16/52 2018

Week 16
16 - 22 April

The weather having drastically improved, we're spending a lot more time out in the back yard again, with toys including the Little Tikes car and some big sticks of chalk. Jamie is really getting to grips with the alphabet and we were playing a game where I would write whatever letters he asked, wherever he wanted. Entirely unprompted, he asked for the letters "O", "D" and "D" on his car door, and then, satisfied, clambered in.

Not the return I'd hoped for

You thought the adventures in cake were pathetic?

Ha.

It can be safely said that 2013 was a catastrophically bad year for me. Things happening to and around me that I could not influence, things I tried to do going horribly wrong despite my best efforts. I would go so far as to say that it was the worst year of my life (the previous contender being around 1998; the big difference being that now I'm in my 30s I have more and better coping strategies than my teenage self). Some of it was single events, some of it was longer-term dramas that just went from bad to worse in ways that would be dismissed by soap-opera writers as simply too implausible. Much of it is still ongoing. Most of it I prefer to keep off the internet.

Still, there were good things. There was sunshine. There was a trip to see friends and family. There were two trips to the Eden Project. There was blue hair.

And through it all, there was my blog, dusty and neglected. I kept thinking about posting but couldn't. Every time I sat down to write, it just seemed too personal or too pointless - or sometimes both.

Coping strategies, right? I should just sit down and write something. Get on with it. Worried about it being too personal? Okay, write something impersonal. Can't think of anything to write about? Well, do something you can write about, and then write about that.

Out came the daffodils, and they reminded me of a primary school "science experiment" where we put food dye in the vases of cut daffodils. The flowers pull up the coloured water, and the petals take on the colour of the dye. For the competent among you, here's the instructions.

So. This blog post was meant to be a nice, positive comeback, lots of pretty pictures, of my lovely yellow daffodils, followed by my lovely multicoloured daffodils.

Unfortunately, this week I've thrown out about a dozen daffodils that... well. If you peered closely, under a good light, you'd recognise a few streaks of colour, but before that, the word that would come to mind would be "dead". "Withered", perhaps, if you were feeling generous.

It's only a mercy that I don't have offspring to look disappointed at me and demand to know why it hasn't worked.

Book Review

At the beginning of June, Tom Reynolds of Random Acts of Reality fame released his second book, More Blood, More Sweat and Another Cup of Tea (also known as BST2 for ease of tagging).

I eagerly ripped open the Amazon package, started reading, almost joined gentleman blogger extraordinaire Scaryduck in a typo-spotting spree, and announced my intention of doing a quick review just as soon as I got to the end...

... and suddenly lost more or less all of my ability with words. Seriously. In the last two months Steve's finished working, he's been off on holiday (biking/camping in Scotland), I've been off on holiday (back to Lowestoft to see friends and family), I've finished several knitting projects, I've enjoyed weekly excursions with my PA, been to a couple of parties and generally been living a pleasant and stimulating life, yet all I've managed to blog are a couple of half-baked rambles about my disability-enhanced shopping skillz0rs and a G1 app that I wish existed. I've also had difficulty reading, which is why it's taken me until now to finish BST2.

I'd be ashamed to admit that and probably would have brushed my intent to review under the carpet as "no longer relevant" if it wasn't for the fact that Tom is probably wondering why it has taken me so long to notice that he's been lovely enough to namecheck me in the acknowledgements as one of the regular commenters on his blog, and I'm therefore even more ashamed that I have not in fact been commenting at all since then.

Still. The book is now finished, and a review was promised, and so a review there shall be, half-baked ramble or otherwise.

The first thing about this book is that it's available for free online as well as for cash from Amazon and regular high-street bookshops. I quite like having a tangible copy, myself.

The second thing about this book is that it isn't really a "read it all in one go" kind of book - it's a series of self-contained blogpost-length entries with very little by way of continuity or story arcs. This makes it rubbish as a novel, but fantastic as a book for looking at for ten minutes at a time, while you wait for the bath to run or the oven to preheat. It would also be a good book for the bathroom (insert obligatory joke about soft pages) or to take on holiday, because it doesn't take an hour to "just finish the chapter" or "just see what happened to this person" while someone else is tapping their foot and waiting for you.

It is quite similar in many ways to the first book, as you would expect for an autobiographical account of the same job with the same company by the same person during the same decade. There is a slightly different feel to it though. The first book Tom was quite "angry young man", whereas in this one he seems more cynical, but also more stoical.

That said, if you haven't read the first book or the blog, then odds are you will start to get angry about some of the nonsense that Tom and his colleagues have to deal with day in, day out. I'm sure most of us could put forward a few stories about out-of-touch management, irrelevant targets, and clueless customers, but for most of us, there aren't lives hanging in the balance.

It's not all doom and despair, though. Tom's dry sense of humour provokes more than a few quiet chuckles, and there are plenty of positive encounters, often when least expected. So although you get caught up in the writing and grind your teeth about the morons with the inflated sense of entitlement, you also feel gratified when people's humanity shines through and absolutely jubilant when a life is saved.


Edited 12:08 12/07/09 to update link

Blogging Against Disablism Day will be on 1st May, 2009

Once again, the excellent Goldfish is hosting Blogging Against Disablism Day on May 1st 2009.

This will be the fourth year running for BADD (see archives of 2006, 2007, and 2008) and the second year I am participating. Well, I say second. My 2008 post is here. Technically I was around for 2007 but I wasn't in a fit state to write anything, and that could happen again, we'll see (currently I am drafting posts and then deciding they're rubbish, it'll be a minor miracle if I even publish this BADD reminder). Of course if anybody wanted to suggest a particular topic or news story for me to pull to bits, get me started, that might help. But better yet would be writing your own post and joining in - you don't have to be disabled and it's fun to be a part of the whole shebang.

If I was a writer, I would say I have writer's block.

I'm not sure what the blogger's equivalent might be. Suggestions in the comments. I have all sorts of ideas and then I open up notepad and all I can manage is one or two horrifically-formed sentences which I would be embarrassed to put my name to. To which I would be embarrassed to put my name. You see? So I'm afraid for now we'll just have to settle for this rambling hotch-potch of miscellaneous Thoughts.

My cold got better, I managed with just one day off work when it was at its worst and there was a fever to go with it which I think is fair enough.

Steve and I have done lots of Interesting Stuff and I have gone "ooh, I will enjoy blogging about this" and then tried to write a post and not got anywhere. So for now you'll just have to have the bare bones and add your own detail:

National Sea Life Centre, Birmingham.

Steve and I went with one of Steve's friends. They took lots of photos, you can see Steve's photos here. It was both soothing and interesting watching the various inhabitants of the tanks swimming about. The HUGE turtle was especially serene, and much more graceful than you would expect of something weighing more than two adult men. Accessibility was great, it's a step-free environment and I only saw one staircase, for which there was a small lift equivalent within a few metres. However wheelies should be aware it's a lot of slopes - the building has a surprisingly small 'footprint' but is multi-storey - so pushing assistance is recommended.


The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre.

As a lifelong Roald Dahl fan, I have wanted to go to this since it first opened. Encouragingly, Steve and I spotted it in the Rough Guide to Accessible Britain so off we went. It was everything we hoped for. The Archive has all sorts of original material, from first drafts of books to letters from his publisher, from the telegrams sent to his parents to congratulate them on the birth of their son, to the regular letters home that he wrote throughout his life. The museum has some of these items on display in museum cases, with the items changed every three months to preserve them from light damage. That's quite exciting for a fan, to see the actual items themselves. But the heart of the museum is its child-friendliness and hands-on-ness. One particularly thrilling piece was the reconstruction of his writing-shed, complete with a filing cabinet of which one drawer was open - and in the drawer were letters from the publisher and annotated drafts and whatnot, looking for all the world like the real thing (they are printouts of the scans of the originals).

I can't be positive enough about the museum, and it's not just the fan in me talking. Look at the website. The accessibility isn't a joke, either - not only can a wheelchair get everywhere easily, but there are also plenty of seats, carers/PAs can get in free, and other adjustments (such as audio transcripts) are available. The only, only hitch is that due to the historic nature of Great Missenden High Street, there's no immediately nearby parking facilities - it's several minutes' walk, which could cause difficulty for wobbly walkers.

Add in a sprinkling of bowling, knitting, meals with friends, a visit to the park, and some shopping, and I haven't been bored. I just haven't been blogging, is all.

The job advert for my PA was in the paper last week, and there's just under three weeks for all the many millions of hopeful candidates to get their applications submitted. Finding the right person is going to be a delicate balancing act. For instance:

- I must get on well enough with them to be able to trust them with my safety and relax in their company. However at the same time, they're not being paid to be my friend, and the relationship must stay on a professional footing.

- They must be able to accept that I'm the one in charge who decides what we are doing and when and how we are doing it just like any other employer/employee dynamic. However they have to be confident enough to take control of a situation when I'm suddenly slumped up and barely conscious.

You see what I mean? And how does one find out this sort of thing in an interview? I think I may have done better to advertise for "henchman required, to enable disabled evil genius to take over the world. Experience with lasers an advantage," at least then I'd know I was getting the right sort of people applying for the job.

Suggestions for posts welcome, anything to get me writing properly again.