Ouch Talk Show #96 April 2013
bbc.co.uk/ouch/podcast

Presented by Rob Crossan and Liz Carr

liz	It's Ouch! Show 96 for April 2013. Thank you for downloading us. I'm Liz and Rob's here to tell you what's in store. 	
rob	Well there's benefits, communication and social media you can join our round table discussion with this month's guest blogger Emma Round, and cartoonist Hannah Ensor. 	
liz	Ever heard of sledge hockey? Well is you're a sports fan you'll know it's the tough and fast moving game that people are beginning to talk about ahead of the 2014 Winter Paralympics which are now just one year away. Tony Garratt will be joining us with sporting guest and some basic facts on what the winter games actually are now that everybody's actually paying attention to such things. 	
rob	And we end today's show with a piece of music you just might want to stay turned for. As well as a track from Matt Bond, a music student from Cornwall, who has put an EP together with other people like him who have a stammer which disappears when they sing. 	
liz	So don't touch that dial as they used to say. 	
rob	Never used to say. 	
liz	Never, really ever. 
[Jingle: From London it's Ouch disability talk from the BBC with Liz Carr and Rob Crossan.]	
rob	And yes, Liz…	
liz	Hm yes. 	
rob	…we do have a little secret to reveal don't we? 	
liz	We do, we do. I mean apart from the fact that in two years I'm probably going to be in residential care but that's probably a bit too premature…	
rob	Two months. 	
liz	Two months probably the way things are going yes. We do, we do have a bit of news. 	
rob	And in a pathetic attempt to get people to listen right through to the end of the show we're not going to tell you.	
liz	Are we going to…	
Rob	…we're not going to tell you. 	
liz	…string them on. 	
rob	Yeah. 	
liz	What you could do of course if just fast forward to 42 minutes. 	
rob	Which is what I normally do anyway. 	
liz	Exactly. So just do what the rest of us do, go to 42 minutes and you'll get the big news. Miss out all the good stuff though. 	
rob	Should we really be encouraging people to do this? 	
liz	No we should not. 	
rob	Of course not. 	
liz	No of course not because as you hear we've some amazing stuff in today's show including what we've got now – the round table discussion time. Yes this is where we throw a few topical discussions into the centre and see what we come up with. So as mentioned at the top of the show we've got two great guests; in our studio in Newbury we have Hannah Ensor. Hello Hannah. 	
hannah	Hello. 	
liz	Now how would you describe yourself, Hannah, in a few words? 	
hannah	Bendy, great fun and stick man mad.	
liz	Okay. I'm intrigued about this bendy, I'm going to ask you about that in a minute okay. And stick man that's what you're known for your cartoons yeah? 	
hannah	Yeah. 	
liz	Okay, brilliant. Now in our mailbox studio in Birmingham we have Emma Round who we described earlier as a blogger and a campaigner – anything else to add to that, Emma? 	
emma	Oh let's think. I'm a professional moaner on the internet. I'm also a big fan of science and rocks and geology and things like that so it's not all just campaigning and things from my side. 	
liz	There're more to you than just the campaigning side. 	
emma	Yeah. 	
liz	Absolutely. Now look before we go on Hannah when we booked the studio for you in Newbury you had a particular access request – what was that? 	
hannah	Yes it was that the studio doesn't get too hot. I'm heat intolerant. 	
liz	Now what does this mean? 	
hannah	Unfortunately it doesn't mean I get hot and sweaty and go, "Oh it's too hot!" From a symptoms point of view it looks like I get progressively drunk. 	
liz	Okay. 	
hannah	Without alcohol I hasten to add!	
liz	Okay so we've propped the door open, you've got a fan, people fanning you hopefully but if you do get too hot you might just need to leave or cool down for a bit before you rejoin us? 	
hannah	Well it's related to my postural orthostatic tachycardia which is my heart rate and blood flow going pear-shaped while I'm upright. 	
liz	That's easy for you to say, wow! That sounded quite rhythmic, I liked it. 	
hannah	It's called POTS, much easier to say. But lying down helps so I might go AWOL and lie on the floor for a bit. 	
liz	Okay now that's good to know. Because actually it's been weird but these last two/three months of guests we've had lots of people with different access requirements. Last month we had somebody who was light intolerant. And we had someone who was scent intolerant so that the meeter and greeter person had to wear no fragrance. And we had to make sure that nobody went into the studio for three hours before with no scent on as well. 	
rob	It's brilliant because all these requests are so incredibly diva-ish or could be interpreted as such. I will not have triangular cut sandwiches, cut them square or I'm not doing it! It's all sounds a bit spinal tap and I quite like it. 	
hannah	It does rather. 	
liz	I don't want points with my bipolar. 	
hannah	But you know what you can pick up the pieces afterwards if you don't do what I tell you. 	
liz	Ooh! 	
rob	I see. Not from London we're miles away, we can't do a thing. So hang on a minute so from stick man, Hannah, you started to sell some of your cartoons and you created, well actually I've got a few of them in front of me here; communication cards that people can get, why don't you describe what these are then we can read a few of them out. 	
hannah	Well they're a way of communicating something that's important and short but with quite a lot of humour. So they were originally designed when a friend and I were trying to work out how to stop helpful people trying to pick us up when we fall over. Because I'm bendy this means my joints will dislocate a lot which is quite painful and very inconvenient. So if someone then tries and hauls me up from the floor then they're likely to remove my arms and we were trying to come up with a way around it and thought, hey why don't we have little cards that say it? Because when you say verbally to someone, "Oh stop, don't do that" they don't usually really register it because in their head they know they're doing the right thing; which to 90% of people might be the right thing, but for me it's not. So it was a way of getting across that message in a clear, concise and with enough humour so it wasn't confrontational. 	
rob	And so I've got the card here and it's a stick figure with someone with their stick limbs bent and shattered all over the place and on the left hand side of the card it says 'Sometimes I fall, don't worry this is normal. I will wait, rest and get up when I'm ready.' Now how to people react when they're given one of these cards?	
hannah	When I've used them I've had reactions that were really positive. For example, I was on the train and had been chatting with a young family that happened to be sitting next to me and then my speech went and I couldn't communicate verbally. 	
rob	So you're not giving this card out just because you're absolutely sick of having to say the same old thing again and again it's… 	
hannah	Well it depends. 	
rob	…because actually you can't speak.	
hannah	Well it depends they're a tool for use, they not prescribed when you can use them. But in that particular instance it was I can't communicate verbally anymore they're going to think I'm really weird or they've offended me so I showed them this card and I was expecting pity. It was a card that says 'My ability to speak coherently is temporarily missing. Please try later.' And there's a little stick man cartoon of someone thinking umbrella and saying unicorn which is something I do. 	
rob	So tell me about these little stick man characters then and where did this all originate from?	
hannah	It started off when I was hospitalised with one of my POTS episodes, one of the first ones and I couldn't speak, and I didn't know what was going on, so I started drawing stick men just to show that I was still me, still had my sense of humour and it's just grown from there. 	
rob	And which card do you find you have to use the most? I presume you have about half a dozen on your person at any given time?	
hannah	Yeah I have my little pack. 	
rob	And which one is the most used, the most dog-eared around the edges from overuse? 	
hannah	The one that says 'I'm sorry I have no idea what you just said and my ability to think coherently has left the building. Please try later.' 	
rob	I would love one of those particularly after midnight in certain bars that I've frequented.	
hannah	Exactly they're not disability specific and they're not even all only for disabilities. Everyone has those kind of moments and it's a real fun way of saying look I'm not being rude and not listening I just can't listen. 	
rob	And, Emma, if you had to have a card on you what would it say?	
emma	Probably something along the lines of 'I'm being sick because of my pills not because I'm contagious' because that's something I notice a lot of. I throw up quite a bit unfortunately and people tend to back away very, very quickly like I've got some terrible deadly disease. 	
liz	I love the idea of the cards. I think it's a bit like playing your disability joker card. 	
hannah	Yes. 	
liz	And I just thought I really want one of these. 	
rob	What would you have then, Liz?	
liz	What would I have? I like that they're little and I thought if the writing is really tiny that they've really got to get very, very close to read it and then you say something like 'What are you staring at?' So I kind of wanted one like that. 	
rob	You want to use it for purposes of cruelty. 	
liz	Cruelty and comedy as well as constructive. I thought that that would be quite useful. But I think that maybe a card that says 'Please don't tell me that you know somebody disabled, that you're related to somebody disabled and that your best friend is disabled' you know what I mean?	
rob	That's a big card.	
liz	It's a big card it's an A4.	
rob	Can we cut this down a bit? What you really want to say is go away. 	
liz	Yes. 	
hannah	There's already one that says that. 	
rob	So you blog don't you Emma?	
emma	Yes I do. 	
rob	Yes so you seem to be rather positive in your work and what I notice is actually rather than sort of shouting and doing the hyperbole you put a lot of positivity into the blog. 	
emma	That's kind.	
rob	Can you tell me a little bit about that because it seems like quite a positive campaigning tool? 	
emma	Thank you. I think that every person who wants to can be a campaigner and things like that and I think people just need empowered.
 they need to feel like they've got the support, got the ability to do these things. And I think trying to be positive and try to look at ways that people can get involved and can improve things is a really useful tool. I think if you keep it negative and keep sort of like the very doom and gloom look then it can really wear people down over time and that's not ideal. 	
liz	We do hear about the negative stuff. Is there stuff to be positive about? Is it really out there?	
emma	Well definitely. And I mean there's an awful lot that's not ideal going on at the moment. In fact it is far less than ideal and there are some reasons for people to obviously have worries about it. But at the same time there are some good things going on and that doesn't negate the changes that are going on with regards to welfare and everything at the moment, but we've got to remember those and we've got to hold on to them otherwise we're all going to end up just sat around feeling absolutely miserable and despairing and I don't think that's good for anybody. 	
liz	So we had Liz Crowe on last month talking about 'Bedding Out' and some of the changes to welfare benefits and welfare reform, and she was saying that there's huge plusses in social media bringing the disability community together, and she talked about them. Is it always positive? There's such a lot of information out there and a lot of discussion are there downsides to that? 	
emma	It's one of these areas, like so much in life, that's a sort of a shades of grey issue - it's not completely good, it's not completely bad either. It's led to a lot of people campaigning and trying to get information out, which is fantastic they're doing lots of awareness raising work. The problem with that awareness raising is sometimes it's not targeted it's not focused on specific audiences. So people might go on to Twitter and they might follow a lot of other people who are disabled and who are doing awareness raising work, and they might start posting up messages about bad things that are going on and some of the risks that are posed by the changes to welfare. And then they'll read a lot of them, they'll retweet a lot of them to other people and they'll get this constant stream of messages that everything is negative, that it's all doom and gloom – starvation, poverty, desperation are the only ways out – and that in itself isn't particularly healthy. 	
liz	And has it affected you, Emma, is that why because I know, as you say, you try to be balanced, put some positive stories so we see a wider picture, a bigger picture. Did you choose to do that because the negative stories affected you personally or people you know? 	
emma	I have post-traumatic stress disorder which does have an effect on my stress levels and things like that obviously. I'm obviously a lot more stressed than the average person is on any day to day basis. And part of my way of looking after myself was to try and make sure that when I found a problem I had a look at different ways that I could go about dealing with it, I could go about trying to effect some change. So instead of it sitting there weighing on my shoulders and worrying me and stopping me from sleeping I could actually go out into the world and say, "Do you know what – that was a problem and I've written a letter to my MP" or I've spoken to some friends about it to get it off my shoulders; or I've gone to a party conference and spoken to some MPs and tried to convince them otherwise, you know, just depending on what my mood is and how able I feel there are lots of little different ways that you can go about it I find to stop it from becoming this overwhelmingly negative thing and to actually make it something that empowers you as a person; if that doesn't sound too new-agey? 	
rob	No it doesn't. 	
liz	Hannah, how about you what do you feel about that? 	
hannah	I was going to say I completely agree with that. The campaigning is, on the one hand, a very useful and important thing because, you know what, the welfare changes aren't the best option perhaps from our perspective. But then again when there are a lot of vulnerable people with disabilities on Twitter, and if they're timelines are filled with negative and depressing predictions for the future then I think that can be very overwhelming for people; which is partly why I've chosen the approach I have which addresses disability. Yes what I draw is true but I always try and put humour and lightness into it so then it can help people see that it's not only doom and gloom there are things…	
rob	Let's see if you can add a little bit of levity to this then speaking about economic predictions, I hate to throw yet more chip fat onto the fire, but a study by Demos, commissioned by the Scope charity, and this estimates the welfare changes will impact between 3.7 and 3.74 million disabled people. And by 2018 these disabled people will have lost in total £28.3 billion! How is this going to affect the economy I mean it just seems extraordinary. That old phrase that we were talking about in the production meeting before the show – PLOD – people living off disability. Who are we talking about, who's going to be affected by this? It's not just disabled people I'm thinking that there's going to be so many more knock-on effects.	
emma	Well definitely. Disabled people don't exist in a vacuum – well one would hope we don't anyway.	
rob	Not anymore, they’ve outlawed  that.	
emma	And it affects everybody. 	
liz	How is this going to affect people in real terms? What do we use this money for that we get, for example, from Disability Living Allowance what do we spend it on? 	
emma	Well generally we spend this money and we put it back into society. We spend it straight into the local economy, we spend it on taxis, we spend it at our local shops and things like that. We spend it buying specially adapted clothes, buying extra equipment. 	
liz	Hannah, how about you? 	
emma	Paying people.	
hannah	Yeah well I think it's kind of summed up on one of  the cartoons that's on the BBC Ouch blog of mine which is with DLA I can be presentable, sat in my wheelchair, active, working. Without it that means I'm going to struggle to stay clean and presentable because I employ PAs for various things. It's going to mean I can't get out and about. It's going to mean I can't… Because I spend it on getting out and about and everything. 	
rob	These aren't fringe benefits these are real…	
liz	These are basics aren't they?	
rob	Real basics aren't they?	
liz	So this is food. So who isn't going to get your money then as a result? 	
hannah	My cleaners won't have a job. The local taxi companies get a lot of business from me. And of course all the local shops. One of the ways I explain it – this isn't quite related to your question but I think it's a point worth making – is that I use a wheelchair. For me it's like a pair of shoes. Can you imagine the outrage if shoes went up to over £2,000 for a pair. There would be outrage about it. So that's the cheapest I have been able to get a wheelchair for that suits my needs very, very sort of just meets them. So you know what that extra money that I get through DLA is used up straight away on just the basics of being able to leave my front door. It's no you're giving me the choice of get DLA or have no disability I think I know which one I'd choose. 	
liz	So wheelchair manufacturers, taxi companies, people that you buy your ready meals from, your cleaners and PAs. Emma have people looked into these knock-on costs and the impact it's going to have on the economy of the cuts?	
emma	Well that's it and it's one of those areas that I get a bit confused about. Because people with less money are well known to be more likely to spend it in their local economy. If you give £500 to somebody who's got very little money that'll be spent straight away and it'll go back into people's jobs, they'll pay VAT on it which will go into the government's coffers. It can increase employment and things like that. If you give a very rich person £500 and it'll probably just go into a savings account, quite possibly a tax-free savings account or one abroad. And that money's not being paid back into the economy which I think is kind of an issue. There's been some interesting reports done in the US about this and I mean it's not just a US thing. The UK Treasury uses something a bit complex called the fiscal multiplier. 	
liz	Sounds good.	
emma	Which is used when they're putting in a policy to look at what the effect's going to be on the economy of it. And basically the higher the fiscal multiplier is the harder it hits the economy. And policies that hit low earners have a much higher fiscal multiplier than those that hit high earners, for example. 	
liz	So they hit the economy harder, they hurt the local economy particularly. 	
emma	Yeah. So I would argue that taking the money out of the pockets of disabled people, especially disabled people who have low incomes, is actually not the wisest thing to do economically speaking. 	
rob	Now the government would say at this juncture that the money that disabled people lose would be fed back into the economy through schemes that give access to work. And we've got a statement here where they've basically told us – well I quote: "We've made changes to Access to Work so that disabled people have the same choice of jobs as everyone else and in every sector from hairdressing to engineering" they say "and at every level. We currently invest around £100 million on Access to Work each year to support around 30,000 disabled people and we recently put another £15 million into the fund." So what's your response to that? 	
emma	Getting Access to Work can be quite difficult. And also their Access to Work is there for disabled people who are employed who have got jobs. There are a lot of disabled people, and especially those low earners that we were talking about, that can't work. And Access to Work is not help to them, it's no assistance to them. 	
hannah	And also you get, and I'm speaking from personal experience here, I lost my job heavily influenced by the fact that the adaptions I needed weren't standard. My employer was unwilling, possibly unable, possibly just didn't understand and thought I was being awkward, so they were reluctant to fund anything and Access to Work said it was outside their remit. So I lost my job. And yeah. 	
liz	So Access to Work is there for people who work, disabled people who work, benefits like Disability Living Allowance soon to become PIP – Personal Independence Plan aren't there for all disabled people yeah?	
hannah	Yeah.	
emma	Yeah. 	
liz	It's been fascinating. A lot of complexity there and I love you're trying to make the complex a lot more understandable for many of us, both of you, Hannah through your cartoons, thank you for, that bringing some humour into it. 	
rob	And you've now got me wondering about where I can get a £2,000 pair of shoes. 	
liz	And Emma thank you for your blogs, we've got information about you on our website, on our blog, so thank you both for joining us. 	
emma	It was a pleasure. Thank you.	
Hannah	Thank you, it's been a pleasure.	
liz	Thank you. 
[Jingle: Ouch talking disability. 
The relaxation in here when the mics are off, what we say to one another, is still not broadcastable. I mean it isn't because of the fact that nobody would understand the shorthand language disabled people use and I love to see that get out there. bbc.co.uk/ouch.]
[Playing clip:
Just on this last S before the final jump hot air. Now he seems to be just turning. Really just turning well wide on the line now. A very, very cautious finish from Sean Rose.]
What better way to start the Winter Paralympic segment than a clip of the 2010 Winter Paralympics with Sean Rose downhill skiing. Tony Garratt you're here to tell us a little bit more about this important milestone because we're a year away now from the Winter Paralympics, is that right?	
tony	That's correct yes. And next big Paralympic event, Winter Paralympics Sochi. 	
liz	A lot of us…	
rob	Oh that's how you pronounce it. I was saying Sotchi. 	
liz	How do you pronounce it? Sochi.	
tony	I think it's maybe it's…	
rob	Sushi. 	
tony	Not Sushi. Sochi sounds probably better doesn't it? 	
rob	And obviously it's in Russia, it's near the Black Sea or near the Crimea is that right? 	
tony	That is correct. 	
rob	Which one? 	
tony	Near the Black Sea. 	
rob	Near the Black Sea right, okay.	
liz	That's one of our questions. You see, Tony, if you're like me or a lot of listeners, even though people loved the summer Paralympics, they might not know a lot about the winter ones, right. 	
tony	Correct. 	
liz	So we need to get a little bit of information, basic information, for listeners out there. We've got some quick fire questions for you, okay. We have a countdown clock, these are quick. Don't you fluffle your papers. Fluffle, do you like that word?	
tony	Fluffle. 	
liz	I just made it up. Don't you fluffle your papers. On the marks, question number one: 	
rob	If the summer games started in Rome in 1960 where and when did the winter games begin? 	
tony	Sweden 1976.	
liz	Beautiful. The next games are in March 2014 but where? See what we did there. 	
tony	But where? Russia. 	
rob	And where were the last Winter Paralympics held? 	
tony	2010 in Canada split between Vancouver where the curling and the sledge hockey was; and up in the mountains Whistler. 	
liz	Tony, how many sporting events are at the winter games?	
tony	Five Paralympic winter sports.	
rob	Can you name them?	
tony	I can indeed: there's going to be wheelchair curling, sledge hockey which is terribly exciting, alpine skiing, cross-country and biathlon. 	
liz	So the new event at the Sochi games?	
tony	The new event which will be the sixth sport this year will be snowboarding which is going to be exciting to say the least. 	
rob	Okay so there were 300 Paralympic athletes competing for Great Britain in London last year, how many Brits will be there at the Winter Paralympics? 	
tony	Probably no more than 12 however…	
rob	12!	
tony	Yeah 12. But if our sledge hockey team qualify, which we hope they will, they'll be a few more. 	
liz	No one we didn't get in the time but quickly, quickly how many gold medals did we win in Vancouver?	
tony	None. 	
liz	Oh man!	
rob	And how many medals has GB ever won at the Winter Paralympics?	
tony	None. 	
rob	What? 	
liz	How many are we going to win next year? 	
tony	We're going to win at least one.	
liz	Really?	
rob	Well good.	
tony	We are. 	
rob	Because one of those tips to help us lift that terrible, terrible duck is Kelly Gallagher who's visually impaired and a skier, and she's on the phone from Bangor in Northern Ireland right now. Hello Kelly.	
kelly	Hi, how are you? 	
rob	I'm very well, thank you. Now you won two silvers and a bronze in the recent Alpine World Championships in La Molina in Spain didn't you is that right?	
kelly	Yeah we won two silvers and two bronzes, so four medals. It was brilliant. 	
rob	Now I have to be honest with you because I'm visually impaired as well and I do have some skiing friends and they've been pestering me for the best part of a decade to go skiing. And I say well obviously no I can't because I'm visually impaired that would be ludicrous. And people like you, frankly, are breaking my excuse. I can't use it anymore when there's people like you who are visually impaired and are doing amazingly well. So just tell me because it just sounds ridiculous; how can you do it without it being exceptionally dangerous? 	
kelly	Well I guess skiing has a little element of danger anyway whether you're visually impaired or not visually impaired. But the balance of skiing and the rush that you get and how much fun it is just overrides any type of nerves that you would have, like being nervous or apprehensive about skiing. I just love it so much. 	
rob	Do you have a guide who comes down the slopes with you or is it all sort of radio so you get directed by radio mic or how does it work?	
kelly	Yes. So I ski with a girl called Charlotte Evans and we ski and train fulltime. She skis in front of me and she wears a luminous orange bib which is really fashionable. But basically she wears that and then with the eyesight that I do have I can focus on that. And that's all I have to focus on, Charlotte takes all the safety into account and she basically picks a way down the mountain so we're not crashing into obstacles or skiing too close to anybody; so it's a lot of responsibility that Charlotte takes. 	
rob	So it's literally follow the bib and you'll…	
kelly	Essentially. 	
rob	…avoid the main dangers of the ski slope.	
kelly	Yeah.	
liz	And if you win a medal…	
kelly	We also wear Bluetooth radio communication so we're in contact the whole time; so the way I'm speaking to you now is the way I can speak to Charlotte. Obviously I'm a little bit more exerted when I'm skiing but yeah it's great, she can tell me when the bumps are coming, when maybe it gets steeper, if it get icy, if there's a roller coming which is a change in terrain. And just generally we talk about other people. She's like, "Do you like that jacket?" I'm like, "Yeah pretty good." 	
rob	I'm curious that Northern Ireland obviously isn't overburdened with huge snowy mountains, so where do you go to train? 	
kelly	Basically we spend quite a lot of time some of it I guess November, December through to March and April in the snow in Austria. Austria's a really good place for training and it's quite easy to get to from London. We spend all that time there training fulltime, six days a week. And it's a little bit of a disadvantage I guess compared to the Austrians themselves or the French team or the German team that we can't just drive to the slopes at the weekend. But I guess we try and make the best of it when we are home we train in the Sports Institute here in Northern Ireland and try and get our strength and conditioning and our physiotherapy and all that kind of thing, like try and get the advantage that way. 	
rob	And one thing I'm also curious about is has there been a sort of London 2012-esq bounce in interest in the sport have you noticed this happening as we get a little closer to Sochi? 	
kelly	Yeah I think definitely just the media interest I mean this time in 2009 I definitely wouldn't have been interviewed by the BBC or anything like that. So it's been really exciting. It's exciting to see people who are just interested in sport now. So people want to go on holiday or their friends are saying to them, their able-bodied friends are saying, "Hey come on holiday with us, let's go skiing" and that is getting more interest and people are more inspired and feel more able to be able to say okay I'm not sure how I can do it but let's find a way to get around it and there must be somebody out there who's done it before; or, I can find a way around doing this. So definitely that's been a legacy from the Paralympic Games in London but I want it more. I want it that everybody knows that anybody can try skiing and there's always a way around it so that everyone can enjoy a skiing holiday or compete if they want to compete. 	
rob	That's a great answer. Thank you so much, Kelly, I love the enthusiasm. 	
liz	Tony, Heather Mills is reportedly putting a bit of effort, quite a lot of effort actually, into the Winter Paralympics. It's April the games are getting closer is she really going to qualify? 	
tony	Now this is one of the big stories that people are getting more interested in. Clearly Kelly and our team, we know the curlers are qualified, obviously very high profile name and is putting a lot of serious training to try and qualify for Great Britain. She's rented a villa, a base in France to really give herself the best opportunity. My understanding is, is that realistically Heather is two levels away; she's training with the squad so she will be training with Kelly and the rest of the team but she's part of the development squad at this stage. But obviously with various funding that she's got it means she can travel around Europe and be there. She's got to basically get some key times in and it will be, she's got two levels, she's got to make sure she competes in the Europa Cup races, and then the World Cup races. So really she'll be doing a lot of training now but obviously the season restarts in October/November. And a lot of the skiers won't actually be selected until quite close to the games because it will depend on their results and on their times. So I think at this stage she's still got a lot of work to do but there is a possibility. 	
liz	I was going to say is she kidding herself or is this a realistic…	
tony	No, no she's been really been putting herself into it for the last year and a lot of people have actually said is this a publicity stunt. But the word out there is that she's really committed, she's training really hard and she wants to compete for Great Britain. So watch this space.	
rob	And let's be fair it's not going to do the media interest any harm at all is it to have Heather Mills competing in the Paralympics, it's not going to do any harm coverage wise.	
tony	We have to be absolutely honest that's correct, Rob. And I think the situation is, is that winter sport and winter Paralympic sport in this country is always going to be lower on the radar. But I think interest is growing and with snowboarding coming in as a new sport that's going to be great. Wheelchair curling where we have won a medal, we won a silver in Turin, missed by a very small percentage to win gold – I'll never forget that. But I think obviously we've got sledge hockey which we're going to talk about in a minute, sledge hockey is one of the best and fastest Paralympic sports. 	
liz	Even I'm quite excited about this. Isn't the tagline 'If you liked wheelchair rugby you'll like sledge hockey' I've got it down here it's a fast moving game on an ice rink with six players. Great Britain beat Estonia to a bronze medal in the world sledge hockey championships in Japan last month. ROB GAZEaze is their goalie and is on the phone from Derby. Hello Rob. 	
rob	Hello Rob. 	
ROB GAZE	Hi, how's it going?	
liz	Really well. Now what is sledge hockey? 	
ROB GAZE	Sledge hockey is the disabled version of ice hockey; very, very similar, most of the rules are the same except obviously most of us can't move our legs or have any function. So what we do is we sit in a little chair which is strapped to a frame which has skates on the bottom. We use two sticks rather than one and they're about a quarter of the length of normal hockey sticks but have the same shooting head on, they have picks on the bottom so we can push around the ice. 	
liz	So you've got like an ice pick and then a shooting thing – do you like that – a stick, that's right. But you've got a puck and everything else is the same. 	
rob	Are you strapped into the chair? 	
ROB GAZE	We are strapped in. It's more of a bucket so it kind of carries all the way over your legs or whatever legs you've got and really tight in. I mean you have to be one with your sled otherwise you're going to find it really hard when you fall over to get back up. 	
liz	Now can you give us a sense of the action and I guess the incidents. I mean why are we comparing it to wheelchair rugby? 	
ROB GAZE	It's a full contact sport. I mean there's…	
rob	That means people get hurt. 	
ROB GAZE	…things you can't do like can't start fights otherwise you're going to get sent to the sin bin and you can't punch people. But there's nothing wrong with you going in with your shoulder into somebody and knocking them flat off their sled. It's a common move to try if they've got the puck rather than going for the puck you try to take the man away, so you're left with the puck and he's left a yard behind you. 	
liz	Is it as thrilling to watch as it is to take part?	
ROB GAZE	Without a doubt, it's better. 	
liz	Really? 	
ROB GAZE	I have a certain bias because I love this sport wholly, but I think it's one of the best Paralympic sports in the world.	
liz	Have you been flung out of your bucket many times?	
ROB GAZE	I have. I'm not supposed to be being the net minder, I'm supposed to sit there and just save the pucks. But you tend to get some overzealous people coming in a bit too close and then hitting you after they've taken their shot. 	
liz	And is this the sport that's going to make it on the telly are we going to see you on the TV?	
ROB GAZE	I do hope so. I mean we're always out there doing our thing until the early hours in the morning putting in the effort. We'd like to showcase what Great Britain can do to the world and showcase what we think is one of the best sports in the world. 	
liz	So usually when you hear about sports people training it's about getting up early in the morning. What is it with you guys and late at night? 	
ROB GAZE	We get whatever…we beg, borrow, steal scraps of ice time whenever we can. Most of our training sessions don't start on ice until 10:00 is the earliest we normally do, most times it's 12:00 until 2:00 in the morning. Because we're not fully funded so we have to trump up our own ice time. It's one of the cheapest places in the slot which not anybody's taken. 	
liz	It's like the graveyard slot that you all have to…	
ROB GAZE 	Yeah the graveyard slot indeed and which normally if there's a nice manager on steal an extra half an hour. 	
rob	So next time you're walking past an ice rink in the dead of night and you hear the crunch of skull upon ice you know that it's potentially not a terrible homicide taking place it's a training session with you guys. 	
ROB GAZE	Yeah without a doubt. If you hear helmets hitting helmets it's definitely us in there. 	
liz	Just before you go you got a bronze last month. 	
ROB GAZE	Yeah, yeah. 	
liz	How close are you to qualifying for the Paralympics next year? 	
ROB GAZE	Well we're always seen as the under dogs but that's the position we like. And we're going through to one more tournament, the final tournament should be around the end of this year and we need to place bronze of higher and then we'll be at Sochi and you'll all be watching us. 	
liz	Are you confident, Rob?	
ROB GAZE	A bit nervous but yeah we can do it. We push ourselves harder every time, every time we go out, and people have started taking notice. So there's not much more you could want. 	
liz	Tony?	
tony	I was just going to say I think sledge hockey, I've been watching it for a number of years, covered two Paralympics and I was with the guys in Turin where they had a tough tournament, but seriously guys this is the big sport. In my view it's in the top five of ALL of the Paralympic sports summer and winter and it will be brilliant, and it will be a great watch and I'm sure our guys will be there. 	
liz	Rob, thanks for joining us. 	
ROB GAZE	Thank you very much. 	
rob	And just before you disappear, Tony, there's another event that we should know about in late April a bit of a come along and try it Paralympic sports day, so tell us a little bit about that. 	
tony	Well just briefly, I'll go back very briefly, we all like a mascot don't we at these games and the two mascots for the Winter Paralympics are called Ray of Light and Snowflake. 	
liz	Not sure about that. 	
rob	Ray of Light! This sounds like some sort of terrible… Millions were probably spent by some PR agency to come up with that. 	
liz	Yeah because ours were what – Wenlock and Mandeville. Because they were stunning weren't they, yes. 	
rob	And so memorable. Echoes down the ages they will.	
tony	That was a little bit of humour. But yes coming up, end of April, 25th to the 28th in Sheffield two big events; it will be first of all it's a British International Disability Swimming championships; so it will be the first time that all of our swimmers from this country and obviously lots of swimmers from abroad will be competing. And it will be a trial for the forthcoming World Championships. So that's going to be April 25th to 28th. Tied in with that the British Paralympic Association are having their second sports festival. They had one, people may remember in Guildford before Christmas, but this is going to be in Sheffield. Over this whole weekend of April 25th to 28th so you can go along try a load of different new Paralympic sports, get to understand about all the Paralympic sports. And then later on nip along to Ponds Ford to see the swimming. So if anyone's up in the Sheffield area or wants to know more about Paralympic sport April 25th to 28th is the place to be. 	
rob	And we will put all the details for that on the blog. 	
liz	Wait, just before he goes, you said that you're no stranger to winter sport, Tony, I'm stunned by this. 	
tony	I know I try to keep this fairly quiet, but when I was a tad younger I took part in some downhill sledge skiing back in the late '70s I think shall we say. 	
liz	I bet the outfit was interesting. 	
tony	The outfit was interesting. It was run by the Norwegian Army and I was a sort of young 18 year old experiencing life on the slopes and everything that goes with it. 	
liz	Après ski no doubt. 	
tony	Après ski no doubt	
rob	Well thank you so much, Tony, appreciate you coming in as always. And that's it we've come to the end of show number 96. So thanks to Emma Tracey and studio manager Gill Drabble. The producer was Damon Rose. And it is now time for that news that we mentioned. Liz, what can I say, let's let the cat out the bag.	
liz	Shall we? 	
rob	Your career is about to enter a steep and in a very real sense irreversible decline.	
liz	Absolutely. 	
rob	Due to the following bananas decision. 	
liz	Bananas. Yes I have decided that after seven years I'm leaving Ouch! I know, I know! 	
rob	Elizabeth! 	
liz	Difficult decision but I'm a bit anal about dates and I thought I've done it for seven years maybe I've got a little bit of a nasty itch these day, the seven year itch. And I thought it's either this or you've got the 100 programme coming up in August, I feel I should…you know my time has come, I've put in my time and I've loved it but I think it's time for a new younger generation. Do you like that? Did that sound good?	
rob	You're basically saying you're past it.	
liz	I'm past it. 	
rob	Yeah. And she looks it. But also she is rather busy listeners with filming Silent Witness on BBC1.	
liz	Absolutely. 	
rob	And so this is obviously a massive part of the decision as well that they just won't let you go to do this show.	
liz	It's very hard to even get half a day it is true. And that's kind of like seven months of the year so that has had an impact. This isn't the last show, I'm doing next month's so I will be there which is great. So I'm looking forward to that. We get one more show together, Rob, and then that's it.	
rob	And maybe we should put this to the listeners that if you do believe that Liz Carr is a Judas traitor and you'd rather she just goes now then do just please write in and we'll send you an appropriately stiff letter.	
liz	Thank you very much I look forward to that. 	
rob	Nice that we could end on such a sentimental tone wasn't it. Go away! Right, well let's pull ourselves together through the veil of tears. This is a track which we're going to finish on from a guy called Matt Bond, he's from Cornwall and he has a stammer. 	
liz	He put out a call out on the internet and got a group of fellow stammerers together to make an EP, there are more details about that on our blog. All the money raised goes to a related charity.	
rob	And we've heard about this phenomenon before where Matt sings the stammer goes away, and the song is called part of me. Matt says it expresses the problems stammering causes me in day to day life but it's also an acceptance that stammering is part of who I am. 	
liz	And that is why the track is called part of me. So until next time then cue the music and goodbye. 	
rob	Goodbye. 
[Playing music]