A friend recently saw a man in a wheelchair crossing the road against traffic because he couldn’t be arsed to wait like the law-abiding, able-bodied were. Although he was very dexterous and did it safely, I fully accept that this was an irresponsible and ill-advisable way to behave – and if I’d been there, not only would I have cheered him on, but probably followed him.

Because so much of being disabled is about sitting patiently, waiting for people to help you. You know that this is the sensible thing to do, now that your ability to help yourself is limited. But insofar as you can help yourself, you know that you must comply, and spend a good deal of your one and only earthly life fussing over yourself, checking “vulnerable” spots as though you were a particularly compromised pot plant.

You must STAY HYDRATED although, if like me you have a catheter, this will inevitably lead to more tinkering. Don’t become constipated, which is very likely if you are old and in a wheelchair, but once you’ve shovelled down the laxatives, don’t get upset when feast follows famine. You should avoid alcohol and caffeine and anything else which alters your mood and takes you out of yourself. Don’t become overweight, although it’s impossible for you to exercise, but don’t become underweight as then you’ll be frail and more likely to damage yourself when you fall – as you inevitably will.

You will hear the words “Bless you!” more than you ever imagined possible – but they will not annoy you as much as you expected, as pity is not half as bad as you thought it would be, and means that help is likely to follow.

Besides, the alternative to pity is often thoughtlessness. In an age when “personal space” is prized, we Wheelchair Warriors have to put up with various rude infringements on our space. Our private parts are no longer private – more strangers have seen my anus since 2024 than that of a habitué of the New York City bathhouses in the entire 1970s — but we understand that the doctors and nurses who peer at our nether regions are only attempting to prevent them from looking even more like vandalised cemeteries.

Less benignly interpreted are able-bodied people who park in disabled bays (previously confined to the merely selfish, we must now add those with “Mental Health” to the pushers-in), vans who park on the drop-kerb (just BEGGING for a “Zorro” type autograph from a discreet pair of nail scissors) and the person who told me the other day (expecting me to embrace her as an invalid-in-arms) that she always uses the disabled toilets whenever possible as her new status as an HSP (Highly Sensitive Person) makes her unable to tolerate the sound of the hand-driers in the regular ones. Mind you, I’m hardly one to point the finger here. There was barely a disabled toilet in the watering holes of Brighton and Hove I didn’t become familiar with in my cocaine-sniffing days.

So when you take all this into consideration, I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t find it refreshing to see my kind become mutinous and throw caution to the wind. I think of us as the Rebel Ripples, incorporating the Cockney rhyming slang for “cripples”.

I understand that there is a desire to sanitise we extreme Disableds, as the ineffable sorrow of our lives – basically being a giant-sized baby – quite rightly frightens the heck out of the able-bodied when they imagine it happening to them. It’s tempting to see us as less than fully human (many disabled people spoke movingly in the assisted dying debates about their fear that they would be bumped off as barely-sentient “burdens”) and perhaps it’s a normal reaction to this to sometimes elevate us to being something more than human.

From the angry lad-turned-writer of to sexy, drug-dealing Penny in (now embracing motherhood, so behaving better), there have been few but memorable disabled heroes. In the current series of , the most likeable and provocative housemate is 18-year-old Charlotte, a quadruple amputee who removed her prosthetic legs to enter the house after losing her shoe. Whether opining as widely as “I hate woke people” to “I want to be tiny like a little doll”, she stands a good chance of offending a vast proportion of viewers. Needless to say, I shall be voting for her to win.

According to a large study this summer, disabled people are three times more likely to abuse alcohol than their able brethren. Whenever I’ve fallen out of my wheelchair, I’ve been drunk. I know it’s risky – but the idea of never drowning my sorrows is too stark. I drank like a fish when I was healthy as a horse, so that’s no excuse, but it was an option then, whereas now it feels like a necessity, however counterintuitive. Because one does feel the need to rebel occasionally, from being dependent on the kindness of able-bodied strangers and loved ones alike.