This Is Me

From darkness to purpose, a personal journey through adversity, creativity, and the making of Dark Cornwall

I am hopefully only halfway through my time on this realm, and I have much still to learn. However, in the pursuit of healing and getting stronger after a traumatic few years, I thought I would put pen to paper and share my story thus far. I am sharing this as perhaps I can help some of you avoid making the same mistakes I have made and show you that my successes came from a place that is achievable by all.

The Trials and Tribulations of Growing Up

I was raised in the British Westcountry, in Cornwall and West Somerset. My father was a caretaker of a secondary school, with a passion for woodcraft and bird keeping, and my mother was a curtain maker. I had a blissful childhood exploring the beaches, moors, and forests of my homeland. I shunned sports and more mainstream activities and favoured drawing, making models, and reading about dinosaurs, dragons, and mythology, both local and worldwide. It was my safe place, one where I found inspiration, solace, and warmth, and still do today. 

There was nothing better than being curled up in my bed, reading about Baryonyx or the Gurt Vurm of Shervage Wood. Ralph Whitlock, Michael Benton, Gregory S Paul, John Gurney, Michael Crichton, JRR Tolkien, and Steve Jackson became my heroes, rather than the Beckhams or the Gallaghers of my peers at school. Unfortunately, I paid the price for not being part of the mainstream, and I experienced physical and emotional bullying and violence that I can only think about for a second before it makes me burst into tears. I struggled at school for a while but remained in the “capable” academic group. I often wished to be marked down so that I could have something in common with the bullies, and so that it might stop. Sadly, it didn’t.

I continued on to college, where I started studying for a Diploma in Communication Design, with a dream of becoming a graphic designer. At this time, I also discovered contact lenses and managed to shed my teenage Harry Potter glasses, discovering a new look. For some reason, this new look gave me a new lease of confidence, and ladies seemed to react positively to it as well. It also, unfortunately, brought even more violence from other classmates.

Anyway, I am not sharing this with you to elicit sorrow or even guilt if those reading this were among the aforementioned bullies. I firmly and passionately believe that if any good can come from all of this pain, it is that others can see there is light at the end of the tunnel. The scars you receive from bullying will eventually become badges of pride, stories of courage and of overcoming what once felt like impossible odds.

During this time, I first discovered the signs of declining mental health. I developed quite severe facial tics that I became a master at hiding. I would place my hand over my face or hide behind a book, concealing my eyes that were darting all over the place. I also developed a need to make a low hum in the back of my throat that reverberated at the top of my mouth, providing comfort during the most stressful times. I still do not know what to call this, but it continues to this day when I am under pressure, although it has largely faded.

Perhaps most importantly for this bio on this particular website, this was also when I had my first brush with a cryptid. I was having a family picnic near Dunkery Beacon on Exmoor and was looking for frogs in one of the gullies between fields. I found bits of sheep’s wool on a tree, so I joined my brother and climbed further up the trunk. About fifteen feet up, we found the rotting carcass of a sheep. Its bones were stripped clean in places, yet the body remained intact. Having read about Britain’s big cat phenomenon, and being a fan of natural history documentaries, I knew that large predatory cats such as leopards often drag their prey into trees to avoid scavengers, and this felt eerily similar. That small moment cemented a fascination that has stayed with me ever since.

After completing my Diploma, I decided to stretch the academic side of my brain, studying for my A levels in one year before going on to university to study business. University, free from the bullies of the past, became a reset. I found friends who shared my interests and discovered a love for the creative side of marketing. I got a job at the Odeon Cinema for beer money, which meant I watched The Lord of the Rings more than one hundred times and occasionally stopped people getting frisky in the back row. Growing up in the bubble of the West Country, having my eyes opened to different cultures, landscapes, and histories was exhilarating, and I look back on those years with great fondness.

After I graduated, I chose not to go backpacking. I was hungry to build a career and make something of myself, so I started as a graduate in a financial services company and moved through several roles over the next five years. I wanted a broad perspective on marketing, and this helped me build it. I eventually realised I had a strong blend of understanding both the commercial side of business and the creative aspects. I relished designing materials for customers, and the skills I picked up during my Diploma were arguably more valuable than those I paid for at university.

Art never leaves you, even if you step away from it for a while.

I have heard criticism that Dark Cornwall is too polished and must be backed by a corporate entity. The truth is simpler. It is just me, my iPhone camera, and some Photoshop. I have an eye for framing and composition, and it has become a personal hobby. I love books on typography and design movements such as Bauhaus, Memphis, and Minimalism, whose clean lines and bold colours evoke powerful emotions. Recently, I regained confidence in my artistic abilities and began expressing myself through sculpture, watercolours, and pen and ink. It has been a wonderful reawakening and feels like a completion of a journey that began in childhood.

Crossing the Great Pond

In my early twenties, I developed an interest in divination and nature-based magic and began visiting a well-regarded witch in a nearby village. She introduced me to spirit guides, taught me runes and tarot, and shared a vision that would come true. She said I would cross a “great pond” and begin a journey in another land. Five years later, I found myself on an eighteen-month assignment in Los Angeles.

While working in business, I explored the entertainment industry as a potential path. I eventually found my way into identifying and managing artists, gaining experience and connections that shaped my understanding of creative industries. I met people who have influenced cinema, video games, and music, and although I will not name names, I learned a great deal from them.

At times, I loved life in California. UFO spotting under the stars in Joshua Tree, snowboarding in the Sierras, meditating amongst the Sequoias, and building a life across different neighbourhoods gave me a deep appreciation for the city. Los Angeles is complex, but if you take time to explore it properly, it reveals itself in remarkable ways.

Woke Capital

After a few years in the “biz”, I discovered that my burgeoning skills in identifying and managing talented folk were drawing me to another avenue, the world of start-up investing. At its core, this is about providing money to entrepreneurs early on in their process of building a business, in exchange for a small bit of ownership in the company. I found a particular interest in supporting people at the ideation stage, when they had not sold any products or even developed one yet. I was interested in investing in the person and not the idea. I then narrowed that focus even further by investing in entrepreneurs and companies that were seeking to create a positive impact for the planet.

The challenge was that I was not wealthy and didn’t have any money to create a pot to provide to these courageous entrepreneurs, betting everything they had on a bold idea.

So I sold all of my assets, which wasn't much, worked extra jobs as a consultant for a few years and convinced some people with more coin than I to invest in me, so that I could invest in others.

Four years passed, and I had managed to find a partner to work with me on the fund, and we had invested in almost twenty companies, almost half of which were run by underrepresented groups, women, LGBTQI, non Caucasian, and military veterans. It wasn’t intentional, as I don’t believe in profiling people, but people from these walks of life just knew how to hustle harder than those born with a silver spoon.

Sadly, venture capital is a space that is largely run by privileged white males, who often have a wealthy background. According to recent statistics, women founders only receive around two per cent of the total investible capital in the world, and, as a result of our focus, we earned the nickname “Woke Capital”.

If I have not bored you yet, I am going to give you a taste of what types of ideas we invested in.

Yes, I funded AI companies, but…

Before ChatGPT was even an idea, artificial intelligence was a bit of a misnomer. AI is anything but intelligent. Before it was trained on your information on social media, whether you authorised it or not, AI models were trained on private data that was generated by the startups themselves.

One such AI company was founded by a brilliant woman entrepreneur who had set out to use AI to eliminate the need for animals to be used in drug testing trials. The efficacy rate of live animal testing is as low as ten percent and her idea was to build artificial “digital twins” of animals typically used in drug trials. It was a resounding success, and now they claim efficacy rates of fifty per cent without harming any animals.

AI is not all evil.

Another idea was a female founder who had an idea to use the imagery created by the thousands of micro satellites floating around and polluting low Earth orbit, and use it for good. This new imagery, called hyperspectral, can help smart people to look at the world with more detail than ever before. In this case, they used the information to guide emergency responders during a catastrophic flood to avoid roads where the water was likely too deep to drive through. This form of AI saved lives.

Anyway, AI is a hot potato, and I cannot stand its usage in the arts field, but it has some uses for good as well.

For the majority of the last decade, I invested in entrepreneurs from all over the world, including Mexico, Israel and the USA, and to be amongst all of the cultures was endlessly stimulating and rewarding. I have never funded any weapons or things that could bring about harm to others, quite the opposite, actually. I didn’t receive a penny in terms of a salary throughout most of this time, but I was honoured to spend time with such a lovely group of people and to witness the marvel of technology and the good it can do for society.

I do not regret any aspect of my career in the world of AI during the second decade of this century. Looking at what we call AI today versus what I was investing in back then, it would be like comparing a coal-fired power station to a nuclear power plant. The world can never go back to a time without AI, but for now, it is still a tool. We may not have control for much longer, though.

Israel connections

Over a decade ago, I made a successful investment into a California based company that employed developers in Israel. As many people know, military service is compulsory for most Israeli citizens, meaning many individuals, regardless of profession, will have served in some capacity. I want to make it absolutely clear that I do not support the actions of the current Israeli government, its military conduct, or the human rights abuses and atrocities that have taken place. Equally, I do not believe in condemning an entire population for the actions of its leadership. Some of the kindest and most interesting people I have met are from Israel, and as far as I am aware, the individuals connected to that investment have no involvement whatsoever in the current conflict. This is where I consider the matter closed.

The next great adventure - parenthood!

The happiest day of my life was when we discovered that we were expecting our first child. Becoming a father completely changed my priorities in life and gave me an entirely new purpose: to grow kind, caring people who will have all the opportunities to go on and do wonderful things for this planet.

Then COVID happened. We had Trump telling us to inject bleach into our bodies, and Los Angeles was literally on fire. We also discovered, three months after giving birth to our first child, that we were expecting our second little bundle of joy. It was a wonderful, but slightly daunting surprise, and I sprang into action on how I could best protect my family.

I was already exploring options to move closer to family, and then an opportunity to move to New Zealand emerged, so we packed everything up in our rental apartment, sold the pick up and jumped on a plane with our six-month-old, our youngest still in the tummy and our dog in a crate in the hold.

The Land of the Long White Cloud

After settling in, I set about continuing my venture capital career down under. I raised more funding and included whatever we had left in our savings into the fund and began to invest in local entrepreneurs who were following a similar path to the one I had laid out before.

I found the New Zealand startup funding market to be a little bit of the wild west when it came to what was on offer as springboard capital for first-time founders. But I tried to carve out my own little corner and invested in areas like video games and visual effects, as well as more traditional software companies and circular economy products.

After investing in almost two dozen different groups of entrepreneurs, I started to realise the toll this career had taken on me personally. In a job that largely requires you to say a polite “no” to passionate entrepreneurs around ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I started to receive threats of violence towards my family and me. Some found it hard to understand why, after an initial investment, you might not want to provide more money if things had not gone to plan. People whom I had believed in resolutely started to let me down. Raising money from the right people is so much more important than you might think.

Anyway, I had finally been able to create a living for my family from this career, and we bought our first house. It turned into a remake of Tom Hanks and Shelley Long’s The Money Pit, and, after finding out that the builders had committed fraud in the process, I had a nervous breakdown.

My family back in the UK needed me more, and my two-year-old son and I had received, at eleven at night, yet another threat of physical violence from an entrepreneur and their family who didn’t appreciate the “no”. After this point, I confessed to my wife that I was having suicidal thoughts and that she needed to prepare to be without me. I had planned the spot where I would do it, and I told her. In hindsight, it was such a selfish thing to do.

The seventy to eighty-hour weeks. The masking of my neurodivergence for the last twenty years. The shame of my own dark thoughts. I was about to release my boys from their father, and it felt like I was doing them a favour.

And then my wife took hold of the steering wheel, put our house on the market and set in motion our plans to return to my homeland. I was a mess. The business I had created was handed to someone else.

We sold our house during one of the largest and most severe market crashes in recent history, and we lost every single penny we had put into the property. Our only asset was gone, but we had each other, and that is all that mattered.

Coming home

The moment I landed at Heathrow Airport, I felt like that scene from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, where Kevin Costner falls face-first into the British sand on his return from the Crusades. The customs officer gave my family and me a lovely welcome, and I burst into tears. A weight had been partially lifted, and my little family and I were intact.

We set up home in Truro, registered the boys at school, and I started the long, dark road of recovery and healing. It was in this darkness that I started the beacon of light that is Dark Cornwall.

Letting our legends live

Story time for our boys is perhaps the most important part of the day. It was time for my wife and me to expand our minds, take them on flights of fantasy and wow them with the wonderful facts of this world.

One thing I was passionate about was educating my children about my (and their) homeland and the stories that make it so special. I used to try to condense Cornish folk tales into three short paragraphs, and I even used generative AI to bring these stories to life. They started to recount the tales of dragons and giants and loved the process.

I was also invited to a lecture on the growth of the “Dark Tourism” industry and how it could represent a new way for Cornwall to create tourist revenue during the shoulder season. I came away as concerned as I was intrigued and had worries about how the stories I would tell my children could be adapted and warped to fit a commercial agenda.

So, knowing that I had a bit of a knack for turning tales into three paragraphs, and with a deep-rooted passion and knowledge base on the topic, I went online and found that the darkcornwall.com domain name was available for a whopping one pence. I also discovered that no one had taken the @darkcornwall Instagram account, which filled me with as much fear as excitement because I had never really been on Instagram before and had no idea how it worked.

I took the plunge, bought the domain name, made the Instagram page and started to build a crude website with the beginnings of a Google Maps-based system charting all of the folkloric sites in Cornwall. I had my three paragraphs, my photos from my own archives or purchased images, and set out to populate this map. I had never built a website before, but I had a basic understanding of how it worked.

I enjoyed the distraction of creating the page and uploading the same content to Instagram, where it seemed to find a community of like-minded people who liked the cut of its jib. I did not understand the etiquette of posting, but I learned through mistakes and trial and error.

The distraction created by building these posts, from the shame that had been sitting in my mind, was invaluable, and I will say loud and proud that Dark Cornwall saved my life, and I am eternally grateful.

The Dark Beast Cometh

After a couple of months of being on “the Gram” and seeing the community grow to a couple of thousand followers, I started to think that something important was happening here. Something beautiful, pure and inspiring. People were enjoying the stories, and I was finding a place to be the real me.

At this point, I decided to message a folkloric illustrator whose work I admired and asked her if she would like to accept a commission from me to create a diorama of my favourite Cornish legends in her unique style. Thankfully, she said yes and the first-ever Dark Cornwall commission was completed. I enjoyed the ideation and brief process so much that I started to commission more artists from a wide variety of different styles to tackle my favourite tales. All of these were funded by whatever surplus money I was making from little consulting projects that I was doing on the side at the time.

Fast forward to today, and I have now personally commissioned over seventy five works of art in the last eighteen months. All artists have been paid, either upfront or on completion, and I experience a lot of joy looking back through our growing gallery of art.

At the same time as the first set of commissions, I was delving into my old book collection of Cornish history and mythology and finding more obscure tales that had not really seen the light of day. I was also spending my limited disposable income on books and pamphlets from second-hand bookshops to widen my knowledge.

It was at this point that I had bought a few folding maps covering folklore in the UK. Some were nationwide, and others were more regional, like the one covering Dartmoor. As my father was an avid collector of maps, I started to share the joy he had found in learning from them. I began to think about what it would be like if I could create our own map of Cornwall and illustrate the areas of folkloric interest on it. I even asked our small community at the time, and it was a pretty resounding “yes please”.

So I set out to design and work with one of our artists to build this mammoth piece of work. It was also during this time that I started to experience some familiar feelings and reactions from the existing folklore world.

The dark side of Dark Cornwall

A few months after launching Dark Cornwall, I started to receive invitations for coffees with people in the folklore space. I went somewhat naively, hoping that they would be warm meetings where we could discuss collaborating and growing together. There were some that were like that and I value those friendships to this day. However, there were others that were more hostile and more overt in wanting to question my credentials and intentions with Dark Cornwall. I am no stranger to difficult conversations and simply placed those connections in the “do not contact again” box.

I also began to receive complaints from certain folkloric site owners who did not like the image I had taken of their location or felt that a fact was wrong in my write up. I apologised where needed and tried to extend an olive branch to start again, but it was often not returned.

At this time, I also started to spend a lot of time with the ancient standing stones in Cornwall. A lot of time. I was practising my own form of nature based magic and trying to bring myself back into alignment with them. I started to feel the drain they were experiencing from over visitation and it bothered me to see their names being used to sell things.

I made one post that I now regret about a band who had named themselves after one such set of stones. It was simply an invitation for them to visit the site if they had not already. As someone new to social media, I was not prepared for the backlash. I received strange messages from people threatening to “burst my bubble” and demanding that I share my family tree to justify my views.

Things escalated.

I had individuals creating fake accounts that resembled my page and calling me all sorts of names. I had to contact the police twice to stop one individual from continuing the harassment.

It came to a head when one of these accounts sent a message through the website, wishing me to die of bowel cancer. A member of my family had just been diagnosed with it that same month. At the same time, more fake accounts appeared, and I discovered that these individuals were attempting to gather personal information about my family. At that point, I was genuinely worried that someone might come to my home and harm us.

I was still finding joy in creating Dark Cornwall, but there was a moment when I wanted to shut it all down. I made a post about selling my books. I felt like history was repeating itself, and I wanted no part of it.

The darkest possible thoughts returned.

I checked myself into the care of mental health nurses in West Cornwall and they helped me more than I can properly express. I came out of their care in a better place.

I had also tried to organise community dinners where people could come together and share stories, but venues were contacted and encouraged not to host the events. I had planned an exhibition celebrating the life and work of Pamela Colman Smith, but it never came to fruition due to similar pressures. I still regret giving in and cancelling that.

I will always be grateful for the friends who pulled me back from the edge and reminded me why I started this in the first place.

I am not sharing this to air grievances or seek revenge. Quite the opposite. I believe that people who behave this way often carry their own pain. Some people need a villain. I understand that. But nothing good comes from it.

If you are thinking about starting something of your own, I would still encourage you to do it. Just go into it with your eyes open. Protect yourself and do not let anyone take it away from you.

Moving on up

Let’s bring this back into the light.

When I decided not to close Dark Cornwall, I found a new energy to continue. It was also at this point that Dark Cornwall became a “we” instead of an “I”. I brought more brilliant people into the fold. I found my tribe.

We created our own map and it sold incredibly well. The feedback was overwhelming.

We hosted our first Dark Folklore Festival and it sold out. Our second is already on the horizon.

We began work on the Dark Cornwall Compendium, our first book.

We started developing our first animated series.

We created in person experiences with partners and built a full calendar of events.

And perhaps most importantly, we created the Dark Cornwall Studio.

It is the linchpin that brings everything together. A space for artists. A space for neurodivergent people to feel comfortable. A place of creativity, curiosity and honesty. It is not open to the public, but it is a sanctuary for those who are invited in.

It is also a place where people can talk about the darker parts of life. I am not trained, but I can listen. Sometimes that is enough.

The Sum of All Things

I have nothing to lose. There is no big pot of money behind Dark Cornwall. It is funded by me, my wife, my part-time gigs, a few loans and the income from what we create.

I am not some venture capitalist caricature like Peter Thiel. I backed people I believed in, who were making positive change in the world, and I am proud of that.

I use AI to correct my spelling and grammar mistakes. I am dyslexic and any reader would not be able to read what I write if didn’t have the ability to dictate my words into AI tools to turn it into these sentences. 

I have no formal credentials in folklore or writing. I have found that the people who make the biggest possible impact are those operating in spaces that they have no “ right to be in”.

I am just an introvert who occasionally pretends to be an extrovert and then needs a long time to recover.

I love instant decaf coffee from Aldi and dunking digestives into it. Fancy, I am not.

I live for my wife and children and for creating something that might make them proud.

I love Cornwall deeply and want to see its magic celebrated beyond just buckets and spades and ice creams. 

And I love seeing children bring these stories to life in their own way.

This is me.

And I am Dark Cornwall.