My Name'5 DODDIE: The Autobiography

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Doddie Weir fights back tears as Scotland rugby legend speaks Doddie Weir fights back tears as Scotland rugby legend speaks

My good lady has to shower me. She has to give me a shave now and then and do my hair but not in the same sort of way - it could be a Mohican and I couldn’t change it. Your muscles in your legs disappear, you can’t walk, you can’t eat and then your muscles within your speech disappear, you can’t speak, you can’t swallow, you can’t breathe so it is horrific what happens and eventually you need help everywhere. Two weeks earlier, on 4 July, he will turn 52. “I think people on the committee [of his foundation] thought I would be long gone by now,” he jokes. It is different at night when he lies in the dark, unable to move. “I can’t even turn over in bed. It’s like an alarm going off in my toes and I have to tell Kathy to turn me over every two hours.”When we started the foundation it was just a group of friends that got together to raise awareness and some money for research,” Kathy says. “I don’t think anybody had any idea how it was going to become such a big thing. His friends were saying: ‘He’ll have six months and then that will be that because he’ll not be here any more.’ It’ll be six years soon.” We make jokes and laugh a lot. You’ve got to do that Kathy Weir He cannot turn his head in the kitchen on their farm near Galashiels, an hour from Edinburgh, to glance out of the window. But Doddie can feel the warmth of the Scottish sunshine on his skin. “I’ve been thinking how good it is today,” he says, “enjoying the lovely weather when many people with MND don’t have that luxury.” It was the simplest insight he could offer into how it feels when you cannot scratch your nose and you cannot feed or wash yourself or go to the toilet without help. Even swallowing and talking become difficult. This frightening paralysis has robbed Weir of so much but his intelligence burns as brightly as ever. Doddie Weir with pet terrier Mavis. The 61-cap Scotland international now needs help from his wife, Kathy, to get on to his mobility scooter. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian Basically it is a muscle wasting disease and that’s how in the later life of MND it is horrific because you need help everywhere.

The World According to Doddie: An A-Z of Life and how to Live it

Kathy rolls her eyes. “He’s got a betting account. But he’s run out of money on it and I refuse to top it up.”

I did my autobiography in 2018 (still available online and in all good book shops) and thought that was me, I’ve done the documentary and the book,I’ll just wear the t-shirt now. Then along came a second book, my A-Z Of Life And How To Live It, which was a bit of fun and I had no intention of writing anything else. What became apparent on this journey, was that in the last three years so much more has happened in my life. Apart from striving to help others less fortunate than him, Doddie tries always to look forward. “It will be our 25th wedding anniversary on 18 July,” he says. “That’s something to celebrate.” In an extract from his new book, Doddie Weir has written candidly about the fall which sapped his confidence and the reality of his Motor Neurone Disease fight. They were together on the terrible Friday afternoon of 23 December 2016 when a specialist delivered the shattering diagnosis that Doddie had MND – and predicted that he would be unable to walk within a year. The former player, who had retired in 2004, defied that prognosis for over four years as he showed the galloping determination which, when he first played for Scotland, prompted the great commentator Bill McLaren to call him “a mad giraffe”. The truth is that I cannot now wash, dress or visit the wee boys’ room without help,” revealed the Scot in an extract published by the Telegraph.