The health service have now reached the stage where the medical care staff, doctors, nurses, are doing a fantastic job but they haven’t got the facilities to do that job. We get appointments sent to us, and then a telephone call saying, ‘Oh they’ve made a mistake. So we phone the consultant’s office to find what date he wants to see me because the staff concerned are getting it wrong. We shouldn’t have to do that. And the question is there have been millions of pounds funding the health service by this Government, where has that money gone and what has it been used for? Because I can only speak about Wales, the big movement in health care in Wales at the moment is the closure of hospitals. Now that is never a good thing. It means people have to travel further for their care. It also means a lack of visitors when they are in hospital because people can’t travel People are having to try and find transport to a hospital, not only to visit loved ones, but for treatment and to attend clinics as well. Now I know from my own experience how tiring it can be when you’re not fit. It used to take us an average of five hours to travel from here to the hospital in London. We’d be in the hospital two and a half three hours and then we’ve got a five hour journey home. Now, although I was grateful for the fact that that facility was provided, and the transport was also provided, I must say that, and I’m very grateful for that. But when you know Wales as well as I do, and know the road structure in Wales and know the length of time it takes to get from major town to major town, then it is not on to close local hospitals and force people in to long road journeys. Very often there is not an ambulance service in most of these areas, there’s not a train service. They’re forced then to use their car. When they arrive in these hospitals, they’ve got to pay to park.

In between writing my life story, I started watercolour painting. Not very good but it was a pastime. I’ve since progressed to writing various articles on local history and the project I’m working on now is a complete, I’ll start again, is a list of shipwrecks along the old county of Glamorgan coastline, that extends from just the other side of Gower peninsula, just to the east of Cardiff. And the earliest wreck I’ve been able to find on record is dated 1737.

I also run a help page on our local web site. It’s the type of page for anybody wanting information about the town or the surrounding area. I help them in that respect. I also try to reunite old friends and families. People whove moved away trying to get back in touch with friends back here. So I don’t get many requests, maybe half a dozen a year, but through it I know have contacts all around the world, which gives me a lot of pleasure and I’m sure by the reaction and the thanks I’ve had that the people I’ve been able to help are more than satisfied with the service I am able to provide. Basically that is what I do with my time.

If you lose the ability to do one thing, think about another that you can do. I now produce electronic art through my computer. Not only does it amuse me when I make mistakes but I get great enjoyment out of it. Think about writing your life story for any grandchildren. Or if you have young children, and I hope nobody takes offence at what I’m saying, think about your own children and put them in a position where they can pick up something that will teach them about your own life and your background. Unfortunately I lost my father when I was fourteen. I knew very little about his background and I’d not been able to find out as much as I would like to know about his childhood and his upbringing. I know about his adult life but not about his childhood.

Don’t leave your children or your grandchildren in that situation. Try and cater for them. If you can’t write it yourself, get a friend or a family member to make notes of what you say and it doesn’t need to be in any special type of book, an ordinary writing pad will do, so long as you get it down on paper. Or if you are able to use a computer, write it on your computer and copy it on to a disk. So your children or grandchildren will know something of you and the life you had. That is very important to the way children react later in life. Don’t give up. It’s not worth giving up.

On the medical side, the only hospital in the area offering respite care had the ward shut. So that no longer offers respite care. There are several homes, charity based, mainly for cancer. Because of the weight they’ve had put on them for care, because of NHS cutbacks in Wales as a whole, they’ve stopped taking patients with MND and other diseases because they can’t afford to do it any more. They’re not getting any funding off the NHS. The NHS isn’t providing care, respite or palliative, and these charities have been put on to such an extent that they’ve been forced to close their doors. Now I know that is the case because when my wife went in for an operation on her knee, a very good friend arranged for me to go on to a neurological rehab ward in a hospital in [city]. But attempts had been made to get me in to a cancer home in [town]. By that I mean the MND Association have used that home on a regular basis with our members who need that type of care. And the request was turned down because of [being] overloaded and lack of funds. I put myself in a rehab ward where I managed to do a bit of good helping people worse than myself. I could turn pages of a newspaper for them, magazines.

I ended up in a situation over my medication where I was having arguments every day over the medication and the dosage which wasn’t doing me any good. If they’d said, ‘You can’t have that because of the diabetes’, I would have accepted that argument, but that never came into the equation. Handling of patients, they weren’t really up to it because they didn’t have the right equipment on the ward. Apart from that, the staff, the nurses, when you compare them in the hospital when I was in the rehab ward, as different as chalk and cheese. In the rehab ward they couldn’t do enough for me, which made me want to do more for myself, to try and help them.

When I was in [hospital treating his diabetes] it was nothing for a nurse to come and take my wheelchair to move another patient to another part of the hospital, and even though my wheelchair had labels all over it saying it was my property or in my care, they never once asked and there was arguments with staff over that. Not only with staff, it caused bad feeling between other patients and myself, because they thought I was being selfish. But it’s not that, if my chair did not come back to me, then I had a bill of approximately ‘200 to pay, which is a lot of money for people in our circumstances. But you couldn’t get the staff to understand that. And instead of saying, “Do you mind if we borrow your chair for an hour?” they’d take it. To me if they’d asked, I would have said yes, I would never say no. But they’d just take it without permission. That not only was, in my way of thinking, extremely rude, but also I thought it could be construed as theft. And one male nurse, I threatened him with police action unless he spoke to me first and stopped taking it out as and when he wanted to. It seemed easier to take a chair from the end of my bed, on the side of my bed, than getting one out of the room further down at the end of the ward. And I found it very, very annoying and upsetting because it was constant.