I have just got in from my usual daily trundle. I don’t want to reveal too much, but I’ve had a bit of an idea, so I was looking for something unusual. The problem was, I didn’t know which shops would sell them. First I checked in the big shops on Greenwich Peninsula without any luck, before heading east through Charlton Riverside and eventually to Woolwich high street. Rather than newer, big chain stores, there are quite a few small bric-a-brac shops in Woolwich where I might find what I was looking for. Heading along the road towards Woolwich, though, I caught myself doing something which I’m not proud of: whereas I had no problem going into the larger shops, I seemed to feel slightly concerned that I wouldn’t be understood in Woolwich. Shops there are predominantly run by immigrants from southern Asia or Eastern Europe. Because I was looking for something rather obscure, I knew I would need to use my communication aid to ask for it, and seemed to feel ever so slightly concerned that they wouldn’t know how to interact with a communication aid user.

Of course I know that’s utter crap, and in the end I had no problem. Yet I just wanted to note that odd feeling of concern: what if they had never met a communication aid user before? What if the shopkeepers just ignored me? Was I being racist?