Something happened yesterday afternoon which made me furious at the time, and which I still think I ought to record here. It was turning out to be a nice day, so at about noon after a short trip to Eltham High Street, I decided to catch the bus to Woolwich. I was planning to catch the Elisabeth Line to Liverpool Street in order to check out a bit more of the phenomenal building work around there. Getting off the bus at General Gordon Square though, I almost immediately encountered a lady shouting nonsense about Jesus, whereupon my instincts kicked in and I told her to shut up. Her reaction was far from pleasant: she instantly became very angry, and rather that trying to talk to me and discuss the issue, she retorted that my lack of faith was the reason I was disabled, or words to that effect.

Needless to say, this made me furious. I saw red, and decided that I wanted the woman either arrested or sectioned. As coincidence would have it, there were three community support guys (quazi policemen) nearby, who came over to see what the increasing noise was about. To my absolute horror and disgust, however, they completely refused to see what I was typing into my Ipad to tell them. They only listened to the woman, and seemed to assume I had nothing to say. It was as if they didn’t know communication aid users existed, or register that I was trying to speak to them.

Being treated with such disrespect naturally enraged me even further. The entire incident only lasted a minute or two. When the officers started to walk away, I tried to follow them, still wanting to speak to them – perhaps I could ask why the ignorant bastards had ignored me like that. But they strutted away as though they had assumed I had nothing sensible to tell them, heading to their offices up Wellington Street.

By then I was angrier than I had been in a long, long time. I headed into the Woolwich Centre opposite: perhaps I could talk to someone in there who could call the police or take some kind of action. To have been ignored by the officers like that was gut-wrenchingly disgraceful. Fortunately I know the people in The Woolwich Centre as they’re the guys who do my PA payroll etc, and to cut a long story short they helped me to lodge a complaint. Whether anything will come of it remains to be seen of course, but I felt it imperative that I took some kind of action. To have been treated in that way, first being insulted by that woman, then totally ignored and even sneered at by the very men who are supposed to sort such issues out, felt very hurtful indeed. I frankly find it extremely troubling that I can still be treated in the way I was yesterday.