Just to give everybody an idea of the sort of crass, patronising stupidity I have to put up with sometimes, I think I ought to record the following. I think I have described here before how much I like walking along the river Lea up to Stratford; it’s one of my favourite routes to trundle, easily navigable in my powerchair and not too taxing on it’s motors. It’s a lovely day, so I thought I would head that way again this afternoon. However, today I found a short section of the path fenced off, obviously due to maintenance. On the fence there was a sign, which I decided to read in the hope of finding out when the path would reopen. As I was reading, though, a youngish man strode up to me totally out of the blue, and in a stern, authoritative voice announced “It’s blocked!” He then strode off before I had a chance to tell him that I was neither blind nor five years old, and that I could see that the path was shut perfectly well for myself.

Giving out a long sigh of exasperation, and, reconciling myself to people presuming I’m a total moron who doesn’t know what fences are, I decided that the only thing I could do about the entire incident was to blog about it.