I had been interested in disability issues since mid-2009, and had long had friends with one disability or another, but this heightened when I read the story of Lynn Gilderdale in January, after her mother was tried for assisting her suicide. I have told the story many times here and it was widely reported in the British media. For reasons I still can’t quite explain, it had a huge emotional impact on me (part of the story is here) and I remember sitting in Costa and being reminded of her, lying there in pain all those years, every time I was about to swallow any of my coffee. I developed an intense interest in ME and it basically became my cause, and I made a few new friends through it including one quite special one, and it provided a whole host of new blogging material.

As those friends came, another lot went, including someone I had been friends with (online and through IM and Skype conversations) since 2003. This had been building up for some time, in large part due to the escalating Jordan controversy of the previous year and because of the antics of one particular former mutual friend. She cut off contact with me once because of accusations others made about me, and did so again after accusing me of allowing others to question her imaan (faith) when I posted a robust defence of polygamy in Islam. I had expected the post to be controversial, but this was over something I did not even know had happened. I can’t completely protect people who comment from being offended unless there is an obvious insult. With that, my last connection to the Muslim blogging community I’d been part of from 2004 to 2008 was severed.

QTM moved on in its usual fits and starts. I made two releases in the second half of the year. Sadly, I find that Qt’s future is uncertain, as Nokia (the company that now owns it) seems to have backed the wrong horse in the mobile phone market. Trolltech (which originally developed it) had its own Linux mobile and PDA platform called Qtopia, but the smartphone market now seems to be divided between the iPhone and Android, with Symbian (the main mobile target for Qt) being squeezed out. On top of this, KDE on the Linux desktop has lost a lot of ground and I had a letter printed in Linux Format in November in which I said I thought it was dead. Qt is too brilliant to just die, it’s really a joy to program with and it runs fast. Perhaps I should broaden my skills base in that area.

Then in June, my sister had a baby girl. I’m now an uncle, and some of you who know me on Facebook or Twitter have seen the odd picture of her and know what she’s called (which I’m not telling the whole world). Her pregnancy was particularly difficult and there was a month-long series of false starts, but when she did come, it was pretty quick. She also got married in August (to the dad, you’ll be pleased to know) and so I now have a brother-in-law (previously it was just me and my sis).

Two other good things happened this past year. The first was getting to the doctor to get my Asperger’s referral, after holding it off for ages. The second was that some work finally came my way last month — I’m not sure if it’s just a bit of pre-Christmas stuff, but nothing like it happened in 2009 and there were only a few days in December 2008 (and I got the flu and had to tail off). It was sorely needed because I ran into trouble with the benefits people, and it meant doing a lot of the country driving I used to enjoy doing a lot when I was driving. I do hope I can find something a bit more meaningful fairly soon, as well as a bit more secure than agency driving.

Anyway I know it’s a bit late, but it’s near the end of the New Year holiday in the UK (as New Year’s Day was a Saturday, we get an extra bank holiday on the following Monday), so I thought if I didn’t post this now I never would. I never exactly look forward to the new year, but for once I’ve got hopes that this coming year will be different (in a good way) from the old one. I hope that’s the same for my readers.

Rumbelow noted that, among feminists in the 1970s, “aping men” was common with trousers and cropped hair, but:

That mood has reversed entirely in the past decade or two. Women are now constantly told they can have both - be glamorous, desirable and feminine and get to the top in macho professions. Forever we are hearing the mantra that women “bring something different” to the boardroom and should be celebrated for that difference. I think this could be a big mistake.

Her reply is that reminders of femininity actually impair women in traditionally masculine pursuits, whether they be academic or part of a career, and the same is true of race where race is associated with disadvantage:

There is now a large body of evidence that shows how damaging stereotypes are. Because black people are rarely lauded for their academic ability, simply making a black student more aware of his race is enough to lower his academic peformance. All it takes to lower a bright black child’s test scores is to first ask him to tick a box identifying his race. The same for women - because it is taken as a truism that girls are less good at “hard subjects” like maths and science, all it takes to lower a girl’s score on a maths exam is first to ask her to state her gender.

It is for this reason that social scientists think that girls do better at maths and science in all-girls schools - they are not constantly reminded of their difference. In mixed schools, uniforms may help because they suppress apparent differences and therefore negative stereotypes. The eminent expert in this field, Judith Rich Harris, said: “I would be very interested in the outcome of an experiment that put schoolgirls and boys into identical unisex uniforms.”

I would disagree with the characterisation of maths and science as “hard subjects”. They are seen in some quarters as masculine subjects, because they are analytical and do not involve imagination and empathy in the same way as English (particularly literature, and particularly the way it is taught nowadays). Maths is very easy for some people; a whole lot easier than understanding several substantial literary works inside out.

As with school subjects, there are certain stereotypes about how women function in business:

It is the case that women are generally considered less good at numbers, less aggressive in making deals and in general less suited to City success. From a social science point of view, all of Lintner’s talk about “embracing femininity” and dressing to emphasise womanliness would therefore conspire to hold her female clients back. It would give everyone - men and women - the unhelpful reminder of how poorly women are supposed to perform in business. Since the 1990s we have spent all this time “celebrating” and therefore exaggerating women’s difference at work, when we might have done better to keep quiet and find some ways of diminishing those differences. In jobs where women are “supposed” to do well, such as the arts, it doesn’t matter. But in jobs to which they are not seen as well suited, it might.

I am sure some will point out that the whole issue doesn’t affect me and that I’m just a man (and not one who’s particularly experienced in office culture) and that my opinion doesn’t count. However, I do see some problems with Rumbelow’s solution.

1. She’s got the feminists of the 1970s wrong

The feminists of the 1970s did not merely advocate women playing down their femininity to succeed in the workplace; they argued that femininity itself was a construct intended to put women “in their place”, and was an instrument of oppression which women should throw off for its own sake. Rumbelow would presumably be happy with women changing out of their trouser suits into a dress when they get home, or when they go out, something that the likes of Sheila Jeffreys would not be seen doing in a month of Sundays.

2. You can only disguise femininity so far

One of the first two commenters on Rumbelow’s piece opined that you cannot disguise women by putting them in masculine clothing, because it’s “all in the pheromones”. Before anyone gets a whiff of pheromone, however, there comes the issue of women’s faces being different, women’s voices being different, women’s hair being different (and not as easy to change as one’s clothes) and women’s figures being different. Women have bosoms, which are usually pretty obvious, which makes any attempt at “defeminising” by wearing a shirt and tie and a pair of trousers pointless.

3. Nobody needs reminding about their sex

People’s male or female identity is ingrained very early on in childhood; children know when they are toddlers, let alone children, which they are (even if they don’t know the words male or female), and research has shown that people do not generally forget it, even if they have advanced dementia. It causes discomfort to anyone, a child or an adult, to face attempts to shoehorn them into a role which goes against it. I recall a story I was told about a family friend who was trying to get her daughter, aged four or five, to wear trousers, which she did not want to do; she wanted to wear dresses (incidentally, the mother usually wore skirts). When given a pair of trousers as a present, she replied something to the effect of “thank you very much … but it’s trousers again”. When a school near Ipswich banned girls from wearing skirts to school, because some girls were wearing skirts too short and cycling in them, some girls complained that they wanted to wear skirts because they were more feminine. Some American county jails have been known to use pink underwear for male inmates, and publicise the fact, presumably as both a humiliation and a deterrent.

If we are to try to reduce the effect of gender stereotypes on achievement in schools, a better way than simply requiring everyone to wear a unisex uniform is to allow the students or pupils to wear whatever (appropriate) clothing they find comfortable, thus avoiding either cramping their styles or imposing a particular interpretation of their gender on them, in the form of an uncomfortable uniform.

4. People still judge women as women

This is the most important problem, because people respond differently to the actions of a woman than those of a man, regardless of whether they leave their femininity at home in the morning. In 1999, Carly Fiorina became chief executive of Hewlett Packard, and told a press conference that “the glass ceiling doesn’t exist”. In 2005, she was sacked, and blamed attitudes towards her on gender, complaining that when men fired people, they were hailed as decisive, while the same action by a woman was called vindictive; stories circulated about her always travelling with a hairdresser and that her office had a pink decor, and that she was routinely referred to in chatrooms as a bimbo or bitch.

Others say that she was sacked for being bad at her job. However, she would not be the only powerful woman in history to be judged differently than a man would. Take Margaret Thatcher, for example. She surrounded herself with men, and men on the political right remarked on her use of feminine charm and even, in one case, on her beauty. The left, however, regarded her as cold and uncompassionate. As education minister in the Conservative government of the early 1970s, she abolished free milk for schoolchildren, which resulted in her acquiring the nickname “Margaret Thatcher the Milk Snatcher”. The Marxist folk singer, Ewan MacColl, wrote a song about her entitled The Grocer, in which he described her thus:

Her hair was the best that money could buy,
her eyes were china blue;
I swear they wouldn't look out of place
on a frozen cockatoo.
She'd a nose like the blade of a metal saw,
a voice like a tungsten drill,
She used it to bore the natives
when she'd a couple of hours to kill.

People expect women to be soft and warm; when they defy this expectation, people (men and women) resent them, even if they would not resent a man who took such a position. For example, the John Major government, which succeeded Thatcher and is notorious for closing hospitals, introducing a tax on domestic fuel and standing by while massacres and mass rapes went on in the former Yugoslavia, refusing even to allow refugees into the UK, is not remembered with such hatred as icy, unmaternal, milk-snatching Maggie. Nick Cohen has noted that Major-era politicians are remembered as kindly old liberal Tories despite this appalling record. (Hillary Clinton was also attacked as unfeminine, but this was more a political smear focussed on her style than a reaction to anything she actually did as a politician.)

Thatcher is not the only right-wing politician to have been accused of being unfeminine. A blogger I read often said the following about Sarah Palin, accusing her of having no loyalty to other women:

I think men, more specifically the Patriarchy, should reclaim Sarah Palin as one of their own. I have decided she just isn’t a woman. If she were actually female, she might have one molecule of respect for other women. I always said women sell each other out and that is why there is a patriarchy to begin with, but when it comes to hitting rock bottom, women usually come back together. Sarah Palin has hit rock bottom and she is still hanging with the menz.

So, doing away with dresses for the office is not going to make male executives feel neutral about their female colleagues and employees. Of course, if femininity means clothes which draw attention to the body, such as the dresses being sold by the designer mentioned in Helen Rumbelow’s article, I would be only too happy not to see it in the office or any other workplace, where it is an inappropriate distraction. (I recall having some middle-aged woman in a skirt less than halfway down her thighs and a top which did not cover her adequately either trying to sell me a computer at the Linux Expo last year, and struggling to keep looking at her face and avoid looking down. Men would get sent home for revealing anything like as much, and rightly so.) I suspect that doing away with skirts is not necessary; they simply need to be sober and concealing, as office dress always has been for men.

Of course, there is a certain trend of right-wing female opinion that states that women do not need anti-discrimination laws or any other allowances to get ahead in male-dominated professions; all it takes is talent and willpower. Whether Rumbelow herself believes this or not, I don’t know, but I more expect to read it in the Times (or the Daily Mail) than, say, the Guardian. Challenging taboos about asking how much colleagues earn, encouraging women to come forward for promotion, as men do, challenging intimidating, anti-female workplace customs such as putting topless pin-ups on the wall (particularly common in workshops, less so in offices) and rebutting any objections about humourlessness and political correctness, and making use of, and strengthening, legal mechanisms against discrimination, would surely be more effective than encouraging women not to dress like women for the office. After all, there are plenty of stereotypes about “manly” women (boiler suits etc.), and “ball-breaker” is a scarcely more complimentary label than “bimbo”, and not much more helpful in one’s career.

I was struck by how quickly they managed to get me in - despite my online application having got lost in the system, I asked them on the phone just after noon on Monday when the next available slot was. I was eventually told that I could come in that afternoon at 3:30 if I wanted, so that’s what I did. The woman running the intro immediately began giving a sales pitch, telling me and one other applicant that it was a job for life, that there is never any shortage of demand for driving lessons and never has been in the 30 years she has been an instructor, and that you can earn £30,000 a year - net, not gross. The cost was just short of £4,000, and included the tuition (as long as it takes), one shot at each of the tests (there are three), your first instructor’s licence (which you have to buy, having paid to take each test), the use of some tax accountancy firm, assistance in getting a job after completing the training, and subscription to a magazine.

It all seemed a bit too good to be true, so I asked if that wasn’t a “boom-time deal”, i.e. a product of the economic climate which prevailed until the credit crunch which is now going to go the way of so many of the “financial products” of that era. She said no, it had always been that way. If you could not stump up the money straight away, don’t worry - there was a 1-year interest-free finance deal available, and there was no way you couldn’t pay it back in that time (although if you didn’t, you’d get clobbered for interest) if you were taking home £600 a week.

Clearly, I went home very much interested, having assured them I would talk it over before committing myself. At that point, I was all but ready to do just that. That changed when I got home and did a brief Google search for the name of the college. Some of the complaints on forums like Gumtree may well have been from disgruntled pupils who did not make the grade but still paid for the package, but what stuck out was that several of the claims the saleswoman had made were flat-out lies. The inquiry led to this page, and to this report from the Guardian. What I wasn’t told in the talk included:

• That there had been a general falling-off in uptake, due to falling birth rates in the 1980s
• That there had been a sharp fall-off in uptake due to the economic situation
• That the £30,000 net annual pay figure is for people who work flat-out (and therefore, should not be used to sell a one-year finance deal)
• That, while just under half of people who take the first two tests (theory and driving) pass, less than 30% of people who take the third test pass.

I tried to get statistics out of this woman for how many people pass these tests. She responded “how long is a piece of string”. What a stupid answer! Of course, it’s not stupid if you are looking to hide the fact that if you take the test and you rely on the tuition they provide, and particularly if you don’t put in an awful lot of private study, you probably will not pass that test. You get three chances, and if you fail a third time, it is back to square one. She also said that the bit about one shot at the tests was a special offer, valid the first two weeks in November alone (i.e. it expires on Friday). I asked why the company whose name was on the adverts had a different name from the company whose offices I visited for the presentation, and was told that the driving school is just one of many schools for whom they train drivers, which is not true - they are in fact owned by the same parent company.

I also contacted a relative who had also gone through this same organisation ten years ago, and briefly worked for a major driving school before giving up. He told me that his tuition only cost £1,000 and that, while he did get work, it involved an awful lot of “dead time” and anti-social hours, and that costs such as the franchise fee (which is a fixed rate, which can be up to the first 14 hours of training you provide every week) will severely eat into one’s takings. His advice was “think twice”, which is exactly what I have done. I am no longer seriously considering using this organisation’s services. (Another relative of mine worked for a similar company based at Tolworth a few years ago, and did not like working there much, and also had a look at what Gumtree contributors said about them, and it amounted to “don’t go near them, they’re shysters”.)

While the tuition seems like a rip-off, the government are partly to blame for the ridiculous costs of becoming a driver, let alone a driving instructor. When I qualified to drive in the mid-1990s, lessons cost £10 a go if you did not go to a “name” driving school (it cost more if you did); the test, if I remember correctly, cost something like £35, and there was no theory test then. Now, the theory test alone costs £30 and the practical £56.50, or £67 in the evening or on a Saturday. Of course, if you do not pass first time, and most people do not (it took me four attempts), you will run up these costs several times. For a potential instructor, the theory test costs £80, and keep in mind that there are two more tests, which currently cost £99 (there are plans to increase this to £112, in the “DSA Business Plan 2008/9”). After you pass the third test, you have to apply for an ADI licence disc, which costs another £300 at present, and is valid only for four years.

(On the subject of licence discs: if you are getting driving lessons through a “name” driving school, there are two types of licence discs, one with a green octagon which signifies that the instructor is qualified, and one with a pink triangle, of all things, which signifies that he is a trainee. They pay them the same, believe it or not, but the pink triangle is valid for six months, although it can sometimes be renewed. If you want a fully-qualified instructor, try asking for one - or go to a one-man driving school, because only fully-qualified instructors can run their own schools.)

I find the obsession with “market logic” in running public services puzzling. These are public services. They are not providing a service to the drivers and instructors, but to the general public, by keeping incompetent drivers off the roads and making sure people are taught by decent instructors. Since we all benefit, surely they should be subsidised more by the taxpayers and less by people who want to drive, or teach people to drive, and do it by the book rather than be a menace on the road or a cowboy instructor? The same is true of motorway service stations: they are a social necessity to stop people nodding off at the wheel; but the services and food provided are sold at a premium. A common excuse is the cost of providing free parking, but surely things which benefit everyone, not just thost who directly use them, should be paid for by everyone?

I heard this being discussed on the radio this morning, with a discussion on the Today programme between representatives of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and the Trades Union Congress (TUC); you can listen to it with this stream. I have considerable interest in this as I have been an agency worker for some time, having worked in both offices as a driver.

The CBI argued that this country has more agency workers than anywhere else in Europe, because agency workers offer flexibility to both workers and employers. My experience is that the flexibility is much more a benefit for employers, because they can sack someone for any reason they like, even after someone has been working there for months. I worked for a certain company for several months through the winter of 2002 and spring of 2003 until I took a week off for a family wedding in Ireland. The managers gave me every impression that I would be welcome back, but when I returned from Ireland I found that my job had been given away. There was nothing I could do about it and was out of work for weeks afterwards. The reason the foreman gave was that he did not like to keep agency drivers on for long, because they tended to “get their feet under the table”.

I think a compromise should be reached so that the nature of agency work is preserved - people know when they start that they are there on a temporary basis, which is why it’s called temping, and that when the occasion for their employment is over, so is their employment. I would, however, like to see more protection from unfair or capricious dismissal - and this for permanent workers as well, as they cannot sue for unfair dismissal until they have been employed for two years.

On Monday, I went into the medical records department at a certain west London hospital (and this department has some sort of educational function as well). My job was to fetch bags full of such records, put them in a truck and drive them to another London hospital. On the table, when I returned from the other hospital, I found a message, covering three sheets of A4 paper, in bold Swiss capitals, containing a print-out of one of these chain emails. “TO ALL MEN: PASS THIS TO ALL THE WOMEN YOU KNOW!! TO ALL WOMEN: REMEMBER THIS!!! THIS GIVES ME THE CREEPS!!”

The message was basically the third of the messages on the page linked above: “Bad guy changing a tire”. It’s about a man who lets a woman’s tyres down when she’s away from her car, then turns up like a good Samaritan to pump it up, and surreptitiously puts a case in her boot which turns out to contain weapons, which he intends to use on the woman. I could not help noticing that “tire” was not spelled as it commonly is in England (tyre; tire is a verb, as in being tired), and that there was a reference to “the mall”. We don’t call them malls here (although the word is used in some actual names); we usually call them shopping centres. The bit about Toronto on CIAC’s version, however, was cut out. So, even if the story was true, which it’s not, it is about things supposedly happening in Canada, not in England. So what’s it doing scaring women in hospitals in London?

On reading the message and recognising it as a hoax, I immediately told several of the staff at this department, who are nearly all female. They did not remove it, and one of them even suggested that the man in the hoax was me and that I was trying to remove warnings of the danger I posed to women! I eventually called the hospital’s main switchboard, asked to speak to someone in management who could lean on medical records to fix the problem. However, the lady on the switchboard took my message and said she’d pass it on, and that I’d know it had been sorted when “that nuisance thing” was gone. I expect I’ll find out tomorrow, when I go in to fetch the records.

Seriously, if you get one of these, do the research before you pass it to your entire contacts list, let alone print it out and stick it on a table on the entrance to a hospital department. If there really was a man tricking women in this way in your area, the police would tell the press and you’d hear about it in the news. Chain letters containing scare stories are almost always hoaxes, and if the story contains foreign usages of English that would not appear if it was aimed at people in your country, why pass it to others in your country?

As for why people write these things, my suspicion is that it is just a sick minded individual who wants to get kicks out of scaring women. Quite possibly, he is like the guy who flattens the tyre in order to change it. I really can’t imagine that there is any political motive, as the article in Bitch magazine implied. Someone has just moved on from email viruses which activate when they’re just read (as opposed to an attachment being opened) and the chain letter which someone in Venezuela didn’t bother to forward and died of cancer. If you get any of these, then “reply all”, tell them it’s a hoax and point them to the page linked above.

I feel somewhat qualified to address some of the points in this article, since I’m a regular cyclist and a professional driver. In my current job, which is in a distant part of London (Wealdstone), I have to cycle to New Malden station before getting two trains (or more usually three, because I get off at Wimbledon, get a coffee and get back on the train to Clapham Junction), and the actual job is mostly van driving. As I wrote here before, I had a very lucky escape at a roundabout on the main route to New Malden when I was hit by an old man who either did not notice me or thought he had priority because he had a more powerful vehicle. (He didn’t - on a roundabout, you give way to the vehicle already on the roundabout unless road markings and signs suggest otherwise).

Where I disagree with this writer is his enthusiasm for the speed cameras which he says are being replaced by reminding devices, in which drivers are reminded of their present speed and to slow down rather than being “flashed” and fined:

One innovation on my local main roads is solar-powered advisory speed signs. If a driver’s doing more than 30mph, they light up. Very pretty they are. But they don’t deter speeding. Why should they? No camera, no fine. All it asks is that drivers be nice and respect the speed limit. And if they hit a cyclist, so what? The chances are that all they’ll get is a charge of driving without due care and atteniton. … Motoring law largely deals with the hypothetical circumstances, not its consequences.

I can’t see how someone who is speeding and kills a cyclist can get off on a petty charge like that. That comes under causing death by dangerous driving, which routinely attracts prison sentences. But my real objection is that there are so many dangers for cyclists than mere speeding. The problem is reckless and dangerous driving.

For example, I’ve worked for numerous companies and had the dubious privelege of being driven around London (and other places) by their drivers. I was once sent out by a vehicle-hire company to deliver vans to companies, and the driver drove like a maniac and cut corners, by which I mean taking a corner wide by driving over the lines in the middle of the road. This is in fact more dangerous than speeding, as it could cause a head-on crash, or run down the cyclist who is in the middle of the road because he is going right or straight on. People are more tempted to do this on back roads, which have a lot of right-angle junctions and less traffic, which leads drivers to imagine that they can cut corners and speed safely. On another occasion I had to swerve to avoid a driver who turned right across my path in Tooting. Some people just don’t look.

Speed cameras, on the other hand, often appear on main roads rather than these back streets. They smack not only of a money-making scheme, but also of the state getting its pound of flesh out of pettily disobedient subjects. They are often used to enforce too-low speed limits, like the 30mph speed limits in the Limehouse Tunnel in east London. In that tunnel, you have to concentrate if you want to keep the speed limit, which means you are likely to be watching the speedometer rather than the road. The last time I drove through it, nobody was keeping the speed limit (some were doing well over 40mph). And it’s not an accident black-spot - I have heard of one serious accident which was caused by a young driver driving recklessly.

Speed cameras are used because they are an easy way of “solving the problem” of dangerous driving, but anyone who works in my profession will know that they are ineffective. They need to sort out the blatantly dangerous driving - the corner-cutting and rapid acceleration and braking, for example. They also need to stop drug driving. On one occasion I went out in a 16-tonne Volvo truck to deliver furniture to Essex, and the driver pulled over and rolled himself a joint as we headed up the main road past Chelmsford. Alhamdu lillah we got back in one piece, but his driving was noticeably impaired.

I’m not surprised that John Miller no longer feels able to cycle in London. Since my crash I cycle less than I used to, and am more apprehensive. I’ve never cycled in Waltham Forest, but the provision for cyclists south of the river isn’t up to much either - in particular, crossing the six-lane A3 is particularly hazardous, particularly if you just want to go straight out of New Malden to Raynes Park. And yes, there is the problem of foliage growing over cycle routes and not being cut back. But I really don’t see the benefits of speed cameras, as they don’t tackle bad driving practices other than speeding.

Yesterday, out of the blue, a company to which I must have sent my CV after seeing their advert as a result of an email circular I’d signed up for, called me on my mobile. I’d forgotten that I’d sent my CV to them, but we arranged for me to visit them on Thursday for an interview. I said Thursday, because of some cash-flow problems I thought I’d have arising from the renewal of my web hosting contract this week (£82). Anyway, this morning, I got up and cycled in the pouring rain to the job in Raynes Park I did yesterday - only to be told that I wasn’t needed, and apparently my agency hadn’t got the message through.

Anyway, later on in the morning, I called that company back and asked them to re-arrange the interview, as I was now free (i.e. unemployed) for today, and might not be free on Thursday, as jobs come up day by day. They agreed, and we set the time for 4pm this afternoon.

Just before I went, I sent them a fax explaining that, for religious reasons, I was unable to shake hands with members of the opposite sex. This was to forestall any embarrassment or offence which might be caused by my refusing a handshake when it’s offered. I set off some time after 2pm, which is more than enough time. I got to the office just before 4, and knocked on the door.

And there was nobody there. There was no sign of life at the office whatsoever, and the door was locked. I tried calling them again, but nobody answered. I hung around for about 20 minutes, asking the guy at reception if he knew why they might not be there. He didn’t, although he did say they’d been in, as they’d got their mail. I called their number and left a message, asking them to call me back if they wanted to arrange another interview.

I then headed for the Apple Centre in Regent Street, where they have free internet access, to check if they’d sent me an email. They hadn’t. So what happened? I’m pretty sure I didn’t mis-hear or forget that they said 2pm rather than 4pm - I’m pretty sure it was indeed 4pm. It seems that either someone didn’t pass on a message, or they got funny when I sent them that fax (which, by the way, did not say which religion, although they could probably guess). Still, I’m going to call them again tomorrow insha Allah, to see if I can re-arrange that interview. If it does turn out to be discrimination, I intend to name the company.

When I first started, I found the van itself a bit of annoyance, but hey - vans almost always are. It’s an Iveco “Turbo Daily” which was converted for its present purpose, so I hear. Vans always have their idiosyncrasies - like the radio which doesn’t remember how loud it was the last time you switched it off, so you always have to turn up the volume whenever you switch the engine off (like whenever it stalls). It also has a lousy turning circle. However, you realise it’s not so bad when you get to drive their old H-reg (that’s like late 1980s, I think!) Ford Transit. My co-worker told me that a repairman once told him, after taking it for a ride, that the van had had some vandalism, and when the co-worker opened up the front, a young fox jumped out! So that’s who’d been nibbling through the wiring!

My daily routine has involved bringing the “service users” in in the mornings, taking a group out from about 11, and then taking them home in the afternoon. The trips out are things like “rambles” by the River Thames at Walton or in the park (of which there are lots in our part of London - Richmond, Osterley, Bushy Park …), supervised shopping or (as today) trips to a “sensory room”, which is a room with dimmed lights and various amusements and soft furnishings, and these rooms are mainly for autistics. The care worker describes it as a “chill-out room”.

The job isn’t made any easier by the road works they are doing in the high street of New Malden. This is something that has Transport for London’s stamp on it, which means it is a London project rather than a Kingston borough project, but it seems to involve narrowing the road to make way for a more generous pavement. Right now though, it involves trucks blocking half the road during the morning rush hour - bright idea, Ken. Worse, my co-worker told me he saw workmen breaking up new concrete kerb slabs and chucking them in the skip! Surely if the slabs are surplus to requirements, they should have got a refund. The centre itself is part of a bizarre one-way system on a road off the high street, and once you’ve gone round the block, you have to go out - you can’t go back round the one-way system again. Then you’ve got to go left at the lights on the high street, down to the roundabout at the bottom of the high street. (Unless you fancy turning round in the road.)

The “service users” have a range of disabilities, although my co-worker told me there had been some who’d had nothing wrong with them at all - they were just institutionalised, having been dumped into the system for such reasons as being born out of wedlock, as in the case of one elderly lady who had died a couple of years back. (This sort of thing really makes my blood boil - people’s whole lives being wasted in order to save other people embarrassment.) Many of them had been victims, sorry, patients of “long stay” hospitals, one of which he had described as an old-fashioned “Bedlam” type place. These were the sorts of people at whom the “care in the community” initiative under John Major’s government was aimed, although it was caricatured as being the release of dangerous mental patients who then went on to kill people. They don’t tell us much about what exactly is wrong with the “clients” for confidentiality reasons.

The people here all fall into the “severely disabled” category. Many of them walk and talk, to varying degrees. A lot don’t. They range in age from late teens to the younger end of elderly; they get sent to this department after finishing with the education system. I always go out with an escort (who used to be a driver, until he was stripped of his licence for reasons connected with his diabetes), and asked him how the “clients” or “service users” became the way they are. He told me that many of them had Down’s Syndrome, and some were the victims of forceps deliveries that went wrong. Not many were disabled by accident. But a lot of them were middle-aged, and lived at home until their parents became too old to cope. The wise ones, he said, got their children used to living in residential care early, so it wouldn’t be too much of a shock when they had to move in for good.

I have to say, this job reminds me of why I wouldn’t like to work with the mentally disabled all the time. A few of them inspire sympathy and/or respect, like Janice, who is in her 40s, and has a calm and dignified air to her even though she cannot talk (she is in a wheelchair and can tread herself round in it), while others shout around her. She has said to have been a “service user” of this department since her early 30s. I enjoy being around her even though she cannot really do much. Others I find frustrating or even a bit frightening. Sometimes I’m looking for a patient (I can’t get to calling them clients) in the unit, and I get some patient who isn’t supervised asking me a question which I can’t really understand. I gather she wants to know about who’s driving her (or someone else) around this week or next. She’s very nicely dressed, in a long denim skirt with flowers on it, and I’ve been told that she lives with her family who look after her very well.

The centre is basically a sheltered workshop combined with a treatment and activity centre, and the more able of them do craft work, the fruits of which they sell at the May Fair to raise money for the centre’s outings. Some of them sit and listen to music and perhaps dance, while others have been known to make clothes. I saw a rather nice picture of various clients with the clothes they’d made, and the ladies tended to make rather nice, brightly coloured dresses. I asked the escort about one of the patients, who attended the centre in a bright purple velvet-effect dress, and he told me that several of the patients liked to dress up, that they had feelings just like any other adults, and many of them in fact had partners among the other patients.

I think I’m going to enjoy this job for the next week or two - it’s nice to work with people rather than goods and on your own every so often. They are much better to work with than most of the driver’s mates or construction site workers I’ve had to deal with on other jobs. But the work is still not a full eight hours’ work, and I’m not sure if it’ll be eight hours’ pay either. I’ll have to see, insha Allah, when I get my pay slip next Friday.