“Before I had this deep brain stimulation, somebody made a documentary film about me. In that film, I say that it is very strange because I have got this body with all the muscles intact in all their capacity but sometimes during the day this body would not work. It is very weird. It is like having a computer which has got all the insides but something is missing so it doesn’t quite work all the time. There is a loose connection. It is all there but it misses this connection. I used to have to wait for hours before the pill worked and would make that connection. It is a rather strange feeling. Also, I could do things that you wouldn’t think I could do. I could run down the road but I couldn’t walk. I could swim in the sea even though I couldn’t get into the water. Because it is a reflective movement. It is a very strange disease. When I got diagnosed I suppose the only thing I thought is that I wasn’t invulnerable. You know how you feel, you worry you might but you never think you gonna get this sort of things. It never takes up too much of your time because you do many things in a day. But suddenly when this thing happens you realise you are not immune from this. I know I will get there one day, I will get all these things that people talk about. So it is very odd".

“I do think about it a lot, when I see people walking down the streets and hopping onto a bus or going down the stairs very quickly in a tube station. They do that without even thinking, they don’t know how lucky they are to be able to do that. I am not jealous of them, I am not envious or maybe I am slightly but I mostly think isn’t it funny how they are all able to do that when I am quite not able to do this anymore. That is why I really like this project

Over The Hill. Sometimes I push myself to do things. People say ‘are you alright Tim, can you cope with it?’ and I say ‘yes’, because I really want to push myself harder and harder. The other weekend I was on the beach with no clothes on and it was 4°C. It was raining and blowing but I felt great, I was “I am gonna do this”. It gives me a sense of power and achievement. I like that, I like being able to do that. Having these little things when I say ‘I am going to do this’.”

“I never wanted to document my disease. Even if I got ill, the main thing about my life was that I wanted to live it. I didn’t want to become an ill person. I wanted to become a person who was free to do all things he wanted to do. I never wanted to document the disease in my project but some photographers wanted to photograph me shaking. Spencer Murphy did a photograph of my head and he did about a three minute shot. Of course I was shaking so it was slightly blurred. It is a great shot, that is what he wanted. He wanted to represent me in that way. I didn’t mind, but I wasn’t going to be restricted by that. I wanted to be photographed as me, as all the different types of me. Years ago I was in a church, at the funeral of a friend’s of my mother. There was lots of people there. The priest looked at us and said ‘all of you has a different story about this woman that put together make her all characters. She was all these different types of things, there was lots different parts of her’. Nobody is one kind of thing. That is how I feel. Although I like acting, I don’t think this is acting. I feel it is a representation of all these different parts of me, seen through somebody who doesn’t know me very well, who just got to know me through the project. Like you today. The thing I love about the project is meeting people. We would never have met otherwise, we might have passed on the street but that’s about it.”