It is quite possible, even today with Facebook and Twitter and all the rest of it, to check out of every day life and have no one notice. I lived in a wood in Scotland, in a tent, for 18 months. I saw hardly any one, just a walker every now and again. I went back to basics, catching fish and deer and collecting rainwater to drink. It wasn’t an ideal life, with temperatures plummeted to 15c below that winter, but the alternative was no less depressing.

I have officially been homeless for 20 years. I’ll admit that at first you could say it was my choice - I did choose to sell my house and go travelling, but when I came back and tried to ‘re-engage with society’, to try and get a foot on the ladder, doing so felt virtually impossible.

I come from a farming background, and I worked as a groundsman as a young man, and then as a park keeper, looking after the bowling green and the grounds of a local park. I married and my wife and I had five good years together. Then what I call ‘the year of disasters’ happened. First of all my mum died of a heart attack, which hit me hard.

Some time later I decided to go on holiday with my brother and a friend. It was a mountaineering trip, the kind of adventure we had been on many times before, climbing on Mont Blanc. I don’t remember when the ice water burst. All I remember is being woken up in hospital, after being in an enforced coma. I went back to the UK with two boxes of ashes. My brother and friend had both been completely crushed by the weight of the ice.

I was having physiotherapy to fix my broken body, but nothing was done for my mind. The term PTSD didn’t exist then, but I kept going over and over the accident in my head. Then my wife was diagnosed with cervical cancer, and in the November of 1989 my dad died. It was the final straw, I couldn’t cope. My wife and I were fighting so much we agreed to split for a while. I went off travelling around Europe, trying desperately to forget everything. While I was gone, she passed away.

So that was when I sold my house, and went to Africa to try and escape everything. I was there for three years, in Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and then in Sierra Leone I got tangled up in the war zone. The things I saw there were just horrific, mind-blowing violence. I went back to the UK, intending to make a fresh start, but because I had been away and had no family I had no connection to any area.

Nobody wanted to know me. I would move from area to area, an itinerant fruit picker along with all the others, but it meant I never set down roots, so I could never get any help when I went to the job centre. They wanted to know what I had been doing, where I was living, and I couldn’t answer because I was paid cash in hand, or I was living in a squat, so I’d be sanctioned and knocked off the system again, and my mental health problems hardly put me at the top of the jobs list.

It would have been so easy to give in to temptation. When I lived in squats people would be cooking up stuff in front of me, telling me that it would take the pain away, but somehow I knew that drugs and alcohol were not the answer for me.

Eventually, when I was in Inverness having done a season’s picking, a Salvation Army hostel there started me in therapy. I spent six months with a psychiatrist and 18 months at counselling, finally letting my emotions out – though art, poetry, talking, it really was amazing to open up and let it go. They set me up in a house, but after 18 months unable to find work I jacked it in. I wanted to let someone else have the house, and that’s when I took to my tent. I had the skills to survive and I was tired of playing the system.

After that I moved on, and it was in Gloucester that I met a woman at the local night shelter who told me about Emmaus. I have been here just over two years and I feel like I am in the right place. I am driven, passionate, and encouraged to use my voice here.

Emmaus is at the forefront of fighting homelessness and we should be proud of what we are doing. I don’t want others to talk for me any more. I don’t want the last 20 years to have been for nothing; I want to speak for homeless people across the UK. I want others to know what it is really like to be stigmatised and forgotten.