Well this had been the case on my patio until recently. But when I went to examine my broad beans one Sunday evening I found one of the foul cr’eatures eating its way through a leaf. I flung it across the patio and then felt slightly guilty. The peas have been destroyed – I should have noticed earlier. It’s amazing how quickly the snails can cause havoc.

So it’s out with the pellets and Slug Gone mulch. I’ve also put copper rings around a few of the plants but I’m not convinced this does anything. Most of the actual pots already have copper tape around them and that didn’t stop the slimy suckers. Slug Gone was praised on the Organic Garden Catalogue website when I bought it but it can’t be that good because they don’t sell it any more. I suppose it’s beneficial as a mulch anyway but now I’ve finished it I’ve bought what seems to be their latest favourite: Slug Snub. These are heavily re-caffeinated coffee grounds which is supposed to suppress snails’ appetites. The pellets must be useless because I never find any bodies. I have a trap filled with beer too. Hopefully one of these approaches will do some good!



Where do I want to be careerwise anyway? I have never had any long term “career goals”. I have had things I think I’m good at and tried to get work involving them. My most long term job, with a Disabled People’s Organisation, seems looking back on it to have just come to me. That was fortunate for me, because I ended up being paid for something I thought was useful and seemed fairly good at. But things changed and, still struggling to come to terms with the fact that as a disabled person I can’t try and get *any* job in a factory, doing bar work etc, I need to decide on the sorts of jobs I’m looking for and get into a position where someone will give me one. It’s got to be a well managed project, not a wandering journey. Of course few people really want to work in bars or factories anyway, but I find it difficult not being able to seek such work as a means to an end. Still, I have decided on some goals and a plan to implement them.

This plan involves something I would have never considered until now: contacting the Disability Employment Adviser. Oh the the joys of the job centre: discussing your personal situation in front of everyone, being told you aren’t entitled to benefit, banging your feet while getting out of the ridiculously tiny lift, being turned away because they gave you the wrong appointment time. Still, I decided it’s just possible they can help me, and I ought to give it a try. So I banish my cynicism, swallow my pride and phone the job centre.

And the line went dead. They say they’ll put me through to my local Centre, but it just rang and rang before simply cutting me off. No answerphone, no “There’s no answer at the moment, would you like to call later?” from a helpful receptionist. Just cut off. Great.

I wasn’t surprised by this but still it’s pretty shoddy. I suppose I could have tried again but after psyching myself up once was enough. I will have to go in to the job centre and ask to make an appointment there. Not a good start.

When I recently filled in one of my housing association landlord’s zillions of forms I left the part asking for my National Insurance number blank. The other day I got a voicemail from them saying I hadn’t filled in the form properly and they “need” my National Insurance number.

Someone I know also was asked to give their NI number to a *potential* employer (Tesco) and could not proceed with the job application until they filled it in.

At my last care review I was asked for it by Social Services. On asking why they needed it they said “It’s nothing to do with benefits. We just use it as a reference number”. Ummmm…are you incapable of creating your own referencing system?

Call me old fashioned, but I thought NI numbers were personal information and only needed by, and therefore only to be disclosed to, people dealing with tax, national insurance or benefits. The information from the directgove website agrees me:

“It’s very important you keep your number safe and don’t give it to anyone who does not need it. This will help prevent identity fraud…”

And Social Services and landlords are not listed as people needing it. Nor is using it as a reference number listed as a reason to use it.

Hopefully I can refuse to give it to my landlord without causing problems for myself. I figure that with personal data, the fewer people/places that have it the less chance of it being misused.

I’ve heard this lately from quite a few people who think putting the clocks back is a bad idea and say “I don’t know why we do it. We’re the only country that does”. When I was a kid I used to think we were the only country to do it. Where does this idea come from?

Curious…

They tickle me from the mouth of a friend
who offers me food to try
after declaring it “vile”

Reviving and wholesome they sweetly sneak
into my festival tent
where journeys and music mix into sleep

Pinching my heart they thrust me free
when leonard cohen, aged seventy three,
dazzled thousands and silenced me.

They softly stroke from ear to ear
as in simple calm i hear
the purring of my cats.

They rummage in rubble or dawdle sometimes
but i mostly eventually find
the bringers of my smiles

Copyright © 2009 by Catherine Turner. All rights reserved

But I’m not in the mood. I find the topic fascinating and important in
lots of ways but my emotions are rather delicate at the moment so I
prefer not to think about it, especially on Valentine’s Day.

Eleven years ago a drunken man who I couldn’t see, hear properly or
touch in a noisy student club asked a drunken me “Can you have sex?” And I felt flattered because sex was somewhat mysterious to me and I took the question to mean that this man – who I knew nothing about beyond the fact he wanted to know whether I “could have sex” – wanted sex with me.

These days I don’t go to noisy clubs, and I would find anyone who asked me that question in that context offputting. To me the question “can you have sex” may or may not be asking something specific about the mechanics of one’s body, but at the same time it’s masking the more fundamental question of “are you human?” Because every human has sexual desire and so in my book – yes, everyone “can have sex”.

Of course that’s not what the guy meant! And I wasn’t bothered then about the questions which occupy me now. These include “how on earth am I going to find a partner when I do the same things with the same people week in, week out?”; “how do I, as a blindy wheely, express my desire and how do others perceive it/me?”; and “who can I find to accompany me and share some desire, expanding horizons, new experiences, comfort and support while we’re here on this grubby beautiful planet?”.

Thanks to decent, accessible housing, technology, a substantial care package, brilliant Personal Assistants and many other things I’m actually able to explore these questions – something I seriously doubt would have been allowed to be an issue if I’d lived permanently in an institution, for example, which was a real and frightening possibility at one point.

As my favourite (I’ve tried a few!) dating website, OkCupid, was pointing out recently – we’re in a recession but messages on OkCupid are free – spread the love!

So my (day late) contribution to this topic is to revel in the fact that I can spread the loves, and pains, and anything else that makes us human, whether we’re disabled or not. I hope you can too.

In these days of powerful computers and speech synthesis braille often gets overlooked or rejected as being old fashioned, too difficult to learn, and various other criticisms. But braille has unique, powerful qualities which are invaluable to a blind person who masters it, and I think it’s crucial we give it a much needed boost and put pressure wherever it’s needed for people to have the chance of learning it. It is difficult to learn, but boy is it worth it! And whoever said worthwhile things were easy to come by?

Here are some personal reflections of why braille has been so important to me.

When, aged eleven, I first dipped my finger into the world of braille I had no inkling it would ever be more than a curious hobby for me. It really was a “dipping”, my eyes were more involved than my fingers, along with a BBC computer and very determined teacher. Whenever I did touch the page I could barely tell that there were individual dots, let alone distinguish patterns they made. So I carried on with the graphics accompanied by monotonous beeps from the BBC and avoided the cold frustration I felt whenever touching the dots. But one day a year or two later I did manage to crack that bumpy code.

The time I became able to start reading braille, rather than deciphering hostile bumps, was when I discovered it was a vehicle for something I definitely wanted to do: the school play. I was using print as my method of reading and writing. But lighting in our school’s drama studio was not conducive to my reading and anyway I felt hampered straining at a script through a magnifier in dull light whilst simultaneously trying to move around and respond to other people. Reading my braille script I found I was able to stop worrying about how to read and start worrying about how to act!

After that, using braille became a real option for me. The difficulties gradually eased and because I found advantages to reading braille rather than print I didn’t mind the frustrations. I could catch up on unfinished homework (unfinished because my classmates and I had spent most of “prep time” discussing music, rearranging the furniture in our classroom or just generally messing around) by reading in bed without disturbing room mates. I chose to use braille hymn books in assembly purely because I’d heard that people sometimes changed the meanings of the words by scratching out some dots. I provided some amusement when, responding to a teacher’s apparent surprise that I was using braille on that occasion, I said that I wanted braille because every time I leaned forward to read print my nose started running (I had hayfever at the time).

So braille became an important tool for me. The ability to use it helped enormously in my school/college work and, just as importantly, allowed me to join in a certain kind of culture among braille users.

By the time I started university my vision had deteriorated to a point where print was not a viable option. I used a mixture of braille, audio and electronic material instead. I preferred braille but couldn’t always use it because of its large space requirements and the lack of available material. Whenever possible I used braille though. There is nothing more distracting when discussing a piece of text in class than hearing a screen reader’s electronic voice babbling, say, Plato’s “Republic” in one ear whilst trying to concentrate on what a tutor is saying with the other. When I did use speech instead of braille in seminars I had to decide whether to understand what was being discussed or to join in the discussion, I didn’t have the capacity to do both. When giving presentations I felt much more confident when I could use braille, the ideas I’d put on paper could flow straight from my fingers to my mouth without the awkward computerised interpreter in between. This was important for me not just for academic work but also for other parts of my life as I was involved in various societies and often facilitated meetings supported by notes I’d made.

However I was forced to stop using braille because of worsening sensation in my fingers. Reading it became slow and difficult so I stopped and got used to relying on speech synthesis. I was able to work in this way but it was tiring and presentations became an embarrassing necessity.

It’s only been in the last year or so that I’ve regained my connection with braille and the qualities it brings. I discovered a few years ago that I could read braille if it was written on plastic type labels or on braille displays because the dots are sharper and firmer. I used labels to identify CDs etc but it was only recently that I acquired a braille display and so truly brought braille literacy back into my life.

I’ve now discovered new benefits to using braille. The difficulties during the school play were nothing compared to listening to synthetic speech, to the director, keeping the laptop on my lap and driving my powerchair, oh and putting effort into the actual acting too, all at the same time. My Braillenote (a braille-based PDA) sits easily on my lap and makes no noise if I don’t want it to.

I can read on noisy trains.

I can understand bank statements more easily by feeling the figures rather than hearing them.

But braille literacy’s gifts are more profound than its tangible uses. It keeps my mind alive and connected with the world around me. My spelling -something I had always been quite good at – became awful when I stopped reading braille. I couldn’t visualise words like I used to. Now that I’m reading again I’m able to visualise in a pattern that’s a kind of fusion between print and braille. I make few spelling mistakes but more importantly this visualisation and imagination that braille stimulates is part of who I am. Spelling is part of language and language is something fundamental to our being; it’s culture and identity. Braille literacy keeps me connected with culture in its widest possible sense.

For me there’s also something unique about the physicality of reading braille. Being a wheelchair user means I don’t experience much direct physical contact with the world and people around me. When using braille I feel more connected with them – it’s almost as if, by feeling the words underneath my fingers, I’m getting a sense of the rough feeling of gravel under my feet, the cramped intimacy of a crowded pub corner or the grimy satisfaction of cleaning a dirty floor. Listening to descriptions – whether by speech synthesis or a human reader – is a pale imitation because it comes through something or someone else first before it reaches my mind.

I’m glad I can experience these sensations and benefit from the fuel braille provides to my imagination. I look forward to the doors it might open for me in the future (I hope to learn braille music). Most of all I deeply appreciate the dull beeps of the BBC computer and determined energy of my teacher all those years ago.

Not sure I’m able to say what “this” is at the moment – I haven’t read many newspapers or listened to much news lately, and when I had the radio on this week I thought I might as well not bother. The economy’s going pretty mushy, Marvin knows whether/how our planet can survive what we’re doing to it and all they talked about on the radio this week was whether Gordon Brown is “the right man” to see us through these economic times, and how well/poorly constructed various politicians’ conference speeches were. I’m sure there are plenty of other real crises happening in the world but like I said I haven’t listened to the news much lately.

I really must do something about my current lack of political or news awareness. I’m not involved in any political groups any more so I don’t pick things up that way. I do the very occasional bit of reading things like Socialist Worker but I also like to listen to news/the radio while I’m getting up in the morning – I do love my BBC radio!

One factor is – everyday things like getting up, getting dressed, eating etc take me so bloody long (being disabled) that I guess I want my news quite short so I can listen to it while I’m doing other things. And of course you don’t get quality discussion/hard questions in hourly news bulletins.

I can still do something about this though – after all I do get weekly CDs from the Talking Newspapers Association. But what do I subscribe to? “Arts And Entertainment Weekly” – no wonder I’m out of touch!

Having said that it was seeing a play that got me thinking about my current ignorance. In “Death Of An Anarchist” one highly talented and pissed off mimic runs rings round the authorities and brings some police to their knees in his quest to find the truth. Towards the end of the show he points out to the audience that we’re such fans in this country of voting (Big Brother etc), and asks us to now vote on whether or not he should set off a bomb, whether the society we’re making for ourselves is really the best we can hope for.

I found it a good show, and it got me thinking towards the end. I felt encouraged that the place was packed, and quite a few of the audience seemed pretty young. I wonder if the sixteenish year old I overheard yesterday saying “I hate politics” would have enjoyed it. I thought to myself as they went by “if what I’ve heard on the radio this week equals ‘politics’ I hate it too”.

Now I’m off to find some news to read, and see what else I can subscribe to from Talking Newspapers.

My first problem was that I’d heard a lot of the material before from his “Jeremy Hardy Speaks To The Nation” radio shows. The live show wasn’t particularly billed as containing new material – the publicity put more emphasis on him being a well established comedian – but even so I somehow expected more than half the gags to be unfamiliar, and it turned out to be the other way around.

I don’t think it was purely the material though – I’ve listened to several of his radio shows plenty of times and do still laugh. Somehow he just didn’t seem to deliver the lines with as much confidence/energy as usual. And whereas his radio shows have themes like “How To Die” or “How To Look”, last night he seemed to wander around with not much connecting the different topics/gags. Perhaps he’s always like this live – I’ve only ever heard him on the radio before – but it didn’t work for me.

That said, the ability to laugh also does depend on mood. I saw Paul Foot last week, and he too wanders from topic to topic – I can’t think of how his “System for Awkwardness Free Encounters” and a mime about a cat sanctuary and a fishmonger’s were linked together. Yet that didn’t bother me, and I found his show very entertaining.

But this week I’m struggling with depression, and though comedy/art of various kinds is more likely than many other things to seep in through the black fog around me, said fog does rather skew my perspective. Perhaps I’m more discerning at these times. Or perhaps it makes me a fickle fan.