I have written on here before about how wonderful I think London busses are with their automatic ramps. Outside of the metropolis, busses still seem to have manual ramps, so a driver has to get out and unfold it whenever a wheelchair user wants to get on a bus. Here in London, though, wheelchair ramps push out at the touch of a button, so getting on and off busses is much less of an issue for everyone involved.

Or rather, it is usually much less of an issue. Nine times out of ten the ramp works without a hitch and I can get onto the bus within moments. Sometimes, however, things don’t go so smoothly: the driver presses his button, the rather nauseating warning alarm starts to sound, but the ramp refuses to move. The driver tries again and again, but still nothing happens.

So there I am all of a sudden: stuck either on a pavement or in the bus wheelchair space, with no way of getting on or off the vehicle. The driver keeps trying to get the ramp to come out, so the bus can’t go anywhere. And I can suddenly feel the eyes of about thirty people upon me, all getting angrier and angrier about the delay in their journey. Things can persist like this for ten or even twenty minutes, everyone slowly getting increasingly impatient.

In such moments I feel about ten centimetres tall: it’s just so embarrassing. Of course I know I shouldn’t feel like that: I didn’t stop the ramp working properly. In that moment though, knowing that you have disrupted the journeys of so many people, I would defy anyone not to feel just a little guilty.

Rather like what I was writing about yesterday, this is one of those things which, I would guess, most people would have little knowledge or experience of. Surely it therefore falls to guys like me to start to try to articulate such experiences in order that others can understand them better. That’s why I have kept my blog going for so long. If I can help others understand what life is like for people with disabilities, articulating experiences which will be foreign to most, then perhaps I can help make the world a little better.