Mariah has been defrosted, Bublé has been released and MacGowan and MacColl’s festive feud echoes across the airwaves.

That can mean only one thing:

It’s… Christmaaaaaaas.

To celebrate this merry month I’m announcing Dystrophy Dadvent. Each day I’ll be sharing a memory or a moment from my life that holds sentimental value.

Christmas is a time for reflection and giving thanks (and eating too much), and that’s what I intend to do. Expect humour, joy and sadness and the odd mystery guest – even they don’t know!

I want to start by celebrating one of the most important people in my life, and the love of it, my wife Tracy.

We met a lifetime ago, or at least a life sentence. And honestly, there is no one I would rather spend my life with.

I was twenty when we met. It was a school disco night at a club in Glasgow and we were both in school uniform. At some point we realised our friends had vanished. Her friend had been ejected for being too drunk and mine was off looking after a mutual friend who was in much the same state.

That left the two of us together, I showed off my absolute lack of dancing skill, before we went for a questionable satay at the late night Chinese across the street.

Our first date was the next day – I was hungover but also very nervous. We ended the night watching Moulin Rouge in a living room that still had Christmas decorations up. It was early January but I consider it a Christmas memory.

Within two weeks I told her I loved her. When she learned I had MD her response was, “Is that all?” That was the moment I knew she was the one. Two years later we were engaged and then married.

We were married in the Autumn, in Alloway, the town where Robert Burns was born, in the shadows of the bridge Tam O’Shanter charged across on horseback.

We fought hard to conceive our daughter, but we got there. Now we have a testy teenager we both adore.

I am definitely more disabled these days, but no less in love. Seventeen years of marriage and almost twenty one years together. She is the best thing that has ever happened to me.

“I can’t make it all alone, I built my dreams around you.”