travel

An Unpleasant – Yet Very Lucky – Evening

I think it’s fair to say that I had a very lucky escape yesterday. To be honest I was in two minds about recording what happened yesterday afternoon here as it’s just too depressing, but I suppose a blog entry is a blog entry. I was out and about once again, this time on quite a long trundle through Bexleyheath heading up towards the river. Spring is coming, so I’m becoming eager to go out and explore a bit more.

The thing is, I have gone on quite a few long trundles recently , and it has probably had an impact on my powerchair battery. I was heading for Abbey Wood in order to get the Elizabeth line back to Woolwich and then a bus home, when I noticed my battery dropping quite rapidly. Of course I knew I needed to get back as swiftly as possible, but to be honest I felt a tingle of panic.

It took me ages to find the Elizabeth Line station, but luckily I managed to get onto a train. I traveled the single stop to Woolwich and got off the train. I was heading along the platform towards the lift, when suddenly my powerchair cut out completely: it turned off and wouldn’t turn on again.

I was obviously in deep shit. Luckily there was a member of TfL staff nearby so I got her attention and explained the problem. The staff took my chair out of drive and pushed me up to the station entrance hall. The staff were very, very kind, doing what they could to help. First they tried calling a taxi to take me home, but rather ridiculously my powerchair wouldn’t fit.

What followed was a very long, stressful evening spent in the Woolwich Elizabeth Line station. The staff did what they could to help me, giving me drinks of water and offering to get me things to eat. As hungry as I was by then however, I didn’t want to risk getting myself too messy, and as there wasn’t a table nearby to put any food on I thought I better not try to eat anything. I tried contacting people like Dom on my iPad without luck. Eventually they dialled 111 for an ambulance to take me back to Eltham.

By the time it came I had spent about two hours at the station, unable to go anywhere. To be honest watching the evening commuters go in and out was fairly interesting, and I think it’s fair to say that London’s newest tube line is being well used. Even so, it was a highly stressful, unpleasant couple of hours waiting for the ambulance.

Thank fuck it eventually arrived. By then it was half past eight and I had spent about three hours at the station. I felt tired and irritable. Luckily the trip home was swift, but when I got back here the zarking chair refused to charge. Who knows what is up with it, but I have emailed my usual wheelchair maintenance guy.

In short yesterday was a horrible day; the kind of day I would rather just forget. At the same time I was incredibly lucky: if my chair had conked out anywhere else things would have been a thousand times worse. At the station there were people around who could help. If I had been, say, in a park or going along the path by the river, I would have been in serious, serious trouble. In all, then, I had a bloody lucky escape, and so it is worth recording. Even so, some days rule and some days suck: yesterday was emphatically the latter.

Bitches In Brookmill Park

London’s parks can be very beautiful, and I love trundling through them in my powerchair. The problem is, I’m constantly having to watch out for dog shit on the paths; I always have to swerve to avoid running over poo. I know there are rules against it, and that dog owners are supposed to clean up after their pets, but some seem to think the rules don’t apply to them. Yesterday, for instance, I was going through a lovely little park the other side of Lewisham, called Brookmill Park. It’s a linear kind of park with a small river running along one side of it, quite wooded with well-maintained paths. When I first entered the park, I saw there were signs saying dogs were prohibited there.

That, of course, struck me as a good thing because I wouldn’t need to dodge dog shit. I was trundling contentedly along, though, when I noticed two old ladies with three dogs walking along the path, blatantly ignoring the rules. That got my ire up, so I decided to confront them: rather than typing anything into my I pad, I just shouted to attract their attention and pointed to a nearby sign.

That was when things started to go downhill. With alarming arrogance, the old bitches said they didn’t care and told me to shut up. It was as though they felt that they owned the park. Naturally that enraged me in the way I’ve described here before, and I shouted back insisting that the women and their dogs leave the park immediately. They shouted back, refusing to do so.

Things then got very, very heated; in fact it almost became violent. I feel I was in the right, but the way the women responded to me with such petulant arrogance was totally unacceptable. At one point, one of them tried to pull my Ipad off my lap. Needless to say, I got very, very wound up, and I still feel angry about it this morning. In the end the women walked away, going over a nearby footbridge with steps so I couldn’t follow them. But I refuse to let this drop – I refuse to be treated like that by two arrogant old bitches who think their rights trump anyone else’s. Unfortunately I have nothing to identify the two women, so probably won’t be able to take this further; but encountering such sneering selfishness has really upset me.

London Public Transport Still Has a Way To Go

At the risk of repeating myself, I’m a big fan of London public transport: I love the ability to get on and off busses and tube trains with very little fuss, and go wherever I want across this vast metropolis. That does not, however, mean that I don’t think there isn’t huge room for improvement. This morning, for example, it took me well over two hours to get from my flat in Eltham to the old family house in Harlesden. It’s a distance of probably around fifteen miles, as the crow flies. It’s also a simple enough journey: a bus to North Greenwich, then the jubilee line to Wembley, then another bus here. Yet for some reason it takes more time for me to get access the city then it used to take dad to drive most of the way up to Cheshire.

To be fair, mum said I made good time this morning, and my journey could have taken far longer. That’s true enough, but even so I found it painstakingly slow. The problem is, I can only go via accessible tube stations, meaning I have to go all the way up to Wembley and then get a bus back to an area the tube train actually passed through. Being able to get off at Kilburn would probably cut about half an hour off my total journey time, but Kilburn isn’t an accessible station. Thus for all its wonderful new lines, and for all the improvements it has made over the last twenty to thirty years, London public transport still has quite a way to go.

Now, though, I’m off to enjoy mum’s cooking and play board games.

TfL Lifts Should Only Be For Wheelchair Users

After what happened today I’m seriously considering starting a campaign to make all the lifts on the London transport network strictly for wheelchair users only, or at least confined to people who strictly need them. It had started out as a pretty normal day: after seeing it flagged up on the breakfast news, I thought I would go up to Central London to check out the Qatari state visit. I took the Jubilee Line up there, getting off at green park. Predictably, however, I got there too late for all the festivities, so there was nothing left for me to do but head back.

Just to make things a little more interesting, I thought I would trundle to Westminster, take the Jubilee Line to Bond Street and from there get the Elizabeth Line to Woolwich. For some reason it impresses me that you can now transfer between the Jubilee and Elizabeth Lines at Bond Street without leaving the station.

It was there, though, that the problems started. As any Londoner probably knows, Bond Street is quite a complex station, with its labyrinth of tunnels, escalators and lifts. To be honest I find it rather fascinating how the engineers managed to merge the old and new parts of the station. This afternoon, however, when I attempted to use one of the older lifts, I found it was going very slowly indeed. Just as I was starting to think that I should have just gone straight home, it finally arrived, and I wheeled into it along with five or six perfectly able bodied people. Everything seemed to be fine, until we got to the required floor, and the lifts doors wouldn’t open. No matter how many times the button was pushed, the doors refused to open.

People gradually began to panic. After a few minutes one guy pressed the emergency button and spoke to the operator. She assured us that a maintenance guy was on his way, but nonetheless I was there stuck in a lift, getting more and more furious with the lazy p’tahks who surrounded me. If such lifts were only used by those of us who need them, they would probably all work perfectly well.

Obviously things were eventually resolved, and after about quarter of an hour the lift began working again. Truth be told things were never in much doubt; but the fact remains that the lifts on the TfL network are getting older and older, and the more they are used by people who are perfectly able to use stairs or escalators, the more likely they are to break down. Obviously there will need to be some exceptions, such as mums pushing prams, but if you ask me all lifts should be strictly reserved for those of us with no alternative. As with my grievance concerning prams occupying the wheelchair space on busses, it just seems so arrogant and self-centred. It is now clearly becoming so problematic that I feel I have to do something about it.

Discovering The London Overground

I found something pretty cool out today. Believe it or not, I had never used the London overground before: I had always assumed it was too complicated, inaccessible and generally not as as advanced as the tube. Mind you, I had been intending to try it out for a while, just to establish whether it could be of any use to me after all. Today, though, I was out on my trundle again: I was up near Farringdon and it was about time to head home, so I thought I’d just hop on to the Elizabeth Line to Woolwich.

The problem was, at the station I was told that the Elizabeth Line wasn’t running today. When I heard that I automatically started to panic slightly – how the smeg was I going to get home? However the man then told me that I could take the overground instead, a suggestion which I found pretty interesting.

That, then, is what I did: it was a smooth, uneventful ride back to Woolwich, if somewhat slower than the Elizabeth Line. Mind you, I enjoyed some great views across South London on the way. More importantly though, I now know that the London overground is accessible, usable, and I’ll certainly try to use it more from now on. All I would need to do is make sure there is someone waiting for me with a ramp at wherever I’m going. Given that there’s an overground station not far away from me in Kidbrooke, this is potentially a very useful discovery for me indeed.

A Change Of Order

The staff at Costa coffee shop at North Greenwich eyed one particular customer with increasing curiosity. For the last few months he had been visiting their shop every Wednesday morning. That in itself was odd, as, due to the location of their cafe, they had few regular customers. But what made this man especially noteworthy was the fact that he clearly had a physical disability. Every Wednesday, at around ten, he would barge through the door of the shop in his large electric wheelchair, select the same cheese and ham toastie from the food shelf, before rolling forward to the counter and typing into the ipad he used to communicate that he would also like a large cappuccino. He would then place his Ipad and baseball cap on the nearest available table before going and ‘parking’ his wheelchair by the back wall of the shop.

This happened as regularly as clockwork: the Costa staff had grown used to it, and now knew that the fellow drank his coffee using a special plastic straw and that he kept his money in his bumbag. Where customers with such disabilities had once been rare, in twenty-first century London they were becoming more and more commonplace. Getting out of his wheelchair, he then always walked in his own unsteady, almost frightening way back to the table he had put his things on to wait for his coffee and sandwich.

Only, something had recently changed. When he first started coming into their shop, the man had seemed a pretty jovial sort of fellow, smiling, laughing, and even typing jokes into his Ipad. For the last two or three Wednesdays, though, he had appeared quieter, slower, and much more depressed. It was as if some enormous problem was suddenly bearing down on him, or that the entire world had grown much darker for him. Of course, the cafe staff knew that it wasn’t their business to pry, but they could tell something was wrong.

This morning, however, things seemed to have changed once again. At just after ten they heard the door of their shop swing open. The cafe staff all looked up to see their regular customer surge through the door, his smile returned to his face. It was as if his usual confidence had been restored. As he passed the shelf, he picked out the same toastie he ate every Wednesday; only this morning something odd happened. Rolling up to the counter, instead of starting to type his usual request for a cappuccino, his palsied fingers went in an entirely different pattern.

“Tea,” he typed. “Earl Grey. Hot.”