3D crosswords and the NCP and RNXB

A very long and involved conversation on the electric telephone this evening with Sirius, the inventor of the 3D crossword. It was a curious conversation, because Sirius is nearly blind and I, am, thanks to the NCP, nearly deaf, so mostly we waved invisible copies of the Financial Times at each other and communicated in a mixture of Braille and Esperanto, in the hope that we hadn't dialled the wrong number and got the Archbishop of Canterbury by mistake (neither Sirius nor I can do Esperanto with a Welsh accent.)


It boils down to this. Sirius has persuaded a dozen or so of the leading lights, if you will forgive the double-entendre, in the crossworld world to give their services free of charge in support of his completely loony idea - 3D crosswords for blind or partially-sighted people. But the powers-that-be in the RNIB are stuck in a time-warp in a universe where the dog-star doesn't exist, so for their protection they move only in well-worn ways, the convenient and comfortable ruts that don't expect, let alone demand, deviation.


When dear Mrs Thatcher was prime minister she didn't like people to argue with her, and most especially she didn't like that cheeky cockney Ken Livingstone or Argentina or coal miners, so she decided to abolish all of them - the first by parliamentary means; the second by gunships; the third by turning the police force into paramilitaries - a device well known to writers of books about the science (!) of management (!), where it is neatly summed up as the Peterloo principle -people rise to one level above their personal level of competence, and then have to shoot somebody. I haven't written my memoirs yet - though I will, because I saw it from the inside - but I have no reason to suppose that the abolition of Ken Livingstone's GLC and the six metropolitan county councils wasn't inspired by the personal spite and vindictiveness of someone who was all ego and bombast and no substance. After all, this woman whom half-wits and other intravenous Tory diehards still hold up as the saviour of our nation only did one other thing to give her a place in the history books - she invented squirty cream from an aerosol tin. Well, whoopee. No wonder they sell the stuff by the ton in Tesco's (you may have to think about that one...)


I mention all this because it is indeed germane, pertinent and relevant to the point at issue - Sirius, who devotes all his spare time to raising money to help blind and partially-sighted people, is having problems with the RNIB, who like his idea, but only on their terms, and Sirius, who has persuaded by his charm (!) and pertinacity (!) a couple of dozen luminaries in the world of the conventional, 2D, crossword to give of their services free (when they would normally expext a fee of between £200 and £500 a puzzle) because they believe in his cause, and they believe in him, is facing an embarrassing dilemma, and one which is made worse by the fact that the people at RNIB to whom he is talking know bugger all about crosswords, and will not, or can not, budge from the rut of their own thinking.


So can I tell you a story?


Way back in 1985, when that woman prime minister was getting rid of everything in sight, someone noticed that the GLC spent something like £8,000,000 a year to support voluntary and arts organisations, and the Metropolitan county councils spent at least another million between them, and they asked the question - what is going to replace that funding? There were sudden huddled meetings between organisations as mighty as the National Council for Voluntary Organisations and its local offshoots, such as the Greater Manchester Council for Voluntary Services, and the lead politicians and officers at GLC and the Mets, and hurried amendments were tabled, and the government gave way, and said yes, we hadn't noticed that, how about a million quid - would that shut you up?


When this concession was offered during one of the Committee Stages of the legislation, the London voluntary services lot, led by a young woman who was the daughter of a bishop, for heaven's sake, wanted to do a press conference to say "thank you, dear government", until it was pointed out to her by one of us from the Mets, more understanding of Realpolitik (vide Rochau, foll. Metternich, and yes, it's all very cynical, but that, sadly, is what politics is about) than she, that we had now got the bastards on the run, and what today was one million quid by tomorrow would be two, and if we thought politically instead of touching our forelocks we could make it £9,000,000 by Third Reading.


We did. It's all there in Hansard.


There's a funny story about the Met county I worked for at the time. Somebody thought that it would be a good idea to set up a Disabled Persons Unit, and give real jobs to people with disabilities and wait and see what happened, and if that wasn't patronising I don't know what is. So our highly paid PR bloke wrote lots of press releases about what we were doing for "the disabled" and "the blind", and there were howls of outrage from the splendid people at GMCVS, and the PR bloke (huge salary) got very defensive and had to start using the word "people", which he didn't like very much.


But the upshot was that once a gang of people had been appointed, all of them people, mark you, though some of them couldn't see or hear very well, or had very short arms and legs, work had to be found for them to do, so a Director had to be appointed (huge salary), and one of the first tasks that this gang of highly intelligent people was given was to collaborate on converting all the council's PR material into Braille. Including the leaflet on How to Pass Your Driving Test.


The people (with disabilities, remember) who were given this task probably tried to keep the irony - and stupidity - to themselves, while rolling round the floor in helpless mirth, and the buzz-word they used to tease us "normal" 'erberts with was: "Do I take sugar?"


That mob of unruly, funny, disrespectful and outrageous original thinkers eventually disbanded themselves, before they were sacked, like the rest of us (and a few thousand coal-miners), but every time I see and hear Thomas Quasthoff sing I weep for those of us who are conventionally normal, and read the Daily Mail, and try to live somebody else's life instead of our own. Because we're OK, aren't we? We're not like them. We're normal, us.


































?