This guy takes photographs. Not just any photographs. He took photos that tell the story of  my life.

Some even before I was even born, some with me in them.

I came across his old dark room when we were clearing out the school buildings. An Science technician there thirty years ago, he used an empty store cupboard to develop and proudly display his work.

I took what I could. I took all those images that I instantly recognised, plus a couple I just liked.

The first family holiday I can remember was to Butlins, Pwllheli. We went to this beach. That’s me running away from the water, scared. Sally often walked Daniel on this beach.

I’ve still got a VHS recording of a trip we went on at primary school to somewhere in the Lakes. On it, we were filmed walking up a mountain. This mountain. It was also Terry and Kim’s favourite place to visit.

When I was seventeen, I was approached by a drunken tramp who told me he was going to kill himself later that evening. I spent time talking to him, gave him some money, and hugged him, told him everything was going to be ok. It wasn’t, and he jumped to his death from this bridge a month after meeting me.

Later, I spent a year in Blackpool at art college. Greg and Ana loved Blackpool, reminded them of Vegas.

Then of course I came to study in Liverpool, and even now my dad sometimes visits the Port of Liverpool building for work. It’s also where Gaz stole his first phone.

Last year I visited Whitby, a beautiful resort on the east coast. This is the harbour.

I spent new year this year at a lovely secluded farmhouse, and the following day visited Conwy and fell in love with the place. Frank had also taken this photo.

Little did I know when hoarding these prints, that Frank now owns my old camera. It was stolen from my class room three years ago by a disgruntled pupil, and sold on in a nearby pub. Frank had always wanted to ‘go digital’ but had previously been too scared. He knew it must have been stolen, but it didn’t really matter. This seemed too good an opportunity to miss.

When he started playing about with the camera, he felt a bit guilty though. And he found the lad on some of the photos stored on it, strangely familiar.

He’s still taking photos, mind.

Today I found out that another mystery that caused me pain, will never be solved by the powers that be.

Despite this letter from the public health department of the council arriving in my postbox a couple of months ago, and the reams of answers that I sent back, Tracey (apt name) from the office dealing with the investigation into the outbreak this morning told me that presumably there was no link to be found amongst those who fell ill that weekend and therefore no further information could be sought or offered.

By now though, Neela will have been deported. It would seem she has got away with it.

If her last act in this country was indeed to poison a section of society, it is pretty ironic considering she was once going to be a doctor.

She came to Britain a few years back to stay with family. It was difficult leaving her husband and their son but things hadn’t been right for a while, she dreamed of bigger and better things and Kalim was happy working where he did. She had a photo of them in her purse – well, she had, it must have dropped out one day and some weirdo had picked it up and kept it. Still, she wrote regularly, sent money home when she could. It got harder when her status changed to ‘illegal’.

She arrived in Liverpool with the intention of working with her cousin in one of the restaurants on Bold Street, until a job came up at the school of Tropical Medicine.

It never did.

Instead, she suffered years of misery. Yes, she had her extended family around her, but missed the warmth of her husband and child, whom she presumed she would not even recognise now. Still, as soon as she was home she would track them down and find out how they were getting on. In a way she was looking forward to going home even more since her town featured in the successful film Slumdog Millionaire. She couldn’t wait to see the changes.

Ever since her arrival in Britain, Neela has been the victim of racist comments at work, in the street. Since the London bombings it had got much worse. But so had the country in general, and the things she saw more regularly now, meant that she wasn’t even that upset the day the letter came telling her she had to go ‘home’. In the past few years, she has had her phone stolen, found out she was working with a load of prostitutes, and most recently she has seen a car crash when the guilty driver sped off.

She just wanted to have a little bit of revenge, it was playful more than anything, she certainly never wanted to hurt anyone.

I guess we’ll never know quite how she did it, unless she comes back to confess, but Easter 2009 will be remembered by many for the week they were infected by campylobacteriosis. Some thought they were going to die, so severe were the gastro pains and headaches. Some lost over half a stone, their appetite, precious time with their families, all because someone else was having to finally admit their dream had died, and left a mark of contamination amongst innocent citizens unlucky enough to eat and drink there that day.

Neela says she will be back.

He was half of one of the first openly gay couples in Chicago.

He might also now be HIV positive.

He first met Chris whilst buying a house – and although they got to know each other intimately, for such a long time they denied their feelings for each other for fear of retribution or knock-on effects within each other’s lines of work.

You see, the doctor is an internal medicine specialist, one of the leaders in his field in American medicine, and is based at the hospital that ER was said to have been based on. A compare healthcare website tells me he studied in Sweden and Sarajevo before coming to America.

Part of their attraction was that as they were talking on an informal date early on, they had both divulged that at school they wanted to be artists. It was a time for experimentation, and they wanted to try new things, so returned to their carefree high school days and decided to start sending out messages. It was so exciting, such a release from the daily humdrum of prescribing drugs or selling properties.

Chris got the idea travelling back from a trip to New York, where he’d got talking to a young guy from Liverpool, England, on an art school trip, whilst dining alone in the Hard Rock Cafe. He liked his ideas, and went back and shared them with the doctor over a romantic catch-up meal. He felt a little guilty as he fancied the English guy a bit but was more bothered about using the inspiration to start a new project. After all, it was a new millennium – and this idea of writing messages on dollar notes wasn’t entirely original but felt anew to them.

One of their five dollar bills, which simply said HAVE FAITH, was intercepted by me in Las Vegas, August 2001.

Their project gathered momentum the following month.

The doctor has always been a minimalist – he didn’t like to carry a wallet, instead, he carried any important documents in his Glasses case. Receipts, prescriptions, his and Chris’s calling cards, that sort of thing.

One day he was in a rush to make an appointment with a newly married couple, who were trying for a baby and were travelling and in town for a couple of days, for some reason he really wanted to help them, and anyway he dropped it crossing a road.

It was picked up by an English couple, who just knew it would be the perfect souvenir from their trip for their eccentric son who revelled in collecting this sort of thing. They retrieved it from a gutter, perhaps he’d been looking at the stars…

His confusion and upset at losing this glasses case only heightened his despair. He was already in trouble for prescribing the wrong medicines, and falsely claiming expenses, so he could have done without losing some of the receipts he lost that day.

As you can see from the above passport photo, which I found in London last year, a trip Chris brought him for a surprise anniversary holiday, the doctor was also awaiting routine HIV test results.

He and Chris don’t have much time for art projects right now.