January 2009 Archives

The latest installment of my column for The Times came out today.

Writing about parenting is an interesting process, as it makes me think about everyday things from a different perspective (can you think from a different perspective?). Writing for a broad audience who might not have any direct experience of disability means no longer assuming a level of familiarity with much of the day to day stuff.

That said, even the most seasoned disability veteran will be ecstatic when they see what I have found. I know we've all done it. All those times when we struggle to get pasta into the socks of a loved one. Those moments when you think, "There must be an easier way to do this."

Well now there is. Courtesy of a 'daily living aids' website in Australia. I present the Pasta-Stocking-Stuffer.

No longer 'Special Needs', as this is seen as inappropriate language. Instead replaced with 'Specific Needs'. There.
Kids at school virtually stopped calling each other spazz when the Spastics Society changed their name to Scope, and instead started calling each other Scopey.

Now, instead of 'Special', will you hear the youth of today shouting from the bus, "You're Specific"? Maybe it's just a sneaky method employed by the education minister to increase the nation's vocabulary one word at a time.  From now on, I wish to be referred to as being 'of compromised ambulation'. Or maybe just 'very relaxed.'

Well, more column than pillar, but I couldn't think of any bad column puns. Anyhoo. Here it is... My first outing as a columnist for The Times.

The excerpt below is a translation into and back from Korean. Reading this has made me realise just how much better my book would have been if I had followed this simple process...

Where to begin? So, it is easy. I'm at the bottom of the client's garden on the roof of an old garage is a fake. I browse the basin under the tree, and just at what is happening is confused.

  A few moments ago, I was a tree, 6 meters in 45 minutes and cut the rope and harness ready to unload it by the top was working.  I can feel my legs and my back is now.

  I, my wife, Penny, also calling me to see me trying to get through the shrubbery in the garden of tangling with jilhohanda out to the gardener.

She is five months pregnant. She just to listen to my voice, low-cost report, to fall, I had assumed that. April 1, 2005, I am 36 years old.

What is weird here, now "it, but somehow I can not remember the pain I remember is that the words" that sick.

I think that's going to get sick, I also like barking like a fairy remember remembered that....

Penny out of fear of losing consciousness, so that a certain line of the conversation to keep her empty.  She called in 20 minutes, we are combined by paramedics.

I could go on, but I fear it will taking something away from the rather pedestrian original version.

+breaking news+breaking news+breaking news+breaking news+breaking news+breaking news+

Following on from Tuesday's piece in The Times, I am delighted to announce that I am breaking into the newspaper business (see what I did there?) by embarking as a weekly columnist in the family section of Times 2 in The Times on Tuesdays.

The column will deal with the highs and lows of wheelchair parenting, and I hope to continue with my mixture of humour and insight (god, this sounds pretentious!), giving the reader a feel for the challenges faced by disabled parents.

Since I began writing back in 2006, I have always wanted to write for a national newspaper and I am thrilled that The Times have given me this opportunity.

There. Enough. In order to offer some balance, I will now show you the kind of thing that I do when I should be writing...

Thank you for all the positive feedback after the Times article. I'm really pleased with the way it came out. Thankfully no-one seemed to notice the huge piles of chaos over our shoulders in the picture. This is because:
a) We have a small child.
b) We hoard stuff.
c) We work from home (sort of).
d) Instead of throwing stuff away, we keep going to Ikea and buying even more boxes and other 'storage solutions' in the naive hope that this is all we need to to transform our flat into some kind of minimalist living space worthy of any Sunday supplement.

My latest piece for the BBC is now up on the OUCH website.
Those of you who have shared my football exploits as a spectator will no doubt be familiar with some of the challenges I have faced.

Those of you who once shared my football exploits as a player will no doubt be familiar with some of the challenges my opponents have faced.

To all of you I offer my sincerest apologies for any boredom or pain caused.

It might be timely to toss this image into the mix.



The team is Perfidious Albion, named after Napoleon's scathing "Perfide Albion," his description of the untrustworthy British.

 It's the only picture that I'm aware of showing me in my footballing prime, all stubbly chin and bouffant (Back row, second from left). Hard but fair was my motto. In other words, a glancing contact on the ball before you kick the opponent up in the air. Not with any malice aforethought, but through a subtle combination of a lack of pace and poor timing. 'Tis all the more ironic that I spend so much time bleating about attractive football and Corinthian spirit.

My article on parenting is in today's Times, and also on their website, if you want to read it online.

A really nice pic, too.

Well, hopefully. I've got a piece running in the Times2 family section of Tuesday's Times. It's going to be a busy day, with meetings at the hospital (Stoke Mandeville), where I sit on the Service User's committee. See? I can do proper grown-up stuff sometimes.

Actually, it's something that I am very happy to be involved with, as the National Spinal Injuries Centre are serious about patient involvement, and as ex-patients remain outpatients of the spinal unit for life, the input they give is invaluable. This is one of the things that I found very supportive when I was first admitted. The idea that the centre is concerned with providing treatment and support for the rest of my life, not just to get me through the rehabilitation process.

While we're praising, I would like to make another (yet another) mention of the International Tennis Federation, The LTA and the integration within the sport. I play fairly regularly at Roehampton, and some of the other wheelchair players train there frequently, often on court next to the likes of Andrew Murray. Actually it has been fairly unbearable playing there of late, as players have been acclimatising for Florida and the Australian Open, which has meant that the heating has been set on Australian high summer.

Which leads me, and quite neatly I thought, to more adventures. In February, we are heading Darn Sarf as we cheeky London chappies are wont to utter. But in this case, dear reader, it is not the wilds of Peckham that we are headed for. Instead we are settling for Australia.

The plan is for three weeks of family catchup fun in Sydney, followed by a week in Perth. We haven't been to Perth before, although people assure me that Perth in February is not dissimilar to the inside of a preheated oven. Obviously they don't actually say that. And certainly not from inside our oven. That'd be weird. Although thinking about the whole acclimatisation thing, it could work...

We are due to arrive in Sydney halfway through the biggest wheelchair tournament in Australia, which I intend to report on. The trouble is, jetlag does all kinds of strangeness to my short term memory, so I could end up writing about anything from the car-park to the inside of my eyelids.

It will most likely end up being some babbling incoherence about the staggering coincidence of so many wheelchair users from around the world all being in the same place at the same time. And all with tennis raquets. What was I saying? Oh look , there's a guy in a wheelchair. And he's got a tennis raquet..etc.

So, a new year begins, with war, financial meltdown, an hilarious bus advertising campaign and of course, the departure of the demented chimpanzee who has been 'in charge of the free world' for a very long time... No? Here's another clue. A quote:
"Free societies are hopeful societies. And free societies will be allies against these hateful few who have no conscience, who kill at the whim of a hat."

You've got to watch those hats. There are many, many more. Worth a look.

As for our start, well, I have managed to shift most of my persisting ills by making an appointment to see my g.p. Is that a placebo of sorts? I'm not sure, but it's certainly effective.  All I have to do now is get over the eating disorder I have developed over the festive period. It's called gluttony, I believe. Time to get out on the tennis courts, methinks. Meanwhile P still has sore ribs from coughing, not helped by R's enthusiastic climbing on her poor mum whenever any opportunity arrises. Sometimes I'd swear she lies in wait, ninja-style, ready to leap outand connect with whatever body part of either of us happens to be injured in some way.

Meanwhile, I have been busy writing various bits and pieces for various publications, some of which are now in print. I seem to have been mostly writing about tennis, but I have also been working on a more parenting based piece for one of the national dailies, of which more nearer the time. Call it superstition if you will, but I'm keeping shtum until I know it's running.

I have also been gradually drawing back the veil of three years on Amitryptyline after my magical sleigh ride kind of put me off in a big way. I'm now down to a lower dose than I have been on for the last three years, and so far without any negative effects. No doubt I'll be wheeling up and down the street with a lampshade on my head, singing 'bring me sunshine' while trying to eat my shoes by the end of the week. But that'll probably be down to the cold weather.

It is intriguing the way that medicine is prescribed sometimes. "Try X. No good? Try more X. Still no good? Try Y. No, keep taking X and Y. If all else fails, we'll throw in a few Zs." And before you know it, you're taking the entire contents of the scrabble set, and you can't remember what you're taking for which, and you have to take one because you're taking another, and your pharmacist starts going on ever more exotic holidays, and you can't remember what your name is anyymore...

What was I talking about? Where's my lampshade? 2...3...BRING ME SUNSHINE, THROUGH THE YEARS...you know the words, missus..etc.