Have You Got Yer Vest On?
Memoir - October 2026
I began writing this book twelve years after Nana died because I realised that the life she made possible had never really left me.Nana was not demonstrative. She did not soothe with carefully chosen words or explain how much she loved you. She fed you. Constantly. Food was care, comfort, celebration and emergency response. Whatever had happened, something could usually be improved by putting the kettle on or giving you something to eat.Then she fixed what was wrong. She made sure you were warm, safe and sufficiently prepared for whatever might happen next. A vest was never just a piece of clothing. It was protection, care and love, tucked firmly into your knickers.I have learned more about myself and my family while writing this book than at any other time in my life. I have laughed until I cried and cried until I could no longer read the words in front of me.Memories I thought I understood revealed something new when I placed them beside one another. Gradually, I began to see not only who Nana was, but what her love had given me.I grew up knowing that I could get things gloriously wrong and still be loved. I could be peculiar, impulsive, funny, difficult, brilliant or completely useless at something practical, and none of it threatened my place beside her.That certainty became the ground beneath everything I later dared to do.I originally intended to pursue traditional publication. Then I realised that I did not want to wait for someone else to decide whether Nana’s story deserved to exist. Nor did I want either of us flattened into something tidier, quieter or easier to market. Her voice, her Yorkshire rhythms, her Austrian beginnings and the particular way she loved people all needed to remain intact.I also wanted to create a video book in which I read the stories aloud myself. The laughter and tears still come when I read them because I was there. These are not simply words I wrote. They are moments I lived with someone I loved, and hearing them allows another part of that story to survive.I thought I was writing about the woman I had lost. In the end, I was also writing about the family I came from and the person Nana allowed me to become.
WATCH THE OPENING CHAPTERSThe first three chapters of Have You Got Yer Vest On? are available to watch on Vimeo. They are a chance to meet Nana and hear the stories in my own voice, with all the laughter, pauses and emotions that remain part of them.WATCH CHAPTERS 1–3 ON VIMEOPUT T’KETTLE ONIf you would like to continue the journey, you are warmly invited to join Put t’Kettle On, a live online reading and conversation about my books. We are currently looking at Have You Got Your Vest On?We meet every other Wednesday at 7pm UK time and 8pm Central European time. I read part of the story aloud, and afterwards we put the kettle on and share thoughts, memories and experiences. It's all very relaxed. Come join us.Our next meeting is Wednesday 16th September 2026.JOIN PUT T’KETTLE ON VIA ZOOM
Alex Frederickson 2026
All rights reserved[email protected]
Labelled
Memoir - December 2014
I left psychiatric nursing in 1992. I closed the ward door behind me and simply walked away.But nursing was not done with me. It would not let go.In 2009, I began trying to tell this story. By then, enough time had passed for me to see what I had experienced as a very young psychiatric nurse through different eyes. Adult eyes. I could see more clearly the people behind the diagnoses, the humanity within the institution and the effect that caring for others had had on me.The memories were extraordinarily vivid. I could still see the wards, hear the voices and smell the particular smells of the hospital. I could feel the fear, absurdity, tenderness, frustration and fierce protectiveness all over again. At times it became so overwhelming that I had to put the manuscript away. Then, eventually, it would call me back.Labelled was first published in the UK in December 2014. In 2016, I wrote a new chapter and released an expanded edition with a new publisher.The book takes readers into a world that was hidden from most people then and is still too often misunderstood and stigmatised now. I wanted those who lived with mental illness to be seen as people, not diagnoses. I also wanted to show the friendships, humour, conflicts and impossible situations that existed alongside the pain. Psychiatric nursing was never simply clinical. It was deeply, messily human.Readers have told me that Labelled helped them understand that world, whether they had experienced mental illness themselves, loved someone who had, or worked within mental health services. Some entered it knowing almost nothing about psychiatric care and finished it seeing both patients and staff differently.Writing it helped me too. It allowed me to return to experiences I had carried silently for years, look at them with greater understanding and finally set the story free.
“A breathtaking look inside a world few people know from the inside.”Amazon reader, verified purchase“People are people and are never just the illness.”Amazon reader
Alex Frederickson 2026
All rights reserved[email protected]
PERMISSION TO BE PECULIAR
Art Book - December 2025
Permission to Be Peculiar began after I was diagnosed with ADHD in 2023, at the age of fifty-seven.The diagnosis brought relief, but also grief. I began looking back at a lifetime of ideas, obsessions, sudden leaps, unfinished paths and things I had never understood about myself. I started drawing again for the first time since I was nine. What followed was colour, chaos, laughter and a collection of characters who seemed to arrive fully formed.They were odd, brave, tender, unruly and gloriously themselves. Some were stitched from people I had met, some from parts of my own history, and some simply appeared. Together they became the Stitchuationists and, eventually, the Peculiarium.Years earlier, while helping people on the streets of Salzburg, I had sometimes been called an angel. At other times, I was called strange or peculiar. But kindness should never be considered extraordinary, and being yourself should not feel like an act of rebellion.I wanted to reclaim the word peculiar.Here, it means refusing to make yourself smaller. It means choosing compassion when the world chooses apathy. It means inclusion rather than conformity, swimming against the tide and trusting that your heart may know the way better than any rulebook ever written.The book was never planned. It grew in the same way much of my work grows: through instinct, curiosity and following the next idea when it arrived. I realised that forcing it into the requirements of commercial printing would mean diluting the colours, the stories and ultimately myself. So the printed edition became a handmade object, built and bound by me. Each copy carries the small differences that come from being made by human hands.The digital edition preserves the original colours exactly as I imagined them and includes videos that bring another dimension to the work. Both forms belong to the same living book, one that can continue to grow and change.At its heart, Permission to Be Peculiar is for my mother and my brother, the brightest peculiar souls I ever knew. We did not have the words for our whirring minds or wild-hearted ways then. They never had the chance to live their peculiar truth out loud, so I am living mine for all three of us.This book is my refusal to shrink, flatten or apologise. It is also an invitation to anyone who has ever felt too much, not enough or somehow wrongly made.Perhaps you were never wrong at all. Perhaps you simply needed permission to be peculiar.
"Absolutely bloody brilliant and an absolute work of art!"B. Orchard
Alex Frederickson 2026
All rights reserved[email protected]
FEET UNDER THE SEAT
Photography Book - April 2021
People have always been my first love.After burnout caused me to step away from writing, I turned to photography. It felt natural to point my camera towards human beings and the small, revealing moments of their lives. But photographing people in Europe brought questions of privacy, and I needed to find a way of telling human stories without exposing the people inside them.The idea for Feet Under the Seat began after I sold my car and started travelling by train. Because I do not hear well, I have always watched people closely. On those journeys, my attention began drifting downwards.I discovered that feet are storytellers.Shoes carry traces of work, weather, age, taste and circumstance. Feet fidget, retreat, stretch out, lean towards one another and sometimes lift from the floor with laughter when a train hits a bump. They reveal something while still allowing the person above them to remain private.Then the pandemic emptied the trains and closed the hotels and ski lifts in the Austrian mountains where I live. Instead of travelling among tourists, I found myself sharing carriages with local people whose working lives had suddenly stopped or changed beyond recognition. I began to notice their feet, imagine their stories and, whenever conversation became possible, discover the lives attached to them.These were not famous people or extraordinary events. They were fragments of everyday humanity: humour, loneliness, resilience, kindness and the unexpected freedoms people sometimes found inside a frightening period.I shared the photographs and stories as the project unfolded. Readers told me they had become part of their mornings, bringing companionship, escape and something to smile about during lockdown. What had begun as my way of continuing to photograph people without identifying them became a small meeting place at a time when so many of us were physically separated.Feet Under the Seat exists because every ordinary person carries a story worth noticing. In a crowd, we may pass one another without looking, but beneath the seat opposite us there is always a life in progress.Sometimes we simply need to lower our gaze.
“Each story I read brings a smile to my face. Some make me thoughtful, some just make me laugh out loud.”C. Ceaton“Without exception they have cheered me for the day ahead in this awful time. Thank you, Alex”A. Keane
Alex Frederickson 2026
All rights reserved[email protected]
Meet Alex
I am a writer, artist and observer of people.My working life has taken several unexpected turns. I trained as a psychiatric nurse, studied personnel management, worked as a self-employed personal fitness trainer, ran my own mountain-bike guiding company, taught English, managed holiday apartments and worked as a documentary photographer. The jobs may appear unrelated, but every one of them has centred on the same thing: people. How they think, cope, hide, hope, connect and reveal themselves in the smallest moments.I was born and raised in Yorkshire, England and have lived in the Austrian Alps since 2006. Existing between languages and cultures has shaped the way I notice the world. I am often looking both from the inside and from slightly outside, interested in the things people who fully belong somewhere may no longer see.My first book, Labelled, grew from my experiences as a young psychiatric nurse and opened a door into a world that was still largely hidden and stigmatised. Feet Under the Seat found human stories in the shoes beneath train seats during the pandemic. Permission to Be Peculiar brought together my writing, art, humour and late ADHD diagnosis in a handmade celebration of people who were never meant to fit neatly into boxes.My latest book, Have You Got Yer Vest On?, is the most personal work I have ever created. It tells the story of Nana, my Austrian-born grandmother, who made her home in Yorkshire after the war and became the formidable, funny and deeply loving centre of my life. Writing it helped me understand not only who she was, but who her love allowed me to become.I also read my work aloud, both live and online. The stories change when they are spoken. The humour, pauses and emotions that shaped them become part of the telling, and readers become listeners gathered around the same table.Whatever form my work takes, I return to the same purpose: making hidden worlds visible, noticing people who might otherwise be passed by and telling human stories without sanding away the peculiarities that make them true.You can reach me at: [email protected]
Alex Frederickson 2026
All rights reserved[email protected]Imprint
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