Having just finished adding lots of photos to this gallery - and while knowing my own story so well - a part of me wonders, "Do I deserve the fantastic life I've created for myself today? Should I feel guilty for all the suffering I've caused others through my years of irresponsibility and crass selfishness? Or, does the source of my dysfunction exonerate me from such accountability?" I totally lack the objectivity such a question requires. 

 

 So many of my school friends never made it to the point where they wanted to change because they died from overdose or violence while still young and naive. I was very lucky in that prison was a cure, somewhere I could endure withdrawal symptoms until becoming clean and new again. It was never this way for my friends as they were practically conformist compared to me - therefore, they lived on the frontline of risk daily for years.  

 

 Heroin began to flood UK jails in the late eighties and early nineties. I found myself re-evaluating my position because I foresaw the haven I had in the prison estate living on borrowed time. This new dynamic, along with the desire to stop my children learning from my behaviour, is what prompted me to seek help from a rehabilitation centre.

 

 Today's lens grants me the vision of seeing my history's biggest irony: had I not been placed in council care, Borstals, and prisons, there's a good chance I wouldn't have made it either. Crime, prison and music saved my life in many ways and I have immense gratitude for this strange Trinity which has been tailing me for so long. Three years of absconding from care homes primed me to be a survivor, and these survival skills have served me well on the many occasions I have left the UK to explore foreign countries with little other than a guitar or a saxophone and a few pairs of boxers, busking my way around different countries and cultures while learning new languages and songs.