He arrived in the world sometime in the 1960s, under a sky permanently tinted the colour of weak tea, in a Birmingham council house that had been built with optimism and painted with resignation. The house was solid, practical and allergic to warmth. Central heating was a rumour spread by southerners and estate agents. Winter mornings began with visible breath, a kettle that took twenty minutes to boil, and the ritual argument over whose turn it was to sit closest to the gas fire. The gas fire, incidentally, had one setting: barely alive.
Education began early, usually with the shock of cold lino underfoot and the smell of damp coats drying in the hallway. School was a red-brick affair with windows that never quite shut and teachers who believed discipline was a contact sport. The classrooms echoed with the scrape of chairs, the clatter of metal pencil cases, and the constant threat of chalk missiles. This was an era when handwriting mattered, rulers were wooden, and the phrase “Wait till your dad gets home” was a recognised legal system.
Playtime was where the real education happened. Football was played with a ball that weighed roughly the same as a house brick once wet, on tarmac that removed skin on contact. Other toys included conkers, marbles, and whatever could be repurposed into something dangerous. A stick was never just a stick; it was a sword, a rifle, a fishing rod, or the steering column of an imaginary lorry roaring down the M6. If you were lucky, you had a bike held together with hope and a single functional brake. Helmets were for astronauts and cowards.
At home, entertainment was rationed. The television was a box in the corner that took several minutes to warm up and displayed programmes in a colour palette best described as “muddy optimism.” Children grew up on theme tunes that lodged in the brain forever, characters that felt like neighbours, and adverts that promised happiness in exchange for cereal. Board games were played until fights broke out, usually over rules nobody fully understood, and bedtime stories were replaced early on with the instruction to “get your head down.”
Food was filling, dependable, and designed to survive a small war. Tea meant tea. Dinner meant something with gravy. Exotic cuisine arrived in the form of chips with curry sauce, which felt thrillingly foreign. The fridge was small, the freezer smaller, and the idea of “snacks” was something that happened at Christmas if supplies held out.
By the time he reached his teens, the city around him was changing. Birmingham still hummed, but the rhythm was off. Factories that had once been the backbone of the city began to quieten, gates chained, windows boarded, promises quietly withdrawn. The adults noticed first. Conversations at the kitchen table grew heavier. Someone’s dad was laid off. Someone’s uncle “took early retirement,” which everyone understood meant not by choice.
School offered careers advice that amounted to “try not to panic.” Apprenticeships were fewer, jobs scarcer, and optimism harder to come by. At eighteen, armed with a school-leaver’s certificate, a borrowed suit, and a CV typed on a machine that jammed every third letter, he stepped into a Birmingham that felt unsure of itself. Interviews were awkward affairs, conducted in offices that smelled faintly of dust and disappointment. Employers spoke of restructuring, downsizing, and “the current climate,” which sounded suspiciously like a polite way of saying no.
And yet, somehow, he kept going. Because growing up cold teaches you resilience. Growing up skint teaches you creativity. Growing up in a city that had taken a few knocks but refused to lie down taught him something else entirely: that even when the factories fell silent and the future looked uncertain, there was still grit, humour, and stubborn pride baked into the bricks. Birmingham might have been changing, but so was he — and he’d already survived worse than a broken boiler.
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