‘I’ve Been Glimpsed!’

This evening, for the ninth time, people across the country stood on their doorsteps or leaned out of their windows and make noise in solidarity with people providing care during the pandemic.

This weekly ritual has become a poignant marker of time for me and many other people.…

Go STOP!

My challenging behaviours and oppositional tics, which I’ve written about before, are still very much part of my life. Confusingly, I’m usually able to manage major feelings or emotionally complex situations, but when it comes to tiny things, I often overreact.…

Video Meetings - My Top Tips

Like many people, I’ve been having lots of video meetings for work recently. I experience chronic pain and fatigue which makes it hard to take part in these calls if there aren’t clear agreed expectations.

I was thinking about this earlier, so I turned the things that help me into a list of top tips.…

Constellations of Love

At the end of last week, during a what’s app hang out with Fat Sister, Bean and King Russell, there was a lovely exchange that got me thinking – and making.

Bean asked if my support worker Claire was my mummy!…

Locked Out Of London

Today, out of the blue, there have been a series of announcements about travel in London that are seriously concerning many disabled people. Moving about this vast city as a disabled person can be tricky with a transport system that’s already far from equal.…

Shielded

On a Friday exactly two months ago, my working week was drawing to an end. It’d been a busy week, full of meetings and rehearsals for a forthcoming tour of our stage show ‘Not I’.

With hindsight there were a few things that might have hinted at the cataclysmic changes that were around the corner, but at the time I was caught up in work and hadn’t paid much attention to meetings being cancelled or re-located, and all the elbow-bumping instead of hand shaking.…

In Praise of Podcasts

Last night I wrote a post while I was in intense pain and struggling to sleep. I wrote to help me focus on what I was feeling and to find a way through. To some extent it worked, and with the additional help of some distracting feline affection from Monkey and some great podcasts, I was at last able to get to sleep.…

Paijn

 The bulk of this post was written on the brink of midnight as I struggled to sleep due to intense pain. It hurt so much that coordinating my movements and focus to type was extremely tricky. I’ve decided to leave all the mistakes in for the remainder of the post because I think they help convey a little of what I was experiencing at the time – these errors are crossed through and greyed out.…

Touch Diary Re-visited

This pandemic’s making everyone re-evaluate their relationship with touch, whether that’s contact with other people, our surroundings, or even our own bodies. Last June I wrote about the role physical touch plays in my life, and for a week I recorded every time I was touched.…

Biscuit Search

At the start of lockdown my friends Ruby, Leo and Laura made me an incredible word-search which I had loads of fun completing, so I decided to make one for them. But rather than use words I used combinations of pictures.…