Comment on: 'We're in a right state'

Comment on: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/12/disability-britain-society-lucy-mangan?commentpage=last#end-of-comments

Partial repost.

Society ascribes a sliding scale of deference to illness and infirmity. If your inability to rise from your bed is caused by, for instance, that genius idea you had at half nine the previous night to switch to shorts, and your symptoms include headache, nausea, 40% proof perspiration and the nagging thought that you did something dreadful in your left shoe last night, you are unlikely to get much sympathy. Consideration for others should, however, be extended to those who have trouble getting about, ranging from those struggling with three bags or more of rebellious shopping, through those with sticks or crutches and wheelchairs, all the way up to speeding ambulances or creeping hearses.

The possible exception is when one sees a tanned, fit looking sort with a colourful cast on his foot and you briefly wonder how deserving of sympathy is somebody who may have just stubbed their toe when pissed out their skull on schnapps during their recent skiing holiday.

Social attitudes towards illness and infirmity have changed significantly over time. A hundred years ago, there was a simple scale; standard-issue ‘healthy’ was upright and able-bodied, but afflicted by any number and combination of maladies that stunted your growth, gave you sores, caused you to walk funny, caused you to look funny, or caused people to look funny at you, throw rocks at you, or in extreme cases hound you out of the village with pitchforks.

If you were ‘poorly’ this normally meant that working eighteen hours a day in a factory or down a coal mine had left you with the sort of cough that would shake a lesser man apart at the seams and a talent for producing different coloured phlegm to order, including multi-coloured on bank holidays.

‘Badly’ was a description of the after-effects of a threshing accident. Today we would say ‘in a critical condition’ or ‘has anybody found his head yet?’ In the huge open plan mills of the industrial revolution, being caught in a loom and accidentally woven into the pattern of a carpet was so common that the drama was downplayed. Likewise, farming and industrial machinery consisted of overheated boilers, spinning flanges, swooping sharp bits and, of course, flywheels driving exposed belt-loops designed to catch not just extremities but bonnets, frilly shirts and other stunningly impractical clothing of the age.

Luckily, we now have advances not just in health and safety, but tight clothing and, of course, medication. But even the cure can be tricky. For instance, not long ago I decided to treat a sniffle by trying an allegedly ‘non-drowsy’ berry-flavoured drink. What I remember is a sensation of hot ribena and then waking up at two in the afternoon feeling a bit queer and not at all surprised that housewives get hooked on painkillers, it makes the dull bit of the afternoon go quicker than two sherries and an episode of ‘antiques roadshow’.

But at least it was a proper chemical cure. When faced with a complex problem or illness there’s nothing worse than these quack cures that homoeopathists peddle - shoving a banana up your arse to cure a headache or whatever (peel it first - you don’t want to look stupid). The purveyors of quack cures should, at least, be honest in their trade, possibly by ditching the white lab coat and simply rolling into town in a horse-drawn wagon, pulling up in the town square and putting on a medicine show flogging ‘Professor McTeeths all-nachural-snakebite-liniment’, a patent cure-all for warts, coughs, lost limbs, teenage boys playing with themselves and, if you drink the stuff, sobriety.

Of course there is a school of thought that you can treat just about anything with alcohol. For instance the belief that a ‘hot toddy’ can have a positive benefit on a cold is so widespread that it’s a wonder you can’t get Glenfiddich on the NHS. Certainly there’s a time and a place for alcohol in the treatment of illness; having a drink to celebrate your hangover dissipating or knocking back an enormous gin while you tell your friends the tale of how you came to lose your arm, while standing on your brand-new tiger skin rug.

(Painful pelvis sounds like a right pain in the arse…and hip, and whole pelvisish region. Hope you are once more able to frolic like a spring lamb on speed soon).

Stuff

I read recently that some supermarket is going to start 'offering' (that is, charging for) a dating service whereby they set you up with a potential partner based on the contents of your respective baskets.

Personally I don't think it's the greatest idea in the world to match people with similar purchasing habits, as nothing puts a strain on a relationship quite like the bitter resentment that stems from your partner eating the last bag of quavers, while people who buy quorn should simply not be allowed to breed.

At the value end of the dating service, it's probably nothing more sophisticated than making sure that people who bulk-buy marmite are not matched with those who do not, while, supermarkets being supermarkets, there's probably a luxury end where blokes can not only be set up with women, but can be informed when they are likely to be ovulating and so time their approach to coincide with a time their prospective partner is craving sperm and hence not too picky.

Of course the idea is not new, people have been checking each other out at the check out for years. Indeed it’s quite acceptable to load your basket with the sort of stuff that would make you attractive to the opposite sex, like the keys to your villa in Italy and plenty of single portion ready meals. Try to avoid a dozen cans of cheap, super-strength cider and a DVD featuring Jeremy Clarkson though.

The service is predicated on the assumption that we are defined by what we consume and, certainly, our stuff gives a clue as to our personality. For instance, if a bloke has shelves full of action figures still in their boxes, he’s likely to be a reasonable sort and the body parts in his freezer will be neatly stacked. However, if a young woman has shelves full of My Little Pony, out of their boxes and showing clear signs of grooming, run! Use the window, not the door, it’s quicker. Never mind the drop, just do it man!

Men have, of course, been storing their tat off-site in bespoke stuff-deposit structures for many years and a glimpse into a chap’s shed is truly a glimpse into his soul, except with more homebrew and well-thumbed porn. That people now have so much stuff they don’t have a place for it all and have spent so much on it they can’t afford to move to a bigger home has not gone unnoticed by business, hence those self-storage places that have sprung up round the country, allowing couples who are moving in together a place to hide, sorry to store all his hideous furniture and framed movie posters until she can eBay the lot or simply torch the place.

By the way, if a female colleague mentions in passing that she is moving at the weekend and putting some of her stuff in storage, remarking that it’ll transform the inside of the storage unit into something resembling a typical female’s front room, don’t on Monday morning ask her if she had a hard time stuffing her ladycave at the weekend. The resulting tribunal won’t result in you being sacked, but you will be tagged as ‘insensitive’ by HR. Like I care.

I’ve always thought that if my personality was wiped as the result of some medical experiment gone wrong, conspiracy or, more likely, trying to fork a muffin out of the toaster while wearing a hat made of tin-foil, I could construct it by re-reading all the books I own, being in the lucky position of not having an original thought in my head and having cobbled together what passes for a personality from a collection of fiction and the odd reference book about cheese. Umberto Eco wrote about this process in ‘The mysterious flame of Queen Loana’ so it turns out that even that idea’s not original. I mean, I thought of it first, but just because he wrote it down he gets all the credit.

But he didn’t take it to its logical conclusion, just like putting fresh fruit in your shopping basket because you know nobody wholesome is going to strike up a conversation with you if it contained your actual dietary staples of pot noodle and mars bars, you could load your reading matter to tailor your reconstructed personality to something, well, a little less freakish.

And the place to start if your teenage diaries. That’s why I’m currently bidding on eBay for a blank Letts diary for my teen years. I’ll then be able to substitute this for my actual diary and convince myself that I was in fact a stylish, confident and happy teen, rather than the shambling collection of grease and neuroses that was actually the case. Hence, for instance, replacing this not untypical entry: ‘Saw [redacted] playing netball today. Made me feel funny. Went home, touched myself. Watched ‘Allo ‘Allo. Went to bed.’ with the rather more erudite ‘Saw [redacted] playing netball. She is beauty poise and elegance and my heart swells with yearning, a divine ache every time I see her. Went home, masturbated to the point of dehydration, watched ‘Allo ‘Allo. Went to bed’.

Big Society and Dystopia repost

Growing up, those twin essential devices from stopping healthy developmental play in the fresh air; foxed-to-the-point-of-badgered library books and terrifying BBC children’s drama, provided essential preparation for what to expect from the dystopian future.

If you read the books of John Christopher, dystopia came in the form of some sort of disaster that set technology levels back to those of the dark ages (alien invasion, mankind tinkering with nature, everyone on the planet simultaneously joining Civil War re-enactment societies, that sort of thing), while the BBC’s Bleak Future was essentially far muddier then the present, being a place where the appearance of a steam engine was greeted with exactly the sort of slack-jawed mixture of fear and awe currently on the faces of the kiddies being traumatised by this tea-time apocalyptic drama, filmed in the West Midlands to save money.

The drama conveyed to kiddies with some style that when they grew up there would be more chance of them being a subsistence farmer than a spaceman* and, most brutally of all, ‘Angel Delight’ would no longer existed.

What was never predicted (along with mobile ‘phone ring tones so irritating it makes you wonder if perhaps the plot of some of these stories: that advanced technology is jealously guarded by a social elite or at least people with taste, is not in fact a good idea) was the solution proposed by politicians to head off a future where the fabric of society is as ragged as a pair of Primark pants after a boil wash: the Big Society.

The Big Society is not, as you might think, Brobdingnag, but rather a model for the future of community services. Essentially funding is slashed for supporting council services and the people who rely on those services are told to ‘get on with it’, much in the way the same phrase is used when you are locked in your study with a bottle of scotch and a service revolver after you have lost a rather important battle or, worse still, committed social suicide by tonguing an unsuitable minor royal.

The Big Society suffered a set-back this week when Liverpool Council announced that they didn’t want to be considered part of the pilot for an idea thought up by posh boys, but instead were quite content to continue to be considered as a city of lovable rogues, chirpy female flatmates or, of course, lesbian patio-layers (might be getting that last one a bit confused).

A ‘pilot’ by the way is where you don't have enough confidence to roll out an ill-conceived scheme nationally and so do it in a few backwater areas. So, when it bombs like a fat kid jumping into a swimming pool, you can explain that either the idea needs work or the bloody yokels in charge of the pilot couldn't be trusted to run a car boot stall, never mind a complex social experiment and anyway, next time the posters will be better).

The gist of the Big Society is that English people, who by tradition would all like to live in castles with moats far from any neighbours and by practice only really talk to their neighbours if they are caught dumping their garden waste over the fence, are supposed to take a community approach and look after things like keeping the streets tidy and, no doubt when the cuts to public services really start to bite, other jobs currently undertaken by trained professionals including; maintaining parks (we can graze our sheep on them when we're all reduced to subsistence farming), health care (who needs doctors now we have the internet - what's easier, seven years at medical school or Googling 'tickly cough'?), or air traffic control.

What certainly won’t be needed are civic poo scoopers. This is thanks to the invention of the doggie bag. Certainly not to be confused with a device used to transport expensive leftovers from a restaurant (itself an alien concept to anyone brought up to believe that not scraping the plate at the Berni Inn until the last morsel of food, and quite a lot of the pattern, was removed was a sin), but a bag full of Scoobie Poo. Thanks to resilient, hole-free (and that’s important), plastic bags, owners of defecating hounds can now swoop with the speed of a cockle-picker racing the tide and simultaneously bag the unthinkable and make a mental note to stop feeding Fido leftover masala.

*Ironically, this is true, if by subsistence level farmer you mean owner of a boutique farm in the Cotswolds producing some sort of organic cheese and pork scratching smoothie concoction that is perversely popular in Japan, sells for a fortune at farmers’ markets and has just been picked up for national distribution by Waitrose.