Test Drive - Rochester

[davidgillon]

 So I took the chair into Rochester for a test-drive this afternoon as I needed to run a couple of errands (getting a new battery for my watch in particular).

Oh dear, cobbles to the left of him, cobbles to the right of him, and where it wasn't cobbles it was 'heritage' flagged pavement, so picture irregular flags with significant variation in surface height and smoothness, and mortared gaps between them big enough to grab your front castor and bring you to a stop. In fact if I park where I normally park, the pavement on one side of Minor Canon Row is too narrow for a chair due to a cunningly placed electrical junction box, and on the other has a foot high kerb (sadly that's not an exaggeration), so I had to wheel along the road. And when I got to the jewellers they had one of those old fashioned set-back doorways with a step up to it, so nothing to do but get out of the chair and haul it inside.

Given the state my shoulders were in by that point I abandoned the rest of the errands and headed back to the car, which turns out to be more uphill than I'd realised. I managed about half of it (so I'll have wheeled about 600m all told), but eventually my shoulders gave out and I had to do the rest of it using the chair as a walker. I knew Rochester was going to be a problem, but it's even more of a problem than I'd realised now that I'm looking at it from wheelchair height. I'm going to have to do the trip more often to build up upper body strength, but that isn't going to fix cobbled pavements and stepped entrances.

Comments

[kaberett]

you really really want either something titanium or e-motions; probably e-motions. I am shortly to get my titanium chair back, at which point I'd be happy to idk haul both of 'em over to Hyde Park and bimble around in 'em with you? We could set up my normal chair at least to actually _fit_ you for the duration.

[davidgillon]

That sounds like it has potential. I definitely want something in the lightweight active user range (I note I've pretty much got the beast looking like one around the house with back folded down and sticky-out footrests dumped), but I want to see what the physio has to say when I see him about my shoulder next week.

The Worldcon experience suggests I should probably be able to manage a chair without power-assist, at least on reasonable surfaces, but that does presume getting reasonable shoulder function back and building up upper body strength (which is why I'm using it around the house even though I don't need to).

[kaberett]

oh! The other thing to consider is whether you're happy foot-propelling, which it sounds like you are? Lots of people do that as an assist to arms. Obviously it needs seat set-up to be a little different in terms of how high you are off the floor, but it's totally a thing.

[davidgillon]

Not really, I've taken the footplates off around the house as it makes it much easier to get into the kitchen, but I'm tucking my feet under - as with an active-user chair, just without a footplate - rather than propelling with them. Not certain how much I could rely on legs for propelling as ankles have been a thing at times. It might be worth evaluating, but it's not something I've particularly been considering.

[jesse_the_k]

Ugh, it's so frustrating going out in a world which could be accessible with just a little more thought.

[davidgillon]

Yeah, the particular problem with Rochester is that the entire town is practically a Charles Dickens theme park, every other building says something like 'This was Uncle Pumblechook's corn merchants in Great Expectations'. Which given tourist attraction and preservation orders, means there's almost no post-Victorian construction, and most of the shops either have steps up, or in a few cases down, at the entrance.

And of course before it was Dickens-ville it was a walled medieval town, with huge cathedral and castle (both still extant), and before that a walled Roman town, and they've had this brilliant idea that wherever they turned up part of the walls, they should mark them by cobbling the road or pavement directly above.

We've had access laws for effectively a generation now, but the only sign of it on Rochester High Street are a couple of shops with push-button buzzers next to their front door saying "Ring For Attention".