At the age of 32, prolific traveller Brian was a latecomer to the profession of overlanding – a nomad’s vocation involving the driving of tourists to some of the world’s most remote destinations.
When one of its drivers in East Africa was struck by malaria, the agency Brian had registered with flew him to Nairobi, where he embarked on his first 13-week trip, accompanied by a seasoned overlander, through Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia and on to South Africa.
Soon, he’d been allocated his own truck on which he took a tour through the mountains of Uganda, where he found himself at one with silverback gorillas.
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Although it was a low-paid job, it satisfied his insatiable wanderlust as his eyes drank in the riches of Serengeti National Park with its magnificent landscapes, its culture and its wildlife.
On September 4, 2001, he dropped his passengers at the harbour in idyllic Kariba, Zimbabwe, where they’d swap their tents for a stay on luxury house boats, complete with pursers, bar tenders, and chefs who’d prepare the food and drink Brian and his co-driver had provided.
Waving his co-driver off on the boat for a lavish few days of respite from their rustic life on the road, Brian took the opportunity to repair a pin on the suspension of their truck that had repeatedly been slipping out.
In the boat yard, he sat L-shaped on a piece of wood under the rear wheels of the truck to inspect the fault.
Disaster struck when the jack failed and the weight of the truck came down on his back, pinning him to the ground.
“I was screaming my head off. It was agony,” he remembers.
“I knew then that my life had changed. I heard the crack in my back.
“ I thought: ‘That is me. I am in a chair from now on.”
A local boat yard worker raised the alarm at the office. Appealing for a phone, Brian managed to put in an emergency call to his girlfriend and to his parents in Scotland.
As a crowd of concerned men gathered in an attempt to pull him from under the vehicle, he begged them not to move him until a doctor arrived and he was removed from the scene on a door which became a makeshift stretcher.
His employer arranged for him to be flown by Medical Air and Rescue to a clinic in Herrera, while his parents boarded the first available flight from Edinburgh to be at his bedside.
The blessed pain relief he got from doses of morphine lasted no more than 30 minutes – and it would be up to six hours before medics administered another.
He even bribed a nurse with a packet of biscuits to persuade her to sit with him overnight.
“Every doctor I spoke to told me I’d never walk again,” said Brian, whose spinal cord was damaged in several places and his vertebrae crushed.
“It was like I was in a dream state. I thought: ‘I’m alright. I’m not dead. But how am I going to adjust to this?’”
Any hope Brian and his family had of getting him back to the UK for treatment was shattered with the 9/11 atrocities that grounded the world’s airlines.
When the skies reopened, Brian was stretchered on to an aircraft on which he was positioned along a row of headrests, his nose inches from the overhead lockers during a journey of nearly 30 hours from Herrera via London to Edinburgh, where a specialist ambulance awaited to transport him to the spinal injuries unit at Glasgow’s Southern General Hospital.
There, Brian underwent a spinal fixation – a procedure in which vertebrae are fused with healthy bone removed from his hip in a bid to stabilise the spine.
“The first time I got in my [wheel] chair and saw myself in the mirror, I threw up due to the complete shock of it,” he said.
“Even now, more than 20 years on, I sometimes don’t believe it. I’ll go to visit some guys I have got to know over the years and find them in their living room in their chair and I’ll say: ‘Why don’t you sit on your couch?’ I take every opportunity to be out of the chair.
“Maybe they accept it more than me. I have to live with it, and I know that.
“But I want to fight through it and do stuff, not sit in my chair.”
As his physio and gym sessions began, Brian was moved out of the ward on which his every needs had been attended to.
“The strategy was that you need to ‘man-up’ and get on with it. Because, if you don’t do that, you’re going to have trouble psychologically, emotionally,” he said.
Two months into his stay at the spinal injuries unit, Brian’s girlfriend travelled south to visit relatives, while his parents went to enjoy their favourite pastime of hillwalking for the first time since his accident.
“I was sitting alone on my bed and that’s when the tears and tantrums started,” he recalls. “There was no physical contact the entire weekend. Nothing happened. By the Sunday morning, I was crying my eyes out.
“The realisation had kicked in. That’s when a hard-faced Glasgow woman said to me: ‘That is great. That is you on the road to recovery.’
“It was a grieving process for the life I’d had. I’d been prancing around the world, having the greatest time, and that was it over.
“I always thought that I’d be able to go travelling again, though. I just didn’t know how it would happen.”
Four months before he was discharged from hospital, he asked his mum to buy him a notebook.
And that is when he began to plan a nine-month trip with his girlfriend from Cape Town to Kenya and back to Scotland.
“It was a cathartic process,” he said. “It was giving me a focus. I was determined I wasn’t going to be idle.
“I was scribbling pictures, planning the car I would buy.
“It had to be an automatic, and it had to be easy for my girlfriend to climb up to the roof.
“I thought: ‘As soon as I get out of here to sort it, I’m definitely going back to Africa.’ That was my focus.”
He left hospital in February 2002 and was allocated a council house in the seaside town of North Berwick.
The pair flew to Cape Town a year later after arranging for the Land Rover he’d bought to be shipped out.
Fundraising activities helped to finance the trip, and proceeds also went to Amref Health Africa, the Zimbabwe Spinal Injuries Association and Spinal Injuries Scotland.
Soon after his accident, although he knew it was unlikely to work in his favour, Brian had asked his girlfriend – who was six years his junior – to go away and seriously think about whether this was the life she wanted. On their return to the UK, they broke up.
“I self-destructed the relationship,” he said. “I did not want her to have that life. I wanted her to have an easier option. It is a big responsibility and a big ask.
“I’m not happy with the situation, so why would anyone else be? I thought: ‘This is rubbish and I cannot put her through this.’”
With sensation in the front but not the back of his legs, Brian was able to wear callipers and walk, with difficulty.
It was hard work, and within six years it was no longer an option.
With the accident having left him in chronic pain and doubly incontinent, Brian said: “There is not enough medication in the world I could take. If I took it all, I’d be a zombie. Some nights are really horrible.”
Brian remained true to his vow never to be idle.
In 2009, he used ropes to rig up a bed in the top of a tree, where he spent the weekend and generated £2500 for the BBC’s Children in Need appeal.
Brian, a former rugby player whose training had included regular runs up North Berwick Law, spent his 40th birthday at the top of the 615ft hill to raise £1400 for a teenage boy who broke his neck in his first scrum.
In 2012, he was marooned on the tiny, windswept island of Fidra for a week with only hot drinks and water in a castaway undertaking, which benefited Children in Need to the tune of £5000.
And he’s cycled with bike buddy Anna Brunyate, who pulls his chair on a bracket made from an old crutch, from Vancouver to San Diego.
“That, to me, is a lot easier than existing in a chair,” said Brian, now 55.
“I am not in love with keeping a tidy house and sitting in it, waiting for the benefit cheques.
“That’s why I want to do lots that will push me on a physical level. I think having a house is a millstone around my neck.
“I’d much rather live in the back of a Land Rover for nine months.”
He heaps praise on the specialist clinical nurses at the Spinal Injuries Association – an organisation that offers hope, confidence, and practical skills to help people rebuild their lives after spinal injury.
Its specialist nurses’ extensive experience means they can completely empathise with patients and plan solutions to address their struggles.
“Everybody has a duvet day, where you say: ‘I’m not playing today,’” said Brian, who has defied his disability through numerous other daring adventures since his accident.
“If it is really bad, I know I can pick up the phone or send them an email and they’ll be right back to you.
“I have never been depressed about the situation.
“I have been low, but I’ve never thought I’ve had enough. Some days, you pour a whisky and have a good cry, and that works.
“If you do not confront your demons, you bottle it up and it will eat you alive.”
For more information about spinal injuries, visit SIA’s website at www.spina.co.uk, or see www.spinalinjuriesscotland.org.uk
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