“Being A Wheelchair User, I’ve Faced Disability Head On. And Food Has Felt Like A Triumph.”

When I first started dating Richard, our relationship was very much led by adventure and food. On our first date we ate Italian food, laughing when Richard refused to get a dessert to share and insisting we had one each. We then ended up at The Ned in London for cocktails as a jazz band played and the winter frost grew sparkly outside. On our second date, I cooked at my flat - a courgette and halloumi bake with plenty of red wine, followed by fresh baked pain au chocolat the next morning. Two weeks later we explored Copenhagen together, finding the best fresh coffee and acai bowls at Bowl Market and an amazing vegan restaurant and bar to fuel us up after a day of exploring.

But only six months into our relationship I became severely ill. It was June 2018 and we’d been out at a gig in Hackney. A mid-week beer and the heat of the crowd and humidity outside was making me feel heady. Sadly, what I brushed off as a summer cold was life-threatening sepsis and meningitis which caused me to lose my ability to walk. As I couldn't access my flat in Hampstead due to using a wheelchair, I moved in with Richard in his home in Wivenhoe in Essex.

Sadly, three months after I first became ill, I got meningitis again. Any recovery I’d made previously was wiped. The second lot of meningitis caused neurological issues and I was diagnosed with M.E (also known as chronic fatigue syndrome) and Functional Neurological Disorder where my brain couldn’t get the messages to my body to tell it to walk or move. Sadly, despite my love of cooking, the kitchen became suddenly off limits.

While Richard is the better cook out of the two of us (as much as it pains me to admit), it was suddenly ALL on him as lifting heavy pans left me drained and I couldn’t even stand up to assist any sort of cooking. Even though I was able to sit in my wheelchair, even just chopping vegetables or making a cup of coffee would cause pain.

Thankfully, Richard is the kindest man I’ve ever met and his ability to consistently cook incredible meals is one of the ways he shows it. Despite barely remembering a lot of this period in my life due to strong pain medication, Richard always made sure I ate well with avocado and poached eggs on sourdough for brunch, his signature macaroni cheese for dinner and fresh coffee on weekend mornings.

Having Richard cook for you is an honour, especially when it's during a time of need.

Eventually, several months later, I began to learn what I could and couldn’t do. I absolutely love hosting, nothing brings me greater joy than friends enjoying my food. Despite the fact I knew it would exhaust me for days, we started hosting friends at our flat again, and I’d wheel around the kitchen or, now I've grown stronger, stand over pans, as guest laughed and I filled their glasses up to hangover levels. My favourite dinner party was Burns Night 2020, mere weeks before lockdown. To celebrate Richard’s Scottish roots I created a menu of smoked salmon and Scottish oat cakes, vegetarian haggis balls with lemon mayonnaise, vegetarian stovies (a mince, potato and onion based stew done in the slow cooker) and a mighty Tunnocks caramel wafer cheesecake. But the real winner of the night? My Irn Bru cocktails! I slept for days afterwards but the joy it brought of us all was more than worth it. I have to pace myself now and realise what needs doing, what is worth doing and what can wait and, for me, cooking has become like a special treat both in terms of the activity and the results of my work.

I grew up in the North East and my mum is the oldest female of 10 children so she knew how to cook from a young age and taught me in turn. Despite turning pescatarian over eight years ago, I still apply my mother’s cooking skills with gusto. My dishes will never be exceptionally pretty but there’ll always be a dollop of Marmite – my mum’s secret ingredient for most things- to add depth to most dishes.

With Richard working from home since lockdown started, we’ve enjoyed lunchtimes together. To help me focus on work or rest, Richard creates colourful salads with falafel or vegan kebab on flatbreads. Despite busy days at work, Richard always manages to make dinner a joyful experience even on the darkest days of lockdown: from homemade pizza to roasted aubergine and bulgur wheat pilaf to the best prawns I’ve ever tasted in my life despite the fact he’s been vegetarian for 25 years but still happily cooks them for me.

Thanks to intense neurology treatment, I learnt how to walk again six months ago. This means I'm more mobile in the kitchen and I’ve loved making crispy quesadillas topped with avocado and Sriracha for lunch or copying my mum’s quiches that remind me of weekend evenings as a child.

Sadly, Richard and I are both not great at baking. When my beloved step-gran passed away from COVID in February, I made a two tier funfetti cake with cream cheese frosting to eat after we watched the online stream of her funeral and toasted to her life with a cup of tea. The cake looked like an absolute disaster, but love had been baked into it.

As I’ve faced disability head on, food has felt like a triumph. From the Caramac bars I craved when I left hospital that felt like they were helping me celebrate the fact I was still living, to the shared dinners with Richard in our home, to the Champagne popping as I celebrated getting onto my Master’s degree starting this September, our kitchen will always be full of love and music and dancing, whether that means I’m wheeling around it or pottering around slowly with my walking stick. And surely, there’s nothing better in life than love and food?

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