This is a story of a boy born in the Lancashire mill town of Farnworth nr Bolton in 1951. One of nine children he was born into a world of violence and extreme poverty along with his two brothers and six sisters. His world as a child along with his siblings was to know nothing else but being constantly beaten and kept a prisoner in the house and never being allowed out to play. Having eventually grown up and left home he ran with the skinhead gangs and into a world of alcohol and drug abuse, written of by the medical profession with the words that he would either be dead are commit suicide before he reached the age of fifty. However his life was about to change in a dramatic way and eventually lead him seven thousand miles away to Chile South America as he took part in one of the worlds most extreme desert marathons The Atacama Desert. This story is true that boy was me.