Chateu D'If

Have you ever seen or read the Count Of Monte Cristo? The film version I have seen is gloriously tacky but no less brilliant for all of that. It stars Guy ‘Mike From Neighbours’ Pearce and Jim Caviezel and also features the late, great Richard Harris as well as Henry Cavill. The latter can currently be found fronting Hollywood’s bid to saturate the movie market with pointless, brainless superhero movies in his role as the latest incarnation of Superman. He’s devilishly handsome and as such is a hate-inspiring smug shitbag of the worst order.

But it’s a great film as I say. It tells the classic story of Edmond Dantes, stitched up royally by his best friend Fernand Mondego to the point where he ends up imprisoned at the remote, depressing Hell-hole that is Chateau D’If off the coast of Marseille. There he meets Harris’ all-knowing priest, learns all manner of skills from him from swordsmanship to the less obviously useful skill of being able to stick his hand under dripping water and pulling it back before it gets wet. Using all of his new found abilities he escapes, swims to the beach, meets a group of pirates from whom he acquires a small fortune, becomes rich and powerful and exacts a terrible revenge on Mondego and the authorities with whom he was in camp cahoots. Oh, and he gets his girl back from Mondego too, after the sleazy schyster had stolen her away following Edmond’s conviction. What? She had no choice, right? If your fella gets wrongly imprisoned for 13 years what else are you going to do but shack up with his best friend? Other men out there you say? Plenty more fish especially when you look like Dagmara Dominiczyk portraying the lovely but a bit dim Mercedes? Desist with your common sense, you’re ruining Dumas’ classic revenge thriller.

This glowing synopsis of The Count Of Monte Cristo is in here for a reason. Chateau D’If is a very real place and one you can visit by boat from Marseille. It’s no longer used as a heinous prison in which the one solitary officer comes to your room and beats the shit out of you every night whether you need it or not, but instead is open to the public to view, enjoy its history and surprisingly its not inconsiderable beauty. Unfortunately it is not accessible to wheelchair users such as myself but I’m kind of ok with that. You can’t really tamper with hundreds of years of history by putting in one of those shite single person lifts that they have at Tesco on Tithebarn Street or at Thatto Heath Rugby Club. I almost got stuck in the one at Tesco yesterday. I’d popped over to buy my lunch and the gate wouldn’t shut behind me. As usual an attractive lady came to my aid, the mortification elongated by the fact that it took her a good 10 or 15 goes to shut the fecking thing. Then it just started moving down of its own accord. At that point I had no choice but to descend, buy my lunch and then worry about how I was going to get back up and out of the building later. Sure enough it got stuck again on the way out, at which point one member of staff and one man who looked as if he had just wandered in from a night’s sleep on the street were the unfortunates charged (not by me) with the task of getting the thing to work. Finally it got going, but it might be a while before I buy my lunch there again. I told the member of staff that it might be a good idea to put a note on the gate telling people that it is out of order to avoid the risk of anyone getting stuck in the store like something out of a Simon Pegg/Nick Frost movie. She just looked at me as if I was disabled, which I suppose I am.

Back to France, and despite the lack of access within Chateu D’If you can still take your biffy arse on to a boat to get close enough to see its awesomeness and get some pretty handy snaps with which to bore all 300 of your Facebook friends. Which is exactly what we do. We sit right at the back of the boat and I climb out of my chair, half expecting to be collared by one of the teams of armed soldiers for behaving in a way not befitting someone using a wheelchair, but thankfully nobody seems to care much where I sit. The whole thing takes around 45 minutes which, although they advertise it as a one hour ride, is probably long enough. The weather is beautiful and so are the views of the coast and out to sea, but not so much that you want to stay for the three hours or so we did in Tenerife when three quarters of the people on board were throwing up at regular intervals when they should have been whale watching. Or looking for dolphins as it is better known.

So anyway, Chateau D’If. It was built in the 16th century as a fortress by King Francis 1, who saw the island of If as a strategically important location for defending the coastline. It later became the prison where Dumas based his famous revenge yarn until the end of the 19th century when it was opened to the public. As we sail past we can see scores of people milling around at the very top of the castle, with many more starting the ascent of the steps to have a snoop around. Apparently you can see the dungeons where Dantes is supposed to have been detained but I’ll never know what they look like. The boat stops here for a brief period and those who can visit the castle and have paid more than our €10 to do so get off. We stay on board and are joined by those who have already visited the castle and want to make their way back. Here’s one of the shots I managed to take of Chateau D’If for you to peruse while you try to bring to mind the image of Guy Pearce playing a dastardly French aristocrat trying to dump on his best mate’s parade. I'll add more later. Maybe;

France - Valerie Adams And L'Open Tour Marseille

Plodding along whether you are here or not then, let me explain a bit more about Marseille. The Raddison is immediately opposite the impressive marina. On our side of the road are a row of bars and restaurants while on the other you will find an equally endless supply of boats, the bluest water on Planet Blue, and a London Eye style wheel which looks a little something like this;

I wouldn't go on it. Unlike in London, the pods are not enclosed. I wouldn't say I have a problem with heights but I don't like being up there without the comforting presence of windows and a roof. It didn't look all that accessible anyway on further inspection, but I wasn't ever going to give it a try. What if it stopped at the top? That's fine if you have windows but otherwise I'd cover the marina on vomit. I'd probably lose my shoes up there too. My shoes always fall off regardless of what size I buy. It's just a fact of life that I have come to accept.

One of the first bars you hit as you walk along the street opposite the marina is a place called The Queen Victoria. It's clearly trying to style itself as an English style pub but it's name is just about the most English thing about it. That's not necessarily a bad thing. One of the most head scrambling things you see on holiday in Europe is people gathered in English-style bars watching bloody Eastenders or Emmerdale. Holidaying in Spain or France doesn't represent a massive cultural shift but bloody hell show some willing and give the soaps a miss, would you? If I can give up my half hour of Only Connect with Victoria Coren-Mitchell you can knock the soaps on the head for a week or two.

The prices at the Queen Vic (get outta mah pab!) are certainly not English. Everything is expensive in the South of France, not least here where 250ml of lager (less than half a pint) will set you back €4. That's around £3.35 which is, well, let's not dress it up, pretty horrifying. They do a special house brew which they call 'beer of the month' (or whatever that is in French) which they serve only in 500ml measures (still less than a pint) and for which they charge €5 (£4.20). A pint of anything that you would recognise as lager costs €7.80 (£6.55). This all makes my bleating about paying £5.30 in a London pub in June look a little petty to be honest. Food is equally expensive. On the first night we eat at a restaurant just down the road from the Queen Victoria. I choose duck, mostly in the absence of chicken, and it costs €23 (£19). Emma says it looks like a liver, but fortunately she tells me this some time after I have finished eating it. Had she said so at the time I might not have eaten too much of it because I absolutely detest liver. Which is apt because my liver fucking hates me too.

Still, the Queen Victoria is not without its plus points. It has a disabled toilet, which for access fascists is an absolute must. It also has free Wi-Fi, meaning you can post numerous holiday meanderings and pictures of yourself and whatever concoction you are consuming at any given moment at the touch of a couple of buttons. Even I know how to do it, which when you consider the trouble I had inserting that picture of the wheel into this article tells you something about how easy it is. I know you come on holiday to get away from the daily drudgery and the berserk microscope that is social media, but human nature has decreed that you'll still want to be nosey about what people at home are doing, and you might also want to keep them updated now and again about your movements given the uneasy feelings around security in France that are currently very prominent. All of which is, admittedly, the moral equivalent of going to Spain to watch Eastenders and Emmerdale.

Outside the bar an argument breaks out between two people walking along the street. One is a girl reminiscent of veteran New Zealander and double Olympic shot putt champion Valerie Adams. She's shouting in French at a much smaller young man and as he heads for the relative safety of the inside of the bar she makes a grab for him. Within seconds the fight is broken up by four men dressed in full military gear, including berets, who carry huge guns around with them. They patrol the streets in groups of four, presumably in a bid to dissuade any members of ISIS/people with mental health problems/delete as appropriate from engaging in any heinous violent crime. It's overkill for this particular minor scuffle, although I am nearly knocked into Emma as it gets a little bit physical, but it is amazing how quickly fights like this are broken up by soldiers carrying deadly weapons than they are by bobbies carrying truncheons and asking people to please calm down. In all likelihood arming our police would likely escalate gun crime and cause all manner of problems, but it would certainly give the Crockie Crew something to think about. In the end, Valerie stomps away still muttering to herself and anyone who will listen, and I learn that the word 'homosexual' spoken in a French accent with the required level of aggression is a gay slur.

We don't drink too much at the bars along that row because we are up early the next morning to do a bit more exploring. We visit the Tourist Information Centre which has a lift which doesn't work, leaving Emma to go in alone to find out what there is to do around here. The lift broke yesterday, they tell Emma. Why wouldn't the lift break 24 hours before my arrival? That's exactly the sort of thing that happens. We have breakfast at a café over the road and I am hugely underwhelmed by what I am told is an English breakfast. It's about as English as the Queen Victoria. There are scrambled eggs involved but the bacon has been practically grated and instead of beans and sausage there is salad. You will go an awful long way in England to find an English breakfast that is served with salad. Emma has more luck with her continental offering, which includes a piece of cake and numerous European bread products and fruit. Over breakfast we decide to take the bus tour around the city today, visit Chateau D'If by boat tomorrow and take a day trip to Toulon on Thursday.

The tour bus - or L'Open Tour Marseille - leaves from just over the other side of the marina from the hotel. That is just a short walk away from the café where we have breakfast and, in a rare moment of convenience, the lady selling the tickets speaks pretty good English. The first bus that arrives is chock full and the driver isn't keen to let any more people on, so we are asked to wait for the next one which will arrive in 15 minutes. Well, we're not going anywhere else. We stay on the bus for a short while listening to the commentary, which refreshingly works through the headphones system and which even more refreshingly is in English provided you have the intellectual capacity to tune in to the correct channel. I can just about manage that so I'm learning all about Marseille's rich seafaring history when we reach the stop at Notre Dame de la Garde where Emma suggests we get off for a couple of photos and a closer look. We had seen this catholic basilica from outside one of the café bars the previous evening. It sits on the top of the hill which sprouts up from behind the marina, something like this;

The image is a little far away for you to get a proper look but you can see it better on my Facebook page. Still I wish we had been able to get a better shot after getting off the bus. Unfortunately the stop was in the middle of one of the steepest hills I have ever been on. We would have seen the basilica much more clearly the top of the road which could not have been more than about 100 metres away, but we don't get more than 20 metres up this ridiculous mountain before I decide it is not going to be possible and tank it. Even if we had been able to get to the top of the road, coming back down again to get back to the bus stop would have been life threatening. People assume going down hills in a wheelchair is easy, but these are people who have never tried to stop themselves travelling down absurd gradients at any kind of speed. The brakes on my chair are a token effort and totally unsuited to the job, which leaves only my hands to stop the momentum. And with that you get burn, blisters and balance problems.

The next bus takes around 30 minutes to get back to the stop, so we just sit for a while and rest in the sweltering heat. There's more bad luck on buses when we get back on board because the next one has a broken audio system, leaving us to complete the second half of the tour with no commentary. It all looks very pretty but there is no context for us as we drive past Vieux Port, Le Panier and Musee Cantini among Marseille's many other places of interest.

When we get back to the marina we carry on wandering around, eyeing up restaurants and bars and looking for anything that might be more reasonably priced. There are happy hours, generally between around 5.00pm and 9.00pm when you can get things a little cheaper or even half price. This is useful to know and explains why, when we emerge later that evening at around 6.00-7.00pm, most of the bars along the row are extremely busy for a Tuesday. Before that we stop at a shop where I buy a postcard to send to my work colleagues, complete with cheap jibe about Liverpool and scousers, and Emma buys an anniversary card for her brother and his wife. It takes a while to buy the stamps and figure out how to send these items, again down to our hysterical lack of command of the French language, but we get there in the end. It's nine days before the wedding anniversary and 13 days before I am back in work. All of which should be more than enough time for the posted items to arrive in England before we do.

France - From The Beginning

I’m not completely sure how to structure this epic tale of Marseille, Nice, Toulon, Monaco, Cannes and Antibes so let’s just start at the beginning.

3.00am, Monday July 25 2016. I’m up at this ridiculous hour to catch a flight to Nice from Manchester Airport at 7.30am. Emma’s been at her parents’ house for the weekend and since my uselessness includes but is not limited to packing for holidays it has been a bit of a scramble to get everything sorted. By about 4.15am we are as ready as we will ever be and on the road. We’re low on petrol, but not low enough to actually stop and fill up now. Resolving that we will be able to do it on the way back in 12 days time is the kind of giddy thinking that can only be inspired by the prospect of going on holiday. And is exactly what we do.

Predictably there is a problem before we get anywhere near the terminal building. We’re leaving the car at Ringway. We always leave it in a long stay car park and then get the bus they provide to the terminal. This decision was inspired by one particularly unpleasant experience in which the company we had hired called the day before departure to say that the lift on the accessible mini-bus was broken, making it an inaccessible mini-bus. Accessible buses that were actually inaccessible buses were to become a theme during our stay in France, but first things first. We’d had to drive to the car park on that occasion and have always done so since. Call it cutting out the middle man.

We board the bus, Emma lugging two large suitcases with her. Turns out I can’t carry suitcases either. She’s managed to store them safely and we were set to go. Except the bus isn’t. The driver has flipped the ramp down to allow me access on to the bus, but upon flipping it back he has found that he cannot then close the door. He tries and tries for possibly the most awkward few minutes any of us on board could remember, before finally giving up and asking for help on his radio. A man who looks the part as a mechanic turns up seconds later, fiddles with knobs knowingly and with authority, before deducing that the thing is actually buggered. We have to disembark which means more lugging for Emma, and then move down to the next bus stop in the car park to catch the next bus. Only the driver of that bus turns out to be the would-be mechanic on the buggered bus, so we then have to wait for him to finish his chin-stroking diagnosis before we can get on board the new bus and be on our way. Fortunately for all our sanity and the brevity of this particular story, the second bus is sufficiently functional to get us to the terminal.

The flight is as uneventful as it can be when you are unable to walk. That is to say that being dragged backwards down the aisle of an aeroplane without any trace of my dignity is now such a regular occurrence that it no longer warrants any further comment. There is a strange moment at the end of the flight when the girl sat next to me by the window decides to wait until my assistance arrives before getting off the plane, even though she appears able to do so under her own steam. I ask her if she wants to get past me to get off and she just shrugs. The thought crosses my mind that maybe she can’t because of some terrible unseen condition so I don’t push it any further. But then one of the cabin crew asks her about it and she squeezes past me, stands up and walks off the plane unaided.

We take a taxi from Nice Airport to Nice Ville railway station. The plan is to get on the train to Marseille where we are staying for the next six nights, before returning by train to Nice for six further nights before flying home. The taxi driver speaks enough English to speculate about whether there are any topless women on the beach as we drive by, to shout abuse at a man he claims is the 'Islam-loving' French Finance Minister (we were sceptical, and then to have a good giggle at the word ‘SEX’ written in enormous blue letters on the side of a building opposite the railway station.

‘I wonder what they sell?’ I ask.

Any train station where language barriers exist is going to be a challenge to negotiate. Add in the need for wheelchair access and you are into Crystal Maze territory. There are two separate desks, one for information and a ‘boutique’ which sells tickets. In the boutique you have to take a ticket from a machine and wait for your number to come up, which is reminiscent of how they carry out blood tests at St Helens Hospital. A ticket to Marseille from Nice costs €70 which after the Brexit fiasco is about £58.00. It’s about 99 miles which should take around two hours and 40 minutes. But this is us remember. It was never going to be that quick or that simple. But before we can even think about that we have to organise assistance on to the train. Bafflingly, this cannot be done at the desk at the boutique. That would be too easy and sensible. You have to take your recently purchased ticket to the information desk and book assistance through them. Turn up at the information desk without a ticket and they won’t take you on, so basically you have to take a bit of a punt that after you purchase your train ticket they will be able to organise the assistance for you in time to catch your train. Generally they require 30 minutes notice to be able to organise assistance for anyone with the temerity to turn up using a wheelchair. It’s not like Lime Street where you can just rock up three minutes before departure and shout ‘Thatto Heath’ at a bloke who is otherwise standing around doing nothing. If they don't get their required 30 minutes notice, you could very well end up waiting for the next train. Trains to Marseille from Nice are not all that frequent so it's not something you want to get involved in.

The lift they use to help me board the train is a real cutting edge piece of technology. It's square in shape and has a ramp that flips open at the front. Then when they close it up behind you they literally wind the thing up manually, like how you used to wind up the windows in your car in 1978. When you reach a suitable height to board the train there is more winding to enable two great fork-like ramps to extend in front of you so you can wheel on board. Sometimes this is necessary as some French trains have two giant steps leading up to the carriage. Other times it is complete overkill and they will just use a small ramp if the platform is closer to the level of the carriage. This one we could have boarded ourselves, so non-existent was the step between the platform and the carriage. But they weren't going to tell us that. It would interfere with their safety policies. The French railway service treats wheelchairs and their users in much the same way as they would treat a toddler wandering around the platform on his own.

There's lots of room in our carriage. It's a specially designated area for disabled people and wheelchair users which were I of a mind might inspire a rant about segregation. However, it doesn't really have that effect as the able bodied population are not shy about shuffling along and occupying the seats there. I jump out of my wheelchair for comfort, pleased that there are no jobsworth guards watching me do so, lest they physically drag me off the seat and dump me back in my wheelchair where I belong. The scenery is breathtaking. The bulk of the journey takes you right down the coastline so you can see all of the stunning beaches and sea views, albeit interspersed with trees and the odd tall building. Everything is so magnificently blue. The sky seems more blue than anywhere else, so too the sea. The scenic route was something we wanted to experience when we considered travelling on the Eurostar. We'd shelved that idea when we realised how long it would take to get from London to Marseille, bearing in mind that it is four hours drive down to London also and probably would have involved another overnight stay. So with that it is fabulous to be able to see France like this anyway, even if the train we are on doesn't quite offer the luxury of the Eurostar.

An hour or so into the journey we slow right down and before long come to a complete stop. We're not at a station so something has gone wrong, which is not altogether surprising in our experience. What is different about this is that it's a little unnerving to listen to announcements over the tannoy in French, particularly when you can only make out the word 'security'. The tension cranks up a notch when the driver, adorning his splendid Axl Rose bandana, hops out of his secluded bubble and begins doing the Peter Kay run that dad's do down the length of the train, all the while mumbling in French in what appears to be an agitated manner. The next minute he is off the train, walking along the railway still muttering away about something or other. There are more announcements that we cannot understand. Now normally this wouldn't be such a big deal but you may have noticed that over the last 18 months or so France has had some issues with terrorism and that public safety is a concern. If you start to think about that sort of thing at the point when Axl gets off the train gibbering away then you could concoct all sorts of scenarios in your mind. But a few minutes later a girl enters our carriage to use what appears to be the only toilet on board. She's French, but she has some kind of far eastern ethnicity also. I'm hoping she speaks English so that I can get her to give us some idea of just what is going on here. As she leaves the toilet and makes her way back to the seat I take a punt;

"Excuse me, do you speak English?" I ask. It's a question I will be asking repeatedly over the next 12 days, owing to the fact that my own French skills do not go beyond Sutton High GCSE experience. Grade fucking C. You're not having a conversation with a real life French person if you only have a grade C GCSE, that's for sure.

"Little." she replies, demonstrating just how little with her one word answer.

"Do you know why we have stopped?"

"Someone, they jump off the bridge because they try to die." She says.

And that is all we find out. Clearly the girl's English skills are too limited for me to press her any further on the matter and it somehow seems inappropriate to do so anyway. So I'm afraid I'll never be able to tell you whether the person who tried to die was successful. I certainly hope not, and can at least assure you that there was no evidence of any death as we finally got going some half an hour or 45 minutes after stopping. No body parts, no gore, no blood or anything like that. There are more announcements, probably telling us how late we are going to be arriving in Marseille, but we'll never know. I should have revised a bit more for that French exam in 1992, I know. But the 16 year-old me thought that revising was something you did if you thought you wouldn't pass otherwise. It never occurred to me that scraping a Grade C would be an issue on a train nearly 25 years later.

We arrive in Marseille around 30-40 minutes later than advertised, and are met by the train station staff with their high-tech lift. You have to give them credit for this part of their accessibility service to be honest. Many is the time (well twice that I can think of) that I have not been met at train stations in England and ended up in entirely different ones than I had intended. By and large the French are very hot on this and are there to meet you with the lift promptly. That's great, but then they have known about the need for assistance since at least half an hour before the train departed. Perhaps that is why they do it, and why they have a computerised assistance booking system at the information desk in the stations. It works, kind of.

Another taxi, another mad driver. He drops us at the Raddison Hotel which is right on the marina at Marseille. The harbour looks pretty spectacular as we drive by it, passing the endless row of bars and restaurants on the way. We're on the fifth of five floors which again could inspire another novel about how we always manage to find our way to the top floor of hotels despite requiring wheelchair access, but let's not spoil it eh? The hotel staff give us a voucher for a free drink, which after a quick refresh in the room we use at the café bar next door on our way out for an exploratory stroll. What we didn't know when we got the voucher is that there is no choice of drink involved. The waitress brings over our free drink which is an orange-looking vodka-based cocktail that looks as though it could take down a herd of buffalo. It tastes good, and it is pretty refreshing in the searing heat that still lingers even at around 6.00 in the Marseille evening.

A Few Fury-Inspired Random Observations

I'm not in the best of moods. No, that's not true. I'm experiencing one of those low days when I want to cut off my own head. Without going into detail that even Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard baulks at I have no sense of self worth today. So let's cheer everyone up with a few random observations inspired by my abject despair.

Yesterday I was in Tesco at lunchtime. There is a new-ish one just over the road from work. There are steps leading down to it and it is crawling with students but the good news for access bigots like me is that it has a lift. The bad news is that said lift is often blocked with stacks of trolleys. When I get to the bottom I'm forced to squeeze through a gap the size of my potential to enjoy today. A gap between the lift door and the trolleys which is very probably a health and safety hazard at worst and at best a major inconvenience and obstacle. I know people who would not be able to negotiate a way out of this gap if they were to try it, which if nothing else has just made me laugh to myself at the thought. Sorry.

So I have started buying fruit for lunch. Laughably, I decided a diet might help with the self worth thing. It hasn't, but that is largely because it hasn't made any physical difference yet. Or is it? Perhaps I would still be a crank if I looked like Chris Hemsworth. Anyway, yesterday I was in Tesco buying my fruit. I paid for it, put it in a bag, thanked the lady serving me and turned away. I took one push forward to clear the area where people were queuing to get served. I lifted the bag to put it in my ruck sack for the journey back to work. Plastic bags in the mouth are not a great look I've decided. As I lifted it the can of coke I had just bought with my fruit (diet? what diet?) shot out of the bag and rolled away from me and under the shelves storing the multipacks of crisps. Now if you are a biff you will know that the first thing to happen whenever you have any sort of mishap in public is that everyone immediately rushes to your aid as if they're Jack Bauer in a hostage situation. Sure enough before I could say 'my coke is three feet under the hula hoops' there was a lady on her hands and knees in front of me scrambling around to try to retrieve the rolling can. As much as you would like to physically drag her back to her feet and tell her not to be so fucking stupid, you just have to let this sort of shite play out at that point. It was over mercifully quickly, and she handed the can back to me as I tried to mumble the kind of apology that was pure Hugh Grant in it's delivery. Mortifying and yet par for the course in my shit show of a life. And you want to talk about self worth?

I used to have a car. Now I have a pile of bird shite that has bits of metal sticking out of it. Several hundreds of years ago my employer declared that as it was having a new entrance built on one side of the building it was moving the disabled parking facilities into the main car park. For three weeks, they said. Like when you lent that copy of 101 Great Goals to your mate in 1984. Again it is perhaps a disability thing, but I know people who have actually died since I lent them books or CDs. I myself am still in possession of a terrible trilogy of videos starring Juliet Binoche which I acquired from a now estranged uncle. Perhaps that is why he no longer visits. He just doesn't want those fucking videos back, ever. You want to see them. They are so utterly depressing. They make this blog entry read like a giddy Timmy Mallet anecdote. Back at the car park and somewhere near the central plot of this delirious, angst-stained rant, the new disabled parking facilities are right underneath where a tree hangs over the fence in the car park. This is a favoured depositing location for the local flying wildlife. Liverpool has seagulls the size of donkeys. Day after day they shit on my car, a turgid metaphor for my state of mind today.

Also today, I suppose I should report that I have been ill. I was off sick from work all last week with yet another infection. This is possibly the same infection I lent to my friend in 1984. The doctors seem to have no clue how to deal with it. I went for my routine four-monthly appointment with the nephrologist last Tuesday. We argued about whether or not I should go on long term anti-biotics. I argued that I should because I'm desperate now and anyway, they would probably just make those Saturday night karaoke sessions at Ice Bar that bit more interesting. The nephrologist only turns up in person to these appointments about as often as my estranged uncle and so this boring circular argument was actually conducted with Sojan, a staff nurse and a Doctor Brown. She spoke to me like I was five, insisted I have further blood tests that day and shortened the length between my appointments to three months. I liked her, though she would not prescribe anti-biotics long term. It was only after a slightly undignified whinge on my part that she agreed to prescribe me any at all. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do.

At around 9.30 that night, already ill remember, I got a phone call from a doctor at the Royal telling me that my blood tests had shown that my potassium level was too high. I needed to go into A & E as soon as possible to have it checked again and possibly treated. Otherwise my heart might explode. Or something. Good luck finding my heart. Four months ago they pulled the same shit on me, and Emma and I waited in A & E for four hours. After repeated blood tests we were told that the reading was fine and that there had been some mistake during the transportation of the blood sample. Naturally I assumed they were at it again but I reluctantly went into the hospital at 10 o'fucking clock at night in anty case. One day these empty threats they make about my impending death may actually come true and then I will look stupid, won't I if I haven't listened to their advice? We were there so long that my employer's old disabled car park almost reopened, at which point I was told that following another blood test the potassium level was still too high. I'd need treatment.

I've had this treatment before, back in 2013 which if you are close to the edge of suicide you can read about again on these pages. It's just a drip, which involves butchering my arms but which is not overly complex in its nature. That didn't stop the nurse who walked me through to the treatment area asking me whether I would need a hoist to get on to a trolley. Firstly, I don't need a fucking hoist thank you very much I'm not Brian fucking Potter. Secondly, I don't even need a trolley. This treatment can be administered very simply with the recipient sitting in a wheelchair. These suggestions and implications were just yet more evidence of medical professionals who ought to know better reacting to a wheelchair as if it is a fucking car bomb. So I sat in my chair, and an altogether more sensible doctor and nurse combo administered my treatment. And they did so with understanding and humour and pleasantness, and all sorts of other things I have never experienced before at Whiston Hospital. I didn't even mind that they put the first drip in incorrectly which consequently meant that the initial few minutes of the treatment felt like repeatedly having your arm punched by Anthony Joshua. An Anthony Joshua who has a lot of nervous energy to expend and is as angry as I felt at the start of this blog entry.

They got me home by 2.30am Wednesday, fully 13 hours after I had left the house for my original appointment. One week on, my arms are still sore and bruised.

And that, folks, was a few fury-inspired random observations. Don't we all feel better?

Idiot Britain Leaves The EU

Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard isn't usually political. Sometimes, however, something happens in politics which is so seismically stupid, annoying and bloody terrifying that it would be remiss not to pass comment. Largely I have been respectful of the opposite view to my own during the EU referendum campaigns. Yesterday was the first time I posted anything about the subject on social media. Many said, quite rightly, that we shouldn't be launching personal attacks on each other over a political issue, but when this morning we awoke to the news that the UK, in their limitless wisdom, had decided to leave the European Union following yesterday's vote I started to wish I'd made more effort to put people off voting Leave. What we will have now is a so-called 'Brexit' which I described yesterday as like setting your rented house on fire because you want more control over what happens to it. When you ask the average Leave voter why they want to leave the EU they don't actually know, or they come up with something about taking back control of our own borders. All of which is complete nonsense, as we will see.

The referendum result was a close run thing. Fifty-one point nine per cent of those who voted chose to leave while 49.1% had the nous to think it better to stay. As a result of this narrow defeat for the Remain campaign, pig-fancying gobshite Prime Minister David Cameron has announced that he will leave office by this October. I can honestly say I never thought I would be genuinely disturbed by his departure, but I am. There will be those who think that the Leave campaign is a triumph because it has brought about the end of his time in Downing Street, but this is a short term view which fails to acknowledge any of the multitude of other dangers that may lie around the corner following his exit. In short, be careful what you wish for.

Although Cameron campaigned for the UK to remain in the EU he is largely to blame for the mess that has this morning left the pound weaker than it has been since 1985. The mess that threatens to see lovable television buffoon and English Donald Trump Boris Johnson take over the premiership, and a situation which will in truth make absolutely rock all difference to immigration except for the anticipated flood of people who might be desperate to get here for fear that we will be shutting our doors to them two years from now. That's right Leave voters, even if we start the process of leaving today (which we won't for reasons I will explain later) it will take two years to complete. Let's just say it is complex. If you imagined that you would wake up this morning to news footage of someone blocking the Channel Tunnel with a great big red brick wall then you are going to be sorely disappointed. Ironically, Leave voters may even have brought about an increase in immigration, in the short term at least. Regardless, if we did shut our doors to everyone and not just those from Europe, it would make a difference of around one in 35 people over a 10-year period. That is to say that in 10 years time there would be 34 children in your child's school classroom instead of 35, or 34 cars ahead of you in the morning traffic jams instead of 35. Was this really worth fucking the economy for? Or potentially turning our fate as a nation over to the extreme right loonies Johnson, Michael Gove and Nigel Farage? Respectfully I suggest not.

The awful truth is that Cameron should never have offered the people a referendum to decide something so important. It was spineless and politically irresponsible, as is his departure now. He'll probably be reflecting on that now as he prepares to go through the door marked Do One. The people were never close to being interested enough or educated enough to make a sensible decision. Right up until yesterday social media was flooded with half-wits suggesting that they didn't know which way to vote because there was 'not enough information' available. These people, who it seems have not yet grasped the concept of Google, were also adamant that since people fought and died for their right to vote that they should exercise that right. All of which sounds lovely in principle but should you really exercise your right to vote if you know fuck all about what you are voting on? And what's more if you do not care to know to the extent that you couldn't spend five minutes conducting a little research, instead preferring to use your technological know-how to shout into the social media void that you don't know what the fuck you are doing? But it's all so difficult, isn't it?

Now even though Cameron's departure as PM could be considered a good thing, it has left the country in an almighty mess. Basically, Mr Cameron has walked into a room, shit in the corner and then ran off to leave someone else to clean up the mess. It's monumentally cowardly of him and I confess to being a little bit surprised by it. I was hanging on to the hope that he would use his legendary devious nature to either rig the referendum for the greater good or else stay in office and work to find a way to avoid enforcing the EU withdrawal. Or at least manage it to try to limit the damage. After all, the vote was particularly close and if you include the people who did not turn out to vote then you could argue that the majority of people did not vote to leave the EU. Still, so long as the people who didn't know what to do until yesterday turned out then we're in safe hands. Democracy works.

Chillingly, the people who will most likely be left to pick up the pieces from this and that ran the Leave campaign are as surprised by the result as I am. It's highly likely that they didn't expect to win and that the likes of Johnson, Farage and Gove just wanted to give Cameron a bloody nose for their own political ends. Their agenda always seemed more likely to be to shove Cameron aside to progress their own, even more right wing plans for control than it was to actually cut the UK adrift from an organisation which has provided us with all manner of positives from human rights, employment rights, regeneration for our cities and towns and blah blah blah. I know, Leave don't want to read that because the main thing is that we stop foreigners piling through our borders at a rate of 200million a day.

Back in the real world and with all that in mind there will now be a probably interminable period to allow for the meeting of these great minds to decide exactly how to go about facilitating our exit from the EU. Scotland and Northern Ireland are already making noises about leaving the UK, clearly because they overwhelmingly want to remain part of the EU. The referendum results in those countries proved that. Brexit is a distinctly English thing. Not that any of this matters to Leave voters who are just delighted that the Leave campaign have promised to stop those bloody foreigners coming over here taking our benefits and our jobs at the same time, contributing to our economy and all kinds of other evil that Little Englanders hate. It's a promise they may not even keep but it has at least sated the English appetite for hatred for now. Indeed, the result is a victory for hate. The people who start their sentences with the phrase 'I'm not racist but....' may not be racist in the same way that people who come up to me in the street and say 'I'm not being funny but...' are not necessarily prejudiced against the disabled. Yet the fact that they need to establish that before they speak sometimes is fairly telling. The bottom line is that they have thrown their lot in with some very powerful people who are clearly racist. People like Farage who sold voters the lie that the UK pours £350million into the EU every week, and who has immediately back-tracked on his laughable claim that following our EU exit that money would instead be spent on the NHS. At best a vote for that is naïve and irresponsible, at worst it is disgusting and unpalatable.

One crumb of comfort could come from the possibility that a General Election takes place. Cameron's lot were elected to hold the referendum, but not necessarily to follow through with our EU exit. If the people decide whether we should stay or go from the EU then perhaps they should also have a say in who manages our departure from it. OK so we are trusting idiots again that way, and the far right psychos like Farage will no doubt take some of the working class vote, thus helping the Tories to divide and conquer us. But it might be our best bet, given that the alternative is to let Bellend Nigel and his cronies guide us through what is now sure to be a difficult period.

The Boss

Yesterday, Saturday, we passed The Shard. So named because it looks a bit like a shard of glass, it's main purpose seems to be visibility from outer space. I actually didn't know what it was used for except showing off, but a cursory Google search has thrown up the nugget that it replaced an office block built in 1975 and is owned by a property company as well as the state of Qatar. It has a viewing gallery, which is the point that I am agonisingly arriving at. I pointed this out but Emma said that it would cost far more than it was worth to go up there (I think she said about £20) and that we could get an aerial view of London from the top of a shopping centre by St Paul's Cathedral.

We have to find the shopping centre first and it doesn't prove to be all that easy. We'd got off the train at Bank and immediately it got complicated. Brilliantly, they shut the lifts off at the weekend. I mean, why wouldn't they? What the fuck are disabled people doing wanting to go anywhere at the weekend? The audacity of these fucking freaks. We spend a ridiculous amount of time sat waiting with a lady and her mum until Emma manages to contact someone on the intercom. He then has to haul his poor arse down a flight of stairs to unlock the lifts for us. One of five bloody lifts in a row, all of which have been shut off because it is the weekend. This happened more than a fortnight before I write this and I'm still reeling. It's all a bloody outrage. If only the pair of us had stayed indoors dribbling like we are supposed to then we might have spared this poor guy his legs. In the event he denies any responsibility for the whole charade, calling himself a 'mere puppet'. To be quite honest it seems as if the whole of Bank Underground Station is run by puppets so he may have more power than he supposes. Either way there is no point wasting any more time berating him for it. That's what this column is for.

We waste yet more time wandering around the area by St Paul's Cathedral looking for a shopping centre. Emma's dad offers some directions over the phone and it turns out that we have gone past it. I think we had expected something taller, given that it's meant to offer a view of the city from the rooftop terrace. Nevertheless we go in and ride the glass lift up to the sixth and top floor. Glass lifts are a bit weird I think. You lose your stomach a little bit. We come out on to the terrace and it's surprisingly stunning. There's a magnificent view of St Paul's Cathedral along a path that leads down also to views of the London Eye. The Shard is probably visible from here too as it is visible from pretty much anywhere in the universe. Best of all there is a small terrace bar just set back from the wall around the terrace. We go there and drink Sol at some totally unjustifiable price but it is hot, it's sunny and it is 11.30 on a Sunday morning. Sometimes you just have to spend a bit more to get a unique experience. Whatever it cost, and I don't rightly remember, it is definitely better value than the £5.30 a pint in The George yesterday. That was just an ordinary pub. A nice pub, don't get me wrong, but just a pub. No views of significant London landmarks and actually no sunshine because all of the outdoor space was taken and we drank inside.

We shelve plans to visit the Tower Of London. By the time we have stopped laying about in the sun drinking expensive beer it's way after 12.00 and Emma wants to be at Wembley Stadium for around 4.00. It's the day of the Bruce Springsteen concert, which after all is the reason we have come all this way. We take a walk (push?) towards and over the Millennium Bridge but then while looking for a pub we visited a couple of years ago called The Old Thameside Inn we take a wrong turn somewhere at Bankside, Southwalk. Eventually we realise this and turn back, looking instead for either Southwalk or London Bridge tube stations. Inevitably, we find another pub. This time it is the brilliantly monikered Doggett's Coat And Badge. There we watch the first set of the French Open tennis final between Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic. Murray wins the first but by the time we leave midway through the second he's on his way to what was probably always an inevitable defeat by the Serb who now holds all four Grand Slam titles, the first man to do so since Rod Laver in 1969. Architecture and tennis. Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard is your one-stop shop for useless information.

We get back on the tube and it starts. The gathering of the hard-core Bruce fans. I'm actually expecting them to be much older and with an array of stupid tattoos and piercings, but most of those that board the train between London Bridge and Wembley Park seem fairly average in appearance. The only thing that gives their musical preferences away is the t-shirts they wear which carry the face of 'The Boss' on the front and a list of exotic places he has played at on the reverse. Well some of them at any rate. Springsteen is 66 years old and has probably played everywhere except Thatto Heath Labour Club by now. Going off on a tangent for a second a friend of mine has just told me that her son is working in Thatto Heath at the moment. He took a photograph of the sign at the railway station and asked the question what kind of name this was 'for a gaff'. Then he said something about it being a shithole. While I can't make an impassioned argument against that I did at least tell her to let him know that I live in the posh end. Which means I own my own home. Said friend then went on to suggest that Thatto Heath must be a shithole because of the way we speak, before having a wild stab at mocking my accent. All of which is ironic given her own staggering scouse-ness.

We've gone off course. The next challenge for us was to get inside the stadium. It is not a long walk from Wembley Park but it is all uphill. At the top I feel like I have done 90 minutes in bloody Gym Bug or some other poser's paradise. We consider buying some food from the many outlets on the way in, but remembering my mum's advice never to buy food from 'places' (by which she means anything with wheels) we skip it and make our way inside. Like last week we are meant to enter at Gate J but we are about 30 blocks over from where we were for the play-off final. It takes an absolute age to walk that distance around the concourse, to the point where actually it would have been much quicker to let us in at Gate K. Which is probably not accessible. That's the only reason I can see for the logic. I mean, come on, it is only 2016 and only four years on from London hosting a Paralympics. Give them a chance.

Just to make life more difficult there is a separate kiosk for every different item of food you might want to spend silly amounts of money on. Which is all very well if you are on your own. Just decide what you want and find the relevant kiosk. But if you are with someone else, and you want a burger and someone else wants a hot dog or some nachos then you have to go your separate ways. So we both got a burger because anyway, in the end, there's little difference between one type of overpriced shit and another. Fortunately, all of the different kiosks serve beer. So with that sorted we eventually find our seats which aren't bad. Perhaps we are a little too far away from the stage if I'm honest. Bruce is going to look fairly ant-like from this distance (though I do hope he is a good deal more entertaining than Ant Man). Yet there are several big screens around the stage which will help.

For now the entertainment is on the field, well before Bruce has even appeared. One fella has had far too many scoops for his own good and is lying prostrate on the temporary surface, emptying the contents of his gut with some vigour. It's highly unedifying and gets worse when the security people get wind of it because their intervention involved that most dreaded of allegedly helpful apparatus, the evac-chair. I have spent large parts of my life to this point doing anything to avoid ever being placed on an evac-chair. Quite frankly I would rather burn like Stannis' daughter than suffer the ignominy of descending a flight of stairs in that manner. The chair they use to hoist me on to aeroplanes is as close as I'm ever going to get to it and that is only because that is a necessary evil if I'm ever going to get anywhere outside of the UK. In this lad's position I would have crawled off the surface and down the nearest tunnel. He doesn't though. He voluntarily sits on the wretched thing, assuming he can do anything voluntarily such is the depth of his inebriation. Notably his mates don't leave with him. Just as you sometimes have to pay that bit extra for a special experience, so you sometimes have to let your mates fuck off on their own to sober up if they can't handle their ale.

I'm in the toilet when Bruce starts playing, which would be slightly annoying if I was a massive fan. I'm not really, is the awful truth. Emma's the one with a keenness for him but I enjoy the show all the same. I don't know all of the songs so I spend part of the three and a half hour gig (he doesn't do support acts) trying to work out what song he is playing and part of it people watching. I haven't seen as many drunken and quite rubbish dance moves as this since we went to see Simple Minds at Wembley arena when punching the air seemed to be the thing. Looking around I'm quite envious that they know every word and are bellowing along. Concerts are always better when you know the music well, so I'd be the same if I'd done my homework. There's no doubt Bruce is good. He's very good and he has an exhaustive repertoire of rock anthems at his disposal. Born To Run is particularly uplifting and a fair portion of folk go quite dizzy during The River. I don't recall him playing Glory Days which is one that I do like, although I may just have missed it having been distracted by the swathes of middle aged, would-be rockers getting their Bruce on in ever more embarrassing ways.

Helpfully, Bruce introduces every song with signs and even chastises one or two audience member for the sub-standard quality of the signs that they have brought with them. I've not seen this kind of signage before at a gig and I can't work out whether it is a Bruce thing or a stadium thing. The majority of gigs that I have been to have been at indoor arenas, except for Robbie Williams at the Eithad in Manchester a couple of years ago. There's a fair chance that his fans don't bring signs because they can't spell. Except for me, of course. I'm a Robbie Williams fan and I can spell.

It takes an eternity to get out of the stadium and Emma's impatience is obvious. The police are holding people up so that there aren't too many people entering Wembley Park at one time. This happened last week but it somehow seems to take longer this time around. Not for waiting, Emma's weaving between the crowds through gaps that I can't fit my fat arse into let alone my wheelchair and I'm worried that I will lose her. Fortunately she knows to wait by the lift outside Wembley Park. Unfortunately, when I eventually get there I'm at the back of a ridiculous queue, made worse by the inability of the general public to operate a lift. They overload it three times, once to the point where an out of service message flashes above the door and it looks for a moment as if we'll all been spending the night here. Unhelpfully people who could walk up the stairs choose not to, contributing even more to the overloading of the lift and wasting yet more of my life force. When it comes to my turn Emma takes the steps, although someone bizarrely claims that they had been told they were not allowed to do so if they were accompanying a wheelchair user. This seems unlikely, although Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard would not be surprised to learn that the right to walk up a flight of stairs and wait at the top has been stripped from anyone who has the audacity to rock up with a cripple.

One such, a middle-aged woman with a seriously bad attitude, spend the tube journey chastising her teenage son for never doing anything to help her. The same teenage son who has just taken her to a Bruce Springsteen concert and pushed her all the way back from the stadium to Wembley Park. She never once touched her own wheels in anything resembling an attempt to self propel. Maybe she wasn't able to, but if that is the case shut the fuck up and stop having a go at your son for not doing anything for you. Do you really think he would rather be at a Bruce Springsteen gig than out drinking cider with girls his own age or whatever it is the cool kids do nowadays. I loathe ungratefulness.

Monday comes and we swerve the Tower Of London again, settling instead for a Spoons brekkie and a bit more time at home ahead of a Wednesday return to work.

Yesterday, Saturday, we passed The Shard. So named because it looks a bit like a shard of glass, it's main purpose seems to be visibility from outer space. I actually didn't know what it was used for except showing off, but a cursory Google search has thrown up the nugget that it replaced an office block built in 1975 and is owned by a property company as well as the state of Qatar. It has a viewing gallery, which is the point that I am agonisingly arriving at. I pointed this out but Emma said that it would cost far more than it was worth to go up there (I think she said about £20) and that we could get an aerial view of London from the top of a shopping centre by St Paul's Cathedral.

We have to find the shopping centre first and it doesn't prove to be all that easy. We'd got off the train at Bank and immediately it got complicated. Brilliantly, they shut the lifts off at the weekend. I mean, why wouldn't they? What the fuck are disabled people doing wanting to go anywhere at the weekend? The audacity of these fucking freaks. We spend a ridiculous amount of time sat waiting with a lady and her mum until Emma manages to contact someone on the intercom. He then has to haul his poor arse down a flight of stairs to unlock the lifts for us. One of five bloody lifts in a row, all of which have been shut off because it is the weekend. This happened more than a fortnight before I write this and I'm still reeling. It's all a bloody outrage. If only the pair of us had stayed indoors dribbling like we are supposed to then we might have spared this poor guy his legs. In the event he denies any responsibility for the whole charade, calling himself a 'mere puppet'. To be quite honest it seems as if the whole of Bank Underground Station is run by puppets so he may have more power than he supposes. Either way there is no point wasting any more time berating him for it. That's what this column is for.

We waste yet more time wandering around the area by St Paul's Cathedral looking for a shopping centre. Emma's dad offers some directions over the phone and it turns out that we have gone past it. I think we had expected something taller, given that it's meant to offer a view of the city from the rooftop terrace. Nevertheless we go in and ride the glass lift up to the sixth and top floor. Glass lifts are a bit weird I think. You lose your stomach a little bit. We come out on to the terrace and it's surprisingly stunning. There's a magnificent view of St Paul's Cathedral along a path that leads down also to views of the London Eye. The Shard is probably visible from here too as it is visible from pretty much anywhere in the universe. Best of all there is a small terrace bar just set back from the wall around the terrace. We go there and drink Sol at some totally unjustifiable price but it is hot, it's sunny and it is 11.30 on a Sunday morning. Sometimes you just have to spend a bit more to get a unique experience. Whatever it cost, and I don't rightly remember, it is definitely better value than the £5.30 a pint in The George yesterday. That was just an ordinary pub. A nice pub, don't get me wrong, but just a pub. No views of significant London landmarks and actually no sunshine because all of the outdoor space was taken and we drank inside.

We shelve plans to visit the Tower Of London. By the time we have stopped laying about in the sun drinking expensive beer it's way after 12.00 and Emma wants to be at Wembley Stadium for around 4.00. It's the day of the Bruce Springsteen concert, which after all is the reason we have come all this way. We take a walk (push?) towards and over the Millennium Bridge but then while looking for a pub we visited a couple of years ago called The Old Thameside Inn we take a wrong turn somewhere at Bankside, Southwalk. Eventually we realise this and turn back, looking instead for either Southwalk or London Bridge tube stations. Inevitably, we find another pub. This time it is the brilliantly monikered Doggett's Coat And Badge. There we watch the first set of the French Open tennis final between Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic. Murray wins the first but by the time we leave midway through the second he's on his way to what was probably always an inevitable defeat by the Serb who now holds all four Grand Slam titles, the first man to do so since Rod Laver in 1969. Architecture and tennis. Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard is your one-stop shop for useless information.

We get back on the tube and it starts. The gathering of the hard-core Bruce fans. I'm actually expecting them to be much older and with an array of stupid tattoos and piercings, but most of those that board the train between London Bridge and Wembley Park seem fairly average in appearance. The only thing that gives their musical preferences away is the t-shirts they wear which carry the face of 'The Boss' on the front and a list of exotic places he has played at on the reverse. Well some of them at any rate. Springsteen is 66 years old and has probably played everywhere except Thatto Heath Labour Club by now. Going off on a tangent for a second a friend of mine has just told me that her son is working in Thatto Heath at the moment. He took a photograph of the sign at the railway station and asked the question what kind of name this was 'for a gaff'. Then he said something about it being a shithole. While I can't make an impassioned argument against that I did at least tell her to let him know that I live in the posh end. Which means I own my own home. Said friend then went on to suggest that Thatto Heath must be a shithole because of the way we speak, before having a wild stab at mocking my accent. All of which is ironic given her own staggering scouse-ness.

We've gone off course. The next challenge for us was to get inside the stadium. It is not a long walk from Wembley Park but it is all uphill. At the top I feel like I have done 90 minutes in bloody Gym Bug or some other poser's paradise. We consider buying some food from the many outlets on the way in, but remembering my mum's advice never to buy food from 'places' (by which she means anything with wheels) we skip it and make our way inside. Like last week we are meant to enter at Gate J but we are about 30 blocks over from where we were for the play-off final. It takes an absolute age to walk that distance around the concourse, to the point where actually it would have been much quicker to let us in at Gate K. Which is probably not accessible. That's the only reason I can see for the logic. I mean, come on, it is only 2016 and only four years on from London hosting a Paralympics. Give them a chance.

Just to make life more difficult there is a separate kiosk for every different item of food you might want to spend silly amounts of money on. Which is all very well if you are on your own. Just decide what you want and find the relevant kiosk. But if you are with someone else, and you want a burger and someone else wants a hot dog or some nachos then you have to go your separate ways. So we both got a burger because anyway, in the end, there's little difference between one type of overpriced shit and another. Fortunately, all of the different kiosks serve beer. So with that sorted we eventually find our seats which aren't bad. Perhaps we are a little too far away from the stage if I'm honest. Bruce is going to look fairly ant-like from this distance (though I do hope he is a good deal more entertaining than Ant Man). Yet there are several big screens around the stage which will help.

For now the entertainment is on the field, well before Bruce has even appeared. One fella has had far too many scoops for his own good and is lying prostrate on the temporary surface, emptying the contents of his gut with some vigour. It's highly unedifying and gets worse when the security people get wind of it because their intervention involved that most dreaded of allegedly helpful apparatus, the evac-chair. I have spent large parts of my life to this point doing anything to avoid ever being placed on an evac-chair. Quite frankly I would rather burn like Stannis' daughter than suffer the ignominy of descending a flight of stairs in that manner. The chair they use to hoist me on to aeroplanes is as close as I'm ever going to get to it and that is only because that is a necessary evil if I'm ever going to get anywhere outside of the UK. In this lad's position I would have crawled off the surface and down the nearest tunnel. He doesn't though. He voluntarily sits on the wretched thing, assuming he can do anything voluntarily such is the depth of his inebriation. Notably his mates don't leave with him. Just as you sometimes have to pay that bit extra for a special experience, so you sometimes have to let your mates fuck off on their own to sober up if they can't handle their ale.

I'm in the toilet when Bruce starts playing, which would be slightly annoying if I was a massive fan. I'm not really, is the awful truth. Emma's the one with a keenness for him but I enjoy the show all the same. I don't know all of the songs so I spend part of the three and a half hour gig (he doesn't do support acts) trying to work out what song he is playing and part of it people watching. I haven't seen as many drunken and quite rubbish dance moves as this since we went to see Simple Minds at Wembley arena when punching the air seemed to be the thing. Looking around I'm quite envious that they know every word and are bellowing along. Concerts are always better when you know the music well, so I'd be the same if I'd done my homework. There's no doubt Bruce is good. He's very good and he has an exhaustive repertoire of rock anthems at his disposal. Born To Run is particularly uplifting and a fair portion of folk go quite dizzy during The River. I don't recall him playing Glory Days which is one that I do like, although I may just have missed it having been distracted by the swathes of middle aged, would-be rockers getting their Bruce on in ever more embarrassing ways.

Helpfully, Bruce introduces every song with signs and even chastises one or two audience member for the sub-standard quality of the signs that they have brought with them. I've not seen this kind of signage before at a gig and I can't work out whether it is a Bruce thing or a stadium thing. The majority of gigs that I have been to have been at indoor arenas, except for Robbie Williams at the Eithad in Manchester a couple of years ago. There's a fair chance that his fans don't bring signs because they can't spell. Except for me, of course. I'm a Robbie Williams fan and I can spell.

It takes an eternity to get out of the stadium and Emma's impatience is obvious. The police are holding people up so that there aren't too many people entering Wembley Park at one time. This happened last week but it somehow seems to take longer this time around. Not for waiting, Emma's weaving between the crowds through gaps that I can't fit my fat arse into let alone my wheelchair and I'm worried that I will lose her. Fortunately she knows to wait by the lift outside Wembley Park. Unfortunately, when I eventually get there I'm at the back of a ridiculous queue, made worse by the inability of the general public to operate a lift. They overload it three times, once to the point where an out of service message flashes above the door and it looks for a moment as if we'll all been spending the night here. Unhelpfully people who could walk up the stairs choose not to, contributing even more to the overloading of the lift and wasting yet more of my life force. When it comes to my turn Emma takes the steps, although someone bizarrely claims that they had been told they were not allowed to do so if they were accompanying a wheelchair user. This seems unlikely, although Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard would not be surprised to learn that the right to walk up a flight of stairs and wait at the top has been stripped from anyone who has the audacity to rock up with a cripple.

One such, a middle-aged woman with a seriously bad attitude, spend the tube journey chastising her teenage son for never doing anything to help her. The same teenage son who has just taken her to a Bruce Springsteen concert and pushed her all the way back from the stadium to Wembley Park. She never once touched her own wheels in anything resembling an attempt to self propel. Maybe she wasn't able to, but if that is the case shut the fuck up and stop having a go at your son for not doing anything for you. Do you really think he would rather be at a Bruce Springsteen gig than out drinking cider with girls his own age or whatever it is the cool kids do nowadays. I loathe ungratefulness.

Monday comes and we swerve the Tower Of London again, settling instead for a Spoons brekkie and a bit more time at home ahead of a Wednesday return to work.

London - The Day Before Bruce

I’m in London the day Muhammad Ali dies. Before that, I watch the breaking news of his death at home over breakfast. Tributes pour in. Tony ‘I am Everton’ (what? mediocre?) Bellew even goes as far as to claim that Ali invented sarcasm. This seems a stretch, but there is no doubt about the influence of a man who is widely regarded as the greatest sportsman of the 20th century and who also was one of the leading figures in promoting civil rights during the troubled 1960’s and 70s. The word ‘legend’ is over-used, as is the phrase ‘the word legend is over-used’, both by this writer and the roll-call of slebs who are cold-called by the BBC to offer their thoughts in praise of ‘The Greatest’.

Four hours later we’re in London. After the excesses of the Britannia International last week, Emma has chosen the rather cheaper and more cheerful Tunes Hotel for this weekend’s visit. Like the Britannia International it is in Canary Wharf but is much smaller, has no bar, and we’re not allowed in our room until 3.00pm. We arrived at 12.30pm. I’m not complaining though. It’s a nice enough place and frankly, if Emma didn’t make the decisions about where we stay when we go on our little forays then it just wouldn’t get done. I’m just one of those people who puts things off. I’m currently late completing my application for my blue badge, which runs out in a fortnight and I regularly receive red letters from United Utilities having forgotten to pay the water bill. This particular problem comes from a stubborn refusal to open most of my mail since I developed kidney disease. I don’t want to read any more bad news.

Since we have to fill some time before the room is ready we set off to find Camden Town. We’re in London for Sunday’s Bruce Springsteen concert at Wembley but if you are going to go that kind of distance you are as well to make a weekend of it. There’s a million gazillion things to do in London, which has transformed in my mind’s eye from England’s toilet to one of my favourite cities in the world. Well, at least of those I have been to but they include Adelaide, New York, Toronto, San Diego, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Barcelona, Minneapolis, Orlando, Amsterdam, Brussels and er…..Leeds. London is right up there with any or all of them and if it had a guarantee of good weather it might just top the lot.

We take the DLR (Docklands Light Railway) from just a short walk outside the hotel at West India Quay. This takes us to Stratford, sight of the London 2012 Olympics and now home to Taxpayers FC Bloody West Ham United. We were last here in November for the England v New Zealand rugby league test match, since when the outside of the stadium has been emblazoned with the happy hammers logo. We can see it from the train as we pass. No doubt next time we are here it will have been completely daubed in claret and blue and there’ll be huge scary billboards of Slaven Bilic all over the place. Did you see him jump on to the table in the ITV studio just because one of his happy hammers scored a goal for France? Bilic isn't even French, yet the way he climbed up beside Manu Petit's coffee mug, arms aloft, would suggest that he grew up just down the road from Petit rather than in Croatia. Perhaps he knows there won't be too much to celebrate from Croatia during the Euros so he's living it vicariously through France.

From Stratford we have to get on an overground train and this is where it gets a bit complex. There doesn’t appear to be anywhere to buy tickets. Finding the right platform is a bit of a minefield too, but we get there and talk to the man at the information desk about where we might be able to get tickets. He tells us that they are sold at machines downstairs, which means that Emma has to go back downstairs to get them. There are currently two trains to Camden Road on the platforms, one of which leaves in three minutes and which the man at the desk informs me we are going to miss, and one which leaves in 10 minutes. We’ll have to take that one, he says, because it will take more than three minutes for Emma to get back downstairs and get the tickets. It does. And while she is away a train pulls in and 20 million people get off it and start funnelling down the stairs leading towards her. I got that figure from the same people calculating immigration statistics for the Brexit campaign. It might be a bit high. Still, I don’t know how she finds me in that crowd but she does and we board the train, but not before the officious man at the desk insists on bringing out the ramp. Access on overground trains is as abysmal in London as it is anywhere else, it seems. The step from the platform is doable for me with Emma to help, but had I been on my own I would definitely have needed the ramp. The man insists on making me use it anyway, which delays things a little and I start to worry that the 10 minutes is probably up by now, but we make it.

Miraculously, there is someone there to meet us at Camden Road with a ramp to again insist on helping me get off the train. This wouldn’t happen anywhere on the line between Thatto Heath and Liverpool Lime Street. Not all of the time, at any rate. On one occasion I was visiting a friend in Seaforth and ended up in Waterloo. The step between the train and the platform was much steeper there and I could have ended up on the front of the local paper if I had tried to get off by myself. Had there been nobody to meet us at Camden Road we would have been ok but it is good to know that they make sure, even if they are a little over fussy about it for my tastes.

Camden Town is the busiest place I have been to bar Manhattan. The narrow, often cobbly pavements are more tightly packed than Tom Daley's trunks. There’s some kind of rock music festival on somewhere in the vicinity, so quite a significant percentage of the people blocking my way are leather-clad, Mohawk-sporting, walking tattoo easels. This being Saturday lunchtime and with the weather co-operating for once, the famous Camden Market is bursting with shoppers just desperate to part with their money in exchange for all manner of assorted tat. But we’re starving having by now. It’s after 2.00 and we haven’t eaten since about 7.30 so instead of scouring the stalls and shops for said tat we are only interested in finding somewhere for a feed. Which is difficult. There’s lots of pubs and restaurants in the area but they are all very, very busy. And loud. If not because of the general hum of chatter then due to various kinds of music blaring out of the open windows and doors. We find a place with a few spare seats outside and pay close to £30 for what is essentially two chicken burgers, one portion of fries and a couple of soft drinks. London is great, but London is not cheap.

Just over the road from where we sit is The Stables Market, inside which you will find what we came here for. The Amy Winehouse statue. It's my fault we are here. Despite the Heroin, the tattoo overkill and her willingness to put up with domestic abuse from half-wit no marks, I've always been a big fan of Amy Winehouse. The word legend is over.....Oh. Well, she was pretty bloody good anyway, especially in an era when most prominent singers are manufactured from somewhere beneath Simon Cowell's high waistline, or have made it through after having to compete with a dancing fucking dog. Amy was a proper singer, soul, blues, jazz, that kind of thing. She didn't dress up in leopard print or whatever it is and scream about how we are all going to hear her roar We can already bloody hear you love.. Nor did she want you to love her like she was a hot pie or any other such lyrical idiocy. As such she hasn't had a major impact on everyone, it seems. Our servers in the restaurant did not know where the statue was situated despite running a business less than three minutes walk away. I find that remarkable and annoying at the same time, but we Google it and crack on. No pun intended. Did Amy do any crack? I don't know, possibly. If she did Mitch probably won't admit it so Mitch, I'm not saying she did, right? In case you were thinking of suing someone who has less than 10 regular readers. Can we have a whip round?

Added to the huge crowds I am now faced with that old nemesis of wheelchair users everywhere, cobbled streets. Many is the time I have been separated from my wheelchair thanks to cobbled streets. My arse does come off the seat occasionally, in fact most of the most pleasurable things in life are practised without a wheelchair anywhere near my arse. So anyway I am moving along especially carefully, on my back wheels only which I'm sure most observers either find odd or think I'm showing off like some under 14's contestant on Kick-Start. Do you remember Kick-Start? It's main attraction was the chance to watch young people fall off logs into streams. It was very popular among young people who like watching other young people fall off logs into streams. There are no logs or streams here but there is method in the puerile manner of my movements. It's the small wheels at the front of a wheelchair which put the user in the most danger on cobbled streets, so if you can stay balanced on your back wheels then you are advised to do so here.

The statue is both smaller than I expected and life-size. Amy must have been smaller than I thought. Everyone looks tall though when you are five foot nothing and spend large parts of your existence sitting down. It's only when a group of girls come by and start having their photographs taken with the statue that I realise that it's probably about the right height. So if that's the case then we can safely assume that it is a realistic width also, meaning that Amy probably never had a square meal in her life. I haven't seen a waist as thin as the one on this statue in my entire life. Do you remember when Sir Bobby Charlton's daughter used to present the weather and Baddiel And Skinner did a sketch about the things people shout at the telly? One of the jokes in the sketch featured the Three Lions-warbling comics shouting at Charlton to eat something because she was so painfully thin. This is the kind of scale we are talking about.

Despite the fact that the Amy statue makes me look fat (I am fat) I have my photograph taken with it also. This is becoming something of a tradition now for me. I've had similar photographs taken with statues of Brian Clough in Nottingham, and with Rocky in Philadelphia. Having updated my phone recently (I had one of those that you have to hold in one hand while the other presses the ear-piece to your ear, popular in episodes of Poirot) I am now able to post my photographs to Facebook. But before I do I have to have the photograph taken again. I had forgotten to put my sunglasses on so my eyes are screwed up in the sun. If you have one of those faces that always looks miserable, like I do, arguably because I am bloody miserable perhaps, but if you do then the only way to make yourself look more ridiculous is to squint. I'm squinting, so I have the photograph taken again, which takes a while because by now a crowd has gathered around the statue, almost as if nobody else had thought about taking a look at it, much less having a photograph taken with it, until I rocked up. On my fucking back wheels like Eddie Fucking Kidd. His wife left him, you know, but that's another blog which I would get too angry about to finish.

From Stables Market it was back on to the train to Stratford and then the tube out to Southwark, where we took in a couple of the local watering holes. One such, The George, had featured on a recently aired programme in which The Hairy Bikers staggered around Britain visiting pubs of note or character. Not bloody Yates, basically. The George was lovely and very popular, with lots of people gathering outside to take advantage of the summer sun before it disappears again until next May. The only problem with The George is that a pint of lager will set you back £5.30, and a half £2.65. If nothing else, that is mathematically logical. But I told you London wasn't cheap. In the next Southwalk pub, the Old King's Head, someone tells me that they hope I have a license for that. Presumably they mean my wheelchair but I'm too dizzy from the witlessness of the remark to be absolutely sure.

I can't really tell you too much about the access in these places because nature doesn't call until we get back to Canary Wharf, specifically at a Wetherspoons just across the road from Tunes Hotel, which is handy. You can always rely on a Wetherspoons to have accessible facilities. Except for the one in Trafalgar Square which we once tried to enter and were presented with the kind of excuse for a ramp which you wouldn't attempt to ascend if you were a contestant on Kick-Start on your big brother's BMX. Less handy is the fact that there is a mouse scurrying around one of the rooms in Wetherspoons. The same Wetherspoons we will be eating breakfast at in the morning. We'll use another room....

One Hull Of A Weekend

Sheffield Wednesday have been crap for years. Which is easy to say for a Liverpool supporter. For people like us reaching (and losing) two major finals represents a disappointing season. Though Liverpool haven't won the title for 26 years and have rarely even threatened to do so, it's still only just over a decade since we last celebrated being champions of Europe. We have one of the most sought after managers in world football and a sense of entitlement that is so heightened that we can afford to leave a £32million striker on the bench and have a good laugh at his ineptitude when he does play.

Sheffield Wednesday know nothing of this. They were relegated from the Premier League in 2000 and haven't been back since. They slipped into League One soon after that and only returned to the Championship when they beat mighty Hartlepool in the play-off final in 2005. I was there that day in Cardiff due to the footballing allegiances of Emma and her family. Since then I've watched them battle it out with the likes of Carlisle United (twice), Blackpool, Tranmere Rovers (now a non league outfit), Bolton Wanderers and Wigan Athletic.

The 2015/16 season has been a vintage one by Wednesday standards, certainly in the time I've been following them since meeting Emma. After years of plodding along in mid table without the prospect of either promotion or relegation they were good enough to secure sixth place and a place in the play-offs. Even then expectations were low that they would overcome a Brighton side which had finished third in the table, especially not over a two-legged semi final. But overcome them they did, booking a place at Wembley for the Championship play-off final where they would face Hull City for a place in the Premier League. It would have been rude not to take the opportunity of a weekend in London for Wednesday's big day.

With a 5.00 kick-off on Saturday afternoon we could have driven down there on the morning of the game but decided to go straight from work on Friday. Previous experience of staying at the hotels near to Wembley Stadium told us that it would be much more cost effective to stay elsewhere and get the tube across to Wembley on the day. That meant battling with the Friday post-work traffic and saw the journey take five hours, but better that than spending Saturday morning parked on the M1 and risking being late. We chose Canary Wharf because we have been there before and knew that we could get around London easily from there.

We were placed on the 13th and top floor of the Brittannia International hotel, which would have been very interesting in the event of a fire. Still, after such a long time on the motorway I wasn't prepared to challenge it. In any case, in all the years I've been travelling around the world, staying in the hotels of varying quality both with Emma and with the basketball team I've only once experienced the spine tingling awfulness of a broken lift. That was in Chester some years ago when I chose to solve the problem by descending two flights of stairs on my backside. These days I'm not sure I can do 13 flights, especially given how dramatically my fitness and all around health has regressed since my time as a pretend athlete. But it was late. I just wanted a beer and something to eat. I was happy to take this risk.

These meanderings serve a purpose other than just logging my travel exploits. Whether anyone reads this or not (and sometimes I think I could use this space to reveal my darkest secrets or confess to a string of murders and nobody would be any the wiser) it acts as a reminder to me of all the interesting experiences I've had, good or bad, on my travels. It allows me to tell the stupid stories I manage to be part of with such regularity. It's also meant to inform others who use wheelchairs about any access issues they may encounter if they find themselves in the places I visit. Well better that than reading reviews on tripadvisor maybe. You don't know the people who post those so how are you going to know whether to trust them? You can have more faith in what I tell you. Even if you are reading this and thinking what a pleb I am. Either way, you have your answer on whether my recommendations hold any sway for you. What I'm saying is that what follows is the practical bit.

If you have an arse that is any wider than mine, or if you have difficulty transferring in and out of your wheelchair then room 1302 of the Brittannia International is not for you. There was just enough room to get my chair in to the bathroom so that I could use the toilet, but closing the door behind me was not an option without vacating my chair. The door swung away in front of the sink on the left hand wall, thus blocking me from using said sink. Leaving my chair outside the bathroom didn't help as it meant that I was sat on the floor so had no chance of reaching the sink. Washing was strictly limited to taking place in or over the bath as was brushing my teeth. How the other half live. You people. You don't know you're born. Thankfully there was more space elsewhere in the room. It not being a disabled room we were spared that all too common indignity of twin beds. You'd be surprised how often this happens. Or maybe you wouldn't. The implication is that the only person your biff arse is sharing a room with is your carer.

The plan for Saturday was to have breakfast late and then get to a pub near Wembley called The Green Man. We'd have a few pints and wait for Emma's mum and dad and their Wednesday-supporting friends to arrive. Before we get there some more advice. Not access-related but if you're having breakfast in Canary Wharf do it at Wetherspoons rather than at All Bar One. The latter's offering is twice the price and half as enjoyable. Also, Wetherspoons are unlikely to have young, attractive bar staff running after you and shouting 'DO YOU WANT TO GO TO THE TOILET?' when they see you heading that way. Acquiring my own radar key hasn't yet taken all of the ignominy away from basic bodily functions, it seems.

It's fully 18 stops between Canary Wharf station and the one at Wembley Park. That sounds like too many to bear but they are quite closely bunched. The entire journey takes around 35 minutes. Wembley Park's platform is not totally accessible but helpfully Canary Wharf's platform has a clearly marked boarding point for anyone using a wheelchair travelling to Wembley Park. The platform is long enough that we had to let one train go because we hadn't quite reached the accessible boarding point, but the regularity of tube trains and the lateness of the kick-off meant that this was never going to be a major problem. Wembley has two tube stations but for access reasons we needed Wembley Park. We did see a couple of Hull City fans get off around Baker Street to get on the Met Line which Emma reckoned might be quicker but isn't accessible.

Everything had gone virtually to plan then until we got off the train at Wembley Park and began trying to find The Green Man. Emma had 'Googlemapped' it so had some idea of where it was. Except she didn't really. We spent the first few minutes going up a steep hill in the wrong direction before realising our mistake and turning the ship around. The journey was supposed to be around 17 minutes and for the first few of those once we'd turned around I was lulled into a false sense of security. It was all downhill and I didn't have to do a thing except slow myself down a little on the slope. And then it flattened out. And then the path started to climb uphill. Not only that, but it was sloped horizontally aswell as vertically. A double whammy that is a killer for most wheelchair users, let alone one whose last athletic endeavour was 10 minutes on a hand cycle four years ago.

Frustratingly, we passed two or three bars on the way but we'd arranged to meet at The Green Man and so had to press on. Those bars looked a bit dingy and empty, but it's surprising how little that mattered to me at the time. Two minutes battling the double slope had given me quite a thirst. They must have been expecting plenty of business at those bars anyway because there were security staff on the door. Helpfully they pointed some other fans in the direction of The Green Man. Unhelpfully their instructions were to carry on down the road we were on. Up the hill, on the path with the sideways slope.

It's a good thing that there were plenty of other fans heading to The Green Man, otherwise we might never have known to take the left turn we took up another ludicrously steep hill. We'd long since given up on Google Maps and besides, neither of us had a hand free to operate a smart phone since we were now both helping out with the pushing. When we reached the top of the ludicrously steep hill we discovered another one where the fans we were following started to head. We were both gassed by then and loudly cursing whoever came up with the idea of meeting at this particular pub. We crossed the road towards the latest (and thankfully last) slope and were asked by the security staff at the bottom of the drive whether we were Sheffield Wednesday fans. Of course I'm not, but after clumbing Kilimanjaro I wasn't going to tell them that. It was only a small lie anyway. I was supporting Sheffield Wednesday that day and I'm certainly not a Hull City fan. Football has now become so uncivilised that they have to allocate entire pubs to one set of fans or the other on occasions like this. This is not what I'm used to as a rugby league fan. When Saints played Wigan on Good Friday I went for a few beers before kick-off at a pub in town called The George. Every single regular in The George is a Saints fan but that didn't stop hundreds of Wiganers from getting in and mixing with us. I was quite happily chatting away to a few of them as we watched the Hull derby on the television. Yet apparently that sort of integration is not possible in football, which is undeniably sad and a bit of an embarrassment to the sport.

The lawn outside The Green Man was already covered with fans when we got there just after midday on what was now an absolute scorcher by British standards. There were no empty seats inside but getting served at the bar was still reasonably easy. We took our drinks back outside and enjoyed some well earned refreshment as the crowd built up. As it did so the accessible entrance became the stuff of myth and legend, doubling as it did as the fastest route to the ladies toilet. From quite early on and for all of the four hours or so we were there the queue was constantly backed up outside the door. Having a wee was going to be a challenge as it would mean battling through the throng of weak-bladdered Yorkshire women. I have enough trouble getting in my own bathroom ahead of one weak-bladdered Yorkshire woman. I was seriously contemplating leaving it until we got inside the stadium but Emma would see to it that I wouldn't be doing that. Probably for the best. I didn't get stage four kidney disease by treating my bladder kindly.

It wasn't long before we got talking to the obligatory chatty bloke. There's always a few people on these occasions who, despite being a total stranger, will chat to you as if they've known you forever when they've had a pint. Truth be told I'm probably one of them. Or at least I was before even I got sick of myself. This one was called Richard, and he hadn't slept for four nights waiting to find out if he'd got tickets for today in the ballot. He mustn't go to very many Wednesday games. We got our tickets based on the fact that we had accrued a small number of points from the few games that we have been to over the last few years. We had to get Roland's friend Norman to pick them up for us but the point is we qualified without the need for entry into a ballot. He seemed confused and slightly miffed when it came up in conversation that we had driven down from Liverpool last night, but Richard was not a grudge holder. He was going to have a good time come what may and he told me several times that I would too.

To that end his was one of the loudest voices joining in with the unofficial Sheffield Wednesday play-off final song. They all knew it word for word and they sang it incessantly. As a consequence I know it word for word. To the tune of Billy Ray Cyrus' Achy Breaky Heart they sing;

'We've got Bannan'
'Barry Bannan'
'I just don't think you understand'
'The wee Scotsman'
'Is better than Zidane'
'We've got Barry Bannan'

There's something pure and wonderful about a set of fans so joyously celebrating something as mediocre as Barry Bannan. It's almost self deprecating, which is something that seems totally absent from fans of the traditional elite clubs. Glory hunting has plunged such depths that I recently read a tweet from one Asia-based fan which expressed disbelief at ending the 2015/16 season as a Leicester City fan before going on to proclaim 'WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS'. The capital letters belong to the person writing the tweet, not to me. The message is clear. That individual was going to support whichever team made off with the Premier League title this season and will probably adopt the same philosophy next season. There is nothing in this world less valuable than his kind of glory and it's something which speaks loudly about the modern Premier League. Yet here we all were waiting to attend a game for which the prize on offer is a place in that very same, soulless cash-fest.

At around 1.30 Emma got a call from Roland. They'd arrived but couldn't get in to the pub because the security people were now employing a strict one-in, one-out policy. We decided to stay firstly because we weren't confident of getting in anywhere else at that stage and secondly because we didn't fancy negotiating more hills in the quest. So Emma went back down the drive to collect our tickets from Norman. I was left making small talk with Richard and his mate Dave (no really) but not for very long. The next person I saw that I recognised was not Emma but Susan, her mum. She wasn't alone either. Roland and Norman were there along with Norman's daughters Lisa and Jenny and Jenny's young son Dylan. Clearly there were enough people leaving the pub to make room for everyone, which was a relief really because the whole point of pushing up those 17 hills was so that we could meet up with everyone.

Inevitably the time came to address the toilet situation. A couple of pints of watered down Fosters will do that to you. Still I was happy to hang on but Emma couldn't. Not wanting to get in the massive queue she made me dodge my way through the weak-bladdered Yorkshire women so that she also could use the disabled toilet facilities. I was pretty put out by this but on reflection I'm a bit more philosophical about it. There aren't many advantages associated with being with a man like me so I suppose you take what perks there are. To be fair the female population of Yorkshire were more patient and accommodating than I'd imagined. Nobody got angry and nobody batted an eyelid when we both went into the disabled toilet together. Sometimes having everyone assume that you can't wipe your own arse can come in handy. It's no less humiliating for all that, mind.

Three o'clock ticked around and so time for Saints to kick-off. They were also playing Hull, specifically Super League leading Hull FC at the KC Stadium. Current form suggested very little chance of a Saints win and when the first Twitter update reported that Luke Walsh had left the field injured and that we were already 6-0 down that chance all but evaporated for me. I was cheered slightly by rumours of Wigan arsehole John Bateman bottling one of his team-mates on a night out, but a loss is a loss even when your rivals are beating each other up. In the end we lost 32-24 with Keiron blaming most of it on the referee. Whatever the reason for it finding out that my team had lost to a team from Hull seemed a pretty bad omen.

The Green Man closed at 4.00. That seems odd in the age of 24-hour drinking but was actually quite handy. It takes the gamble of having just that one more pint before you leave out of the equation. As we made our way back down the hill towards the stadium the fans were still chanting about Barry Bannan (or Gary Balloon in Susan's case) and spirits were still very high. Perhaps Richard was right and we would all have a great day no matter what. As we rolled on down Wembley Way I veered off the road to allow a slow-moving car to pass me. It's progress was being held up by the hordes of fans in the road but that was just giving the man in the back seat time to film the scene on his phone. As he passed me I turned to find that the man poking his head out of the window was former England cricket captain Michael Vaughan. Vaughan is the poster boy for celebrity Wednesday fans now that Roy Hattersley and David Blunkett are yesterday's news so it was no surprise that he was at Wembley, despite having been working for BBC Radio on England's test match with Sri Lanka at Durham. It's a long way from Durham to Wembley, but Roland had been listening to the radio earlier on and heard Vaughan say that he had a helicopter picking him up to take him to the Wednesday game. All of which was all Susan needed to run up to his open car window and ask as to the whereabouts of said helicopter.

On the way up to Block J I bumped into an old basketball team-mate. I knew he'd be here as he's a regular at Wednesday but it still felt strange seeing him in a crowd of 70,000. We were led through a gate and made our way to section 134, coming to rest in our seats at the back of the first tier directly behind the goal where all the Wednesday support was assembled. From that moment, right up until the final whistle those fans were relentless and unfailing in their support. That's all the more remarkable given the low quality of their team's performance and of the game in general. If this were Saints playing this poorly in a game this bad it would be all of five minutes before the bitching and moaning went into overdrive. It goes back to that sense of entitlement again. Wednesday fans just don't have it. They love their team unconditionally. The media talk a lot about the best fans in football being those in Liverpool or Newcastle or Glasgow but this lot are right up there.

The atmosphere dipped only slightly when Mo Diame scored the winner from out of absolutely nowhere with about 20 minutes left. It seemed a decisive blow even then. Wednesday were creating very little in terms of goal threat and the decision by manager Carlos Carvalhal to use the lumbering and useless Adte Nuhiu as a substitute before the gifted Lucas Jiao seemed like an admission of defeat. Over 90 minutes Gary Balloon proved beyond doubt that he was not better than Zidane or even Kilbane, and there were those who couldn't keep up the pretence as the clock ticked down to their timid defeat. One lad sat directly in front of me had spent almost the entire game singing and chanting, hitting me on the head with blue or white balloons (probably Gary's) at regular intervals. But when Diame scored he sat down quietly, resigned to his team's fate and scarcely even able to watch.

Before time was called there was one half-hearted shout for a penalty for handball and one wasted opportunity which the inept Jeremie Helan stroked over the bar, but in truth Wednesday didn't do nearly enough to avoid a painful defeat. Despite their low expectations there was palpable disappointment in the Wednesday end and it was hard not to get a little caught up in that dejection. Particularly if you're a miserable bugger to begin with. This was a whole season's work that had come to nothing and done so without much of a fight. The more philosophical Wednesday fans might reflect that this is a side which isn't quite ready for the big league but in the context of Leicester City winning the thing this year that may no longer ring true. Another year in the Championship could help them develop and come back stronger, but equally there are no guarantees that they'll get this close to promotion again any time soon. Wednesday's loss is probably the Premier League's loss too. I've certainly seen enough of Hull City's yo-yo act over the last few years to believe that they won't add much more to it than another scrapper aiming only for survival.

We said our goodbyes to the others when we met outside the ground. None of them were staying in London for the night so understandably wanted to get away. It was well after 8.00 by the time we got away from the stadium and we were held up further by the police limiting the number of fans getting into Wembley Park station at any one time. We got off the train at Westminster so that we could visit the Red Lion, a small pub around the corner from the Houses Of Parliament. It's a place that oozes character. You sense it's history. You can well imagine many a political strategy or big decision being mulled over here by prominent political figures over the years here. It's unlikely that those politicians were drinking bottles of San Miguel when they considered the country's fate, but there's enough in the décor and the layout to give it the sense of history that is slightly diluted by what they now sell.

Sadly they don't sell it for very long these days. We got there at around 8.35 thinking we'd have time for a couple before heading back to Canary Wharf, but for reasons best known to the management they closed at 9.00. Nine o'clock on a Saturday night! I don't remember this being the case on our last visit but it certainly has made us think again about coming here when we're back in London next weekend for the Bruce Springsteen gig. For now we made our way back to the station, making sure to take a photograph of an illuminated Big Ben looking resplendent in the fading early summer light. Certainly a lot more attractive than a couple of the selfies I had posted earlier in the weekend, one an ingenious in-joke with a friend who's partial to a car selfie, and the other an altogether better affair rescued by Emma's presence.

We finished the night back in Canary Wharf at a bog-standard, tourism-proof Slug & Lettuce. We made plans for next week while I tried not to vomit at the sight of self-adoring football superpower Cristiano Ronaldo scoring the winning penalty for Real Madrid to beat rivals Atletico in a Champions League final shoot-out. Theirs is the highest honour in European club football but it's highly doubtful that it meant as much to them as the day they went to Wembley meant to the insomniac Richard and the rest of the Wednesday faithful.