baroque_mongoose

I read at church now and again. And the way that goes is I trundle up to the front in the scooter and someone hands me a microphone. Not that I couldn't manage to project my voice (it's a school hall that seats about 300, so fairly big but not ridiculously so), but the place is set up for microphones, so that's what we use. It's all perfectly straightforward and nobody gives it a second thought; and the last time I read, they gave me the first chapter of Ecclesiastes and you can have an absolute ball putting in the emphasis there, so I got a few unexpected compliments. Well, really, anyone could make that passage hum.

Well. Now I have been asked to do one of the readings at my mother's funeral on Thursday, and it's a beautiful chunk of Isaiah (there are so many of those). However, I've also been told it would be "better" if I brought the rollator rather than the wheelchair (as if I can't use the wheelchair as a rollator as well over a short distance, so it's more versatile than the rollator), because I have to get up one step to read from the lectern.

You see the problem here, don't you? It's not that I'm unable to do that. I can manage one step; I'll probably have to steady myself on the lectern, and it's going to be slightly awkward, but it's do-able. The problem is that in this particular church, while it's a good church in many other respects, they're so fixated on "we have to read from the lectern" that everything has to work round that. Someone who had to use a wheelchair all the time would simply not be able to read in that church, no matter how well they did it, because they couldn't get to the lectern.

Yeah, well, no, frankly. Churches, of all places, need to be taking the lead when it comes to ensuring that everyone is included. In this case it's a simple enough fix; I believe the microphone is fixed to the lectern, but they do have other microphones, so it would just be a question of, perhaps, one of the music group temporarily handing one to a reader in a wheelchair. (There is another consideration in play here, too. Our church is the sort of place where you're encouraged to bring your own Bible or borrow one of the church ones. The church where my mother's funeral is taking place is not. It's a Catholic church. There is a large missal sitting on the lectern, open at the day's readings. Some Catholics do bring their own missal, but it's not universal practice and it's not specifically encouraged. But, even so, there's probably going to be at least one person in the building with a small missal the reader could borrow, if they don't have their own.)

The priest there is a nice bloke, and a reasonable one at that, so I think I may be having a quiet word with him about it after the service - I don't need to do it before, since I can manage, but I should do afterwards for the sake of those who can't. After all, it's not a question of anyone deliberately intending to exclude anyone. It's just that - as in so many cases like this - they haven't thought.

Well, now I get to help them think. They're welcome.

I recently had someone inform me that disability discrimination didn't exist because it was illegal. I was far too polite to say "oh, my sweet summer child," but those were the words that were going through my head at the time. I mean, when was the last time someone made a law to protect those with less power from those with more, and the people with more power just went "oh, right, then, we'd better obey the law"? Nope. They all wiggle round it as much as possible, and, because this law is so hard to enforce (it's extremely hard to prove disability discrimination, even when it's extremely obvious from the way people's faces fall when you show up for an interview and they realise you have a disability), most of the time they'll just blithely ignore it.

I'm not saying this applies universally. There are a few employers who recognise that, often, the best person for a particular role may be someone with disabilities, and there are a few more who think a quota looks good (that type will tend to employ people with very mild disabilities as far as possible, to allow them to tick boxes, because they don't really want to go to the trouble of making adaptations). But even the Department of Work and Pensions, which is not exactly known for its sympathetic attitude towards people who have difficulty in finding paid work, accepts that disability discrimination is still an enormous problem in this country, and further accepts that employers are highly unlikely to offer me a job I can do, for that very reason. "A job I can do" means working from home; but employers, almost without exception, see that kind of job not as a reasonable adaptation for someone who can't commute to an office, but as a perk for the sort of employee who might otherwise get headhunted.

And, of course, it's not just employers. My ex-husband, who was blind, used to talk about the "eyesight to brain ratio", because he would frequently be perceived as stupid (one thing he certainly was not) for no other reason but that he couldn't see. There is no logic behind this, and I found it especially strange that it happened in Sheffield, where we had a blind MP (David Blunkett) for many years. I knew him slightly. I have to say I didn't get on with him, because he had a one-track mind; he could not get off the subject of politics even for a minute, so he was possibly the only person I've ever met in my life I would call a bore. But there was no denying he was a very intelligent man, and so you would have thought that, with this example in front of them in public life, people might just have had the sense to put two and two together. Apparently not.

As I've previously mentioned, I help at the local food bank; and some time ago we had a bloke from one of the local housing developers who wanted to film us. Not because that particular developer had anything to do with the food bank, but because "look, here's a thriving community already, we're going to be developing it further" and, I think, hoping to pick up a bit of undeserved reflected credit. This bloke talked to all the other volunteers at some length, and completely ignored me sitting there in my mobility scooter until he was told that in no circumstances would he be filming any of our visitors, so someone would have to play that role. At that point, he appeared to notice me for the first time.

"Would you like to do that?" he asked.

"No," I replied.

I let him stand there and rev in neutral for a moment before I continued.

"If you're going to film me," I said, "you can film me doing what I normally do here. Don't you think it would be good to show people with disabilities contributing to the community?"

Honestly. From the look on his face, you'd think a sheep had walked up to him and started reciting Shakespeare. It must have been at least a minute before he finally managed to pull himself back into gear and stammer something to the effect that, yes, that would be good, he hadn't quite thought of it like that.

Well, no. He hadn't thought at all. In the end we decided not to let him film, full stop, and I for one was not disappointed about that. To be honest I don't get that kind of thing too often, because anyone who gives me a chance to speak for so much as a couple of minutes is going to notice that my brain is not in any way disabled; he just didn't do that till it was too late.

Pretty nearly everyone ends up disabled in some way, given enough time. The only exceptions are the ones who die young as a result of something like an accident, and I'm guessing most people don't want to be in that category. But I'm truly amazed at all the people who seem to think it'll never happen to them.