Today’s entry was going to be a slower-paced, more sedate and calm stroll through some of the noteworthy but not pulse-quickeningly infuriating events of the week in both my own troubled existence and in the wider world. We may still get to that, but I am afraid I can no longer make any promises about the pace or calmness of this piece.
That’s mainly because just three days on from Disabled Access Day on January 17 came International Day Of Acceptance on January 20. Now I know we have been through this in a previous column and in what turned out to be one of the more heated discussions in Facebook history (and continued to be long after I left it apparently) but I really do remain flummoxed by this sort of thing. Just as the notion of Disabled Access Day seems to imply that it is ok to have no disabled access every other day, so International Day Of Acceptance appears to suggest that you only have to be accepting of other people’s race, disability, culture, gender, religion or whatever for that one day. Since International Day Of Acceptance was yesterday we can presumably now revert to our intolerance and prejudices?
The argument for these sorts of events is that they raise awareness. Maybe, but it’s sobering to contemplate that when asked by a journalist around the time of Black History Month how we could ever stop racism Morgan Freeman replied simply by saying ‘by not talking about it’. He was objecting to Black History Month on similar grounds, arguing that there is no White History Month or Jewish History Month so why is that we need a Black History Month? We probably don’t. But like Disabled Access Day and International Day Of Acceptance they make us feel better about the lack of effort we make for the rest of the year. So this trend for setting aside days to raise awareness of the bleeding obvious is set to continue. Look out over the coming months for ‘World Wash Your Hands When You’ve Been For A Shit Week’ and ‘International Day Of Not Stealing From Your Mother To Fund Your Crack Habit’.
Disabled Access Day might have been a roaring success for all I know, but it certainly wasn’t for one unfortunate wheelchair using soul who ventured out to see a film at his local cinema that day. Joe France, a 12-year-old from Harrogate in North Yorkshire was keen to see The Theory Of Everything, a biopic about the life of genius astrophysician and WHEELCHAIR USER Stephen Hawking which has been pelted with award nominations in recent times. Young Joe was left disappointed however when it turned out that the Odeon Cinema was not showing the film on any of its accessible screens. Any of its accessible screens. First of all, why does it have inaccessible screens? Well, because it is a listed building, that’s why. For clarification, listed buildings are those which have been ‘judged to be of national importance in terms of architectural or historic interest’ according to planningportal.gov.uk. Ok. Now I can see why you can’t install lifts and ramps into a 12th century castle. I visited Nottingham last summer and marvelled with everyone else at the beauty of the castle there. I’d agree that it would lose something if you were to add in everything you would need to make all of it wheelchair accessible. But if a building is protected against an overhaul for access reasons why is it allowed to undergo any sort of conversion to become an Odeon Cinema? Are Odeon Cinemas of ‘national importance in terms of architectural or historic interest’?
You may remember that Odeon is the same company responsible for removing a customer from one of their theatres for using a ventilator too loudly. Now comes this second PR own goal in as many weeks for what in any just world would be fast becoming a beleaguered company. I remember Jamie Carragher scoring two own goals in the same game against Manchester United once. I can’t remember any other examples of two own goals in quicker succession, but even Odeon can’t compete with the man who was once identified by a Sky Sports statistician as the man with the second highest number of goals against Liverpool in the Premier League era. I doubt whether Odeon Cinema profit margins will go down even a fraction of a percentage point in reality. Nobody cares enough, and Joe’s wound is heavily salted by the irony that this happened on Disabled Access Day and that it was the biopic of a wheelchair user who has achieved more than probably any other in the last half century. Certainly more than anyone reading this or anyone currently working at Harrogate Odeon whether they use a wheelchair or not.
Now I promised we would get to some other news and we will. Social media has been buzzing over the last few days over the sudden disappearance of topless women on page 3 of The Sun newspaper. In the first instance and whatever you think about the rights and wrongs of page 3, it is unpalatable to see apparently responsible people like members of parliament congratulating The Sun newspaper for anything. I have never been a Sun or News Of The World reader, not even in the days before their now notorious crimes against decency and humanity regarding Hillsborough and The Millie Dowler murder. They have always been Tory rags, save for the couple of months in 1997 which they spent recognising that a Labour election victory was inevitable and so jumped on board to claim the assist.
But showing a few boobs on page 3 was, in my humble opinion, among the lesser crimes that they have committed. The legions of men I have seen posting their congratulations on Twitter on the ending of the objectivity of women are either lying in an attempt to be seen by women as some sort of modern feminist, or they should go along to their local quack and ask to have their pulse checked as they might very well be dead. Either way, the women they are targeting should avoid them at all costs. Remember ladies, all acts of romance and chivalry are sexually motivated. Meanwhile, the Sun and News Of The World will remain Tory rags (changing your brand from the News Of The World to the Sunday Sun fools nobody but the most gullible) regardless of what happens to page 3, which they have yet to officially announce the abolition of in any case. The word is that they are leaving the situation in the event that sales take a turn for the worse.
I’m leaving the last word to Dierdrie. I haven’t been a fan of Coronation Street since I was a much younger man but growing up Anne Kirkbride’s character was a regular presence in our house and we all followed her fortunes avidly. Except my dad who used to develop pains in his neck whenever he heard the Coronation Street theme tune. Now I have said in other columns that we should not go overboard in mourning the famous because we don’t actually know them and to turn out in the streets in floods of tears is hysterical and disrespects the grief of those who genuinely knew and loved the deceased. So I’m not going overboard or hysterical, just pointing out that Kirkbride’s passing has taken with it an iconic symbol of my youth.
And that has to be worth the last word.
Wednesday, 21 January 2015
Thursday, 15 January 2015
This Week On Facebook And Odeon O.G.
It’s possibly a sad reflection on me that a lot of what follows in today’s column is rather Facebook-centric. More and more now we seem to use Zuckerberg’s world-dominating cyber meeting place to learn, state and question everything. I’m probably not the only blogger who trawls through his timeline day after day looking for interesting links upon which I can unleash my fearful, venting wrath. Neither am I, in all probability, the only one who thinks about this from time to time and can’t help but wish we could all go down to the pub and argue about The Undateables and Disabled Access Day instead of tapping away at our laptops and ipads like a race of demented keyboard warriors incapable of actual discourse.
But we can’t, apparently. So in my search for suitable subject matter I stumbled upon an article about a disabled man who had been thrown off a flight from Dallas, Texas to Fort Collins, Colorado because the strapping he was using to secure himself to his seat was deemed unsafe by the pilot. Rather than call airline management the Frontier Airlines pilot decided instead to flatly refuse to transport the man, insisting that airport police board the plane and remove him. Airport police. This man was so freaked out by disability that he called the police. Imagine if I did that every time I was freaked out by an able bodied person. I’d be locked up for harassing the police. Anyway it all seemed like excellent material for a good old fashioned Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard rant (and this blog has been called a rant before, and not just by me) about disability access. I had a thousand intricate and clever ways (well two) to link this man’s experience to my own with American Airlines and the ‘wonderful’ staff at Manchester Airport and it was all going to be a rip-roaring success in the world of disability-related literary comment. Which after all is what Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard was created for. And if it doesn’t relate my own experiences to the disability issues of the day then it is no sort of memoir at all and should be sued under the Trade Descriptions Act.
But then I realised that this incident took place in June 2011. Three and a half years ago. I’m too busy with my day job to offer up-to-the-minute comment on everything that happens but even I have to draw the line at waiting three and a half years to have my say. Luckily, sadly actually given what follows, an article I came across in today’s Independent served up a more than adequate replacement.
It tells of a man named Richard Bridger. Richard suffers from Duschenne Muscular Dystrophy, a highly debilitating condition which means among other things that he has to use a ventilator for 18 hours a day to help him breathe. Richard, according to the report, was forced to leave the Odeon Cinema in Epsom because some of the able bodied bastards…..I mean customers…..complained that his ventilation machine was making too much noise. It was, they said, spoiling their enjoyment of Liam Neeson’s surely Olivier-esque performance in Taken 3. Now the fact that you could watch a film like Taken 3 with the sound down and still get the same level of enjoyment from it (i.e very little) strengthens my argument but is not the point. It’s not like Richard rocked up to his local pictures on the back of a tractor and proceeded to plough through the aisles deafening all and sundry. He had a ventilator which yes...makes a little noise but not enough to warrant his public humiliation and that of his companion who was also invited to look elsewhere for his fix of Liam. They referred to him as him Richard’s carer in the article by the way but that term presumes too much for my tastes.
Worse than lobbing Richard out of the theatre literally for breathing was the fact that Odeon management then backed the actions of their staff, citing six complaints from the 200 strong audience. I’ve been in cinemas where people with certain types of disability have involuntarily made a little noise and nobody has seemed too affected by it. One man laughed out loud during a particularly tense scene near the end of 'Gone Girl'. I understood and let it slide. Far more of a menace to my mind are the people who can be relied upon to start texting and taking selfies on their iphone 86 as soon as the trailers start. They’re on silent, but twenty or so phones all lighting up at the same time around you is at least as distracting as the sound of a ventilator. And, despite the way some people act these days, nobody needs a text message or a selfie to help them breathe. Oh and by the way that is something else I have noticed on Facebook this week. Despite being only 10 years old it has decided to delve it’s pinky into the waters of nostalgia by asking users to post their first ever profile pictures. You can only imagine the array of disturbingly smug selfies this has inspired and I have to say it’s not for me. Whoever invented the selfie and its satanic spawn the selfie stick should be held to account. It’s not that some of you aren’t pretty to look at. You really are. I just don’t really care what your first profile picture looked like or how much you have changed in the twelve minutes since you last posted it.
Finally today I have a suspicion that Facebook has cost me not only someone I would go so far as to call an acquaintance, but also a regular blog reader. My piece on Disabled Access Day appears to have inspired someone to delete me from his Facebook. My crime was to disagree with the content of his post, if not the act of actually posting it. But let’s be real. Let’s have the debate. If you post something on your timeline and I register an opposite opinion then you have to accept that if you are going to have me as a Facebook friend. Otherwise you are just adding or accepting me to pad out your quota of Facebook friends which is an act of vanity that even the selfie-stickers would baulk at. So let me tell you now that I consider all of you on my list to be fair game. Anything you write in what I remind you is a public forum is there to be shot at so long as things don’t get personal or abusive. Which they did not in this case. The same is true of anything that I write including and especially Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard. And all of this applies whether I see you every day of my life or whether I haven’t seen you since my student days.
Some would refer to this as free speech which if you don’t like, you know where the delete button is. This piece will still get 436 reads because they are generated by the same man from Copenhagen hitting refresh, we all know that…….
But we can’t, apparently. So in my search for suitable subject matter I stumbled upon an article about a disabled man who had been thrown off a flight from Dallas, Texas to Fort Collins, Colorado because the strapping he was using to secure himself to his seat was deemed unsafe by the pilot. Rather than call airline management the Frontier Airlines pilot decided instead to flatly refuse to transport the man, insisting that airport police board the plane and remove him. Airport police. This man was so freaked out by disability that he called the police. Imagine if I did that every time I was freaked out by an able bodied person. I’d be locked up for harassing the police. Anyway it all seemed like excellent material for a good old fashioned Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard rant (and this blog has been called a rant before, and not just by me) about disability access. I had a thousand intricate and clever ways (well two) to link this man’s experience to my own with American Airlines and the ‘wonderful’ staff at Manchester Airport and it was all going to be a rip-roaring success in the world of disability-related literary comment. Which after all is what Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard was created for. And if it doesn’t relate my own experiences to the disability issues of the day then it is no sort of memoir at all and should be sued under the Trade Descriptions Act.
But then I realised that this incident took place in June 2011. Three and a half years ago. I’m too busy with my day job to offer up-to-the-minute comment on everything that happens but even I have to draw the line at waiting three and a half years to have my say. Luckily, sadly actually given what follows, an article I came across in today’s Independent served up a more than adequate replacement.
It tells of a man named Richard Bridger. Richard suffers from Duschenne Muscular Dystrophy, a highly debilitating condition which means among other things that he has to use a ventilator for 18 hours a day to help him breathe. Richard, according to the report, was forced to leave the Odeon Cinema in Epsom because some of the able bodied bastards…..I mean customers…..complained that his ventilation machine was making too much noise. It was, they said, spoiling their enjoyment of Liam Neeson’s surely Olivier-esque performance in Taken 3. Now the fact that you could watch a film like Taken 3 with the sound down and still get the same level of enjoyment from it (i.e very little) strengthens my argument but is not the point. It’s not like Richard rocked up to his local pictures on the back of a tractor and proceeded to plough through the aisles deafening all and sundry. He had a ventilator which yes...makes a little noise but not enough to warrant his public humiliation and that of his companion who was also invited to look elsewhere for his fix of Liam. They referred to him as him Richard’s carer in the article by the way but that term presumes too much for my tastes.
Worse than lobbing Richard out of the theatre literally for breathing was the fact that Odeon management then backed the actions of their staff, citing six complaints from the 200 strong audience. I’ve been in cinemas where people with certain types of disability have involuntarily made a little noise and nobody has seemed too affected by it. One man laughed out loud during a particularly tense scene near the end of 'Gone Girl'. I understood and let it slide. Far more of a menace to my mind are the people who can be relied upon to start texting and taking selfies on their iphone 86 as soon as the trailers start. They’re on silent, but twenty or so phones all lighting up at the same time around you is at least as distracting as the sound of a ventilator. And, despite the way some people act these days, nobody needs a text message or a selfie to help them breathe. Oh and by the way that is something else I have noticed on Facebook this week. Despite being only 10 years old it has decided to delve it’s pinky into the waters of nostalgia by asking users to post their first ever profile pictures. You can only imagine the array of disturbingly smug selfies this has inspired and I have to say it’s not for me. Whoever invented the selfie and its satanic spawn the selfie stick should be held to account. It’s not that some of you aren’t pretty to look at. You really are. I just don’t really care what your first profile picture looked like or how much you have changed in the twelve minutes since you last posted it.
Finally today I have a suspicion that Facebook has cost me not only someone I would go so far as to call an acquaintance, but also a regular blog reader. My piece on Disabled Access Day appears to have inspired someone to delete me from his Facebook. My crime was to disagree with the content of his post, if not the act of actually posting it. But let’s be real. Let’s have the debate. If you post something on your timeline and I register an opposite opinion then you have to accept that if you are going to have me as a Facebook friend. Otherwise you are just adding or accepting me to pad out your quota of Facebook friends which is an act of vanity that even the selfie-stickers would baulk at. So let me tell you now that I consider all of you on my list to be fair game. Anything you write in what I remind you is a public forum is there to be shot at so long as things don’t get personal or abusive. Which they did not in this case. The same is true of anything that I write including and especially Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard. And all of this applies whether I see you every day of my life or whether I haven’t seen you since my student days.
Some would refer to this as free speech which if you don’t like, you know where the delete button is. This piece will still get 436 reads because they are generated by the same man from Copenhagen hitting refresh, we all know that…….
Monday, 12 January 2015
Aww-ing And Ahh-in in 2015
I got into more than one argument on social media this week. Three, if I recall correctly, only one of which was with someone who I have actually met and would claim to know. And when I say an argument I mean an argument, not a calm if dull debate about the merits of the Super League salary cap or something equally unimportant in the grand scheme. I’m talking about a full blown argument, provoked by people who clearly have absolutely no regard for what is decent and acceptable. Yes, people who watch The Undateables. And not only watch it but enjoy it and go ‘aww’ and ‘ahh’ at regular intervals.
I deliberately left that word ‘Undateables’ out of the title of this piece for fear that you would simply move on to the next hastily and barely crafted rant in the blogosphere. Even I’m getting quite bored of myself on this subject, which is little wonder given how many times I have been provoked by you, the idiot public, into telling everybody exactly what I think about the putrid thing. So tonight, in an audacious bid to stay off social media (except to post this piece on Facebook and Twitter) and thus avoid getting into any more slanging matches with a distinct absence of dignity, I’m trying to put down some coherent thoughts on the subject in my own space. That way you can take them or leave them and if we get into an argument we will all remember that it’s because you read it and had to, just had to bang the drum for your right to watch distasteful, downright offensive television.
As it happens I also defend your right to do just that. I just wish you would be a little more honest about it. Some of the shite
I have read from people defending The Undateables as a concept this past week is utterly risible. When you are ‘awwing’ and ‘aahing’ at the latest collection of down-on-their-lucks please have the decency to admit that you are not being entertained. Rather, you are being made to feel better and that is why you are watching. Better because you are comforted by the fact that there are people in the world you can look down on. Better because when these people find ‘love’ it means that you don’t have to feel so bad about the fact that you would never consider partnering up with someone with autism, cerebral palsy or achondroplasia. That’s a form of dwarfism in layman’s terms. Or terms that viewers of The Undateables will understand.
One of the common threads running through the argument of those who apologise for The Undateables is that the show gives the people featured the chance to find love and ‘be normal’. I can’t think of any single thing in the world more offensive than the notion that people with a difference need specially arranged television shows to give them a fair crack of the whip when it comes to the dating game. Not even Ken fucking Morley. This assertion is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more you say that these people need this kind of vom-inducing helping hand, the more likely it becomes that they will. How are they going to get a date if you, sitting there in your perfect world of perfection you fat fuck, consider listening to their lifelong attempts to cop off to be a reasonably diverting form of entertainment rather than a fucking national disgrace? If you put away your lazy prejudices for a second and rose up against this kind of vile exploitation and voyeurism, perhaps the people featured would stand more of a sporting chance. The Undateables is nothing but another form of segregation, another way for you to shout ‘stick with your own kind and don’t come here trying to mix your faulty, biffy, imperfect genes with my exalted form of loveliness and absolute and unspeakable cool I’m fucking better than you’.
Yes, better. Because that is the message you send when you ‘aaw ‘ and ‘aah’ over The Undateables’ success stories as much as it is if you laugh out loud at their misfortunes. That you are better than they are and what is more, you are going to sit in front of your television for an hour with a big fat fucking cake and a cup of tea and prove it. To yourself if nobody else.
Now you will be glad to know that this is very possibly my last word on the Undateables. I simply don’t have the stomach to go into it any further. As I said before I absolutely respect your right to watch whatever sordid piece of shit television rocks your world. I’m addicted to Banshee, after all. The purpose of this piece is just to let you know that we know. We know why you are watching it and we want you to know that we know. And I say ‘we’ because I know the horror of ‘it’s not you, it’s the wheelchair/autism/dwarfism/delete as appropriate’. I was there when someone told my friend that he was ‘too fit to be in that wheelchair’. That’s a haunting place to be and to try to describe it to you would be the definition of futility.
Along with watching The Undateables and trying to pass it off as harmless entertainment that is in some way heart-warming when it is actually an assault on the dignity of everyone who doesn’t match your idea of what is normal.
I deliberately left that word ‘Undateables’ out of the title of this piece for fear that you would simply move on to the next hastily and barely crafted rant in the blogosphere. Even I’m getting quite bored of myself on this subject, which is little wonder given how many times I have been provoked by you, the idiot public, into telling everybody exactly what I think about the putrid thing. So tonight, in an audacious bid to stay off social media (except to post this piece on Facebook and Twitter) and thus avoid getting into any more slanging matches with a distinct absence of dignity, I’m trying to put down some coherent thoughts on the subject in my own space. That way you can take them or leave them and if we get into an argument we will all remember that it’s because you read it and had to, just had to bang the drum for your right to watch distasteful, downright offensive television.
As it happens I also defend your right to do just that. I just wish you would be a little more honest about it. Some of the shite
I have read from people defending The Undateables as a concept this past week is utterly risible. When you are ‘awwing’ and ‘aahing’ at the latest collection of down-on-their-lucks please have the decency to admit that you are not being entertained. Rather, you are being made to feel better and that is why you are watching. Better because you are comforted by the fact that there are people in the world you can look down on. Better because when these people find ‘love’ it means that you don’t have to feel so bad about the fact that you would never consider partnering up with someone with autism, cerebral palsy or achondroplasia. That’s a form of dwarfism in layman’s terms. Or terms that viewers of The Undateables will understand.
One of the common threads running through the argument of those who apologise for The Undateables is that the show gives the people featured the chance to find love and ‘be normal’. I can’t think of any single thing in the world more offensive than the notion that people with a difference need specially arranged television shows to give them a fair crack of the whip when it comes to the dating game. Not even Ken fucking Morley. This assertion is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more you say that these people need this kind of vom-inducing helping hand, the more likely it becomes that they will. How are they going to get a date if you, sitting there in your perfect world of perfection you fat fuck, consider listening to their lifelong attempts to cop off to be a reasonably diverting form of entertainment rather than a fucking national disgrace? If you put away your lazy prejudices for a second and rose up against this kind of vile exploitation and voyeurism, perhaps the people featured would stand more of a sporting chance. The Undateables is nothing but another form of segregation, another way for you to shout ‘stick with your own kind and don’t come here trying to mix your faulty, biffy, imperfect genes with my exalted form of loveliness and absolute and unspeakable cool I’m fucking better than you’.
Yes, better. Because that is the message you send when you ‘aaw ‘ and ‘aah’ over The Undateables’ success stories as much as it is if you laugh out loud at their misfortunes. That you are better than they are and what is more, you are going to sit in front of your television for an hour with a big fat fucking cake and a cup of tea and prove it. To yourself if nobody else.
Now you will be glad to know that this is very possibly my last word on the Undateables. I simply don’t have the stomach to go into it any further. As I said before I absolutely respect your right to watch whatever sordid piece of shit television rocks your world. I’m addicted to Banshee, after all. The purpose of this piece is just to let you know that we know. We know why you are watching it and we want you to know that we know. And I say ‘we’ because I know the horror of ‘it’s not you, it’s the wheelchair/autism/dwarfism/delete as appropriate’. I was there when someone told my friend that he was ‘too fit to be in that wheelchair’. That’s a haunting place to be and to try to describe it to you would be the definition of futility.
Along with watching The Undateables and trying to pass it off as harmless entertainment that is in some way heart-warming when it is actually an assault on the dignity of everyone who doesn’t match your idea of what is normal.
Wednesday, 7 January 2015
Disability Access Day
Following on from my stunning achievement in upsetting all wrong-thinking people on the subject of The Undateables last night I am about to court yet more controversy.
That’s because I learned earlier today that next Saturday, January 17, is Disability Access Day. That’s actually quite a poignant date for me. It would have been my old mate Martin’s 39th birthday had he not passed away in mid-August of last year. He was never in my league as a nay-sayer and all around nihilist so I have no doubt that he wouldn’t have had a problem with Disability Access Day as a concept. But I’m afraid that predictably and rather yawnsomely, I do. Now, before I hit my seething, sardonic straps on the subject let me first explain to you what this means and then try and offer something resembling a balanced view on it. Disability Access Day, according to its website, is ‘all about getting out and visiting a venue that you have never been to before – whether a cinema, coffee shop, sports centre or anywhere else’. Over 200 companies have pledged their support to the event and several places of interest such as Buckingham Palace, the Houses Of Parliament, Cutty Sark and the National Theatre are offering free tours or tours that have been specially adapted so that they can be enjoyed by people with a whole range of disabilities and access issues. All well and good. What is not to like about that? What could even I, the man with the most poisonous pen in the North of England when it comes to disability issues, find to object to?
Strengthening the event’s appeal is the fact that it is being run by a group of disabled people and their family and friends who are based in Scotland. Now clearly that is well intentioned and these people have obviously identified a glaring, gaping hole in the world where disability access should be. Recognising that not all disabled people have my abilities I am sure that there are some people out there who will find this initiative beneficial. In fact this has been made perfectly clear to me in no uncertain terms. But equally some disabled people might find the invitation to get ‘out and about and visit a venue that you have not been to before – whether a cinema, coffee shop, sports centre or anywhere else’ faintly offensive. As if we hadn’t thought of it before or had never had the brains to explore ways of doing so until someone thought of Disability Access Day. There is merit in what this group are trying to achieve here, but I would argue that they are not the first to discover that there are problems with access on pretty much every corner. It’s just that some of us choose to address them by drunkenly climbing up the stairs to a nightclub on our backside or shouting abuse at taxi drivers who ‘don’t do wheelchairs’, while others choose to organise initiatives like this which in a just world would be entirely superfluous. You pays your money and takes your choice as to which you think is the approach with the most impact. Oh and by the way, free tours? I’ve paid to visit several of the places listed on the website for Disability Access Day and am hoping that on that basis I qualify for a refund. I’ve been financially punished because I know how to use Google and didn’t rely on some very well intentioned people to make the arrangements for me. The injustice.
The website also promises that you can ‘try an accessible bus’. I’m not sure exactly what this means. Hopefully it is geared towards helping the people with access issues who have hitherto been too affected by their mobility problems to give it a go for themselves. I didn’t know those people existed until today so I think we can say that we have all learned something from Disability Access Day already. Perhaps that itself is justification for it and suggests that I should shut my metaphorical cake-hole. Presumably anyone ‘trying an accessible bus’ at a specially arranged event like this will not find that the only accessible space available is already occupied by the lady from across the road who is eight months pregnant and who is already pushing a twin buggy.
So it’s the need for such a day in the first place and the back-slapping that is going on as a result of it, that’s what I object to. Although with a heavy heart I am prepared to accept that actually there might well be a need for it, and on that basis congratulate the people involved for trying to do something which they say will raise awareness and have some sort of lasting effect. I just feel very sceptical about that particular outcome. Clearly the 200 companies involved should provide access as a matter of routine and not be shouting out ‘look at us, we’re helping out on this particular day’ in what seems to be in grave danger of becoming some kind of self-indulgent disability access dick measuring exhibition. I very much hope that some of the 200 companies who are involved are potential places of employment for disabled people, because that is where arguably the biggest access issue resides. We’ve all turned up for job interviews only to find that there’s a flight of 27 stairs to be negotiated. It’s all very well making it easier for disabled people to pop into their local Costa and spend £3 on cup of boiling hot water and a tea bag but wouldn’t we all be better off if we could eliminate the very notion of inaccessible places of employment? Wouldn’t that truly enhance our options and subsequently our lives? And not just for one day, but forever? Perceptive types among you will have noted that January 17 is a Saturday so my feeling is that many places of employment will dodge this particular bullet and access to their premises will not improve even for one day. I can’t include my employer in that as it has always provided excellent access and is as good an employer for people with disabilities and access issues as there is in all of the UK. It’s such a shame that I’m not allowed to name them here and so they won’t actually get any credit in the eyes of the few hundred people who might stumble across this piece.
I really do regret that despite my best efforts, I appear to have failed to be overly positive about Disability Access Day. I just can’t get past the idea that it is yet more lip service in the tricky sphere of disability awareness. As with the gruesome Undateables, other minority groups would not countenance it. When is black access day or gay access day?
And why, why oh fucking why, isn’t every day Disabled, Black And Gay Access Day in any case?
That’s because I learned earlier today that next Saturday, January 17, is Disability Access Day. That’s actually quite a poignant date for me. It would have been my old mate Martin’s 39th birthday had he not passed away in mid-August of last year. He was never in my league as a nay-sayer and all around nihilist so I have no doubt that he wouldn’t have had a problem with Disability Access Day as a concept. But I’m afraid that predictably and rather yawnsomely, I do. Now, before I hit my seething, sardonic straps on the subject let me first explain to you what this means and then try and offer something resembling a balanced view on it. Disability Access Day, according to its website, is ‘all about getting out and visiting a venue that you have never been to before – whether a cinema, coffee shop, sports centre or anywhere else’. Over 200 companies have pledged their support to the event and several places of interest such as Buckingham Palace, the Houses Of Parliament, Cutty Sark and the National Theatre are offering free tours or tours that have been specially adapted so that they can be enjoyed by people with a whole range of disabilities and access issues. All well and good. What is not to like about that? What could even I, the man with the most poisonous pen in the North of England when it comes to disability issues, find to object to?
Strengthening the event’s appeal is the fact that it is being run by a group of disabled people and their family and friends who are based in Scotland. Now clearly that is well intentioned and these people have obviously identified a glaring, gaping hole in the world where disability access should be. Recognising that not all disabled people have my abilities I am sure that there are some people out there who will find this initiative beneficial. In fact this has been made perfectly clear to me in no uncertain terms. But equally some disabled people might find the invitation to get ‘out and about and visit a venue that you have not been to before – whether a cinema, coffee shop, sports centre or anywhere else’ faintly offensive. As if we hadn’t thought of it before or had never had the brains to explore ways of doing so until someone thought of Disability Access Day. There is merit in what this group are trying to achieve here, but I would argue that they are not the first to discover that there are problems with access on pretty much every corner. It’s just that some of us choose to address them by drunkenly climbing up the stairs to a nightclub on our backside or shouting abuse at taxi drivers who ‘don’t do wheelchairs’, while others choose to organise initiatives like this which in a just world would be entirely superfluous. You pays your money and takes your choice as to which you think is the approach with the most impact. Oh and by the way, free tours? I’ve paid to visit several of the places listed on the website for Disability Access Day and am hoping that on that basis I qualify for a refund. I’ve been financially punished because I know how to use Google and didn’t rely on some very well intentioned people to make the arrangements for me. The injustice.
The website also promises that you can ‘try an accessible bus’. I’m not sure exactly what this means. Hopefully it is geared towards helping the people with access issues who have hitherto been too affected by their mobility problems to give it a go for themselves. I didn’t know those people existed until today so I think we can say that we have all learned something from Disability Access Day already. Perhaps that itself is justification for it and suggests that I should shut my metaphorical cake-hole. Presumably anyone ‘trying an accessible bus’ at a specially arranged event like this will not find that the only accessible space available is already occupied by the lady from across the road who is eight months pregnant and who is already pushing a twin buggy.
So it’s the need for such a day in the first place and the back-slapping that is going on as a result of it, that’s what I object to. Although with a heavy heart I am prepared to accept that actually there might well be a need for it, and on that basis congratulate the people involved for trying to do something which they say will raise awareness and have some sort of lasting effect. I just feel very sceptical about that particular outcome. Clearly the 200 companies involved should provide access as a matter of routine and not be shouting out ‘look at us, we’re helping out on this particular day’ in what seems to be in grave danger of becoming some kind of self-indulgent disability access dick measuring exhibition. I very much hope that some of the 200 companies who are involved are potential places of employment for disabled people, because that is where arguably the biggest access issue resides. We’ve all turned up for job interviews only to find that there’s a flight of 27 stairs to be negotiated. It’s all very well making it easier for disabled people to pop into their local Costa and spend £3 on cup of boiling hot water and a tea bag but wouldn’t we all be better off if we could eliminate the very notion of inaccessible places of employment? Wouldn’t that truly enhance our options and subsequently our lives? And not just for one day, but forever? Perceptive types among you will have noted that January 17 is a Saturday so my feeling is that many places of employment will dodge this particular bullet and access to their premises will not improve even for one day. I can’t include my employer in that as it has always provided excellent access and is as good an employer for people with disabilities and access issues as there is in all of the UK. It’s such a shame that I’m not allowed to name them here and so they won’t actually get any credit in the eyes of the few hundred people who might stumble across this piece.
I really do regret that despite my best efforts, I appear to have failed to be overly positive about Disability Access Day. I just can’t get past the idea that it is yet more lip service in the tricky sphere of disability awareness. As with the gruesome Undateables, other minority groups would not countenance it. When is black access day or gay access day?
And why, why oh fucking why, isn’t every day Disabled, Black And Gay Access Day in any case?
Tuesday, 6 January 2015
Watching Wednesday. At Wigan. On A Tuesday.
I hate Wigan. Always have. That might seem a little harsh, a little xenophobic even but it is important to understand what I mean when I say I hate them. I don’t mean the people or even the town itself. I mean the sports teams, basically. I’ve spent too many of my formative years watching the charade of Ellery Hanley and Dennis Betts perform fitness tests before major cup finals before inevitably declaring themselves fit and stomping all over a massively inferior, semi-professional Saints side. I’ve seen a couple too many Saints players of old get to the top level and then decide that actually they would rather be in Wigan sitting on their cash mountain. Then I’ve had to listen to Wigan fans trot out stomach churning, curdled rhino-shit about how Wigan turned those players into world class athletes.
Now this is just rugby league but the emotional pummelling I have received in that sphere has tainted my views on all of Wigan’s sporting endeavours. I wouldn’t support a Wigan team if they were taking on Ian Brady at backgammon and they had to win to save mankind. The recent revelations regarding Wigan Tory and absolutely not racist Dave Whelan have only served to intensify my feelings. I have always hated Dave Whelan anyway. Not just because he is a Wiganer, a Tory and now absolutely not a racist, but because of the way he celebrated Wigan’s League Cup semi-final victory over Arsenal in 2006. I’m all for chairmen connecting with the fans but his exhibition of head-rubbing in the disabled areas was too much to bear. If I had been a Wigan fan sat in that end that night I would have punched him full in his greedy, Tory face. Or in the Chingaling. So it was little surprise that I found myself supporting the opposition when I visited the pie dome for a bit of festive football on the Tuesday between Christmas and New Year. That the opposition was Sheffield Wednesday, Emma’s team, pretty much sealed the deal. More Wednesday support came from her mum and dad who had arrived to spend New Year with us.
This being the day before New Year’s Eve I volunteered to do the driving. There would be plenty of alcohol related chicanery 24 hours hence and as it turned out it was all very convenient. Disabled parking at the Dave the Wanker Stadium is remarkably easy to come by. Emma had requested it some days earlier and had received email confirmation, but when we arrived nobody questioned us or asked to see a blue badge. Perhaps they have more disabled parking than they could possibly need at the home of a struggling Championship outfit. They are remarkably blasé about it.
Do I sound like I’m from Yorkshire, by the way? I know I lived there for a few years but I really didn’t think I had picked up too much of the accent. I ask because as we approach the lift the attendant asks us if we have brought any snow with us from Sheffield. Despite her origins and allegiances, Emma doesn’t have a Yorkshire accent either. Nor is she wearing any Wednesday merchandise so I’m a little bewildered. Perhaps he just noticed the fact that I don’t have a Wigan accent and decided that I couldn’t be from anywhere else but Sheffield. There’s a certain logic in that. Who else would turn up at Wigan to see two poor Championship sides do battle in the perishing cold but people from either Wigan or Sheffield? I explain that I am from St.Helens and more of a rugby league man and to my extreme satisfaction he reveals that although he works their games he does not support the despised Worriers. Instead he watches his rugby league in Swinton, Chorley and Blackpool. A proper fan. Not like us spoiled, Super League types. Amusingly, the floor 2 button inside the lift is upside down so I ask Emma to take a photograph and stick it on Facebook. A Wigan 2. But while she is doing so the doors close and the lift automatically starts moving back downstairs. The door opens again and all we can do is smile and apologise to the people still waiting to get upstairs. I don't want to speculate on what they probably thought we were doing.
We have half an hour to kill before kick-off so we go for a brew. The concourse is already filling up and most people there seem to be extremely boisterous Wednesday fans. Makes sense since we are in the North Stand where the away support is housed. In the time it takes to get served we are treated to the full repertoire of Wednesday fan songs. Most strikingly, to the tune of ‘She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain’ (alright, it is probably not called that but you know the one I mean) they sing ‘if you don’t fucking bounce then you’re a Blade’. A Blade being a Sheffield United fan. That is the lowest insult they could pay you. There’s an interesting contrast between their aggression and their politeness. In between publicly decrying Sheffield United fans they bend over backwards to help me pass through the crowds. Almost every person I encounter moves away quickly, apologising a thousand times for being in that particular space at that particular time. You get the feeling they would have done the same for me even if I had been a Blade.
Roland, Emma’s dad, has a beer. This being a football ground for the night we are not allowed to our seats inside the stadium until he has finished it. In a few days it will be 2015 and still we are led to believe that football fans cannot be trusted to have a beer or two without embarking on an 80’s style riot. It seems a little draconian to me, especially when a bout of fisticuffs breaks out later in the evening in any case. I’m starting to think the ban might be nothing to do with the potential for hooliganism and more to do with the fact that nobody wants to be picking up plastic beer containers from in between 25,000 seats. Instead of entering the stadium then we find a little space away from the main throng of fans and drink up, watching previews of tonight’s other Championship games on an incredibly small screen perched high above our heads. Derby are taking on Leeds while Ipswich Town face Charlton Athletic. Roland hates Ipswich for reasons that I don’t think I have fully understood. He’s a Sheffield Wednesday fan living in Buckinghamshire but somehow he is irritated by a middling outfit from Suffolk whose last meaningful success was in the late 1970’s. Football, sport in general, can do that to you.
When we do enter the stadium we find that Emma doesn’t have a seat. The platform has space for around five or six wheelchair users and not much else. Anyone accompanying a wheelchair user either has to stand, or else go and sit in the row of seating just in front and off to the right of the platform. It’s another classic piece of segregation. Up there with the Liverpool Empire Theatre’s brilliant idea of having you sit behind your companion if you happen to be using a wheelchair. We’ve never experienced it for ourselves. The knowledge of those arrangements was enough to put us off even trying it out. That and Ray Fucking Quinn.
I feel like I should have remembered about the lack of seating up here and warned Emma but I completely forgot. I have been here a couple of times before, in this exact same stand, watching Saints have varying levels of success against the other lot. One night, Sean Long ripped them a new one in a play-off game here as we ran out 54-16 winners. He was dazzling. One of the more enjoyable Saints-Wigan derbies in living memory. Sean Long is my favourite Wiganer by some distance. He might come from the wrong side of the lump and talk funny but he is nevertheless the second highest points scorer in Saints history. I can see why the Wigan fans hate him. One of their own turning to the other side, picking up pots and medals as a matter of routine and repeatedly humiliating them. That must have hurt. As I said earlier though, we really do know how that feels so suck it up, Wigan. Besides, it is the same situation with Matty Smith now with the obvious difference being that Matty Smith is shit. Ok, so he is not shit, but he is no Sean Long and never will be.
Emma’s not as upset about the lack of seating as I had feared. In fact I think I am more offended but I decide to refrain from too much of a rant about segregation and I will spare you it now aswell. Soon all of our concentration is on the game itself as the teams come out and begin aimlessly woofing the ball at each other as if it were a weapon of mass destuction. Wigan won the FA Cup last year but have fallen on hard times since being relegated under that football genius Roberto Martinez, while Wednesday remain mired in the same shit-swamp of mediocrity which has seized them for more than a decade. It’s not pretty to watch. Chief culprit is Wednesday striker Atdhe Nuhiu. He’s ploughing the proverbial lone furrow tonight due to manager Stuart Gray’s decision to keep Stevie May on the bench from the start and he is ploughing it in the most hapless way imaginable. His presence serves only to persuade his team mates to whack the ball up to him as hard and as high as they possibly can but his touch is preposterously bad and most of his lay-offs find a blue and white striped shirt. Which would ordinarily be ideal except that Wigan are at home and are therefore the team donning those colours. Wednesday are in yellow, which might be confusing the big Austrian. He has one moment in the first half where he could affect the game, latching on to a cross from the right but finding only the feet of Wigan goalkeeper Scott Carson, a man so ordinary that he wasn’t even good enough for Liverpool. Anyone who has seen Simon Mignolet play recently will be able to put that into some kind of context. Despite Wednesday’s good opening through Nuhiu it is Wigan who are the slightly better side in a first half lit up by little else other than a couple more from the Wednesday fan songbook;
(To the tune of KC And The Sunshine Band’s ‘Give It Up’)
“Na na na na na na na na na na……we’ve got Stevie May, Stevie May, we’ve got Stevie May!”
(To the tune of ‘Oh When The Saints Go Marching In’)
“I’ve got a shed. As big as this. I’ve got a shed as big as this…..”
Strangely there is also a chorus of a song which has as its main thrust an order to ‘fuck the IRA’. That might not be the worst sentiment in the world given their history of terrorism against the UK but I’m not sure what place it has at a football match. It is not universally enjoyed but there are enough people joining in for it to dominate the atmosphere at our end for a short while. Perhaps if you let them have a beer they would refrain from this kind of negativity and anger?
When we rejoin Roland and Susan on the concourse at half-time Roland’s main bugbear aside from the plainly incompetent Nuhiu is the behaviour of winger Jeremy Helan. The Frenchman has pace to burn but Roland complains that he doesn’t engage his brain and that all of his athleticism is wasted because he basically doesn’t know what he is doing. He’s equally unimpressed by the other winger, Jacques Maghoma. I’d describe his first half performance as disappointing had I expected anything of him in the first place. Clearly Roland did expect a little bit more from the man from Zaire.
Wednesday are markedly improved in the second half as they kick towards the goal behind which we are positioned. Around the hour mark controversial absolutely not racist Wigan manager Malky Mackay introduces Callum McManaman from the bench and I wonder if this might be a decisive move. It is, but not in the way I had imagined. McManaman earned rave reviews for his performances under Martinez in the Premier League a couple of years ago and so clearly has the class to impose himself on a game of this level. He does that alright, but only in lunging recklessly at Wednesday man Claude Dielna and earning himself a deserved red card within 10 minutes of his introduction. It was the kind of tackle in which the perpetrator seems to view the ball as nothing more than an obstacle between him and his real goal located somewhere around the opponent’s knees. The referee has no hesitation, but not all inside the North Stand are impressed. There is one lone voice, that of a Dave the Wanker Stadium steward who is angrily claiming that Dielna is play-acting as he writhes around on the turf waiting for assistance from the physio. Incadescent, the steward points out that this would never happen in rugby league. He would just get straight back up and get on with it if he were a rugby league player. Having seen rugby league players carry on playing with broken bones it is sort of easy to see where he is coming from, but Dielna is by no means play-acting and in any case, the extent or otherwise of his injury has no bearing on the fact that McManaman’s tackle is both late and dangerous. He has to go.
And when he does it really puts Wednesday in charge of the game. They enjoy the expected increase in possession and use it well, culminating in the winning goal just nine minutes after McManaman’s sorry exit. What is more surprising is that the goalscorer is that man Nuhiu. He had continued to make a Nuhiu-sance of himself throughout the second half with little in the way of finesse, before finally latching on to an Helan cross to power a header into the roof of Carson’s net. Wigan hit the post before the end but their forays into the Wednesday half are rare due to their numerical disadvantage. With five minutes left Gray gives the Wednesday fans what they had been waiting for all night when he throws May into the fray. May is a frizzy-haired, diminutive Scottish striker who has pace but is hardly clinical in front of goal. Yet try telling that to the Wednesday fans who laud him at every opportunity with their Stevie May song, sung with the kind of ghusto that makes you believe he is Luis Suarez.
Wednesday cling on for the win that takes them into the top 10 of the Championship and leaves Wigan floundering at the wrong end of the table. Celebration comes in the form of a chippy dinner on the way home after a more than satisfactory way to sign off in 2014. Just don’t mention the fact that their first game of 2015 is away to Premier League champions Manchester City in the third round of the FA Cup on Sunday.
But since we weren’t there, we will gloss over that particular result.
Now this is just rugby league but the emotional pummelling I have received in that sphere has tainted my views on all of Wigan’s sporting endeavours. I wouldn’t support a Wigan team if they were taking on Ian Brady at backgammon and they had to win to save mankind. The recent revelations regarding Wigan Tory and absolutely not racist Dave Whelan have only served to intensify my feelings. I have always hated Dave Whelan anyway. Not just because he is a Wiganer, a Tory and now absolutely not a racist, but because of the way he celebrated Wigan’s League Cup semi-final victory over Arsenal in 2006. I’m all for chairmen connecting with the fans but his exhibition of head-rubbing in the disabled areas was too much to bear. If I had been a Wigan fan sat in that end that night I would have punched him full in his greedy, Tory face. Or in the Chingaling. So it was little surprise that I found myself supporting the opposition when I visited the pie dome for a bit of festive football on the Tuesday between Christmas and New Year. That the opposition was Sheffield Wednesday, Emma’s team, pretty much sealed the deal. More Wednesday support came from her mum and dad who had arrived to spend New Year with us.
This being the day before New Year’s Eve I volunteered to do the driving. There would be plenty of alcohol related chicanery 24 hours hence and as it turned out it was all very convenient. Disabled parking at the Dave the Wanker Stadium is remarkably easy to come by. Emma had requested it some days earlier and had received email confirmation, but when we arrived nobody questioned us or asked to see a blue badge. Perhaps they have more disabled parking than they could possibly need at the home of a struggling Championship outfit. They are remarkably blasé about it.
Do I sound like I’m from Yorkshire, by the way? I know I lived there for a few years but I really didn’t think I had picked up too much of the accent. I ask because as we approach the lift the attendant asks us if we have brought any snow with us from Sheffield. Despite her origins and allegiances, Emma doesn’t have a Yorkshire accent either. Nor is she wearing any Wednesday merchandise so I’m a little bewildered. Perhaps he just noticed the fact that I don’t have a Wigan accent and decided that I couldn’t be from anywhere else but Sheffield. There’s a certain logic in that. Who else would turn up at Wigan to see two poor Championship sides do battle in the perishing cold but people from either Wigan or Sheffield? I explain that I am from St.Helens and more of a rugby league man and to my extreme satisfaction he reveals that although he works their games he does not support the despised Worriers. Instead he watches his rugby league in Swinton, Chorley and Blackpool. A proper fan. Not like us spoiled, Super League types. Amusingly, the floor 2 button inside the lift is upside down so I ask Emma to take a photograph and stick it on Facebook. A Wigan 2. But while she is doing so the doors close and the lift automatically starts moving back downstairs. The door opens again and all we can do is smile and apologise to the people still waiting to get upstairs. I don't want to speculate on what they probably thought we were doing.
We have half an hour to kill before kick-off so we go for a brew. The concourse is already filling up and most people there seem to be extremely boisterous Wednesday fans. Makes sense since we are in the North Stand where the away support is housed. In the time it takes to get served we are treated to the full repertoire of Wednesday fan songs. Most strikingly, to the tune of ‘She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain’ (alright, it is probably not called that but you know the one I mean) they sing ‘if you don’t fucking bounce then you’re a Blade’. A Blade being a Sheffield United fan. That is the lowest insult they could pay you. There’s an interesting contrast between their aggression and their politeness. In between publicly decrying Sheffield United fans they bend over backwards to help me pass through the crowds. Almost every person I encounter moves away quickly, apologising a thousand times for being in that particular space at that particular time. You get the feeling they would have done the same for me even if I had been a Blade.
Roland, Emma’s dad, has a beer. This being a football ground for the night we are not allowed to our seats inside the stadium until he has finished it. In a few days it will be 2015 and still we are led to believe that football fans cannot be trusted to have a beer or two without embarking on an 80’s style riot. It seems a little draconian to me, especially when a bout of fisticuffs breaks out later in the evening in any case. I’m starting to think the ban might be nothing to do with the potential for hooliganism and more to do with the fact that nobody wants to be picking up plastic beer containers from in between 25,000 seats. Instead of entering the stadium then we find a little space away from the main throng of fans and drink up, watching previews of tonight’s other Championship games on an incredibly small screen perched high above our heads. Derby are taking on Leeds while Ipswich Town face Charlton Athletic. Roland hates Ipswich for reasons that I don’t think I have fully understood. He’s a Sheffield Wednesday fan living in Buckinghamshire but somehow he is irritated by a middling outfit from Suffolk whose last meaningful success was in the late 1970’s. Football, sport in general, can do that to you.
When we do enter the stadium we find that Emma doesn’t have a seat. The platform has space for around five or six wheelchair users and not much else. Anyone accompanying a wheelchair user either has to stand, or else go and sit in the row of seating just in front and off to the right of the platform. It’s another classic piece of segregation. Up there with the Liverpool Empire Theatre’s brilliant idea of having you sit behind your companion if you happen to be using a wheelchair. We’ve never experienced it for ourselves. The knowledge of those arrangements was enough to put us off even trying it out. That and Ray Fucking Quinn.
I feel like I should have remembered about the lack of seating up here and warned Emma but I completely forgot. I have been here a couple of times before, in this exact same stand, watching Saints have varying levels of success against the other lot. One night, Sean Long ripped them a new one in a play-off game here as we ran out 54-16 winners. He was dazzling. One of the more enjoyable Saints-Wigan derbies in living memory. Sean Long is my favourite Wiganer by some distance. He might come from the wrong side of the lump and talk funny but he is nevertheless the second highest points scorer in Saints history. I can see why the Wigan fans hate him. One of their own turning to the other side, picking up pots and medals as a matter of routine and repeatedly humiliating them. That must have hurt. As I said earlier though, we really do know how that feels so suck it up, Wigan. Besides, it is the same situation with Matty Smith now with the obvious difference being that Matty Smith is shit. Ok, so he is not shit, but he is no Sean Long and never will be.
Emma’s not as upset about the lack of seating as I had feared. In fact I think I am more offended but I decide to refrain from too much of a rant about segregation and I will spare you it now aswell. Soon all of our concentration is on the game itself as the teams come out and begin aimlessly woofing the ball at each other as if it were a weapon of mass destuction. Wigan won the FA Cup last year but have fallen on hard times since being relegated under that football genius Roberto Martinez, while Wednesday remain mired in the same shit-swamp of mediocrity which has seized them for more than a decade. It’s not pretty to watch. Chief culprit is Wednesday striker Atdhe Nuhiu. He’s ploughing the proverbial lone furrow tonight due to manager Stuart Gray’s decision to keep Stevie May on the bench from the start and he is ploughing it in the most hapless way imaginable. His presence serves only to persuade his team mates to whack the ball up to him as hard and as high as they possibly can but his touch is preposterously bad and most of his lay-offs find a blue and white striped shirt. Which would ordinarily be ideal except that Wigan are at home and are therefore the team donning those colours. Wednesday are in yellow, which might be confusing the big Austrian. He has one moment in the first half where he could affect the game, latching on to a cross from the right but finding only the feet of Wigan goalkeeper Scott Carson, a man so ordinary that he wasn’t even good enough for Liverpool. Anyone who has seen Simon Mignolet play recently will be able to put that into some kind of context. Despite Wednesday’s good opening through Nuhiu it is Wigan who are the slightly better side in a first half lit up by little else other than a couple more from the Wednesday fan songbook;
(To the tune of KC And The Sunshine Band’s ‘Give It Up’)
“Na na na na na na na na na na……we’ve got Stevie May, Stevie May, we’ve got Stevie May!”
(To the tune of ‘Oh When The Saints Go Marching In’)
“I’ve got a shed. As big as this. I’ve got a shed as big as this…..”
Strangely there is also a chorus of a song which has as its main thrust an order to ‘fuck the IRA’. That might not be the worst sentiment in the world given their history of terrorism against the UK but I’m not sure what place it has at a football match. It is not universally enjoyed but there are enough people joining in for it to dominate the atmosphere at our end for a short while. Perhaps if you let them have a beer they would refrain from this kind of negativity and anger?
When we rejoin Roland and Susan on the concourse at half-time Roland’s main bugbear aside from the plainly incompetent Nuhiu is the behaviour of winger Jeremy Helan. The Frenchman has pace to burn but Roland complains that he doesn’t engage his brain and that all of his athleticism is wasted because he basically doesn’t know what he is doing. He’s equally unimpressed by the other winger, Jacques Maghoma. I’d describe his first half performance as disappointing had I expected anything of him in the first place. Clearly Roland did expect a little bit more from the man from Zaire.
Wednesday are markedly improved in the second half as they kick towards the goal behind which we are positioned. Around the hour mark controversial absolutely not racist Wigan manager Malky Mackay introduces Callum McManaman from the bench and I wonder if this might be a decisive move. It is, but not in the way I had imagined. McManaman earned rave reviews for his performances under Martinez in the Premier League a couple of years ago and so clearly has the class to impose himself on a game of this level. He does that alright, but only in lunging recklessly at Wednesday man Claude Dielna and earning himself a deserved red card within 10 minutes of his introduction. It was the kind of tackle in which the perpetrator seems to view the ball as nothing more than an obstacle between him and his real goal located somewhere around the opponent’s knees. The referee has no hesitation, but not all inside the North Stand are impressed. There is one lone voice, that of a Dave the Wanker Stadium steward who is angrily claiming that Dielna is play-acting as he writhes around on the turf waiting for assistance from the physio. Incadescent, the steward points out that this would never happen in rugby league. He would just get straight back up and get on with it if he were a rugby league player. Having seen rugby league players carry on playing with broken bones it is sort of easy to see where he is coming from, but Dielna is by no means play-acting and in any case, the extent or otherwise of his injury has no bearing on the fact that McManaman’s tackle is both late and dangerous. He has to go.
And when he does it really puts Wednesday in charge of the game. They enjoy the expected increase in possession and use it well, culminating in the winning goal just nine minutes after McManaman’s sorry exit. What is more surprising is that the goalscorer is that man Nuhiu. He had continued to make a Nuhiu-sance of himself throughout the second half with little in the way of finesse, before finally latching on to an Helan cross to power a header into the roof of Carson’s net. Wigan hit the post before the end but their forays into the Wednesday half are rare due to their numerical disadvantage. With five minutes left Gray gives the Wednesday fans what they had been waiting for all night when he throws May into the fray. May is a frizzy-haired, diminutive Scottish striker who has pace but is hardly clinical in front of goal. Yet try telling that to the Wednesday fans who laud him at every opportunity with their Stevie May song, sung with the kind of ghusto that makes you believe he is Luis Suarez.
Wednesday cling on for the win that takes them into the top 10 of the Championship and leaves Wigan floundering at the wrong end of the table. Celebration comes in the form of a chippy dinner on the way home after a more than satisfactory way to sign off in 2014. Just don’t mention the fact that their first game of 2015 is away to Premier League champions Manchester City in the third round of the FA Cup on Sunday.
But since we weren’t there, we will gloss over that particular result.
Monday, 22 December 2014
The Widnes Wild
It’s not often I get anything free from my publicity-shy, anonymous employer but at the weekend I had a new sporting experience at their expense when I took in a Widnes Wild ice hockey game.
I can’t really describe myself as an avid ice hockey fan. It’s a wonder I find time to eat and sleep (much less work for a living) considering all of the sport that I do watch, but ice hockey has never really been included alongside all of the football, rugby league, cricket and NFL that I regularly submerge myself in. At this time of year I even find myself watching darts. Who can resist the temptation to watch fat men throwing small arrows at a circular board while thousands of drunk onlookers shout ‘boring, boring table’ at each other? It’s a masterclass in witlessness but it’s also sport apparently. Not only that, but St.Helens is prominent in the darting world with at least three of the PDC’s top men either hailing from, living in or having once visited the old Woolworths in the town.
But I haven’t seen much ice hockey. It’s on Premier Sports to which I don’t yet subscribe despite their holding of the rights to NRL rugby league in Australia. One of the wonderful benefits of the end to Sky's monopoly on sports is that you have to have 17 different sports packages to be able to see all of the sport you want, meanwhile Sky steadfastly refuses to lower its monthly subscriptions despite the loss of content they have endured. Also, ice hockey is broadcast at times which are hardly suitable for the working man. Unlike the NFL which has games at either 6.00 or 9.25 on Sunday evenings, you’re looking at something around 1.00-1.30am before you get anything resembling live NHL ice hockey action on British television even if you have paid for that 17th subscription. The closest I have got to any kind of ice hockey-related activity is playing out my own version of the 2010 NHL season on the Nintendo Wii. That’s unless you count being in New York when it was hosting the Stanley Cup Finals earlier this year. In Madison Square Garden, which is not a garden and is not in Madison Square. And I never actually attended any of the games so it probably does not count in any case. We walked past the Garden one night and could hear music blaring from within which we assumed to be the pre-match entertainment and rituals, but getting in was never an option.
So anyway when the opportunity arose to see some real, live ice hockey I was uncharacteristically keen to respond to my employer. I say uncharacteristically because on the rare occasions that my employer emails me offering something for nothing I don’t get to the end of the second paragraph before the email gets deleted. I have no need in my life at this particular time for Indian head massage though I am sure it is every bit as relaxing and revitalising as is claimed. It’s just not for me, in the same way that Jeremy Clarkson isn’t. I’ve heard he is quite popular but I won’t have him on my telly. But ice hockey, well that sounded much more like my kind of thing. And Emma’s. She used to go to watch a team in Sheffield and since one of the games on offer through my employer was the Widnes Wild versus the Sheffield Senators it seemed like it was worth a go.
Whether it was or not is a matter for some debate. We arrived around half an hour before the start of the game to be looked at blankly by the two girls at the box office. I explained that I had come to pick up two tickets and that it had been arranged by my employer. Fortunately I had an email advising me that all I needed to do was explain this at the box office and present my staff card. Had I not kept the email I might very well have spent the rest of the evening trying to persuade the girls at the box office to let us in. Instead they just looked at each other before one of them muttered something to me about how nobody ever tells them anything. Then she issued what passes for a ticket and sent us through into the rink. The first thing that immediately strikes you is how cold it is, a fact which should have been and was obvious but even with my heavy coat on I could still feel the chill. To our left were a set of steps leading to the seating area which were clearly going to be inaccessible. We were advised by the man on the door that someone would be along in a moment with the key for the lift to take us up to the upper deck. At the time that seemed like a relief. None of the arena was visible from where we were by the door and the barrier stretched all around the playing area. It was not transparent plexiglass so you couldn’t see anything of the arena through it. After a few minutes wait the man on the door told us that someone was now at the lift waiting for us and we made our way around the arena to the lift. We were taken up one floor and led to our viewing area.
Which was a café bar. And all sense of relief turned to mild bewilderment. It had those plush comfy seats you find in hotel bars but mostly there were high stools and even higher tables. The kind that I spent 10 days moaning about in New York. There was no viewing area, as such, you just had to find a place to sit where you could see the action. Except there wasn’t anywhere fitting that description for someone of my height using a wheelchair. For reasons that would be exhaustively explained to me later on and which my brain has already dumped into the trash-can marked ‘not necessary to retain’ there is a barrier which has to be a certain minimum height. Like kids trying to get on the rides at Alton Towers. Speaking of whom, there was also a kids play area directly behind one of the two areas where it was possible to sit, in this case directly behind one of the goals. The other such area is along one side of the ice but that is interrupted by a wall, leaving you craning your neck around said wall whenever the puck goes up the other end of the ice. Predictably and despite the fact that there was a national league ice hockey game going on which some people had paid £6.00 to watch, the play area remained open for the kids throughout the night. When Emma went off to find someone to complain to, a man arrived to discuss our concerns and promptly and angrily chased all of the kids out of the building. They were running around in the open play area. Playing, you might say. The nerve.....
The man we found happened to be the same man with whom my employer liaises to get our staff free tickets for the games. He turned out to be a great bloke to be fair, who went a long way out of his way to try to help us. However at first he was confrontational and at one point I thought we were going to have to leave because he could not agree with us that this area was not suitable for disabled people to view ice hockey games or anything else held at the rink for that matter. He was a disabled person himself so perhaps should have known better, but nevertheless he claimed that I was the first disabled person to raise any concerns and that every single member of his sledge hockey team had tested it and declared the area fit for purpose. He must have some very tall sledge hockey team mates. Either that or their expectations are markedly lower than mine. As he sat in one of the comfy chairs next to me I knew very well that he could not see what was going on in the game while all the while he was arguing that there was nothing wrong with the view. By the end he was downsizing his claims by insisting that nobody said that the area was fully accessible and that actually it has no intention of being such. Rather, it aspires to be inclusive. All of which sounds like a vomit inducing, catch-all phrase for people who live under the noble but absurd misapprehension that disabled and able-bodied people can all live together in a fluffy world completely devoid of any bitterness and acrimony. Not if I have anything to do with it.
The outcome of what was becoming an increasingly circular discussion was that I felt that I should have been advised that the area was not fit for purpose before I travelled, but that there are plans to improve the facilities for disabled people in the future. They are going to introduce plexiglass to the upper deck viewing areas where there is currently only a thick, high barrier which should go some way to appeasing your average, angry disabled observer with an overwhelming desire to blog to all of his mates about the outrage of it all. I might be back to test that theory in the new year as our friend (his name is Matt, a former Paralympian sledge hockey player) showered us with freebies including season tickets for the rest of this season and a pledge that we could also go to any Sheffield Steeldogs (yes, really, Steeldogs) game if we just get in touch to let him know we are going. He gave us free tea, offered us free food which we declined, and regailed us with tales of his Paralympic career and titbits of information about the players in the Wild team. One works at the local Tesco and has played at the Elite League level but doesn’t want to travel any further than across the car park from his place of employment. Apparently he turned up one night at their training session with some extensive ice hockey kit and ran rings around his potential team-mates. When asked why he wasn't playing at a higher level he just pointed out that he worked at the Tesco over the road and said 'I play for you'. He's Czech or Polish or something. No doubt the Daily Mail will be furious to learn that he is taking the place in the team of a local Widnes lad. Another player is a plumber and others are electricians and builders. Only the referees get any financial reward which sounds a lot like the wheelchair basketball arrangements I remember from my former life.
I managed to repel several attempts by Matt to get me to go along to a sledge hockey session, by the way. Thursday nights are sledge hockey nights down at Widnes but I pointed out to him that you would have to be madder even than I am to get on the ice and have a go at that. He responded to this slur on his good name with another story, the one about how half his teeth came out when keeping goal in one fondly remembered game or other. If that doesn't put you off basketball stars then consider the fact that there is no classification system like in our namby-pamby game. Be prepared to be smashed into the ice by an array of seven foot ex-soldiers. Matt tried to argue that a classification system is not necessary and that moving the sledge around the ice quickly is down to core muscle strength and nothing to do with balance or anything like that. Which is, frankly, horse shit. Curling was of more interest to Emma, and I would be willing to have a go but due to a complex process which can also be found in that ‘not necessary to retain’ trash can (something about having to prepare the ice overnight) they can only offer the sessions on Friday mornings. Now we are left wondering whether a game of Curling is worth a day’s leave or flexi which, if it is anything like a night at the ice hockey, it won’t be. Besides, I have accepted my Paralympic failure. I’m not one of these biffs who is going to try every sport he can possibly get involved in before making his Paralympic debut in sausage eating at the age of 51. I’m over it, really.
The game itself, or the bits of it that I could see, was very entertaining. The Wild lost out 8-6 to the Senators in the end, with the last goal scored just a couple of minutes from the end as the frost-bite inducing possibility of an overtime period lingered. Emma pointed out that although it was entertaining, it was a pretty average standard even by comparison to the Elite League games that she has seen in the past. Nevertheless I’ll probably give it another go at the end of January by when Matt assures me that the plexiglass will be in place and I’ll be able to see a lot more of the skills of the shelf-stackers, electricians and plumbers of the Widnes Wild.
Until then I’ll stay in and watch the darts.
I can’t really describe myself as an avid ice hockey fan. It’s a wonder I find time to eat and sleep (much less work for a living) considering all of the sport that I do watch, but ice hockey has never really been included alongside all of the football, rugby league, cricket and NFL that I regularly submerge myself in. At this time of year I even find myself watching darts. Who can resist the temptation to watch fat men throwing small arrows at a circular board while thousands of drunk onlookers shout ‘boring, boring table’ at each other? It’s a masterclass in witlessness but it’s also sport apparently. Not only that, but St.Helens is prominent in the darting world with at least three of the PDC’s top men either hailing from, living in or having once visited the old Woolworths in the town.
But I haven’t seen much ice hockey. It’s on Premier Sports to which I don’t yet subscribe despite their holding of the rights to NRL rugby league in Australia. One of the wonderful benefits of the end to Sky's monopoly on sports is that you have to have 17 different sports packages to be able to see all of the sport you want, meanwhile Sky steadfastly refuses to lower its monthly subscriptions despite the loss of content they have endured. Also, ice hockey is broadcast at times which are hardly suitable for the working man. Unlike the NFL which has games at either 6.00 or 9.25 on Sunday evenings, you’re looking at something around 1.00-1.30am before you get anything resembling live NHL ice hockey action on British television even if you have paid for that 17th subscription. The closest I have got to any kind of ice hockey-related activity is playing out my own version of the 2010 NHL season on the Nintendo Wii. That’s unless you count being in New York when it was hosting the Stanley Cup Finals earlier this year. In Madison Square Garden, which is not a garden and is not in Madison Square. And I never actually attended any of the games so it probably does not count in any case. We walked past the Garden one night and could hear music blaring from within which we assumed to be the pre-match entertainment and rituals, but getting in was never an option.
So anyway when the opportunity arose to see some real, live ice hockey I was uncharacteristically keen to respond to my employer. I say uncharacteristically because on the rare occasions that my employer emails me offering something for nothing I don’t get to the end of the second paragraph before the email gets deleted. I have no need in my life at this particular time for Indian head massage though I am sure it is every bit as relaxing and revitalising as is claimed. It’s just not for me, in the same way that Jeremy Clarkson isn’t. I’ve heard he is quite popular but I won’t have him on my telly. But ice hockey, well that sounded much more like my kind of thing. And Emma’s. She used to go to watch a team in Sheffield and since one of the games on offer through my employer was the Widnes Wild versus the Sheffield Senators it seemed like it was worth a go.
Whether it was or not is a matter for some debate. We arrived around half an hour before the start of the game to be looked at blankly by the two girls at the box office. I explained that I had come to pick up two tickets and that it had been arranged by my employer. Fortunately I had an email advising me that all I needed to do was explain this at the box office and present my staff card. Had I not kept the email I might very well have spent the rest of the evening trying to persuade the girls at the box office to let us in. Instead they just looked at each other before one of them muttered something to me about how nobody ever tells them anything. Then she issued what passes for a ticket and sent us through into the rink. The first thing that immediately strikes you is how cold it is, a fact which should have been and was obvious but even with my heavy coat on I could still feel the chill. To our left were a set of steps leading to the seating area which were clearly going to be inaccessible. We were advised by the man on the door that someone would be along in a moment with the key for the lift to take us up to the upper deck. At the time that seemed like a relief. None of the arena was visible from where we were by the door and the barrier stretched all around the playing area. It was not transparent plexiglass so you couldn’t see anything of the arena through it. After a few minutes wait the man on the door told us that someone was now at the lift waiting for us and we made our way around the arena to the lift. We were taken up one floor and led to our viewing area.
Which was a café bar. And all sense of relief turned to mild bewilderment. It had those plush comfy seats you find in hotel bars but mostly there were high stools and even higher tables. The kind that I spent 10 days moaning about in New York. There was no viewing area, as such, you just had to find a place to sit where you could see the action. Except there wasn’t anywhere fitting that description for someone of my height using a wheelchair. For reasons that would be exhaustively explained to me later on and which my brain has already dumped into the trash-can marked ‘not necessary to retain’ there is a barrier which has to be a certain minimum height. Like kids trying to get on the rides at Alton Towers. Speaking of whom, there was also a kids play area directly behind one of the two areas where it was possible to sit, in this case directly behind one of the goals. The other such area is along one side of the ice but that is interrupted by a wall, leaving you craning your neck around said wall whenever the puck goes up the other end of the ice. Predictably and despite the fact that there was a national league ice hockey game going on which some people had paid £6.00 to watch, the play area remained open for the kids throughout the night. When Emma went off to find someone to complain to, a man arrived to discuss our concerns and promptly and angrily chased all of the kids out of the building. They were running around in the open play area. Playing, you might say. The nerve.....
The man we found happened to be the same man with whom my employer liaises to get our staff free tickets for the games. He turned out to be a great bloke to be fair, who went a long way out of his way to try to help us. However at first he was confrontational and at one point I thought we were going to have to leave because he could not agree with us that this area was not suitable for disabled people to view ice hockey games or anything else held at the rink for that matter. He was a disabled person himself so perhaps should have known better, but nevertheless he claimed that I was the first disabled person to raise any concerns and that every single member of his sledge hockey team had tested it and declared the area fit for purpose. He must have some very tall sledge hockey team mates. Either that or their expectations are markedly lower than mine. As he sat in one of the comfy chairs next to me I knew very well that he could not see what was going on in the game while all the while he was arguing that there was nothing wrong with the view. By the end he was downsizing his claims by insisting that nobody said that the area was fully accessible and that actually it has no intention of being such. Rather, it aspires to be inclusive. All of which sounds like a vomit inducing, catch-all phrase for people who live under the noble but absurd misapprehension that disabled and able-bodied people can all live together in a fluffy world completely devoid of any bitterness and acrimony. Not if I have anything to do with it.
The outcome of what was becoming an increasingly circular discussion was that I felt that I should have been advised that the area was not fit for purpose before I travelled, but that there are plans to improve the facilities for disabled people in the future. They are going to introduce plexiglass to the upper deck viewing areas where there is currently only a thick, high barrier which should go some way to appeasing your average, angry disabled observer with an overwhelming desire to blog to all of his mates about the outrage of it all. I might be back to test that theory in the new year as our friend (his name is Matt, a former Paralympian sledge hockey player) showered us with freebies including season tickets for the rest of this season and a pledge that we could also go to any Sheffield Steeldogs (yes, really, Steeldogs) game if we just get in touch to let him know we are going. He gave us free tea, offered us free food which we declined, and regailed us with tales of his Paralympic career and titbits of information about the players in the Wild team. One works at the local Tesco and has played at the Elite League level but doesn’t want to travel any further than across the car park from his place of employment. Apparently he turned up one night at their training session with some extensive ice hockey kit and ran rings around his potential team-mates. When asked why he wasn't playing at a higher level he just pointed out that he worked at the Tesco over the road and said 'I play for you'. He's Czech or Polish or something. No doubt the Daily Mail will be furious to learn that he is taking the place in the team of a local Widnes lad. Another player is a plumber and others are electricians and builders. Only the referees get any financial reward which sounds a lot like the wheelchair basketball arrangements I remember from my former life.
I managed to repel several attempts by Matt to get me to go along to a sledge hockey session, by the way. Thursday nights are sledge hockey nights down at Widnes but I pointed out to him that you would have to be madder even than I am to get on the ice and have a go at that. He responded to this slur on his good name with another story, the one about how half his teeth came out when keeping goal in one fondly remembered game or other. If that doesn't put you off basketball stars then consider the fact that there is no classification system like in our namby-pamby game. Be prepared to be smashed into the ice by an array of seven foot ex-soldiers. Matt tried to argue that a classification system is not necessary and that moving the sledge around the ice quickly is down to core muscle strength and nothing to do with balance or anything like that. Which is, frankly, horse shit. Curling was of more interest to Emma, and I would be willing to have a go but due to a complex process which can also be found in that ‘not necessary to retain’ trash can (something about having to prepare the ice overnight) they can only offer the sessions on Friday mornings. Now we are left wondering whether a game of Curling is worth a day’s leave or flexi which, if it is anything like a night at the ice hockey, it won’t be. Besides, I have accepted my Paralympic failure. I’m not one of these biffs who is going to try every sport he can possibly get involved in before making his Paralympic debut in sausage eating at the age of 51. I’m over it, really.
The game itself, or the bits of it that I could see, was very entertaining. The Wild lost out 8-6 to the Senators in the end, with the last goal scored just a couple of minutes from the end as the frost-bite inducing possibility of an overtime period lingered. Emma pointed out that although it was entertaining, it was a pretty average standard even by comparison to the Elite League games that she has seen in the past. Nevertheless I’ll probably give it another go at the end of January by when Matt assures me that the plexiglass will be in place and I’ll be able to see a lot more of the skills of the shelf-stackers, electricians and plumbers of the Widnes Wild.
Until then I’ll stay in and watch the darts.
Wednesday, 17 December 2014
A Different Kind Of Access Problem
Time to break that rule about not writing about work again. Of course we will avoid the specifics. Under absolutely no circumstances will I reveal the name of my employer, which is a shame because it single-handedly cured Ebola just the other day.
But this is not about that. This is about what MOAFH specialises in. My foolishness and subsequent humiliation. A bit of background for you. My employer is very security conscious, as it needs to be. They wouldn’t want the wrong sort of people getting into the building, let alone areas of said building where the wrong sort of people could wreak various kinds of havoc. I am not sure what type of people they have in mind. Perhaps the locals, which gives rise to all sorts of brilliant gags about what you call a scouser in an institute of higher education (careful……). But I’m not doing any of those gags about scousers. Some of my best friends are scousers. Salt of the earth, God-fearing insurance fraudsters that they are….. I, on the other hand, do not fear God as we know because I am a Godless atheist. So anyway on account of the security consciousness of my employer we have staff only access to many areas of the building including the office in which I conduct most of what passes for my daily business. I know, I was as surprised as you to learn that I’m not actually a proper writer. And that a disabled person has a job. Back to the plot. Access works like this. You have a staff card and you swipe said staff card along a reader outside the office door. The reader clicks and you are granted access. I have been gaining access to this place of business in this precise way for six years.
Six years.
Two days ago my six-year-old battered, tatty old card gave up. As an amusing aside the photograph on my staff ID card was taken with something odd in the background hanging above my head and because my head is shaved it looks like I have a Mohican circa David Beckham 2001. Without the good looks, clearly. The card had been very erratic in recent months, only allowing me access when it was of a mind to do so. All of which was much to the chagrin of my long suffering colleagues, particularly those who sit nearest to the office door and to whom it therefore most commonly falls upon to get up from their seat and press the button inside the office which unlocks the door. By now the card had decided that it didn’t care what mood it was in, I was not getting into that office unaided and so I went downstairs to the security desk to get an upgrade. I came back to the office and swiped in. Nothing. Nada. Computer says no. I went to the printing room down the corridor and swiped the reader outside that door. A beep later access was granted. Something was beginning to whiff a little. How could it be that I could use the card to get into the print room (and as I subsequently discovered through the barriers just inside the main entrance, the barrier to the disabled car park and the main door at the rear of the building) but not to get into the office? There are those who would point out how typical and predictable this is. Of course I would be able to get everywhere else but into the room that I move in and out of most often. The Law Of Sod was written with people like me in mind.
I went back down to the security desk twice to obtain new cards, believing that on each occasion they had just issued me with duds. I spoke on the phone to the security manager who assured me that everything was fine with the technology and that he also was baffled by the whole affair. Today he visited me at the office and we went out to the reader so that I could demonstrate the problem. You’re ahead of me, aren’t you? Well not quite perhaps. I swiped it twice more, in the way I had been doing for six years. Nothing. He took the card from me and swiped it twice more in the way I had just demonstrated. Nothing. At this point I should point out that the reader has a little screen at the top where it says something like ‘please swipe card’. Below this screen is a keypad. For six years I have been swiping the card across the screen and gaining access. Never have I swiped it across the keypad. Presumably for shits and giggles he thought he would give the latter a try. He swiped the card against the keypad, just below the top row of numbers.
There was a click and the screen lit up. The door was open.
I have been back out there several times since and even now if I swipe my card anywhere above the top row of numbers nothing happens. An inch or so below and I’m in. Upon our discovery the security manager gave me a look which I cannot reasonably describe without having the company arrest me and lop off my head. Suffice to say he was suitably and understandably unimpressed at having been dragged probably half way across the city from a different site to explain to the disabled person that he has been swiping his card incorrectly for the last six years. Actually, I’m not sure that he believed that I have been swiping it that way for six years but I can assure him and all of you that I have. Nevertheless I have at best assured my place in one of his ‘people at work are stupid’ anecdotes when he is out with his family and friends over the Christmas period. At worst I have earned a place in a rather darker ‘disabled people are stupid’ lament.
Maybe it’s me with the attitude problem but this always seems worse because of the prickly problem that is disability. When you have what might otherwise be referred to as a blonde or senior moment it’s magnified enormously by a wheelchair. You can multiply what you think you would feel in that situation by about 10,000. As a disabled person in that predicament you can’t shake the feeling that everyone thinks that in the first place you are thick, and in the second place you are thick because you have a wheelchair and it is all you can do to avoid slavering in the corner while rocking back and forth and shouting ‘sausages!’. My path will likely never cross that of the security manager again so what kind of first and last impression is that to leave him with?
But that’s me isn’t it? Always doing my bit to promote disability and obliterate tired old stereotpyes…..
But this is not about that. This is about what MOAFH specialises in. My foolishness and subsequent humiliation. A bit of background for you. My employer is very security conscious, as it needs to be. They wouldn’t want the wrong sort of people getting into the building, let alone areas of said building where the wrong sort of people could wreak various kinds of havoc. I am not sure what type of people they have in mind. Perhaps the locals, which gives rise to all sorts of brilliant gags about what you call a scouser in an institute of higher education (careful……). But I’m not doing any of those gags about scousers. Some of my best friends are scousers. Salt of the earth, God-fearing insurance fraudsters that they are….. I, on the other hand, do not fear God as we know because I am a Godless atheist. So anyway on account of the security consciousness of my employer we have staff only access to many areas of the building including the office in which I conduct most of what passes for my daily business. I know, I was as surprised as you to learn that I’m not actually a proper writer. And that a disabled person has a job. Back to the plot. Access works like this. You have a staff card and you swipe said staff card along a reader outside the office door. The reader clicks and you are granted access. I have been gaining access to this place of business in this precise way for six years.
Six years.
Two days ago my six-year-old battered, tatty old card gave up. As an amusing aside the photograph on my staff ID card was taken with something odd in the background hanging above my head and because my head is shaved it looks like I have a Mohican circa David Beckham 2001. Without the good looks, clearly. The card had been very erratic in recent months, only allowing me access when it was of a mind to do so. All of which was much to the chagrin of my long suffering colleagues, particularly those who sit nearest to the office door and to whom it therefore most commonly falls upon to get up from their seat and press the button inside the office which unlocks the door. By now the card had decided that it didn’t care what mood it was in, I was not getting into that office unaided and so I went downstairs to the security desk to get an upgrade. I came back to the office and swiped in. Nothing. Nada. Computer says no. I went to the printing room down the corridor and swiped the reader outside that door. A beep later access was granted. Something was beginning to whiff a little. How could it be that I could use the card to get into the print room (and as I subsequently discovered through the barriers just inside the main entrance, the barrier to the disabled car park and the main door at the rear of the building) but not to get into the office? There are those who would point out how typical and predictable this is. Of course I would be able to get everywhere else but into the room that I move in and out of most often. The Law Of Sod was written with people like me in mind.
I went back down to the security desk twice to obtain new cards, believing that on each occasion they had just issued me with duds. I spoke on the phone to the security manager who assured me that everything was fine with the technology and that he also was baffled by the whole affair. Today he visited me at the office and we went out to the reader so that I could demonstrate the problem. You’re ahead of me, aren’t you? Well not quite perhaps. I swiped it twice more, in the way I had been doing for six years. Nothing. He took the card from me and swiped it twice more in the way I had just demonstrated. Nothing. At this point I should point out that the reader has a little screen at the top where it says something like ‘please swipe card’. Below this screen is a keypad. For six years I have been swiping the card across the screen and gaining access. Never have I swiped it across the keypad. Presumably for shits and giggles he thought he would give the latter a try. He swiped the card against the keypad, just below the top row of numbers.
There was a click and the screen lit up. The door was open.
I have been back out there several times since and even now if I swipe my card anywhere above the top row of numbers nothing happens. An inch or so below and I’m in. Upon our discovery the security manager gave me a look which I cannot reasonably describe without having the company arrest me and lop off my head. Suffice to say he was suitably and understandably unimpressed at having been dragged probably half way across the city from a different site to explain to the disabled person that he has been swiping his card incorrectly for the last six years. Actually, I’m not sure that he believed that I have been swiping it that way for six years but I can assure him and all of you that I have. Nevertheless I have at best assured my place in one of his ‘people at work are stupid’ anecdotes when he is out with his family and friends over the Christmas period. At worst I have earned a place in a rather darker ‘disabled people are stupid’ lament.
Maybe it’s me with the attitude problem but this always seems worse because of the prickly problem that is disability. When you have what might otherwise be referred to as a blonde or senior moment it’s magnified enormously by a wheelchair. You can multiply what you think you would feel in that situation by about 10,000. As a disabled person in that predicament you can’t shake the feeling that everyone thinks that in the first place you are thick, and in the second place you are thick because you have a wheelchair and it is all you can do to avoid slavering in the corner while rocking back and forth and shouting ‘sausages!’. My path will likely never cross that of the security manager again so what kind of first and last impression is that to leave him with?
But that’s me isn’t it? Always doing my bit to promote disability and obliterate tired old stereotpyes…..
Thursday, 11 December 2014
Whose Accessible Bus Seat Is It Anyway?
This column is among the louder trumpeters of disability rights that you might awkwardly stumble across as you trawl the internet looking for pictures of Miley Cyrus. Barely an entry goes by without it venting at some wretched wrong-doing by the able bodied community who are, as regular readers will know, a villainous rabble. But it draws the line at this bloody bus row.
Now a proper journalist would review the facts of the case in great detail. However, I stopped being a proper journalist around 2001 so let me summarise for you. Some time in the recent past it was declared lawful that disabled people should be given priority over people pushing prams when it comes to blagging the pitiful amount of accessible space on offer. Then it was decided that actually, no, that is a lot of old nonsense and the pram-pushers were favoured. Notwithstanding the fact that you could never create a bus big enough for the pram pushing population of Thatto Heath, it is my duty to report that this latest decision is being challenged again by the disability rights campaigners. In particular, one disability rights campaigner who scored the Paralympic level own-goal of allowing himself to be photographed boarding a bus with his piss-bag sticking out of the bottom of his trouser leg for all to see. Now tell me how he gets priority?
So anyway the point I am making is that despite being a disabled person myself, and one who spends his life crusading for the rights of such people, I am against the idea that all disabled people should be given priority for the aforementioned pitiful amount of accessible space on offer. Some of us just should not. I have experienced all too often that awful moment when the bus driver, who is already confused about who should get priority it seems, makes some poor girl with 13 children move from her seat so that I can reverse into the space, being careful to place my head against the headboard and apply the brakes on my chair which exist only in the minds of the able bodied. It’s embarrassing and it will serve only to demonise the disabled population with young mothers in particular. What red-blooded male wants to be demonised by young women anyway? I say we are demonised enough. You have the space, love, I will use the fucking allowance that the government pay me to have a motability car (for which I am exempt from paying insurance), and we will all get to where we are going anyway. If I want a drink I will use yet more of my benefit or, Heaven for-fucking-fend my WAGES to get a taxi.
As I suggested this does not apply to all disabled people, just the likes of me actually. Yes there are people who for whatever reason can’t just jump in their mobility car and drive themselves to wherever, or who have trouble persuading that most common sufferer of back injury, the taxi driver, to help them into the back of their hire vehicle. Perhaps those people have a case to be given priority, but for it to be spread across the board and to be applied to all disabled people is loony leftism of the worst kind. The kind of strange, woolly thinking which leads to Mario Balotelli being punished for an anti-racist tweet in his second language while the institutional racism he has to endure in his daily life goes virtually unnoticed by the shitclowns at the FA.
Now wouldn't the answer be to provide more access for buses, and spare everyone the legal wrangling over who gets the last crumb on the island before we have to start eating each other?
This blog was written in 10 minutes at the end of a working day and you can’t half tell.
Now a proper journalist would review the facts of the case in great detail. However, I stopped being a proper journalist around 2001 so let me summarise for you. Some time in the recent past it was declared lawful that disabled people should be given priority over people pushing prams when it comes to blagging the pitiful amount of accessible space on offer. Then it was decided that actually, no, that is a lot of old nonsense and the pram-pushers were favoured. Notwithstanding the fact that you could never create a bus big enough for the pram pushing population of Thatto Heath, it is my duty to report that this latest decision is being challenged again by the disability rights campaigners. In particular, one disability rights campaigner who scored the Paralympic level own-goal of allowing himself to be photographed boarding a bus with his piss-bag sticking out of the bottom of his trouser leg for all to see. Now tell me how he gets priority?
So anyway the point I am making is that despite being a disabled person myself, and one who spends his life crusading for the rights of such people, I am against the idea that all disabled people should be given priority for the aforementioned pitiful amount of accessible space on offer. Some of us just should not. I have experienced all too often that awful moment when the bus driver, who is already confused about who should get priority it seems, makes some poor girl with 13 children move from her seat so that I can reverse into the space, being careful to place my head against the headboard and apply the brakes on my chair which exist only in the minds of the able bodied. It’s embarrassing and it will serve only to demonise the disabled population with young mothers in particular. What red-blooded male wants to be demonised by young women anyway? I say we are demonised enough. You have the space, love, I will use the fucking allowance that the government pay me to have a motability car (for which I am exempt from paying insurance), and we will all get to where we are going anyway. If I want a drink I will use yet more of my benefit or, Heaven for-fucking-fend my WAGES to get a taxi.
As I suggested this does not apply to all disabled people, just the likes of me actually. Yes there are people who for whatever reason can’t just jump in their mobility car and drive themselves to wherever, or who have trouble persuading that most common sufferer of back injury, the taxi driver, to help them into the back of their hire vehicle. Perhaps those people have a case to be given priority, but for it to be spread across the board and to be applied to all disabled people is loony leftism of the worst kind. The kind of strange, woolly thinking which leads to Mario Balotelli being punished for an anti-racist tweet in his second language while the institutional racism he has to endure in his daily life goes virtually unnoticed by the shitclowns at the FA.
Now wouldn't the answer be to provide more access for buses, and spare everyone the legal wrangling over who gets the last crumb on the island before we have to start eating each other?
This blog was written in 10 minutes at the end of a working day and you can’t half tell.
Wednesday, 19 November 2014
Three Things That Happened
One…………
Following possibly the most unimaginative title in the history of Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard comes this routine but thankfully short trundle through the madness that is my daily life. For the over sensitive, every effort will be made not to mention the name of the organisation which employs me and which recently cleared third world debt.
First of all let me relay to you that I have again managed to display my other-worldly talent for needlessly embarrassing myself. This morning I was talking with a couple of colleagues while in the process of passing over a form or something equally mundane. As I made my way back over to my own desk one of them whispered a polite ‘see you later’. Nothing unusual about that. We work on different sides of the office so we don’t see a lot of each other. We actually might aswell be in different rooms. Yet this does not justify the way in which I then proceeded to bellow;
‘SEE YA’ ……………
AT THE TOP OF MY VOICE AS IF SHE WAS SAT ACROSS THE STREET AT THE END OF THE ROAD ON AN ESPECIALLY WINDY DAY.
Excruciating. Again, it’s always a female.
Two……….
Later on I had just finished another piece of work and was carrying out the equally mundane and in fact suspiciously similar task of passing the form to a staff member at the other side of the office. She wasn’t there so I just left it on her desk. Lucky for her, lest I scream some inappropriately loud greeting or goodbye at her. Some hours later I was informed by someone else that this staff member is in fact no longer with us. I don’t mean she’s passed away. As far as I know they haven't started killing people yet. I just mean she has moved to another site. Taken seemingly in the night like in some bizarre kidnapping. No email, no collection that I know of. Nothing. How does this happen without my knowing? Am I so oafishly unaware of what is going on around me? Everyone else in my team knew that this had happened but that is possibly because they spend large parts of their day huddled over their computers whispering darkly while I remain soundlessly bricked up behind my screens. Rendered deaf to the banter by the security measures which are no doubt in place to stop me spreading Spina Bifida here, there and everywhere. To be honest, that is not always a bad thing.
Three……..
And then I went to the toilet. Except I couldn’t get in. I waited a few minutes as I always do when someone who I suspect is not disabled is occupying the disabled toilet. If you are going to make me wait then be advised that I will shame you. She emerged just in time to stop me pissing in my pants and she was all apologies and so forth. Apparently she didn’t know. Didn’t know what? That she was in a disabled toilet? That she was not disabled? That I am disabled? It’s unclear. What is clear is that if I didn’t need my job so much then many of her necessary administrative documents which reside within our department might find themselves being posted to Portugal. But I do need my job and so her documents won’t make it any further away than a shelf in the corner of the room. And then at some point, unless someone mercifully beats me to it, I’ll have to help her out with said administrative needs while all the while seething quietly as I remember that she is the kind of person who craps in a disabled toilet and makes me wait my turn.
At least I didn’t fart today. Well, not loudly anyway.
Following possibly the most unimaginative title in the history of Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard comes this routine but thankfully short trundle through the madness that is my daily life. For the over sensitive, every effort will be made not to mention the name of the organisation which employs me and which recently cleared third world debt.
First of all let me relay to you that I have again managed to display my other-worldly talent for needlessly embarrassing myself. This morning I was talking with a couple of colleagues while in the process of passing over a form or something equally mundane. As I made my way back over to my own desk one of them whispered a polite ‘see you later’. Nothing unusual about that. We work on different sides of the office so we don’t see a lot of each other. We actually might aswell be in different rooms. Yet this does not justify the way in which I then proceeded to bellow;
‘SEE YA’ ……………
AT THE TOP OF MY VOICE AS IF SHE WAS SAT ACROSS THE STREET AT THE END OF THE ROAD ON AN ESPECIALLY WINDY DAY.
Excruciating. Again, it’s always a female.
Two……….
Later on I had just finished another piece of work and was carrying out the equally mundane and in fact suspiciously similar task of passing the form to a staff member at the other side of the office. She wasn’t there so I just left it on her desk. Lucky for her, lest I scream some inappropriately loud greeting or goodbye at her. Some hours later I was informed by someone else that this staff member is in fact no longer with us. I don’t mean she’s passed away. As far as I know they haven't started killing people yet. I just mean she has moved to another site. Taken seemingly in the night like in some bizarre kidnapping. No email, no collection that I know of. Nothing. How does this happen without my knowing? Am I so oafishly unaware of what is going on around me? Everyone else in my team knew that this had happened but that is possibly because they spend large parts of their day huddled over their computers whispering darkly while I remain soundlessly bricked up behind my screens. Rendered deaf to the banter by the security measures which are no doubt in place to stop me spreading Spina Bifida here, there and everywhere. To be honest, that is not always a bad thing.
Three……..
And then I went to the toilet. Except I couldn’t get in. I waited a few minutes as I always do when someone who I suspect is not disabled is occupying the disabled toilet. If you are going to make me wait then be advised that I will shame you. She emerged just in time to stop me pissing in my pants and she was all apologies and so forth. Apparently she didn’t know. Didn’t know what? That she was in a disabled toilet? That she was not disabled? That I am disabled? It’s unclear. What is clear is that if I didn’t need my job so much then many of her necessary administrative documents which reside within our department might find themselves being posted to Portugal. But I do need my job and so her documents won’t make it any further away than a shelf in the corner of the room. And then at some point, unless someone mercifully beats me to it, I’ll have to help her out with said administrative needs while all the while seething quietly as I remember that she is the kind of person who craps in a disabled toilet and makes me wait my turn.
At least I didn’t fart today. Well, not loudly anyway.
Tuesday, 11 November 2014
Incontinence And The Blag Bee Gees
I farted in work today.
And not just a little silent one like the kind that girl’s do. I’m talking about a long, sustained rumble of a fart. The kind that makes you take a large breath in through your nose just to be sure. This happened just as I approached my colleague’s desk to pass on a phone message. Of course it was a female colleague. It’s always a female. It was a female the time I fell out of my chair on the threshold of the exit to the building, why wouldn’t it be a female when every last breath of wind escapes through my back passage in one go?
This is clearly an acute embarrassment. Mortifying. We both somehow managed to ignore it but we both knew. It was an unspoken truth. We just got on with talking about what I had gone over to talk about but it was there, lingering, like a fart does. Had it been a male colleague we might well have been able to laugh it off, gently jabbing each other with a fist and shouting 'har-har' like Edmund and Bob in Blackadder II. In my defence it is not my fault. I have no idea this is going to happen until I hear the beginnings of the sound itself. By then it is too late. You could shove a cork up there and it would be like the story of the boy with his finger in the dyke or whatever it was. King Canute trying to stop the tide. Steven Gerrard trying to play as a holding midfielder without Luis Suarez and Daniel Sturridge to keep the ball at the other end of the field for him. A fools errand.
I don’t want to tar all disabled people with the same soiled old brush. The reason I don’t know about this before it happens is my disability but it is just that…my disability. We’re all different and Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard does not claim to represent all disabled people. It is based only on the experiences of one disabled person in particular. And not a particularly well adjusted disabled person at that. Not everyone has my shortcomings. At the same time there are people who are worse off. On Sunday I spent a good 15 minutes with a good friend of mine which mainly consisted of anecdotes about various people of varying disabilities soiling themselves in ever more impressive and amusing ways. At one point I was falsely accused of shitting in my own hair in an incident that can only be described as a shite shampoo. It wasn’t me but I sympathise with anyone who has had this happen to them. As my wise friend said, it’s not whether you shit yourself, it’s how you deal with it. If this amuses you it’s ok. Incontinence can be funny, it just takes a few years or so for the person suffering the incontinence to join in with the joke.
Incontinence is sort of linked to what I really wanted to tell you about tonight which is Nights On Broadway…The Story Of The Bee Gees. Only the incontinence there was mostly in the audience due to their average age. The show was staged at the Theatre Royal in town and that, owing to my previously positive experiences of theatres, was enough to persuade me that it might be worth a go. It’s not cool to say so, but the Bee Gees were brilliant. Their body of work rivals that of anyone you can name. Yes, even that of Cheryl Whatever Her Name Is This Week. As songwriters the Bee Gees were peerless and prolific so I am well acquainted with their material. On the other hand my previous experience of the Theatre Royal extends to my participation in a school production of War Of The World’s which must have been held there some time during the early to mid 1980’s. I can’t remember what part I played. I was either a Martian or a tree but frankly what is the difference when it comes to wheelchair dance? All I can recall is the gruff narration of Richard Burton and the haunting soundtrack. If we performed it now and you came in expecting Tom Cruise running around shouting you would be gravely disappointed. I’m not exactly proud of my performance, put it that way. Or of the production as a whole. If I was to summarise it I would say that it was marginally more embarrassing than farting in work, but slightly less embarrassing than shitting in your own hair. I imagine.
First of all I would take issue with the title of the show. Nights On Broadway. Emma and I have had a few Nights On Broadway and they were nothing like this. Though it was cancelled due to an invasion of Philistines, the Rocky musical was utterly, jaw droppingly fabulous while the Motown show we saw was chock-full of people you had never heard of who nevertheless had bucket loads of talent. That these performers remain anonymous while middle aged women from GodKnowsWhere achieve fame for baking a cake is a fact which makes my eyes bleed. As such we will end the discussion there before I have another accident. Oh, and Bee Gees Story, you say? Story? This implied that we might emerge at the end of the show having learned something that we may not previously have known about the Bee Gees. That would have required acting and dialogue, of which there was precisely none. What we had here was effectively a tribute band, and a very iffy tribute band at that. This lot didn’t need the Theatre Royal at £17.50 a clip at all. They were strictly Chicago Rock on a Wednesday night, By Jovi, Robbing Williams, Zoo 2 material.
Barry Gibb was played by Bjorn Borg, I’m sure of it. Aswell as being a Swedish tennis legend Borg is known for the fact that he doesn’t bother getting out all that much these days. It is unlikely he would subject himself to attempting to replicate Barry’s famous falsetto. Yet the man playing Barry was a dead ringer for Borg. Barry-Bjorn’s falsetto jolted you out of your seat as he screeched to find the smoothness with which the real Barry delivers his vocals. Robin was probably the most competent singer of the trio but probably the one who looked least like a Bee Gee. Which is saying something when you consider that you have a five-time Wimbledon champion playing Barry. Maurice looked the part but rather like the real Maurice, that was mostly down to his ability to grow a beard and wear a hat and then just blend in.
When Emma pointed out to me that they weren’t even playing the instruments they were holding, and that the only truly live music was coming from the band at the back of the stage I was starting to think in terms of a refund. The guitarist may or may not have been our own Johnny Vegas but as for the others, I couldn’t see them due to the location of the accessible seating. Should you have the temerity to turn up to the Theatre Royal without the ability to walk you will be placed at the end of the row and in your eyeline there will be a large speaker blocking the screen behind the performers on stage. Thankfully, all I seemed to miss on said screen was an inexplicably inappropriate Kenny Everett sketch from his 1970’s television show in which he mercilessly lampoons the Bee Gees while ironically remaining blissfully unaware of his own shiteness. Saying that, when I was about six the sight of Everett crossing and uncrossing his legs and saying ‘all in the best possible taste’ at every opportunity was the very height of comedy as far as I was concerned. But I was six years old and I do fart in work.
The lack of any acting or actual story may or may not have been compensated for by an attempt on the part of the band to sound like the Bee Gees when they were talking to the audience in between numbers. But they were Irish. So Irish were they, in fact, that they sang ‘true’ instead of ‘through’ and ‘dis’ instead of ‘this’. At various points along the way they repeatedly mentioned that this (dis?), humble old St.Helens, was the last stop on their UK tour. Where the bloody hell else had they been? My mind whirred with the possible permutations. But don’t worry, they told us, they would be available in the lobby at the end for photographs and to sign copies of the DVD. The DVD? At this point my thesaurus isn’t up to the job. They have a DVD? The Bee Gees did a live show in Las Vegas or New York or somewhere exotic which can often be seen on Sky Arts and indeed, with some irony, was broadcast by that channel again on Sunday night just past. You would have had a far greater Bee Gees experience, and learned more about the band and their ‘story’ by staying at home and watching that show than we did by going out on a damp night in November.
Afterwards we stumbled bewildered into the nearest pub and unexpectedly found Stillia, a local band made up of teenagers with loud guitars, playing live. They were very good as it turned out and you can see them again this Friday night at The Glass House in town if you are so inclined. They play everything from George Ezra to The Killers, The Stereophonics and some of their own stuff. No Bee Gees alas.
But for us, at that particular point in time, that was a good thing.
And not just a little silent one like the kind that girl’s do. I’m talking about a long, sustained rumble of a fart. The kind that makes you take a large breath in through your nose just to be sure. This happened just as I approached my colleague’s desk to pass on a phone message. Of course it was a female colleague. It’s always a female. It was a female the time I fell out of my chair on the threshold of the exit to the building, why wouldn’t it be a female when every last breath of wind escapes through my back passage in one go?
This is clearly an acute embarrassment. Mortifying. We both somehow managed to ignore it but we both knew. It was an unspoken truth. We just got on with talking about what I had gone over to talk about but it was there, lingering, like a fart does. Had it been a male colleague we might well have been able to laugh it off, gently jabbing each other with a fist and shouting 'har-har' like Edmund and Bob in Blackadder II. In my defence it is not my fault. I have no idea this is going to happen until I hear the beginnings of the sound itself. By then it is too late. You could shove a cork up there and it would be like the story of the boy with his finger in the dyke or whatever it was. King Canute trying to stop the tide. Steven Gerrard trying to play as a holding midfielder without Luis Suarez and Daniel Sturridge to keep the ball at the other end of the field for him. A fools errand.
I don’t want to tar all disabled people with the same soiled old brush. The reason I don’t know about this before it happens is my disability but it is just that…my disability. We’re all different and Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard does not claim to represent all disabled people. It is based only on the experiences of one disabled person in particular. And not a particularly well adjusted disabled person at that. Not everyone has my shortcomings. At the same time there are people who are worse off. On Sunday I spent a good 15 minutes with a good friend of mine which mainly consisted of anecdotes about various people of varying disabilities soiling themselves in ever more impressive and amusing ways. At one point I was falsely accused of shitting in my own hair in an incident that can only be described as a shite shampoo. It wasn’t me but I sympathise with anyone who has had this happen to them. As my wise friend said, it’s not whether you shit yourself, it’s how you deal with it. If this amuses you it’s ok. Incontinence can be funny, it just takes a few years or so for the person suffering the incontinence to join in with the joke.
Incontinence is sort of linked to what I really wanted to tell you about tonight which is Nights On Broadway…The Story Of The Bee Gees. Only the incontinence there was mostly in the audience due to their average age. The show was staged at the Theatre Royal in town and that, owing to my previously positive experiences of theatres, was enough to persuade me that it might be worth a go. It’s not cool to say so, but the Bee Gees were brilliant. Their body of work rivals that of anyone you can name. Yes, even that of Cheryl Whatever Her Name Is This Week. As songwriters the Bee Gees were peerless and prolific so I am well acquainted with their material. On the other hand my previous experience of the Theatre Royal extends to my participation in a school production of War Of The World’s which must have been held there some time during the early to mid 1980’s. I can’t remember what part I played. I was either a Martian or a tree but frankly what is the difference when it comes to wheelchair dance? All I can recall is the gruff narration of Richard Burton and the haunting soundtrack. If we performed it now and you came in expecting Tom Cruise running around shouting you would be gravely disappointed. I’m not exactly proud of my performance, put it that way. Or of the production as a whole. If I was to summarise it I would say that it was marginally more embarrassing than farting in work, but slightly less embarrassing than shitting in your own hair. I imagine.
First of all I would take issue with the title of the show. Nights On Broadway. Emma and I have had a few Nights On Broadway and they were nothing like this. Though it was cancelled due to an invasion of Philistines, the Rocky musical was utterly, jaw droppingly fabulous while the Motown show we saw was chock-full of people you had never heard of who nevertheless had bucket loads of talent. That these performers remain anonymous while middle aged women from GodKnowsWhere achieve fame for baking a cake is a fact which makes my eyes bleed. As such we will end the discussion there before I have another accident. Oh, and Bee Gees Story, you say? Story? This implied that we might emerge at the end of the show having learned something that we may not previously have known about the Bee Gees. That would have required acting and dialogue, of which there was precisely none. What we had here was effectively a tribute band, and a very iffy tribute band at that. This lot didn’t need the Theatre Royal at £17.50 a clip at all. They were strictly Chicago Rock on a Wednesday night, By Jovi, Robbing Williams, Zoo 2 material.
Barry Gibb was played by Bjorn Borg, I’m sure of it. Aswell as being a Swedish tennis legend Borg is known for the fact that he doesn’t bother getting out all that much these days. It is unlikely he would subject himself to attempting to replicate Barry’s famous falsetto. Yet the man playing Barry was a dead ringer for Borg. Barry-Bjorn’s falsetto jolted you out of your seat as he screeched to find the smoothness with which the real Barry delivers his vocals. Robin was probably the most competent singer of the trio but probably the one who looked least like a Bee Gee. Which is saying something when you consider that you have a five-time Wimbledon champion playing Barry. Maurice looked the part but rather like the real Maurice, that was mostly down to his ability to grow a beard and wear a hat and then just blend in.
When Emma pointed out to me that they weren’t even playing the instruments they were holding, and that the only truly live music was coming from the band at the back of the stage I was starting to think in terms of a refund. The guitarist may or may not have been our own Johnny Vegas but as for the others, I couldn’t see them due to the location of the accessible seating. Should you have the temerity to turn up to the Theatre Royal without the ability to walk you will be placed at the end of the row and in your eyeline there will be a large speaker blocking the screen behind the performers on stage. Thankfully, all I seemed to miss on said screen was an inexplicably inappropriate Kenny Everett sketch from his 1970’s television show in which he mercilessly lampoons the Bee Gees while ironically remaining blissfully unaware of his own shiteness. Saying that, when I was about six the sight of Everett crossing and uncrossing his legs and saying ‘all in the best possible taste’ at every opportunity was the very height of comedy as far as I was concerned. But I was six years old and I do fart in work.
The lack of any acting or actual story may or may not have been compensated for by an attempt on the part of the band to sound like the Bee Gees when they were talking to the audience in between numbers. But they were Irish. So Irish were they, in fact, that they sang ‘true’ instead of ‘through’ and ‘dis’ instead of ‘this’. At various points along the way they repeatedly mentioned that this (dis?), humble old St.Helens, was the last stop on their UK tour. Where the bloody hell else had they been? My mind whirred with the possible permutations. But don’t worry, they told us, they would be available in the lobby at the end for photographs and to sign copies of the DVD. The DVD? At this point my thesaurus isn’t up to the job. They have a DVD? The Bee Gees did a live show in Las Vegas or New York or somewhere exotic which can often be seen on Sky Arts and indeed, with some irony, was broadcast by that channel again on Sunday night just past. You would have had a far greater Bee Gees experience, and learned more about the band and their ‘story’ by staying at home and watching that show than we did by going out on a damp night in November.
Afterwards we stumbled bewildered into the nearest pub and unexpectedly found Stillia, a local band made up of teenagers with loud guitars, playing live. They were very good as it turned out and you can see them again this Friday night at The Glass House in town if you are so inclined. They play everything from George Ezra to The Killers, The Stereophonics and some of their own stuff. No Bee Gees alas.
But for us, at that particular point in time, that was a good thing.
Saturday, 4 October 2014
Introducing The Rugby Football League To The Existence Of Fans With Disabilities..........
This time next week I will be on my way to Manchester for the Super League Grand Final at Old Trafford. It’s Saints v Wigan. One of the great rivalries. Up there with Liverpool v United, Benn v Eubank and Ken Barlow v Mike Baldwin. The fact that the Super League title is on the line makes it all the more unmissable.
On Thursday night Saints took their place in the Grand Final with a 30-12 win over Catalan Dragons. Tickets for the Grand Final went on sale the following day to season ticket holders only. The Saints website proclaimed that season ticket holders would have all of Friday and Saturday to secure their tickets before they were to go on general sale on Sunday. Only right and proper. You’ve followed the team throughout the season and forked out a fortune for the privilege so you should have first dibs on the Grand Final seats. Only this does not apply if you happen to be a wheelchair user.
I am a season ticket holder, and have been since the club moved to Langtree Park at the start of the 2012 season. I’ve had to watch Josh Perry in driving rain and sub-zero temperatures. Yet when I rang the club to book my tickets I was informed that the RFL (Rugby Football League) had not sent the club any tickets for wheelchair accessible seating in the West Stand, where the majority of Saints fans will be housed on the night. All they had was ticketing in the East Stand among what would later that day be confirmed as the Wigan end after they edged out Warrington to take their place. They advised me to ring the RFL ticketing hotline to see if they could help.
They could not. They advised me that there was no wheelchair accessible seating in the West Stand available. But I’m a season ticket holder, I said. Where is my right to secure my place during all of Friday and Saturday along with the rest of the season ticket holders? I was told basically that I have no such right, that they are there to sell tickets to any old bugger who phones up to ask for them, and that they have been selling them all year. Having no choice at this point I managed to get tickets in what the RFL claim is a ‘neutral’ area which they tried to sweeten up by describing as the ‘ability suite’. This means that me and my friends won’t have to queue for our drinks but oh, by the way, you can’t drink inside a football stadium anyway. Anyone who has ever had the misfortune to spend 80 minutes with me while Saints are playing Wigan in a game of this magnitude will know anyway that even if you could, my nerves will be far too shredded to even contemplate the idea of leaving my seat to buy a drink. All that will be done in the bars around Manchester before and afterwards.
I emailed both the RFL and St Helens RFC to suggest to them that they might not be treating wheelchair users fairly. And that if it is not possible for a season ticket holder of one of the participating clubs to book tickets among his fellow supporters on the very day they become available to season ticket holders only, then Old Trafford is an unsuitable venue for the event. I don’t have the statistics to hand but it all suggests to me that Old Trafford is palpably failing to meet the minimum requirement of wheelchair accessible seating available which is now law in English football stadia. If I had been trying to book late having ignored the advice published on the Saints website then I would understand their position. But I didn’t. I did exactly as I was advised and was blatantly treated differently and unfairly. The RFL tried to hide behind the idea that the Grand Final is for all Super League fans and that they want an ‘eclectic mix’ of fans to generate the atmosphere. But surely the participating clubs should be given the opportunity to meet their fans’ ticketing needs before the rest of the rugby league supporting community get their hands on them? All of which reminds me of an exchange in The Simpsons featuring Lisa Simpson and her dance teacher when Lisa is overlooked for a part in the production;
Teacher; I'm sorry, Lisa, but giving everyone an equal part when they're clearly not equal is called what, again, class?
Class: Communism!
Beautifully, the RFL advisor who I spoke with and who took part in the subsequent email exchange is called Chris Burns. Stop chortling and saying ‘Smithers…..’ at the back. Mr Burns has advised me to write to Mr Ralph Rimmer who, aswell as being on something pompously called the Executive Board of the RFL has a beard of many colours. Perhaps he is trying to promote an eclectic mix of beard colours to appease all rugby league fans.
I will write to Mr Rimmer with absolutely no hope of getting anything done differently in the future. They will pay me lip service, perhaps follow Merseytravel’s lead and send me a £1 voucher to be spent on something only they offer, and then go back to their firm conviction that seating arrangements and the fan experience as a whole are only important when applied to people who can walk into a stadium.
On Thursday night Saints took their place in the Grand Final with a 30-12 win over Catalan Dragons. Tickets for the Grand Final went on sale the following day to season ticket holders only. The Saints website proclaimed that season ticket holders would have all of Friday and Saturday to secure their tickets before they were to go on general sale on Sunday. Only right and proper. You’ve followed the team throughout the season and forked out a fortune for the privilege so you should have first dibs on the Grand Final seats. Only this does not apply if you happen to be a wheelchair user.
I am a season ticket holder, and have been since the club moved to Langtree Park at the start of the 2012 season. I’ve had to watch Josh Perry in driving rain and sub-zero temperatures. Yet when I rang the club to book my tickets I was informed that the RFL (Rugby Football League) had not sent the club any tickets for wheelchair accessible seating in the West Stand, where the majority of Saints fans will be housed on the night. All they had was ticketing in the East Stand among what would later that day be confirmed as the Wigan end after they edged out Warrington to take their place. They advised me to ring the RFL ticketing hotline to see if they could help.
They could not. They advised me that there was no wheelchair accessible seating in the West Stand available. But I’m a season ticket holder, I said. Where is my right to secure my place during all of Friday and Saturday along with the rest of the season ticket holders? I was told basically that I have no such right, that they are there to sell tickets to any old bugger who phones up to ask for them, and that they have been selling them all year. Having no choice at this point I managed to get tickets in what the RFL claim is a ‘neutral’ area which they tried to sweeten up by describing as the ‘ability suite’. This means that me and my friends won’t have to queue for our drinks but oh, by the way, you can’t drink inside a football stadium anyway. Anyone who has ever had the misfortune to spend 80 minutes with me while Saints are playing Wigan in a game of this magnitude will know anyway that even if you could, my nerves will be far too shredded to even contemplate the idea of leaving my seat to buy a drink. All that will be done in the bars around Manchester before and afterwards.
I emailed both the RFL and St Helens RFC to suggest to them that they might not be treating wheelchair users fairly. And that if it is not possible for a season ticket holder of one of the participating clubs to book tickets among his fellow supporters on the very day they become available to season ticket holders only, then Old Trafford is an unsuitable venue for the event. I don’t have the statistics to hand but it all suggests to me that Old Trafford is palpably failing to meet the minimum requirement of wheelchair accessible seating available which is now law in English football stadia. If I had been trying to book late having ignored the advice published on the Saints website then I would understand their position. But I didn’t. I did exactly as I was advised and was blatantly treated differently and unfairly. The RFL tried to hide behind the idea that the Grand Final is for all Super League fans and that they want an ‘eclectic mix’ of fans to generate the atmosphere. But surely the participating clubs should be given the opportunity to meet their fans’ ticketing needs before the rest of the rugby league supporting community get their hands on them? All of which reminds me of an exchange in The Simpsons featuring Lisa Simpson and her dance teacher when Lisa is overlooked for a part in the production;
Teacher; I'm sorry, Lisa, but giving everyone an equal part when they're clearly not equal is called what, again, class?
Class: Communism!
Beautifully, the RFL advisor who I spoke with and who took part in the subsequent email exchange is called Chris Burns. Stop chortling and saying ‘Smithers…..’ at the back. Mr Burns has advised me to write to Mr Ralph Rimmer who, aswell as being on something pompously called the Executive Board of the RFL has a beard of many colours. Perhaps he is trying to promote an eclectic mix of beard colours to appease all rugby league fans.
I will write to Mr Rimmer with absolutely no hope of getting anything done differently in the future. They will pay me lip service, perhaps follow Merseytravel’s lead and send me a £1 voucher to be spent on something only they offer, and then go back to their firm conviction that seating arrangements and the fan experience as a whole are only important when applied to people who can walk into a stadium.
Thursday, 2 October 2014
This Is A Rant
This Is A Rant.
You should already have been asked this before reaching this page but it you are offended by liberal use of profanities you should probably stop reading about now. This is not a jolly story about where I went and wasn't it nice and didn't we only have just the 237 access-related problems. This is not a comedy anecdote with a serious moral about disability awareness wedged deeply, almost invisibly into my manic prose. This is not about anything that happened. It's about how I feel. And if this blog can't be about how I feel aswell as about what I did and what I saw then it can fuck off aswell. I once stopped writing for about eight months because of my dark days but I refuse this time. Far better to get it down and let everyone puke at the sight of it, squirm for me if you want in your Ivory Towers in HappyHappyLand. The signpost marked 'I Give A Shit' is 30 miles down the road in the opposite direction. Besides, some of you might even identify with it and if it helps one other person feel better about the fact that they have days when they hate everyone and everything almost, then it is not for nothing.
Still here? Then we'll begin. Today I want to ram a sizeable skewer through my brain until, to paraphrase Hugh Laurie in Blackadder Goes Forth, it really hurts. I've made great strides with my depressive tendencies over the last couple of years but today I've fallen off whatever the depressive's equivalent of the wagon is. I'll try to explain it but don't expect anything on the scale of Mark Rice-Oxley's brilliant memoir on the subject Underneath The Lemon Tree. That's all far too coherent and considered. This, as you may have gathered by now, is made up on the spot. Saints are playing tonight, by the way. I want to mention that now because I want this entry to reflect the fact that in the hours leading up to the game that will decide whether they get to the Super League Grand Final or not, I have almost forgotten that I am attending this game. Ordinarily I would have had trouble thinking about anything else. That's because what little energy I haven't devoted to doing my job today has been used up trying to summon the will not to punch anyone full in the fucking face or hit them flush in the nose with a ring binder.
I have a reason for this which obviously I can't discuss lest I be arrested and executed by The Company. But the point is, as fellow depressives will know, that I don't actually need a reason. Some days, probably those days which follow a poor night's sleep in my case, I just sit quietly with a seething fury inside me. It's completely overwhelming. I can't even participate properly in a discussion about where to hold an office Christmas night out without wanting to pick up my own head (if that were possible) and thrash it repeatedly on the desk until someone assures me that it's all over. That I don't need to bother because it's now fucking June. Maybe my depressive tendencies are seasonal. I don't remember feeling like this in July even though I was surrounded by the same people and most, if not all, of the same problems. Like I said though, I've made great strides. But that thing that is unique to September at work. Well, I can't mention that. Except to say that if it were a living thing I would kill it. Burn it. Shred it. Shove it up the collective arse of those on high whose idea it was to have the fucking thing in the first place. I have made the point vocally already that I don't want to do this thing, just to get it out there and with absolutely no intention of ever refusing to do it. It's work after all and I need to pay the mortgage. Although I'm sure there are people who would refuse. I'm certain there are, in fact. But I'll say it again on these pages just to get it out there again. Just to confirm it, if you like. I don't want to fucking do it. There. Don't we all feel better?
So this is for you, if you have ever felt like this for no good reason that you know of. Or even if you have a good reason, it's still for you. We are not alone. We are not the mentally weak. Especially since for the most part we get on with it, albeit in my case on the proviso that I can offload it all here heavily disguised in hushed tones and dark, violent metaphors. Sorry it's a bit shorter than your average MOAFH entry but again it's about how I feel and unless you are as good as Rice-Oxley, a lower word count is inevitable when you are writing about how you feel rather than something that actually happened. If you really want to be informed about a depressive state of mind and how to recover from it, read his work.
And anyway This Is A Fucking Rant.
You should already have been asked this before reaching this page but it you are offended by liberal use of profanities you should probably stop reading about now. This is not a jolly story about where I went and wasn't it nice and didn't we only have just the 237 access-related problems. This is not a comedy anecdote with a serious moral about disability awareness wedged deeply, almost invisibly into my manic prose. This is not about anything that happened. It's about how I feel. And if this blog can't be about how I feel aswell as about what I did and what I saw then it can fuck off aswell. I once stopped writing for about eight months because of my dark days but I refuse this time. Far better to get it down and let everyone puke at the sight of it, squirm for me if you want in your Ivory Towers in HappyHappyLand. The signpost marked 'I Give A Shit' is 30 miles down the road in the opposite direction. Besides, some of you might even identify with it and if it helps one other person feel better about the fact that they have days when they hate everyone and everything almost, then it is not for nothing.
Still here? Then we'll begin. Today I want to ram a sizeable skewer through my brain until, to paraphrase Hugh Laurie in Blackadder Goes Forth, it really hurts. I've made great strides with my depressive tendencies over the last couple of years but today I've fallen off whatever the depressive's equivalent of the wagon is. I'll try to explain it but don't expect anything on the scale of Mark Rice-Oxley's brilliant memoir on the subject Underneath The Lemon Tree. That's all far too coherent and considered. This, as you may have gathered by now, is made up on the spot. Saints are playing tonight, by the way. I want to mention that now because I want this entry to reflect the fact that in the hours leading up to the game that will decide whether they get to the Super League Grand Final or not, I have almost forgotten that I am attending this game. Ordinarily I would have had trouble thinking about anything else. That's because what little energy I haven't devoted to doing my job today has been used up trying to summon the will not to punch anyone full in the fucking face or hit them flush in the nose with a ring binder.
I have a reason for this which obviously I can't discuss lest I be arrested and executed by The Company. But the point is, as fellow depressives will know, that I don't actually need a reason. Some days, probably those days which follow a poor night's sleep in my case, I just sit quietly with a seething fury inside me. It's completely overwhelming. I can't even participate properly in a discussion about where to hold an office Christmas night out without wanting to pick up my own head (if that were possible) and thrash it repeatedly on the desk until someone assures me that it's all over. That I don't need to bother because it's now fucking June. Maybe my depressive tendencies are seasonal. I don't remember feeling like this in July even though I was surrounded by the same people and most, if not all, of the same problems. Like I said though, I've made great strides. But that thing that is unique to September at work. Well, I can't mention that. Except to say that if it were a living thing I would kill it. Burn it. Shred it. Shove it up the collective arse of those on high whose idea it was to have the fucking thing in the first place. I have made the point vocally already that I don't want to do this thing, just to get it out there and with absolutely no intention of ever refusing to do it. It's work after all and I need to pay the mortgage. Although I'm sure there are people who would refuse. I'm certain there are, in fact. But I'll say it again on these pages just to get it out there again. Just to confirm it, if you like. I don't want to fucking do it. There. Don't we all feel better?
So this is for you, if you have ever felt like this for no good reason that you know of. Or even if you have a good reason, it's still for you. We are not alone. We are not the mentally weak. Especially since for the most part we get on with it, albeit in my case on the proviso that I can offload it all here heavily disguised in hushed tones and dark, violent metaphors. Sorry it's a bit shorter than your average MOAFH entry but again it's about how I feel and unless you are as good as Rice-Oxley, a lower word count is inevitable when you are writing about how you feel rather than something that actually happened. If you really want to be informed about a depressive state of mind and how to recover from it, read his work.
And anyway This Is A Fucking Rant.
Wednesday, 24 September 2014
London Continues
Stevo is talking about the following day's Challenge Cup Final between Leeds Rhinos and Castleford Tigers;
"I think if Daryl (Castleford coach Powell) lets them play they'll give Leeds problems at Wembley." he says.
Ah yes, the wide open spaces of Wembley. One of the truly great sporting myths. It comes from a time during the 80's when Challenge Cup Finals at the old Wembley were played out in a more open style than you see in the modern game. When Wigan beat Hull in '85 nobody seemed to be worried about 'getting through the sets', 'winning the arm wrestle' or my personal favourite...'interfacing at the ruck'. But which do you prefer? An era of open, flowing rugby in which Wigan win everything or an era in which coaches rack their brains to find ways to strangle the game but in which Saints have a reasonable chance of picking up silverware each year? The latter for me. The former was just too Hellish.
Stevo seems genuinely disappointed when we tell him that we are not going to Wembley tomorrow. I explain to him that we don't book early in case Saints don't make it (which of course, they haven't) and we end up watching 'that lot from over the lump'. He laughs, but he gives me a look that suggests I'm being a bit harsh which is rich coming from a man whose job is to upset everyone who doesn't support Leeds. I want to stop for a while longer and ask him how he comes to the conclusion that the club that has topped the Super League for most of the season (and would go on to win the Sky devalued league leaders shield) is in crisis. But there's lots more to do down here in The Smoke. Stevo was never part of the plan.
We head on down towards Trafalgar Square from Whitehall, past the Queen's Horse Guards. The horses are particularly skittish today but then you might be if you had to spend your days surrounded by tourists who just stare at you expectantly. You'd probably be thinking 'I'm a horse, what do you want?'. On board these impressive beasts are the fabulously over-attired guards who, like those at the palace, seem to be employed for their ability to remain utterly motionless in the face of persistent annoyance. We stay a while but we can't get a clear view of 10 Downing Street. The road itself is cut off from the public and watched over at all times by policemen. Who would have thought that David Cameron would need such high security? As if anyone would want to lob half a brick down the street at his putrid little bonce. Anyway, the result of all this police presence is that even the famous door to the Prime Minister's home is not visible from where we are.
We carry on down towards Trafalgar Square and it is only a few minutes until we arrive at Nelson's Column. It's so tall that it is impossible to get a photograph that features both the Column and a five foot nothing biff. Not helping is the fact that there is a road going right around the square so you can only step so far back to try and get everything into shot. Nevertheless it is another brilliantly iconic monument. It is over 51 metres tall and almost 175 years old. At its base are four huge stone lions of the kind that used to frighten me when I was a kid. I've got issues around lions, even stone ones. I have a recurring dream about mammoth-sized lions roaming free in local parks. It's only the males. It must be something about the mane, the magnificence of it all which awes me a little. Yet I have no problem seeing them at the zoo or at Safari Parks. They're quite beautiful so long as there is an excessively large fence between us.
Next it was on to the London Eye. The Tourist Attraction Formerly Known As The Millennium Wheel. It's a long push over to the other side of the river and we have to cross at a bridge some distance away due to a broken lift by the Millennium Bridge. Still, it's a nice day so it is a pleasant enough journey. We are greeted at The Eye by queues. Lots and lots of queues. It's like an X-Factor audition except those patiently waiting are hoping for some eye-catching views of the capital as opposed to the opportunity to prove to the world that they sound like a particularly cack-handed schoolboy scraping a pair of scissors down a blackboard. The levels of delusion which feed that show's very existence are a grave concern for me. It's one thing to have a go at the karaoke at the local, and quite another to whail your way to inevitable disappointment in front of millions of people with nothing better to do on a Saturdy night.
Happily we managed to skip most of the queuing. Staff opened gates, unhooked ropes and cleared pathways as several thousand irate tourists looked on. This is where people's utter lack of respect for the disabled comes in handy. The kind of people who think that using a wheelchair makes you deserving of their pity aren't going to complain when you are fast-tracked past them to the London Eye. I have yet to see anyone vocally take issue with my staff-assisted queue jumping racket. They just stand there thinking 'aw, yeah let him go first'. Morons. Still, as I have always said, if you are going to deal with the shit that disability throws at you then make sure you take the perks. I resist the temptation to wave at anyone on the way past.
The Eye itself is majestic. I knew that the capsules were much bigger than those on the versions at either Sheffield or Berlin but it really does feel like you are in a small room. A small room which just happens to be crawling around the circumference of a 440ft wheel. Curiously it never stops, except to let me on with my wheelchair. Most people are expected to step on board while it continues to move, albeit at the kind of pace that would have your average slug tapping his watch impatiently. It almost stops, but it never does. The only fault I can find with it is that it is maybe a little overcrowded which obstructs my views at times. Nevertheless we get some dizzying looks at the Tower of London, Wembley Stadium, St Paul's Cathedral and the Shard amongst many others. The Shard is somewhat ubiquitous the whole weekend. Every street we turn down we seem to be able to see some or all of The Shard. It takes about 30-45 minutes to get back to the bottom of the eye to disembark and at £29 for the two of us we had little to complain about in terms of value. Which is a shame because this column is at its best when it is complaining about something.
Included in that price is the London Eye River Cruise along the Thames. This again is a quality experience, far better than those we have had elsewhere. We have access to both decks of the boat and, get this, we can even hear the commentary fromoura very knowledgable guide. She spends a little too much time telling people off for standing up on the top deck (which we have decided to stay on for a bit of air) but she makes up for that by pointing out everything from the many and varied bridges which cross the Thames (and the stories behind them) to the headquarters of sinister but comic London Mayor Boris Johnson, the ITV Studios, Westminster Abbey, The Houses of Parliament and, of course, the ever present Shard.
The evening is spent in Leicester Square taking on some liquid refreshment. Towards the end of the night we run into several gentlemen hailing from the borough of Wigan. Or pie eaters, as they are more commonly known. They torture me by trying to force a Wigan flatcap on to my head. I'm drunk, but I've never been that drunk. One of the men tells me that he has not missed a Challenge Cup Final in 35 years, proving that the tales of Wiganers and their obsession with the greatest game is not just a story. Paul used to tell me that some of the disabled fans at Central Park must have stayed there for a fortnight watching the grass grow in between games because no matter what time he got to a game they were always there in the best spaces. This was long before common sense prevailed and they started letting us purchase season tickets. Or indeed any kind of tickets. What they haven't worked out yet is to make it possible for you, as a wheelchair using season ticket holder, to go to the game with another wheelchair user and be able to sit together. Or indeed for anyone else other than your chosen companion to be able to sit with you. How did this blog turn into a complaint about disabled access at sports stadia. I told you I was good at complaining.
Next time, we aimlessly hunt down an inaccessible pub, drink off lemonade in a branch of Bella Italia and pop round for a brew with the Queen at Buckingham Palace.
"I think if Daryl (Castleford coach Powell) lets them play they'll give Leeds problems at Wembley." he says.
Ah yes, the wide open spaces of Wembley. One of the truly great sporting myths. It comes from a time during the 80's when Challenge Cup Finals at the old Wembley were played out in a more open style than you see in the modern game. When Wigan beat Hull in '85 nobody seemed to be worried about 'getting through the sets', 'winning the arm wrestle' or my personal favourite...'interfacing at the ruck'. But which do you prefer? An era of open, flowing rugby in which Wigan win everything or an era in which coaches rack their brains to find ways to strangle the game but in which Saints have a reasonable chance of picking up silverware each year? The latter for me. The former was just too Hellish.
Stevo seems genuinely disappointed when we tell him that we are not going to Wembley tomorrow. I explain to him that we don't book early in case Saints don't make it (which of course, they haven't) and we end up watching 'that lot from over the lump'. He laughs, but he gives me a look that suggests I'm being a bit harsh which is rich coming from a man whose job is to upset everyone who doesn't support Leeds. I want to stop for a while longer and ask him how he comes to the conclusion that the club that has topped the Super League for most of the season (and would go on to win the Sky devalued league leaders shield) is in crisis. But there's lots more to do down here in The Smoke. Stevo was never part of the plan.
We head on down towards Trafalgar Square from Whitehall, past the Queen's Horse Guards. The horses are particularly skittish today but then you might be if you had to spend your days surrounded by tourists who just stare at you expectantly. You'd probably be thinking 'I'm a horse, what do you want?'. On board these impressive beasts are the fabulously over-attired guards who, like those at the palace, seem to be employed for their ability to remain utterly motionless in the face of persistent annoyance. We stay a while but we can't get a clear view of 10 Downing Street. The road itself is cut off from the public and watched over at all times by policemen. Who would have thought that David Cameron would need such high security? As if anyone would want to lob half a brick down the street at his putrid little bonce. Anyway, the result of all this police presence is that even the famous door to the Prime Minister's home is not visible from where we are.
We carry on down towards Trafalgar Square and it is only a few minutes until we arrive at Nelson's Column. It's so tall that it is impossible to get a photograph that features both the Column and a five foot nothing biff. Not helping is the fact that there is a road going right around the square so you can only step so far back to try and get everything into shot. Nevertheless it is another brilliantly iconic monument. It is over 51 metres tall and almost 175 years old. At its base are four huge stone lions of the kind that used to frighten me when I was a kid. I've got issues around lions, even stone ones. I have a recurring dream about mammoth-sized lions roaming free in local parks. It's only the males. It must be something about the mane, the magnificence of it all which awes me a little. Yet I have no problem seeing them at the zoo or at Safari Parks. They're quite beautiful so long as there is an excessively large fence between us.
Next it was on to the London Eye. The Tourist Attraction Formerly Known As The Millennium Wheel. It's a long push over to the other side of the river and we have to cross at a bridge some distance away due to a broken lift by the Millennium Bridge. Still, it's a nice day so it is a pleasant enough journey. We are greeted at The Eye by queues. Lots and lots of queues. It's like an X-Factor audition except those patiently waiting are hoping for some eye-catching views of the capital as opposed to the opportunity to prove to the world that they sound like a particularly cack-handed schoolboy scraping a pair of scissors down a blackboard. The levels of delusion which feed that show's very existence are a grave concern for me. It's one thing to have a go at the karaoke at the local, and quite another to whail your way to inevitable disappointment in front of millions of people with nothing better to do on a Saturdy night.
Happily we managed to skip most of the queuing. Staff opened gates, unhooked ropes and cleared pathways as several thousand irate tourists looked on. This is where people's utter lack of respect for the disabled comes in handy. The kind of people who think that using a wheelchair makes you deserving of their pity aren't going to complain when you are fast-tracked past them to the London Eye. I have yet to see anyone vocally take issue with my staff-assisted queue jumping racket. They just stand there thinking 'aw, yeah let him go first'. Morons. Still, as I have always said, if you are going to deal with the shit that disability throws at you then make sure you take the perks. I resist the temptation to wave at anyone on the way past.
The Eye itself is majestic. I knew that the capsules were much bigger than those on the versions at either Sheffield or Berlin but it really does feel like you are in a small room. A small room which just happens to be crawling around the circumference of a 440ft wheel. Curiously it never stops, except to let me on with my wheelchair. Most people are expected to step on board while it continues to move, albeit at the kind of pace that would have your average slug tapping his watch impatiently. It almost stops, but it never does. The only fault I can find with it is that it is maybe a little overcrowded which obstructs my views at times. Nevertheless we get some dizzying looks at the Tower of London, Wembley Stadium, St Paul's Cathedral and the Shard amongst many others. The Shard is somewhat ubiquitous the whole weekend. Every street we turn down we seem to be able to see some or all of The Shard. It takes about 30-45 minutes to get back to the bottom of the eye to disembark and at £29 for the two of us we had little to complain about in terms of value. Which is a shame because this column is at its best when it is complaining about something.
Included in that price is the London Eye River Cruise along the Thames. This again is a quality experience, far better than those we have had elsewhere. We have access to both decks of the boat and, get this, we can even hear the commentary fromoura very knowledgable guide. She spends a little too much time telling people off for standing up on the top deck (which we have decided to stay on for a bit of air) but she makes up for that by pointing out everything from the many and varied bridges which cross the Thames (and the stories behind them) to the headquarters of sinister but comic London Mayor Boris Johnson, the ITV Studios, Westminster Abbey, The Houses of Parliament and, of course, the ever present Shard.
The evening is spent in Leicester Square taking on some liquid refreshment. Towards the end of the night we run into several gentlemen hailing from the borough of Wigan. Or pie eaters, as they are more commonly known. They torture me by trying to force a Wigan flatcap on to my head. I'm drunk, but I've never been that drunk. One of the men tells me that he has not missed a Challenge Cup Final in 35 years, proving that the tales of Wiganers and their obsession with the greatest game is not just a story. Paul used to tell me that some of the disabled fans at Central Park must have stayed there for a fortnight watching the grass grow in between games because no matter what time he got to a game they were always there in the best spaces. This was long before common sense prevailed and they started letting us purchase season tickets. Or indeed any kind of tickets. What they haven't worked out yet is to make it possible for you, as a wheelchair using season ticket holder, to go to the game with another wheelchair user and be able to sit together. Or indeed for anyone else other than your chosen companion to be able to sit with you. How did this blog turn into a complaint about disabled access at sports stadia. I told you I was good at complaining.
Next time, we aimlessly hunt down an inaccessible pub, drink off lemonade in a branch of Bella Italia and pop round for a brew with the Queen at Buckingham Palace.
Monday, 22 September 2014
London Calling
Today would have been my mate Paul's 41st birthday. Because of that it seems appropriate to write something. Not necessarily about Paul, but just something. Something I can look back on in six months from now and know that I marked the occasion by doing something I enjoy doing and should do more of. I think he'd like that. Whether he would think I should do more of it is another debate.
I've had an odd sort of day. Work is work and I'm not allowed to write about it anyway, but it was just one of those days when I spent much of my time talking to the backs of people's heads while they consistently failed to respond. Part of that is due to my almost soundproof barrier of a desk, and the rest is either because my colleagues are ignorant or because I have nothing interesting to say out loud. Which is possibly why I write.
So anyway let's talk about London. Having spent much of my time dismissively referring to it as England's toilet I have changed my view completely. I hadn't experienced it properly before. My previous experiences amounted to the odd basketball game in Hackney or wherever and a few trips to Wembley to see Saints. With varying degrees of enjoyment. For every Goulding-inspired Ultimate Comeback of '96 there is a 27-0 thrashing by Wigan of '89 to look back on. During the latter, Saints played very much like you might imagine Blackbrook Under 10's would have done against Ellery Hanley and company. It wasn't pretty. Which made the joy of Bobby's bombs and Nathan Graham's generosity in repeatedly dropping them seven years later all the more enjoyable. Before Super League, success for Saints was about as frequent as a referendum on Scottish Independence.
Refreshingly, my enjoyment of a weekend in London with Emma did not depend on the fortunes of an incredibly unreliable rugby league team this time. We drove down on the Thursday before the August Bank Holiday. We weren't doing this on the cheap. I'm not sure it is possible to do London on the cheap, not if you have access needs. But also we wanted to stay somewhere that would give us reasonable access to the Jubilee Line. Only certain stations are accessible so you have to do a bit of research. To be fair, Emma did the research. She's very good at that. Left to me we'd be staying in the first hotel to show up on a google search. In the event we stayed in the Marriott at Canary Wharf. It is conveniently located very close to a row of bars and restaurants so the first night was spent getting a feel for what was around. After a couple of drinks in The Slug & Lettuce and The Cat And Canary (we passed on the Dog And Bollock) we ate at La Tasca. You might think that such a Johnny-Come-Lately, bandwagon-jumping organisation would be all kitted out with disabled access but I regret to report that when it was time to spend the proverbial penny I had to be led out to a restaurant three doors down because the disabled toilet in La Tasca wasn't working. Or maybe it didn't even exist. I think it did exist but either way if it is not usable then it may as well not exist. Like a Manchester United defender. The whole thing was massively undignified and it did nothing to change the negative view of London that I had lazily held until then. A friend of mine had messaged me earlier in the afternoon to let me know that his cousin has a bar in the same area. Henry's Bar. I should maybe have taken his advice and paid them a visit instead. Thankfully the La Tasca episode was not a sign of things to come.
On Friday morning we were booked in for a tour of the Houses Of Parliament. The route from the Marriott to the underground station at Canary Wharf is not a particularly long one but it is littered with dizzying twists and turns, making it impossible to find your way from one to the other without making at least one navigational mistake. We made several over the course of the weekend and we cut this first journey pretty fine as a result. We were due to start our tour at 9.20am and the advice is to get there 20 minutes before your tour starts. We failed to do this, especially since we had to pass through the kind of security that would make New York's JFK Airport's look like the border between England and Scotland now that Mr Salmond's bid for freedom has hit the buffers. Fortunately the tour had not begun by the time we had finished being checked over by armed policemen and passed through security doors which don't let you through until a painfully slow door has shut behind you. I remember being a little awed when we moved through towards the accessible exit at Westminster and caught a glimpse of either Westminster Abbey or the House itself. Last time I felt that way when seeing such an iconic building with my own eyes was when my dad first took me to Wembley in '87. We lost that day too. Oddly, I didn't feel quite the same way about the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State buildings. Not when I first caught sight of them, impressive though they are.
There is one part of the tour that is not accessible. Our guide explained this to us before we started but again we were already armed with that knowledge thanks to Emma's research. St Stephen's Hall used to be the site of the House of Commons until a fire in 1834. I'm really glad that it isn't now because it is this part of the tour that I wasn't able to see. Our guide had just finished explaining that we would be taken down a different route to meet the others in the group once they had finished at St Stephen's. I remember thinking it ironic that Stephen did not have access to St Stephen's Hall. Not even 180 years after it was rebuilt following a fire. I didn't dwell on this unhappy coincidence for long. My attention soon turned to our guide again who was instructing a member of her staff to 'come and get my wheelchair' when the group arrived at St Stephen's.
Her wheelchair? Where was her wheelchair and why wasn't she telling her staff to come and get the gentleman using a wheelchair, HIS wheelchair? Later, when we arrived at the House of Lords and she waxed lyrical about it and how the system isn't broke so why fix it I wanted to ask whether someone could come and get my elitist bag of a guide and replace her with a much younger, less prune-faced member of the parliamentary staff. By the way did you know that when you see an elderly, overweight Lord slumped into his chair in the house it is because he is trying to listen to the reading of the bills through the speaker in the back of the seat and not because he's grabbing a cheeky Friday afternoon nap? I know. I was skeptical too.....
In the Members' Lobby there is a terrifying sight. The Members' Lobby is used by MP's when they are not busy filling in bogus expenses forms or engaging in sexual activity with fruit. It's a place to congregate for discussion. It houses a number of statues of former Prime Ministers and there, at one side of the room, looking down on you and pointing as if to once again give the order to destroy industry, start a vote-winning war, sell off every playing field in sight and take milk away from schoolchildren is Mrs Thatcher. I had a passing fantasy about beheading the statue there and then. Only my respect for an historic institution, the fact that the building was swarming with armed police and the fact that I haven't done anything illegal since I recorded the top 40 on Radio 1 in 1982 persuaded me to let it pass. We're shut of her now anyway. Dragon. Also represented in statues here are Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George and Clement Attlee.
The House of Commons itself is surprisingly small. Six hundred and fifty members were elected at the 2010 General Election and there isn't room in the house for many more than 400. It's pretty much first come, first served at Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday lunchtime. Those not in listen from outside if they wish but what is more likely is that they find a television. Probably in the pub around the corner. The House's green seating and speaker's chair are as iconic to me as the outside of the building, Big Ben and all. I must confess though that a combination of work commitments and a growing disaffection with all political parties and the system itself mean that I haven't seen it for a while. You don't really feel part of the political process if you've had to vote in a Tory defector to New Labour who then proceeds to do whatever the Whips tell him to for the sake of his career. All without a second thought for the actual wishes of his constituents. They could put Peter Sutcliffe up as their candidate for election and I'd still vote Labour. Perhaps I'm at fault but the system is hugely flawed.
In the corridors behind the House of Commons is Hansard, a painstakingly accurate record of everything ever debated in the House. Our guide then told us about the aforementioned pub, where MP's go for their swift halves or sherries. Seeking a bit of history, we paid a visit but before I tell you about that I should mention the Queen's Robing Room. It is here in this slightly wilting, decoration requiring and small space that Her Maj prepares for the State Opening of Parliament. As a committed republican I'm not that taken with the idea of being in a room frequently occupied by our long-reigning monarch, but if we're going to have a royal family then the least they can do is continue to uphold English traditions. The State Opening qualifies. Apparently they stopped chopping off their spouses' heads some time ago.
And so to the pub we learned about by Hansard. The Red Lion is just a few streets away. The sense of history is palpable. Any politician, Cabinet Minister or Prime Minister you care to name has probably been here for a pint. Probably not Thatcher, actually. Fun Loathing Criminal Thatcher. As we entered there was a man with a familiarly flabby gut and bald pate stood talking on his mobile phone. No, not me. It's Stevo. No, still not me. Mike 'Stevo' Stephenson, Sky Sports' rugby league summariser and champion of the mythical momentum rule. I remember meeting him once before at Wigan. I was there with Paul. He would have had something to say as Stevo and I briefly discussed the following day's Challenge Cup Final between Leeds Rhinos and Castleford Tigers. Some kid, somewhere was going to have his own first experience of a newer Wembley, which seems a reasonable place to stop.....
I've had an odd sort of day. Work is work and I'm not allowed to write about it anyway, but it was just one of those days when I spent much of my time talking to the backs of people's heads while they consistently failed to respond. Part of that is due to my almost soundproof barrier of a desk, and the rest is either because my colleagues are ignorant or because I have nothing interesting to say out loud. Which is possibly why I write.
So anyway let's talk about London. Having spent much of my time dismissively referring to it as England's toilet I have changed my view completely. I hadn't experienced it properly before. My previous experiences amounted to the odd basketball game in Hackney or wherever and a few trips to Wembley to see Saints. With varying degrees of enjoyment. For every Goulding-inspired Ultimate Comeback of '96 there is a 27-0 thrashing by Wigan of '89 to look back on. During the latter, Saints played very much like you might imagine Blackbrook Under 10's would have done against Ellery Hanley and company. It wasn't pretty. Which made the joy of Bobby's bombs and Nathan Graham's generosity in repeatedly dropping them seven years later all the more enjoyable. Before Super League, success for Saints was about as frequent as a referendum on Scottish Independence.
Refreshingly, my enjoyment of a weekend in London with Emma did not depend on the fortunes of an incredibly unreliable rugby league team this time. We drove down on the Thursday before the August Bank Holiday. We weren't doing this on the cheap. I'm not sure it is possible to do London on the cheap, not if you have access needs. But also we wanted to stay somewhere that would give us reasonable access to the Jubilee Line. Only certain stations are accessible so you have to do a bit of research. To be fair, Emma did the research. She's very good at that. Left to me we'd be staying in the first hotel to show up on a google search. In the event we stayed in the Marriott at Canary Wharf. It is conveniently located very close to a row of bars and restaurants so the first night was spent getting a feel for what was around. After a couple of drinks in The Slug & Lettuce and The Cat And Canary (we passed on the Dog And Bollock) we ate at La Tasca. You might think that such a Johnny-Come-Lately, bandwagon-jumping organisation would be all kitted out with disabled access but I regret to report that when it was time to spend the proverbial penny I had to be led out to a restaurant three doors down because the disabled toilet in La Tasca wasn't working. Or maybe it didn't even exist. I think it did exist but either way if it is not usable then it may as well not exist. Like a Manchester United defender. The whole thing was massively undignified and it did nothing to change the negative view of London that I had lazily held until then. A friend of mine had messaged me earlier in the afternoon to let me know that his cousin has a bar in the same area. Henry's Bar. I should maybe have taken his advice and paid them a visit instead. Thankfully the La Tasca episode was not a sign of things to come.
On Friday morning we were booked in for a tour of the Houses Of Parliament. The route from the Marriott to the underground station at Canary Wharf is not a particularly long one but it is littered with dizzying twists and turns, making it impossible to find your way from one to the other without making at least one navigational mistake. We made several over the course of the weekend and we cut this first journey pretty fine as a result. We were due to start our tour at 9.20am and the advice is to get there 20 minutes before your tour starts. We failed to do this, especially since we had to pass through the kind of security that would make New York's JFK Airport's look like the border between England and Scotland now that Mr Salmond's bid for freedom has hit the buffers. Fortunately the tour had not begun by the time we had finished being checked over by armed policemen and passed through security doors which don't let you through until a painfully slow door has shut behind you. I remember being a little awed when we moved through towards the accessible exit at Westminster and caught a glimpse of either Westminster Abbey or the House itself. Last time I felt that way when seeing such an iconic building with my own eyes was when my dad first took me to Wembley in '87. We lost that day too. Oddly, I didn't feel quite the same way about the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State buildings. Not when I first caught sight of them, impressive though they are.
There is one part of the tour that is not accessible. Our guide explained this to us before we started but again we were already armed with that knowledge thanks to Emma's research. St Stephen's Hall used to be the site of the House of Commons until a fire in 1834. I'm really glad that it isn't now because it is this part of the tour that I wasn't able to see. Our guide had just finished explaining that we would be taken down a different route to meet the others in the group once they had finished at St Stephen's. I remember thinking it ironic that Stephen did not have access to St Stephen's Hall. Not even 180 years after it was rebuilt following a fire. I didn't dwell on this unhappy coincidence for long. My attention soon turned to our guide again who was instructing a member of her staff to 'come and get my wheelchair' when the group arrived at St Stephen's.
Her wheelchair? Where was her wheelchair and why wasn't she telling her staff to come and get the gentleman using a wheelchair, HIS wheelchair? Later, when we arrived at the House of Lords and she waxed lyrical about it and how the system isn't broke so why fix it I wanted to ask whether someone could come and get my elitist bag of a guide and replace her with a much younger, less prune-faced member of the parliamentary staff. By the way did you know that when you see an elderly, overweight Lord slumped into his chair in the house it is because he is trying to listen to the reading of the bills through the speaker in the back of the seat and not because he's grabbing a cheeky Friday afternoon nap? I know. I was skeptical too.....
In the Members' Lobby there is a terrifying sight. The Members' Lobby is used by MP's when they are not busy filling in bogus expenses forms or engaging in sexual activity with fruit. It's a place to congregate for discussion. It houses a number of statues of former Prime Ministers and there, at one side of the room, looking down on you and pointing as if to once again give the order to destroy industry, start a vote-winning war, sell off every playing field in sight and take milk away from schoolchildren is Mrs Thatcher. I had a passing fantasy about beheading the statue there and then. Only my respect for an historic institution, the fact that the building was swarming with armed police and the fact that I haven't done anything illegal since I recorded the top 40 on Radio 1 in 1982 persuaded me to let it pass. We're shut of her now anyway. Dragon. Also represented in statues here are Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George and Clement Attlee.
The House of Commons itself is surprisingly small. Six hundred and fifty members were elected at the 2010 General Election and there isn't room in the house for many more than 400. It's pretty much first come, first served at Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday lunchtime. Those not in listen from outside if they wish but what is more likely is that they find a television. Probably in the pub around the corner. The House's green seating and speaker's chair are as iconic to me as the outside of the building, Big Ben and all. I must confess though that a combination of work commitments and a growing disaffection with all political parties and the system itself mean that I haven't seen it for a while. You don't really feel part of the political process if you've had to vote in a Tory defector to New Labour who then proceeds to do whatever the Whips tell him to for the sake of his career. All without a second thought for the actual wishes of his constituents. They could put Peter Sutcliffe up as their candidate for election and I'd still vote Labour. Perhaps I'm at fault but the system is hugely flawed.
In the corridors behind the House of Commons is Hansard, a painstakingly accurate record of everything ever debated in the House. Our guide then told us about the aforementioned pub, where MP's go for their swift halves or sherries. Seeking a bit of history, we paid a visit but before I tell you about that I should mention the Queen's Robing Room. It is here in this slightly wilting, decoration requiring and small space that Her Maj prepares for the State Opening of Parliament. As a committed republican I'm not that taken with the idea of being in a room frequently occupied by our long-reigning monarch, but if we're going to have a royal family then the least they can do is continue to uphold English traditions. The State Opening qualifies. Apparently they stopped chopping off their spouses' heads some time ago.
And so to the pub we learned about by Hansard. The Red Lion is just a few streets away. The sense of history is palpable. Any politician, Cabinet Minister or Prime Minister you care to name has probably been here for a pint. Probably not Thatcher, actually. Fun Loathing Criminal Thatcher. As we entered there was a man with a familiarly flabby gut and bald pate stood talking on his mobile phone. No, not me. It's Stevo. No, still not me. Mike 'Stevo' Stephenson, Sky Sports' rugby league summariser and champion of the mythical momentum rule. I remember meeting him once before at Wigan. I was there with Paul. He would have had something to say as Stevo and I briefly discussed the following day's Challenge Cup Final between Leeds Rhinos and Castleford Tigers. Some kid, somewhere was going to have his own first experience of a newer Wembley, which seems a reasonable place to stop.....
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