Tuesday 17 December 2019

Wrong Patch

Indulge me in writing the second entry in as many days but I have another short tale to tell. The kind that could only happen to me. You remember some years ago when a man walked uninvited into my house and asked me if I was selling any ‘ciggies’? Well this is in that category, that field of the downright batshit bizarre, though it doesn’t quite top it.

It is dark when I get out of work at this time of year. Without wishing to depress you too much just five days on from a crushing Tory victory at the General Election, it is dark when I leave for work in the morning also. Like many people who work nine to five (8.30 to 4.30 but who’s clock watching?) I see hardly any daylight during the winter months. This lack of daylight is central to the farce which unfolded this evening.

Emma works until 5.00pm. It is about a 10-minute walk from her place of work to mine, where we park the car. We do this because, when I remember to renew my blue badge, it is free to do so.. So tonight I’d asked her to pop to Gregg’s for some sausage rolls. Are you even from St Helens if you don’t have pastry products for your tea once in a while? As a consequence of the Gregg’s stop I was a little earlier getting to the car than Emma. It was only a few minutes but long enough to convince me that I needed something to pass the time.

Like anyone else these days social media on my phone is the go-to method of killing any waiting time. I was idly scrolling through Twitter, pondering whether the appointment of Clare Balding as RFL President will make any more difference to the sport of rugby league than the appointment of her predecessor Tony Adams did. I started tapping out a comment on the BBC’s linked tweet to the story when I heard the rear door on the passenger side of the car being opened. I didn’t even look up from my phone at first. I assumed it was Emma, which on reflection is odd because she never sits in the back of the car. At the time though I just thought it was possible that she had decided she couldn’t be arsed to move my wheelchair to the boot but that was always a long shot. It was not Emma.

I finally turned my head to look at the recently opened door and, staggeringly, found myself confronted with a man clambering on to the back seat. Bold as brass he just climbed in like it was the most routine thing in the world. I hadn’t felt this violated since my last stay in hotel NHS. There was a surreal moment where we both paused to just look at each other before he eventually climbed back out from whence he came and said, in a thick scouse accent;

“Ah....sorry mate. Wrong patch.”

Wrong patch? Who says that? And then it hit me. He must have thought I was a drug dealer. And now he was apologising in the way you might apologise for burping in a lift.

Without wanting to stereotype he had the look of an addict. Confused expression, a skinny physique that made Zammo from Grange Hill look like Anthony Joshua, and several gaps where his teeth used to be. It was a moment Victor Meldrew would certainly not have believed. To his credit he soon scarpered, apologising again as he walked up the hill and out on to the street. I didn’t have time to say anything as he left, momentarily dumbfounded that the local druggies now mistake me for their top supplier. Do Liverpool drug dealers really hang around outside Universities in red Vauxhall Astras? Or was he just so spaced out that the colour and model of my car were an irrelevance? Will any parked car suffice for an addict if it has someone sat in it idly scrolling through Twitter on his phone? It would appear so.

My car is due for a service this week. I might ask them if they can give it a luminous spray to make it absolutely clear to the ne-er do-wells among us that I’m not the man they’re looking for.

Monday 16 December 2019

Take His Legs

I got into a long and fruitless Twitter debate last night. It was my own fault as these things often are. I had to make my point. I couldn’t leave it, even though I know that through this platform I can have as much say as I like and people are far less likely to come back at me. Maybe I like the conflict of the more instant Twitter slanging match exchange. Freud would know.

Most of all though the argument raged because I believed what I was saying. I still do. I was responding to a number of tweets about Adam Hills’ Channel 4 documentary about Physical Disability Rugby League (PDRL), the brilliantly if a little obviously titled Take His Legs. At this point I hadn’t watched the programme. Now I have and we’ll talk about that later. But had I seen these tweets after seeing the programme I would have felt the same way and got into the same fruitless debate.

The film follows Hills as he attempts to set up one of the UK’s first PDRL teams in Warrington. They claim to be the first and they may be, but to be the first to play you have to have somebody to play against. So Leeds, a team which included Hills’ Last Leg co-presenter Alex Brookes, must have at least a share in that honour. From that first meeting with the rhinos, a defeat, the Wolves PDRL team are followed on a journey which takes them on a three-game tour of England and to Sydney, Australia to take on Hills’ boyhood heroes, the South Sydney Rabbitohs.

All of which sounds like compelling sport mixed in with an opportunity to get to know the players off the field woven together by a superb comic talent. And it is. We get to meet several members of the squad. Seven-year-old Leon was almost written off at birth, given weeks to live and then developed cerebral palsy at two years of age. Another has a visual impairment, another a problem with his hands which doctors can’t really explain beyond calling it a ‘phenomenon’. If Hills is the star off the field then Tony, who suffers very severe anxiety and depression, is the star on it. He’s rapid, to the point where it is said that Super League players talk about his pace.

I wish some of those commenting on the film on Twitter had talked about Tony’s pace. He is a prolific try-scorer for the Wolves, describing his running style with a self-effacing humour as ‘a bit like Forrest Gump’. Unfortunately this was not the focus of the Twitter chat. Nor was anything else these people do on a rugby league field. The focus was on how ‘inspirational’ Tony and his team-mates are and how they have ‘overcome’ their disabilities to do something they say they never thought they would be able to. One female Twitter user was moved to admit that the whole thing made her cry.

Here’s the problem. To focus on these things is inspiration porn. Inspiration porn is the portrayal of disabled people as inspirational merely for existing and doing everyday things. Including playing sport. At one point Brooker tells us that his involvement in PDRL was the first time his disability had failed to get him out of sport. He’s joking of course. He’s a comedian. That’s what he does, but you can tell from the awed reactions of the Twitterati that they believe him.

The narrative here is that you don’t play sport if you are disabled. But that’s bollocks. I played wheelchair basketball from the age of 13 until my early 30s. There was nothing inspirational about it. My mum didn’t worry any more than she would have done had I played football, rugby or cricket with my able bodied friends at that age. It was totally unremarkable. If you had told any of those kids who trained with me on a Thursday night at Fazakerkey that they were inspirational they would have looked at you with deep suspicion. We weren’t trying to inspire anyone. We were trying to win and have fun like any kids in competitive sport do.

Back to Warrington and Twitter, were noted rugby league journalist Trevor Hunt reacted to the film by suggesting that the Wolves PDRL team should have won BBC Sports Personality Of The Year Team Of The Year because.....spoiler alert.....they did go down under and beat the Rabbitohs to claim the first PDRL World Club Challenge title. This is a magnificent achievement in a sporting context but if we’re viewing this as sport alone can we really argue that it belongs in the same stratosphere as England winning the men’s cricket World Cup? No. To put it up alongside that is to view it through the prism of overcoming adversity or obstacles. That framing of disability as an obstacle to be overcome, a burden, is textbook inspiration porn and I won’t have it in the house.

You could argue that some of the participants play along with the narrative. One, Jason, talks of PDRL helping him ‘come out’ about disability as if it were something about which he should be socially ashamed. Others in the group talk about a trip to play away at Wakefield being the first time they have been on a bus ride, or the flight to Sydney their first time on a plane. That’s great for them if that is the case but the trouble is that it paints a picture to the didn’t-they-do-well-ers watching on of disability that is patently false in most cases. By the time I was 15 I had been to Wakefield more times than is reasonable in any sane person’s lifetime. Disabled people do stuff, and they don’t want praise for it. They’re just trying to live, like you.

But I don’t blame them for participating in it. What rugby league player worth his salt would turn down an opportunity to fly to Sydney to take on the Rabbitohs for a world title which is then celebrated with Rabbitohs owner Russell Crowe? Of course they’re going to do it, and if that means serving up some good old fashioned inspiration porn as an indirect consequence then so be it. That is several steps up on the morality ladder from the absolute whoppers who take part in the Undateables to sate the public’s appetite for ‘ah....isn’t lovely?’ voyeurism.

I know most of you reading this are one of them so apologies for the generalisation, but it seems to me that the able bodied always have to have someone to feel superior to. It’s almost like we should exist to shake them out of whatever rut they have got themselves into. ‘Well if Jeff With No Head can become a Go-Go dancer in LA I can bloody well motivate myself to mow the lawn on Sunday afternoon.’. But we’re not here for that. We are here as equals, human beings who are just as filthy about having to get up for work in the morning as you are.

Do watch Take His Legs. It’s available to download on whatever Channel 4’s catch-up service is calling itself this week. For all the flaws I have pointed out it is a great sports documentary in its own right, with a liberal sprinkling of the kind of predictable but no less successful humour that we all carry with us as a defence mechanism. But if you do watch it, watch it for these reasons and not because you want to be inspired by people just getting on with their lives.

Friday 13 December 2019

Election 2019 - A Better Class Of Bigotry

If I didn’t know where to start writing a blog about a Prime Minister hiding in a fridge I certainly don’t know where to start with a blog about that same Prime Minister winning a majority of almost 80 seats in the General Election. Yet somehow startlingly, chillingly, that is exactly what has taken place.

The whole situation defies belief and is, from that standpoint, almost impossible to analyse. It’s the morning after the night before so emotions are still running a little high, but I have not felt this negatively about British politics since I became old enough to vote. To give you an idea of how long ago that was the first General Election I was eligible to vote in was in 1997.

How could Britain do it? How could they vote so overwhelmingly to elect a man who not only hides in fridges to avoid interviews but also openly uses racist, homophobic and Islamophobic language and tells lies at an extraordinary rate? This is where we are now. Our politics is so broken that Johnson was viewed as the least worst option. Unfathomably there are people who call themselves centrist, even traditional Labour supporters, celebrating the prospect of another five years of austerity. Another five years of the continued deliberate underfunding and possible sale of the NHS. Another five years in which a further shift to the right and an anti-immigrant agenda is inevitable.

I’m not really a fan of Jeremy Corbyn. The right wing media will always be out to destroy a Labour leader so the terrible coverage he received was never enough in itself to produce this result. There had to be something else about him that didn’t impress the electorate. I can see why there is mistrust of him. There’s a doggedness about him that can be interpreted as arrogance. He is single minded, unwilling to deviate an inch from his course despite his unpopularity of which he must have been aware. I can’t go on social media without someone accusing him of being antisemitic. Do we really believe that the legions of media experts and image consultants who work in politics hadn’t noticed this perception and pointed it out to him? Why did they do so little to dampen it? No smoke?

I have never heard Corbyn say anything that could be considered antisemitic but the allegations are so widespread that they had to be dealt with regardless. That hasn’t happened. Even I as a Labour voter cannot be sure that he doesn’t hold those views. It’s fair to suggest that he hasn’t done enough to make those doubts go away. That cloud hangs over him to the extent where I can see why a lot of people have chosen not to vote Labour.

Here’s what I don’t get. In the red corner you have a man tainted by the whiff, the suspicion of these prejudices. But over in the blue corner you have Johnson, an openly racist, homophobic, Islamophobic miscreant. If we accept that they both have unsavoury prejudices why is Johnson’s bigotry more palatable than Corbyn’s? The statistical evidence shows that this result is not merely the product of Labour supporters abstaining from backing a man that they believe is antisemitic. In many of the key constituencies that changed hands the Labour vote compares favourably in terms of the actual numbers of votes cast with that of most General Elections since 1997. The result has come from a surge in Tory votes in these areas. There is actually an appetite now for right wing policy.

Of course Brexit is the variable which offers both a sinister explanation for that appetite but also a slither of hope for Labour. The failure to leave the EU since the 2016 referendum has been the biggest and often the only issue for some voters during this campaign. It is not by accident that Sky billed their coverage using the phrase ‘The Brexit Election’. There will be those who voted Tory simply on account of Johnson’s much repeated promise to Get Brexit Done. On the rare occasions that Johnson did turn up in front of the cameras he repeated this three-word mantra to the point where it became a parody. Whether discussing health, education, transport or changes to how we use VAR Johnson would always drag the conversation back to Brexit. He reinforced the message that he was the only leader of the three main parties guaranteeing Brexit. Labour offered a referendum on a newly negotiated deal with an option to remain while the Lib-Dems were totally committed to revoking Article 50 and remaining in the EU.

The trouble with Johnson’s position on Brexit is that it was and is another lie. Just like he will not recruit another 50,000 NHS staff, just like the 20,000 more police officers he pledged are the same 20,000 officers that his party’s austerity agenda took away, so he cannot just Get Brexit Done by the end of January. His so-called ‘oven ready’ deal requires much more negotiation to determine the UK’s trade relationship with Europe and any alternative deal with the USA could take years. In all of that delicate negotiating the futures of both the NHS and the peace in Northern Ireland could be frittered away or used as bargaining chips. This is the cluster-fuck we have allowed.

The good news is that even if voters believed him this time around (and why would they when he won’t even tell us how many children he has?) their support may be a one-off. The hard of thinking complained that Corbyn’s Brexit policy wasn’t clear but what they meant by that is that it wasn’t quite Brexit-y enough to reflect the 2016 result. It’s not difficult to understand the concept of a renegotiation within three months and a referendum within six. There was no confusion. Voters understood that fully. They just weren’t happy with it. It may be that Labour are being punished for that and that their support will return when EU membership is not the first item on the electorate’s agenda. Whenever that might be.

By then of course we will likely be out one way or the other. That is unless the notoriously duplicitous Johnson changes his mind again. If that happens there will be absolute scenes when all those people who flipped for him, who prostituted their morals on the altar of Brexit, get wind of it. But it could happen. The Prime Minister has written lengthy arguments for and against EU membership over the last few years. He’s a journalist. That’s what he does. He’s good at it. If he has problems securing the Brexit he wants he could just turn on the mumbling clown persona again, find someone else to blame and convince people who should be ideologically opposed to him that he’s on their side and will fix it.

Much also depends on how Labour respond to what is looking like their worst defeat since before the Second World War. Corbyn has not yet resigned even though he should have done so after losing to Theresa May in 2017. In losing to Johnson he has surpassed himself in the field of proving oneself incapable of electability. He has at least pledged that he will not contest the next General Election. So that’s something. The fact staring everybody in the face, and that Labour have failed to realise since Tony Blair came to power 22 years ago, is that the majority of voters occupy the centre ground.

If you can win the battle for the support of voters who are not tribally attached to one of the three main parties you usually put yourself in a position to win. If Brexit has dominated this result then the centre ground will continue to be crucial once EU concerns are out of the way. Many centrists have already acknowledged this and called for a Keir Starmer type figure to drag Labour back from its left edge. What they have not explained satisfactorily is why, if they are centrists unwilling to vote for the extremist Corbyn, did they choose to lend their vote to the extremist Johnson? It seems we can turn a blind eye to some forms of prejudice if we believe it will produce the Brexit we have all obsessed over since the referendum.

Wednesday 11 December 2019

Election Eve - Don’t Hand Power To Zuul

Where do you start when trying to write a blog about a Prime Minister who hides in a fridge? The only other examples of such behaviour that spring to mind are these;

Indiana Jones in order to survive a nuclear detonation
Zuuuuuuuuuuuuuul!!!!!!

Film buffs will know that the former was one of the least ridiculous set-pieces of Steven Spielberg’s ill-advised fourth instalment of the Indy franchise - Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, while the latter as every 80s child knows refers to the Gatekeeper of Gozer who lurks between Sigourney Weaver’s eggs, milk and peanut butter while waiting patiently for her Dana Barrett character to come home so she/he/it can possess her spirit. Forgive the indecision on pronouns there. I’m not woke enough to be certain of the pronouns of the Demigod minion of Gozer,

Where were we? Oh yes, Johnson. Your Prime Minister. He has been notoriously difficult to interrogate during this General Election campaign. He had agreed to be interviewed by the BBC’s political verbal torturer Andrew Neil but pulled out after seeing Neil interrupt the other major party leaders into submission. Johnson’s main rival Jeremy Corbyn came out of his ordeal with Neil as negatively as is possible for a man who is smeared more often than the peanut butter in Dana’s fridge. Seeing this, Johnson took evasive action and reneged on his agreement to appear on Neil’s show.

Despite his distinctly right wing leanings Neil did his best to shame the PM into sitting down for that chat he promised. Neil delivered a lengthy and stylish monologue, the theme of which was basically the slippery cowardice of Johnson and a run down of the lies he was evidently not prepared to defend on national television. Have you heard the one about the 50,000 new NHS staff which is really 31,000 new NHS staff and a commitment to try to prevent 19,000 current NHS staff from quitting under the strain of a woefully and deliberately underfunded service? Or the one about the 20,00 extra police offers that are the 20,000 that were taken away by heavy-handed austerity measures? It was scathing, but it did not alter Johnson’s stance. He knows that he is considered selfish, racist, homophobic and unfit for office. Why would he open his mouth and prove it?

Avoiding the gnarled former This Week presenter’s grilling is one thing but you might have thought that Johnson would be more open to a discussion with the altogether gentler Good Morning Britain duo Piers Morgan and Susannah Reid. Morgan has been known to hack the odd phone or mock up the odd front page photo to get a scoop, but these days he’s a sofa-softie who is only permitted to be slightly more demanding of his interviewees than Phil and Holly. Surely someone who is hoping to continue as Prime Minister for the next five years, who has in his own words negotiated a ‘fantastic, oven-ready Brexit deal’ and who sells us EU departure on the basis that he will be able to make yet more ‘fantastic’ deals with Donald Trump and other world leaders can handle a few minutes on Breakfast TV?

Evidently not. GMB’s reporter asked for those few minutes, a request which seemed to spark a degree of panic in Johnson and his team of aides. One such, his press secretary Rob Oxley, was seen mouthing ‘oh for fucks sake’ at the prospect of his man having to face anything as terrifying as some light early morning questioning on his campaign and the policies he hopes will win him a majority at tomorrow’s big vote. This is where the fridge came in. Johnson was visiting Modern Milking, a small business in Pudsey, Yorkshire when he was approached by GMB’s man. It seems that in the absence of any better ideas from his team Johnson was bundled into the nearest available hiding place. Like Zuul only he got inside Dana’s fridge door (if you’ll pardon the expression) all by himself, without any help from a panicked Tory press team fully aware that their man is an electoral liability.

He soon emerged beaming that Etonian simpleton smile, carrying a crate of milk bottles, playing up to the lovable clown persona that was funny on Have I Got News For You in 2005 but is starting to wear thinner than a Soccer AM sketch. We were told that he had been prepping for another interview which had been previously agreed. That’s a stretch. Who could he possibly have agreed to give an interview to if he’s too scared to take on the collective might of Morgan and Reid on GMB? CBeebies? Nickelodeon?

Meanwhile Johnson’s champion, the repugnant BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg, was again busy trying to take the heat off her man. Behind every man there is a good woman they say, so it makes sense that behind every snivelling, scheming chancer there must be a woman of similar disrepute. Just as Fridgegate threatened to gain momentum Kuenssberg took one for Team Boris by blathering on about postal votes and how many might be of a Tory persuasion. Firstly, how does an organisation that can’t choose which of its staff gets to interview the Prime Minister be privy to supposedly secret votes cast in an election that hasn’t yet got under way? And secondly, if they do have that information isn’t it illegal to share it with their viewers? Even though there are only 14 of them left. Only 12 still take Question Time seriously and they are all either related to Nigel Farage or they are adolescent boys hoping for the despicable Emily Hewertson to get more screen time. But it’s the principle. If it is against GDPR for me to write someone’s name in the subject field of an email sent from my work account then disclosing information on General Elections that haven’t happened yet has to be a little bit on the Harry Redknapp side.

It wasn’t the first time this week that Kuenssberg tried to detract attention from a Johnson gaffe. Earlier in the week your PM was questioned by a reporter from a local newspaper in Yorkshire (how did he get so close?) about a photograph of a young, clearly very ill boy lying on the floor in a Leeds hospital due to the absence of an available bed. This happened, in the fifth largest economy on Planet Earth. Naturally Johnson didn’t want to talk about it, so proceeded to take the phone from the reporter and casually plonk it into his pocket like a schoolteacher confiscating a packet of fags from some spotty teen.

Kuennsberg’s response and that of ITV Tory apologist Robert Peston? Take to Twitter to announce that Health Minister Matt Hancock had been ‘punched’ while out campaigning. Tragically for the credibility of journalism and for people like me who would quite like to see Matt Hancock get punched while out campaigning, the story wasn’t in the same postcode as the truth. What had actually happened was that Hancock had walked very gently into someone’s outstretched arm which happened to have been extended at an inopportune moment. The ‘punch’ story was nothing but an attempt to bury the controversy around the boy in the hospital and the confiscated phone. When that didn’t work as a strategy the Tory PR machine then attempted to discredit the story. The rumour that the whole thing was staged by the mother of the boy spread on social media like......well......a smear on Jeremy Corbyn. It has since been verified by the newspaper involved but is still being questioned by the same kind of ignoramus blurts who insist that nobody has to use food banks due to Tory cuts.

We’re less than eight hours away from the opening of the polls as I write this. The final days of the campaign have shown, if we didn’t know it already, that we are living in the same kind of post-truth era that we have seen in America since Trump came to power. There will be consequences if we do not act tomorrow by voting Labour or for the party most likely to stop the Tory candidate in areas where Labour cannot win. If that means holding your nose, closing your eyes and voting for a party you dislike, do it. Just get the Tories out.

If we fail to do that then Corbyn will be partly responsible. Whether the accusations levelled at him are true or not (and who doesn’t have a few doubts about the nice grandad act?) he should have recognised his unpopularity is a barrier to removing the Tories from office. A moderate Labour leader would be making mincemeat of the far right fascists who have seized control of the Tory Party, backed as they are by vacuous vegetable-heads who justify their choice to inflict suffering on the most vulnerable with the phrase ‘but.....Jeremy Corbyn’. And backed as they are by the once impartial, public service broadcasting giant that is the BBC.

But in the end we still have an opportunity. Don’t hand power to a fridge dweller with sinister intentions. Don’t hand power to Zuul.

Friday 6 December 2019

All Heart - No Common Decency & Respect

We are six days away from a General Election. As each day passes by I become more and more convinced that the right-wing blockheads we have in charge are untouchable. No matter how low they sink with their repellent attitudes and behaviours they are still the party most likely to form a majority government after December 12. How is this possible?

We are becoming increasingly like the United States, where currently a racist, bigoted disability-hating sex-offender continues to hold the highest office in the land. Every allegation thrown at the despicable Donald Trump is simply met with a metaphorical thumbed-nose before he goes about his business unflustered. All nay-saying against his administration is fake news as far as he is concerned. The American electorate has now become so obsessed with trying to reverse cultural diversity and with pushing their right-wing white supremacy agenda that they are prepared to tolerate this and more from the person who is supposed to be their ultimate statesman. And as long as we in the UK have Johnson and his vacuous band of planks in control we will veer further in the same direction.

Further evidence of the Tory villainy came to light today when at one hustings event a Conservative party candidate was actually filmed suggesting that disabled workers should be paid less than their able-bodied counterparts. This is an old trope used by the Victorian maggots that are currently in power (has anyone seen Jacob Rees-Mogg lately?). The Conservative party candidate for Hastings and Rye Sally-Ann Heart embellished this vile point of view with an extra nugget of ignorance as she spoke to the people of her constituency at the event. She told them that the reason that disabled people should be paid less was that some of them ‘don’t understand money’.

So now not only is the work we do less valuable than that of our colleagues, it doesn’t really matter anyway because none of us know what to do with the reward we are given for our efforts. They might as well just pay us in chocolate buttons and have done with it. After all, which of us hasn’t gone into a shop to buy something, reached into our pockets for our wallets or purses only to find mysterious bits of paper and shiny pieces of metal that we just cannot for the life of us identify. All we know is that they all have a picture of a pensioner wearing a crown that looks a bit like John McEnroe in a certain light. What are they doing there? Where are the magic beans that we thought we would be able to spend at Marks & Spencers and Tesco? We only came out for a fucking loaf.

Heart tried to justify her comments by suggesting that the idea - which apparently comes from a piece written by Rosa Monckton in September 2017 for Tory toilet roll substitute The Spectator - was that working for lower wages was about the ‘happiness for work’ of disabled people. Staggeringly Monckton has a daughter with Downs Syndrome. I shouldn’t be surprised. I have encountered many parents of disabled people who undersell the abilities of their children. Their instinct is to protect them because they view them as more vulnerable. But that comes from a wider lack of education around disability and the potential of those who are affected by it. The message from Monckton and Heart appears to be that it doesn’t matter if we are paid a pittance, we should just be thankful that we are being given the opportunity to go out and mix with all you normal folk.

I’m not going to argue that working doesn’t enhance your life in ways that are not necessarily financial. When you don’t have a job to go to you can spend large parts of your day sitting around doing nothing much of anything, waiting for everyone you know who does have a job to become free at the weekends. All while watching some of the most awful television ever made. This gets depressing rather quickly. It might be difficult to get out of bed at 7.00am, especially with a kidney function that currently stands at a surgery-prompting 16%, but it is far better than the alternative.
Joining the work force has helped my mental health immeasurably. Yet that alone is not enough to wrench me from my pit every morning. If you took away all or part of my salary, which is fairly modest as it is, then I might start thinking that days on the sofa are a more attractive proposition again. I have On-Demand TV now. The days of Jerry Springer and Homes Under The Hammer are over. The suggestion that anyone, disabled or otherwise, should work a full time job for anything less than the minimum wage is an appalling attitude that belongs in an era centuries before this one. It is exploitation made worse by the fact that they would try to dress it up as a favour for all those poor, disabled folk who don’t get out much. It is terrifying, unforgivable ableism. As much as there may be some people who don’t have a total grasp on the mathematics involved in monetary transactions, it appears that there remain some politicians who don’t have a grasp on common decency and respect.

Let’s humour Heart for a second. There are no doubt some people who don’t understand the full implications of finance and how to handle money, so let’s assume I don’t for a second. Does that mean that I don’t have bills to pay? That I don’t have a mortgage or rent to pay? That I don’t need to buy food, clothes or heating? Heart probably cannot imagine that I have any of these needs. She’s too wrapped up in her own Tory wankerbubble which assumes that disabled people are less valuable souls, there to be pitied or used for what amounts to slave labour. I find it hard to believe that this needs saying, but whether you understand money or not we all have financial responsibilities and requirements. Nobody, not even people that Heart considers of less value than her who may or may not be able to count, can get by without any money.

I wonder – if Heart were to meet with some unimaginably awful accident involving the front of my Vauxhall Astra that left her less mobile but unaffected mentally – would she consider it acceptable that she should either stop working and be paid by the state or else receive a reduced salary for the work she currently does? If that ever happened to her she would find out quickly that everything she previously believed about disability is nonsense. You still have to get on with life the same as anyone else. You don’t get charged less for a Big Mac in McDonalds because you happen to use a wheelchair. Although a man did once give me a pound to buy a burger in the branch in St Helens town centre when I was about 11. But that is another story about how ableism also involves leaning too far the other way and believing that disabled people should be looked after entirely without the need to worry about things like working and making money. That’s also a pretty offensive mentality which does nobody any good.

The problem with Tory ideals on disability, and indeed those of a good number of ignorant dimwits of all political persuasions is that they are held with a deep conviction that life-changing disabilities are things which happen to other people. When it does happen to them they cannot comprehend it for a long while afterwards, and sometimes never really do. There is a cultural obsession with fixing disability instead of learning to accept it. We should be focusing on modifying the world to embrace the differences between people but we are not, still in 2019. Every time an able bodied person gets mangled in some horrible accident the narrative is about how they will walk again and how, if they don’t, they will feel and be treated as if they are less human than they were before. I can attest that unfortunately, unforgivably, they absolutely will be treated differently should something like that happen to them. But that problem does not belong to the person with the disability, it belongs to society.

There is enough ableism in the world without these Tory grubs trying to use it to save money. No doubt they view taking money from disabled workers as a more justifiable means of boosting the coffers than taxing the top 5% of earners a little more, a policy for which Jeremy Corbyn is currently being vilified by the right wing media. Otherwise known as the BBC. Whoever is pedalling it, it is abhorrent ableism and it has to stop. Let’s not be like Trump’s America. Let’s vote these turds out on December 12.

Tuesday 3 December 2019

Dignity, Respect & Other Unrealistic Nirvanas

Today is International Day Of Persons With Disabilities. Since 1992 December 3 has been marked by the United Nations in an attempt to ‘promote an understanding of disability issues and mobilise support for the dignity, rights and well-being of persons with disabilities’. Twenty-seven years into their campaign I’m a bit concerned by its progress.

Twenty-seven years seems like a long time. It is so long that Everton have won a meaningful trophy within that time. We have had six Prime Ministers, 10 full-time England managers and 47 different Sugababes line-ups. But when you are devoting only one day a year to the cause you should expect progress to be slow. International Day Of Persons With Disabilities registers in the national consciousness about as much as World Wetlands Day (February 2), World Day For Water (March 22), Wrong Trousers Day (June 24) and International Day Of Photographing Your Dinner (September 12). Ok, I made that last one up. Every day is World Photographing Your Dinner Day.

The point is that ‘special’ days like these are a misguided if well-intentioned token gesture. Their very existence merely encourages the notion that we can forget about disabilities, wetlands, water and our trousers for the rest of the year. There’s no responsibility attached to our ignorance of these things if we have the safety net of one 24-hour period out of every 365 spent half-heatedly encouraging people to do something that should, by now in 2019, be automatic. Supporting the ‘dignity, rights and well-being’ of disabled people shouldn’t be an effort. It should not be marked on your calendar as the day you will make a big push towards the lofty ambition of not being a total arse. Least of all your advent calendar which should only ever be used for the consumption of small pieces of chocolate.

This seems obvious but I have to tell you that there are still a sizeable number of people out there who haven’t grasped these dignity and rights concepts. Let me give you an example. The building where I am employed (I know, maybe we’ve taken this whole equality thing too far) has a very steep ramp which leads on to the main streets. In the absence of anything resembling a cafe or coffee shop on site I have to negotiate this ramp to get out for my lunch. I won’t lie. It’s hard work. I hate it. So much so that I have started taking a much longer route, visiting a supermarket much further away to avoid it. Yet the physical exertion required is only one reason why I have given it the swerve. The other is that I cannot push up this ramp without members of the public offering to help me and, in extreme cases, completely ignoring me when I politely decline.

The whole situation is embarrassing for everyone. If I have declined an offer of help, sometimes two or three times, then it surely becomes an actual crime to then put your hands on me and start pushing me anyway. Where is the dignity? Where is the respect? Has International Day Of Persons With Disabilities taught you nothing?

Of course it hasn’t because, as we’ve discussed, the only evidence you will have seen of it anywhere in the media whether mainstream, social or other is this thousand-word letter of complaint on the subject. It’s not a big deal, but then for the reasons we have seen that is probably a good thing. The last thing I want is to be lulled into believing I have dignity and respect on December 3 every year only to wake up on December 4 to find that nothing has been done -still in 2019 - to make trains legitimately accessible and that forcing a disabled person to sit in front of their partner (rather than next to them) in the theatre is still acceptable in polite society. That would bee too much to bear, wouldn’t it? I’m keeping my expectations low.

When you able bodied folk are not demonstrating your sense of superiority by insisting on providing physical assistance that has been declined, and scratching your heads about why a disabled person needs to sit next to anybody at the theatre, you swing wildly in the other direction into the realms of inspiration porn. Suddenly you are not worthy, and begin romanticising perfectly mundane tasks performed by disabled people as if they are Herculean efforts. It is not a compliment to tell a disabled person how well they have done to avoid killing themselves this morning, or how fantastic it is that they can drive a car or drink a beer (not at the same time).

Paralympians are relentlessly targeted too, as if their sporting prowess has been achieved ‘despite’ their disability. The implication is that their achievements are only valuable because they have arrived in what are perceived to be trying circumstances. But when a para-athlete is training to win gold they are not thinking in terms of overcoming a disability. They are thinking only of winning. Of beating the opponent. It is sport and disability does not enter into it.

This message never quite seems to hit home. The effect of it is that those of us who are not on telly like Ade Adepitan, who are not in the House Of Lords like Tanni Grey-Thompson and who have not won her multiple Paralympic titles and those of many others are viewed in an even dimmer light than we were before. Having seen what has been possible to achieve for these highly talented, highly dedicated people, thoughts start to turn to why there are some disabled people knocking about that haven’t matched that level of attainment. Aren’t these people just lazy scrounges? The Paralympic ‘Superhumans’ as they are often depicted on Channel 4 have become the standard by which the rest of us are judged. If you’re not breaking records, influencing political debate or both then you really mustn’t be trying very hard. It has become almost impossible for disabled people to be viewed as ordinary or, dare one utter the shudder-inducing term.....normal. We are either celebrities to be revered for all the wrong reasons or we are pitiable, inferior Undateables fodder who definitely need a push up a steep ramp whether we like it or not.

I have been alive for 16,127 days. You can actually Google that. I haven’t been sat here for the last two hours trying to work that out and having an internal argument with myself about whether leap years coincide with World Cups or Olympic Games. It’s the latter, if you’re wondering. But anyway, 28 days dedicated to dignity, respect and well-being in a life spanning 16,127 days and counting hasn’t been nearly enough. We have a long way to go.

Friday 29 November 2019

Badge Of Dishonour

This week’s access rant blog comes in the wake of news from Nottingham of another brilliantly under-thought scheme aimed at making life easier for disabled travellers. That’s people with a disability who use public transport, not people with a disability who knock about with the Fury family.

Finding room on buses as a wheelchair user is an age-old problem. Well, I say age-old. It’s a problem that has existed for about as long as buses have been accessible. I could boringly recount to you again how long it took Emma and I to get a bus home from Liverpool after the 2005 Champions League victory parade but I won’t because this column is about accessibility and not the validity of the penalty that eventually levelled the scores at 3-3 when Xabi Alonso knocked in the rebound from his own botched spot-kick. And that is surely where we would end up if I started riffing on the subject of 2005 and its European Cup Final.

Happily since then accessible buses have become a much more common sight, but space within those accessible buses is still scarce. There are times when the seats which fold up to create space for a wheelchair are taken. Quite often the driver will humiliate you by asking the person occupying the seat if they wouldn’t mind shifting their clearly non-disabled arse to another part of the bus to make some room for you. But if that doesn’t happen then as the wheelchair user you are left to either squeeze in wherever you can fit or else risk the wrath of your salt of the earth community by asking someone to make way for you. There is a reason why disabled people and parents with prams don’t get on. It’s a war zone out there. The modern update on Ben Elton’s famous double-seat stand-up routine.

To combat this the good-to-middling brains of Nottingham have come up with a badge scheme. There are two types of badge aimed at addressing the issue. One is for the non-disabled to wear which carries a message that they are ‘happy to move for you’ when they are occupying an accessible seat, and the other is for the disabled person to wear which rather mortifyingly asks ‘please offer me a seat’ if there aren’t any free. You are way ahead of me if you have spotted that wheelchair users already have a seat. It is a space we require. Semantics are important, but maybe this is more for those who have no need for a wheelchair but who have enough mobility problems to make clambering to the one empty seat at the back of the bus a problem. Yer nana for example.

The thing is that the wearing of badges has arguably as much of a negative stereotype attached to it as the use of wheelchairs or walking aids. For me it conjures up images of schoolchildren who have just managed to swim 25 metres in their local pool for the first time, boy scouts who have learned to tie 740 different varieties of knot, or loud centre of attention juveniles who want everyone to be made indisputably aware that ‘I AM 10!’. Adults don’t tend to wear badges, apart from that Portsmouth fan that Sky Sports were so fond of when Pompey were in the Premier League.

Despite my reservations the move has been met with a mostly positive response from disability campaigners, though they did point out that the need for people to wear portable requests for common courtesy on their apparel is ‘sad’. What baffles me about it is that in 2019 we have decided not to tackle the problem by designing transport with more accessible features staffed by people with a keener sense of how to make sure there is room for everyone, but instead to develop a way of making disabled people look like victims. Or to make the non-disabled stand out for offering a simple slice of decency. Badges are an acute embarrassment to me, but they are a source of pride and indicator of achievement to others. Vacating a seat that you should not really be using in the first place is not an achievement. It is not your 25 metre swimming badge.

Fortunately I drive so I will have little cause for wearing any kind of badge on my travels, except on the increasingly rare occasions I go out drinking. My most regular beef is not with accessible seat botherers (though they are villainous) but with drivers who continually use disabled bays without ownership of a badge that is anything approaching blue. One such little dweeb was on Twitter recently boasting that he arrived at his local supermarket at 5.30 in the morning and decided that it would be fine to park illegally in a disabled bay. The logic here was that there are 30 disabled bays and that the chances of 30 people who need disabled spaces turning up at 5.30am is low.

There are obvious reasons why this is wrong including the mind-blowing concept that he has failed to grasp of disabilities that you cannot necessarily see. But the biggest reason is that it assumes that disabled people don’t need to be going to certain places at certain times. It is still generally accepted by able bodied society that it is ok to make disabled people book assistance 24 hours in advance to use a train because after all, nobody who has a disability will ever need to go anywhere on a whim, will they? Assistance, by the way, can be defined as one member of staff plonking a portable ramp down on the ground so that you can board the train from platform level. If they didn’t lock them all up on station walls or on trains then you could probably pick the fucking thing up and do it yourself.

Again though, this is society deciding what is best for us. They lock them up on walls and on trains for the same reasons that they lock disabled access toilets. Namely that the general public can’t be trusted not to vandalise and ruin them if they are easily accessible. This fear may be real, but its effect is to rob us of our independence. I would happily piss into a broken toilet if it was a choice between that and having to ask Miss behind the bar if I can go to the little boys room. Many of us have radar keys but again the onus is on us to acquire them to make facilities genuinely accessible. If you are wondering, the official line on radar keys is that they will set you back £4.50. This is not a lot of money but if you lose them at the rate that I do then it all adds up. This is a tax on my bladder and nothing else.

Maybe one day in public places in Nottingham you’ll be able to get a badge that says ‘I need a wee’.

Saturday 23 November 2019

TV Talk - Manifest

I’ve been at the box-sets again. I watch far fewer TV dramas than I used to. That’s probably been the case since I bought the iPad that I’m using to write this piece right now. It has led to a healthy increase in the amount of reading that I do. I haven’t reduced the amount of sport that I watch so the one thing I have done less of is TV drama. I still have half a series of Killing Eve and an entire series of Big Little Lies on the planner.

Given that I devote less time to watching TV dramas something really has to pique my interest to get me to tune in. An intriguing premise maybe, a standout cast or a dramatisation of a film or book I’ve previously enjoyed. This happened recently with Manifest, an NBC drama which aired on Sky One. Unfortunately though not surprisingly it did not live up to my early hopes and expectations of it.

The premise is the hook. An aircraft takes off from Jamaica bound for the USA (where else, this is television drama after all) and goes missing. Five years later it reappears and lands. The killer twist is that for those on board it has only felt like a few hours. During the flight they experience some fairly terrifying turbulence during which the lights go out and the oxygen masks drop but once that is negotiated it seems to them like an otherwise uneventful flight. They disembark expecting to go about their business as usual only to find that five years have passed. The world has moved on around them. They have all been presumed dead by their families who have aged five years while the passengers have not. It’s a bit like living in Wigan only to step outside the boundaries of the borough and realising that it’s actually 2019.

There are hundreds of passengers on your average commercial flight from Jamaica to the USA so Manifest decides to keep its focus on one family. TV and film do not give a shit about anyone but those central to the plot. The Stone family are not all on board the time-shifting flight. It’s over-booked (no wonder Thomas Cook went under if this kind of travel balls up is common) so Grace, wife of Ben Stone and mother of twins Olivia and Cal, offers to catch the next flight with their daughter and Ben’s parents. Cal has leukaemia so takes priority, meaning his father has to travel with him and so be split from Grace. Also with Ben on that first, soon-to-be mysterious time-hopping flight is Ben’s sister Michaela.

It’s an incredible set-up but it all goes wrong from there. Even at 16 episodes it is a stretch to believe that the writers could come up with a reasonable explanation for the five-year lag, resolve all of the personal and relationship conflicts which arise and cunningly set it up for another money-spinning series. In the end they don’t try, settling instead for a resolution to some but not all of those conflicts but leaving the question of what happened to flight 828 to cause it to flash forward five years unsatisfactorily unanswered. All of which makes you feel like you have wasted about thirteen and a half hours of your life. At around 50 minutes per episode it turns into a longer haul than any flight you’re ever likely to take. Longer even than the one I took with American Airlines from Manchester to New York during which they had to rip the doors off the toilet to make it possible for me to spend any pennies.

The acting doesn’t help. The actress playing Michaela is Melissa Roxburgh and while she has every right to appear stressed under the circumstances her permanent hangdog expression starts to grate. Ben is played by Josh Dallas whose bio informs me that he was in Thor. I can’t say I remember his role in that but his performance here makes it even harder to imagine. He treats the Stone family crisis like Cliff Huxtable and Mr Drummond treated the teenage angst of the kids in their care. Let’s just talk it through and everything will work itself out. It won’t Ben. Least of all the plot which as we have established the writers have no intention of resolving until the last dollar has been squeezed out of the concept at the end of series 7.

In the end it all feels a little bit too much like Lost. If like me and 98.4% of the population (probably) you saw that show before seeing Manifest you’ll probably view the latter as an inferior tribute act. One of Lost’s strengths before it entered really disturbing levels of batshit craziness was in how it tied all of the numerous characters’ back stories into the air crash/island plot. There’s none of that with Manifest which dispenses with the diverse ensemble cast of its predecessor to focus solely on the Stones. Others on the time-hopping flight get involved at various points but with nothing like the same depth. Overall none of the characters, not even the Stones, do enough to show how inexplicably losing five years of your life in a single night might affect you.

I should have watched those still to be viewed episodes of Killing Eve and Big Little Lies from the planner.

Wednesday 20 November 2019

Mass Debaters

Apparently there was a debate on TV last night. Whatever it was, the ITV shit show featuring Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was no more a debate than my wheelchair is a moon buggy. It was not remotely serviceable for the task in hand.

The phrase ‘Prime Minister Boris Johnson’ is still absurd some four months on from his arrival into Number 10. It sounds like a line from a dystopian novel. It has probably only managed to stay within manageable levels of shock value due to the presence of the even more preposterous Donald Trump in the White House. After that anything seems plausible. Liam Gallagher to become a social worker? Sure. Prince Andrew to present next year’s Children In Need? Maybe not. But we’re heading in that sort of direction if an absolute fucknugget like Johnson can be PM.

The problems with the whole production were numerous but principally the stumbling block was that only Corbyn clung to the naive belief that he was there for an actual debate. The fact that only the two main parties were invited to be represented should have sounded the alarm bells that this was going to be anything but a grown up discussion about policy. Foolishly, Corbyn had prepared reasoned arguments about his plans to make society fairer, improve public services and in particular the NHS. Meanwhile Johnson merely shifted every question thrown at him back on to the subject of Brexit. A word that didn’t exist four years ago is now the one most commonly uttered by the most powerful man in the country. Whether the hand-picked yet supposedly diverse audience members questioned the pair on health, education, taxation or the decision to dispense with the services of Mauricio Pochettino Johnson merely repeated the same mantra. He was like a ‘talking toy’ only instead of saying ‘to infinity and beyond’ or ‘there’s a snake in my boot’ he repeated ‘Let’s Get Brexit Done!’ when someone pulled the string in his back.

It’s actually quite shrewd of Johnson to avoid debate on policy. It allows him to perpetuate the bumbling man of the people con that he has been pulling since his hilarious appearances on Have I Got News For You, and also spares him from having to explain his cruel austerity policies which are killing people as I write this. Or go into detail about his sinister plans to sell off parts of the NHS to Trump. He also is observant enough to have noticed that as a nation we have become weirdly obsessed with Brexit to the detriment of all other policy discussion. The fact that the 2016 referendum result could not be delivered on without crippling the economy has fired up the defenders of democracy to the absolute max. The problem is that these witless slabs of gammon know as much about democracy as Eddie Hearn knows about humility. The referendum was advisory and always had to go through parliament. That is how democracy works. Threatening to ‘punish’ your local MP for not implementing the supposed ‘will of the people’ is a berserk position. As I said in my last piece, you will get the government you deserve if you do that.

But back to the moon buggy - I mean the debate - which was not helped by host Juliette Etchingham’s inability to guide the discussion. She spent much of the hour trying to stop Johnson waffling on, while whenever a genuine debate did threaten to break out she insisted that it was time to move on to the next topic. Which of course as far as Johnson was concerned was Brexit. Always Brexit. It may have been more palatable if his repeated promise to ‘Get Brexit Done’ was even realistic. The other thing that the baying hordes of Leavers don’t seem to understand is that despite Johnson’s claims that he has ‘a fantastic deal’ to leave the EU by the end of January the reality is that he has a withdrawal agreement that is several shades worse than the one secured by robot dancing wheat botherer Theresa May. That one was voted down several times by MPs but now, in their bid to stay in favour with Prime Minister Boris Johnson (eek! that phrase again) 650+ careerist Tory tossers have pledged to back it should the worst happen and the Conservatives win a majority. When they do so we will crash out of the EU with a deal but a shit deal. There will then follow literally years of trade negotiations with whoever we can find who is willing to deal with us and our mop-headed psycho Premier. Yes, including the EU nations.

To sell his idea Johnson actually uttered the Brexiteers’ stock catchphrase ‘take back control’, once more perpetuating the myth to gullible Little Englanders everywhere that we are not currently responsible for our own policy making. From the same school of non-thought comes the insistence that remaining in the EU would mean we would have to join the single currency (created in 1999 yet still not the currency of the UK) and that we would also have to forego our own armed forces to participate in the new EU army plan. Now you might think that being in a European army was a good way of ensuring that you never have a military conflict with another EU nation but that offends the sensibilities of the poppy fascists who actually believe that brave soldiers fought and died in order to force everyone to remember them in the same way using the same emblem and to Hell with anyone who might have suffered at the hands of British military activity. Soldiers aren’t all bad, of course, but they are not all good either. War generally is A Bad Thing but there is nevertheless a significant number of flag-hijackers who think you are unpatriotic if you don’t want to nuke at least six Muslim countries. In any case, a European army featuring British forces is no closer than you are to needing a wallet full of Euros when you visit your local pub to pay for all that beer made by.....Europeans that you are being taught to hate by the likes of Johnson and Wetherspoons Wazzock Tim Martin.

Johnson is a liar. He again made claims that his government are funding 40 new hospitals when the number is closer to 6. He boasted about putting 20,000 police back on the streets but aren’t they the 20,000 police that the Tory austerity regime took OFF the streets? This is the school bully nicking your lunch money and then handing it back to you years later as a ‘gift’. Lies, lies, lies from Johnson wrapped around the biggest one of all that he can Get Brexit Done without ruining the very economy that he alleges is most threatened by Corbyn.

In the aftermath the biggest criticism of Corbyn appeared to be that he didn’t wear a pair of glasses very well. Never mind that he wants to end poverty, revitalise the NHS, invest in better education. It’s all about the way his glasses made him look, an eerie parallel to the way Ed Milliband ate a bacon sandwich did for his hopes in the 2015 election. This is where we are now as a society. Four weeks between now and the General Election doesn’t seem like nearly enough time to turn around our fortunes. Still...at least we will Get Brexit Done.

Friday 1 November 2019

We Will Get The Government We Deserve

Like me you may have missed every single 6.00 news bulletin for the last few weeks because you don’t want to miss House Of Games. Nevertheless you will no doubt be aware that there is a General Election looming. With TV personality turned pound-shop Donald Trump Boris Johnson having failed in his bid to drag the UK out of the EU without a deal by Halloween night, the other parties have agreed to take him on as he bids to recoup some of the 437 MPs that he has sacked for disagreeing with him since taking over from dancing dunce Theresa May just a few months ago. December 12 is the big date, which will apparently be the first winter General Election since Laura Kuenssberg was impartial.

As much as it is an opportunity for the bumbling, mop-haired cretin Johnson to bolster his ranks in the House Of Commons it is also a chance for us to finally get rid of this dismal government. The problem is that with Jeremy Corbyn in charge it is highly unlikely that the Labour Party will win. Even their own voters are turning against them amid allegations of antisemitism, non-committal dithering on Brexit and fears that his policies are a little bit too left wing and radical. The country can’t afford it, they scream, while ignoring the fact that tax evasion and the ludicrous bonuses paid to the already sickeningly wealthy are what is actually crippling the country. All of this is added to by the standard media-driven bile that Corbyn is ‘unelectable’. He is unelectable if the papers keep telling their millions of sponge-brained readers that he is unelectable.

Of course the reason we are approaching a third General Election in four years is Brexit. Soon after pig-fancying gobshite David Cameron snatched power from Labour in 2010 the Tories introduced legislation that meant that the full term of an elected parliament should be five years. Previously it had been four with an option for a fifth depending on how likely the incumbent Prime Minister felt that a General Election victory might be at the time. Despite this legislation the Tories have called two elections since Cameron made his contribution to history in 2016, calling a needless referendum on the UK’s EU membership without first offering anything approaching a debate on the subject. That decision has brought us to the brink of all-out civil war. One side accuses the other of refusing to respect the ‘will of the people’ while the accused fire back with their own allegations that leave voters had no idea what they were voting for at best and that at worst their vote was motivated by xenophobia and outright racism. In addition the Leave campaign was mostly built on lies scrawled on the side of a bus. There may be good arguments to leave or remain in the EU but we haven’t heard a single fucking one of them above the din created by these two warring factions.

If we can have three General Elections in four years how is it that we cannot have a second referendum on the UK’s EU membership? It is quite clearly bonkers to witter on about democracy when arguing against a second referendum only to then call another General Election. Leave voters counter with the argument that the wishes of their 2016 vote haven’t been carried out but that is to ignore the fact that parliament has spent three years doing absolutely bugger all else except try to work out a way to pass Brexit legislation that won’t destroy the economy. What Leave voters failed to understand is that the referendum was advisory, and that MPs would still need to pass the legislation through parliament for it to become law. That is how democracy works. I have every sympathy with Leave voters who believe that they are not being listened to but this goes back to the point about having the referendum before the debate. We had to make a decision about our EU membership without knowing anything of the complexities of Article 50, the Customs Union or the effect on the peace process in Northern Ireland. It was only after Leave won an unexpected victory that the politicians started to ponder these imponderables. It is no wonder that a large number of them backed away from the precipice when they found out what it really entailed. And yet still we seem to be holding on the dogged and stupendously dim idea that the result of a referendum in these circumstances should be legally binding. We have reached peak Brexit when the man on the street, when warned that leaving the EU could mean that he won’t get access to the medications that he needs to survive can only retort that ‘Leave Means Leave’. There are actually people out there who are stupid enough to not mind very much the idea of dying as long as the rest of us are forced to suffer with them. In the meantime, while all of this failure to secure a sensible Brexit deal has been going on piffling issues like health, education, transport, human rights, the environment, defence and cultural issues have been left to rot in the in-tray of MPs. While we are busy arguing about which course of action will turn the country to shit in the quickest time the country is turning to shit before our very eyes.

The greatest trick that the Johnsons and Jacob Rees-Moggs of this world have pulled is to convince us that we’d be better off after Brexit. It wasn’t long before that rather bold claim became something closer to ‘it’ll be ok in the end’ until now some kind of moronic reminiscence of Second World War Blitz Spirit has kicked in. If we survived being bombed to shit by the Nazis in the 1940s we will survive Nissan moving to Belgium or wherever it might be. Romanticising the Second World War in this way is an affront to the people who lived through it and especially those who fought in it. They didn’t fight for our freedom so that we could become an insular set of fucktards with the intellectual capacity of Isabelle Oakeshott. What is worse is that the vast majority of people going on about the Second World War as if it were just some character-building period of mild hardship were not around for any of it. Not to pick on anyone in particular, but Geoffrey Boycott springs to mind as an advocate of this kind of thinking. The same Geoffrey Boycott who was born in 1940 and so has memories of the Second World War which are restricted to potty training and just about taking on solid foods.

It will be difficult, but if you can find anything in the pre-Election debates other than Brexit you have a pretty stark choice on a variety of issues. On the one hand you have the Eton-educated posh boys who are set to get rich off Brexit while you bear the consequences, and on the other you have a Labour leader who wants to rein in the greed of the rich so that a higher standard of living and better quality public services will be available for all. All of which flies in the face of the absolute bullshit theory that all politicians are somehow ‘the same’. If they were all the same we wouldn’t have the NHS for starters. The Tories deny that they are trying to sell off the jewel in the UK’s political crown to that orange buffoon Trump but who believes them? I read on social media today that Jeremy Corbyn is the one trying to get rid of the NHS which, for all the faults of the train-dwelling lame duck Labour leader is a pretty out-there theory. He’s a socialist. He certainly is not going to endorse the idea of forcing people who are already financially challenged to stump up a few hundred thousand for their cancer treatment. Johnson on the other hand has publicly stated that if we had to pay for the NHS and health care in general then we would all ‘appreciate it more’. Those who could afford it might appreciate it more. Those who cannot will literally die in hospital corridors if we go down that route.

It is not only the NHS that is under threat. Austerity politics is having a thunderous and devastating effect on many people in their every day lives. Yesterday there was a story doing the rounds about a disabled woman who had been deemed not quite disabled enough to qualify for a motability car. That is quite common under this government to the point where we have reached the rather shameful stage of becoming desensitised to it almost. Yet this story caught everybody's attention. This wasn't just some old timer with a bit of a limp that right-wing plebs might shout 'snowflake' at (for that is the limit of their vocabulary in an alarming number of cases). This case is something else altogether. She has bone cancer and a fucking prosthetic leg! Tory austerity politics are literally killing not only disabled people but poorer people as I write this. But sure, politicians are all the same. Have a word with yourself.

Look it is not really my business how you vote or indeed whether you vote at all. I just wanted to check in with you today to remind you that on December 12 we will get the government we deserve. Either we take some positive action to get rid of this cruel, self-obsessed bunch of fuckwits currently running the country or we will allow them to continue unchallenged. Corbyn is far from perfect and I suspect that Labour won’t win a majority as long as he is in charge. The saddest part of it all is that if Labour had a more moderate leader, a middle of the road type figure who knew how to handle the media and how to cultivate a more positive image they would wipe the floor with the worst collection of right-wing fruit loops since Thatcher’s reign of terror in the 1980s. Yet even if we shouldn't expect an outright majority for a left-wing or even centrist party there might be a chance that we can salvage some sort of coalition between those parties who are a good deal less psychotic than the Tories.

The alternative is to let far right ideas which have been on the rise since the referendum continue to gather pace. If you think that is fanciful then ask yourself why such an esteemed organisation as the BBC, built on impartiality, continues to give a platform to the likes of Nigel Farage, Tom Harwood and Oakeshott. Farage has failed to be elected to the UK parliament on no fewer than seven occasions and yet still manages to convince one of the world’s leading broadcasters that he is worth listening to. He’s a man who barks loudly about the tyranny of the EU while, you guessed it, actually making his living out of being an elected member of the European Parliament. The same European Parliament that he would have you believe is undemocratic and should be disbanded as soon as possible. If he gets his way and the UK leaves the EU he is going to have to find another topic to barf on about on the BBC or on LBC Radio otherwise his tweed wardrobe won’t be getting stocked for a while.

If we are talking about pandering to right wing cranks Question Time is especially guilty here. What was once a sensible and enlightening topical debate show has degenerated into a right wing shit-show led by uber-Tory host Fiona Bruce. Her mask of impartiality slips so often on that show I keep waiting for her to stand up and deliver a full hour monologue on the greatness of Thatcher. I'm not basing this on any recent experience of watching to be honest because I gave up on it weeks ago.

It isn’t just the Beeb though, with most TV broadcasters having been guilty of taking the racist filth spewed by Tommy Robinson far more seriously than is warranted over the last few years. He’s just an EDL white supremacist who thinks he has the right to prejudice court proceedings with his vile message of hate. Yet somehow he is also a household name. How the fuck does he even get a platform? This is where we are in 2019. Meanwhile in the written press Rod Liddle has just created a storm by suggesting in his column for The Spectator that we should hold the General Election on a day when Muslims would be prevented from voting for religious reasons. This is bigotry and nothing else. By the way ‘Boris’, your Prime Minister, was editor of The Spectator until 2005. Make of that what you will. Just don’t tell me that all politicians are the same.

We have less than six weeks to think about this. Irrespective of the Brexit outcome we have to decide whether we want to continue persecuting the poor, sick and the disabled for the benefit of the wealthy or whether we want to go down another path. It might not be much of a choice given the shortcomings of Corbyn, but let’s be clear. It absolutely is a choice. You will get the government you deserve.

Tuesday 15 October 2019

The Transplant Situation

Strap yourselves in this might get personal. I went to see the surgeon today. I don’t write about this a lot because of its personal nature and its lack of scope for comedy. So - spoiler alert - I’m having a kidney transplant.

This is the third time I have seen the surgeon in the calendar year of 2019. The first time was in January when I was at 10% kidney function and had spent large parts of Christmas Day asleep in my old room at my mum’s house. I’d also spent a day in early January at A & E at Whiston with heart palpitations which I had thought were linked to my previous in the field of high potassium but were not. They sent me home reassured that my kidney function had not altered significantly but without a satisfactory explanation as to the cause. I was signed off work for a month.

It was around that time that I first met Mr Ridgeway, the transplant surgeon. Dan. I can’t get used to calling him Dan. Because I don’t know him well enough it makes me think about Stephen Mangan’s character in that episode of ‘I’m Alan Partridge’ where Alan thinks that he and Dan have become friends only for Dan to blank him in that cringeworthy scene in which Alan just keeps shouting Dan’s name.

Once I had met Mr Ridgeway the race was on to have the transplant before I had to start dialysis. If you think a transplant is a big deal I can assure you it is preferable to dialysis for me. That shit changes lives. I work full time. I travel, sometimes on a whim and I have other commitments like the radio show and - in a not unrelated twist - attending Saints games to consider. I don’t have time to spend four hours a day, three days a week hooked up to a machine. Even if there are days when I wonder whether that might be better than working.

The good news is I’m winning that race. For reasons that even the many brilliant medical people I have met cannot explain my kidney function started to spike back northwards in the first quarter of 2019. Like Gerry Cinnamon’s popularity it was going up but nobody knew why. From 10% in November 2018 it had recovered to 13% in April 2019, to 14% in May and then again in July which is the last time I had it tested. I am seeing the nephrologist in 10 days time (I am currently under more medical consultants than David Beckham was when he broke the world’s most talked about metatarsal before the 2002 World Cup) and it will be tested again then.

That is normally like running the gauntlet. Not that I have ever run a gauntlet. Or anything or anywhere else. But you understand the metaphor. It’s scary because any test result that they don’t like could lead to a serious discussion about dialysis. I was having those kinds of conversations when my function hit 10% which was especially hard because the weird thing is that by and large I don’t feel ill. I don’t feel great which I’ll come to but there’s no nausea. I don’t throw up regularly. I haven’t turned the colour of Homer Simpson. It’s one thing to be told that you have a disease that will kill you slowly without transplantation, it is quite another to get your head around this fact when you still feel fit enough to go about the rest of your business. I don’t want to feel symptomatic of course but I do sometimes think it would help me make more sense of the whole thing.

So anyway this time I am a little more relaxed about the result because of the discussions I have had with Mr Ridgeway. Today he told me that they are happy that all the tests are complete and that we can expect to have the surgery early in the new year. I say we because my mum is involved in this also. She’s my donor, which may raise a few eyebrows when you have worked out that given my age she must be getting on a bit too. But that is one of the things that you learn when a kidney transplant is something which is happening to you. It doesn’t really matter about the age of the donor.

They are only interested in the health of the kidney that is being donated. They do other general health checks on things like the heart and lungs of both the donor and the recipient but they are just to make sure that you are both fit to undergo surgery. They are thorough with these tests because kidneys are precious resources and they want to make sure that every transplant has the highest possible chance of success, but I have passed them and so has my mum. I suppose what I’m intimating there is that you just need a decent level of health. It is not about fitness as such. You don’t have to be Mo Farah. Sorry Sir Mo. I wouldn’t want to miss an opportunity to remind the racists and extremists that a black Muslim has been knighted for becoming one of Britain’s greatest ever athletes.

We have one more assessment to get through in November. This is basically just a routine check that we are both entering into this for the right reasons and that nobody is coercing, bribing, blackmail or profiting from anybody in any kind of transaction. And that we are sound enough in the mind to make the decision to go ahead. I’m not quite sure how they determine this. If I were designing a test for this it would include rigorous psychological conundrums like ‘Wigan or Man Utd?’, ‘Have you ever agreed with Katie Hopkins?’ and ‘Do you watch I’m A Celebrity?’.

Oh hang on no, not that last one. My mum would probably fall at that hurdle and we’d have to find another donor and restart the whole process of tests and consultations which, by the time of transplantation, will have been going on for 12 months. That’s another of the hidden foibles of the process. It’s one donor at a time. If you have more than one person willing to donate they don’t test them all at the same time. If anyone is found incompatible for any reason you go back to the start. Like the Chinese team in the Women’s 4 x 100m final at the recent World Athletics Championships in Doha. All of which sounds like a particularly vicious game of snakes and ladders but I haven’t had to go through it so I haven’t spent too much time thinking about the consequences of it. I have other potential donors. My dad is as likely to be a match as my mum because I have 50% of each of their DNA. The only reason that my mum was tested first is that my dad needed an operation of his own at the time that testing began. He’s ok now. Just bad timing.

Incidentally for anyone wondering about the prospects of getting a suitable kidney from a live donor a parent is your best bet. They are highly likely to be a reasonable match. There are now ways of making slight differences work which is another bloody medical miracle. Siblings are also a good bet, or any blood relative. This doesn’t rule out anybody who is not a relative. Plenty of people receive kidneys from sadly deceased people whom they have never met. It just increases your chances of a more positive outcome for longer if you are a blood relative of your donor. Even more so if they are still alive.

The procedure itself is slightly more complicated for me than it might be for others. Due to my spina bifida my pelvis is a little crooked so plumbing in a new kidney is not straightforward. They don’t take a bad one out to put a good one in, like they do with parts on a car. They plumb a third one - the good new one - in and just leave the two malfunctioning kidneys where they are. They are useless but they are not doing any harm. They’re like Taylor Swift in that sense. Though a nephrologist will often look at you, shake his head and breath through his teeth when he sees your kidney function. Like a mechanic checking over your battered car engine except because our NHS is free until the Brexiteers get their way and sell it off to Donald Trump he is not doing it to work out what he can charge you for it.

What is required in my circumstances is two operating theatres. One to open me up and have a quick look around to work out the best way of shoehorning a third kidney in there, and another to then go and get my mum’s kidney and bring it over to me to finish the job off. Mr Ridgeway says it will be ‘a long day’ but I’m guessing he means for him performing complex surgery. We’ll be unconscious and so will know nothing about it after we are asked to breath into the mask and count.

It is afterwards that I face my challenges. I was relieved to find out today also that I’ll only be in hospital for 10 days or so. When I saw Mr Ridgeway he told me he had seen cases similar to mine (crooked spines or to use a technical term biffyness) in which patients had been hospitalised for up to five weeks. I am not a great patient so five weeks on a ward is something close to my personal Hell. But in those cases there were underlying conditions that I don’t have so Mr Ridgeway is not expecting my stay to be any longer than two weeks tops.

Recovery takes on average something between eight weeks and three months if you’re talking about getting back to work. During that time I’ll have regular hospital visits to check that everything is working ok and I’ll forever be on anti-rejection drugs which do what you might expect, stop the body rejecting a kidney which is after all a foreign body entering your system even if it comes from a close blood relative. Taking a lot of drugs is not something I am a stranger to. I don’t mean that in a Pete Doherty sort of way. I just mean that I am already on five or six different types of medication to slow down the deterioration of my current kidneys and help with associated conditions like high blood pressure and that old favourite, high potassium. What’s a few more?

The immediate aim is to try and get through to the date of the surgery without going off sick from work. That should be doable, although I confess it is getting a little more difficult now. The itchiness I suffered in the early part of the year (oh, didn’t mention that, kept me awake night after night to the point where I now use medication and cream to combat it) is enjoying a slight resurgence in recent weeks and any sleep lost through that is a major problem. Even when I do sleep well I find that I get tired far more easily than was the case maybe a year ago. It’s starting to frustrate me that I can be sat relaxed watching a game on TV one minute and wake up the next to find that an hour has passed. Unless I’m busy I find it really hard to fight off sleep during the day. Work helps with that because it gives me something that requires more concentration than NFL Sunday or a Test Match, but I don’t know how much longer that will be the case.

The other major symptom, if you can call it a symptom considering what happens to some sufferers of kidney disease is panic attacks. I hadn’t had one since my last stay in hospital for bowel surgery in April until last night. It could have been due to the fact that it was the night before what I anticipated would be my last appointment with Mr Ridgeway before shit gets real. I don’t know. What I do know is that when it happens I get this odd sense of deja vu, as if everything I am seeing and hearing has happened before. At the same time my heart rate speeds up and it feels like my entire body is palpitating as this weird and unpleasant tingle (that’s the best way I can think of to describe it, like a scary tingling feeling) courses through me. I had a particularly unpleasant occurrence this morning while my mum was in with Mr Ridgeway and I was waiting to be brought in. Protocol, apparently. To prevent any of that coercion and bribery stuff I mentioned earlier. However the fact that I got the news I expected and to be honest that I wanted might be the reason why I have not had one since. I don’t feel like I have been over thinking or worrying about today in the day’s leading up to it. I’ve been too busy at Dave Gorman gigs and Grand Finals. This weekend I’m going to see Ben Elton. I just think maybe sometimes these anxieties are subconscious.

I try and play it down and I hope that anyone in a similar situation reading this column may have had some of their worst fears allayed. That anyone wondering whether or not to donate organs before or even after their own death might be encouraged to do so. But it is still kind of a big deal.

Wednesday 9 October 2019

Dave Gorman And Salisbury

Yesterday I turned 44 years old. To celebrate getting through another year in which I have miraculously avoided dialysis in the way that Soccer AM has avoided cancellation I decided to take a trip to Salisbury. This choice was made for the single and only reason that it happened to be where Dave Gorman was taking his tour on the date of my birthday.

I have to tell you something straight away. This was going to be the first comedy gig that I had actively paid to attend. As far as I can remember it is only the third comedy show I have ever attended, following on from a dreadful Mick-Miller like buffoon at Prestatyn about 15 years ago and - most startlingly of all - a performance by Jimmy Cricket at Blackpool during the 80s. In the first instance I just happened to be at a Pontin’s holiday resort and so faced with a choice of the crap comedian, bingo or pool and in the second I was probably about eight years old and so not in control of the decision making when it came to evening entertainment. My first voluntary visit to a comedy gig has whetted the appetite with Ben Elton’s return to stand-up next on the to do list.

By the way if any of you don’t remember Jimmy Cricket let me fill you in. He was an Irish comedian who wore wellies with ‘L’ and ‘R’ written on them. He wore them on the wrong feet which I’m sure you’ll agree is just side-splitting. He had his own TV show in the 80s on which Rory Bremner made his first small-screen appearance. Cricket’s act was based mostly around mockery of the Irish and starting one terrible anecdote after another with the phrase ‘c’mere’. My own memories of his performance are dominated not by how bad I thought he was but of the actual physical pain that my dad appeared to be in as he sat through it. What made his experience worse was that he was sat behind a man who cried with laughter at every crap quip. This chap has never seen anything funnier in his entire life. I hope he hasn’t laughed more than that since because there’s a reasonable chance it would kill him. This was anathema to my dad who has pretty much despaired of humanity ever since.

I’d toyed with the idea of seeing Dave Gorman before. It just never seemed feasible when his tour dates were initially released due to all the uncertainty with my health. Just by chance I saw an advert for the tour, entitled With Great PowerPoint Comes Great ResponsibilityPoint, when it was extended for a third time due to the demand. The Salisbury show was on my birthday and with an appointment with the transplant surgeon coming up next week I decided it might be the last chance for a while so why the Hell not? Even if it is a four-hour drive away.

The show is based on Dave Gorman’s TV show Modern Life Is Goodish. It’s basically observational comedy using PowerPoint as a demonstrative tool. At the end of the show he actually asks the audience not to give anything away on social media and since this blog sort of falls into that category (that is how you will probably have found it) I feel obliged to keep Dave’s secrets. I wouldn’t want to be that one knob-head spoiling it for others. I have to say given the knob-head ratio on both Facebook and Twitter I’m stunned that nobody has plastered it all over one or both of these platforms. Dave Gorman fans must be trustworthy, reliable types. Either way it is difficult to tell you too much about it but if you have ever seen the TV show you’ll have some idea of the sort of thing he does. If you haven’t, Google it. I’m sure YouTube has some clips. It’s better than Jimmy Cricket.

Before the gig we had a chance to see some of the local hostelries. That is after I had negotiated the obstacles in our not very accessible hotel. The Red Lion is a Best Western on Milford Street in the city centre, only about five minutes walk from the gig venue at City Hall. I’d booked over the phone and been assured that the hotel had an accessible room but that definition appears to be something that hotel chains think they can play fast and loose with without consequence.

The accessible room - such as it is - has a small step up to a security door for which you are given a passcode. I wasn’t on my own but if you are a wheelchair user who ever does find themselves staying alone at this place then you might have fun trying to negotiate the step while also trying to punch the passcode on to the keypad. It’s like fucking Takeshi’s Castle. If you can overcome that hurdle you might just be able to squeeze your wheelchair through the narrow security door then make the tight left turn to the front door of your room. If you get through all that your next challenge is the bathroom which has a carpeted ramp leading up to another narrow doorway. If your wheelchair is any wider than mine it will fall off the ramp. Except it won’t because you won’t have been able to get it through the doors to get inside the room. If you can’t stand up then you can forget about taking a shower also. This despite the fact that they asked me when I phoned to make the booking whether I’d need a shower seat. I’m sure I said yes but maybe they get confused between yes or no like Alan Partridge when he gets that message about whether he would like to continue viewing the adult channels. I thought about going back to reception to ask for one - a shower seat not an adult movie channel - but the controls were not at an accessible height either.

They’ve given me a 20% refund after I pointed out these flaws to them but as you can see that hasn’t stopped me from savaging them on these pages and telling anyone who might be reading who also uses a wheelchair not to book a night at the Red Lion Best Western in Salisbury. Suitably unimpressed we set about exploring those hostelries. We were hungry having skipped breakfast but of course the first decent place we found was a non-starter. There were two lads outside smoking, presumably members of staff, and they told us that the hot food kitchen was not open and to try the cafe just a few metres further on. The closed cafe just a few metres further on. Memories came flooding back of that trip to Prestatyn when we turned up at a pub in a place called Criccied on the one day of the year that they were not serving food. Running out of both ideas and drinking time we inevitably ended up in one of Brexit Wanker Tim Martin’s cheap booze dens known colloquially as Wetherspoons. The King’s Head is your bog standard spoons and we ate your bog standard burgers just to fill a gap.

The next pub was far more interesting. The Golden Mill is opposite the King’s Head, set back from the road across an aesthetically pleasing bridge which crosses the stream outside the pub. Inside it appears to lack character, looking like a fairly common garden variety sports bar with TV screens on every wall. It has high tables on the bottom level which I always find infuriating. This phenomenon is the absolute scourge of disabled people. Trying to transfer in to a chair three feet above my head height is the fastest way to end up in the local hospital so Emma and I end up trying to have a conversation at different heights like Jermain Defoe and Peter Crouch. Hearing each other becomes impossible.

The good news is that The Golden Mill has lower tables on the second level AND a fully functioning lift to that second level. This was a game changer for us so we could finally settle down with a drink. Despite its apparent lack of character The Golden Mill is noteworthy as one of the places visited by Sergei and Yulia Skripal before they fell ill as a result of the now infamous Novichok spy-poisoning affair in March 2018. There is still an argument raging about whether the Russian government was responsible for the attack. Well, I say argument. What I mean is that the UK government of dubious reliability claim to have proved that it almost certainly was the Russian government of equal if not greater dubious reliability, who for their part maintain that they had nothing to do with it. Their state-controlled media hardly referenced it before or since to the extent that a Russian newspaper claimed that 20% of respondents to an independent poll had heard nothing about it. The alleged perpetrators are officers in the old GRU, which is the English translation of the acronym for the Russian Intelligence Directorate. I learned this while watching an episode of brilliant-but-tacky ITV espionage drama The Americans a while back. It was a piece of knowledge that gave me a greater appreciation of the genius behind the makers of Despicable Me and it’s comedy villain.

Our next stop was just next door. The Bridge Tap is another pub which looks nice on the outside but is a plain old sports bar on the interior. If you are looking for somewhere to watch a sports event in Salisbury you are very much in luck. The Rugby Union World Cup is on at the moment so the Bridge Tap is hammering that in terms of advertising. They have a great big Guinness-sponsored rugby ball at the end of the bar to constantly remind you that you are only ever a day away from another kick-infested snooze-fest played out in front of bafflingly huge crowds. England rugby shirts are prevalent here to the extent that they probably call the barman ‘barkeep’ and hold their £50 notes folded between their fingers to attract his attention when they are thirsty in the several hours of down time during a rugby union game. The Bridge Tap also has a prize-winning pointless line in punnage, a red neon sign that says ‘Bridge It Bardot’. Geddit? I get it but I am still working on the reason someone thought it was funny or cool.

Last stop was City Hall for the gig. Just like the Best Western they had assured me over the phone that it was fully accessible. So you can imagine my cocktail of scepticism and anxiety as we trundled down there fuelled by a few pints of lubrication. Thankfully they were true to their word. All one level, no steps, accessible toilets. The only minus point was that they didn’t serve Guinness in the bar so I had to make an emergency switch to vodka and lemonade. I bought a book which I was reliably informed Dave would be signing copies of after the show. Actually there were several books available one of which was a collection of found poems (watch the show, these are a highlight), one was an account of his quest to meet as many other people called Dave Gorman as possible and then the one I bought which was an account of his trip round America in which he set out to buy products solely from independent retailers and avoid all the big chains.

I didn’t stay behind to queue for the photograph and the book signing. I’m not really one for photographs or queueing unless it’s Tommy Martyn or Justin Holbrook. Regardless, the book themes give you a further insight into the type of comedy Dave Gorman does, supported by Nick Doody who also worked on Modern Life Is Goodish. Doody himself was Goodish, peaking with the assertion that Donald Trump is ‘a sex offender who has been rolled in Wotsits’ but rather losing me when he took to his keyboard to sing a song about Batman. I’m not a superhero fan. Neither is Dave, who I will tell you denies that the title of the show - With Great PowerPoint Comes Great ResponsibilityPoint - has anything to do with Spider-Man. Where that phrase originates is one of the many things you will learn if you see the show because as we know I’m not allowed to reveal it here.

I’m not going to be that one knob-head.....

Friday 27 September 2019

The Accidental Thief

I accidentally stole a Twix today.

There’s a Tesco just up the road from where I work. I have mentioned it many times before. Usually in the context that accessing it using a wheelchair is on a par with trying to get into Mordor to destroy The Precious. The shop floor is below street level so if you are not a stairs person - and I most definitely am not a stairs person in the same way that Boris Johnson is most definitely not an integrity person - you have to use the small lift by the door. The problem is it frequently fails to work. I think the current record for its uselessness stands at around six months. Six months in which ‘it’s been reported’ was there go to mantra. For a long time I gave up and resorted to Bargain Booze a little further on. Dark times.

Currently, however, the lift at Tesco works. We are in the midst of a golden age in which it has been possible for a wheelchair user to access Tesco on Tithebarn Street every day for ooh….at least the last three months. What a time to be alive. I go there to buy my lunch, principally because I am too lazy to either make a sandwich the night before or to get up a little bit earlier to do it in the morning. And also because we don’t always have packets of Mini Cheddars in the house whereas Tesco seems to have an endless supply. I must be the only person buying them.

Today I needed to buy some drinks. We haven’t got any in the house until we get the shopping delivery. We are well past the point where either myself or Emma actually goes into a supermarket to do a proper shop. Smaller supermarkets are fine if you are just going in to buy your Mini Cheddars and accidentally steal the odd Twix, but the larger stores are infested with Other People and those awful self-service machines. And that after you have spent half your life looking for a disabled parking bay that is not occupied by a boy-racer who has stopped off before he goes dogging in Sherdley Park or a rich person who considers themselves too important to adhere to parking regulations. There are a disproportionate number of Jaguars, Mercedes and other types of what are known locally as ‘posh cars’ in disabled bays in my experience. Oh, by the way, those of you who read my last entry will be relieved to know that I have stopped haemorrhaging cash at parking meters with the long-awaited arrival of my blue badge! Hurrah, and all that. Except that officially and according to the blue badge admin bods I am only disabled until the end of January 2020 which is as long as they have proof of my receipt of Personal Independence Payment. PIP PIP. Presumably at the end of January the miracle will be on and I will have no business claiming disability benefit. Looking forward to that.

Since I needed drinks I thought I would buy a handy six-pack of Coke. Knowing that they are quite bulky I knew I would have problems carrying them along with my sandwich (standard smoked ham and cheddar), the mandatory Mini Cheddars and the soon-to-be-accidentally stolen Twix. I put the latter in my coat pocket. It has been raining pretty much all day in Liverpool so the big coat is a must, especially with tonight’s almost important playoff between Saints and Wigan to consider also.

The problem is that when I picked up all of the other items on my modest list I completely forgot to take the Twix out of my pocket. It was an extra large one too. The Twix, that is, not the pocket. None of your standard fare. It wasn’t until I got back to work and reached into my coat pocket for my staff badge which operates the security doors that lead towards the office, that I felt the Twix and remembered that I hadn’t paid for it. I was mortified. I felt like some latter day Oliver Twist. Had I noticed earlier I would have gone back into the store and apologised and paid for it. But I had made it all the way back to the office by then. The journey to Tesco from the office is not long but it involves the ascent of a ramp that is about as much fun as my job. Taking into account my level of knackered-ness (I will be having that kidney transplant within the next few months) and the woeful state of the weather I decided against going back. They have made it even more difficult anyway because during the process of demolishing the flyovers in the city centre that has caused all manner of disruption around the building they have installed what they think are accessible drop-downs to the pavements. What they are in reality is ramps leading up to the lip of the kerb, so you have to push up the little ramp and then have enough momentum to get over the lip. I would rather just bump up a kerb from a flat surface. Someone with lesser chair skills than I, and I believe such people exist, will end up on their arse on Primrose Hill. Which sounds like a Coming Of Age movie starring Tom Hanks. On Their Arse On Primrose Hill. Emma Thompson would definitely take a role.

So I didn’t go back. I ate the Twix with my lunch and it tasted all the sweeter for the fact that I had stuck it to the corporate Man. My guilt is real but is tempered by all the times I have been unable to access the store because of the broken lift. In addition I've heard it said that disabled people need to be watched carefully in shops because they steal things. Apparently we are buggers for putting items for which we have not paid under the cushions of our seats and casually floating out of the door. I have never, ever done this, but I feel like I am tarred with this brush anyway. And now, accidentally, I have contributed to the stereotype. Confirmed the lazy prejudice.

It was only a Twix, but I am slightly surprised that a corporate bully like Tesco can allow this to happen. I would have expected some sort of alarm to go off, possibly one that speaks in the style of other modern technology in lifts and so forth. It might say something like ‘staff member to main entrance, a biff has stolen a Twix’ which it could just repeat until the filthy cushion-hider has been apprehended. They are surely missing a trick but then again, given that they have only just figured out a way of getting wheelchair users into their store on a consistent basis it is expecting a bit much for them to have developed a security system which prevents us stealing extra large Twixes.