So many souvenirs; it's as if her old life shattered with her bones and threw glittering shards of her past and future in all directions. She doesn't shy away from the toll it took. "There you have it – the core of loss. The stone heart of longing, envy and emotional shut-down which is a woman’s self-defence against disability," she writes. And so she watches the siskins, the goldfinches, the redpolls, the yellowhammers (“I’m boasting now”) – birds she would never have seen when her eyes were shut to them.

The government has had four or five years to set this straight. Mark my words, there will be a class action suit bigger than anything they've ever seen.

I would be immensely flattered if even that was half the case,” she says. “But there are compensations: I have enjoyed so many things since my accident that I never thought I could enjoy. The sound of silence; the stillness; the minutiae of life; watching the birds. Watching insect life. I never had a bird table before my accident; I was too busy.” Reid started out in film in 1987, as a trainee on Sam Pillsbury movie Starlight Hotel. In the same period she was third assistant director on Geoff Murphy romp Never Say Die and a stunt horse rider on big-budget fantasy Willow.

Now it’s challenging, going from a 52-fancies-herself-as-32-year-old woman, to 90 plus overnight… and even nonagenarians have superhero powers compared to tetraplegia. That’s 40 years of acclimatising to decline, frustration, loss of power and independence … pfff! – by-passed in an instant. My answer to that is why don't you look at the exposed group and do the health study on those people those people who walk down the road with me and say `in this house they lost this many children; in that house they lost this many children and she's now got a baby with hydrocephaly'."A I am patron of the Spinal Research charity. One of the reasons I became a patron is that I firmly believe there will be a cure this century with enough research funding, but it won't come in time for me. I am 61 now. But I want it to come in time for young people who are now suffering from spinal injuries. They have been cheated out of a lot of good years.

These days, I pinch myself, but yes, that really is me lingering over the Easylife catalogue and thinking, ‘Ooh, that could be very useful.’ That is me, excited at the magic device you attach to your carkeys or your phone to locate them (Dave wants one for his dental top plate). And, yes, it was a very different sort of life: the other Melanie Reid was an award-winning writer at the Herald in Glasgow; a journalist at the Times in Scotland; busy mother of teenage son Douglas; passionate horse-rider. Then, one Good Friday four years ago, her big chestnut horse refused to go over a jump at a cross-country training practice. Melanie fell, face first, body contorted. Conscious throughout, she realised almost immediately something terrible had happened; “Everything went bright red and my whole body was suffused by this intense feeling of warmth and I knew I’d done something catastrophic.” Yet almost from that first moment – ever a documenter of life - she was writing about it in her head. Last year, she and David put in a new kitchen, but it's designed to fit in with the style of the farmhouse rather than her wheelchair. Much about the science of dioxin is messy. For example, there is no dispute that dioxin causes some cancers, but there is vigorous disagreement on whether or not it can cause multi-generational mutations. TV3 quotes the studies which support the idea that dioxin is "mutagenic"; the Ministry of Health quotes those which suggest it isn't. Similarly, it is difficult to accurately state precisely how elevated blood dioxin levels might affect the health of a given individual. "Safe" levels of dioxin exposure have been repeatedly revised downwards over the decades as new evidence of its dangers have come to hand.You’ll be able to push me to the pub in a wheelchair,’ Dave said. ‘And empty colostomy bags, that sort of stuff.’ I do understand this [attitude] – the fact that people say, 'my wheelchair is me, I want to stay here,' and that the world has to take cognisance of that. They are far bolder than I am, than I could ever be, and I really admire them for that. But I can't go there. Theirs is the new world, let them take it. I have seen what my naked body looks like with all the tubes coming out of it and I don't feel proud of it." When Melanie Reid spent a year recovering on the spinal ward in Glasgow after falling off a horse, her world collided with an unlikely collection of ordinary people with incredible stories. Despite their only common ground being a newly broken body, Mel grew close to her ward mates. She sets out to discover what became of them. Above her desk, there is the famous Banksy picture of the rat, with the words: "I'm out of bed and dressed – what more do you want?" daubed in red paint. "That's very much my motto, these days," she says, wryly.

Whatever the reason, Reid convinced herself that she would defy the odds and recover. After finding she could wiggle one of her toes, she drove herself to the brink of madness trying to prove the doctors wrong. When she realised her condition had plateaued, and that she would, in fact, always be in a wheelchair, she hit a trough.And even though she has to go to hospital shortly, she makes me feel so welcome. “Have a sandwich! You can come with us, if you haven’t got all you need!” From the 1970s on, there was growing international concern that dioxin could lead to an array of diseases, especially cancers. In the same decade, a number of "clusters" of birth defects observed in New Zealand were alleged to have been caused by maternal exposure to 2,4,5-T. In print, Reid is able to mask some of her pain. Her public persona is steely, but in real life she is a discomfiting blend of resilience and fragility; defiance and (unjustified) guilt. There are many points in our conversation where tears are running down her face. But when I ask her if she wants to stop, she plays it down."Oh, I cry easily and a lot," she says. This, says TV3 lawyer Clare Bradley, is not what the BSA was set up to do. She believes the BSA should simply be judging whether Reid did everything she could to bring a story to light and gave the other side a reasonable opportunity to put its perspective. Instead, says Bradley, "the BSA has a tendency to become the investigator of fact, which I think is a wrong use of their mandate. They don't cross-examine to determine credibility in the way a judge does".