At 16 the things I loved most were judo and karate, and I was playing lots of basketball. My knee was about to collapse – I didn’t know that at the time – so that was all about to come to an end. But the Leisure Centre in Gateshead transformed my world. It helped me get over my childhood asthma and gave me confidence. My other big passion was history. So in some ways I’m rather unchanged. Physically I was a lot fitter, but I was passionate about history even then.
At 16, I’d just been diagnosed with dyslexia and it was too late for me to do well in my GCSEs. So I was looking ahead to A levels, but with new knowledge of how to manage a learning difficulty that is very profound in my case. It had been ignored and dismissed by my school. I was only given an
