Skydive

 

I work (for now), I love, I live, I have fun. Just with wheelchairs and drugs and spasms and stuff...

 
22 January 2021

Making Grand Plans When Multiple Sclerosis Has Other Ideas

Back in the Noughties, I spent a happy three years or so working for the ‘leading premium health and fitness group’, or something like that. Fluffy marketing and pr-speak for David Lloyd Leisure. Thoroughly recommend: https://www.davidlloyd.co.uk/  . It was very much a lifestyle job. If you had a morning meeting, you could bet your bottom dollar – and indeed any excess fat on your bottom – that you would run into other attendees prior to that meeting on a treadmill, or in the pool. Or dosing up on a Full English Breakfast as a reward for all the worthy calorie-crunching. If the meeting was in the afternoon, the same exercise logic applied. But replace ‘Full English’ with ‘Pint of Beer […]
18 April 2020
A man lies sprawled in the shade. He is lying across a sofa, asleep. He is wearing pyjamas, with his T-shirt riding up to reveal a less than glamorous belly. He has a dodgy Mohican haircut.

Covid-19 ain’t no flu. My Coronavirus and my Multiple Sclerosis

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 […]
16 July 2019

A Glutton for Funishment

Oh dear. There was me thinking I had come up with the word ‘Funishment’ all on my own. I was wanting to describe my Tough Mudder/Wheelchair Rugby/Skydiving adrenaline fetish. And it turns out fetish is thoroughly appropriate. Funishment is apparently defined as ‘a pleasurable way of being punished, usually in a sexual way.’ Oh.     There was nothing sexual whatsoever about being manhandled like a sack of potatoes by a dozen guys and gals over, under and through 15 devious Tough Mudder obstacles. Especially on the multiple occasions I got a wedgie, or my ‘special pants’ were on display while being dragged over the line or a high wall.     Why exactly did I love it? Why do I […]
21 June 2019

Why I do stupid things…

Hmmm… That title could take this blog so many directions!   Option 1 Yes, Multiple Sclerosis makes me visibly disabled, tired, never far from a loo etc. It also affects my thinking. Cognitive Dysfunction they call it. The same faulty nerve signals affecting my legs (for example) directly impact my brain. I can’t process the world around me as fast as others. I can’t concentrate or focus for long. I forget things, especially short-term. I struggle to multi-task. [insert appropriate bloke joke]. On a bad MS day, I would certainly pass as stoopid. Nope, not talking about that today. Option 2 It’s a bugger, but my brain is also affected in other, subtler ways. (the long-suffering Mrs W would argue […]