So I ran out there and chased him and his wife and his kids out of the street, shouting and swearing at them.

And I was telling them that I'd been in exams or seminars all day. And because I hadn't been anywhere, I'd been in the hospital. I think it was a consultant had said to me, wife, just get him down there and see how he does.

And we'll keep an eye on him for two years. And so I was going down there and coming back up at home at weekend and holidays. And with my wife and child, James, it was a pretty good set up because somehow they'd gotten this package together to look after me.

So I was seeing the hospital, the consultant and whatnot, at the Bassett Law District General Hospital when I was on. But when I was down at Reading University, I was going to a place called Radcliffe Neurological Infirmary in Oxford. And also the Students' Union Welfare Office were helping me out.

Because I couldn't remember where my classrooms were, where I got to go to lectures or when I'd got to go or anything like that. Everything was out of place, James. And I think I was fortunate because one of the things I was studying were institutions, total institutions.

And I was studying Irving Goffman's total institutions. He looked mostly mainly at residential secure mental hospitals because he saw them as the total institution. But he also looked at other institutions like prisons and armies and universities and boarding schools.

And he talked about the difficulties people have adjusting, of maintaining a sense of self and identity in these total institutions, because they're told where to sleep, what room they're going. Often they can't have photos about and that sort of thing. They can be moved from one place to another just like that.

They told when to have the meals, often what to have and that sort of thing. Yeah.

But sometimes when I was lucid, I understood that it was because of my brain injury and that I couldn't remember things. And those times when I was pretty lucid, I used to get pretty upset as well. One of the things that lives with me, James, is I'm what neurologists call emotionally labile.

I describe it as emotionally unstable. It means my emotions can swing about and I relive experiences emotionally. Not necessarily remember them and articulate them in my head, but emotionally relive them.

It's amazing because I look back on it now and I wrote a paper a while back, The Perception of Severe Head Injury as a Social Problem. So during the course of writing that paper, I came across some research that we're doing on Baron Wilhelm von Richthofen, the Red Baron, the flying ace pilot. Apparently, he had a near-fatal head injury before he became a really ace pilot.

He was an ace pilot before, but then he got hit and he sustained a head injury. And when he came out of that head injury, he was bawdy where he hadn't been bawdy before. He was grabbing older women, he was getting into fights, he was a drunk and a Luftwaffe wouldn't let him back in because he was too disturbed.

They said he was mentally ill, he's not rating head. But he was a rich guy and he's got his plane in his private hangar and he painted it all red and off he went out to fight against the Allies. It was amazing.

And I read about this story being described as I'd never read it before. And it seemed to the witnesses who saw him that he committed suicide in spectacular fashion, probably being unaware. Happened not committing suicide, just being focused, James.

Just being focused. Target fixated, they called it. Focused on shooting down the Allied planes.

So he just chased them. Apparently, you know, Allies hated it, the Baron chased them because he wouldn't stop until he shot them down. And that's all he did.

So I wrote that paper years later after I'd been at Reading University. But looking at Reading University and asking me could I concentrate on those things? How could I focus on those intellectual tasks?

I think I was that target fixated. I wanted to get my degree. That's what I was doing.

That's what drove me when I came out of my coma. I was talking to people as if I were at university and I'd never been to university, but I thought I was there. And when I was there, I was focused on my tasks.

They were colleagues too. She came from a poor place in Doncaster. And suddenly we were living there.

We were living, well, we had plenty of money. We didn't have to pay any board and we didn't pay student fees in those days, James. And my wife got a job in the kitchen and it seemed like we had lots of money and we were mixing with lots of different people from cultures that we'd never met before.

Not just people from other countries, James, but the class of people we were mixing with, the socioeconomic class, eh? And my wife developed an illness that was some form of the three words, schizophrenic psychosis, paranoia, something like that. She became really ill because I was such a different person.

I was so different to what I'd been before. So I was a bit like the Red Baron, you know. I was drinking.

I was swearing. I didn't do those things before my accident. My body was a temple.

I didn't swear. I was a good chap, I thought.

And because I think she experienced that ambiguous loss. The last word she ever said to me, James, was, I just want my old Steph back. And I went out to pub to watch a game of pool and came back and got into bed and slept.

And in the morning I woke up and she was shallow breathing next to me in bed. And on the way she took tablets and died. I'm so sorry to hear that.

So I'm really passionate, James, about looking after those around us, looking after the victims around us. Because a lot of the time I couldn't even remember I'd got a brain injury, let alone be able to help her out. And anyway, I would just focus on my studies.

That's what I was doing.

We really had them in those days, James. And I sat on that. And I met a guy on there, Richard Brain Injuries, like myself.

And on that group, we were the leaders of the research, those who were directing it. And really, we felt to be on a parity with the clinicians. We also had some help from some researchers from the University of York.

It sort of gave us confidence, James, to be able to do things. Because I'd always felt like that I were a researcher, but I felt like I were a thwarted researcher, because I never got through that degree at Reading University. I did finish my degree at another university, but many things happened between then.

Researching in the Brain Injury Rehabilitation Research Partnership, BIRP, with clinicians from the Sheffield Community Brain Injury Rehab Team and others from Edway and other volunteers, I started to deliver brain injury awareness training with another survivor. And I delivered it with a specialist brain injury social worker, the manager of the place in Sheffield, and with a clinician, a neuro-rehab clinician from the Community Brain Injury Rehab Team. The first session was led by Simon Eggington, the social worker manager.

And I asked him if I could lead the next one. And I led him ever since, James. That was years ago.

And while doing that, it was, ee, this was later, 2012. And I came across some research that had been done in Leeds and Toronto in Canada. And that showed that, well, in Toronto in 2008, they showed that around 53% of the population, homeless population in their city, had sustained a TBI, a traumatic brain injury.

And that was fairly replicated in May 2012 in Leeds by a disability trust group that they researched it out. And that was in 2012, May 2012. And they showed that 48% of the homeless population in Leeds sustained a TBI.

And both studies showed that the overwhelming majority of these people sustained the first TBI prior to becoming homeless. So that suggested a causal link to me. And we incorporated these figures into our training and consolidated them with our only lived experience, because we'd had an idea separately.

And together, me and this guy had had experiences of homelessness. And we thought something can be done about this brain injury and homelessness. And then to read, James, that it was so, there was so much brain injury in homeless populations.

Half the homeless population have got a brain injury. And overwhelmingly, most of them sustained it prior to becoming homeless.

Where are the gaps that appear again and again in different cases? Are there any common things that keep happening? And we intuitively felt that it should be done qualitatively, not quantitatively.

And we intuitively felt it should be led by people like us who've experienced that.

And I know people who went there, I had some experience myself in the very early days of Ben's Centre. That's where we found our homeless people. We got them to work with us, Ben's Centre, and they were all keen for us.

They were all keen for something to be done because mostly what they were doing was they were looking after people. They were looking and they were intuitively aware that many of their client group, for want of a better word, had head injuries, because a lot of the guys used to get their head shaved there. It's easier to look after your hair if you just get it shaved off.

And many of them had scars on their heads. So they wanted to do this as well, because they're a charity and they've got to raise money to do this. So they run a campaign to get money to show an homeless person, and he might have a can in his hand, and he might have a syringe in his arm, and he's got a dog there.

And that's how people think of homelessness, but it's much more complex than that. That's just one visible aspect of it. And I came across some research being done by a guy called John Dean at Allam University, and he talked about how the misrepresentation of homelessness defines the issue.

So people think of homelessness, and if it's misrepresented as people who are on drugs or alcoholic and they've got a dog there in vacant streets, then the real causes of homelessness aren't going to be addressed.

Did you find common reasons why people end up being homeless after head injury?

Some things have changed to service provision in Sheffield, like the service now, the Sheffield Community Brain Injury Rehab Team, they now help provide a service that is led by brain injury survivors who've been through a programme of rehabilitation at the centre, because we found that that was after people had been through rehab, they went out there into the community, and still nobody knew about brain injury.

Nobody understood what they were going through. And they had to keep saying the same things over again. So what was established was the clinicians in Sheffield now facilitate essentially peer support groups.

It was different to the other peer support groups in Sheffield. And it works really remarkably, extremely well.

Yeah. It's brain injury that needs that complete reappraisal, isn't it, James? I mean, because so little is known about it.

There's an old John Mills film, I forget what it's called now, but he has an accident on a train and he gets a TBI and he's in hospital for something like 11 months. And the consultant says to him when he goes out at door, he says to him, try not to get too excited. The world can seem a strange place after you've had a brain injury.

That seems like sensible advice, but very little advice. And where's the world gone? We haven't done very well with brain injury so far.

Although having said that, there are lots of other groups I'm involved with, and I know you are too. Things are happening now. I am quite optimistic that there's the Edge Together group, there's the Brain Injury Social Work group that's, they're all building up momentum.

And of course, we've got UKABIF and Chloe Hayward who seems to have an encyclopaedic contact of knowledge. She's like the yellow pages of brain injury all over the UK. So things are happening.

And I think that amongst those of us that know, we know this has to be done. And we know it's not just about increasing the volumes. It is about where we get that message to.

It is about getting it to the social workers, into adult social care. It's about getting it into housing. But at a top level, it's about getting it into the police force and the criminal justice system.

I mean, there are comparable figures for homelessness and brain injury as there are for prison populations and brain injury. And the figures for women are depressingly much higher than female populations, much more prevalent in brain injury.

It took me years and years to get my degree and I never got my honours when I got it. And I remarried. I married a great woman.

I love her to bits. She's sat beside me now, James. But we experienced some awful times because, well, essentially because of my brain injury.