading speed is the same as a ten-year-old’s. The same age as the reading age when I was eighteen and couldn’t read. The same age as when my dad died.

When people learn about my reading journey, I get two responses.

First is always denial. No way. I couldn’t imagine you like that. A story too ugly, too inconvenient, too embarrassing to attach to the person standing in front of them.

Then, once they see I’m being serious. How?

So, for the National Year of Reading, I thought it might be good for me to do a little series on my journey of learning to read.

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Part 1 - My First Book. Autumn 2008.

Every children’s home I had been in had a ‘library’.

Sometimes that word meant a room with real shelves and the stale hush of dust which had given up on moving. Sometimes it meant a bookcase bolted to the wall as a statutory duty.

In a children’s home, ‘library’ was never a verb.

No one went in there.

No one took anything.

No one returned anything because nothing ever left.

By Autumn 2008, I was fifteen, and living in a small children’s home. The kind that tried to look like a home if you squinted your eyes really hard and ignored all the floating blue-and-white fire door stickers and locks on the doors. Our ‘library’ was a single bookcase tucked behind the living room wall, on the other side of the TV. A hiding place. A secret that wasn’t meant to be used.

I don’t know who chose the books. I don’t know how long they had been there. I only knew no one picked one up. No new ones arrived. No books were ever opened. They were props for children to vent their anger.

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A care worker in my children’s home brought in a DVD. I was hoping she would remember, as she promised when she was last on shift, to bring it in. I held the white sleeve in my hands, sliding the case up and down inside it, a small restless ritual. The same way you fiddle with a lighter when you’re trying not to light anything. But she said to wait till after tea so we could watch it together.

And I waited.

I didn’t question my own compliance. A few months before, the mere suggestion I should have to wait would have sparked some kind of kick-off. Rage was my native language, and I spoke it well.

But those months had changed me in a way I didn’t have language for yet. I’d been spending most of my days sitting on the edge of the bed, teaching my fingers to dance on a fretboard with the synchronisation of a ballet. Trying not to trip over each other. Trying to make two hands agree on one intention.

Sometimes things click.

Sometimes the body learns something the mind can’t explain yet.

When my left hand wrapped around lacquered wood, when my right hand pressed down on the high-tension strings, something in me shifted. It sent me somewhere I hadn’t been in a long time. Since I was ten, when my father died, my world had been black-and-white. But whenever my fingernails scraped the strings, a bit of colour would seep in at the edges.

I felt less angry. It was addictive. But not destructive. I didn’t know that kind of addiction existed. Up until then, my addictive behaviour ruined lives, mostly mine. It sent me to hospital. It sent me to silly counselling sessions on drug safety. It sent me to court. Most of all, it made everyone hate me. I looked like a problem dressed in a boy’s skin.

This was different. [Care] Staff would smile at me rather than put up with me. The children’s home felt different, too. Home-like. Not safe, exactly. Not innocent. But less like a holding pen for mini volcanoes.

Usually, I would wolf my tea down as fast as I could. Not because I didn’t want anyone to steal my food, but because I didn’t want to be around anyone long enough for my skin to start buzzing with threat. I ate fast, so I could leave fast, so I didn’t have to look at faces, so no one could say my name in a tone I couldn’t handle. Instead, I took my time. Wednesday nights were Chicken Fajitas. A tradition, and also a subtle prank. The care worker, who worked most Wednesdays, was fed up with them, so I made sure they were on the menu every week. The food was dished out onto the table, ready for us to scoop, splatter, and splosh at our own pleasure. The kitchen smelled of paprika and hot oil. Tortillas steamed in the plastic bag from the microwave. The salsa made the air sharp. Among the spices and the mess, we talked about what songs I had been learning on the guitar. I had become obsessed with Johnny Cash, mainly because his songs only had three chords, so they were easier to play, but the rhythm was difficult.

After we finished, I raced across the corridor to the living room, whacked the DVD into the player, set it up, and then the deep tones of the blues slide guitar blew out of the TV as the Walk The Line DVD menu appeared. I was about to learn everything about the man who wrote the songs I had been learning for the past few months.

A lot of the film spoke to me, as I hoped it would. There were scenes where Johnny Cash is playing a guitar like mine. But one scene had me. Johnny Cash walks June Carter to her hotel room. She empties her bag to give him a copy of the Billboard charts with his song on it. But to get to it, she empties her bag. Books. A small spill of hardcovers. Johnny says, “You got a library in there?” It never occurred to me that this could be a compliment. Like a library is something a person carries around because they couldn’t bear to be away from books.

June hands him a book. A pale cover with a face imprinted: The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. Just the title alone felt like a door. The care worker sat next to me, tapped my arm, and said all the best songwriters have a copy of that book. A word which promised knowledge. A hidden map. Prophet. Someone who knows. Someone who sees what other people can’t.

The next time the book appears, Johnny Cash is trying to write a song. Something in my chest tightened in a way the film had nothing to do with. Right there and then, I decided I wanted to write songs. I needed to read that book.

Not someday.

Not when I was older.

Not when I had a life that made sense.

Now.

I needed The Prophet. I needed a book. I needed the thing in his hands.

But I couldn’t read. I’d never read a book before. Not properly. Not the way people mean when they say, “I read this”. I’d never moved the pages on purpose, letting sentences build a world inside my skull.

I didn’t know how to.

Never thought I needed to. I thought reading was for wimps. That was the rule I lived by. Every boy in a children’s home seemed to live by. Books were soft, books were for school, books were for people who got to be children. Books belonged to kids who had homes. I was a young person in a unit. A case. A file. A risk assessment in trackies and trainers. And yet, there I was, watching a woman pull books from her bag, watching a man read his way into a song, and I was left with a sharp, unfamiliar sensation inside me.

I went to bed thinking about the film. Thinking about the book. The next day, a care worker from another children’s home who played guitar, called Jimmy, came to visit and jam. He would visit every week. I told him about the book, and he said he had a copy I could have. I rubbed my hands in excitement.

He arrived the following week with a red and yellow book in his hand. It had a different-coloured cover from the film copy, but the face imprint told me it was the same door. This wasn’t his copy. It was brand new. I opened it, and on the first page, Jimmy had written the story of how he came about the book. I couldn’t read it. I couldn’t make the words hold still enough to make meaning. But he was there, so he told me anyway. His voice did the work my eyes couldn’t do yet. I held the book as if it were warm.

Now I had it. I didn’t know what to do with it. I couldn’t understand it. I knew the secret of being a great songwriter was in there somewhere. I was still obsessed with Johnny Cash, so I bought a copy of his autobiography, Cash, the one the film was based on. I thought I would have an easier time reading his book first, rather than the book with the secret. I also hoped somewhere in his book, he would just point to the paragraph and go, “ This bit. This is what turns you into someone else.” I wanted a shortcut.

The book was black with pictures in the middle. I stared at them for hours. The pictures felt like reading without the risk of failing. Then one night, I decided I should give it a try. It took me all night to read the first page, and none of it stayed in. I read and reread lines, not understanding what was being said. Forgetting each line as I moved on to the next. I tried to let the words conjure images. All I got was blackness, which made me doze off. My brain ached, my eyes burned, my head was heavy with a familiar shame.

Still, I kept the page open. Something kept telling me I needed to do this. It was like the feeling I had when I first strummed a guitar. I told myself if I could teach myself guitar, I could teach myself to read. I was terrible at guitar when I first picked it up, but with enough practice, I became fluent. I just needed to do it with the book.

Three chords.

Two hands.

One Page.

A door.

The word ‘library’ began to twitch, like I was ready for it to become a verb.

Part 2 to follow soon.

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“So, what did you do wrong?” | Lyric Essay

Matt Taylor — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 08:02:33 GMT

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

“So, what did you do wrong?”

It’s a question that is never just a question. It’s a statement, a reflection, with pointed intention. Because this question never hits like a question. When I mention that I grew up in children’s homes, a small silence always follows, always a second too long. Then it lands.

“So what did you do wrong?”

People are always curious about who exactly is at fault. But I find it insane that they always aim the blame at the child, rubbing salt into the wounds. Why do I need to feel their shame?

I grew up in care, not prison. I say it like a fact, like my phone number, recited without thinking. But none of that matters, because they want an answer.

“So, what did you do wrong?”

It’s said like I’ve never heard that question before. Like it never affected my perception, or left my lips every time I saw my reflection. Like I’ve never struggled with their subtle blurring lines and warning signs. Like I’ve never familiarised myself with this subtle way to stigmatise. Like I’ve never experienced this quiet strip-searching of character. Facts leave my lips, but they want to hear feelings. There must be a reason. There must be a reason.

There was a reason.

But blame never lands where it belongs. Their eyes direct it for them.

“So what did you do wrong?”

I saw a handwritten note taped on the window of the chippy on the corner, close to the Social Services building in the Isle of Man. It read: Spud Lad required. £5.25 per hour. I stared through the window, and the fluorescent light winked at me to take this. I walked in, asked, applied, and I walked out with the job. I was fourteen, and this was my first proper job. Two hours a day, three evenings a week. They put me in a uniform of waterproofs and wellies too big for my adolescent Twiglet body and sent me downstairs to the basement. I heaved sacks of freshly harvested spuds into a rumbling tumbler, removing all the skins and mud, and then chopped them into brilliant white chips. I felt I was good. Never late. Never sick. Never complained. Covered shifts. Stayed quiet. At school, I was difficult. In the basement, I was gold. In there, I was not trouble. In there, I was not unlovable. In there, my work meant I could be trusted. I had tasted something I thought was for other people, control. I had the feeling that someone could count on me, and I wasn’t going to let them down. One evening, the owner sat on the stairs in the basement, with a cigarette burning too close to her fingers, waiting for me. She leaned in so close that nicotine bleeding through her teeth mingled with my breath. She asked, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you’re in care?’ I stared. This was a familiar accusation, but this time presented in curiosity-coloured wrapping paper. I didn’t know how she found out. I didn’t know whose whisper, what telephone conversation, which file had been delivered here, but I didn’t want to open it. She said it like I lied. Like I had forgotten to tick the box on the application form that says “Is your family a shitstorm?” Suddenly, we weren’t talking about how untarnished my chips were. We were talking about how tarnished my family was. I gave guarded answers because it didn’t matter what answer I gave. Children do not end up in care by accident. All I wanted was to be wanted. All I wanted was to please. I believed that if I worked hard, if the basement beamed with chips that were perfect, I could earn my way into being trusted. She pleaded with me, ‘It’s not a problem,’ as if the problem was the conversation. Maybe she was right, it wasn’t, but I knew she thought I was. I nodded in silence because a fourteen-year-old boy is never going to call it out. Then it landed.

“So what did you do wrong?”

They never ask what happened.

Sometimes it’s followed by, “If you don’t mind me asking”, as if politeness could soften the landing. It didn’t matter by this time, because regardless of whether I minded, they had already decided what they thought of me. They think it’s a small question, and I shouldn’t complain if I can’t handle the suggestion that I have the morals of an alley cat.

Perhaps it took a lot of love for my mother to hate me in the way she did.

Perhaps –

(There are sentences I still can’t finish)

Tracksuits | Lyric Essay

Matt Taylor — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 08:02:27 GMT

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

“You dress like a cartoon character,” people say, and I smile. Always the same colours, always the same cuts, as though consistency itself could define me. As though repetition could render me safe, accepted, and beyond their casual judgment.

“Please just stir it up a bit”, some prod.

“Can’t you afford any other clothes?” others ask.

I bat away these questions with flimsy shrugs and sighs, like I don’t want to get decision fatigue from thinking about what I wear, or I have OCD, or I just don’t care about what I’m wearing. I’m lying. Ever since I was 17, I’ve always lied about my clothing. That’s because how I dress changes the way people see me.

My uniform is heavily curated.

Comfortable, black, made-in-the-UK New Balance trainers. Classic Levi 502 jeans, slightly faded and softened from wear. A jumper, red or blue, reliably soft. Probably cashmere to serve as a gentle indulgence, preferably bought by a friend.

I know precisely what this uniform is saying.
No statement, no threat, no edge to catch your eye.
Just polished enough not to provoke judgment.
Just casual enough to blend in.

Clothing is camouflage, armour, diplomacy.
How we dress determines how we’re seen.

Before this uniform of blandness, I had a different outfit: the tracksuit. An arsenal of catalogued shades of rebellion.
Navy blue Fred Perry for the everyday.
Black Nike Tn for special occasions.
A grey Nike comfysuit for hazy summer days.
And a baggy blue and white Reebok tracky, loose and forgiving, dotted with hot rocks, for moments when escape came in hotboxed smoke clouds and laughter.
Tracksuits so loud they gave the entire room tinnitus.

The beauty of a tracksuit is that anyone can wear it at any time. It’s accessible to everyone.

I loved my tracksuits, and I wore them proudly and defiantly. Each zip pocket was a protest, each hood a refusal to lower my eyes, each elastic waistband holding tight the secret ache of growing up in care. But clothing can tell a louder story than any children’s-home boy could. In my tracksuit, I became shorthand: a signal, a warning sign, the butt of middle-class scorn. Middle class whispers of chav, scumbag, yob, dangerous, wrapped tight. Their assumptions gripped me as tight as the elastic cuffs around my ankles. Class has a uniform. Zipped up to the neck, with bottoms to match, pockets that zipped shut to hold the little we had safe: secrets, fists, and truths.

Now, I dress in the uniform of carefully constructed acceptance. It’s served me well.
In my work, I’ve earned respect.

But I still own some tracksuits. Whenever I slip back into them, Tesco staff follow me around the store, and the cashiers ask for ID. If I go for a run, police stop me and ask why I’m running. People avoid me. The assumptions come back. No matter how high I rise, the tracksuit returns me to my assigned class and place in society.

So, I have learned what is safe. What makes assumptions vanish. What makes doors open. What grants respect. My uniform may be heavily constructed, but not by me – by the middle-class society I live in.

Now, when I buy a coat, although it may be expensive and ‘nice’, I make sure it has zipped pockets so I can secure my secrets, my fists, my truths.

Every day, in quiet defiance beneath this bland cashmere jumper, a chav still breathes, with classic Reeboks and tracky bottoms tucked in socks, ready to run.

This piece was originally commissioned and published by The Bee Magazine, eariler this year. If you’ve not checked it out, pop over.

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Are writing development programmes worth it?

Matt Taylor — Tue, 27 May 2025 16:10:34 GMT

Polaroid from the celebration event at Faber & Faber - A Writing Chance 2024/25.

Last week marked the official end of A Writing Chance, twelve months of structured possibility dissolving quietly back into an ordinary silence, the kind that follows when something special comes to an end. As I sit in the hush, a silence that is both familiar and unsettling, I wonder if anything has changed, if I now firmly belong in the world of words or if I remain a trespasser perpetually lingering outside of literature’s cast-iron gates.

Belonging is a tricky word. Slippery. Fragile. It’s a dull ache that has never faded since my childhood of temporariness, where kindness felt transient, conditional, something lent until someone took it back. Trust became a cautious negotiation, rarely extended, often withdrawn. I’m older now, and words have become a safe house, but belonging isn’t a fixed place, and this could never be a long-term solution.

A Writing Chance is unusual. It’s not just an opportunity but the assembling of scaffolding, built explicitly to lift working-class writers like me up and over those gates. New Writing North constructed a comprehensive structure, including financial support, industry insight days, a writing retreat, workshops, Zoom sessions, and mentorship. Tools were carefully chosen to address barriers I know intimately. Tools that allow me to dedicate time to exploring my voice. But tools alone do not create belonging. That requires something intangible, beyond mere access.

As you might have guessed, I was placed on the Substack strand of the programme. Truthfully, it is the only reason why this Substack exists. Did I really need this programme to launch it? Technically, no. But emotionally, yes. I was already knee-deep in a Master’s programme for creative writing. Therefore, my writing was being developed and was growing steadily. However, the feeling of belonging evaded me and was affecting my ability to write. I would see other people in my year getting opportunities and advancing themselves. At the same time, I was left peering at the gates.

I applied during a period when I had stopped writing entirely. My personal life, work life, creative life, each layer was imploding simultaneously. Months passed without a single word written. I felt like I lost my ability to be a writer. Applying was desperation. My final throw of the dice. Sometimes validation, the assurance of external permission, is precisely what’s needed to type out the first trembling words.

Once my place was confirmed, it was on me to build this digital corner. New Writing North would support me in any way I felt I needed. But no one was going to do the work for me. I was uncertain if my voice would carry, uncertain if I belonged. I scoured Substack, looking for other care leavers, voices like mine, searching for a home here. There were a handful whose subscriber counts only reached double figures, but they are all quiet now and have faded away a few years ago. Perhaps our voices didn’t belong on this platform? Doubt clung stubbornly, like leaves in an autumn breeze.

Mentorship is the heart of the programme. A year-long lifeline, carefully tailored. Mine arrived in the form of the floppy-haired Substacker, columnist, and recently crowned Sunday Times Best Seller (he’ll hate me for that), .

Our first meeting arrived, naturally, on Zoom. My pulse quickened like a brass band tuning before the first note. Three dots bounced beneath his name while the audio struggled to connect. Seconds stretched unbearably. I’m shy with new people, shy of conversation stalling awkwardly, shy of belonging, still out of reach. None of that mattered once his tile faded from black to fuzzy blue.

Jonn immediately confessed a hatred of Zoom.

“Can we just WhatsApp and meet in person?” he asked. “I don’t want this to be formal if that’s ok with you?”

Relief flooded me quietly. Unexpected but very welcome. We discussed my plans for the newsletter, audience-building, my uncertain voice, what I hoped to get out of the mentorship. Beneath my ambition lay a simpler, quieter hope: to get to know people, to feel permanent, to belong, and not to fade away. I was struck by his confidence that we could do this.

Belonging begins this way. Unexpectedly, in tiny kindnesses, in the moments someone makes space for you. I wasn’t expecting this. My doubts were stubbornly clinging on, but his infectious enthusiasm made it hard for them to stay.

Unlike other programmes, New Writing North had considered every possible barrier to prevent working-class people from succeeding in publishing. They would cover our travel, our food, our hotels, but to think that the only barrier for working-class people is financial is incredibly shortsighted. One of the hardest obstacles is imagining yourself belonging in spaces that seem reserved for others. Industry insight days dismantled some of this. Substack, Audible, Faber & Faber, and The Daily Mirror, once distant logos, became real places with familiar faces who knew my name, my face, my contact details. I felt something shift gently, the gates quietly opening, whispering, “Come inside.” This is what makes A Writing Chance unique.

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Throughout the year, my mentorship deepened beyond expectations. Jonn’s eye was sharp and generous, illuminating the fascinating aspects of my writing that I routinely overlooked. Quiet lines I almost deleted would suddenly glow under his attention. He’d share my work with his readers, and his friends would share it too. Subscribers would trickle in gently, affirming quietly that perhaps my voice did carry. There was a place for me here.

In my moments of burnout, those silences where no emails appeared in your inboxes and the pages remained blank, Jonn would quietly check in.

“Everything ok?” he’d ask simply.

I’d never known this quiet care from a mentor before. Trust remains an elusive concept, a barrier built from experience, each brick cemented by past disappointments.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he reassured as the year wound down. But my history is filled with, as Mary Poppins would call them, pie crust promises: easily made, easily broken. Mentorship had an official expiry date. Fear persisted. Without formal obligation, would this relationship continue?

At the year’s close, last Thursday’s celebration evening arrived in the form of an exclusive event at Faber & Faber. A final push to help build connections for the whole cohort while also tying off an intense 12 months. Uncertain if Jonn would attend, I waited anxiously like a child, hoping their parent would appear at a school play. When he showed, something shifted further inside me, this small act of presence, this simple validation.

Two truths remain clear from this year. First, my writing has become sharper, gaining clarity and resonance. I know this from all of you, my readers, who subscribe to my newsletter, share it with your friends, hit the like button, and let me know in the comments. I feel I’ve reached a point where words come more fluently. Second, I gained something rarer, not merely a mentor but a friend. Jonn’s voice was still there, reassuring, perhaps now freer, gentler, more genuine as it is unbound by obligation.

I’ve had mentors before from other opportunities, but this feels different. Maybe it’s the meeting in person or WhatsApp, but it feels more lasting. I can message, meet for coffee, and maybe even share new work.

Thanks to all of you who have come with me on this journey over the past year. I will continue this newsletter, and we’ll grow it together. Will I stay lingering at the gates? For now, I’m in. My agent has been in touch to say how much my writing has improved recently and how she now sees a way to get me published. I will share any updates with you as they become available.

Belonging, I now realise, it is not a permanent destination. It’s a process. It’s an exhausting one, but the small victories, quiet validation, and friendships slowly emerge from mentorship. It’s the realisation that, even when the scaffolding disappears, something intangible remains. It lives quietly, in a friend’s voice, in simple kindnesses, in risks of trust, in careful leaps of imagination.

Was it all worth it? 100%.

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Are working-class people in the music industry destined to be Remy from Ratatouille?

Matt Taylor — Mon, 19 May 2025 14:53:48 GMT

Working-class panel at The Great Escape. Fellow panellists (left to right): Imogen Williams, Elise Brown, Sam McGlynn, Emma Townsend, Myself.

Last week, I was in Brighton as it hummed softly beneath the festival lights of The Great Escape. Streets brimming, buzzing with ambition, the days salted by sea and hope. Inside the conference room, the microphone seemed heavier than I’m used to. Another space I never imagined myself stepping into. Another door crow-barred open, another panel set to ask the question the industry never quite answers: why are there so few working-class people in music?

As a child, animated films would take my eyes away from the bleak world I lived in. An unlikely hero always resonated deeply, someone who dared to dream beyond their place in life. But none of them quite stayed with me like the 2007 Pixar classic, Ratatouille. Remy, the little rat, who created flavours nobody imagined, lived inside walls, scavenging dreams alongside scraps. Always questioning, always untrusted, always unwelcome because of what he was and where he was from. Remy made magic, yet to the chefs, he remained vermin.

Being viewed as vermin is not new for me. When you grow up in the care system, life is lived in corners, tucked away in files marked confidential, shuffled quietly between care workers whispered decisions and social workers scribbled assessments. Always in the margins, always between worlds, never quite home anywhere. Like Remy, I learnt how the world sees rats. Messages whispered clearly through quiet barriers with signs declaring, ‘you’re not supposed to be here’. My accent betrays my image. My clothes betray my past. My scars, my nervous hesitations, they betray my story. I wonder if they ever see talent, or just a scumbag that found its way in.

Remy didn’t belong in a kitchen, just as we are quietly told, in subtle and often unsubtle ways, that we do not belong here. On stage, backstage, in label offices, in control rooms, at mixing desks. Rats in kitchens; working-class kids in music. Both unsettling to those accustomed to the dining without discomfort.

The irony whispers itself. We are exactly what they seek. They want grit, passion, authentic voices from gritty streets, gritty homes, the dirt beneath the fingernails. They want Remy’s artistry, his flavour, his genius, but not his whiskers, not his tail, not his story. They love our taste, yet fear our contamination.

At The Great Escape, a panel discussion wedged between headline shows, hidden in a basement conference room, on a smaller stage away from the bright lights. Are we rats nibbling around the edges, tolerated so long as we don’t stray too far, so long as we know our place?

The panel itself felt radical, each of us living proof that rats can make it into the kitchen. All of us working-class, each having clawed past barbed wire and electric fences put purposefully in our way.

We discussed the challenges we came up against as we began our careers, but we all mentioned how we each had a key turning point which led to us working in music. Each turning point was a person.

Remy found Linguini, the awkward, fumbling kitchen assistant who gave him a way into the world he’d always been barred from. Linguini, who recognised magic and created a place for it, a partnership born by chance, by risk, by openness. The film suggests Linguini inherited none of the talents from Gusto, his legendary chef father, but I disagree. He inherited the most crucial talent, the ability to see and nurture potential, no matter how humble its origins are .

Linguini embodies a simple truth. Talent from humble sources can thrive, but only if it finds a way in, a conduit, someone who points to a path, someone who believes enough to risk it.

Should the music industry use finding a Linguini as a quality filter? Should it rely on chance encounters, random kindness, fleeting charity, so working-class people can be part of it? This reliance on rare generosity won’t sustain it forever. It leaves too many behind, talented but unseen.

Still, all the panellists, myself included, remind me of Remy, how he cooked anyway. With passion, precision, defiant brilliance. He created flavours that demanded recognition. He claimed space. He made something impossible, possible. This is why we leave our homes behind, searching for a chance to escape. To expand. To meet people who see something more than vermin in our shadows, who glimpse at potential beneath our scars.

We concluded our panel acknowledging that barriers will always exist, and that’s fine. But those barriers must be equal. Transparent. With no gatekeepers. Fairly faced regardless of background. The industry can’t survive on the hope each of us will find a Linguini to let us in.

Did we answer the question, probably not. But we had the discussion. This is a place to start. Hopefully, as enough of us start to emerge, the industry will be forced to have a little less conversation and a little more action.

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I met Giles Martin - Not the normal I ever dared to expect.

Matt Taylor — Sun, 11 May 2025 13:54:51 GMT

Me and Giles Martin doing a photo call to urge the UK Government to rethink its plans on AI Copyright exceptions.

Days slip by quietly, threaded with a disbelief so subtle it almost vanishes, with whispers of chances I once believed were reserved for others. It’s easy, dangerously easy, to forget the strangeness of this normal. I live in a world far removed from the restless, ragged boy who shuffled between courtrooms and children’s homes, the chavvy little bastard who perpetually teetered on the edge of disaster, and occasionally fell over. Normalcy becomes invisible when you live in it. But every so often, reality fractures and I’m reminded how ordinary this extraordinary has become.

This week was such a fracture.

Giles Martin stood in front of me. Not merely as the name beneath a Beatles remix, but as someone who knew mine. Yes, I’m talking about that Giles Martin, the architect behind the latest Beatles track “Now and Then”, the guardian of a legacy shaped by his father’s hands. Yet, there we stood together, neither gods nor myths, just two music producers in a mundane photo call to urge the UK government to rethink it’s AI copyright plans, to allow music creators to give consent and be paid for the use of their work. Me, as a director of the trade organisation representing music producers, and him as a well-known music producer. We chatted about work, about the Music Producer’s Guild, about doing some more stuff together. A perfectly normal situation for someone in this position. This is never quite my normal. Not the normal I grew up with. Not the normal I ever dared to expect.

But it is normal. Well, it is now. It’s not a new normal as it has been this way for a while. And it's not an old normal as that was my life as the chavvy little bastard that everyone refuses to believe exists. Regardless of how long this normal has been with me, in these moments, the improbability swallows me whole.

I cling to one tether, the one voice I’ve reached for daily since the days of the care system. Many people know her as Fiona, but I know her as Fi-fi. The first voice I seek whenever life reminds me of this extraordinary.

Glaswegian grit shaped her, leaving her unimpressed with these calls.

“You’ll never guess who I just met”. I could feel her eyes roll down the phone line.

“The prime minister” she mocks sarcastically. There are few names which take her breath away, but I knew this one would. I threw the ball up and prepared to swing.

“Giles Martin”.

Silence stretched, a rare moment of astonishment.

When I was sixteen, as I left the Isle of Man, Social Services placed me in something they call “supported lodgings”, which is Social Service speak for renting a stranger's spare room. That stranger was Fiona. At that time, we were both in a moment of quietly tearing ourselves apart. But our battles faded in shared nights, washed in the flickering blue glow of Beatles documentaries. Fiona with a bottle of wine (or two), and me secretly sniffing an unreasonable amount of drugs.

It was during these nights, in those dimly lit conversations, that she prodded gentle provocations. Prying open doors, I had slammed shut after my father died when I was ten years old. She would challenge the assumptions I felt were impossible with,

“Why not?”

Why not you? Why not LIPA? Why not working recording studios? Why not have a life beyond police cells and drugs? I never felt I had permission to dream like this in my life. She would share her knowledge. She would inspire me. I absorbed it like a sponge. She became a mother figure. She would undoubtably be the mother figure I never had. She stopped being Fiona and became my Fi-fi. And slowly, my world shifted from monochrome despair back to colour drenched possibilities.

Recalling those nights, I reminded her,

“I bet you never imagined this?” feeling her quiet pride crackle through the line.

Truthfully, neither did I. Although, one of my subscribers, who is a former care worker of mine, will say she’s not surprised. This is also them, like me, taking who I am now for granted and forgetting the vastness of the journey, the near impossibility of this normal.

Statistics don’t capture our stories. Care leavers in the creative industries remain undocumented. Invisible. I suppose this isn’t surprising, as this is how we are in society. Invisible. People only keep stats on things they care about. People don’t care enough about care leavers doing well. The numbers when they do exist rarely celebrate our resilience. Instead they catalogue the adverse effects of our trauma, the negative impacts of the care system (e.g. prison population, joblessness, lack of educational attainment), the echoes of societal indifference. Despite our very specific challenges, we get lumped in with other working-class statistics. But these are also quite stark. In a 2024 report by PEC, which found that people from working-class backgrounds made up 8.4% of the workforce in the creative industries.

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Recognition matters. One of the reasons I think the numbers remain so low is that people never acknowledge the journey to success. I appreciate being seen as an equal and, therefore, treated as one. However, my journey to this point has been anything but equal to my peers, and this needs to be recognised. You cannot be what you cannot see. You shouldn’t have to get lost to find a place no one around you has found. So, every moment like meeting Giles Martin, every unlikely achievement, must be spoken loudly. Only then will it open up more avenues, so more care leavers can experience the extraordinary and make it their ordinary, so the seemingly impossible can become possible for every chavvy little bastard like the one I once was.

Let's shift our focus away from those who don’t get the opportunity to be inspired, those who don’t find their Fi-fi, and focus on those who do. Report success too. Why would anyone from the care system believe it is possible for someone like them to create a career in the creative industries when they never get to know it happens? We need to see our successes grow. They’ll never be able to sustain one, if the industry doesn’t recognise how much of an achievement it is when they do. Then we can rewrite what is normal, and we feel like we should be here.

Fi-fi replied saying it didn’t matter what she imagined. All that mattered was that my head didn’t get so big that it couldn’t fit through the train door on the way back.

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Burnt Out: I'm sorry

Matt Taylor — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 10:52:00 GMT

Photo by Alexander Andrews on Unsplash

I’m really sorry for the silence here recently. Words had abandoned me, retreating to hidden corners, leaving blank pages to stare back, defiant, empty, accusing. Stale coffee cups sat scattered, quiet witnesses to my failed rebellions against this inertia. My fingers arabesque over the keys, full of ambition, but caught in an endless loop of almost beginning. Intentions swirl restlessly, never breaking free.

I go through periods of burnout. This isn’t an excuse; it's just a fact I’m not sure how to deal with yet. It descends on me in fierce waves, merciless tides dragging me from myself, each surge more suffocating, shrinking the room until the walls press in, squeezing out the air, leaving no room to breathe. Their frequency alarms me, and their unpredictability of arrival terrifies me.

I’ve pushed myself to do this post today. It may be a little messy, it may be a little incoherent. But it is me as I am today.

Burnout is recent to me, and something I thought happened to other people. I was sure I had struck some halcyon bargain for an extra hour in the day. Casually joking about my busyness by intensely filling up my schedule to outrun the shadows of my childhood trauma. I tricked myself into thinking that this displacement, this avoidance, this so-called being productive, felt safe until it was not.

The past two months have taught me I take too much on. I’m on the wrong side of being too busy. I’m driven by a restless fear of emptiness. But that fear has led to me driving on empty. Because of this, I cannot rest, so burnout is not a paralysis of doing nothing. Far from it. It’s a switch into low-power mode, limping by only doing things that must be done.

My whole life is based on my work. My vocation and advocation are so wrapped up into one that I don’t know the difference anymore. In my younger days, I ached for this. So I suppose I’ve met my goal. However, I now find myself in a situation where I can no longer turn off, recharge, refresh. I’ve created a life where spare time and downtime do not exist. I’ve made an entire identity of someone who does things, so when I reach a point where I can no longer do things, where I’m no longer useful to others, who am I?

Boys in children’s homes are often written off. I was no exception. I was a shitbag. A pain in every adult’s arse that crossed my path. I cringe at the sharp edges of my then-self. Learning to play the guitar softened things. Suddenly, approval was within reach. Not being written off felt good; it felt great, actually. At this moment, the care system taught me to relentlessly chase approval, believing that usefulness meant safety, meant belonging. What it has actually meant is a perpetual state of emotional exhaustion. Why am I just using busyness as an armour against a silence of loneliness?

Herbert Freudenberger first used the term emotional burnout in his research paper from 1974. He described it as ‘a state of mental and physical exhaustion caused by one’s professional life’. One of the phases he describes is ‘a compulsion to prove oneself’. This description no longer fits into today’s definition. Although it feels intimately familiar.

The truth is, I compulsively say yes to everything because I learnt that saying no could mean abandonment. I fear disappointing people more than the crippling exhaustion itself. The more I write, the more I realise my burnout is born from the insecurities of my childhood, cultivated from temporary homes and conditional love.

This time around, I remembered a strategy that would snap me out of this. The refill of the emotional tank. For some people, it’s reading, for others, it’s binge-watching the TV. For me, it’s Clive. Everyone remembers their first, and at 16, Clive was mine. My first proper guitar. I bought him just before I moved to the UK, when I still lived in a children’s home on the Isle of Man. We’ve been through a lot together. Every time my fingers glide down his strings, calm enfolds me, whispering gently of home, as close as I have ever known.

I know this is not a long-term solution and I need to cut back. For now, this is working.

I’m sorry for not fulfilling my promise of regular content. Normal service is beginning to resume. Thanks for bearing with me.

Thanks for getting to the end of this piece, and I hope you enjoyed it. I’m developing this Substack channel as part of New Writing North’s A Writing Chance Programme for working-class writers.

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I met my younger self for coffee today | Lyric Essay

Matt Taylor — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 14:33:54 GMT

I met with my younger self for coffee today. He arrived five minutes early, and so did I. We slipped into the coffee shop, where the baristas hissed steam into milk and the grinders groaned, a symphony of modern necessity that he finds unsettling, but I hardly notice anymore.

He wore faded white classic Reeboks and a blue Fred Perry tracksuit, with a short back and sides haircut smothered with wet hair gel. A uniform of a youth in search of identity. I wore a red cashmere jumper with blue Levis and black New Balance trainers, with a slightly longer haircut with hair clay to style the fringe to the side so it didn’t impede my Rayban glasses, mine a uniform more suited for this place.

He ordered a hot chocolate with cream and marshmallows, and so did I. Our spoons danced a skittered ballet, slicing through the cream as we raced to plop the marshmallows in the hot milk to melt. I tell him we live in the UK now. His body stiffens while avoiding eye contact. I forgot his wariness around adults, especially in settings like this, the usual stage for social workers to forage for secrets to be held against us. I hear him reply,

“What, across? I wouldn’t want to move so far away.”

Show me your fingertips, I asked him. Grooved callouses were forming on his fingers from all the hours of guitar practice. I showed him mine.

“Do you remember what Jimmy Gillespie told us when we first started playing the guitar?”

He said, “Yeah, that if you can play an instrument, you’ll always travel and make money.” I told him it was not about money. It was a window to a world that would eventually give him an escape route out of this life.

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He wondered if we ever find a way to stop using drugs.

“We do,” I reply, “one day. It gets worse first, but you need to get there to stick to your choices.” He exhales a fragile sigh that I feel in my own lungs. I want to reach over and hold him for a moment, tell him I’m sorry for every self-destructive path I led him down. But I don’t. He doesn’t need my guilt, just a promise that the chaos ends.

“Do we ever go to prison?” he asks, almost bracing himself in a fragile quiet. “No,” I say, “but almost”. His guarded eyes widened as I told him we eventually met a caregiver with care to give. I told him we relapsed into the same criminal behaviour we did before we found music, and despite having her family, her ex-husband, her work colleagues, her friends, our social worker all telling her to send us back to the Isle of Man, she says no, and that she’ll say that she refuses to because every adult before her had let us down and she was going to be the first one not to. I told him she’ll go to the sentencing hearing, and the judge will see her sitting beside us, beside me, beside him, and says he intended to send us to prison, but if the victim of our crimes will forgive us and support us on this day, then he could not send us to prison. We still call her every single day, I added.

Half-melted pink clouds started to merge into one as they sat on top of our hot chocolates. We each scooped the gloop into our mouths before stirring the remaining pink edges, curling into the dark as they dissipated into the chocolate. He asked if we ever find a place we call home.

“I don’t know yet,” I replied, “every relationship on every level still feels transactional, although everyone around me would disagree. People only like me because of my work, not because of who I am.” I told him I don’t know if I’ll be able to experience it in any other way, but I’m still figuring it out. He asked me why I care so much about how or why people like me and said I should be grateful that people like me all because everyone currently writes him off.

“Do we get a proper job?” he asked. I told him we turn our lives around and find a job we love. One where it didn’t matter that we grew up in children’s homes or were young offenders or could not read yet, and the only thing that mattered was how hard we tried. I went on to tell him that the busyness was a blessing because we’re so busy we won’t have time to think about our childhood or deal with it. He said that doesn’t sound fun, and he probably wouldn’t love that. And that I should learn to forgive but not forget.

“It’s the closest thing to home,” I added, “every time I enter the heavy doors of a recording studio, it doesn’t matter how tired, run-down, angry, or stressed, whatever problem I have, hearing the hum of equipment or the smell of air-conditioned air, makes it all fall away, and leaves us three inches taller”. He can’t believe I actually managed to turn his hobby into a job and whispers to himself, I’m so glad I stuck it out.

Our spoons clinked on the bottom of the glass mugs. The hisses and groans faded down to an aroma of baked goods and the clattering of dirty cups. It occurred to me I was living a life he didn’t know existed yet, and I had blocked out his. He tells me I shouldn’t worry too much about him and focus on getting us where we want to be. I asked him if he ever worried about me. He asked me if I remembered the fortune cookie we got on the last day of primary school. I said yes. It said that I would never grow old because of my personality. He said, “Exactly, so I don’t need to worry”.

He got up to leave, scraping his chair across the floor as he pushed it back under the table, and so did I. He exchanged a wave because he’s not conformable with physical contact, and so did I. It will be years before we meet again. Still, every time he now meets a brick wall because people from the care system don’t really exist in the creative industries, he knows all the resilience we have built up will help see us through. I wondered what we would talk about next time or whether it would still be a hot chocolate. He popped in his headphones, and so did I.

Thanks for getting to the end of this piece, and I hope you enjoyed it. I’m developing this Substack channel as part of New Writing North’s A Writing Chance Programme for working-class writers.

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Are Traditions Important?

Matt Taylor — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 13:02:11 GMT

This week, I have been busy with other projects, so I haven’t been able to dedicate as much time to Substack. However, I am determined to keep my goal of regular posting this year, even if I have been a day late both times. I’m so sorry. Here is a little note I’ve been working on about the importance of traditions. I hope you enjoy it.

The word tradition literally means the transmission of customs or beliefs from generation to generation. 2025 will be the 23^rdyear of Care Leavers Week, and it has reached the point where it has crossed generations and become a tradition. Every year during the October holidays, we ask the country to pay attention to those who grew up in the state's care. To celebrate their achievements. To amplify their voices. To raise awareness of their challenges. But this is not one we should be proud of and not one I will pass down to my children. This got me thinking: are traditions important?

I’m fortunate enough to go to the university with the most famous whacky, arcane traditions, from setting clocks five-minutes wrong to swearing not to light a fire in the Bodleian library: the University of Oxford. Each October, sees one of the most public of Oxford rituals: matriculation. The ceremony that confers a student’s place here. An induction into the family. Acceptance into this world. A new word which I still don’t know how to say.

Traditions scare me. That’s because I’ve never really experienced them in the way most people have. In the care system, we don’t have any family traditions, let alone any school ones. I didn’t receive a birthday cake until I was seventeen, and I won’t horrify you with Christmas. So, when the university emailed me, demanding my participation, every rebel bone in my body was triggered.

My initial reaction was to run away. To convince myself that this was some outdated, posh rhubarb that didn’t need me. The truth was, I was scared. To take part in a tradition, you must feel part of something. That’s a feeling I’m not used to. Care leavers are used to being ignored, overlooked, and demeaned. Excluded. By definition, we’re not usually seen as ‘part of the family’. We’re used to institutions baking pie-crust promises, easily made, easily broken. Scars that are hard to fade.

Some say the Oxford traditions go against everything we have learned about being progressive, productive, creative, and innovative, and are just not inclusive. That they form barriers for people from my background. But is that really the case?

Traditions form a collective identity. They touch us, connect us, expand us. As much as I hated being paraded down the street in a silly hat, gown, and white bow tie, for once, I felt included.

The Sheldonian Theatre, filled with black-and-white TV static, created a unique moment. For that moment, all the differences in background, area of study, interests, or personalities no longer mattered. At that moment, as the static froze and the Latin was spoken, we were all the same. Officially becoming students at the University of Oxford unified us all. From that moment, finally, I felt part of something.

Are traditions important? In my world, the only tradition is that they chuck you out at eighteen, regardless of your situation, making your life as unstable as a Mentos mint in a Coke bottle. This is something that needs to stop. But as Oxford opens up to more people from diverse and low-income backgrounds, traditions will be touchstones that make us feel part of the university. It is an extreme sense of privilege not to see how these silly, inconsequential customs give the rest of us the permission to be part of it. If anything, it’s an attempt to exclude us from their world. Ultimately, if I had to be paraded in public in a silly hat and a white dicky tie, so should everyone else after me.

Thanks for getting to the end of this piece, and I hope you enjoyed it. I’m developing this Substack channel as part of New Writing North’s A Writing Chance Programme for working-class writers.

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Photos Define a Person – Pt. 2

Matt Taylor — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 08:30:51 GMT

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It’s been a few months now. All I had to do was to download the zip file. I downloaded the file. Open the folder. I opened the folder. Hit the space bar on the icon. My finger quivered over the key. It was like standing in front of a door that won’t open.

It felt silly and entirely out of character. I knew what the photos were of. I fought hard to keep the rational part of my brain in control. I still remember the trip to Blackpool vividly. I close my eyes, and the rattles and roars of the rides at the Pleasure Beach shoot by, followed by flashes of the falling sensation while standing on the glass floor of the Tower, sweet cream and peppermint shutter by, while watching the confectioners make sticks of Blackpool rock. All of these have served me well until this point, but when it came to hitting the space bar, the whole melodrama of “Do I need to open them” started all over again.

All these images are from my perspective, through my eyes. I can remember the colours of what I wore but not what I wore. I can remember how I styled my hair with wet hair gel, but not how it looked. No one can know what they look like unless someone shows them photos. I found comfort in not having this. In my social work files from the time, there are frequent references to how I “looked really young for my age”. Something I now relish in but definitely hated at the time.

Memories are just memories of memories. When I remember a memory, I’m just creating a new memory of that memory, with each generation degrading the last, becoming fuzzier, noisier, filled with artefacts as it blurs. I use narratives to attempt to de-blurr, de-noise, to preserve the images in a way so I accept them.

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It’s hard enough remembering my opinions without remembering my reasons for them. Maybe I didn’t want to hit the space bar because I knew the photos were the truth, destroying the delusional narratives that had masked the memories for so long.

These pictures are one week after a crazy weekend, or as my care workers, social workers, and health workers put it, a suicide attempt. I wrote about this episode a few months ago in a piece called Pushed or Pulled. I had found a way to move on from that part of my life. So much now it doesn’t really feel real anymore. I know it happened. The scars of sleepless nights downstairs with the TV off remind me how real it was. Would the reckless self-destruction I lived in, engaged in, and fermented in at that point be visible in my eyes? Would it be evident to me now because it wasn’t then?

My inbox pinged with another email from my former care worker. He replied to my scream in lowercase with, “I found a few more photos from our trip to London for that football thing.” He was referring to a trip to Brixton to play 5-aside football with some other children’s homes. Some things are packages of emphasis, and I couldn’t find any more excuses. I gave him a last scream in lowercase.

By not moving on, I was still making payments on an emotional debt I didn’t owe. Was I ready? Well, you never know the true strength of a tea bag until it hits the water. I took the plunge. Hit the space bar.

I opened them. The first picture wasn’t of me. A fury of frustration erupted. I spent all this time refusing to view an image which didn’t have me in it. It was of my younger brother. I had forgotten just how young he was then, still eleven years old. I hit the arrow key and moved down. The second picture was of me.

Emotions ran through me like foreign water through a tourist.

In my current life, I proudly parade myself as a chav. Often in meetings with industry leaders, political leaders, or whoever, declaring myself as the resident chav before saying something mildly contentious. It gets a laugh in the room before I try to make a serious point. I know why they laugh. It’s because they can’t imagine me like that. They can’t imagine someone like that being an equal in that room. They imagine that the person who had mellowed their accent expanded their vocabulary, and rounded off the rough edges must be exaggerating with such a pronouncement. But it’s a firm part of my background and who I was. I know for the people I’m around, I’m a novelty. I understand the laughs. I understand the advice of how I ‘shouldn’t do myself down’. They need to understand there is nothing wrong with it.

I stared at the picture. The background music, which I hadn't been paying attention to, had been turned off, and suddenly, there was silence. My fingers were too stunned to move. I recognised the face. I recognise the scene. But I didn’t recognise the person. It was me, but I was staring at a different person. He had the most mischievous eyes. He was confident. I have no memory of ever feeling that confident. He looked so so so young.

Before this, I could remember how I dressed. I was a chav, after all. I could've portrayed one of the boys from the song A Certain Romance by the Arctic Monkeys. I had the classic Reeboks and tracky bottoms tucked in socks. But I didn’t realise just how much I embodied this stereotype.

I continued to scroll. All the memories were there, almost like I pictured them. But seeing the pictures triggered a vividness I wasn’t expecting. There’s a particular ache in seeing your younger self caught in an image that doesn’t tell the whole story in a moment of fleeting happiness that masks something deeper. I wanted to cover him up in bubble wrap. I knew the decisions he would make, and I wanted to stop him. I wanted to guide him. But I couldn’t. I feel angry because they were my decisions, and I know the harm they will cause him.

I know everything works out for him in the end. But I don't think the anger will subside until I understand the bad moments, spend time with them, and elongate them. I appreciate the opportunity to feel this way, though. It’s a privilege I hadn’t had until now.

There are some Facebook groups dedicated to care leavers. A community of us who connect, ask for and share advice. After posting part 1 of this piece, I wondered if anyone else has had trouble getting photos from their time in children’s homes. It’s easy to think you’re the only one, and others may have had an easier time with it. Unsurprisingly, it’s not the case.

All respondents said it was impossible to get any pictures. Like me, they all have memories of them being taken, but blame GDPR and consent as the issue for not being able to obtain them. Their history is littered with Local Authority shaped potholes because bureaucracy always trumps compassion. Care leavers are left with gaps in their history, denied the ability to be a definitive person, their childhood denied existence because it’s impossible to redact a photograph. For the past thirty years, every Government has said they put children at the heart of their policy, to give them control, to reclaim their future. However, they are denied the chance to reclaim their history once they are adults.

I was lucky because a care worker didn’t just care deeply enough to take the photos, but care enough to keep the photos, so he could share the photos with me when I was ready to care enough. Ready to stand in front of the lens on my own terms and begin to see myself through kinder eyes, a person who has grown beyond the limitations of stigmatised labels and difficult memories. Is it right that people who grew up in children’s homes have to face a lottery like this when they are ready to care, reclaim their history, fill that gap, resurrect their existence, and become a definitive person?

Thanks for getting to the end of this piece, and I hope you enjoyed it. I’m developing this Substack channel as part of New Writing North’s A Writing Chance Programme for working-class writers.

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New Year’s Resolutions: Is there any point?

Matt Taylor — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 09:01:41 GMT

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Happy New Year. 🎉🍾🎉

Thanks to everyone who has come on board and subscribed to my newsletter over 2024. Writers need readers, so it’s an honour to write for you all. This newsletter started in May as part of a writers development programme, but the more time I spend here the happier I have become. To see in the new year, I’ve departed my usual ramblings of my childhood trauma and written this quick piece about New Year’s Resolutions.

For 2025, I will be changing from publishing newsletters on Sundays to Wednesday. This is the first, so I hope you enjoy.

“New year, new start” is one of those phrases that slips through our lips every January, mine included. It is a terrible cliché, but I’ve always seen it as a good opportunity to close down the open tabs in my brain and refresh the browser. The trouble is having created some new, unused space, I fall into the trap of filling it with so-called New Year’s resolutions, and without realising it, I’ve stacked up new tabs and maxed out before I’ve begun. According to a recent You Gov poll, 16% of us plan making at least one New Year’s resolution for 2025. With the numbers so low, is there any point?

The custom of a New Year’s resolution dates back 4000 years to the Babylonians. They would celebrate the new year by promising the gods to pay their debts and return any borrowed objects. Whilst today we don’t make promises to the Gods, we do make them to ourselves. Has this innovation made it easier to stick to them? Well, the same poll reported that only 17% claimed to have stuck to their resolutions throughout the year, which is down from 31% in the previous year. After 4,000 years of broken promises, it’s not surprising less people are bothering. I’m someone who strives relentlessly for my goals and am finally seeing the results of my efforts. I wasn’t always this determined, so here are some reflections on what I’ve learned along the way.

New Year’s Resolutions are about getting into the habit of doing new things. In my case (and probably others on this platform), it will be writing more consistently, sending out newsletters on schedule, and building up my subscriber base. These are manageable but too often, people set overwhelming ambitions and it’s just lining ourselves up for failure.

The first hurdle we trip down on is the Monday Myth. Starting something new at the beginning of the week is certainly enticing. The synergy of a new week, new year, new habit, should make committing and sticking to our promises easier. But the problem with Mondays is that there are 52 of them this year. There will always be another Monday to start again but before you know it, it will be 2026.

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In all seriousness, it’s because we’re muddled up between means and our ends, often confusing the difference between aspiration and practice. If the polling data is anything to go by, we make a practice out of setting goals and aspiring to achieve them. This is the wrong way around. I’ve found that to stick to our ‘resolutions’, there has to be a change in myself. The most effective habit to create this change was focus.

Focus isn’t something I can switch on by declaring, “Today, I’m going to focus.” I’ve learned that it’s a habit requiring continuous upkeep, mostly by learning to say no. That means no to the easy distractions, such as, podcasts, streaming shows, or social media, which at times every bone in my body is aching to give in to. Even though some (very little) of it is useful, they creep in and erode the time and mental energy I need to reflect and write. I recently read that forming a new habit takes about 66 consecutive days. That number felt huge at first! But it’s a little over two months, so by March a habit could start to form. I’ve decided to start small: I want to write for 2 hours a day, every day. If I try and do the whole two hours from the off, I’ll trip within a week or two. I know I have to build up to it. So, I’ll commit to at least 15 minutes of focused writing time a day. As I build momentum, I can expand from there and hopefully by the end of the year, I’ll build a routine of two hours a day.

Optimism alone will not create the habit of achieving the goal, trust me on this. This is the reason why so many resolutions or goals fail. Without the ability to focus, it just creates an endless doom loop of failed ambitions.

Why not form the habit that will allow you to create further habits? Change is big and hard. But it’s also lots of baby steps on a bigger journey. I have found refining my ability to focus has given me the confidence to decide what is essential and what isn’t. Therefore I have set the parameters for further change in the future.

Meaningful and lasting change is a lot of little things done well. It has scared me how many goals I have been able achieved by truly learning to focus. So yes, there a point. It’s how we grow. Set backs are unavoidable. But giving up is unforgivable. Otherwise, every year (on the current polling), we will become a nation of almosts and maybes.

What about you - any goals for 2025? Do let me know in the comments.

My Writing Journey 2024 Wrapped | Lyric Essay

Matt Taylor — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 16:06:21 GMT

January – Thunderous Black Moodcore

Top Genre: I played 14 hours of rumbling clouds and screeching guitars. A storm on loop.

Mood: Apologies for the delay, I have been drowning in chaos.

2024 opened with heavy skies in my inbox, my home, my studies. I couldn’t find the space in my mind to write a single word. The laptop keys fell silent like a radio, searching for a signal in the middle of the ocean. It’s impossible to be creative when the pressure mounts. I spiral into a thunderous black mood when the words refuse to dance. Too many of my emails during this period opened with, “Apologies for the delay; I have been drowning in chaos and struggling to come up to breathe”.

Still, I hurled two writing submissions into a restless sea. They felt half-formed, limply cast out in green bottles. That’s all I had: the faint possibility they might wash ashore somewhere.

February – Drowning in The Undertow Blues

Top Genre: Low-toned heartbreak, heavy on bass.

Mood: The inside of a churning wave, no surface in sight.

No writing surfaced in February. The chaos that started the year was now overflowing into this month, and the undertow was pulling me further under. My adopted mum’s partner faced complications with his heart surgery – “touch and go”, the doctors said. The strongest woman I knew began to crack under the weight, her strength fraying at the edges. Family crises reveal your place in the narrative, and mine was edited out without the anchor of biological ties. Every wave of news swelled higher, and I felt myself slipping beneath it, fighting the current.

March – Chaos Breaksbeat

Top Genre: Pulsing in chaos, breakbeats fracturing the silence.

Mood: Everything got too much. Something had to give.

I could no longer bear the weight of the waves as chaos kept coming. The pressure was too high. Everything got too much for me. Something had to give before I did. My only logical gasp for air was to take a study break from my master's. Ducking out meant leaving that group. I felt like I was letting them down. I had no idea what I would’ve done had they not agreed. At home, there was a slow turning of the tide: my mum’s partner recovering, a sense of normalcy edging back in. Work was still a riptide, but I found some footing. I wrote a column for the student newspaper. Typed words, pressed send, and felt relief.

April – Shallow Validation Indiepop

Top Genre: Upbeat, shimmering, with small triumphs.

Mood: The sweet ping of the notification bell.

The two limply cast-off bottles from January came back with opportunities. A piece I submitted to the Fish Publishing Short Memoir Competition was longlisted. I was selected to be part of New Writing North’s development programme for working-class writers, A Writing Chance. Which is how this Substack started. The validating dopamine hits helped me find my footing again.

I felt like I shouldn’t need that validation. I felt superficial, chasing the high from seeing my name on a list or the ping of new subscribers. But in those moments, the damper lifted, and the words flooded back.

My adopted mum revealed she would marry her partner. I was the last to know.

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Top Genre: Airy synths and reverent echoes of possibility.

Mood: From a children’s home to Abbey Road Studios. Impossible becomes real.

May marked a milestone: my first recording session at Abbey Road Studios. From children’s homes on the Isle of Man to the most famous recording studio in the world. What one felt so far away became real. My adopted mum and I had dreamed, planned, and schemed this over late-night talks when I was younger, with her expelling any reason why I couldn’t. It always amazes me what this scrawny little chav gets up to now. The A Writing Chance programme hit the ground running. I went on the iconic Arvon Retreat, spending a week with fellow writers in the middle of nowhere. Writing, connecting, decompressing. The exhaustion of the previous five months crashed over me in that stillness. Being ‘on’ all the time is its own kind of fatigue. I launched my Substack with its first post and met my mentor. I felt in sync with the current this month.

June – Algorithmic Tides

Top Genre: A restless ambient drone, numbers creeping upward.

Mood: Self-doubt behind every status update.

June arrived with a wave of hope: permission to write again. But I drowned myself in my imaginary expectations. The keys fell silent again. My footing was slipping against the current again, and it was my fault this time. I berated myself: “How can I be a writer if I can’t even do one post a week?” I cheated by recycling old work to maintain standing with the algorithm. But no new writing emerged. Rolls of thunder echoed in the back of my mind again. Substack isn’t just about publishing. It’s about building an audience. Writers need readers. Otherwise, what is the point? I obsessed over metrics and retreated to the comfort of the recording studio. Music was easier than words.

July – Lost in Static

Top Genre: White noise.

Mood: Faded transmissions, a station left in silence.

No posts. No pulse. No reverb. I drifted in static.

August – Festival Revival

Top Genre: Electric chord progressions, crowd roars.

Mood: High voltage, carried on cheers.

Everything swelled in August, and I could now ride the current instead of being slapped by it. I played at a major UK festival (YNOT), something I had dreamt about ever since I first plucked the strings of a guitar when I was fifteen. The stage lights glowed. The adrenaline soared. The audience roared. I could write again. I typed up a piece recapping the festival and hit the post on Substack. The notifications pinged. Jonn, my Substack mentor, shared my page with his network, and new readers trickled in. My words made ripples, and I found myself riding a new exhilarating current.

September – Uncharted Frequencies

Top Genre: Experimental rhythms of hope and fear.

Mood: A hush before the biggest drop.

Momentum slowed when I started drafting a piece about the paradox of overprotection of the care system. How the best intentions can lock young people in a cage. The writing demanded a deeper vulnerability, like diving without knowing if your lungs could handle the depth.

My study break ended. I returned to the master’s program but in a new group. I feared the old pattern: expectations pressing down like a heavy tide, snuffing out the spark I’d just revived in my writing. I told myself I knew what to expect this time. But nothing prepares you for the presence of a planet-sized star in the same orbit. A famous face that distorts the gravity in every workshop, every critique, every conversation.

October – Weathered Reflection Shoegaze

Top Genre: Soft, introspective strumming with waves of reverb.

Mood: The ache of old memories, the hush of new truths.

My adopted mum married her partner this month. His close shave with death revealed her silliness for her unwillingness to marry him when they were already tied by life’s everyday threads. This year, I’ve learned that I’m a fair-weather family member. They say DNA doesn’t make a family, love does. But this is only when the sun shines and the seas calm. I can handle that if only the lines were clear. It’s not ok to be told you’re equal only to find you’re optional when it really matters. It felt good to see her happy again.

October is the anniversary of my father’s death when I was a child. I’ve never really spoken about it, but I wanted to explore how I felt, so wrote a piece about how the gap of a father is one that never closes. Similar to my September piece, I found myself descending into new depths of vulnerability with my writing, feeling the water close over my head but refusing to panic. Substack may demand quantity, but its readers demand resonance and truth. Meaningful writing requires time. Some waves crest faster than others, and I’m finally accepting that.

November – Echoing Confessional Lo-fi

Top Genre: Slow-burning reveals beneath layers of fuzz.

Mood: The subtle tremor of vulnerability that doesn’t quite reach the same dark corners as before.

The post about my father touched more people than any other. There’s a particular appetite for trauma, a strange thirst for the raw and painful. I’m not sure how I feel about offering it so freely. But for now, the words are out there, reverberating in the digital air.

I finally finished a post about returning to the University of Oxford, where I folded like a melted Mars Bar under the weight of expectations. It felt different from my October piece, as though I was splashing in a puddle rather than diving into the depths. Maybe I was simply being shallow? Or maybe, after stripping my soul bare in that father-focused essay, I needed time to wade back into safer waters.

So there it is: the echo of confession, tinny and distant, reverberating in the digital landscape. Not every wave dips as low as the last. Not every post can scrape the ocean floor of my psyche. Sometimes, I can only handle skimming the surface, letting the undercurrents swirl beneath. But I was more confident in my writing.

December – Steady Undertow Post-Rock

Top Genre: Building crescendos with patient, looping progressions.

Mood: A quiet confidence in the face of comparisons and algorithms.

I noticed the other writers in my A Writing Chance cohort had more followers than me. Their audiences differ from mine, and the numbers shouldn’t matter. But my confidence was already wobbly, so reason arrived too late to save me from sinking. If you want your “subs to stack” on Substack, you must play the game: network, find your niche, and hope for virality. My posts never go viral, but that’s okay. This knock felt different. A kind of muscle memory kicked in, the one I’ve developed over the year for surfing self-doubt.

The undertow never overwhelmed me. This time, the keys never fell silent. December was one of my most consistent months, with four posts. Yes, I did cheat once by recycling an old piece, but I also finished a post that had been simmering for six months about hunting down old photographs from my childhood. `And other post of how I went to the BRITs and this post of weaving a final reflection on how far my writing has come over the last twelve months.

It’s okay to repurpose old work. It’s okay to take time and write something deeply meaningful. It’s okay to drop out sometimes and let life intervene. It’s okay not to chase subscribers because they will eventually chase you. As I wrap this year, I see my writing like the tide: ever-shifting, constant, sometimes receding, sometimes surging forth.

The playlist of 2024 may be wrapped and put back in its sleeve but the 2025 one is about to spin. Each new track will carry me further into seas I never saw on any map. Will I find the words or let the current wash them away again?

Play, pause, replay. We carry on, chasing the next note.

Thanks for getting to the end of this piece, and I hope you enjoyed it. I’m developing this Substack channel as part of New Writing North’s A Writing Chance Programme for working-class writers.

If you haven’t succumbed to all the other pleas of subscribing. Be a hero and pop your email address in the box, and receive newsletters as they happen in your inbox.

The time I went to the BRIT Awards 2018

Matt Taylor — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 08:01:13 GMT

Ed Sheeran performing at The BRITs 2018 - captured by my blurring iPhone

Last week, I was part of The BRITs Voting Academy, which decides the shortlist for the BRIT Awards 2025. It’s quite an honour and a privileged thing to do. There is no application process, as someone must nominate you to be part of it. I’m relatively modest about my career, but even I acknowledge this is a sign of how far I’ve come. In 2008, I sat with two of my care workers on the children’s home couches, watching Duffy win Album of The Year. This year, the guy who recorded that album nominated me to be on this year’s voting academy. It’s funny how life works itself out.

This isn’t my first encounter with the BRITs. In 2018, with my shameless chavvy bravado, I blagged myself a Diamond Dinner ticket to that year’s ceremony. I was studying for an undergraduate degree in Liverpool then and wasn’t in the industry yet. All the sound dropped around me momentarily when that email confirmation pinged my inbox. To them, they were putting a bum on an empty seat. To me, it was my foot in the door. My chance to brush shoulders with the top 1% of the industry, with people who had only ever existed in newspapers, social media feeds, and YouTube Videos. It became one of the most unforgettable nights of my life.

For anyone who isn’t familiar with The BRITs, they are the British version of the Grammys. Full of glitz, glamour, and prestige. However, anyone in the industry knows that it is not based solely on excellence. Only the releases which have entered the Official UK Top 40 Charts (also run by the same organisation that puts on the BRITs) and put forward by their label can be considered. We all know some of the best art doesn’t necessarily enjoy immediate commercial success. So, unless you have a good label and good budgets and good marketing teams and good connections, you’ll never be a contender. Still, it’s the biggest celebration of British music of the year, and this was my only chance to be part of it.

There must be a catch because there is always a catch. There was a catch. A snag that me in my 30s would definitely consider that me in my 20s didn’t. I could afford the return train journey to London. I couldn’t afford a place to stay for the night. By nature of my background, I didn’t have family or friends to pull favours from. Things in London seemed more 24-hour than up north, so what’s the worst that can happen?

That is the prerogative of being young, no concept of fear. No what ifs, no buts, no maybes, the holy trinity of naivety. As a pre-teen, before I went into care, I regularly slept rough in the bushes of overly flamboyant roundabouts to avoid going home. Once I left care, I would sleep on people’s floors or office chairs when working in studios once the session had gone past the time of the last train. In fact, even during this time [2018], while studying for my undergraduate, I would book the Uni studios in the middle of the night so I would have somewhere to sleep when I couldn’t get back to the place where I was staying rent-free, as I couldn’t afford the student accommodation. So, it only seemed natural that I would consider staying in a 24-hour McDonald's until the first train back up north the morning after.

Once the elation of the confirmation email reached a cruising altitude, I could read the instructions properly. It requested food orders, drinks orders, and drinks bags. It said the dress code was “glamourous” and “not black tie and no jeans”. This sent me into a tailspin. What is the difference between a standard suit and a glamorous one? When I get like this, playing email tennis only makes things worse. What is the difference between a drinks bag and a drinks order? This wasn’t my world, and I felt ashamed to ask for help.

The email said, to arrive at 16:30 at Arora Ballroom at the back of the O2 Arena for reception drinks. It was late February, cold and windy, and dusk was about to set in. But it doesn’t matter how cloudy the skies are, how grimy the fences are, how dirty the roads are. Everything always feels a little brighter when you’re doing something special.

The email said, to arrive at The BRITs red carpet entrance. Things started to feel real as I got to the world on the other side of the camera lenses. There is something eery about not seeing a roaring sea of lenses snapping and flashing that famous carpet. Instead, it was the silent flickers of iPhone cameras as people stopped to have their pictures taken to prove they were there. I wanted to stop and have someone take a picture of me like I had seen many do on the TV. All it would take is a simple question. I heard others ask it, but I couldn’t muster my confidence. It was probably the only time I would have this experience, and rather than be the fanboy I was, I told myself it was cooler not to ask and just walk through like I do this all the time. Everywhere I looked, I recognised faces. I may have moved my foot from the door to inside the room. It was the moment I wanted, and I fell into a corner and collapsed into my phone. I had no idea how to talk to anyone because what right did I have to be in there?

The email said, at 17:00, to move through to dinner, a 3-course meal with a performance from the Critics’ Choice Award-winner. I had never enjoyed such levels of extravagance. I sat at the table, and the cutlery was reassuringly heavy. Coke bubbles bopped and glittered inside the fuchsia crystal goblets as the stage lights lit up for the performance. The food arrived looking like Michelangelo model sculptures, so bright, smooth, and vibrant. My eyes gobbled to food before I could even pick up my fork. Usually, the beef I had at home ended up so grey it looked like Dot Cotton’s lung. There is no hiding your background with food. How and what we eat will reveal all to everyone.

“You know the mash is supposed to make the veg stick to your folk”, a guest in the next seat advised. My eyes rolled in confusion as I continued to turn the fork over and scoop like a spoon.

The email said, 19:00, to walk through and watch the show in priority seats. The drink bag was handed to me, just a bag of cans of Coke. And the extravagance from the dining room was deemed dull as the biggest celebration in music began. The clothes, the jewellery, and the expensive haircuts were all on display. Maybe this is what they meant by glamorous? All of that was surpassed when I watched swooshing baseball bats smash up a Lamborghini just so Kendrick Lamar could make his rapping more visually appealing for TV.

The email said, to go to the after-show party after the show, but the room was quiet. An actual after-party was probably going off somewhere else, away from the riff-raff like me. I thought there would be little opportunity here, so I left.

The email ended, and now, my decisions were my own. I knew I needed to find a 24-hour McDonald's to be safe until the next train at 5am. There is no shortage of McDonald’s in London. I decided it was probably best to be near Euston station, so I headed that way. The closet I stumbled upon was Kings Cross. It was 24 hours, so ticked my boxes. It was 23:30.

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I walked in, and the place was howling with a hooligan of boys. Intermingled with the boisterous thunders, classical music played out of the speaker system. I suppose it’s hard to have an angry brawl to Tchaikovsky. It was busier than I expected, but not heaving. It was less a restaurant and more of a humanitarian crisis centre. Is it possible we were all here because we were all homeless tonight?

The walls were coated with signs saying, ‘Seats are for paying customers only’. My belly was still full of indulgences from the show. Sweat-laced coins sieved through my fingers as I figured out if I could afford the minimum cups of coffee I would need to stay the night. I scanned the room for an empty table. I looked around, but I wasn’t really looking around as I tried to avoid eye contact from everyone there.

A tower of Happy Meal boxes sprouted out of the table, with sprinkles of crumbs and lettuce towards the counter.

“You need to leave now,” the security guard said. You can’t sleep here. You need to leave now.

“I wasn’t asleep. I closed my eyes for a second.”

“Get up and leave now.”

The treatment was harsh, but I needed a seat to stay. I learned the rules for staying in this McDonald's. Needs must when the devil drives.

Five and a half hours. That’s all I have to kill. Other than drinking coffee, I wasn’t sure what to do. There were no plugs to charge my phone and I needed to preserve my battery. Despite planning to do something like this, I didn’t bring a book or a notebook. Without something to occupy myself, keeping my eyes open would be even harder.

I was still in my suit from The BRITs, and I felt the glares of the whole room. Keeping your head down is hard when you stand out like that. I stood out. I had a change of clothes in my bag. But getting changed could also risk losing my seat and getting kicked out. I was in a position of a cat, hearing a dog in the distance, unsure how to move to avoid danger. I decided it was less risky to blend into the chaos and change my clothes. After a quick dash to the urine-laid toilets, I was now wearing blue jeans, trainers, and a sweater, a uniform more suitable for this time and place.

To quash my boredom, I would listen to other people’s conversations. Next to me were two girls, one with blond hair, the other brown. They were wearing oversized coats and had small bulging bags with them. There was a plumb-nosed little old man with a faded black jacket sat opposite talking to them. At first, I thought it must have been one of their relatives. But I soon worked out it wasn’t, as he kept asking questions he should’ve known the answers to. The girls discussed how they couldn’t go back home. That their home was a children’s home. They were sixteen and fed up with being treated like children. I figured out that they would be on the missing list tonight and perhaps had a plan similar to mine to keep themselves safe. I felt the need to check they were safe but couldn’t find a way.

It’s hard not to imagine what you would do when faced with a situation like this. Often, people think of themselves as the hero, but when faced with reality, they make different decisions. This thought went through my head as I grappled with what and when to do something. Him going to the toilet would be the perfect moment. He may have appeared like a little old man, but he had the bladder of a Duracell bunny. As their conversations went on and on, I became more convinced they were being groomed. In my head, I planned out what I would say to them when the opportunity arrived, “Are you ok? Do you feel safe? You’re more than welcome to sit with me if you like if you want to get away from him. I’m only staying till my first train back home”.

Eventually, he stood up, and this was my chance. As soon as the door for the toilets closed behind him, I stood up and went to their table.

“Excuse me”, this stern Eastern European voice shouted at me as her arm fell in front. I looked up, confused, at seeing this blond, middle-aged woman. “You can’t go near that table. Please stay away”. Spidey senses tingled as I realised this was probably a grooming gang. If I continued, I would be in danger, too. I don’t fancy getting stabbed tonight raced through my head. Before I knew it, I could see two or three others circled around the girls. I went back to my seat.

The little old man returned, and coded head movements between him and the Eastern European woman occurred. They left. I felt helpless and cowardly as I watched him, the girls, theEastern European woman , and a few others go together. I managed to sneak some pictures of everyone to hand them to the police in the morning. It was probably too late by then.

I sat in shock. In shock of being teleported to a world I knew, I grew up with, I lived in, but at that point in my life, I had forgotten. In a matter of hours, I went from being surrounded by absolute extravagance to being surrounded by absolute destitution. I went from a world that people saw, cared about, and valued, to one that people were blinded to, ignored, and demeaned.

For two weeks after that night, I obsessively searched the internet to see if those girls were reported missing. To see if the information I had was of any use. I couldn’t find anything. I like to think it’s because everything probably worked out in the end. But I know there is a good chance that things probably didn’t because they tend to be written off when it involves people from the care system.

Shortly after this, I grabbed a final coffee and I left to get my train. I walked in a big loop around Euston till 5am.

Thanks for getting to the end of this piece, and I hope you enjoyed it. I’m developing this Substack channel as part of New Writing North’s A Writing Chance Programme for working-class writers.

If you haven’t succumbed to all the other pleas of subscribing. Be a hero and pop your email address in the box, and receive newsletters as they happen in your inbox.

R-A-T: The three letter word I'll never be able to say

Matt Taylor — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 08:30:51 GMT

It’s been fifteen years since I managed to escape. I can still taste the sharp stench of sewage mixed with sea salt secreting from the seaweed plastered along the sleepy shoreline. It’s the kind of place that grinds squares into circles. From the moment of birth, those are taught to accept the island’s way, live their lives inside the island, and try not to fall into the sea too much. Most do. That’s what makes living there so harmonious. It’s a minimal life. But I couldn’t getaway from the fact that everything they called life was created by people who had never lived on the island, had never stepped foot on the island, and had no idea the island even existed.

Icy blue railings curled the two-and-a-half mile stretch of Douglas promenade. I leaned out, gazing at the hazy horizon. This felt different. I could sense my life beginning to open. Life beyond a children’s home. My things were expert Tetris-level packed away in the car. I have learnt to pack light. A new separation was taking place. Life beyond the island surrogating my needs. I hoped.

My island is small, so small it often does not warrant a spot on the weather report maps. But when it does, it’s concealed by the dark cloud symbol. Hidden in the middle of the Irish Sea, crowded between its far more prominent neighbours. In school, we were told the Isle of Man was shaped like a Shih Tzu in a full show coat, but to me, it looked like a crumpled crisp packet burnt on a cooker. It takes its name from the Celtic Sea God Manannan Mac-y-Leirr, who made the island his throne. Manannan, a master of tricks and illusions, would shroud the island in a 15-tog blanket of fog to protect it from invaders, or so they said. This illusiveness and chicanery are embedded in our psyche. We are a nation of myths. We relish the mystic misconceptions about us. That we’re so tiny the island is practically a street where everyone knows each other and which can be walked within minutes; or my personal favourite, that we must be inbred because our flag has three legs. It’s frustrating, the constant confusion with the other British isle with a similar name [Isle of Wight], almost 300 miles away and in a different sea. But who was I without the defining boundary of the island? So much of my identity had been bound up with the care it provided.

* * *

“STOP! Can we not wait till the rocking stops?” I pleaded.

“This is really important”, said Graeme. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to relieve some of his boredom, but I knew if I looked up, I might be sick.

“When the rocking stops, I’ll chat”. My arms wrapped around my face on the table, I was trying desperately to figure out what I could’ve done wrong. Finally, after around fifteen minutes, the boat stopped rocking. Yellow swords of fluorescent light stabbed my eyes as I lifted my head.

“Can we go outside?” I needed the wind to beat the nausea out of me. We stepped out to the rumbling steel deck to the rear of the boat. A succession of galloping white horses ejected from behind it.

“Right, what is it?”

“Now you’re moving to the UK, there are a few things you need to know”, Graeme said with his creased forehead on show. I looked at him, puzzled.

“What are you chatting about?” I said, shaking my head with bafflement.

“You know living on the mainland is different to the Isle of Man, don’t you?”

“What, do you think I’m thick or something?” Of course, I knew life was going to be different. I wouldn’t have his prying nose in it, for a start. I could do what I wanted and when, like a typical sixteen-year-old.

“No! There are some things you need to be mindful of. I don’t want you to look like a twat.”

“Oh yeah, like what?”

“The whole thing with fairies and not saying…” His eyes rocked like the boat earlier, swaying from side to side. He edged closer and whispered, “Rat”.

* * *

I was four years old when I discovered that rat was a swear word. The Isle of Man is one of the few nations that still worship fairies. Something every other part of the Western world had discovered and accepted did not and does not exist. Outside of the walled garden, the image of fairies is a playful one. Little people who spread magic and joy with their trickery, like Tinkerbell. Somehow, on my island, they appeared to have bred a rare breed of fairy. Ones who spread fear and fury to the residents who do not fulfil their yearning for admiration and respect. Every child growing up on the island is indoctrinated into its folklore, myths, and rituals. They rationalise this by saying, ‘Kids grow up so fast these days. It’s nice to keep a bit of the magic for as long as we can’. But it didn’t feel like that.

I tried to explain to my family the cartoon I had watched, Pinky and the Brain, based on two lab rats setting out on world domination. I was startled and confused when the word strolled out of my lips. Everyone in the room banged the table and whistled.

“Don’t say that word!” My mother barked at me with the same conviction as if I had put my hands in the fire. “You need to tap and the table and whistle…NOW!”

I was scared – frozen stiff. My eyes flickered across the other people in the room. I had no idea what I had done, but I knew it was serious. I desperately tried to figure out how to whistle. My lips trembled as I attempted to mimic the shape everyone else’s lips made, but as I exhaled, I burst into tears.

Once I had calmed down, my dad explained that saying R-A-T aloud would kill a fairy and bring bad luck to you and everyone who heard it.

The Isle of Man is the only place on earth with hundreds of synonyms for the word rat. Longtail, roddan, ringie, joey, R-A-T, big fella, skippo, sackot, uncles, longies, quare fellas, caul, cowl eyed fella, and anything else with ‘fella’ behind it.

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* * *

It hit me then. Most of the passengers would have been horrified if they’d heard Graeme. Maybe my escape would not be as simple as hopping on a boat and starting a new life.

“No one outside here knows all these terms you have for it,” Graeme explained, but then assertively warned, “You have to get used to saying it.”

I knew he was right, and I could feel the quiet look of hope leave my eyes.

“Shut up. You’re chatting shit!”

“Don’t shoot me with that cocky chav voice.” He stared at me. Waiting. The anguish made my toes twitch uncontrollably. He wasn’t going to let this go. I was not the first person from the Isle of Man he’d released into the wild. My lips quivered just like they did when I was four, the last time this rodent of a word wriggled out of my lips. I watched the island get smaller with each passing minute, but I had not broken free from its straitjacket, and it was still restricting me. The more I resisted, the more it persisted. Every rational part of my brain knew this didn’t make sense, but my larynx refused to play ball.

“Look, it’s Dr. Pepper. What’s the worst that can happen?”

“Fine!” My eyes were still open, but I couldn’t see anything anymore. Every ounce of energy went into saying this word out loud. It was like a child playing with a shock toy, not knowing how much it would hurt.

“Rat”, I muttered as my body shot into flight mode. I was on edge, waiting for the same reaction when I last said the word at four years old. I looked around to see if I could find anyone whistling or tapping their head. But, of course, they didn’t hear me. The wind and the engine ensured no one past my nose could catch it. Regardless, I was convinced everyone heard it. Graeme laughed. Tapeworms of envy wriggled inside of me. It felt unnatural. There was no way I could get used to this. Why should I have to get used to this? But I knew I’d have to. It’s the only way I could truly leave. This was only the beginning. I was now a compass that couldn’t find north.

Thanks for getting to the end of this piece, and I hope you enjoyed it. I’m developing this Substack channel as part of New Writing North’s A Writing Chance Programme for working-class writers.

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Photos Define A Person - pt. 1

Matt Taylor — Sun, 08 Dec 2024 08:01:43 GMT

Photo by Pascal on Unsplash

I screamed in lowercase: “i have no photos from my childhood.” To me this is normal, but for the BBC journalist doing a feature on me, it was impossible.

“There must be one,” he said.

“Nope,” I replied. “I don’t have any. I grew up in care. In children’s homes. Photos weren’t really a thing. No one really cared about that stuff.” It didn’t matter how many times or what formation of this answer I gave; he refused to believe me. But after several sympathetic email niceties, he went on to say,

“Surely you can just get in touch with your family and get one?” I screamed in lowercase,

“Thanks for your help. I grew up in care. It’s not that simple.”

I’ve always had a problematic relationship with photographs. I have an equally deep interest and disinterest in them. I love the art of photography but I struggle with the sentimentality of photographs. Photos are the symbol of the things we care deepest about. We take photos of moments we care about. We keep photos of memories we care about. We share photos to show people who we care about and what we care about. So, maybe it isn’t surprising that I had no photos of my childhood. But was it because no one cared, or was it because I did not care about that time of my life?

I have read somewhere that photos define a person. And if this is the case, I didn’t exist before I was sixteen, until I left the Isle of Man and its children’s homes forever. I grew up in the age of the disposable photo, the deletable image, the throwaway memories, and in that move, I erased my childhood without a second thought.

When I left the island, I drank the clichéd working-class Cool-Aid of a fresh start. I can still feel the wet sea salt sprinkle my face as I watched my childhood dissolve into the horizon. But the tingling sensation of relief quickly turned into a shudder of dread as I realised I didn’t want the shadow of that life to follow me. This separation was a chance for a new shadow. Or at least I wanted people to see a different one. Not the scrawny little bastard with a chavvy hair style. Not the track suits and white trainers. I wanted to be a normal kid.

Photography is about light. Having no photos plunged my childhood into a dark age. As much as the BBC journalist frustrated me with his lack of empathy towards my situation, he ignited something in me that hadn’t been there before. I didn’t know why, but having some photos of my childhood felt necessary.

I wasn’t lying to the journalist when I told him photos weren’t really a thing in children’s homes because they weren’t. For most of the time I lived in them, and I aimed to spend as little time inside them. I was sure no photos existed from that time. It had been over ten years since I left. To prove myself wrong, I would go on long walks to forage the deepest, darkest, densest, overgrown parts of my memory, desperately searching.

Each search led me to a void, a wall of infinite blackness so profound that I sometimes doubted whether I could find a way back.

Little sparks occasionally flashed: memories of photos being taken. Grainy A4 printouts of pictures taken from a care worker’s phone when they took me and my brother to Blackpool for a weekend as part of transitioning to a new children’s home. They were pinned up in the kitchen. Some photos did exist. People didn’t really know how to store photos back then. That trip was in April 2007, before the iPhone or the iCloud or anything now that allows us to keep photos we forget about. This is a starting point.

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On further walks, I wrestled, wondering whether I wanted to pursue this. Was it worth it? Was I ready? What am I even doing this for? I walked away from that life for a reason. Sentimentality was never something I had learnt. It’s hard to grow an attachment to things when anything you are attached to would disappear at some point. Without realising it, I had embodied Dory’s mantra of ‘just keep swimming’.

Getting any photos would take me to a place I’m not sure I wanted to go again. It would never be as simple as firing up an old hard drive or dusting off an old box. I would have to contact people and services.

I obtained my care files from Social Services. Out of the 15,000 PDFs, out of the tonnes of images of handwritten notes, not a single photograph. More memories flashed by: celebration evenings. I firmly remember being shown the photos by a staff member on their email after one. They looked professional. Someone must still have them?

Luckily, I was still in contact with that staff member. I got in touch. She couldn’t help and told me of a policy that came in shortly after I left.

I screamed in lowercase: thanks for the help.

I went back to Social Services and asked them to look again. Still nothing.

I screamed in lowercase: thanks for the help.

I got in touch with the care provider. Still nothing. I pushed back on what their policies were on this, and that I had firm memories of photos being taken and shared. All they replied was, two months after I left, a policy came giving each house a camera and all the photos would be archived.

I screamed in lowercase: thanks for the help.

It’s not that simple. That’s what I told the journalist. Why, a year after the feature was published, am I pursuing this? Setbacks are unavoidable. But giving up is unforgivable. This wasn’t a round of Mastermind, ‘I’ve started, so I’ll finish’. Sometimes, my brain obsesses. Things I resist tend to persist. Maybe I was just fed up with not being able to join in when people shared the parts they cared about from their childhood?

The original spark. The memory of the Blackpool photos in the kitchen. That care worker was into saving things. We used to share MP3s with each other. Is it possible he just might still have copies of those photos? I’ve tried to connect with him before, but he has always ignored me. I get it. People move on with their lives. This was one last shot in the dark. My fingers let out an exhausted sigh after tapping out another cold-calling email, desperately hoping this one would get back to me.

Nothing. Weeks of empty plastic bags tumbled past.

An email landed in my inbox.

These were the photos. My brain puked verbally incoherent remarks while my fingers trembled over the trackpad. Now I had them. Did I actually want to see them? Some things can’t be unseen. The photos would take me back to a place I wasn’t sure I was ready to go. I closed the email.

Maybe the reason I didn’t want any childhood photos is because I didn’t want to understand what my childhood meant? I would have to confront this eventually. I reopened the email.

I screamed in lowercase: thanks for your help.

Part 2 can be found here:

Thanks for getting to the end of this piece, and I hope you enjoyed it. I’m developing this Substack channel as part of New Writing North’s A Writing Chance Programme for working-class writers.

If you enjoy the writing, please help grow the channel and the voice of care leavers by sharing it with your network, friends, or family. It all helps.

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To Be Expected…

Matt Taylor — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 08:00:50 GMT

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

I find the burden of expectation heavy.

Expectations are the lists of things we build up: they tell us how things should be, they keep us ‘safe’, but they also hold us back, they stop us from being present in our lives. In Latin, expectation means an awaiting. The anticipation of something. The suspense of the unknown. Uncertainty. I melt with anxiety from not knowing.

I know it comes from the care system. From not knowing if I’d be stabbed with another bout of rejection with the announcement of yet another change of social worker, who was always keen to write a new care plan. From not knowing exactly who would be staying in my [children’s] home each night and the sense of shakiness from my hand each time I walked through the front door to be introduced to a new set of adults or housemates. From not knowing if my room, my phone, or my journals, all my private spaces had been rifled through while I was out, and the sense of violation all in the name of ‘keeping me safe’. The only certainty was the uncertainty of what next.All these expectations were rooted in shame and punishment with no hope. I still have these emotions in my body, and they’ll probably never leave me.

Care leavers spend more of their lives dressed in other people's expectations rather than their own. We are the expected of rather than the expecting. I feel shackled by other people’s expectations. Expectations placed on us hold us in an infinite loop of false possibilities. Impossibility. They don’t guarantee anyone a thing. It starts off with suggestions, which turn into small favours, which turn into requests, which turn into requirements, which turn into obligations, which turn into demands, which all turn into pressure, and unrelenting pressure eventually combusts. Expectations always hurt. And they are exhausting.

Last month, I returned to the University of Oxford after taking a study break from their Creative Writing Master’s programme. Sometimes, my life gets complicated. Sometimes, my emotions get complicated. Sometimes it all gets too complicated. When this happens, I have learnt to hit the pause button and unmuddle myself. And pausing meant precisely that. As my year group continued to march through their study, I remained where I was, waiting to join the next group when they filed by. When I could hear the cavalcade of Converse-type shoes trek up behind me, I could smell my stench of panic.

Hitting play scared me. I knew I was expected to pick up as if nothing ever happened. Intrusive bubbles of “ifs, buts, and maybes” circled my head. I was intruding on a well-defined group with its dynamics, conflicts, and memories. But I chose this. I may have earned my place at Oxford, but I would have to earn my place in this group.

Expectation stands on the shoulders of trust, as they both require a strong belief in something or someone. Trust, like many children from the care system, is a language I was never taught how to speak. Along the way, I have picked up a few basic phrases to get myself by, but I am basically illiterate. Despite my ignorance, at the very least, I trusted my tutors would introduce me to my new year group. I quickly learnt this was something else expected of me.

I was in a conflict of familiarity. I’ve done this thing before, I’ve completed the first year, too. I know what they’ve been through. But my memories of the first year are not their memories. I knew the classrooms, the common room, the dining room, the staff, the tutors, and the reading lists. This false sense of comfort veiled enough of the uncertainty for me to miss it.

The residencies on the programme have a substantial social element: tea breaks, lunches, dinners, drinks, and readings. Walking into a room like that is hard when you are the only stranger in the group. Every introduction in that situation has a power structure. It didn’t feel like this when I began the first year. We were all new, starting from the same point, at the same time, trying to protect delicate beginnings. In doing so, any power dynamic was removed from the introductions. When it is there, I’m triggered back to the children’s homes, introducing myself to the adults I knew who were judging me and analysing me. I was emotionally exhausted.

I get it. It’s a way of getting us to practice to ‘put yourself out there’ and ‘make connections’. But to assume that everyone who comes on to the course comes from the kind of background that gives them the confidence to just walk into a room full of strangers who already know each other and just ‘put themselves out there’ reveals a huge privilege blind spot. I’m sure those of you who have read some of my Substack by now know I don’t have this background. Again, this was expected of me.

The endless not-knowing and misreading and second-guessing perpetuated through the remaining 4 days. My new year group are complicated. It's way more complex than my original one. In that one, we viewed each other as colleagues. In this one, it felt like we were all competitors. There were sides to be taken. There were more expectations to be placed on me. What had I got myself into? Had I made a mistake in taking a break? Should I have been stronger and found a way through? More bubbles circled my head.

I found that despite taking a break, my background, the kind of person I am, the course leaders expect people to be able to deal with this. I’m aware I’m talking about the most elite university in the world, and the kind of people who usually walk through their doors aren’t people like me. So I probably shouldn’t be surprised that they didn’t consider accommodating this, which makes it a “me problem”. I get that. Maybe it’s because I’m a careleaver. I read everywhere that one of our key strengths is resilience. Maybe that’s true. Maybe I am. If I am, if we are so resilient, we didn’t choose to be, and it doesn’t give anyone the right to expect us to be.

Trust is a doing a word.

Towards the end of the second day, I debated whether it was worth skipping the final workshops of the afternoon. The weight of expectation to speak and give feedback on work was crippling. At the same time as meeting new people, I had to provide honest, constructive feedback on creative work to a group that had radiated complex shit. Some were not ready for a bright spotlight to land on their work. I couldn’t do it anymore. Those emotions of shame, humiliation, and violation started to resurface. Some came up to me and said I needed to be more confident, or people would start thinking differently of me. I couldn’t do it anymore.

One of the benefits of my conflict of familiarity was a tutor I felt I could trust. Mainly because she was a careleaver. I wished she would get it. I told her of my struggles of having to be constantly ‘on’ every time I entered a room and how it triggered the memories of returning to the children’s home each day. I told her that being summoned to give feedback in class was crippling me and that I need some time to get to know the personalities before I constructively critique their work. I told her how I was so exhausted with the burden of expectation placed on me and how I almost ducked out of the workshops that day.

We discussed things. I didn’t know what I expected her to do with this information. One of the phrases of trust I have learnt is that you just allow someone to help and let them do what is needed. All I asked was for the level of expectation to be lifted. If people don’t expect things from me, I’ll engage better. I don’t know what she did, but the next day, I felt better.

Everyone is so caught up in not having expectations of themselves that they become blind to the fact they are placing on other people. Expectation does not stop the painful stuff care leavers go through. It just blames us because other people don’t want to deal with us as we are.

Thanks for getting to the end of this piece, and I hope you enjoyed it. I’m developing this Substack channel as part of New Writing North’s A Writing Chance Programme for working-class writers.

If you enjoy the writing, please help grow the channel and the voice of care leavers by sharing it with your network, friends, or family. It all helps.

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There are more people in space than care leavers at the University of Oxford

Matt Taylor — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 15:07:53 GMT

Photo by Mingrui He on Unsplash

This week is the start of National Care Leavers Week in the UK. Every year, during the October holidays, the country is asked to pay attention to those who grew up in the state’s care, celebrate their achievements, amplify their voices, and raise awareness of their challenges. Please check them out; some of us are doing incredible things.

Here is a piece about the challenges Careleavers face getting into the top university in the world.

Last year, there were double the number of people in space than care leavers studying for an undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford. Out of the 9,000 care leavers who applied to universities across the board, only five were considered talented enough to get into the top university in the world. What is behind this seismic underrepresentation at Oxford? Is it that those from the care system are thick, or is there something lingering institutional bias in the admissions process?

This subject is an angry tenant in both my head and heart, as I am a careleaver studying at the University of Oxford. I'm a graduate student, so I don't fall within these figures. Regardless, the barriers are the same. It probably doesn’t surprise anybody that our most significant hurdle is financial. For instance, we don’t have parents to go back home to between term times, so we require accommodation all year round. Oxford does provide some financial assistance to help with this. £3,000 per year and a scholarship for undergraduates. But this is only up to the age of 25, yet 69% of applicants from the care system tend to be mature students. For graduates, there is now the Academic Futures Programme. However, these things aren’t always as accessible as they seem.

When I started in 2022, I found no specific support for graduate care leavers, but of course, there are the usual scholarships are open to everyone. The way Oxford University operates, to be eligible for any scholarship, you must apply before the January deadline and be offered a place during that round of interviews. I did apply on time, hoping to get a scholarship. However, I was placed on a waiting list to be considered after the March deadline. This small decision meant I was no longer eligible—no ifs or buts.

These arbitrary cut-off points in the admissions process fail people from the care system.

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It's hard to be what you cannot see. When I left the care system at eighteen, I could hardly read or construct a sentence, let alone write a whole argument. Somehow, the dream of studying at Oxford got into my head. I believe that when you have a dream, you have a responsibility to make it happen. For ten years, I prayed at the altar of hard work, grit, determination, and resilience to realise it. But being told after my admissions interview, ‘We think you’re good, but we want to see if anyone better applies’, almost broke that ambition. I believed I had hit the end of the road. This is as far as someone from a children’s home gets to places like this.

Getting the offer to study at Oxford was one of the proudest moments of my life. I’d done what felt impossible. The offer contained one condition: a financial declaration. The euphoria quickly sank to panic. It felt like I needed to prove I had money to come to a university like this. That I couldn’t just blag that I’ll get an extra job or work harder. I’d need to prove two years up front that I had the money now. Despite still having my application in time for scholarship consideration, I was moved against my will to the March deadline, the university confirmed I would not get any support from them. Along with all the other challenges of being a careleaver here, would I now be able to afford it? The process makes no concession for background or circumstance.

I’m not saying the process needs to be watered down to let more people in. Far from it. I would hate for that sense of achievement to be devalued just to be seen to ‘do the right thing’. It should be hard. But the barriers must be the same for everyone, regardless of their background. Not a Takeshi’s Castle of obstacles littered through the admissions process, eliminating many of the care leavers until there are only a handful of us. I believe this institution is better than that.

You have to be the change you want to make. Is the University of Oxford ready to change the admissions process to be more inclusive to those like me from the care system? These things are slow and take time. But studying at Oxford shouldn’t be as tough as entering space.

Thanks for getting to the end of this piece, and I hope you enjoyed it. I’m developing this Substack channel as part of New Writing North’s A Writing Chance Programme for working-class writers. Please be a hero and subscribe to the newsletter to receive posts as they happen in your inbox. Paying is optional.

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Please Mind The Gap

Matt Taylor — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 10:59:54 GMT

Photo by AXP Photography on Unsplash

The gap of a father is one that never closes.

Fill it, leap over it, or even try to move away from it. The gap is still there. It is always there, like a lost piece of Tupperware missing its lid. Sometimes, all my pretending slips into forgetting. But before too long, my foot will catch in the gap, and I will fall.

Today is one of those days.

Twenty-one years ago today, the fickle finger of fate scooped out my gap when my father died suddenly that Thursday morning. I was ten years old. I was old enough to understand the practicalities of death. I understood that when I last saw him, I was going, and now he was gone. Never to come back. The night before, we sat and watched reruns of old quiz shows, and that would never happen again. Never have my fingers glide through the woolly dark hairs on his arms. Gone. Never be able to ask him how he somehow knew all the answers to a quiz show that originally aired twenty years ago. Gone. Never get to cushion up while watching TV and fall asleep. Gone. But I was too young to understand that the gap left would never be gone.

Learning to live with the gap is also learning to survive.

I have often struggled with the concept of missing someone, and maybe that’s because the feeling of missing someone arrives once you see them again. But early on, I got used to the idea of not interacting with him again and that the missing sensation never came. That’s not to say I never thought about him, I do. Or that I would never speak to him in my thoughts, I do. Or that I never dream about him. I do. Clearly, I felt something was missing.

When the cavity emerges, the first instinct is to fill it. But no concoction of father-figured asphalt will work. Children who suffer bereavement are naturally vulnerable. With vulnerability also comes impressionability, and both of them became the spades I used to fill the gap. They were the only tools to hand. No one around me, from my biological family to the whole mountain range of social workers and care home staff, thought to equip me with anything different. But they attracted father figures like magnets attract metal. I had no control over this. Often, they were rusty decapitated things that should be avoided at all costs.

The second is to leap over it. For a time, this works, but practice does not make perfect, and eventually, it becomes exhausting. Over time, the edges blend into the surroundings. This is pretending becomes forgetting, and I will misstep. Like a cleverly disguised cartoon trap hole, I will fall headfirst with no one to help rescue me.

The third is to move away from it. To use abstraction as a response to trauma and avoid the gap. I do a lot. I make myself so busy, that I don’t have time to deal with my trauma. This avoidance has been helpful as it has manifested itself in a drive that has pushed me to achieve some success in life. But my selfishness in avoiding my gap impacts those around me.

The fingerprint has remained on me as an adult.

In his memoir, Barack Obama says that people either live up to their father’s expectations or try to make up for their father’s mistakes. I think I do both, although I was too young to know exactly what my father’s expectations of me were. I know I definitely try to make up for what I believed were his mistakes.

My father was an honest man who loved his family and worked hard. Incredibly hard. He worked as a taxi driver. His colleagues would tell me he worked all hours god-sent, and I often believe this is where my intense work ethic has come from. However, his job was essentially to transport people to their exciting lives. He died at the age of 39. Was it worth working that hard? Sacrificing all that time with his family? After all that, he would die, and I would end up in a children’s home anyway. Maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe no matter what job he had, this would always happen. Maybe this is how he dealt with his gap.

Adversity has shaped me.

I learnt from a young age that I could die at any moment. That the fickle finger will come down and, in one poke, push you out of the party. Nothing sticks a rocket up your arse like knowing you could die soon. I am 86 months away from reaching the age he was when he died. The rational part of my brain tells me it’s unlikely the same fate will fall upon me, but the fingerprint is still there. Burnt into me, like a scar. A birthmark. It now manifests as an aching drive to achieve something, to be the interesting person in the back of his taxi. It has pushed me to insane levels of burnout just so I can say I did something.

Am I making up for his mistakes or just repeating them? Is it good enough that if I die at 39, any children I would have would say this is what my dad did, rather than this is what I did with my dad?

The trick is to accept that the gap is there.

It has taken me 21 years to acknowledge this gap and that it will never close, never be filled, and will just be there. Acceptance shrinks the gap. Instead of falling into it, it can be walked over like a small pothole with little consequence.

We have no choice about leaving a gap, but we do get to choose how it is left. We get to decide its shape, size, and tools for those who must deal with it. Perhaps this is achieved through acceptance.

My father died 21 years ago today. It is twice the time I spent with him while he was alive. I now accept the gap between him is there. It will always be there. It will never close.

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Pushed or Pulled?

Matt Taylor — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 07:00:59 GMT

Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash

Something is triggering about magnolia paint. Whenever I’ve asked why it’s used, I’m told that it is neutral and unoffensive. That it doesn’t insult anyone’s sense of taste. That no one has an opinion about magnolia. I do. The blandness. The offensive blandness. Not a blank canvas but one that states we don’t want personality here. It’s a nothing colour for nothing kids. Designed to sap the vibrant, dynamic, engaging energy out of the offensive kids it’s wrapped around. Almost every room in my teenage years had this spiteful paint. The oppression of any self-expression. Nobody cares about magnolia, was their mantra. Maybe this is why it is used in waiting rooms of social services, of police cells, of health clinics. Because nobody cares about the kids inside of them.

I thumped the small wire-glass window with a policeman’s knock to the seven-note ‘shave and a haircut’ rhythm. The health visitor jumped out of her skin. I didn’t want to be there as much as she probably didn’t want to see me, but this is one of the routines that no child outside the care system must endure. These small practical jokes were my way of making it tolerable. I had largely forgotten these even happened. Save one. I entered alongside the neglected scream of the door creaking and squeaking.

“Hiya, Matthew, take a seat.” She said.

I think I mumbled a reply.

“This is just a check-up to see how you’re getting on after your suicide attempt a couple of months ago.”

“What, suicide attempt? I’ve never tried to kill myself.”

“It says here on your records you did.”

Screen-shot from my care files.

How did I get there? How did I, after only being in the care system for under a year, descend into such chaos, and find myself sat in another magnolia room discussing a suicide attempt I had no recollection of? How did I end up in a place where I should never have been?

In 2021, the Children’s Commissioner released a report stating that children who enter residential care (children’s homes) as teenagers are “drawn into dangerous or criminal behaviour”. Ever since I started writing, I’ve learnt that the words a writer chooses to reveal much about their real thoughts. Whether they know it or not. In that report, which looks at the characteristics of the children entering the care system while trying to be on the side of children, in one word, they exposed their lingering institutional bias against those children. Drawn.

Drawn is to be attracted to. Pulled into the situation. That there is little the system could do at this point because the magnetic force is so strong. Drawn deletes any decision, removes any responsibility, cancels any culpability, frantically hits the backspace on any blame, cutting and pasting it all from the system to the dangerous situations, to the nefarious adults, to the innocent child. They – we – were not pulled, attracted to, or drawn into. We were pushed, repelled, forced into by the system. By lack of independence. By an unhealthy desire to overprotect. By suffocation. By not being able to learn how to have fun in a safe way. By being pushed away from stable friend groups. By being punished for their lack of trust.

In writing my memoir, I have pondered where it all started. Was my descent into chaos as invertible as the reports suggest, or could it have been prevented? One of the few benefits of being in care, and it is only a benefit in this situation, is that for all my time there, detailed notes were made by multiple ‘professionals’. I have over 15,000 pages detailing my life in fine detail.

Nothing is magnolia about reading my thirteen-year-old self, but it is triggering. As I dug and dug, looking for a start, memories that I felt were concrete turned to dust in one scroll of the screen. Part of the emotional reaction is just how biased, one-sided, and out-of-context, some of the observations are. This is something that deserves its own exploration and something I will dedicate a few Substack posts to.

I found two save points, which pushed me away from my stable friend group when I entered the care system. Two times, if the care workers and social workers behaved like normal parents, the decline might not have been as steep, or maybe not at all.

The first was not allowing me to go to an under-18 club night at the local theatre. Everyone I knew was going, all my friends were going, all the kids who could have overnight stays at their parents in my children’s home were going, and so I wanted to go. These events are essential to teaching boundaries and how to safely have fun while allowing children to feel independent. On the day of the club night, my social worker phoned my children’s home and asked the staff to inform me that she had decided I couldn’t go. Despite already having bought a ticket and was getting ready at a friend’s house and I was assured it wouldn’t be a problem. I was told my social worker wasn’t sure how safe it would be or whether I would encounter nefarious adults.

The second was wanting to stay overnight at a friend’s house, like I used to before I went into the system. The friend’s family passed all the intrusive background checks, but at the last minute, as last the time, the same social worker decided I couldn’t because she wasn’t sure about my safety.

To be treated like normal children. That’s all we want. For carers and social workers to behave like normal parents would. Any child who has been or is still in the care system will tell you this is all we want. To have the same freedoms as other children outside of the system. For the system to make decisions like any normal parent would. For the system to trust us, so we can learn how to be safe. Being safe, staying safe, keeping safe are skills learnt through experience. Not from being wrapped up in cotton wool.

The first law of teenagers is that they explore boundaries. Test them, push them, and, on occasion, break them. But where they are set is down to parenting. This can’t be avoided. They are always going to explore the limits. If they don’t get a chance to examine boundaries safely, they will end up doing it unsafely. This is the first law of teenagers.

“In April, you consumed a high number of Benzodiazepine tablets and ended up in hospital.” The health visitor explained. I had no idea what these tablets were, but I do remember a weekend when I went crazy on some medication, I stole from a house that me and my new friend group broke into.

“That was a crazy weekend, not a suicide attempt.”

“With these tablets, is there much difference? Are you ok with yourself now?”

I gradually fell out of my first friend group. I would no longer get invited to things. At this age, the strength of the bond between friends is equal to time spent together. I couldn’t give the time, so I fell out of orbit. Instead, I gravitated to people who could understand my situation or didn’t care. These people tended to be those who prayed on the vulnerabilities that came with me. I started to appear on the missing list, I engaged in crime, and I consumed unreasonable cocktails of drugs and alcohol. The situations, the people, and the behaviour, I now found myself in were incredibly dangerous. I shouldn’t have been there.

Before these two safe points, my daily summaries were pretty mundane. My fingers got tired of scrolling through many pages of “MT seems in good spirits”, and “MT up early and ready for school”. In a separate document, I found a readout from a meeting with senior social workers and care staff where they discussed whether I still needed to be looked after. They concluded it was probably time for me to go home. But my descent was in place, and weeks later, my crazy weekend or their suicide attempt happened.

I didn’t know this at the time. Now, I can’t help but think what would’ve happened if one or both requests were given. If the social workers had done what the policy set out and allowed me to participate in reasonable activities that other children my age could have. One thing is for sure, I definitely felt like I was pushed into it, not pulled, attracted, or drawn into it as they would have you believe.

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Share Underclass Hero with Matt Taylor

Underclass Hero with Matt Taylor

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January – Thunderous Black Moodcore

Top Genre: I played 14 hours of rumbling clouds and screeching guitars. A storm on loop.

Mood: Apologies for the delay, I have been drowning in chaos.

February – Drowning in The Undertow Blues

Top Genre: Low-toned heartbreak, heavy on bass.

Mood: The inside of a churning wave, no surface in sight.

March – Chaos Breaksbeat

Top Genre: Pulsing in chaos, breakbeats fracturing the silence.

Mood: Everything got too much. Something had to give.

April – Shallow Validation Indiepop

Top Genre: Upbeat, shimmering, with small triumphs.

Mood: The sweet ping of the notification bell.

May – Milestone Dreamwave

Top Genre: Airy synths and reverent echoes of possibility.

Mood: From a children’s home to Abbey Road Studios. Impossible becomes real.

June – Algorithmic Tides

Top Genre: A restless ambient drone, numbers creeping upward.

Mood: Self-doubt behind every status update.

July – Lost in Static

Top Genre: White noise.

Mood: Faded transmissions, a station left in silence.

August – Festival Revival

Top Genre: Electric chord progressions, crowd roars.

Mood: High voltage, carried on cheers.

September – Uncharted Frequencies

Top Genre: Experimental rhythms of hope and fear.

Mood: A hush before the biggest drop.

October – Weathered Reflection Shoegaze

Top Genre: Soft, introspective strumming with waves of reverb.

Mood: The ache of old memories, the hush of new truths.

November – Echoing Confessional Lo-fi

Top Genre: Slow-burning reveals beneath layers of fuzz.

Mood: The subtle tremor of vulnerability that doesn’t quite reach the same dark corners as before.

December – Steady Undertow Post-Rock

Top Genre: Building crescendos with patient, looping progressions.

Mood: A quiet confidence in the face of comparisons and algorithms.

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Pushed or Pulled?