Blinkin' 'ell

When hard-living Sussex farrier Stevie Fisher suffered a stroke in August 2014 he lost all means of communication except his left eyelid. But he didn't lose the sense of fun that had lit his life and whose excesses brought him down. Blink by blink, letter by letter, here is 33,000-word proof that there is nothing as strong as the human spirit.

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Blinkin' 'Ell is both a celebration of life and a cautionary tale. It is a raw, boisterous, untutored, un-ghosted scrapbook of memories from a man whose world seemed to have ended in August 2014 when a massive stroke left him permanently incapacitated with only his left eyelid for communication. It tells of how, once he found his niche as a champion farrier, Stevie Fisher burned the candle at both ends, in the saddle, at the races, or at many another jape on his countryman's horizon. The addictive wonder is not just that Stevie has, blink by blink, letter by letter, brought us these stories of his old great times and of his present grotesquely bad, but that he has done so with all the over-the-top verve of the cheering, galloping figure whose pictures on the wall contrast so vividly with the shrivelled Stephen Hawking body on the bed. Stevie Fisher took a lot out of life. Read Blinkin' 'Ell and be amazed and uplifted by how much he still has.