Journalistic Stardom and More Co-ordinating Crips

I got an article published on the BBC Ouch! website today. This is very exciting – the first paid employment of my adult life no less. But also, they asked me to do it. The BBC actually approached me to write for them. This is not an incredibly big deal in the wider scheme of things, but for me and my secret belief that I’m useless at everything, this matters. A lot.

Did you know that Lewis Carroll was first published in our very own Whitby Gazzette? The title of my novel is from a Lewis Carroll poem. My novel is called To Fear The Light and it's from the poem Phantasmogoria. The relevant verse goes;

“And as to being in a fright
Allow me to remark,
That Ghosts have just as good a right
In every way to fear the light
As Men to fear the dark.”

So there you go.

Recommended listening (if a touch traumatic) is last week’s It’s My Story on Radio Four. You’ll have to click that link before the next episode on Thursday or else you’ll get something else. Anyway, it was about a journalist with a heritable impairment and her decisions around starting a family. This was quite interesting because the lady clearly hadn’t got her own disability completely sorted in her head (who has?) and some of the non-disabled people featured had a much more reasonable, less disabling perspective than she did. Anyway, I could say a lot more about this but have a listen.

Spotted another co-ordinating crip at the weekend; a fairly elderly woman being pushed in a wheelchair by (presumably) her daughter, both of them wearing very bright turquoise rain macks. I can’t imagine it was the older woman’s choice to look as much of a pillock as her daughter did.

I popped out on Saturday afternoon and got effectively forced into the road by the crowds on the pavement. This is no good. Other people were walking in the road, but of course when a car came along, they could all hop to safety; I had to trundle along until the next lowered curb. I don't think I was in any danger, but the place was busy and I was worried about getting shouted at by a moody driver, or someone trying to rescue me. So please everyone let those using a wheelchair, a crutch or stick take the inside of the pavement.

Anyway, it has been kind of fun looking after [...], who is mending. They’ve given him the same tablets I take and these made him much more comfortable. Being a total light-weight however, they have induced him to sleep pretty much all weekend – I’ve never known anything like it! But basically he’s all right and since I’m not so bad just now, we’ve not yet reached the stage of crisis with stuff like food and housework. The fact he appears to have caught my cough/cold thingy – over a week since I got ill with it – isn’t exactly helpful, but usually he works through colds, has no rest and thus makes them last for weeks on end. Forty-eight hours sleep might be enough to throw this into touch.

It's good not to feel useless. With me in charge we've eaten well all weekend and the house hasn't burnt down or become infested with rats yet. So that's great really.