Baby Daddy

Is there something in this?

We know so much about how nature operates (and the possible problems) that we get great anxiety about keeping track of it to make sure everything is still working ok. Let me expound (vomit some words) a little.

As a recent parent I’ve found myself reading books about parenting and making the effort to keep up to date with ‘what to expect’ and ‘how to deal with it’. Mrs Monkey as I think most mums these days is even more ‘into’ it and informed. There’s a feeling that we must be completely qualified and well-versed in case we do something wrong and ruin our little bundle of ‘joy’ (possible inappropriate use of quotes there).

What tends to happen in practice that Mrs M is immersed in the mummy lifestyle and baby circuit so picks up on the collective neuroses about what should be done and when, and what he should be doing at what stage. Don’t let him do a, b, c in case x,y,z happens…make sure he drinks full fat milk in the morning rather than semi skimmed because research has shown that d, e, f… you get the jist.

I seem to use the phrase ‘awk it’ll be fine’ pretty constantly. But you can bet your bottom dollar that I’ll be making sure he wears a helmet (that I never did) when he rides his bike, and probably worry about him walking to the shops on his own (which I always did), or getting five minutes un-creamed exposure in the ‘summer’ sun.

We think we can create the perfect child by giving them the right music lessons or choosing the right pushchair. It is taboo that any conversation with another adult should take precedence over something going on with your child. When I was a child, it was a big deal if we were doing something specifically because I wanted to, it was a massive treat. Nowadays, people plan their weekends around what their children want to do, rather than having them experience life through their parents.

Is this a new phenomena? I think it might be. Certainly my parents generation and before viewed kids a lot like pot plants - looks after them and they’ll grow up ok. Don’t do anything stupid like leaving them for a week without water… but don’t obsess too much about the books that say your plant needs to be kept at 18-22 degrees, or that it needs 7+ hours of direct sunlight… or that x brand plant food is 4.6% better for leaf greenness etc etc.

Is there a similar thing when it comes to the environment?

A very un-parsed thought, but am I on to anything?

The randomness of guilt

An estemend blogger wrote about the ‘drama of forgiveness’… he injected lots of god mumbo, and yes, some jumbo but the sentiment was an interesting one.

Guilt is a funny thing and from my experience, quite random. I’m sure (know) I’ve done lots of bad things and hurt people along the way but for most of these incidents I feel only passing guilt and in the most cases I would imagine I don’t remember. But there are somethings I’ve done which stick with me and fill me with genuine guilt.

I’m gonna lay them out before you here not as a confessional, but to show you how random and quite puny these things are.

Both are things which I did or was involved in when I was in primary school, at the age of about 7-8. I wonder if there are any psychologists out there who can make some assessment of me based on this. It’s gonna come across that I was a goody-two-shoes as a boy, which I suppose I was… but I did ‘bad’ things like lighting fires, chucking crab apples at peoples windows (windys), once pulled a pen knife on someone during a fight (seriously)… zero guilt attached.

These are the things which I find myself thinking about occasionally on the bus to work

The first is the most puny I’d say… simple as this… stole a fiver from my mum’s purse and spent it on loads of sweets then scoffed them all. Back in them days a fiver was ‘something’ probably equivelent to a £20 today… I was able to buy a carrier bag full of sweets and treats. I think the guilt is made worse because my mum asked me directly if I had taken it, and I lied through my teeth. SERIOUSLY I’ve felt guilt about it since then, so much so that on my mother’s death bed when I was 25, I had to tell her, she laughed and couldn’t even remember.

The other thing is a wee bit worse, all the females reading this are gonna think I was a orrible little boy. It all involved a girl whose name I remember well but will call her Kate… she was my ‘best friend’ when I was a 5 yr old. Crucially she was the first girl in the class to get boobs - not her fault, and some would also jump to my defence and say it’s not my fault. All of a sudden the boys in the class decided that they were supposed to ‘love’ her. No one was quite sure why and what exactly we were supposed to do. About 5 or 6 of us started to hang around outside her house to see her (I think her dad actually did come out with a big stick one time). Kate didn’t really know what to do with all this attention, she remained friendly and one fated afternoon she agreed to kiss us all. Very nice of her, but ill advised. There was an actual queue, I think I was toward the end of the line so I could make sure everyone else was actually gonna do it.

This is when it all changed. I’m not sure who it was, I don’t think it was me but it might have been, that decided to call her blubber lips. We were suddenly all very ‘aware’ and embarrassed - like Adam and Eve in the garden of eden, if you will. We all ran for the cover of mockery and made her life hell. We all decided we hated her… that she was fat, ugly and had blubber lips (which she hadn’t… she was just a normal little girl, who’d been early to develop). For a few months it was our sport… mocking her, laughing at her, refusing to stand beside her in line-ups. She moved school. I was 8 years old, and still I feel bad.

There you go.

High Anglican Jinks

An unexpectedly interesting morning. A good friend from work had a little girl a few months before I had my little boy, today was her christening. It was a very grand affair, his wife is a teacher at a plush boarding school, with its own massive and impressive chapel. The layout is ala St.Pauls & House of Commons with rows of pews facing each other. The choir processed in followed by the rector (+ henchmen), first up the choir sang a very dramatic a-capella Latin piece which was truly spine tingling. The whole service was very ‘high Anglican’ and I have to say I loved it - ‘uplifting’ i think the word is.

It’s weird to watch myself type that, but the sense of occasion, coming together, community and family was great - if it wasn’t for all the wacko miracle claims, eternal life fetishes and ‘Jesus loves me’ delusions (not sure the Anglicans go in for much of that anyway )

Maybe I’ll become a vicar now that I’ve resigned from my job…. VicarMonkey.

Jebus: Martyr or Murderer?

‘Murderer’ is over egging an already well egged pudding - but it has a nice controversial rhythm to it. Anyway, let me tell you a story passed down to me for generations (say).

They say Jebus was born miraculously in a small town just north of Cardiff, a thousand years ago during the English occupation. He was a bit of a thinker and philosopher and when he came of age some people started to say he was ‘the one’, god’s messiah.

As he travelled into Cardiff one spring morning crowds gathered to greet him as their saviour, he didn’t do anything to correct their assertions so the rumours grew - as they did quite often in those times. He did a bit of a speaking tour talking about god and hinting that he was their long-awaited messiah, but then things started to go a bit sour.

There had been rumours of wondrous miraculous happenings, so a caravan of the sick and the needy started to follow him around. One day he was on the way to a wedding when some people stopped him and said… about 10 percent of our children die before they reach the age of 2… what can we do about it? But instead of telling them about water purification, antibiotics and general child heath care (which if he was god, he would have of course known) he said… sorry, I’m on the way to a wedding… but you’ll like this… while I’m there I’m gonna take some of that pure water which you need, and then I’m going to turn it in to wine, yazam! We is going to par-tay. The villagers used their god-given rationale and knew that this couldn’t be the actions of a loving god so they continued their messiah search.

It kept happening… one day on the way to a friend’s funeral… a group mothers came to him and said, our children have all died in the last month of an infection, dozens more are sick, they were innocent kids who we loved, if you are god can you be merciful and raise them from the dead? He said… hmmm , nah sorry… but tell you what how’s about I resurrect my mate Lazarus instead. The mothers where less than impressed, especially when he refused to give them any hints as to why infections spread in the first place (which he of course would have known).

The mothers decided that if someone had this kind of power, yet chose not to use it (apart from the odd party trick), and chose to let these innocent children die that it was tantamount to murder, or at least man slaughter, certainly not the actions of a loving god - so they continued their search for a messiah. Jebus wasn’t the one. There were later rumours of a personal resurrection, but he’s conveniently lifted himself up into the clouds to heaven… the mothers rolled their eyes with a chuckle and continued to worship Yahweh like they always had.

But maybe the problem was that their minds where too small to comprehend the wonder of why Jebus was actually god’s son, and if only they had opened their hearts a little more to Jebus they would have believed… as opposed to following the non-related Jesus of Nazareth who WAS of course, the one, as his actions and the evidence is a lot more compelling.
Happy Easter

Those pesky islamists

There’s something very oppressive about the climate of fear brought about by deadly Islamic attacks on western civilians. Has there ever been a more unnecessary statement you may say, but it’s the small things that get to me. Yesterday evening I was coming back from a work meeting on the train, and sitting across from me was a Muslim woman, head to toe in black complete with a head scarf. She was quietly sitting there by herself, eyes closed, lips moving, obviously praying to Allah. I wanted not too, but I couldn’t help it, I was looking around to see if she had any large bags or if she looked like she had any bulk around her waist. Whether I liked it or not I thought that my chances of making it to my destination had at least slightly reduced.

Two years ago I was in Australia with my then girlfriend, flying from Perth to Sydney. It was completely clear as we flew over Western Australia and we could see the shadow of the plane miles below on the dessert earth. After about an hour’s flying time I noticed that we were slowly changing course. At first it didn’t even register as unusual, I thought it was a change of flight path or normal routine, but slowly over the course of 5-10 minutes we kept turning and turning in a large circle until it started to become obvious that we were headed back the way we came.

I don’t know if anyone else noticed but certainly no one said anything and there was no message from the pilot. I took a breath and started an internal dialog, asking myself if what was happening was really happening and what it meant. I decided that either some person was forcing the plane to turn back or something technical was forcing the plane to turn back, neither was good.

I was listening to some music at the time, the song was Bob Dylan’s Forever Young - that’s irrelevant, but I just remember it. It sounds so naff and bravado-lite but I started to physce myself up for trouble. I swapped with my girlfriend from the window seat to the isle, put on my shoes and looked around for any likely helpers should it all ‘kick off’. A bit embarrassingly Rambo-esque, but at the time it felt completely real.

I didn’t want to tell my girlfriend what was happening, as I knew she’d be quite panicky, but unbeknownst to her I was planning to ask her to be my wife that evening, on the steps of the Opera House. The idea came to me that I should just go for it now in case I didn’t get the chance (seriously, this is how I was thinking). So I turned to her and said…. Bing Bong… it was the captain.

‘Ladies and gentlemen you may have noticed that the plane has turned around, we had a slight problem but it’s been resolved and we’re now turning back on our original flight path’

The cabin crew had smelt ‘something funny’ in the food storage area… which on further investigation turned out to be rotten coffee at the bottom of a trolley. Good job I was all physced up for some Steven Segal action!

By the way she said yes, on the steps of the Opera House that evening

Who do you think you are?

This is one of those posts were I have no idea where it’s going, one of many. It’s such an obvious idea, but I find it really interesting. It’s the idea of family, heritage, race, ancestors and national culture.

I was watching a program a while ago called “Who do you think you are?” When celebs track their family tree - it’s a surprisingly interesting program. This week it was Barbra Windsor, the arcatypical East Londoner. Sure enough her parents and grandparents had been born and bred within the sound of the bow bells, but what struck me was when she went back a generation more and found that they have come from County Cork and Scandinavia.

I don’t know much about my family tree, but I can go back to my great grandparents on one side as County Longford shop keepers, and on the other side as county Down farmers. The interesting thing is, anything further back than that, I have no idea - for all I know they could all be Russian, Italian, Polish.

With that thought in my mind it strikes me as strange for anyone to have a over inflated sense of nationalism. Seeing themselves as ‘true’ English or ‘true’ Irish or whatever - even Babs Windsor is quarter Irish/Scandinavian. After a generation or two an immigrants family can be truly integrated to the point where they can even find themselves being jingoistic about their ‘adopted’ country.

I have a Czech friend who lives near me and it strikes me that in 100+ years our respective great great grand kids will probably just see themselves as English and maybe not even know our original nationality - and maybe complain about the Paddys and Poles coming in and taking all the jobs etc.

Were it is different I suppose is with skin colour. If I was literally green, with green skin then my great great grand kids would know that they weren’t originally anglo-saxons, and more importantly others would see them as ‘different’. If Obama’s parents came from Albania rather than Africa he might just assume that he could trace his linage back to the Mayflower - and it wouldn’t mater either way.

There is a nugget of something worth saying here.

The look of love

An interesting article in Time magazine this week, which I tend to read on the loo (too much info, yeah?), It was an investigation into the nature of romance. An unexplainable intangible you may say, and to a large degree that’s true, but here’s the theory.

People tend to search for the most attractive person they can pull (to paraphrase). The evidence is, and we all know… 10s tend to marry 10s, 7s tend to marry 7s etc. People also tend to,  marry in their late 20s when they start to feel the need to ‘settle down’ find that special person and start a family.

So to be unromantic about it, if you are going out with someone in your late 20s, you get on really well with them, are attracted to them, and feel that you’re probably not going to do any better - then you marry them. BUT… that’s the theory… in truth, people ‘fall in love’ they have this extra, irrational ‘love’ thing, romantic love. So why is this - in an evolutionary sense.

Here’s the interesting theory - if you ‘settle’ for the best you can get at the time when you want to get married theres always the chance, in fact the probability that later in life someone better will come across your radar, and be interested in you -and if you are being rational about it you will say… ok, here is someone better for me - so I’ll move on.

This is of course bad for the species, breaking up families and taking away our sense of security that our partner is going to leave us if someone better comes along. So apart from our moral consciences what makes us stay with our partners? The fact that we didn’t rationally decide to love them, we irrationally fell ‘in love’ and that connection is intangible.

I’m always warning single people not to be too picky - but this article got me thinking - maybe they should all wait until they find that spark, that romantic tremor, embrace it and don’t down play it as something that wears off.

Daddys can’t be trusted

A moving tale was regaled to me around the table at a wedding over the Christmas period. You know how it goes, no one at the table knows each other but there’s the one guy who’s willing to be the chatty one - everyone else lets him fulfill that role because it’s easier than trying to think of our own conversation. He did though weigh in with a story about his niece which left us all close to tears.

His brother was very worried about his eight year old daughter’s performance in school, she was good at English and reading but was continually failing maths. He struck upon an idea to inspire her, she loved Harry Potter above anything else so he wrote out a fake letter from Dumbledore to his daughter saying that she had been chosen to attend Hogwarts next term, all she had to do was to get a C in maths. He rubbed some butter on the letter and put it under the grill for a minute or two, then ruffled it up, put it in a fancy calligraphy envelope and sealed it with some wax.

When his daughter got the letter she was overwhelmed with excitement, running around the house ‘daddy daddy, guess what!? Guess what!?’ he advised her not to tell her friends in school because they would be jealous, but to just try her best to do better at maths, this of course, she did, studying every night to get better grades. Her dad kept the letters coming, from Dumbledore telling her that she was doing well and to keep it up, the problem was that she was improving so well that the implications started to register with daddy.

He’d no idea what to do, he knew his daughter would be gutted when she found out that she wasn’t going to Hogwarts. He decided to stop sending the letters in the hope that she would just forget about it, a forlorn hope as it was all she ever talked about. He started to subtly cast doubt on the validity of the letters saying that she should get her hopes up too much, and that it might actually be better if she didn’t go to Hogwarts. One evening she came out with it… ‘Daddy, did you write the letters from Dumbledore?’ so there he was faced with lying to his daughter, right to her face, the alternative was terrible too but he had no choice… he said ‘yes, but only….’ . It was no use, she ran up to her room in floods of tears.

Days went by and she had stopped crying but she refused to even look her daddy in the eye. She had told her closest friends about the letters who hadn’t really believed her and now she had to tell them that they were right. There was nothing daddy could do or say, she wouldn’t engage with him. After a week or so as they were having breakfast her mum asked… ‘Darling, are you alright? Daddy is really sorry, I think you should be friends again’.

She replied in a very adult voice… ‘Mummy, I think we have learned something… daddys can’t always be trusted’.

Barely a dry eye around the wedding table.

Grown ups, pff!

I’m reading a great book at the moment called They F*** You Up, It was recommended to me by a fine scholar and a gentleman of sorts. The basis is a well worn polemic of Nurture over Nature, but it’s very well written and revelatory. It is heavy on case studies from families and evidence of how much the way we treat and relate to our children effects what we become in later life. I’m reading it as a bit of advice on how to be a good parent myself, but I’m finding a lot of things about my own upbringing with rings strikingly true, uncomfortably at times.

The most obvious, yet the most striking thing is how children take on the values and beliefs of parents they respect.  In fact how we relate and teach our children can resonate down through generations. What a responsibility! Both my parents where god-fearing church goers and I ended up having their values and beliefs almost by default… my father in law turned veggie about 20 years ago, and his children who liked and respected him followed suit soon after. Believe-you-me (first time with that phrase) his daughter (and son) can argue passionately for that value.

But here’s the rub… I manged to negociate a default non-veggie ethic for my little boy, but it’s just hit me that he is going to at some stage decide to be veggie or not… probably depending on which parent he respects more,   oh dear, the competition begins!

What’s your best Christmas memory?

Ok the reception in my office have a CD player on non stop Christmas hits, and the office smells of pine - so im well and truly in the mood. Lets do this thing.

Gimme your earliest or best Christmas memories.

First one that pops into my head is thus…

My sister and I never had stocking hung up (though I think we did have a dad sock each filled with oranges and apples)… in stead we had a chair each in the lounge.

I’d usually wake up at around 3-4 am on the day, sneak out into the landing where my wee sis was usually waiting, too scared to go downstairs by herself in case ‘the big man’ was still there. We’d creep downstairs very slowly, usually feeling a little cold, but more shaking with the excitement of it all, almost unable to hold it in. We’d open the lounge door and before we’d turn on the light we could see that ‘he’d been’ because of the silhouettes on the chairs. We’d pause for a moment, almost wanting to delay it a second or two longer, then turn on the light to revel all. Truly magical. I’d drive my remote control truck into the mum and dads room at 4am… to ‘show’ them what Santa had brung.

I might have found myself an Existential Dilemma

I’ve been dying to get one of these for ages… and I’ve eventually found myself one - not offa eBay or anything, just lying in bed thinking - flip, this whole existence stuff is a bit weird.

I must admit this may be fueled by the fact that my learn-ed brother in law lent me a book of esseys by John-Paul Sartre, which I’m loving. 

In modern civilisation, lets say from the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago, people have been born, lived for an average of lets say 50 adult years then died.

So I am born, try my best to learn the history of all those 200 or so generations that have gone before me, do my little bit to be involved in the process of moving humanity on a little further, get together with another person to create another generation of people who grow up and learn the history of human kind (including the addition made (and being made) by my generation), I then shuffle off the mortal coil, having done my little bit.

I suppose this is Nietzschean ‘death of god’ thing… the thought that there is no overarching ‘watcher’ of the whole of history happening, the players just nip in for a while, do their bit, then pass the baton to someone else. A very few make a mark which reverberates through history, I wonder if will, probably not, oh dear that’s a bit depressing

A prize for anyone who guesses the amount of commas

I wanna be like you hoo hoo

I’m not really a ‘Mr Angry’ character, if I was I would probably be a better and opinionated blogger. I tend to give celebs and people in newspapers the benefit of the doubt - saying things like. I don’t really know Peter Andre, who am I to have an opinion on him, likewise Jade Goody or Prince Philip. I say this as cover for the fact that once in a while a someone says something, or a story emerges that really gets to me and makes me into ‘Mr Angry from Bristol’.

My local infant school recently made the local Points West news over a teacher racism scandal. Click here to read the story on BBC.

I’ll paraphrase it. The school was putting on production for parents of Jungle Book, when the teacher was apportioning out roles, she asked the 7 year olds, who wants to be a monkey? Of course, every hand was pushed high in the air, and the teacher chose 5 kids. Two of the kids were black brothers (I mean they WERE actually brothers).

That’s pretty much the story. When the they got home they excitedly told their mum and step father (indecently their step father is white). At this point the parents hit the roof, and demanded an explanation from the school, and the suspension of the teacher. Why? Because it was racist to cast the black kids as monkeys.

There was a massive hoopla with BBC Points West covering the story for a couple of days and newspaper interviews from teachers and parents at the school.

It made me really sad. What on earth did these parents think they were doing. What exactly did they want the teacher to say… “sorry kids you can’t be monkeys because some idiots in the 1970s used to use monkey as a derogatory term for blacks”.

My son will quite likely go to this school in a few years, and it really annoys me the idea that he would come home from school asking why his friend Billy wasn’t allowed to be a monkey because he’s black.

The MOST annoying thing is, that the school seemed to pander to the parents, instead of laughing them out the school… or maybe make them attend some basic classes!

What’s that they say, political correctness gone mad.
There you go… once you’ve typed that phrase in a blog, you really ARE “Mr Angry”.

A Real Checkpoint Charlie

As I’ve mentioned before in a rather long dramatic and hammed up post, my dad used to be a member of her majesty’s constabulary in Belfast, NI. It did lead to a couple of good blog-fodder moments, which im sure is why he joined. At the age of 16 I decided that having basically failed my exams that moving on to A-Levels and Sixth-Formness was just asking for trouble. So I opted to take a different tack… and go to college. I didn’t exactly know what that meant other than that I didn’t have to get a job, and it wasn’t school. I remember looking through the prospectus deciding between ‘Heating and Pluming’ and ‘Land Management’ I’d no idea what either of them really were but I was told these were the least subscribed courses so I’d a good chance of getting on one. In retrospect if I’d chosen Heating and Pluming I’d most likely be a lot richer than I am now… but at the time it seemed really gypy! I ended up choosing a generic engineering course - but that’s not the point of this post.

The college was at the bottom of Divis Street, beside Divis Flats, infamous for having a British Army lookout base on the top floor and for being a staunchly Irish Republican area. It should be noted that before I started going here I don’t think I had ever had a conversation with a Catholic -  not because I didn’t want to, I lived in a prod area and went to a prod church, all my friends where prods all my parents friends where prods - that’s the way it was/is.

Needless to say that it was enlightening being in a class of 20 boys where I was the only non militant Irish republican - I actually kinda liked it, I was their pet Hun! I started to take note of the Glasgow Rangers scores (even though I hadn’t before) so on Monday morning I could have a bit of banter.

It got a bit ropy at times, especially when there were a lot of car bombs going of in town. One day there was a bomb in the car park of Castlecourt Centre, just across the road. We were all evacuated but we were close enough to see it go of - all the boys started cheering and singing which was a bit of a reality check about the assorted political views.

Then came the moment. On a boring afternoon were all making some sort of electronic capacitance meter when one of the lads called everyone over to the window. There were a couple of police armoured Landrovers outside and they were just setting up a check point. The boys were hanging out the window shouting abuse and pointing rulers at them pretending to be snipers… nothing out of the ordinary really until my mate Connor (who’s house in Ardoyne I’d scarily been to visit) started shouting… “hey, look at the auld boy getting out now… fuck aff ya beardy bastard”. He caused a bit of a stir so I went over to have a look, with the intention of being the ‘sensible’ one and looking a bit put-out by it all. I looked out at the check point and got that sinking feeling in my stomach - the beardy bastard was of course my dad. I almost wanted to say hey, that’s my dad and for them all to be shocked and see that there’s actually a human behind the uniform but I realised that it wasnt the smartist move as some of the lads openly bragged about family in the IRA. I told my dad that night and he just laughed it of like it was nothing, and said he should have waved at me. I took it to heart though and it changed the nature of my relationship with the other students - I was much less of a gung-ho loyalist parody and just kept my head in my books (yeah right!  I just bunked off to listen to the CDs in the Virgin Megastore!!).

University Muskahound Challenge

A guilty pleasure I must admit to, is watching University Challenge on a Monday night. Don’t know why I say it’s a ‘guilty pleasure’, just a way of getting the sentence up and running I suppose.

Part of the tradition is seeing how many questions the mrs and I can get right. It’s accepted that the questions are well out of our league, so answering say, one out of ten right makes us feel like we’ve moving up an intellectual league. If it’s a round on French Impressionist painters for instance, we both shout out MONET to every question and if we happen to be right one time we high-five with delight (I might shout Cézanne one time, to make it look like I’m thinking).

The other night was one of my favourite moments, it was Liverpool University vs. Magdalen College, Oxford. Liverpool were quite literally, being taken to school. So we along with most of the viewing public were hoping that Liverpool could scramble some resemblance of credibility. The question was on pre-revolutionary France, and who was the 16th century cardinal to Louis XIV. Immediately I shouted out Cardinal Richelieu! The one and only reason i shouted this had to be kept secret, until to my joy ‘Ling’ from Liverpool was overheard on the microphone consulting her team mate with the words ‘what do you call that one offa Dogtanian and the Muskahounds!?!’ They lost 230 - 80.

Celebrity Encounter: Rolf Harris

It was circa 1991, Harris was at his height, and Rolf’s Cartoon Club was required watching on a Sunday evening.

My sister and I were on a family holiday with our parents, waiting at the baggage carousel at Heathrow, when one of us noticed the bearded one. My mum at this time was in a wheelchair, and as you’d expect from grumpy teenagers, neither of us wanted to do the pushing – until that was, we noticed Rolf. I grabbed for the handles and pushed mums chair at break neck speed, the long way round the carousel to where he was standing. I tried not to look directly at him, lest I turn to a pillar of salt (or whatever), but deliberately steered the wheelchair at him.

Then he spoke. I will remember these words till the day I forget them. Wheel on through there mate, wheel on through.

yes,   wheel on through