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In the beginning....
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My first vivid memories of life are the senseless confusion at pre-school and the terror of being unable to make sense of my surroundings. I was bewildered by 'the vast place of deafening, confusing mush of sound' where 'the multi-coloured blurs [children] rushed past sometimes knocking into me'.
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Despite my protests, I was continually sent to places full of incomprehensible chaos. I spent my primary school life tormented by confusion, bemused by the shapes on a page of printed text 'should I read the black bits or the white bits?', puzzled by the riddle of 'Why high notes on a piano are not further from the ground than low notes' and baffled by the way people treated me and why I was considered unintelligent.
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At 11 years old I changed to a large comprehensive school, I could barely read or write and was desperate not to be a social outcast, but was unable to conform to 'normal' teenage activities. The tragedy was that nobody understood what was wrong, not even my parents. This ignorance left me stranded in life and wondering why I should carry on living, let alone why I should study towards my GCSE's [UK exams which are sat at age 16].
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I left school at 16 years old and searched to give my life some meaning while struggling through an electronic engineering apprenticeship, trying to hide my inadequacies (particularly reading and writing difficulties) but refusing to give in to them. Unexpectedly against the odds I achieved outstanding academic marks. I was not stupid and maybe even good enough for a top university?
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Flung out into the big wide world of university life, I was now 20 years old and totally stranded with my lack of social skills and my inadequate comprehension of myself, language and the environment around me. Although I could now compensate for many of my difficulties, including coordination and vision problems, my compensations were to challenge my pain threshold and endurance capabilities.
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In the years of unemployment that followed, I began to make real sense of my surroundings, other people and more importantly myself. I came to a point, at the age of 28, where life now made reasonable sense. I wrote and published the first edition of my autobiography '
My World is not Your World'
in an attempt to show everyone that some of us are just different.
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...Discovery...
Find out about my autobiography and read some extracts
Experience my distorted vision & by watching a simulation
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Since I wrote the first edition of my
autobiography
I have worked for a multinational company doing website and database design and also IT related problem solving (I was often given the problems other people could not solve and was renowned for quickly finding solutions!). But after 4 year effortlessly solving many IT problems I became bored because I was not being stretched.
Physics had always been my first love and an irresistible opportunity arose to go to university and do full-time Masters Degree in physics. I will not pretend that life was easy. My disabilities did create problems they always will and it would be naive to expect otherwise. However I completed the 4 year course in just 3 years.
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In June 2005 I fulfilled my lifetime ambition and gained a First Class Honours Masters Degree in "Physics with Cosmology" ...I then updated my autobiography (added another chapter).
Having finished my degree I commenced a PhD in Mathematical Physics and in April 2009 I was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy in Physics.
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...and currently...
I am now thoroughly enjoying myself - working as a post-doctoral researcher applying advanced mathematical techniques to various fundamental physics problems. My research ranges from the physics of novel materials to how the brain works!
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