Yesterday was ‘Bring Your Bear to Work Day’. I mentioned this to Will today and after he’d established that this was a fact and not a tic, our conversation went like this:

Will: So you took a bear to work, right?…

Today is National Poetry Day, a day that aims to celebrate poetry and engage people with it. I enjoyed studying poetry at school but I didn’t think about it a great deal after that, at least not until my vocal tics began to get more noticeable and complex.…

So today Scotland’s deciding whether to remain part of the United Kingdom or to become an independent country. I’m not about to wade into the political debate about the referendum myself, but unsurprisingly my tics are quite happy to:

“Run while you can Scotland.”…

A week ago I left the castle with my support worker and got on a bus into town. It was a warm Saturday morning so waiting at the stop was no hardship. It was a good job it wasn’t because three buses went by before one came along where the wheelchair space was free and we could get on.…

This evening Captain Hotknives and I had our first London gig. Actually, not being people to do things by halves, we had three gigs at the Southbank Centre – part of the Unlimited Festival that’s taking place there this week.

The Festival showcases new work by disabled artists, and it has a wonderful inclusive atmosphere.…

When Leftwing Idiot came back from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year there was one show he’d seen in particular that’d made a big impression on him. It was Robert Softly Gayle’s ‘If These Spasms Could Speak’, which brought together different disabled people’s experiences, along with his own.…

We got back from Shambala in the early hours of this morning, and I went straight to bed. Several hours later I woke up to a very rainy London, feeling exhausted. I’d been planning to go to Notting Hill Carnival and Eoin was coming to pick me up in the early afternoon.…

I had lunch with Bunny, Fran, Pete and a load of other people, sitting on the grass, bathed in sunshine, with the sound from the main stage of an incredible harp player drifting over hundreds of other people all having a lazy lunch too.…

The sun’s been out for most of the day and Shambala’s looking beautiful, with people in colourful costumes everywhere. I’m not doing a show today so I’m able to relax properly.

Captain Hotknives did have a show though, a solo set in the Wandering Word tent.…

I woke up in a warm tent and crawled out into the dewy day. King Russell and Fat Sister, camped opposite, were already up and about. They were making tea on a portable stove and I sat with them, surfacing slowly.…