I can’t have seen Chris Whitaker in twenty or twenty-five years, but this morning for some reason I thought about him. We were in nursery school together. He has

CP, but early on he got included in mainstream. The last I heard he had passed his Phd. This morning I suddenly got the urge to google him: I was curious about his PhD thesis, and how it squared up to my masters. (I know, I can be stupidly competitive sometimes). To my joy I discovered that he now keeps a blog, too. Personally Speaking Out is a really interesting page. Chris seems to cover a lot of the same ground I try to, inasmuch as he attempts, in his entries, to define his role as a disabled blogger, and the extent to which he should emphasise his disability. I face the same issues, torn between the urge to play down my disability and just write about things as anyone else would, and the urge to acknowledge the point of view having a disability and belonging to the disability community awards me. It’s a subject I’ve returned to quite a bit, perhaps most notably in my Us and them entry, so it’s fascinating to see Chris deal with similar issues. Given his cp is milder than mine, his perspective is slightly different, yet we come to many of the same conclusions. For me, if the internet is to truly reflect human diversity, bloggers with disabilities surely have a duty to write about the world from their perspective. At the same time, to do so risks overegging the pudding, sounding like a one-track record; someone obsessed with the things which set him apart from others rather than a regular person, as complex and multi-faceted as anyone else, who just happens to have a disability.

Chris only started blogging in june, so I welcome him to the blogverse. He still seems to be finding his feet, so I wish him luck. Having regularly updated a blog for well over ten years, I can assure him it’s a habit he’ll soon find hard to kick.