Tales from the Tigerfort

Two weeks ago:

Me: The house is very cluttered and full of boxes, so you can't get to the walls or anything. I'm worried it might put people off, so I'm trying to make space as fast as I can, before we put it on sale.
Agent: That won't make any difference, don't worry about it. People can see that they'll need to redecorate, and the clutter isn't going to affect that because they know the boxes will move out with you.

Today:

Agent: The feedback from the viewings is that the house is very cluttered and full of boxes, so people can't get to the walls or anything, and it's putting people off. Is there anything you can do to make space (preferably by the next viewings, this afternoon).
Me: [fumes silently, rather than saying "you've just wasted a fortnight, on which you intentionally focussed your marketing efforts in order to get a quick sale".]

I've just found a large (several kilos) stash of dried pasta, which we're never going to use because of K's allergy to wheat gluten. It's several years past its "best before" date, but there's nothing obviously wrong with it. The local food banks &c won't take it (past best before) and I'd really rather not throw it away. Any suggestions? (I'm happy for someone in the Oxfordish area to collect, or potentially even to deliver it to someone.)

[ETA: now handed over to a someone else, who will ensure whatever's edible is eaten and whatever isn't is given to a suitable preschool.]

this entry of venta's made me think to mention an almost-opposite problem I've been having: I get ten yards out the front door and then realise I've forgotten my crutch. Pretty much every single time I leave the house. I mean, I've only been using the thing since June, so it's not as though you'd expect it to have become a habit by now. I think the problem is that I don't need it around the house (even at the beginning, it was always easier just to grab walls or furniture - our house is modestly sized and very full:), but it's a little frustrating to walk past it on the way out and then have to come back for it.

[possible trigger warnings for victim-blaming and feelings of powerlessness. Also, possible TMI.]
This is a post about the problems of phrasing things in a way that avoids accidental discrimination and victim-blaming. As such, I've almost certainly messed up badly somewhere in a way that causes one or both of those problems. If you see a sentence where I've done that,
(a) Sorry, I didn't meant to cause any offence or harm
(b) If you point it out in the comments, I'll both be grateful and do my best to fix it
(c) I'm aware that (a) doesn't prevent it from causing hurt, and (b) isn't anyone's job but mine, but the combination is the best I can currently manage, because I'm human and I make mistakes

So, I was involved in an (entirely amicable) exchange on Twitter a couple of days ago with a couple people, both hard-working campaigners for disabled rights and justice, about a tweet I thought was problematic. Since Twitter isn't the best place for detailed discussion of complex things, I'm now trying to expand and clarify why I think that tweet was problematic.

So, the tweet in question said this:

“@medaThingsLife: If you don't fight for what you want, don't cry for what you've lost.” @suey2y

— Claire (@tweeky_2) March 22, 2014

To avoid any ambiguity: this was a tweet by one well-intentioned person, retweeted by another as encouragement for the fight to retain and improve disabled people's rights. Intellectually, I knew that when I saw it, but emotionally it felt like a punch in the face - both personally and on behalf of a lot of others. There are two separate issues, one of which I brought up at the time, while I tried to keep the other out of the discussion (because it was more personal, and much harder for me to keep a veil of rationality over). Call them "reality" and "perception" - both are real problems, but one is about a person's actual ability to fight while the other is about their internal perception of whether they've fought enough.

Firstly, perception. My disabilities are mostly physical; I suffer from mild depression mainly as a side-effect of the restrictions on what I can do. Mostly, it's under reasonably-effective pharmaceutical control, even when I'm not able to turn the pages of a book because it hurts too much. But the pills aren't perfect, and I have plenty of days when I do everything I physically can and still feel despairing because I don't think I've done enough. I may have written to my MP (though he's a Tory minister, and doesn't give a ****), signed a couple of petitions, and complained on the internet, but I didn't go to any demonstrations, or chain myself to anything - I haven't really fought, so I don't deserve tears, from myself or anyone else. Fighting that feeling when it comes entirely from the inside is hard enough, but seeing other people apparently saying it makes it much harder to reject. (Writing this now, I'm having a serious struggle not to delete the whole paragraph on the grounds that it's just self-pity from someone who deserves all the shit the government - via the DWP and "don't give" ATOS - keeps trying to pile on us.)

What about the second problem - people who are genuinely unable to do anything to fight for themselves? There are quite a few types of these, and possibly more of them than even a lot of rights campaigners realise; some can be hurt directly by such statements (and may well be high suicide risk already), while in other cases it will be their carers who see a statement saying that the person they fight to protect doesn't deserve tears. Consider:

• Most obvious, but probably the smallest number of cases, "Locked-in" syndrome and similar problems. People who are literally unable to move a muscle voluntarily.


• Those with serious Alzheimers, some kinds of stroke-damage, and other types of memory failure. By the end of her life, my grandmother was essentially incapable of expressing herself on any complex issue because ten words into the first sentence she'd forgotten what she was talking about. (Which was heartbreaking to watch; I suspect it's also a much more common problem among the elderly than initially seems to be the case, although obviously I don't have the numbers to back that up. But unless you know them very well, it's difficult to distinguish between someone who can no longer construct a coherent argument and someone who can do it, but then has the words flee before they can speak them. I have no idea how you'd collect the data, or what you could do to help the sufferers if I'm right. Also, I digress; I might try to persue this thought another time, though.)


• People with serious learning disabilities of assorted kinds. Most notably many sufferers of Down's Syndrome, but also including various types of brain damage (both prenatal and due to later injury) and probably a lot of other things I don't know about. People who, for one reason or another, are unable to understand the issues at hand, or to defend their needs. Arguably, this category could be extended to include all children, both neurotypical and otherwise - would you ask a toddler to fight the DWP for their right to see friends, if the government decided children should all stay indoors? (You'd expect their parents to stand up for them, of course, but that's rather my point - some people are unable to defend their own rights, and that doesn't make them unworthy of those rights; it doesn't mean they can't cry when those rights are lost.)


• People with various kinds of mental health problem. This is in some ways the most complex category. It's also probably the one that contains the highest number of "working age" adults - the sort of people that the DWP, Daily Mail, and other two-minute-haters are happiest to pick on. (It's hard to persuade anyone that pensioners or children "deserve" to suffer, because people instinctively regard them as unable to look after themselves, at least to some extent.) But someone with really crushing depression, or severe social anxiety disorder, or a range of other conditions, may well find it impossible to stand up for themselves. Depending on their disorder, that might be because they are certain that they deserve to be treated vilely by organisations like ATOS[1], or because they are literally afraid of communicating with others, or all sorts of other reasons. But all of those reasons are real, and mean that while they don't fight for what they need (never mind want), they do have the right to cry for what they've lost - and we should cry with them.

[1] known in this household as "don't give" ATOS, when we have to mention them

I've not yet said anything about how best to avoid this kind of thing, partly because (as so often) preventing the problem is much harder than identifying it. I've also got a nagging feeling that I've left out something that belonged in this first (part of the) post. But I'm going to stop and post it now, because I've been working on this for half the day, I'm emotionally exhausted from writing it, and I strongly suspect that if I don't post it now, I'll never post it at all.

It seems to be a month since I last posted. Sigh. I kept meaning to, and then I kept letting the good be the enemy of getting started.

I did get my in-person triage for the knee, which basically consisted of a consultant physio observing that it looked pretty bad and was obviously affecting me quite a bit and it would probably be a good thing to get on and do something about it. Then it turned out that they don't have a bit of paper from my GP confirming that I've been told I can go to any hospital I like and nonetheless inexplicably chosen the nearest and most convenient one[1]. The hospital has therefore sent a letter to my GP, because they need such a bit of paper before they're allowed to treat me - the primacy of patient choice and all that. They're not allowed to take any kind of statement from me to that effect, because reasons; I don't need to sign it or see it or anything, and indeed wouldn't know that it existed if only it did exist.

[1]because after all, I might want to make a much longer and more difficult journey in order to get treatment for my serious mobility problem. The fact that the Nuffield is a world-famous research centre specialising in this kind of thing just adds some icing to the cake.


As a side-effect of feeling bad about not posting, I've not been reading anything here for the last week or so, either; I'll try to catch up, and might even try to post useful comments.

I seem to have only posted twice in the last three-and-a-bit months. Oops. Nonetheless, we ait'n't dead.

What's happened here in the meantime? Well, not very much, really. I finally got my knee scanned in early December, and am now awaiting a triage appointment with the relevant surgical department (torn cartilage and cysts that may be pressing on things). In the meantime I continue to sit around too much, eat too much, not get enough exercise, and have concerns about my slowly-but-steadily rising weight and blood pressure.

Resolutions-wise, I obviously didn't manage weekly postings in November or December. I also still didn't post my new-book-lists for 2011 or 2012 (to which I can now add 2013). However, I didn't buy any second-hand books, either, so at least that one went pretty well. I'm planning to try and retain that habit, and return to weekly posting, this year. I'm also going to make an attempt to get back up to reading two new books each week (I managed 55 in 2013, well down from the previous couple of years). While I'm about it, I'll continue to try to ensure that an acceptable proportion of those books have female authors. (Of 2013's 55, 27 had female solo-authors, two were co-written by a husband and wife team, and there was one mostly-male anthology with a couple of stories by women in it; near enough exactly half.)

Hmm. Not all is perfect on the resolution front, it would seem:

1) Not much improvement here; only two posts each in July and August, and this is the first for September.

2) Two-thirds of the way through the year, I've still not posted my "new books" lists for 2011 or 2012.

3) I've only strictly bought one second-hand book that I can think of since the end of June. But I'm not quite sure how to count things from the £2 book-shop; it seems likely that what they sell is remaindered stock for which the author is getting little or no royalty, so I suspect the book I bought there should also count. On the other hand, if you'd told me last year that I would be upset about not having reduced my S/H book habit below one per month, I'd have thought it unlikely.

3a) I've not actually disposed of the books listed here, or sorted out any more for disposal. This is at least partly due to my general lack of activity, which in turn is due to the problems with my knee that I've almost totally failed to post anything about.

After preparing my install media, I realised that whereas I'd have configured the plug via serial console, I was going to need to attach a monitor to the emergency replacement. That's fine, I have a spare monitor. Unfortunately, the monitor only has a DVI-D input, and the computer only has an HDMI output.

Out I went again, to discover that a suitable adaptor was not to be had in town. So I went to Oxford, to get one from Maplins (the last resort for things you absolutely have to have right now). Picked up what I wanted, went to the till, drove back home to get my wallet....

But the second time round, I left Oxford with the adaptor I needed and one of Maplins' Raspberry Pi kit packs ("everything you need" - well, except for an actual case to put the circuit board in, for crying out loud) on the grounds that the RPi was probably my first choice for a long-term replacement anyway, so why not go straight to that?

Basic Pi set-up is very friendly, and I soon found myself with a choice to make: install the full mess that I used on the plug (postfix, dovecot, squirrel-mail[1], etc) which I've done before but took some time to get right, or try "Citadel", which is touted by various (on the Pi forums and elsewhere) as an easy-to-configure alternative. Citadel installed quickly, and basic configuration was as easy as promised. I eventually worked out how to allow users aliases (that's under "change contact information", along with their physical address and phone numbers. Obviously.), but discovered to my regret (and astonishment) that not only does Citadel not default to sending email as plain text only, it doesn't support it as an option (although allegedly such an option may be in progress). Emails can only be sent as dual plaintext/html mime messages. It also doesn't appear to have an option to turn off html processing for incoming email, which is ... not what I expect from open source projects; perhaps my personal acquaintances have led me to expect a higher level of security consciousness than is actually normal?

However, it's up, and email can come in (I'm not sure about going out), and that'll do for now. In another week I'll have some time to fiddle and get things set up more to my satisfaction (including a shift to postfix, etc, if necessary), but right now I can go flop (and then go and do other things).

[1] for the account-holders whose paws dislike non-web-mail clients. Another potential issue with Citadel is that I think it may actually make it much harder for me to use my preferred email client.

It, um, seems to be a while since I last posted. Oops. Obviously, my excuses are impeccable (a couple of weeks spent in Cornwall with K's parents, then back here for ten days or so during which I mostly (a) slept and (b) made sure we had everything we needed for the next week, which was spent on our first holiday since about 2004), but since I'd already left myself an out in the form of easy ready-made posts that I didn't do anything about I think that's probably a draw at best.

But we did get to have a holiday, and we both enjoyed it, even if we have both basically gone flop on getting home. So there'll be a post about that (possibly with pictures, if I'm organised*) once I have some energy. Probably some posts about other stuff, too.

*stop laughing at the back, there. And at the front, come to that.

Having made it a couple of months into the year, I thought I should have a look at how I was doing with maintaining my fairly trivial resolutions.

1) Post (at least) once per week: mostly successful. I have missed one week, but so far only the one.

2) Total fail, so far. I've still not posted the lists of books I read in 2011 or 2012.

3) Cut down on S/H book purchases. I think I've bought a total of four books in charity shops this year, two of them written by millionaires and one of the others several decades out of print. I have also acquired two books (both OOP and written by dead people) from the Seacourt booksforfree and three from ewx, but that's still only one per week on average.

3a) I've also been organised enough to dispose of over a hundred books I'm not going to read again (well, and a few duplicates I don't need), helping somewhat on the "piles of books everywhere" front. There should be another batch getting listed soon.