travel

Trying Out The Trams

This afternoon, what happened yesterday still very much on my mind, I thought I would set myself a bit of a challenge: how far could I get while using as little powerchair battery as possible? IE, could I still get out and about, without needing to actually drive my powerchair very far? Obviously that would mean sticking to public transport as much as I could, but given the alternative was staying at home on my computer all day, I was up for it.

With that in mind, I must say I just got in from a rather cool afternoon. The route I took was quite an elastic one: I caught a bus to the Royal Standard, then another from there to Elmers End in order to catch a tram. I had been intending to check out London’s tram system again for a while, and today seemed quite a good opportunity.

The tram ride was sleek and modern, if rather slow. It is essentially a tube line across south London, built on the surface due to the water-logged ground south of the Thames. If anything, I started to wonder why the line didn’t extend further east to, say, Woolwich or Greenwich, in order to link up with the tube. That would make it much more convenient if you ask me, but that’s a question for another time.

After an hour or so on the tram I found myself in Wimbledon. I haven’t been to that area of London much before, at least not for a while, so decided I’d have a brief look around. I was, however, still conscious of my need to conserve battery power, so before long I returned to the station to get the District Line. By then the system was getting crowded, but it wasn’t too bad. From Wimbledon it was a short(ish) ride up to Paddington, the Elisabeth Line from there to Woolwich, and then a bus back to Eltham: all sleek, smooth and accessible.

I don’t think I’ll ever stop being amazed by London’s public transport system. It is very much the circulation system of this thriving metropolis. It is far from perfect, but I’m happy to say it is gradually becoming more and more accessible. Today on the tram I went through places I had never visited before, even after fifteen years of living here. But the flip side of that is, while London gets all this fantastic new infrastructure – trams, crossrail, superloop – I can’t help worrying the rest of the country, especially the north, is being left further and further behind.

The Most Unpleasant Few Hours of my Life

It is incredible how much better a good night’s sleep in your own bed can sometimes allow you to feel, and how much it can help you regain your usual perspective on the world. It has been quite a rough, nasty few days to be honest: I was considering keeping all this to myself because it was such a nightmare, but as usual the blogger in me has taken over. Basically, it started six days ago, when John and I were in Paphos. After quite a few Keo beers the night before, I woke at about 4am, feeling slightly strange and disoriented. I lay awake, unable to get back to sleep, until John woke at around seven. When he did, he passed me our hotel room’s television remote control so I could watch a bit of TV before getting up and dressed. But then I noticed something: my fingers wouldn’t press the right buttons on the control, and I could suddenly sense something was very, very wrong.

It was like nothing I had ever felt before. I had had quite a few nasty absences over the previous few days, but this was of another order. My fingers were going haywire, and it seemed like reality itself had gone out of kilter. It was rapidly getting worse. I told John, who phoned an ambulance.

I cannot remember the next few hours, so forgive me if I omit the detail; I just know that they were the most unpleasant, frightening hours I have ever experienced. Reality seemed to have become chaotic, time seemed somehow to be repeating on itself. It was horrible, and something I hope never to go through again. I must say, though, that the way in which John stood by me that day, looking after me, making sure I had the medical help I needed, was truly humbling. I doubt there are words in any human tongue which can come close to expressing the gratitude I owe him, save to say that I don’t think I would be here now writing these words, had it not been for his help. I will now forever regard him as something akin to a brother – Samwise to my Frodo, Spock to my Kirk.

We spent the day in the hospital. I had many tests, including a blood test and EEG. My memories are predictably extremely hazy. I’m not sure how many epileptic seizures I had, but it was several.* All I remember is being unable to stop my arms and legs shaking. There was talk of keeping me there overnight, but I preferred to be taken back to our hotel, as it would be easier for me to eat etc there. I’d been put on a drip of some kind, and the fits were easing off. John took me back to our hotel, and I had a fairly good night’s sleep.

That was a few days ago, and fortunately since then I have seen no sign of a recurrence, although to be honest I didn’t feel quite right for three or four days. I don’t think there is any clear cause, but obviously I must do all I can to prevent it happening again. That includes improving my diet and avoiding alcohol at all costs. I went to the local hospital yesterday to get checked, but nothing was found. My deepest regret is that this nightmare ruined what was turning out to be a wonderful, fascinating trip. Again, my profound gratitude goes out to John: not only did he once again take me on an amazing holiday, but this time he helped me through the most unpleasant few hours of my life. How lucky I am to have such a friend.

*I presume they were epileptic, given my absences are essentially a mild form of epilepsy, but of course I could be wrong

The Greatest relief I Have Ever Felt

Yesterday was so crazily farcical that I barely know where to begin, but I think I’ll blog about it anyway just for the record, not to mention the enormous sense of relief I ended up experiencing. It all started the evening before, when John noticed we had somehow lost the power cable for my iPad. By the morning my charge was getting really low, so we decided to go buy a new cable. I use my iPad a lot, not least as my communication aid. The fact that it wouldn’t turn on at all put me in serious trouble. John asked the staff at the hotel where we could find one, and they suggested a shop not too far away.

We got to the shop perfectly fine.   There was a step up into it, so John went in and got the cable we needed. He then came back out to get my credit card from my bumbag.  The problem was, he couldn’t find it anywhere in my wallet.

We both began to panic, me especially: I was sure I had brought my card. I rarely use it these days, but we assumed I would need it here. We couldn’t find it anywhere in my wallet or bumbag though! I quickly began to loose my patience. Fool that I am, I must have left it back in London. We were screwed.

I was on the verge of suggesting forgetting the whole trip and going straight back to the UK, when John suggested I lean forward in my wheelchair. In a moment of jaw-dropping relief, he found my credit card down the back of my trousers. I have genuinely no idea how it got there, or how John guessed it was there. It was, though: safe and sound, and I had nothing to do worry about. The relief I felt in that moment was like nothing I had experienced before. Our trip could continue, and I hadn’t made the screw up of my life.

We spent the rest of the day enjoying more of Cyprus. We bought the charger with cash in the end, and my iPad is now fully charged. Today we are going to explore more, but I certainly plan to keep an eye on my credit card, and make sure it doesn’t disappear down my kecks again.

Meeting the JPF (or PFJ)

Today turned out to be rather more interesting than I expected. As usual these days, I almost instantly flew into a rage when I turned the news on this morning. What happened at the White House yesterday really was repugnant, enough to make me feel I had to do something.

I looked up the route to the American embassy. Quite what I would do once I got there I had no idea, but I could sort that out in due course: Part of me just felt compelled to go and somehow insist that they immediately replace Donald Trump with someone who isn’t a gut-wrenching disgrace to human civilisation. The route seemed simple enough: jubilee line to London Bridge, and then the northern line to Battersea Power Station.

That’s how, at about one this afternoon, I found myself at the American embassy on the south bank of the Thames. Unfortunately, fool that I am, I hadn’t considered the fact that the embassy would be shut for the weekend and nobody would be there. The trip was not completely in vain though, as I got to explore a part of London I hadn’t been to before, full of dazzling new buildings.

I was just beginning to think about my route home though, when I noticed a group of protesters across the road. They were campaigning about Palestine, and were holding some kind of meeting. Mostly out of curiosity, and wanting to do something interesting with my Saturday afternoon, I thought I would cross the road and say hi. What is currently happening in Israel is a thorny, complex issue of course, which is why I try to veer away from it here; but on the whole I have a lot of sympathy with the Palestinian cause.

Frankly, what followed was rather curious. The group I had come across was made of good, kind people, clearly very concerned about what they not unjustly termed an Aphartied. I doubt any intelligent, well informed person could be anything but sickened by what Is currently happening in the Middle East. It might be simply because I rewatched The Life Of Brian last night though, but I couldn’t help being reminded of the famous scene about the Judean Peoples Front: that is to say, there was a lot of talking going on, but I fear that it will ultimately achieve nothing. It obviously helped the people there feel like they were doing something, but at the end of the day, how could a small meeting of Londoner on the banks of the Thames possibly influence such a complex, horrific conflict?

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.”