Donna Gee - Spain's Grumpy Old Gran

EVER stood inside a giant warehouse service lift as the rickety contraption creaked and squeaked its way between floors?
Throw in a couple of dithering button pushers, a circuit or two of Liverpool Airport runway and a laid-back wheelchair pusher rumbling you through passport control, and bingo, you’ve arrived.
Unfortunately you’ve missed out just a little. Because the other passengers are all long gone, and the pilot and crew who flew you from Alicante tucked up in their hotel beds.
I was in the process of discovering that for disabled and frail travellers, wheelchair travel can be both a godsend and a penance.
It was heaven to be the first passenger aboard at Alicante - and promptly smothered with Air Smiles by an eager-to-please cabin crew.
But when I eventually met up with my family in a near-deserted arrivals area at Liverpool, I didn’t know whether I was coming or going.
By the time the tiny wheelchair entourage reached to passport control, our fellow passengers had long since headed off into the night.
Nobody in their right mind would WANT to be pushed around in a wheelchair rather than exercise their pins.
But as I approach the Biblical three score years and ten, the reality of existence is beginning to hit home.
I am going to need help more often than not on future flights after my latest ordeal.
I don’t want to die. But imagine where we would all end up if our bodies kept going but continued to degenerate.
Like Woody Allen, I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by living for ever.
Or at least until I look in the mirror on my 20,000th birthday.

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