…Embrace were great. Or they would have been, anyway.

I’d had tickets to see them in Southampton on Monday 25 November for about six months, but a few unfortunate circumstances meant it wasn’t to be. To start with, I ventured out to Southampton far too early in the day. I went at lunchtime, thinking I’d make an afternoon of it (and to be fair, I did squeeze in a visit to Pizza Hut), but I also underestimated the mileage my wheelchair was capable of in doing so. The whole thing was ultimately killed stone dead by my insistence on doing a recce of the route to the venue once I was off the train – what I thought was only a few minutes in a straight line turned out to be a bit more than that. I’d seen the directions on Google Maps, of course, but they doesn’t account for how a wheelchair user might get to a destination, only a pedestrian on two legs. You can never tell where the next dropped kerb is – or how long a detour to find one might be – so the only option was to do a test run and get everything straight in my head.

Who would have thought that Southampton was so bumpy and rugged? Not me, that’s for sure. By the time I actually had to get to the gig, I was down to my last few bars of power. In the end, I got as far as hearing the band soundcheck from the pavement outside. The drums were pounding away within those four walls, muffled but tantalisingly close as I admitted defeat. I went home and felt like an idiot for the rest of the evening. Apart from everything else, £30 had gone down the drain because of my own poor planning! I didn’t really get over it until I’d slept it off. I could see things much more clearly the next day. I thought so, at least. I still felt silly, don’t get me wrong, and frustrated too – but not just for the reason you might expect.

As I’ve said, I only wanted to make sure I knew where I was going and minimise any mishaps in the process. I couldn’t have known I’d be creating them instead when I was leaving my flat, chair fully charged. I have to consider accessibility nearly every day of my life, to some extent, and as far as I was concerned neglecting the recce would have been irresponsible. Simultaneously, though, turned out to be the right and wrong thing to do. Moral of the story, able-bodied folks? Don’t take any of your trouble-free adventures for granted, because some of us can’t win. Being able to move from A to B without getting stuck or making a scene is something we really value, and we learn the hard way that it’s never guaranteed, even when we think every eventuality has been covered.

Mason