A Spoonie’s Day, Cooking…

Apologies if you find any discontinuities in what follows. Even though it’s only a little over 1,000 words it’s taken me almost 4 days to finish – an indicator of just how crappy things are right now.

When I write about cooking I’m often moved to include a disclaimer, pointing out that this is the exception, rather than the rule, and that most days cooking is way beyond me. So, on the occasional days when I am able to cook, I make stews and casseroles, which can be frozen against the times – most days – when I’m unable to do more than reheat something.

As this is the 7th anniversary of my blog it seemed an apposite time to show why this is.

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A normal cook will belly up to the workspace, sharpen his/her knives, get stuck in, and leave when the prep’s finished and the dish is cooking, at which point it can often be left more or less to its own devices.

For Spoonies – this Spoonie, at any rate – things are very different.

My workspace always has a restaurant-standard mise en place setup – all ingredients and utensils needed are assembled in and around the workspace prior to starting, as it’s the sensible way to go – it means I barely have to move from the spot once I start. Except, of course, when I need to rest.

Foreign aid or disability benefits – which comes first?

Should we be paying out billions on foreign aid, much of it lost to corruption and maladministration along the way, when we have a government that claims we don’t have enough money to support our own most vulnerable citizens – the chronically sick and disabled – and, instead, prefers to punish them for being chronically sick and disabled?

A commenter at the Guardian thinks we should, saying:-

Both this government and the Labour government before agree that it is our social responsibility as members of the human race to help the less fortunate peoples.

This was my reply:-

The Chronically Sick and Disabled need your help – now.

One of my tweeps** retweeted my Paralympics press release earlier today, appending a note saying “He took days to write this”.

**Twitter follower/followee

Now that’s OK, I know exactly what Jeni meant because at some point on Twitter I’d said it myself – I had been so ill when I wrote it – Arrowe Park Hospital screwing with my life yet again – that it took me three days to write a

The Paralympics and the chronically sick and disabled, a press release.

The following is being sent out by me to all newspapers not hiding behind a paywall. It’s already been sent to the Guardian.

I have no objection, providing the source is properly acknowledged, to it being copied and sent to whosoever you think can make a difference.

Ron.

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“Chronically sick and disabled” is really not the same as “disabled”.

“Chronically sick and disabled” is really not the same as “disabled”.

I wrote this post in May 2011. With the looming Paralympics, which will almost inevitably, given the government-sponsored hostile mood of much of the country, reflect badly on the chronically sick and disabled community, I thought it was timely to re-publish it. It was, at the time, one of my most well-received posts.

The truth about how we’re deprived of benefits, from inside Atos…

Exclusive: ‘Sick firm told us to catch out disabled people’

The ruthless Tory drive to remove thousands of seriously ill and disabled people from benefits was exposed this week as a nurse employed to assess them spoke out to Socialist Worker.

Jean, a former employee of Atos Healthcare in Scotland, exposed a process she described as a “sham”. Atos is a multinational firm contracted by the Department for Work and Pensions to screen patients.

“I worked for Atos as a ‘disability analyst’ thinking I would be helping vulnerable people to access their benefits,” she said.

“I soon discovered

Working while claiming DLA…

For the first time in a while, a question from my search-engine slush pile “will the DLA know if I start a part time job?”

Whether they know or not doesn’t matter – they don’t care.

Contrary to what the cretins at the Daily Mail and the Torygraph seem to think, DLA is

Daily Mail benefit lies and the Twitter #MyDLA campaign…

For those of you seduced by the seemingly endless torrent of benefit-related lies from the Daily Mail, from free BMWs for the disabled to today’s crock of shit that DLA is available just for the asking, I recommend the Twitter hashtag #MyDLA, and the document that @LucyTweeting has created from the contributions.

E-petition rejected for blatantly dishonest reasons…

Yesterday I submitted an e-petition request which said:-

We call upon the government to compel Atos Healthcare to replace its current tick-box disability assessment system with one in which disabled claimants are properly assessed by qualified doctors as, indeed, was the case before Atos were appointed. The current system is demonstrably unfair and arbitrary.

Today I got a reply saying:-

Reduce the cost of disability – end pointless reassessments…

Someone on Twitter asks, when PiP is introduced, will the blind be left alone and not repeatedly reassessed. However, it affects very many more people than those who are registered blind.

These days amputees are routinely reassessed, presumably in case limbs have magically grown back, as is pretty much anybody with an incurable and progressive illness, including