Piece in our Times

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.