The world is full of surprises

I’d just spent a couple of hours with a friend I hadn’t seen for a while.
Then I found myself taking a photo in picter-squee, Douglas Row, as a couple walked out of one of the quaint terraced cottages and into my shot.

‘Was I in your picture?’ said the guy in an Ulster accent, as he crossed the street, coming towards me.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but it warms a picture when you have some human figures in it.’ I was waiting for him to tell me he didn’t like being in my shot, but he said nothing more.

‘Do you live here?’ I asked.

‘No, we’re on holiday, this is our last day.’ He was wearing a blue jumper over his arms, or so I thought, when he said: ‘I’ve got no arms, due to Thalidomide.’

‘ Yes, I know about it,’ I said, ‘strangely, I was thinking about it only the other day.’ This was perfectly true. Mum and I had a holiday at Butlins, Ayr, in 1964, and she had explained about Thalidomide to me after we had seen a wee girl with funny short arms. This fellow told me that hundreds of people in the UK had been affected, and apparently, thousands in Germany. He also told me that Thalidomide was still used for leprosy in Brazil, ‘because it works.’

‘’That’s the trouble,’ I said, ‘if a drug works, it seems to override everything else.’

‘We’ve just done the North Coast 500,’ he told me, ‘I drive with my feet.’

‘That’s brilliant,’ I said, wondering how anyone could steer a car with their feet. It seemed utterly amazing.

He then asked me for directions to the Botanic Gardens, and I told him it was a good half hour walk. ‘That’s fine,’ he said, ‘we like walking.’ He was one of those outgoing people who seem to wear their disability as a badge of pride, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

When they decided to go across the famous Grieg Street Bridge, we went our separate ways. Afterwards I thought that I would like to have shaken his hand. I’m not being funny here, that’s the thought I had.

My extra shot is entitled: 'Go for it, Rover!'