Foot-bones of contention
BOCCIA. I’ve been digging deep into the Paralympic TV schedules to find the time, date, and channel to watch expert boccia players hurl, pitch, and lob the red and blue leather-clad balls towards the white jack.
I was introduced to boccia when I was in Stoke Mandeville: the National Centre for Spinal Injuries. In those early days of my injury, I needed a kindly therapist to hold and angle a ramp as I struggled to nudge the ball with my only moving part: the thumb on my left hand. Now, two years later, l am pleased to boast of growing strength in my arms and dexterity in my hands, and am an impressive chucker of the red or blue balls.
I’m not alone with growing prowess in relation to boccia. Over time, our weekly sessions have brought improved performances and a hint of competition. This has led to a new problem: it really does matter which ball is closest to the jack. No longer were we content with the referee’s size-11s adjudicating whether the red or blue team wins the round. Even drawing on the impartial eye of a passing-by carer was no longer adequate — what was needed was a tape measure.
My deep research via a well-known online store resulted in Draper’s Pride, a pukka tape measure known to serious boccia and bowls players alike, and the perfect gift for our referee.
Onward referral
TO DISTRACT from the strain and stress of labouring in my standing frame in the gym (this needs amplification: I have a customised contraption that enables me to stand and sit as my wayward blood pressure allows; think of tedium, and battling with an invisible demon for 30 minutes each day, and you get the measure of the challenge), I invited our boccia referee to try his arm at Twenty Questions to guess what my gift might be. He, too, found himself labouring.
Other therapy assistants joined in, but to no avail. They had clearly missed out on Gilbert Harding’s chairing of Twenty Questions on the Home Service, and therefore missed the vital first question: was it animal, vegetable, or mineral?
Triumphantly, and in a flash, I was presenting our boccia referee with his Draper’s Pride. “A present,” I said, “just for you.” With hindsight, I should have been more careful. Our boccia referee and his fellow therapists and therapy assistants were now party to a gift from a resident, and an alarm bell sounded.
An email went to the boss to check whether it was OK to accept a gift from a resident, and then an email pinged to the boss’s boss, and then upwards again, and then. . . the increasingly problematic gift, vital to the future of our improving game, was given the imprimatur.
Gift aid
INITIALLY, I inclined toward mockery at these organisational shenanigans. My second thoughts were more measured. We now know too much about the dynamics of grooming to presume anything innocent. Would the issue have disappeared if I had said “Here is something for our boccia games,” and never mentioned the words “present” or “gift”?
I was so mithered by the question that I phoned a friend. Liz and I had both studied social administration in its early days — the 1970s. I half-remembered an essay about the importance of “gifts” and altruism to the then budding social-welfare sector. Liz remembered her undergraduate studies with aplomb. It was Richard Titmuss, she recalled, and his treatise The Gift Relationship. This took me to Wikipedia, which, coincidentally, is also reliant on the gift relationship for its very existence and continuity.
Titmuss, it turns out, was an actuary for 17 years before shaping the emerging practice of social administration. He drew on these skills to investigate blood donation, comparing Britain and the United States. He concluded that the British reliance on people making the “gift” of blood would provide a more efficient, sustainable, and safer system than one run by “for profit” companies where people were paid to give their blood.
Titmuss died long before he would see the accuracy of his analysis. We are now at the conclusion of the Infected Blood Inquiry, which has investigated how, before 1996, the NHS risked treating patients with infected blood and blood products from the US, where “paid-for” blood was not screened for HIV and hepatitis C.
The then Prime Minister, Theresa May, commissioned the Infected Blood Inquiry six years ago, at about the same time as I was taking a dear friend, with incipient leukaemia, for her regular blood transfusions. I was struck by how many in the clinic were reliant on other people’s blood. My conscience was pricked, but not my arm. I enquired whether I could become a blood donor, only to be told that I was too old. I had waited too long to make my gift.
Go out with joy
TWO friends were determined not to be tardy in their gift-giving. They had puzzled how I could gain entrance to their house in my wheelchair. The only place that could be reached was their slip of a front garden. They checked that I would have no objection, to not just eating alfresco, but eating in pubblica, visible to passers-by as they walked along the pavement.
Having got the thumbs-up, they set about constructing a shelter to protect from a passing shower or harsh sunlight. Like a sukkah, constructed for the Festival of Booths, they created a structure of bamboo, but, instead of a roof of myrtle boughs, they harnessed a tarpaulin lent by a neighbour. To the south of the structure was attached a curtain, to be drawn when the sun’s rays became lower in the sky. For Jews, Sukkot is a season of rejoicing, and the effort and glorious food were most certainly a gift of rejoicing from special friends.
As I learn about disability, I have discovered the difficulty of “paying it forward”. I am regularly on the receiving end of kindness, but with little ability to carry kindnesses to others. Holier people than I am might suggest that this has the potential for deep spiritual grace — but my ambition is to watch my language so that a gift does not trip the safeguarding alarm.
Ann Morisy is a community theologian, and is a member of the congregation at St Leonard’s, Streatham, in the diocese of Southwark.