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Why I Write About Grimsby (and Apparently Wales) When I Live in Kent

I live in Dover. Have done for a few years now, after nine years in Folkestone before that. Sadie’s here, Reggie the three-legged cat is here, work’s here, half of my adult life is built on this particular stretch of coastline. And yet if you read enough of what I write — the screenplays, the novels — you’d be forgiven for thinking I’d never actually left Grimsby. Or possibly that I’d quietly relocated to Pontypridd without telling anyone, including myself.

Neither is true. I’ve lived in Kent for thirteen years. I’ve spent a grand total of two weeks in Wales, ever. And yet my imagination appears to have filed a permanent change-of-address form with both places without consulting me first.

I find this mildly ridiculous, so naturally I’m writing a blog post about it.




Grimsby: Explainable, At Least

Let’s deal with the sensible one first. A novel called Small Fish, set in a fictionalised version of the town I called Grimhaven, twenty-four chapters deep, seven of them actually written, which for a writer is basically a personal best. A chunk of my zombie novel, End of the Line, is set in Grimsby too, because apparently even the apocalypse has to start somewhere familiar. Ideas that keep wandering back up the A180 whether I’ve invited them to or not.

This one I can explain. I grew up there. The better part of thirty years, give or take, versus just over a decade in Kent — so when my hands go back to Grimsby on the page, that’s not nostalgia, that’s just basic arithmetic. Kent is where I live. Grimsby is apparently where my subconscious still has a season ticket.

Small Fish became Grimhaven rather than literal Grimsby, mostly because I wasn’t trying to write a documentary about a real place that’s continued existing without my permission since I left it. I wanted the feeling of the place — the grit, the football, the very specific grey of a sky over the docks — without having to be accurate about, say, whether a particular chip shop is still open. (It’s probably not. They never are.) End of the Line, on the other hand, just goes ahead and uses the real place, possibly on the basis that if the dead are going to rise anywhere, it might as well be somewhere I know the geography of well enough to write a decent chase scene.

So: Grimsby makes sense. Moving on.

Wales: Does Not Make Sense, At All

Here’s the bit where I lose the plot slightly, so bear with me.

I’ve been to Wales twice in my entire life. A week each time — once in 1992, when I was a child and had approximately zero say in the itinerary, and again in 2025, as a fully grown adult who really should know better by now. Of that second trip, exactly one hour was spent in Pontypridd, the town where my grandmother was born. One hour. I’ve spent longer than that queuing for a gig.

And somehow, that one hour appears to have rewired something. Not the two weeks of general, perfectly pleasant Welsh holidaying. Not the scenery, not the castles, or the Blaenau Festiniog Light Railway, not whatever I had for lunch on either trip, which I genuinely cannot recall. Just the hour. In Pontypridd. Specifically.

I have no rational explanation for this, and I want to be clear that I’ve tried. My grandmother was from there, which is the only actual evidence I’ve got, and on paper it’s not much to build an entire emotional attachment on. People meet their actual living relatives for longer than an hour and feel less moved by it. I’m half convinced my own ancestors are mildly embarrassed on my behalf — “he was here for sixty minutes and now he wants to retire here, bless him.”

Because that’s the other thing. Sadie has mentioned, more than once, that when we eventually retire, Wales might be the answer. And the genuinely baffling part is that I don’t immediately laugh this off. Some small, currently unsupervised part of my brain goes “yeah, alright then,” based entirely on an hour I spent there once, in a town I couldn’t confidently find again without a satnav.

I have, if I’m honest, more feeling toward Wales as a concept than I have toward England, despite having lived in England my entire life and visited Wales for a combined total of roughly two weeks. This is not a sensible ratio. I am aware it is not a sensible ratio. I have made my peace with the fact that my sense of belonging apparently does not consult a spreadsheet before making decisions.

So What’s Actually Going On Here

I think — and this is very much a working theory, subject to change without notice — that creative work, and maybe identity generally, doesn’t care all that much about how long you’ve spent somewhere. It cares about whatever’s load-bearing. Kent is where my actual life happens: the bills, the cat, the theatre, the back pain, the whole functioning-adult operation. Grimsby is the thirty-year foundation underneath it, fully explicable, no mystery required. And Wales is just… in there. Uninvited. Unexplained. Possibly ancestral, possibly just a really good hour, possibly both.

I’ve stopped trying to force a tidy answer out of the Wales thing, mostly because I don’t think there is one, and partly because demanding logic from your own feelings is a famously losing battle. Some places just get under your skin regardless of how much actual time you’ve clocked there, like a song you’ve heard once and now can’t stop humming, except the song is a Welsh valley town and the humming is a vague but persistent desire to live there one day.

So if you ever read something of mine set in a windswept fictional fishing town, you’ll know where that’s from. And if, decades from now, you hear I’ve retired to a small house somewhere near Pontypridd having visited the place for a cumulative total of sixty minutes, please don’t act surprised. Some of us were always going to end up exactly where we couldn’t logically explain.

Does anyone else feel inexplicably tied to somewhere they’ve barely been? Or is it just me, romanticising a single hour like it owes me a mortgage? Let me know in the comments — I could use the company.

If you enjoy what I do, consider supporting me! Every little bit means the world!

Gary grew up in Grimsby, lives in Dover, Kent, and has a worrying amount of feelings about a Welsh town he’s visited once, for sixty minutes.

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Why Every Brilliant Idea I Have Arrives at 2am and Leaves by Breakfast

There is a very specific kind of confidence that only exists between the hours of midnight and roughly half past two in the morning, and I want to talk about it, because it has given me no end of grief over the years.

You know the one. You’re lying in bed, supposedly asleep, and your brain — having clocked off from anything useful hours ago — suddenly clears its throat and goes “right, here’s a thought.” And it’s not just a small thought. It’s a plot twist so perfectly constructed that you genuinely sit up in the dark and think: I am a genius, I’ll be fielding calls from Netflix before my toast goes cold.

I get my phone. I type it into my Notes app with the shaky urgency of a man defusing a bomb, because if I don’t capture this exact wording right now, in this exact moment, the universe will swallow it up and consign it to the annals of history. Then I go back to sleep, deeply satisfied, basically already drafting my awards speech.

Then it’s 7am, and I read it back.




The Morning Read-Back: A Crime Scene

Here is a small sample of things 2am-Gary has typed into my phone with absolute, unshakeable conviction:

“What if the killer is a poltergeist”

“Grimhaven but it’s in an alternative universe?”

“What if they push criminals through a time machine so they have to serve their punishment dodging dinosaurs?”

That last one, for the record, I stand by slightly more than the others. But the broader point remains: not one of these, read in daylight, with actual blood sugar in my system, survives contact with reality. They read less like notes from a working novelist and more like the rambling words of a madman who hasn’t slept for weeks and is living off copious amounts of caffeine.

It’s not that the ideas are always bad, exactly. It’s that 2am-Gary has access to none of the things that make an idea actually usable — things like plot logic, structural consequences, or any memory whatsoever of what happened in chapter six. 2am-Gary is a wildfire with ideas but no thought on whether any of them are actually any good.

Small Fish Has Survived Several Assassination Attempts

Small Fish — my football novel, currently twenty-four chapters planned, seven actually written, which is either a healthy work-in-progress or a crime scene depending on the day — has been “saved” by 2am ideas more times than I can count, and “saved” is doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting in that sentence.

At various points, 2am-Gary has decided that Grimhaven needed a secret underground tunnel system, that one of the central characters was secretly somebody’s long-lost brother for reasons that made perfect sense at 2am and absolutely no sense by Tuesday, and — my personal favourite — that the entire third act should be told backwards. Not flashback-backwards. Properly backwards, like Memento, except I am not Christopher Nolan, I am a man with a bad back trying to finish a novel about lower-league football, and the two things do not need to intersect.

None of these ideas made it into the actual manuscript. All of them felt, in the moment, like the missing piece I’d been searching for. This is the great cruelty of 2am: it doesn’t just generate bad ideas, it generates bad ideas that feel exactly identical to good ones, with none of the usual warning signs. There’s no flashing light. No klaxon. Just pure, false certainty, delivered straight to your nervous system at the worst possible hour for critical thinking.

End of the Line Got It Even Worse

My zombie novel, End of the Line, partly set in Grimsby because apparently even the undead have hometown pride, has weathered its own share of 2am interference. There was a stretch of about a fortnight where I was completely convinced the zombies needed an origin involving the docks, some kind of industrial chemical spill with a name I’d apparently already decided on, fully formed, like I’d seen the safety data sheet myself in a dream.

I wrote two pages of this at, predictably, gone midnight. I read it back the next morning with the specific horror of a man finding out what he did at a party he doesn’t remember attending. It wasn’t unsalvageable. It was, worse than that, almost good — good enough that I had to sit with it for an actual half hour before admitting it didn’t fit, which is far more time than a chemical-spill zombie subplot has any right to occupy in a grown man’s Tuesday.

So Why Does This Keep Happening

I’ve got a theory, which is that your brain, late at night, with all its usual inhibitions switched off, finally gets to do the thing it actually wants to do, which is be reckless. Daytime-Gary has deadlines, structural concerns, the nagging awareness that a 24-chapter outline doesn’t actually want a tunnel system shoved into chapter fifteen. 2am-Gary has none of that. 2am-Gary just wants to see what happens if the cat solves the murder.

And honestly, I don’t think the answer is to stop having the ideas. Every so often — rarely, but often enough to keep the habit alive — something genuinely good survives the morning read-back. The trick, as far as I can tell, isn’t suppressing 2am-Gary. It’s just refusing to let him anywhere near the actual manuscript without a chaperone. Write it down, by all means. Just don’t act on it until you’ve had breakfast, regained the use of your frontal lobe, and confirmed that no, the killer cannot, in fact, be the house.

Does anyone else’s brain turn into an unsupervised intern the second the lights go off? I’d love to know I’m not the only one waking up to notes I have no memory of writing and even less ability to explain. Tell me your worst 2am idea in the comments — bonus points if you also wrote it down and have since had to live with it.

Gary writes novels, mostly during the day, despite his best efforts to convince himself otherwise at 2am.

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When the Dream Job Stops Feeling Like a Dream

EDIT: I’ve had a few messages and a phone call from family and friends asking how I am as a result of this blog post. Let me say that I’m talking about filmmaking, not my day job which I thoroughly enjoy.

There was a time when I couldn’t switch my brain off from filmmaking. A shot would catch my eye on a walk and I’d be reverse-engineering the lighting before I’d finished crossing the road. A line of dialogue would land wrong in something I was watching and I’d be rewriting it in my head, half paying attention to whatever I was actually meant to be doing. It wasn’t a job I was working towards. It was just how my brain worked, all the time, whether I wanted it to or not.

I’m not sure exactly when that stopped. That’s part of what makes this hard to write about. There’s no single morning I can point to and say “that’s the day it left.” It was more of a slow leak than a puncture. One day I looked up and the tank was just… lower than I remembered, and I genuinely couldn’t tell you which mile it happened on.

I want to be honest about this, because I think a lot of people carry some version of it quietly, and the quiet is the worst part.




It’s Not One Thing. That’s What Makes It Hard.

If I could point to a single cause, this would almost be an easier post to write. A bad experience, a project that fell apart, a person who knocked the wind out of me. Something with an edge to it, a villain, a clean narrative.

It’s not that. It’s everything, a little bit, all at once.

It’s the back injury and the bone spurs that mean a full day on set, on my feet, lugging kit, isn’t the straightforward thing it used to be. It’s the fatigue that comes with managing a chronic illness I’ll be carrying for the rest of my life, even in remission, even on a “good” day. It’s running front of house at the Tower Theatre, which I genuinely love, but which also takes a great deal of the same creative and organisational energy that filmmaking demands — there’s only so much of that particular fuel in the tank on any given week, and theatre has, fairly, been getting most of it. It’s the writing projects, the wiki work, the music, Sadie’s care, the general business of staying upright. Filmmaking didn’t get pushed out by one thing. It got quietly outcompeted by a dozen things, none of which were its fault, and none of which I particularly regret choosing in the moment.

And then there’s the industry itself, which I won’t pretend hasn’t played its part. The gap between the dream version of filmmaking — the one I had in my head as a younger man, scripts and sets and a clear path forward — and the actual mechanics of trying to make anything happen as an independent creator with limited time and limited budget, is a genuinely difficult gap to keep staring across. I’ve written things I’m proud of. Story bibles, scripts formatted properly, projects with real bones to them. And then they sit there, because the next step requires a kind of relentless self-promotion and networking energy that I simply don’t have spare most weeks. That’s not the industry’s fault either, particularly. It’s just true.

So: a mixture. Health, time, energy, the industry, life. All of it, a little bit, pulling in the same direction.

The Guilt Bit (You Knew There’d Be a Guilt Bit)

Here’s the part I find hardest to admit. There’s a specific kind of guilt that comes with losing interest in the thing you always said was your dream. Other people remember you talking about it. They ask how the latest script is going, with genuine warmth, and you have to decide in that moment whether to give the easy answer or the true one.

The easy answer is “yeah, ticking along.” The true answer is closer to “I haven’t opened that file in three months and I’m not entirely sure why, and when I think about opening it I feel something closer to tired than excited, and I don’t know what to do with that feeling.”

I don’t think losing passion for something makes it less real that you once loved it, or that you might love it again. But it took me a long time to separate “I’m not currently excited about this” from “I’ve failed at the thing that mattered most to me,” and I’m still not sure I’ve fully managed it. Those two sentences feel identical at 11pm. They are not, in fact, the same sentence.

What I’m Not Going to Do

I’m not going to wrap this up with a neat resolution, because I don’t have one. This isn’t the part of the post where I tell you I rediscovered my spark on a long walk and everything’s back to how it was. That would be a nicer ending. It would also not be true, and I promised myself a while ago that this blog is the place I tell the truth rather than the highlight reel.

What I will say is that I don’t think the passion is gone. I think it’s buried under quite a lot of other, currently louder things — pain, fatigue, caring responsibilities, a job I love that takes more than it gives back some weeks, and an industry that asks for energy I don’t reliably have. I don’t think that’s the same as it being dead. Dead feels permanent. This feels more like a fire that’s gone quiet under the ash, still warm somewhere underneath, waiting for slightly better conditions than the ones I’m currently in.

I don’t know when those conditions arrive. Maybe when the back settles into something more manageable. Maybe when there’s a stretch of life that isn’t quite so determined to throw things at me, on the evidence of my last blog post, which — if you’ve read it — you’ll know is a fairly long list. Maybe it just happens gradually, the way it left, and I won’t notice the exact day it comes back either.

For now, I’m trying to let that be okay. Trying not to force a passion that isn’t currently there, because forcing it has never once worked and has only ever made me feel worse about both the not-wanting-to and the guilt about the not-wanting-to. Trying to trust that the bit of me that used to rewrite dialogue on the walk home is still in there somewhere, just resting.

If You’re In This Too

If any of this sounds familiar — if there’s a version of you that used to light up about something and currently just feels tired when you think about it — I don’t have a fix for you. I’m not sure there is one, or at least not a fast one. But I don’t think you’ve failed, and I don’t think it’s gone for good. I think you’re just carrying a lot, and the thing that needs the most energy is, unfairly, often the first thing that gets quietly put down when the energy runs low.

I’d genuinely like to know if this resonates. Has your relationship with a dream changed shape over the years? Did it come back? What did that look like? Drop it in the comments — I think there’s more comfort in knowing this is common than there is in pretending it isn’t happening at all.

Gary is a designer, developer, theatre manager, songwriter, and — somewhere under the ash — a filmmaker, based in Kent.

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Did I Do Something Very Bad In a Past Life?

Let me paint you a picture.

It’s morning. I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, sock in hand, preparing for what has become the daily ritual that most accurately summarises my relationship with my own body. My foot needs to reach the sock. The sock is approximately thirty centimetres away. This should not be a problem. It is, nonetheless, a significant problem.

What follows can only be described as a man attempting to kickstart a motorbike with his foot while simultaneously being electrocuted. There is lunging. There is twisting. There is a level of grim determination usually reserved for people attempting Everest. Eventually — eventually — the sock goes on. Victory.

This is my life now. And honestly? It’s the funniest part of my morning, right up until it isn’t.



I’ve been thinking lately about the accumulation of it all. The full inventory of what my body has put me through over the years, laid out plainly. Not for sympathy — I’m not built that way — but because I think there’s something worth saying about how you carry it. How you keep going. How you find the dark laugh in it when the alternative is just sitting with it, and sitting with it is no fun at all.

So here it is. The full list. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

In 2012 I had surgery for pectus excavatum — a congenital chest wall deformity where the breastbone sinks inward, asymmetrically in my case. The surgery to correct it is called the Ravitch procedure, and it is not, to put it mildly, a minor operation. My surgeon broke ten ribs and my sternum, repositioned everything, and held it all together with titanium bars. I was out of action for a year. A full year. I joke that I’m part robot now, which is true. That was the opening act.

Then there are the knees. Brittle cartilage, both of them, a gift I’m fairly confident I earned by jumping twelve to fifteen feet off Cleethorpes Pier onto the sand in my younger and considerably more stupid days. At the time it felt brilliant. My knees have been filing a formal complaint about it ever since.

Then, in 2019, came the diagnosis nobody wants: stage 4 SMZL — Splenic Marginal Zone Lymphoma. Cancer. I’ll let that land for a second. Six months of chemotherapy followed, ending in March 2020. Two weeks later, the country went into lockdown. I’d like to say the timing was darkly poetic. It was, in fact, just dark. The world shutting down precisely as I emerged from the other side of chemo — when you’re supposed to start rebuilding, seeing people, feeling human again — is something I don’t talk about much. But it happened, and it cost something.

It cost more than I realised at the time. Because my immune system had taken such a battering from the chemo, I had to shield for the entire first year of lockdown. I did not leave the four walls of my home for twelve months, other than a couple of hospital follow-up appointments. Twelve months. No fresh air, no wandering, no pub, no people. Just the walls, the silence, and a body I was still learning to live in after everything it had been through. I don’t say this to make anyone feel sorry for me. I say it because it happened, and it shaped things, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

The cancer is currently in remission. The less good news is that it’s incurable — I’ll carry it for the rest of my life, managing it, monitoring it, living alongside it like an uninvited lodger who won’t leave but has at least learned to keep the noise down. I’ve made my peace with it. You have to.

In February 2024, I tore a muscle in my back hauling ten-stone beer barrels at work. The tear itself was bad enough. What followed was worse: bone spurs developing along my spine, my body attempting to repair itself and making a fairly poor job of it. Now I live with constant pain. Some days it’s manageable — background noise, a dull ache I’ve learned to work around. Other days I can barely stand. The socks, as you now know, are every day regardless.

Four months later, in June 2024, I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Of course I was. At this point my body was clearly just working through a list.

And then there’s the ADHD. Not yet officially confirmed, but we’re heading there — the pieces fit too well to pretend otherwise. Here’s the thing about having ADHD when you also have a back injury that’s stripped most of the hyperactivity out of you: the H has largely gone quiet. My body isn’t bouncing off walls anymore. My brain, however, absolutely is. It will pick a song — usually, inexplicably, a McFly song — and play it on a loop for weeks. When I wake up. When I go to sleep. In my dreams, sometimes. Full production. No fade out. No mercy. Thank fuck I like McFly, genuinely, because I think a Coldplay phase would finish me off entirely.

And then there’s Sadie.

My wife lives with her own long-term chronic health conditions — I won’t share the details here because they’re hers to share, not mine — but what I will say is that managing my own health while also being her carer is something I carry with a lot of love and, occasionally, a lot of weight. I have a Carers Card. An actual, official Carers Card. I am, technically, a registered carer. If you’d told me that ten years ago I’d have laughed. Now I carry it in my wallet and feel, if anything, quietly proud of it. We look after each other. That’s what it comes down to.

So. Did I do something very bad in a past life? Statistically, it’s starting to feel that way. Titanium ribs. Lymphoma. Knees that haven’t forgiven me for a pier jump in my twenties. A back staging a slow mutiny. Diabetes. ADHD. A wife I love deeply and care for practically, every day.

The thing is, I don’t say any of this from a place of despair. I say it from a place of — I don’t know, exhausted honesty? There’s a version of this post where I wrap it up neatly with something about resilience and perspective and silver linings. But that would be a bit dishonest, and I’m not really in the business of performing okayness at the moment.

What I am in the business of is getting through the day. Doing the work I love. Looking after Sadie. And spending time with Reggie — our three-legged cat, adopted at the end of April, who has brought more light into this house than I can properly explain. He gets around better on three legs than I currently do on two, which says something, though I’m not entirely sure what. He also likes to help me write. Daily. Usually by walking across the keyboard at a critical moment and contributing a paragraph of his own — ggggggggggggg, typically, or perhaps xxxxxcccc if he’s feeling creative. I’ve learned to save regularly. He has not learned to care.

And talking about it. Because I think a lot of people are carrying their own version of this list — the accumulation of things, the ways their body has let them down or surprised them or just refused to cooperate — and not saying much about it. So consider this me saying something.

What’s on your list? Drop it in the comments. I’d genuinely love to know I’m not the only one having a one-sided argument with my own spine every morning.

*Gary is a designer, developer, theatre FOH Manager, and occasional filmmaker songwriter based in Dover, Kent. He puts his socks on every day. It takes a while.*

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