³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

Whenever I fly, I always fight with the airline staff for the right to keep my chair with me until boarding, then have it brought straight back to me at my destination. My gut instincts tell me that there are far fewer opportunities for screw-ups if I keep the damn thing within view at all times.

This time, however, I lost the argument at the check-in desk and hence agreed to have it tagged as baggage. This meant that I had to immediately transfer into a sub-standard airport wheelchair, which would have made even the crappiest NHS chair look state-of-the-art cool. I felt a strange sense of foreboding as I watched my wheelie trundle away from me on the conveyor belt - though this was probably more to do with it obviously being too big to fit through the gap in the wall, coupled with the staff's ham-fisted attempts to forcibly ram it through at all costs.

Having been deprived of my own superior, made-to-measure chair for the duration of my arduous journey, I was given yet another uncomfortable and unwieldy contraption to sit in during our brief stopover in Singapore. As if to add insult to injury, Changi Airport's 'special needs assistant' then insisted on labelling me with a sticker declaring that 'I am being assisted with special care'!

Quite why it was deemed necessary to tag my person in this fashion is beyond me, since the very fact that I was sitting in one of their enormous thrones on wheels should have been enough of a clue that I was one of the aforementioned special unfortunates. It's not even like I could have wheeled myself very far, as all four wheels of the airport wheelchair were roughly the diameter of compact discs.

The assistant seemed bemused at my refusal to hand over my passport and boarding card for her to hang on to. But then, why would I want to surrender my only means of continuing on my journey to a complete stranger who didn't speak the same language as me and couldn't understand a word I was saying? In my mind, I had already started running through all the possible reasons that could prevent her from returning with the vital documents when it was time to re-board the plane: fatal accident, passport being sold on the black market, even alien abduction. However unlikely these scenarios seemed, they just weren't risks I was willing to take.

Yet when I looked around me, to my horror I saw that all of the older disabled passengers were willingly giving up their travel documents and wearing their 'special care' stickers with pride. I grimly wondered whether there will ever come a time when I too will give up the fight, go with the flow and surrender my dignity?

Of course, it was only when I got to our next stopover in Sydney and discovered that my chair hadn't even made it out of Heathrow that I got to truly appreciate the extent of this 'special care' I'd been receiving. What you really need at the end of a gruelling thirty-hour journey is a further seven hours delay to fill in lots of lost property forms, whilst various officials gamely try to guess the whereabouts of your wheels.

Finally in Adelaide, I was forced to perform the first night of the festival in a borrowed airport wheelchair, which took some serious effort to propel across the stage using my feet. I guess the audience may have mistaken my repeatedly strained expressions for jet lag or, even worse, constipation.

In the end, though, my nightmare journey was well worth it. I was made to feel very welcome by everyone at High Beam Global, and it was an amazing, unforgettable experience. I was also bowled over by the number of Ouch readers and listeners that I met during my stay. I hadn't realised before just how much of a global phenomenon this website has now become.

And my missing wheelchair? It eventually showed up, two days after I arrived, complete with two burst tyres and a broken backrest. Seems that I wasn't the only one who had been treated with 'special care'.