Shake well before use!

Not too shabby, the way he balances the ball on the instep of his foot, kicks it up and catches it on his knee — many times in a row. And the power with which he sends a golf ball flying into the clear Hertfordshire sky from the painstakingly manicured fairway of the Moor Park Golf Club. “Those are instinctive movements,” explains Isaacs as he effortlessly snatches a USB stick out of mid-air with his left hand, which had just been twitching uncontrollably. “My disease isn’t really even noticeable in those instances.” 

Isaacs has Parkinson’s. Aged  just 27 he wanted to send a postcard from Indonesia to his Australian friend Anthony Diacopoulos. The hand holding the pen froze at the last name — somehow he just couldn’t continue. A trip to the neurologist and the diagnosis was clear: Parkinson’s, a disease that typically afflicts older people. “The doctor knew the minute that a Parkinson’s-specific medicine relieved my previously unexplained symptoms,” recalls Isaacs.

The diagnosis stunned him. He alternated between sarcasm (“At least the disease is named after an Englishman and is easy to pronounce!”) and despair. “I hit rock bottom in Australia when an elderly woman on a bus saw me suddenly begin to shake and offered me her seat.” That was when he realized he would have to get the disease under control before it got him completely in its grasp. The chartered real estate assessor had to adapt to a future with a disease lurking within this body.

He overhauled his life plans. Isaacs accepted the disease. “Part of the brain refuses to work,” he reflects, “while another kicks into high gear.” Like many Parkinson’s patients, Isaacs also developed a creative vein. He takes photographs, wrote songsand finally his travelogue, which led some critics to rank him right up there with such masters as Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux. 

Today Isaacs is 41 years old. We are sitting together in his house in Rickmansworth, north west of London, about an hour’s drive from the city’s centre. He lives here in the countryside with his wife Lyndsey. “It was love at first sight in 2001,” says the University-trained acupuncturist, who has a practice in London and will be celebrating five years of marriage to Isaacs in 2009. Chewie, their three year old Nova Scotian retriever, growls as if in agreement, but the dog simply wants to go out.