Rachel’s Blog

I want to draw attention to this wonderful choir based in London. Called Sing for Joy, it is made up of people with Parkinson’s Disease, and their friends and carers. It was initiated by two women who were diagnosed with PD and did not want to sit back and be medicated.

I heard these women speak at a conference last year, and there was something so inspiring about them. I felt they refused to be pathologised in a way so common in the healthcare system; you are your disease. And I felt it must be so empowering to feel, as someone with a life-changing condition, that there is a way of self-medicating, that something you are doing is helping, and you’re not just sitting back and letting someone prescribe drugs for you to passively swallow.

In fact, there is something about singing which is the antithesis of ‘passively swallowing’. Singing is powerfully life-affirming; I am still breathing. This is my voice. My voice. Do you hear me? Listen.

A friend of mine, a freelance writer/philosopher/theologian (who’s blog can be found here) has just scuppered my attempt to convince people in my risk assessment that singing is safe, by saying the following…

“Singing is one of the most dangerously subversive, creative, life-affirming, anti-consumerist activities in the universe. “

Damn!

When I’m out and about I am quite open to chatting with random people on the street (obviously the ‘stranger danger’ message passed me by). The past couple of days I’ve chatted with various different people – mainly older people – and the contrast is sometimes astounding – and makes me realise what a big age range ‘older people’ cover – 30 years!

Walking on Port Meadow, and passing through a gate an old woman said to me “don’t grow as old as me, you won’t enjoy it… I’m past my sell-by-date” - I beg to differ.

Yesterday at a bus stop I had a brief conversation with a woman who said she wanted to get her karate black belt by age seventy (she was sixty-nine) and an A* in GCSE Science. Refreshing.