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It was the Scope Awards today and I'd been invited along to give a short speech about my No Solero February Challenge. I am not sure anyone in the room had done anything as worthy and difficult as not eating an ice cream for 28 days, so I am sure I was a huge inspiration to them all, but some of then had done stuff almost as good and arguably more difficult.
For the 21 years that I've been involved with Scope I have always got much more out of it than I've put in and today was no different as I shared afternoon tea with some exceptional people. The afternoon was hosted by Adam Pearson, who I'd never met before, who is a charming and funny man who I'll hopefully interview on RHLSTP soon.
The event would be an anti-woke person's nightmare as everyone who went on stage was asked to give their preferred self-audio description (I went for "if you imagine someone who has eaten a Solero every day for the last decade then you have just exactly imagined what I look like) and the whole afternoon was a celebration of the mental and physical diversity of humanity. I wish those anti-woke people had been here though, as it showed the joy of difference, but also the shared experience of being a person. The shared struggle for us all might be the journey to self-acceptance and being allowed to be yourself. If you have that then perhaps you don't have to get into a flap about how other people self-identify or whether they conform to your ideas of what a person should be.
After years of joking that I only supported this charity in the hope that I'd get given a disabled parking badge, I was able to claim that as a result of the loss of a testicle I am now disabled. "Apparently that doesn't count though," I complained, "Your rules are tight. If even Scope don't recognise a disability then you know that the prejudice is real."
I understand why a lot of people don't want to think about disability and are worried about how they are meant to interact with disabled people or that they might say the wrong thing. But you don't need to worry. You will see the person not the disability pretty much straight away and realise what an arse you're being. One of the things I enjoyed about this afternoon was seeing people with different disabilities interacting and having to learn the rules of the other person's disability. Do you duck down for a photo with someone in a wheel chair? Does a deaf person have to tell someone the reason that they're staring a bit intently at their face is because they are lip-reading? Ultimately nearly everyone just wants to be polite and learn or be polite and explain.
As I explained my Solero challenge I said "Where's my award?" and thankfully the audience understood the vast chasm between a greedy man giving up an ice cream for four weeks and the stuff that was actually being acknowledged today. But Adam did then pop up to give me a framed cartoon of a Solero, which was a nice comically nod to both the uselessness and usefulness of what I'd done. As with most things in my life I am both proud and embarrassed of myself simultaneously.
I am fearful for the future in a world where hate and prejudice seem to be winning, but I am also hopeful that the positive energy in this room can defeat the negativity of the outside world. You may not be disabled, though as has been pointed out to me before, you're almost certainly just not yet disabled. It's in all our interests to fight.
