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For tetraplegics, the road must be particularly rough. The rule she says is adapt or die: ‘A rehab ward in a spinal unit is like an under-strength factory floor: too few staff battling to a relentless timetable of feeding, medicating, washing, toileting, dressing and hoisting dozens of helpless carcasses into wheelchairs to get them to the gym.’ And then, if you’re doing well, come other multiple terrors and challenges of returning home and rebuilding life. Melanie Reid writes sensibly and well about thoughts of suicide, about depression, about the frustration of media-hyped ‘medical breakthroughs’ that never quite translate into helping you yourself; and unsparingly about the daily frustrations and humiliations of disabled life. For what it’s worth, I too have found myself screaming with rage from time to time having dropped yet another utensil on the kitchen floor.

So in that sense, these are really ‘Notes from the Underground’; and why would you want to read that? The answer is not only that you might find yourself in just the same place, but that Melanie is such a good guide in how to survive it. She knows that although the subject of disability might seem depressing and offputting, the courage it requires is exciting and inspiring. What she has gone through requires no less physical courage and determination than being imprisoned in a wartime prison camp – a parallel that hovers at times through the writing, but is no hyperbole. She rightly quotes the great English vicar-philosopher Sydney Smith on the importance of taking a short view of life: ‘Are you happy now?’ She understands the absolute importance of shunning the lethal beckoning poison-fairy of self-pity. As she says: ‘you learn, very slowly, to rediscover joy’.