Playing and making are the two big passions in my life, and they always have been.

Play is a fundamental part of children’s lives and it’s very individual for each person, but sadly some children don’t have the same opportunity to express themselves in this way as others.…

My sister had a BBQ yesterday. It was a small gathering of about fifteen close friends. I could see that her two-year-old daughter Bean was very excited by the party but also a bit overwhelmed by so many lovely people who she knows well being there at the same time.…

It feels as if my body’s gone on strike. Or maybe more than that, it’s as if it’s engaged in some sort of direct action against me.

Since January I’ve been swimming at my local hydrotherapy pool on most days. Also, at the start of the year I had some improvements made to my wheelchair to make it more comfortable.…

Leftwing Idiot’s been away for over a month. We last saw him in New York in April where we’d been showing our film ‘Me, My Mouth and I’ at a film festival.

This morning Jen and I met him at Heathrow but he wasn’t heading home – instead together we were all heading for Bern in Switzerland.…

Almost a decade ago I had a conversation that changed my life – I was sitting in Leftwing Idiot’s kitchen talking about my intensifying tics and he described my Tourettes as a “language-generating machine” and told me that not doing something creative with my tics would be wasteful.…

I spend very little time on my own. To live an independent, happy, safe, creative life I need other people’s support and a team of personal assistants and support workers help me at work, at home and overnight.

When my tics started to limit what I could do I was quite slow to realise I needed more help, and struggled on for ages, leading an increasingly restricted life.…

I’m writing this post from my room in an old, elegant hotel on Broadway, New York. Spring sunshine, streaming in through the window is broken up by the wooden blinds, casting fragmented light and shadows across the smooth floor.

We arrived in New York yesterday.…

I’ve written a lot over the last year about my increasing pain and decreasing energy. I’ve shared my concerns about the impact on my work, but I’ve not talked about the adjustments we’ve been making so I can keep doing the job I love.…

At work today I had a ‘ticcing fit’. I lost all regular speech but my vocal tics continued. Much to my surprise and that of my colleagues a strange story emerged. Here’s my Tourettes-generated fable:

“There was a table and tortoise
The tortoise had a shell made of caves,
The table had a brain made of waves.…

Last night we had our opening performance of Not I here in Berlin. The show went well and the audience seemed to enjoy it.

It was quite late when we finished and none of us had eaten so the whole team went to a nearby falafel place for a late-night dinner.…