Stairs for Breakfast

This is the kind of book you should read when you think you have had a bad day. Patrick Souiljaert was deprived of oxygen for the first 4 minutes of his life and consequently denied the gift of easy movement and speech for the remainder of it. It means that this brutally frank autobiography of a Cerebral Palsy sufferer who needs crutches for walking and eats stairs for breakfast when he falls, should be a depressing experience for the reader. It isn't. Patrick's sense of humour and love of his fellow human beings shines through. You, the reader, will share what it is like to be an articulate, highly intelligent person inside a disabled body, of what it is like to have people patronise you when your IQ is several notches above those patronising you. You will laugh, you will cry and you will never feel sorry for yourself again.