Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

When I got married and moved house five years ago, my old powerchair was too large to store in our new home and had to be consigned to a damp, musty garage where it quickly decayed and became unusable. It has resided in a succession of garages ever since, rusting away under piles of cobwebs; a fitting monument to my former carefree, independent bachelor lifestyle.

Since then I’ve been using a manual chair (that's one you push yourself) and my ability to get out and about has been somewhat curtailed. I’ve either relied on my personal assistant to push me around or propelled myself short distances with my feet. I've even had to limit my shopping to one particular street in my home town of Liverpool, for reasons which will become clear.

The street contains pretty much everything I’d ever want from the whole shopping experience: my bank, a trendy clothes store, a good bookshop, a vegetarian food shop, an arthouse cinema, a sci-fi shop and a pub. But the main draw is that it's on a very steep slope, so I simply get a cab to drop me off at the top of the hill and let gravity do all the hard work over the course of an afternoon, until I reach the handily-positioned taxi rank at the bottom. Which is fine, but no way to live your life.

Once I'd decided that a powerchair was the way forward, the first step was to set about finding the right model for me - one that is small, lightweight and portable. The usual approach would be to arrange a wheelchair assessment. This is where you spend an hour resisting an occupational therapist's attempts to convince you that a cheap, bog standard NHS chair would suit your needs. I haven't a lot of faith in this process, as in the past I have never been assessed by someone who actually uses a wheelchair. This has led to me often ending up with chairs I’m not entirely happy with.

This time I swore that things would be different. I sought advice from the real experts - namely, other disabled people who use powerchairs. After all, if you're considering getting a particular model of car, you don't get assessed for it, you talk to friends with the same one to find out what it's really like. By asking around I was able to learn about reliability, maintenance costs, battery life and a whole load of other practical issues that your average occupational therapist wouldn't have a clue about.

Through doing this I've decided on a product I never even knew existed. It's a conversion which turns my current manual wheelchair into a powerchair with ultra-lightweight batteries.

The next step towards acquiring a chair was finding someone to pay for it. The process of getting an outdoor powerchair in the UK can be a bit of a hassle, unless you have a spare five grand to buy it yourself. You can use the Motability scheme, but this means surrendering all or part of the mobility component of your Disability Living Allowance, which could limit your ability to go places once you have your new powerchair.

Luckily, the government’s Access to Work scheme assessed me as needing the chair for my job and agreed to pay, but only if I could prove that no one else would foot the bill. Some local NHS wheelchair services provide powerchairs or vouchers towards the cost. I ended up spending weeks chasing my local NHS group for written confirmation that they wouldn't give me the chair I needed. I already knew this - it's common knowledge amongst local disabled people - but I still had to go through the rigmarole of getting officially turned down before Access to Work would come up with the cash. Quite frankly, I couldn't give a damn which public service provides the chair, so long as I actually end up with one. But the system is set up in such a way that we are batted back and forth from one service to another until one of them finally takes responsibility.

While I wait for my almost-new powerchair to finally arrive, in my mind I can't help but go through all the restaurants, bars and shops I'll be able to go to again without having to plan in advance for my PA to take me. It looks like I'm going to regain my ability to be spontaneous.

I think my son Tom is looking forward to daddy's new chair arriving as much as I am, although I suspect this is for slightly different reasons. When I tried it out a few weeks ago, it probably looked to him like daddy was getting the largest, most exciting toy he'd ever seen. Ever since then he's literally asked me every day when it's going to arrive. I can see that when it eventually does come I’m going to have to keep it under lock and key.

Regaining my mobility could well prove a double-edged sword however, as from now on, whenever my wife asks me to pop out for a pint of milk or a takeaway I'll no longer have a decent excuse not to go. I suppose this's the price I have to pay for independence.