What do you do if you want to go to the sold out Martin Parr talk at the South Bank Centre?
If you are Wife, you discover that there ARE Disabled tickets available, and start scouring the charity shops of West London for wheelchairs, leg braces, white sticks and patient Labradors. After some consideration (and a very real danger that she was going to ask to borrow a Nun’s wheelchair, which she needed some talking out of), she decided that her disability of choice was going to be blindness, scored herself a walking stick in Oxfam and headed off, diving into the disabled loos to help her get into character.
She bottled it a bit when she picked up her tickets and they had “Wheelchair Access” stamped over them (also in Braille, which must have been a nice additional extra for her…), but hit upon an ingenious (and morally dubious) plan. She claimed to the people in the ticket office that she had been intending to accompany her wheelchair-bound father to the event, but that in the end he had been simply too unwell (the truth being, of course, that Father-in-Law is in cracking shape and spends every free minute striding round a golf course, gallery or holiday location) and so she wondered if she could bring her able-bodied friend (who had been psyching up to play the role of Wife’s “carer”, but was losing her will by the second) instead? No problem.
And so it was that Wife and her friend discarded the stick, the pretence and the anxiety that might have attached itself to blagging their way in, got to hear an (apparently) fascinating talk by Martin Parr and then spent a couple of hours in the Oxo Tower sinking Mojitos.
