I grew up on top
of a hotel.
Now I'm rebuilding
London's queer soul.
My father Clive ran the St Giles Hotel, Tottenham Court Road. Welsh. My mother Vanessa arrived from Ireland with 40 pence and got a job at The Ritz. Both of them built something from nothing, in a city that wasn't built for them. I have been doing the same thing — AuDHD, gay, Welsh-Irish, Camden-raised — ever since.
Two strands.
One system.
The double helix drifting through this canvas is not a metaphor borrowed from biology. It is how my brain has always worked. Two strands running in parallel, binding at every interchange.
The purple strand is Autism: pattern recognition, deep expertise, systems architecture, documentation obsession, low tolerance for friction. The pink strand is ADHD: hyperfocus, urgency, novelty drive, parallel processing, compulsive building.
Where they meet — the gold points you can see flickering through the canvas — is where the partnerships are built. The original thinking. The 48-hour sprint that should have taken six weeks. The 27-subdomain ecosystem operated by one human and an AI workforce.
Use the toggle at the top right to isolate each strand. See what Autism does alone. See what ADHD does alone. Then turn them both back on. Watch the gold ignite.
Not coping mechanisms.
Optimised workflows.
Each trait is doing a specific job. These are not soft skills. They are production-grade capabilities — running live, right now, across two businesses in Camden.
My husband thought I was going crazy. He said it with love. He is not wrong that I am at the edge of something. But the edge is exactly where I need to be.
I cried in public for the first time. Not in private. Not alone. In a room full of people. Because I cared too much about something to hold it in. That is not a breakdown. That is what happens when you finally let yourself feel something all the way through.
Camden Council demolished my childhood in a single day. The buildings where Sebastian and Max and I used to play. The summer nights at Tasha's house — sneaking through the side door because she had the Barbie dolls and it felt like the most free place in the world. St Joseph's RC Primary in Covent Garden. The years at The Oratory. All of it.
They didn't just take buildings. They took my christening boxes. My Star Wars collection. Everything stored in the shed next door — not across the city, next door — and then deleted. Erased. One call, one decision, one morning I wasn't there for.
Dust is skin.
Skin is people.
I am covered in it — day and night.
That is not a metaphor. It is physics. Every surface I walk through is made of everyone who ever walked through it before. Working in an LGBTQIA+ venue — breathing it back to life — I am covered in the dust of those buildings, those streets, those summers. From the places my mates used to play to the lovely summer nights at Tasha's. It is all still there.
I feel the world differently. I always have. I feel it all at once, sometimes — all of it, simultaneously, with no buffer. People call that erratic. I am choosing to call it accurate. The world is erratic. I am just not pretending otherwise.
Does it make me crazy? No. Does it make me erratic? Yes. And that is okay. Because at the edge of your comfort zone is the magic. In the void is where the original thinking lives. And we don't need big caves or grand moments to connect with what is real.
And while I'm here: I have worn so many masks for so many years. Give me a break. I am almost 36 and one year diagnosed. One year of finally having language for something that was always operating underneath — underneath the hotel roof, underneath the school uniform on the BP forecourt, underneath every boardroom in every city on four continents where I sat and performed a version of myself that was easier for the room to digest.
It has been an epic rollercoaster of discovery. A lot of meditation. A lot of sitting with things I spent decades running past. The diagnosis did not change who I am. It explained who I always was. And what it has made absolutely, irreversibly clear is this: I cannot be moved on my principles. Whatsoever.
I am binary. Not in a way that needs explaining or defending. Binary in the way that matters: things are right or they are wrong. People are acting with integrity or they are not. The work is honest or it is not.
I am unwilling to adjust who I am to suit the needs of the small-minded. That is not arrogance. That is what happens when you spend thirty-five years masking and then spend one year — one extraordinary, destabilising, clarifying year — learning what was actually there the whole time. You do not go back. You do not soften the edges for people who were never going to see them anyway.
I genuinely live in the node code and the bash shell. It is safe there. No one shouts. No one is drilling. No one is telling me I am after something other than what I am actually after — which is simply to be understood, and to have others be understood in return.
That is the whole thing. That is partnerships.community. That is an LGBTQIA+ venue. That is the Library of Curiosities. That is every system I have ever built. Understanding, made structurally reliable. A terminal gives you a clear answer. A 200 means yes. A 404 means no. There is no ambiguity, no subtext, no one making you feel like your intentions are suspicious. The code does not have an agenda.
I feel conned. I was taught — and I believed it, genuinely, for thirty-five years — treat others how you'd like to be treated. And on the whole, I have met some of the most incredible people I could have hoped to meet. But others — I am just not sure I am ready to experience all of that in full colour just yet.
We are not an inconvenience. Every damn moment I am masking for you. Give me a hot minute.
I wear a lanyard. Because NOISE = PAIN. Literally. Not a preference. Not a quirk. Not something to manage quietly so the room stays comfortable. Physical pain. Every day. In every room. While smiling. While building. While being, in every outward sense, completely fine.
And yes — I am rebuilding a music venue. A loud one. In Camden. With drilling. I know. The irony is not lost on me. Neither is the calling.
Deep thought and pace = stimming. That is how the processing happens. That is how the architecture gets built — not at a desk, not in a meeting, but moving. Pacing a construction site at 07:30 while the contractors arrive. Walking the floor of a venue that smells of fresh paint and plaster dust. The body regulates so the mind can work at full capacity. You cannot separate the two.
And I cannot not be at the venue. Cannot. Not. Because I am responsible for sales and marketing — and responsibility, for me, is not abstract. It is physical. It is presence. It is being in the room even when the room is loud and the drilling starts at eight and the lanyard is on and the wristband is on and the body is already asking questions the brain hasn't answered yet. You show up anyway. That is not martyrdom. That is just what the operating system does when the calling is real.
36 days of hell.
1 Apr 2026 → 9 May 2026 · an LGBTQIA+ venue · Camden NW1
My biggest fear is being locked up. Caged. This brain going full speed — and white walls to look at. That is not a metaphor. That is the specific terror of an AuDHD nervous system with nowhere to put itself. The thought of it is enough.
But this time I marched into that A&E. On my own terms. Knew the staff. And found myself — not as a patient, not as a liability, not as the person everyone was quietly worried about — but alongside the team, caring for Roddy. That is what actually happened.
The damage was done. Everyone now thinks it's me. The narrative has been written. The perception has set.
I just don't care.
I really don't.
That is not resignation. That is what one year of diagnosis does. You stop needing the external narrative to match the internal truth. You know what happened. You know who you are. You know the difference between being perceived as unstable and actually being unstable. One of those is real. The other is someone else's comfort with a story that makes more sense to them than the actual sequence of events.
So be it.
The Black Cap was the first drink with my mother. And I came out there. At Camden's most iconic gay bar — the one that had been there since the seventies, the one with the drag cabaret and the sticky floors and the sense that you were somewhere that had been fought for — I had my first drink with the woman who arrived in London from Ireland with forty pence in her pocket, and I became myself.
I saw Stardust at the Odeon. And then the Odeon shut. And then the Black Cap shut — 2015, protests outside, national headlines, another queer space scraped away because the parchment was too expensive to keep. And Camden had nothing. The community that had been there, that had made this part of London safe enough for people like me to come out in, was left without a room.
My memories were erased too. The christening boxes. The Star Wars collection. The Black Cap. The Odeon. The city keeps scraping its parchment clean, rewriting itself over the top of everything that made it worth living in. And I keep showing up — lanyard on, wristband on, 36 days in, reputationally on the line — because someone has to be the UV light. Someone has to be the one who refuses to let the undertext disappear completely.
That is why it is an LGBTQIA+ venue. Not a career decision. Not a strategic pivot. Personal history completing itself — the boy who came out at the Black Cap, keeping the last queer space in Camden alive, the night before it opens its doors again.
The mask is off. The wristband is on. The doors open tomorrow.
Numbers that survive
a follow-up question.
Every figure below is qualified. The boring true version is more impressive than the punchy bigger-numbers version, because the boring version holds under scrutiny.
Every tension
produces a capability.
A manuscript page — parchment or vellum — scraped, washed, or erased to be reused for a new text, yet still retaining faint, recoverable traces of the original writing. The practice was driven by the high cost and scarcity of parchment. The original could not be afforded. So it was erased. But it was never fully gone.
The most important mathematics of the ancient world was scraped away to make a prayer book.
Archimedes' treatises — including The Method, a work that would not be rediscovered for a millennium — were erased by monks who needed parchment for liturgy. The prayer book was practical. Archimedes was expensive to keep. So he was scraped.
In the 20th century, multispectral imaging recovered him from under the prayers. Every theorem intact. Every proof legible. The most fundamental things cannot be fully erased — only buried, waiting for the right light.
Queer culture in Camden. A independent venue scraping by. A childhood erased by a council decision and an asbestos clearance order. An immigrant mother's forty pence. A Welsh father's accent softened by a hotel lobby.
All of it: scraped. None of it: gone. The dust is still there. The history is still there. And he is the UV light.
The current model is a relic.
I have built an alternative.
It is not a "service." It is a structural inevitability — a biological and technical architecture designed to see what others miss and build what others cannot. These are its laws.
The Law of Structure
We do not build on sand. We build on rigorous, documented, immutable frameworks. If it is not repeatable, it is not real. The autistic brain does not prototype carelessly — it architects. Every system I hand over is built to run without me in the room.
The Law of Velocity
We do not wait for permission. We hyperfocus. We compress months into days. We hunt for the unseen angle that renders the conventional approach obsolete. When hyperfocus arrives, the output is extraordinary — and the documentation from that sprint runs without me afterward.
The Sacred Contradiction
Most people see the tension between Autism and ADHD as a defect. I see it as the sacred contradiction — the place where two opposing forces create something neither could produce alone. A Fortress that is stable. A Thunderbolt that is fast. A system that is simultaneously rigorously architected and creative enough to outperform category norms. The gold points in the helix above are where the two strands meet. That is where the partnerships are built.
Sometimes the caring breaks the body. I don't hide the hospital wristband. I wear it as proof that I am all in. If you aren't feeling the world, you are not building for it.
We just have to all
stand still
for a second.
And breathe.
The magic is not in the grand cave or the eureka moment. It is at the edge of your comfort zone — right at the line where you do not know if you can hold it. Original thinking happens in the void. Connection — real connection, with each other, with the earth — does not require a ceremony.
This is the operating system. AuDHD. LGBTQ+. Welsh-Irish. Camden. The hotel roof. The dust. The hospital wristband. 27 subdomains. A independent venue opening its doors tomorrow.
All of it. At the same time.
My father built hotels.
My mother built a life from 40 pence.
I build partnerships.
Not a discovery call. A genuine conversation about your opportunity — and whether my operating system, my team, and our values are the right fit for yours.
Start the conversation →