My beautiful big brother - Keith - was everything a little brother could ever hope for. He was kind. He was patient. He was curious and quietly wise. And above all, he was never cruel. He was twelve years older than me, but never once did he treat me as a nuisance, never once did he bully or belittle me. In a world where older brothers often tower and tease, mine only reached down - to guide, to help, to show me things. And I adored him for it.

He taught me how to paint. Not with instructions, not in a classroom way, but by doing - by letting me watch, by letting me in. There was something sacred about the way he moved a brush. The world quieted when he painted, and I learned early on that silence could be full of meaning. We took long walks together - just the two of us - talking, wandering, watching.

One time we followed the River Stort, wandering far beyond where I’d ever gone before. We veered off into open fields and climbed a shallow hill, just to catch the view. He always seemed to know when something was worth seeing. At the top, the world stretched out beneath us - a soft and gold in the afternoon light. But it was on the way down that curiosity took over.

We came across an electric fence- there to keep the sheep in- and naturally, we began discussing it. What would it feel like to touch? What if you used one hand? What about both hands at the same time- would the current pass through your chest? Would it reach your heart?

Keith was fascinated by the mechanics of things, by the mystery of the ordinary. His curiosity often won out over caution - and in this case, it did. He tried it. Both hands. And the jolt he got was enough to make him jump and shout- a flash of surprise and pain that quickly gave way to laughter. I didn’t follow his lead. I’d had my own lesson in electricity when I was younger - five or six. I had once stuck a carving knife into a plug socket, desperate to understand what the “magic stuff” was that made lights shine, bring the world in on the tv and  radios sing. It threw me across the room - literally. I landed dazed, with a deep respect burned into me. So when Keith got shocked by the fence, I simply nodded and thought, yes, I know that dance.

Another time, we walked from Rye House, where we lived, all the way along the River Lee to his place in Broxbourne. We chatted the whole way - some things I remember, many I don’t. We crossed a strip of wild land, now long lost to housing. As we moved through the undergrowth, a barn owl swooped down in front of us—majestic, silent, otherworldly. I cried out in excitement, “Capture it, Keith! Capture it in flight!” And he did. Out came his sketchpad, and sometime later, I saw the owl immortalised in pencil, bathed in the golden light of that dying day. He had frozen a fleeting miracle. That was his gift.

There were more moments like these - fishing trips where he’d sit beside me sketching the bank while I pulled up little fish; shared silences while starlings formed impossible shapes across the sky; hours spent watching swarms of gnats shimmer in the fading light. He showed me how to see.

But then, that night happened.

And in one unthinkable, senseless act, he was gone. Murdered. Stabbed to death. Just 27 years old.

And what I want people to truly understand is this:

a knife doesn’t just kill a body - it kills futures, it wounds families, it tears reality apart.

That night, they didn’t just take my brother.

They stole Keith.

They stole my protector.

They stole my guide.

They stole every future walk, every future conversation, every piece of art never painted, every word never said.

They stole my parents’ peace, condemned my mother to heartbreak, and set my father on a lifelong search for justice - a search that defined the rest of his days. They stole from my family more than I can ever count.

They stole from me a version of myself.

For over forty years I’ve lived with that absence.

And still, I can’t fully open those memories - because if I did, they’d rip me apart from the inside. You learn to hold grief carefully, to carry it like glass, or a grenade with the pin pulled. But it’s always there. Always.

What most people don’t see - what I need them to see - is that knife crime is never just about one victim. It’s a tsunami. One quick, violent moment - and then the wave comes crashing down. Families shattered. Time rearranged. Grief embedded in the walls of every room, in every silence, every missed birthday, every ordinary day that should have had more in it.

Yes, life continues.

Yes, we move forward.

But we do so changed, damaged, redefined.

I still carry Keith in everything I do. I still see him in the sky when the starlings dance, or when the sun filters through the trees. I still hear his voice when I pick up a brush. And I still feel the weight of his absence - every single day.

There are no words to measure how much I have missed him for these 43 years.

I will share more soon. I have stories—some light, some painful. Some full of joy, others marked by sorrow. But they are his. And they are mine. And they deserve to be told.

Because Keith was not just a victim of knife crime. He was an artist, a brother, a son, a friend, a man with a future that someone else chose to erase.

But I won’t let him disappear.

You may take a life, but you will not silence a legacy.

 

The Frosted Doors and the Road Beyond

There were two lives, really. The one with Keith, and the one after.

He was twelve years older than me, but that never seemed to matter. Age was an illusion in our house. He was more like a whisper of the future walking beside me in the present. We didn’t need many words, we had something more powerful: a knowing. That quiet brotherhood that sits under the skin, behind the ribcage, where real love lives. Despite the years, we were the same. Different on the surface, he more academic, me more feral and free, but underneath, cut from the same cloth.

The earliest memory I have is more warmth than image. Keith behind the frosted doors. His room was like a planet on its own axis. Those sliding panels,12 by 6 inches each, milky and private, marked the threshold between boyhood and something more grown, more complex. My father had installed them himself, trying, perhaps, to tame a house that never quite fit together neatly.

Inside, Keith painted. I’d sit cross-legged in silence, thumb in my mouth, watching him transform nothing into something. The air smelled of turpentine and effort. He’d put music on, loud—and the house would hum with it. Not chaos. Something deeper. A rhythm of becoming.

Outside, life smelled of horses. Sweat, hay, mud, leather. My life began in the stables, boots full of straw, heart full of joy. My father—well, he’d inherited the trade from his own father, who’d been a fireman until the smoke stole his lungs. Told to find fresh air, he found horses and never looked back. My father, in turn, became a cartage contractor, drove lorries and trucks across the UK, worked through the war, left school at fourteen to hawk groceries and tar blocks door to door with my grandfather. The blocks were carved from the roads themselves, the old London streets that bled black and burned slow.

That was his world: hard work, harder roads. But the horses were his breath, right up until he was 81, alive with purpose, until the last six months when the final horse was put down, and something in him began to change.

By then, Keith was long gone.

He was murdered when I was fifteen.

That sentence alone swallows the air in my lungs.

Murdered. A word so sharp it splits time in half. Childhood ended in that moment. The stables fell quiet. The laughter stopped. Our house in Hoddesdon was no longer a home but a haunted thing. We tried to hold it together, but the air was heavy with the absence of him.

By the time I was nineteen, we’d whittled the horses down to two and fled to Cambridgeshire. We moved to escape the world, but the world crept in anyway. It always does. Not all bad, life is never one note. I eventually clawed my way back to school, chased a literature degree, scratched meaning from words like a miner in the dark. Keith, the grammar school boy, would’ve been proud. I think he’d have smiled at the idea of me parsing Chaucer with working hands.

But I didn’t study books for books’ sake. I studied to fight. To read between the lines. In hopes I’d learn the language of systems and justice. To eventually find whoever took my brother’s life and make them see, see what they’d done, see how they had destroyed our family, ended the life of someone who deserved to live. I had theories but that’s all they were, theories - I needed words, knowledge - help! But life happened. Two children, a thousand distractions, and time’s slow erosion. I never found the killer.

And now, here I sit - older than I ever imagined I’d be, still with fire in my belly and tears not far behind.

Because knife crime is worse than ever.

Because boys with blades are no longer shocking, they’re statistics.

Because somewhere, some mother’s child is bleeding in the street right now and no one will stop to hold their hand.

What have we done?

Childhood is supposed to be holy - full of joy and mess and scraped knees and silly dreams. Not caskets. Not vigils. Not t-shirts printed with faces lost too soon.

What has become of us? What disease has taken hold of the human heart?

We’ve become addicts - hooked on comfort, drowning in ego. We put ourselves first, every time. Our success, our image, our wants - at the expense of the quiet, the poor, the meek, the children who just want to play. We live in a time where greed wears suits and lies smile in daylight. And still, we pretend it’s all fine.

But it isn’t.

We are swimming in a stagnant pool of self-importance, and the stench is unbearable. We must wake up. We must. Eight billion people. Eight billion sacred lives. Imagine what would happen if we all cared. If we treated every child like our own. If we stamped out evil the way we stamp out disease—quick, merciless, with no tolerance for rot.

Where is the love?

Not the empty kind sold in songs or posted for likes. But the true kind. The kind that holds the hand of the broken, shelters the lost, feeds the stranger, and fights for the voiceless.

My brother didn’t die for us to forget. He died, and in that absence, a duty was born. To remember. To protect. To speak the truth even when it hurts.

He is not gone. Not fully. Not while I write, not while I burn.

And so I write.

To honour him. To make sense of the senseless. To cry out against this creeping cruelty that steals our sons and daughters in the streets.

We are better than this.

We are meant to be better than this.

If the human race has any hope of survival, it must start here—in truth, in tenderness, in the sacred act of giving a damn. We must teach our children not just to survive, but to love deeply. We must show them that power is not dominance but kindness. That justice is not revenge but protection.

Let my brother’s life, and not just his death, be the fire we gather around - help me help others to change this deadly course we are on.

Let that be the horse that knows its way home.

And let us follow it.