The dog and I are wintering. Well, I am, the dog is being a dick but more on that another day.

I am embracing the season and have slipped from the winter festivities into the warming embrace of hibernation. My health, always declining in the darker days like some Victorian invalid, requires this time of rest and recuperation. This year, instead of battling on, I’ve decided to embrace it. Well, as much as you can with a psycho dog.

My days are filled with a little knitting, a little reading, a proper afternoon nap and walks with the dog. (By walks you know I mean wheelies but it is easier to type walk – the phrase ‘wheelies with the dog’ conjures up an image of me on a bike, pulling a decidedly wobbly wheelie with the dog perched in a basket on the front!)

Where was I? Oh yes, walks with the dog.

The winter weather has been blisteringly beautiful, and not without adventure. A middle-aged woman sliding across black ice, wearing a rather fetching newly knitted hat is a sight to behold, so I’m told. I was more worried about the three-point turn I’d have to perform to get out of the ditch.

Wheelchair-battery-roulette took on a slightly perilous turn. (A brief explanation of wheelchair-battery-roulette. The chair needs to be charged each day but sometimes I forget, or can’t be arsed to plug it all in, too eager to get back into the warm. Mostly it is fine. Three green lights mean full charge, and three amber obviously means think about heading home now.  Three red lights mean hurry up you daft bat and get the charger.)

The chair was fully charged when I left that morning, the green lights glistening in the early morning frost. Everything down the field glittered. As if holding its breath, the world seemed still and paused in the frozen embrace of the winter winds. The snow, falling days before was now frozen and rutted, no mean feat to traverse in a wheelchair, – who knew a sports bra might be required for such dangerous pursuits, I nearly took an eye out.

So, the dog and I wandered the icy wastes of the fields, crossing the river to pass through the more manicured pastures of the posh side of town. It was then that I noticed the battery lights on the chair – two yellow lights, which, not too alarming, was less than I would have expected. Maybe bouncing along the frozen terrain had taken it out of us both. But no bother, there was plenty of charge to get home, though I might go the road way, just in case.

It’s 15 minutes to get home along the road. I’d reached the turning by the church when I noticed two red flashing lights. Confused for a moment I paused to turn the chair off and on again, maybe all that bobbing about loosened a wire. This, it turns, out was a mistake.

Turning the wheelchair back on I had only one red light. And it was flashing. By design, when the battery slips into the red everything slows down. I assume this is to eek out the last drops of charge, not simply to make me look an idiot.

Normally I whizz about the place, dodging runners, dawdlers and cyclists as I rush about.

One red flashing light is not conducive to whizzing. It’s pretty much standing still, moving imperceptibly, like a caterpillar in a cocoon, movement only visible when the camera is sped up. 

So, I crawled home, moving at the speed of a caterpillar. Cars rushed by. Old people on zimmers zoomed past. On the other side of the road a cat, taking the piss out of the dog, dawdled along beside us, ran off ahead and then returned to lap us not once but twice. The ten-minute walk to my house took 25 minutes as I inched along.

Not for the first time I wondered, ‘Who do I call?’

I mean, if my wheelchair stops in the middle of the road, who do I call for assistance? You can’t really call the Police. Or the fire brigade, What are they gonna do? And how would I bear the shame?  I could call a friend, but they’re all working or valiantly out hunting down pharmacies that stock the last packet of HRT in the Western Hemisphere.

In the end, I limped home. Progressively slower, the chair, now powered by the sheer glow of my embarrassment, died with a judder as we reached my back door.

‘It’s the cold’, someone told me, ‘messes with the electrics.’

‘You should charge it every night,’ a man explained like I was a fucking idiot.

Bollacks to that.

Even in the soothing embrace of my wintering hibernation I still need a little excitement in my life, and the daily adventure of will I manage to swallow a giant Magnesium tablet without choking is wearing a bit thin. And anyway, I wouldn’t have anything to tell you then, would I?

So, it’s service to you that I live a little dangerously. Zooming about without a sports bra, playing fast and loose with the electric.

You’re very welcome.

And now back to the knitting. I’ve changed the pattern but have forgotten by how many stitches so it may all end in disaster – cue tense exciting music, a dramatic crescendo, maybe I’ll do a wheelie as I save the day.

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