Knife crime is on the rise in MK – that is a fact we can’t ignore as a city. In Celebrate:MK’s bid to educate youths that gang life is not the way forward, local anti-knife crime campaigner, UK garage music MC and poet Champagne Bubblee (real name Quinton Green) writes a column reflecting on his stabbing, entitled ‘Nil by Mouth’.

I distinctively remember the jumper I was wearing when I was stabbed seven times in Northampton. I’ve never seen a jumper like it before or since.

It was a black knitted Adidas jumper with the logo somehow interwoven on the back. When I first put it on, I adopted a sort of swagger.

I’m not sure if it was because I’d found the perfect medium between sportswear and looking smart, but I finished off the look with a pair of black Evisu jeans and white trainers.

The police returned my clothes after a brief investigation and mum put the jumper in the washing machine to get rid of the blood!

My grandmother stitched it back together when she came down from Norfolk to visit and I was back out in the same clothes 2 weeks later.

I think as a family that’s just what we did, we got on with it. My grandad was a Barrow boy raised in East London and dad grew up in Croydon and originated from Kingston, Jamaica. They’d seen it all.

OK I was “one of theirs” but I didn’t exactly return home to servings of tea and sympathy. My friends called the injuries “battle scars” and joked that some of the wounds must have been inflicted by a knitting needle because they looked like small puncture wounds; not realising that if the KITCHEN KNIFE had perforated my lungs I could have drowned in my own blood.

I was hospitalised for three days and there was an elderly man in there at the same time as me who would make escape attempts at night, and the nurses would often chase him around the ward.

It was excruciating to watch, especially when he’d wake me up at 3am to go and place a bet on imaginary horses in make believe races.

I woke up one morning and his bed was empty. The old man had passed away. Life is fleeting.

One day he was running around in a gown using the mobile IV drip pole as a getaway vehicle, the next he was gone. I suppose the point that I’m making is that it could have so easily been me that day.

An empty bed, on a ward. My notes still scrawled on the clipboard. Quinton Green, seven puncture wounds to the back, arms and torso… NIL BY MOUTH.

Follow Quinton on Instagram @champagne_bubbler and @whoismrmilise, and follow Knife Crime Victim Support on Facebook. Email him on kcvsinfo@gmail.com

This feature was published in the February 2020 issue of Celebrate:MK lifestyle magazine. Read the full magazine above or by clicking on this link.