MARK Taylor was just 26, a multiple cross country champion and an FA Vase winner with Whitley Bay, when told he had motor neurone disease.

“They said it would leave me in a wheelchair within six months and eventually that I’d be totally paralysed,” he says.

“My first and only question was how long did I have. The consultant said three years and that there was no cure.”

Nearly seven years on, Mark has written the extraordinary, soul searching, damn near heartbreaking story of his life.

As predicted, he’s in a wheelchair. He’s had a tracheostomy, can no longer speak, is fed (save for the occasional whisky) through a tube in his stomach, has endured pneumonia and (hardly surprisingly) mental health issues, needs two full-time carers around the clock and can communicate only by blinking or through something called an eye gaze computer.

That’s how the book was written. “A right pain in the arse,” he says, by way of mixing anatomical encumbrance, but if a pain in the backside’s the least of your worries it’s essential, utterly imperative, to read more about Mark Taylor.

PROBABLY he’d been unlucky since he was a kid, when his granddad ran over and killed Gazza, one of 32 cats on his grandparents’ farm and most of them named after members of England’s 1990 World Cup squad. It would have to be Gazza.

“There were the same amount of tears shed by me and Gemma (his sister) as there were by the human Gazza in the semi-final,” he recalls.

Save for his parents’ divorce, growing up might otherwise have been supposed stress-free: football trials with Arsenal, Middlesbrough and Newcastle, part of a Wallsend school team which won 52 games in succession, the 2009 Whitley Bay team which beat Glossop North End at Wembley, numerous athletics honours.

“I would give anything,” he writes, “just to go for one run, for one hour.”

The book also details numerous social occasions, nights on the spree. No doubt that the lad liked a drink, though the nickname Two Cans Taylor suggested that he wasn’t all that good at holding it.

Soon after Wembley, however – and that was a canny night, too – he’d started to notice a weakness in his right hand, a tendency to stumble and a general absence of customary fitness. He began the following season in the reserves in a vain attempt to regain it – “my passing was horrendous, even worse than usual.”

The consultant broke the news in an empty ward at the RVI in Newcastle. “We were all devastated. I’d thought and hoped that it might be cancer, like a brain tumour, because I maybe would have been able to fight and beat it, but MND is such a cruel and unfair disease which destroys your body and your life.”

That was the worst day of my life – not knowing that I was dying but telling other people that I was, and seeing their reactions.”

AT school he’d been helped by inspirational teachers, not least PE master Steve Tupling – Wensleydale lad, well-remembered former Darlington full back, hirsute still.

Example engrained, he studied sports sciences at Northumbria University, his dissertation on the effect of neurolinguistic programming on imagery, vividness and motor performance. “Thirteen thousand words to find out it didn’t work,” he concludes.

Thereafter he got a PE post at Benfield School. “If you treated kids with respect, and I always tried to, they will give you it back,” he supposes.

He was also in a relationship with Faye – “without doubt the love of my life” – offered her an escape clause after the diagnosis. “Most people would have run a mile. She didn’t. She made me very happy for a long time.”

They were married in July 2010, Mark determined to walk his bride down the aisle. He started using a wheelchair the following day.

One Saturday morning in 2014, however, Faye told him that she was leaving. Mark declines to go into details, save that the following day his dad died. “It was,” he says, “a pretty tough weekend.”

THE book’s called A Brief History of Mine, a nod to Stephen Hawking – another MND sufferer – and his Brief History of Time. Most of his mates won’t get it, says Mark.

By the end it’s pretty black: the desperate anxiety episodes, the waking nightmare of critical care, the absence of speech, the 24-hour dependence. “Loads of different carers – some good, some horrendous,” he writes.

Most of all he has been cared for by Gemma and by Gillian, his mum. “Amazing people,” he says.

Though no longer able to lead a class – “It’s hard to describe how much I miss teaching, I just want to help people learn” – he still, with the help of several agencies, has a full-time development role at a school in Kenton, north Newcastle. “A huge part in maintaining my motivation and sanity.”

Mostly he tries to be upbeat, grateful for the good years. Sometimes he just agonises at the unfairness of it all. “I know my condition is only going to get worse, with the terrifying prospect of losing the ability to control my eyes.

“If that happens, I don’t much see the point in going on fighting for some sort of normality. Until then, and until I get ill and there’s nothing more can be done, I’ll keep on fighting and enjoying life.”

Particularly he remembers a wheelchair meeting at a social event in 2014. The comment was therapeutic: “At least you kicked the ball.”

* Led by Mark himself, family and friends have raised around £80,000 for motor neurone disease research since his diagnosis. Twenty per cent of all profits from the book will also go to the Motor Neurone Disease Association. It’s available on eBay or from The Seahorse Club, Rink Way, Whitley Bay NE25 8HR.

FOR a decade or more now, these columns have also been writing of Mike Findley, a retired Marske-by-the-Sea postman and trade union official who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2005.

Since then the indomitable Mike has been Mayor of Redcar and Cleveland and was appointed MBE for his amazing fund raising activities for MND research.

The next event, an evening with former Boro favourite Bernie Slaven, is at Marske Cricket Club at 7 30pm on Friday March 31 and is expected to push the total past £180,000. Tickets cost £6, including pie and peas, and are available from the Marske branch of the Yorkshire Building Society of the Garybiz computer shop on Marske Square.