This week’s contribution is about exclusion.
It’s funny I’ve been forced to think quite intently about all the things that I love that I’m being excluded from at present. And these are exclusions that possibly people don’t really think about.
For instance, we’re moving to a cashless society. Now any bright, intelligent person would tell you that’s a really bad idea because it’s the end of privacy, but equally, for somebody experiencing homelessness on welfare benefits, actually having cash is a much easier way to budget, to control things. And as long as you’re getting it sort of in weekly spits and spurts, you can really control what’s going on in your world.
So, when people start saying, “Oh, we don’t take cash,” it becomes a big problem. And that’s now happening to things like theatres. And I love going to the theatre and I often get incredibly good deals and you just walk up to the box office, you can sometimes negotiate a ticket price, and then you pay in cash. Well, they’ve stopped taking cash. They’ve also stopped taking cash at the half price their ticket box office in Leicester Square, which excludes me from going to the theatre. And I don’t think people think about that very often.
My dress code also excludes me from doing certain things, so friends invite me to the gentlemen’s club, for instance, and there are legendary stories about a visit to an Athenaeum with Christopher Lee, where they have to drape me in a tablecloth because I was wearing jeans. Now, had I not been going to meet Chris, really, I’m pretty sure they just wouldn’t let me in.
Anybody seeing any images with me in the last sort of five or six years… I live in t-shirts, jeans, trainers, a jacket and a hat and sunglasses. That is now my trademark look. That’s how I look pretty much in every image you will ever see of me. I do have beautiful suits – Armani and Gucci – but they’re all sitting in my storage unit and they’re not accessible.
I’ve had John Lobb shoes, but again, I can’t easily access these things and I can’t carry them around with me. So, the uniform that I have allows me to have a change of t shirt and a pair of pants and socks in a bag. But that’s it. So, when friends invite me out to sort of dinner parties that require black tie – I don’t have a bank account, so I can’t hire anything and not that I’ve got the money to do so anyway. So, then suddenly I’m getting blocked because of my clothing.
We’ve got this strange world where, actually, the blocks to engaging with a good life, are your dress code, your money. It’s happening all around you, and the third thing now, from my perspective, is because I’m ME/CFS sufferer.
When the vaccines first came out, we kind of looked very carefully at how the vaccines were impacting on me, CFS sufferers, and because our condition is one where our bodies are heightened and basically fighting constantly. The ME/CFS 24-7. Anything else that we get hits us 10 times or 100 times harder than it would be somebody who doesn’t suffer. And so the results from the vaccine came up very quickly and it went – Ah! Don’t take it.
Basically, it was a risk judgement, and they were going, we can’t guarantee you’re going to have a crash if you take it and if you get ill, we’re not sure how you’re going to respond to it. You may be good; you may be bad. But the likelihood that you get ill now is pretty slim.
The likelihood of you getting very ill is very slim and the likelihood of dying from it is infinitesimal. So, it became this thing that, especially if you’re experiencing homelessness, you know you’re not going to do something that guarantees you to have a crash. So, you say, “I’m not doing that”. And we basically become an exemption category.
But now any Covid passports to get into theatres and venues and things so that that makes you exclusionary and you can’t even get sort of PCR tests and things because you don’t have an address, you don’t have a digital device and everything is done via email. You’ve got to log in and you’ve got to do that. And you kind of go, my world’s getting really, really small and nothing’s changed. You know, there’s really nothing has fundamentally changed, but suddenly we’re into exclusion.
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