My own first experiment: the full story

the long version

This post is part of the long version series: the full text behind a passage the front pages now say in fewer words. Nothing was cut from the record; it moved.

I started behind DJ decks, playing over three hundred clubs and festivals, learning how repetition and variation create tension and release. That was my first education in recursion: small iterations compounding into something far greater than their parts. I carried it into business and built a company from £40,403 to £624,000 in annual revenue over a decade, systems compounding on systems, until one day the doors were padlocked. The property was disposed of. Revenue fell by 99.1 per cent, and a winding-up order followed. I had no legal representation and could not afford any.

So I taught myself law. Not from a position of comfort, but from necessity. I have since appeared as my own advocate eleven times, by my own count, across the High Court’s Chancery Division, the King’s Bench Division, the Insolvency and Companies Court and the Business List. I draft my own skeleton arguments. My appeals are pending.

What I discovered in those courtrooms surprised me. The law is recursive. Precedents build on precedents. A principle established in 1876 cascades through a century of case law until it governs a dispute today. My mind, which struggles with linear procedure, grasps recursive structure instinctively. The field I was forced into turned out to run on the very pattern I had spent my life studying.

I should be equally straight about the other half, because it is the same fact wearing different clothes. I have ADHD and autism, recognised in adulthood. I can draft a skeleton argument for the Court of Appeal. I struggle to open routine post. That is not dysfunction. It is specialisation. A KC does not manage their own diary; they have clerks. A chief executive does not process their own invoices. A senior solicitor does not do their own filing. The work that defeats me is work that senior professionals delegate by design. I had that support for ten years, lost it when the company went, and landed in the most administratively demanding field imaginable. The struggles and the capabilities come from the same source. You cannot have one without the other.

This is the full text behind the story section of the home page, which now carries the short version. The wider account is at about.