Cameron Must Go! National Demonstration - March for Health, Homes, Jobs and Education

Very proud to share this report my daughter, Jennifer Drewett, put together following the demonstration in London yesterday. (You won't have seen anything like this on the news, of course.)

Over the years Jen and her brother, who were both effectively written off at the ages of four and three respectively by a diagnosis of severe autism with learning disabilities, have benefited from disability allowances, Statements of Special Educational Need which provided them with access to the education they required, and years of speech therapy from the NHS. One senior registrar once said to me that their progress was a miracle, but I say it was in large part down to our welfare state.

All this is now being swept away by the Tory government. Meanwhile, the rich get richer, the poor pay a hugely disproportionate burden of tax, and the Daily Mail tells its idiotic readers that we should leave the EU and lose the tattered remnants of our human rights. It does my heart good to see that there are still those who will stand up and protest.

Homesick in Surrey

Surrey is relentlessly picturesque and so in-your-face about it that it made me want to issue it with an Asbo.  Though I did enjoy marauding around Gunter's Wood (second woodpecker of the week) and sitting by Hambledon village duck pond writing the first draft of a poem while waiting for my guided tour around Oakhurst Cottage.

Which was equally picturesque and furnished with improbably lavish chattels for a labourer's cottage, but we'll let that go. Because how could you not love somewhere that looks like this ...



Luckily for me, I had the guide all to myself.  I told him the origin of the phrase 'upper crust' and he told me where 'sleep tight' comes from.  

Then it was on to Godalming, passing on the way the Devil's Punchbowl (oh, the much loved paperbacks of my youth ... )

Once in Godalming I was unaccountably homesick.  Well, maybe not unaccountably - I think this shop display (one of many on a similar theme) had something to do with it, not to mention the lamp posts weighed down by Union flags.  And the plethora of antique shops which made it seem like a red brick tile-hung Cotswolds and are fine if you want to eat a Chippendale chair or bang in a nail with a Dresden Shepherdess.  Final straw for me was the brass band in the bandstand.  It was like being trapped in Trumpton.  

In the Church of St Peter and St Paul, I really liked the twelfth century wall paintings,the 13th century oak coffer, some gorgeous Arts and Crafts tiles, and the fish graffiti, though I resented the fact that the graffiti was mentioned in the guide book because I prefer to find these things for myself.  I also didn't like that the Anglo-Saxon carved stones from the 9th century were in a glass case with very reflective glass, and chairs and a pew were covering a 16th century brass memorial carved with a fine-looking (from what I could glimpse) Elizabethan gentleman.  

Add to this a slight biliousness when I learnt that the beam of the gallows used to execute two alleged murderers in 1818 was reused as a rafter in the spire and I was feeling downright grumpy.

I wandered along the bank of the picturesque River Wey, dotted with picturesquely fluffy ducklings and edged by magnificent but picturesque ornamental weeping willows. Then my eye lit on a wonderfully tussocky scrubby unkempt piece of land - three water meadows, in fact, called the Lammas Lands and still being used to pasture cattle.  This was more like it!

I climbed a stile and squelched across the marshy land.  Oh, it felt good.  I didn't even notice the brass band any more.  A little bit of wildnerness in the heart of Daily Mail land.   

As I left, a stinging nettle kissed me goodbye and I treasured my welt all the way back down the M4, heading towards the sun and home.  Seems my roots are digging down ever deeper.     

Poem for World Autism Acceptance Day 2012

This is a poem I wrote 13 years ago.  I don't much care for polemical poetry and seldom write it but this wrote itself.  (Plus, it's always satisfying to have a pop at the Daily Mail!)  I am reposting it for World Autism Acceptance Day 2012 which is today.

Back then I could never have known how well things would turn out for my two autists.  They were written off at the ages of four and three.  'No functioning intelligence,' said one White Coat. 'They'll never learn to speak.'  But they are both warm, creative and talkative people with hearts full of love.  I couldn't be prouder of them.

                 
                 Cut Out and Keep 

Already you test me with questions.

But how to explain the inexplicable

in ways you’ll understand?

I have no glib replies.

You bear off my inadequate words

in your hands

to look at, sniff and taste.

Meanwhile I ponder

what I’m not going to tell you –

how in years gone by

they’d have burnt you as witches

or left you to wolves

or the mental asylum,

simply because you’re you.

And I compare this

with latter-day attitudes:

patronising Daily Mail articles

re the latest miracle cure

that works for (a few of)

the Poor Brave Victims

they would deem you.

But we know

there’s no bravery

in no choice.

And so I love this otherness,

as much a part of you

as your scent and skin and smiles

and this is why

I do not wish you otherwise.

© Deborah Harvey 1999, 2012