Wheeling towards oblivion

As he's not getting any younger, Paul Carter ponders the choice between walking and wheels

I’ve been thinking lately, rare as that is, that now I’ve left the halcyon days of my twenties and misspent youth behind, it’s only natural that I start looking ahead and planning for my golden years. Y’know, retirement and stuff. I’m not talking about boring things like mortgages and pension plans, I mean the cool stuff that you get to have later in life, such as speedy scooters and birds you can teach to shout obscenities. That kind of thing.

I’m being slightly disingenuous with the truth if I’m honest. I’m actually getting increasingly lazy, meaning that walking is creeping higher up the list of things I have massive dislike for*.

It’s currently sitting somewhere between “ironing” and “most people”. (*for the benefit of DLA assessors this is what’s not known in the trade as poetic licence)

Because of this, I think it’s time I got myself a new wheelchair, while it’s actually still possible to obtain one, and there’s not some sort of Stasi force tipping us all out in order to melt them down to make hat badges for bankers or something.

I do have a wheelchair already, but it’s so old that it actually got condemned by the nice man who came to fix it last time. I don’t mean condemned in the sense that he expressed complete disapproval. I mean in the sense that he actually condemned it like you would a building i.e. the next time I sat in it there was every chance it might utterly collapse. Makes going out in it a bit like a crap version of Russian roulette.

Still trying to decide whether or not I should go for another wheeler, or save up for a powerchair, which I also used to have in days gone by. The electric wheelchair I used to have in my days as a student, that I used to drunkenly career around town in at the time, even had its own parking space marked out in masking tape in the entrance of the student union bar. Happy days.

It reminds me of a story from those days that still makes me smile. Some friends showed me a newspaper cutting from the local paper, which had a small story about police being called after a disabled man was driving his electric chair in the middle of the road at 3am, obstructing traffic. “By the time officers arrived, the man had vanished,” it said. I don’t think it was me.

Actually, the more I think about it the more I’m coming round to the fact that this is a bad idea. I think I’ll stick to walking. Otherwise I might not survive long enough to be at my own retirement party.