Invisible Illness

Yesterday I went to see the crew at Serpent’s Tail/Profile, as I haven’t seen them since my launch in the middle of January. As an experiment, I left my stick at home. Oxford Street and the tube in rush hour were a bit too much, but otherwise I really should leave it behind more, at least when I’m going somewhere quiet.

However, after my experience the other day, I wonder if that’s a good idea. People really are funny.

I’d been in Kentish Town, and decided to walk part of the way home. When I got to Adelaide Road, I felt too hot and tired to go on, and decided to wait for the 31 bus. When I got on, I was pleased to find an empty seat at the front, in the ‘Please give these seats to disabled people and those with children’ seats. (I don’t have the phrase to hand, but will try and find it.) I flopped gratefully into one of the two free seats, my stick folded up in my bag.

A couple of stops later, an Irish woman in her 50s got on, and an old white-haired lady who she seemed to be accompanying. Perhaps it was her mother, who knows. I glanced up, and figured that if the old lady needed to sit down, she could take the seat next to me. The older Asian couple in the seats behind got up and said they were getting off at the next stop, so the two women ended up sitting together.

But this was clearly not good enough for madam. She began a rumbling bitching session about ‘her’ in the seat in front, addressing the back of my head, and how awful it was, and how those seats were ‘actually supposed to be for old people,’ and yadda yadda, all of which I ignored because in truth I did not have the energy for a confrontation. When we got to my stop, there was more muttering and an evil glare.

It got me thinking. What on earth are all the people with cancer, heart disease, Crohns, or emphysema (to name a random sample), or recovering from strokes, supposed to do, in order to signal to all the self-righteous bullies on public transport, that although they are not limping or in a wheelchair, they are in fact quite ill and could do with a bloody seat?

Not sure why this got to me, in the same way as the receptionist at the anticoagulation clinic managed to do last week. Looking back, I wish I’d given them both, separately, a mouthful, I really do, just to restore the natural balance of things, but I was just too tired. And, of course, two wrongs don’t make a right.