I grew up in a christian community and spent my formative years in a do-it-yourself small school run by my parents and their friends. In some ways it was an idyllic way to grow up, very sheltered and safe, but as I grew older I began to form my own views ( I am if anything an Atheist by nature, with the occasional foray into Buddhism) and began to feel stifled, and rebel.

This rebellion, and adjusting suddenly on leaving school at fifteen to the real world, took rather a toll on my A-levels, and so in the second year I packed a few boxes and left for the craggily beautiful quarries and cliffs of the Isle of Portland, where I planned to become a sculptor.

What with one thing and another, I ended up becoming a Stonemason first, which I always have derived a great deal of pride and satisfaction from. It also had a great effect on my ability to produce work fast, efficiently and to a high standard, and by the end of my apprenticeship I was selling my own pieces for reasonable sums, albeit infrequently.

By the age of about 21 1 sold a piece for £3,000 that only took me three days to carve, and decided that I had found my life’s purpose. I also ran my own masonry firm, renovating many castles and churches across the south of England.

After ten years of this, I moved back near my family, married a wonderful woman and was in many ways having a great life — but the cracks were at this point starting to show. I had been smoking cannabis pretty heavily for over a decade, I’d been insomniac since the age of eleven and for a decade I’d been working an average of eighty hours a week on about three hours sleep. I’d had two mental breakdowns in ten years due to stress and exhaustion I was also subsuming my coping issues into a growing obsession with survivalism and ‘prepping’.

This hobby, obsession, call it what you will, got so out of control that in 2015 I was imprisoned for the mandatory minimum of five years for possession of a prohibited firearm. I hasten to add that there was no suggestion even by the prosecutor that I possessed it for any violent reason, but nerdiness and appreciation of the collector’s value do not count as defenses under English law. I ended up in prison after six months of court related tension. 2015 was not a good year. I found out on the first week inside that my wife was pregnant and on the second week that she was getting evicted. My life had reached what felt like rock bottom.