The Floor
- 25 Jul 07, 5:42 PM
I hate the floor, me. I mean, I realise it has its uses in architectural or gravitational terms. I’m not suggesting that disabled and non- alike live out their days suspended in air, that would worsen the situation somewhat for those of us with poor spatial awareness. I merely ask that someone, somewhere, in between designing Wheelchairs wot climb stairs, completely revaluate the concept of Floor.
Once something has hit the floor, there is no predicting its destiny. I recently told you all of my DVD Boxset of House. Well, I regret to inform you that it has since met an unfortunate fate. I was sat at my computer, minding my own, I reversed my wheelchair and there was a loud tearing cracking noise. I had crushed the half-empty boxset box.
Never again will I be able to arrange my DVDs side by side in numerical order, safe in the knowledge that they are secured by cardboard with a matching colour scheme. What pains me is, this was all the work of a slight nudge on a joystick. The same wheelchair that veers into the road at the smallest pavement tree root is capable of wanton destruction. Destroying things with the kind of efficiency it appears to lose when I need to be at the library on time. Yes indeed, this was all about being disabled. This would never have happened had I not nearly been born on a pavement in my mum’s lunch break in 1984. Hugh Laurie’s face would still be intact instead of covered in tyre tracks with a hole gouged out.
The only way to save something from an uncertain future in the shadow of a power chair is, of course, to pick it up off The Floor. This is easier said than done. The art of dropping things on The Floor, or rather the end result, splits into three categories: In Reach; Out of Reach; In Reach But Risky.
For me personally, “In Reach But Risky” can mean anything from dicing with death to just leaving the thing until 6.30 (My timetabled PA/carer slot, how could you not know?)
The other day it was my MP3 player. A disaster, the thing slides spectacularly from my lap to the floor under the desk. Eventually resolved with my crutch and my less spazzified foot. But frankly I have better ways of filling my time, like watching battered House DVDs.
Finally, and this is important: Floors hurt. A lot. Many’s the time I have reached the drunken conclusion that I can in fact walk unaided, only to meet swiftly with someone’s carpeted concrete and the kind of pain no amount of alcohol can numb.
Floor: it doesn’t have to be this way… or maybe it does. I don’t know about you but I’ve not seen Tomorrow’s World in ages, did they axe it? Because if schoolfriends, cabbies and passing strangers are anything to go by. TW is the only place to bring anything useful to disabled people. That and the occaisonal Newsround slot.
Oh well, no one can invent Nouveau Floor for us. The design brief being: no pain, no dropping, basically no gravity. Damn.
Comments
Sorry. Can't help myself. This is from the Penguin Book of Comic and Curious Verse, which was required reading when I was a child. I think it's anonymous.
Ahem.
"I wish that my room had a floor.
I don't care so much for a door.
But this walking around
Without touching the ground
Is getting to be quite a bore."
I'll fetch me coat...
I'm right with you there, Nicola, and it's not just power wheelchairs that reduce things on The Floor to pulp, I do a very good job in my manual chair... Especially now I have mountain-bike type tyres with very deep tread.
Ban gravity, I say...
I have a problem with floors in hospitals. They are invariably extremely hard. I tend mainly to attend hospitals when I have harmed myself and fear further harm which beckons at every one of my uncertain steps.