Today as I lay curled, cat like upon pillows in the long awaited sunshine thoughts spun and whirled through my mind and once again I became frustrated at my inability to capture what in my mind emerges as beautifully formed streams of prose, yet when I attempt to catch these whirling shining perfect phrases I am it seems unable, slowed down by my body's inability to keep up with my mind dancing faster and further ahead of my feeble fingers.
But despite the desire to write I was compelled to stay, drawn to the sun, like any reptile, basking, desperate to fully warm through it's body, thoughts of the long winter months unable ever to be entirely warm for now driven away by the heat of the rays caressing my skin, soothing my joints, easing loose my knotted muscles working over hard in their ever fruitless efforts to hold my body together.
I try to write longhand, to see a screen impossible in the bright light but more unable to face the gloom and chill of the room I spend most of my time a prisoner in, seeming so far away from the warmth of the healing rays. My hand can no longer grip the pen as my shoulder screams in pain from this level of effort so I swap to the other hand and try that for a couple of arduous sentences before becoming frustrated enough to see if I am able to write with my toes. I am but cannot control the pen enough to make anything out and so finally, for now, I concede defeat.
This man is desperate to be labelled disabled, whilst this man asking only to be able to compete with other men has to agree to submit to tests to prove the aids to his disability do not give him unfair advantages.
He's 29. He has a first class honours degree. He has been headhunted as a webdesigner. He is a young man. He has exactly the same hopes, and dreams as any other 29 year old.
So why, why, why does this 29 year old man have to live in a place of someone else's choosing? Be given a bath at the time and day of someone else's choosing? Be forced into unemployment through the rules regulating the incredibly high cost of his already unsuitable living environment?
The short answer to me seems as usual fairly simple, and is the same answer time and time again. These rules have been designed by people completely and utterly ignorant of the realities of the workings of either the benefits or care system. People who with woefully few exceptions still blithely assume they know best. Civil servants, politicians, doctors, nurses, and always, always, always the worst offenders of all the social workers. Able bodied professionals who make decisions over other lives without even the most basic of understanding of how it is to live such a life.
It is precisely 21 weeks today since I gave up smoking. I feel a sense of pride, having smoked for more than half my adult life. I started to smoke for typically the stupidest of reasons. An insecure and ridiculously young looking teenage self meant I believed the so called friend who regularly bullied me when she said she would no longer repeatedly call me juvenile once I had both tried smoking and 'snogging'
Unsurprisingly the bullying did not stop, and I ended up with a serious nicotine addiction, marlboro reds being my drug of choice during my teens...I can still feel that initial burn in the back of my throat as I type this. What's more surprising is the pleasure that memory evokes even now, in contrast to the memory of my 14 year old self hidden away in a park, afraid of my friends, not wanting to smoke or even touch the cigarette but more afraid not to.
Today thankfully the plumber arrived to sort out the leak in the toilet. I say leak, but outside it's been causing more of a minor flood that the local kids have happily been playing in and making the grumpy man opposite complain, not to me but to my neighbour. He told her that I should 'just do this....' and she happily informed him that that was all well and good but I wasn't actually capable of 'just doing anything' and that plumbers aren't the easiest to get hold of these days. Fortuitously with all the kids playing in the water it happened to be leaking from the cistern and out the overflow, and so was clean water not sewage of any kind, not that these kids belong to anyone in my road or appear to have parents to be concerned that their pre school age children might be playing in sewage water.
The plumber arrived and I made him a cup of tea before he turned the water off. I pootled around whilst he sorted the problem out and talked to me about his son and the problems he was having with his now ex girlfriend and their baby. It's the usual story I've heard so many times of being refused access despite paying out to support her and the child.
The toilet was fixed within half an hour, something to do with a diaphragm...though I'd thought that was a form of contraception. I asked him how much he wanted for the job and he said £9. I tried to give him £10 but he insisted on giving me back £2 and apologised for burdening me with all the stuff about his son and grandchild.
Increasingly I feel like I am living in some sort of parallel world.
