skibbley

This morning I go into town for a work meeting. I get on the bus with my white cane and the driver says "[Number] to [destination], yeah?" And I know this, it's the only bus that stops at this stop, but I still feel so good when it happens. The drivers are supposed to tell blind people this but it doesn't happen to me often.

So I smile (the driver can't see it behind my mask but he can hear it) and say "thank you!"

"You're very welcome," he says, surprisingly me again.

A few kind words, a few seconds' extra effort, and I feel so much more a part of society.

Reading poetry always makes me want to write poetry (which I almost never actually do). But I especially strongly want to write poetry now as I'm reading Hanif Abdurraqib, even though these are technically essays and not poems. He writes poetically -- I guess maybe that's more what I want to do, than write poems as such. More what I'm prone to doing, I guess.

On the bus journey this morning, I read an essay about Atmosphere and St. Cloud Minnesota (where my brother went to college) and driving to St. Cloud from Columbus, OH (which I more or less did with my boyfriend a decade earlier when we went to visit my best friend from high school who was briefly in Columbus after graduation), and I was in tears even before it got to the end and was an essay about the juxtaposition of this transcendent show with learning afterwards of the murder of Tamir Rice. Which meant it was the day before the ninth anniversary of my brother dying.

When Tanni Grey-Thompson, a wheelchair user, had to crawl off a train because there were no staff who could help her and we're still decades away from step-free boarding in Great Britain, one of the things she said afterwards has stuck with me ever since:

A train exec asked me once, what do you want? I told him I just want the same miserable experience of commuting as everyone else.

This is relevant to my work too; we just had a meeting today about how we define what good looks like for disabled people's experience of the public realm: we can't say there's no annoyances or problems of course because no one has that. It's just that the same amount everyone else has would be an improvement for us. And I think part of why I was able to get lost in the book and feel all my feelings and drift through all those memories... I'm not saying it wouldn't happen anyway on a day when the bus barely stopped for me at all or whatever. But I think it really does feel easier to do that on a day when the bus driver made me feel supported and safe because my presence on his bus wasn't a surprise or unexpected.

• I've been drinking coffee most days lately; I have no idea why. As the person who's awake first in the mornings, I make a pot of tea for the household, enough for us each to have some. I'm the only one who can drink coffee in this house so I normally can't be bothered with it, but lately it just seems like a good idea almost every morning. I think I'm feeling homesick.

• My ankle has been bad the last few days. It does a thing that just makes me feel uncomfortably aware of it sometimes, which started on Friday, but it actively hurt on Saturday. I got through lift club thanks to my old pal ibuprofen gel. And I pre-emptively added some more on Sunday because D and I helped J move, into P's house. It's been a little better today, but cranky after circuits.

• J was already at P's a lot thanks to P's care needs in the last year, but now they're formally ending their tenancy and moving all their stuff into P's place. Their flat was up a flight of stairs and almost everything was going up a flight of stairs in P''s house to the Room For Putting All The Things In. So yeah, a lot of stairs. P fed us afterwards and J was generous in their praise of us when I thought we had the easy work, just lifting and moving things. They had to do all the decision-making, and a good part of the emotional work, themselves and that's by far the most difficult.

• This morning, along with telling D and I that they hoped we weren't suffering (I wasn't! I truthfully told them that I went to bed almost immediately last night so I'd had lots of sleep and felt surprisingly good for a Monday morning), J also told V "thank you for training 2 good spoony allies. To get to that level you need to be incredibly kind for starters but it also takes a lot of practice with a brilliant mentor." I was very happy to agree that V has been a brilliant mentor to me in learning how to not be a dick to chronically ill people, or at least less of one than I was before I knew them. I really lucked out in them and D being the first friends I made in Manchester.

• I forgot I have an in-person meeting tomorrow morning -- only in Manchester, but still. I'd neglected to put it on my work calendar so I was extremely glad for the reminder e-mail today! And the offer of meeting me at the train station nearest to wherever this building is, which saves me from finding it myself. My guide is also visually impaired, so fingers crossed we find each other tomorrow, heh.

• I am extremely grateful that we have access to covid vaccines, that we can afford them now that they're not freely available. We talked about the importance of D and I getting ours early enough that they'll have kicked in before we go to Germany (which is in less than a month now!) and other stuff has conspired to mean that it's good to do this week. The only time we're all free is Wednesday afternoon. I am going to London for work on Thursday, which means an early start and a long day. I don't normally react very strongly to the covid shot but please cross your fingers for me because it'd be just my luck to be wiped out by it this time!

• "Touch my leg!" D greeted me with this morning, and held up his calf. He's wearing new corduroys! They're extremely soft, and a very pretty dark blue.

• Last week he said "Sniff my beard!" He ordered new clothes, he's trying to grow out his beard which means finding a beard oil that doesn't set off his sensory aversions to smells or greasy things. His careful research in this area has resulted in something I'm borrowing because I actually like how it makes me smell, and I'm starting to have enough beard to want it to be softer and particularly for the skin underneath to be a bit better looked-after.

I meant to share a while ago that diffrentcolours found that there's now a blue plaque to commemorate Sister Rosetta Tharpe playing in Manchester.

The plaque is part of an initiative by social historian and broadcaster Karen Gabay, to place plaques across Manchester, honouring Black musicians who left a mark on the city.

D found a video has more of the performers. And he said:

Wilbraham Road station was on what's now the Fallowfield Loop cycle path, between the Alexandra Road South bridge and Athol Road. I'm tempted to go down there among the trees and foliage where the station stood, and listen to it where it was performed in 1964. Maybe in the rain for verisimilitude...

(The BBC article has a quote from a fan who attended that gig in 1964, and he said "I remember the weather was cold and horrible but the music made up for it.")

I love this idea and I do want to do this.