David Allen
- Dynamic Public Speaker – 15 years of fun, energetic, and humorous presentations that captivate audiences.
- Adventurer with Unique Stories – Memorable tales from cycling to Cairo and hitchhiking through North Africa.
- Mental Health Advocate – Personal, insightful talks on living with OCD and anxiety, aimed at reducing stigma.
What David Allen's clients say
Available for
Languages:
- English
David Allen's 2025 biography
David Allen – Adventurer, Historian & Mental Health Advocate with a Passion for Storytelling
Funny, light-hearted, but meticulously well researched, David Allen’s talks are both fun and thought provoking and are either taken from his own life experience travelling or are based on hours, days and weeks of tireless historical research sourcing records dating back to the 1800s.
A professional public speaker for 15 years, his presenting style is fun, energetic and inventive, always with a great deal of humour, and invariably he involves the audience as part of the story to bring the subject to life.
David’s working life has taken on many strands; he started out as a solicitor, then trained as a primary school teacher, whilst also writing and performing, and over the years he has performed at the Buxton Festival, Edinburgh Fringe and Latitude and in theatres and venues in various venues around the UK.
An adventurer at heart, David’s aversion to flying has taken him on many outlandish trips by train, boat and bicycle all over Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, and he has many hair-raising tales of travelling adventures, notably cycling from London to Cairo, and hitchhiking to Morocco.
David’s love of history and research has led him to develop a particular fascination with all things Victorian, he is a member of the Dickens Fellowship and offers many different talks on various aspects of Victorian History.
However, though a natural entertainer, privately David has struggled with intense anxiety, depression and debilitating Obsessive Compulsive Disorder since childhood, with a later diagnosis of severe health anxiety.
Following the pandemic, as part of his recovery, David decided to take a step towards tackling the stigma of mental health and instead make a virtue of his experience, and so trained to be a Lived Experience Practitioner whereby people like him with experience of mental health help those at the start of recovery. He later began volunteering with Champions for Change (previously Time to Change), an offshoot of the mental health charity Mind and is now a ‘People’s Champion’ to help raise awareness of what it is really like to live with a mental health condition. He has also worked with health professionals and groups of student nurses to help them better understand the needs of those suffering from mental illness.
Now an advocate for mental health, David is combining his public and private ‘faces’ and is giving talks on what it is really like to have OCD and health anxiety. Poignant, humorous and heart-warming, David is keen to explain and broaden the understanding of OCD as a form of anxiety, drawing on his lifetime experience of living with severe OCD, how it started, its triggers and effect on him, whilst also offering the tools and coping strategies that he has developed along the way to survive.
Drawing all these parallel strands together, David Allen is a very popular public speaker, who is the perfect combination of being both hugely knowledgeable and a very skilled and entertaining storyteller.
David Allen's 2025 talks & topics
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL - MENTAL HEALTH
Living with OCD – A survivor’s guide
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder – A heartfelt and insightful exploration of this potentially debilitating condition, from David Allen’s personal experience, having lived with it since childhood. How it started, its triggers and its effect on him, whilst also offering the tools and coping strategies that he has developed along the way to survive.
“Oh sorry, I’m a bit OCD about that…” This phrase is bandied about a lot these days, and indeed in many ways is just a shorthand code to describe a simple desire to be neat and tidy. However, though mental health is increasingly discussed in the media, there are still many misrepresentations and misconceptions about what it looks and feels like to live with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
The condition can affect people in different ways and with varying severity. Still, in broad terms, OCD is where repetitive irrational thoughts (obsessions) lead to a compulsion to carry out unwanted irrational behaviours to control those thoughts and disprove the fears. Each person’s beliefs and compulsions are as individual as they are, but for those who live with severe clinical OCD, like David, this condition attacks rational thought, and can control the sufferer’s life, creating immense stress, trauma, and extreme anxiety.
From personal experience, David will tell you that OCD is clever. It’s like a heat seeking missile that hunts out your weaknesses. It never gives up, and the more you run, the faster OCD will chase you.
For David, its weapon is the irrational belief that the lives of loved ones are under imminent -and constant- perilous threat, and it is only by carrying out minor, insignificant rituals can those lives be saved. But of course, only if he does it ‘right’.
Driven by this powerful and often terrifying belief, David’s OCD would often lead to an overwhelming compulsion to carry out repetitive activities. Despite knowing that, logically, there was absolutely no rational connection between his behaviours and the objective to save lives, nevertheless in the moment he believed that he had to follow these ‘orders’ to keep his loved ones alive, because of the insurmountable fear that, if he disobeyed, then the consequences would be catastrophic.
David’s OCD would attack his perception of the world, forcing him to take evasive action to avoid touching certain objects such as taps, switches, clothes and even areas of the floor, which his OCD had, for no logical reason (because OCD isn’t about logic), identified as bad or dangerous. Dangerous and terrifying, because it meant that even if he accidentally even slightly touched it, or chose the ‘wrong’ item on the supermarket shelf, unless he put it right – mmediately- then his loved ones would die. All because of him. Nowhere was safe. Living in constant terror and on high alert became the norm.
Imagine one human being believing they have the responsibility to save the life of a loved one. How? Just by touching a door, the edge of a paving stone or washing their hands 10, 30, 100 times, or more, and again, and again. But they must do ‘it’ right. Now imagine the fear, the pressure, the anxiety, knowing that if you don’t do it ‘right’, your friend, family, loved one will die. If the stakes were really that high, wouldn’t you do everything you could?
OCD is frighteningly common, and the pandemic only served to compound the problem. However, many still suffer in silence because they are too embarrassed to admit the details of the rituals controlling their lives, and what they fear and believe will happen if they don’t obey ‘the OCD voice’. Consequently, struggles with mental health are very often accompanied by a huge amount of shame, which of course makes it harder to seek help.
Poignant, humorous, and heart-warming, in this talk David Allen is keen to explain and broaden the understanding of OCD as a form of anxiety, drawing on his lifetime experience of living with severe OCD, how it started, its triggers and effect on him, whilst also offering the tools and coping strategies that he has developed to survive.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL - TRAVELLING TALES
7 Countries, 10 Punctures & 1 Friendly Camel – London to Cairo on Two Wheels
Armed with just a second-hand bicycle, gritty determination, and a sense of humour, this is a true, light-hearted tale of accidental adventure, hungry wild dogs, desert potholes, scythe wielding goat-herders and losing one’s way in the woods! David’s fun, hair-raising stories from the road will leave you excited, thrilled, and maybe even yearning for your very own adventure.
Tangiers or Bust! Hitchhiking to Morocco
Tales of David’s hair-raising adventures as a hitchhiker in the 1980s, encountering eccentric drivers and characters who had to be seen to be believed, a van laden with hens, a car that couldn’t stop, floods and lightning, sleeping in doorways, mountain escapades, and the Kasbah of Marrakesh. David’s fun stories from the road will leave you excited, thrilled, and maybe even yearning for your very own adventure.
VICTORIAN HISTORY
Blood, Guts & Gore – True Stories of Murder in Victorian England
History and dramatic storytelling rolled into one! Buckle up as skilled storyteller David Allen takes you on a gripping jaunt through the world of plots, deadly poisons, and the occasional chopped-up body. Jam-packed with factual details, each story has been meticulously researched using contemporaneous newspapers and law reports. The current story in this series, ‘Blood Guts & Gore: Scandal Below Stairs’, is a particularly blood curdling tale, in which you will be introduced to an eccentric, cantankerous ex-teacher who hires a new servant…but is she too good to be true? Are you sitting comfortably? Then let’s begin…..
The Lady Poisoners of Victorian England
History and dramatic storytelling rolled into one! Jam-packed with factual details, each story meticulously researched using contemporaneous accounts from newspapers and police reports. Meet the wicked ladies who bump off their husbands & lovers, such as the lady who falls deeply in love with the handsome new doctor… but oh no, he’s already married! What does she do next? Of course, she takes a trip to the local pharmacy to buy a packet of deadly poison…. Welcome to the true tales of lady poisoners with one thing on their mind…Murder!
The Amazing Mr. Dickens!
Join David Allen on an affectionate romp through the ‘rags to riches’ life story of the world’s greatest storyteller from his early childhood working in a factory, to his illustrious life as a writer and social reformer, including his scandalous affair and daring escape from a train. With dramatic readings from some of his most popular works, including Oliver Twist.