Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

I had three volunteering meetings in the last day.

The first was last night; like I said I signed up for the first agenda-setting meeting for an RNIB LGBT+ group in the north of England. It had what the organizers considered a good turnout, seven or eight people I think, but which the person who arrived last thought was a bad idea because the north of England is way too big an area. Maybe it is but...we only had seven or eight people! If it gets huge we can split it but for now, it's worth establishing that we want such a group at all.

People apparently do, so three of us (yes I am one of the three) are going to be the "organizing committee" to plan what monthly meetings could look like. So that meeting is next week. I'm looking forward to having something Biphoria-ish to do again, and glad that this intersection of crip and queer might finally get some presence in my life because I'm bored of all my activism/socializing that's one thing being terrible about the other thing.

Then this afternoon I had a kind of interview with a couple of people from Transport for Greater Manchester about bus information and what kind would help me as a blind person. We talked about real-time information at stops/on apps, having that information on the buses in audio and visual formats like they do in London (what number bus it is, what direction, what the next stop is, etc.) and even about information about how crowded the bus is which would be a huge bonus while the pandemic is going on and rules about masking and distancing and ventilation range from unenforceable to non-existent. I found it interesting, if exhausting to just do that much thinking, and they seemed to find it really useful. And I'll get a decent amount of money in a voucher for doing it, I guess, so that's cool.

But mostly I'm just unspeakably glad to see TfGM talk about buses! They've been responsible for the trams forever but buses have been this shitty de-regulated thing where all my complaints about not enforcing covid rules, or before that when buses wouldn't stop for me, it was always like "you have to take it up with the particular bus company." Even though the problems are the same everywhere. Even when I felt like I was getting somewhere in my pre-pandemic "stop for blind people" activism, I was aware that to get any reliable progress I'd have to do the same work with First and Arriva and whoever else, and it was hard enough to do all that work with Stagecoach! And that was with sympathetic management, which there is no guarantee you'd get from the next bus operator. So I'm really glad that shitty system is coming to an end here.

Technically there was an hour and a half between that meeting and my next one today, but as usual it overran slightly and I had to do some staring into space drinking tea before I could contemplate starting dinner, but I had to do it then if we were going to eat before it got too late for me and I turned into a gremlin (we ate really late in the evenings all weekend, and last night did by accident when the takeout took much longer than planned to turn up, so I wanted to go back to getting it right for me tonight).

So I put a quiche in the oven and started work on chopping vegetables for salad and I boiled potatoes for potato salad...we have too many potatoes! mother_bones kindly finished off the green salad while I was in the meeting so I just had to add the cucumber, mint, greek yogurt and lemon juice to make potato salad (it might sound weird but it's very good, this household loves my potato salad) afterward and dinner was basically ready.

My last meeting was like a focus group for an ad coming up from the RNIB and it was surprisingly fun and great. I found myself among my people! I worried at first I'd be the only one ranting about the sighted gaze, ableism, tragedy porn or inspiration porn but I absolutely was not.

We weren't sure what the goal of the ad was but we wanted it to be more about what sighted people could learn about and indeed from blind people: from #JustAskDontGrab to why we're expected to disclose our diagnosis and potentially traumatic stories to receive support or sympathy.

We questioned things outside the scope of the individual ad, like the "see the person not the sight loss" motto they keep using, which I hate, which thanks to this group I now want to replace with "My biggest limitation is your vision." It'll never happen, but a boy can dream can't he.