Video: Boat trip to Greenwich

This was created by a visually-impaired person for other visually-impaired people to watch, so the text is probably bigger and slower than you might be used to.

It was my first effort at using Microsoft Movie Maker, hence the reference to "frequent swearing" in the end credits! It's always so much fun to do something when you can't quite see well enough to make out the tiny elements you're supposed to be working with ...

A crip on my shoulder

I get really cheesed when I get official letters that tell me that this letter-form-information booklet-whatever is also available in large-print format.

Why should I get annoyed at knowing that there are accessible forms of this document that are mine for the asking?

Why should I get so irritated at government and council departments and other organisations finally realising that visually-impaired people have special needs, and taking steps to meet those needs?

Well, it’s very simple … how do you think they invariably tell me that I can have large print?

You guessed it … IN SMALL PRINT!

In the same size print as the rest of the letter, they tell me that I can have large print.

If I could read the small print to know that I had the option of having large print, I wouldn’t need to ask for large print; I’d be able to read the whole damn letter-form-whatever in the original format.

They might as well tell me – in Sanskrit or Egyptian hieroglyphics – that I can have the letter in English if I want.

If I can’t access the information to know that it’s also available in alternative format, how the hell am I supposed to know that I can ask for that alternative format?

I notice that, when they say that the letter-form-whatever is available in other languages, they always put a line in that language, presumably telling people in their own language that they can have the whole thing in that language if they need it.

But not the visually impaired! We’re only allowed to be given this information in a way that we can’t sodding well access.

Don’t people think? Don’t they realise that, if we can’t read small print, we can’t read the “you-can-have-this-in-large-print”?

Why don’t they put this line IN large print, and give us a sporting chance of actually being able to read it?

Penetrating insights

I’ve been pondering this subject for a while (mostly pondering how to state my case with the maximum of clarity and the minimum of basic Anglo-Saxon). Let’s see how near I’ve got …

In (nearly?) all sexual encounters between men and women, it’s the man who does the penetrating: even in kissing, the man is more likely to penetrate the woman’s mouth than she is his.

So it’s common for women to discover the limit that will initiate their inbuilt gag reflex, and correspondingly rare for men to discover theirs.

Not being penetrated as a general rule, men don’t know what it feels like, and so blithely continue to shove things into places that were never meant to receive such items, especially with such enthusiastic vigour.


So, blokes, here’s an idea: why don’t you try a few things on yourself, to find out what it’s like to be on the receiving end of what you give out?

Step 1: Get a piece of raw liver and cut it to tongue shape and size. Now shove it into your mouth, and then push the tip of it down your throat. Move it about as you move your tongue about in your lover’s mouth.

Step 2: Select the vegetable of your choice and whittle it into the approximate size and shape of your own favourite body-part. (You can over-estimate as much as you like here!)
Now try oral sex with that. How does it feel to you to have something that size pushing into your mouth and down your throat?
We all know the thing about "sticking your fingers down your throat to make you sick". Well, the effect is exactly the same with anything else stuck down your throat.


Step 3: Since quite a few men seem to have a thing about anal sex, the next step is obvious ...


Check out how it feels to you before you do it to other people. You might learn a few things that would make you a better and more considerate lover.

(In the interests of sexual equality, women could take another slice or liver and fold it into a “butterfly” and see how the man feels, too!)

Wha'is the matter with clothes manufacturers these days?

I’ve been trying to find women’s long-sleeved shirts (cos I want a change from Primark men’s shirts!).

That’s all I want – plain, boring, long-sleeved women’s shirts that are long enough in the body so as not to come untucked when one bends forward (I thoroughly dislike that “air-gap” – are “ladies” supposed to do nothing except look pretty? They’re not meant to do anything that means they have to lean forward even a bit??)

I just found something (eventually!) on eBay (what’s the point of searching for “ladies’ long sleeved white shirts” when you get three pages of short-sleeved black t-shirts?) … so I looked at some of the shirts that were actually what I’d been looking for.

And then I noticed how they were sized. I quote:

size 8 - XS (30")
size 10 - S (32")
size 12 - M (34")
size 14 - L (36")
size 16 - XL (38")
and so on ….

I average around size 14 and I don’t feel particularly obese, thank you very much!

At least this is slightly better than a previous instance: I bought a basque for a fancy dress event: size 14. when it arrived, I tried it on and it fitted well.

Then I noticed the size label sewn into it … “XL”.

If I’d known that before I bought it, I wouldn’t have bought it, no matter how well it fitted – how dare some (probably male) git in an office somewhere arbitrarily decree that anyone my size is well on the way to obesity?

WTF are we coming to when a size 14 is considered “extra large”?

And you wonder why so many women and girls have bad body images when they’re as good as told that if they’re not matchsticks they’re barrage balloons?

You wonder why so many women and girls are anorexic or on the way to anorexia when we’re told that a female who is properly woman-shaped is “extra large”, implying the incipient onset of clinical obesity?

Why don’t manufactures just put the actual size on the garment and leave out “small-to-gigantic” labels, with all the attendant hang-ups that they cause?

They’re only generalisations, anyway – one manufacture’s “medium” is another’s “huge”, so they’re no more than very vague descriptions.

I’ve had “medium” t-shirts that were large enough to get a second person in as well, and “large” t-shirts that I had to get on with a shoe-horn.

They don’t actually tell one the real size of the garment unless one knows what the manufacturer consider small, medium or large – they’re comparatives, but we’re not given the comparison to let us work out what ruler the manufacture is measuring with.

Even clothing sizes are relative: the UK, Europe and US all have different size labels for the same physical size.

So why don’t they just put the actual chest size – 34”, 36”, or whatever. Inches are inches, so it won’t matter which country one lives in; if one uses the imperial measuring system, one will know if a garment will fit or not.

Of course, if they put both inches and centimetres on garments, then us Imperialists could gradually get to know our metric sizes too!

But let’s cut this “extra large” bollocks. We don’t need it! any more than we need the “size 0” at the other end of the scale – the one that we’re all supposed to aspire to if we want to be real women! Even if it kills us, and it probably will.