And me n da GG went to watch Brentford play against Sunderland yesterday.
Not being ( still ) that acquainted with football.. I wasn’t that aware that Sunderland was a premier league team !?
Well they are, if you didn’t know.

Anyway the lead changed hands regularly, but with goals being disallowed left, right and centre… it ended 1-1.
I always get a visitor or 3 at half time ( always a pleasure ) and yesterday Churchy and Clare came for a chat and a laugh.

Brentford march on. 2 wins and a draw so far
Good start on the road to eventual world domination.

Gawd I saw a quite amazing play last night
The Oresteia … in the Bridge Theatre.
Wow, what a great production/ performance/ tale.
Over 3 hours and with TWO intervals.. you don’t get many of those around here, do you?!
It’s a story of a very messed up family ( think my own) but with far more people ending up deaded.

Me n my ickle chum Kerry were very impressed.
I get to hear about her tangled love life and there’s always wine too.
Earlier we’d been to an exhibition in Somerset House. Cool stuff, but blimey that place sells too many tickets to too many people… so it was very crowded.
In a chair, in a crowd, this is what my view of the art looks like..

Not the best, is it?

The set of the play was very impressive though.

It’s actually a bit cold now at night.
It’s 11 miles back on the road.. too far when the roads are full of potholes and I have to keep swerving to avoid them. Swerving is the kind of thing that could get me run over.. 🤦‍♂️

Bless GG for still, every night, helping me into bed to avoid aggravating my arm injury.
Last night she’d been out and had a couple of drinks before she helped me – hence her being fast asleep on my sofa.
She’s a superstar, even when a bit pissed 😅

A belated thank you to Roy, Jezza and Sam for taking me out for a birthday celebration… top lads.

I saw Abigail’s Party last night ( not for the first time, I should say ) but for the first time with Leighton n Bev!
It’s a great play – funny/ nostalgic if you’re as old as me, and this production has a bit of pizzazz with Tamsin Outhwaite as Beverly ( the star lady ).

To wheel the 8 miles back in cool air is a welcome change. Suddenly everyone is wearing a coat ( though it’s 20 degrees ) – has everyone gone soft, or what?

I go slower these days. As my left arm still hurts, 2 months after my last crash, I’m not taking any more chances ( he says, after another 20 miles of busy road trips in a fast wheelchair )
Taking risks is all relative 😊

Would you Adam n Eve it… I made it to another milestone birthday last week.
Big party of course ( at mine because it’s just difficult in unfamiliar venues) , lots of lovely people there, lots of my Welsh relatives, including my aunties, my uncle and my cousin etc etc, but even better was the meeting of all FOUR brothers for the first time.
Yes, Paul is a recent addition.. despite being the first of us on the planet ( on the right in this picture.
I’m in the middle, in the wheelchair.. if you didn’t know – the standy uppy ibot one.

Late night and a lot of alcohol/ food/ music/ laughs.

Thanks to everyone for coming and making my 30th so special.

Thanks to all the ladies who made it possible, in particular Mira and GG.

Aware I haven’t written anything for ages!

Okayyy… so both arms still hurt, a month later for the left and 2 months for the right.. after my 2 crashes. I tell you, I am now so bloody wary of everything when I’m on the road – crashing clearly isn’t good for me.
It has meant that exercise is very painful – well let’s face it, when you only have your arms, you don’t really have loads of choices about what exercise you can do.

What else has happened?
It’s been unrelentingly hot, as we all know. Once I was a sun lover, but that had to stop cos of various skin cancer type issues.. and anyway I can’t just have a shower now like everyone else, so getting excessively hot isn’t the best option.

Been to a lot of theatre stuff – Trainspotting the Musical, Abigail’s Party, The Ballad of Johnny and June, Jesus Christ Superstar( didn’t like that one at all ), seen my Uncle Richard Dawkins speak at the Barbican( loved his dismissal of a woman shouting out about trans people – well there’s no such thing as changing your sex, is there? ) watched a load of World Cup stuff, going to see Cyrano de Bergerac tonight, and Death Note the musical tomorrow..

My ex wife got married ( congrats ) to the chap she started seeing when I was in hospital… well, she and I were truly over by then, so that didn’t bother me in the slightest. Weird I didn’t get an invitation though ( but she doesn’t do friendly – only I do that )

My spasms continue to plague me, but perhaps mercifully they are less at night than in the day, so I actually get to sleep pretty well these days ( who’d have bloody thought?! )

Big thanks to GG for being so helpful all the time, tho she’s just started writing a list every Friday, where she details everything I’ve done wrong in the previous 7 days.
Hilariously she only manages 1 or 2 things, so I’m going to have to try harder to get on her nerves more.
Clearly I’m a delight to be around.
😇

Whilst on the bus the other day, a young woman was arguing loudly on her phone, with the other person on loudspeaker.
Of course, this stuff sadly goes unchallenged nowadays, but an elderly man eventually asked her to stop. She took zero notice, and Gina then asked her to do as the old man had politely asked.

The woman shouting on the phone then told the old fella to mind his own business, and turned on Gina, saying ‘ and you can shut up, with your dusty wig !’

Gina immediately went on Google to look up what that actually meant ( you’ve got a rubbish hairstyle and you haven’t washed your hair )
Gina thought she’d be really clever and shut the girl up by saying ‘ I’m only wearing a wig because I’m terminally ill’

However the girl took no notice of that at all.

Needless to say, to me it’s been hugely entertaining to say ‘ shut up you, with your dusty wig!’ a lot, since then.

😅

Lovely to see my old chum Russ the other day.
Known him since he had hair ( and that was a long time ago )

We did laugh non stop for 3 hours, mostly at the stuff that happens to me.

He’s convinced that I should write a book, featuring my stuff.

The thing is that I’d have to write it under a pseudonym or I’d get into a lot of trouble.
And how would I be able to get away with a pseudonym when it’s about a fella in a wheelchair that’s Welsh?

I’m not gonna make myself English, am I ?
There are limits on what I’d do to disguise myself!

No crashes in 10 years
Two crashes in one month

A pissy motorist who clearly didn’t like my presence on the road, after telling me so ( and to whom I verbally defended myself ) then proceeded to overtake me at about 60mph in a 20mph zone, only then to brake hard in front of me, causing me to crash once more into the tarmac.
This time it’s my left side… just as my right side was starting to feel ok.
Once more several guys picked me up and got me back in my chair.

Christ I am now feeling very nervous about even going on the road.

Unfortunately I didn’t get his registration number.

It’s very frustrating that I can’t get up from the chair and drag people like him out of his car. Some people just deserve a few teeth knocked out.

An amazing day in Taunton at the home and workshop of Phil Eaglesham.
What an incredible wheelchair Phil and his crew have invented.
After contracting a very rare virus in Iraq ( in 2010 ?) whilst serving as a Marine, Phil was rendered ( functionally ) tetraplegic .. and yet had the spirit/ drive/ determination to dream up a unique wheeled invention.

The Omni is a terrific machine – all terrain and 4 wheel drive, with a rising seat height, as well as being fully reclining to a lying position.
Oh, and 0-8mph like a Ferrari.

Phil’s own story took a dramatic twist when ( through his own research ) he found a really old drug that ( once he’d finally been able to get hold of some- by having to leave the UK medical system and go to Europe where the rules are different ) his theory was then proved correct.
He can now take a tablet, and literally miraculously, can get out of his wheelchair and be physically normal.
Imagine that … for me that is a fairytale.

Of course there’s a downside… the drug will only be effective for a finite number of doses, after which he’s permanently back in his wheelchair.

Well it’s an extra reason to be motivated to develop the best machine possible.

Phil and I are extra connected via my buddy Dan White.
Dan phoned me a year ago to say he was skiing with a friend of mine.
I asked who, and he said Phil E.
I said ‘ is he in a sitski ? How is he doing?’
Dan said ‘ no, he’s on skis ‘
I said that it must be a different Phil as the one i knew definitely couldn’t stand up, let alone ski.. at which point I heard about the magic tablet.

If it sounds incredible to you, imagine how it sounds to me ( and anyone else in a wheelchair )

Phil, you’re a legend of a man.

Oh, and today marks 13 years since my own terrible bike crash.

A lot of stuff has happened to me in my life, but yesterday I experienced something I haven’t before.
I was going along the road that borders Hyde Park, at about 20mph, and a pigeon flew into the side of my head ( at high speed ).
Thankfully it didn’t knock off the new glasses that I have just bought to replace the ones I smashed in my recent big crash…. that would have been a bit like I was getting a message from above that I should stop going out.
As it was, I was just a bit bemused.
Does this happen often to people?
Could I be the first person in history, in a speeding wheelchair, to have been attacked by a high speed pigeon?

I met Kerry, to see a play called The Truth. The play was great, very funny, but I’d forgotten how difficult The Apollo ( Shaftesbury Avenue ) is to get into.
If you have ever played Mousetrap and constructed that rickety railway thing for the ball to travel around, then that’s a bit what the wheelchair staircase lift is like at The Apollo. Very unnerving.
It’s too small to stay attached to my Triride, and so they have to separate me from it, which I also don’t like much, as I just don’t know what will happen to it once it’s wheeled away from me. People can be a bit clumsy with it and if it gets damaged, it’s only me that suffers the consequences.
The theatre inside is also on quite a slope, and there’s hell of a camber to navigate before I even get to the wheelchair space I go in.
Because my body is fixed with metal, I can’t lean sideways at all to counterbalance against the camber, so I feel like the chair is at tipping point for far too long.
I do think my recent crash has unnerved me tbh. My heart is in my mouth regularly now, as people continue to step out in front of me, or cars ahead of me brake unexpectedly.

It’s probably a good thing that my mind is on alert even more than before, but I’d like to rid myself of the fear factor that accompanies it …
It’s odd – I can do the 30mph through the traffic stuff, but a slow moving rickety staircase lift I’m afraid of.
It’s the lack of control ( my control ) that unseats me a lot.

As it’s 13 years on Sunday, since I broke my back, I think that’s been weighing on me too.
The profound changes to every aspect of my life are nearly all very, very negative ones, no matter how I look at them.
There are one or two surprising positives, but largely I can’t write about those.

Great to have Leighton and Bev to mine the other night, and I’ve seen some great stuff recently.
I went to a theatre talk about the SAS escapades in WW2 the other night.
Wow, talk about Boys Own stories- like stealing a train to access and liberate a concentration camp in Italy in 1945, and walking 250 miles through the desert with water or food. The mental fortitude of these men was what sets them apart from people.
The latter is what I have to tap into, to make the best of my situation.