Would someone please tell me where this particular rant came from?

Maybe, when we are old, and have no teeth or eyes or ears and cannot walk, we will live in a community which takes off its hat to the bloody minded old fart who has fought the fight and refused to give up. This would be my dad. Some people lose their limbs in an instant; their sight, hearing or mind at the blowing of a whistle. For the rest, it takes a lifetime.

We may ask: 'Given two choices, would you rather lose your mind or your body?'

I come from a family whose bodies are spent long before their minds. I would rather lose my mind, which has always been out of sync with this world, to be honest.

Where is the glory in having a limbless body or sightless eye in a world that recoils from the imperfect? I would rather have no mind and thus no knowledge of the ridicule to which I would be subject. I would prefer to be unaware of the injustice and prejudice inflicted on the vulnerable.

My mum had some casual work over Christmas 1977, in a Quaker old peoples' home in Nottingham. Mum had various tasks to do and one of them was to talk to an old lady who was blind and deaf. I cannot remember her name, nor what she looked like, apart from her skinny, wasted, legs, no wider than my thinning, anorexic, wrists. To communicate with her, mum had to take hold of her hand and 'write' on her left thigh, spelling out words, letter by letter. You will possibly try it out for yourself by closing your eyes and writing your name on your own thigh. How can you have a conversation like that? This woman did. She even had the mental capacity to accomodate handwriting styles, as my mother had an unusual way of writing the letter 'G' - as in Glennis (mum's name). 'Yes' was an upward and downward movement. First gear to second, if you drive. 'No' was checking neutral, if you like, an horizontal movement. To be honest, it got a bit boring and I moved from watching this communication to other things within the room.

There were pictures of a beautiful young woman, vibrant, alive. Some looked like wedding photographs. They could have been 'stills' from the silent movies I remembered watching, not too many years before. An alarmed heroine, strapped to a railway line, crying for help. And all the while, the piano music smashed and crashed in the background. A conglomeration of cinematographic memories choked me. Who was this voiceless, screaming, woman? Fifty years later, my mother was holding her hand.

Over thirty years on from that, I wonder if that nameless woman danced. In her own time, in her own space, did she remember the music she fell in love to? The songs she sang? The hearts she broke?

And what would she have thought if she had known she would become a skinny thighed, deaf, blind old woman, locked away in one room of an old people's home with all of her mind and no body?

I would rather lose my mind. I would want to piss on those scummy, hooded, little shits who think they own the world than owe my body to the stupid, fucking, morons who went through college and think they know what it's like to be old, blind, deaf, voiceless.

We might like to think, in our perfectly Christian way, that this old woman 'found peace'. I wouldn't. Not if I had a thinking mind. Fuck, no. I would stumble, blindly around my room, putting all my precious pictures and special things away in a safe place and trash that fucking prison some sick bastard locked me in to.