Let me just give you some backdrop to my mood as I write this. I’m £100 lighter having just settled up a parking charge with some company whose name escapes me and which seems to exist only to collect parking charges. It’s my fault. Who else is to blame for neglecting to display his blue badge in the window of his Ford Focus while parked in a disabled bay at Boots on Ravenhead Retail Park? I was in there for less time than it takes for Steven Gerrard to get his marching orders but there’s no getting away from the fact that I did park in a disabled bay without displaying my blue badge. For this reason my heart wasn’t in it when it came to an appeal. If people don’t pay parking charges for parking in disabled bays without displaying their blue badges then how am I ever going to find a disabled parking space again?
The problem is they probably don’t and the fact that I, a genuine wheelchair user, got caught being absent minded rather than lazy or inconsiderate is still rather irritating me. How many able bodied bastards get away with pulling up at their local Tesco, heading straight for the disabled bays and winging it completely while they nip in to get their night’s supply of Red Stripe? What’s grinding my gears (sorry, but we are on a motoring theme here) further is the fact that the money goes to some faceless debt collecting entity. If it went to Cancer Research or some other well intentioned charity I’d have paid it without hesitation and probably felt better about my day in the process.
I’m further culpable for the amount I have had to pay. When the ticket was issued a month ago it was only worth £30. But I did what I have always done with any problem I have ever had in my life, including stage four kidney disease until the heart palpitations started, and ignored for as long as was humanly possible. I received a letter yesterday telling me that it was too late to appeal against the judgement, and too late to settle it by paying just the initial charge of £30. This was followed by several vague threats of court action. Apparently the ticket stipulates that you have 14 days to pay the £30 before it then becomes £100 and you have no right of appeal regardless of the condition of your spine/legs/torso/head. There was a brief moment when I thought about waiting for the inevitable summons and then making my appearance in court, if only to prove to the faceless debt collectors that I am in fact a disabled person and not a boy racer stopping off for Red Stripe. But again it came back to the question of what happens if everyone starts finding a reason not to pay their parking charges. The boy racers would have an even freer reign of the disabled bays at Tesco and then where will we be? In a bay that is too narrow to allow you to get out of your car and into your wheelchair, that’s where.
So I’m to blame. But remembering a situation I found myself in when I lived in Barnsley many years ago I can’t help thinking that a degree of common sense should come into the law here. I was parked in a disabled bay outside a branch of Halifax Bank in the town centre. I was sat in the car eating my lunch. I practically lived in my car when I was a student, mostly because it was a good deal more accessible than my house at the time. So I was munching away on my sandwich and reading my magazine when someone knocked on my window. I looked up and saw a 60-something woman gesturing for me to wind the window down. When I did she asked me where my blue badge was. The bald truth of that matter was that I didn’t have a blue badge at that time. Blue badges cost £2 even then, and as any student knows £2 is £2. Or four shots of whiskey to put it another way. I did have a wheelchair though, which I pointed to for her benefit. It probably didn’t help that I made a face which indicated that only the most brainless moron who ever lived on Planet Earth would ask a person as to the whearabouts of their blue badge when they clearly had a wheelchair sitting in the passenger seat beside them. To my mind my wheelchair trumped her blue badge, which was probably acquired following a particularly nasty grazing episode outside of Gala Bingo. Anyway, she was not convinced and angrily reminded me about the law on blue badges and how wheelchairs don’t count. But in the absence of faceless debt collectors I won this battle, refusing to move my car until I was good and bloody ready, by which time she had harrumphed off to tell all her grazed friends about the injustice of it all.
But the point is this. Surely there are other ways than the presence of a blue badge to demonstrate whether an individual is genuinely in need of the disabled parking bay they have just occupied? The person who issued my ticket at Boots would not have seen my wheelchair because I was in it elsewhere, but surely it is not beyond the realms of human endeavour for a record of blue badge holders to be kept somewhere so that forgetting to display said blue badge is not such a problem. You don’t have to display a tax disc any more. The DVLA know exactly which cars are taxed and all you have to do is go online to make sure that yours is one of them. This wouldn’t stop time-wasters hogging disabled bays because as I alluded to earlier blue badges are no doubt absurdly easy to acquire, but it would at least stop forgetful people in genuine need from being punished. If the authorities can see their way clear to catching the odd Boy Racer along the way then that's a bonus. I'm just asking not to be punished for being careless.
I suppose that as long as absent minded piss-hats like me continue to forget to display their blue badges then there is always going to be a perceived sense of injustice. I’ll take the hit, but just do me one favour. Do not make a patronising comment on this link about how I have been ‘naughty’ or include the phrase ‘tut, tut’ in your response. If you do I will remember it to my dying day and one day, when you least expect it, even if everything is fine between us for the next 20 years, I will come around to your house and punch you full in the face.
Now fuck off away from my page.
Wednesday, 25 March 2015
Thursday, 19 March 2015
Neighbours - Nostalgia Overload
I don't watch Neighbours. It's not really aimed at grumpy men approaching middle age. It's aimed at what I used to be, grumpy teens approaching whatever age comes before middle age. It hasn't always been this way though. For a surprisingly long time I was completely hooked on it. This was not only because teenage boys who didn't want to look at Natalie Imbruglia in a bikini are a figment of your imagination, but because I was genuinely absorbed in its crappy, cliched storylines.
Imagine my delight then when I stumbled across a special programme on Channel 5 last night celebrating 30 years of it. Is it really that long since I was consumed with the pointless non-existence of Mike, Scott, Jane and Charlene? If you think that my obsession with all things Ramsay Street in the late 80's is a little bit peculiar then I would ask you what else was there to do at that time anyway? When I wasn't watching Neighbours I was pushing (or being pushed by over-bearing friends whose only actual discourse with me was to ask me the time every twenty minutes) to the local shop for a packet of pickled onion Monster Munch and a Supercan of Coke. Or hanging around on street corners to absolutely no effect. People complain about the fact that children nowadays don't have any sense of adventure since the invention of the X-Box, but before the X-Box those same people were terrorised by young people with absolutely nothing to do except bully and grope each other while kicking footballs at the nearest window.
Anyway, back to the 30th Anniversary special. I wasn't expecting much in terms of production values so I wasn't disappointed when I was confronted by a rather tired format of interviews with stars of the show past and present, interspersed with classic clips and all linked together terribly by Stefan Dennis and some lad who now plays the son of Scott and Charlene. He's about 47 or something. I'm not sure what the casting director was up to with this lad. When you look at him you don't automatically think Kylie and Jason. You think Brad Willis or some other two-dimensional Aussie beach bum. Is that racist? Feck off.
Despite the lack of any real innovation in the format there was nostalgia quite literally dripping from every pore of this production. Impressively, they had managed to snare interviews with the really huge ex-Neighbours stars which gave it all that extra bit of gravitas. Where I was expecting the woman who played Mrs Mangel we actualy got Mike, subsequently known as film icon Guy Pearce. And Charlene, who still manages to get away with hot-pants and some increasingly dodgy pop music well into her 40's under the ludicrous pseudonym Kylie Minogue. Then there is Margot Robbie, last seen alongside Will Smith in Focus but perhaps even more famous for regularly showing her bits in God-Awful and offensive idiot-fest The Wolf Of Wall Street. They even got Delta Bloody Goodrem to say a few words. And of course Jason Donovan, although his star has fallen slightly to the point where a few short years ago he played some of his 80's hits at Chicago Rock in St.Helens and Emma complained because he only did a few songs. I would have thought that a short Jason Donovan gig was a merciful thing, but what do I know?
What pleased me most about the interviews is that Pearce,Donovan, Minogue and all are as enthusiastic about the show now as I was then. I had expected Pearce in particular to flatly refuse to appear, or if he had to then I had thought he would tut mournfully about what he'd had to do to make a name for himself in the manner that George Michael talks about Wham! But he only had good things to say about Neighbours, as did Kylie, Jason and Margot. Craig MacLachlan didn't appear to be taking it as seriously but when did Henry ever take anything seriously? No Neighbours anniversary show would be complete without several gut-twanging shots of Henry wearing nothing but those old dungarees or, in one or two clips, running around in nothing at all. And all set against the backdrop of a montage of clips in which Ian Smith (Harold Bishop) shouted 'Oh Henry, how could you?'
Disappointingly, there was no sign of Natalie Imbruglia. Not only that, but while the superstar careers of Pearce, Minogue and Donovan were celebrated there was no mention of the torrid pop ventures of Dennis and MacLachlan. Don't It Make You Feel Good? Mona? Eighties pop classics both, right? Maybe this where I should bow down to the producer's better judgement and admit that these abominations are better off left to old episodes of TOTP2 with a music Hell theme. Imagine the fun that bloke off the radio could have delivering whithering quips about them over the top of their videos...
The phrase 'rocking the mullet' inevitably cropped up as Pearce and Donovan reminisced about their characters Mike and Scott, while Anne Charleston (Madge Bishop) rightly pointed out that Henry's was the worst because it was curly. You can have a mullet, and you can have curly hair, but even in the 80's I'm not sure that both at the same time was a good idea. Oh Henry, how could you? The girls didn't fare much better in the hair stakes though, with Daphne Clarke's short spikey number and Charlene's blonde frizzy effort. Did my sister and her friends genuinely try to copy this or was it just the case that any female with blonde hair in the 80's was inexorably doomed to have it frizz up like that? Either way it was no barnet for a self-respecting car mechanic.
One of the things about nostalgia like this is that it plays havoc with your memory. The clips were littered with characters who I recognised in some dark recess of my mind but couldn't bring fully to mind. Who was that best man at Joe Mangel's wedding? The female doctor who gave Des Clarke the awful news about Daphne's death (at which you cried, you baby). And who was that young lad who was the first person to bump into Harold in Ramsay Street when he returned from the dead? 'It was a little bit stretched' understated Smith by way of explanation of that particular storyline. On further inspection I discovered that it was Brett Stark who first met Harold. Stark is notable only for being a Stark long before Game Of Thrones' creator George RR Martin got the idea, and for having a sister called Danni who, for a time during the mid 90's, was in my opinion the only reason to watch television at all. If all you wanted from your youth was a pointless crush on someone unobtainable, Neighbours was your first stop. The actress who played her (Eliza Szonert) has faded into obscurity now, which might be a good thing. She couldn't possibly have retained such paralysing beauty and I'm not sure I could have coped with the shock of her deterioration. Annie Jones (Plain Jane Superbrain) hasn't aged all that well as evidenced here and in a recent episode of raucously stupid but brilliant Aussie drama Wentworth Prison based on the even more raucously stupid but brilliant Aussie drama Prisoner Cell Block H.
If you had asked me before last night's show how long I had been an avid Neighbours fan I would have probably estimated something around the five year mark. That just about covers my teenage years, taking me to the point where I'm too old for it and it is all a bit silly. Yet a segment on the unlikely affair between Doctor Karl Fletcher and a character called Sarah revealed that I had been a fan well into my 20's. Sarah, another classic and unrealistic megababe in the greatest of Neighbours traditions, appeared in the show between 1996 and 1999. Or to put it another way, her affair with the Doc took place somewhere between my 21st and 24th years on Earth. All of which means that I was a fan of Neighbours for something north of a decade. I took GCSE's, A-Levels, passed my driving test and represented my country at wheelchair basketball at junior level while all the while fretting about whether Susan would find out and what would happen if she did. Terrifyingly, Neighbours was the background noise to an alarmingly large chunk of my life! At least I stopped before Margot Robbie got involved in 2008. I had to be told by a bloke on the radio a few days before this show that she used to be in Neighbours. Does that mean I'm cured?
So what, other than babes in bikinis, held my interest for such a preposterously long time? It was alluded to on the show that Neighbours is a good deal less depressing than the English soaps. A few weeks ago I sat down to watch an episode of Eastenders to see if I could catch up with the storyline after several years of completely ignoring its existence. I thought it might make an interesting blog. But frankly 1,000 words on the inactivity of Danny Dyer's hugely punchable face and an absurd death scene by the previously excellent Timothy West was beyond me. I just couldn't do it, not if I wanted to avoid jumping in the bath and cutting up every major artery immediately afterwards. Neighbours was never like that. Nobody ever moped around wondering why their brother had slept with their mother's dog at The Arches. They talked of barbies, yewts (check spelling) and Bouncer (pronounced bee-ann-sah).
A staggering 20 million people in the UK alone watched Scott and Charlene get hitched in 1987 or 1988. Now the show attracts only 250,000 to 350,000 viewers which is either because my generation were freaks and the show was doomed when we became old freaks, or because of the invention of the X-Box again. Several million rubbish television channels showing a variety of boiled reality shite don't help either. Then there is the fact that nobody watches anything that isn't live at the time it is broadcast any more. It's all in the planner. Even suicide-fest Eastenders has suffered a dramatic drop in ratings in the Sky+ age.
If young people aren't watching in the same numbers now then it is probably their loss, but on the flip side of that they will never reach 39 and develop a headache trying to remember the name of Joe Mangel's best man at his wedding.
Imagine my delight then when I stumbled across a special programme on Channel 5 last night celebrating 30 years of it. Is it really that long since I was consumed with the pointless non-existence of Mike, Scott, Jane and Charlene? If you think that my obsession with all things Ramsay Street in the late 80's is a little bit peculiar then I would ask you what else was there to do at that time anyway? When I wasn't watching Neighbours I was pushing (or being pushed by over-bearing friends whose only actual discourse with me was to ask me the time every twenty minutes) to the local shop for a packet of pickled onion Monster Munch and a Supercan of Coke. Or hanging around on street corners to absolutely no effect. People complain about the fact that children nowadays don't have any sense of adventure since the invention of the X-Box, but before the X-Box those same people were terrorised by young people with absolutely nothing to do except bully and grope each other while kicking footballs at the nearest window.
Anyway, back to the 30th Anniversary special. I wasn't expecting much in terms of production values so I wasn't disappointed when I was confronted by a rather tired format of interviews with stars of the show past and present, interspersed with classic clips and all linked together terribly by Stefan Dennis and some lad who now plays the son of Scott and Charlene. He's about 47 or something. I'm not sure what the casting director was up to with this lad. When you look at him you don't automatically think Kylie and Jason. You think Brad Willis or some other two-dimensional Aussie beach bum. Is that racist? Feck off.
Despite the lack of any real innovation in the format there was nostalgia quite literally dripping from every pore of this production. Impressively, they had managed to snare interviews with the really huge ex-Neighbours stars which gave it all that extra bit of gravitas. Where I was expecting the woman who played Mrs Mangel we actualy got Mike, subsequently known as film icon Guy Pearce. And Charlene, who still manages to get away with hot-pants and some increasingly dodgy pop music well into her 40's under the ludicrous pseudonym Kylie Minogue. Then there is Margot Robbie, last seen alongside Will Smith in Focus but perhaps even more famous for regularly showing her bits in God-Awful and offensive idiot-fest The Wolf Of Wall Street. They even got Delta Bloody Goodrem to say a few words. And of course Jason Donovan, although his star has fallen slightly to the point where a few short years ago he played some of his 80's hits at Chicago Rock in St.Helens and Emma complained because he only did a few songs. I would have thought that a short Jason Donovan gig was a merciful thing, but what do I know?
What pleased me most about the interviews is that Pearce,Donovan, Minogue and all are as enthusiastic about the show now as I was then. I had expected Pearce in particular to flatly refuse to appear, or if he had to then I had thought he would tut mournfully about what he'd had to do to make a name for himself in the manner that George Michael talks about Wham! But he only had good things to say about Neighbours, as did Kylie, Jason and Margot. Craig MacLachlan didn't appear to be taking it as seriously but when did Henry ever take anything seriously? No Neighbours anniversary show would be complete without several gut-twanging shots of Henry wearing nothing but those old dungarees or, in one or two clips, running around in nothing at all. And all set against the backdrop of a montage of clips in which Ian Smith (Harold Bishop) shouted 'Oh Henry, how could you?'
Disappointingly, there was no sign of Natalie Imbruglia. Not only that, but while the superstar careers of Pearce, Minogue and Donovan were celebrated there was no mention of the torrid pop ventures of Dennis and MacLachlan. Don't It Make You Feel Good? Mona? Eighties pop classics both, right? Maybe this where I should bow down to the producer's better judgement and admit that these abominations are better off left to old episodes of TOTP2 with a music Hell theme. Imagine the fun that bloke off the radio could have delivering whithering quips about them over the top of their videos...
The phrase 'rocking the mullet' inevitably cropped up as Pearce and Donovan reminisced about their characters Mike and Scott, while Anne Charleston (Madge Bishop) rightly pointed out that Henry's was the worst because it was curly. You can have a mullet, and you can have curly hair, but even in the 80's I'm not sure that both at the same time was a good idea. Oh Henry, how could you? The girls didn't fare much better in the hair stakes though, with Daphne Clarke's short spikey number and Charlene's blonde frizzy effort. Did my sister and her friends genuinely try to copy this or was it just the case that any female with blonde hair in the 80's was inexorably doomed to have it frizz up like that? Either way it was no barnet for a self-respecting car mechanic.
One of the things about nostalgia like this is that it plays havoc with your memory. The clips were littered with characters who I recognised in some dark recess of my mind but couldn't bring fully to mind. Who was that best man at Joe Mangel's wedding? The female doctor who gave Des Clarke the awful news about Daphne's death (at which you cried, you baby). And who was that young lad who was the first person to bump into Harold in Ramsay Street when he returned from the dead? 'It was a little bit stretched' understated Smith by way of explanation of that particular storyline. On further inspection I discovered that it was Brett Stark who first met Harold. Stark is notable only for being a Stark long before Game Of Thrones' creator George RR Martin got the idea, and for having a sister called Danni who, for a time during the mid 90's, was in my opinion the only reason to watch television at all. If all you wanted from your youth was a pointless crush on someone unobtainable, Neighbours was your first stop. The actress who played her (Eliza Szonert) has faded into obscurity now, which might be a good thing. She couldn't possibly have retained such paralysing beauty and I'm not sure I could have coped with the shock of her deterioration. Annie Jones (Plain Jane Superbrain) hasn't aged all that well as evidenced here and in a recent episode of raucously stupid but brilliant Aussie drama Wentworth Prison based on the even more raucously stupid but brilliant Aussie drama Prisoner Cell Block H.
If you had asked me before last night's show how long I had been an avid Neighbours fan I would have probably estimated something around the five year mark. That just about covers my teenage years, taking me to the point where I'm too old for it and it is all a bit silly. Yet a segment on the unlikely affair between Doctor Karl Fletcher and a character called Sarah revealed that I had been a fan well into my 20's. Sarah, another classic and unrealistic megababe in the greatest of Neighbours traditions, appeared in the show between 1996 and 1999. Or to put it another way, her affair with the Doc took place somewhere between my 21st and 24th years on Earth. All of which means that I was a fan of Neighbours for something north of a decade. I took GCSE's, A-Levels, passed my driving test and represented my country at wheelchair basketball at junior level while all the while fretting about whether Susan would find out and what would happen if she did. Terrifyingly, Neighbours was the background noise to an alarmingly large chunk of my life! At least I stopped before Margot Robbie got involved in 2008. I had to be told by a bloke on the radio a few days before this show that she used to be in Neighbours. Does that mean I'm cured?
So what, other than babes in bikinis, held my interest for such a preposterously long time? It was alluded to on the show that Neighbours is a good deal less depressing than the English soaps. A few weeks ago I sat down to watch an episode of Eastenders to see if I could catch up with the storyline after several years of completely ignoring its existence. I thought it might make an interesting blog. But frankly 1,000 words on the inactivity of Danny Dyer's hugely punchable face and an absurd death scene by the previously excellent Timothy West was beyond me. I just couldn't do it, not if I wanted to avoid jumping in the bath and cutting up every major artery immediately afterwards. Neighbours was never like that. Nobody ever moped around wondering why their brother had slept with their mother's dog at The Arches. They talked of barbies, yewts (check spelling) and Bouncer (pronounced bee-ann-sah).
A staggering 20 million people in the UK alone watched Scott and Charlene get hitched in 1987 or 1988. Now the show attracts only 250,000 to 350,000 viewers which is either because my generation were freaks and the show was doomed when we became old freaks, or because of the invention of the X-Box again. Several million rubbish television channels showing a variety of boiled reality shite don't help either. Then there is the fact that nobody watches anything that isn't live at the time it is broadcast any more. It's all in the planner. Even suicide-fest Eastenders has suffered a dramatic drop in ratings in the Sky+ age.
If young people aren't watching in the same numbers now then it is probably their loss, but on the flip side of that they will never reach 39 and develop a headache trying to remember the name of Joe Mangel's best man at his wedding.
Tuesday, 17 March 2015
Blackpool Part Two - Saturday
I didn’t tell you about our room with a view in the first part of this piece. From Room 102 on the first floor of the Ibis Styles Hotel you get an almost perfect view of the sea. Almost. For your own safety there is a clunking great panel covering a large chunk of the left hand side of the window, but there is still enough glass there to enable you to see a long way out to sea. It would be possible to see even more of it if this were not the beginning of March. Still, there is scope enough for gazing out at the sea, drinking tea and eating shortbread and, if you want to be really pretentious about it, putting on a very thoughtful, scheming facial expression in the manor of Nucky Thompson looking out over the Atlantic City boardwalk. Across the corridor the Ibis Styles also has a Room 101 but we skipped that. I’m not a particularly superstitious man but to go there would be just asking for trouble given our propensity for balls ups.
As I looked out on to the sea I saw two suspiciously person-shaped figures in the distance. They looked to be walking along and then sporadically bending down to pick something up. The distance between them never changed for a time and for those moments I thought I was seeing things, that they were just objects bobbing around in the sea to no effect. But then they walked back towards the prom, huddling together to no doubt discuss whatever they had been out there doing. They could have been cockle picking. Do they have cockle pickers in Blackpool? They certainly weren’t just out for a pleasant stroll along the sand and a wade into the sea at this time of year. It might have a prom and a hotel with a big glass window you can look out on to the sea from, but Blackpool is not Atlantic City.
I’ll tell you what Nucky Thompson wouldn’t put up with. The lack of hot food available at breakfast. Continental only. I shudder to think what Jeremy Clarkson would have done in these circumstances. Not being an arrogant Tory bore myself, I managed to resist the temptation to punch the receptionist and threaten him with a trip to the job centre. It was a bit much though. It wasn’t as if the room was cheap. The least they could offer you is a couple of fried eggs. Emma assured me that there was no option to book a room without breakfast online, which makes sense because she would not ordinarily book breakfast in a hotel. We’re Wetherspoons top early-morning customers when we are on our travels in the UK. Us and the old men who take their first sip of bitter at 8.30 in the morning. How do they do that? Hoovering up our underwhelming breakfast cereals, pieces of toast and croissants we resolve to go out and buy breakfast the next morning, even though we have already paid for it here.
We headed out towards Blackpool Tower. It was only five minutes from the hotel so we reckoned we could go up there, and then be out in plenty of time to have a stroll towards the football ground. Stopping at one or more pubs along the way. More on which later. You’re ahead of me if you have guessed by now that getting to the top of the tower was not exactly routine. Having bought tickets yesterday we ignored the queue of people buying them and immediately got lost. I spotted a small corridor with a reception sign pointing towards it. It led us to a girl who informed us that nobody would be going up to the top of the tower at the moment because it was too windy. It was very windy, but it hadn’t occurred to us that they would close the Tower Eye, as they call it. By the way did you know that the Rockefeller Center in New York sways in the wind? This was a thought that made Emma feel a bit queasy as I recall, in fact it still does. I remained sceptical. Surely you would feel a building swaying? Evidently not. It has to sway anyway for reasons that I don’t understand and which you have to be a science nerd to grasp. Or at least faintly interested.
There was an alternative to the Tower Eye. We’d also bought tickets yesterday to Illuminasia, an indoor lights exhibition located in the Winter Gardens. We were going to visit on the Sunday but events had conspired against us and so we’d have to change tack. If breakfast was underwhelming then Illuminasia was either closely related to underwhelming or it was its doppleganger. Illuminasia contains around eight rooms within which are various representations of landmarks, land and sea creatures and Chinese lanterns. Lots of Chinese lanterns. It was mostly assembled by Chinese workers using a gazillion bazillions tons of steel and oh….I don’t know….some old rope. The lanterns are accompanied by the story of a Chinese city which was about to come under threat from the evil Emperor (not Sir Alex Ferguson) but which staved off said threat by lighting up lanterns and setting off fireworks to give the impression that they had already been, to use the technical term, bombed to shit. Apparently it worked and now there are lots of lanterns in a moderately sized room in Blackpool to commemorate the fact.
Of slightly more interest were the landmarks. Models of Tower Bridge, the leaning tower of Pisa (amusingly referred to by one small boy doing the rounds as just ‘pizza’), the Sphynx and the Statue Of Liberty are diverting enough, but we could have well done without the laser show which some poor girl has to rock up on to the stage and perform every 15 minutes or so. Her bizarre green wig is clearly designed to glow in the dark but frankly made her look like a transvestite with very poor taste in head-dress. Her dance moves were meant to give the impression that she was moulding and shaping the lasered lights in spectacular style but actually indicated that she was filling time until the summer begins again and she can go and sod off to be a redcoat in Minehead. If none of this nauseates you quite enough there is an accompanying quiz to complete as you go around the rooms to view the exhibition. I say quiz, it looks like a £2 Lotto scratchcard with multiple choice answers to taxing questions, the gist of which is basically ‘can you count?’. I suspect this might be aimed at a younger audience rather than a grumpy biff approaching 40.
Within a merciful amount of time we were on our way down to the football ground. This was the reason we were here, after all. Well, it is the reason we picked this particular weekend. Blackpool FC, currently languishing at the very bottom of the Championship, were hosting Emma’s Sheffield Wednesday. Sheffield Wednesday could very well be a term meaning mediocrity in a foreign language, but I always enjoy going to see their games. Just for the experience. I’m priced out of going to Liverpool who, in any case, probably operate a similarly scandalous policy to Manchester United and Everton when it comes to disabled fans. Basically they tell you which games you can go to because they haven’t got enough space to accommodate you. Only two or three Premier League grounds have stadia which meet the minimum requirement for the amount of wheelchair accessible seating which is a bloody scandal. Liverpool are not one of those who comply. Why would they? It’s expensive and they have got Kolo Toure’s wages to pay. Blackpool, on the other hand, is a club which is relatively easy to visit as an away fan. Probably because they are not very good.
After around 20 minutes ambling up the prom towards Blackpool’s Bloomfield Road ground pointing out potential chippy stops for the way back to the hotel, we happened upon a pub which we thought might be a nice spot for a pre-game beverage. The Lifeboat Inn is situated just off the promenade, a fact which had already attracted several Sheffield Wednesday fans. You can spot Wednesday fans a mile off. Well, you can if you are aware that Wednesday play in blue and white vertical stripes. What I was not aware of was a sign on the door which read;
PLEASE MIND THE STEP
Ignoring this completely and focusing only on whether the pub would have wheelchair access and a spare seat for Emma, I crashed through the door. If you hadn’t seen the sign you could be forgiven for thinking it was all on one level. The step was very small. I thought about this as my front wheels went over it, dug into the carpet and lifted the back end of my chair inexorably up into the air. It was one of those moments which I am sure all wheelchair users have experienced when they know they are going to fall out of their chair but they don’t really have an awful lot of input into the question of how to stop themselves. It being such a small drop I knew I wasn’t going to hurt myself as I put my hands out to break my fall. But I also knew that the embarrassment was going to be considerable. That’s quite something to have to contemplate for the one or two seconds it takes to hit the deck. In a flash I was on my hands and knees, my ankles in their traditional fall-out-of-wheelchair position, trapped inside my footplate. After much wriggling and trying to avoid eye contact with the girl sat directly opposite the front door who must have been quite startled by the man literally falling through the door, I managed to free my ankles from my chair. Half of Blackpool rushed to pick me up which, as fellow wheelchair users will also know, is the absolute slowest way for anyone who has recently fallen out of their chair to get back into it. Politely declining all offers of help and continuing to avoid eye contact with anyone, I clambered back into my chair.
We left.
Further up the promenade there is a pub called The Manchester. It sounded very much like the Wednesday fans had taken residence already as we passed it. You don’t hear ‘Hi-ho Sheffield Wednesday’ in The Manchester on a normal day, I wouldn’t have thought. Yet the front of the pub was not accessible and so we were directed to the side door and advised to go up in the lift to the family room. This meant missing out on the loutish sing-song behaviour of the Wednesday fans first hand (although we could still hear them from upstairs) but after falling into The Lifeboat I was prepared to settle for less. We sat at a table and drank soft drinks, partly because of last night’s exploits and partly because by this time there was only going to be time for one, and I don’t really do one. At least it was reasonably quiet and there was no problem getting served. Getting to the toilet was a little more problematic, principally because a young boy was getting an absolute scolding from his mother for failing to notify her of the fact that he needed a wee. Across the room was a young man wearing a Saints jumper. We get everywhere. I doubt very much whether he was here to see Sheffield Wednesday.
We found the ground just by following the crowd. We’d been before on our last visit but we couldn’t remember the way. On that occasion I had my photo taken with the statue of Stan Mortenson. We’d wanted to buy tickets for the football then, for a game against Hull City, but it had been moved from the Saturday to the Monday by the game’s governing body, Sky Sports. Outside the ground this time there was a loud protest against the Blackpool chairman Karl Oyston. Oyston has presided over a string of disasters over the last few years since the club spent the 2010/11 season in the Premier League. Two weeks before this campaign began they only had eight registered first team players. Then manager Jose Riga performed relative miracles to get a full team out on to the pitch for their season opener with Nottingham Forest in August but couldn’t mould them into a winning side. He was predictably sacked, since when Lee Clark has struggled similarly which, as far as this group of fans chanting for Oyston’s removal are concerned, is primarily down to a lack of investment and broken promises from the chairman. Blackpool are rock bottom of the Championship and are almost certain to be relegated to the third tier at the end of the season. It is all a far cry from Charlie Adam's set-pieces and the Premier League.
Hindering Blackpool further is the state of their pitch. It’s like a farmer’s field. It cuts up horrifically and from our position just behind the advertising boardings at ground level we spend a lot of time avoiding chunks of turf that have been dislodged by sliding players. It’s a sideline view for away fans at Bloomfield Road. My Blackpool supporting friend had warned me that it was grim and, though it wasn’t exactly palatial, I was pleasantly surprised at how bearable it was. My friend has obviously never been to Knowsley Road in January. Chief turf-flinging culprit is Wednesday’s Jeremy Helan. He’s normally a winger but today he is doing a passable impersonation of the worst left-back in league football. It’s not so much that he is easy to get past. It’s more that when he wins or receives the ball he treats it like a hand grenade and smacks it as far and as aimlessly down the field as possible. To be honest the entire 90 minutes is a masterclass in head tennis and over-hit crosses. Wednesday striker Atdhei Nuhiu is in familiarly hilarious form, falling over with prolific regularity, smashing one chance straight into the legs of Blackpool goalkeeper Eliot Parish and missing the target with another from a free header. In the end the game is won by Lewis McGuguan’s inswinging free-kick from the Wednesday left, which Parish cannot decide what to do with as he waits for someone to get a touch. He ends up doing nothing as nobody gets a touch and it nestles in the far corner.
As we leave the ground the Oyston protestors have decided not to renew hostilities with the chairman and all is quiet. Apart from the murmurings of the fans as they amble away discussing one of the least eventful games of football in living memory. Like many other Wednesday fans we call in at a chippy on the way back to the hotel. I don’t normally eat fish from chippies but decide to give it a go. Fish and chips seems like exactly the sort of thing you should eat after you have been to the football. It’s quite nice as chippies go, with table service included. You don’t get table service in my local chippy. You get to shout your order at them from the bottom of the six foot step they have actually inserted since a refurbishment. DDA. Here in Blackpool the bloke serving us ruins it slightly by getting tetchy when I remind him that I ordered bread and butter. I genuinely thought he had forgotten because he brought our food over and then asked us to remind him what drinks we had ordered. So I mentioned the bread and butter and he told me, helpfully because I couldn’t see this for myself, that he only has one pair of hands.
We go out late Saturday night. Unlike last night there is no rugby league to get to the pub for and we are unlikely to get chucked out early on a Saturday night in Blackpool so there is plenty of time. We start at Yates, where the same girl comes over three times and offers us Jagerbombs. We decline every time, but are reminded of Bob Willis’ withering assessment of Gary Balance’s drunken antics in a Nottingham nightspot. His emphasis was very much on the word ‘Jagerbomb’ as if he had never heard of it before and was at a loss to understand why anybody would want such a thing. Similar to how I regard anything from the Fast And Furious franchise. Or Jeremy Clarkson.
From there it was on to The Layton Rakes, another Wetherspoons pub naturally enough. It’s much quieter than Yates’ with not a Jagerbomb or an England cricketer in sight. Although there is the odd roudy hen party to contend with. There is apparently a roof top bar but it is a little chilly to try it out tonight. For those of you who read this column for access information the toilets are upstairs but there is a lift. When I used it I was surprised also to see that there is another bar area on the upper floor, one which was even quieter and more Jagerbomb-free than the one on the ground level. If you want to get served quickly this is for you. Had I known I probably would have suggested we sit there to save me getting in and out of the lift whenever the need arose, but you live and learn.
As we made our way back to the hotel the weather had improved, with very little wind. Perhaps we would get to go to the top of Blackpool Tower on Sunday.
As I looked out on to the sea I saw two suspiciously person-shaped figures in the distance. They looked to be walking along and then sporadically bending down to pick something up. The distance between them never changed for a time and for those moments I thought I was seeing things, that they were just objects bobbing around in the sea to no effect. But then they walked back towards the prom, huddling together to no doubt discuss whatever they had been out there doing. They could have been cockle picking. Do they have cockle pickers in Blackpool? They certainly weren’t just out for a pleasant stroll along the sand and a wade into the sea at this time of year. It might have a prom and a hotel with a big glass window you can look out on to the sea from, but Blackpool is not Atlantic City.
I’ll tell you what Nucky Thompson wouldn’t put up with. The lack of hot food available at breakfast. Continental only. I shudder to think what Jeremy Clarkson would have done in these circumstances. Not being an arrogant Tory bore myself, I managed to resist the temptation to punch the receptionist and threaten him with a trip to the job centre. It was a bit much though. It wasn’t as if the room was cheap. The least they could offer you is a couple of fried eggs. Emma assured me that there was no option to book a room without breakfast online, which makes sense because she would not ordinarily book breakfast in a hotel. We’re Wetherspoons top early-morning customers when we are on our travels in the UK. Us and the old men who take their first sip of bitter at 8.30 in the morning. How do they do that? Hoovering up our underwhelming breakfast cereals, pieces of toast and croissants we resolve to go out and buy breakfast the next morning, even though we have already paid for it here.
We headed out towards Blackpool Tower. It was only five minutes from the hotel so we reckoned we could go up there, and then be out in plenty of time to have a stroll towards the football ground. Stopping at one or more pubs along the way. More on which later. You’re ahead of me if you have guessed by now that getting to the top of the tower was not exactly routine. Having bought tickets yesterday we ignored the queue of people buying them and immediately got lost. I spotted a small corridor with a reception sign pointing towards it. It led us to a girl who informed us that nobody would be going up to the top of the tower at the moment because it was too windy. It was very windy, but it hadn’t occurred to us that they would close the Tower Eye, as they call it. By the way did you know that the Rockefeller Center in New York sways in the wind? This was a thought that made Emma feel a bit queasy as I recall, in fact it still does. I remained sceptical. Surely you would feel a building swaying? Evidently not. It has to sway anyway for reasons that I don’t understand and which you have to be a science nerd to grasp. Or at least faintly interested.
There was an alternative to the Tower Eye. We’d also bought tickets yesterday to Illuminasia, an indoor lights exhibition located in the Winter Gardens. We were going to visit on the Sunday but events had conspired against us and so we’d have to change tack. If breakfast was underwhelming then Illuminasia was either closely related to underwhelming or it was its doppleganger. Illuminasia contains around eight rooms within which are various representations of landmarks, land and sea creatures and Chinese lanterns. Lots of Chinese lanterns. It was mostly assembled by Chinese workers using a gazillion bazillions tons of steel and oh….I don’t know….some old rope. The lanterns are accompanied by the story of a Chinese city which was about to come under threat from the evil Emperor (not Sir Alex Ferguson) but which staved off said threat by lighting up lanterns and setting off fireworks to give the impression that they had already been, to use the technical term, bombed to shit. Apparently it worked and now there are lots of lanterns in a moderately sized room in Blackpool to commemorate the fact.
Of slightly more interest were the landmarks. Models of Tower Bridge, the leaning tower of Pisa (amusingly referred to by one small boy doing the rounds as just ‘pizza’), the Sphynx and the Statue Of Liberty are diverting enough, but we could have well done without the laser show which some poor girl has to rock up on to the stage and perform every 15 minutes or so. Her bizarre green wig is clearly designed to glow in the dark but frankly made her look like a transvestite with very poor taste in head-dress. Her dance moves were meant to give the impression that she was moulding and shaping the lasered lights in spectacular style but actually indicated that she was filling time until the summer begins again and she can go and sod off to be a redcoat in Minehead. If none of this nauseates you quite enough there is an accompanying quiz to complete as you go around the rooms to view the exhibition. I say quiz, it looks like a £2 Lotto scratchcard with multiple choice answers to taxing questions, the gist of which is basically ‘can you count?’. I suspect this might be aimed at a younger audience rather than a grumpy biff approaching 40.
Within a merciful amount of time we were on our way down to the football ground. This was the reason we were here, after all. Well, it is the reason we picked this particular weekend. Blackpool FC, currently languishing at the very bottom of the Championship, were hosting Emma’s Sheffield Wednesday. Sheffield Wednesday could very well be a term meaning mediocrity in a foreign language, but I always enjoy going to see their games. Just for the experience. I’m priced out of going to Liverpool who, in any case, probably operate a similarly scandalous policy to Manchester United and Everton when it comes to disabled fans. Basically they tell you which games you can go to because they haven’t got enough space to accommodate you. Only two or three Premier League grounds have stadia which meet the minimum requirement for the amount of wheelchair accessible seating which is a bloody scandal. Liverpool are not one of those who comply. Why would they? It’s expensive and they have got Kolo Toure’s wages to pay. Blackpool, on the other hand, is a club which is relatively easy to visit as an away fan. Probably because they are not very good.
After around 20 minutes ambling up the prom towards Blackpool’s Bloomfield Road ground pointing out potential chippy stops for the way back to the hotel, we happened upon a pub which we thought might be a nice spot for a pre-game beverage. The Lifeboat Inn is situated just off the promenade, a fact which had already attracted several Sheffield Wednesday fans. You can spot Wednesday fans a mile off. Well, you can if you are aware that Wednesday play in blue and white vertical stripes. What I was not aware of was a sign on the door which read;
PLEASE MIND THE STEP
Ignoring this completely and focusing only on whether the pub would have wheelchair access and a spare seat for Emma, I crashed through the door. If you hadn’t seen the sign you could be forgiven for thinking it was all on one level. The step was very small. I thought about this as my front wheels went over it, dug into the carpet and lifted the back end of my chair inexorably up into the air. It was one of those moments which I am sure all wheelchair users have experienced when they know they are going to fall out of their chair but they don’t really have an awful lot of input into the question of how to stop themselves. It being such a small drop I knew I wasn’t going to hurt myself as I put my hands out to break my fall. But I also knew that the embarrassment was going to be considerable. That’s quite something to have to contemplate for the one or two seconds it takes to hit the deck. In a flash I was on my hands and knees, my ankles in their traditional fall-out-of-wheelchair position, trapped inside my footplate. After much wriggling and trying to avoid eye contact with the girl sat directly opposite the front door who must have been quite startled by the man literally falling through the door, I managed to free my ankles from my chair. Half of Blackpool rushed to pick me up which, as fellow wheelchair users will also know, is the absolute slowest way for anyone who has recently fallen out of their chair to get back into it. Politely declining all offers of help and continuing to avoid eye contact with anyone, I clambered back into my chair.
We left.
Further up the promenade there is a pub called The Manchester. It sounded very much like the Wednesday fans had taken residence already as we passed it. You don’t hear ‘Hi-ho Sheffield Wednesday’ in The Manchester on a normal day, I wouldn’t have thought. Yet the front of the pub was not accessible and so we were directed to the side door and advised to go up in the lift to the family room. This meant missing out on the loutish sing-song behaviour of the Wednesday fans first hand (although we could still hear them from upstairs) but after falling into The Lifeboat I was prepared to settle for less. We sat at a table and drank soft drinks, partly because of last night’s exploits and partly because by this time there was only going to be time for one, and I don’t really do one. At least it was reasonably quiet and there was no problem getting served. Getting to the toilet was a little more problematic, principally because a young boy was getting an absolute scolding from his mother for failing to notify her of the fact that he needed a wee. Across the room was a young man wearing a Saints jumper. We get everywhere. I doubt very much whether he was here to see Sheffield Wednesday.
We found the ground just by following the crowd. We’d been before on our last visit but we couldn’t remember the way. On that occasion I had my photo taken with the statue of Stan Mortenson. We’d wanted to buy tickets for the football then, for a game against Hull City, but it had been moved from the Saturday to the Monday by the game’s governing body, Sky Sports. Outside the ground this time there was a loud protest against the Blackpool chairman Karl Oyston. Oyston has presided over a string of disasters over the last few years since the club spent the 2010/11 season in the Premier League. Two weeks before this campaign began they only had eight registered first team players. Then manager Jose Riga performed relative miracles to get a full team out on to the pitch for their season opener with Nottingham Forest in August but couldn’t mould them into a winning side. He was predictably sacked, since when Lee Clark has struggled similarly which, as far as this group of fans chanting for Oyston’s removal are concerned, is primarily down to a lack of investment and broken promises from the chairman. Blackpool are rock bottom of the Championship and are almost certain to be relegated to the third tier at the end of the season. It is all a far cry from Charlie Adam's set-pieces and the Premier League.
Hindering Blackpool further is the state of their pitch. It’s like a farmer’s field. It cuts up horrifically and from our position just behind the advertising boardings at ground level we spend a lot of time avoiding chunks of turf that have been dislodged by sliding players. It’s a sideline view for away fans at Bloomfield Road. My Blackpool supporting friend had warned me that it was grim and, though it wasn’t exactly palatial, I was pleasantly surprised at how bearable it was. My friend has obviously never been to Knowsley Road in January. Chief turf-flinging culprit is Wednesday’s Jeremy Helan. He’s normally a winger but today he is doing a passable impersonation of the worst left-back in league football. It’s not so much that he is easy to get past. It’s more that when he wins or receives the ball he treats it like a hand grenade and smacks it as far and as aimlessly down the field as possible. To be honest the entire 90 minutes is a masterclass in head tennis and over-hit crosses. Wednesday striker Atdhei Nuhiu is in familiarly hilarious form, falling over with prolific regularity, smashing one chance straight into the legs of Blackpool goalkeeper Eliot Parish and missing the target with another from a free header. In the end the game is won by Lewis McGuguan’s inswinging free-kick from the Wednesday left, which Parish cannot decide what to do with as he waits for someone to get a touch. He ends up doing nothing as nobody gets a touch and it nestles in the far corner.
As we leave the ground the Oyston protestors have decided not to renew hostilities with the chairman and all is quiet. Apart from the murmurings of the fans as they amble away discussing one of the least eventful games of football in living memory. Like many other Wednesday fans we call in at a chippy on the way back to the hotel. I don’t normally eat fish from chippies but decide to give it a go. Fish and chips seems like exactly the sort of thing you should eat after you have been to the football. It’s quite nice as chippies go, with table service included. You don’t get table service in my local chippy. You get to shout your order at them from the bottom of the six foot step they have actually inserted since a refurbishment. DDA. Here in Blackpool the bloke serving us ruins it slightly by getting tetchy when I remind him that I ordered bread and butter. I genuinely thought he had forgotten because he brought our food over and then asked us to remind him what drinks we had ordered. So I mentioned the bread and butter and he told me, helpfully because I couldn’t see this for myself, that he only has one pair of hands.
We go out late Saturday night. Unlike last night there is no rugby league to get to the pub for and we are unlikely to get chucked out early on a Saturday night in Blackpool so there is plenty of time. We start at Yates, where the same girl comes over three times and offers us Jagerbombs. We decline every time, but are reminded of Bob Willis’ withering assessment of Gary Balance’s drunken antics in a Nottingham nightspot. His emphasis was very much on the word ‘Jagerbomb’ as if he had never heard of it before and was at a loss to understand why anybody would want such a thing. Similar to how I regard anything from the Fast And Furious franchise. Or Jeremy Clarkson.
From there it was on to The Layton Rakes, another Wetherspoons pub naturally enough. It’s much quieter than Yates’ with not a Jagerbomb or an England cricketer in sight. Although there is the odd roudy hen party to contend with. There is apparently a roof top bar but it is a little chilly to try it out tonight. For those of you who read this column for access information the toilets are upstairs but there is a lift. When I used it I was surprised also to see that there is another bar area on the upper floor, one which was even quieter and more Jagerbomb-free than the one on the ground level. If you want to get served quickly this is for you. Had I known I probably would have suggested we sit there to save me getting in and out of the lift whenever the need arose, but you live and learn.
As we made our way back to the hotel the weather had improved, with very little wind. Perhaps we would get to go to the top of Blackpool Tower on Sunday.
Thursday, 12 March 2015
Blackpool Part One - Friday
It’s been a really long time since I last went to Blackpool. More than five years. Possibly 10. This blog recounts tales of all sorts of far more exotic trips. Las Vegas, Florida, New York, Barcelona….er……Bath. Blackpool all seems a bit retro. A place you’d go years ago before you could hop on a plane to some sunny European hotspot for the price of a night out in town. It took Sheffield Wednesday’s recent trip to Bloomfield Road to play Blackpool in a crunch mid-to-lower table Championship clash to bring an end to this barren spell of Blackpool-lessness. I don’t think it will be so long before we go back again.
It was a bloody nice place to be. Even for the time of year. This might have something to do with the fact that had I not been in Blackpool I would have been stuck in the office laboriously bashing a keyboard or sifting through the debris on my desk. But a very good time was had by all (well, me and Emma) even if not everything went absolutely 100% according to plan. If everything went 100% according to plan it just wouldn’t be us and it almost certainly would not be a story that had any chance of finding its way on to these pages.
We stayed at the Ibis Styles hotel on the seafront which as it turns out is right opposite the north pier. After setting off on Friday lunchtime and finding ourselves in Blackpool in not much more than an hour, we then proceeded to waste another 45 minutes driving around in state of bafflement as we tried to find the place. The satnav continually led us to a dead end that had been pedestrianized, which it would do considering it was programmed somewhere in between the Falklands War and Italia 90. Eventually we pulled up outside of a large multi-storey car park and Emma phoned the hotel to ask for directions. They told us to park in the car park that we were at that very moment sat outside. Which we thought was great at the time but didn't turn out to be great advice. Yes it involved a discount in partnership with the hotel but it was a good 10 minute walk down the hill to the hotel from there. Which meant it would be uphill on the way back.
Check-in was supposed to be from 12.00. By 2.15 we were at reception being politely informed that the room was not quite ready and that we were invited to sit in the bar/restaurant area and have a drink while we waited. At that point it registered how unrealistic a 12.00 check-in had been. Not only because we were never going to make it to the hotel by then, but also because check-out is also 12.00. There has to be some time in between for the maids to go in and pee in your wardrobe or whatever it is they do. One small orange juice (with bits in) later we were ushered back towards reception and given our room key.
Only the bathroom was too small. Emma hadn’t asked for a disabled room which, while you might think a slight oversight, is not ordinarily a problem. Most hotels have bathrooms big enough for me to get my chair into. As wheelchair users go I’m not in the big league when it comes to wheelchair width. Even those who are usually don’t have this problem in my experience. Whenever we spent the night at a hotel on an away trip with the basketball team I cannot recall too many people complaining that they couldn’t fit their wheelchair into the bathroom. You book a disabled room if you have to have a shower seat or a toilet handrail or if you are really lucky and are living the luxury hotel dream, a set of windows which open from a height of less than eight feet. I can get by for a weekend without any of these things, and a bathroom door the width of one you might find on an aeroplane was not something we had considered. We headed back to reception and, after another wait in the bar/restaurant area, were moved to an accessible room. Naturally, it had twin beds because we all know by now the rule about how The Undateables don’t sleep with other human beings. Not in the same bed. Don’t be revolting, darling. When I flagged up this potential problem I was assured by the receptionist that some kind of jiggery pokery could be performed on the bed while we were out that afternoon to make it become one. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the trickery and cunning behind that. I’m just a little troubled at the assumption that you make an accessible room a twin room first and then a double on request.
After all that we went for a walk on the prom and happened upon the tourist information centre. Normally these are the kind of tat emporiums that would make Mike Ashley blush and you would expect that to be especially the case in one of England’s most famous seaside resorts. Yet Blackpool’s selection of souvenirs and trip reminders is fairly minimalist. Emma couldn’t even find a Christmas tree bauble. It has somehow become customary for us to buy a Christmas tree bauble whenever we find ourselves in a tourist information centre or gift shop. Our Christmas tree had an array of interesting baubles with representations of everything from New York to the Houses Of Parliament. We’d have been able to show these off over the festive season had we had any visitors, or had we been remotely inclined to answer the front door if we’d had any visitors. I was involved in a discussion about this recently and was pleasantly surprised to find that there are many other people who do not answer their front doors. When I was a kid ignoring the front door was the last word in rudeness, but now it appears that nobody wants to open their homes even for a few minutes just in case those looking in are religious freaks or bloody cold caller salesmen. As the culture of authorised harassment has developed, so we have responded by locking our doors and refusing to hear anything but whatever is playing on our Sky+ boxes. We’re all the better for it, I think.
What the tourist information lacked in Christmas tat it made up for in tickets for local attractions. They have probably reasoned that there are endless other places on the Golden Mile where you might be able to buy a Christmas tree bauble or a key-ring or a hat with a cringeworthy slogan on it. One with fake limbs sticking out of the top of it perhaps, or some sort of representation of a bloody weapon to give the impression that the wearer has had their head sliced open. Ho, ho, ho, put it with that fake turd you put on your grandma’s seat during last year’s Christmas lunch. All that is freely available elsewhere so the tourist information centre has decided to instead offer tickets to the local attractions at slightly reduced prices. We bought tickets to go up to the top of Blackpool Tower, and for an indoor illuminations experience called Illuminasia. I was surprised for some reason to learn that the outdoor illuminations for which Blackpool is so famous only run for nine or 10 weeks in the autumn. Apparently the purpose of that is to make people feel better about the end of summer, or at least it was originally. Now it is to clog up the M6. In its stead they have built an indoor illuminations ‘experience’ at the Winter Gardens. We were reminded of this every time we looked outside of our hotel room window as it was plastered all over a large screen next to the north pier.
By this time we had been in Blackpool for a good couple of hours without visiting a pub. It was time to put that right. There’s a Whetherspoons on the prom called The Albert And The Lion which seemed like a good spot for a Friday afternoon beverage. As you enter from the front you are immediately greeted by a large step or three to the main bar area, so if stairs are not your thing (and they are really not mine) you have to whizz around to the left hand side and use the small lift. It carries just one person (maybe two if someone stands on it with you) and is one of those with a button that you have to keep your finger on to keep the thing moving. At the top is a small gate which wouldn’t shut on the way out. If the gate doesn’t shut, the lift doesn’t move. At least five people saw my comical efforts to shut the gate and seemed to take it in turns to make the situation worse and more embarrassing. Finally a member of staff came over and, after what seemed like a fair degree of reckless walloping, finally managed to get the gate shut and therefore get me out of the place.
The plan for the evening was to find a pub where we could watch Saints’ Super League match at Wakefield on Sky. The Albert And The Lion was out because Wetherspoons don’t really do live sport, and a quick glance around Walkabout yielded no success. They had some small screens which might have been useful but there was no accessible seating. Everyone seemed to be stood up, in fact. And there was loud dance music playing. The kind that I thought had been banished to oblivion in about 1991 but which, apparently, is still allowed in public. We moved on to The Litten Tree just around the corner. Kick-off was only half an hour away so before buying anything I asked the barman if he would be able to put the game on. It wasn’t a given. This was not rugby league country. He was quite agreeable about it and told me that all of the televisions currently showing the snooker would have the rugby league on by kick off. As we took our drinks and found a corner by a snooker-showing screen a besuited man of staggering self importance asked me if I could see the screen. I explained to him that I had asked the barman to put the rugby on in a minute, and he looked at me like I had asked if we could watch a litter of puppies being executed live.
“Really?” his friend asked me dismissively. A friend who it has to be said looked suspiciously like the absolutely not in any way real paedophile and murderer Joe Miller from Broadchurch.
“Really.” I said. Thankfully there was a couple on the table next to us who seemed more interested. One of them asked me if I had happened to see Leeds Rhinos’ game the previous night. I had an ally in my quest to get the game on, none of which helped the barman to put the thing on the screen that he said he would. Instead he put it on the screen which had been showing Sky Sports News, meaning I had to turn around completely from where I had been sitting and was now directly next to Emma, with no access to our table if I wanted to see the screen. At a certain point during the first half we were turfed out of our position completely as the staff wanted to move the tables to create dancing space. Dancing should be outlawed, especially among men. But to interrupt a Saints game for it is well….it’s just heinous. In the 30 seconds or so it too for us to locate another table in front of another rugby league-showing screen Wakefield had scored a try to cancel out the one that Saints had crossed for earlier. The next hour was spent in various states of distress as an injury-plagued Saints crawled over the line by a score of 20-16. All the while, a balding man with a southern accent was barfing on to me about how he had ‘seen the one that England play…but never rugby league’. The one that England play? Bugger me sideways. The RFL’s marketing department take an awful lot of stick but sometimes you have to take a look at what they are up against. By the end the balding man with the southern accent was expressing his surprise about how entertaining rugby league is, which is not a secret at all to sensible people and is in fact the default reaction of any union-loving ignoramus who watches league for the first time without any biased input from John Fucking Inverdale or Jeremy Fucking Guscott.
Thankful for the win we moved on to Soul Suite. If you like a bar to have character and a little something different then this is the place for you. So many bars you go in now are dull and featureless affairs playing a mixture of X-Factor filth and dance durges. Soul Suite plays nothing but soul as the name suggests, and usually has live singers. The live acts are of varying degrees of quality, admittedly. But even the crap ones are entertaining when you compare them to some dullard DJ flirting with the only two girls on the dance floor in Chicago Fecking Rock. It’s certainly preferable to standing around in a Walkabout which is too loud to even entertain the notion of conversation and which is playing the sort of music you can only enjoy if you have taken a sizeable amount of crystal meth.
We weren’t the only people to prefer a bit of soul in our lives. The balding man who watches The One England Play had made his way over from the Litten Tree also and was continuing our discussion at the bar. It turns out he was a Charlton Athletic football fan, and he was bewildered and seemingly slightly annoyed when I told him that I had been to The Valley watching Saints against London Broncos. So not The One England Play, then. Despite my clear memory of sitting on the sideline at The Valley with former Saints coach Ian Millward sat on the other side of Emma, the balding man who watches The One England Play wasn’t having it. Rugby league does not exist within earshot of a tally-ho of Twickers.
Having left him we just about managed to find a seat in the bar and spent the next couple of hours watching people clown it up on the dance floor. One man stood tall above everyone, a greying figure who must have been close to six feet ten in height. No matter what track was playing he applied the same shoulder thrusting, demented duck dance moves to it. He was completely indefatigable too. He never had a breather. Quite boundless energy for a man who must have been pushing 60. Ian from Burnley was well over that age by the looks of him, and a good two feet shorter than the dancing duck. He wore a smart jacket and hat combo and spent large parts of his evening dancing away and trying to ignore the legions of knobheads attempting to patronise him to death as he did so. I’ve been in that boat, by the way. Anyone reading this who is both a wheelchair user and who has had the misfortune to find themselves in my vicinity on a dance floor in our younger days will know the feeling all too well. Some attractive lady comes up and starts talking to you and then she wants to dance. You hate dancing but you know this is how the game is played and so you tolerate it for a while and you dance and then…..
She wants to dance with your mate aswell….
Which would be ok. People are free to choose who they dance with after all. But if you do want to dance with someone other than my teenage self then please make sure you do so at a different time than the one at which you intend to dance with me. Otherwise you are likely to be on the receiving end of a fearful volley of abuse which serves no purpose other than to get me all worked up and to present the disabled in yet another bad light. The old chip on your shoulder light. I’ve got a chip on my shoulder because I am not prepared to tolerate the notion of sitting around with my best friend, each of us holding on to one hand of some dim tart we wouldn’t ordinarily waste our time on if we hadn’t just inhaled 20 pints of Stella. Now fuck off.
One of Ian from Burnley’s tormentors was a young man clad ludicrously in the sort of Ellesse tracksuit top that would have been de rigeur when Pat Cash won Wimbledon but is now useful only as a subject of parody and ridicule. Like the tall greying man he refused to consider that any differences in the music might influence his choice of dance moves, only his choreography was even further out of place, laced as it was with Ian Brown/Stone Roses type shuffles and arm waving, with perhaps half a soupcon of an attempt at some mad for it head movements. He repeatedly tried to grab hold of Ian from Burnley’s hand and raise it above both of their heads as if he were a boxing referee declaring the old man middleweight champion of the world. Straw-weight perhaps. Ian from Burnley was about six stone even if he had waded into the sea.
The live singer was Lance and to be honest, he was pretty average. He could carry a tune and he wore a sharp suit, but he’d never have made it into any of the 436 versions of The Drifters currently doing the rounds. None of which stopped any of our favourite dancing doofuses from lapping up every note and every word he sang with great delight. We left at around midnight I would guess with the tall dancing duck, Ian from Burnley and Not Ian from The Stone Roses still going strong like relentless Duracell Soul Bunnies.
But our day was done. The plan for tomorrow was to hit the top of the tower before a pre-game beverage and a post-game chippy dinner. It sort of worked out…….
It was a bloody nice place to be. Even for the time of year. This might have something to do with the fact that had I not been in Blackpool I would have been stuck in the office laboriously bashing a keyboard or sifting through the debris on my desk. But a very good time was had by all (well, me and Emma) even if not everything went absolutely 100% according to plan. If everything went 100% according to plan it just wouldn’t be us and it almost certainly would not be a story that had any chance of finding its way on to these pages.
We stayed at the Ibis Styles hotel on the seafront which as it turns out is right opposite the north pier. After setting off on Friday lunchtime and finding ourselves in Blackpool in not much more than an hour, we then proceeded to waste another 45 minutes driving around in state of bafflement as we tried to find the place. The satnav continually led us to a dead end that had been pedestrianized, which it would do considering it was programmed somewhere in between the Falklands War and Italia 90. Eventually we pulled up outside of a large multi-storey car park and Emma phoned the hotel to ask for directions. They told us to park in the car park that we were at that very moment sat outside. Which we thought was great at the time but didn't turn out to be great advice. Yes it involved a discount in partnership with the hotel but it was a good 10 minute walk down the hill to the hotel from there. Which meant it would be uphill on the way back.
Check-in was supposed to be from 12.00. By 2.15 we were at reception being politely informed that the room was not quite ready and that we were invited to sit in the bar/restaurant area and have a drink while we waited. At that point it registered how unrealistic a 12.00 check-in had been. Not only because we were never going to make it to the hotel by then, but also because check-out is also 12.00. There has to be some time in between for the maids to go in and pee in your wardrobe or whatever it is they do. One small orange juice (with bits in) later we were ushered back towards reception and given our room key.
Only the bathroom was too small. Emma hadn’t asked for a disabled room which, while you might think a slight oversight, is not ordinarily a problem. Most hotels have bathrooms big enough for me to get my chair into. As wheelchair users go I’m not in the big league when it comes to wheelchair width. Even those who are usually don’t have this problem in my experience. Whenever we spent the night at a hotel on an away trip with the basketball team I cannot recall too many people complaining that they couldn’t fit their wheelchair into the bathroom. You book a disabled room if you have to have a shower seat or a toilet handrail or if you are really lucky and are living the luxury hotel dream, a set of windows which open from a height of less than eight feet. I can get by for a weekend without any of these things, and a bathroom door the width of one you might find on an aeroplane was not something we had considered. We headed back to reception and, after another wait in the bar/restaurant area, were moved to an accessible room. Naturally, it had twin beds because we all know by now the rule about how The Undateables don’t sleep with other human beings. Not in the same bed. Don’t be revolting, darling. When I flagged up this potential problem I was assured by the receptionist that some kind of jiggery pokery could be performed on the bed while we were out that afternoon to make it become one. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the trickery and cunning behind that. I’m just a little troubled at the assumption that you make an accessible room a twin room first and then a double on request.
After all that we went for a walk on the prom and happened upon the tourist information centre. Normally these are the kind of tat emporiums that would make Mike Ashley blush and you would expect that to be especially the case in one of England’s most famous seaside resorts. Yet Blackpool’s selection of souvenirs and trip reminders is fairly minimalist. Emma couldn’t even find a Christmas tree bauble. It has somehow become customary for us to buy a Christmas tree bauble whenever we find ourselves in a tourist information centre or gift shop. Our Christmas tree had an array of interesting baubles with representations of everything from New York to the Houses Of Parliament. We’d have been able to show these off over the festive season had we had any visitors, or had we been remotely inclined to answer the front door if we’d had any visitors. I was involved in a discussion about this recently and was pleasantly surprised to find that there are many other people who do not answer their front doors. When I was a kid ignoring the front door was the last word in rudeness, but now it appears that nobody wants to open their homes even for a few minutes just in case those looking in are religious freaks or bloody cold caller salesmen. As the culture of authorised harassment has developed, so we have responded by locking our doors and refusing to hear anything but whatever is playing on our Sky+ boxes. We’re all the better for it, I think.
What the tourist information lacked in Christmas tat it made up for in tickets for local attractions. They have probably reasoned that there are endless other places on the Golden Mile where you might be able to buy a Christmas tree bauble or a key-ring or a hat with a cringeworthy slogan on it. One with fake limbs sticking out of the top of it perhaps, or some sort of representation of a bloody weapon to give the impression that the wearer has had their head sliced open. Ho, ho, ho, put it with that fake turd you put on your grandma’s seat during last year’s Christmas lunch. All that is freely available elsewhere so the tourist information centre has decided to instead offer tickets to the local attractions at slightly reduced prices. We bought tickets to go up to the top of Blackpool Tower, and for an indoor illuminations experience called Illuminasia. I was surprised for some reason to learn that the outdoor illuminations for which Blackpool is so famous only run for nine or 10 weeks in the autumn. Apparently the purpose of that is to make people feel better about the end of summer, or at least it was originally. Now it is to clog up the M6. In its stead they have built an indoor illuminations ‘experience’ at the Winter Gardens. We were reminded of this every time we looked outside of our hotel room window as it was plastered all over a large screen next to the north pier.
By this time we had been in Blackpool for a good couple of hours without visiting a pub. It was time to put that right. There’s a Whetherspoons on the prom called The Albert And The Lion which seemed like a good spot for a Friday afternoon beverage. As you enter from the front you are immediately greeted by a large step or three to the main bar area, so if stairs are not your thing (and they are really not mine) you have to whizz around to the left hand side and use the small lift. It carries just one person (maybe two if someone stands on it with you) and is one of those with a button that you have to keep your finger on to keep the thing moving. At the top is a small gate which wouldn’t shut on the way out. If the gate doesn’t shut, the lift doesn’t move. At least five people saw my comical efforts to shut the gate and seemed to take it in turns to make the situation worse and more embarrassing. Finally a member of staff came over and, after what seemed like a fair degree of reckless walloping, finally managed to get the gate shut and therefore get me out of the place.
The plan for the evening was to find a pub where we could watch Saints’ Super League match at Wakefield on Sky. The Albert And The Lion was out because Wetherspoons don’t really do live sport, and a quick glance around Walkabout yielded no success. They had some small screens which might have been useful but there was no accessible seating. Everyone seemed to be stood up, in fact. And there was loud dance music playing. The kind that I thought had been banished to oblivion in about 1991 but which, apparently, is still allowed in public. We moved on to The Litten Tree just around the corner. Kick-off was only half an hour away so before buying anything I asked the barman if he would be able to put the game on. It wasn’t a given. This was not rugby league country. He was quite agreeable about it and told me that all of the televisions currently showing the snooker would have the rugby league on by kick off. As we took our drinks and found a corner by a snooker-showing screen a besuited man of staggering self importance asked me if I could see the screen. I explained to him that I had asked the barman to put the rugby on in a minute, and he looked at me like I had asked if we could watch a litter of puppies being executed live.
“Really?” his friend asked me dismissively. A friend who it has to be said looked suspiciously like the absolutely not in any way real paedophile and murderer Joe Miller from Broadchurch.
“Really.” I said. Thankfully there was a couple on the table next to us who seemed more interested. One of them asked me if I had happened to see Leeds Rhinos’ game the previous night. I had an ally in my quest to get the game on, none of which helped the barman to put the thing on the screen that he said he would. Instead he put it on the screen which had been showing Sky Sports News, meaning I had to turn around completely from where I had been sitting and was now directly next to Emma, with no access to our table if I wanted to see the screen. At a certain point during the first half we were turfed out of our position completely as the staff wanted to move the tables to create dancing space. Dancing should be outlawed, especially among men. But to interrupt a Saints game for it is well….it’s just heinous. In the 30 seconds or so it too for us to locate another table in front of another rugby league-showing screen Wakefield had scored a try to cancel out the one that Saints had crossed for earlier. The next hour was spent in various states of distress as an injury-plagued Saints crawled over the line by a score of 20-16. All the while, a balding man with a southern accent was barfing on to me about how he had ‘seen the one that England play…but never rugby league’. The one that England play? Bugger me sideways. The RFL’s marketing department take an awful lot of stick but sometimes you have to take a look at what they are up against. By the end the balding man with the southern accent was expressing his surprise about how entertaining rugby league is, which is not a secret at all to sensible people and is in fact the default reaction of any union-loving ignoramus who watches league for the first time without any biased input from John Fucking Inverdale or Jeremy Fucking Guscott.
Thankful for the win we moved on to Soul Suite. If you like a bar to have character and a little something different then this is the place for you. So many bars you go in now are dull and featureless affairs playing a mixture of X-Factor filth and dance durges. Soul Suite plays nothing but soul as the name suggests, and usually has live singers. The live acts are of varying degrees of quality, admittedly. But even the crap ones are entertaining when you compare them to some dullard DJ flirting with the only two girls on the dance floor in Chicago Fecking Rock. It’s certainly preferable to standing around in a Walkabout which is too loud to even entertain the notion of conversation and which is playing the sort of music you can only enjoy if you have taken a sizeable amount of crystal meth.
We weren’t the only people to prefer a bit of soul in our lives. The balding man who watches The One England Play had made his way over from the Litten Tree also and was continuing our discussion at the bar. It turns out he was a Charlton Athletic football fan, and he was bewildered and seemingly slightly annoyed when I told him that I had been to The Valley watching Saints against London Broncos. So not The One England Play, then. Despite my clear memory of sitting on the sideline at The Valley with former Saints coach Ian Millward sat on the other side of Emma, the balding man who watches The One England Play wasn’t having it. Rugby league does not exist within earshot of a tally-ho of Twickers.
Having left him we just about managed to find a seat in the bar and spent the next couple of hours watching people clown it up on the dance floor. One man stood tall above everyone, a greying figure who must have been close to six feet ten in height. No matter what track was playing he applied the same shoulder thrusting, demented duck dance moves to it. He was completely indefatigable too. He never had a breather. Quite boundless energy for a man who must have been pushing 60. Ian from Burnley was well over that age by the looks of him, and a good two feet shorter than the dancing duck. He wore a smart jacket and hat combo and spent large parts of his evening dancing away and trying to ignore the legions of knobheads attempting to patronise him to death as he did so. I’ve been in that boat, by the way. Anyone reading this who is both a wheelchair user and who has had the misfortune to find themselves in my vicinity on a dance floor in our younger days will know the feeling all too well. Some attractive lady comes up and starts talking to you and then she wants to dance. You hate dancing but you know this is how the game is played and so you tolerate it for a while and you dance and then…..
She wants to dance with your mate aswell….
Which would be ok. People are free to choose who they dance with after all. But if you do want to dance with someone other than my teenage self then please make sure you do so at a different time than the one at which you intend to dance with me. Otherwise you are likely to be on the receiving end of a fearful volley of abuse which serves no purpose other than to get me all worked up and to present the disabled in yet another bad light. The old chip on your shoulder light. I’ve got a chip on my shoulder because I am not prepared to tolerate the notion of sitting around with my best friend, each of us holding on to one hand of some dim tart we wouldn’t ordinarily waste our time on if we hadn’t just inhaled 20 pints of Stella. Now fuck off.
One of Ian from Burnley’s tormentors was a young man clad ludicrously in the sort of Ellesse tracksuit top that would have been de rigeur when Pat Cash won Wimbledon but is now useful only as a subject of parody and ridicule. Like the tall greying man he refused to consider that any differences in the music might influence his choice of dance moves, only his choreography was even further out of place, laced as it was with Ian Brown/Stone Roses type shuffles and arm waving, with perhaps half a soupcon of an attempt at some mad for it head movements. He repeatedly tried to grab hold of Ian from Burnley’s hand and raise it above both of their heads as if he were a boxing referee declaring the old man middleweight champion of the world. Straw-weight perhaps. Ian from Burnley was about six stone even if he had waded into the sea.
The live singer was Lance and to be honest, he was pretty average. He could carry a tune and he wore a sharp suit, but he’d never have made it into any of the 436 versions of The Drifters currently doing the rounds. None of which stopped any of our favourite dancing doofuses from lapping up every note and every word he sang with great delight. We left at around midnight I would guess with the tall dancing duck, Ian from Burnley and Not Ian from The Stone Roses still going strong like relentless Duracell Soul Bunnies.
But our day was done. The plan for tomorrow was to hit the top of the tower before a pre-game beverage and a post-game chippy dinner. It sort of worked out…….
Thursday, 29 January 2015
The Quickie, The Thief And A Fellow Hazard
I’m getting a new wheelchair which, for those of you who aren’t sure, does not involve a surgical procedure to have my current chair removed from out of my arse. I am not ‘in a wheelchair’. Not right now anyway, because I’m tapping this out from the comfort of what we used to call the settee.
You may not need an operation to get a new wheelchair but you do need to involve the NHS. Wheelchair Services had spent months trying to contact me and then not being available when I returned their calls until finally they decided to write to me to offer me an appointment. Which I managed to be half an hour late for. I could have had all of this sorted two years ago on my last visit there but back then the only option was a hideous box-shaped item that would have made Ironside blush. And I don’t mean that new version who is supposed to be cool and trendy. Do people still say trendy? The bloke from Wheelchair Services said it a lot during my appointment which I found encouraging and annoying in equal measures. Encouraging because he was assuring me that my new chair will not be an Ironsidian eyesore, but annoying because I’m almost sure nobody has used the word trendy since we stopped wearing hooded tops made by Walker Sports.
I don’t know how I managed to get my appointment time so badly wrong but the fact that I did led to a chance encounter with an old friend I hadn’t seen for 15 years. I’d expected Peter Ball to look a little older. Probably because he was the oldest of my group of friends at school and so we all looked upon him as some sort of senior figure. Two years might aswell be 20 when you are 14. At first I couldn’t be sure it was him. Not only did he not look as old as I had imagined he should but I’m still naïve enough to believe that the chances of me bumping into a disabled person that I know at Wheelchair Services in my home town are quite low. Everyone else thinks that we all know each other but there are an infinite number of wheelchair users and people with all sorts of disabilities whom I do not know and have never even laid eyes on. It wasn’t until Peter spoke that I was 99% certain that it was him.
Strangely there were no displays of wild surprise by either party when we realised that we knew each other. We just carried on talking like strangers in a waiting room might do until the subject of school somehow came up and even then, the tone did not change. We discussed old times with nothing more than a shrug, and hardly stirred even when we noted that we had not seen each other since the funeral of our mutual friend in 1999. We shook hands on the way out and told each other how nice it had been to see one another. It was so matter of fact but in a very odd, almost inexplicable way.
Equally inexplicable is the way in which I was able to order a new wheelchair within 20 minutes given that it had taken two years to get around to it. Replacing Jeff (I think it was Jeff but there is a blog if you can be arsed to check it from around January 2013) was Jay. Jay works for Quickie, which would no doubt inspire a barrel full of arf-arfs from my colleagues at work but is actually a long established wheelchair manufacturer. Jay showed me two options but was almost adamant about which one he thought the better. Quite the salesman he was, which is all very well except for the fact that this being the NHS I’m not paying him a penny for it. No doubt Mr Cameron will do something about that should we see fit to somehow let him stay in his famous old house for another five years.
Little bit of politics, my name’s Ben Elton goodnight.
The new chair is what you might call minimalist. A lot of the unnecessary metal you see on my current model is absent. And it will be great to have a cushion which I haven’t squashed flat with my fat arse so that I might be able to look at people from above groin level. I’m not so sure about the tyres though which Jay described as only half solid whatever that means. But he assured me that punctures won’t be a problem. Punctures were a problem before I got solid tyres and now that I am working for a living they would be a huge inconvenience. Nothing says professionalism like hobbling around on a flat tyre because Ross Autos can’t come out and fix it because they haven’t got anywhere to park near to where I work. You’re probably marvelling at how I have managed to live as a wheelchair user for 39 years and not know how to fix a puncture. I do know how but there are two basic problems. The first is that I can’t be arsed and the second is that since I can’t be arsed I have become one of the least practical human beings on Earth. My brain deals only in words, sarcasm and ire. It can’t fix things.
The chair arrives in eight weeks.
When it does it will no doubt catch the attention of the security staff of St.Helens and elsewhere. This week the London Evening Standard reported that a woman posed as a wheelchair user to steal meat from a branch of Marks & Spencer in Coventry. She and her male accomplice made off with £60 worth of meat from the store (about two boxes of chicken drummers) after she stood up from her chair to swipe the meat from the shelves in the manner of Andy Pipkin from Little Britain. I want that one. Yeah I know yeah. That bloke.
This reminded me of a story my mum used to tell me when she worked in the St.Helens branch of TJ Hughes. She said the person responsible for security there was particularly wary of wheelchair users and this story seems to serve as evidence that she might have been wise. I’d like to point out that I have never stolen anything in my life except for a traffic cone and a photograph of a crap singer called Tony Lemesma from outside a cheap Majorcan bar. Although an acquaintance of mine at school (not the one I met in Wheelchair Services) once told me how easy it was to nick stuff from Burtons by putting it under his wheelchair seat cushion. The stuff of Fagin.
Finally today I have just read the tale of a 20-year-old man from Birmingham who was escorted DOWN a flight of stairs by security staff at a pub because the lift had broken. Apparently he had been lifted upstairs by his friends but was told that his presence there breached the pub’s safety regulations. Despite the fact that this meant that they, untrained as they are in the art of lugging wheelchair users down flights of stairs, would have to do exactly that. The management said that the man got upstairs without them knowing and that they would never have let his friends take him up there had they known. Fine, but since you are not allowed to use a lift in the event of a fire anyway where is the sense in then humiliating the lad by carrying him back down the stairs? It’s dangerous and nonsensical but it seems that as long as it covers the company in accordance with the madcap laws on these sorts of things then it's ok. Why wasn’t the lift working anyway? It probably was. They probably just use it as a store room. Don’t think I’m joking.
Of course, allowing your drunken friends to carry you up a flight of stairs in a busy pub is very much the preserve of 20-year-olds. I remember similar episodes with my friends in such luxurious establishments as The Palace and Peppermint Place from my own youth and to be honest it is quite a relief to be able to fall back on the excuse that I really am too old for that shit now. However, if a man above the legal age to frequent such places wishes to do so on the upper level of a mult-level establishment then I think we can agree that more should be done to allow him to do so. And if these places continue to deny people these basic human rights then perhaps it’ll all end in the kind of farcical scenario which once prompted me to ascend staircases at Crystals in St.Helens and Lineker’s bar in Blackpool among others.
They said that the young man in Birmingham was a security hazard, by the way. As a fire hazard myself (it’s not called that for nothing) I empathise completely.
You may not need an operation to get a new wheelchair but you do need to involve the NHS. Wheelchair Services had spent months trying to contact me and then not being available when I returned their calls until finally they decided to write to me to offer me an appointment. Which I managed to be half an hour late for. I could have had all of this sorted two years ago on my last visit there but back then the only option was a hideous box-shaped item that would have made Ironside blush. And I don’t mean that new version who is supposed to be cool and trendy. Do people still say trendy? The bloke from Wheelchair Services said it a lot during my appointment which I found encouraging and annoying in equal measures. Encouraging because he was assuring me that my new chair will not be an Ironsidian eyesore, but annoying because I’m almost sure nobody has used the word trendy since we stopped wearing hooded tops made by Walker Sports.
I don’t know how I managed to get my appointment time so badly wrong but the fact that I did led to a chance encounter with an old friend I hadn’t seen for 15 years. I’d expected Peter Ball to look a little older. Probably because he was the oldest of my group of friends at school and so we all looked upon him as some sort of senior figure. Two years might aswell be 20 when you are 14. At first I couldn’t be sure it was him. Not only did he not look as old as I had imagined he should but I’m still naïve enough to believe that the chances of me bumping into a disabled person that I know at Wheelchair Services in my home town are quite low. Everyone else thinks that we all know each other but there are an infinite number of wheelchair users and people with all sorts of disabilities whom I do not know and have never even laid eyes on. It wasn’t until Peter spoke that I was 99% certain that it was him.
Strangely there were no displays of wild surprise by either party when we realised that we knew each other. We just carried on talking like strangers in a waiting room might do until the subject of school somehow came up and even then, the tone did not change. We discussed old times with nothing more than a shrug, and hardly stirred even when we noted that we had not seen each other since the funeral of our mutual friend in 1999. We shook hands on the way out and told each other how nice it had been to see one another. It was so matter of fact but in a very odd, almost inexplicable way.
Equally inexplicable is the way in which I was able to order a new wheelchair within 20 minutes given that it had taken two years to get around to it. Replacing Jeff (I think it was Jeff but there is a blog if you can be arsed to check it from around January 2013) was Jay. Jay works for Quickie, which would no doubt inspire a barrel full of arf-arfs from my colleagues at work but is actually a long established wheelchair manufacturer. Jay showed me two options but was almost adamant about which one he thought the better. Quite the salesman he was, which is all very well except for the fact that this being the NHS I’m not paying him a penny for it. No doubt Mr Cameron will do something about that should we see fit to somehow let him stay in his famous old house for another five years.
Little bit of politics, my name’s Ben Elton goodnight.
The new chair is what you might call minimalist. A lot of the unnecessary metal you see on my current model is absent. And it will be great to have a cushion which I haven’t squashed flat with my fat arse so that I might be able to look at people from above groin level. I’m not so sure about the tyres though which Jay described as only half solid whatever that means. But he assured me that punctures won’t be a problem. Punctures were a problem before I got solid tyres and now that I am working for a living they would be a huge inconvenience. Nothing says professionalism like hobbling around on a flat tyre because Ross Autos can’t come out and fix it because they haven’t got anywhere to park near to where I work. You’re probably marvelling at how I have managed to live as a wheelchair user for 39 years and not know how to fix a puncture. I do know how but there are two basic problems. The first is that I can’t be arsed and the second is that since I can’t be arsed I have become one of the least practical human beings on Earth. My brain deals only in words, sarcasm and ire. It can’t fix things.
The chair arrives in eight weeks.
When it does it will no doubt catch the attention of the security staff of St.Helens and elsewhere. This week the London Evening Standard reported that a woman posed as a wheelchair user to steal meat from a branch of Marks & Spencer in Coventry. She and her male accomplice made off with £60 worth of meat from the store (about two boxes of chicken drummers) after she stood up from her chair to swipe the meat from the shelves in the manner of Andy Pipkin from Little Britain. I want that one. Yeah I know yeah. That bloke.
This reminded me of a story my mum used to tell me when she worked in the St.Helens branch of TJ Hughes. She said the person responsible for security there was particularly wary of wheelchair users and this story seems to serve as evidence that she might have been wise. I’d like to point out that I have never stolen anything in my life except for a traffic cone and a photograph of a crap singer called Tony Lemesma from outside a cheap Majorcan bar. Although an acquaintance of mine at school (not the one I met in Wheelchair Services) once told me how easy it was to nick stuff from Burtons by putting it under his wheelchair seat cushion. The stuff of Fagin.
Finally today I have just read the tale of a 20-year-old man from Birmingham who was escorted DOWN a flight of stairs by security staff at a pub because the lift had broken. Apparently he had been lifted upstairs by his friends but was told that his presence there breached the pub’s safety regulations. Despite the fact that this meant that they, untrained as they are in the art of lugging wheelchair users down flights of stairs, would have to do exactly that. The management said that the man got upstairs without them knowing and that they would never have let his friends take him up there had they known. Fine, but since you are not allowed to use a lift in the event of a fire anyway where is the sense in then humiliating the lad by carrying him back down the stairs? It’s dangerous and nonsensical but it seems that as long as it covers the company in accordance with the madcap laws on these sorts of things then it's ok. Why wasn’t the lift working anyway? It probably was. They probably just use it as a store room. Don’t think I’m joking.
Of course, allowing your drunken friends to carry you up a flight of stairs in a busy pub is very much the preserve of 20-year-olds. I remember similar episodes with my friends in such luxurious establishments as The Palace and Peppermint Place from my own youth and to be honest it is quite a relief to be able to fall back on the excuse that I really am too old for that shit now. However, if a man above the legal age to frequent such places wishes to do so on the upper level of a mult-level establishment then I think we can agree that more should be done to allow him to do so. And if these places continue to deny people these basic human rights then perhaps it’ll all end in the kind of farcical scenario which once prompted me to ascend staircases at Crystals in St.Helens and Lineker’s bar in Blackpool among others.
They said that the young man in Birmingham was a security hazard, by the way. As a fire hazard myself (it’s not called that for nothing) I empathise completely.
Wednesday, 21 January 2015
International Day Of Acceptance, Another Odeon Own Goal And Staring At The S*n
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.
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.
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.
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