May 2009 Archives

Yes, what a busy bee I have been this week, as not only did I have the travel piece on Saturday, but I also have my column today.

And that's NOT all, folks. Yes, I have a bonus feature today, with the publication of my recent interview with Frank Gardner, the BBC Security correspondent.

I would like to offer some clarification to any poor souls who may have stumbled upon my blog as a consequence of reading one or more of these articles. For such a person, this might seem like the most vulgar and confusing circular exercise in self-promotion, and they may be right. But I would like to offer in my defence the fact that a significant proportion of my extended family live overseas, scattered to the four winds, and so I like to use this blog as an opportunity to keep them up to speed with what I've been up to.

In this respect, it could be seen as no more than the equivalent of a web-cam in a radio studio (it's radio. who needs pictures?) or worse perhaps,trained on someone who irons in the nuddy for money. I have heard tell of such things. I am not totally naive. I am anxious, though, as such an undertaking sounds extremely risky. It could lead to a very embarrassing hospital visit.

Firstly, a pointer to my Travel article from Saturday's Times.

Then on to matters of the racket. Or racquet. Or whatever. You know, the bat with strings in.

Anyways. I am doing the equivalent of mumbling on the keyboard for I am plum tuckered out, and all I have to show for my endeavors is one measly 'runners up' trophy from the doubles. I lost in the semi-final of the singles, and the final of the doubles. Both B division, a step up from last year's novice category.

I did manage a fairly spectacular cough and splutter  midway through the first set, but we (Sarah and myself, who won the novice doubles last year, but haven't seen each other since, on account of her being in Scotland and me in London) rallied spectacularly, coming from 5-1 down to lose the second set 7-6 on a tie break.

All of which goes to show, dear reader, that I am now a tennis bore. Hooked on the horror of competition. I have never enjoyed horror movies much, nor roller-coasters, but I imagine there is a similar mental process involved, as I find the time on court in competition, terrifying and generally emotionally unpleasant, but once I come off, I can't wait to get out there again.


Enough of this drivel. I'm away to my bed.

Today's Times column. And I would like to clarify something. While wheelchair trolleys don't have baby seats in them, that is not the only reason why I have never used one.

I don't like wheelchair trolleys, as they are often ill-fitting, and they make the trip through the supermarket feel a bit like driving a milk-float through a...well, a supermarket.

Other news:

I have a cold. Yep, middle of May, and I have a cold. Thanks to our beloved daughter for bringing it home to share with the family. Unfortunately, timing IS everything, and so I am trying to shake it off in time for my attendance at the National Wheelchair Tennis Championships at the weekend.

Yes, it's that time of year again. After some emotional turmoil, I have decided that I can not, in all conscience, defend my Novice Title. It would certainly be a linguistic contradiction if nothing else, and so once again, I step up to the B division, as I did when I so famously CHOKED in Cardiff.

Well not this time. I shall cough and splutter because of my cold, but that only adds to the chair adjustments and new rackets that I have gathered together to ensure that I have a basket full of excuses to draw on when the going gets tough.

Found this while trawling the intermeweb when I should have been doing something more constructive with my time. It's worth a nose around the site, though. Lots of intriguing eye-wobbling things to stare at, while dribbling on the keyboard.

Then there's the interesting contrast between the I.Q. sucking effect of staring at the illusions, and the very elaborate technical explanations...
Here's another. A bit creepy, somehow.

So, on from my flat tyre adventures, and I find myself at the tyre repair shop. You know, the one that you can't get better than...?

The man at the counter takes all the details, and replaces the tyre which is covered by the Motability scheme of which I am an enthusiastic member. Incidentally, it's the wall of the driver's side rear tyre which went. I'm sure it's due to all the 'kerbing' involved ingetting the car in as close as possible to the pavement to make the dismount easier.

The tyre is replaced, but then I ask the man (who clearly works mostly behind the desk) if he would be so good as to put the wheel back on the cage uner the car.
"You'll have to wait, as all the bays are occupied."
"No, sorry, I meant could you just put the wheel back on the rame under the car?"
"I can't The bays are all busy, and I need the jack, otherwise I'd have to crawl around on the ground."

At what point did garage mechanics object to being in contact with the forecourt? He managed to put on gloves and replace the tyre, could he not don overalls if necessary, and pop the wheel back in the cage? It would take two minutes, surely.

"You know what? Just put it in the boot, and I'll do it myself."
So he does. And I do. OK, so I have to get out of my wheelchair and onto the ground to do it, but I don't care. And anyway, F**k him if he can't be bothered.

It's funny how such a relatively small thing can spoil what would otherwise have been a perfect customer experience.

Last night, while driving back from tennis at about eleven p.m., I had my first flat tyre since I have been a wheelchair user. I pulled into a service station, wondering if I should phone the RAC, but decided that I should see what I can do myself, as I didn't fancy sitting in the car for two hours waiting to be rescued.

The first challenge was finding the wheelbrace (under the bonnet).Then I had to find the manual, which revealed that the jack is actually housed in the spare wheel under the car. As I wrestled with the huge heap of assorted wheelchair wheels in the boot of the car to get to the release for the spare wheel, I became aware that I was being watched carefully by the attendant in the night-counter.

He probably had one shaky finger poised nervously over the panic button, convinced that I was part of some elabourate ruse to drae him out of the office. After all, no wheelchair user in his right mind would attempt to change a wheel on a car, would they?

While I understood his reluctance to get involved, I was a little disappointed when someone came in, filled their car, paid, and left without paying me the slightest heed.

That said, I was glad of the opportunity to see just how much I could do, and discovered that I could actually change the wheel all by myself.

The next person to come into the station did get out of his van and offered to help. And he did it really nicely, too. He said he was running early for work and that he'd be happy to finish off the job if I wanted. I let him nip the wheelnuts up, and we had  a 'car talk' in the way men do, chatting about emergency sparewheels and the location of jacks.

Although the whole thing was a hassle and I ended up getting home after midnight, I am still basking in the satisfaction of knowing that I can still change a spare wheel. OK, so the average light-bulb is still just a dream, but you've got to start somewhere...

(By the way, I know the picture is clearly not King's Cross at 11pm, but I thought it was a bit more picturesque)

The latest Times column.

Ah, coffee. I start the day with coffee (without it, I crash into things, stare blankly into space, put my shoes on the wrong feet, etc.).

But then during the day, I also like to go out for coffee.I mean good coffee. Proper, strong, frothy milk coffee. Not weak, watery drowned in frothy milk coffee as we have been swamped with in this country. How is it that we, who live 800 miles from Italy (surely the undisputed home of good coffee), and yet we have embraced the tall/grande/gigante/biggabucketa  coffee culture born in Seattle, some 4800 miles away. Do we like paying four pounds for a pint of foaming semi-skimmed with a hint of beige?

I am lucky, we in the Stoke Newington area have a few good places for coffee. I am also lucky that coffee can help to focus my mind of the task in hand, and I feely admit to using coffee as a performance enhncing drug when it comes to wriring.

However. There is a downside to my coffee habit. I am now certain that after the coffee wears off, my levels of neruopathic pain increase. Particularly the one that feels like someone is trying to cut my legs off with a blunt saw and a knitting needle, before giving up and just setting fore to them..

Last night, I had to take the big Z option in order to get to sleep. This works, but when I take the larger dose, I fell a bit 'underwater' the following day. It's not a totally unpleasant feeling, but it's not that conducive to writing. And co, there's the temptation to have a cup of coffee. I mean good coffee. Proper, strong, frothy milk coffee, etc.

While doing a bit of a spring clean, we found an old Embassy ashtray. No small item this, but one which would take pride of place on even the biggest pub table (from which is was lifted) back in the day, and it made me think about how the smoking ban has contributed to a changing in social attitudes.

Even with my sympathy for the plight of smokers ( I smoked myself until seven years ago), it's hard not to see the benefits in the ban. Not coming home reeking of fags after a night out is one, or though as parents of a young child, we don't have nights out anyway. Then there are the health implications, again something felt keenly as a parent, but also as someone with spinal cord injury.

The affects of smoking when one has an SCI can be catastrophic- smoking is bad for your circulation, thus putting you at an increased rick of developing pressure sores and problems with feet as well as reducing your ability to heal after any dings or scratches on the paralysed section of your body.  Smoking is also disastrous for the respiratory system, a particular negative for those with higher level injuries who are not able to control the muscles of their diaphragm fully and so have an increased risk of developing pneumonia.

But yet I have met countless people with SCI who describe smoking as one of the few pleasures still left to them, particularly if they are recent injuries.

My hope is that they would discover in time that more pleasures are available, and perhaps think about maximising their possibility of enjoying them by knocking the cigarettes on the head.

But then I still feel a little spark of nostalgia towards a previous time. A time when ashtrays were so big that six people could simultaneously use the same one for a whole night, each with their own individual cigarette resting place, and still struggle to fill it.  A more decadent time? A time of plenty? A time of innocence? Or just a morning of hacking coughs over breakfast and a laundry basket that sets off the smoke alarm.

Still, the kids love it, eh?

Not a great morning. Sitting on the bed getting dressed when I get yet another jolt of pain in my legs, and I find myself talking to it. Much of my outburst is made up of expletives, but the bits in between are something like, "Come on, get on with it. " For the pain comes in a wave, beginning with a hot itch and building up to a burning stab before subsiding.

I wonder when I started talking to my pain? I think it has been going on for some time, and obviously the worst attacks come in the form of my nemesis Spike. The fact that Spike has a name suggests some kind of dialogue, but he's the off the scale, knock myself out, serious badass pain. How long has the everyday, annoying, distracting pain been part of the conversation.

Next question, is the demolition of my beloved Arsenal by the evil Manchester United last night contributing to this mornings pain levels? And could I sue?

Sadly, while my Corinthian romantic side says "no," it may be time for Arsenal to look again at the wages policy that prevents them from negotiating United/Chelsea-sized salaries for new players. It saddens me that those two teams in particular have cherry-picked just about every player that makes a name for themselves at a premiership club- Ferdinand, Carrick, Rooney, Teves, Berbatov, Van der Sar, Joe Cole, Lampard, etc.

I'm sure that money was a big factor in the choices made. And Arsenal are not perfect, with the signing of young talent nurtured by other clubs. I could go on with this stuff for pages, but I'll start to sound like one of those people who phone into the endless hours of talk-radio. And, if I'm honest, it's all rather boring.

Still, it does show that pain can take many forms... and I bet the players of Corinthian F.C. would have played through them all with gritted teeth and a sporting smile (not easy).



 

The latest installment of my Times column.

On from the challenges associated with keeping up with a child on wheels, I find myself wondering if I should try my tennis chair for this purpose. I can certainly push much faster in it than I can in my everyday wheelchair. This is partly due to the 26 inch wheels instead of the everyday 24".

The only problem is that any kind of change in pavement level would leave me stranded, as the tennis wheelchair is designed for use on tennis courts, which aren't supposed to contain steps or drop-kerbs.

The other option I briefly toyed with was to put her on wheels but with some kind of harness and lead so that she would stay a fixed distance away but no further.  Two obvious problems spring immediately to mind.
Firstly, that she might end up dragging me around and develop a power lifter's build at the age of four.
Secondly, people might misunderstand the set-up and assume that I am exploiting my child as a mobility device akin to a team of huskies.

 There would also be inevitable compromises in her ability to balance, so Instead I have decided to try and refine and improve my 'this time I really mean it' voice in the hope that she might actually pay attention to me, instead of assuming that everything is a game.

Just in case you were wondering what happened to my tennis exploits, dear reader, I can now reveal that one long held ambition has been achieved. On Sunday, I went for a hit with a friend in the local park. It was the first time that he has seen anyone attempt wheelchair tennis, and I knew that he was a little puzzled about how it could possibly work, as well as the two bounce rule (see previous entry).

I arrived to find him playing with two other people, and I quickly joined in for a spot of doubles. Although I should certainly have warmed up first, I held my own, and it worked surprisingly well, considering I hadn't played doubles with an able-bodied partner before.

The tricky bit is net coverage, as people tend to expect their partner to go in to the net, especially on serves. If I go into the net, the chance that I will be lobbed is extremely high, whereas if I'm at the back of court, then the two bounce rule means that I can get to most stuff. Not necessarily hit the damn thing when I get there, but at least I'm near.

Anyway, the best thing was just taking to a busy court in the park on a Sunday lunchtime, and give a reasonable account of myself.

That said, my game is falling apart, especially as I have adjusted my tennis chair to sit two inches higher. I must stress that this was on the instruction of my coach, and nothing to do with an inferiority complex that I have developed. Yes, I am still six foot two, but now that I am folded, I feel a teensy bit small, especially when the tennis ball flies over my head.


Still, the best thing about tennis in a wheelchair is that suddenly I have an abundance of new excuses for why I can't hit the sodding ball. Not only the racket or shoes, but there's the waist strap, the footplate position, the height, the position of the axle, the tyres, etc.

It could be that I'm just a bit crap, but let's not jump to conclusions...