fitness

Not A Very Uplifting Experience

Something bloody stupid happened this afternoon. It’s one of those slow, cloudy Sundays, so I thought I would pop up to Stratford for a trundle around the Olympic park. Up there, to get from the station to the park you either have to go up a flight of stairs or use a lift, as I do. This leads to a large foot bridge over the railway station, which is the only way between the older and newer areas of Stratford. The two lifts are really over used, and over the years I have had quite a lot of trouble with them.

Today, however, really took the biscuit: One of the two lifts was clearly completely out of order, and I must have had to wait at least ten minutes for the second to arrive. When it did, though, it was already full of people who were obviously perfectly able to use the nearby stairs. What followed was quite a furore over who should be using the lift and who should not. Things become rather heated, and to cut a long, stupid story short it was around another five more minutes before I was eventually able to get into the lift. They seemed to think they had as much right to use the lift as I did, if not even more. I’m not sure what happened then: as I was entering the lift I might have knocked the door with my powerchair or something, because it then completely refused to go up to the floor I needed to get to. No matter how many times the button was pressed, the lift wouldn’t move.

After a few minutes two other wheelchair users got in. By then the ambulant people had got out to use the stairs, but those of us who had no choice gradually began to panic. For a while the zarking lift seemed broken. Fortunately things ended well, the lift started working again and finally went up to the bridge without the engineer having to be called out. As I trundled towards the Olympic park though, I found myself reflecting once again that such things would happen far less often if lifts in places like that were only used by people who need to use them; and that the episode would probably be good material for a blog entry.

Summer Has Definitely Begun

There is something truly magnificent about the feeling that you get when you wheel into a cricket ground for the first time in the year, and all the players preparing for their match greet you like an old friend. It feels like all the woes of the world have suddenly lifted, and summer has at last begun. That was the feeling I had this afternoon, and it was truly joyous.

To be honest I had already had quite an interesting morning: I thought I would go see the what I could of the marathon, so after breakfast I went to where it starts in Blackheath. I then decided to trundle along the route for a bit, just to see if there was anything interesting going on. I followed the runners along Shooters hill, past Charlton and Woolwich, and then back to Greenwich. That is quite a way, and quite amusingly it reached the point where people seemed to think that I was actually participating in the marathon; but at Greenwich I decided it would be unwise to go any further. Besides, I had somewhere far cooler to go.

Yesterday when out on my daily trundle, I thought I would pop in to the cricket ground to see if there was a match on. There wasn’t, but I was told that the Mighty Eights, the team I first saw playing in Charlton park when I first moved to London, would be playing a pre-season warmup match there this afternoon. That, then, is where I headed, and I instantly found myself among friends.

It was incredible. My Australian friend Tesco was there, preparing to bowl. They kept offering me beer, but I’m still abstaining. I got chatting to a couple of the new guys, including one who has a disabled son. The atmosphere was warm and friendly, and with the sun beating down and all the talk around me being about overs and innings, yorkers and maidens, it seemed like summer had definitely begun in the most glorious, reassuring, optimistic way possible.