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I really wish I could tell you that I chose to study in Liverpool for some deeply profound reason, such as a highly specialist academic course or a really accessible university campus. Unfortunately, however, my choice was pretty much based on the fact that a girl I happened to fancy at the time was also intending to come here. Like most other eighteen year olds, I wasn't exactly letting the correct part of my body do the thinking for me.

In those dark, medieval days before the advent of the Disability Discrimination Act, my university of choice seemed to try their very best to put me off the idea of applying there. In order to make me feel especially welcome, I was given a guided tour of the campus, which somehow managed to encompass just about every possible access barrier they could think of. Over the course of an afternoon I was presented with a seemingly endless succession of staircases, steps, heavy doors, narrow doorways and steep ramps. At each and every obstacle, I was asked how I intended to overcome it.

At the time, it just seemed like a bizarre version of The Krypton Factor, but with hindsight I now wonder whether the whole exercise was a sly way of getting an access audit done on the cheap.

However, as my university tour became more and more pessimistic, I responded with optimism and determination. Eventually, they caved in and offered me a place there.

I fully intended to leave Liverpool at the end of my three years, but when the time came I found myself in a quandary. I had two options: one was to go back to living with my parents and lose my independence; the second was to stay on as a postgraduate student and keep my accessible flat at the university.

In the end this turned out to be a no-brainer, as accessible accommodation is incredibly hard to come by. I'm willing to bet, however, that this is possibly one of the strangest reasons anyone's ever come up with for doing a Ph.D.

Liverpool was one of the first local authorities to introduce a direct payments scheme - though recent progress towards individual budgets has been somewhat slower - so the prospect of being able to carry on using personal assistants after my student days were over was enough of a reason to stick around a while longer. I even bought my own flat and started getting into writing and performing comedy through , the city's disability / Deaf arts festival.

However, I was increasingly getting more and more work in London. By 2002, I was all set to move down there for good when I was hit by a bolt from the blue - I fell in love and married a Scouser.

Ever since then I've been constantly trying to persuade my wife to move down south, but she's not having any of it. To me, London is a city chock full of bright lights and opportunities; to her, it's just overcrowded and far too expensive.

Now that we've become parents, another advantage of staying put has been an ever-willing source of free childcare in the shape of my wife's parents! Even I am forced to admit that, at the moment, we'd struggle without them, so I content myself with giving our son the occasional elocution lesson to ensure that he doesn't pick up too much of the local accent - much to my wife's dismay.

A vastly improved train service to the capital has even made it possible for me to have my cake and eat it. If I get up at an incredibly unsociable hour then I can catch the two-hour express train and be in central London ready to start work by a quarter past nine in the morning - a hell of a lot earlier than many commuters can manage. However, this fact is of little consolation at this present moment in time since, ironically, I am currently sat writing this article on a train coming back from London, which is running about two hours behind schedule.

So sixteen years on, I'm still calling Liverpool home. There's a lot to stay here for too, such as the vibrant arts scene, beautiful architecture and surely the biggest lasting legacy of 2008 - a huge new accessible shopping centre. But who knows - maybe next year we'll finally look at moving somewhere else ...