Before I start can you please do something for Mission Motorsport. It will help them to hopefully win some PR advertising which will be amazing for them. I need for you to go on to twitter if you have an account and copy these words;
I vote for @MissionMotorspt for @AutomotivePR #Tweetcharity’
Then paste them on to your twitter. Mission Motorsport and I will really appreciate it if you can do this for them, two minutes, please do it. Thanks.
Anyway….
I bought the paints I needed to finish spraying the `Picklemobile` but as yet the weather has been far from suitable for me to finish spraying it. We got the battery jeep, soon to be the `Picklemobile`, for my Son when he was a similar age to `Pickle`. He was three months premature when he was born and as a result has learning difficulties amongst other things, on speaking to his specialist we were told to do as much as we could to help his hand eye co-ordination and so the jeep was purchased. We obviously spent time doing other things but thought that this would be a really good way for him to judge distance and help his co-ordination, and it did a fantastic job. We were shocked at how quickly he picked up the fact that if he turned the wheel then he would go in a different direction, and similarly we were impressed with how well he coped with driving between things. He absolutely loved it and drove it for a good few years.
When `Pickle` was old enough, we thought that she would be able to ride it but unfortunately it would not drive. I had already had my accident and was unable to have a proper look at getting it going but luckily I knew someone who was an electrician who said that they would have a look and get it going for me, this was great news as I knew that `Pickle` would love it. The jeep was stripped down, completely stripped down, lights out, wheels off, motors out you name it, it was out. Then came the bad news. One of the motors was shot and needed replacing, until this was done the jeep would be in bits. It did seem strange that it had been stripped so far to figure out why it did not work but as the person was a qualified electrician I figured it must be for a reason. We waited for the person to get back to us with a price for a motor but alas it did not happen. When it was time for us to move to the bungalow where we are now we had to make a decision on whether to bin the jeep or take it, we had decided on binning it but we were told to take it as the person would sort it, so take it we did.
My Brother eventually took the bits that were once a jeep to our friend `Chis` who is also an electrician who said he would take a look at it for us. In one afternoon he completely re wired and reassembled the jeep. He put a new battery on it that he had lying around and even managed to sort out the motor which we had been told was shot. Aside form all of this, it was a lot more responsive and powerful than it was before. My Brother bought it back in the afternoon and `Pickle` had her first drive in it. The laughter was brilliant that was coming from `Pickle`, she was loving it, at least it did get sorted but was a shame that it had taken so long to get there.
I have been looking at how many of the people from hospital have been getting on and it seems as if there is a pattern, families and friends have massively let them down. It is shocking at how many people are finding this. I would think that if someone has been involved in an accident which has left them close to death and when they have recovered from that are left paralysed, the families and friends would want to be there. Any differences would be put aside as people realised their own mortality, the fact that life is short and that there are more important things in life than things that some people get caught up in. Surprisingly though this is not the case. I read and hear about how friends have been in contact with the injured person or their partners saying that if there is anything they can do to help then just to ask. The reality is though, across the board it would seem, that these are just words. What the people should actually say is that, if you need anything, don’t ask me as I will be too busy or uninterested. It seems that in the event of a tragic incident or occurrence that people say what they believe is the right thing to say, even though they actually don’t mean it or have any intention of giving the help or assistance that they have offered, strange.
Occasionally though your eyes are opened by the generosity and kindness of some individuals. I had a pond at my old house, it was dug by hand, by me and built using blocks and mortar also by myself. I did have help with the liner from my Brother in Law who also keeps fish and is more than used to building ponds. We had to make a decision about the fish when we moved as to whether we would be able to keep them or not, we were told though that we should take them and that a pond would be made. This was brilliant news, so we asked the landlord if we were allowed to build a pond to which they agreed. Two volunteers came to dig the pond and to build it and I supplied a digger, the blocks etc needed to build it, a good supply of sausages and bacon for lunch and we were good to go. As I had managed to get a digger another volunteer came over. This will be great, dug in no time and hopefully not long to build.
Unfortunately while digging, some pipes were discovered, pipes which should not have been there but obviously were. The pipes were not damaged but also appeared to go no where but never the less, the pond site was moved. Whilst digging another pipe was discovered, also not meant to be there and appeared to be attached to nothing but still, it was left. Unfortunately though, so was the digging and the volunteers left leaving half a hole, a churned up garden and a bit of a mess. Unable to do anything about it I was left in a bit of a pickle that was until Alison and Steve popped round for a coffee. They had a chat and a drink and after a surprisingly short while left to go home. Ten minutes later and they were back with welly boots and spades and carried on digging. This was something that others jumped on too, like my Brother, Paul, Sister in Law and Brother in law’s to name a few. Eventually the hole was dug. I remember my mate `Dobsy` coming round after work one evening as he wanted to help and started laying blocks dry inside the hole. He had never tried block laying before but really got in to it, to the point that we had to turn the outside light off to get him in!
Others also did some block work inside the hole including my Wife and my Brother, until we got to ground level, this was where the real shock came. One Friday evening there was a knock at the front door, on answering the door there was a gentleman who I had never met before stood in front of me. He introduced himself and said he had come to see the pond, I explained that it was not exactly a pond and he said that he knew but that was why he was there. I took him to the back garden and showed him what stage we were at. He looked around at the materials we had and said that he would be back in the morning. On the Saturday morning there was a knock at the door and stood there was the gentleman who had visited the previous evening and a younger gent. They came through and immediately began to mix muck and lay the blocks for the above ground part of the pond walls. These two gents were friends of Darren and Tabatha, they had never met me or my family and yet they chose to come down and build our pond for us. They would not accept anything for their help simply saying, “If you can’t help someone who is trying to help themselves then it is a bad job”. Proof that there are good people out there which is great but disappointing that it takes strangers to step in.
A similar thing happened to the front of our bungalow. I had asked someone if they would be happy to tidy the hedge at the front and cut the hedges in the back garden, something that I was unable to do and that I did not want my Wife having to do, climbing a ladder to cut a hedge I did not really want her to do. My friend Paul came round one day and started to carefully trim the hedge to make it look a bit tidier, until that is that someone came round and decided that it was not very good. With Paul still here, the petrol hedge trimmer was picked up and the hedge was cut right back, great you may think, but no. The hedge now had no green showing to the front of it, it was just brown dead leaves and branches. We had a couple of contract professional gardeners come round to ask advice but unfortunately the outcome was the same, it had been cut back too far and would simply look a mess until it grew back, assuming it would. The only option we had was to remove the hedge and replace it with a fence, Bob Barathy did an amazing job at putting the fence up for us and it looks great, but had the hedge not been destroyed it would have saved me over one thousand pounds.
I have tried to understand why families and friends would fail when people get to a point where they are in such a situation where they are more vulnerable than usual and require assistance, and I can only come up with the following;
They misunderstood in school teachings and have become confused with the fact that the world revolves around the sun, they believe that the world revolves around them.
They feel guilty for what has happened to the person involved in the accident in so far as they don’t know what to say or how to say it and it is therefore easier to be an asshole and distance them self/themselves and play the victim.
They struggle with the topic of conversation not being about them and can only therefore resort to the previous said course of action.
The unfortunate problem with this is that they have probably spent years honing their skills on convincing people that they are the poor hard done by and therefore manage to cry on the shoulders of those gullible enough to be roped in to the tales of woe and have a `fan base`. For those who have been left to deal with the problems which are unknown to the family and friends after their accident, they are then given the slating comments and snyde remarks to deal with from those poor mislead people who are members of the `fan base` which has been established. It is easy to ignore the idiotic no minds who make the comments as there are far more important things to deal with which as I said are unknown to family and friends, and it strangely gives something to look forward to, the day when the truth comes out and all of those easily led people, just like many before them, realise not just the fact that they were played, but that things are far far worse then they had realised.
I sympathise with those who are or have experienced this and can but say one thing, the people who are around you now, not when it was unsure if you would survive or recover, are the ones you should now bother with. All others who came to see you when you were wired up like a science project with tubes and needles sticking out, just so that they had something to talk about down the pub or at work are simply a waste of oxygen, you will know this to be true because they have been no where to be seen since.
Tomorrow my Dad is chauffeuring my Wife and I to something we have been invited to, I really appreciate him doing this for us as my Wife was not looking forward to the drive. She was never one for driving long distance and although she is so good since all of the driving she has had to do since my accident left me unable to drive, she did not want to. I hope the weather will stay nice, and that the traffic means we are not back too late. Time depending, I will let you know where we went and how the day was. Until then.
Goodnight all.