Unwell Ramblings

Apologies for the lack of updates recently but I’ve been a little under the weather. Last week I started to feel a little strange during my special needs school visit and I haven’t been able to shake it off since. Nothing too serious, but enough to put a dampener on things.

I’m really excited for next week because two of my oldest friends are coming to visit. I haven’t seen them for ages and, well, I miss them. So it will be great to catch up and amuse ourselves with embarrassing teenage memories of kissing the wrong people and suchlike. Also, it will be good to show some friends around my patch as I haven’t really been able to do that yet. Doubtless this will take in yet another trip to the beautiful Korakuen. I must have been there 8 or 9 times now. I always enjoy it but each time I go am irritated that I never bought myself an annual pass as I:d have saved about 20 quid by now.

I was at my special needs school again today and it reminded me of what I meant to say in my last post. Going to the special needs schools has been in many ways a happy experience. But it has also been a little depressing and saddening at times. Many of the students will lead very limited lives in which there will be constant boundaries on what they are able to do. You get a huge outpouring of happiness from them. But speaking to the teachers, they tend to focus on the long term. One teacher commented that she finds it sad because so many of the students will grow up frustrated and irritated by the things they are unable to do. She also said that she finds it difficult knowing that a fair number of the students she teaches may not live that long. Dipping into the school is fine and the nature of my visits means that the students are generally happy because they are pleased to see me. But in many of the ways that matter, they can sometimes be deeply unhappy. When I think about my own circumstances and the things in my life that make me happy-the truth is that many of those things won’t be open to these kids as they develop into adults. It’s desperately sad, when you think about the reality of it.

I’m trying hard not to generalize too much here and I know the above does go slightly against the grain of what we are encouraged to think about disabled/differently abled people having as much potential for achievement and happiness as anyone else, so I hope I don’t sound like an arse in the above paragraph.

In other news, I’m heading to a rabbit-filled island on Sunday. It used to be a research and manufacturing centre for chemical weapons-now it is marketed like a petting zoo. Japan is strange sometimes.