the way back

G raham is a mensch. He had been at that school for nearly three decades. Officially, he was the sports coach. In reality, he was much, much more than that. He was one of those rare people whose reputation extends way beyond their job description: children adored him, parents trusted him, and colleagues looked up to, and relied on him. Half the borough seemed to know him. He was part of the very fabric of the school and the community.   During my years at the school, I came to value him not just as a colleague but also as a friend. He was mischievous, funny and endlessly generous with his time. Beneath the jokes was someone who cared deeply about children, their wellbeing and their future. Everything he did came back to one simple question: what is best for the child?   When things started to unravel for me, Graham was one of the people who quietly stood by my side. He never made a great show of it. He simply checked in, listened and reassured. In a workplace where many p...

Many people told me to give up. To leave it behind me and move on. Some of them were very good friends, people whose judgement I respected and whose intentions I never doubted. One such friend recently had the integrity to apologise for having said so. They had since been through a similar trauma themselves, and that experience had given them a different perspective. They now understood, in a way they hadn't before, why I couldn't simply let it go. I appreciated that apology more than they probably realised. It takes a certain kind of honesty to revisit something you've said, recognise that you got it wrong, and have the courage to admit it. Perhaps it is difficult to understand from the outside. Until something similar happens to you, it is tempting to believe the answer is straightforward: draw a line under it, stop looking back, move on with your life. Sometimes, understanding comes only when you find yourself standing in someone else's shoes. But some experiences do...

Lately, my mind has felt as though it has a ridiculous number of tabs open. I struggle to close any of them, yet keep opening new ones all the time. It’s exhausting. It’s been six months since my ADHD diagnosis, and by now I was supposed to be trialling new medication. However, at the end of the summer, I received an email apologising that this next phase of my treatment would not begin until April 2027 at the earliest. It came as a shock. I had thought that, finally, I might soon be able to find a little more mental balance in my life. After so many years of knowing that I wasn’t neurotypical, receiving a diagnosis had been such a relief. At last, I felt recognised, understood, and able to look forward to finding ways to manage my condition. And now, more waiting. In the grand scheme of things, I suppose it’s not the end of the world — very much a first-world problem. It makes everything happening around me feel even more intense and much harder to process calmly. Everything seems to...

PART ONE — DECEPTION Once upon a time, in a kingdom not so very far away, there lived a witch of a most peculiar sort. She was proud, spiteful and thoroughly unpleasant. Those who crossed her path wondered what terrible enchantment had taken hold of her heart. Had some dreadful misfortune befallen her in youth? Had a wicked curse been cast upon her? Or, as some whispered behind firmly closed doors, had she simply been born with a swinging brick where a heart ought to be? Whatever the truth, the witch grew older and more ambitious. She set her sights on becoming Head Witch at one of the kingdom’s most respected schools of magic, nestled among the leafy hills of the south-east, close to the great capital. It was no small undertaking. She had already travelled from school to school, leaving behind quarrels, broken spirits and considerable destruction. But she was not one to let her history stand in the way of ambition. Armed with a cunning disguise, a silver tongue and no small amount of ...