Hunting Season

I listened in horror to Radio1 on Monday as they and the rest of the BBC news media spewed forth all manner of vitriol against Incapacity Benefit claimants, who according to them are apparently all off work scrounging from your hard earned taxes for a variety of well deserved reasons such as acne, obesity or just being a bit tired. It's always nice to be publicly hated, especially when such a thing as journalistic integrity seems a thing of the past.

Clairwil has written an excellent post on the subject, so I suggest you all go there and read that before reading any further here. Go on, off you go. Then come back here and read the rest.

Right, as you all know now, to claim for Incapacity Benefit you need to be signed as unfit for work by your GP, and then, in something called the Personal Capability Assessment attain a certain amount of points to qualify, 15 for physical health problems, 10 for mental health. The All work test I'm linking you to is several years out of date, but hasn't changed that much. For interest I decided to score myself on the test again, and deliberately put myself into lower categories for many of the questions, such as this one, bending and kneeling, where of course being absurdly bendy, I can both bend and kneel, but also being absurdly unstable around the joints, can't do it, or get up again without dislocating, in my case often multiple joints. Despite my deliberate underestimating of how badly I'm affected and therefore lower points score, I still managed to end up with 99 points. Unfortunately I don't think that means I get 6.6 people's worth of Incapacity Benefit.

Activity Descriptor Points Select
One
6.Bending and kneeling. (a) Cannot bend to touch his knees and straighten up again. 15


(b) Cannot either, bend or kneel, or bend and kneel, as if to pick up a piece of paper from the floor and straighten up again. 15


(c) Sometimes cannot either, bend or kneel, or bend and kneel, as if to pick up a piece of paper from the floor and straighten up again. 3


(d) No problem with bending or kneeling. 0

Actually, as I've mentioned before I don't receive Incapacity Benefit, and so don't even count as one of the official statistics, like many people I instead receive Income Support. However, ignoring that and the large numbers of people like me who are not counted as part of the official statistics for Incapacity Benefit, now is a very frightening time to be genuinely sick or disabled in the UK.

As Peter Hain, the Work and Pensions Secretary announced on Monday, the old style PCA test will be replaced by a new work capability assessment along with the new Employment and Support Allowance. All of this of course was previously announced as part of the Welfare Reform Act 2007. According to Mr Hain the new test will concentrate more upon what sick and disabled people can do rather than what they cannot do, apparently abandoning tests such as being able to walk more than 400m or climb 12 steps without the aid of a bannister instead looking at issues like manual dexterity, speech, vision and hearing, as well as ability to cope under pressure and interact with other people. (source BBC news online)

Now, call me a huge cynic if you will, but that's pretty much exactly what the current PCA test looks at, with the exception of the first two questions they appear to be removing. We all know the benefits system is a contradiction in terms long overdue for reform, but really, what use is it declaring someone as fit for work if their mobility is so poor they can't actually get out of their home to to get work or move around a workplace even, and shucks, it's not like anyone's naive enough to think the government will suddenly start providing everyone who needs them with appropriate power chairs, are they?

Unless of course all this is purely to make it appear to the general public that the government is addressing the issue of welfare reform, whilst they terrify the vast majority of genuinely sick and disabled claimants, already living under difficult enough circumstances, many of whom would welcome anything that meant a realistic opportunity to work, unlike the government's much hyped New Deal for Disabled People's scheme, which as I've written about before seems nothing more than a money making exercise for those able to set themselves up as job brokers. It would, for once be nice to hear some realistic suggestions from at least once of the three main political parties, two of which are led by men with disabled children of their own. However, money and power make comfortable cushions from reality and until such time the disability charities get out of bed with the government, and politicians, regardless of allegiance wake up and realise that to effect true welfare reform they need to consult those living within the system, the disabled and chronically unwell, those able to provide some realistic solutions to the situation, I fear no licence will be needed to take aim at the most vulnerable.

It's cold outside!


Winter Fuel payment is for those over 60 who receive a State Pension.

It is not available to those in receipt of even the highest levels of Disability Living Allowance, many of whom have to heat their homes all year round.

No matter how cold our furry barometers tell us our homes may be!

DLA insanity

Like Louise Bolotin, the author of this rare insight into the insanity of the DLA system, I am also completely dependant on the financial security that Disability Living Allowance provides me. Unlike her however, I live alone, and depend entirely on benefits to survive, having no-one else to step in and support me so although my DLA has time left to run on it's current award, I'm permanently aware in the back of my mind that it could randomly be removed from me on the 'whim' of a decision maker, regardless of the level of my disability.

This for me is of particular relevance at the moment having strived so hard for so long to gain control over my condition and therefore improve my life. Should I inform the DWP that I have managed to 'improve' and therefore risk my entire award, which if I were to lose it would without doubt lead to a drop in benefits so drastic I would be left unable to meet basic utility bills and rent, let alone consider luxuries such as food, or should I say nothing as actually these improvements, although considerable for me, are by anyone else's standards minor and still leave me substantially disabled and genuinely entitled to the awards I've been given, if not the higher awards my GP pushed for me to be given at the time but the DWP in their typical nonsensical logic refused as they insisted the bodily functions I needed help with during the day did not exist at night.

This week saw my annual landlord safety check done by British Gas, where they come out and check all the gas appliances in the house. Whilst checking the gas hob the engineer asked if it always turned on in a particular manner, and asked to see me turn one of the rings on. I managed to do so after a couple of attempts, but only when prompted by him did I notice that as I'd turned it on, the only way I could do so had meant I'd had my fingers in the gas flames and left them there until he pointed it out.

For all the 'improvements' I think I've made, I don't think it's worth risking losing everything, including potentially my life, by informing the DWP of 'improvements' that are only improvements so they can remove benefits from the most vulnerable.

Remembrance Sunday

After everyone else had gone, once again we sat and talked. Of past lives and histories, childhoods lost and things to come. Bosnia. The shadow it casts over your life. The months and months after you came back, deeply depressed, unable to function, the gradual rebuilding, again and again.

Eventually, in the small hours as I try to persuade you of the strength, the bravery it has taken for you to overcome trauma after trauma throughout your adult life I finally ask if you think any of these things could have happened to you if not for Bosnia. Surprised, you say to me 'but, of course not, it was always because of Bosnia'.

At 11am today I watched the ceremony at the Cenotaph in silence and my thoughts were with you and every other.

Fireworks

It may only have been a week since my last post, but it's certainly been an eventful one. In chronological order;

The trip to see Big. It was lovely to see him, and after a bit of a struggle on my own unable to call for assistance as it didn't exist in the airport car park at 4.30am, things actually ran really smoothly on that front. I did think as I was left sat alone in a wheelchair next to the aeroplane on the tarmac as the man assisting me wandered off to find someone to work the lift to the plane that maybe they thought disabled people were incapable of committing crimes, or of being any kind of threat, but that would be really stupid, wouldn't it? At the other end I could not have been more impressed with the way the assistance and services were organised, it put everything in this country to shame and just showed how good things could potentially be

Overall, things were as I expected, and had discussed with a couple of friends before I went, the make or break situation, well, for me anyway, having previously tried to end things and move on, and a part of me needed to go and see him for things to end. I don't know what he thinks, or feels, I doubt with him I ever will, which is one of the reasons it had to end for me, but unlike previous times I finally feel a readiness to move on, whatever hold he has had over me for the past three years having come to its own conclusion. I'll always care about him, always be fond of him, suspect we'll always be friends, but as we discussed whilst I was there, neither of us are the people we were when we met, and I feel like I'm about to start a new stage of my life, something I'm strangely excited about.

I got back on the thursday evening, so I was totally knackered and in no mood to drag myself to Toes Hallowe'en party on the friday night. I got a few messages from him throughout the day telling me he'd accept no excuses, and even telling me to get back to bed in the afternoon to make sure I made it! After all that I forced myself to get ready, going for the fetish part of the theme, purely because it meant making no more effort than wearing the contents of my underwear drawer. Leah and her boyfriend had come round to get ready at mine, so we could all be several hours late arriving, meaning things were in full swing when we got there. The 6'5 grim reaper was sat in the kitchen whilst Toes pranced round in his dress and corset by the decks with a guy in jeans and a t shirt. I noticed the tall, dark haired guy as soon as I arrived, but I'm ashamed to admit I thought he was gay, mainly because he was so good looking, but partly forgiveable I suppose at a party full of people where both sex and sexuality are very blurred.

I soon joined the smokers in the garden, wanting to catch up with the grim reaper, but before long fascinated by the conversation of the (all male) group. They were all a dither, having only just realised that the tall, ravishingly pretty girl they'd all been eyeing up wasn't actually a girl. I was more amused than I should have been at this as after a few initial shocked remarks, all but one bloke came rapidly to the conclusion that 'she' should see it as a compliment and moved on from the subject. Or they attempted to. The bloke who was gutted to the point he had tears in his eyes, kept going on and on about his psychological distress, that he actually might not have found out until the last moment was, so overweight, unattractive, and devoid of all personal and social skills that there was no way this attractive girl would ever notice him, and yet he was convinced he'd been in with a serious chance. Bizarre. However, whilst this was going on I had sussed out pretty quick that the seriously good looking guy wasn't gay, or a woman, or any of the other possibilities there that evening, he was it seemed 'just' a friend of a friend of Toes, who just so happened to be devastatingly good looking, Irish, funny, charming, and maybe flirting with me a little bit. I kind of hoped he was anyway, he was sharing my spliff while we were chatting away, back inside for a while, then back outside carrying on chatting when we were watching the fireworks set off by very drunken people in breach of any and every safety rule ever thought of whilst after one or two we ended up cowering in the kitchen, then, as these things happen, at these kind of parties anyway, he went a bit white and had to go to bed. Sigh. I was a bit mortified that I'd killed not just the most attractive man there, but the most good looking man any of us girls had seen for ages. ( I think we're a bit starved of attractive men round here!)

The party invitation had been for the whole weekend, although that's not usually taken up by the likes of me, so its not unusual for people to randomly get in to, or out of bed at any given point, in fact the very first one of Toes parties I went to, the whole evening was spent in his bed, with about 20 other people. No, not that kind of party. Dirty minded lot. Little Miss Red Riding Hood had turned up, just in time for the fireworks, she's a girl Toes knows, and really fancies from work, and she and I spent hours chatting in that way you do when you don't know each other but bond at a party, about men, shoes, clothes, men, sex, men, and men some more. We were talking about some guy she's crazy about at work, and so when Toes asked me today if I thought she might like him, I felt really awkward as she's totally in to this other guy. Eventually we somehow ended up in Toes bedroom, the gorgeous guy crashed out in the other bedroom and several people crashed out in Toes bed while a load of people carried on dancing downstairs.

The girly bonding conversation carried on with Toes and another mate listening and occasionally contributing, but every time I got up to go to the loo I went into the other room to check on the sexy Irishman, partly out of a vague sense of concern and responsibility, and partly just because he was so damn sexy. Mind, he managed to come alive every time I checked on him and chat to me for a few minutes, trying to get me to stay in there with him.

By around 4am although a few hard core dancers were still going there were about 5 people sleeping in Toes room and I'd crashed in the other room, which has no door and is lacking all its walls with the sexy Irishman. We were talking and giggling for a while in the single bed, before kissing, while other people wandered in and out hoping to crash out in the bed, or Toes come to check I wasn't being ravished against my will.

Hours later, after it had got light, we ended up back at my house, at first to sleep, but gradually it became one of those magical weekends where you only get out of bed to get each other clean so you can get each other dirty again. I drove him back to the old friend he was supposed to be spending the weekend with on sunday lunchtime both of us with silly grins on our faces.

He's so good looking that Fruitrock actually cheered earlier when she saw me, and even better he doesn't even seem to know it. Unfortunately he lives between 2.5 to 3.5 hours drive away from me, which puts a bit of a dampner on the whole situation, but we both said we'd like to see each other again, and have been texting since, with him being sure to tell me he won't be able to get my email for a few days as he's in work, which I hope is a good sign. We'll see. Life has already started to feel very different.
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