Actually, that’s not quite right. I don’t owe anyone anything. But I’ve been quiet on here for longer than I intended; I’m aware of it, and I’d like to tell you why. Not because I have a neat narrative to offer (that will be the day), but because this newsletter is where I want to share the honest version of things, not the edited kind.

So. Where to start?

Well, if you’re in the UK and watching ITV, you might catch me doing something I’ve never done before this week. I am in a TV drama called The Twelve: Cape Rock Killer.

The Twelve: Cape Rock Killer is on ITVx now.

The abridged version of this wild and unexpected story is that a casting director came looking for me, convinced me to audition, I auditioned, and then somehow, unexpectedly, I got the role.

I turned up on set in Australia a few months later and acted, which is a sentence I could not have predicted writing in any version of my life plan.

And I’m telling you this news first not because it’s the most important thing that has happened of late (far from it), but because it’s the easiest entry point to something more existential that’s been going on.

Let me explain.

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For the last several months, I’ve been commuting from Edinburgh to London once a week to study painting at the London Fine Arts School. Proper atelier training. It is extraordinary and wonderful in many, many ways, but it has also thrown me into a state of creative crisis so complete that I’ve temporarily lost the ability to say anything about it, which is why I’ve been quiet on here.

What I’ve been learning at LSFA is a particular technique: a method of working in which you begin with a careful monochrome underpainting, building the entire tonal structure of the painting in ‘grisaille’ before a single drop of colour touches the canvas. Then you build translucent layers of colour on top, building luminosity and depth over time.

The process is methodical, slow, almost meditative. The depth you can achieve is unlike anything you get from wet-on-wet painting. It is, technically, beautiful.

Here is my painting I am currently working on:

Unfortunately, though, it has, temporarily, muddled me up. Not because the technique is wrong. It isn’t! It’s the method of the Masters, for crying out loud.

But what I have noticed about learning a new process is that it doesn’t just teach you a new way of making; it momentarily dismantles the way you were already making. It gets into your instincts and starts pulling at the threads.

And when the threads come loose, everything you thought you knew about your own work starts to feel uncertain.

Take the swimmers; a series I’ve been building on and off for years, the work I’m probably most connected to, painted with a directness that felt right: fast decisions, physical marks, the energy of water caught in the moment. There is something in them that feels like mine; even though they aren’t ‘there yet’ in my opinion, they feel satisfying to make.

But now I’m standing in front of a new canvas, trying to apply this slower, layered, structured approach, and it’s not working for me. The swimmers don’t want to be glazed into existence. They seem to want to arrive all at once.

I’ve been trying to force them through a method that might not actually be theirs or mine, and the result is a pile of canvases I don’t want to look at, nor do I want you to look at… and a very specific kind of creative despair to boot.

Am I getting bogged down by the process? Probably. Is the method the problem or the solution? I genuinely don’t know. But I feel confused and stuck. A feeling that is being physically compounded at the moment by the fact I am back on ‘bed rest’ again. So really, literally, stuck.

What I do know, though, is this: I want to make art that connects. That speaks. That takes you into the dark places I have been (and am in), and that shows you what I have found.

And whether that thing is painted in raw umber with a restricted palette following every principle I’ve been taught, or whether it’s scraped onto the canvas with a palette knife at two in the morning because that’s what the image needed, I’m becoming less certain that the method is the point.

Does it matter how I paint it if it’s true? Does the process matter if the thing itself speaks for me?

I’m not being dismissive of craft. Craft matters enormously, and I’m learning it with everything I have. The commute and commitment are a testament, but I’m also aware that at some point, the rules have to become so internalised that they disappear, and what’s left is just the work.

I’m just not there yet, though, guys.

And I’m not good at being in this stage.

These new tricks are not easy for this old dog, and there's an abundance of badly mixed paint colours and scraped-back canvas boards to prove it.

Recently I’ve been watching a seven-year-old learn a new skill and man, the face he makes when he can feel the gap between what he’s trying to do and what his hands are actually producing is one of the most recognisable things I’ve ever seen.

Because I’m making that face. Every day. At forty-something.

Of course, there’s a question that hovers over that child, as it does over me, and anyone attempting to learn something hard: when is the difficulty the point, and when is it a sign you’re pushing against the wrong thing? Where’s the line between this is hard and that’s okay, and this particular method of learning isn’t for you?

I don’t have a clean answer. But I’ve noticed that the question itself is useful, because it forces honesty. It makes you ask what’s actually driving the resistance: the natural friction of real learning, or something more fundamental and insightful?

In my own case, I think it’s both.

And I think I’m deep in the ugly middle of things, and the ugly middle of it all, it turns out, looks and feels a lot like failure from the inside.

Jesh, I tell you, every painting that doesn’t work feels like a referendum on whether I should be doing this at all!

Every session where the values collapse lands somewhere near a loud internal voice that says: you are wasting time you can’t afford to waste.

And these voices are worth examining, I think, because it’s not really about the painting, now is it?

Thinking, here, now, about it, I know this much to be true: I’ve built a career on productivity. Ergh, this word kills me.

But it’s true. For two decades, my worth was legible: the TV programmes, the campaigns, the column inches, the speaking engagements, the followers, the impact. I had an output. I could point at it.

I was not a person who sat around failing at things. No, sir, not me.

That version of myself was, I now understand, also a version I’d constructed out of necessity. You prove you can do things because someone, somewhere, needs to know a wheelchair user can do things. You fill every available space because empty space gets read as inability. You outproduce the judgement. You outproduce the doubt.

But now I’m in a period where I’m regularly, deliberately incompetent at something, and after twenty years of professionalism, that feels like a strange and slightly unhinged way to spend my time.

And on top of that, fucking Instagram keeps serving me feeds full of artists who appear to have it all worked out: selling out shows, painting for ten hours a day, fluent and certain in their vision. I know, intellectually, that nobody posts their worst paintings. I know the feed is not the whole truth. But fluency is deeply seductive yet threatening when you’re sitting here without words.

So I’m just over here, trying to replace the loud, productivity-obsessed voice with a softer one. A kinder one. One who understands that this sticky, messy, painful period is not the obstacle to making good work. It is probably the making of it. And in so doing, hopefully finally finding my artist voice too. My style, my language.

It seems clear I cannot get to the other side of this without going through it, and that going through it is not time wasted. It is, in fact, the only time that matters.

Some days I believe that. Some days, reader, I paint something that suggests I might actually be getting somewhere, and the relief is so enormous and so ridiculous in equal measure, I can barely contain the feeling.

But some days I don’t.

And I have a little welp and…try again.

Anyway, there is no resolution here. I told you at the start I didn’t have a neat narrative to offer, and I meant it.

What I have is the ongoing messes, the fear, the doubt, the not-knowing. The sense that I am in the middle of something I can’t see the edges of yet, and that the only way to find out what it is is to keep making. Keep failing. Keep asking the question. Keep sitting with the terrible, necessary discomfort of not yet being the artist I want to be, while making the work anyway.

After all, my life does somewhat depend on it, but this is a statement for another article.

So, anyway, hello again! This is where I am! Not arrived. Not resolved.

Somewhere in the middle.

And in the meantime, you can catch me on ITVx, building flat pack furniture and screaming at my screen partner with such conviction you might be able to tell I'm not exactly acting…!

Onwards.

Sx

The Art of Sitting Still publishes sporadically. If this resonated with you, please share it, that’s how it finds the people it’s meant to find. And if you’re not subscribed yet, it would mean a lot to have you here.

But then I noticed something.

An area of skin, a scar site that has troubled me, on and off, for twenty years, had become inflamed overnight. The early signs of a pressure sore.

So instead of jumping in my car and driving myself to the airport, I lay in bed and wrote this email.

I can not tell you how many versions of this email I have written over the years. To PR’s, to editors, to producers, to friends….I’m so sorry, I write, trying to explain this complex reality. The words are always slightly different, but the shape of them is always the same: composed on the outside, devastated underneath. I click send, and the panic subsides, then the sinking reality of bed rest begins.

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Now let me say something clearly. The act of bed rest is a lie. It is not, I repeat NOT, restful. Bed rest is immobility dressed up in clinical language, as though giving it a gentle name might make it bearable. And reader, it doesn’t. There is nothing gentle about lying prone, watching the world go on without you. Is this going to last a day? A few days? A week? Longer? Your paralysed body refusing to give you any answers. It’s exhausting in ways no word can encompass.

I have been here before. Many times.

But the first time, that was the time that changed everything. And I want to tell you about it.

As all great tales do, it began in a pub.

It was 2004, and I was at Art School in south-east London, studying fine art, twenty years old and determinedly trying to fit in. One Sunday afternoon, I pushed myself to the local pub to find the gang of students I most wanted to be part of. They hadn’t invited me along, but I hoped that if they saw me there, relaxed, joining in, just another student in a pub, they might see me, and not my wheelchair, which in all honesty, they all seemed to struggle to look past.

The pub itself, however, had other ideas. There were steps to get in and narrow gaps between tables, so narrow that when I finally clattered my way through the pub doors to make my way to the table of painters at the back, I wanted to befriend, the entire room stopped to stare.

Skin yet thickened by these types of experiences (I had only been in a chair a year at this point), I was embarrassed by the time I made it to the group, but steadfast to execute my wee plan, I transferred out of my chair onto the pub bench.

*dramatic pause as I immediately went into a violent spasm that shook the whole table.

I laughed and kept smiling, trying to distract everyone around me from the fact that something must be very wrong in my body for it to react like that.

What I didn’t know, until much later, was that what had caused the spasm was a large wooden splinter from that bench that had punctured the skin on my bum. By the time I found it, it had turned into an abscess. I was taken into surgery and when I woke up, face down on a hospital pillow, a nurse told me not to move. I had to ‘stay off it’. Which, in real terms, meant no sitting. No pressure on the wound. No wheelchair.

But for how long? I asked naively.

The doctor wouldn’t say. The nurse wouldn’t look me in the eye.

And just like that, my life shifted on its axis.

I was returned to my parents' home for indefinite bed rest. The district nurses arrived every morning with the punctuality of prison guards, under the watchful eye of my mum, who sat at the end of my bed with a coffee she wasn’t really drinking, watching them dress the wound. Days turned to weeks. Weeks turned to months. The metal rods in my spine ached from lying prone all day. But healing wasn’t happening correctly; the wound kept breaking down. Six months in, I was told it needed to be reopened, and we’d have to start again.

Six months became a year. A year became two. I turned twenty-one on my stomach. I deferred my degree. I taught myself to knit, presuming I’d be done by the time I’d finished a scarf. I wasn’t. I knitted another.

I didn’t want to admit to the word depression, but I knew I was as close to it as I had ever been.

Then one day, someone came to my rescue.

She arrived in the form of a postcard, sent from a friend in Mexico with a note: She reminds me of you. It showed a black-and-white photograph of a young woman with a bold monobrow, sitting in a wheelchair in front of a blank canvas, a cigarette in one hand, rings on every finger. Fierce. Unapologetic. Refusing to be pitied. It was Frida Kahlo.

I asked my mum to find me a book about her and what I read stopped me cold; Frida had been in a bus accident at eighteen years old and, like me, her spine had been damaged. As a result, she spent months at a time in bed, and during those impossible months, she turned to painting.

Her story was so similar to mine that it felt almost designed. Her pain felt visceral to me. One painting in particular, The Broken Column, seemed lifted from my own imagination!

So I started painting my own version. I asked my dad to move my bed and position a canvas underneath me. Lying on my stomach, arms hanging down, I copied Frida. Topless, strapped in a corset, my body torn open to reveal a (spinal) column that was cracked and crumbling. I painted the nails, piercing my skin, repositioned in the places where I could still feel. I painted my broken face looking strong. I didn’t paint tears. Frida’s version shows her crying. Mine doesn’t. I was tired of crying.

When the painting was finished, I leaned it against the wall to watch over me, and then I started a new canvas…which I splashed with blue.

The only thing I wanted to paint next was the fantasy I had been running on repeat in my mind for months: myself, swimming. A body moving freely through water. A body without restriction. A body that felt like mine. I spent the final year of bed rest painting. After three years, I was finally free.

That was twenty years ago. I have been painting swimmers ever since.

The series has evolved over the years, gradually at first, in the background of a very full life, and now very much in the foreground again. In all of the variants, the figures move through water that shifts from deep blue-grey to luminous turquoise. They float, dive, reach. They exist in a state of suspension that I know, from the inside, is the closest thing to freedom my body has ever found.

Water is the only place paralysis doesn’t win. The physical rules that govern my life on land, the chair, the transfers, the careful management of a body I cannot fully feel, none of them apply. I float. I move. I am, briefly, just a person in water. In the water, I am weightless.

That’s what I am trying to capture. Not just the technique, though God knows the technique is always giving me trouble, the colours I use, the visual language I adopt, the exact quality of light through water, I am still trying to get just right, but the sensation is what matters most. I want you to look at those paintings and understand what it feels like to be paralysed and free. I want you to feel the release of it. That’s what I’m chasing.

That’s why I’m flying to London every week to learn portraiture, because I need better tools to translate what I feel into something that makes other people feel it too.

Or at least, that’s what I was doing. Before this morning.

So, yes, I have been on bed rest multiple times in the twenty years since that first three-year stretch. A week here. Six months there. The scar is a sensitive area in a very difficult place to manage, given that I have no feeling or sensation there, so I can’t tell when something’s wrong until it’s already gone wrong. A knock, a bang, a scratch that turns bad.

Each time it happens, it interrupts something different, and that’s what determines how it feels. What I miss out on will vary, from huge and important jobs to birthday parties, nights out or holidays; it really depends on the timing, of course. But it’s never good.

This time, it’s the first day of school, which I have been looking forward to not just for weeks but, on some level, for years.

And no, unfortunately, it doesn’t get easier. I want to be clear about that. People sometimes imply that I must get used to these things, that repeated experience somehow softens the blow. But it doesn’t. You just get better at adapting to the rhythm. I know now how to build structure into formlessness, how to keep myself busy, how to manage the fallout, how to send the right emails, how to console my friends and family (who know just how detrimental this is for me and my physical and mental health), and how to survive the hours, but the loss itself is still a loss. Every time.

And you never know, at the start, what this particular round will cost you.

But I also know that when one thing contracts, something else expands and that when each stint of bed rest stops me in my tracks, as I found through art, a redirection happens.

Now, please believe me when I say that we are not obligated to find gifts in our suffering; that’s a story that puts the burden back on the person who is already being crushed. And a narrative that the disabled community do not need to hear any more about. But here’s what I’ve learned, over twenty years and multiple rounds of this type of setback: when my body forces me to stop, my creativity expands.

It happened the first time, on my stomach for years, in my childhood bedroom with a canvas half under the bed, finding Frida and painting myself back into existence, and it has happened in every stint since.

When we are most physically limited, something in us grows. Our resilience deepens. Our understanding of what we want to say, and why it matters, sharpens.

And if I am honest, lying here today, in this position that is very far from where I want to be, there is one thing I’m grateful for: the way this type of limitation forces me to become bigger on the inside. I’m not sure yet what that will mean this time around.

But I know it’s coming.

So I’m going to lie here. I’m going to let the hours do what they do. I’m going to try to paint, knowing that, at the very least, I'm going to have something refreshed to say when I am finally able to get back out into the world again.

And maybe I will finally find the feeling I am searching for in my paintings.

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It’s called ‘What the Water Gave Me’, a deliberate nod to Frida Kahlo, my favourite painter, who used the same title for one of her most intimate works.

In hers, she stares through the still surface of her bathwater at her own feet and sees fragments of her trauma reflected back. Her legs, impaired by polio, sit beneath the surface, and the water holds a mirror to everything she cannot outrun. It is a painting about looking inward and sitting with what your body holds. It’s beautiful and surreal, like all her work.

And mine?

This is what I see in mine…

A figure, emerging from a shadow, whether that’s her past, her trauma, her former self, or simply the pull of the depths, I don’t think it matters. What matters is that the shadow is dark and solid, and her legs, still, unmoving, slightly distorted by the water, are part of it. She can’t escape her shadow. She’s rooted in it, connected to it. As she is the water itself.

Her upper body is moving; her arms are wide open.

She is neither drowning nor fully emerged. She is suspended in the exact moment between one state and another, held in that silent space that water gives you. Calm. Not trying to be anywhere else. In her own world, in her own body, completely unbothered by who’s watching.

She could be me. She could be anyone.

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And before I continue, a quick word on what water actually gives someone with a body like mine, and I imagine, someone like Frida. Because it gives us something most people will probably not appreciate.

In water, my paralysed body moves completely freely. Not because my nervous system has decided to cooperate obviously, but because buoyancy does what my spinal cord won't…it lifts me, it equalises, it removes the force that makes my paralysis most apparent, gravity, and lets me float, painless and weightless.

When in water, the gap between the body I have and the body I used to have, the type world was designed for, narrows to almost nothing. Water is the only place I have ever felt my body be, for want of a better word, free.

While I'm in it, there is a suspension of effort, of adaptation, of the constant low-level negotiation that disability requires, that I cannot find anywhere else. That is what water gives us. Perhaps that is why Kahlo painted it. And it certainly is why I did too.

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Now, I know the painting needs work; it's no masterpiece, it's just the start of a journey of artistic exploration. I plan to keep pushing, learning and expanding the work as far as it will take me, but let me talk through the process as it stands, as I feel it’s important.

The whole painting came from just three colours: ultramarine blue, burnt sienna, and titanium white. Everything, the water, her skin, the shadow underneath her, is just those three pigments, in different ratios.

As delighted as I am to have found a palette that works for me, I have to confess it was not solely a sophisticated artistic decision; it was more of a coping strategy.

I have found that if I give my brain (ADHD, dyslexic, intimately familiar with analysis paralysis) a full palette of colours, I will spend hours sitting in front of it doing absolutely nothing, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of options. I will debate. I will second-guess. I will convince myself that the answer is in a colour I haven’t tried yet and ultimately, I will achieve nothing.

Limited my palette, however, and suddenly I can get moving.

This process forces me to learn what those three colours actually do, how they behave in contrast to one another, how they interact, and what they can and cannot be. The limitation removes the noise and leaves the thing itself. Less choice, more clarity.

Constraint as a creative force.

Now, this is a theme I’ve been exposed to a lot in my life: limitations. And I have noticed that, as hard as they are to contend with, the more adaptable you become to accepting some limitations, the more creative you can be. As a result, in my experience, disabled people are some of the most creative people alive because we have no choice but to live within certain limitations.

I want to be careful how I say this, because I am not talking about the sanitised, inspo-porn version of this concept, nor am I talking about overcoming. I am not interested in the narrative where limitation becomes a gift, where adversity builds character, where we should all be grateful for our obstacles because look at the resilience they produced. Bollocks. That smells like ableism to me.

What I am talking about is something more pragmatic.

I am talking about the specific, unglamorous, relentless creativity that is required to exist in a world that was not built for you, does not think about you, and treats your presence as either an inspiration or an inconvenience, rarely just a fact. I am talking about the cognitive load of perpetually solving for problems, aka limits, that shouldn’t exist in the first place. The rerouting. The workarounds. The split-second adaptations that disabled people make constantly, invisibly, just to survive.

Non-disabled people do not develop this muscle because they don’t have to.

It is not a virtue; it is a necessity. We simply don’t have the privilege of choice. But what it generates, what it inspires, whether or not we name it as such, is a form of creative intelligence, creative resistance, that is genuinely extraordinary and almost never acknowledged as such.

Twenty years in a wheelchair will teach you things about constraint that you cannot learn any other way. The main one being this: constraint is not always the opposite of freedom. Limitation does not always mean less. What it actually does, if you stop fighting it and start working with it, is force you to understand your specific context so deeply that you find room inside it that other people (people with more options, more space, more access) never bother to find, because they don’t have to.

I feel this concept comes to life, personified, in a limited palette. Powerful yet paradoxical, sure, is that in this limiting, through choice and design, I have both restricted and liberated myself. Who knew!

Oh, and talking of restrictions, limits and choices, next week I start studying portrait painting at the London Fine Arts School. For those of you who have been following this journey and read my last substack:

….you will understand the significance of this move. I have been looking for a school to learn in but have consistently been restricted by a lack of access to any of the schools locally. So I am over the moon, but the truth is, to do this, I will be commuting to London from….Edinburgh.

One day a week….I know. Eek.

But London Fine Arts is, as far as I can establish, one of the only representational art schools in this country with any form of wheelchair accessibility. Trust me, I have looked. The art schools I actually want to attend, as they didn’t depend on me spending hundreds of pounds on flights, risking my body and my chair every time I fly, and leaving my home when I would rather not, the ones teaching classical, rigorous, figurative painting, are almost universally inaccessible.

So the constraint here is not a preference, the choice isn’t between the ideal and the compromise; it’s between the possible and the impossible.

But where there is a will, there is a way, and within the limitations of choice, I am thrilled to have found a way forward.

Although flying to London once a week is not cheap. I’m a freelance travel journalist and part-time TV presenter, which means I believe in what I do and I budget accordingly, but the maths of this particular ambition requires things to go reasonably well on several fronts simultaneously.

It’s a leap of faith I have to take…which is where last week comes in.

Last week, I posted a photo of the aforementioned painting on social media and the response was, I’m going to be honest, not what I expected. People were saying things like, they saw themselves in it; they were describing their own liminal moments, their own shadows, their own suspensions between one state and another. They were finding something in it that I had put there without knowing anyone else would find it, and that is - and I don’t have a less dramatic way to say this - everything. That is the entire point of making anything.

And then, to top it off… people asked if they could buy it. Real people with specific, serious expressions of interest.

Accordingly, I have spent the past week in a state of low-level giddy disbelief and underneath that: the very loud, very familiar voice of imposter syndrome, pointing out that I am still a student, still making beginner mistakes, still figuring out what I’m doing, and therefore the idea of putting a price on any of this is frankly absurd.

But I have never, in my entire working life, had the luxury of waiting until I felt ready, because ready for me has always been a moving target that retreats the moment you approach it. I have always had to go before I felt certain. Act then think! That has been, in various ways, the story of my life.

All that being said, therefore, as extraordinary as this sounds, the prints are in the works!

If you want to be first to know when they’re available, drop me a message.

So yes, my life, like my palette, is limited; it always will be.

Accessible art schools are few and far between, the commute will be absurd and fraught with risk, and the financial arithmetic requires a level of optimism I am not typically blessed with.

But within that limitation, and I mean this without a trace of the sentiment I normally want to escort firmly off the premises, I have never felt more expansive. Like the figure in the water, I am at peace, ready soon to surface!

And now….onto the next.

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For the past few years, I’ve been reviewing spaces and places for national and international publications and have been lucky enough to build an award-winning career in accessible travel journalism.

“Access All Areas” is my new personal blog that will sit beside and behind my travel writing, where I will review everywhere I visit, for work or simply for fun, with a lens on what it’s actually like for wheelchair users and disabled travellers.

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Property Review: The Westin London City.

Newly built on the banks of the Thames in London, positioned between St. Paul’s Cathedral and Shakespeare’s Globe, The Westin London City is functional, well-located, and accessible in the ways that matter.

With good transport links, proximity to the South Bank, and welcoming staff its’s ideal for various traveller-types, plus it’s positioned beside a barrier-free running route for disabled runners at a moment when the London marathon season is underway.

Getting Here

In my experience, the Thames Path on the North and South Bank is actually one of London’s most accessible areas, as it was surprisingly built with access in mind, which is rare in London. So The Westin’s position, accessible from both the street-level entrance on Upper Thames Street and directly from the riverside walkway, extends that accessibility perfectly, meaning you have options for how you can arrive.

Personally, I arrived from Blackfriars station (from Gatwick airport), which is step-free from the street to train. I had my batec attached, so I simply headed west along the Thames path towards the hotel ‘on foot’. Blackfriars is reliably accessible for wheelchair users (it’s one of only 69 fully step-free stations on the entire London Underground, so note that). The hotel is easily reachable from there, about a ten-minute Batec journey along the river.

The hotel website lists Mansion House as the closest tube station (a five-minute walk). What they don’t mention, however, is that - at the time of writing - Mansion House is not wheelchair accessible. It’s all stairs. So if you’re arriving by tube, Blackfriars is your best option on this stretch of the line. It’s further, but at least it works.

The ground-floor lobby overlooks the river. It’s functional, not elaborate, but it does what a lobby should: orients you before you head to check-in on the fourth floor (lift accessed). There’s quiet seating, decent coffee, time to breathe before navigating further into the building.

For those arriving by car, you’ll be directed to the nearby NCP Thames Vintry (about a 10-minute walk). Standard London situation.

The Room

They have accessible rooms marketed as “Classic” rooms, technically distinguished from the Signature King only by their accessible features.

The design language of the room - and the whole building - is a calm, neutral palette, natural materials, designed to echo the flow of the river. It’s perfectly functional and the bed is adjustable, and incredibly comfortable.

The bathroom features roll-in showers, adjustable grab rails, and wheelchair-height toilets. Whether that translates to your body and your needs is something you need to verify directly with them. They seem very receptive to detailed conversations about access, which is honestly half the battle.

The Spa

The Heavenly Spa by Westin takes up significant space in the hotel. There’s a 12-metre heated indoor pool (with a hoist), a vitality pool, five treatment rooms, a sauna, a steam room, and what they call a sensory shower.

Yes, you read that correctly, the pool has a hoist!

Which matters if you, like me, want to swim but can't transfer in and out of the water independently, you are covered. Which also means you can access their sound bath events which happen throughout the year.

Spa is open 8am–8pm.

Pool hours: 8am–8pm general; children’s times 10:30am–4:30pm.

Book treatments in advance (it’s in high demand).

Contact heavenlyspa@westinlondon.com or +44 20-3146-2691 for specific accessibility details on treatments.

Getting Around the Hotel

The fitness studio is open 24 hours. It’s included in your stay. Peloton bikes, Technogym equipment, free weights, cardio, recovery station. Standard gym stuff, accessible.

Two restaurants: Mosaic (all-day dining, “Eat Well” menu available) and Hithe + Seek (third-floor wine bar with Thames views). Both accessible and really lovely with GREAT views of the Thames.

The Accessible Running Route

This April, The Westin is unveiling a new accessible running route, designed specifically for wheelchair users and parents with buggies to participate in running culture in London.

Running routes aren’t typically designed with wheelchair accessibility in mind so this is really exciting. Charlie Watson, the hotel’s running ambassador and an NHS dietitian who’s completed 16 marathons, designed the route.

If you want to join:

Global Running Day: Thursday 4 June

• Meet at the hotel 6:00pm, run starts 6:30pm

• Evening 5km run through London landmarks

• Led by Charlie Watson

• Post-run: drinks, refreshments, and Hyperice recovery treatments

• Around 100 runners expected

• Free to join

• Book here

Marathon Weekend (April)

The hotel sits directly on the London Marathon route and they’re hosting an inaugural accessible ‘Shakeout Run’ for those preparing for the big event. There will be personalised carb-load boxes and pre-race nutrition advice from Charlie Watson.

On race day itself, the hotel opens to supporters and spectators with a poster-making station, interactive window art, photo booth, complimentary yoga sessions, and access to the spa and pool as a post-race reward.

What This Hotel Gets Right

It’s a new building designed with accessibility from the outset, so there are no retrofitted compromises. The spa having a hoist is fantastic.

Location is off the charts, given you can roll out either for a run or a drink, pick your poison….

Who This Is For

• Disabled business travellers who want to work in a hotel where they don’t have to negotiate access.

• Disabled runners who want to participate in running culture in London.

• Anyone staying in London for more than a night who wants access to a decent spa without the constant problem-solving.

• Disabled people who want to experience London (specifically the South Bank and City areas) without spending hours working out how to get around.

• People travelling with disabled family members who want luxury without having to call ahead for every small thing.

• People attending the marathon

The Practical Bits

The Westin London City 60 Upper Thames Street, London EC4V 3AD

Phone: +44 20-3146-2690 Accessibility inquiries: +44 20-3146-2690 Spa booking: heavenlyspa@westinlondon.com / +44 20-3146-2691 Web: marriott.com/lonwi

Check-in: 3pm / Check-out: 11am

Nearest stations: Mansion House (5 min), Cannon Street (5 min), Blackfriars (8 min) Nearest airport: London City (7.9km), Heathrow (17.4km)

Parking: Limited on-site by request (£65/day). Off-site: NCP Thames Vintry (10-minute walk)

Accessible features:

• Multiple accessible entrances

• Step-free access throughout

• Accessible rooms (about 10% of inventory, as required by law)

• Pool hoist

• Accessible spa treatment rooms

• Wide corridors

• Roll-in showers, grab rails, wheelchair-height toilets

• Visual and audible fire alarms

• Vibrating pillow alert devices on request

• Comprehensive PEEPs

• 24-hour fitness studio

• All restaurants and bars accessible

What to ask when booking: Specific bathroom layout, bed height, shower configuration, and any particular access needs you have. They’ll listen.

This is my first property review for Access All Areas. If you’re a disabled traveller with experience at a hotel worth writing about—good, bad, or complicated—get in touch. I’m interested in the places that actually work, the places that try and miss, and the places that don’t try at all. The Access All Areas series is built on lived experience.

Share this if you know disabled runners in London. Subscribe if you want the next instalment.

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I had that buzzy, fizzing kind of excitement where you’ve already planned what you’re wearing and you’ve got a new playlist on in the kitchen, because your mates are booking planes and trains from all over the country, because everyone’s coming, and it’s going to be one of those weekends.

My partner and I were going to rave together for the first time, at a venue in Edinburgh called The Liquid Room, to music I love, surrounded by people I love. A completely ordinary, unremarkable, joyful thing that millions of people do every weekend without giving it a moment’s thought.

So, yeah, I admit, I got all excited. Well, I should have fucking known better…as a wheelchair user of over two decades now, I really should have fucking known better.

I’ve just returned to the UK after three years in the US, determined to finally do the thing I’d wanted to do for twenty years: learn to paint properly. I’m settling into my new life with some degree of success, but here’s the thing about stepping back from advocacy: apparently, you let your guard down, and you actually believe things might be changing.

So yes, I got excited about that nightclub, because for a moment, I forgot what it costs to exist in this world as someone like me.

Now, out of caution, I called the venue to check if they had a disabled toilet and when I made that call, I discovered there wasn’t just no disabled toilet…there was no wheelchair access whatsoever.

When I asked whether my partner and friends could simply carry me in, I received a voicemail from them, all very matter-of-fact, to say, no, my people can’t carry me down the stairs because it’s ‘a health and safety risk’. They’re not insured for it (aka. people like me) and, most importantly, ‘it’s a fire safety risk’.

And then, casual as you like, they signed off: “Have a good day.”

Have a good day.

As though she hadn’t just told me I was a liability.

So there you have it. I called to ask about a toilet, only to be told my presence in the building is a liability. Not in those words, of course. It was all very polite, all very matter-of-fact, well-meaning. There was no apology, no alternative offered, no refund, and no attempt to find a way to make it work.

Simply: you can’t come. Then: have a good day.

This, if you didn’t recognise it at first, is exactly what disability discrimination sounds like when it has been so thoroughly normalised that the person doing it doesn’t even recognise it as discrimination. So normalised it almost sounds polite.

And then, to add insult to injury, this was not the only door closed on me this week.

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Since returning to the UK, in my pursuit of being a painter, I’ve contacted every art school within two hours of where I now live. Every single one, without exception, has told me I can’t come because they’re inaccessible.

There’s one school in London (I now live near Edinburgh) that could work, technically, but the class I want is only offered upstairs. There’s an actual lift (a rarity) that goes to the right floor but the rules say the lift is for things, not for people, and despite how I’m being treated at the moment, I am, regrettably, a human being.

So in the span of days, I got two identical versions of the same message: you don’t fit, you’re the problem.

And, by the way, have a good day.

I should have found this funny, I suppose, but instead, I found myself thinking: I just came back to this country to finally do something for myself. I stepped away from a few decades of fighting for rights, from advocacy burnout, from being the voice for everyone except myself and the second I try to exist in a space that isn’t a stage for my activism (a nightclub, a classroom), the world shuts the door.

So yes reader, it may well be 2026, we may have robots and ai and whatever else the world has created to help us be more efficient or productive, and our reality somewhat augmented, but if you use a wheelchair, it turns out you can’t get the education you want, you can’t have the social life you want, and to make matters even worse, if you dare attempt to fly anywhere, let’s say, to take your mind off any of it, according to the devastating news that broke last week, there’s a high fucking chance that the airline would not just break your wheelchair, or injure you during boarding.

It could, in fact, kill you.

And no, I am not speaking in hyperbole.

Let me explain what just happened.

On 28 March 2024, Hunter Adkins, a twenty-four-year-old man with muscular dystrophy, arrived at Huntington Tri-State Airport in West Virginia with his father, Tony, and his nine-year-old brother, Kaden, to board an Allegiant Air flight. Hunter was a power wheelchair user, and it’s important to note that his condition meant he had limited to no ability to brace himself, catch himself, or protect himself should he fall.

The airline knew this, after all, federal regulations in the USA required them to know it. Those same regulations also required two things: first, that Hunter be transferred into a narrow “aisle wheelchair” fitted with safety straps designed specifically to move passengers safely in and out of aircraft. Second, that he be assisted by at least two trained crew members. This is standard practice, by the way. This is not unusual for disabled folk.

And yet, neither happened.

According to the lawsuit filed by Hunter’s family, the aircraft’s captain ordered staff to rush the boarding process so the plane could take off within twenty minutes. In that rush, the assistants who were supposed to help Hunter were reassigned to load luggage. Because we all know, luggage is far more important than people.

With just one attendant left, Hunter was placed in a wheelchair without safety straps and pushed up the boarding ramp. Not pulled, which is standard procedure when moving a wheelchair user up an incline. When the chair hit the transition plate that spans the gap between the ramp and the aircraft, it tipped.

Hunter was thrown face-first onto the ground and because of his condition, he could not break his fall. The wheelchair and the attendant crashed down on top of him. His father watched. According to what I have read, his nine-year-old brother watched too. His father and other bystanders had to pick him up off the floor.

According to the lawsuit, crew members standing at the aircraft door did nothing to intervene.

Hunter was taken to the hospital. Fifteen hours later, he died. His death certificate listed the cause as ‘multiple blunt force injuries’.

He was twenty-four years old.

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Now, you might be asking, how the fuck did this happen?

Well, it happened for a number of reasons.

First, I want to stress one point that many people don't realise: a key aspect of air travel for wheelchair users, which explains everything.

This happened after Hunter was removed from his own wheelchair and placed into one totally unfit for human use.

You see, flying is the only form of transport where wheelchair users are forced to surrender our wheelchairs. On a bus, we can stay in our chairs. In a taxi, we can stay in our chairs. On a train, we can stay in our chairs. But on a plane, we have to hand over our chairs, aka. our independence, at the aircraft door and hope it comes back in one piece. Meanwhile, we are manhandled into narrow-aisle chairs, transferred by strangers who may or may not have been properly trained, and deposited into airline seats that were never designed with us in mind.

So that’s one reason why this happened.

Had Hunter been travelling in his chair, he would still be here today. And before you tell me it’s not possible to get a wheelchair on a plane, let me stop you. Because it is.

Chris Wood MBE, founder of Flying Disabled and co-founder of my campaign group, Rights on Flights, father to two power wheelchair users, has spent nearly a decade building that solution. His consortium, Air4All, in partnership with Delta Flight Products, design firm PriestmanGoode, SWS Certification, and wheelchair manufacturer Sunrise Medical, has created a revolutionary aircraft seating system that allows wheelchair users to remain in their own chairs during flight. Should they choose to…

The design is elegant in its simplicity; the front-row seats fold away, and a locking system secures the wheelchair to the aircraft floor. No loss of passenger capacity, no radical redesign of the fuselage; instead, a seat that converts, when needed, into a wheelchair space (for both business class and economy). It exists, it has been prototyped, and it has even been demonstrated at international aviation expos.

As far as I know, Delta Flight Products submitted applications for technical certification in 2024.

So the reason wheelchair users cannot fly in their chairs is not that it is technically impossible; it is that it has never been commercially prioritised. The technology exists, the engineering is sound, what is missing therefore, is the will. And, critically, the legal obligation.

If Hunter Adkins had been able to remain in his own wheelchair, secured by a system like Air4All, he would not have needed to be transferred by an untrained, solitary attendant into a strapless chair. He would not have been pushed up a ramp in a contraption that was not fit for purpose. He would not have fallen. He would not have died. The time to make space on board is now.

Watch my documentary Fight to Fly here.

Which brings me to the deeper reason all of this keeps happening. Not just to Hunter. To all of us.

It is people’s attitudes.

It is the same attitude I got from the club. The same attitude I got from the art schools. The same attitude that keeps disabled people out of work, out of education, out of daily life, out of politics, out of everything. It is not our disabilities that are at fault. It is the systems around us.

Systems designed by people who never considered us, maintained by people who do not care to, and defended by people who treat their own indifference as common sense. Systems maintained by people who have no idea just how harmful they are.

People who turn you away as though you are the problem, then wish you a good day.

The same thread connects The Liquid Room to the Huntington Tri-State Airport. It is the ableism that runs so deep it has become invisible to us all: the assumption that disabled people are not people but problems. We are the risk. We are the complication. We are the thing that doesn’t fit. And the world around us is treated as fixed, immovable, the status quo.

You are not welcome here, says the venue. You have to adapt to us, says the school. We won’t change, says the airline. This is your problem, not ours.

A “heartbreaking situation.”

Deepest sympathies.

Have a good day.

The same tone. The same message. Just escalating consequences.

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So, for the millionth time in my disabled life, I want to say this, and I want you to hear it, whether you are disabled or not.

You will, in all likelihood, become disabled at some point in your life. This is not pessimism, nor is it a threat; it is statistics. Disability is not something that just happens to other people. It is something that happens to all people. To your parents. Your partners. Your children. To you.

And when it does, that nightclub you walk into without thinking, that art class you sign up for on a whim, that flight you book without a second thought? All of it could become inaccessible, or indeed, fucking fatal, to you overnight, too.

And when it does, you will discover what I discovered a long time ago: that the world was not built for you, and nobody with the power to change it considers that relevant, nor indeed, urgent.

What happened to Hunter Adkins should outrage everyone. A young man died trying to board a plane, not in some freak accident, not because of turbulence or mechanical failure or an act of God, but because an airline rushed its boarding process, reassigned its safety staff to handle luggage, and ignored its own federally mandated protocols.

It should be on front pages…it should be leading news bulletins.

But it won’t cause outrage, because it happened to a disabled person, and disabled people’s suffering has been normalised to the point where a death during boarding is treated as a sad but isolated incident rather than what it actually is: the inevitable, foreseeable consequence of a system that has decided we do not matter and never will.

And in truth, I don’t know how to end this.

Usually, I know. Usually, there’s a call to action, some rallying cry, a “here’s what we do next.” I have spent years doing that after all, I have campaigned and lobbied and made documentaries and written articles and given talks and testified before governments, and I have believed, really believed, that if enough people heard, if the evidence was clear enough, if the argument was sharp enough, things would change.

But I don’t think or feel like they have. After reading this, do you?

And right now, the fight has left me. I feel depleted and lost, and I don’t know how to make a change in this world. I feel like I’m shouting into a void, and the void is lined with health and safety disclaimers, “deepest sympathies” press releases, and “have a good day” sign-offs.

I don’t have a neat conclusion….I don’t have an answer. What I do have is the suffocating knowledge that the world would rather we didn’t exist than redesign a single thing.

Hunter Adkins was twenty-four. He had a father who loved him and a little brother who looked up to him. All he wanted to do was take a flight. And it killed him. I don’t think there's anything we can do as a community about it.

So no, I will probably not have a good day after all this. Would you?

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Sophie Morgan is a journalist, broadcaster, and disability rights campaigner. She co-founded Rights on Flights and her documentary Fight to Fly is available on Channel 4. Her TEDx Talk on wheelchair access in aviation has been viewed worldwide. If you believe this matters, please share this post.

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Be that failing to mix the right colour, failing to get a two-value charcoal drawing to do what I want it to do or failing, specifically, to understand why the medium I am using is causing my oil paint to shift so badly, despite the fact I have now watched five thousand tutorials and asked Chat GPT to explain colour temperature to me like I’m five. Which, according to my paintbrush, I might actually be. It’s been a week.

But also, this week I had a revelation and, to those of you who are here with me on this Substack journey, I am thrilled to share it with you! Ok, so bear with me whilst I try and explain it…

I’ve been reading ‘Art Monsters’. For anyone who has read this seminal art book, you will know what I mean when I say it’s grabbed me by the art-balls. WOW.

What a book. I am only just getting started but so much as made an impact. Specifically, the sections on radical female artists of the 1970s.

How had I not learnt about these pioneers sooner!?

These are women who rejected the canvas altogether and used their own bodies, their environments, their rage, their lived experience as the medium. Performance art, they called it, not because it was performed for an audience (though often it was), but because the act itself was the work.

The doing was the art, the body was the material.

Holy Fuck, I thought to myself at 1am, nearly jolting my partner awake. That sounds familiar.

What if I’ve been making art for twenty years and just didn’t know it?

You see, there’s a widely held assumption that art begins with intention. That to make art, you must first decide you are making art, then select your medium, then produce something that can be exhibited, sold, critiqued, or hung on a wall, for instant. The infrastructure of the art world sort of reinforces this (think galleries, exhibitions, degrees, residencies, etc). Art is what happens inside certains spaces, made by certain, people who have been credentialed by certain things, to make it.

Thankfully though, in part thanks to ol’ Marcel Duchamp who placed a urinal in a gallery in 1917 and called it Fountain, a question arose in the mind of the viewer of art: what exactly qualifies as art…

….and that question has never fully recovered.

When I was twenty, before television and campaigns and fights for my rights, I studied at Goldsmiths in London. Whilst there, my tutor told me something I’ve carried ever since, though I think I misunderstood it for most of those years. He said: “Question what you want to say and how you want to say it. Painting isn’t the only medium.”

At the time, I disagreed. Painting was my medium, I was sure of it. But before I could crack it, as I have been explaining in my articles here, life then intervened, and the painting got shelved. For two decades, I told myself I’d get back to it. That the ‘real’ art was waiting.

But here comes the revelatory idea: what if I never stopped making art? I just stopped painting.

What if my art took a different turn?

Let me give you some examples and you tell me:

There was the time I sat in a shop window in my underwear, in my wheelchair, whilst being filmed and literally stopped traffic. Not as a protest, exactly, but I used my disabled body in a public space to make people confront what they’d rather look away from. I didn’t call it art though… I called it “raising awareness.”

Then there was the time I sat nude, on national television. The first paraplegic woman to do so, as far as anyone knows. I didn’t call that art either….I called it “representation.”

Or when I created the first female seated mannequin in a shop.

Or when I became the first paralysed British woman to experience zero gravity.

Or when I sent wheelchair users undercover with hidden cameras to expose how airlines treat disabled passengers, turning their real experiences into a documentary that made the invisible undeniable.

And that is just to name a few…

Basically, I have spent twenty years putting my body, and the bodies of other disabled people, into spaces and situations designed to shift perception, to provoke, to make the comfortable, uncomfortable.

I called it advocacy, broadcasting, campaigning…but what if it was also art?!

This is not a retrospective rebranding exercise or wait, maybe it is.

Ok, well if it is, I think it’s an exciting one.

Because when I read about the radical women of the 70s, about Carolee Schneemann using her own body as material, about Adrian Piper inserting herself into hostile spaces to force confrontation, about Hannah Wilke documenting her own vulnerability with unflinching precision, about Faith Ringgold quilting her politics into fabric because the painting establishment wouldn’t let her in, I don’t see women who are fundamentally different from what I’ve been doing.

I see women who understood that the body is political, that visibility is a medium, that showing up where you’re not expected is, in itself, a creative act.

The difference is they got to call it art, or someone else did for them.

But the impulse? The impulse was the same. To say: look at this body. Look at what it can do. Look at what happens when you put it where it doesn’t “belong.”

Which brings me to a new set of questions I’ve been turning over all week, and I don’t have answers, which is unlike me and slightly annoying:

Where does performance art stop and start? What defines it? Who gets to call it art? And what do we lose when we police those boundaries too tightly?

If Marina Abramović can sit in a chair at MoMA for 736 hours and call it The Artist Is Present, can I not sit in a wheelchair for twenty years, putting my body on the line to change how disability is perceived, and call that something too?

If Yoko Ono can invite strangers to cut her clothes off as an act of radical vulnerability, is it so different from what I did, letting cameras capture the moment my wheelchair was returned to me in pieces, exposing the violence that disabled travellers absorb in silence?

I’m not equating the work of course (I must stress, I am not), but I’m questioning the categories because the categories have always been drawn by people who weren’t in my position, and I’m starting to wonder if the reason I never called it art is because no one told me I could.

Art theorist Arthur Danto argued that what makes something art is not the object itself but the theory that surrounds it, the framework of meaning in which it sits. A Brillo box in a supermarket is a Brillo box. A Brillo box in a gallery however, presented by Andy Warhol, is art. The object didn’t change; the context did.

By that logic, the acts I’ve described could absolutely be read as a body of performance work; the medium is my disabled body, the gallery is the public sphere. The audience is everyone who was made to look, to confront, to reconsider. What was missing wasn’t the art, it was the frame, so to speak.

And the act of naming your work, of claiming it as a deliberate creative project, changes not just how others see it but how you see yourself. It transforms scattered acts of defiance into a coherent body of work. It gives you authorship over your own story and, if you’re lucky, it makes sense of the years you might currently be thinking as somewhat detours. And that sits well with me right now!

And more, food for thought, you see, the reason I’m only now, at forty, learning to paint, the reason it took me twenty years to get back to a canvas, is the same reason I spent those twenty years doing all the other things. Almost every art class I’ve tried to attend in the UK has been inaccessible. The physical spaces designed for learning art have, time and again, told me I wasn’t welcome.

So when I think of this truth and the consequences of it from a new perspective, I come to this radical conclusion; I went and made art anyway. I just didn’t have a studio, I had a television set or a parliamentary terrace or a fucking airplane, hey, even a zero-gravity chamber.

The whole world became my medium, because the traditional one was locked!

And this, reader, is a lovely, empowering thought to have; It’s helping me feel much better about the inadequacy of my visual art work at the moment.

It is, in fact, the sort of revelation that makes you want to pour a glass of whisky on a Sunday night and feel good about things. Till I get back to my easel this week and once again…start again! Onwards.

I was lying in bed, half-awake, doom-scrolling with the specific joylessness of someone who knows better, when Instagram served me a photo of myself at the 2024 Paralympics.

There I was, at NBC, slightly younger, slightly blonder, grinning into a camera with the professional warmth of a woman who had trained herself to look like she was having the time of her life on demand.

I looked at her, at me, and felt something I wasn’t expecting. Not nostalgia. No, not pride. Not curiosity. Irritation.

What did she think she was doing? I thought to my and of myself. And did any of it actually work?

I remember exactly how that version of me felt during those games: the fourteen-hour days, the relentless performance of a 6-hour live broadcast, with no co-host, on a multi-sport event, the gnawing awareness that the effort to shift public perceptions in the USA of disability wasn’t working how I had dreamt it would.

That perhaps this TV Studio wasn’t where I was supposed to be.

Now, the thing is, this thought was, and still is, complicated for me.

I did that job, in one capacity or another, for years. Starting in 2012, on the Paralympic Games in London and Channel 4’s seminal coverage, then in 2016 in Rio, 2018 in South Korea, 2021 in Tokyo and then in 2024 in (for) the USA.

I did it because I believed, with every fibre of my being, that visibility was the work that mattered most. That if disabled people could just be seen enough, in enough contexts, on enough screens, the world would eventually catch up. Representation would change attitudes, attitudes would change systems, and one day we’d arrive at something resembling disability equality.

But sitting here today, with a paintbrush in my hand instead of a microphone, as the Winter Games play out in Cortina and Milan, I find myself asking a question I couldn’t have asked when I was inside it: what kind of seeing was I actually enabling? Of myself and of Disability?

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My article on Adventure.com about the world’s first wheelchair-adapted mobile safari in Botswana’s Okavango Delta went live a few weeks ago.

It is about a wonderful man called Mike Hill, who has spent twenty years doing something the entire travel industry has spectacularly failed to do - taking wheelchair users into one of the most remote, wild, exhilarating wildernesses on earth. The published version was my love letter to what he has made possible.

Here’s everything else that I couldn’t fit in!

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There’s a version of travel writing about accessibility that sorts the world into two clean columns: accessible and inaccessible, with the implicit goal of a frictionless experience. Reader, you will not find that here.

You see, in my experience, the truth about accessible travel is that the best kind exists in the middle, in places where our needs are met but the rest yet to be discovered!

For me, the best kind of accessible travel is when we, as disabled travellers, have to hold contradictions. For example, our experience may turn out better than you feared, yet perhaps harder than the brochure promised, and that tension is precisely what makes it extraordinary.

Mobile safari camping in the Okavango Delta is a case in point.

Because what Mike and the team at Endeavour Safaris have built is not a sanitised version of safari. It’s something far more interesting: access within the wildness. Not wildness minus the risk, but the risk of the wildness plus the infrastructure, which means you don’t have to sit it out.

That distinction matters enormously, and understanding it before you go is, I’d argue, the single most useful thing you can pack on this trip of a lifetime.

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An overview of the trip

I arrived at Maun Airport to find Jonny May of Wild Paths waiting, with the enthusiasm of someone who has spent considerable time in Africa. He knew exactly what lay ahead, plus he’d arranged the trip with Mike Hill of Endeavour Safaris, local expert and accessible safari legend. Together, they had the confident air of people who had done this before;

Alongside me was my best friend, Bowl (real name Alick), and after one night in Maun, the four of us headed out into the Delta. The drive took six hours; the landscape growing wilder and more remote with every kilometre, until the road became a track and the track became a bush that only Mike seemed to know how to navigate, with the help of his radio and his team, who had arrived ahead of us to set up camp.

By the time we reached it, I understood, in a way no amount of research had prepared me for, just how far from everything we actually were.

On our first morning, Mike woke us before sunrise, the smell of coffee cutting through the cool delta air. By the time the light had turned gold, we were deep into our first drive, tracking a leopard.

We found her draped along the branch of a sausage tree, and for two hours, we simply watched her. Time moves differently when you’re sitting in silence in the African bush, waiting for a leopard to decide what to do next, it was as close to an apex predator, and as close to peace, as you can probably get!

The second day, we found a herd of elephants mid-morning, one hundred or so animals moving through the Delta with that unhurried, purposeful grace. Calves pressed close to their mothers. A large bull paused and regarded us with ancient, unimpressed eyes before deciding we weren’t worth his attention and moving on.

One afternoon, before the evening drive, I was sitting outside my tent when this same heard moved through the tree line not thirty metres away. Bowl appeared silently at my elbow. We were so close to the Elephants, and yet there was nothing between us, just the the air we shared. I will never forget it.

On our final night, the lions started, close enough that their calls rolled through the night, into the tent and settled somewhere deep in my chest. I lay awake listening, equal parts terrified and yet completely alive.

The Delta itself is unlike anywhere I’ve been. In the dry season, it covers somewhere between ten and twelve thousand square kilometres; the exact size shifts with the rainfall, both locally and in the catchment area upstream, so no two seasons look quite the same.

By day, everywhere you looked, something was happening: a fish eagle dropping toward the water, a herd moving through the tree line. And at night, the sky was just obscene with stars.

With Mike, there are no fixed itineraries, no groups herded toward a pre-approved viewing spot. He reads the landscape fluently, and in just a few days, we saw it all.

Please read my full article for more details.

So, who is this safari for?

If you are a manual wheelchair user, a power wheelchair user, or someone with a physical disability who has written off this kind of travel as simply not for you, I am here specifically to tell you: it’s for you. It was made for you. Mike made it for you.

Mike has taken guests with MS, muscular dystrophy, spinal cord injuries, acquired brain injuries, people who use ventilators, stroke survivors, and elderly travellers with limited mobility. He has spent twenty years accumulating the knowledge and equipment to make this possible, and he has seen most things.

One important note on independence: Endeavour is about access to the African bush - not personal intimate care. If you need support with intimate care needs, you’ll want to bring a competent partner or carer with you. What Mike provides is the infrastructure, expertise, and adapted environment; what you bring is the right support for your individual level of independence. It’s a partnership, and an honest conversation with Mike before you book will establish exactly how it can work for you.

The vehicle: what you need to know

This is the centrepiece of the whole operation.

Standard safari vehicles are high-sided by design; they have to be, for wildlife safety. The result is that most disabled travellers either get manhandled in ways that are unsafe, undignified, and for many of us with more complex physical disabilities, this is just medically impossible.

Thankfully, Mike’s adapted vehicle has a hydraulic lift.

It’s the only one of its kind in Botswana, and as far as anyone can establish, in the whole of Africa.

What this means in practice: you can either stay in your wheelchair for the entire game drive, secured with four-point restraints, or transfer to a standard seat if, like me, that’s your preference. The lift is smooth, reliable, and operated by Mike and his team with the matter-of-factness of people who’ve done it a thousand times and find any fuss unnecessary.

What to know: the vehicle is not air-conditioned, which is relevant if you have temperature regulation challenges (more on this below). It is open-sided, which means extraordinary wildlife viewing but also dust, heat, and the occasional very close encounter with a branch. Dress in layers, bring sun protection for your arms and the back of your neck, and accept that you will return to camp with a fine coating of Botswana in your hair. This is non-negotiable and entirely worth it.

The camp: what you need to know

Getting around: Paths across the sand are created using a combination of heavy-duty rubber matting and wooden boards. The precise setup varies with the size of the camp and the spacing between tents, but the principle remains consistent: a smooth, stable surface for wheeling. My manual wheelchair moved across it without assistance.

The tent: Spacious. A raised bed at a sensible transfer height, not so high it requires a hoist if you can self-transfer, not so low you need assistance getting up. Good turning radius. Mike had clearly thought about someone conducting a reconnaissance sweep in a wheelchair and had addressed every obvious obstacle.

The bathroom: Open-air roll-in shower and a shower chair positioned over the camp toilet with handles.

What to plan for: The camp moves, that’s the point of a mobile safari; you follow the wildlife. This means the adaptations are reassembled each trip, and while Mike’s team are practised at this, there is inevitably a degree of flexibility required from you as a guest. If you need the toilet rail at a very specific height or need coffee delivered first thing in the morning to help with bowel routines, communicate that clearly in advance. Mike is exceptionally responsive to this kind of detail; it is, essentially, his entire professional specialism.

Beyond camping: boats and lodges

Mike and his team frequently combine camping trips with boating safaris, which are also camping-based but seasonal (typically June through September, depending on water levels). Both offer something the other doesn’t, and both are adapted for wheelchair users.

More commonly, the camping element is combined with stays in local lodges in Northern Botswana. So if the prospect of full mobile camping feels like a stretch for your first trip, or if you’re travelling with someone who needs a little more comfort, a mixed itinerary is absolutely possible and often recommended.

Temperature regulation: the thing I didn’t adequately prepare for

I have a spinal cord injury at T5. Like many people with high-level SCIs, I cannot regulate my body temperature properly and I don’t sweat below my injury level. In extreme heat, my core temperature can rise dangerously, and I won’t feel it happening the way a non-disabled person would.

The Okavango Delta has distinct seasons, and temperature regulation needs vary significantly across them. May, June, July, and August are the coolest months; though “cool” is relative; you’re likely in a t-shirt by ten in the morning. September, October, and November are the warmest months, and these are the months when temperature regulation requires the most careful planning. The heat is dry and can be intense. Temperatures drop dramatically once the first rains arrive, but until then, afternoons can be genuinely demanding if your body can’t self-regulate.

Mike’s team know this well and have practical solutions: wet kikois and spray bottles are a standard part of the kit during warmer months. But the key is to tell Mike about your specific needs before you go, so the schedule can be adapted accordingly and timing drives to avoid the worst of the midday heat, factoring in shade time, adjusting pace.

On one afternoon during my trip, we returned from a drive to find the camp in full afternoon sun, and within thirty minutes, I was overheating rapidly. The solution that day was to sit in the open-air shower and run Delta water over me until my temperature dropped.

What I’d do differently: bring a cooling vest and wear it on afternoon drives. Tell Mike explicitly about your temperature regulation challenges before you arrive. He will not be alarmed; he will simply problem-solve. For example, if you need to catheterise whilst out on a drive, there’s a way around that too.

Top tip: tell Mike everything. He will have encountered more of it than you might expect.

The practical bits

Booking: Contact Mike and his wife, Silvia, directly through Endeavour Safaris; both are involved in the planning of all adaptive trips.

I would also strongly recommend contacting Jonny May at Wild Paths, who has built a close partnership with Endeavour and specialises in progressive, experience-led Africa itineraries for disabled travellers from the UK and beyond.

Jonny can handle the full picture (flights, transfers, accommodation at both ends) and thinks carefully about the whole journey, not just the safari component.

Getting to Botswana: Most people fly into Johannesburg or Cape Town first, then connect to Maun, the gateway to the Okavango. Maun is a small airport, but assistance is available.

On airlines: Ethiopian Airlines has been having very positive conversations with Endeavour about supporting disabled travellers, including those using electric or power wheelchairs (dependent on aircraft size and chair dimensions), and crucially, they fly directly into Maun. Worth looking at alongside other options.

For power chair users, Mike also recommends flying into Victoria Falls, a larger airport with more robust assistance, and meeting the team there for the drive into the Delta.

About your wheelchair on flights: I could write a whole separate piece about this (and will). The short version: declare your wheelchair and all your equipment in detail when you book, get written confirmation of how it will be stored, and photograph everything before it goes in the hold. Know your battery specifications if you use a power chair or any battery-powered attachment, and get them confirmed as compliant before travel. I flew on a small safari plane from the Delta back to Maun on my last day and was manually assisted into the plane, not ideal, but totally manageable and cut the journey time in half.

Cost: This is a premium experience. Mobile safari in the Delta is not budget travel, and for many disabled travellers, this will be a significant, once-in-a-lifetime trip. It is worth it. I don’t say that lightly.

The access verdict

Best for: Manual and power wheelchair users with any level of spinal cord injury, MS, muscular dystrophy, limb differences, acquired brain injury, stroke, and elderly travellers with significant mobility needs. Mixed-ability groups and disabled parents travelling with non-disabled children are also well catered for.

Requires: Advanced communication about your specific needs. A competent carer or partner, if you need support with intimate care. Flexibility and a good sense of humour. Some tolerance for heat and dust. Willingness to let people help with transfers on the understanding that they will do so with complete respect and skill.

Mike has spent twenty years making a case that disabled people belong in wild places and that the outdoors is not a privilege reserved for the physically able. He didn’t need to do any of it; he had no personal stake beyond having once looked around, noticed that something was missing, and then had the sheer tenacity to fix it.

“Endeavour,” he told me, “means to try with purpose, to go beyond expectation.”

My advice? Go to Botswana. Let Mike take you into the wild. It will change something in you that I suspect needs changing…

Thank you for the trip of a life time, Jonny & Mike

Sx

Endeavour Safaris: endeavoursafaris.com

Wild Paths (UK booking agent): wildpaths.co.uk

Read the original Adventure.com piece: adventure.com/botswana-world-first-wheelchair-adapted-mobile-safari

‘Access All Areas’ publishes as part of The Art of Sitting Still. It will soon be a paid-only subscription. If this was useful, please share it.

Anything I have missed, please get in touch with any questions!

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There, in the corner of the living room, was an easel. Beside it: a pot for my brushes, my paints laid out, and a handmade shadow box my partner had built himself.

My plaster casts were quickly unwrapped and arranged on the shelf. My brushes fanned out into the jar. And I just sat there looking at it for a long time, trying not to cry.

An art corner…a space…a room…of my very own.

Just four feet by four feet and yet somehow, the most expansive thing I’ve ever been given.

Now, before I go any further, I should explain why a corner of this kind, once upon a time, would not have been the fairytale ending I would have dreamt of.

When I became a wheelchair user as a teenager, the world immediately started shrinking the space it offered me. Not always cruelly, sometimes with the very best of intentions, but consistently, persistently, in a thousand small ways, it shrunk…the message was impossible to ignore: this world isn’t built for you.

I tried, for instance, to go to art college in Brighton after I was discharged from the hospital, the thing I wanted to do most, and was told the building wasn’t adapted for wheelchair users, so I couldn’t attend.

It felt as though I was being told the only place I could belong now was in a corner.

But, as any properly belligerent teenager would, I spent the years immediately following my injury doing everything in my power to resist this reality. I blew the limits of my new life wide open: saying yes to every terrifying thing, proving I could be as mobile, adventurous, and unconstrained as anyone.

I fought back and had the college adapted and then went on to live my disabled life with a tenacity and aggression that makes me proud to this day.

I travelled aggressively. I chased adventure with what I now recognise as a kind of fury. I went out to prove that, indeed, no one puts this baby in a corner!

But it meant I could not sit still, because stillness felt like surrender. Because as the world had already decided what a disabled life was supposed to look like, and I refused to give it the satisfaction, I had to spend all my energy disproving, redefining and smashing any stereotype that got in my way.

A paralysed body did not mean a paralysed life. It did not. I wanted to say to everyone I could. Life can still be HUGE and wonderful, even if you can’t walk.

A corner, back then, you see, could well have been a cage.

Virginia Woolf famously wrote that a woman needs a room of her own. She was, obviously, correct. But there’s a version of that argument I’ve been thinking about lately that doesn’t get said nearly often enough: for disabled women, a room of one’s own isn’t just a feminist ideal.

A room of one’s own, when the world has spent years telling you that either you must stay in your room OR most rooms aren’t for you, represents something entirely different.

Like my favourite artist, Frida Kahlo, I too have spent significant stretches of my life literally confined to a room, on bed rest, unable to move, and the impact that had on my relationship with freedom and movement was profound. Ever since then, having the ability to leave, to expand, to go, to choose where I spend my time was my north star.

Which is why what I’m about to say feels significant: for the first time in my adult life, I don’t have the compulsion to expand into the world. I want to sit still and be a corner of my own.

I guess I have nothing left to prove!

Since returning from Florence, intent on continuing my studies, I have been politely turned away by three separate local atelier art schools. Each one, ‘regrettably,’ inaccessible. Listed buildings, you understand. Terribly sorry.

But this time, it doesn’t bother me. This time, rather than fighting to be let in somewhere that doesn’t want to accommodate me, I am building my own room. One that doesn’t require negotiation.

You see, you spend enough years being turned away from rooms, and you become exquisitely sensitive to the spaces that simply let you in. They feel different. They feel like rest. They feel, if I’m being precise about it, like that involuntary exhale I still have, after twenty-three years in this wheelchair, when I arrive somewhere and the access is simply there.

The four-by-four corner of my living room feels like that. A Room of Requirement….appearing exactly when I needed it.

So, what am I painting? Asked no one, but I’m going to tell you anyway, I am painting swimmers….specifically, female figures, underwater, bodies suspended in that gorgeous silence that only water creates. Most of the figures I paint are inspired by images of me. Limbs weightless, movement fluid, everything unanchored.

I’ve been obsessed with painting them for a while now.

For a paraplegic, there is a freedom in water that exists almost nowhere else. In the pool, I am not navigating around my disability; I am moving with it, through a space that doesn’t care about the paralysis in my body. Underwater, you don’t walk or run or stand; the entire architecture of movement that the non-disabled world is built around, the whole vertical grammar of a world designed for upright non-disabled simply ceases to apply!

And so when I paint these swimmers, caught mid-motion in shafts of underwater light, I’m painting something about that, about freedom, yes, about movement. But also about what it feels like to be simply a body, moving through the world, without the world pushing back.

They say every painting is a conversation you’re having with yourself, and what a lush, long-overdue conversation this one is turning out to be.

Yesterday, I painted for two hours. Just a small study, blocking in the dark shapes of water around the figure, trying to get the shadow shapes right. I mostly, did not. My palette still has the honest chaos of someone still learning.

I stopped to make some tea halfway through. I rolled back to my fixed viewing point and squinted at the work. I went back in. I failed a bit, then slightly less. Repeat.

Outside, the world was doing what the world does: demanding, urgent, complicated, frequently inaccessible in ways that still have the capacity to exhaust me even after two decades of practice. I’ll push back out into it eventually, I always do.

But for now its just me and my corner. Surrendering to some stillness. Loving sitting still.

The Art of Sitting Still publishes every Sunday from here on. If this resonated, share it with someone who’s been waiting for permission to claim their own corner! And if you’re not yet subscribed, I’d love to have you with me.

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It’s a Tuesday. I’m sitting outside a restaurant in what the hotel website described as their “fully accessible outdoor terrace.” The terrace is lovely. The step to reach it is not. It is approximately eight inches of poured concrete, completely unremarked upon in every review I read, and the waiter is currently staring at me with the specific expression of a man who has never once considered that this might be a problem.

This is not an unusual Tuesday.

For as long as I’ve been writing about travel and long before that, in fact, since the day I sat up in a hospital bed at eighteen years old with a paralysing spinal cord injury and started working out what the rest of my life was going to look like from a wheelchair, I have been navigating the wide, inaccessible void that exists between what we as disabled people need from the world and what the world genuinely has to offer.

That gap, in my considerable experience, is vast. But, in my more recent experience, I also believe the gap is closing. Not fast enough, sure. Not always in the right places, no. But it is, honestly, closing.

And that is exactly what this new strand of articles, ‘Access All Areas,’ is here to document.

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Here’s what Access All Areas is, and what it is not.

It is not a list of “disabled-friendly” travel destinations, written by someone who has never actually been disabled, structured around a press trip where everything went suspiciously, implausibly well. It is not a series of uplifting anecdotes in which I, brave and smiling, overcome barriers and inspire onlookers. I have been the subject of enough of those, and they are exhausting for everyone.

What it is, is a frank series of the places I go, from hotels, restaurants, experiences, airlines, airports, destinations, transport, all of it, assessed honestly for what they actually deliver on accessibility for people with physical impairments. Written by someone who has spent over twenty years navigating the world as a high-level paraplegic manual wheelchair user.

Someone who can tell, within approximately thirty seconds of rolling through a door, whether the person who designed a space has ever actually met a disabled person, or simply consulted a building regulation checklist and called it a day.

I will share with you the questions I have learnt to ask, the things to look for, and how to find the places that have raised the bar, because they do exist, and they deserve to be celebrated.

I’ll also tell you about the ones that haven’t, because they deserve to be named.

Please note that I’ll be reviewing from my particular perspective - as a female, white, 41-year-old manual wheelchair user, specifically a paraplegic - which means I can’t speak to every access need.

But I’ll tell you what I find, as specifically and honestly as I can, and I’ll flag where other disability types might have different experiences from my own. Talking with other experts and a wide range of disabled travellers alike.

A word on why this matters now, specifically, beyond the obvious.

We are at a strange inflection point in accessible travel right now.

On one hand, awareness has never been higher. “Accessibility” is now a word that appears all over the place…in hotel brochures, on destination websites, in the mission statements of tour operators who would, five years ago, have looked at you blankly if you’d raised the topic.

On the other hand, awareness is not the same as action and a lot of what currently passes for “accessible travel” is, in practice, more about optics than outcomes.

But look, the travel industry has, broadly speaking, discovered that disabled people exist and that we travel. What it has not yet fully grasped is that we travel with opinions, standards and, increasingly, our own platforms to help one another find resources and information we can truly trust and believe in. Consider this one of them.

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Before we even talk about the destination, though, we need to talk about the journey, as for many disabled travellers, the most significant barrier to travel isn’t inaccessible hotels or cobblestoned streets. It’s the flight.

In 2023, I co-founded Rights on Flights, a global campaign to reform how airlines and airports serve disabled passengers. It has made tangible progress but the problem is far from solved. Without proper enforcement, without real consequences for airlines that damage equipment or abandon passengers, the abuses continue.

This year, we’re ramping up again. After a period of necessary rest, I’m returning to the campaign with renewed energy, new partnerships, and continued pressure on policymakers in the UK, the US, and beyond. There is work underway that I can’t fully detail yet, but it is coming, so please, watch this space. I’ll be sharing updates here as they happen.

In the meantime, if you’re planning to fly: know your rights, document everything, and never, ever check your wheelchair at the gate without photographing it first!

Ok, so what is Access All Areas? Well, it will read like travel writing, because I am a travel writer, but mostly it will delve into the granular, and the rest will be in my published articles.

Take this, about Safari, in The Times, for example.

Or this, about New Zealand, in The Telegraph.

Or this, about New Orleans, in Conde Nast Traveller.

I’ll also be deep-diving into the difference between what accessible means and how inclusion feels, and how I now understand the two to be bedfellows but not mutually exclusive.

I’ll be rating destinations and properties using my own framework, which will evolve as I gather feedback, covering everything from physical access to attitude, from infrastructure to inclusion, from what the website promises to what you actually find when you arrive. Because the gap between those two things? That’s where the story usually lives.

The first full Access All Areas review is coming next week, and it will be all about Botswana.

In the meantime: if you’ve been somewhere that deserves to be on this list, somewhere that genuinely got it right, or somewhere that spectacularly, infuriatingly didn’t, I want to hear about it. Drop it in the comments, and please share this with someone who needs it.

A quick word on Access All Areas: it will soon be a paid subscription-only strand of my Substack, and I want to be straightforward about why: writing is how I earn a living, and honest, first-hand accessibility reviews, the kind that are actually useful rather than optimistically vague, take time and resources to produce. I've spent twenty-three years navigating a world that wasn't designed for me, and that experience has value, and this is how I'm choosing to put it to work.

I hope it helps you travel better, or helps someone you love do the same.

Thanks for joining…

The world awaits.

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Access All Areas publishes as part of The Art of Sitting Still. Subscribe to get it in your inbox, and share it with anyone who needs to build confidence and resources for an adventurous life.

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I am, literally and figuratively, flying high.

Florence is behind me. For now. The rest of my life, I am flying towards at, what? 500 miles per hour?!

And tomorrow I turn 41.

Now, I’m not usually sentimental about birthdays. The anniversary of my spinal injury (18th August) is the date I tend to save all my fucks for. But 41 feels significant, probably because turning 40 last year was the birthday where I blew everything in my life up, and a year on, I am only now starting to put the pieces back together in a meaningful way.

40 was the milestone when I properly stopped, in a way I hadn’t in years, and asked myself what I actually wanted for my life? What I, Sophie Morgan, actually wanted to do with the rest of my days?

Because I was burnt out and beyond that, I wasn’t entirely sure who I was anymore. The answer, when I truly listened, came back deafeningly loud.

I wanted to learn to paint…properly.

So I did.

And a year on, I am happy to report to myself and anyone who will listen, that I am doing exactly that and….I am happier than I have been in years

I’m properly, as they say, on one.

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Before leaving, I made one final pilgrimage.

If my first visit to Zecchi’s (the legendary art supply shop on Via Del Studio) was about gathering my tools, then my visit to Thor Larson’s cast studio was about finding what I’ll take home with me to fine-tune my craft.

Thor is a sculptor and teacher at the Florence Academy of Art, and his studio is the kind of place that makes you feel simultaneously very small and very inspired. Plaster casts everywhere: hands, feet, heads, fragments of the Antique, all cast from originals, all used for exactly the purpose they have served for centuries: inspiring and teaching artists.

You see, the practice of drawing from casts is where it all begins.

Back in the day, before a student in the great European academies was permitted anywhere near a live model, they would spend months, sometimes years, drawing from plaster.

The logic is elegant: a cast doesn’t shift or breathe or need a break. The light falls on it consistently. Set it up in a shadow box, a three-sided structure that isolates and controls a single light source, and you can return to the exact same conditions for hours, days, weeks. It teaches you to see form, to understand how light travels across a surface, to discipline your eye before your hand can follow.

The sight-size method I’ve been learning at the Academy works beautifully with casts. Better, in some ways, than with a live model, because the variables are controlled. The only variable left is you. Which is, of course, the whole point.

I chose a mouth, an eye, and a classical head of a young woman.

Thor wrapped them carefully and wished me luck in my onward studies.

As I settle now into my 41st year, I can’t help but reflect on what might have happened if I’d done all of this sooner, and I’ve concluded that if I had attempted this at twenty, or even thirty, I would not have been ready for it in the ways that matter most.

Not because I lacked interest. Not even because I lacked time, though I did, I suppose, as I was too busy being young and proving things, demonstrating to myself and everyone else that being disabled wasn’t a death sentence, not even a diminishment. That I could have a career and a life and adventures and all of it, even in a wheelchair, thank you very much.

But had I done this any sooner, perhaps I wouldn’t have had the resources to rent an accessible apartment in Florence. And perhaps I wouldn’t have had the confidence to navigate an ancient city as a wheelchair user; the grit required to treat uneven stones and absent ramps as simply the conditions of the experience, rather than a reason to abandon it, takes years to develop. It took me years. I needed those years.

And perhaps most importantly, I wouldn’t have had the patience for the practice itself. Sight-size painting is slow and deliberate. The ability to return to the same problem every day without expecting it to be solved, only slightly better understood, is not something I possessed at twenty.

Forty was the right time. The only time, for me.

On my last weekend in Florence, my parents came out.

My mum, who has spent most of her adult life watching me do things with enormous courage to variable outcomes, arrived fully in. Excitedly so. My Dad arrived with his characteristic effervescent positivity and joie de vivre, trilling about the wine and the grandeur of the place.

Both of them walked into the atelier, looked at my painting, which, at this stage of learning, is, let’s be honest, more ambitious than accomplished, and lit up. They have always been my greatest cheerleaders, but I hadn’t fully anticipated what it would mean to have them there.

These are two people who have watched me navigate eighteen years non-disabled and twenty-three years of life in a wheelchair: all the physical battles and the invisible ones, the rebuilding and the relapsing, the years of fighting systems and fighting myself. They have seen me at my most determined and my most depleted. They have never, to their enormous credit, tried to contain me. But I think, perhaps, they have spent a lot of years quietly worrying.

So to watch them walk into a room where I was simply making something - not campaigning, not recovering, not proving a point to anyone - and see their faces do what faces do when relief and pride arrive at exactly the same time: that was something I hadn’t prepared for.

It’s oddly moving being seen by your parents in a new context at forty years old. Their presence and support made the ending of this chapter feel like a beginning. Which, of course, it is…

So. What comes next.

I’ve signed up for an online foundation course with London Fine Arts, which I’ll be doing from the UK alongside my work, my writing, and whatever else this peculiar, shape-shifting life throws at me on any given week. I have my casts. I’ll have my shadow box. I have my Zorn palette and my now-somewhat-battered set of brushes.

I also have the motivation, which, after a year of wondering and wandering, turns out to be the most robust thing I packed. The discipline of the practice is something I am committed to maintaining. Not because it will be easy to carve out the time, but because I’ve learned that the things worth doing are never going to be easy to carve out the time for, and that waiting for the right conditions is, well, just another way of saying never.

And in June, I go back.

The five-week intensive at the Florence Academy begins in the summer, which means this isn’t an ending at all. It’s barely even a pause. It’s the gap between acts, the bit where I return to my life and carry the practice with me, trusting that it’s accumulating into something even if I can’t quite see it yet!

Looking back across the year between this birthday and the last, I feel a proud. I am also deeply aware that I have the privilege to do all this.

Not everyone can step off the treadmill, fly to Florence, rent an accessible apartment, and spend weeks failing at painting. I hold that lightly and gratefully, and with the knowledge that it took twenty years of building something to earn the flexibility to occasionally step away from it.

But I also think there is something worth saying to anyone who has a thing they’ve always wanted to do, a skill they’ve always wanted to learn, a version of themselves they’ve been indefinitely postponing: it is not too late. It is probably exactly the right time. You are probably more ready than you think, in the ways that actually matter, and less ready in the ways that don’t matter at all.

Begin anyway.

From next week, The Art of Sitting Still moves to Mondays, a new dispatch at the start of each week, from the studio, from the road, from wherever I happen to be.

I’ll also be launching a new strand called Access All Areas: honest reviews of destinations, hotels, and experiences through the lens of accessibility, written by someone who has spent twenty years rolling through a world that wasn’t entirely built for her. More on that very soon.

But tonight, at 35,000 feet, on the eve of 41, I feel that particular sensation you only get when the aircraft lifts you from a place where you found yourself, and the ground falls away, and there is, for a moment, nothing between you and everything that is possible.

And for the first time in longer than I can remember, I have absolutely no desire to land anywhere other than exactly where I am going.

Oh I do love a metaphor.

Life is taking off…again.

Let’s go!

The Art of Sitting Still publishes every Monday. If this resonated, subscribe — and share it with someone who needs to hear that it’s not too late. It genuinely helps.

I nodded like I absolutely knew what she meant, while internally screaming…or sobbing. At this point, it’s hard to tell the difference.

Week two is underway, and it’s less romance….and more reality.

This week introduced me to “blocking in”, the process of laying down colour in broad strokes to establish major value relationships before you even think about details.

We’re working with the Zorn limited palette, just four colours: titanium white, ivory black, yellow ochre, and alizarin crimson. Four colours to capture the entire human form.

The theory is that the Old Masters, such as Anders Zorn, John Singer Sargent, and Joaquín Sorolla, proved you don’t need a rainbow of pigments to paint believable flesh and atmosphere. You just need to understand value (light to dark), chroma (colour intensity), and temperature (warm versus cool). Simple, right?

Except it’s not.

I’ll mix what I think is the perfect shadow colour, apply it to the canvas, roll back to my fixed viewing point, and realise it’s completely wrong. My instructor will come over, squint at my work, and mix an exactly right colour in about three seconds. I will then want to throw my palette out the window.

“You’re seeing local colour instead of actual colour,” she explained, which is art school shorthand for: your brain is lying to you about what you’re seeing.

My brain, which has navigated three decades of life relatively successfully, is now being told it doesn’t know how to see.

And my ego does not appreciate this development.

On top of this, the physical side of the process is its own battle: eight hours at an easel means hours of holding my core steady, reaching, adjusting, squinting, so by evening my shoulders are screaming, and my hands are cramping. But the long hours, I can manage; most of my career, I have worked punishingly long days.

No, it’s the emotional confrontation that catches me off guard. The gap between what I see in my head and what appears on the canvas. The creeping certainty that everyone else in the room is progressing faster, seeing more clearly, understanding something fundamental that I’m missing.

This is the artist’s struggle, I’m learning, not the romantic version, where you suffer beautifully for your art, but the actual version, where you show up every day and fail in incrementally less spectacular ways….and apparently, the struggle doesn’t end once you progress past the learning stage.

“That’s why they call it painting,” one advanced student told me, grinning.

Dear god, what have I begun?

Plus, dear reader, on top of the painting/learning process, there’s the guilt.

I’ve spent the last two decades building a platform from which to advocate for disabled people’s rights, and every hour I spend in the studio is an hour I’m not spending on battles that actually matter to other disabled people. The world is, quite literally, burning, and I’m here squinting at shadow values. And badly, at that.

Yesterday, though, my algorithm cleverly delivered me a TED talk by Amie McNee called “The Case for Making Art When the World Is on Fire,” in which she argues that making art isn’t self-indulgent, it’s essential. Radical even. A necessary act of creation, especially when everything feels like it’s falling apart. It's certainly food for thought and helped stave off the guilt for today at least.

Outside the studio, Florence presents a different kind of struggle altogether.

For a city that’s been perfecting beauty for centuries, it apparently missed the memo on accessibility. There. Are. Steps. Everywhere. Even in the new parts.

My Batec gets me around the outdoor bits brilliantly, past the Ponte Vecchio, through the Piazza della Signoria, past the Duomo morning and evening. But the moment I want to actually enter anywhere that isn’t a major museum? Florence says I can fuck right off.

Oh, and then there’s the staring. Don’t get me wrong, I’m used to being stared at, it’s an occupational hazard of being a wheelchair user who also happens to be a blonde woman riding what essentially looks like a motorcycle attachment. But Florence takes it to another level, probably because they genuinely don’t see disabled people here very often. The infrastructure makes sure of it. It’s an absence that tells its own story: that disabled people aren’t expected here, aren’t part of the city’s imagination of itself.

And given that Florence has been continuously inhabited for over two thousand years, that’s quite the sustained erasure.

For once, though, I’m not here to educate anyone. I’m not here to be brave, or inspiring, or to overcome anything…..except the process of painting. If my presence happens to normalise wheelchair users in Florentine art schools, good. But that’s a side effect, not the goal.

The goal is now the mixing, the failing and…the trying again…..

My instructor said something yesterday that I keep turning over. I was nearly crying with frustration over a painting that looked nothing like the figure in front of me, and she said, quietly: “Hard is not the same as wrong.”

I think on some fundamental level, I feel that difficulty means I’m doing something incorrectly, that the right path should feel easier, more natural. That competent adults shouldn’t struggle this visibly. But this experience is teaching me something different, and I’m here for it.

Besides, if my life in a wheelchair has taught me anything, it’s that you don’t ever overcome the struggle; you settle into it. Twenty years in, I don't wake up having solved disability. I just wake up better at it, at the mental calculations, the contingency plans, the very specific skill of making peace and picking the right battles with the gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be. The struggle didn't go anywhere; I just stopped treating it as a temporary problem I was about to solve and started treating it as the actual conditions of my life. Which, paradoxically, made everything easier.

And the same seems true of painting, of learning anything late and from scratch. You don't graduate out of the frustration; you just get better at sitting within it.

So, in an exhausted summary - and thank you, if you have made it this far - the struggle, it turns out, is the point.

And not just at the beginning.

But always.

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Yesterday morning, I zoomed past the Duomo in that misty morning light when medieval stone seems to glow as if lit from within, heading to the Florence Academy of Art for my third full day of class, and the thought that kept racing through my head was: This is my life now. This is actually my life.

And no, the juxtaposition wasn’t lost on me: a 21st-century manual wheelchair user, powered along by lithium batteries, speeding toward a school teaching a 15th-century painting method that hasn’t fundamentally changed since the masters perfected it. Time folding in on itself in the most delicious way.

I’m the first wheelchair user to study at this academy, I’m living in an accessible apartment in Florence, and I’m learning something that I’ve wanted to learn for twenty years, an art that has been studied for centuries.

Revolutionary feels like too small a word.

Before classes started, I made my pilgrimage to Zecchi’s, the art supply shop that’s been operating since 1918. Entering onto Via Del Studio is like stepping into Diagon Alley and if Ollivander’s made paintbrushes instead of wands, Zecchi’s would be the place. And let’s be honest, in this context, paintbrushes might as well be wands.

The shop is a warren of wooden drawers and glass cabinets, floor to ceiling, containing every conceivable pigment, medium, and tool. Raw umber from Cyprus. Genuine lapis lazuli ground into ultramarine blue that costs more per gram than cocaine. Sable brushes so fine they contain a single hair. The wizened old men behind the counter speak in hushed, reverent tones over half-moon spectacles about the properties of different varnishes like wand-makers debating the temperament of phoenix feather versus dragon heartstring.

Yes, I spent an obscene amount of money. No, I regret nothing. My basket of supplies felt like assembling an arsenal: brushes as wands, pigments as potions, gesso as... well, the metaphor gets away from me, but you understand….I was being equipped for magic.

The Florence Academy teaches what’s known as the ‘sight-size method,’ which sounds technical but is essentially this: you paint what you see at the exact size you see it. Your canvas is positioned precisely at the same distance from your subject as you are, creating a direct visual comparison. You step back (or in my case, roll back) to a fixed viewing point, check the relationship between your painting and the subject, make corrections, repeat. For hours. For days. For however long it takes.

This is how the Old Masters worked. It’s painstaking, humbling, and requires the kind of patience our dopamine-fried modern brains have largely forgotten how to access. You can’t AI-generate your way through this. You can’t hack it. You simply have to look, I mean really look…and then try to translate what you see onto a surface, mark by mark, until something resembling truth emerges.

It’s also, and here’s where it gets interesting for me specifically, a method designed for standing. The traditional posture is to stand at your easel, step back to your viewing point, step forward to paint, repeat ad nauseam. Except I can’t do that. I’m sitting down, obviously. In fact, I’m the first wheelchair user to study at this academy (and hopefully not the last).

So I’ve had to adapt the method: my easel is lower, my sight-line different, the mechanics adjusted. But essentially, the method remains intact. And I feel excited to bring my perspective to this age-old way of seeing.

But learning is slow going. After all, I’m 40. Forty years old and holding a paintbrush like a first-year student, which, of course, technically, I am. I’m making beginner mistakes; squinting at proportions, mixing muddy colours because I don’t yet understand how pigments interact.

Part of me rages at the years I didn’t spend doing this. If I’d started at 20 (when I wanted to, but wheelchair access and a desire to prove being disabled wasn’t a fate worse than death prevented me), I’d have two decades of skill under my belt by now.

My hand would know things my conscious mind doesn’t, the paintbrush truly would extend from my arm like a wand. The masters themselves back in the day started learning as children, apprenticed to workshops, absorbing the technique through muscle memory before they could even grow beards! By 40, they were painting masterpieces. I’m painting what essentially amounts to sophisticated doodles.

But then there’s another voice, one that’s growing more assertive each day, that says: better late than never. Better to start at 40 than to reach 50, 60, 70 (if, of course, I am lucky enough to make old bones) and still be thinking, I wish I had learned to paint. Every mark I make now is one I wouldn’t have made if I hadn’t started.

The alternative isn’t a different, better timeline where I began at 20. The alternative is never beginning at all.

Besides, I’ve spent two decades learning other things. How to be a TV presenter, for instance. How to read a room, conduct an interview, craft an argument, survive live television. I learnt how to write, how to campaign, advocate, create lasting change. How to travel, how to move country, for crying out loud. In fact, I have spent the last twenty years not just learning, but mastering, how to not just survive but thrive as a disabled woman in this ableist world - which is perhaps the most complex skill of all.

Those years weren’t wasted (well, some were). They just weren’t spent on painting.

This is the bargain we make with time: it’s always too late and always exactly the right moment, depending on your perspective.

Anyway.

So what have I learned so far?

Well, there’s an intimacy to working in an atelier that I hadn’t anticipated. Ten of us, arranged around a model, each interpreting the same forms from different angles. The silence is punctuated by the scratch of charcoal, the swish of brushes, the occasional sigh of frustration or murmur of discovery.

We’re all adults…retirees, career-changers, people who chose desire over the safer path or simply wanted to brush up on new skills. There’s a tattoo artist from New York, a teacher from Berlin, and a graphic designer from Monaco. We’ve left our previous lives at the door and become, simply, students. It’s equalising in a way few experiences are, and it’s both humbling and liberating to be judged purely on craft, on effort, on the work itself.

The technical learning is also overwhelming in the best possible way. I’m discovering that painting isn’t really about colour…it’s about value, which is the relative lightness or darkness of a colour. Get the values right, and you can paint with a muddy palette, and it’ll still read as believable. Get them wrong, and no amount of perfect hue will save you. We spend hours squinting at our subjects, reducing the world to a scale of greys, learning to see light and shadow before we even think about whether something is blue or green.

We’re working with a limited palette - essentially just black, white, yellow ochre, english red, and burnt umber. It sounds restrictive until you realise the Old Masters built entire paintings with similar constraints. The limitation forces you to really understand colour temperature and mixing. Every colour has a temperature, every shadow has a colour, and learning to see these subtle shifts is like being given a new language.

The process itself is methodical to the point of meditation.

First, we make colour studies, small paintings where we’re just trying to match the exact value and temperature of what we see. Then we draw on canvas with charcoal (see gallery below), mapping out the big shapes and proportions before we ever pick up a brush. We learn to see “shadow shapes” as single, connected forms rather than individual details. We study how the model’s pose creates angles and relationships that need to be captured accurately, or the whole thing falls apart.

It’s humbling, this business of learning to see what’s actually there rather than what your brain insists should be there. Your mind wants to simplify, to fill in gaps, to rely on symbols. But the method demands you look, really look, at the specific angle of a shoulder, the exact point where light turns to shadow, the way a form curves away from you in space.

But perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned - the thing that matters more than values or colour mixing or proper proportions - is how it feels to finally do the thing you always wanted to do. I’m deeply happy. Not the performative, Instagram-filtered version of happiness, but the real thing. The kind that comes from spending your days doing something you have denied yourself, for all your life, something you love…and nothing else…(all with your basic needs met!) …

I guess sometimes the bravest thing you can do is choose something that serves no one but yourself. It really feels radical.

Because every mark I make in this studio is essentially selfish.

Every hour I spend squinting at proportions is time I’m not spending on more important things. Changes I want to make to the world go unchanged. Friendships and relationships I want to cultivate remain the same. Fights for rights, remain unfought. Goals for work…on hold.

And yet, somehow, this feels like the most important thing I’ve done in years. Not because it’s meaningful to others, but because it’s meaningful to me, and maybe that’s what starting late teaches you: that desire doesn’t need justification. That love for a thing is reason enough….

The Art of Sitting Still is my newsletter about many things: choosing desire over duty, about starting late, and about travelling. For now, I’ll be writing twice a week - from Florence - but I'm never in one place for long. If you enjoyed this, please share it. And please subscribe.

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What I did next was what any properly incensed person does these days: I took to social media.

The next day, I happened to be appearing on Loose Women, ITV Daytime, (I was a regular on the show at the time), and they kindly let me talk about what had happened. I posed a question whilst on air, and that question has now become the driving force behind our global campaign called ‘Rights on Flights’…

‘Why can’t wheelchair users travel in their chairs when we fly?’

That moment on national TV may have been the moment the campaign began, but truthfully, this fight for rights had been gestating for years through every indignity, every time I’d been left stranded on an aircraft, every broken chair, every crawl down an aisle because there was no aisle chair on board. Every flight I had taken starving or dehydrated. And, for every time the very same had happened to friends of mine. Not just in the UK but around the world, wheelchair users were facing the exact same issue. One woman had been so badly treated by an airline in the United States that she had died.

Enough was enough.

And as we all know, well-behaved women seldom make history, I decided it was high time I caused a fuss.

The Problem We’re Normalising

Here’s what most non-disabled people don’t understand: flying is the only form of transport where wheelchair users are forced to surrender our wheelchairs. On a bus, in a taxi, or even on a train, we can stay in our chairs. But on a plane? You are forced to hand over your independence at the aircraft door and hope - just hope - that your body can withstand the journey and that your mobility device comes back in one piece.

Let me share the numbers that should make you furious:

In the US alone, 29 wheelchairs are broken during air travel every single day. That’s 29 lives stopped in their tracks. Daily.

If non-disabled people were having their legs broken at the same rate we’re having our chairs broken, there would be an absolute outcry. Parliamentary inquiries. Front-page headlines. Immediate regulatory intervention. But we’ve normalised this discrimination. We’ve collectively shrugged and said, “Well, that’s just how it is.”

I fundamentally disagree.

A wheelchair is not luggage. It’s not a “piece of equipment” in the way a suitcase is a piece of equipment. It’s someone’s legs. Their independence. Their freedom. Their lifeline. When you damage it, you’re not causing inconvenience; you’re causing harm.

What We Set Out to Do

Rights on Flights launched in March 2023 with co-founders who understood this intimately: Maayan Ziv, Josh Wintersgill, Chris Wood MBE, Roberto Castiglioni MBE and Jet Gates and later Martyn Sibley joined. We weren’t starting from scratch; we were building on decades of lived experience and expertise in aviation accessibility.

We had two clear goals:

Short-term: Reform how airlines and airports serve disabled passengers by demanding meaningful accountability. We lobbied the UK government to give the Civil Aviation Authority enforcement powers, meaning the ability to impose actual fines when airlines damage wheelchairs, leave disabled passengers stranded on aircraft for hours after landing, or fail to provide adequate assistance despite advance notice.

Because here’s the thing: the CAA’s existing rules weren’t enough. Airlines faced no real consequences when things went wrong. Without teeth, regulations are just suggestions.

Long-term: Complete redesign of aircraft to allow truly inclusive air travel. Until wheelchair users can fly in our chairs - the way we can take trains, buses, or taxis in our chairs - we haven’t achieved genuine equality.

Then we went bigger. We assembled a team of aviation experts, and we drafted actual legislation: the Assisted Air Travel Act. We presented it at the House of Commons in September 2023 to a packed terrace - MPs, Lords, Ministers, representatives from the White House, industry stakeholders from IATA and major airlines.

The Act mandates:

• Better training for airline staff on disability awareness and equipment handling

• Removal of compensation caps for damaged or lost mobility equipment

• Improved protocols for transporting wheelchairs and mobility devices

• Concessions for personal assistants traveling with disabled passengers

• Institution of Complaint Resolution Officials to handle issues as they arise

• Creation of working groups between airlines, airframe manufacturers, and wheelchair manufacturers to develop airworthiness standards

It’s comprehensive. It’s workable. It’s grounded in what disabled passengers actually need.

Making the Invisible Undeniable

At the time, as a TV presenter, it was obvious this unfolding story needed telling and, close friends with the newly appointed head of Reece Witherspoon’s production company 'Hello Sunshine’s newly established Unscripted Department, Sarah ‘Lazers’ Lazenby, we decided to roll cameras.

Soon after, a documentary titled ‘Fight to Fly’ was commissioned by Channel 4, which became our way of making the problem undeniable.

For the film, we sent a group of wheelchair using travellers with various disabilities on undercover missions through European airports and airlines that had faced criticism from disabled passengers. It was a social experiment, and the results were gutting but entirely unsurprising.

We uncovered exactly the problems we knew were happening: wheelchairs damaged beyond repair, passengers forced to crawl because assistance simply didn’t show up, people manhandled out of their chairs, inaccessible facilities, and staff with no training on how to actually help.

People dismiss disability issues when they’re invisible, but when you see a wheelchair careening down a luggage chute, hitting the stopper at speed and bouncing over the top - when you watch a passenger having to drag himself along the floor to reach a toilet because no aisle chair is on board - it becomes unmistakably unjust.

Every time these stories break, non-disabled people respond with shock: “Oh my god, that’s terrible, I had no idea!” And we’re sitting there going, “WE’VE BEEN TRYING TO TELL YOU.”

I have always believed that even if the world won’t listen to statistics, it will listen to stories. Stories are all we have.

During the film, I also became the first British female paraplegic to take a zero-gravity flight. Why? Because if you can make aerospace accessible, aviation bloody well should be too. But more on that another time…

Why Campaigning Matters (Even When It’s Exhausting)

I’ve spent two decades travelling as a wheelchair user and the past few years travelling as a travel writer, and I’m not going to lie - I get tired. Advocacy burnout is real. I’m tired of repeating myself. Tired of being framed as “inspiration” when I just want to get on a plane without my wheelchair being treated like disposable luggage. Tired of the assumption that we should be grateful for scraps of accessibility rather than demanding the dignity we deserve. And I am tired of being labelled a trouble-maker by the industry, and at the same time seemingly offending my own community for dominating the conversation on this issue.

But here’s why I keep going, why this campaign matters to me beyond the personal frustration:

For me, campaigning isn’t abstract. It’s personal. Every time I step onto a plane, I’m not just boarding a flight, I’m staking a claim to the basic dignity that others take for granted. I’m refusing to accept that a multibillion-dollar industry can continue treating disability as a problem while claiming to care about customer experience.

And when I see the messages - hundreds of them, btw - from people sharing their own traumatic experiences, from parents whose children have been left like discarded rubbish on aircraft, from adults forced to drag themselves through airports, from people who’ve stopped flying altogether because the system has broken their trust, I know this matters beyond me.

This isn’t a fringe grievance. This is systemic discrimination masquerading as an operational limitation.

What We’ve Achieved (And Why It’s Not Enough)

Since we launched Rights on Flights, tangible things have shifted:

• Industry-wide working groups are forming

• Airlines are investing in better staff training and equipment

• Accessibility is being treated less as a niche concern and more as a benchmark of quality customer service

• In the UK, momentum is building around improving legislation to grant regulators greater enforcement powers

• Innovation is happening: Chris Wood and his team developed the Air4All system, a foldable plane seat that could allow wheelchair users to remain in their chairs during flights

• The UK Civil Aviation Authority launched consultations on frameworks to improve airline experiences for disabled passengers

As for me, I’ve been to the White House to meet with the Secretary of Transport and his indomitable advisor, Kelly Buckland, to discuss fairer, safer air travel. I’ve presented our work at the United Nations. I’ve given a TEDx Talk about it. The campaign has gained international attention, influencing conversations in the US Department of Transportation and aviation stakeholders worldwide. A working group was also established in the UK, chaired by Paralympian Tanni Grey Thompson, but no real improvements have yet been made.

And - and this is crucial - awareness is not the same as justice.

And without enforcement powers, without real consequences, without disabled people having genuine recourse when things go wrong - the problems persist.

What Comes Next (After I Catch My Breath)

Here’s where I need to be honest with you: I have advocacy burnout. Proper burnout. The kind where you’ve fought so hard for so long that you need to step back before you become too bitter to be effective.

I’m currently in the middle of a major life redesign; I recently turned 40, returned to the UK after three years in the US, and I’m busy reclaiming my life around desire rather than duty. Part of that means I’m out in Florence studying art, reconnecting with creativity. Part of that means reminding myself that I’m more than my advocacy work.

But stepping back doesn’t mean stepping away forever.

Rights on Flights continues. The work continues. And when I return, recharged and clear-headed, we’ll be pushing harder. Because the absence of accountability means the problem persists, and we deserve more.

This year’s plans are still taking shape, but here’s what I can tell you: We’re working on next steps for legislative pressure, continued industry engagement, and expanding the campaign’s reach. There are meetings happening. Conversations with policymakers. Partnerships forming.

The campaign started because I couldn’t accept a system that works perfectly for some but consistently fails for others. It continues because we deserve air travel that respects our autonomy, our safety, and our place in the world.

Why This Should Matter to You (Yes, You)

If you’re disabled: I see you. I hear you. Your experiences are valid, your frustration is justified, and you deserve better than what the aviation industry is currently offering. You’re not being difficult. You’re not asking for too much. You’re asking for basic human dignity.

If you’re not disabled: This should still matter to you. Because accessible design benefits everyone - it’s better customer service, better operational standards, better safety protocols across the board. And because at some point in your life, you or someone you love will likely need accessibility accommodations. Ageing happens. Accidents happen. Temporary injuries happen. The systems we build now determine the world we all get to move through.

And frankly, it’s 2026, and we should all be past the point of accepting that entire categories of people are locked out of fundamental experiences like air travel.

Stay Tuned

Until then: Watch this space. Keep making noise. Keep demanding better. Keep refusing to accept “that’s just how it is” as an answer.

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Fight to Fly is available to watch on All4. For more information about Rights on Flights, visit rightsonflights.com or follow #RightsOnFlights on social media.

Not in the way you might imagine, not as a teenager clutching a portfolio, hoping to scrape into foundation year. I’m forty years old, soon to be forty-one, I’ve had an entire career, and I’m about to sit in a studio in Florence learning to draw like it’s the Renaissance.

The Florence Academy of Art. The actual one. Where they teach you to paint in the classical tradition, the way artists have learned for centuries. Where you grind your own pigments and study anatomy from casts and spend weeks on a single ear because mastery takes time and there are no shortcuts. I got in. I’m going.

And I am absolutely over the moon.

I’ve painted my whole life. Before my crash, before the wheelchair, before any of it — I painted. It was the one thing I was good at, the thing that made me feel like myself. At school, I was the art kid. I could draw. I could see things other people didn’t seem to notice. My art teacher told me I had something.

But when it came time to choose what to do with my life, I didn’t choose art. I chose law. Because I could. Because it was sensible. Because “artist” didn’t feel like a real job, and I was eighteen and terrified of getting it wrong.

Then I crashed a car and got it wrong anyway, in a much more spectacular fashion.

The decades that followed were about survival, then recovery, then building a life that looked like success. I was too busy proving I deserved to exist to worry about whether I was actually doing what I wanted.

Art got squeezed out. There was always something more urgent, more important, more career-advancing. I’d sketch occasionally. Paint when I could. But it was always in the margins, always the thing I’d get back to “one day.”

Well. It’s one day.

There’s a particular kind of painting I’ve always loved. Realism. Portraiture. The Old Masters — Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Velázquez. The way they captured light on skin, the weight of fabric, the soul behind someone’s eyes. Not abstract, not conceptual. Just: look at this human. Really look.

The Florence Academy teaches in that tradition. Classical realism. Atelier training. The kind of rigorous, foundational work that most contemporary art schools abandoned decades ago in favour of... well, I’m not entirely sure what. Installations? Concepts? Vibes?

I don’t want vibes. I want to learn to see. To render what’s in front of me with honesty and skill. To master the craft before I break the rules.

And I want to do it in Florence. Because if you’re going to learn to paint like a Renaissance master, you might as well do it where they actually were. Surrounded by Botticellis and Michelangelos. Eating pasta. Drinking Chianti. Living the absolute cliché and loving every minute of it.

I want to become a proper painter. Not a hobbyist. Not someone who “does a bit of art on the side.” A painter. Someone who can look at a face and render it with truth and skill. Someone who has put in the hours, learned the craft, earned the ability.

I want to see if the thing I gave up at eighteen is still there, waiting.

I want to prove to myself that it’s not too late. That forty is not too old to start again. That a body that doesn’t work the way it used to can still create something beautiful.

And I want to share it with you.

This is going to be a journey. Probably a messy one. I’ll be learning in public — the breakthroughs and the failures, the days I feel like a genius and the days I want to throw my easel into the Arno.

I want to document it here. Not in a polished, curated way, but honestly. What it’s actually like to learn a classical skill from scratch in midlife. The techniques I’m being taught. The work I’m producing (good and bad). The experience of being a disabled student in an intensive art programme. The life in Florence — the studios, the galleries, the food, the light.

I’ve spent years writing about travel. This is a different kind of journey. Internal as much as external. I don’t know where it ends, or what I’ll make, or who I’ll be on the other side of it.

But I know I want company along the way.

If you’re interested in art — whether you make it yourself or just love looking at it — I’d love you to follow along. If you’ve ever thought about learning something new in midlife, or going back to a dream you abandoned, or terrifying yourself in pursuit of something that matters — maybe this will resonate.

The Art of Sitting Still. Except I’m going to Florence. To learn to look. To learn to see. To finally, after all these years, learn to paint.

I can’t bloody wait.

First dispatch from Florence coming soon. Subscribe so you don’t miss it.

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It was time for a reckoning; not with America exactly, but with the version of myself I’d become there; the relentless striver, the professional overcomer, the woman who’d spent twenty years proving she deserved to take up space. So yes, I was, in fact, perched on said toilet, pinching some branded loo roll when I realised I was done, and it was time to blow up my life, and see where the pieces would land.

But first things first, I needed to leave America.

I want to be clear: this isn’t a rage-quit, nor is this a flouncing exit or a political statement, though the timing is admittedly complex. The truth is, I’d been circling this decision for months, maybe longer. The question I was grappling with was, was it time to move back to the UK?

I had to weigh up the pro’s and con’s…

Here’s what America gave me: permission.

By this, I don’t mean a visa - though yes, that too (at great cost) - I mean the audacity to believe I could do things I had no business attempting. In Britain, we’re raised on a steady and bland diet of self-deprecation and managed expectations. Don’t get above yourself. Who do you think you are? Americans, meanwhile, will look you dead in the eye and tell you you’re going to be huge and somehow, you believe them.

I arrived in the States alone, knowing no one and yet, within a year, I was hosting the Paralympics for NBC. Within two, I’d been to the White House twice. I built a life from nothing, in a country that doesn’t make anything easy, all with a body that makes everything a lot harder.

The US taught me to stop waiting for permission. To say yes first and figure out how later. To take up space unapologetically, even when - especially when - no one was making room.

That rewired something in me and I’m grateful for it.

And then there’s the access.

The Americans with Disabilities Act is, frankly, extraordinary. In Britain, our law isn’t even worth the paper it’s written on - “reasonable adjustments” is a phrase that essentially means “we’ll try our best but no promises, and please don’t make a fuss.” In America, accessibility is the law, and you can sue if it’s not provided.

So, for the first time in my adult life, I could just... exist. I could get into buildings without phoning ahead, I could go to a bar, a restaurant, a gig, a gallery, without having to research, plan, and accept that half the places I wanted to go weren’t options for me.

My world, as a result, got bigger. Not because I changed, but because the infrastructure did.

I didn’t realise how small I’d been living in th UK until I suddenly wasn’t.

I had arrived in LA, California, my home for the entirety of my life in the US, by motorbike, having driven all the way across the continent over three weeks.

This expereince not only opened my mind to the sheer scale of the country I had moved to, it also gave me the sense that there was space here for everyone. Unlike the UK, where you feel decidedly cramped at the best of times, or certainly, I had, living in London, America’s geography expanded my thinking. And from the moment I touched down, I never stopped exploring what I would come to call, ‘the land of step-free’!

But here’s where it gets complicated.

Physical access is one thing. Being seen is another.

Yes, I hosted the Paralympics for NBC, and was the first woman with a visible Disability to do so in the history of America. And when it was over, I assumed — naively, it turns out — that other opportunities would follow. That’s how it works, right? You do a job well, and doors open.

But the doors did not open.

I took meetings, I pitched, I showed up with my best American confidence, the kind the country had taught me to wear. And what I heard, over and over, in various politely evasive formulations, was: we love what you do, but we’re not sure our audience is ready. Ready for what, exactly? A wheelchair? In 2024?

The landscape for disabled talent in American media is barren in a way that genuinely shocked me. For a country that talks so much about diversity and inclusion, the absence of visibly disabled people on mainstream television is staggering. We’re fine for inspiration porn and charity segments, but just being there — on a panel show, a news desk, a travel programme — being good at the job without the disability being the entire point? Almost non-existent.

I moved to America for more opportunity and yet I found a ceiling I hadn’t expected. Not a physical one — the ramps were all there — but a visual one. A representational one. A you can come in, but we won’t put you on screen one.

I set up a production company, Making Space Media, that was in a first look deal with Reece Witherspoons company, Hello Sunshine, and yet despite countless development calls with an ever-changing sea of accomplished development exec’s, nothing moved from ideation into reality and there is only so many times I could blame my lack of talent, imagination and story telling for the lack of momentum. From the moment our deal was announced in the press, Disabled people across the USA with extraordinary talent came to me with ideas for TV shows and formats, yet even with the might of the sunshine behind me, nothing grew…

Despite my newly developed super-sized self-belief, despite the network I had created, despite the push, the drive, the will, it became clear that America was not ready for authentic Disability representation in unscripted TV, and I was certainly not going to be the person to change that.

Meanwhile, back in the UK — the country I’d left partly out of frustration as the lack of access comparably was so hard to unsee in contrast to the States — things had actually moved forward even more. The BBC had made real commitments to disabled representation. Channel 4, a genuine pioneer for decades, continued to redefine what disability looks like on screen. Ideas for shows were landing in my inbox, reminding me that I could have a career in British television that simply wouldn’t have been possible in the States.

Sometimes you have to go away to understand what you had. Even if what you had was imperfect. Even if the pavements are still shit and the trains are still a nightmare and the concept of “reasonable adjustments” still makes me want to scream, the UK is a world of its own, and I am proud and privileged to be from here.

So, while America taught me to dream bigger, it also showed me the places I still didn’t fit. It gave me freedom of movement and then boxed me out of the culture.

It told me I could be anything, and then couldn’t imagine someone like me as a regular presence on screen.

It built the ramps but not the vision.

And then, Trump came in, and we watched rights I thought were settled become suddenly, terrifyingly unsettled. I felt the particular exhaustion of being a woman, being disabled, and paying attention as the ground shifted, arise in me. Contracts and budgets for DE&I departments were being cancelled, people in my community were losing jobs (and their medical support), the rhetoric around disability was becoming increasingly ableist, and eugenics was, once again, raising its ugly head. And I realised that the physical infrastructure, extraordinary as it is, means nothing if it’s not matched by the will to actually include us — in the rooms, the decisions, the stories being told.

So, yes, I am grateful for what America gave me, but I am also ready to leave.

I’m leaving with friendships and memories that will last a lifetime — the kind forged in the particular intensity of immigrant life, where everyone is a little bit lost and a little bit brave, and you bond faster because of it.

I’m leaving with stories I’ll dine out on forever. (The White House toilet paper is still in my mum’s downstairs loo.)

I’m leaving clearer on what I’m willing to stand up for. What hills I’ll die on. What compromises I refuse to make.

America clarified me. And now it’s time to go.

So what comes next?

Honestly? I don’t entirely know. And that’s the point.

For twenty years, I’ve been running. Outpacing the ghost of who I might have been. Turning trauma into trajectory. Building a life so impressive that no one could question whether I deserved to be here. It worked. It got me to the White House, to NBC, to places I never imagined.

It also got me to a toilet cubicle, mid-existential crisis, wondering if this was really it.

The next chapter is going to be different. Slower. More intentional. I want to paint again — properly, not as a hobby squeezed into the margins. I want to write about and present on travel in a way that changes things. I want to make TV that changes perceptions. But above all else, I want to stop proving and start living on my terms.

Desire, not duty. That’s the experiment.

I’m coming home with a full heart, a firmer sense of my values, and the quiet, terrifying excitement of not knowing what happens next.

Thank you, America. For all of it.

UK — it’s good to be home.

Next week: Deciding my ‘Forty Things For Forty’ and why making this list changed everything.

I don’t know exactly where this is all going. But I’m writing it down anyway. If you want to follow along as I figure it out, I’d love the company.

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So who am I and why would you want to be here? Well, I am many things. Professionally, I’m a TV Presenter and a Travel Writer. I am also a Disability advocate. Furthermore, I am a painter, a solo traveller, a woman who just turned forty, and — despite being a paraplegic for over two decades — someone who still hasn’t figured out how to sit still but is on a quest to learn.

So, welcome! I’m so glad you found me….

Why This Exists

I fucking hate social media.

The endless scroll, the algorithm that thinks it knows me better than I know myself, the performance of it all.

So I’m trying something new. Where I can write properly and share what I’m really thinking, not just what performs well.

This is that place.

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What You’ll Find Here

Travel I write about travelling for a living — for Condé Nast Traveller, The Times, Wanderlust, Adventure.com, and others. I specialise in accessible and inclusive travel, because I believe disabled people deserve adventure too. Here, I’ll share the stories behind the stories: the trips, the people I meet, the story that doesn’t make the edit, plus practical tips so you can plan your own adventures and advice on where to go and how to get there!

Life as a Wheelchair User I’ve been paralysed from the chest down since I was eighteen. Twenty-two years later, I’m still figuring it all out. I’ll write about bodies, about access, about confidence, about the daily absurdities and occasional triumphs of navigating a world that wasn’t built for us.

Solo Female Travel I travel alone, a lot and it give me a particular perspective — on independence, on vulnerability, on the joy of eating dinner by yourself in a beautiful restaurant and not giving a shit what anyone thinks.

Midlife, Redesigned I also just turned forty. I’ve spent the last year blowing up my life - leaving America where I lived for the past three years (more on that in my first post), moving back to the UK, questioning everything I thought I wanted - and I’m documenting that here. The existential crises, the experiments, the attempt to let desire, not duty, be my compass.

40 for 40 Before my birthday, I made a list. Forty things I wanted to do, try, become, confront. Some are adventures. Some are terrifying. Some are silly. I’m working through them and writing about it as I go.

Art Here’s something most people don’t know about me: I’m a trained portraitist. I’ve painted my whole life, but somewhere along the way, it got squeezed out by the career, the campaigning, the constant motion. I’m reclaiming it and I want to become the best artist I can be, so I’m going to document that journey here too — the learning, the failures, the studio days, the work.

TV & Projects I’m always working on something — documentaries, presenting projects, campaigns. I’ll share updates here first, before anywhere else.

Who This Is For

People who travel, or dream of travelling.

Disabled people who are tired of being told they’re “brave” for existing in public.

Non-disabled people who are curious about a perspective they don’t often hear.

Solo travellers. Women in midlife. Anyone who’s ever looked at their life and thought is this it?

People who love art, or want to make more of it, or just want to watch someone else try.

Anyone who’s sick of social media but still wants connection.

Basically: curious, kind, adventurous people who like good writing and don’t mind the occasional swear word.

If that’s you, you’re in the right place.

The Community Bit

I want this to be more than me talking at you. Substack has comments, and I’ll actually read them. I want to hear about your travels, your lives, your own experiments in sitting still (or refusing to).

I want this to be a gathering place for like-minded people — a little corner of the internet that isn’t trying to sell you anything or hack your attention span. Just real people, real stories, real conversation.

Let’s see what we can build.

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Free subscribers get some of the essays, travel stories, and updates. That’s the core of what I’m doing here, and I want it to be accessible to everyone.

Paid subscribers — I’m still figuring out exactly what this tier looks like, but it’ll probably include things like: early access, extra behind-the-scenes content, the unfiltered stuff, maybe some art process posts, and the knowledge that you’re directly supporting independent writing.

If you can afford it, it means the world. If you can’t, stay anyway, please.

Let’s Go

I don’t have a five-year plan for this. I don’t have a content calendar or a growth strategy; I just have a lot I want to write about, a deep need to do it somewhere that isn’t Instagram, and a hope that some of you might want to come along for the ride.

The Art of Sitting Still. A work in progress, like me.

Subscribe, say hello in the comments!

Let’s go…

— Sophie

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P.S. If you’re wondering about the name: I’ve been a paraplegic for twenty-two years and I still haven’t mastered the art of sitting still. Not physically — I’ve got that bit down. But mentally, emotionally, existentially? Absolutely not. I’m always chasing something. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe sitting still is the one thing I’ll never learn. Or maybe that’s what the next forty years are for.

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