Have you ever thought about becoming the complete opposite of who you are? I guess we have all thought of it and to an extent in life we do that. But what of a radical change from having an identity then morphing into something that you have always detested and feared? The pupil to the teacher; the criminal to the law enforcer; the carer to the cared for; the poacher turned gamekeeper?

Charon’s Ferry is intended as a sequel to my first book A Pillar of Impotence. It is of course quite possible that you as a reader have neither heard of nor read the first book. I am after all an unknown, a no one other than in my own little world. If that is the case I will try briefly to elaborate on my previous work.

A Pillar of Impotence is the story of a journey undertaken during the 1990s. It is my story. It is the story of a highflyer whose life came crashing down in a mental breakdown. A tale of mental illness, despair, decay, breakdown, suicide, incarceration, misdiagnosis, and psychosis. Of power gone wrong, of condemnation, judgement, poverty, unemployment, shame, and stigma. But there is a very strange and unexpected twist that brought about my recovery and a return to a more normal life, accepted by society. It was not a return to the old life but to a radically new one. Had my life been as stable and sorted as I thought, I might never have got ill.

People who have read it tell me that it reads as if they were on the journey with me. It takes the reader from the arrogant decadence of Cambridge to the decay of a Victorian Asylum; the great cathedrals of Europe to the hopelessness of a Social Security Office; the splendours of the Middle East to the caged roof of a “modern” psychiatric clinic in Central London; the wonders of Van Gogh to the ghettoes of South London; the hedonism of Brighton to the moribund stuckness of a Day Hospital; the coffee shops of Amsterdam to the grinding boredom of a small, quaint but run down town on the Kent coast; the mysticism of the abode of a Buddhist healer to the judgement of a DSS tribunal. And finally back to Cambridge.

That was supposed to have been the end of my story. But fate once again intervened and threw me back into the System that had so utterly failed me throughout that decade. This time the outcome was different. For it was then that I met a psychiatrist who was different. She asked me what I thought, she listened, she dismissed the bullshit, she offered me choices, and most importantly she came up with a simple solution.

A Pillar of Impotence ends the day I first took the atypical antipsychotic Risperidone. It was a miracle. I had found my Holy Grail.

There are of course many good books out there about people’s recovery journeys. As I started to write it in 2002 I wanted to try to do something a little different. At heart I am a historian; it was my great passion as a child and indeed what I studied at Cambridge. I wanted to include some of that too. It is not just my journey but also a limited historical record of the 1990s. So it is set against the backdrop of the First Gulf War, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. The rise of Tony Blair and New Labour, the death of Princess Diana and arguably more importantly of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Of OJ Simpson, Fred West, and Michael Stone. The Good Friday agreement and David Copeland’s outrageous bigoted bomb attacks on London. The world changed so much during that decade.

But as some have asked me, what happened next? Well Charon’s Ferry is the story of the next decade, from 2001 until 2011. It is how I became someone completely different.