Blog – Page 7 – www.lookatthestateofthat.com

Edinburgh: Women won’t wheesht!

I was in Edinburgh yesterday, for this:

The issue is one of a proposed self-ID law in Scotland allowing men to enter women’s spaces such as changing rooms, toilets, hospital wards and prisons on the basis of self-identification, that is: nothing more than saying they’re women. Under self-ID, men won’t need to have ‘sex reassignment surgery’, be in possession of a Gender Recognition Certificate, be taking cross-sex hormones or even to dress in traditionally female clothes to freely enter spaces where women and girls are undressing or are otherwise vulnerable.

This is a matter of women’s safety and dignity; the vastly, overwhelming majority of violent and sexual assaults against women and girls are committed by men and female-only spaces should be a refuge rather than an additional danger.

It’s also a matter of political necessity; if women cannot be recognised as a distinct class, how can policies affecting women be properly formulated? How can they be implemented if nobody knows where funding is most needed or best applied?

#WomenWontWheesht is a call for women’s voices to be heard in political decision-making and policy creation/enactment. It’s a call for their spaces, safety, dignity and political identity to be preserved in the face of a now relentless assault.

I haven’t written much about this issue here because this is supposed to be a blog about wheelchairs and training for half marathons in them. But it’s too important an issue not to write about it more. Besides, the issues have coincided twice now because I’ve had wheelchair news relating to two #WomenWontWheesht events: the first in Glasgow in July, which was simultaneously my first wheelchair-bound train journey and a protest in support of Marion Millar. The second was my first train and urban journey in my new wheelchair coinciding with attendance at this event.

The protest went really well. I’ll write more about it in another post and link to pictures and videos, when I’ve collected them.

The wheelchair news is also good and I’ll write about that in another post, too, because this one is already too long. Short version: almost all good news, but I really need to get a better bag.

Got it!

I got my new chair a few days earlier than expected and spent the weekend playing with it. This is more or less the model I have…

,,,with a few minor differences. The backrest and footrest are a bit different on mine and it has (folding) push handles. Oh, and the castors on mine are black, not silver. But you get the idea. I also got a set of offroad tyres and a Feeewheel attachment, which looks like this:

…and attaches to the footrest, so that I will look like this when marauding around:

I don’t know why I’ll be trying to climb a small rock, but here we apparently are.

Anyway, I haven’t been able to test the Freewheel and offroad tyres outside because it’s been raining all day, but I took a trip around the village and then a decent run of ~5 miles. It’s a huge improvement in almost every way, since my old chair is an off-the-shelf one. The new one being made to measure makes all the difference, but I think I want to drop the centre of gravity a little bit and see if that generates a little more torque.

But definitely a massive improvement in covering distance. Inside, it’s a lot more manoeuvrable. I can get into the kitchen, now, without a lot of faffing around. Of course, I can’t actually reach the hob or anything from the cupboards while I’m in there, but first things first. It’s also a lot easier to get into the car: wheels off and straight into the boot. If I ever get a car with hand controls, I reckon I’ll be able to lift it into the passenger seat over my body without much difficulty.

All positive so far, no doubt I’ll find something to annoy me over time. I’m going to Edinburgh in it tomorrow, to this:

Edinburgh is hilly, but I shouldn’t have to go up too many of them.

Good news, everyone!

I haven’t posted for a while because I’ve been busy and distracted by builders (not in a good way). I’ve been keeping up with my training, though (two hours a day full tilt on the rolling road in blocks of half an hour or an hour, plus (usually) half an hour practising acceleration timing). I’ve been meaning to post some stats to prove to the easily-led that my speed and fitness are improving, but they’re fairly uninteresting, even to me. If anyone asks, I’ll get around to posting them.

But the good – the great – news is that my new wheelchair has been built and will be delivered – all things going well – in the next few days.

My new wheelchair will look almost but not entirely unlike this

I have to admit that even I, a repressed northerner of the old school, am quite excited. Several people have recently tortured me with tales of a new lease of life with a made to measure chair and I’ve made the mistake of half believing them.

So expect in the next few days either gushing accounts of exorbitant freedom or waves of crushing disappointment. But don’t worry if you’re a fan of both. It might be both.

Some inspiration

It’s Monday morning and some even more terrible things than usual are happening in the world, but it’s always still possible to be inspired by people working hard to make life better for others.

Here on Twitter and here on Instagram, Jennie Berry (Wheelie Good Life) is writing about her daily experiences as a wheelchair user. She’s a strong advocate for accessible spaces. And she’s local!

In this post, she writes about the seat collapsing in an accessible shower in a hotel, due to inadequate screws.

The aftermath of showering in my hotel sat on the shower chair when suddenly it failed at @mamashelterlondon @accor . The whole chair came off the wall, meaning I fell; leaving me wet and naked on the floor. I look up, assuming that because I’m in a disabled room with adaptations, there will be a red cord. The cord was tied up to the ceiling. Another common occurrence that disabled people face daily.

Fortunately, Jennie was able to reach the secondary cord to call for help. I can imagine how horrific the indignity of her rescue must have been and my heart goes out to her. I’m certainly difficult enough to haul about the place even when I’m clothed and not slippery. The people who have tried possessed the best will in the world but not an understanding of my disability, so it didn’t go well. Trying too hard and acting without coordination or a clear plan is not likely to help. Add nudity, soap, urgency and mortification and nobody involved is likely to come away with a sense of a job well done. I hope Jennie wasn’t too traumatised.

I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve been vaguely aware in some part of my mind that I’ve seen red cords tied up as Jenny describes. I paid them no attention! I haven’t needed to use one, yet! I’ll untie any I see in the future.

Presumably, the cleaners tie up the cords because they’re annoying (the cords I mean, not the cleaners, I don’t know whether the cleaners are annoying). I don’t blame them (the cleaners), I blame the establishments for not having proper training and inspection procedures. And in this case, for using crappy screws. Whoever did that work wasn’t thinking about the consequences of doing a shoddy job, which staggers me.

So if you see red cords tied up, untie them! They are not supposed to be tied! And check out Jennie’s Twitter and Instagram feeds, there’s lots of good stuff. I’m sure I’ll be linking to them here, from time to time.

I’m constantly annoyed by how poorly designed a lot of accessible spaces and products are. I’m fortunate enough to have good upper body strength so poor design is mostly a minor annoyance to me. To others, it can be a major obstacle. I need to do more to bring bad design to everyone’s attention and to wake up some of the designers. Jennie has inspired me! You can tell I’m inspired, I don’t often use so many exclamation marks!

Failure to adapt

One of the ways in which I’ve failed to adapt to being in a wheelchair is that I don’t seem to experience physical fear in the same way others do. This is not to claim that I am especially brave or even necessarily stupid; just that I’ll happily endanger myself for no better reason than whim (note: this is not how I ended up in the chair). It’s not that I’m reckless, either; I carefully calculate risk. It’s just that I tend to value my own life and limbs differently to the way most people value theirs.

Today this led to the blithering and near-fatal act of moving a piece of heavy exercise equipment by myself.

It also resulted in the quasi-famous Sainsbury’s travelator incident of 2021. You see, I was thinking “what’s the worst thing that could happen? I might fall out of the chair” And everyone else was thinking “holy fucking christ, he might fall out of the chair!”

You see, same calculation of risk, but with a different value assigned to the outcome. I can’t help it and I don’t want to help it. I see a steep flight of worn, slippery steps and I think “some day…”

And yes, of course I fell out of the chair.

Race conditions

Well, not quite, and apologies for the computer science pun. Now I’ve written it down I can’t bring myself to delete it even though it’s not funny and nobody will understand it anyway.

What I’m talking about is my getting away from the rolling road for a while into the real world on a nice, flattish road in calm weather conditions without a yawning chasm for a camber. Conditions almost as one might have in a race.

But more importantly, I got to chase some people! It wasn’t a race…. and the people I was chasing were on foot…. and we were going to the pub… but bear with me.

It was the first time I’ve tried to catch anyone up over a relatively long distance. The people I was chasing were about 500m away and moving at going-to-the-pub speed (that’s fast, this was Glasgow.) Previously, I’ve just tried to go as fast as I can for as long as I can. On Tuesday, I learned something about catching people up – about pacing – that should have been obvious from the start. I learned about how much effort to put into acceleration vs maintaining momentum. I learned why people who do distance races seriously have pacemakers. It’s not just about maintaining a constant speed, it’s also about pacing acceleration. Real roads are different from the rolling one for several reasons, but one is related to the amount of torque the wheels can generate and the diminishing returns from the effort put in. It helped me understand more about how to use different pushing techniques.

I’m not sure that makes sense, but it has certainly inspired me to make some changes to my training regime. I’ll explain the changes later.

In case you’re worried, I did eventually catch the people up. But it turned out that the pub wasn’t wheelchair accessible, so it was all a bit of a waste of time. Other than the valuable lesson learned, of course.

News teasers! Plus an outing!

First, I have news, which I’ll tease now and then cover in full in a few days: my new chair is finally on the verge of being ordered! The retailer is slow but, I have to say, thorough, and we’ve made sure all the measurements and accessories and attachments are right and the from just needs to be sent to the manufacturer. Delivery is expected round about the end of August, but I’m pessimistically going to add a couple of weeks onto that. Various people have proposed it, but I know it as Hofstadter’s Law, after Doug Hofstadter:

Everything takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
Hofstadter’s law

So I’ll get it when I get it, August or September, but at least the details are finalised and the damn thing is on it’s way. Possibly.

Those details are the things I want to talk about, because they’re all important parts of buying a wheelchair and ones which nobody told me about. I didn’t even know that some of the things were things I needed to know. But I don’t have time for that because I’m up early in the morning to go on an outing!!! So more on the measurements/attachments/accessories in a day or so.

The outing is to Glasgow, where I’m meeting a bunch of nice people brought together by the case of one Marion Millar. Again, I’m afraid that I’m going to have to cut my description short until I get back. This is because there’s a great deal to write about and some of it is central to the reason I’m writing this blog. The reason I’m training for half marathons in the first place. The reason I’m going through the mystical complications of buying a new wheelchair. So I want to spend some time on getting it right. It’s a free speech issue and in particular an issue about women being silenced because of their views. I happen to agree with Marion’s views (her actual views rather than some of the false, hyperbolic versions you might come across) but if I didn’t, I’d still be supporting her right to hold them. Police Scotland disagree, as does a contingent of social media and a cavalcade of cowardly politicians and celebrities, who should be ashamed of themselves. Because of it, a woman and her family are living under the endlessly-drawn-out threat of her prosecution and possible jail sentence for the ‘crime’ of Tweeting.

But no time for that now! This will be my first longish journey by myself since I’ve been in the chair and I’m a little anxious about whether I’ve packed the right things and whether the things I’ve chosen are charged. So I’m going to go and completely change my mind about that several times for the next hour and I’ll write more on the train, tomorrow.

In which I almost kill myself, then almost kill myself again in a slightly different way

I have no updates about progress on my wheelchair order (I might have more news later today) but I’m making some changes to my exercise routine and I ought to write about that. My first attempts ranged from haphazard to potentially lethal, so I know I’m in the right ballpark.

The main issue is that since I can’t use my legs properly, and can’t gain any leverage using my legs, they are difficult to exercise. But exercise is good for them and for the rest of me. It might conceivably help bring back some function in my upper legs. Exercise has certainly increased my stamina and balance. But since I have received no physiotherapy at all due to COVID, I’m having to make it up as I go along.

The short story is that I’m trying to use my weight bench to do squats (or, rather, sissy-squats). It has a seat built in partly for that very purpose. I can’t stand up at all without taking most of my weight on my arms, so the trick is to:

try not to use my arms too much and take as much weight as I can manage on my legs,
keep my back straight and pull with my abs, and
try not to let my arms slip, fall over and kill myself

It was mostly point 3 that caused me difficulty this morning and there was a certain amount of being killed. I need to contrive a wider bar to hold onto, rather than the narrow seat back of the…. squat…thing. The annoying part is that if I could stand properly and use heavy tools in the first place, I could make the equipment I need to exercise because I can’t do those things. I can weld, I can make stuff.. And I have some designs in mind… I know people who have the right tools… We’ll see, I might rope in some friends to help me build something. I’d advise them to stand well clear when I’m tottering around using an angle grinder with one hand, though.

As an encore, I tried to lift a barbell while standing. I can not emphasise enough how bad an idea this was.

For now, I’m going to stick to my under-desk elliptical trainer, which I can manage for short periods of time by using what feels like all the wrong muscles, but which exhausts me very quickly. In the meantime, I’ll try to work out a slightly less lethal way to do squats without dangerously using power tools to build something even the A Team wouldn’t dare to go near.

I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that

Buying a wheelchair is more complicated than you might think. There are dozens of options, which I expected, but little in the way of advice about which options are the right ones. For example, do I want hard or soft castors? Why the hell would they be soft? What size should the castors be?

More importantly, what camber (tilt angle) do I want the wheels set to and how should the centre of gravity be configured? I want the chair to be comfortable and manoeuvrable for everyday use, but I also want to minimise the energy I need to push it over long distances. It seems as though these things ought to be trade-offs, but I’ve no idea how to work out what’s best for me.

Fortunately, finding stuff like this out is what this blog is about, so sooner or later, there will be answers!

Sooner, hopefully. When I ordered the chair, the company sent me a ridiculously confusing order form with tick and/or number boxes for each option. I worked through it as well as I could and asked for advice with the rest. When I have it, I’ll spill it and the chair will be ordered.

I’ve no idea how long after that it will be until I get my fetid claw on the chair itself. I’m guessing at least a month.

I chose the colour, though, which is the main thing.

I didn’t think this through

We’re having some building work done soon, converting our not-used-for-cars garage into a sort of utility room stroke gym. It’s only just occurred to me that the work will remove the radiator which is the only thing I have to haul myself up at the bottom of the stairs when I go down them.

I’m torn between fitting a rail and just moving my computers to the bottom of the stairs and staying put.