About a year ago, I went to a party in Old Botley where a young man in a wheelchair spent the earlier part of the night careering about madly. A bit later, the wheelchair stood empty in the middle of the garden, at which point it became clear that his occupancy of it had been both optional and confronting.
I spent the next couple of hours in the wheelchair myself, and it was both interesting and a lot of fun, though I woke up the next morning wondering if it's ok to do that sort of thing. My favourite bit was when C ran round the garden with me at great speed and then bumped me down some steps into the living room where several people expressed shock at his reckless handling of me, even though they knew me and knew that my legs work perfectly well.
I have thought about that night many times since. Which is one of the reasons tonight was so weird - M was playing his first gig with his new band in the Old Dairy in Headington Hill Park. I rang C, who is recovering well from his car crash but still very poorly, to see if he wanted to come. He said he wasn't really up for it as he can't walk very far. I said 'well, what if we find you a wheelchair?'
And it turned out that the performance art wheelchair was still in the garage in Old Botley, and I ended up wheeling C up the hill in it, in all its flat-tyred, spider-ridden glory. It was the wheelchair equivalent of the avocado bathroom suite, and all the worse, somehow, when he was having a little walk and I was wheeling it empty. I felt like something out of a David Lynch film.
Nonetheless, it was well worth it to see him out and about, and it was amazing to see the Old Dairy, which still has its stalls and its original milk-draining floor, and which all reverberated well to screeching and screaming and violins and bass and drums. The first song was called Silence in the Slaughterhouse. It was 7pm on a warm summer's evening and I was still scared.
Later K&A bought curry from Aziz and we all sat in the garden eating and drinking and (in everyone else's case) listening to me rant about the Great War of Africa (known to wikipedia as the Second Congo War) which no-one in Europe's ever heard of BUT WHY NOT. This was a response to A's comment about the UK's domestic and US news focus - I agree we're rubbish at covering Europe, but we're rubbish at covering everywhere else as well.
This developed into a monologue about the whole 'heaven in a wild flower why leave your house to discover all the beauty the world has to offer' vs the 'how can you be a global citizen without some understanding of the reality of life in developing countries even if you have to fly long haul to get there' dilemma. And when I say monologue, I mean monologue. My companions flaked away one by one, while being careful to say to me that it was nothing personal.
So let's say that I loved Malawi (photos here), but it's also good to be home.
joella
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