bored of excitement – the griefjunkie blog 

Dear Rachel

Yeah I was at Greenwich last Saturday when I had a right laugh with two guys who were not only deaf, and not only disabled, but to cap it all would you believe gay with each other. In a odd way, it was a bit like a full house in poker. I first realised that they might be deaf when they didn’t hear me repeatedly saying hello to them, and I first realised that they might be disabled when I noticed that they both had wheelchairs. They were in fact quite reminiscent of the cover of lovely old Suede’s tremendous first album, which features two disabled lesbians kissing, and I was tempted to break into a couple of verses of Animal Nitrate, but thought that they probably get that all the time. However, if my experience in casual retail is anything to go by, disabled people are usually quite a giggle. Indeed, it was a wheelchair fan who supplied me with my single favourite moment of market trading, when a bloke with cerebral palsy bought one of our ‘Help! I Can’t Speak Properly!’ baby bibs, because, you see, he literallly couldn’t. I suppose that if you find yourself in a wheelchair, you can afford to lighten up a bit, as things are hardly likely to get any worse.

Anyway. At some length, I suggested that they get their wheelchairs welded together for added romance, which they agreed would save a fair amount of tyre expenditure, and also remarked at how lucky they were to each find a fella with a thing for deaf disabled guys. Otherwise, as I pointed out, they would have been like two ships that got pushed past each other in the night.

[Hitting Read More now will reveal dismal tales from a fun pub in Slough]

Regrettably, my relations with the disabled community have not always been so cordial – for example, during the time I was running the Printers Devil pub in Slough. For a couple of years, the Printers Devil was a fun pub. A fun pub is a thing in the 1990s where people would drunk a lot of Corona or Rolling Rock, dance to Chaka Demus and Pliers, and then beat each other up. Anyway. I barred a deaf bloke for pestering girls – because let’s face it, tell a dolly you’re deaf and you’ve pretty much got her bra off, right there – by writing ‘Get Out’ on one side of a bit of paper and ‘You’re Barred’ on the other. I really wanted him to not understand, so I could write, I dunno, ‘Don’t Make Me Have To Tell You Twice’ on another bit of paper, or ‘I’m Not Going To Ask You Again, Mate’ in really big letters, as if I was shouting, but I was sadly denied these opportunities.

My other altercation with disableds involved a well known one called Frankie, who seemed to have a wide range of handicaps and could often be seen trundling round the pubs of Slough in his little motor chair. If you know Slough, you’ll know that the Printers is just over the railway bridge on Stoke Road, and whenever we had a disco on I would see this silhouette of Frankie is his wheeled basket coming over this bridge, with a great deal of extremely slow moving traffic behind him, at about ten minutes after we had stopped serving. There would then follow a ghastly pantomime, in two acts. The first act would consist of a couple of shiftless local bints getting the DJ – a good bloke called Dave, who resembled former Liverpool midfield general Terry McDermott – to play that awful Frankie, Do You Remember Me? song while they danced around his little chair. This would set the scene for the second act of the horrid performance, which would entail the shiftless bints going on and on at me saying, yeah we know it’s after hours, but come on, let Frankie have a drink, after all, it is Frankie, poor Frankie and his little shrivelled legs, and so forth. I would usually respond by saying that unless Frankie is carrying five grand in his tyres to cover the fine I would get for serving out of licensing hours, I’m having none of it, and that furthermore, if you’re so very concerned for his happiness, forget trying to get Bacardi and coke for him to drink through his feeding tube and just treat him to a blowjob. I can’t speak for Frankie – well, he couldn’t speak for himself, in any recognisable format anyway – but in his situation I reckon he would probably choose an affectionless blowjob round the back of a Slough fun-pub over a patronising Bacardi and coke on the dance floor, any day of the week, no matter how popular a drink the latter was in the pre-Smirnoff Ice era.

I learned two lessons from all this. Firstly, it’s not really necessary to address your disabled brethren and sistren in the manner usually reserved for fussing domestic pets that you’ve dressed up in novelty human outfits, and secondly, never take on a licensed premises with wheelchair access.

Able to get online on public transport?: Twitter.

Fond of taking pictures of your shoes?: Facebook.