30 June 2020
It’s tough out there right now. As I write this, and in the U.K. alone, perhaps 50,000 family and friends, (more or less 20,000, because we’re in both a guessing game and watching political football), are mourning a loved one. Gone to a virus none of us had heard of just a few distant months ago. In that same brief, surreal period, others have lost equally loved ones to something else. Accidents, scary illnesses, and old age? Well, they trample on, regardless of what makes the headlines. And very few of us dealing with the mounting waves of shock, bewilderment and fear have been allowed to manage the grief process. No proper funerals with cucumber sandwiches and sherry. No final, […]
18 April 2020
Yikes! Well that’s been a fun two weeks or so. Not. Lockdown all started out ok. The sun was out and I was set on getting just a bit fitter. This brief video of me exercising is not speeded up. At all. No sir-eee https://youtu.be/lKE6OAxR9HI Then, just as the U.K. was approaching peak cases and hospitals were heroically, desperately bursting at the seams, I developed the main symptoms of Covid-19. A constant, exhausting and painful dry cough. A fever. In my case, a sore throat and a touch of nausea too. And anxiety through the roof. A doctor call-back confirmed I probably had it, as did a dashed paramedic visit to our son, who also had Covid-19, but with an […]
23 March 2020
It’s a bizarre time to be alive, is it not? I do wonder how everything since the ‘credit crunch’ will be written up by future historians. They’ll be looking back from their floating homes and edible sofas, wondering what the bloody hell we were up to. I dunno. But I know it won’t be the ‘era of empathy’. Despite countless moments of courage and kindness these last days. Hoarding and ‘last nights out’ all squidged together seem to be way too fashionable. Right now I sit tapping from my wheelchair, knowing I am classed as ‘vulnerable’ to Covid-19. And wondering if that means I will be looked after. Or discarded? As the Coronavirus tragedy started to emerge, I could have […]
3 December 2019
So, legions of adoring fans, I haven’t written for a while. ‘Lesions’ of adoring fans, if you know your MS stuff and like a bad pun. The complaints at my deafening silence have been flooding in. Not really. Am not sure anyone has noticed. Hey ho! I have lots of draft blogs which are nearly there, honest… Writing and thinking is therapy anyway, and probably stimulation for my foggy brain. ‘Cos that’s what it is. Foggy. Cloudy. Hazy. As if I were simultaneously a brain forecaster for Mark Webb and for UK weather. I can confidently predict more mist and storms to come. With rare but glorious clear spells. Look at me sat in a wheelchair and you guess, correctly, […]
21 July 2019
My short-term memory may be shot to pieces by Multiple Sclerosis and hardly helped by chronic fatigue. Yay, I can blame everything on MS! But my long-term one is crystal clear. I can vividly remember the first time I mentioned the word ‘disabled’ about myself, and it was a fight to get the words out: Costa Coffee, Leighton Buzzard. 2009 perhaps, two years after diagnosis. Ordered myself a Latte and a Tiffin (that’s rich chocolate and crunched biscuit naughtiness for the uninitiated). And realised as I ordered that I was having a particularly wobbly day. Only half the coffee would reach the table if I carried it. “I’m slightly disabled, do you mind bringing the coffee to my table?” I […]