Access All Areas

Two days of poetry readings as part of my local literature festival have been summarily cancelled.

For several years now, they have been held in the upstairs room of a local tea shop. Free entry as long as you buy a cuppa and a cake. Excellent poets, many of them extensively published, travel from all around the area to perform free of charge.

This year, a disability group has complained that the event is not fully accessible because of the stairs, and so it will not now take place. This is quite likely the group that previously led to the cancellation of another regular poetry event in a neighbouring town for similar reasons.

So now the event is equally inaccessible to everyone and we should all be equally happy with this outcome, I guess.

It's a tricky one, isn't it? I'm all for equal access, clearly.  But in my day job I have seen many businesses have to close down, and many landlords go bankrupt, because our country's property portfolio  -  sometimes many hundreds of years old  -  cannot always be adapted to meet the new requirements.  And as a poetry performer I have seen that only running readings that are fully accessible has the net effect of making live performance evenings less easy to hold and therefore over all less accessible.  A pub or tea shop can't give up it's main trading floor without charging a fee and therefore less events like our readings and poetry nights can take place.

Probably now I'll be hoisted up and made an example of, as if I were unsympathetic to the rights and indeed challenges of people with mobility issues. I know, I know, the problems we face in our family trundling about the place with a profoundly disabled child, his chair, his paraphernalia, his occasional disturbing seizures and (in my view) even more disturbing episode of random Exorcist-style projectile vomiting. I'm just saying, it's tricky to tell when something is right, and when doing what seems like the right thing leads to the wrong outcome.

Meanwhile in this politically correct day and age, discrimination and bullying of gingers continues unabated.  Yes I know we are ugly, and pale, and every freckle points to a soul that we have stolen with our evil carrot-headed mischief. And I had heard it rumoured that we smell.

In my day at school, gingers were reputed to smell of piss. Apparently that's not correct.  According to the latest teenage lore, we smell of cake - and not in a good way.

This is another thing I don't really understand. Oh my golly. I think I'll retreat to bed with a cup of tea and a gingerbread-person.