It’s officially become both springtime and British Summer Time since we last spoke, and though everyone but the most miserable soul will be pleased with this development – the changing of the seasons being one of the most ordinary yet miraculous recurring events imaginable – the perking up of the climate has a dash of something bittersweet to it for those of us who are disabled. Especially for those of us to whom it happened recently, and all at once.
I’ve lived in a seaside city for the past 30 years, and I love it. Though not the outdoorsy type – to put it mildly – as soon as the sun made an appearance I could be found in the sea, on the shingle or, let’s be honest, more likely at a lovely pavement cafe table feeling the sea-breeze and appreciating how lucky I was to be here on a steaming hot day rather than sweating cobs in “That London”.
I was taken in for an emergency spinal operation the week before Christmas 2024, and was relatively fortunate to be in rehabilitation throughout the cold weather: free heating, Wi-Fi and adult nappies galore! I was sprung on 1 May 2025 and I remember the extreme glee I felt coming back to my lovely Art Deco flat near Hove seafront – maybe not quite so exquisite now the toilet door had been removed (a pervert’s paradise) and with both a hospital bed and a plastic bath-chair cluttering up my previously minimalist jewel-box of an apartment.
But I was so pleased to be home, away from the clamorous ward (“Eat more prunes!” a ward-mate would repeatedly shriek while I hung helplessly hoisted over a commode), that these were easily integrated. I powered through that summer, industriously utilising the fact that at one end of my street, the Hove restaurant quarter could be found. I was optimistic and in good health – for a cripple – after all that nursing. Being home brought not just the solitude I had craved, but the chance to go out to lunch with my mister and my mates once more.
Regrettably, the year since has brought co-morbidities, pressure sores, suicide attempts and an extremely dismaying absence of the lovely strong painkillers, such as morphine, which one gets given as a matter of course in hospital. The imminence of summer also brings home to me the fact that at the other end of my handsome thoroughfare is the seafront, the site of so many able-bodied antics for me across three decades – and a place which I have gone out of my way to avoid since I came home.
Do other disabled people regard summer the way I have come to, both yearning for and fearful of it? When the weather is inclement, we tend to stay in more, and thus our cerebral selves come more to the fore. Hence, my long-time reference to rainy days as “lovely writing weather!” when my husband and I are trying to dissuade each other from embarking on a pub crawl. When the weather warms up, to a far greater extent, we become our bodies; if that body is broken, there’s a certain sorrow there.
One would have to be a saint not to feel some measure of envy towards the way that people of all sexes, shapes and sizes quite naturally strip off when the sun comes out, shaking what their mama gave them up and down the main drag – and don’t even get me started on the shameless, blameless bodies on the beach, where until my Bit Of Bad Luck I was one of the most immodest.
Ever since I’ve lived here, I’ve had an emotional attachment to the seafront that goes far beyond my usual liking for the cheap and cheerful aide memoires of my working-class girlhood. It was where I took my son – now 10 years a suicide – each weekend after his father won custody of him, distracted from the mind-bending sorrow of our savage sundering (“I don’t mind being an only child, because you’re not just a mum, you’re a sister,” he once told me) by arcade games and toffee apples. It was where I bagged my next husband’s virginity; 30 years on, we’re still together, but he is the grown-up now. It was where I saw my Emmy-winning show, Sugar Rush, being filmed, marvelling at my good fortune and believing that things would just keep getting better. How callow I was, how arrogant, how pitiable in my ignorance.
I love everything about the seafront; even the high school graduation gatherings on the Hove Lawns, which bisect the end of my avenue from the beach. If only the People’s Republic of Brighton & Hove Council were as relaxed with the spectacle – and sound – of several hundred teenage school-leavers taking their ease every June to celebrate the conclusion of exams. Instead, they’ve been known to send the cops in to arrest – and then “de-arrest” – tipsy kids. We’re forever hearing about the loneliness and anxiety epidemics sweeping this teenage cohort; then, when they get out of their bedrooms and off their computers, it’s treated as some sort of public order panic.
But most of all, I loved the water, stretching as far as the eye can see. It’s quite a leap for me to grasp that the swimming side of my life is over now. And before some well-meaning person suggests it, I don’t want to be helped, assisted and dipped at a lovely caring lido – I want to be able to stride carelessly into the briny like I used to, and failing that I’ll forsake it. I’d rather look on the bright side and remember that last time I went in, I found myself cheek-by-jowl with an unwelcome swimming companion in the shape of a seagull with no head.
The hospital never got to the bottom of what caused such huge swathes of bacteria to build up around my spinal cord and ruin it (intravenous drug use is the most common cause – the one kind of drug use I’ve never indulged in, ironically) but close encounters with a decapitated chip-stealer can’t have helped, especially when one is swallowing gob-fulls of the water it’s been stewing in.
Instead, I’m going to celebrate the seasonal sunshine by getting my arms and legs out and necking the strongest type of tanning pills known to man until I turn the colour of Donald Trump, just for the fun of it. I already get stared at often by impolite children, so hopefully I’ll give them double the freak to stare at: an orange human on wheels.
And if the truth be told, the swims were getting less frequent; what my mister and I really loved was the bar-hopping afterwards, delighting in each other’s company. And, fingers crossed, we’ve still got that.
For confidential emotional support, Samaritans is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Call for free on 116 123, email [email protected] or visit samaritans.org
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