They’ve parked me under the pine trees in the shade and it’s beautiful here. I have the background company of cicadas, a cool breeze, and I can see everyone on the beach. Before she ran off into the sea my niece Serena sloshed anti mozzy stuff all over me, so I’m not going to get bitten to pieces like last time.

My sister Maggie and her husband Terry have hired a special disability van with a lift for my wheelchair. The best thing about it is I can see out of the windows because they’re big and low and it’s amazing to see where I’m going for a change! So far this is a great holiday and I’m looking forward to dinner tonight – we sit outside at the taverna and if my hands make food go flying nobody cares, it just lands on the earth. And there’s music so if I inadvertently make odd sounds I don’t disturb anyone either.

Thinking about the flashy hired van here reminds me of Jamie’s van, our family’s first van, and I have to laugh! I’ll tell you about it in a minute, but right now I’m watching four muscular young Greek men playing a bat and ball game on the sand. They’re very energetic: leaping about athletically, whacking the ball to each other and falling about trying to reach it – it’s fun to watch! I try to put myself in their bodies to discover what it might feel like to be strong and gleaming with sweat in the sun… Actually I can’t imagine it.

So – back to Jamie’s van. Jamie is my oldest brother – I’m the youngest of seven siblings by the way, five brothers, one sister and me. Kenny is the next oldest and far more informative – ‘Jamie is a doer and Kenny is a thinker’, Mam says. So Kenny tells me Mam had problems when she was having me, she nearly miscarried me several times but she held onto me fiercely and wouldn’t let me go even when Da said she should give up. When I was born Da wasn’t there so her brother, Uncle Joseph, came with Mam to the hospital and when he held me, with my bent and jerky arms and legs, Kenny said Uncle Joe looked into my eyes and declared:

“This little lad has a happy disposition, Martha!”

“God has blessed him,” replied my mother firmly.

When I was five my brother Jamie was 17 so he took his driving test and bought this old van. It was scratched and battered but it had eight seats, with a space at the back for my wheelchair. Jamie concocted a harness for me with webbing straps which went around me like a cocoon so my cerebral palsy didn’t make me bash my hands and feet into the sides of the van. It was cosy in there but there weren’t any windows so I was hurtling round corners without seeing a thing! Mam sat in the front next to Jamie and the rest of them just piled in. I loved it with all of us together, talking and laughing! Jamie took us to so many places and wherever we went one of them pushed me along and we certainly saw some sights. And sometimes people stared at me as I jerked and twitched, and my siblings would say rude things to them.

That was before I could speak properly so sometimes they would just invent terrible things for me to say: ‘Arno says this or Arno says that…’ then fall about laughing. Mam had christened me Arnold after Arnold Schwarzeneggar because he is strong and God goes with him, she said, like He does me.

Da never came on our outings. We kids were scared of Da but I don’t know why, he was never cruel to us. He was more just “not there” somehow. He worked on the buildings all day then he had his tea on his own for peace and quiet, he said, and then he went to the pub with his mates to unwind, with “a game of darts and a couple.” Then he came home to bed. He was a good man: he supported his family and paid the rent. But he was a ghost of a father. Jamie turned into the man of the house by the time he was 15 and left school to start working and save up for our van. Jamie is a big man, bigger than Da. And when I turned 14 Da went back ‘home’, as he called it, back to Connemara. We were all born in Liverpool so we stayed where we were and Mam went over on the ferry to visit him now and again, sometimes with one or other of us, but she never took me.

All this remembering is making me a bit tearful, so I concentrate on watching Serena swim far out and there’s my brother-in-law Terry even farther, clinging to the yellow ball marking the edge of the swimming area. I don’t know what it’s like: I’ve never been in the sea. My darling sister Maggie is bobbing around in the shallows: she’s met up with a couple of other ladies which is typical, and they’re all non-stop talking. That’s Maggie’s forte.

The young Greek men have finished their game and come over to the wall under the trees, carrying ice cold cans of beer. One sits on the wall beside me and smiles, then gets out his packet of cigs and lights one. He glances at me.

“Want a cigarette?” he asks me, shaking the pack so one bounces out.

I gather myself to speak. I spent five years with my speech therapist learning to speak so it better damn work!

“I’ve never had one,” I say. It sounds intelligible, to me anyway.

“Excuse me?”

“I never had a cigarette before,” I say slowly, trying to make it clearer.

He laughs, “Oh! Never before! Then you try!” he says, taking the cigarette from his mouth to pass it to me. I try to take it, but my hand jerks away from me and I accidentally knock it sideways. He grabs it; he can see I look stricken.

“Ochi problema! – no problem!” he says, and he puts it to my lips and tells me to breathe it in. I do and I cough like nobody’s business and he pats my back and his friends all gather round and also pat me on the back, and give me some of their beer to drink.

It’s nice to be with these friendly young men, chatting to each other in Greek and sometimes saying something in English to me. They share sips of beer with me, which make me feel warm. Very different from the occasional Guinness my brothers drink. Then they decide to go and cool off in the sea.

“You want to go in the sea?” asks the one who’d first spoken to me – Stelios is his name. I can’t believe it. Can’t they see I have cerebral palsy, in other words, I am a spastic? I’m amazed enough, truth be told, that they talk to me at all, let alone so easily accept me and let me join in with them.

So I say yes! Yes! I would like to go in the sea with them, I would, more than anything I have ever been asked. And I would like to have a beer with them afterwards, and a cigarette too! Why not? They unclip the belts around my middle, my legs and my chest and lift me out of the chair. I exert all my strength to try and keep my limbs still, but it doesn’t seem to bother them that I flail around, because I’m laughing and happy – beyond happy really. They take off my tee shirt and three of them carry me in my shorts carefully into the sea, then they lower my legs in first, holding me under my arms to gently let me slide onto the sand beneath the clear blue water. Never in my life have I felt such a feeling! The cool water and the sand beneath me! There are little fish! The men are strong, they hold me up. The water ripples around me. I taste the salt water on my fingers. Christos, another guy, splashes me a little, playfully, and a few drops of the sea land on my nose and make me take a shocked breath, and I let my legs freely jerk and thrash as they will, laughing and crying at the same time, and the young men encourage me, kindly.

Then suddenly here are Maggie and Serena, running towards me through the shallows panicking – until they see my face “suffused with joy,” is what Serena says, so they sit in the water beside us. This holiday’s beyond my wildest dreams and if I never have another one, the memory of this one will last me my lifetime.

Mam is right. God has blessed me.