I woke up in ridiculous amounts of pain yesterday. Without pouring it on too much it was seriously unpleasant. But it did at least serve as a reminder of the kind of agony I was in when I landed at JFK airport in New York City on June 7 2014, which is where we left the story last time. How very helpful of my mysteriously damaged back to assist my writing in this way.
I'm still writhing around stupidly when we go to the customer service desk to speak to the people responsible for getting us from the airport to the hotel. We can't book transfers in the usual fashion. I have done it before, but I now consider myself too old and battered to suffer the indignity of climbing aboard an inaccessible coach like everyone else. Sometimes we just jump into an inaccessible taxi, a feat I am still just about capable of in my decaying state. However, on this occasion the hotel is too far away for that. It would be far too expensive. So back in February Emma booked an accessible vehicle with a company called Go Air Link. That's February. The February that is four months ago. How is it then that when she phones them to let them know we have landed they act like they have never heard of us or our booking? Not only was this booked four months ago, but at their request we also emailed to confirm this earlier this week. Yet still they are not very sure of themselves. To top it all they question the need for us to have confirmed it in the week, despite that being their request. Eventually they acknowledge our existence and our booking and agree to send a vehicle. Ten to fifteen minutes they say, which is about ten to fifteen minutes more than I can stand in my current condition but at least things are moving along now.
I'm stretching out my back in a position which probably looks absurd. Were I able to feel any embarrassment at this stage I would likely feel like Alan Partridge stretching out his hamstrings in his hotel room. Eventually I find a position that seems to help. Or is it the tablets finally kicking in? Unlikely, considering that I violently wretched them up a few minutes ago in another visit to the toilet. What you need when you are suffering excruciating back pain after a seven hour flight on a flying 10A is another visit from your hiatus hernia. Regular readers (or anyone who has had the misfortune to go out drinking with me) will know that on occasion this causes a violent gag reflex which leads to long spells of wretching. There's no vomit involved. It's like being sick without being sick. It's among the least enjoyable of my accumulating ailments.
Around twenty to twenty-five minutes later the help arrives. It's a black van. Give it a red flash and it could belong to BA Baracus. Except that obviously he wouldn't be anywhere near an airport, you crazy fool. The last time I saw a van like this was the morning we went to pick up one of the kids on the school run only to find that he had passed away that morning. Which might seem inappropriate for what is still a happy and exciting occasion but I just want to get there now so I don't question it. My back is starting to ease because of the stretching and things are looking up. On route to the Hilton Garden Inn on 48th Street and 8th Avenue our Guatemalan driver shows us a few of New York's sights, not all of which would immediately spring to mind if you thought about the city's major landmarks. Flushing Meadow where the US Open tennis championship is played. The largest cemetery I have ever seen. Michael Jordan's restaurant. Radio City Music Hall. 42nd Street. He advises us to eat on 9th Avenue between 44th and 48th street where he says there are nothing but restaurants and that they are more reasonably priced. I can believe that. You wouldn't expect Michael Jordan to sell you anything cheaply. We will soon learn that nobody in New York sells you anything cheaply.
The time difference between the UK and the eastern side of the United States means that we are effectively living this afternoon twice. It's still only around 4.00 in the afternoon when we head out onto the streets. The first port of call on any holiday, in any place with which we are unfamiliar, is the tourist information centre. Of course the Americans don't call it the tourist information centre. This is a nation that is currently referring to World Cup warm-up matches as the 'soccer send-off series'. So naturally they call the tourist information centre simply the visitors centre. And a simple title seems apt given it's simple minimalist layout. It's a huge place but it would be difficult to find a more unnecessary amount of space. Wigan, perhaps. All that can be found of note is the reception desk and a touch-screen guide to New York. That's a clever idea but it is also rather basic. There's three or four suggested places to eat and drink and the rest is information that you would only need if you had recently landed from Jupiter. The Statue of Liberty is here, did you know? Yes. And the Empire State Building. Revelatory. One thing on the touch-screen catches my eye. A pub on 6th Avenue is hosting Shakespeare plays performed by drunken people. Apparently they down shots of whatever lethal concoction is popular and then attempt to recite Hamlet or something. They'd never put up with it in Stratford but 'Drunken Shakespeare' sounds like something I'd like to see. There are passes available for the more famous attractions but after a brief discussion with the staff and a look at the prices versus paying individually for them we decide not to go that way. It's $180 for a pass which gets you into any six attractions but you have to do them on consecutive days. Individually they cost around $22-$29 and you can visit at your own convenience.
The visitors centre is on 7th Avenue on Times Square which is busy to say the least. As is well known many American cities have a block system of streets and avenues to help you avoid getting lost. It works very well to that end, but in Times Square you don't get very far very quickly. Every few yards you have to stop to cross the road at the pedestrian crossing where the street meets the avenue. The crossings work in basically the same way as ours except that drivers turning into the street you are crossing are not held up by a red light, and are instead trusted to stop as they make the turn to allow you to cross. This works most of the time but there is also a fair smattering of horn-honking and swearing going on as frustration builds on both sides. Just like pedestrians, drivers on Times Square can expect to crawl around New York at a very slow pace, despite the apparent haste.
We'd been warned in the Manchester hotel about the naked cowboy, but I wasn't prepared for the naked cowgirl. Shuffling among the huge throngs of people I catch her out of the corner of my eye. She's stood on the corner talking to some people about something I can't quite catch. To her right are Iron Man, Spider Man and Woody from Toy Story. On this corner you would be forgiven for thinking you had landed in Disney Land. Except for the naked cowgirl maybe. And maybe the mostly-naked, body-painted girls who also hang around seemingly doing not much of anything. But despite their glamour they are overshadowed by the shocking sight of the naked cowgirl. She's mature, to put it politely. If certain parts of her body go any further south then they will be in Disney Land after all. I don't look for long and I'm certainly not looking to have a chat. Instead I get across the road as quickly as possible, through the potholes and the cracks in the road surface, narrowly missing the legs of people who randomly stop in front of me.
We need a drink. There aren't that many options on 7th but in this searing heat and after half an hour mingling among these crowds we decide that Hard Rock Café is good enough. It's not good enough. Not really. Just like the Hard Rock Cafes in Los Angeles and Barcelona we have experienced there is nothing but inaccessible, high seating in the bar area at Hard Rock Café. If you want a smaller table then you have to have something to eat. But we don't want to eat. We just want to get a drink, consult the information we have and plan what to do for the rest of the afternoon and evening. The girl at the bar advises us that we cannot have a small table in the dining area unless we are dining, but that we can take the drinks back out into what she calls the lobby and find a seat there. Wearily we agree to this but go back to the lobby to find that there are no seats available. There are only around eight seats in there consisting of two small sofas wedged into a corner. It's another blatant misuse of space. And anyway all the seats are currently occupied by shouty people reporting to each other that they were like, and then he was like, and then she was like, and then they were like. It's a bad episode of Friends. More commonly known as an episode of Friends.
We go back to the bar to speak to someone else about getting a seat at a sensible height. One woman sees sense and allows us through to the dining area with our drinks. Yet within seconds of sitting down we are questioned again. A man comes over and informs us that he will be our server for the evening and he'll now take our food order. There isn't a food order, we say. We just want to get a drink and we've been through all of this once before. He's not sure. The idea of someone using a wheelchair wanting an accessible table is clearly quite confusing to him and he wanders off to consult one of his seniors. Finally he accepts that there will be no food order and no further moving of chairs but ten or fifteen minutes later he's back to offer us more drinks. Another controversy looms. There are free refills on drinks in this area and we are advised that will apply to us even if we do not eat. I find it hard to believe and sure enough our server questions it. He has to speak to the manager when we ask if the next lot of drinks are free. We would maybe not have ordered them if we had known they would not be free, and because we have been told that we can have them the manager agrees not to charge us. The server looks suitably miffed. We've broken two house rules in the space of a few minutes and it has completely disorientated him. We don't see him again. Presumably he has gone for a lie down.
I'd forego a free drink for some decent access. Is it too much to ask in 2014 to have a bar area at one of the largest bar chains in the world that has some lower, accessible seating? It would seem so. They have accessible toilets and lifts but no lower seating. I always find it puzzling when a public place has an accessible toilet but no access in other ways. It smacks of lip service to the accessibility laws. And as we were to discover, this problem is not limited to Hard Rock Café.
Back out on the road we head for Drunken Shakespeare. It's housed in a pub called Queens. I don't know where the Arms or the Head is. It's just Queens. It's a small pub but I can see one low and therefore accessible table placed in front of the big screen showing England's soccer send-off series match with Honduras. Promising. Now comes the disappointment. We ask about Drunken Shakespeare and the lady there enthuses about it at length as if she is trying to sell it to us. But of course she hasn't thought it through. It's upstairs, she tells us when we enquire about accessibility. She offers to get the staff to help lift me up the stairs but I decline. Like climbing on to coaches I'm passed all of that now. I don't trust people I don't know to do that and besides where would I then go to the toilet? Another toilet drama on this holiday is not required thank you very much although who knows, there might well be a disabled toilet upstairs. You have to comply with the law after all.
By now fatigue is beginning to set in so we decide to head back towards the hotel for a rest. The plan is to come out again for a late meal. We set off again on the packed streets, stopping regularly for a game of frogger at the crossings;
"Hey yo cruise control!" shouts a man stepping out in front of me. Before I can say 'who the fuck are you calling cruise control and what does that even mean?' I find myself taking his outstretched hand. I feel somehow at the time that it would be rude not to. Now, on reflection, I think I should have told him to shove his hand up his arse. Not only has he just referred to me as cruise control (and apart from anything else I am not on cruise control I am pushing my tripes off on some quite steep slopes in stifling heat) but he compounds his error with the following nugget;
"He's on cruise control and he's still got a chick!"
Emma's my chick. I'm sure she's flattered. I should probably be grateful that he has worked out that we are partners and that she is not just some care in the community worker. Even if I am greatly offended that my domestic arrangements seem to surprise him. He explains that he is collecting money so he can go on tour to Toronto, Canada. Why do Americans always feel the need to tell you what country they mean when they name a city? Toronto, Canada. London, England. Wales, England. Or something. He shoves a CD into my lap. He's signed it as if he is some kind of well known artist. It looks like some kind of gangsta crap. It becomes apparent that he wants me to make a donation to his tour fund. I'm suspicious that he is not going to Toronto, Canada at all and that he is just going to the pub with its high seating. There's an awkward moment when I fail to reach for any change to give to him and he makes a remark about how he accepts notes also. Still I don't feel compelled to donate. He's no Geldof, this fella;
"Does this mean I have to give you your CD back?" I ask almost rhetorically and before I have even finished the question he has snatched his CD back and is telling me to have a good day. He thanks me, for what I am not sure.
We're about half way back when Emma stops suddenly. She has noticed that the ruck sack on the back of my chair has been opened. Nothing has been taken out of it because I keep everything valuable to others elsewhere, but it's still a little unnerving. We can't figure out when it could have happened but she says it was definitely not open earlier when she was walking along just behind me. You've probably watched too much television if you think New York is really some kind of crime capital but at the same time it goes to show that you have to be careful here. We can only conclude that it must have happened at one of the many crowded corners where you have to stop to cross the street. Maybe it was the naked cowgirl trying to be opportunistic on a slow day.
Our evening meal is at McHales, a pub just a couple of blocks away which has both a disabled toilet and a crap ramp. Two men sit animatedly discussing ice hockey as they watch the Stanley Cup Finals between the Los Angeles Kings and their New York Rangers. In truly American style one leaves before the end, and soon after we take our leave at the end of a long, exhausting but kind of fun first day in the big apple.
Sunday, 22 June 2014
Friday, 20 June 2014
New York: The Journey
They've let me out of the country again.
I've just come back from New York. That's New York, New York. So good they named it twice. Either that or just because actually, like most things American, it just likes to shout about itself to you repeatedly until you bloody well listen. In any case and as we all know, I can't go to the paper shop next to the chippy without some kind of incident, so send me 3,000 miles across the Atlantic and you are guaranteed a story. What follows is as faithful an account of that story, the trouble, stupidity and the joy and wonder of it all as I can remember. Though I do have notes, obviously.
Inspired by Emma's prolific ability to Get Things Done I am something of a frequent flyer by now. I travelled a lot when I played basketball but now I'm actually opening my eyes and seeing the world. Rather than hotels and sports halls. Also, I'm sharing it with someone I love and choose to be with, rather than with a group of athletic types who all think I'm a loser and laugh out loud when I speak at team meetings. Enough of that. Let me get off the psychiatrists couch and get back to the point of this paragraph which is that having travelled a lot I have come to realise that one of the few things I dislike about holidaying are the unreasonably early starts. You all know how it is I'm sure. Your flight is at 10.00am say, but you are advised to get there three hours before that. Since the nearest airport that offers access to anywhere further away than Luton is in Manchester you have to get up a couple of hours before that if you are travelling there on the morning of the flight. Our flight to New York is at 9.50am on Saturday June 7 2014 so we take the decision to stay in one of the hotels near to the airport on Friday night. It's expensive but you can't take it with you and besides, that extra hour or two in bed and the opportunity to have some breakfast might be helpful before a seven-hour flight. Particularly with my experience of airports and airlines. Again, they don't let me down. Well they do, but you know what I mean.
The Crown Plaza isn't the monstrous skyscraper I had anticipated but it serves its purpose. Except that there is no disabled parking available when we get there on Friday afternoon. There are a few spaces, around eight, but of course they have all been taken already by a mixture of fat people and dyslexics. Luckily I am now well versed in the art of getting out of my car and into my wheelchair in a space no bigger than an aeroplane toilet (much more on which later) without scratching the Rolls Royce made entirely out of gold parked next to me. Once settled in we naturally head straight to the bar and the rest of the day passes without incident. It's enjoyable even. Even I would struggle to fail to enjoy an afternoon in a bar in the knowledge that I have 10 days in the Big Apple to look forward to. Were it possible, I might even get excited.
On our way back to the room I am stopped by a man I am struggling to recognise.
"Fancy seeing you here." he says cheerfully.
Fancy. I don't remember this man. This happens a lot. I've explained before how using a wheelchair makes you instantly recognisable, and if it doesn't then it at the very least makes people think they recognise you. There are people out there who think I wrote A Brief History Of Time. I use a wheelchair so it must have been me.
"Where are you flying to?" the man asks, unfazed by my discomfort and my yes-I-absolutely-know-who-you-are act. It's impossibly rude and embarrassing to ask someone who they are so I fake it with all I have. It might be my fault anyway. There's every chance that I do know him but I just cannot bring him to mind. Even now, two weeks later as I write, I have no idea;
"New York." I answer.
He smiles at this and enthusiastically advises me that I must see the naked cowboy who hangs around Times Square. We're staying in Times Square so there is a fair chance that the naked cowboy and I will run into each other. I don't fancy it. I wish I had known about this earlier. , I could have prepared at least. Perhaps gouged my eyes out. Perhaps not. I need another disability like the BBC need another panel show. My unrecognised friend goes on to tell me how he is about to visit Venice, and I mumble something about how I went there once and it was full of steps which my dad had to carry me up despite the fact that I was 11 years old. Why does everything come down to access with me? Oh yes, because there isn't any. There was even less than none in 1987. I haven't been back to Venice.
Things start well on Saturday morning. We are awoken at a more civilised 6.00am and enjoy a proper breakfast. The plan is to get the free bus from the hotel to the airport terminal and, after being told on Friday night that we might have to get a taxi we learn that the bus is accessible after all. The driver tells me this with great pride, as if he's telling me that he's just found out how to eradicate disease across the world. He hasn't, of course. He's come up with two metal planks that pass for a ramp. Somehow they get me on to the back of the mini bus and we're on our way.
We'd had some trouble checking in online yesterday, a fact we explain to the American Airlines staff when we arrive. They're very helpful. They check us in quickly, bumping us past the growing queue of tired children and their disinterested parents. They're falling over each other to help, asking if there is anything else they can do for us. If I had known then what I know now I would have written them a list. Before we are allowed to advance to the departure lounge and the next bar they ask the obligatory stupid security questions. Are you carrying any sharp objects? Any fireworks? A large bomb perhaps? A nuclear device? Even more pointlessly they take our word for it when we tell them that we are not carrying anything dangerous on to the plane and I am left wondering what the point of all that was. Is anyone going to say that yes they are carrying a set of knives and a detonating ruck sack on board?
Boarding the plane carries with it the usual embarrassment attached to being dragged backwards on an aisle chair but thankfully there is no repeat of last year's Rio Ferdinand episode. They have let me board the plane first for once which seems like the sensible and therefore least likely thing they could have done. However, I am alarmed by the size of this plane. When we went to Orlando and Las Vegas the planes were three times the size of this one. Essentially what I am now sat on is a flying 10A. I would not be at all surprised if it stopped at Dovecot. I'm in the middle of a row of three seats with Emma to my left nearest the window. To my right is a young man who seems to know some of the airline staff. He's talking to them quite matter-of-factly, not in that forced, awkward way that people who don't know each other ordinarily communicate. He has an ipad and throughout the flight he uses it to play some kind of inane war game. Every time I glance over he is pushing buttons in an attempt to virtually invade Poland. I have absolutely no room to move and I'm going to pay for it at some point.
The in-flight movie is The Monuments Men, a would-be comedy set during the second world war about stolen paintings or some such. It stars Matt Damon and Bill Murray and I remember seeing them promoting it on the Graham Norton Show a few weeks ago. Sadly, there were more laughs in that 10-minute interview than there are in the whole of the film. Perhaps it is not supposed to be funny. It is set during the second world war after all. If that is the case though, why does it have Bill Murray in it? For a character that dull they would have been better off casting Roy Hodgson or Andy Murray. My war-loving neighbour is not impressed. He never once looks up from his war game, let alone go to the trouble of putting on the headset. He likes his war a little more realistic, obviously.
Going to the toilet would not make the cut in a holiday story for most people. But the disabled are not most people. When the film finishes I have to go through the rigmarole. This is a seven-hour flight and people who go the toilet by the clock cannot just jump around in their seat with their hand between their legs in the manner of a small child when they need a wee. I put my attention light on reluctantly, feeling like the kid in class sticking up his hand and asking Miss if he can go to the toilet. My discomfort is only going to get worse from here. The stewards bring the aisle chair and after the mandatory backwards drag down the aisle they place me outside the toilet. I wait for them to push me into the toilet but they never do. I realise that they're somehow expecting me to stand up at this point and walk in to the toilet. I have to explain that the chances of that happening in this life aren't good to which they respond by wearily setting about the task of pushing the aisle chair into the minute crevice that qualifies for a door way. This is when we all realise.
The aisle chair does not fit into the toilet.
At first they try and force it in there anyway but it's not happening. Whichever angle they turn the aisle chair, however hard they push it, however many times they sigh and ask me again if I can stand, it's not going in. I'm going to wet myself, so I decide that a slightly better option is to ask if they have anything that I can pee in. I've peed in a pint glass before now which you may not want to think about if you are going to the pub this evening and you spot a wheelchair user who does not have the luxury of an accessible toilet. It's ugly but it is the only way I can see this working. I'm about three feet away from the actual toilet bowl and guess what ladies, it doesn't stretch that far. I know, I was as surprised as you are. I need a bottle, a glass, a fucking empty coke can, anything to pee in except my pants. But they don't have anything. In fact they look at me as if that suggestion is a good deal worse than the prospect of peeing in my pants. They would. They're not wearing my pants.
They take the door off the toilet.
I'm not kidding. They have to unscrew it in several different places which takes a while, but eventually they just pull the bloody thing down. I am so relieved that I don't really think about the fact that I now have no privacy in this desperate, door-less dunny. There are two people waiting to use the toilet behind me, one of whom is of course female. But I ignore all of this and go about my business. It's become an emergency. Mid-pee it dawns on me that the stewards are standing behind me with a curtain to protect my modesty. My dignity has flown away so fast that it will be in New York before me. When it is all over the drag back to my seat seems tame by comparison. I thank the stewards for their ingenuity, hopefully without a trace of sarcasm, and hastily stick my head into my kindle.
An hour before we land my pain becomes physical. The tiny seat I have has played havoc with my posture and the right side of my back has stiffened up considerably. By the time we land I am just desperate for the war-game man to stand up and just get off the plane so I can at least stretch the muscle out. Inside the terminal at JFK airport I pay another bathroom visit, keeping the door where it is this time, and I have to sit on the floor for several minutes to alleviate the pain. We try to pass through immigration but are dragged back because American Airlines have not advised us that we needed to fill in one of the blue forms. The ones which ask whether you have brought any fruit into the country. The last thing the Americans want is to run the risk of foreigners bringing their exploding apples into the USA. There's further confusion about the flight number because there is one for BA who are running the show and one for American Airlines who have provided the flying 10A. A staff member insists that we use the American Airlines number and only then can we finally progress to pick up our luggage. By this time I have never felt pain like it in my back. I'm literally writhing around in my chair, chucking down painkillers like polos. I think a nerve is trapped and I'm not sure it will free itself in time for us to enjoy our first afternoon and evening in New York.
Which would be a real shame because it has been such fun so far.
I've just come back from New York. That's New York, New York. So good they named it twice. Either that or just because actually, like most things American, it just likes to shout about itself to you repeatedly until you bloody well listen. In any case and as we all know, I can't go to the paper shop next to the chippy without some kind of incident, so send me 3,000 miles across the Atlantic and you are guaranteed a story. What follows is as faithful an account of that story, the trouble, stupidity and the joy and wonder of it all as I can remember. Though I do have notes, obviously.
Inspired by Emma's prolific ability to Get Things Done I am something of a frequent flyer by now. I travelled a lot when I played basketball but now I'm actually opening my eyes and seeing the world. Rather than hotels and sports halls. Also, I'm sharing it with someone I love and choose to be with, rather than with a group of athletic types who all think I'm a loser and laugh out loud when I speak at team meetings. Enough of that. Let me get off the psychiatrists couch and get back to the point of this paragraph which is that having travelled a lot I have come to realise that one of the few things I dislike about holidaying are the unreasonably early starts. You all know how it is I'm sure. Your flight is at 10.00am say, but you are advised to get there three hours before that. Since the nearest airport that offers access to anywhere further away than Luton is in Manchester you have to get up a couple of hours before that if you are travelling there on the morning of the flight. Our flight to New York is at 9.50am on Saturday June 7 2014 so we take the decision to stay in one of the hotels near to the airport on Friday night. It's expensive but you can't take it with you and besides, that extra hour or two in bed and the opportunity to have some breakfast might be helpful before a seven-hour flight. Particularly with my experience of airports and airlines. Again, they don't let me down. Well they do, but you know what I mean.
The Crown Plaza isn't the monstrous skyscraper I had anticipated but it serves its purpose. Except that there is no disabled parking available when we get there on Friday afternoon. There are a few spaces, around eight, but of course they have all been taken already by a mixture of fat people and dyslexics. Luckily I am now well versed in the art of getting out of my car and into my wheelchair in a space no bigger than an aeroplane toilet (much more on which later) without scratching the Rolls Royce made entirely out of gold parked next to me. Once settled in we naturally head straight to the bar and the rest of the day passes without incident. It's enjoyable even. Even I would struggle to fail to enjoy an afternoon in a bar in the knowledge that I have 10 days in the Big Apple to look forward to. Were it possible, I might even get excited.
On our way back to the room I am stopped by a man I am struggling to recognise.
"Fancy seeing you here." he says cheerfully.
Fancy. I don't remember this man. This happens a lot. I've explained before how using a wheelchair makes you instantly recognisable, and if it doesn't then it at the very least makes people think they recognise you. There are people out there who think I wrote A Brief History Of Time. I use a wheelchair so it must have been me.
"Where are you flying to?" the man asks, unfazed by my discomfort and my yes-I-absolutely-know-who-you-are act. It's impossibly rude and embarrassing to ask someone who they are so I fake it with all I have. It might be my fault anyway. There's every chance that I do know him but I just cannot bring him to mind. Even now, two weeks later as I write, I have no idea;
"New York." I answer.
He smiles at this and enthusiastically advises me that I must see the naked cowboy who hangs around Times Square. We're staying in Times Square so there is a fair chance that the naked cowboy and I will run into each other. I don't fancy it. I wish I had known about this earlier. , I could have prepared at least. Perhaps gouged my eyes out. Perhaps not. I need another disability like the BBC need another panel show. My unrecognised friend goes on to tell me how he is about to visit Venice, and I mumble something about how I went there once and it was full of steps which my dad had to carry me up despite the fact that I was 11 years old. Why does everything come down to access with me? Oh yes, because there isn't any. There was even less than none in 1987. I haven't been back to Venice.
Things start well on Saturday morning. We are awoken at a more civilised 6.00am and enjoy a proper breakfast. The plan is to get the free bus from the hotel to the airport terminal and, after being told on Friday night that we might have to get a taxi we learn that the bus is accessible after all. The driver tells me this with great pride, as if he's telling me that he's just found out how to eradicate disease across the world. He hasn't, of course. He's come up with two metal planks that pass for a ramp. Somehow they get me on to the back of the mini bus and we're on our way.
We'd had some trouble checking in online yesterday, a fact we explain to the American Airlines staff when we arrive. They're very helpful. They check us in quickly, bumping us past the growing queue of tired children and their disinterested parents. They're falling over each other to help, asking if there is anything else they can do for us. If I had known then what I know now I would have written them a list. Before we are allowed to advance to the departure lounge and the next bar they ask the obligatory stupid security questions. Are you carrying any sharp objects? Any fireworks? A large bomb perhaps? A nuclear device? Even more pointlessly they take our word for it when we tell them that we are not carrying anything dangerous on to the plane and I am left wondering what the point of all that was. Is anyone going to say that yes they are carrying a set of knives and a detonating ruck sack on board?
Boarding the plane carries with it the usual embarrassment attached to being dragged backwards on an aisle chair but thankfully there is no repeat of last year's Rio Ferdinand episode. They have let me board the plane first for once which seems like the sensible and therefore least likely thing they could have done. However, I am alarmed by the size of this plane. When we went to Orlando and Las Vegas the planes were three times the size of this one. Essentially what I am now sat on is a flying 10A. I would not be at all surprised if it stopped at Dovecot. I'm in the middle of a row of three seats with Emma to my left nearest the window. To my right is a young man who seems to know some of the airline staff. He's talking to them quite matter-of-factly, not in that forced, awkward way that people who don't know each other ordinarily communicate. He has an ipad and throughout the flight he uses it to play some kind of inane war game. Every time I glance over he is pushing buttons in an attempt to virtually invade Poland. I have absolutely no room to move and I'm going to pay for it at some point.
The in-flight movie is The Monuments Men, a would-be comedy set during the second world war about stolen paintings or some such. It stars Matt Damon and Bill Murray and I remember seeing them promoting it on the Graham Norton Show a few weeks ago. Sadly, there were more laughs in that 10-minute interview than there are in the whole of the film. Perhaps it is not supposed to be funny. It is set during the second world war after all. If that is the case though, why does it have Bill Murray in it? For a character that dull they would have been better off casting Roy Hodgson or Andy Murray. My war-loving neighbour is not impressed. He never once looks up from his war game, let alone go to the trouble of putting on the headset. He likes his war a little more realistic, obviously.
Going to the toilet would not make the cut in a holiday story for most people. But the disabled are not most people. When the film finishes I have to go through the rigmarole. This is a seven-hour flight and people who go the toilet by the clock cannot just jump around in their seat with their hand between their legs in the manner of a small child when they need a wee. I put my attention light on reluctantly, feeling like the kid in class sticking up his hand and asking Miss if he can go to the toilet. My discomfort is only going to get worse from here. The stewards bring the aisle chair and after the mandatory backwards drag down the aisle they place me outside the toilet. I wait for them to push me into the toilet but they never do. I realise that they're somehow expecting me to stand up at this point and walk in to the toilet. I have to explain that the chances of that happening in this life aren't good to which they respond by wearily setting about the task of pushing the aisle chair into the minute crevice that qualifies for a door way. This is when we all realise.
The aisle chair does not fit into the toilet.
At first they try and force it in there anyway but it's not happening. Whichever angle they turn the aisle chair, however hard they push it, however many times they sigh and ask me again if I can stand, it's not going in. I'm going to wet myself, so I decide that a slightly better option is to ask if they have anything that I can pee in. I've peed in a pint glass before now which you may not want to think about if you are going to the pub this evening and you spot a wheelchair user who does not have the luxury of an accessible toilet. It's ugly but it is the only way I can see this working. I'm about three feet away from the actual toilet bowl and guess what ladies, it doesn't stretch that far. I know, I was as surprised as you are. I need a bottle, a glass, a fucking empty coke can, anything to pee in except my pants. But they don't have anything. In fact they look at me as if that suggestion is a good deal worse than the prospect of peeing in my pants. They would. They're not wearing my pants.
They take the door off the toilet.
I'm not kidding. They have to unscrew it in several different places which takes a while, but eventually they just pull the bloody thing down. I am so relieved that I don't really think about the fact that I now have no privacy in this desperate, door-less dunny. There are two people waiting to use the toilet behind me, one of whom is of course female. But I ignore all of this and go about my business. It's become an emergency. Mid-pee it dawns on me that the stewards are standing behind me with a curtain to protect my modesty. My dignity has flown away so fast that it will be in New York before me. When it is all over the drag back to my seat seems tame by comparison. I thank the stewards for their ingenuity, hopefully without a trace of sarcasm, and hastily stick my head into my kindle.
An hour before we land my pain becomes physical. The tiny seat I have has played havoc with my posture and the right side of my back has stiffened up considerably. By the time we land I am just desperate for the war-game man to stand up and just get off the plane so I can at least stretch the muscle out. Inside the terminal at JFK airport I pay another bathroom visit, keeping the door where it is this time, and I have to sit on the floor for several minutes to alleviate the pain. We try to pass through immigration but are dragged back because American Airlines have not advised us that we needed to fill in one of the blue forms. The ones which ask whether you have brought any fruit into the country. The last thing the Americans want is to run the risk of foreigners bringing their exploding apples into the USA. There's further confusion about the flight number because there is one for BA who are running the show and one for American Airlines who have provided the flying 10A. A staff member insists that we use the American Airlines number and only then can we finally progress to pick up our luggage. By this time I have never felt pain like it in my back. I'm literally writhing around in my chair, chucking down painkillers like polos. I think a nerve is trapped and I'm not sure it will free itself in time for us to enjoy our first afternoon and evening in New York.
Which would be a real shame because it has been such fun so far.
Wednesday, 14 May 2014
The Gots And The Needs
Something a little lighter than last week's hospital visit perhaps. Or perhaps not for my wrath is rising and my poison pen is at the ready, hand twitching as I grip this metaphor and strangle it like QE2 euthanising pheasants.
One of my favourite childhood pastimes was collecting stickers. More specifically football stickers. There were slight variations. I remember a Return Of The Jedi related album and even one linked to the spew-inducing cheesefest that is the 1980 cinema version of Flash Gordon. Winged Brian Blessed and all. Yet these were minor interruptions. Football was the mainstay of all things Panini in my formative years, and I had every album from around 1979 to something like 1987. Some classic images remain and can still pop up in conversations with my friends even now. Aidrieonians goalkeeper Ernie McGarr's outrageous claim to be 25 years of age, Motherwell's Hugh Sproat's inexplicable moustache, and the early 80's Swansea squad insisting on being photographed in their stockinged feet. McGarr was 75 if he was a day, while the sight of Merseyside legends like Latchford, Toshack and Ray Kennedy in Swansea's white socks is an indelible one.
With the World Cup in Brazil fast approaching I, like any other sane sports fan, am getting far more excited than is advisable, particularly given my recent health worries. Should the miracle happen and Steven Gerrard volleys England to victory in the last minute of the final it is quite likely I will have one more, fatal, palpitation. Since the chances of this happening are pretty remote I can probably get away with saying that if it does happen it will all have been worth it. What else is there to live for once you have seen England win the World Cup in dramatic fashion?
Well the answer to that of course depends very much on whether you have completed your Panini sticker album. In my excitement I have decided to delve back into the world of nerdy collecting. It can never be the same, of course, but that is true of a great many things that we continue to do until we keel over and die. Some have suggested that collecting stickers is childish. That I obviously have too much money. Gary Barlow has too much money. I just have imagination and a liking for nostalgia. Besides what should I be spending my time and money on? Something more mature like tattoos? Sunbeds? The gym? Or should I be glued to Masterchef, hanging on the every word of the latest TV chef and food fascist telling me what I can and cannot eat? The kind of people who have labelled me childish are the kind of people who would declare a preference for either Team Edward or Team Jacob. Enough said.
Money isn't an issue quite yet, anyway. I haven't actually bought any stickers. The only ones I have came free with the album added to a few extra I acquired from a very kind work colleague. She bought her album for the kids. Right. I bought my album for the kids too. All I need now are the kids. Imagine my surprise when I realised that it takes at least nine months for those to arrive. By then the World Cup will be a distant memory, the sad-song montage of recently failed English penalty-takers a fading, sketchy memory. But I'll be able to refer to my album and see the unlucky men in more happier times, or at least more neutral times as they pose stoney-faced for their Panini mugshot. I've never filled an album but I confidently predict that my barren run is about to end. I won't be allowing the fact that only a limited number of shops stock the stickers, or the fact that I have just read that it will cost me at least £64 to complete the collection stand in my way. By the way, that figure is optimistic because it assumes you won't buy any stickers that you already have. Or twicers as we used to call them.
Twicers. In my childhood these were probably the most valuable currency. They were like hard drugs in Baltimore in an episode of The Wire. Except nobody came flying around the corner in a police car to beat us with baseball bats when we tried to swap them. Some lads would have piles and piles of twicers, hundreds upon hundreds of the things. I had a fair few myself and I have got one already this year, one Cristiano Ronaldo. That won't be worth anything in 10 years time if the gelled genius does a Maradona and single-handedly leads Portugal to glory, will it? The trade of twicers brought with it a familiar refrain as between you and your dealer you would work out which stickers were valuable to you and which you could ignore. You all remember it. He flicks slowly through his twicers one by one, showing you what is on offer and you start up....
"Got. Got. Got. Got. Got. Got. Got. Got. Need!". You'd scream the word 'need' like you were asking for oxygen rather than a small card with a sticky back with a picture of a footballer with a bad haircut on it. Doubtless you had prepared for this meeting by painstakingly writing down the numbers of all of the stickers you were missing so that you would be able to quickly decipher which were 'gots' and which were 'needs'. As your collection progressed you would get up to around 25 or 30 'gots' before you found a 'need', but was just a sign that you were heading in the right direction. That you were so nearly there. And yet despite several of these sticker summits I never quite got there.
This time. More than any other time. As the 1982 England World Cup squad once sang....
One of my favourite childhood pastimes was collecting stickers. More specifically football stickers. There were slight variations. I remember a Return Of The Jedi related album and even one linked to the spew-inducing cheesefest that is the 1980 cinema version of Flash Gordon. Winged Brian Blessed and all. Yet these were minor interruptions. Football was the mainstay of all things Panini in my formative years, and I had every album from around 1979 to something like 1987. Some classic images remain and can still pop up in conversations with my friends even now. Aidrieonians goalkeeper Ernie McGarr's outrageous claim to be 25 years of age, Motherwell's Hugh Sproat's inexplicable moustache, and the early 80's Swansea squad insisting on being photographed in their stockinged feet. McGarr was 75 if he was a day, while the sight of Merseyside legends like Latchford, Toshack and Ray Kennedy in Swansea's white socks is an indelible one.
With the World Cup in Brazil fast approaching I, like any other sane sports fan, am getting far more excited than is advisable, particularly given my recent health worries. Should the miracle happen and Steven Gerrard volleys England to victory in the last minute of the final it is quite likely I will have one more, fatal, palpitation. Since the chances of this happening are pretty remote I can probably get away with saying that if it does happen it will all have been worth it. What else is there to live for once you have seen England win the World Cup in dramatic fashion?
Well the answer to that of course depends very much on whether you have completed your Panini sticker album. In my excitement I have decided to delve back into the world of nerdy collecting. It can never be the same, of course, but that is true of a great many things that we continue to do until we keel over and die. Some have suggested that collecting stickers is childish. That I obviously have too much money. Gary Barlow has too much money. I just have imagination and a liking for nostalgia. Besides what should I be spending my time and money on? Something more mature like tattoos? Sunbeds? The gym? Or should I be glued to Masterchef, hanging on the every word of the latest TV chef and food fascist telling me what I can and cannot eat? The kind of people who have labelled me childish are the kind of people who would declare a preference for either Team Edward or Team Jacob. Enough said.
Money isn't an issue quite yet, anyway. I haven't actually bought any stickers. The only ones I have came free with the album added to a few extra I acquired from a very kind work colleague. She bought her album for the kids. Right. I bought my album for the kids too. All I need now are the kids. Imagine my surprise when I realised that it takes at least nine months for those to arrive. By then the World Cup will be a distant memory, the sad-song montage of recently failed English penalty-takers a fading, sketchy memory. But I'll be able to refer to my album and see the unlucky men in more happier times, or at least more neutral times as they pose stoney-faced for their Panini mugshot. I've never filled an album but I confidently predict that my barren run is about to end. I won't be allowing the fact that only a limited number of shops stock the stickers, or the fact that I have just read that it will cost me at least £64 to complete the collection stand in my way. By the way, that figure is optimistic because it assumes you won't buy any stickers that you already have. Or twicers as we used to call them.
Twicers. In my childhood these were probably the most valuable currency. They were like hard drugs in Baltimore in an episode of The Wire. Except nobody came flying around the corner in a police car to beat us with baseball bats when we tried to swap them. Some lads would have piles and piles of twicers, hundreds upon hundreds of the things. I had a fair few myself and I have got one already this year, one Cristiano Ronaldo. That won't be worth anything in 10 years time if the gelled genius does a Maradona and single-handedly leads Portugal to glory, will it? The trade of twicers brought with it a familiar refrain as between you and your dealer you would work out which stickers were valuable to you and which you could ignore. You all remember it. He flicks slowly through his twicers one by one, showing you what is on offer and you start up....
"Got. Got. Got. Got. Got. Got. Got. Got. Need!". You'd scream the word 'need' like you were asking for oxygen rather than a small card with a sticky back with a picture of a footballer with a bad haircut on it. Doubtless you had prepared for this meeting by painstakingly writing down the numbers of all of the stickers you were missing so that you would be able to quickly decipher which were 'gots' and which were 'needs'. As your collection progressed you would get up to around 25 or 30 'gots' before you found a 'need', but was just a sign that you were heading in the right direction. That you were so nearly there. And yet despite several of these sticker summits I never quite got there.
This time. More than any other time. As the 1982 England World Cup squad once sang....
Saturday, 10 May 2014
Use Your Infusion
Since this is a memoir, and the title would suggest it is, then it's occasionally necessary to record stuff that happens to me. Even if it is not funny or even if it is, frankly, a bit gloomy.
On that basis then I have to tell you that I had another encounter with my friends in the medical profession this past Wednesday. It is well documented on these pages how much I hated hospitals, how I was absolutely convinced that doctors and specialists considered us expendable and how, therefore, it was always imperative not to go anywhere near a hospital or even a doctor, nurse, porter or hospital chef unless it was absolutely necessary. That all changed last summer when it became absolutely necessary to go to hospital, and I miraculously spent a whole three days in the care of the NHS and didn't die. Maybe they are worth listening to, I thought.
So I agreed to resume consultations on the previously taboo subject of my waning kidney function. At my first consultation with my nephrologist Mr Khalil in December last year I was advised that I would require an iron infusion. Naively I believed this to be an injection, like a flu jab or something. However, during a visit to my GP recently I was informed that it is a slightly longer process than that, more similar to my experiences of last summer when all kinds of crap was pumped into me in a bid to get my potassium levels back down from the stratosphere. That worked pretty well, eventually, so all things considered I came to the conclusion that this iron infusion malarkey might be worth a go. Except it didn't happen after my first consultation with Mr Khalil. At my second in April he told me that this was because the blood tests I'd had in December showed that my haemoglobin levels were not low enough for anyone to be bothered sending for me. He said he would look into it again after the results of my April blood tests and would organise it if necessary.
If you have been keeping up with my neurosis via these pages you will not be surprised to learn that I was suitably outraged when I received the appointment letter at the end of April. It gave me just a week's notice before the scheduled infusion. Nine days, to be precise. Normally I need at least three months to psyche myself up for a hospital visit, particularly one involving actual treatment. More than that, it brought me down and unearthed my tenuously dormant negativity. The only sensible conclusion I could draw from receiving the appointment letter was that my haemoglobin levels had dropped dramatically according to my latest blood tests. I'm not even sure what the consequences of low levels of haemoglobin are but that didn't stop me from blindly panicking for the next hour about all kinds of possibilities. At best I was going to be at the hospital for hours on end getting assaulted by nurses, and at worst I was going to be kept in for six months on some kind of high dependency ward for people with low iron levels conjured straight from my imagination. This is quite clearly madness but when you have had stage four kidney disease for the last eight years and you have watched dozens of your friends and acquaintances pass on from conditions relating to their disabilities you get a whole new perspective on your mortality. I never thought about it before, but now I think about it every day. I'm thinking about it now but we'll leave it.
Fast forward nine days. My appointment is at the Royal Liverpool hospital. According to my appointment letter no other hospital in Merseyside can offer the kind of treatment I need, which added even further to my anxiety. I woke up on Wednesday morning, May 7, in a strange old state. My mind was clear and fine. I'd had enough time to rationalise the whole thing and knew for certain that I was just going for one little injection, and then a bit of a wait while the iron dripped into me. Then I'd be on my way. Tell that to my insides. My heart was inexplicably pounding in a manner reminiscent of the palpitations I suffered last July and August and my stomach was churning. I was nervy, on edge and quite categorically out of my mind. It's a shameful carry on when you consider what other people, people I know, have to go through at hospitals. But just because there is always someone worse off than you does not mean you are in control of your anxieties.
Parking the car was almost as much of an inconvenience as the appointment itself. I pulled up at an outdoor car park and was told that there was only one space remaining and that there was no disabled parking available. I would have to drive back up the hill and go around the block to the rear of the Q Park. The same Q Park I could see in front of me barely ten yards away. Nothing is ever that simple, is it? At least I was calm by now. I crossed the street and eventually found Ward 9B. As the name suggests it is on the 9th floor. The lifts are not easy to get into because they're not that big and everyone wants to use them at the same time. When I reached 9B I was struck by the smell. I don't know what it was but it smelled like death. Yet more unnerving was the fact that I had to pass some very ill people hooked up to all manner of machinery to get to the ward reception and introduce myself. I was sent to wait in a very modest waiting area with blue chairs. Everything is blue in 9B from the chairs to the signposting to the mood of the patients, myself included. Sitting opposite me a woman was waffling inanely into her mobile phone despite several signs requesting that you turn your mobile phone off while on the ward. The worst waiting area I have ever seen is topped off by the fact that nurses and cleaners wander back and forth around you completing their important but unsightly daily tasks. There's no segregation between you, the day patient, and the bleak realities of a nephrology ward.
When visiting the bathroom another awful memory was brought back in quite revolting circumstances. When I was first diagnosed with kidney disease they made me carry out this test in which I had to collect all of the urine I passed for a 24 hour period. This involved lugging a huge bottle around with me on my daily business, half-filled with my liquid waste. As I lock the door of the disabled toilet on 9B I notice that someone else has been asked to perform the same test. Except they have managed to leave their half-filled bottle on the toilet floor. Discarded. If they were not going to keep their sample to submit it could they not have at least poured it down the toilet? It was only two feet to the left of them, after all?
Fortunately I was not left to wait too long. Within five minutes or so I was called in by a very happy, smiley, enthusiastic nurse to a small room at the back of the ward. Her name was Fran and she asked me to transfer from my chair on to a recliner. I just about managed this but only because the arms on the recliner could be moved. Had they been fixed it would have been impossible. Quite how anyone with even greater mobility problems than me is expected to do this I don't know. It was quite a relaxing recliner though, I'll say that. Had I not been about to be prodded and poked and injected with all kinds I could easily have fallen asleep there. Fran and I had the inevitable conversation about my work, which was always going to happen given the nature of it. Pity I'm not allowed to tell you about it except to say that I'm CIA and what you are reading is classified. There were two other patients in the room having the same treatment, a stark reminder of how bleak the future might be. Mary, to my left, was positively yellow and although seemingly in good spirits, looked very poorly indeed. The man to my right looked even closer to the end, but he must have been somewhere in his mid 80's. He'd gone past yellow and was fast approaching green. It didn't stop him from shamelessly flirting with the nurses. Whatever gets you through it, I guess. Fran fiddled around pointlessly for a while but she managed to find a suitable vein first time around which at least spared me from the kind of butchering I received at Whiston last year. After that, all that was left to do was have my blood pressure checked regularly by a slightly more intimidating nurse. She thought that she knew me from somewhere, that my name was familiar. I hoped not but then as any wheelchair user knows, unwanted local celebrity is a symptom of your condition.
My blood pressure was too high again, so the nurse in charge came to speak to me about going along to a chemist to get it checked again in a few weeks. She advised me to speak to my GP if it remains high. 'A stitch in time' she said, adding that high blood pressure is one of the biggest causes of kidney deterioration. I lied and told her that I would do as she asked, but really all I wanted to do was get back in the car and drive home. At the end of the treatment I had to wait another 10 minutes to see if I had any reaction or allergy to it. Reassuringly, Fran told me that if a reaction is going to happen it would happen quickly so 10 minutes of hanging around would be more than enough. With no reaction forthcoming I thanked everyone for their help and left hastily. A member of hospital staff ushered me into a lift which was only supposed to be used for patients being transferred in their beds. He then got out of the lift leaving me to explain to several people why I was in the wrong lift. Fortunately nobody seemed to mind too much. Before I could escape to the street though there was one more reminder of the horror of hospitals as an elderly lady in a bed was pushed into the lift, looking like she might expire before the start of Eggheads. I sincerely hoped not.
Most people only require this treatment once so hopefully this particular process is not one that will be repeated. But on the way home I refuse to look that far ahead, thinking only of the fact that it is 30 days to my holiday in New York and that, all things being equal, I will not be summoned to a hospital appointment between now and then.
Some hope.
On that basis then I have to tell you that I had another encounter with my friends in the medical profession this past Wednesday. It is well documented on these pages how much I hated hospitals, how I was absolutely convinced that doctors and specialists considered us expendable and how, therefore, it was always imperative not to go anywhere near a hospital or even a doctor, nurse, porter or hospital chef unless it was absolutely necessary. That all changed last summer when it became absolutely necessary to go to hospital, and I miraculously spent a whole three days in the care of the NHS and didn't die. Maybe they are worth listening to, I thought.
So I agreed to resume consultations on the previously taboo subject of my waning kidney function. At my first consultation with my nephrologist Mr Khalil in December last year I was advised that I would require an iron infusion. Naively I believed this to be an injection, like a flu jab or something. However, during a visit to my GP recently I was informed that it is a slightly longer process than that, more similar to my experiences of last summer when all kinds of crap was pumped into me in a bid to get my potassium levels back down from the stratosphere. That worked pretty well, eventually, so all things considered I came to the conclusion that this iron infusion malarkey might be worth a go. Except it didn't happen after my first consultation with Mr Khalil. At my second in April he told me that this was because the blood tests I'd had in December showed that my haemoglobin levels were not low enough for anyone to be bothered sending for me. He said he would look into it again after the results of my April blood tests and would organise it if necessary.
If you have been keeping up with my neurosis via these pages you will not be surprised to learn that I was suitably outraged when I received the appointment letter at the end of April. It gave me just a week's notice before the scheduled infusion. Nine days, to be precise. Normally I need at least three months to psyche myself up for a hospital visit, particularly one involving actual treatment. More than that, it brought me down and unearthed my tenuously dormant negativity. The only sensible conclusion I could draw from receiving the appointment letter was that my haemoglobin levels had dropped dramatically according to my latest blood tests. I'm not even sure what the consequences of low levels of haemoglobin are but that didn't stop me from blindly panicking for the next hour about all kinds of possibilities. At best I was going to be at the hospital for hours on end getting assaulted by nurses, and at worst I was going to be kept in for six months on some kind of high dependency ward for people with low iron levels conjured straight from my imagination. This is quite clearly madness but when you have had stage four kidney disease for the last eight years and you have watched dozens of your friends and acquaintances pass on from conditions relating to their disabilities you get a whole new perspective on your mortality. I never thought about it before, but now I think about it every day. I'm thinking about it now but we'll leave it.
Fast forward nine days. My appointment is at the Royal Liverpool hospital. According to my appointment letter no other hospital in Merseyside can offer the kind of treatment I need, which added even further to my anxiety. I woke up on Wednesday morning, May 7, in a strange old state. My mind was clear and fine. I'd had enough time to rationalise the whole thing and knew for certain that I was just going for one little injection, and then a bit of a wait while the iron dripped into me. Then I'd be on my way. Tell that to my insides. My heart was inexplicably pounding in a manner reminiscent of the palpitations I suffered last July and August and my stomach was churning. I was nervy, on edge and quite categorically out of my mind. It's a shameful carry on when you consider what other people, people I know, have to go through at hospitals. But just because there is always someone worse off than you does not mean you are in control of your anxieties.
Parking the car was almost as much of an inconvenience as the appointment itself. I pulled up at an outdoor car park and was told that there was only one space remaining and that there was no disabled parking available. I would have to drive back up the hill and go around the block to the rear of the Q Park. The same Q Park I could see in front of me barely ten yards away. Nothing is ever that simple, is it? At least I was calm by now. I crossed the street and eventually found Ward 9B. As the name suggests it is on the 9th floor. The lifts are not easy to get into because they're not that big and everyone wants to use them at the same time. When I reached 9B I was struck by the smell. I don't know what it was but it smelled like death. Yet more unnerving was the fact that I had to pass some very ill people hooked up to all manner of machinery to get to the ward reception and introduce myself. I was sent to wait in a very modest waiting area with blue chairs. Everything is blue in 9B from the chairs to the signposting to the mood of the patients, myself included. Sitting opposite me a woman was waffling inanely into her mobile phone despite several signs requesting that you turn your mobile phone off while on the ward. The worst waiting area I have ever seen is topped off by the fact that nurses and cleaners wander back and forth around you completing their important but unsightly daily tasks. There's no segregation between you, the day patient, and the bleak realities of a nephrology ward.
When visiting the bathroom another awful memory was brought back in quite revolting circumstances. When I was first diagnosed with kidney disease they made me carry out this test in which I had to collect all of the urine I passed for a 24 hour period. This involved lugging a huge bottle around with me on my daily business, half-filled with my liquid waste. As I lock the door of the disabled toilet on 9B I notice that someone else has been asked to perform the same test. Except they have managed to leave their half-filled bottle on the toilet floor. Discarded. If they were not going to keep their sample to submit it could they not have at least poured it down the toilet? It was only two feet to the left of them, after all?
Fortunately I was not left to wait too long. Within five minutes or so I was called in by a very happy, smiley, enthusiastic nurse to a small room at the back of the ward. Her name was Fran and she asked me to transfer from my chair on to a recliner. I just about managed this but only because the arms on the recliner could be moved. Had they been fixed it would have been impossible. Quite how anyone with even greater mobility problems than me is expected to do this I don't know. It was quite a relaxing recliner though, I'll say that. Had I not been about to be prodded and poked and injected with all kinds I could easily have fallen asleep there. Fran and I had the inevitable conversation about my work, which was always going to happen given the nature of it. Pity I'm not allowed to tell you about it except to say that I'm CIA and what you are reading is classified. There were two other patients in the room having the same treatment, a stark reminder of how bleak the future might be. Mary, to my left, was positively yellow and although seemingly in good spirits, looked very poorly indeed. The man to my right looked even closer to the end, but he must have been somewhere in his mid 80's. He'd gone past yellow and was fast approaching green. It didn't stop him from shamelessly flirting with the nurses. Whatever gets you through it, I guess. Fran fiddled around pointlessly for a while but she managed to find a suitable vein first time around which at least spared me from the kind of butchering I received at Whiston last year. After that, all that was left to do was have my blood pressure checked regularly by a slightly more intimidating nurse. She thought that she knew me from somewhere, that my name was familiar. I hoped not but then as any wheelchair user knows, unwanted local celebrity is a symptom of your condition.
My blood pressure was too high again, so the nurse in charge came to speak to me about going along to a chemist to get it checked again in a few weeks. She advised me to speak to my GP if it remains high. 'A stitch in time' she said, adding that high blood pressure is one of the biggest causes of kidney deterioration. I lied and told her that I would do as she asked, but really all I wanted to do was get back in the car and drive home. At the end of the treatment I had to wait another 10 minutes to see if I had any reaction or allergy to it. Reassuringly, Fran told me that if a reaction is going to happen it would happen quickly so 10 minutes of hanging around would be more than enough. With no reaction forthcoming I thanked everyone for their help and left hastily. A member of hospital staff ushered me into a lift which was only supposed to be used for patients being transferred in their beds. He then got out of the lift leaving me to explain to several people why I was in the wrong lift. Fortunately nobody seemed to mind too much. Before I could escape to the street though there was one more reminder of the horror of hospitals as an elderly lady in a bed was pushed into the lift, looking like she might expire before the start of Eggheads. I sincerely hoped not.
Most people only require this treatment once so hopefully this particular process is not one that will be repeated. But on the way home I refuse to look that far ahead, thinking only of the fact that it is 30 days to my holiday in New York and that, all things being equal, I will not be summoned to a hospital appointment between now and then.
Some hope.
Monday, 5 May 2014
The Help
You may have already seen this one on Facebook. As soon as it happened I failed miserably to save it for the blog. I'd had a few beers at the time and so resisting the temptation to share it on Facebook was always going to be a big ask. So this one is for those of you who have me on Twitter and not Facebook. Curiously, that is pretty much everyone who follows me on Twitter. For some reason the people who see fit to befriend me on Facebook are a totally different set of people from those who follow me on Twitter. I don't really get that but we're not going to waste time and effort trying to figure it out. What I can tell you is that the only reason I didn't share it on Twitter is that I couldn't do it justice with 140 characters. It's a common problem and why I tweet very rarely except for links to nonsense like this and my work on redvee.net.
On Friday night I was out with a couple of my mates. Now that we're quite old nights out are genuinely uneventful and so not normally worth writing about. I could have written several novels on the events of nights out ten years or so ago. I didn't because firstly I am exceptionally lazy (as evidenced by the fact that this is the first entry in Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard since April 2, some 33 days ago) and secondly because what happens on a night out when you are young and foolish stays on a night out. You really, really wouldn't have wanted to know.
So we'd just watched the rugby (that's league, not union obviously) in the latest incarnation of The Market when we decided upon a change of scenery. Consensus was that we are now too uncool for the likes of Zoo Bar and Bar 44 (as if cool people go there) so we headed to The Sefton instead. It was my round, so I headed to the bar and ordered the drinks. There were only three of us. Three bottles of beer, then. After I had paid for the drinks and put my change away I picked up the first bottle from the bar and began to pass it over to where my two friends were sitting. Literally about three yards from the bar. We're all wheelchair users but still this was not a task which seemed beyond the realms. As I started to pass the beer a man offered me his help.
"I'll take that for you, mate." he said.
"Oh no, thanks mate. It's ok, I've got it." I replied.
He asked again. I declined again. Politely. Every bit as politely as I had the first time. I passed the other two beers over to my friends and we got on with the business of intoxication by alcohol. It must have been ten minutes later that the man who had offered to carry the drinks for me tapped me on the shoulder. For an awful moment I thought he was going to tell me about how he knew 'someone like me' (someone drunk, then?) or about how he works with 'people like us' (St.Helliners? rugby fans? What? Who do they mean?). He didn't say either of these things, but instead introduced me to a new way in which the general public can get their attitude to disability so staggeringly wrong.
"I just offered to help you with your drinks and you fucked me off." He complained. In no other world but his had I 'fucked him off'. I'd just politely told him that I could pass the drinks the short distance to my friends myself. Thanks very much. I promise you that this is the absolute truth. It's not that I'm incapable of being rude to able bodied people desperately trying to save me from my awful affliction. I've said some things to able bodied do-gooders that are right up there with the rudest things you can say to anyone. Once, on a rain-soaked night out in Liverpool I responded to a man's declaration that he had a brother 'just like me' by asking whether the brother in question was piss wet through. Sometimes I'm rude, impatient, obnoxious and a bit of an arsehole. But not on this occasion. I'd just said no thanks. I tried to explain this again to the man. No dice;
"You did, you spat on my help!" he announced. Another attempt on my behalf to deny not only rudeness but now the allegation that I had 'spat on' his help fell on deaf ears. No, not deaf ears. Stupid ears. He heard and understood what I had said alright, he just couldn't get his head around why anyone with a disability would want to refuse help and go to the trouble of passing their own beer to their mates. Then he hit me with a withering bombshell;
"Well that's it now. I'm not going to be offering my help to any disabled people, and that's because of you."
With a theatrical wave of his arm he stormed off before I could respond. I didn't mind that because he was embarrassing everyone and I really couldn't be arsed having the debate with him any further. But I must apologise to all my disabled brethren at this point. Never again will you receive the help of a half-cut, self righteous inspiration porn addict in the watering holes of St.Helens. I'm sure you will agree that this is a monumental loss to the disabled community on Merseyside. I'm not sure how we are going to cope, really. Until now, we have all been going out of our houses only on the basis that someone will help pass the beer or, in some cases, get us from A to B. I remember once pushing up the ramp at Thatto Heath train station when one of these help for the disabled crusaders actually put his hands on my back and began pushing me forwards to the summit. I was a good deal ruder to him on that occasion, and may possibly have taken a swing. If I put my hands on an able bodied person in such a manner, even if I claim I'm trying to help, I'm very likely to be prosecuted.
So now all that help we receive has gone, and it is all down to me. I can only again apologise and express my deep regret. Our lives may never be the same again....
On Friday night I was out with a couple of my mates. Now that we're quite old nights out are genuinely uneventful and so not normally worth writing about. I could have written several novels on the events of nights out ten years or so ago. I didn't because firstly I am exceptionally lazy (as evidenced by the fact that this is the first entry in Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard since April 2, some 33 days ago) and secondly because what happens on a night out when you are young and foolish stays on a night out. You really, really wouldn't have wanted to know.
So we'd just watched the rugby (that's league, not union obviously) in the latest incarnation of The Market when we decided upon a change of scenery. Consensus was that we are now too uncool for the likes of Zoo Bar and Bar 44 (as if cool people go there) so we headed to The Sefton instead. It was my round, so I headed to the bar and ordered the drinks. There were only three of us. Three bottles of beer, then. After I had paid for the drinks and put my change away I picked up the first bottle from the bar and began to pass it over to where my two friends were sitting. Literally about three yards from the bar. We're all wheelchair users but still this was not a task which seemed beyond the realms. As I started to pass the beer a man offered me his help.
"I'll take that for you, mate." he said.
"Oh no, thanks mate. It's ok, I've got it." I replied.
He asked again. I declined again. Politely. Every bit as politely as I had the first time. I passed the other two beers over to my friends and we got on with the business of intoxication by alcohol. It must have been ten minutes later that the man who had offered to carry the drinks for me tapped me on the shoulder. For an awful moment I thought he was going to tell me about how he knew 'someone like me' (someone drunk, then?) or about how he works with 'people like us' (St.Helliners? rugby fans? What? Who do they mean?). He didn't say either of these things, but instead introduced me to a new way in which the general public can get their attitude to disability so staggeringly wrong.
"I just offered to help you with your drinks and you fucked me off." He complained. In no other world but his had I 'fucked him off'. I'd just politely told him that I could pass the drinks the short distance to my friends myself. Thanks very much. I promise you that this is the absolute truth. It's not that I'm incapable of being rude to able bodied people desperately trying to save me from my awful affliction. I've said some things to able bodied do-gooders that are right up there with the rudest things you can say to anyone. Once, on a rain-soaked night out in Liverpool I responded to a man's declaration that he had a brother 'just like me' by asking whether the brother in question was piss wet through. Sometimes I'm rude, impatient, obnoxious and a bit of an arsehole. But not on this occasion. I'd just said no thanks. I tried to explain this again to the man. No dice;
"You did, you spat on my help!" he announced. Another attempt on my behalf to deny not only rudeness but now the allegation that I had 'spat on' his help fell on deaf ears. No, not deaf ears. Stupid ears. He heard and understood what I had said alright, he just couldn't get his head around why anyone with a disability would want to refuse help and go to the trouble of passing their own beer to their mates. Then he hit me with a withering bombshell;
"Well that's it now. I'm not going to be offering my help to any disabled people, and that's because of you."
With a theatrical wave of his arm he stormed off before I could respond. I didn't mind that because he was embarrassing everyone and I really couldn't be arsed having the debate with him any further. But I must apologise to all my disabled brethren at this point. Never again will you receive the help of a half-cut, self righteous inspiration porn addict in the watering holes of St.Helens. I'm sure you will agree that this is a monumental loss to the disabled community on Merseyside. I'm not sure how we are going to cope, really. Until now, we have all been going out of our houses only on the basis that someone will help pass the beer or, in some cases, get us from A to B. I remember once pushing up the ramp at Thatto Heath train station when one of these help for the disabled crusaders actually put his hands on my back and began pushing me forwards to the summit. I was a good deal ruder to him on that occasion, and may possibly have taken a swing. If I put my hands on an able bodied person in such a manner, even if I claim I'm trying to help, I'm very likely to be prosecuted.
So now all that help we receive has gone, and it is all down to me. I can only again apologise and express my deep regret. Our lives may never be the same again....
Wednesday, 2 April 2014
Card Chaos
The following really happened...
I was covering reception at work today. It's a shame I'm not allowed to tell you where I work but if you can just try and imagine what working at a reception desk for the day entails then you'll be able to follow me. It's a real shame that I can't tell you where I work actually because my employer does an awful lot of good work for charity which it doesn't like to talk about. It once saved an entire litter of puppies from drowning in a sack on its lunch break. When the sun comes out on summer days my employer is responsible. It's a real shame I am not allowed to tell you where I work.
All was quiet in the morning until around 11.30 when everything started to go distinctly boobs upwards. Suddenly the reception area was swarming with people asking questions and wanting this, that and can you effing believe it, the other. I had to go into the room next door to reception which I can only access using my staff card. My staff card that is made of gold and sings a joyful ditty at you compliments of my employer. It's a shame I'm not allowed to tell you where I work. I reached into the bag under my chair where I keep my wallet. No wallet. It could only be in one of two places. The toilet, or the room next door to reception where I needed to be, but where I couldn't get to without my staff card which was inside the aforementioned wallet.
After a brief flap during which I thought only of how I was going to have to cancel all of my cards and how I was going to have absolutely no means of buying any dinner I went back into the office to borrow a staff card from a colleague. I was still fairly hopeful that I would find my own staff card in the filing room next to reception. I explained that I had lost mine without going into painful detail about the whole sorry scenario and my colleague kindly agreed to lend me her staff card. She even asked if I wanted to keep it on the lanyard which goes around the neck to keep it safe. But I didn't. I'd just lost one card and I was 100% certain I wasn't going to lose another. Despite my assurances the last thing my colleague said to me before I left the office again was 'don't lose my card'. I wouldn't. As if.
You're probably ahead of me here. I went back into the filing room where fortune smiled upon me in the case of my own staff card. I found my wallet resting on the top of a box of filing. Opened but untouched. I put it away and found what I was looking for the people in reception who were still waiting for me to stop having a dithering nightmare. I put my colleague's card 'safely' in my lap. My lap which has reduced sensation due to something called a disability which I temporarily forget about from time to time. As I pushed back towards reception the thought crossed my mind that I should take my colleague's card back to her. It was a passing thought which I moronically ignored. I was perfectly capable of handing out the items to the waiting people and then taking the card back to my colleague. Except I wasn't. With still at least 398 of the 400 people who were waiting for me to get my sorry shit together I reached down to my lap to pick up the card and take it back. Not there. It must have fallen off my lap while I was moving back into the reception area from the room next door.
By this time it was time for another of my colleagues to come and take over reception for my lunch break. We spent the next 10 minutes looking for the missing staff card to no avail. I was wasting everyone's time and no small amount of oxygen in my floundering attempts to resolve this Keystone Cops situation. I had even been to the bathroom to see if it had slipped down into the depths of my chair somewhere, or even my person. This has happened before. I have found items under my cushion, stuck to my arse, and in all manner of other ludicrous places before now. Onen day last week I left a shoe outside my house and had to drive all the way back home, whereupon I discovered it had been moved to my doorstep by my cousin, who just happened to be dropping her kids off at my auntie's house because they were off school that day. It took some time to get into the bathroom to properly check if I had somehow managed to lose the card in any of these ways because when I opened the toilet door there was a girl there, sat on the toilet with her pants around her ankles. She apologised!! Well, she should have locked the door of the disabled toilet that she should never have been in in the first place, to be fair. I was so pre-occupied by the whole lost card scenario that I barely noticed her holiest of holies winking at me in any case. I just noncholantly shut the door as if the whole affair had never taken place.
Finally I had to admit defeat and went in to deliver the comically bad news to my colleague. Just on the off chance I asked her whether anyone had brought her card back into the office. They had. It turns out another colleague had been passing by and noticed the offending card on the floor in the reception area. Without telling me she had just picked it up and given it back to its rightful owner. I'm used to feeling like an idiot but this was taking it to a whole new level. My colleague had saved my bacon but not let me in on the plot. Well, my colleague would save my bacon because I work for an employer which once averted a full scale nuclear war between the world's leading superpowers before sauntering off out to break the world record for the 200metre dash.
It's such a shame I'm not allowed to tell you who I work for.
I was covering reception at work today. It's a shame I'm not allowed to tell you where I work but if you can just try and imagine what working at a reception desk for the day entails then you'll be able to follow me. It's a real shame that I can't tell you where I work actually because my employer does an awful lot of good work for charity which it doesn't like to talk about. It once saved an entire litter of puppies from drowning in a sack on its lunch break. When the sun comes out on summer days my employer is responsible. It's a real shame I am not allowed to tell you where I work.
All was quiet in the morning until around 11.30 when everything started to go distinctly boobs upwards. Suddenly the reception area was swarming with people asking questions and wanting this, that and can you effing believe it, the other. I had to go into the room next door to reception which I can only access using my staff card. My staff card that is made of gold and sings a joyful ditty at you compliments of my employer. It's a shame I'm not allowed to tell you where I work. I reached into the bag under my chair where I keep my wallet. No wallet. It could only be in one of two places. The toilet, or the room next door to reception where I needed to be, but where I couldn't get to without my staff card which was inside the aforementioned wallet.
After a brief flap during which I thought only of how I was going to have to cancel all of my cards and how I was going to have absolutely no means of buying any dinner I went back into the office to borrow a staff card from a colleague. I was still fairly hopeful that I would find my own staff card in the filing room next to reception. I explained that I had lost mine without going into painful detail about the whole sorry scenario and my colleague kindly agreed to lend me her staff card. She even asked if I wanted to keep it on the lanyard which goes around the neck to keep it safe. But I didn't. I'd just lost one card and I was 100% certain I wasn't going to lose another. Despite my assurances the last thing my colleague said to me before I left the office again was 'don't lose my card'. I wouldn't. As if.
You're probably ahead of me here. I went back into the filing room where fortune smiled upon me in the case of my own staff card. I found my wallet resting on the top of a box of filing. Opened but untouched. I put it away and found what I was looking for the people in reception who were still waiting for me to stop having a dithering nightmare. I put my colleague's card 'safely' in my lap. My lap which has reduced sensation due to something called a disability which I temporarily forget about from time to time. As I pushed back towards reception the thought crossed my mind that I should take my colleague's card back to her. It was a passing thought which I moronically ignored. I was perfectly capable of handing out the items to the waiting people and then taking the card back to my colleague. Except I wasn't. With still at least 398 of the 400 people who were waiting for me to get my sorry shit together I reached down to my lap to pick up the card and take it back. Not there. It must have fallen off my lap while I was moving back into the reception area from the room next door.
By this time it was time for another of my colleagues to come and take over reception for my lunch break. We spent the next 10 minutes looking for the missing staff card to no avail. I was wasting everyone's time and no small amount of oxygen in my floundering attempts to resolve this Keystone Cops situation. I had even been to the bathroom to see if it had slipped down into the depths of my chair somewhere, or even my person. This has happened before. I have found items under my cushion, stuck to my arse, and in all manner of other ludicrous places before now. Onen day last week I left a shoe outside my house and had to drive all the way back home, whereupon I discovered it had been moved to my doorstep by my cousin, who just happened to be dropping her kids off at my auntie's house because they were off school that day. It took some time to get into the bathroom to properly check if I had somehow managed to lose the card in any of these ways because when I opened the toilet door there was a girl there, sat on the toilet with her pants around her ankles. She apologised!! Well, she should have locked the door of the disabled toilet that she should never have been in in the first place, to be fair. I was so pre-occupied by the whole lost card scenario that I barely noticed her holiest of holies winking at me in any case. I just noncholantly shut the door as if the whole affair had never taken place.
Finally I had to admit defeat and went in to deliver the comically bad news to my colleague. Just on the off chance I asked her whether anyone had brought her card back into the office. They had. It turns out another colleague had been passing by and noticed the offending card on the floor in the reception area. Without telling me she had just picked it up and given it back to its rightful owner. I'm used to feeling like an idiot but this was taking it to a whole new level. My colleague had saved my bacon but not let me in on the plot. Well, my colleague would save my bacon because I work for an employer which once averted a full scale nuclear war between the world's leading superpowers before sauntering off out to break the world record for the 200metre dash.
It's such a shame I'm not allowed to tell you who I work for.
Sunday, 16 March 2014
Leicester - Day Two
On day one of our visit to Leicester I defied my natural aversion to science lessons to visit the National Space Centre. It was a great decision as it turned out. The National Space Centre is entertaining, informative and, to all but most stubborn of bible thumping fantasists, persuasive. Day two is the encore. For my next trick I am going to meet my disdain for the monarchy head on and visit the Richard III exhibition.
I hate the monarchy. Not the individuals within it, obviously. I don't know any of them, although I did meet Princess Anne when I was about seven. I remember complaining about having to go to school that day. A photograph still exists somewhere of me and a group of my friends waiting around for the dubious honour of a handshake or the exchange of a few words with the Queen's horse-faced daughter. To describe the look on my face in that photograph as unimpressed or apathetic would be playing it down a little too much. I was seconds from either throwing rotten fruit or slipping silently into a boredom-induced coma. I can't even remember why the school were taking us to meet her. Possibly because, this being the 80's and the education of disabled people being fairly low on the agenda, they thought it would be something nice for us to do while the 'normal' children carried on learning their times-tables. They were wrong. The very idea that someone can be given all those riches and privileges just because they have been born into a certain family is repugnant. I believe in equality, not deference.
The history of the monarchy is of far greater interest. In years gone by the kings and queens of the day had real power. They had to fight, quite literally, to hold on to that power. All of which was a bit too much for some of them and they ended up either succumbing to madness or traipsing around Britain psychotically beheading anyone who didn't agree with them. Power corrupted well before Mr Blair came along. You can't condone this sort of behaviour but it is more interesting than the waving and er...more waving favoured by this current crop of unchallenged, buck-toothed parasites. Avoiding the pointless debates with royalists about whether or not they generate or cost money in modern Britain, the most compelling reason for getting rid of the whole lot of them is that basically, they don't do anything. They're like the reality tv stars we're all so obsessed with nowadays. Sitting there doing absolutely rock all while the idiot nation hangs on every bit of that nothingness, discussing it with their friends in lieu of any real life of their own to talk about.
But as I say that has not always been the case, and it certainly was not for Richard III. Old Richard was the last English king to be killed in battle on British soil. And it just so happens that the scene of his slaying was the Battle of Bosworth in Leicestershire. In 2012 archaeologists were arsing around at a car park in the city hoping to find bits of an old church choir and cloister. They wanted to piece together the artefacts they would find to give them an idea of what the friary in the city would look like. In turn this would tell them more about how the friars would have lived. While doing so they stumbled across what they thought was the remains of the last Plantagenet king. Our man Richard. The Richard III exhibition recounts the story of their find, and their subsequent quest to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it was Richard buried there under that car park.
It also tries to shed more light on Richard's character. There are some who would brand him a ruthless, child-killing tyrant. A total bastard made of piss. He came to the throne in 1483 after the death of his brother, Edward IV. Within a suspiciously short period of time thereafter Edward's two sons (and therefore the only two humans ahead of Richard in the queue to be Edward's successor) were whisked away and locked into the tower. Richard claimed that both were illegitimate in any case, making him the true heir. Some say he had them both killed to avoid any doubt as to who should take the crown. Others deny this tale, painting Richard as no more villainous as the next psychotic bully with designs on the throne. No angel, but never capable of slaughtering his two young nephews to further his career. An audio feature at the exhibition presents the two sides of this argument in greater detail and probably does so more efficiently than I just have.
This being Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard we are always looking for a disabled angle. Brilliantly, we have one in the fact that Richard suffered from scoliosis, which is a curvature of the spine. It was this curvature which first led the archaeologists to believe that the skeleton they found underneath that Leicester car park could be that of the former king. It was already well known that he was a scoliosis sufferer. That's right, Richard III was a biff. Of sorts. The most powerful man in England between 1483 and 1485 was a disabled person. What do you think about that, you able bodied shitclown? And not only him, but also the ill-fated early 90's grungemeister Kurt Cobain had scoliosis too. And most startlingly of all, world-record-breaking fastest man in history Usain Bolt too. Finally, after all my years of drum-banging for the disabled we have inherited the Earth. Not before time. If we must continue with the monarchy we should probably sack the Queen right now and move Hannah Cockcroft into her place. Fuck that. I don't even like Hannah Cockcroft, but you get my point.
Richard was a man who never let his scoliosis get in the way of a good dust-up. As we know he died in battle, and at the exhibition you can read about some of the gruesome details of his violent ending. He was doinked on the head with a sharp blade numerous times, causing severe brain trauma. For the nutjobs among you who it is also said that a blind beggar woman had predicted that Richard, having bumped his spur on crossing the bridge on his way out to battle, would bump his head in exactly the same place on the way back in. And that he did exactly that, though it would have been hard for him to take care not to on the way back since he was very definitely an ex-person at that point. If it is true then the blind beggar was a wise woman. There are two things you need to know about the wise woman. First, she is wise. And second, she is a woman....
Yet it is the wounds that Richard suffered after his death which are the most wince-inducing. When the skeleton was found it was without any feet but worse than that, there was evidence that he had sustained a 'humiliation wound'. In short, someone stabbed him in the anus. When the body went on display after his death to convince the doubters that the king was dead it was also important to someone to graphically demonstrate just how dead he was. Tsk, those 15th century japesters....For those of that kind of persuasion there is a digitally interactive impression of the skeleton in the exhibition where you can push buttons, touch panels and fiddle with knobs to reveal more about the king's ruined, rotted form.
After a leisurely amble around the Jewry Museum in the afternoon it was time to explore more of Leicester's social delights. We settled for Bella Italia in the end but before we got there I was collared by a lagered-up half-wit just desperate for his fix of inspiration porn. Scott just can't resist coming over to tell me that he thinks that those people in the Winter Paralympics are fantastic for just 'having a go'. I have no patience with this sort of thing but I tried my best to explain to him that they weren't doing it to 'have a go' and that it was the bloody Paralympics. You don't just sign up for it or get a go because you have won a viewers' competition on the Alan Titchmarsh Show. But try as I might I couldn't get him to understand the idea that these athletes train and compete constantly to a professional standard, and are not just coming together for a few days for another misleading Channel 4 documentary on disability.
To his credit Scott could sense my irritation at this point, even through his alcoholic fug. But rather than just leave us alone and get on his way he decided instead to re-direct his focus from inspiration porn to piss poor comedy banter. When I told him that I come from St.Helens he came out with a line that is so old that even the archaeologists who dug up Richard III wouldn't be able to find its remains;
"I went there once, and it was shut" he chortled.
"Yeah. We knew you were coming." I answered with as much pompous disdain as I could muster.
Several glasses of red wine later I was all but burned out. Lenny Henry had blatantly lied to me again about the quality of sleep you can expect to get at the Premier Inn. Lenny Henry is a liar and Tiswas was shit anyway.
We retreated to Room 101 to prove him wrong again.
I hate the monarchy. Not the individuals within it, obviously. I don't know any of them, although I did meet Princess Anne when I was about seven. I remember complaining about having to go to school that day. A photograph still exists somewhere of me and a group of my friends waiting around for the dubious honour of a handshake or the exchange of a few words with the Queen's horse-faced daughter. To describe the look on my face in that photograph as unimpressed or apathetic would be playing it down a little too much. I was seconds from either throwing rotten fruit or slipping silently into a boredom-induced coma. I can't even remember why the school were taking us to meet her. Possibly because, this being the 80's and the education of disabled people being fairly low on the agenda, they thought it would be something nice for us to do while the 'normal' children carried on learning their times-tables. They were wrong. The very idea that someone can be given all those riches and privileges just because they have been born into a certain family is repugnant. I believe in equality, not deference.
The history of the monarchy is of far greater interest. In years gone by the kings and queens of the day had real power. They had to fight, quite literally, to hold on to that power. All of which was a bit too much for some of them and they ended up either succumbing to madness or traipsing around Britain psychotically beheading anyone who didn't agree with them. Power corrupted well before Mr Blair came along. You can't condone this sort of behaviour but it is more interesting than the waving and er...more waving favoured by this current crop of unchallenged, buck-toothed parasites. Avoiding the pointless debates with royalists about whether or not they generate or cost money in modern Britain, the most compelling reason for getting rid of the whole lot of them is that basically, they don't do anything. They're like the reality tv stars we're all so obsessed with nowadays. Sitting there doing absolutely rock all while the idiot nation hangs on every bit of that nothingness, discussing it with their friends in lieu of any real life of their own to talk about.
But as I say that has not always been the case, and it certainly was not for Richard III. Old Richard was the last English king to be killed in battle on British soil. And it just so happens that the scene of his slaying was the Battle of Bosworth in Leicestershire. In 2012 archaeologists were arsing around at a car park in the city hoping to find bits of an old church choir and cloister. They wanted to piece together the artefacts they would find to give them an idea of what the friary in the city would look like. In turn this would tell them more about how the friars would have lived. While doing so they stumbled across what they thought was the remains of the last Plantagenet king. Our man Richard. The Richard III exhibition recounts the story of their find, and their subsequent quest to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it was Richard buried there under that car park.
It also tries to shed more light on Richard's character. There are some who would brand him a ruthless, child-killing tyrant. A total bastard made of piss. He came to the throne in 1483 after the death of his brother, Edward IV. Within a suspiciously short period of time thereafter Edward's two sons (and therefore the only two humans ahead of Richard in the queue to be Edward's successor) were whisked away and locked into the tower. Richard claimed that both were illegitimate in any case, making him the true heir. Some say he had them both killed to avoid any doubt as to who should take the crown. Others deny this tale, painting Richard as no more villainous as the next psychotic bully with designs on the throne. No angel, but never capable of slaughtering his two young nephews to further his career. An audio feature at the exhibition presents the two sides of this argument in greater detail and probably does so more efficiently than I just have.
This being Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard we are always looking for a disabled angle. Brilliantly, we have one in the fact that Richard suffered from scoliosis, which is a curvature of the spine. It was this curvature which first led the archaeologists to believe that the skeleton they found underneath that Leicester car park could be that of the former king. It was already well known that he was a scoliosis sufferer. That's right, Richard III was a biff. Of sorts. The most powerful man in England between 1483 and 1485 was a disabled person. What do you think about that, you able bodied shitclown? And not only him, but also the ill-fated early 90's grungemeister Kurt Cobain had scoliosis too. And most startlingly of all, world-record-breaking fastest man in history Usain Bolt too. Finally, after all my years of drum-banging for the disabled we have inherited the Earth. Not before time. If we must continue with the monarchy we should probably sack the Queen right now and move Hannah Cockcroft into her place. Fuck that. I don't even like Hannah Cockcroft, but you get my point.
Richard was a man who never let his scoliosis get in the way of a good dust-up. As we know he died in battle, and at the exhibition you can read about some of the gruesome details of his violent ending. He was doinked on the head with a sharp blade numerous times, causing severe brain trauma. For the nutjobs among you who it is also said that a blind beggar woman had predicted that Richard, having bumped his spur on crossing the bridge on his way out to battle, would bump his head in exactly the same place on the way back in. And that he did exactly that, though it would have been hard for him to take care not to on the way back since he was very definitely an ex-person at that point. If it is true then the blind beggar was a wise woman. There are two things you need to know about the wise woman. First, she is wise. And second, she is a woman....
Yet it is the wounds that Richard suffered after his death which are the most wince-inducing. When the skeleton was found it was without any feet but worse than that, there was evidence that he had sustained a 'humiliation wound'. In short, someone stabbed him in the anus. When the body went on display after his death to convince the doubters that the king was dead it was also important to someone to graphically demonstrate just how dead he was. Tsk, those 15th century japesters....For those of that kind of persuasion there is a digitally interactive impression of the skeleton in the exhibition where you can push buttons, touch panels and fiddle with knobs to reveal more about the king's ruined, rotted form.
After a leisurely amble around the Jewry Museum in the afternoon it was time to explore more of Leicester's social delights. We settled for Bella Italia in the end but before we got there I was collared by a lagered-up half-wit just desperate for his fix of inspiration porn. Scott just can't resist coming over to tell me that he thinks that those people in the Winter Paralympics are fantastic for just 'having a go'. I have no patience with this sort of thing but I tried my best to explain to him that they weren't doing it to 'have a go' and that it was the bloody Paralympics. You don't just sign up for it or get a go because you have won a viewers' competition on the Alan Titchmarsh Show. But try as I might I couldn't get him to understand the idea that these athletes train and compete constantly to a professional standard, and are not just coming together for a few days for another misleading Channel 4 documentary on disability.
To his credit Scott could sense my irritation at this point, even through his alcoholic fug. But rather than just leave us alone and get on his way he decided instead to re-direct his focus from inspiration porn to piss poor comedy banter. When I told him that I come from St.Helens he came out with a line that is so old that even the archaeologists who dug up Richard III wouldn't be able to find its remains;
"I went there once, and it was shut" he chortled.
"Yeah. We knew you were coming." I answered with as much pompous disdain as I could muster.
Several glasses of red wine later I was all but burned out. Lenny Henry had blatantly lied to me again about the quality of sleep you can expect to get at the Premier Inn. Lenny Henry is a liar and Tiswas was shit anyway.
We retreated to Room 101 to prove him wrong again.
Tuesday, 11 March 2014
Leicester - Day One
I got an 'E' in GCSE Science. Probably not the 'E' for effort that is often joked about, but more for Enormous apathy. I didn't care. I didn't like my science teacher, nor the school they made me go to in order to have science lessons. To me a bunson burner is a cricket pitch conducive to spin bowling, and there is nothing I care less about in this world than how to tell the difference between Earth and Live and whatever else it is.
And yet my decision to visit Leicester this past weekend contradicts all of that. It came about though idly googling cities that Emma and I haven't been to and the attractions they might offer. That's how I stumbled upon the National Space Centre. Who even knew we had a National Space Centre? I have been to the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, details of which can be found somewhere in the bowels of these pages. Do pages have bowels? Especially pages that aren't pages at all but are electronic screens? Anyway, I remember what a fascinating and awe inspiring experience this was, even for a science-dodging luddite like myself. With the Richard III exhibition also located in Leicester that was that, we were going. More on Richard in the next part, or at least his 500 year-old skeleton recently dug up from a Leicester car park. Let's get back to the National Space Centre for now.
The building is shaped like an enormous beehive. It's set back from the surrounding roads which have exciting sounding names like Exploration Drive and Discovery Road. We arrive about lunchtime on Saturday. We couldn't go on Friday night because Saints were playing and well....it's Saints and we've paid for it anyway and we can always take Monday off and.... So we did exactly that. It being lunchtime the first thing we do is eat. This decision is also influenced by the fact that the cafe is the first place you hit when you go through the entrance. The entrance to the exhibits is a little further along. All of which means once you are in among the exhibits you cannot then use the lift to gain access to the canteen from another floor if you get a touch thirsty at any point. You have to go all the way back through to the lift on the opposite side of the building and then back through the gate on the ground floor. Which frankly is a little silly but I am supposing they are worried about people grabbing a sandwich before taking the lift to the upstairs exhibits and cutting out the inconvenience of having to pay for their visit. On which subject, you can expect to pay £13 per adult to visit the centre, and £11 for concessions of which I am one. Everything is accessible except the space travel simulator but that's probably a pretty big deal. Big enough to knock off a few quid from the admission price.
The most interesting thing about the cafe is the model rockets which hang from the ceiling. They probably don't hang. They're much too heavy for that but from my position at a table on the other side of the room I can't actually see what is holding them up. Something big and strong like Simon Cowell's ego perhaps. Below one of these rockets is a table at the centre of which is a red button. Most adults can barely reist the temptation to press buttons despite not knowing what they do, so you can imagine how often the children at the centre poke their tiny, tampering fingers in its direction. When they do they get a set of scienc-ey instructions which are indecipherable to me and a countdown, all delivered in a Transatlantic drawl. But that isn't the fun of it. The fun of it is the fake smoke which then descends from the rear of the rocket. Kids line up to stand underneath the rocket in order to get overwhelmed by the fume fakery. It's all a bit like a 70's episode of Top Of The Pops. Except nobody will get arrested as a consequence. Hopefully. As gimmicks go at least you can say it is fairly original, though the sight of young children violently swatting the smoke away from in front of their faces does make me wonder how much they have enjoyed the experience. Apparently enough to do it again. And again. And again.
Once you are inside you had better be prepared for a lot of reading. I read everything but, being a luddite with the attention span of a recently concussed goldfish, I find it hard to hold that information inside my brain for more than a couple of hours or so. The video and audio exhibits leave a longer-lasting impression on me. One section speculates, through a variety of talking heads and written quotes, about how the universe will end. An eight-year-old boy is quoted as saying that the universe will end when someone eats all the Galaxies. It's as good a theory as any. Certainly better than any piffle about horseman of the fecking apocalypse. And what kind of a universe would it be without Galaxies anyway? Would you want to live in it? In another clip clever-arsed film director Woody Allen can't come up with a thesis for the possible end of the universe, and instead questions people who would want to 'know' the universe in any case.
'I can't even find my way around Chinatown' he muses.
But if you want a real visual and audio experience at the National Space Centre then head for the Sir Patrick Mower Planetarium. You have go when they tell you but it is worth a look. By which I mean that when we pay our entrance fees we are informed that we have been booked in for the 1.50pm screening of 'We Are Aliens'. Well, you might be aliens. I'm definitely from Thatto Heath. If I were a superior being I'd probably find a better way to get around than an NHS wheelchair. Now, normally when I go to a theatre or a cinema or something of that nature I like to bail out of said NHS wheelchair and transfer on to a seat. The Sir Patrick Mower Planetarium is not the place to do this, for me anyway. I'm not the tallest, and when my backside hits the cinema-style seating I sink into it and can't see anything except for the back of the seat immediately in front of me. The screen surrounds you so this might not have been such a problem, but I do like to be able to see what is directly in front of me. Besides I look like Kermit The Frog's nephew Robin sitting on the Iron Throne. I get back into my chair.
I remember wondering why they had chosen Rupert Grint to narrate the film. For those of you who have been living alone on a remote island for the last decade or so Grint is most famous for his role at blathering idiot Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter films. I can't see the connection. Harry Potter films are about wizards and magic, not space travel. Space travel is not magic, it's science. Although as we know I got an 'E' in science so what do I know? For 25 minutes or so Grint speculates about the possibility of life on other planets or even in other solar systems with the help of some distinctly cartoon-like graphics. He concludes that Mars is the place that scientists are 'most excited about' because there used to be a lot of water there. I'm not so sure. There's water in Wigan but I'm not sure you'll find any signs of civilised societies.
Some five hours after arriving at the National Space Centre we head back to the Premier Inn, where we have booked to stay for two nights. We are assigned Room 101 which, for people as ignorant as I am pompous, is not only a mediocre panel show hosted by Frank Skinner but also the room containing all of the Hellish nightmares in Winston's mind in George Orwell's 1984. Only we could be burdened with such an omen. Thankfully there seems relatively few fears within the walls and no sign of the four R's I would select should Frank ever be kind enough to ask me on to his show. Religion. Royalty. Rugby Union. Rihanna. That just about completes my list. Neat and tidy. No need to use words starting with any other letter.
Having been told on arrival that the town centre was 20 minutes walk away we are pleased to find that it is more like 10, and within just a few minutes we have found a trusty old Wetherspoons. While we eat and enjoy the first alcoholic beverages of the evening I still can't refrain from getting annoyed. First by two Scottish men arguing in very strong accents so that you couldn't understand the problem, and then by a bunch of girls taking 'selfies'. I hate selfies. I hate the word 'selfies'. Curse me for polluting my column with such a vile word. Selfies are the ultimate expression of narcissim. Can you really not wait that long for someone to take your photograph? I hate having my photo taken anyway. Taking a selfie for me would seem like poking both of my eyes out and then skinning myself alive. With a potato peeler. I don't like selfies.
Later on in another bar when things get really tipsy there is a girl dancing to a Katy B song. She's doing that generic arm-dancing that girls with no rhythm do. She hasn't moved her feet at all. Again, why would you want to dance when you are shit at it? She's no Katy B. She's Katy Z, at best. We peruse a few more watering holes before calling it quits in preparation for our Richard III themed exploration tomorrow.
But I fucking hate royalty, don't I?
And yet my decision to visit Leicester this past weekend contradicts all of that. It came about though idly googling cities that Emma and I haven't been to and the attractions they might offer. That's how I stumbled upon the National Space Centre. Who even knew we had a National Space Centre? I have been to the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, details of which can be found somewhere in the bowels of these pages. Do pages have bowels? Especially pages that aren't pages at all but are electronic screens? Anyway, I remember what a fascinating and awe inspiring experience this was, even for a science-dodging luddite like myself. With the Richard III exhibition also located in Leicester that was that, we were going. More on Richard in the next part, or at least his 500 year-old skeleton recently dug up from a Leicester car park. Let's get back to the National Space Centre for now.
The building is shaped like an enormous beehive. It's set back from the surrounding roads which have exciting sounding names like Exploration Drive and Discovery Road. We arrive about lunchtime on Saturday. We couldn't go on Friday night because Saints were playing and well....it's Saints and we've paid for it anyway and we can always take Monday off and.... So we did exactly that. It being lunchtime the first thing we do is eat. This decision is also influenced by the fact that the cafe is the first place you hit when you go through the entrance. The entrance to the exhibits is a little further along. All of which means once you are in among the exhibits you cannot then use the lift to gain access to the canteen from another floor if you get a touch thirsty at any point. You have to go all the way back through to the lift on the opposite side of the building and then back through the gate on the ground floor. Which frankly is a little silly but I am supposing they are worried about people grabbing a sandwich before taking the lift to the upstairs exhibits and cutting out the inconvenience of having to pay for their visit. On which subject, you can expect to pay £13 per adult to visit the centre, and £11 for concessions of which I am one. Everything is accessible except the space travel simulator but that's probably a pretty big deal. Big enough to knock off a few quid from the admission price.
The most interesting thing about the cafe is the model rockets which hang from the ceiling. They probably don't hang. They're much too heavy for that but from my position at a table on the other side of the room I can't actually see what is holding them up. Something big and strong like Simon Cowell's ego perhaps. Below one of these rockets is a table at the centre of which is a red button. Most adults can barely reist the temptation to press buttons despite not knowing what they do, so you can imagine how often the children at the centre poke their tiny, tampering fingers in its direction. When they do they get a set of scienc-ey instructions which are indecipherable to me and a countdown, all delivered in a Transatlantic drawl. But that isn't the fun of it. The fun of it is the fake smoke which then descends from the rear of the rocket. Kids line up to stand underneath the rocket in order to get overwhelmed by the fume fakery. It's all a bit like a 70's episode of Top Of The Pops. Except nobody will get arrested as a consequence. Hopefully. As gimmicks go at least you can say it is fairly original, though the sight of young children violently swatting the smoke away from in front of their faces does make me wonder how much they have enjoyed the experience. Apparently enough to do it again. And again. And again.
Once you are inside you had better be prepared for a lot of reading. I read everything but, being a luddite with the attention span of a recently concussed goldfish, I find it hard to hold that information inside my brain for more than a couple of hours or so. The video and audio exhibits leave a longer-lasting impression on me. One section speculates, through a variety of talking heads and written quotes, about how the universe will end. An eight-year-old boy is quoted as saying that the universe will end when someone eats all the Galaxies. It's as good a theory as any. Certainly better than any piffle about horseman of the fecking apocalypse. And what kind of a universe would it be without Galaxies anyway? Would you want to live in it? In another clip clever-arsed film director Woody Allen can't come up with a thesis for the possible end of the universe, and instead questions people who would want to 'know' the universe in any case.
'I can't even find my way around Chinatown' he muses.
But if you want a real visual and audio experience at the National Space Centre then head for the Sir Patrick Mower Planetarium. You have go when they tell you but it is worth a look. By which I mean that when we pay our entrance fees we are informed that we have been booked in for the 1.50pm screening of 'We Are Aliens'. Well, you might be aliens. I'm definitely from Thatto Heath. If I were a superior being I'd probably find a better way to get around than an NHS wheelchair. Now, normally when I go to a theatre or a cinema or something of that nature I like to bail out of said NHS wheelchair and transfer on to a seat. The Sir Patrick Mower Planetarium is not the place to do this, for me anyway. I'm not the tallest, and when my backside hits the cinema-style seating I sink into it and can't see anything except for the back of the seat immediately in front of me. The screen surrounds you so this might not have been such a problem, but I do like to be able to see what is directly in front of me. Besides I look like Kermit The Frog's nephew Robin sitting on the Iron Throne. I get back into my chair.
I remember wondering why they had chosen Rupert Grint to narrate the film. For those of you who have been living alone on a remote island for the last decade or so Grint is most famous for his role at blathering idiot Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter films. I can't see the connection. Harry Potter films are about wizards and magic, not space travel. Space travel is not magic, it's science. Although as we know I got an 'E' in science so what do I know? For 25 minutes or so Grint speculates about the possibility of life on other planets or even in other solar systems with the help of some distinctly cartoon-like graphics. He concludes that Mars is the place that scientists are 'most excited about' because there used to be a lot of water there. I'm not so sure. There's water in Wigan but I'm not sure you'll find any signs of civilised societies.
Some five hours after arriving at the National Space Centre we head back to the Premier Inn, where we have booked to stay for two nights. We are assigned Room 101 which, for people as ignorant as I am pompous, is not only a mediocre panel show hosted by Frank Skinner but also the room containing all of the Hellish nightmares in Winston's mind in George Orwell's 1984. Only we could be burdened with such an omen. Thankfully there seems relatively few fears within the walls and no sign of the four R's I would select should Frank ever be kind enough to ask me on to his show. Religion. Royalty. Rugby Union. Rihanna. That just about completes my list. Neat and tidy. No need to use words starting with any other letter.
Having been told on arrival that the town centre was 20 minutes walk away we are pleased to find that it is more like 10, and within just a few minutes we have found a trusty old Wetherspoons. While we eat and enjoy the first alcoholic beverages of the evening I still can't refrain from getting annoyed. First by two Scottish men arguing in very strong accents so that you couldn't understand the problem, and then by a bunch of girls taking 'selfies'. I hate selfies. I hate the word 'selfies'. Curse me for polluting my column with such a vile word. Selfies are the ultimate expression of narcissim. Can you really not wait that long for someone to take your photograph? I hate having my photo taken anyway. Taking a selfie for me would seem like poking both of my eyes out and then skinning myself alive. With a potato peeler. I don't like selfies.
Later on in another bar when things get really tipsy there is a girl dancing to a Katy B song. She's doing that generic arm-dancing that girls with no rhythm do. She hasn't moved her feet at all. Again, why would you want to dance when you are shit at it? She's no Katy B. She's Katy Z, at best. We peruse a few more watering holes before calling it quits in preparation for our Richard III themed exploration tomorrow.
But I fucking hate royalty, don't I?
Saturday, 1 March 2014
Thatcher Day, Electronic Skeletons And The Lockout
I signed a petition the other day. I don't normally sign petitions. Ordinarily my Olympic sized apathy concerning everything and everyone prevents me from bothering. That and my award-winning laziness. Admittedly signing an online petition does not involve getting off the couch and missing the end of Pointless, but it invariably involves having to read a long winded message about what it is they want you to sign and why. I just can't be arsed.
I usually treat the petitions I come across as just another of the many annoyances plastered all over social media. On which subject, don't you just get fucking mad with rage and hell fire about people posting pictures of various forms of physical abuse on Facebook and Twitter? Don't be posting disturbing images on my timeline unless you are going to actively do something about stopping the abuse. Don't just leave it there like a dirty bomb while you fuck off back to watching Towie and eating bacon butties. What are you trying to prove? That you disapprove of cruelty to children and animals? Don't we all. Your position is not revolutionary. All right thinking people disapprove of cruelty to children and animals. The only people who don't are either psychotic and should be removed from your friends list and arrested immediately, or have beans for brains. You are not going to be considered some kind of modern, independent free-thinker by contaminating cyberspace with pictures of malnourished dogs or tortured children. But you might get 583 'likes' which if you are honest, is what it is really all about. Cut it out, as my mum used to tell me.
Back to petitions. This one was different. This was a petition to try to stop the August Bank Holiday being named after Margaret Thatcher. No, really. Some delusional Tory, specifically Peter Bone MP, is sufficiently unaware of the depth of hatred of Thatcher in many quarters to have seriously suggested dedicating an otherwise pleasurable late summer holiday to her. This displays a staggering level of ignorance at best and arrogance at worst. Even if, like old Bonehead, you are one of those Greed-Is-Good turdwits who liked Thatcher because you did very well out of her premiership thank you very much, how is it possible to not understand that at the very least she polarises opinion across the country to extreme levels? There hasn't been a more divisive figure in British history. Where I live, Joanna Dennehy would get more votes in an election than Thatcher. If you're going to name a Bank Holiday after her you might aswell go the whole hog and rename Christmas after Mussolini.
I'm happy to report that I am one of 124,000 people who felt moved to put my name to the petition to stop this and that we have been successful. Bone's bill was due to be heard on February 28 but it was one of over 30 due to be discussed that day. They never got round to it. Well, it was Friday afternoon and most MP's are asleep by then. You would like to think that those who remained awake would, had it got that far, been aware enough of what is going on around them in the country they claim to represent to laugh the idea out of the house. Knowing what we know about our politicians that is far from certain, but at least they had the wherewithal to prioritise the afternoon's agenda in such a way that this turgid idea will now never get off the ground. Had it done so I might well have felt compelled to boycott that Bank Holiday, preferring instead to sit outside my place of employment banging on the door until they let me in. I'm not celebrating anything in her name except maybe the fact that she is no longer running this country. It would have been a moral dilemma of the worst kind though. Celebrate Margaret Thatcher Day or lose your August Bank Holiday because of the evil old witch? Thankfully I'll probably never have to decide.
I was having a conversation with a friend and colleague yesterday about some kind of research into therapy for people who have become paralysed. You know the kind of stuff Christopher Reeve was into before he sadly shuffled off the proverbial coil? It transpires that some crazy boffins somewhere are trying to develop some kind of electronically powered skeleton suit or whatever the hell it might be to try and trick the brains of the paralysed into making their affected bits move. Can you tell I wasn't listening all that well and that I haven't really done much research into this since? Why should I when you can get significantly more 'likes' on Facebook by posting a photograph of a dying puppy than you can from trying to write something accurate and informative? Anyway, at first I scoffed at this in a way that only I can. I'm a champion scoffer, as we know. I saw it as an attempt by the able bodied to rid themselves of the shame of having disabled people living among them. I'm not that bothered about walking and I see the task of making things accessible for me as the duty of a civilised society. It is not incumbent upon me to find ways to start walking, surely?
Having given a bit more thought to the question of whether I would like to eliminate my disability I now accept that yes I probably would. But not by simply moving my legs. Getting my disobedient limbs to comply is not going to eliminate the worst things about disability. If research of this kind can find a way to give me control of my bladder and my bowels so that I may not have to use implements which make me more susceptible to infection and the subsequent organ damage I have suffered then that's worthwhile. Of course, you can't go back in time so no amount of research could reverse my kidney damage. But in theory I would support that idea for future generations. Provided the shamed, socially inept teen mothers of the modern generation haven't aborted us all out of existence by then. Genuine results from this research are so far away that they won't affect me in any case, so I'll hold out and request only that people start showing a little more respect for disabled people and treat them as equals. That would cost an awful lot less than an electronic skeleton, I would imagine.
Before I leave you for another prolonged period of introspection (which mostly involves reading through old columns and squirming at their pomposity) I can't neglect to mention that the lock on my front door is broken. Emma went out to the shops this morning and when she got back she couldn't get in to the house. Her key turned but the door wouldn't budge. I tried to unlock it from the inside but had the same problem. The lock turned, but the door jammed. I had to go through to the back door to let her in, which sounds simple but such is the amount of junk now stored in our house it actually meant that I had to bail out of my chair and crawl on the conservatory floor in order to get to the back door. I looked like Leonardo Di Caprio in that awful, offensive cerebral palsy scene from the vastly over-rated Wolf Of Wall Street. Although I concede I was not nearly as good looking as Leo. Anyway, If only I had an electronic skeleton type suit thingy I could have walked there. By about 7.30 on Tuesday. On route, I had to move an enormous blue basket-shaped contraption which I'm told helps dry clothes. I don't go into the back room of our house that often but every time I do it seems like another new attraction has been added. Like they do in Disney Land from time to time. The upshot of all this is that we now have to get a locksmith out to attend to it, and since they are cheaper in the week than they are at the weekend it's going to have to wait till Monday. To compound things, this happens only a year away form a complete overhaul of the way the house is laid out and when we will therefore need an entirely new front door. With classic Emma-and-Stephen luck on our side, what is the betting that we will have to buy a new front door now aswell?
Fortunately, Emma has been good enough to plot an escape route for me past the blue, basket-shaped clothes-drying contraption.
I usually treat the petitions I come across as just another of the many annoyances plastered all over social media. On which subject, don't you just get fucking mad with rage and hell fire about people posting pictures of various forms of physical abuse on Facebook and Twitter? Don't be posting disturbing images on my timeline unless you are going to actively do something about stopping the abuse. Don't just leave it there like a dirty bomb while you fuck off back to watching Towie and eating bacon butties. What are you trying to prove? That you disapprove of cruelty to children and animals? Don't we all. Your position is not revolutionary. All right thinking people disapprove of cruelty to children and animals. The only people who don't are either psychotic and should be removed from your friends list and arrested immediately, or have beans for brains. You are not going to be considered some kind of modern, independent free-thinker by contaminating cyberspace with pictures of malnourished dogs or tortured children. But you might get 583 'likes' which if you are honest, is what it is really all about. Cut it out, as my mum used to tell me.
Back to petitions. This one was different. This was a petition to try to stop the August Bank Holiday being named after Margaret Thatcher. No, really. Some delusional Tory, specifically Peter Bone MP, is sufficiently unaware of the depth of hatred of Thatcher in many quarters to have seriously suggested dedicating an otherwise pleasurable late summer holiday to her. This displays a staggering level of ignorance at best and arrogance at worst. Even if, like old Bonehead, you are one of those Greed-Is-Good turdwits who liked Thatcher because you did very well out of her premiership thank you very much, how is it possible to not understand that at the very least she polarises opinion across the country to extreme levels? There hasn't been a more divisive figure in British history. Where I live, Joanna Dennehy would get more votes in an election than Thatcher. If you're going to name a Bank Holiday after her you might aswell go the whole hog and rename Christmas after Mussolini.
I'm happy to report that I am one of 124,000 people who felt moved to put my name to the petition to stop this and that we have been successful. Bone's bill was due to be heard on February 28 but it was one of over 30 due to be discussed that day. They never got round to it. Well, it was Friday afternoon and most MP's are asleep by then. You would like to think that those who remained awake would, had it got that far, been aware enough of what is going on around them in the country they claim to represent to laugh the idea out of the house. Knowing what we know about our politicians that is far from certain, but at least they had the wherewithal to prioritise the afternoon's agenda in such a way that this turgid idea will now never get off the ground. Had it done so I might well have felt compelled to boycott that Bank Holiday, preferring instead to sit outside my place of employment banging on the door until they let me in. I'm not celebrating anything in her name except maybe the fact that she is no longer running this country. It would have been a moral dilemma of the worst kind though. Celebrate Margaret Thatcher Day or lose your August Bank Holiday because of the evil old witch? Thankfully I'll probably never have to decide.
I was having a conversation with a friend and colleague yesterday about some kind of research into therapy for people who have become paralysed. You know the kind of stuff Christopher Reeve was into before he sadly shuffled off the proverbial coil? It transpires that some crazy boffins somewhere are trying to develop some kind of electronically powered skeleton suit or whatever the hell it might be to try and trick the brains of the paralysed into making their affected bits move. Can you tell I wasn't listening all that well and that I haven't really done much research into this since? Why should I when you can get significantly more 'likes' on Facebook by posting a photograph of a dying puppy than you can from trying to write something accurate and informative? Anyway, at first I scoffed at this in a way that only I can. I'm a champion scoffer, as we know. I saw it as an attempt by the able bodied to rid themselves of the shame of having disabled people living among them. I'm not that bothered about walking and I see the task of making things accessible for me as the duty of a civilised society. It is not incumbent upon me to find ways to start walking, surely?
Having given a bit more thought to the question of whether I would like to eliminate my disability I now accept that yes I probably would. But not by simply moving my legs. Getting my disobedient limbs to comply is not going to eliminate the worst things about disability. If research of this kind can find a way to give me control of my bladder and my bowels so that I may not have to use implements which make me more susceptible to infection and the subsequent organ damage I have suffered then that's worthwhile. Of course, you can't go back in time so no amount of research could reverse my kidney damage. But in theory I would support that idea for future generations. Provided the shamed, socially inept teen mothers of the modern generation haven't aborted us all out of existence by then. Genuine results from this research are so far away that they won't affect me in any case, so I'll hold out and request only that people start showing a little more respect for disabled people and treat them as equals. That would cost an awful lot less than an electronic skeleton, I would imagine.
Before I leave you for another prolonged period of introspection (which mostly involves reading through old columns and squirming at their pomposity) I can't neglect to mention that the lock on my front door is broken. Emma went out to the shops this morning and when she got back she couldn't get in to the house. Her key turned but the door wouldn't budge. I tried to unlock it from the inside but had the same problem. The lock turned, but the door jammed. I had to go through to the back door to let her in, which sounds simple but such is the amount of junk now stored in our house it actually meant that I had to bail out of my chair and crawl on the conservatory floor in order to get to the back door. I looked like Leonardo Di Caprio in that awful, offensive cerebral palsy scene from the vastly over-rated Wolf Of Wall Street. Although I concede I was not nearly as good looking as Leo. Anyway, If only I had an electronic skeleton type suit thingy I could have walked there. By about 7.30 on Tuesday. On route, I had to move an enormous blue basket-shaped contraption which I'm told helps dry clothes. I don't go into the back room of our house that often but every time I do it seems like another new attraction has been added. Like they do in Disney Land from time to time. The upshot of all this is that we now have to get a locksmith out to attend to it, and since they are cheaper in the week than they are at the weekend it's going to have to wait till Monday. To compound things, this happens only a year away form a complete overhaul of the way the house is laid out and when we will therefore need an entirely new front door. With classic Emma-and-Stephen luck on our side, what is the betting that we will have to buy a new front door now aswell?
Fortunately, Emma has been good enough to plot an escape route for me past the blue, basket-shaped clothes-drying contraption.
Saturday, 15 February 2014
Easyjet's French Farce
The increase in airport security since 9/11 is rightly considered to be A Good Thing. Most people would consider an extra few minutes spent going through extra security checks to be a small price to pay for ensuring that the aircraft they are about to travel on is not hijacked and flown into the most famous and highly populated building that the terrorists can find. But at what point does security go too far? Is there a point where security is just used an excuse to treat people like shit?
Well yes there is, and the evidence was provided by minge-bag budget airline Easyjet this week. A court ruled that they must pay a £42,000 fine for ordering a disabled woman off a plane for what they claimed were security reasons. Initially they were only ordered to pay £4,500 but the fine was increased by almost ten times after the crappy airline appealed the decision. Back in March 2010 a French woman named Maria Patricia Hoarau boarded a flight back to Nice from Paris but was told that she would not be able to travel. Hoarau had committed the heinous crime of being a disabled person and being alone, the two things which the able bodied community appear to fear the most. Especially those in big business, for whom the merest whiff of a risk is reason enough to take discrimination to absurd levels.
Despite having taken the flight from Nice to Paris just a few days earlier Hoarau was told that since she did not have a 'helper' she would not be able to take the flight. Ever more brilliantly they informed her of this decision AFTER she had boarded the plane! Even when another passenger offered their assistance in the event of any emergency the airline refused to change their stance, claiming that they could not allow it as the pair had not checked in together.
Now let's talk about the word 'helper' for a moment. By and large, disabled people don't have 'helpers'. They have friends, family, boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands and wives. Just like you lot. In the event that none of these people are present at the time they wish to travel, they do so alone. Just like you lot. I get this shit when I ring up to order tickets for an event. I used to go to watch Saints on my own at Knowsley Road, but now they have a proper stadium I have to buy a season ticket. Not that I mind that, particularly. I'd much rather pay for a better view and a spec that you don't have to wheel through shit to get to. It also means I get to rock up five minutes before kick-off whereas previously if you weren't in your space at least half an hour before the game you could forget about seeing anything. Now I get one ticket free for my 'helper', the implication being that I could not possibly go anywhere on my own. Particularly not a fully accessible rugby stadium. Obviously. Or work. Bugger that. I'm an Undateable living on Benefits Street, remember. Back in the real world Emma comes to Saints with me most of the time, and on the rare occasions she does not I take my nephew Joe with me. My partner or my nephew. Never my fucking 'helper'. She's never available because she has gone on holiday with Easyjet.
Back to Hoarau, and the language used gets worse. Even from people who were speaking in support of Hoarau but who should know better, frankly. The French disabled rights association the APF commented that;
"We are pleased at this exemplary sentence against Easyjet for discriminating against this woman because of her handicap."
Handicap? Fuck off. If you are handicapped you are somehow worse off than everyone else and that is not really the image we are trying to project. A handicap is a disadvantage, an archaic term associated with the days when we were all educated in special schools away from the 'normal' children, lest our horrid diseases be spread around. Please can we not go back to that?
For her part, Hoarau was suitably miffed by the whole experience. After being marched back into the terminal and having to wait until a 'helper' could be found she remarked that;
"Being ordered off like that in front of my fellow passengers was a slap in the face. I felt humiliated and like a pariah who has no place in society."
You're spot on Ms Hoarau, that's exactly what you are in the eyes of far too many people considering it is 2014. A pariah who has no place in society. Tell you what though, you want to try being dragged backwards down an aircraft aisle while Rio Ferdinand stares at you impatiently on his way to his golfing trip in Portugal. Then you'll really feel like an outcast and a burden.
By now none of you will be surprised when I tell you that the words 'this has happened to me' are hurtling inexorably towards this article. This has happened to me. Or something like it. During my former life as a basketball player we had to take flights to Belfast and Dublin among other places with money-mad budget airlines masquerading as champions of our safety. They insisted that for every person we had in our party who could not walk we had to have one who could. Luckily disability is a wide and varied conidtion, so many of our party could actually walk (albeit some of them with a little less grace than others). So we got away with it and were able to travel. Oh how grateful we were. We were a party of probably 10 or 15 people. Try that on your own and you are very likely to end up in a similar position to Ms Hoarau. In the 21st century.
In defence of his rag-tag organisation Easyjet's French director Francois Bacchetta believes speed is the most important factor here. He hasn't got time to wait for social pariahs to get off his airplanes without the aid of a 'helper';
"In the event of an emergency, we need to be able to evacuate all passengers in 90 seconds." he explains.
Since Ms Hoarau boarded the plane without assistance I hardly think it likely that she would need more than that in the event of an emergency. I cannot board a plane without assistance, but only because to do so would be arduous and embarrassing. Were I to find myself on board one that had recently crash-landed in the Atlantic Ocean then 90 seconds to crawl from my seat to the nearest exit would be forever. Anyone who saw me ascend those stairs in Crystals in angry pursuit of my ex-girlfriend all those years ago can testify to that. I daresay that Ms Hoarau would have been able to disembark even more quickly. That they refused to allow another passenger to assist in the incredibly unlikely event of an emergency just craps down more shame on Easyjet and it's shitty, anti-disability, risk-fearing ways.
Oh, but they would like me to finish by pointing out that they did not charge Ms Hoarau for another flight ticket once they had found her a 'helper'. Hearts of gold.
Well yes there is, and the evidence was provided by minge-bag budget airline Easyjet this week. A court ruled that they must pay a £42,000 fine for ordering a disabled woman off a plane for what they claimed were security reasons. Initially they were only ordered to pay £4,500 but the fine was increased by almost ten times after the crappy airline appealed the decision. Back in March 2010 a French woman named Maria Patricia Hoarau boarded a flight back to Nice from Paris but was told that she would not be able to travel. Hoarau had committed the heinous crime of being a disabled person and being alone, the two things which the able bodied community appear to fear the most. Especially those in big business, for whom the merest whiff of a risk is reason enough to take discrimination to absurd levels.
Despite having taken the flight from Nice to Paris just a few days earlier Hoarau was told that since she did not have a 'helper' she would not be able to take the flight. Ever more brilliantly they informed her of this decision AFTER she had boarded the plane! Even when another passenger offered their assistance in the event of any emergency the airline refused to change their stance, claiming that they could not allow it as the pair had not checked in together.
Now let's talk about the word 'helper' for a moment. By and large, disabled people don't have 'helpers'. They have friends, family, boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands and wives. Just like you lot. In the event that none of these people are present at the time they wish to travel, they do so alone. Just like you lot. I get this shit when I ring up to order tickets for an event. I used to go to watch Saints on my own at Knowsley Road, but now they have a proper stadium I have to buy a season ticket. Not that I mind that, particularly. I'd much rather pay for a better view and a spec that you don't have to wheel through shit to get to. It also means I get to rock up five minutes before kick-off whereas previously if you weren't in your space at least half an hour before the game you could forget about seeing anything. Now I get one ticket free for my 'helper', the implication being that I could not possibly go anywhere on my own. Particularly not a fully accessible rugby stadium. Obviously. Or work. Bugger that. I'm an Undateable living on Benefits Street, remember. Back in the real world Emma comes to Saints with me most of the time, and on the rare occasions she does not I take my nephew Joe with me. My partner or my nephew. Never my fucking 'helper'. She's never available because she has gone on holiday with Easyjet.
Back to Hoarau, and the language used gets worse. Even from people who were speaking in support of Hoarau but who should know better, frankly. The French disabled rights association the APF commented that;
"We are pleased at this exemplary sentence against Easyjet for discriminating against this woman because of her handicap."
Handicap? Fuck off. If you are handicapped you are somehow worse off than everyone else and that is not really the image we are trying to project. A handicap is a disadvantage, an archaic term associated with the days when we were all educated in special schools away from the 'normal' children, lest our horrid diseases be spread around. Please can we not go back to that?
For her part, Hoarau was suitably miffed by the whole experience. After being marched back into the terminal and having to wait until a 'helper' could be found she remarked that;
"Being ordered off like that in front of my fellow passengers was a slap in the face. I felt humiliated and like a pariah who has no place in society."
You're spot on Ms Hoarau, that's exactly what you are in the eyes of far too many people considering it is 2014. A pariah who has no place in society. Tell you what though, you want to try being dragged backwards down an aircraft aisle while Rio Ferdinand stares at you impatiently on his way to his golfing trip in Portugal. Then you'll really feel like an outcast and a burden.
By now none of you will be surprised when I tell you that the words 'this has happened to me' are hurtling inexorably towards this article. This has happened to me. Or something like it. During my former life as a basketball player we had to take flights to Belfast and Dublin among other places with money-mad budget airlines masquerading as champions of our safety. They insisted that for every person we had in our party who could not walk we had to have one who could. Luckily disability is a wide and varied conidtion, so many of our party could actually walk (albeit some of them with a little less grace than others). So we got away with it and were able to travel. Oh how grateful we were. We were a party of probably 10 or 15 people. Try that on your own and you are very likely to end up in a similar position to Ms Hoarau. In the 21st century.
In defence of his rag-tag organisation Easyjet's French director Francois Bacchetta believes speed is the most important factor here. He hasn't got time to wait for social pariahs to get off his airplanes without the aid of a 'helper';
"In the event of an emergency, we need to be able to evacuate all passengers in 90 seconds." he explains.
Since Ms Hoarau boarded the plane without assistance I hardly think it likely that she would need more than that in the event of an emergency. I cannot board a plane without assistance, but only because to do so would be arduous and embarrassing. Were I to find myself on board one that had recently crash-landed in the Atlantic Ocean then 90 seconds to crawl from my seat to the nearest exit would be forever. Anyone who saw me ascend those stairs in Crystals in angry pursuit of my ex-girlfriend all those years ago can testify to that. I daresay that Ms Hoarau would have been able to disembark even more quickly. That they refused to allow another passenger to assist in the incredibly unlikely event of an emergency just craps down more shame on Easyjet and it's shitty, anti-disability, risk-fearing ways.
Oh, but they would like me to finish by pointing out that they did not charge Ms Hoarau for another flight ticket once they had found her a 'helper'. Hearts of gold.
Friday, 14 February 2014
The St.Valentine's Day Massacre
Today is Valentine's Day. I hate Valentine's Day. Fucking loathe it. I'm getting angry about it now just thinking about it, hence the expletive. My fury may just be reflected in the remainder of this piece but that's ok cos it is just a blog. Not a newspaper column. Nobody said I was Henry Winter.
I hate Valentine's Day for all the obvious reasons really. It's a crass, overly commercialised vom-fest. An opportunity for card manufacturers to cash in on your guilt and the duress you're placed under by your signifcant other. To break your balls, in other words. I'm fortunate in that I have a partner who genuinely does not give two shits about Valentine's Day. She possibly hates it almost as much as I do. So I don't have to bother. Obviously that means I don't receive anything either but really, so what? We spend our money more wisely, let's put it that way. Not that anyone believes this when I tell them. They shake their heads in disbelief and come to the conclusion that I am an anti-romantic, lazy, rubbish boyfriend. Which I am, but that doesn't change the fact that my Mrs doesn't care.
Some people think I am lucky to have a partner given my general level of misery and grouchiness. Again they are right, but again it is what it is. The Sun shines on a dog's arse some days. Someone told me the other day that if she was my girlfriend and I didn't buy her a Valentine's card then she would dump me. This seems a little knee-jerk on her behalf so I'm suspicious of it's authenticity. Would any sensible person really throw away a long-term relationship for the sake of a bit of card with a tacky message inside? Or a bunch of flowers that will die by Thursday week if you are lucky? A box of chocolates that they will stuff down their necks in one night and then start moaning about putting on weight? Besides, if this person and I were the only two people left on Planet Earth I still don't think I could bother my arse to try and make it work out. The human race just isn't that important to me. I fucking hate people anyway. Why make more of them? I Can't work it out.
Valentine's Day also offends my anti-religious sensibilities. It's a Saints day, like any other. The only thing worse than people going to restaurants and eating heart-shaped desserts because it happens to be February 14 is people going out in large green hats and pretending to be Irish on March 17. It's fucking moronic. Stop it now, before it's too late. I am no more likely to celebrate St.Valentine's Day or St.Patrick's Day than I am St.David's Day (how many of you even know when that is?), or St.Swithens or whatever the fuck that is. I take my atheism very seriously. I have no patience with the view that God exists. It's just a completely illogical pile of horse shit. Like Valentine's Day. I celebrate Christmas but that's basically because I have stolen it from the God Botherers. Like The Grinch, which aptly suits my personality I think.
I think the other reason I hate St.Valentine's Day is that I never got any female attention until I was about 17. And that worked out really well... Meanwhile, the rest of my friends were groping girls in tents. I really think I should get over this blatant climate of discrimination that I used to live in (and but for Emma, still would but without the tents) but I don't seem able to. It's stayed with me forever. I'm holding a massive grudge against all things romantic, including the rather less romantic endgame of what elderly people call courting.
Actually, now I think about it I don't believe any men like Valentine's Day. I don't think I am unique. I'm just in the fortunate position of being able to admit it without spending the rest of my life in Coventry. I reckon about 90% of men who are doing something to celebrate Valentine's Day tonight are doing so to please their women. Valentine's Day is for girls. Like netball and mood swings. So anyway I think perhaps I should thank Emma for not forcing me to go through the shambolic facade that is Valentine's Day. I think there was a time, in the dim and distant past, when we bought each other Valentine's Day cards but it is long ago. Valentine cards are the preserve of people trying to impress someone or trying keep their dinner out of the dog. Perhaps it should be allowed for newly attached couples, but then anyone caught celebrating it after more than say, five years in a relationship should be taken outside and beaten to death with a hear-shaped spade.
Happy Valentine's Day.
I hate Valentine's Day for all the obvious reasons really. It's a crass, overly commercialised vom-fest. An opportunity for card manufacturers to cash in on your guilt and the duress you're placed under by your signifcant other. To break your balls, in other words. I'm fortunate in that I have a partner who genuinely does not give two shits about Valentine's Day. She possibly hates it almost as much as I do. So I don't have to bother. Obviously that means I don't receive anything either but really, so what? We spend our money more wisely, let's put it that way. Not that anyone believes this when I tell them. They shake their heads in disbelief and come to the conclusion that I am an anti-romantic, lazy, rubbish boyfriend. Which I am, but that doesn't change the fact that my Mrs doesn't care.
Some people think I am lucky to have a partner given my general level of misery and grouchiness. Again they are right, but again it is what it is. The Sun shines on a dog's arse some days. Someone told me the other day that if she was my girlfriend and I didn't buy her a Valentine's card then she would dump me. This seems a little knee-jerk on her behalf so I'm suspicious of it's authenticity. Would any sensible person really throw away a long-term relationship for the sake of a bit of card with a tacky message inside? Or a bunch of flowers that will die by Thursday week if you are lucky? A box of chocolates that they will stuff down their necks in one night and then start moaning about putting on weight? Besides, if this person and I were the only two people left on Planet Earth I still don't think I could bother my arse to try and make it work out. The human race just isn't that important to me. I fucking hate people anyway. Why make more of them? I Can't work it out.
Valentine's Day also offends my anti-religious sensibilities. It's a Saints day, like any other. The only thing worse than people going to restaurants and eating heart-shaped desserts because it happens to be February 14 is people going out in large green hats and pretending to be Irish on March 17. It's fucking moronic. Stop it now, before it's too late. I am no more likely to celebrate St.Valentine's Day or St.Patrick's Day than I am St.David's Day (how many of you even know when that is?), or St.Swithens or whatever the fuck that is. I take my atheism very seriously. I have no patience with the view that God exists. It's just a completely illogical pile of horse shit. Like Valentine's Day. I celebrate Christmas but that's basically because I have stolen it from the God Botherers. Like The Grinch, which aptly suits my personality I think.
I think the other reason I hate St.Valentine's Day is that I never got any female attention until I was about 17. And that worked out really well... Meanwhile, the rest of my friends were groping girls in tents. I really think I should get over this blatant climate of discrimination that I used to live in (and but for Emma, still would but without the tents) but I don't seem able to. It's stayed with me forever. I'm holding a massive grudge against all things romantic, including the rather less romantic endgame of what elderly people call courting.
Actually, now I think about it I don't believe any men like Valentine's Day. I don't think I am unique. I'm just in the fortunate position of being able to admit it without spending the rest of my life in Coventry. I reckon about 90% of men who are doing something to celebrate Valentine's Day tonight are doing so to please their women. Valentine's Day is for girls. Like netball and mood swings. So anyway I think perhaps I should thank Emma for not forcing me to go through the shambolic facade that is Valentine's Day. I think there was a time, in the dim and distant past, when we bought each other Valentine's Day cards but it is long ago. Valentine cards are the preserve of people trying to impress someone or trying keep their dinner out of the dog. Perhaps it should be allowed for newly attached couples, but then anyone caught celebrating it after more than say, five years in a relationship should be taken outside and beaten to death with a hear-shaped spade.
Happy Valentine's Day.
Saturday, 1 February 2014
The Jump
You may not have noticed amid all the publicity being undeservedly hogged by former bigoted racist turned national hero Jim Davidson, but the Winter Olympics starts next week. Two weeks of people doing crazy things on bobsleighs, sleds, skis and skates begins in Sochi, Russia on February 7.
But Channel 4 can't wait that long. So to fill the void until then they have done what all television companies like to do these days, and based a celebrity reality television show on it. 'The Jump' pits a series of slebs and no-marks against each other in some highly dangerous sporting pursuits, presumably in the hope that one of them will suffer a serious injury. Because that would be great television.
And one of them almost did during the episode that I watched on Thursday night. The Olympic connection may just be a coincidental bonus, but the sight of five-time rowing gold medallist Sir Steve Redgrave stumbling into the snow at break-neck speed was probably exactly the sort of thing the producers were after. I just felt a little embarrassed by it all. This well respected Olympic hero reduced to a crumpled heap on the snow, letting out moans which reminded me of when Alan Partridge got stuck under a cow;
'Are you alright, Alan?'
'No, I'm not alright. I'm stuck under a cow...'
But the show must go on with or without Sir Steve. At the point I join proceedings there are only seven celebrities left in the competition. The idea is that they all compete against each other in a series of winter events, with the bottom two celebrities suffering the indignity of 'The Jump', an actual, real-life if slightly smaller-scale ski-jump. Whoever jumps furthest out of the two gets to further their careers for another night. The loser goes home, metaphorically speaking. In reality they stick around to comment on what happens to the others in subsequent events. Tonight's expert analysis comes from Amy Childs, much to the delight of her interviewer and Last Leg pillock Alex Brooker. Spellbinded by Childs' boobs on legs form, Brooker is reduced to a blathering imbecile. I'm certain he's trying to flirt with her. He then turns his attention to reading out viewer tweets, of which remarkably there are several. What kind of people sit at home watching this shite and think 'I know, I'll tweet Alex Brooker to see if they read out my keyboard warrior false name on television'? And anyway why does Brooker have to have a role in everything broadcast by Channel 4? Anybody would think that he actually has some talent. As for Childs, she is no longer in the competition after she actually refused to perform her ski-jump when she found herself in the bottom two. There's footage of her sitting terrified at the top of the slope, like a mortified deer refusing to drink from the river in case they are eaten by a crocodile. Also hanging around after being knocked out is Sinitta. The thought crossed my mind that this show cannot have been the first time that Sinitta has tried to further her career with a jump.
And so to tonight's event which is the bobsleigh. The bobsleigh is not all that compelling when there are Olympic medals at stake, so what chance does it have of creating excitement when the most interesting possible outcome is watching a celebrity's head roll slowly down the track like Vyvyans on the railway during that classic University Challenge episode of The Young Ones? With Sir Steve in hospital it has therefore been established that this is not even live, thus reducing the chances of any celebrity deaths being broadcast to an almost miniscule level. Sir Steve's bobsleigh run had already been filmed before his accident so he is there and yet not there, if you see what I mean. His run is particularly harrowing for me as the camera inside the bobsleigh dwells unnecessarily on his bollocks as he endeavours to get into the bobsleigh. By the way, the celebrities aren't driving the bobsleigh. That would be madness. Instead their task is to run as fast as they can pushing the bobsleigh down the track before hopping in, bollocks-cam and all. After that their only concerns are holding on for dear life, screaming intermittently, and pulling the brakes on when they hit the finish line.
It's all presided over by shouty former Big Brother presenter Davina McCall. Big Brother is a steaming pile of sewage, but being shoved on to this guff probably qualifies as a demotion for McCall. There's a wonderful sketch on Dead Ringers in which McCall is depicted along with Claudia Winklman as a grunting lunatic, incapable of actual speech. The two meet in the park pushing prams and just thrash their heads about while they grunt. It's one of those rare sketches which you know is not accurate, but you have to love it because it gives you the feeling that this is how the two of them should communicate were they to meet in the park. When she is not shouting McCall is there to provide sympathy for the celebrities as one by one they look back disappointedly on their bobsleighing efforts. To be fair she has done well to recognise some of these celebrities. Who is Kimberley Wyatt anyway? And Laura Hamilton? Then there is Joe McElderry possibly making his first television appearance since X-Factor, and Richie Neville from Five (who in preparation for his bobsleigh run is trying to recall his rugby days, which is like me trying to remember my rock-climbing days), Donal McIntyre, and Marcus Brigstocke. Well who were you expecting? It takes a certain level of desperation to volunteer to career down an icy track at a million miles an hour just to be on telly.
McIntyre is particularly inept. The investigative reporter can get into the inner sanctums of the most cloak and dagger organisations for his television shows, yet here he can't even get into a bobsleigh. He is duly disqualified and, unless more than one of the remaining contestants shows equal ineptitude, is resigned to taking part in the climactic 'jump' at the end of the show. They don't, and so joining him in the crunch showdown will be Hamilton, who it turns out is a television presenter according to commentator Barry Davies. The work must be drying up, is all I can think. She's taking pointless daredevilry to new heights as she explains to McCall that she recently gave birth. The pressure increases on McIntyre then. How humiliating will it be if he can't ski-jump further than a woman half his size who has only recently been discharged from the maternity ward?
And anyway what happened to Barry Davies to see him reduced to this? My childhood is peppered with memories of Davies commentating on some of the biggest sporting occasions on television. He retired from all of that after a moody flounce. He wanted to know why he wasn't getting as many big football games as John Motson. And well he might. I think we all have a case for being selected to commentate on Match Of The Day ahead of Motson, whose descent into senility is gathering pace. Davies' unfaithful dalliances with the likes of tennis, gymnastics and ice skating probably cost him dear on that score, but I'm sure he never saw it ending like this. Trying to describe a ski-jump performed by two inept celebrities just hoping for another night on the telly.
In the event it is McIntyre who edges the jump, with a winning distance of 13.5m. So unimpressive is this that I am reminded of Bob Mills' old joke about sliding down his driveway one snowy morning and finding out later that day that he was ranked second in Great Britain in downhill skiing. A lack of a reliable snow supply has rendered the British somewhat useless at winter sports, a fact that will no doubt be further proven when the real action starts in Russia. And so seven become six here in Celebrityville, and we are promised some speed skating tomorrow. Sir Steve's participation is in some doubt but that would not be as big a blow for him as it might be for some of the others involved. No matter how many crap reality shows you do you can expect to retain some modicum of respect after having achieved all that he has.
The stakes are palpably higher for the likes of McElderry.
But Channel 4 can't wait that long. So to fill the void until then they have done what all television companies like to do these days, and based a celebrity reality television show on it. 'The Jump' pits a series of slebs and no-marks against each other in some highly dangerous sporting pursuits, presumably in the hope that one of them will suffer a serious injury. Because that would be great television.
And one of them almost did during the episode that I watched on Thursday night. The Olympic connection may just be a coincidental bonus, but the sight of five-time rowing gold medallist Sir Steve Redgrave stumbling into the snow at break-neck speed was probably exactly the sort of thing the producers were after. I just felt a little embarrassed by it all. This well respected Olympic hero reduced to a crumpled heap on the snow, letting out moans which reminded me of when Alan Partridge got stuck under a cow;
'Are you alright, Alan?'
'No, I'm not alright. I'm stuck under a cow...'
But the show must go on with or without Sir Steve. At the point I join proceedings there are only seven celebrities left in the competition. The idea is that they all compete against each other in a series of winter events, with the bottom two celebrities suffering the indignity of 'The Jump', an actual, real-life if slightly smaller-scale ski-jump. Whoever jumps furthest out of the two gets to further their careers for another night. The loser goes home, metaphorically speaking. In reality they stick around to comment on what happens to the others in subsequent events. Tonight's expert analysis comes from Amy Childs, much to the delight of her interviewer and Last Leg pillock Alex Brooker. Spellbinded by Childs' boobs on legs form, Brooker is reduced to a blathering imbecile. I'm certain he's trying to flirt with her. He then turns his attention to reading out viewer tweets, of which remarkably there are several. What kind of people sit at home watching this shite and think 'I know, I'll tweet Alex Brooker to see if they read out my keyboard warrior false name on television'? And anyway why does Brooker have to have a role in everything broadcast by Channel 4? Anybody would think that he actually has some talent. As for Childs, she is no longer in the competition after she actually refused to perform her ski-jump when she found herself in the bottom two. There's footage of her sitting terrified at the top of the slope, like a mortified deer refusing to drink from the river in case they are eaten by a crocodile. Also hanging around after being knocked out is Sinitta. The thought crossed my mind that this show cannot have been the first time that Sinitta has tried to further her career with a jump.
And so to tonight's event which is the bobsleigh. The bobsleigh is not all that compelling when there are Olympic medals at stake, so what chance does it have of creating excitement when the most interesting possible outcome is watching a celebrity's head roll slowly down the track like Vyvyans on the railway during that classic University Challenge episode of The Young Ones? With Sir Steve in hospital it has therefore been established that this is not even live, thus reducing the chances of any celebrity deaths being broadcast to an almost miniscule level. Sir Steve's bobsleigh run had already been filmed before his accident so he is there and yet not there, if you see what I mean. His run is particularly harrowing for me as the camera inside the bobsleigh dwells unnecessarily on his bollocks as he endeavours to get into the bobsleigh. By the way, the celebrities aren't driving the bobsleigh. That would be madness. Instead their task is to run as fast as they can pushing the bobsleigh down the track before hopping in, bollocks-cam and all. After that their only concerns are holding on for dear life, screaming intermittently, and pulling the brakes on when they hit the finish line.
It's all presided over by shouty former Big Brother presenter Davina McCall. Big Brother is a steaming pile of sewage, but being shoved on to this guff probably qualifies as a demotion for McCall. There's a wonderful sketch on Dead Ringers in which McCall is depicted along with Claudia Winklman as a grunting lunatic, incapable of actual speech. The two meet in the park pushing prams and just thrash their heads about while they grunt. It's one of those rare sketches which you know is not accurate, but you have to love it because it gives you the feeling that this is how the two of them should communicate were they to meet in the park. When she is not shouting McCall is there to provide sympathy for the celebrities as one by one they look back disappointedly on their bobsleighing efforts. To be fair she has done well to recognise some of these celebrities. Who is Kimberley Wyatt anyway? And Laura Hamilton? Then there is Joe McElderry possibly making his first television appearance since X-Factor, and Richie Neville from Five (who in preparation for his bobsleigh run is trying to recall his rugby days, which is like me trying to remember my rock-climbing days), Donal McIntyre, and Marcus Brigstocke. Well who were you expecting? It takes a certain level of desperation to volunteer to career down an icy track at a million miles an hour just to be on telly.
McIntyre is particularly inept. The investigative reporter can get into the inner sanctums of the most cloak and dagger organisations for his television shows, yet here he can't even get into a bobsleigh. He is duly disqualified and, unless more than one of the remaining contestants shows equal ineptitude, is resigned to taking part in the climactic 'jump' at the end of the show. They don't, and so joining him in the crunch showdown will be Hamilton, who it turns out is a television presenter according to commentator Barry Davies. The work must be drying up, is all I can think. She's taking pointless daredevilry to new heights as she explains to McCall that she recently gave birth. The pressure increases on McIntyre then. How humiliating will it be if he can't ski-jump further than a woman half his size who has only recently been discharged from the maternity ward?
And anyway what happened to Barry Davies to see him reduced to this? My childhood is peppered with memories of Davies commentating on some of the biggest sporting occasions on television. He retired from all of that after a moody flounce. He wanted to know why he wasn't getting as many big football games as John Motson. And well he might. I think we all have a case for being selected to commentate on Match Of The Day ahead of Motson, whose descent into senility is gathering pace. Davies' unfaithful dalliances with the likes of tennis, gymnastics and ice skating probably cost him dear on that score, but I'm sure he never saw it ending like this. Trying to describe a ski-jump performed by two inept celebrities just hoping for another night on the telly.
In the event it is McIntyre who edges the jump, with a winning distance of 13.5m. So unimpressive is this that I am reminded of Bob Mills' old joke about sliding down his driveway one snowy morning and finding out later that day that he was ranked second in Great Britain in downhill skiing. A lack of a reliable snow supply has rendered the British somewhat useless at winter sports, a fact that will no doubt be further proven when the real action starts in Russia. And so seven become six here in Celebrityville, and we are promised some speed skating tomorrow. Sir Steve's participation is in some doubt but that would not be as big a blow for him as it might be for some of the others involved. No matter how many crap reality shows you do you can expect to retain some modicum of respect after having achieved all that he has.
The stakes are palpably higher for the likes of McElderry.
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