I’m currently on holiday with Fran. We’re staying at an all-inclusive resort in Spain with a large pool, clean accessible rooms, delicious food and drink available throughout the day, and it’s idyllic!

I’m here for a proper rest after months of increasingly difficult health issues. There’s a big difference between being disabled and being ill, although you can obviously be both. I’ve identified as a disabled person for many years, using the Social Model of disability which means I don’t blame my wobbly body for the barriers I encounter in the world. Instead I understand that what’s disabling is our failure as a society to consider different types of mind and body when we set things up.

Lots of the work I do aims to change the perception that ‘disabled’ means ‘broken’. But at present the reality is that my body does feel quite broken, and as well as being disabled I’m also not well. It’s taken me a while to understand this and to be able to say it out loud.

I was thinking about the key difficulties I’m facing now and what might help me address them when, inspired by our location and the many cocktails on offer here, I decided to invent two cocktails of my own. One represents the current state of my body, and the other shows the elements that will help get me through.

Introducing the Painacolada! The ingredients are Pain = Red, Nausea = Orange, Fatigue = Pink, Bladder = Blue, and Memory = Purple.

And now the Bloody Marvellous, which I imagine will be more popular. This includes Friendship = Light Green, Laughter = Yellow, Rest = Dark Green, the NHS = Light Blue, and Medication = Dark Blue.

Drinking real cocktails here with Fran certainly feels as if it’s doing me some good.