I have been asked and asked about my trip and I find it very difficult to respond. It was too big for a few sentences to delimit it. It had too profound an effect upon me for me to thrust it out in description easily.

I must start with what I actually achieved. I achieved nearly all of my targets. This quite quite flabbergasts me still. I am so used to disappointment, I am so used to the constraints of disability, I am so used to frustration, I am so used to being thought over-ambitious. Yet hundreds of people helped to make my dreams turn into achievement. Something really huge happened to me and that in itself is inspirational. I can make things happen. I can set myself a target and pursue it and reach my objective. I did.

I also had to rely on total strangers and their goodwill for 51/2 weeks. It wasn't hard to trust people as it sometimes is at home. It felt as if people were reaching out eagerly to help, as if it was a pleasure to meet me, which was a very comfortable feeling. Of course, I had to contend with curiosity and I had to repeat myself a great deal, explaining several times a day how I communicate, why I jerk, how I can't help making involuntary noises or falling asleep, how I'd like to eat and drink but am finding it difficult, why I've come to wherever I am, what I like about it, and how very kind everyone is. It was quite tedious but it is sometimes the only way I can give. I cannot join in activities. I cannot build or heal or teach. What right did I have to nose my way into people's lives? Of course they were curious. They were as curious as I was about them. It made the playing field level. It made it not white child swans in to view crippled/sick/poor/homeless/abandoned/otherwise disadvantaged persons. It made it different.

There was only one person who made me feel uncomfortable and that unfortunately was the known other I was travelling with. I took 2 companions to act as my carers, my dear mother, and my dear friend Tom. I am sure there are plenty of tales from other travellers of team-manship and tension. It would be rather surprising if such a motley crew as we three globetrotted without incident, but it is a matter of regret that Tom got so fed up and it raises issues for me of how I will ever find people who can cope with me other than my dear besotted mother.

It was widely reported via The Telegraph/ Canadian National Post/ Sydney Morning Herald et al that I fear that I am not loveable. Returning on a flight with a man who says that I must cure my disability because he cannot stand it any longer and who has suggested to my mother that I be hit when I involuntarily cry is the stuff of nightmare. Proximity to me causes hatred. I know I exaggerate but why is he not in touch with me now? I wish we could be sitting happily reminiscing not giving each other space. But getting it in perspective is the key. I am 12. The next 10 years will be about trying out friends, making and dropping, oscillating wildly between love and detestation. That's what I see in young people. That's what seems to preoccupy them so much. Relationships. Trouble is I just don't want to get bogged down in all that. I want to press on with my new agenda.

What new agenda? Well that I won't divulge until I've told you a bit about my journey. 4 continents for my first trip beyond Europe. 4 continents separated by horrid air flights. They take one's chair you see. They strap you on a tiddly thin one, arms tightly constrained by the straps, a total stranger who doesn't know or care at all about the nature of one's disability takes charge, inevitably cheerful and friendly but distant and but briefly seen. Normally one is loaded first and unloaded last. One can't hurry. One must go at their pace, even with another plane to connect with. It appears as if the plane can wait an hour on the tarmac for me if the pusher has another chair to get to another plane. These are the times one is last on. The in-flight attendants are solicitous and aware that I'm too old for teddies but they want to give them to me anyway because I suppose I must seem cute. I got given so much stuff on planes I had to buy another bag. Mind you I got given a bag too. So the plane is full of means-well folk but o boy there's no leg room for me and to change my continence pad means 3 attendants plus mum and Tom holding fold-out doors in place, trying to screen 5 feet of floor space. I find I cannot sleep on planes and when I get tired I am sick, and when I am sick there are no sick bags around and I get in a smelly horrible mess. I am either cold or hot. I am very definitely bored. There is too much noise to think straight. My mother keeps falling asleep because she's taken a travel pill. I get thirsty and I get hungry. I flail around restlessly and irritate Tom. He enjoys the journeys. That irritates Mum. She finds it hard to help me when she's feeling lousy herself. On one journey she injected herself in the leg because she got a migraine, on another she was sick when the plane landed, on another she was sick after the plane had landed and we'd got off and then she injected herself. What a pair we were. They were just days to be got through, days made better by occasional upgrading to business class where I felt less hemmed in.

I never had a view out of a window and the one time the sun shone in on me another passenger asked for the shutter to be pulled down so that it didn't shine on the tv screen. I made friends with one flight attendant, a Scottish Emirates woman called Morag whose wedding will be a memorable event later this year. Good luck, good luck Morag. No passengers ever spoke to me, apart from a very large (but not noticeably obese) quite elderly gent who offered me sweets and who Tom abhorred because he was loud. He was a sad man, travelling alone. He didn't fit the seat and had to stand for 5 hours until they found another one for him. He liked going to the opera and his heart was massive, far too big for most normal people to take on. Accordingly he was sneered at. He did nothing to deserve contempt. It is not comfortable how private most westernised people are. There is a politeness about being reserved as if it's the only correct way of being. I like being quiet. I do not always want to converse with strangers. That is my personality. That is what you have to respect. It has nothing to do with any idea of what is proper. My mother finds it hard to ignore strangers. She claims it's to do with being a Scot. Glaswegians gabble to anyone and everyone - have I said this before - in lifts. It's not polite to stand in silence next to someone ignoring them. One makes a comment about the weather or somesuch. In the south of England it is the opposite, it is rude to intrude upon the space of another's bubble by impinging sound, one has to be well-nigh non-existent - not smelly, not noisesome, not touching, not looking - eyes front. I don't feel it's the way of the rest of the world. I think it's frequently rude to be a reserved English person. And I think it's often uncomfortable to put distance between oneself and others. I hope I don't find as I get older that this changes. I don't want to get more awkward, I want to get less awkward.

Awkward is what I felt too much of the time. Too unconfident, too stressed physically, too scared. I have to do more of this travelling and find out how to relax into it faster, how to put others too at their ease. Because travelling broadens the mind faster than anything else. Yanks it so taut one never regains the original shape.

I stepped out (well not literally) into the Kenyan heat at 7am on a Saturday in January and said goodbye to an old young self. The experience of the drive from the airport to Moshi in northern Tanzania thumped me, hurt me, pummeled me, wreaked such havoc on my emotions, I was immersed in an unstable sort of feeling I didn't recognise and didn't like for a week or more. I expected to feel inspired by a grand landscape, a wilder place. I think I expected poverty to look like something basically comfortable but lacking the trimmings, ie simple not desperate, austere not luxurious. I certainly expected the road to the honey-pot world-class game reserves to be well made up and peppered with tourists and signs of tourism, eg hotels, restaurants, the sort of shops mum detests, as in multinational chain stores. I had previously been very disappointed at aged whatever, o 7 or 8, when I first travelled out of the UK and found Europe to be much the same as home. I was terribly terribly sad to find Heidi-land full of motorways and city-chic and the various mechanical means of getting to the tops of mountains outside our price range and to boot busy. Then I found that the calm and inspirational landscapes I sought were in Scotland and noted that rugged terrain needs to combine with a low population density and an outward simplicity for me to feel at ease. I am especially at ease where there is warmth and people are rooted in their place through love. Scotland (well Mull) is ideal because it is also thoroughly modern with excellent communications with artistic centres and global technologies....where I dream of making my home.... so my expectation was based on this travelling in Europe and glossy travel progs on tv. I wanted to escape the tourist bit and find out what life was like behind that. Behind what? I never even found a facade, a veneer, a pretence. I found a different sort of place entirely and have had to re-jig a great deal of my assumptions about my knowledge, about what's real and what's not in the world. Since my starting point was in error, of course it took a long time to get my bearings.

I am not here going to tell the whole tale of my journey in chronological fashion - extracts from other writings will appear sporadically over the next few months. I'll just whet your appetite by listing some of the things I did.

• drove amongst wild elephants so close I didn't need binoculars and all alone
• saw other stuff too: giraffes, lion, zebra, impala, hartebeest, wildebeest, baboons, warthog, vultures, hornbills, sunbirds, lovebirds, ostriches, guinea fowl, ibis, marabou
• savannah plains, scrub and woodland,
• saw towns of tin-roofed shacks and far more people than I expected buying selling and hanging around, walking, pushing handcarts, bicycles, donkeys
• trucks and pick-ups full of people not goods, never goods
• moneychangers doing business through the window at the border
• stretches of cultivation mostly bananas
• stayed in a glassless bungalow with views of snow-capped Kilimanjaro, and avocados, bananas and mangos growing in the garden
• camped under the African full moon and had horrible termite larvae fall from the roof into my hair
• saw weaver birds and their nests, termite mounds, acacia trees, baobabs and hot red dusty earth that in other seasons would be cloying mud
• saw Masai pastoralists and only glimpsed their lives
• was verbally abused by Masai women selling souvenirs
• was vehemently and at considerable length and amazing volume prayed for (in Swahili) by a man upset by my disability and in need of a miracle for his piece of mind
• haggled in the market for a spray to cool me down, bought a cassette and bananas from stalls, sliced bread from an air-conditioned baker's, milk, eggs, fruit from a very old-fashioned grocer's
• haggled for a carved African chair in a tourist shop incongruously adrift amongst the tin roofed shacks of Arusha and apparently the only shop in northern Tanzania to take credit cards
• had nosebleeds and was sick and needed cold baths and extreme measures to keep me cool day after day
• talked with a Kili guide, a local businessman and his family, a house servant, teachers and pupils
• spoke to classes of all ages at the international schools on disability issues
• went to a centre for 70 abused homeless children run by a young Oxford graduate of medieval history or some such
• toured a cholera/dysentery hospital and malnutrition rehabilitation unit, meeting individual patients
• visited a rehabilitation centre and met people paralysed from carrying too heavy a load upon their heads and people paraslysed from falling out of fruit trees, and through tuberculosis, and out of windows, and crashes in baby-taxis, people who either moved back to their villages with skills to make them a useful member of their community or who worked at the centre as eg security guard, administrator, press officer (some though still in traction)
• met kids with cerebral palsy who had been abandoned by their families but who sang for me
• went a boat trip through rural Bangladesh
• had a very special evening of classical Bengali music put on for me by professional singers musicians and dancers, with a wonderful sarod player my personal highlight
• dined in the Canadian, American and British clubs
• talked with diplomats, aid workers, an agricultural scientist, missionary, therapists, businessman/entrepreneur
• was well looked after with a personal driver and within a diplomatic household with cook, houseworker and security guard
• got a fever and diarrhoea
• met an eminent photographer of good left wing views with anguished personal tales to tell of civil war and revolution
• bought a cheap aluminium water vessel
• encountered a crip begger rolling along the pavement and gave him money
• saw a million rickshaws
• visited Mollie's slum home and made friends with Mollie who is a budding young journalist with a well-developed sense of social injustice
• attended a closed rehearsal at Sydney Opera House but took ill
• was hospitalised and missed my awards ceremony at the National Maritime Museum
• met up with Katy and Daryl friends from London who came to the ceremony from Melbourne and Kath who came to the ceremony from Balina (of whom more anon)
• missed making friends with the other winners, and the perks of the flash hotel in which winners were put up for 4 days, including a roof-top pool with views of the nearby opera house and the harbour bridge, and quite a lot of fine weather, and an ozzie barbie
• got 1st prize in the individual category, a certificate and a cheque for £1,500 presented at a private ceremony the next day with award winners and media only
• zoomed off to a small town suburb on the outskirts of Sydney to stay with 60s immigrants from the motor industry of Lancashire and meet their family and hear tales of the passage out to Oz, the building of the suburb, compulsory voting, the problems of car dependence for the aging, etc etc
• saw huge white and sulphur crested cockatoos and was woken in the mornings by their shrieking
• caught a river cat down from Parramatta to the city centre chatting en route to a couple whose son was dying of Huntingdon's Chorea (outward) and to a lesbian couple one of whom was a wheelchair user (return)
• did the tourist bit (frustrated as a wheelchair user) around the outside of the opera house
• developed a great deal more diarrhoea
• shopped at the local mall
• picniced at Bondi, fed the Pacific seagulls from my hand, got caught up in the surf and had to settle for sitting like a bedraggled mermaid upon a rock waves treated more kindly
• watched high from a rocky promontory dot sized surfers speeding under furling house-sized breakers stretching a mile across a brilliant blue bay, dazzlingly Aussie alongside a happily grinning mother at ease in the fresh sea air
• met Oli a full-time surfer dripping still from his ride through danger with tales of death and naivity
• stayed up north in NSW with my wacky lesbian e-pal Kath and her partner on a small-holding with bananas mozzies water dragons and a huge number of melodious birds
• walked in the rain forest with lianas and buttressed trees and potteroos and yuck leeches
• saw how the health service worked up there when mum needed treatment
• drove the dirt roads and fords and watched the kookaburras being called down by Kath & Gill
• met an aboriginal woman proud to discuss her roots and her daughter (with Down's syndrome)
• spent a rainy afternoon with Kath hacking up a small doll with pruners so that it resembled her (one arm, one leg, born that way) and could sit more happily on her computer workstation (she's a radio and hard-copy journalist) inspiring great thoughts (and memories of me)
• bought a mozzie net as a souvenir of Ozzie
• stayed in a wheelchair resort run by a wheelchair user, paddled in the Pacific in my go-anywhere chair, swam in the rain, admired a huge spider on my bedroom wall nearly a handspan in size but not poisonous and a 9 foot long sleeping snake in a nearby tree, tried out the electric bed and was ferried through deluges of unexpected rain rain rain in the only accessible vehicle of the trip other than the New York buses
• drove into Manhatten from JFK in the dark to an apartment right right on the East River with a book cover designer as hostess
• met a biologist just back from the South Pole
• bought a coat for Tom in a charity shop as snow flurries chilled our tanned skins
• visited Anne our hostess at work in a magnificent suite of offices near the top of the Flat Iron building
• squeezed me and chair into yellow cabs and had in consequence to cope with mum's travel sickness
• was interviewed by CNN at some length
• visited the NYPD meeting a mounted policeman and his horse, a beat sargent and a detective who despite having drawn his gun thousands of times (from a holster near his ankle) had never fired it on duty
• attended a full dress rehearsal of Rigoletto at the Met (except the 2nd Act when I went to meet an assistant to James Levine backstage)
• popped into a Picasso exhibition at the Guggenheim
• had bout after bout, day after day of uncontrollable yelling and crying and hysterical laughter, could not regain control of my normally rather quiet self, but my diarrheoa stopped
• had Tex-Mex and Indian and Vietnamese meals delivered
• shopped for presents for my da and bro in Grand Central Station
• attended a very from the heart church service in Harlem and met the minister
• rode the ferry to Staten Island to spend the day with a truck driver and eat pizza
• experienced real minus 12 degree cold and bright cheerful sunshine, instant numbing of nose and a mother gaspingly unable to push my chair
• had a 15 minute meeting on the 38th floor of the UN with Kofi Annan the Secretary General who is most encouraging of my new agenda
• flighted home to my family my dying dog my dear wee home and a great deal to do....

OK, so what was/is this new agenda? Quite simply water. It horrifies me that hard-working honest nice people can be living with electricity in their homes and access to free health services for the treatment of cholera and dysentery and without access to safe clean water. It upsets me that they want it and can't have it. It upsets me that we wind-surf, shop till we drop etc etc while this situation goes on. If there is not the will, the infrastructure, the taxation system, the wealth in wages to tackle this from inside the country, logic and humanity dictates that aid must be given so that it is achieved. It was a target for the UN through the 70s. It should be the target for the new millenium. Victorians sorted it in the UK and we take it for granted. Australia was but recently settled and they take it for granted. It is absurd that so much still depends upon luck. It is for example, absurd that a service exists merely because a dedicated person from a foreign country made it their life's work to provide it, but it is very much better than nothing at all and it is very inspirational to see services in the hands of committed and caring people. The development of such services is as much an act of creativity as a theatrical production or a sculpture. It's just that the product is not art but something else. I want to be part of that creativity.

I cannot sit complacently by when there is such inequity in the distribution of life-chances - according to Unicef figures, 14.4% of all live born children die in Tanzania before reaching 5, and 11% in Bangladesh, compared with 0.7% in the UK. That means 20 times the number of kids die in Tanzania as here.

I am going to work to change things. I haven't worked out how to change the world but I feel I must play my own small part in trying to do so. I cannot live a complacent life ignoring what I have learned. I have to try to ensure that this most basic resource is available to everyone. Mr Annan is egging me on to campaign and agitate vigorously. Let's do it.

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