An article by Steve Day
DISABILITY NOW ARTICLE 2007
Hello lovely DN readers. Here I am tucked away amongst the mobility scooters and the adoration of St Tanni. It’s a pleasure to be here, especially as I’ve been out and about helping the GOJO campaign to encourage young disabled people to get out and about on public transport. www.mygojo.co.uk to see me and others gigging on a bus.
I do feel I should use the bus more often, especially as where we live in Lewisham there is, on average, about one bus per person. Bus travel is, statistically, much safer than car driving as well, something you need to consider if the likes of George Michael are driving around. He’s my consolation, George, God’s way of telling me that being deaf, not such a bad thing after all. I only wish, when the magistrate sentenced him she had one of those Wham! t-shirts from the eighties that said ‘CHOOSE LIFE’.
With the campaign in mind I finally decided to use my bus, got on to find there was one other passenger on board, just me, him and the driver, but for some reason we stopped at every stop. No-one got on and no-one got off. This puzzled me somewhat, ‘til we’d been a couple of miles and I suddenly realised, I’d been leaning on the button.
I think I’m cursed when it comes to any form of transport. I often fly with Easyjet, and I now have an aversion to the colour orange. I get put off by the classification you get given on your boarding card depending how late you check in: A; Nutter who’s camped out all night to be first, B: Slightly Anal, wears a cardigan, C: Normal, D: Delinquent. The worst was once when, for reasons of deafness, I got assigned PB on my boarding card, ‘Pre Board’. This was not the luxury I envisaged. Strolling on with the mums with babies I had two hundred pairs of eyes burning into me all thinking, “What the f-ing hell’s wrong with him?” It was all I could do to not develop a sort of justificatory limp.
Even ships have been unlucky for me. I once did a gig on a cruise. I thought it would be all glamour, MILFs at sea or something, but it was nothing like that because everyone was so old. Not just slightly middle aged but the oldest people I’d ever seen alive. People who looked like they were made of nothing but paper and a heartbeat. When the ship docked in Naples and a hearse pulled up at the dockside I really wasn’t sure if they were picking someone off, or dropping them off. My gig went really badly, and worse than that I realised I was stuck on the boat with them for another five days afterwards. That’s when I found out one of the really good things about Alzheimer’s disease because by the next day they’d forgotten the whole thing. Two of them thought I was their grandson, I got a cake and a new cardigan.
Come on everybody, Get On The Bus.