Dear advocate: please stop calling our chromosome disorder a “superpower”. It’s not a superpower; it causes defecits and disadvantage. Naturally, I understand why you do so: to encourage those youngsters with a diagnosis, helping them to overcome their difficulties. Perhaps you could say that their natural temperament — that sensitivity and kind character often identified …
My next door neighbour reports that when he bought his house sixty years ago, its price was £1,300, repaid over 25 years. When we bought our house just over fifteen years ago, we paid a hundred times that. An eye watering price for a young couple on low incomes, but we would have had to …
The Yorkshire Tea company has the best adverts, without a doubt, always funny and irreverent. But their tea? No, not for me. I’m an Assam man. Or so I just remembered, after buying a big box of Yorkshire muck because nothing else was available. I thought tea would all be much of a muchness, and …
God bless my wife for being so patient with me through those early years of our marriage. I look back now both embarrassed and humbled by all she had to put up with. I took so long to find my feet. God must have had mercy on me, granting such a steadfast companion, through thick …
The old man insists on paying me for helping him with his website. I decline. No payment necessary. He gave me an opportunity to do a good deed. That’s enough. But he insists. So I insist back. I’m not going to take a penny from the old man. Not every deed has to be a …
Family time. Grand Designs. Toasty fire. Fluffy dressing gowns. Followed, of course, by some daft Turkish comedic melodrama, at which point I tune out, plumbing myself into my smartphone.
Life runs by, quicker than a blink of the eye. As the years pass, those sentiments once heard chime ever truer: that when raised alive on that awesome day, we will complain that we tarried on the earth for just an afternoon, or a few hours at most. Perhaps the midlife crisis is a dress …
We talk about someone, and at that very moment they call. We think of someone, and all of a sudden they appear. Over and over, we experience this in our lives, and yet still we conclude that there is nothing special about life at all. Just chemical reactions, or something.
When I was young. I could never understand why kindness was greeted with contempt. Nor could I understand why being nice would so often result in violence, actual or threatened. It seemed so strange that the world was set up to favour the strong, brazen and self-assured. As for those who go out of their …
There are two aspects of my being which I tend to hide from the outside world for very similar reasons: my faith and the name of the condition I have been bestowed with. In both cases, because they are poorly understood and so badly misrepresented, that misunderstandings and prejudices are commonplace. More to the point, …
I wonder. Do others ever look back on the past to question longheld assumptions, as I do? Do they ever ponder past interactions, wondering if they did the right thing? Do they ever wonder what happened to those whose paths they crossed? Do others wonder what became of those they once shared days and weeks …
Schools and their petty rules. Punish bad behaviour, sure. Create a safe environment in which learning can take place unimpeded: we support you in this completely. But enforcing expectations which are not even behaviour issues with strong sanctions, disproportionate to the offence? Why? What’s the point of that, except to diminish the self-esteem of youngsters …
Daily, I have conversations with our children about the importance of studying hard to lay firm foundations for the future. Not for the sake of status and pride, but in pursuit of ease and comfort in years to come. These reflections borne of my own malaise, feeling constrained and constricted by my circumstances. By now, …
