Hey everyone, it’s certainly been a while, I think when I did my last audio blog, I said it had been a minute, and it’s certainly been a good few minutes since I last sat down and did this.

I hope everyone’s well, since it’s the end of 2024, I thought I’d sit down, record an update on where I’ve been, what’s been going on and what my plans are.

And trust me, I know that I’ve promised plans many many times before, but let’s just say 2024 has been the roller coaster that I didn’t expect it to be.

The plan is that 2025 is going to be much better, I’ll get back on track and I’ll start doing the things that I wanted to do this year.

As I mentioned before, I’m not going to go into huge amounts of detail about some of the stuff, it’s not really my story to tell, yes I was part of it, but I don’t feel like I’m in the right position to actually tell that story, so I will skirt around some of it, but obviously I’ll give you the detail where I can, and apologies to those of you that have listened to my audio blogs before, I will have said some of this in the past as well.

It was a bit of a turbulent end to 2023, which is how 2024 started.

So things were a little bit tough, I realised that it was important to put myself first and put my own wellbeing first, probably for the first time ever, I needed a little bit of a break to reset myself, which I absolutely did, and then that meant mid-January I hit the ground running with 2024 and things started progressing in a really good direction.

However, shortly after that I then hurt my back for the first time, I’ve covered this before so I won’t go into too much detail.

Long story short, it took about 3 months for that back to get better, lots of medical stuff, scans etc, I couldn’t ever find a real cause, eventually it did get better and as mentioned previously I did make it on my cruise this year as well, but that’s where things started to go wrong this year.

Whilst I was away on my cruise, my watch flagged that I had arterial fibrillation, which is essentially an irregular heartbeat.

I have covered this in previous episodes of this podcast so please feel free to go back and listen to exactly what happened.

I made it back from the holiday and that’s when the second thing that I’m not going to talk about occurred, but let’s just say it made me stop and think about actually what’s important and what matters, and it taught me a lot and I felt like I grew a lot as a person around how to support other people and how to be there and just how to deal with what’s happening right in front of you right now.

It made me realise that a lot of other stuff didn’t matter.

Those events that occurred in the few months after put a brand new perspective on the year and the focus was just to make sure that those close to me were ok, and all of my other plans went out the window so I kind of knuckled down and focused on work, to keep my mind active and not overthink things, and then obviously focus on supporting the people around me that I needed to.

All of that stuff going on kind of put a pause to me wanting to do things like this, wanting to provide updates, there wasn’t many updates to provide, everything was kind of the same, so all of this went on the back burner and I realised that time was ticking by and I wasn’t doing updates.

I’ll be honest, I haven’t really thought about what I’m going to do for 2025 yet.

I know there’s lots of stuff I didn’t do in 2024, I spoke about getting a new wheelchair for example, I didn’t do that in 2024 because of everything else that was going on.

I need to go back on that journey again and look at what’s out there, look at what I want, has that changed since I was looking last January, do I need to look at something else, do I want something else, definitely getting back on the new wheelchair journey.

The other big thing for 2025 which is probably going to be the piece that takes up most of the time, when I hurt my back I realised I was massively restricted in terms of being able to get up and down the stairs, we tried the stair lift, the stair lift didn’t work, I didn’t fit, apparently my legs are too long, who knew that, but they measured me three times and I still didn’t fit.

The plan now is to basically adapt the downstairs to be a fully self-contained annex within where the garage is today, essentially to rebuild the garage into a fully accessible living area, there’ll be a bedroom, a bathroom, an office area.

We’re not going to do a kitchen yet because it will literally be next door and it will be easy for me to get in and out of there but it will be an option to add that on if we wanted to in the future.

This is a brand new exciting journey, I’ve never done building work of this kind before, I’ve never done architectural drawings.

We’ve submitted the planning permission, we’re just waiting for that process to go through, that’s likely to be a few more weeks at this point and I’m sure New Year’s going to add on some additional time.

It’s a really exciting thing to do, it’s probably something we should have done a long time ago to make it more accessible in the situations where I literally couldn’t stand up.

I’m sure actually there’ll be many, many a question to lots of people to say, oh how do I do this?

Or, you know, what boiler do I need?

What electrics do I need to think about?

The list of questions is long and I’m sure I’ve not even scratched the surface of stuff that I need to think about and it is things like heating for example, do I want traditional radiators?

Do I want underfloor heating?

Do I want to put it into some sort of joint heating air conditioning system?

Many many questions, I don’t know the answers to yet but I’m sure we’ll figure it out along the way.

I’m really looking forward to it, it should be an experience and ultimately it’ll make my life a whole lot easier, especially that I’m getting on a bit now.

And you’re going to laugh because, you know, I’m turning 40 in 6 months time which is fairly horrendous to think about.

Those of you that know me when I was 29 turning 30, that year of my life was essentially me just not looking forward to turning 30.

I pretty much complained about it almost every day.

39 to 40 has not been the same, I’ve not been in that same mindset but I think it is a milestone for sure.

Turning 40 is kind of like the big thing, although I’m sure that’s now turning 50 but you know what I mean.

I’m trying not to think about it too much but yeah I am getting on a bit and I am realising that things need to change and I need to be a little bit kinder to myself in terms of how can I change my life to make this a bit easier rather than me continuing to prove myself.

I’ve always had this thing of proving myself throughout my entire life.

Obviously I’m restricted in what I can and can’t do.

I’m fairly independent, I do a lot of things but there are genuinely things that I can’t do and I need to get people to help me or I need to get equipment to help me do that.

And I think I’ve always wanted to prove that I can do 99.9% of the things and push myself harder to achieve that.

But I’m now getting to the point of like, why do I need to prove myself?

And who am I trying to prove myself to?

In the old me it would have been, I’m trying to prove myself to everyone around me.

But ultimately I’m trying to prove myself to myself if that makes sense.

And now I’ve realised, why?

What have I got to prove?

I know who I am, I know what I can do, those around me know who I am and know what I can do.

I don’t have anything to prove anymore.

So I think that change in thinking has been game changing.

Which has been fascinating so maybe I’ll touch on that a bit more over the next few months as well.

But I just wanted to come and say that I’m still here.

My 2024 wasn’t ideal and I’m going to write it off as much as I can to say that that year just didn’t happen.

Although to be fair, the trip to Norway was amazing before it went wrong for me, but still love Norway, still would very much like to go back again.

It’s one of my favourite places I’ve ever been, highly recommend it.

So it hasn’t all been bad, it’s just you know, the last sort of six months or so have been a little bit of a revelation for a number of reasons.

It’s time to learn from those, to grow from those and to move on into 2025.

Of course I’ll do my Stevie TV update, looking at the stats which you’ll see shortly.

It’s been the quietest year that I’ve ever done and it probably is linked to everything that’s been happening.

I haven’t really had time to sit down and watch some TV.

There’s been some good stuff in there that I will talk about separately.

There is an ambition that Stevie TV was a thing that I made for me to track my own TV, but I know that other people have been interested in it.

So there’s a tiny, tiny chance I may branch out to make it accessible to others and utilised by others.

I’m not talking about releasing an app or making anything major, but just those that are around me that want to use it.

It could become more of a community based TV tracking solution, but we’ll see.

So yeah, that’s probably it.

And this was very, very strange.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve sat down and recorded something and I’ve done numerous retakes of stuff because I’ve just not said it properly or I’ve stumbled over my words.

I’ve definitely forgotten how to do this and how to plan it.

I didn’t write any notes.

I didn’t write any pointers.

This is just me talking because it felt like the best way to do it.

I’m looking forward to getting back into it, getting it a bit more formalised again with some stuff that’s coming up in the future and we’ll go from there.

I’ll take this opportunity to wish everyone a happy new year.

I hope everyone has lots of exciting stuff planned.

If we cross paths, great, let’s do something together.

If not, we’ll catch up really, really soon.