Run Britain Day 108: Campervan day
It’s campervan day! I didn’t really focus on the run from Port Glasgow to the Erskine Bridge, where Heather and her friend were waiting to pick me up, complete with massive car full of shopping. I was too excited to get to the van.
Heather is a friend from university who got in touch over the summer to offer her support for Run Britain. That support ended up coming in the form of a couple of weeks of driving in the south and a month in a campervan in the highlands.
She is the perfect crew for this adventure. She doesn’t take life or herself too seriously, but is fully supportive of the mission and what I am trying to do. She’s incredibly generous, organised, but happy to sort things out last minute. And because we’re both really just trying to enjoy ourselves after a difficult few years, she is quick to laugh and make things fun. I have been really looking forward to her return.
The van took a strangely long time to pack up and prepare for our adventure up north, but we eventually set off for the other side of the Clyde. I am very excited about this next phase of the adventure.
Our first night in the van was a little odd though, owing to an interview with the Telegraph.
This is a meeting that has been being discussed for months and I have had a bad feeling about it since the journalist asked me if there was anything that had ‘caused’ my poor mental health. I don’t love this question because I think it trivialises mental illness. I have spent the best part of three years trying to understand my psyche, what makes me think and why my self esteem has, at times, been cripplingly low. There is not one ‘cause’ or one trigger. It’s just an illness. One that I have overcome with a lot of hard work.
But the journalist settled on my MS diagnosis as the main issue behind my poor mental health and decided to focus her interview on that, despite the fact that what I am doing with Run Britain has nothing to do with MS.
I perhaps didn’t go into the interview with the most open of minds, but my bad feeling got stronger as the conversation progressed and the journalist seemed insistent on asking me gossipy questions: ‘were you close to your parents’, ‘were you in a relationship at the time’.
She also wanted to ghost write my story in an article written in the first person. I ended up telling the journalist I didn’t want her writing my story - a click-bait article written after just over an hour of research is not worth the potential publicity of the Telegraph audience.
But what troubled me most about the interview was the unbelievable lack of care. At 5:30 on the dot, the journalist had to rush off the call - a call in which she had needled away at some of the most distressing aspects of my life. She did not follow up with me, or email to thank me for my time. In fact, I did not hear from her at all until late afternoon the next day after I had sent a message saying I didn’t want her writing the article.
Now both my mental and physical health are in quite good places and I wasn’t on my own when I did this interview. But she didn’t know that. I am shocked that a newspaper with a good reputation for quality journalism (political feelings aside) had such a poor duty of care for subjects of its possible stories. Especially stories that relate to health issues.