PERS ONALITIES
The passion and the pain TV antiques dealer Adi Higham speaks openly to Caroline Spencer about his passion for Jersey, Acorn and ‘brocante’, but also about breaking his back, mental health and why he once tried to take his own life
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t is impossible not to be caught up in Adi Higham’s enthusiasm for everything he talks about, not least his newfound love of Jersey. But there are shadows behind the bright spells. When he visited Acorn Enterprises last October, it became apparent that he had a genuine empathy for the work that is done there. Acorn provides work and training opportunities for people who have a disability or longterm health condition, and Adi knows just how that can affect anybody. In 2017 he broke his back in a cycling accident. ‘I was in Scotland training for the London 100-Mile Bike Ride,’ he said. ‘Coming down a mountain, I hit 31 mph, weighing 31 stone, came to one of the last bends and missed it completely.
‘You are vulnerable when you have a health problem. I was getting better, but I’ve felt vulnerable again these last three weeks. Very quickly it can become a very lonely place.’
‘I face-planted the bank at the side of the road, the second face-plant was into the road and I ripped my lip off. I still suffer from the injuries. I know what it’s like to spend six months in hospital. I’ve got a wandering eye and I forget things in conversation, more than I should at 54.
Adi speaks openly about how his mental health also took a battering following the accident. He said he just felt sad and lonely and kept bursting into tears over the simplest things. Thanks to the persistence of his partner, Tara Franklin, he sought help.
‘I also now have piriformis syndrome which has destroyed the nerves down my legs. At the moment my right leg doesn’t want to do anything.’
‘In the end I had to hold my hands up and say “I’m in trouble”. What brought it on, I had no idea, but I knew I could no longer fight it. I went on medication, which I am still on to this day.
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You are vulnerable when you have a health problem. I was getting better, but I’ve felt vulnerable again these last three weeks. Very quickly it can become a very lonely place Adi Higham is the larger-than-life antiques dealer on the BBC programme The Bidding Room, which starts its fourth series in March. He is known for wearing bright colours and purple trousers. But today he is talking from his bed, as his back has ‘gone’ again, leaving him unable to walk for the last three weeks. ‘Things like this accident can happen to anyone, and all of a sudden you’re not the person you were the day before,’ he said.
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‘What I saw at Acorn was a community that genuinely cared and people who were willing not just to help but to understand the situation you’re in. And it was so upbeat. I loved it.
‘I have opened up about it and realise how many people it affects. If I knew of any way to help more than I do, I’d do it.’ Although it was the first time that he acknowledged that he was suffering from depression, on reflection, he realises that he had been there before. Years ago, when his sons were two years and six months old, his fiancée, Anne-Marie, was killed in a farming accident in France. ‘We had only recently moved there, I spoke no French whatsoever, and I had these two little children,’ he said. ‘The easiest thing would have been to sell up and come back to the UK, but I didn’t want to. I handled it very much on my own. Looking back, I very much did have depression. ‘I have never admitted this to anybody before, certainly not to a magazine, but I’d had enough. I couldn’t see the point in carrying on. I took my boys to the UK with all intentions to go back to France and kill myself. I failed miserably, thank goodness.
