As a child, Felicity was always interested in the news. She recalls watching the big stories of the late-80s unfold; the Hungerford massacre, the Kings Cross fire. The Zeebrugge ferry and the Lockerbie plane. Hillsborough. She watched the Berlin Wall fall – at 11 years old she had no idea why it was important, but she new she was watching history form in real time. A year later, someone in her school deemed the resignation of Margaret Thatcher so important that they sent students around to deliver the message to every classroom.

The end of Thatcher’s prime ministership was monumental for someone born in 1978, just a year before Thatcher came to power. She was the only Prime Minister that Felicity had ever known. Despite growing up in a very Conservative area of leafy Essex and reading her mother’s Daily Express every day, Felicity already had a natural sense of fairness and social justice that would never be served by Conservative politics. She joined the Liberal Democrats for a year before moving to Stoke on Trent to study Creative Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Crewe & Alsager faculty of MMU was not a hive of student rebellion. The only university campus in the country where the Student Union didn’t run the bar, Felicity made few friends, wasn’t enthused by her studies and scraped through with a 2:2. Returning home, she worked in music retail for a year before moving to London, eventually working in the finance department of HMV’s head office.

When Felicity was first dating her husband-to-be, she said, “I don’t know why or how, but I feel like I’m here to change the world.” His response? “Well no-one can change the world.” After 11 years of enjoying a life packed with music festivals, travels and Michelin starred restaurants, Felicity got restless. The husband became the ex-husband, and Felicity went on a quest to work out why she had walked away from a comfortable life of fun and frivolity.

Felicity was on a mission to truly start to live up to her own name and discover what was missing from her own happiness. Her studies included neurologists and psychologists such as Sonja Lyubomirsky, Daniel Gilbert, Laurie Santos and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. She also completed her yoga teacher training, and her reading of yoga texts such as the Yoga Sutras and Bhaghavad Gita informed her understanding of what makes us happy.

It was the simplicity of Aristotle which brought into sharp focus what Felicity was missing. Aristotle posited that, as well as hedonic happiness, humans also needed eudaimonic happiness. Best described as, “a life lived well,” all consequential models of happiness show that meaning and purpose, or a sense of fulfilment are crucial to human happiness.

Felicity’s path to deeper happiness led her first to volunteering with recent Syrian refugees in her home of Lancashire, helping with their English language learning. She put her bookkeeping skills to good use and became Treasurer of Hello Preston, then her leadership skills to the test as Chair of Preston City of Sanctuary. She is currently Treasurer of Sanctuary Cookalongs, a charity based in Preston which brings together communities through cooking.

Over the next few years, Felicity had ideas of building a business, combining yoga teaching with personal development coaching, changing lives by helping other to apply everything she had learnt. But selling happiness is hard, and helping individuals wasn’t fulfilling for Felicity. Despite being active among networks of entrepreneurs and engaging in lots of learning around building a business, she always felt like a fish out of water. In 2023, she realised that business was never going to be the way she would change the world.

But politics was.

In her book Walk the Walk, Felicity describes how being in the world of entrepreneurship made her feel like a child wearing her parents’ oversized clothes, but politics felt like a well-fitting suit. She had already joined the Labour Party in 2022, but started to get involved with the local party, attending her first Labour Conference in 2024. Felicity is currently LGBT Officer for Chorley Labour Party, an active member of LGBT Labour and Mainstream Labour. Her ambition is to be a Member of Parliament.