Airshow 2007

More planes
Originally uploaded by girl_of_bats

Warning: This is likely to be an appalling post, even by my standards, because I am broken.

So, the Airshow. It's actually a longer event than usual this year. We had planes on Thursday and Friday, then today (Saturday) is powerboat racing, and tomorrow (Sunday) is the Eastern Lights motorbike event.

Thursday the weather was crap, I wasn't feeling too good, and Pip had only managed to get about 3 hours sleep so he wasn't really up for managing awful traffic followed by Littlun in a big crowd. So I spent the whole day in the flat, taking it easy in anticipation of the better weather predicted for the Friday, which as you can see in this photo, we got.

The flight path must have been changed, because the planes weren't anywhere near as noisy as usual. Most years, there's several performances that physically rattle the windows of local residences, but this year, I had the windows open and could hear the tannoy from the beach, but although I could hear the planes, they were no more disruptive than, say, heavy traffic outside.

A couple of planes, the older ones, couldn't make it because of the high winds. I couldn't tell you which ones though. I don't even know what planes are in this photograph. I can identify the Red Arrows but that's about it. A planespotter is not me.

I saw a lot of extremely soggy people scurrying for their homes/cars/guesthouses in the afternoon from the safety of my flat window. This included no less than three children wearing one waterproof between them, which put me in mind of the three-headed giant from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But shorter. Um.

Anyway, Friday was much better, Friday was when I took this photo. Pip came to mine with Littlun and a couple of friends and parked the car in my handy locked off-street parking space that comes with the flat. We suncreamed up - a procedure which Littlun detests, but that's just tough - and set off to the beach.

Lowestoft Airshow is run off money yoinked from wherever the organisers can beg, steal or borrow it from. This includes fees for stall pitches on the seafront area, sponsorship from the larger local businesses, sales of any amount of tat like tshirts, badges, caps, programmes etc, and a voluntary donation scheme. There's this big thing about keeping the show free, but at every entrance to the seafront area they have a bunch of volunteers with collection buckets and stickers. The suggested donation is £1 per adult, which is hardly bank-breaking, and then you get a sticker and can feel morally superior. A lot more people were wearing the badges this year than last year, or so it seemed.

There's also a very effective scheme for lost kiddies. The collection guys direct you to the stalls where you can get a heavy-duty plasticised card wristband clamped onto your kid. Littlun didn't manage to get his off, so they must be pretty damn durable. The wristband has the parent's mobile phone number on it. Any kid found unaccompanied just has to be herded to the nearest stall or Airshow official (and there are hundreds of these, from various voluntary groups in the town). Rather than mess about taking the kid to a central point, the officials all have mobile phones and immediately call the parent directly. In this way most kids are reunited with their parents in less than ten minutes with a minimum of fuss.

We spent a while having a look-round, and we watched the Red Arrows, which was fun - Littlun quickly picked up on pointing and shouting "WOW!" Then Pip made sure I got back up to my flat safely and they went back while I had a sleep.

Later in the afternoon, I went to join them again, down on the actual beach. By this point Littlun had gone through all the clothes Pip had brought for him (two pairs of trousers, two tshirts, a pair of shorts and a jumper) with an assortment of Ribena, ice cream, sea-water (fell over full-length while paddling) and, uh, "misc". He's two, it happens. He ended up wearing Pip's t-shirt which looked incredibly cute (click the picture for my flickr stream).

They were with a bunch of friends who'd come down with a large pack of beer, a radio, a windbreaker and the suchlike. It was really nice sitting on the sand, watching the occasional planes, playing with the kid, having a chatter, relaxing in the sunshine. A couple of the gents dug a big hole for Littlun to play in (we filled it in before we left) which he thought was fantastic. It also had the advantage that we could all sit down without someone having to be poised to dash after him...

I'm paying for it today, obviously, but then I'm not too bothered about Powerboats and it was worth it. Next week most of the tourists should have gone home again and then we can resume normal life.

Edited 17:30 to add tags

Rejected, again.

At the beginning of June, I found out that the Department of Work and Pensions had turned down my application to renew my Disability Living Allowance.

My condition and the way it affects me hasn't changed in the least, so by my logic, the amount of DLA I am legally entitled to shouldn't have changed either.

After a bit of a panic and a lot of support from friends, family and other bloggers, I started the process of asking for an explanation of the decision and a reconsideration. I assembled every scrap of additional evidence I could get my hands on and wrote a detailed refutation of the "explanation" they gave me for their decision. If you want to have a browse through my blog archives for the last two months you will get an idea of how much this took out of me.

Today I got their decision. It's actually some four weeks earlier than expected, so yay them, they get to tick an efficiency target. However, in their words, "we have not changed our original decision". I can't walk to the bus stop, I can't cook a proper meal on my own, I can't do or I have difficulty doing a hundred other everyday things and I fall over a lot... but they have decided I have no care or mobility needs.

I am stunned.

I'm not a fraud or a faker. I told them the honest truth and described the difficulties I have and the help which I need, no more, no less. Two years ago, the facts I told them resulted in me being given the middle level of DLA Care component and the higher level of the Mobility component. Today, those same facts result in zero. How can this be right? How does this make any sort of sense at all?

I have the right to appeal to an Independent Tribunal.

What I do not have, is the capacity to appeal to an Independent Tribunal.

I simply cannot do it. Jumping through hoops and visiting their doctors and fighting That Bloody Locum and dealing with legalese and trying to find someone who can represent me and all of this, while coping on a very much more restricted income, and knowing that there's still a good chance of them turning me down yet again... no.

This mess has already done me more harm than good. If I am prepared to lean a bit more heavily on the support offered by my friends and family, then I can get by with just the Incapcity Benefit. But I can't fight battles at the same time. It makes me feel sick to be giving up like this, and it makes me angry that someone in the same position as me but without the friends and family would be so utterly stuck.

Pip (and Littlun, of course) has looked after me today. Many cups of tea have been applied and both shoulders utterly soaked by a sobbing Mary. I'm sure it's not the day he had in mind, poor git. Steve has also been lovely, in a long-distance kind of way, listening to the tears and saying all the right things. I've also had a brief but reassuring phone chat with my mum. The consensus is that it's not right, and it's not fair, but it's also not the end of the world and we've got through much worse than this before.

On the positive side - and there is one - my condition may improve a bit now, because a certain amount of stress has been tossed overboard. I can get on and enjoy the summer rather than back-and-forthing with the DWP. I can sit outside in the sunshine without thinking "ooh, I must save my energy for filling out reams of paperwork". I won't have to worry, every time I have a good day, that someone might notice I'm moving a bit easier or not leaning on the stick as much, and report my one-off good day as me being "better". And I don't have to listen to the DLA unit's hold music, a bonus which is almost worth the money on its own.

In other news, the Lowestoft Airshow is almost upon us - this coming Thursday and Friday. God only knows what the weather will do, and as such, plans are near impossible to make. I'm going to start in much the same way as last year - rest up beforehand, buy plenty of milk/juice/etc before the tourists descend, and generally arrange things so that there is nothing I *need* to do. Those of you I know in real life, are any of you planning on being round this way?