Among my earliest memories is one of myself, my grandma and brother Mark in Congleton park. I wasn’t very old, still in my pram. Mark and grandma were kicking a ball around, and I was watching. Our brother Luke, still a baby, must have stayed at home with Mum. I remember being highly amused at the fact that Grandma said the running-with-the-ball motion she was doing was called ‘dribbling’. I was the boy who usually got accused of that.

I just got home from powerchair football training. Today, Matt B and I were capturing some footage for a short we’re making (having first got the right permissions, of course). It was going quite well, and turned out to be a great deal of fun – I’m definitely slowly getting better at that sport. At one point, I was practicing moving with the ball – a skill which, truth be told, is far harder than it looks. Controlling one’s powerchair in order to keep charge of a ball requires concentration, and is a tough skill to master. At one point, though, it suddenly occurred to me that what I was doing was, in effect, dribbling: I was moving with the ball, keeping it under control. My mind went instantly back to Congleton park, to watching my Grandma and brother kick the ball, and how funny we found the coincidence of the two words.

Grandma’s funeral is still in a couple of weeks. I may, truth be told, have found her irritating sometimes, and didn’t interact with her that much in her latter years; but the fact is she was one of the people who made me who I am. It is early memories, like of watching Mark and Grandma dribble the ball and finding it funny, which forge our personalities. That’s why I thought about Grandma this afternoon, over in Woolwich: it would seem that I’ve finally learned how to dribble the way grandma and mark did it. I will miss her, and henceforth think of her whenever I dribble.