[APPLAUSE] Thank you and ladies and
gentlemen let me add my words of welcome to you all,
this very special first Disability lecture.
And perhaps it's an enormous pleasure to be welcoming back our speaker.
Hillary Lister, as all of you know,
Hillary was an undergraduate at Jesus college, and
it's particularly nice to welcome you back Hillary on such a windy day.
>> [LAUGH] >> Hillary is someone who knows wind and
knows how to deal with wind.
So it's a great pleasure to welcome you Hillary and
also to members of your family who are here today,
especially would like to welcome Professor Pauline Ruts and
Pauline knows Oxford very well.
Pauline is Hillary's mother and she was also a member
of the Glyco Biology Institute here for many years,
until her research group moved to also a fairly windy place,
Dublin and it's great to welcome you back Pauline.
Now as you know we are here for a very very special event,
the universities first Disability lecture organized
by the university's Disability Advisory Group,
and also by the Equality and Diversity Unit.
The university is committed to ensuring an inclusive
environment where all members of a university can
flourish no matter where they find themselves
in the academic landscape of the institution.
Now many of you will be familiar with the activity to
support across the university greater gender and race equality.
Those are areas where differences are very visible.
However, some aspects of equality are less visible,
such as sexual orientation or religion or belief.
Disability is an interesting area city \g
campuses both visible and invisible differences.
This further complexity about language since
many people who might fall within that
definition do not consider themselves disabled.
This is a group of people who may need to do things
differently in order to achieve the desired end result.
I hope that all of you after listening to Hillary's
lecture will be able to stay with us afterwards for
refreshments and I'd like to encourage all of you
to talk to people here people you haven't met before,
but also to have conversations about how we might
enable disabled people to flourish at this university.
When we're discussing what support disabled students or
members of staff need to enable them to carry out their work.
We often use the concept of reasonable adjustments.
Now this recognizes that to get to the desired outcomes,
disabled people meaning to do things in different ways to numb disabled people.
Sometimes, that might mean using technology in particular
ways to carry out particular task which the individual
finds difficult to do because of their disability.
And we could not have a more wonderful example today in Hillary,
who pushes this use of technology further than most,
she relies on all manner of computer aided tools for
controlling her boat at sea.
As a university, we are proud of our long history.
But we also recognize that in order to remain successful
as a university as a research and teaching institution,
in order to remain successful, we must change.
Our present surroundings provide a perfect example of how this can be done.
With respect to physical access,
we may be in a rather ancient part of Corpus Christi.
But we also know that corpus has built a modern,
accessible venue that anticipates that disabled
people will be active participants in events.
And make sure that access and availability is present.
An inclusive environment for our disabled students and
staff is of course about much more, far more the only physical access or
even providing creative and flexible support,
for individuals important though that is.
But an inclusive environment for our disabled
students is also about attitudes, and expectations.
For example, when we think about people who might excel, at extreme sports.
I suspect that the first image that comes
to our mind is of a strong, powerful person.
Not a disabled woman with very little independent movement,
but Hillary shows us the limitations of our thinking.
Sometimes disabled people are limited in
their aspirations at work and outside work,
whether by their own fears or by the protectiveness of others.
Hillary, is an inspiring example of someone,
who refuse to be confined, who has been setting her
own challenges and then going about meeting them.
We like to think in Oxford that the education we offer our students and
Oxford education equips our graduates to do anything,
give them the confidence, the ability, the skills,
but also the will to achieve anything.
And Hillary is someone who has made the most of her transferable skills.
Clearly she's is an expert at strategic thinking and
has great problem solving skills.
Things we like to instill in all of our students.
She also clearly has well developed executive skills
to directs others to carry out her instructions.
And she has very strong persuasive skills to
convince other people to lend her equipment and
to support her in achieving her goals.
And finally, she clearly has great leadership skills in
convincing in a way that a solo sailor must do in convincing a loyal and
dedicated support team to be part of everyone of her great endeavors.
And so ladies and gentlemen, it's an enormous pleasure for
us in this inaugural disability lecture here at Oxford University.
To welcome back Hillary Lister to be our first speaker, thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE] >> Vice Chancellor, ladies and
gentlemen, thank you so much for inviting me to be here
It's a huge honor and privilege to speak to you tonight.
I knew at the age of three that I wanted to be a biochemist,
recap chickens, and I was to understand how they worked.
It was probably just as well my mother was a chemist,
because I think I would probably have been anybody else in the room.
I was born able body, and I easily say I am third of four boys.
I was generally into any sport that involve two things,
a ball and physical contact.
So rugby, hockey that sort of thing.
I came off the pitch one day though, aged 11,
with sore knees and just thought I'd got growing pains.
At 13, I found I was getting pain every day.
So, technical hitches.
So, at 13, experiencing pain every day,
I still thought I'd probably grow out of it.
It was only at 15 when I really couldn't put one
foot in front of another that I thought I ought to go and
see a doctor for the first time.
Well, there's good news and there's bad news.
Well, I thought I'd go for the bad news first,
with the idea that the good news would then cheer me up.
Unfortunately, you're going to be in a wheelchair
with your legs straight out in front of you in plaster for two years.
The good news was gonna have to be pretty damn good news.
On the positive side, after two years everything is going to be okay.
Well, other than the fact that he'd squeezed in a piece of bad news.
Values, two years, family's life forever is shifting.
It would have been very good news had it actually been correct.
Here I am almost 30 years later with a degenerative
neurological disorder that means I've lost
the use of all of my body from the neck down.
And just have the sensation of pain in all my joints.
At first, everything carried on pretty much as before,
just on four wheels rather than two legs, I still had holiday jobs.
I still played my clarinet which was my second love of the science.
I still drove my car.
Teaching my clarinet I have to say was also a very
useful as it provided income when I was student here,
but I sat my GCSE and A levels, and over by then I was paraplegic.
Jesus college accepted me to come and read biochemistry.
My dad and more than a few people started
to offer their condolences when they were told that Hillary is gone to Jesus.
>> [LAUGH] >> I think I was the only person allowed
to bring my car into college other than the visor and
the master, it was a huge park.
I had a parking space not only in college, but at the department as well.
Also, I was unable to drink alcohol due to the drugs I've been prescribed.
This made me extremely popular as a taxi driver.
>> [LAUGH] >> And I got to go to lots of parties, so
it was great.
>> [LAUGH] >> In my third year, though,
I got seriously ill and was hospitalized and
eventually was facing due my finals, flat on my back
with the Dynamo heroine drip going into my spine.
I had to dictate my finals.
And I'm sure that the heroine opened up parts of
my brain that would otherwise have been completely inaccessible.
As I came out with a reasonable grade something that nobody least expected.
I seemed to get better afterwards.
But it did leave me with numb fingers.
Something which I tried to ignore, doctors not being my strong point.
And after Oxford, I decided I'd move down to Canterbury to do my PhD there.
It was only when the disease progressed to the point,
when I started to drop things,
that pressure to go and see the doctors mounted.
As the value of the things I had increased, I had dropped increased.
So did the pressure, to go and get treatment.
Finally, having dropped four months worth of work,
I'm 12,000 pounds of sample on the floor, which I rescued.
I had some time.
I was kicked out of the lab by my supervisor understandably really.
He said, go away until you badge that.
So reluctantly, I went to see my specialist.
Well, there's good news and there's bad news.
Here we go again.
Let's have the good news first this time as everything
didn't work out that well last time as a treatment,
wonderful like a nice thought.
Suddenly I thought I'm thinking I've missed a bit.
Hang on, what is the bad news?
It's experimental.
It could mean killing all the nerves in your arms, leaving you paralyzed.
Well, with my luck, and medicine.
It was always a foregone conclusion really.
So I left with no movement in my arms.
I could not have to see the ramifications in my worst nightmares.
I became unable to feed myself, dress myself or wash.
Worst of all, I was unable to do my silence or play my
and that had been my emotional outlet all my life.
So suddenly the world became a very dark place.
I had been in the house for about two years and
I hadn't even found the courage to go into my garden for three months.
When a man I had met once knocked on my door and
asked me if I would like to go sailing.
To my utter astonishment, there was still a part of
me that thought I was worth the space I took up on the sofa and it worked out.
So I agreed.
But when the day dawned it was another matter.
I had everything wrong with me.
My stomach ached, I was ill, I was tired.
I couldn't go honest just overwhelmed.
Finally though I convinced myself that these people advances so much trouble.
I couldn't let them down.
So, I forced myself to step, or roll, out of the front door and
for the first time in my life, I was doing so as a disabled person.
And not just as a As a disabled person but
as a disabled person who needed help.
This was and will always be the hardest thing I will ever have to do.
Fortunately, the [INAUDIBLE] opportunities
the world seems oblivious, to my disability.
To golden chair intuiting then to support onto my legs and
another down my back to support my head.
As a final health and safety measure >> [LAUGH]
>> And health and safety.
They used duct tape.
>> [LAUGH] >> To fix my head in place so
it didn't fall out.
This is where I learned the first rule of sailing.
There is nothing duct tape cannot fix.
>> [LAUGH] >> Within 30 seconds of being on
the water, I have fallen in love with sailing.
To my incredible joy I had found my second vocation in life.
Not everything was rosy though,
with no systems to help me with any part of the boat,
I was always going to be a passenger.
And I was pretty soon frustrated.
One day though, I'd had a particularly good time on water.
We were herring along on this boat and the man sailing the boat for
me, who was kneeling on the back of something akin
to 18 inches of very, very narrow sea pier, said,
this is the best sailing we've had all seas, splash.
>> [LAUGH] >> Everything went very quiet.
And for a few seconds, I found myself alone on the boat.
Before he popped back on board, it was wonderful.
I came off the water that day and said I was going to sell the channel.
So then, for the first time they treated me like a disabled person.
They almost but not quite flustered me on the head and
said that's a nice dream to have like in a million years is never gonna happen.
So when I called them having done a little research,
just two days later, and said it's going to happen this summer.
I cannot possibly repeat in such polite and robust company.
>> [LAUGH] >> What they said.
Suffice it to say they had to put the phone down and recover themsleves.
So I attended my first boat show in 2005, and
by some miracle, managed to find sponsors for
kids and for practical help, but no boat.
And crucially, I had no money to buy the only
system that was available on the market.
We sat down absolutely exhausted,
to eat lunch at about 4:00 o'clock in the afternoon.
Outside the bookstore there was a sign,
Emma Richard, now Miss Anderson, signing books here.
Well, to be honest, Emma was the only sailor I had heard of.
Talk and then but
to my amazement Emma didn't want to talk about,
Amazing experiences traveling around the world,
and I wanted to know what I was doing at the boat show.
She even said I could go and see her face, which was incredible.
Amber nods to me, she then went to begin his far
where her sponsor Andrew Pindar was, and
persuades him to rearrange her former program and lend me a boat.
This was the second rule of sailing Amber break with me,
all the best deals are done at the Guinness Bar.
>> [LAUGH] >> Although other beers are amazing,
I couldn't tell.
>> [LAUGH] >> I could not believe my luck until that
was we put the boats into the water, when it sank so
fast that it was not used to praying and
it turned out to have a rather large track in a very important place.
>> [LAUGH] >> Track well and
truly fixed, I had one smallish problem.
I still had no way nothing to sail a boat, no system, and no money to buy one.
Well I'd thought about it a bit, and
it seemed to me that my wheelchair went forward,
backwards, left and right, left and right could obviously
be transferred onto the radar for steering, and
forwards and backwards could let the sails out and
pull the sails back in, at least that was a theory.
So, we dismantled my chair.
>> [LAUGH] >> And here it is just to prove it.
It started of as just borrowing the control system,
but seeing everything from batteries and motors,
to the seat and the wheels were borrowed and
used on the boat and a still afloat actually on a boat on a lake.
The NHS had a very understanding about it, remarkably.
>> [LAUGH] >> One of our biggest problems was
finding the right life jacket.
As it turns out, quadriplegics and
therefore possibly unconscious people, so
it may apply to more than you think, both face down.
We threw me into the water in every conceivable position,
wearing a pre-inflated life jacket, I still floated face down.
>> [LAUGH] >> The moral of the story?
If you can possibly avoid it, don't inflate your
life jacket until just after you are unconscious.
>> [LAUGH] >> So I spent a morning on the water,
when the phone call came in to tell me that if I was going to make the sail,
the boat would have to come out of the water on
that day on The Solent, and travel up to Dover.
So, with all the two and a half hours on the water,
learning to sail from scratch in a boat this crucial
parts were mostly duct tape and stream, >> [LAUGH]
>> And during which time I found,
two relatively major features, one of which left
me leaving a note saying sorry on somebody's boat.
>> [LAUGH] >> And who's designing to do every single
three quarter inch block on the Isle of Wight.
I found myself on the world's busiest shipping
way indulging everything from fairies to supertankers.
The next six hours and 11 minutes flew by far too fast.
It was the first time in 60 days I am staring somewhere
in the way I wanted to get there, and getting there by myself.
It was a truly indescribable feeling,
I can only liken it to an able bodied person, been given the ability to fly.
When I got back to Dover, someone's got
the microphone in my face and asked me, what next?
Well, I'd spent the last six months living and
breathing this project, so I haven't spent
a minute thinking about what I might do next.
>> [COUGH] >> And what the words I'm going to
sail around Britain, fell out of my mouth.
>> [LAUGH] >> I was as surprised as anyone.
>> [LAUGH] I then compounded
it live on Radio 5 Live as it turned out.
And I'm hoping that if I find my sponsor the dream, he'll help me out again.
Well, together with ultimate investment management,
Pindar decided that I needed a boat with some
proper systems and no cracks to leave it.
So I found myself the lucky recipient of an ultimate 20,
and featuring the electronics system I so
desperately needed to serve reliably.
At six meters long and just one and
a half meters wide, she's tiny but she's fast.
I must have some special ability though that makes me a great solo sailor.
It isn't time on the water, it is certainly not technique,
it is as far as I know, >> my unrivaled
ability to lose people off my boat.
>> [LAUGH] >> One of the team who was supposed to be
looking after me fell into the water five times in four months.
All I can say is, thank goodness for
dry suite because the water around us is extremely chilly
>> I sailed the ultimate using three
straws, essentially, they're just switches,
that recognize positive or negative pressure.
One is dedicated to the tiller, one kind of menu select switch,
and the third is is the straw that actuate
whatever I've selected on the second menu switch.
It's really not as complicated as it sounds.
And rather than showing you endless pictures
of the coast of Britain, beautiful as it is,
I have a short piece of film that will show you how the Artemis works.
Just let Louise, my able bodied and
beautiful assistant, >> [LAUGH]
>> push some buttons.
If you keep tabbing you should get the, okay, here we are.
So this is my seat, and as you can see,
the seat skin boats I remain up right and
rather have far the boat tips over, unless I forget to raise the beam,
which I did in more than one occasion and have two straws in my mouth.
And just like any other sailor I have my chart closer and
my compass in front of me.
And I can see where I'm going and and I can get there pretty quickly.
She sails at about three to four knots average, so she is fast, very fast.
I think that's the I promised you some
finally it's coming up, and that's her moving
through the water very nicely, quite a leak actually.
I need you to out tab now, could you please and get me back to the beginning.
That's it yeah, and then whiz over here, and
turn my page, and push the button.
You have to be multi-talented to be my parent.
>> [LAUGH] >> After sailing solo around Britain,
I was invited to take my boat to the June 14th sailing event in Cardiff,
I recommend you look it up on YouTube cuz the crashes are amazing.
There I met Albert Whitley through Oman sail.
He said he'd love me to come out to Oman to talk to their sailors, and
what's more, he wanted me to bring my boat so they could sail it.
It's only really by seeing it in the flesh,
it's truly possibly to understand the sense of freedom it gives me.
Oman is very forward thinking In pretty much all areas,
but particularly when it comes to women.
It has female sailing instructors which
raises the huge problem when you are Muslim and
you're getting wet in a wetsuit, and they have an all
women sailing group, which races all over the world.
I just needed to talk to all their sailors,
all the kids that came to learn to sail, Oman sail and do their stuff.
So for 10 days we've worked from six in the morning and
10 at night and loved every second it.
Now to this day I am not quite sure how it happened,
but Albert offered me the use of his Dragonfly 28,
which was then brand new, his baby to sail across parts of the Indian Ocean,
from Mumbai to Moscow about 815 knots per miles.
The only stipulation seems to be that I take
an Omani lady sailor with me, that was fine, and
that we have a fairy godmother just in case,
we needed to be bailed out if we got into any trouble.
For both of these things seemed entirely reasonable,
so I grabbed the opportunity with both hands and refused to let go.
So In February last year, I flew out to Oman for
the second time with all three of my parents,
needless to say, none of them was desperate
to stay at home for seven more weeks of winter.
>> [LAUGH] >> I am extremely lucky in my friends and
one of them, Roger Crabtree, designed and built an entirely new Sip,
Puff system, having never seen the boat or met me.
Our meetings were extremely formal over Skype.
He lives in New Zealand, and so one or
the other of us was always in our pajamas.
>> [LAUGH] >> So we met for the first time in Oman
and he and the team who programmed the little PLC,
which is like micro computer, which controls the boat
did an incredible job as it worked as soon as we put it on the boat.
Something which couldn't be said for the system that's on the market.
It kept going for nine days as well with only the occasional reboot required.
The real beauty of this system though is that it's cheap,
it's easy to copy, and easy to build, so
other disabled sailors can pick it up and run with it.
But most importantly for me,
it controls some reversible electric winches,
which actually do what they sail on the team.
This means that together with my system, I can tack a boat on my own for
the first time a normal boat without any other adaptations,
I just simply let one sailor out and reel it in on the other side.
This gives me control over almost everything on the boat,
almost all the time.
On this occasion I got the luxury of a whole three hours to learn the new system,
well half an hour from the last time had to be worth it,
and one of my carers had to make the nine day trip with us.
Since Lisa was the only who'd spent any time on the boat at all,
a whole nine hours, which made her practically a veteran sailor,
she was the obvious choice, boy, was she sick.
>> [LAUGH] >> Somehow she manged to keep going there,
she was fantastic.
We left Mumbai at 6 o'clock in the morning,
a relatively civilized to say this at least on March the 11th.
We prewarned by Albert that many of the unused
oils platforms of the coast were lit in the dark,
this is slightly scary to say the least.
This made our plan to sail up the coast of India, and
then crossing due West across to Oman seemed like
an even better plan than it had done when we planned it back in Oman.
It didn't however avoid the fleets of Indian fishermen,
who fish in every type of craft,
from dugout canoes with no lights upwards,
most of them can't afford proper lights,
it's really that simple, so they use disco balls.
>> [LAUGH] >> As in turned out,
this really [INAUDIBLE] Little wind there was which
was precious little turned out to be right on our noses so
we spent first thirty six hours motoring.
This used up all nine cans of fuel that we had packed away for
safe keeping, in case of an emergency.
And we were left with nothing for the main crossing.
It was something we need to kind of plan for.
And we picked what looked like on Google Earth,
at lest, cuz there are no charts in this region.
A relatively large harbor and fishing town as a port of refuge.
Somewhere to stop, catch up, and crucially stock up on more fuel if needed.
Luckily for us, Nashra, my Alani colleague, spoke both Hindi and Urdu.
And so was able to ask for petrol.
But when we were going in, we'd assumed it would be
on the key side somewhere near the key side.
This just goes to show how far Google maps can lead you astray.
And how naive we were as question favors.
The channel got narrower and narrower and shallower and shallower.
Until we have lifted up the sensible,
which is basically what hold both upright and
was steering with just the back edge of the rudder.
The smell was indescribable as the harbor acted as both sewer for
a medium sized town and dumping ground for fish entrails.
Eventually we rafted up against some fishing skirts
by which point the whole village had come out to see
these mad foreigners who lived just sailing for fun.
Nobody sailed for fun, surely.
Eventually, we, sorry.
We [INAUDIBLE] back to [INAUDIBLE] >> Okay.
>> Next, next page, there, sorry, it turned out that the few was
not as we had assumed, either on the guard or in harbor,
it was ashore at least 40 minutes ashore and so
ends so slightly legal trip was made by Nile.
Our fairy godfather.
I'm not sure it's something that looked like a moped.
With a wheelbarrow stuck to the back.
>> [LAUGH] >> This left Lisa and
me on board with the entire population of an Indian town.
One thing to have a look around our extremely strange boat.
But of course everyone, and I mean everyone, had to come and say hello.
Monthly English teacher worked out that my legs didn't work,
and I pointed out that neither did my arms.
They had to come and say hello again.
[LAUGH] >> Luckily enough though, Nile and
in Nashra were back on board when security came round.
Men in an unmarked white boats with security written on the side and
some machine guns, turned up demanding to know who we were and what we were doing.
It was just as well they didn't know about our trip ashore really.
We tried to contact the harbor master when we came
into port but we hadn't got any reply.
And since we didn't have a photo copier on board
they wanted to take our customs paper,
our only clearance, our only proof of who we were.
They wanted to take our custom clearance
[INAUDIBLE] There was no way we were handing this over.
Especially as it was only at this point that we realized
that the crew who'd sailed the boat over to India had
taken it's official papers proving who owned it.
And getting off the boat in Mumbai, and
then put them in their suitcases and flew them home to my mom.
So security issued a direct threat to arrest us all if we tried to leave.
They disappeared back to shore to go and
get someone far higher up the chain of command to sort this out.
In the meantime, we started a lengthy radio conversation with
the harbor master, who had miraculously reappeared,
i.e., finished his lunch and his postprandial and that.
>> [LAUGH] >> He had an incredibly long form which
the Indians love to fill in.
This included gross tonnage, one possibly, cargo.
Please don't say people Nile.
>> [LAUGH] >> And of course the name of the boat
Valerian, so can you spell that phonetically?
Okay, bravo, alpha, thema, alpha, Romeo, silence.
Nile had forgotten what I was in >> The phonetic alphabet.
And it was at this point he tried to kill me for the first time.
Lisa who's giving me my medication,
something needs doing very carefully as I have no gag reflex.
I started to giggle as water went into my lung,
I managed to stress the word India at him to prompt.
I also then had to sputter Oscar and November and
it was only 15 minutes later, when this was still
beating the living daylights out of my back.
And he finally finished bluffing he realized something was wrong.
Eventually, though, the custom's man and
a helicopter and he was more than happy to take Nile's
word as a gentleman not mine of course as the captain.
But we did have our Mumbai customs clearance and sealed it with handshake.
He didn't even come aboard.
As we left, the entire town was calling out.
Don't forget the Porbana.
I don't think there's any risk that any of us will.
I also hope and pray that I will never want or
have to leave anywhere in quite such a hurry again.
The Arabian sea was a whole new experience, it was warm for a start.
We went went through 36,000 most amazing phosphorescence just incredible.
It was this as if the whole boat was lit up by neon lights from below.
In England sailors get excited if there's the smallest
trace of light behind them from the phosphorescence.
But this was so thick.
We could see fish beneath the surface, and
it had Nile throwing buckets of water on the trampoline and
then jumping up and down.
To watch the drops of water that were blowing bounce.
It was phosphorous and spontaneously in a way that
this generally only made possible by Disney but it was just, just beautiful.
While going through sea of neon phosphorus, I just, I don't know.
During the day, the temperature got much hotter,
up into the upper twenties and
it doesn't fall all that much at night at least at sea level.
This means that you're in a kind of sea mist permanently and
it feels like you can only see about two boat lengths ahead of you.
It's incredibly eerie, and it magnifies every single noise,
that the whole peaking sounds make.
This makes it sound like gunfire.
Since there are pirates not very far away from where we were,
it was easy to blind my care up until that there had
been pirates, although they haven't.
>> [LAUGH] >> And it does make you wonder,
at least to start with when you first hear it.
[INAUDIBLE] next one.
On one of my night watches, around 3 AM whilst Nile was trying to sleep on deck.
He came a little closer to the local wildlife and
he thought he would have liked,
a flying fish hit him squarely in the back of the head.
>> [LAUGH] >> He didn't think it was very funny for
some reason, when I said there's nothing like
being slapped around the face with a wet fish.
>> [LAUGH] >> The following night however, he more
than got the joke when one hit me square in the face and then landed in my lap.
They are most peculiar fish.
They don't flap about when they land on surfaces.
They just lie there with their wings out presumably in
the belief that they'll end up in the water again by some sort of magic.
Flying fish is by no means a misnomer.
Although they glide rather than fly,
they can travel up to 100 or 150 meters through the air.
It's incredible.
We arrived back in Oman on March the 20th.
The first Omani And the first disabled woman to make the crossing.
As usual, I experienced the familiar feeling of [INAUDIBLE] when I saw land.
>> While everyone else was dreaming about what they were going to eat,
but hadn't been dehydrated, rehydrated,
forgotten about and finally eating.
So, what next?
There's always a lot next with me.
I'm hoping to sail with Nashra from Seychelles to Muscat.
And then I'm hoping to sail to show the boat off all over the world.
Just before sailing the Atlantic a dream I had
ever since the first trip across the channel,
while I'm very definitely got salt in my veins And I just
need to someone to lend me [INAUDIBLE] >> [LAUGH]
>> Somewhere around that would be great.
I promise I'll give it back and it will be almost in one piece.
I have to say to thank you to a few people because although
this is what the media portrayed, just the two of us on the boat.
The reality is more like the picture that's up at the moment.
So, I have to say thank you to the people listed up there,
which is Primarily really GAC-Pinder and
Oman Sail who made it possible to make that crossing.
When it comes to life, I reckon though that I have a choice.
It's really very simple and it comes about going out through the door.
I either evince my condition, or I strive to make my dreams the reality.
You know what, I choose my dreams every day of the week and
to people so thank you so much for listening to me.
[APPLAUSE] [APPLAUSE] >> Good evening vice chancellor,
Hilary, ladies and gentlemen.
I'm Dr. Kylie Marie, Fellow in English at Balliol College,
and member of the University Disability advisory group.
Thank you so much for attending.
That has been quite an extraordinary expression of interest in this event.
And we hope disability lecture will become
an annual high profile event in the Oxford calendar.
Today the screen is off to a really promising stuff.
I know everyone will agree that Hillary's talk
has been powerful and compelling, we are so
proud to welcome you back as an alumni of the university, Hillary.
But in addition, you embody the core values of creativity,
resilience, and aspiration that we want to
communicate when we talk about disability at Oxford.
It has been a privileged, a delight,
and then inspiration to hear you speak today.
Thank you so much for sharing your story with us.
You took the whole audience with you when you described loosing
the use of your arms and the barriers that that brought.
But to hear your story of empowerment from the water,
was fascinating and uplifting.
Through this you have shown us that with lateral thinking and
creativity, we can overcome barriers and achieve remarkable things.
There's a universal lesson that we can all take away from today.
No matter how great the obstacle or walks the adversity is,
with resilience, determination, and creativity we can succeed.
It only remains for me to wish everyone a safe journey home.
And to remind you that you are very welcome to join us for
drinks now where you can meet our speaker and
reflect on her incredible talk.
Thank you again, Hillary for
breaking the mold to use the title of your talk today and
for showing us all the importance of aiming high and
not giving in and following our dreams.
Thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]