Melanie Reid

It's almost 15 years since Melanie Reid fell from her horse and broke her neck and back. The accident left the talented journalist paralysed but, just days after the accident, she was writing again (her first piece dictated into a dictaphone in ICU). Journalism - and specifically writing about life on the frontline of disability - became her lifeline.

Her 'Spinal Column' in The Times Magazine is by turns moving, darkly comic, serious and poignant, giving the able bodied an insight into what it’s like to have the life you knew snatched away and a voice to people with disability. She has hordes of devoted readers, who will be saddened when she retires next month.

Reid’s column of 15th October 2024 was a battle cry for why MPs should vote in favour of assisted dying. She wrote ‘The moment I genuinely can’t bear it any more, I’m offski. The decision is entirely my own to make, because only I know what it’s like to live in this body.’ She invited naysayers to ‘Come and inhabit my body.” She wrote from a unique perspective: not just as a disabled person, but as someone whose elderly parents both took their own lives. ‘Quietly, with dignity, they got their way. My mother said she couldn’t bear hanging around being a burden’, she writes.

Thirty years ago Reid interviewed a young naval pilot called Trevor Jones who had broken his neck. That day, she was standing, while he was in a wheelchair. She had never met anyone who was paralysed before, and remembers ‘trying very hard to understand what it must be like’. In her column of 27 July 2024, she wrote movingly about their bittersweet reunion where they were both in a wheelchair. ‘It wasn’t so much that water had flowed under the bridge since I last saw him; it’s that an ocean of lifetimes had. We were on the same side now. Like him I was becalmed in the same grisly make-of-it-what-you-can life as a tetraplegic.”

Reid’s trademark humour had the readers smiling about a subject which you would think was no laughing matter - losing a breast to cancer. ‘I do use it as a paperweight to pin back my stoma bag sometimes, when I’m washing, but it’s really just a hindrance,’ she wrote on 30 March 2024. She also explained with frank honesty - ‘Because I’m paralysed and have no sensation, because I never stand and look in a mirror, clothed or otherwise, I don’t see my missing boob. There’s no lament, no mourning of lost sexuality, because that had already gone.”

Melanie imagined she had six or seven columns in her after the accident. Hundreds of columns later (always filed on time, whatever medical emergency she was going through), she has changed the way we see disability in Britain - and entertained her many fans every Saturday. Recognition of her contribution would be a fitting way to mark the end of an era.