My story
The short version. The long one is in the book.
Where I started
I grew up in Camden in the 1980s. When I was five, I was electrocuted on the railway line behind the Maiden Lane Estate, and my brother pulled me off the track. The accident burned my hands and affected my speech and my writing, and school became a place of embarrassment rather than a place where I belonged. Much later I found out I have ADHD. Nobody was looking for that in a boy from a Camden estate back then.
Losing my way
By thirteen I had walked away from education for good. At home there was nobody really in charge, and the streets found a use for a mind that school never had. I first went to prison at fifteen, to Feltham Young Offender Institution. That is where I found my first book.
For years after that I led crews that stole from businesses across London. I told myself nobody was getting hurt. That was not true. In 2013, when I was trying to go straight, I took part in a robbery that I regret more than anything I have ever done. I served four years, and they were where everything changed.
Where it turned
In prison I became a rep, supporting men who were frightened, confused or unable to read the forms in front of them. I put a sign on my cell door: "Knock if you need my help." And I went back to Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, a book I had first read years before. Frankl believed the last freedom anyone has is the freedom to choose how they respond. This time I understood him, and I started choosing who I was going to be.
After prison
I was released in 2017. My son was born the following year, and a month later I went back to the classroom. I finished a Higher National Diploma and then, in 2021, a degree in Business Management and Entrepreneurship at the University of Sunderland in London.
Then I hit the wall that so many people with a record hit. A charity named Project ReMAKE supported me and Capita gave me a chance with my first job and I worked to become a Social Value Manager on the Department for Education's Turing Scheme. In 2024, Capita named me its Hero of the Year. That same year I launched Anabranch Plus, and in December 2025 I left my job at Capgemini as a social value consultant to run it full time.
Why I tell it
People do not fail to progress because they lack ambition. They usually fail because nobody shows them where the door is, or what is behind it.
I tell my story because nobody is born bad and nobody's story is ever finished.
Hear when my book is out
I am finishing a book about my life, The Anabranch and an easy-read version, A Quarter of a Book, for anyone who finds reading hard. Leave your email and I will let you know when they are ready. I will only write when there is something worth sharing.