The 10th Bloggerversary Post

This morning I thought, "It must be about ten years since I started Diary of a Goldfish." and indeed it is - Sunday was the tenth anniversary of my very first post. I started on the casual suggestion of my brother-in-law, before I ever really read a blog. I feel quite lucky that I plunged into it without much thought - if I had had a particular agenda or theme, it might not have proved so useful.

A lot has happened in ten years. I wrote a novel and am almost done with my second. I got married to the wrong person for the wrong reasons, met Stephen, divorced and married the right person for the right reasons. I learned to paint. I've seen a fair amount of bereavement but I've gained a nephew, niece and a new extended family. I moved home four or five times, depending on how you count it.

As a result of blogging, my words have ended up all over the place; The Guardian, the BBC, education resources, disability studies periodicals. I got my face on the front cover of The Cambridge City News (along with some rescued kittens - it was a real slow news day). I've been invited to join Where's the Benefit? and the F-Word. I never had any ambition to do any kind of non-fiction writing, so it's been great.

I've also made some very good friends and had some very interesting and important conversations. I founded Blogging Against Disablism Day, which I know has come to mean a lot to many people.

However, this blog is really a gift you give to me, dear reader. I don't imagine I'm providing any kind of public service or useful function - it's really nice when something I write is useful or interesting to someone. But the person who has benefited the most from Diary of a Goldfish is me. It's given me lots of writing practice and helped my writing to improve. It has given me a place to express myself, vent and lecture people on subjects that matter to me without awkward social consequences. And I know you're there, in varying numbers, so I can pretend you're hanging on my every word. I sometimes get lovely comments, here and elsewhere and that stuff is huge to me. At a particularly difficult point in my life, I had an A4 print out of the nicest things people had said about my writing.

My blogging has changed a lot in ten years (as the world of blogging has). Earlier on, I was more or less keeping a diary, which was useful because, at the age of twenty-four, I was still struggling to be the protagonist in my own life story. Later on, some of these posts became downright disturbing. While it was going on, nobody knew about the violence in my first marriage and I rarely had to explain anything - my face was never bruised, I never sought medical attention. However, after my divorce, when I went through my archive in order to completely anonymise my first husband, I found that it was as if I had been compelled to write on days where there'd been violence and instead tell a funny or sweet story where no-one got hurt. I was spinning stories to myself, in public. Sometimes I told abject lies - entirely unnecessarily lies.

I find that baffling and weird, even now. I took all these posts down, by the way. There are plenty of posts where I express ideas or opinions I no longer agree with, but I took down anything I found where I actually lied.

There have been a few points where I thought about ditching the blog, possibly starting afresh, but I'm really very attached to it. If I had thought more about my 10th Bloggerversary coming up, I would have prepared a better post.

Stephen suggested that I should post links to my "Top Ten Posts". I don't know if these are my favourites - there's almost a thousand to choose from and I'm not going to spend the next week reading through my entire archive. However as a fairly evenly spread selection (2005 was just too weak):

1. Love is real, Real is love (2006)
2. Above and Beyond: Butch's Diary (2006)
3. Propaganda (2007)
4. I thought I was someone else, someone good (2008)
5. How to be a Disabled Villain (2009)
6. It Was Thirty Years Ago Today (2010)
7. Looking After Yourself as Radical Political Activism (2011)
8. Domestic Violence: Why Zero-Tolerance is So Tough (2012)
9. How Marriage Became More Meaningful (2013)
10. The History of My Adult Life in About 100 Objects (2014)

And now, having skimmed the archive to retrieve these links, I realise I really ought to organise some pages of links to the three or four subjects I keep coming back to.

Thank you all very much for this. Where on Earth are we going to be in another ten years time? 

The Potato Harvest

Stephen and I finally moved into our own place.  It's weirdly blissful. Weirdly because there's a lot going on and we've still got a huge amount to organise and work out. But it's so peaceful. We're very busy and very peaceful; quietly productive.

We live opposite a junction and watch a lot of agricultural traffic passing through; enormous slow but very deadly looking farm machinery, mud-splattered jeeps, the occasional horse. Every now and again, we'll be sitting quietly in our living room (our living room) and Stephen will exclaim, "Potatoes!" as a truck, bearing enough spuds to feed the village for a year, goes by.


For almost two weeks, I couldn't believe we'd really done it. We've talked about a home of our own for four and a half years. We've talked so much and planned and schemed, so that actually moving in felt like a further exercise in fantasy, as if we'd been allowed to play house for a few days before having to go home. Home - I was finally given my own key to my parents' house on the day I moved out.

This spell was broken by a new washing machine - strictly speaking, a washer-dryer. Turns out, when the machines achieve singularity, they won't take over and enslave us, they'll simply humiliate us by undermining all logical steps we might take to wash our clothes. We could have fantasised about the peace and quiet, the freedom and the flat-pack furniture (it's so satisfying). I wouldn't have fantasised about spending the best part of a day trying to get one load clean and dry(ish). So it had to be real.  It's real.

When he was a boy, Stephen heard the Strangler's Golden Brown and understood perfectly; Golden brown, texture like sun - Hugh Cornwell was quite obviously singing about his love for potatoes, a love that young Stephen could relate to.

This is one reason why I love him. I've known a few people who have survived periods of adversity by holding fast to some positive in their life; a dream for the future, a passion in the present, a pet cat. At some point, Stephen learned to find joy in the minutia; the pattern of veins on a leaf, the comfort of woolen socks or the glorious versatility of the humble spud. He's carried me through difficult times this way. Bad morning? Then let's make lunch an event. To say every day is special sounds both corny and slightly nauseating, but the truth is occasionally like that.

Manna From Potato Heaven; a large, still rather dirty
potato embraced by a pair of manly white hands.

As the potato-laden lorries turn the corner, they lose a little of their load. You often see this in the countryside, at this time of year; mostly root veg and sugar beet, scattered along the outside of sharp corners, usually cracked by the fall and crushed by the proceeding traffic. The gutter outside our house is strewn with spuds, partially-mashed.

A large specimen lands in our garden, perfectly intact. We'll have that. Vegetarian roadkill.


We've always lived in other people's homes, one way or another. Stephen has always lived with his parents. I've lived with my parents, my ex-husband and briefly, a friend, but I've always had to fit myself to other people's routines and rituals, the way other people want to do things, sometimes infuriating in their futility, sometimes just impossible to abide by fully. When I first left my ex-husband, the relative freedom was overwhelming; when you've had someone else dictating everything from what you wear to how you make a cup of tea, it's hard to know where to begin.

Something similar is happening now, although it's shared between us. We need to work out how to manage our energy, now that we can do pretty much what we like, whenever we like. Fending for ourselves, we need to use a lot of energy on the basics, but those basics don't need to accommodate anyone else, whether in terms of space or timing or anxiety that if there's food on every shelf of the fridge, it may stop working altogether.


It's a long time since I lived in a town; I've never lived in the city.  But I don't know what comes next, once all the potatoes are gathered in.  I'm sure onions came earlier - late August, early September. You could smell them, even if you couldn't see them.  Once the potato lorries drive away (Potato Merchant, one of them declares on the side), is that it, for the winter?

I'm so tremendously happy right now.

The Cult of Self-Improvement

It's that time of year; adverts for new diet regimes, articles about makeovers (houses, wardrobes, faces, lives) and on-line dating (I did enjoy the BBC's two offerings on what not to put in a profile). This year, the Guardian is offering an entire weekend supplement every month to help enable its readers to live more intensely. I panicked - this directly clashes with my personal ambition, which is to live a little less intensely; to lay back and consider the lilies rather than wake up and smell the coffee.

But I can keep breathing, because the Guardian's campaign to intensify your life includes instructions for knitting a scarf. The Do Something Manifesto explains the urgency in their woolly-minded project:

"As a society, we've long championed sober diligence over the quest for thrills. But the tide of research is turning. Recent years have established that a liking for novelty, neophilia, is a reliable predictor of wellbeing, provided you've got a certain capacity for perseverance, too. Couples bond more, it's been shown, when they pursue unfamiliar activities together, rather than the comforts of movies and meals out ("Marriage," as Balzac wrote, "must fight constantly against a monster that devours everything: routine.")"

Knitwear has a place in marriage: We model
our Smitten & Mittens, a wedding present
 knitted by idlevic.
(A white man and woman huddle together,
there hands held in a red heart-shaped
double woolen mitten in front of them.)

Of course, we only got married last year and I reckon we need to tire of that thing with the hedgehog costume before we bring knitting needles into the bedroom (there's a movie about that). The Guardian also suggest starting a Supper Club which strikes me as a great idea - I know so few people who call their evening meal supper, they should definitely get together and re-enact scenes from P G Woodhouse.

However, in line with all our culture's self-improvement narratives, the Do Something supplement is about doing more work and spending money in order to improve one's social status; to gain more whimsical anecdotes ("I was once a gorilla keeper for a day"), add upholstery skills to your CV, to make more of the right kind of friends, invite them round for tea and charge them £15 for the privilege.

This is the capitalist model of self-improvement. You buy an experience; an upgrade on yourself and your life. Even if there's no monetary transaction involved (although there almost always is), it's still about labour and acquisition; regardless of whether you enjoy knitting or want a scarf, we're told that knitting a scarf

"even makes watching telly feel productive". 

The pressure to reinvent ourselves is a very profitable one. As well as the spend required to coax them into being, the new you will require new trappings of identity - a new look, new surroundings, new accessories. After a short while, you are likely to see similarities between the new you and the old you, tempting you to seek out yet another newer shinier you. Self-help is like pornography; if it truly fulfilled rather than exciting then frustrating, the consumer would not keep coming back for new variations on the theme.

I've always been attracted to people who see themselves as works in progress. As I've grown older, I have become wise to those who have found the answer, usually unexpected (vigorous wishful thinking, doga), which is going to change everything.

Diane doesn't know it, but she is one of the wisest people I know when it comes to personal change:

"It’s taken me over a decade (I am not good at life) to realise that feeling turned upside down and like you’re about to hyperventilate is just… how it feels. Even when you’re moving towards something positive, change does not feel good. It’s so much easier to resist, to give in to the magnetic pull of I can’t do this. But it turns out that resistance and all those crappy feelings are part of the process. When you don’t recognise your life and nothing feels safe, it probably means you’re moving forward. 

"The other messed up, un-movie-montage-like thing I’ve learned is that change can be slow. Sometimes it’s so slow that it doesn’t seem like change at all."

I don't believe Diane is not good at life. Many people get through their whole lives without making any dynamic changes at all - many are lucky enough not to need to, others don't bother to try. Outright panic may not be inevitable, but meaningful change is always hard and often slow. It almost always involves either removing oneself from a warm, familiar and often comfortable source of misery (a place, relationship, job, personal habit) or else embarking on a terrifying adventure that should lead to somewhere good. If significant change was ever easy, we'd never find ourselves in positions when it needed to be thought about in any depth..

Meanwhile, when I first saw the phrase Do Something on the Guardian website, I had a naive expectation. I thought, since the Guardian is into hand-wringing about the injustices of the world (and they sometimes publish genuinely good social justice writing), a Do Something Manifesto might be about, you know, doing something to making the world a better place; helping out in one's community, supporting one's friends and family, giving time and energy to causes that make a difference. Especially as the tide of research would suggest that this, far more than neophilia (with all due respect to Keanu), is what makes people feel good.

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. 

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! 

If I were a rich man

Last week, there was a Forbes article entitled If I were a poor black kid, in which a wealthy white guy explained how poor urban black kids might pull themselves up by their bootstraps. This side of the pond, despite being in the middle of a recession, with all the random misfortune that entails for ordinary people, the UK government, peopled (though largely manned) by extremely wealthy, privately educated, white straight non-disabled Oxbridge graduates, are constantly talking about the fecklessness of the poor and the need to send out specialist trouble-shooters to deal with troubled families (which, according to the criteria, mine would be, if I had children). All of which seem to amount to the philosophical standpoint that states

If I were poor, I wouldn't be poor any more.

Then on Friday, David Cameron professed his own vague Christianity, and the importance of Christian values to fixing the country's problems. Presumably Cameron reads the New Testament (ha! As if he had actually read it!) as a morality tale: If only Jesus had knuckled down at his academic studies as opposed to learning to make rustic garden furniture with his father, he might have appreciated what the money-lenders were up to in the temple, and may have been able to afford a decent lawyer when he got into that scrape with the Romans.

I suppose I'm lucky. New Testament Christianity, humanist virtue ethics and the moral codes of almost all other world religions, put me in a rather privileged position. My responsibilities for doing good are greatly restricted by my energy levels and finances. I have the responsibility that comes with being rich relative to most people in the world, but I am surrounded by people who are much richer and far more capable of doing good than I am. As Lady Marchmain says in Brideshead Revisited, the poor have always been the favourite of God, whereas rich people have been desperately investing in camel-moleculising technology for centuries.

So from my position of almost innate virtue and particularly in the run-up to Christmas, when the world freezes over but Scrooge's heart thaws, I thought I should offer my wealthier readers some advice on how to establish a soul as sparkly clean as my own.

If I were a rich man...

Naturally, I would biddy-biddy bong for much of the day (though perhaps not all day long, as the song suggests – I'm no hedonist). Otherwise, there are a few things I would do to make sure that I fulfilled my responsibilities to the world which made me so wealthy.

I would

Pay every penny of tax I owed, publically volunteer to pay more tax and campaign for higher taxes for people like me.

All governments waste money, but there are lots of things which it is both most efficient and desirable to achieve through tax, as opposed to individual enterprise, charity, volunteering, private armies and so forth. Quite where the balance lies between what tax should pay for and what should be left up to individuals is up for eternal debate, and having a particular position in this debate is the foundation for some of our political parties. However, some of this stuff is the basis of a civilised society – like emergency services available to everyone, free school-age education, free healthcare and the welfare safety net.

In the UK, there is no mainstream political party who argues against the sanctity of these provisions, but the quality of them is fast being diminished by the current government, because of the crash. Frankly, this lot are attempting to solve the financial crisis by taking money from the poorest people and then scapegoating them as the root of the problem. This is having only mixed success; poor people are an easy target, but it won't help the deficit because poor people are not very costly and we will pay for them, one way or another.

The most obvious answer is that the very wealthiest people should pay more tax. They can afford to. The Robin Hood tax was a brilliant idea. The idea that we risk scaring away wealthy people is just daft. The only wealthy people we risk losing through high taxes are greedy bastards. So Scotland lost Sean Connery that way, but then I never found his accent convincing.

I'd also

Use, Support and Get Involved in my Local Public Services

All too often, wealthy people deny public services their social capital by sending their children to private schools, using private healthcare, living in gated communities and so on. Public services need wealthier people in order to survive and prosper. Public services are great! They are either free or massively subsidised at the point of delivery! They are interconnected and whilst not perfect, have developed with the public interest in mind over many decades. The private alternatives only want to make money out of the people who use them, which is why private healthcare-users are persuaded to have all kinds of bits and pieces removed - wisdom teeth, foreskins, appendices, self-esteem, life savings - regardless of medical need.

It's no accident that if you drive around London, public streets inhabited by wealthier people are better kept; they are cleaner, road surfaces are in better repair, they are safer. This isn't because councils quietly decide to privilege wealthier residents. But wealthier residents are more likely to be home-owners, they are more likely to consider themselves entitled to good roads, be able to organise themselves and make a fuss if there's a problem. And they are more likely to be listened to.

When wealthy people use their social capital to make a difference to other public services, they really do make a difference.  The great tragedy for our country at the moment isn't that the coalition is dominated by the Conservatives, a party which naturally leans towards the interests of the individual, but that we have a government dominated by youngish rich people who have never had to rely on the services that the rest of us use all the time.

I would also

Have a collection of electric cars and have a home which generates electricity.

Poor people have very few options when it comes to their environmental responsibilities. Unemployed people need to heat and light their homes whilst everyone else is at work. Disabled people are often unable to use public transport and have to use the pre-packaged or disposable option. Poor people often have no option to shop ethically and, especially in cities, poor people often live in tower-block housing where household rubbish cannot be sorted and there are no easily accessible recycling facilities. However, as a rule, because poor people buy less stuff, go out less, live in closer proximity to others and have fewer holidays, they generally have a lower than average carbon footprint.

For middle-income households (£40K is apparently now average for a household with two working adults – yikes!), some environmental matters are dead easy, but the bigger investments are difficult – you might be able to afford to install solar panels, or buy an electric car, but these things have a large initial outlay, which only pays you back over a period of years (and in the UK, government grants have just vanished). Meanwhile, as people who buy more stuff and travel about more, middle-income households are usually quite bad for the environment. I think it takes a lot of strength for someone in this bracket to do the right thing – so if you are and you do, well done!

If you are seriously wealthy, however, there is no excuse. People who own extensive land and property, but are still taking power from the grid as opposed to putting  itback, people who have a collection of cars and none of them are electric? Well they are a burden on the future of humankind.

I'd also

Make sure at least 10% of my income went to charity, including some to

• schemes which make a massive difference to people's lives. For example, Deworm the World, which keeps millions of children in good health and in school or Camfed which ensures the education of girls. If you educate girls in Africa, then they are much more likely to have healthy and comfortable lives, they are much less vulnerable to HIV, they are likely to have fewer babies, which increases the prospects for them and their children, but it helps to slow down population growth with a view to saving the world. Giving girls an education is by far the most effective form of population control – more effective than even then most draconian measures.

• schemes which help save lives. For example, organisation such as the Against Malaria Foundation are extremely open about how money is spent and really can save a lot of lives for your lolly.

For a long time, I imagined that all working people who considered themselves Christian paid 10% to charity – I thought it was in the rules, like Zakat in Islam. The conversation that disillusioned me was with someone whose household earnings were in excess of £50K, but who explained that they had a high mortgage and nothing to spare at all.  If Cameron was, as he claims, vaguely Christian, he might consider giving up at least 10% of his massive fortune and do so very publicly, to set an example to his colleagues and associates.

Poor people can afford to give little if anything to charity, but nevertheless give a far greater proportion of their income than richer people. If you are hard up but not stony broke, one way of helping others is through Kiva loans. You can loan someone in the developing world to improve their life or business, and you will get paid back.

Finally, if I were a rich man, I would

Apply vigorous ethics to all my business and consumer choices

Poor people can not always afford to make ethical consumer choices. For example, if I couldn't afford to buy Fair Trade teabags, bananas, chocolate etc., then I could do without and I buy almost all my clothes second hand. But when I need knickers, second hand isn't an option and I can't afford £10 a pair for Fair Trade – I have to buy cheap knickers that were probably made by people working in very poor conditions, paid much less than I have to live on. But it's those knickers or no knickers. If you do spend £10 on knickers, I suggest Who Made Your Pants?.

Rich people, however, not only have the money to make all ethical consumer choices, but they often have lifestyles which allow them to make a difference in all kinds of contexts. They can choose to look after their employees, even choose to employ people who others would not. They can choose to invest in good things and withdraw their investments from bad things – or use threats to withdraw in order to improve business practices.

Rich people can afford to to do so much good and they have a responsibility to do so. Making money is not, in and of itself, a virtue. Using money to make the make the world a better place, choosing to make less money than you would if you sacrificed the interests of other people and the environment, all that leaves a much more worthy and enduring legacy than the number of digits in the profit margin.


For better responses to If I were a poor black kid which actually address the American, urban and black kid bit, see
The Atlantic - A Muscular Empathy and
Pursuit of Harpyness - Uncle Whitey Explains It All with poignant David Simon quote.

Coming Home Undefeated

I'm thirty in less than three months time and I am moving back in with my parents. So many truths that I held as dear have been crushed underfoot in the past six months, and here goes another one: Whatever happened, I would never ever live with my folks again.

Squish. But as with most of these recent squishings, it is a surprisingly pleasant sensation.

I think it is much harder for adults living with their parents when one party is disabled. I am not capable of living in such a way that home is just a base, somewhere to rest my head and store my stuff and borrow the washing machine once a week, spending most of my time out at work and socialising out of the house. My home is my environment for work and rest and most of my social activities. I cannot live alone and I have to live with people who are willing and able to help me and from whom I am comfortable asking for help.

As a sick teenager, I lived in terror of being stuck at home forever. In my early days as a wheelchair-user, riddled with internalised prejudice, I experienced a special kind of mortification when being pushed around by my mother (not helped by the fact that she initially kept muddling the words wheelchair with pushchair). My parents and I had returned to a practical dynamic we had left behind years earlier and I think, for a short time, our relationship actually regressed; I think my parents forgot how old I now was and I assumed they couldn't possibly adapt. There were real struggles around my desperate need to be both looked after and left alone which I thought could never be resolved. And none of it was resolved before I moved out and in with my ex-husband.

After that, living with my parents remained the big threat. I suppose that between lots of couples, there are arguments that culminate in threats of desertion. But for me, the threat was always that I would be sent back to my parents, like an unruly child who having abused her grown-up privileges, has them taken away again.

For all kinds of reasons, my marriage caused and sustained unnecessary tension between my parents and I and since its end, my relationship with them has dramatically improved. This is mostly about me. I have finally shrugged off my adolescent evasiveness and started to be more honest about my life, my experiences, my health and the help I need. I've also seen my parents through different eyes; my own eyes when no other opinion mattered and the eyes of my open-hearted friends. And thus they frustrate me much less, and I like them much more.

Plus, of course, life's dramas always allow folk to surprise you, either way. My parents have been brilliant in the last six months. Not that I thought they wouldn't help me, but I underestimated their capacity to know how to help me and when. They stepped back when I needed space, they stepped in when I needed assistance. They moved all my worldly possessions from East Anglia to Wales and this weekend, they are moving everything back again.

And I feel at peace with them. Peace is something I am learning a lot about. Where it can and cannot be found, how and with whom.

But it also helps that I am choosing to live with them now, because it is a sensible and practical thing which I actually want to do, not because I don't have any other options. And it helps a very great deal, that this situation is not permanent. I think it would be a lot harder without plans for the future.

As you can see, I have new boots. Second two photographs (and plans for the future) courtesy of the amazing Stephen.

On a not dissimilar theme, William has been writing a lot about independence and dependence lately, both from hospital and now in bed at home.

Jack

Jack Pickard has died. Jack was in his mid-thirties, married with two little boys. Apparently, this was very sudden and unexpected. The news is difficult to comprehend.

I was not close to Jack but he was a friend and someone I've “seen” several times a week for years. He was an entertaining and eclectic blogger – he blogged about current affairs, technology, football, Dr Who, books and philosophy. But to me, the two most notable things about the blogger Jack were his excellent sense of humour and his tremendous sense of fair-play. Inequality, unfairness in any form, from any quarter was anathema to him. And yet he was extremely reasonable in his arguments, never ad hominem, always sincere. His last non-football-related post is a good example.

Jack was a prolific commenter here - many of you will have seen him around. He was a supportive and enthusiastic promoter and participant in Blogging Against Disablism Day, despite being, as he put it, “disability-challenged” (non-disabled).

There's nothing positive to be said about such a death other than it was good to have him around. I feel so very very sorry for his family and close friends to have to lose him so suddenly when he had so much yet to do.

See also Ian Cuddy's post Jack Pickard Remembered and James' We'll miss you Jack

Sara

Sara died. Sara was one of my favourite bloggers and a true friend. She had cancer for many years and as long as I have known her, I have known that it was on the cards. Then last year, she had a brain tumour and I thought we might lose her very quickly, much more quickly than we did. So this wasn't unexpected. And I honestly believe that Sara had a good life. Shorter than most and with an extremely unpleasant disease through much of it, but good. She kind of made that her project I think, to get the very most out of everything she had for as long as possible.

Sara taught me a very great deal. She also supported and encouraged me in all sorts of ways. I thought about writing a tribute to her, perhaps finding exampls of her great wisdom and kindness to quote to you, but what I feel now is a little personal, a little raw. Both Elizabeth and Kay have written about her death.

The most important thing to be said, I guess, is that I feel very very fortunate to have known Sara. She was one of those friends who altered the shape of my world. I am very sad just now, but she was more than worth it and I shall continue to benefit from the gifts she gave me. I really hoped to finish my book before Sara died. It was something that we talked about.

In other news, I have a new keyboard for my EEE PC and everything seems to be working. I would be ecstatic about this after the boredom of the last ten days without it, but ecstasy is slightly beyond me just now. At least I can now get on with my work.

Happy New Year!

I think 2008 has been characterised by Unexpected Developments. A few of these have been negative, but most not and more importantly, the positive ones have set things up for a very interesting 2009. Oh this is is just rubbish, but I'm really tired now and I can't possibly say what I want to say. Basically, 2009 promises to be one of the more interesting years of my life so far, if it goes according to plan. If it doesn't, well that's going to be interesting as well. But I am looking forward to seeing how things pan out.

It was a very good Christmas. Alexander liked his snake puzzle, although asked what kind of creature it depicted, he said, “Ssss – ssss – ssss – worm!” He has however learnt both our names and has over double the vocabulary he had in August.

But I am shattered, so after the vaguest and briefest of annual reviews you are likely to encounter, thanks for all your presence, comments and suppport during the last year and a very happy new year to you all!

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.

A happy ending

So I spoke to my folks towards the end of yesterday and managed to worry them. It is rather odd to have one leg so much worse than the other, and to have this level of pain on my current pain pills. My folks thought I might have a clot - and they weren't just being mean about AJ. I thought this unlikely in the extreme and I'm sure it was only in their minds because my sister's father-in-law had exactly that last weekend. Nevertheless, I was coerced into phoning the doctor out of hours.

The doctor diagnosed sciatica, which meant that I had a nerve trapped in my back and happened to be feeling it in my leg. This made me feel better straight away, because it could have been so much worse - pain in leg is much nicer than pain in back. Hooray for my arrangement of nerves! Plus it wasn't going to get any worse and knowledge almost always has a positive effect on pain.

But then this morning it is much much better and amputation has lost all appeal. I have decided to put this down to love-making, as it is the only notable event between then and now. There are other explanations, of course. I did eat a small amount of chocolate, which may have helped. I tend to think that sex and/ or chocolate can account for most positive health outcomes. Medical science can play a supportive role, but only that.

The doctor did suggest that the trapped nerve might have something to do with my barely-functioning bowels and there might have been some change there, but that's just not nice to think about.

Anyway, having had such a moan yesterday, we are still pretty worn out and still worried about AJ, but I am much more comfortable myself.

Oh life.

It has been a kind of crappy week here. It has not been terrible, at one point we struck upon a genius idea, which I can't possibly publish here in case someone nicks it and makes a small fortune (it's not that profitable an idea, but it still a very good one).

However, AJ has been ill. He has chronic digestive problems which were so under control as to be unnoticeable for years and years, but have become increasingly worse over the last ten months. This last week he's been in great pain and vomiting all night on three thankfully non-consecutive occasions. He has more effective medication now, but he has to it investigated. Which starts with an endoscopy. Which is gruesome.

So that's completely wrecked our sleep as well as being most unpleasant. AJ's problem is very unlikely to be anything too sinister, although I'd be lying if I said that all the morbid possibilities hadn't occurred to me. And it is going to be a rather stressful; I think I may be more upset at the thought of someone putting a tube down his throat than he is.

Meanwhile, my pain has edged up whilst I've been moving about more, trying to look after AJ. This is really depressing on the tablets I'm taking, which made me feel invincible over the summer (I acquired both sunburn and nettle-rash and didn't feel more than a tingle). One leg is so bad just now that if it hasn't improved by the afternoon I will cut it off with a bread-knife*. I know it would hurt so much less.

However, all this does read somewhat grimmer than it really is. We remain in good spirits, if rather fragile and weary. And now we're both going back to bed.

* I probably won't though; I don't think I have the strength.

An avenue of trees

Probably the best thing about living in this corner of the country is that whenever we go south of here we get to travel down roads like this. The woods are gorgeous all year round, so long as there's a little light. In fact, I think this is probably prettier in the autumn, but it is still jolly nice just now.

Have a very hectic few weeks coming up. In fact, with any luck, the rest of the summer is likely to be hectic by my standards. I say luck because I'm going to have to be on my very best behaviour, without any unexpected down-turns to cope with it all. I don't know why I'm telling you this. I suppose sharing the intention adds to the incentive to fulfill it.

It occurs to me that I should explain that our van is left-hand drive, and I took this photo in the passenger seat - in case it appeared that someone had taken the photo whilst driving...

An appointment with pain

I had a full hour way for my appointment with the Pain Specialist, so I played spot the pain in the waiting room; most people attended the clinic accompanied by someone, so I was guessing which of any given couple was a patient there. You should be completely unsurprised by the fact that I had no idea so long as they were all sat-down, although I did suspect that the other wheelchair-user, who was visably wincing every now and again and took some pills at one point, just might have been less comfortable than her partner or friend who wore running shoes and a London Marathon t-shirt. Although you never can tell.

Oh, at one point I went to the loo and they had a toilet that flushed when you waved at it – you have to understand that I don't get out much and this was incredibly exciting. But then I picked up a glossy magazine about Weddings and proceeded to sleep through the rest of our wait.

I fell everso slightly in love with the Pain Specialist. She happened to be an extraordinarily attractive woman but she was also one of these excellent doctors who talk to you as if you are two experts conferring about a problem; she is an expert in medicine and I am an expert in my condition (or at the very least, the way it is for me). We talked about different drug options, which was a tremendous relief; turns out there are loads of different ways of doing this. I mean, all the drugs are pretty icky, but there are degrees of ickiness and ways of taking the same drug which could reduce side-effects and the risk of addiction or tolerance.

I can just about live with the side-effects*, addiction would only become an issue if I experienced a significant remission, but tolerance frightens me.

We even talked about methadone, which shocked me somewhat. But of course the whole point about methadone's use in heroine addiction is that it shouldn't get you high and you shouldn't build a tolerance to it. Unfortunately, it is a controlled substance which stays in your system a very long time and the doctor had the not unreasonable expectation that a twenty-seven year old might want to have babies and/ or travel the world at some future date, whatever her current protestations.

Anyway, upshot is that I'll hopefully be able to get something which is slower-releasing, perhaps even a patch (a patch would be so cool – no more pills, no drug-induced ups and downs - imagine!). Meanwhile, I've been given some exercise sheets (more yoga, basically) and set on a project to research how I might take the strain off the particular muscle which hurts the most.

Promise I won't write any more about pain or life with the Dreaded Lurgy for at least a few weeks. Your patience is appreciated.


* Although I am getting rather sick of my current diet of bran flakes for breakfast, salad for lunch and bran flakes for tea, with lots of fruit, yoghurt and the like in between. Especially as I have to take laxatives on top of that. But that's the last time I'm going to allude to my digestive system on here for a long time too, hopefully ever.

An O. K. Computer

I'm writing this on my new computer! You may remember talk of a new computer about one year ago. Well, I finally got one. It is not a MacBook. In fact I had the following exchange with my sister's friend who became interested in our conversation:

“Is it a Mac?”
“No,” I say, “It's made by a company called Asus and it runs on Linux.”
“What the hell is Linux?” he demands.
“Linux is a family of open-source operating systems, named after the programmer Linus Torvaldes who was Finish or Swedish, or possibly a Peanuts character.”
“Oh,” he says, disdainfully, “Well if it's not a Mac...”
“Basically, Linux is what all the cool kids are using now.”
A shriek. “What?!”
“I'm afraid so.”
“But everyone in Starbucks has MacBooks!”
“Exactly.”

It is true that all the grooviest people are using Linux, at least my homies Vic and Mr Bunny are and they are two of the hippest cats I know. If you imagine those Mac adverts with Robert Webb representing Apple, David Mitchell representing Microsoft (although in fairness he doesn't), well if Linux was to be represented, it would be by Jimi Hendrix walking on and doing something like this. But since David Mitchell really represented all PCs, I guess my new computer is David Mitchell - but come on, he's the one we all fancy if we're honest with ourselves.

Of courseＩwas far more concerned about the fact that it was the cheapest, lightest most shock-proof computer I could find with a word-processor and a wireless card. And the most exciting bit is the aforementioned word-processor which actually saves to disk and I can use the same machine to go on-line. Otherwise I just have the guilt that tends to accompany new toys, which I have to combat with the knowledge that it's really a new tool and one I've been struggling without for a long time.

It is very diddy, about the same size as The Complete Winnie-the-Pooh, so a bit bigger than a bible but smaller than a dictionary. As a result, the small keyboard takes some getting used to, but I would say I have average dexterity and I've just about got the hang of it (it's not like one of those raspberry devices where you have to cut your fingernails to a point to hit one key at a time). And it works. And it saves files to disk. Amazing!

April Aunt Blogging

Come on, it has been a while since you've seen any gratuitous materteral blogging on here.

Yesterday, I got to see Alexander! I wasn't sure I was going to, on account of the fact that my sister's family all had rotten colds last weekend and frankly, if I hadn't got my pain sorted out, it would have been very difficult. I can't really be trusted to supervise Alex because I have no means of chasing after him; if I was really going to babysit, I'd need a giant net on a very long pole. However, at least with less pain I could pick him up if I needed to and I did manage to push him on the swing, from a sitting position on the grass (this is still a precarious practice, but I reckon the sustained giggling of a small child is worth the risk of being kicked in the head).

Another slice of luck was that the weather was so nice. I think it was warmer yesterday that it had been last August when we were in my folks' garden for his birthday party. Which is especially odd given the weather at this time last month.

Alex still doesn't say much but he has learnt to count! Up to three at least. Mum was playing a game where she was saying "One, two three, hooray!" and Alex imitated her by say "Do, do, do, yeah!" several times over and he never one uttered more or less than three dos . Does that count as counting? I reckon so.

Alexander devised an excellent variation on the game of golf, whereby merely hitting the ball with a club (both lightweight plastic) merits a cheer. This is much more exciting and uses considerably less space than the other version.

He also participated in the ancient East Anglian tradition of pushing small children about in a wheelbarrow. This originates from the time that women used to give birth out in the fields and wheel their children home sat amongst the turnips. This resulted in many turnips being mistakenly brought up as human children, with one turnip making it so far as becoming Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093. Sorry, but if I don't plump up this paragraph there will be a big gap at the end of my text.

So anyway, it was a very nice day. Alexander is a very bright and happy child who finds amusement in almost everything. Meanwhile, the more disconcerting side-effects to my new pills are already diminishing.

Oops inside my head

A much better week with decidedly less pain. The haze is a challenge, but it is not insurmountable. The biggest issue is one of deception; I am much less able to trust what seems to be going on around me. However, I've been through very similar side-effects before and never been quite so bright with it as I seem to be now. There's drowsiness, but even that is deceptive; it's more like a mist between me and the world as opposed to anything which stops me thinking. I think. There is the possibility that my head is full of nonsense only I haven't realised it.

If I'm honest, I find the side-effects quite interesting. It's not fun; I'm not high. In fact my mood does seem to be swinging about a wee bit. But the mild hallucinatory effects are curious. My brain is basically attempting to fill in the gaps as all brains do all the time - all of us with two eyes have a gap in our visual field which many people never notice (whereas others use it to decapitate people who are irritating us, if they are at the right distance). And beyond this, we use our imaginations to make sense of things. For example, you're not actually registering all the letters in this sentence, but just the shape of the words (unless any are unfamiliar to you). Often when we see something that doesn't make complete sense, our brains make it into something that does.

Just now, my brain is filling in more gaps than actually exist. I believe the thing with the insects is a very common experience; every slight movement registered towards the edge of my visual field becomes an identifiable insect, at least for a second. I imagine most people have experienced thinking they saw a fly or spider when it was probably a flicker or light or a spec of dust on the surface of the eye. Except this is distracting me several times a day. Meanwhile, every bit of noise I'm registering seems to be voices - I'm not hearing voices, but I'm hearing the sound of people talking or singing elsewhere in the house, and there's nobody there.

There must have been a slight change in the smell of the air as I entered the kitchen and I was convinced - as well as somewhat confused and annoyed - that [...] was using glass-cleaner to clean the oven. Glass cleaner is a horrible stinky chemical and my nostrils were full of the stuff. But when I asked, he insisted that he was only using warm water and the smell went away.

Nothing too dramatic, at least not during the day. Nights are another matter. I don't know whether the drugs are causing me to have vivid and traumatic dreams or perhaps I'm happening to have a phase. Trouble is that I wake up a few times every night and I seem to become conscious some minutes before I stop dreaming. This is actually quite frightening if I need the loo; if I stay in bed with these odd things happening around me, then I feel fairly safe - I know I am awake and this is the stuff of dreams. If I get up, then I am very nervous of what I might see or hear; I'm nervous of being startled, of screaming or falling over because of something that isn't there.

After all, there was that dead body on the floor in the dark at the end of my bed. It even felt solid when I kicked it (I confess to having very little respect for the dead when they are inexplicably on my bedroom floor), but then when I knelt down and touched it, it was gone again.

That might sound far more distressing than it was; fact is, if you really did find a dead body on your bedroom floor, confusion would be the initial response. It would probably take some moments before you felt the full horror of the situation and before those moments were over, I had established that it wasn't really there.

On the plus side, I have been able to manipulate these night-time semi-somulant experiences ever so slightly. Just to see if I could, I imagined there was a thick fur rug beside my bed, reached down and drew my fingers through it - and it was, it was fur, very thick, soft and silky to touch (the bedroom carpet is quite the opposite). If I could master control of this stuff it would be seriously cool, but that seems rather unlikely. Most of it is, alas, just filling in the gaps.

Compared to what?

An odd week, much sleep, and this is just musing on several posts by other people.

First off, both Andrea M. and Sage have been writing about the way we compare ourselves with others when considering our own body image. Sage has written about the different aesthetic ideals she and her teenage daughter have selected, whilst Andrea, who ought to write a book about her Internet Dating experiences, has written about how we select the "relevant others" to whom we compare ourselves, concentrating on the game of sex and romance

Earlier in the month, Ruth wrote about a cosmetic surgery which corrected the appearance of people with Down Syndrome, such that they no longer looked like they had Down Syndrome. My reaction to this was one of stomach-churning disgust, mostly because this was done to a child who had no say in the matter. However, would it be fair to be disgusted if this was an adult making the choice? After all, I don't have Down Syndrome and people with Down Syndrome are one group whose faces provide a visual clue to an impairment which meets with a great deal of discrimination, mockery and fear. Obviously, I would much much rather live in a world where a person was not judged by the ...contours of their eyelids but the content of their character, but still.

Then there was the story of Natasha Wood, covered by both Wheelchair Dancer and Disability Bitch. Natasha Wood is a disabled actress who has had breast enlargements and lipo-suction and features in an appalling article on the BBC News website. Now Ms Wood didn't have anything done which disguised her impairment; she's still a wheelchair user, but apparently now more shapely than nature intended. The lady hasn't had anything done which other women haven't had done before her, and one presumes that her motives are much the same as those non-disabled women who make the same choices. In many ways, disability is of limited relevance to her story, except if that were acknowledged there would be no story. Instead there is an article, which ought to win some sort of prize, celebrating the fact that, as Wheelchair Dancer puts it,

"Ms. Wood is too weak to even lift "a pint of milk." And yet... couldn't you just hear it coming? So weak, so disabled, but even this woman wants a sexy body."

My response was pre-empted in the comments to WD's post, where Gaina said (a little more harshly than I would);

"Well, it's nice to see disabled women [...] can be equally as vacuous as able-bodied ones when it comes to image."

I suppose I do naively imagine that people with physical impairments would generally care less about the body beautiful. I don't imagine we care any less about presentation, but having had to come to terms with the physical limitations of our bodies, we might accept the our own aesthetic limitations a lot easier.

But our self-assessments of beauty are all about comparisons, as Andrea and Sage's posts point out. I've written about this before and the importance of our choice of object, most recently about The Grotesque Old Woman. However, I do wonder whether people with physical impairments use the same objects as others. Are we comparing ourselves to mainstream images of masculinity and femininity or are these ridiculous ideals just a little too ridiculous for us lot? Do we instead compare ourselves to other beautiful people with impairments?

I have no disfigurement, no twisted spine or spastic limb, but I am sat down almost all of the time. In aesthetic terms, sitting down seems a greater disadvantage than, for example, walking with a stick. However, I never think that (well I just did, but only just there) because if I were to compare myself to other disabled people, aesthetics simple wouldn't feature. I want the more comfortable, less restrictive impairment, not the prettier one.

I do envy other disabled people who are more beautiful than I am, but this is almost always muddled up with impairment. Wheelchair Dancer is a hot crip, but then I'd love to be able to self-propel a wheelchair, let alone dance as she does. Which isn't to compare our lots - I really don't mean to do that - point is that I can't really differentiate between wishing I looked like that and wishing I could do that.

And of course, I would like no impairment at all, so I could be more comfortable and have the capacity to do a great deal more with my time on Earth, not so that I could look better - although I undoubtedly would.

I imagine the rationale is similar for many of us, perhaps especially those of us with chronic pain and fatigue, progressive and life-threatening conditions and those of us who have experienced the ordeal of surgery in circumstances where there was no choice at all. The question of if I could change one thing about my body has a very different answer and vanity seems a preposterous indulgence.

And yet, as Wheelchair Dancer says;

"I have, like many other women and, in particular, women of difference, felt the pressure to change my body. There have been many times in my life when I have wished to be slimmer, whiter, less curvy, more curvy, less disabled, etc. In fact, I often think that the primary thing stopping from actually doing something surgically is the opinion of people around me."

Personally, I've never begun to contemplate surgery, but I've certainly felt wretched about some supposed flaw or other, despite everything I've learnt. So do we have an advantage in this? Or will the article about Natasha Wood's surgery inspire all number of disabled women to address their self-esteem issues with surgery?


On the subject of surgery of a far less frivolous nature, Sara has returned to blogging with a big kickass scar. Which is officially the best news since... when Alexander was born. Not the scar, but the fact that Sara no longer has a brain tumour.