People Are Strange #3897

A woodland path in late summer; leaves slightly yellowing,
sun low in the trees.

So Stephen and I were on honeymoon in West Wales, coming out from the woodland path, both of us on mobility scooters. A slim anoraked woman in her mid-forties was walking down the road and, although we were moving at casual walking pace, she startled and stepped back. Then she said, "I thought you were a rat!"

Most people in the world might respond to this with a mixture of bafflement and offense.  But we're English. We apologised.

"I just saw a rat up the road," she went on to explain. "I thought you were another one, about to jump out at me. It was dead and everything!"

Of course; two tall adults using mobility scooters could easily resemble a rat. Particularly a dead rat. Just like the dead rats that often jump out at people on country lanes in broad daylight.

I have no clue whether the scooters were a factor in our rat-like appearance - we may have been mistaken for a rat by this eccentric person whilst on foot. In fact, had we been standing up, the sight of all six foot of us on our hind legs may have caused the woman to scream and run back up the road.

We had a wonderful honeymoon; exciting, relaxing and productive in equal measures. I got a great deal of writing done, we watched in wonder as this little story took the East Anglian press by storm and Stephen went a little bit wild:

Video description: Stephen (a handsome young white man with dark hair, dark glasses and a funky hat) zooms down a steep slope on his mobility scooter, holding a bubble sword (a plastic loop) that creates a modest cloud of bubbles in his wake. 

On Love, Stationery & Law Enforcement.

When I was 8 years old, I wanted to be a detective.

Television had taught me that children could achieve almost anything by writing letters, so I wrote to Suffolk Police offering my services as a detective. I thought I could help out - that really is how I phrased it. I also offered the services of my older cousin because crime-fighters generally come in pairs.

A Police Range Rover with my nine year old self
at the wheel. 

The police were unable to find a position for me at that time, but they did take my cousin, myself and a boy who'd had the same idea, for a day at the Suffolk Police Headquarters at Martlesham, at the end of the Christmas Holidays, in January 1990. I had just turned nine.

This was amazing. They picked us up in a police car. They shows us the control room where they receive emergency calls. They took our fingerprints. I got to sit on a police motorbike. I got to sit in a police Range Rover. They showed us a private museum of criminal paraphernalia; weird weapons, benign-looking objects with secret compartments for smuggling drugs.

The best bit was sitting in the back of an ordinary-looking car while the driver demonstrated advanced driving skills; speeding around and skidding all over the place. Scary and brilliant in equal measure.

That day was one of the most exciting days of my young life and it influenced me in two significant ways:

1. Unsurprisingly, I carried on wanting to be a detective, right up until an adolescent need for attention and self-expression beckoned me onto the stage. Thus, I kept looking at the world with a view to solving its mysteries. I noticed curious behaviour. I watched people. And I've never really stopped that - I still notice people who don't quite fit and briefly fantasise about their criminal story.

I always wrote stories, as soon as I could spell enough words (or at least, I could spell some words, and build a story around them). However, I'm not sure I've ever written any piece of fiction which wasn't about some kind of mystery. This is, apparently, what I do.

2. I basically trust the police. I report crimes and encourage others to do the same. When asked for information, I've always been forthcoming (except once, when I had the most inappropriate fit of the giggles*).

Three children and a police officer in front of an ordinary
looking white car which can go faster than you'd think.

I know some people can't trust the police and I understand that; if you've been dismissed or belittled in your most vulnerable moment, if you have been repeatedly treated with suspicion because of your race, impairment or the place you live, then trust would be an unnatural response. I also know that some people enter the police force (together with certain other professions) because they enjoy wielding power over others.

However, that day at the Suffolk Police Headquarters established a fundamental trust in the police which has remained largely unshaken by adult experience.

Anyway, my most beloved souvenir from my day with the Suffolk Police was my Suffolk Police pencil. Well, obviously - you use it to write things down!  I used to write stories, but also to collect the number plates of suspicious (or at least unfamiliar) vehicles, to note the strange comings and goings at Number 52 and to record general observations in the hope that one day, one of my neighbours would be brutally murdered, and I'd be able to work out who'd done it.

Then one fateful day, I was on a school trip to West Stow Anglo Saxon Village. I was dressed as an Anglo Saxon, casing out one of these reconstructed Anglo Saxon dwellings for signs of underhand Viking activity (why no Anglo Saxon literary sleuths? We've got Falco, a Roman, then no detectives until medieval Cadfael?).

I dropped the pencil.

I don't recall my visit to the Anglo Saxon village as well as I do my trip to the police headquarters, but I can tell you that when Anglo Saxons built a house, they first dug a deep hole for foundations. I know this because I watched helplessly as my pencil rolled through the gap between the floorboards (no tongue and groove for those Saxons) and fall down to the floor of the pit the house was built over.

I could see my pencil, but there was no way I could reach it. Also, it was really going to confuse future archaeologists if the settlement got buried again by the sands of time, only to be dug up again, featuring authentic Anglo Saxon buildings and artifacts and one graphite pencil with Suffolk Police printed on it.

I don't generally get too attached to objects, but I was fairly gutted about the pencil.

My nephew has been to West Stow himself a few times and has always brought back a pencil. "It's to replace your Police pencil!" he declares (he knows the story but being six, he may have forgotten the fact he'd bought me a pencil on previous visit. After all, when I asked him what year he thought the Anglo Saxons lived at West Stow, given that it had to be a very long time ago it was, his guess was 1998).

Anyway, fast forward to our wedding day, last Monday. Stephen gives me a long velvet box, the sort you might display a bracelet in, or perhaps a fountain pen, or perhaps... a Suffolk Police Pencil! Exactly the same pencil!

Me holding a white pencil with an eraser on one end and
"Suffolk Police" printed in blue on it.

I am stunned. Delighted. Curious. Surely they're not selling these things on eBay now?

In May, Stephen wrote to Suffolk Police - sent an e-mail entitled "NON-EMERGENCY - a request" and told this story. He used what he had learned of the language of policing from TV and Films, referring to Suffolk Police as Suffolk's Finest (like New York's Finest, only with many more incidents involving pigs). He even concluded the story with "Can you see where this is going?" just like on The Wire when they've presented incriminating evidence to a hoodlum.

This e-mail traveled through departments at Suffolk Police over a period of some weeks before landing with a public relations officer. They no longer have pencils (they probably give away USB pens these days) but they had a rummage in their stock rooms and found two. Two Suffolk Police pencils. And they sent them to Stephen, along with a compliments slip congratulating us on our wedding. Suffolk Police congratulated us on our wedding.

A man and a woman in fairly fancy clothes:
Mr Goldfish & myself on our wedding day.

And so, now you know. Now you know why I still think the police are basically a good bunch who will be there for anyone in their time of need. And now you have a tiny taste of why I married Stephen.


[The school liaison officer who took us around the Police HQ that day was a PC Howlett, who also came into our primary school to advise us against playing on railway lines and the like. He was an engaging speaker and some of the stories he told (fun stories about feckless criminals, rather than stories about children getting hurt) stuck in my mind, regardless of everything else. Just saying on the unlikely chance he should google himself. ]

* They were door-to-dooring following a very serious crime on the street where I was living (this was the North Yorkshire police, or the NYPD as I'm sure they prefer). Anyway, the officer handed me two sheets of paper, one of which had an outline of a car, the other the outline of a man - a person, I suppose, but definitely a mannish figure. The idea was to draw or write in any details you remembered. The whole situation was so serious, but this outline of a man struck me as very funny - there were just so many silly thing you could - and people probably would - do with it. So I had the giggles. I expect the police are used to that. I expect they have gigglers even when folk are identifying bodies. Especially if someone has died in a comical way.

H-A-P-P-Y

My Gran was a very unhappy and unpleasant character.  I think she suffered from untreated depression for most of her life, she had no friends to speak of, and had dramatic fallings out with, over time, almost every member of her vast family. As she became older and more infirm, she fell further in on herself, paranoid and suspicious of everyone she encountered, until she developed dementia and lost the ability to hold a grudge. Now my Gran is more cheerful than I can ever remember her being. When the nursing home took photos for a newsletter, Gran was the single smiling face amid the crowd of bewildered residents. Occasionally, Gran's old suspicious self seeps through, but only briefly, before she loses her thread.

Mum was helping Gran write a card out to Stephen and I, spelling out our names.

"I know h," she said, "as in H-A-P-P-Y."

And so somehow, we received a card addressed

To Deborahappy and Stephappy.

The card was because last Thursday, we performed the legal part of our marriage. The wedding is in July and the plan was to do the Registry Office bit very quietly indeed. We thought it was only fair to let our folks come along if they wanted, and soon enough there were eleven people there. But it was nice. It was quiet by most people's standards, and getting underway at four o'clock in the afternoon (Remember four o'clock last Thursday? It was about then that the blizzard arrived.) it wasn't a long day.

I couldn't pronounce matrimony - I didn't pronounce matrimony, so there's the possibility that legally, Stephen and I have another kind of legal contract altogether - possibly something only covered by Klingon Law. Sophie is practising her vocal skills at the moment, and gave a running commentary like a less articulate Huw Edwards (although there were times even during the Royal Wedding where "Bla bla bla bla bla." would have made perfect sense).  Both these things worked in our favour, because it all felt quite strange and giggleless silence would have made everything rather tense.

Suzi the toy poodle - the face of a very small white fluffy dog.

Later that evening, I discovered that, thanks to the considerable help of a certain gherkin fan, I won my benefits appeal.  And the next day, a tiny white poodle came into season.  This was significant because she lives with stud dogs, her owner was away and Stephen's parents had offered to take care of her if this occurred.

Dogs teach us something about hierarchy and nature. Ajax is the oldest, largest and most intelligent dog, and the one aggressive in play; he'll growl, bear his teeth, pounce and gently nip at you.  He'll bound after pigeons in the garden (but will slow right up if they don't fly away). He's very attached to us all - when Stephen and I were away and sent a postcard home, he took it for himself and wouldn't let it go - but he's not very good at doing what he's told. Yet somehow, he is at the bottom of the pack, and even Suzi, size and temperament of a rabbit, seems to have inserted herself above him; she goes first, he gets out of her way.

Ajax and I, for a sense of scale: A black fluffy dog sits on the
back of a sofa behind me (a white woman with brown hair).
He is small, but much bigger than the white dog.

Few animals are hierarchical in the same way dogs are, and people certainly aren't.  But people are the only ones who ever argue that there's any obvious natural system (smarts, strength, seniority etc.) that determines who should be in charge. They ought to observe toy poodles.

Anyway, all in all, life is treating us very well.  We're planning the wedding for the summer, we're watching the skies for the possibility that there might be a spring at some point between now and then and I'm writing lots and lots and lots (at least, by my standards, which means I'm getting on with my work, at a slow but steady pace).

We are engaged!

View towards the beginning of a cloudy sunset
across a somewhat pewter Irish Sea.

On Thursday evening, we went to the seafront to have fish and chips. While his Dad went to get the food, Stephen and I sat in the shelter looking out to sea and got engaged. This is all very exciting! We both became all trembly and weird and needed a long lie down afterwards. Everyone has questions we don't have the answers to yet, but the main one is about when we're getting married and the answer is some time next year.

There are pictures of us and our rings but we're on mobile broadband for the next few weeks so I shall ration you to one photo which is the view we had from where we were sitting.  I'll update Flickr when we get back to civilisation.

Never Been Thirty-One Before

Today is my birthday and I can safely say this has been the happiest and most productive year of my life. This doesn't mean I've not had rubbish health, worries and a fair few minor disasters. Just that there's been so much good stuff packed around the bad. 

So my year in bullet points...

• I absolutely loved being thirty. I hope I will love thirty-one just as much. I have never wished to be another age, but I have particularly enjoyed my age. I do now. I feel like I earned thirty-one. I have a lot of stories to tell, but I've still got everything to look forward to. Oddly, entering my thirties has coincided with being met, for the first time ever, with the assumption that I am younger than I really am. Previously, people were always adding ten or fifteen years.

• This year, things seemed to get done. I'm amazed at what I have just got done this year. Art projects, craft projects, writing projects. This year, it seems, if I put my mind to something, it just happened. Not that I finished everything I started, achieved everything I wanted or didn't have set backs. My health is still pretty lousy and sometimes very lousy indeed. But during good periods, I painted more, wrote more, made more stuff, learnt more than I ever have before in any twelve month period.

• I've embarked on the first tentative steps towards getting my first novel published. This has been terrifying. It is the closest thing I have ever done to applying for a job.  Fortunately, when you try to sell yourself as a writer, qualifications and work experience aren't very important, or else I'd be in real trouble. It's still very scary. It's not even fear of rejection. I can't really explain it.  

• I've written between half and three-quarters of a non-fiction book, which will have to remain under wraps until it's done. And I've started on my second novel, which just now, I'm very excited about.  Just now, I'm thinking, "Well, this will be better than the first!" which I think is a very good thing, given that I had had so many set backs and finished the first against such tremendous odds, and that story wouldn't let me abandon it. 

• I have continued to be brave, in all kinds of ways, many of which remain unbloggable.  However, I am rather proud that when I needed fillings for the first time in my life, I had five of them, in one go, without annaesthetic. Conclusions? Two of them hurt a lot, but it was brief and perfectly bearable.

• I have worked through and overcome so much emotional nonsense that I carried after leaving my violent marriage last year. At the beginning of this year, I had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Now, that's reduced to a bit of a scar which gets sore in damp weather. 

• I've seen three plays, which is fantastic. I love going to the theatre, I always have, but it takes some doing and it was seven years since I'd last seen a play. Admittedly, the productions I saw this year were too long and pain overwhelmed me towards the end. The best was King Lear, performed in an abbey ruin in Wales, complete with realistic storm conditions throughout the second half. It was August, I was very well wrapped-up but I can't imagine I will get as cold as I was then this winter. It was a superb production, but I came to the conclusion that the play itself is overrated - it's often said to be the ultimate Shakespeare, but I can't see it myself. The oddest was Clytenmestra (the Libation Bearers) by Aeschylus performed in Ancient Greek at the Oxford Playhouse (Stephen reviewed it here) and the other, Dangerous Corner by J. B. Priestley, was fairly odd in that neither the audience nor the players seemed to know whether we were dealing with a thriller or a farce – in any case, we laughed throughout.

• The only thing I really haven't done enough of is reading. But I did re-read the His Dark Materials trilogy with Stephen, which was an absolute joy. When we set out to take turns to read it to one another, I thought it would take a few years – especially as neither of us can read out loud for long and both of us are prone to falling asleep when we are read to. But we got through the whole thing in about six weeks. Unfortunately, my Texan accent was so bad that Stephen almost cheered when Lee Scoresby died. We also made a CD of poetry for my nephew Alexander, who is an avid reader but doesn't get exposed to much poetry.  At first he wasn't much interested, but now he listens to it so incessantly that his parents must be thoroughly fed up with Roald Dahl's Red Riding Hood, despite Stephen's critically-acclaimed performance as Grandma.

• I'm so proud of Stephen and everything he has achieved this year. It's been the most wonderful thing to share in his life, and to share my life with him. In the spring, we both spent months totally immersed in Greek Drama as Stephen wrote essays about Aristophanian obscenity in the work of Snoop Doggy Dogg and  prepared for his final exams. He now has a 2:1 BA (Hons) in Classical Studies (Please watch his vlog if you didn't at the time). He then had to deal with both DLA and ESA forms, both of which we managed without too much trouble. He's also whizzing through learning Latin and has learnt how to play the ukulele, very well, in the space of four months. And together we've mastered the art of making Turkish Delight, pain au chocolat, chicken and black bean sauce and the world's best vegetable casserole.

• We're making a success of the whole having to live with parents for the forseeable scenario. Making this work is an ongoing project and there have been times when we've found my parents particularly difficult.  But we're taking responsibility for things, even if we occasionally behave like the desperate parents of children who can't play nice together - like when fed up of their bickering, we sent my folks for a Segway lesson. What can I say?  It bought as a period of peace and harmony.

One of this year's negatives has been that the political situation for disabled people in the UK has deteriorated during a time when I wasn't up to doing much about it. Now, as various bills which threaten our independence and even our lives reach the end of their process in the House of Lords, Lisa has compiled a list of mostly very simple things you can do to help.

But for now, I thank you for hanging around and cheering me on these last twelve months and I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year! 

Top Gear & Disabled Parking Spaces

I can't believe I'm blogging about Top Gear. Stephen has done a much better job than me so go there and read that instead.

Stephen loves cars. From childhood, he has been obsessed with cars, their design, their innovations, their specifications. When he is in great pain, as he often is, talking about cars, looking at pictures of cars and watching programmes about car helps to keep him calm and thus as comfortable as possible. This may sound sad, but I'm the same with craft projects and materials, leafing through a Panduro catalogue or talking through how I'm going to make my nephew's birthday present is highly therapeutic. And naturally, these interests are contagious. Stephen has learnt the difference between découpage and appliqué, I have learnt that the Smart ForTwo and the Caterham are the only production cars to have a De Dion suspension system.

Then there's Top Gear. Top Gear is many strange things, but among them, it is the only regular programme dedicated to cars on a television channel you don't pay for. I could say some pretty scathing things about it's production and presentation, but that's a matter of taste. It is a taste that neither Stephen nor I share, and as such we both find it fairly annoying and sometimes offensive. However, it features lots and lots of pretty footage of cars and occasionally some interesting data. Not as much as it could – and in fact, to maintain my blood pressure on Sunday night, and because I am a square and I don't care, I was using a stopwatch to calculate out how many minutes of the hour actually featured a car, its interior or its engine in frame. I was guessing it would be less than half, but I never got far enough to see.

Our expectations were especially low because they were talking about electric cars. Quite apart from it's cultural position, Top Gear does not feature its presenters reviewing cars from their own impartial or even personal perspective. Top Gear is funded in part by the petroleum industry and depends on good relationships with the big car companies, the majority of whom still make most of their profits from the sales of gas-guzzlers. Top Gear is currently being sued by Tesla, having featured their high-performance electric car and pretending that it had run out of electricity and broken down on set. Similar tricks were played with the electric cars on Sunday, things went wrong that wouldn't normally go wrong, they went to one of the few counties in the UK where there are no public charge points and so on. And this was irritating, but I was happily distracted with my stopwatch experiment. But then....

The cars were parked in clearly marked disabled parking bays.

Parking in a disabled bay is illegal if it is on public property. On a private carpark, landowners have the right to clamp vehicles and issue big fines to offenders. It is possible – probable even – that the Top Gear crew got special permission from a private landowner to park in the disabled bays, but the viewer isn't to know this. If this had been the case, it would have been small effort to cover up the markings on the tarmac – even edit them out of what was effectively a still shot - but they didn't.

I'm not someone who goes crazy every time I see someone illegally parked in a disabled parking bay. I've been blogging for all these years and I can't remember ranting about it before*. But of course it disappoints me, it's a small chip in my faith in humanity. Disabled parking is not about convenience, nor is it a compassionate move to make life a little bit easier for disabled people. Usually, whether that parking space is available makes the difference between whether we get to do something – attend an appointment, meet up with a friend, shop, post a letter etc. - or not. But people don't know this and I make excuses for them (I'm concerned how much of this post seems to be about strategies I use to prevent my blood from boiling). I imagine that they have a blue badge that has fallen out of sight. Or they are waiting for an up-to-date badge to come through the post (they can be slow sometimes). I imagine that whilst the kid in the convertible managed to exit his car without opening the door, within a few yards down the road, the pain he lives with will have rendered his gait to a stagger.

But when it happens on prime time television, watched by more people than read The Daily Mail?

Honestly? It shook us up. We'd been talking about the reception we get from people when out and about together lately and the fact that our immunity to negative comment didn't last. It felt personal. This article Wheelie Catholic linked to described the abuse of a disabled parking space as a micro-aggression, a small act of contempt, though not quite malice, that people with mobility impairments face in our everyday lives. But it loses the micro when it is broadcast and normalised without comment. Added to this, a nice visual metaphor when the camera sweeps between the electric cars driving along the road and a woman with a mobility scooter riding the pavement beside them, along with comments about things with batteries being rubbish.

We turned the television off and e-mailed a complaint to the BBC. Stephen grimly speculated that they might have done this just so that they could laugh at people who complained next episode (which does seem a publicity strategy) before we realised that it had been the last in the series. Good, we can't be laughed at again.

This morning, we used our currently limited internet connection to see if anyone had noticed. Rob had, inviting the comment that Top Gear is a "man's programme" so that's okay (?!). Apart from that, much of the talk seemed to be about a very special piece that they did at the end of the show – which we missed – when they featured heroic amputee veterans involved in the Dakar Rally. I can't comment on how they handled this, except that the tired old triumph over adversity narrative seems to be what others have picked up on.

Unfortunately, I am not a hero. I just want to go about my business like everyone else. And for that, I need the single ounce of respect it requires a person not to park where they're not supposed to.


* I had a quick look through and actually found a post in which I argued that the Blue Badge (disabled parking permit) should be made less profittable. To be honest, I can no longer stand by that one entirely, but hey.

Here's a hand to lay on your open palm

Holding one another's hand in public is a privilege Stephen and I rarely get to enjoy. Of course, there are a tragically large number of lovers in this world who cannot hold hands in public without fear of antagonism, abuse and even arrest. Thankfully, our obstacles are mostly practical.

You can't hold hands between two assistant wheelchairs, unless you can co-ordinate the pushers (neither of us can self-propel). You can't hold hands between powerchairs unless the controls are on alternate arms (although Stacey and Mia offer one beautiful solution to this). Scooters, however, provide the possibility of riding alongside one another and holding hands. I'm not all that great with a scooter, but just now we have access to two scooters and a broad and fairly lonely path between us, the woods and the beach.

There is a special art to holding hands whilst driving mobility scooters. Not only do you have to be closely synchronised with the other person, but you have to gauge and respond quickly to the subtleties of the other scooter. Different machines slow or speed up more or less on a gradient or on different terrain. And nothing brakes or turns as quickly as an ambulant person can, even if you have the same reflexes (which I certainly don't). So in other words, it takes far more concentration and is ever so slightly hairy. We meander a great deal. And of course, we take up space. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Stephen is more self-conscious than I am, having been subject to a fair amount of harassment and hostility when out and about. He's lived in less friendly places and maybe as a young man, he is considered especially fair game to those kinds of people (not that disabled women are immune by any stretch, in fact we seem to get it nastier if less often). So Stephen is more conscious of the fact that we might be judged. That some people will find it a novelty to see disabled people together, let alone being romantic, in public. That some people will find it cute and some people will find it weird. That people will undoubtedly gossip about us. Stephen says there are places where it would be a bad idea for us to hold hands because of other people - and not just to avoid crushing their toes.

I know this is true, but I also notice advantages. So far we've always been out together in a fairly rural environment where lots of people speak to us, yet nobody has made comments about speeding (ha ha ha) or learner-drivers (ho ho ho) or any such thing - even when Stephen has been using the bright yellow borrowed “power trike” which looks very cool and can go very fast (you can't hold hands with that either, as it has manual brakes).

My hope is that together we exude confidence, and people don't feel the need to say a thing about our wheels. Either that or they have merely been terrified into friendliness and courtesy.



Incidentally, Wheelchair Dancer has written a little about the possibility of intimacy in being pushed, at the end of a post about the crapness of being pushed the general crapness of being pushed.

This post is brought to you by the numbers 3 and 13

Like much of the blogosphere in August, things are a little quiet around here. My health has been up and down, and when I've not been ill, I've been using my energy to either work on the book or get out to enjoy the sunshine. I've got lots of things I want to blog about, but forgive me if that happens slowly. Thank you all for sticking around.

Yesterday was the thirteenth anniversary of my getting sick. I don't mind it too much, I certainly don't mind the anniversary. I just hope that, being a teenager, the Dreaded Lurgy doesn't now try to hook up with other chronic illnesses. I'd be very happy if it throws a tantrum and storms off, but this seems unlikely.

It was also the anniversary of going to see Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, my finally getting my essential GCSEs (nine years) and of my sister going into labour (three years). So Alexander is three today! I have made him a fire-fighter's uniform, as he is currently obsessed with putting out imaginary fires and rescuing people at the moment. I shall maybe add a picture to this post if someone takes one.

Have not deserted you. Will be back again soon.

This is the real world #1 Friends & Mentors

I'm waiting for people to stop writing articles about how rubbish or dangerous the Internet is. There have been so many in recent months that when I tried to track all the links down and provide all the hat-tips, it'd be a post in itself. I'm sure you'll have seen them, not those stories in which people have made mistakes with (relatively) new media, such as James has documented here, but stories about Twitter or Facebook rotting your brain, the death of blogging, young people being made stupid by the Internet and so on. Special mention must be made to Ira who recently wrote an excellent defense of Web 2.0 and has frequently argued for social networking as a tool for learning.

I wrote briefly about my passive social life a few years ago. On-line or off-line, it is all the same to me. I think I have a very good social network. It is quite hard to say that without sounding like a boast, but it's mostly to do with my good luck and the gullibility of a handful of caring and interesting individuals who imagine I'm worth their investment. I have a few close and precious friends for whom I would walk through fire, so to speak, and then I have slightly less close but nevertheless valued friends and then a load of interesting friendly acquaintances. And regardless of how we met, I hardly ever see any of them face-to-face.

I wouldn't choose this, but that's the way it is and the way it has been all my adult life. And although I would love to have more face-to-face contact with my friends - I wish I had the energy to e-mail them more often - I do think there are real advantages to having at least some of your social life on-line.

So I wanted to write about the positive things about on-line social contact which would be positive for anyone, not just a poor lonely invalid like me. It'll be at least two posts, but I might write about something else in between. So today;


Interesting Friends and Uninhibited Mentors

I was talking with a friend about this (actually talking, with our voices) and she said, “I never trust people I met off-line. You have to go through so much social rigmarole, you never really get to know them.”

I laughed. I said I had friends, I didn't say they were normal.

Normal for people of my class background would be to have a circle of friends drawn from people the same age as me, in the same income bracket (often the same occupation or employer), with the same shape families and the same interests. Sometimes such friendships can be precarious, based as they are on so much common ground; if a person gets sick, loses or changes their job or gets divorced, they can find themselves cast out. At other times such friendships are more like family ties and as such, a person can wind up bound to friends they don't actually like or get on with. Not that the quality of a friendship is inversely proportional to the things you have in common, every single friendship is unique and works slightly differently. In any case, I'm excluded from all this because I got sick and don't fit in with anyone.

It's not like my social circle is massively diverse. Most of my friends live in the UK and most of them were born here. But in every other superficial respect they are all over the place. Their age range spans over thirty years, they are in very different lines of work with very different interests and domestic arrangements. And thus the common ground, which I guess must exist in all friendships, tends to be something reasonably deep.

Now, I am the kind of unBritish person who strikes up conversations with strangers, but it is a quite complicated business getting to know someone - really know them - off-line:

• You meet. You talk. When you first meet someone, you are likely to talk about the weather and whatever immediate situation you find yourselves in (a party, a train journey, the checkout queue etc.). You are not likely to prize a great deal of information from them at first - it happens, but it's not usual. I don't meet many new people off-line because I spend so little time out of the house.

• Social etiquette is such that you don't exchange details or arrange to meet again with someone you've met only once unless you are trying to get into one another's thermals. So your next several meetings are left down to chance. If you belong to the same club or have friends in common, then this is hopeful. For me, because I don't get out much, this is hopeless.
  

• Only much later, after several face-to-face meetings, do you begin to really know what a person is about, and you form a bond which means that that person will miss you and bother to call or e-mail when you disappear for months on end. Since I don't get out much, it usually takes years to get to know someone this well off-line.
  

It's not always like this, of course, and the few friends I have made off-line in the last twelve years have broken this pattern. On-line, things are easier. You don't need to walk away from that first conversation, you don't need to worry about being seen to be too keen or not keen enough because you can talk over a period of days or weeks. And then you're in touch. You don't need to wait to meet again, you know where to find one another whenever you like.

And so you get to know people deeper, quicker. You get to know people who you would never have known otherwise. Nothing to do with geography, not really. Often, the conversation that we needed to have in order to... fall in platonic love? would never have taken place, even if we were next-door neighbours.

This is especially the case with those people, only some of whom became my friends, who have taught me stuff. All sorts of stuff, explained facts to me in science and history, explained theories in philosophy and sociology and imparted a great deal of wisdom. You can get so much from books, but a person who is prepared to explain things, listen patiently, answer questions and explain again is invaluable. And if the fact I left school at fifteen and have next to no formal qualifications ever surprises anyone, that's partly about reading and listening, but partly about all the (generally) older and wiser people who let me feed on their brains - most of whom, I have found on-line.

And this was especially the case when I was younger - what middle-aged man or woman engages in a serious conversation with a teenager who they are not either related to or employed to talk to? On-line of course, people don't necessary know your age, and even if they do (a) they can't see you so it's not an ongoing distraction and (b) nobody else is looking on, wondering what's really going on between you.

This is another obvious advantage (and the great peril) of on-line social contact. The observations of one's wider social circle can be very useful, sometimes a life-saver and are particularly important when it comes to young people and anyone who fancies themselves in love. Nobody I know has ever had a crime committed against them by someone they met on-line, but there are stories about romantic relationships with people who were not at all as they seemed. This can happen off-line - in fact, it happens all the time - but there are usually many more opportunities for other people to point out what the lover cannot see.

However, the judgment of on-lookers can also make things complicated. We have this idea that the main purpose of non-familal social contact is either straight-forwardly sexual (pairing off) or connected to sexual identity (shopping, watching sport etc.). Many people remain suspicious of men and women who are very close friends (unless he is gay and she is straight - almost every other combination seems to arouse suspicion). And it's not just about sex. When you have friends a lot older than you, there is the assumption that you are plugging some psychological hole in one another's life - your older friend is supposed to be the parent figure you've been missing, you their substitute child and it's all rather unhealthy.

One relative has a delightful habit, whenever I mention a friend, of asking, "What's wrong with them?" on the grounds that all my friends must be disabled (or at least, that's what I took it for - now I've written that down, they might mean something else entirely!).

Being on-line can makes it easier to be friends with whoever you happen to like, however weird such a friendship would look to other people. And you're all great, wherever you fit in!

I feel I have now outed myself as a really sad case, but as I shall explain in my next post on this subject, I am not in the least shy or insular - and the Internet has saved me from being so.

Between a rock and a hard place

On Saturday, we went on a cultural excursion to Norwich. No really! Funnily enough, this is only the third time I can remember ever going to Norwich and the last two occasions were to see productions of Shakespeare – extremely good ones at that.

This time was to see a sculpture exhibition featuring the work of Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson at Norwich Castle, which our friend Vic had told us about. Moore and Hepworth in particular are probably the most significant sculptors of the first half of the twentieth century. Lots of public art in the UK is either by them or produced under their influence.

I've realised in recent months that if I don't ask, I would never ever leave the house, and the more extravagant and specific the request, the more likely it is to be granted. Subtle hints are useless. It also helps if, like the snowdrops and this exhibition, the trip has to be made within a given time-frame. Any further obstacles like distance or access only work in my favour. When something requires planning, I can force my minions to commit to the trip in advance, and then tell them exactly what to do, where and when.

So although nobody else had the slightest interest in twentieth century sculpture, I managed to drag both my parents and [...] all the way to Norwich. And it was good, really good. I can't find pictures I can reproduce here - since most of their famous stuff is big public works, I'm struggling to find pictures to even point you to. There were lots of abstract figures in different sorts of stone, very beautiful organic shapes. Several variations on the mother-and-child theme, plus some purely geometric stuff, which didn't work so well for me - except possibly this, which is an absolutely gorgeous object in real life.

My Mum loved it too and now wants to try her hand at sculpture. Dad was ambivalent, prompting an in-depth discussion on the definition of art. He also recounted the tale of the public sculpture he created, which stood outside Suffolk College for six years before being removed because of Health & Safety concerns on account of its moving-parts.

Norwich Castle is a bit of a Museum of Everything. There's the castle keep, with battlements and dungeons and exhibits on the castle's nine hundred years history. Then there's the broader local history and artifacts back to Boudica and the Iceni (including a kind of chariot-ride simulator). But then there's a great collection of mostly Victorian paintings – including a few famous names. There's also a modern art gallery, which includes a collection of chewing gum in a glass case but also some truly great art. Then there's an Egypt bit with some poor dead mummy on display, a room all about the history of textiles, another room full of stuffed animals and the Twinings Teapot Gallery (a room full of teapots, in case you couldn't guess).

And I don't think we saw nearly all of it. Which is probably a good thing as I'm sure I learnt a very great deal about all manner of things but can't remember any of it.

Norwich Castle is extremely accessible given it's a castle. You can't go up on the battlements and funnily enough, the Normans didn't think to build an elevator down to the dungeons, but otherwise it is all great and I didn't feel slightly nervous of knocking anything over.

Oh and on the way there, we passed a protest against the closing of a local school. There was quite a crowd, but two placards in particular caught my eye. The first stated that "Weight-Watchers meets here!" which I thought perhaps was a fairly feeble argument. But my favourite was, and I don't tell a lie,

"Down with this sort of thing!"

Cake, some action's what I need

Granny and I decorated this year's Christmas cake last week - well, we started last week, but I fell asleep and had to finish it off at home this week. It's quite pretty, only it's not everso Christmassy (not nearly so Christmassy as last year's effort), and those white flowers are supposed to be hellebores (Christmas Roses). Unfortunately, they look rather more like lillies. Perhaps they are Christmas Lillies.

Still, I think we did pretty well considering the lack of time. And the bit I sawed off in order to make the top flat was scrumdiddly. There's enough brandy in that there innocent-looking cake to make an elephant dance the Macarena.

Our Ikea Adventure

Sixty-something years ago, a group of bright young minds, including the great Alan Turing went to Bletchley, to perform complex mathematical equations in order to crack Nazi military codes and eventually defeat the forces of tyranny. It was perhaps an ill-fitting tribute that this weekend, [...] and I went to the Ikea in Bletchley, to perform complex mathematical equations in order to buy a new kitchen, taking the 2.5% reduction in VAT into account.

We certainly overcame tremendous odds, such as lack of sleep, van-no-brum-brum and cold heavy rain which meant that, once we got going, we had to drive all the way there with the windows open so that the windscreen didn't steam up. And the Sat-Nav which didn't know that Milton Keynes existed (perhaps she just hates going to Ikea).

However, fate smiled on us in a number of ways. Highlights included:

• Since it was so far to travel (for us) and we had so much to do, we planned to stay overnight in Milton Keynes. On a Sunday night, if you book in advance, you can get a room – including complimentary teabag – for £30. It was by happy coincidence that the new VAT rates came in on Monday, so we were able to save our landlady about £30 on the kitchen. So our stopover paid for itself in a roundabout way (there are a lot of roundabouts in Milton Keynes).

• Staying in a hotel is still a terribly exciting thing for me which I get to do about once every three or four years. I think hotels are terribly exciting places where all sorts of weird and wonderful things go on in close proximity. I could barely sleep for thinking about all the illicit affairs, murders and mafia dealings taking place in the rooms around us.

• We bought new plates and bowls! Since I break everything I touch, we've been needing some more for ages - if anyone came round to eat, we had to take it in turns. And they are very nice, as plates and bowls go. Cobalt blue,Ｉguess you'd call them.
  

• For the first time ever, I was able to go round Ikea under my own steam (uh, it's a very old-fashioned coal-fired wheelchair). It was much better. I could look at all the things I wanted without having to give directions or answer the question, “What do you want to look at that for?” and I could fondle the soft-furnishings to my heart's delight.

• I could also participate in the warehouse bit – every other time I've been, I've had to be parked somewhere and sit like a lemon for half an hour. Then there's always been this difficulty of how to get both myself and a trolley of stuff out through the checkout. But as my powerchair goes pretty fast, I could go and collect things for [...] and he could be the lemon. I did have to stand up on tip-toes for some of them, but I waited until nobody was looking.

• I almost ran over a hedgehog! It was a cuddly hedgehog, but it still would have gone squish. Fortunately I stopped just in time and was able to return it safely to the little girl who had dropped it.

• I managed to resist the temptation of a great number of toys I might have bought for Alexander, thus maintaining my record; two and a half years of auntihood and I haven't bought him any toys (although I've made him lots). It took some effort though; they had plush woodlice!

It was such a busy couple of days that on Monday night I was wound up like a spring and couldn't sleep. So I watched an episode of Spooks (daft spy thing) on BBC iPlayer. I then dreamt about espionage being conducted in Ikea; secret codes written on those shopping-lists, spies hiding in the wardrobes, the boxes in the warehouse really having missiles in them.

Yesterday I could sleep and did a great deal. I attempted to wash up and woke up with my head in the sink, still clutching the sponge.

Coincidentally, Mary went to Ikea this weekend (although a different one - otherwise we might have met unexpectedly and ripped a hole in the space-time continuum) and Sara lost her Ikea virginity last month.

Visiting Hours

The great things about visiting other people in hospital as a wheelchair user include the fact that everywhere is flat, there are plenty of spacious lifts and nobody bats an eyelid at your presence. The bad things about visiting other people in hospital are much the same for everyone, and thus are bound to outweigh the good.

My Gran took a bad fall on Friday night. She's not that badly hurt; nothing was broken, but she fell on her face hard enough to knock herself out, she is rather confused and terribly distressed about the whole thing. She always been prone to confusion and depression, but following this concussion she apparently found out that she is much older than she thought she was (that is, how old she thought she was when she came round). She thought she was sixty-three, and is terribly upset to learn that she is fact eighty-two. She says she has all manner of wrinkles that she never had before. A curious concern for someone whose face is currently every colour of the rainbow.

She hasn't lost nineteen years of her life; it's not that she didn't recognise me from my eight year-old self or she thought my Grandad was still alive or anything like that. But it has thrown her. She is also very frightened about what happens next; she is frightened of going home and having another fall, she is frightened of having to go into residential care. It's impossible to reassure her and just now I feel very very sorry for her.

However, my mother made me feel very useful. I helped, apparently, with both comforting my Gran and given pertinent information to the social worker. I'm not sure whether I was at all useful or not, but it was a novel feeling to even think I might be.

Gran was, of course, completely and utterly oblivious to the US presidential election. But thank you very much, my American cousins for all you did for the world on Tuesday. Passing by the US Airbase* today, the stars and stripes took on a certain nobility that it may have lacked over recent years.

Oh and Happy Bonfire Night! Of course, the failed terrorist atrocities on 5/11 back in 1605 were used as an excuse for wholesale percecution of Catholics and religious non-conformists of all ilks. One such group of Puritans suffered so much that, following a detour to the Netherlands, they got on a ship called the Mayflower and sailed away in that direction [points West]. You see, everything is connected!


* In fairness, the Americans don't fly the flag at their airbase because it's really Ministry of Defence land; the flag was flying outside a nearby car shop where the US service personnel can buy tax-free gas-guzzling vehicles (the sort with wheels as big as a house) to fill with um, tax-free petrol, but we'll put that to one side for today.

Extermicake!

Sometimes, blogging can influence the very traditions of our families, customs and rituals to be passed down from generation to generation. Following the success of my sister's Dalek cake which she made for my mother's birthday last year - inspired by a post by Lady Bracknell where Jess commented, linking to the Dalek Cake pool on Flickr - may I present my own attempt for her birthday this year.

Two years on the trot, we'll be doing this forever now. Probably long after my mother is gone, long after I am gone and maybe even after people have forgotten what the heck a Dalek was, the family Goldfish will be making Dalek Cakes at this time of year.

I seem to be cursed with technology just now and although I took some lovely pictures of my mother with her birthday cake, this was the only one that came off the camera. But you get the general impression. My Mum said it looked like a cat. Charming.

I went to the shops and I bought...

...a ukelele! Isn't it a thing of beauty? Most importantly, it sounds beautiful and within a matter of weeks, I daresay I should be able to do this sort of thing.

The guy in the music shop tried to sell us a mandolin case to put it in. I suggested that having a ukelele in a mandolin case was a little like keeping your machine gun in a violin case. The guy looked kind of nervous.

We bought it in Cambridge where we also had a look the new clock at Corpus Christi. It is almost five feet wide and has an evil-looking grasshopper on top, which is munching up the time.

A lady who was standing by the clock said, "I'm sure the grasshopper is supposed to do something on the hour, like light up or wave its arm in the air."

To which [...] responded, "It climbs down and bites your leg off. At least that's what happened to her." and he nods towards the wheelchair.

Later I wheeled into a tree, although I was pretty knackered by that point and it was a tree coming out of the floor in a shopping centre. And I lost our parking ticket. And my computer died. But today I am too busy rearranging Linkin Park songs for ukelele to care!

The Sea, The Sea

This weekend we went to visit our friend Vic, who was holidaying on the North Norfolk Coast. Well, it was kind of on the edge of the Wash, but we couldn't see land the other side of the water. I haven't seen the sea for almost two years (I almost saw the sea when I was in Hampshire, but the Isle of Wight was in the way). I have missed it rather badly.

Despite having rumbled and rained for most of last week, Sunday was a beautiful day and we sat outside looking at the water. [...] went for a walk on the beach and kept going until we could only see his head, at which point he decided that the water was a wee bit too nippy. And because we were facing west, the sun set over the sea - admittedly in an unremarkable way behind clouds. It was all very beautiful and we had a lovely weekend.

Having said...

Having said I had returned, I am now feeling guilty for neglecting you. But once again, I was busy then tired. Last week it was a shopping trip to Cambridge, which was great fun. I spent £6.25. It was a spree!

Well it's not quite September yet. Come September, I shall blog more regularly.

Return of the Goldfish

I was very slow, then I was very busy and then I had some serious sleeping to do. Now I'm picking up again and making a tentative return to blogging and the world generally.

The busiest bit involved a trip to Southampton to visit Alexander. I was only there a few days, but they were very full days, as days tend to be in the company of a two year old.

Alex is still not saying a great deal, but he made several admiral attempts at my name. He is also adept at pointing out churches and miscellaneous Christian iconography (crucifixes etc.) with a very musical "Dong!" (the sound a church bell makes, presumably and much easier to pronounce than church

I have been monitoring Alex's verbal progress on account of the competitive auntying my friend Vic and I engage in; Vic's two-year-old nephew is using grammatical tenses and learning to count in Cantonese! However, my mother informs me that I didn't have a lot to say for myself at two either. See, I wasn't a smartie-nappy (which is like a smartie-pants, but smaller).

I got to see the school where Alex is starting nursery in a few week. I know, two years old, but now I've inspected the place I reckon it'll be a lot of fun for him. It'll only be a few mornings a week in any case.

For his birthday (which is actually this Wednesday), I made Alex a playmat, a blanket with roads and fields sewn on. This took me ages, sewing it all by hand, hours and hours and hours.

Fortunately, it didn't cost me anything, as I seemed to have a few green remnants from things like Alex's jacket plus two green tops, one of which had paint down the front and the other had an irreparable hole on the chest. I found a scrap of blue lining fabric for the river and teh roads are made of less than a remnant of black PVC that I bought ages ago because it was very cheap (although I told my sister it had come from one of [...]'s old catsuits). There are even road markings embroidered on there but you probably can't make them out.

Oh yeah and the blanket I sewed all this on? It was the accursed wheelchair blanket my mother gave me some years ago. When she noticed, I claimed it had been on my lap (serving its purpose) when I had begun to sew and it accidentally got stitched into the project.

Hopefully Alex will be able to use it for lots of different games, for toy cars, farm animals and later on, as a landscape for a Lego town (which was the favourite use for the one Mum made us as children).

Alex knew exactly what to do with it and I could only get blurred images of his zooming a toy truck around the roads. I tried to observe whether he 'drove' on the right side of the road. Even though the steering wheel of his Little Tykes car isn't attached to anything, he nevertheless steers in the correct direction every time he turns. Which I think is genius.

In other news, tomorrow marks twelve years of the Dreaded Lurgy. I am rather proud of my near indifference to this event - not quite so near that I haven't noticed, but pretty damn near.

What would you do if I sang out of tune?

This is a portrait of my friend Vic, whose thirtieth birthday we've been at this weekend. She is the first person I have painted who isn't a blood relative and thus could conceivable disown me if my painting compared to my cake-decorating skills. As she was still talking to me a full 48 hours after seeing it, fingers crossed.

We had a very good weekend. Vic rented out an enormous house called Black Dyke Barns, not far from here, where a small gang of us hung out and lounged about for a few days. Apparently (according to the guest book) the place has been used for filming by the adult entertainment industry. This knowledge haunted us throughout the weekend.

Other highlights included our performance of With a Little Help From My Friends on guitar, ukelele, tin whistle and a string instrument which is possible a zither (we weren't sure), played in a key that none of us could consistently sing at. There were also sparklers (see below), my decisive victory at Bagpuss, the boardgame and the formation of a top secret underworld organisation of as yet indeterminate purpose. We came up with a really good name but it is top secret.

Having borrowed and learned to play Don't look back in anger on aformentioned ukelele I have fallen in love. It only has four strings! My guitar is broody! And I've already seen a purple one on eBay!

Anyway, had a really good weekend, made new friends and probably didn't knacker myself too badly.

A belated Happy Bastille Day. Vive la France!

Mon amie la rose

We've got a rose in our garden. I had noticed the beginnings of a bush but I don't think it flowered last year. It is a big fat gorgeous rose, the size of my fist.

We've also been watching bats in the evening. When I first saw them I hurriedly closed all the windows to stop them coming in the house and nesting in our underwear.

Incidentally, the best version of Mon amie la rose is by Natacha Atlas, who gives a little more welly than the original.

I am off partying for the rest of the weekend (seriously). Hope you all have a good one.