Today after 15 years I felt a small victory after getting my own back on the snow. Let me explain. I hate the snow. I hate it so much I’m going to use caps lock, bold and underline. I HATE THE SNOW. There I feel a bit better now. I think to be honest though I have good reason. In January 1996 there was a particularly bad winter in terms of snow. It was so bad that it made the recent cold snap we are going through look like a balmy summer’s day. The snow was that severe that in my hometown of Darwen in Lancashire pretty much everything came to a standstill and like most teenagers I decided to make the most of it and go sledging.

This didn’t turn out to be the greatest idea I’d ever had as after trying to make the sledging more exciting I decided to go backwards and with no control or sense of where I was going I crashed head first into a tree. The collision was pretty horrific and as a result I split my head open, broke all my ribs, shattered my back in four places and punctured both my lungs and had to wait for what felt like an eternity for an ambulance to get to me through the fluffy white stuff. Now almost a decade and a half later I’m a wheelchair user with a fiery hatred for snow. I hate the fact that every time I see a flake of snow I remember my accident as though it was yesterday, I hate the fact it makes my hands so cold, I hate the fact that it brings public transport and the roads in general to a standstill and I hate the fact that it is ridiculously difficult to push through.

Well today dear reader I began the fight back thanks to The Beast, otherwise known as my off-road chair. I bought The Beast earlier this year to use at music festivals but today it got a new use as I used it to get to work instead of my ordinary day chair which is almost impossible to use in the snow due to the tiny front casters and the slick tyres on the back wheels. The combination of the thicker tread on the back tyres, the larger front wheels and the higher foot plate makes it so much easier to use when the weather takes a turn for the worst. In fact it was so much better in the snow than my day chair that on the way home I was made the most of my new found freedom by doing doughnuts and skids on the ice. You think I would know better by now. I really would recommend it to anyone who like me still wants to get about in their chair when the white stuff descends. A word of warning though I did find that whilst The Beast might be great outside in a cramped office it is not that great. I just want to take this opportunity to apologise to the various filing cabinets, desks, door frames and photocopiers that I crashed into a work today.

If you want to know more about the chair then you can read a blog I wrote earlier this year when I first got it http://www.rockupandroll.com/post/538776267/the-beast-is-here.