For the past ten years, I've been writing one television series. It's called Greenhaven.

The first scene came to me when I was sixteen, in a Film Studies class three months before my mother died: a boy running down the stairs of a tower block, documents in hand, pursued by a man in black. I knew what it was the moment I saw it.

My mother, Yasmin — a community worker, a friend, one of my earliest teachers — was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease when I was ten. For six years the corridors of Southampton General Hospital were a second home. She died on December 20th, 2016, five days before Christmas.

I started writing Greenhaven shortly after, on a secondhand iMac gifted to me by the Young Carers group I belonged to. The first rejection letter from a BBC production company arrived just before my eighteenth birthday. I kept it.

What followed was the long apprenticeship — university, then libraries and coffee shops, then back to university for a degree in English Literature, then production work for a national broadcaster, then a one-way flight to teach drama in China. Across countries and classrooms, Greenhaven stayed with me. Every year, it deepened.

I said it at sixteen and I'll say it again now: this series has the DNA to be one of the great ones.

Ten years on, I'm taking it to its home. The deadline is December 20th, 2026.

See you on the other side.