(Letter first published in the Guardian, Tuesday 8^th October 1996, headline by the Guardian Newspaper)

If anything matters in what you read below, it is the fact that so much has not changed. This letter was written 21 years ago and five years after the death of my daughter.

The letter was triggered, incidentally, by an article about screening for handicap and terminating foetuses where handicaps were discovered:

For the four-and-a-half years of her brief life I was proud to be the father of a beautiful but massively handicapped little girl. She was blind, incontinent, incapable of speech or verbal comprehension, and totally dependent upon others. She never knew my name, but she came to know my grip, my touch and my voice, and loved me as she never loved another.

The hardships devolving from her care cannot adequately be described but are perhaps summed up in that one long, terrible night when I started, semi-conscious, from my bed convinced that I was dead – that I had been for years, and that I was in Hell.

Could screening have prevented her birth I would have been spared a great deal. But I would have missed and lost far more. I wish she was with me still, and were I presented with the prospect of another, identical child I would not hesitate to fight again for the preservation of its precious life.

It was not her handicaps which created Hell in my life. All she created was love and joy. It was the society we lived in which handicapped us. It was a parsimonious State and the prejudices of the short-sighted. It was the meagreness of benefits, the inefficiencies of over-stretched hospitals and the lack of adequate respite care.

It was the people who prayed for help on their knees but delivered none on their feet. It was the sanctimonious mewling of middle-class advocates of abortion for handicapped foetuses and all those other inadequates who saws handicap solely as a problem to be solved rather than a challenge to be met.

What of her life? She – my Jenny – knew pain, but she also knew joy and in no small measure. Her pain could be moderated through medicine, and her life and joy were a fluttering, incandescent flame that brightened and warmed the lives of many others.

I can understand how some, faced with the reality of society as it is, might  choose to avoid the battel of being parent to a handicapped child. They have my sympathy. But the route of ‘screening out’ handicap is, to me, the advocacy of genocide of the defenceless by the misguided.

RVR

It is 31 years since my daughter, Jennifer, was born. It is 26 since she died.

There was no Facebook when she died, no Skype, no real facility to share without turning to the conventional media, to the journalists and publishers whose primary concern would always be ‘the story’.

When our daughter died and we were interviewed by a member of the local press, I was ready to thank a great many people, including medical staff, for what they had done. I was also ready to make certain criticisms, to tell some of the stories that were often not told, but my then wife wanted no part of that. Jenny was dead and a warm cocoon was necessary for my wife to survive that (though she didn’t, anyway) so we were to say nothing that might cast a chill. And while she was alive there were certain things we only ever shared with fellow-sufferers because you have to be very careful about pissing-off people that you depend upon.

My silence persisted. My marriage broke down in the aftermath of our own little girl’s life, I became a single parent with other things on my mind. The parents of handicapped children who had been our friends dropped away from us, faced with the cruel reality that our lives were made easier by the very death of our daughter. Life took me to a different part of the world, to different priorities, different needs, and I felt a sense that my knowledge and experience must surely be becoming, anyway, out of date?

Surely, I thought, things must have moved on? Hospitals and medicine must have got better, understanding must have developed, progress must have been made? But whilst some probably has, too much, it seems, has not.

The Charlie Gard story, and others in recent times, have reminded this old-stager that an awful lot has NOT changed. People are still struggling with the same issues we struggled with a quarter of a century and more ago.

Check out, for example, this item by Sam Carlisle

So here I am. Watching, listening, and ready to speak out, ready to share in the hope that my doing so may help others who are still in the throes of suffering.

And if you are inclined to, don’t thank me. I am writing about what is for me water under the bridge. None of this is ‘about’ me. It costs me nothing – my little girl and I are beyond any petty revenges, so I am free to say what I think needs saying.

Agree with my posts? Then please share them. There are some dark corners that could benefit from the spreading of more light.

Affected by anything in them? Please contact me. I am listening.

In an earlier post some time ago I asked the question; is there any point in continuing?  Is writing (in my case literary historical erotica) worth the effort?

I have decided it is not. I have quit. Called it a day. Called it a night. Whatever phrase you prefer.

And it has proved to be a weight off my mind. The clamor (clamour in English English) of the marketeers, the people telling me how brilliant their next must-read novel is, the people telling me how easily they can splurge my name/my books across Twitter and the internet, is all gone. It has suddenly gone quiet.

I am not going to spend another six months, year, two years, three, investing effort into a manuscript, creating, writing, editing, re-editing a work which, on publication, will be worth less to the average reader than the price of a Starbucks or a piece of cheap, made-in-China tourist tat.

Nor will I ever wait anxiously in case the next review is written -as was one of my very first – by a loser who thought she had a score to settle, or by someone who struggles if there is more than one comma in a sentence.

Nor will I worry that any success I might achieve will be undermined by plagiarism or naked piracy.

To rest, now. Very soon I will change my tags on here, and considerably more, and all you are likely to find here will be photographs, predominantly of birds and squirrels, the odd observation on life, and small scale representations of the art work I plan to focus myself upon. I can draw, I can paint – kind of, and other things, and none of them require the effort or the time that is required by writing.

Yet how many folks, I wonder, will offer me – for a watercolour, an oil or a drawing – less than the price of a commercial coffee?

We’ll see.

Take care now.

Exposure used to be the treatment/cure, but the world has evolved to be exposure-resistent. Exposure is like tossing regular penicillin at flesh-eating MRSA and expecting it to work.

Source: A Culture Addicted to FREE—How FREE is Poisoning the Internet & Killing the Creatives

Q: It is easily aroused, can maintain an erection, make a female pregnant and can hold its own in a fight. What is it?

A: It is probably a dog.

Q: It is easily aroused, can maintain an erection, make a female pregnant, and cannot resist its need for sex. What is it?

A: It is a dog.

Neither of the statements in the questions above defines a man. Having sex does not make a boy a man, it makes him a boy having sex. Dogs can have sex. Rabbits can have sex. Snails can have sex. If you want to be more than a dog, more than a rabbit, more than a snail; if you want to be a MAN you need to be capable of much more than having sex.

A well-trained dog understands the word ‘no’. You are less than a dog if you do not understand the word ‘no’.

If you can get a girl to do something she really does not want to do, it does not make you a man, it makes you an abuser, and an abuser is worthless and despicable.

You will never amount to anything, never ever be a real man, unless you can respect yourself, and you can only respect yourself if what you do, every day and to everybody, is worthy of respect.

Be able to like yourself. Then, maybe, you will become a man.