That dream and that secondary school.

When I was in the first year of Wetherby High School there was a night when I saw a hopeless and lonely future. Without knowing it I created my reality out of the illusion encapsulated within a dream...

In the morning, and for virtually the entire day, I was engulfed, bereft, in floods of tears. To the extent a girl thought something dreadful had happened in my family - a death or other trauma. I just couldn't tell them what emotions I was going through: I had killed myself so vivid was the dream.

High School was a very bad place for me, from the moment I arrived, and was left alone in the hall, after everyone else had been summoned to their form group, and had to ask strangers why I hadn't been picked out and sent to a classroom to meet the teacher. There was no one registered at all by the name Daniel Sherburn. There was on the list a 'David Sherburn' but that couldn't be me? That wasn't me. It was a David. Being David destroyed my experience of that place from the first day as, in every class I went to, the roll call always asked for a David to be present and I had to repeat time after time that that wasn't my name it was an error: the other children mocked me.

That school excluded me from it without any cause from me. The ball kept rolling and a few months in: it was during the autumn months, after we'd moved from Meyrick Avenue to Nidd Approach, I saw the horror of my life ahead of me: barren and unloved. I produced myself from this untruth and still live alone to this day: no one comes close.

Except Lola: such a relief that she's saved me at this stage in my existence. I could've said no back in 1983 to this future, but I had no idea I was creating my own destiny... I was eleven...

Even now I struggle to explain what it was that I saw in the dream which broke me in two. At primary school I wasn't excluded from anything in class. In high school I was anonymous to the point of personality dismantlement. Nothing good came of the 3 and a third years I spent there before we, as a family, emigrated to Australia leaving Manchester Airport on the 8th December 1986 for Heathrow, Singapore and Perth International Airport on the 10th.

The problems then are still playing havoc with my life now: when will I let the past fade away and start living fresh and upbeat now? It's all in my mind...