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.