#WordyandWheelyWednesdays: For Martop

Hello my lovely readers!

Today's #WordyandWheelyWednesdays entry is comprised (mostly) of a creative piece I wrote in the immediate aftermath of the news about Shane, before the enormity had quite hit me and I lost my words. It wasn't originally intended for this blog but, as I'm still struggling to form sentences, I thought I would add to it a little and post it - not least because we are all coming together today to celebrate his life. I hope it suffices, mate, and I love you:

When you’re little and people start to talk to you about being disabled, they mention things like physiotherapy and other physical interventions, as well as the fact that you’ll have to get used to people staring at you and asking questions they wouldn’t dream of putting to anyone without at disability. Questions like “Do you sleep in your wheelchair?”, “Could you go to university?” and, later, “Can you have sex?” What they don’t tell you about is the grief: about the day you’ll come to understand that eventually you’ll be one of only a handful of students from your special school still alive. Or about the fact that the kid you’re wheelchair-racing down the corridors with one week might go into hospital the next – and not come out. Or about how, due to the difficulty of navigating great distance with disabilities, most of your class reunions will coincide (of necessity) with yet another funeral. And they definitely don’t warn you that the rest of the world has absolutely no formula for dealing with such situations, because people can barely bear to broach the idea of one death, never mind many.

However, they also don’t tell you about the joy – the intense, incandescent joy of forming fast and firm friendships because you know that you have to make the most of every moment. That's what our class bond was like, tenacious teenagers throwing everything we had at the world, whether in the humour of pretending we were Andy from Little Britain or in the relief at finding characters living lives like us in Inside I'm Dancing; even if the actors weren't wheelchair users. 

So thanks, Martop, for being one of those fast and firm friends. Thanks for the hockey games, the slalom scorekeeping (even though we nearly always tied because our chairs went at the same speed). Thanks for being there for chats and early Youtube binges. Thanks for all the times you (rightly) called me a muppet and for knowing when you were being one yourself.

I'm wearing my footy shirt today - I hope you'll see us in our sports gear and be proud. I'm certainly proud to have known you. Still can't quite believe you're gone but I'm so very glad you were here.

I'll stop being soppy now because I know you'd find it hilarious.

Love you always

Marrott xxx