My Latest Article

I've just been checking out my latest contribution to the magazine Care Talk, which can be viewed free of charge online. Page 19 issue 10.

I'm impressed with the layout, as ever, and coincidentally I've just been interviewed today by one of the magazine's staff writers, for an article in a future issue about assistive technology.

Anyone that knows me will know that I am never short of something to say, and it is through the medium of voice assisted software that I am able to create not only this blog, but also the articles that I have written for Care Talk magazine.

Access to technology is such an important issue for everybody these days, and for someone like myself, severely disabled, it is essential to enable access to a world that has become much more difficult to access in ways that most people take for granted.

I think it was in a film somewhere that I remember first hearing about the notion of technology achieving a point where connectivity has reached a critical level, and I suspect what was once a science-fiction concept in a film, has become or is becoming a reality.

Take for example something I heard on the radio this week. There has been a report published about the skills that carers need to possess so that they can care appropriately for people, and a politician gave as an example (it is always a politician that gives examples) the fact that carers should have as an essential skill the capacity to be compassionate.

The example that was given was of the way in which people are called by their given name, rather than some shorthand like Dearie, Darling, or in a negative context, referred to as bed blockers in hospitals.

This reminded me instantly of a poem which has been included in my first selection, 50 x 50. It's worth reproducing here, to give some sense of the context about which I am talking.

My Given Name

I can't walk the walk and I won't talk the talk
but behind these tired eyes
still beats the same heart as that of
the woman that has raised her children
then their children, loved and been loved
 in return. My memories
may be broken, but they are mine
please help me to keep them alive.

Don't call me Dearie, or Darling, or Ducks,
give me back what is mine
and what belongs just to me.
It's the name my fiancee proposed with
the one I married with
and the one that will be given to the registrar
one last time, all too soon.

Before then, keep me safe, keep me warm
in this place, use my name to my face
please protect me from harm
and to the end call me Grace.

It's my given name.



Like many of my poems, it is short and of course created using voice-activated software.

It suddenly struck me that the politician was virtually quoting unknowingly the first line of the second stanza, and this spurred me into action, so I sent a copy of the poem to my local authority contract with the suggestion that the local authority concerned might steal a march on what the government is talking about, if they were to produce my poem as a poster to be pasted to the wall in every staffroom in every care home in the County.

Blow me, if I don't get feedback by e-mail within a couple of hours to say that it was a moving way of communicating how everyone might wish to be treated as they become older, and that it will be raised at team meetings across the country over the next couple of weeks.

The speed of e-mail. And then I got to thinking about whether I had any other contacts that I could send the poem to, and I immediately thought of a friendly press officer that I had met in the context of a short documentary film about me being used for the launch of Social Care TV.

All of this, by the way, was happening before 6 AM in the morning, listening to the news. And so I sent something to my press contact friend, and as a consequence he asked in passing what I was up to these days.

Which meant I told him about this blog, and it turns out that the report that the politician was responding to had been written by the organisation for which the press person worked, so of course he knew exactly who to pass it on to. Small world.

And as a consequence, I may be able to have my blog hosted on some site I would never have thought about, and which would bring me to an audience that I would never have considered might be available to me. Magic.

And all of this through the medium of new technology, that makes communication instantaneous to all intents and purposes. So, I'm looking forward to the next time I can make some kind of connection between something I have written by way of a poem, and something I have heard someone talk about in the press.

Who knows how this thing might end. Hopefully, not in the way that TS Eliot  said, not with a bang but a whimper, nor as at the end of Shakespeare in Love, with tears and a journey. My favourite cliched ending is that it will not end until the fat lady sings. Since I used to work in the world of opera, I feel as if I can wish for that one. And most of my friends that can sing would forgive me since they are anything but fat.