It feels as if my body’s gone on strike. Or maybe more than that, it’s as if it’s engaged in some sort of direct action against me.

Since January I’ve been swimming at my local hydrotherapy pool on most days. Also, at the start of the year I had some improvements made to my wheelchair to make it more comfortable.…

I feel really sad.
A deep churning sadness.
A very familiar and crushing mix of shame, frustration and exhaustion.

It’s a mix of feelings I can’t remember ever not being present. Experience tells me these feelings won’t last with the intensity I’m feeling them right now, but neither will they ever fully go away.…

Almost two years ago something remarkable happened: Fat Sister had a baby, my beautiful, brilliant, hilarious niece, Bean.

I’ve worked with children for about twenty years but they’ve always been five years or older and I had limited experience with younger children, particularly babies.…

Almost a decade ago I had a conversation that changed my life – I was sitting in Leftwing Idiot’s kitchen talking about my intensifying tics and he described my Tourettes as a “language-generating machine” and told me that not doing something creative with my tics would be wasteful.…

I spend very little time on my own. To live an independent, happy, safe, creative life I need other people’s support and a team of personal assistants and support workers help me at work, at home and overnight.

When my tics started to limit what I could do I was quite slow to realise I needed more help, and struggled on for ages, leading an increasingly restricted life.…

I’ve loved drawing for as long as I can remember. In fact when I was learning to write and finding it difficult I used to imagine each letter as a drawing. When I left school I studied art and went on to university to study drawing.…

My grandad kept a diary for most of his life. In some ways it was very detailed and in others, very general. He noted the wildlife that had visited his garden, the miles the car had done, and who he’d met and chatted to that day.…

My niece Bean loves animals but as a Londoner she doesn’t get loads of opportunities to see them, apart from on TV and the kitty that hangs out in her garden. She’s also much more into looking at them than touching them – but she is very into looking at them.…

It’s our last day in New York, the sun’s been shining and the sky’s been a bright, clear blue. Our hotel is really close to Central Park and we walked across it, grabbed a breakfast juice, and headed to the Guggenheim to see an exhibition by the artist Hilma af Klint.…

My two year old niece Bean looked at my feet and said:

“No, Aunty Touretteshero, not needed.”

She was right of course; I didn’t really need to be wearing flippers in the house, though as a wheelchair user I could do this without any great inconvenience.…