Why Pink Spades Are Probably Trying to Kill You [alternative title: This is what an idiot would do]

As my most popular humerous post was a re-telling of a story from my childhood, I decided I would try another. This is a few different stories mashed up from my childhood growing up with one sister, two brothers and a Richard.

Everybody should have a Richard in their life, in fact, they probably do: that unfortunate guy whose parents gave him two first names; that unfortunate guy who has a nickname people giggle at the first time they hear it; that unfortunate guy. For my family, our Richard is all three-- named Richard Richardson, nicknamed Dicky and, of course, marred by all of those horrendously funny things that happen to the same person. Our Richard has taught us many things, ranging from why never to leave your drink at a night club, to how children's garden implements can be lethal. Probably.
One thing about growing up with plenty of siblings the same age is the entertainment you can provide yourselves with over summer (see this post). One of the many wonders my childhood world brought me was the ghost train.

For anyone who has never seen one of these, they were the best things since barbies and action-men as far as my siblings and I were concerned. This is not merely a tractor, though. This is the best seat on the ghost train. You travel at speeds of up to Ben's-Top-Running-Speed, are scared by 3D-real life Brothers-Friends-Jumping-Out-of-The-Shed-and-Screaming, and-- worst of all-- chased back out of the garden and down the street by both brothers... with a wheelchair going up to 4mph. And if that doesn't scare you sh*tless, you're probably not 6-year-old Frankie. It wasn't necessarily scary, it was just exhilarating to go that fast down a hill on a toy tractor that you don't have to pedal and damned if seeing your siblings and their friends jump around like lunatics wasn't the funniest thing to happen that Sunday.
I'm sure you've all heard about the bed antics, so I'll move on to when we were a bit older and not at all wiser, when parks were all the rage in the early millennium and not many kids' disappearances were broadcast on day-time TV. Josh had moved to secondary school and was most probably in year 8 by this point, dating these stories roughly at 2002. Dicky, a friend of Josh's and fast becoming member of the family, took to-- what can only be described as my family's war-spirit-- and began hanging out with us on school holidays. I guess it would have been a kind of 'bike riding after-school' friendship, if Josh was able to cycle, but as luck would have it Dicky had to be shared between Josh, Ben, Lizzie and my little old self. A sport me and my siblings (from now on, unless I state other wise, assume that siblings/family includes Dicky) enjoyed in the lighter months was Wiffle, a game I can't remember the rules to, but involved a light, plastic ball with holes in and... basically a really long, plastic baseball bat. According to Wikipedia it's similar to baseball but everything is lighter- including the nature of the game. We used to play Wiffle everywhere! On holiday, in the garden, in the park, in the street; me and my sister even used to play it in our bedroom. As I've aged I may have dropped my mind in the gutter and now-- even though the name means the same thing to me-- I hesitate a little every time I go to tell someone of my family's favourite childhood sport.
Changing the subject (necessarily) me and my sister used to have story time before bedtime, which is a pretty normal thing for children and parents to do. During the summer months though, when there was more light at a later time, play-time took presidence. We would often ask if we could substitute our story time for said play-time, and our parents always obliged; that is until... the Pink Spade Incident. To be fair, this incident was not the fault of us not reading a story specifically, but one could be forgiven for assuming that when our mother asked us to come inside, our chimed response of "story-time-for-bed-time?" put a spark into our brother's (assume 'brothers' includes Dicky, also) minds.
"No, no, no, we'll do your story for you, but it'll be a play!" called Dicky, having already made his mind up apparently, about the travesty that was about to unfold. Once the sun started going down, however slowly, the Whiffle bat and ball would go away and we would entertain ourselves once again with formerly mundane, useless items. Like a toddler's see-saw "being kept for the grandkids", or... a children's gardening set my grandma probably got reduced from the pound shop or the 'munitions factory.
"Don't try this at home, kids." My brothers chorused from the grass. Lizzie and I were sat on a plastic table on the patio, looking down at the dangerous things the skinny, energetic lads were doing, as Josh dictated what each should do. Turning the see-saw upside down and standing, balanced on the seats was fun to watch and pretty dangerous for kids. Balancing it upright on one of it's ends and leap-frogging over-- sure to end in a broken bone for girls aged 8 and under. But no one could have predicted the hilariousity (that's right, the moment's aura has created a new word in the comedy genre) that would ensue once my sister and I had 'gone to bed'. We were directly instructed by the director of the garden-implements facade (Dicky, actually not Josh) to go and sit in our room on my sister's top bunk to continue watching the show incognito. We turned the bedroom lights off, the nightlight on, shut the door, sat on my sister's top bunk, opened the windows, closed the curtains behind us and dangled our legs out of the window. We were watching, laughing and jesting, as Ben and Dicky talked us through in Zoo-Keeper-at-Feeding-Time style, the dangerous objects in out garden- the trees, the bees, the plants,
"And the garden wall" Shouted Dicky as he jumped off a very old, 4ft and questionably unstable wall.
"You're an idiot" we replied, with childhood innocence. At this point, Richard must have spotted the death trap that is a pink spade from that murder kit I mentioned my grandma had bought earlier; the paint was chipped and it had probably been out for a few days on the lawn. The metal, revealed under the paint-lacking patches, was rusty and flaking, and the whole spade just screamed tetanus. Not knowing this, he made a dive for the spade and swung it in an almighty bid to make us all laugh whilst saying the next sentence
"No, I'm putting on a show. Don't try this at home!-- This is what an idiot would do--" WHACK.
That almighty swing? Ended on his forehead. I don't know if he thought the spade would quickly crumble away on his noggin, leaving him impact free, or if he assumed it was one of those magical spades which pass straight through your head, but it did neither. It did, however, send out the loudest metallic clanging sound I've possibly ever heard, and rebound straight off his head onto the lawn, in the same fashion a tennis ball might bounce off a wall, but enough force to wrench itself free of Dicky's grasp and leave a very fast-growing egg, the size of-- well-- an egg, on the lad's forehead. My sister and I quickly assessed the damage. The singular "...Ow" which came from Dicky told us it wasn't good, but at the same time we couldn't just bolt down the stairs-- our parents would know we had been sitting up watching the incident. We couldn't resist the opportunity to see a cartoon head bump in real life. When we got downstairs (after hearing the boys were inside and tending to Richard's head) we acted surprised. 'What happened?' 'Oh my this is so unexpected!' Trained in the art of acting clueless, we gathered in the downstairs bathroom to see the shiner up-close. It actually looked like Dicky was growing a baby dinosaur on his head, but it was first nesting it's egg between his eyes.

"I fell."

And that was the story my parents knew for a good long time. Until the spade appeared in the garden one day and Richard screamed running from it shouting some obscenities about hit-men and all had to be explained. Still, not one of my family members can pass a small pink spade without laughing or exclaiming "This is what an idiot would do!"

Civil Rights, People, Civil Rights.

There are lots of ‘disgraceful’ acts which make their way up into our news; the lady who put a cat in a bin; people being charged with ‘public indecency’ because of wearing pyjamas in public; children being taken to court for not attending birthday parties. These are things that provoke people to say they weep for humanity or really worry about where society is headed. On a tangent and from an entertainment perspective, society is becoming more visually fascinated with the world, and whilst not many could withstand a silent theatre production, the intrigue of my generation lands far more on the ocular than other senses. That’s why we have 3D-iMax cinema, 4K and curved-screen TV’s. That’s why Disney Classics are being restored and released on a yearly basis; people hate the scratchy-tape look. Admittedly, the ears are far more easily offended than eyes, but the focus seems to be – at least overtly – more on visual effects. Is that the reason people are racist? I mean, yes, the world’s powers have become a lot more tolerant of different cultures, beliefs and looks, but unfortunately, racism still exists. Is that because it’s far easier to tell someone’s skin colour apart from their voices? Or is it simply a prejudice that clutches onto some people? At any rate, this story (a Portuguese commission for the 50^th anniversary of the Universal Declaration for Human Rights) just proves how the present generation have come on in leaps and bounds in terms of prejudice and acceptance:

A white woman sits down for a flight, looking uncomfortable with her travelling companion; a black gentlemen. The woman calls a flight attendant over and says she couldn’t possibly spend the flight next to a "negro". The flight attendant says there are no more seats in economy, but will speak to the pilot. She comes back and announces that there is indeed a seat in 1^st class and that the pilot agrees he wouldn’t have any of his passengers sit next to such a ‘despicable’ passenger. She then beckons the man to first class and the woman is left alone in economy.

See, in this day and age, prejudice should be combated like this; don’t accommodate the accuser, make more comfortable those being rebuked. A case of racism is agreed upon to who is being abused and who is the bigot; the person making preconceptions over the colour of another person skin is being racist, and should not be accommodated, but the victim – in this case the black man – should be apologised to on behalf of the racist, and if necessary paid compensation. After all, racism is against the law in England.

That’s why I was absolutely horrified to see the latest “cat bin lady” story. A young man with a horrendous, crippling and life-limiting condition (Muscular Dystrophy, a condition my own brother, Josh, has) was asked to leave a cinema after another viewer complained that his ventilator was apparently making ‘too much noise’. Firstly, let me explain about the ventilator and the vitality of this bit of kit.

1.   Muscular Dystrophy (MD) is a group of muscle wasting conditions, whereby the body either: cannot produce muscle fibres correctly; destroys its own muscle fibres, or; produces muscle fibres without the adhesive enzyme needed to connect them together. This causes muscle tissues to weaken and deteriorate. Lungs function only via the intercostal muscles (the muscles connecting ribs) and the diaphragm (a band of muscle stretching across the abdomen). When these muscles are wasted in MD the lungs cannot function: you lose your ability to breathe. A ventilator acts as a pump for your balloon-like lungs, and essentially keeps you alive by manually breathing for you.
2.     The noise a ventilator makes is a hushing sound, sort of like wind, or someone making a 'shh' sound. This type of noise is white noise, and the human brain usually blocks this out, or at least doesn’t focus on it, and the white noise descends into the background of your unconscious minds- basically, you shouldn’t notice it’s there.

So from this, we’ve established that a ventilator is essentially portable life-support, and the sound it makes is pretty natural and non-invasive. So why did Richard – a 31-year-old suffering with a condition which has a life expectancy of about 15 years; a miracle and a medical breakthrough – why was this fine gentlemen removed from an Odeon cinema screen in Epsom, showing a film to 198 others? Why was this stupid act of discrimination allowed to happen? Has the world not moved on from removing black people from buses in 60 years? I would hate to think that the world has an obsession with placing certain standards and social equity groups in every generation, to the extent that some prejudice always has to be prominent in order for people to feel better than others.

Sure, it might have been a mistake. The usher may not have been trained as to ‘how-to-handle-complaints-about-vulnerable-customers’. However, I’m sure their moral compass would have told them to evict the complainer, had they been asked to remove an Asian or black girl from the cinema. And sure, this isn’t the same situation – 6 people complained that the noise the ventilator made was a ‘nuisance’ (and maybe they could indeed hear the ventilator), but when I go to the cinema, I hear people laughing and texting throughout the film. If I had complained about a mobile phone, I still wouldn’t expect those people to be evicted, just to be told to keep the noise down; those people have a choice, and are perfectly able to turn their phones off. Josh and Richard don’t have the opportunity to turn their ‘nuisances’ off. If they did, they would die; that’s the reality of this situation. So the only option left, you might think, is to ask him to leave.

But the air hostess didn’t accommodate the racist, did she? She didn’t move the bigot to 1^st class so she wouldn’t complain any more, but rather, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would believe the flight attendant to compensate towards the abused, and make him more comfortable. It’s not as easy to evict a racist from a plane, as it is to ask prejudiced movie-goers to leave a screen. I’m not looking for a 'sincere' apology to Richard – he’s already had this. I’m not looking for someone to explain why it happened. I’m looking for people to change their frame of mind. Don’t reward people with prejudices. Racism is illegal. Why isn’t prejudice against people with disabilities illegal? Or just a step away from that, why do people not think a little more -- not to be totally anal about what’s PC and what isn’t -- but just to find other solutions; if people can’t accept others’ differences, they should look away, get a little more perspective and come back another day. Not be allowed to continue in their reign of bigotry.

It’s not time for apologies, it’s time for change.