Learning Difficulty Week and the Cow Sign at Rickney

Its the end of Learning Difficulty Week and I was surprised that it came so soon after Carer's Week and if I had the time, I might wonder who plans these things, who decides that this week is for people with learning difficulties. For my son and I it was just another week. It was another week in which he was defined by his difference. By his humming loudly to himself, and jumping up and down, excited and animated by the excellence of an idea that had crossed his mind. It was another week in which we went to photograph the cow sign at Rickney for the thousandth time and again I learn't that each time we return, its a little different.

It was another week in which his wicked father made him go to school - despite his insistence that he shouldn't. It was another week in which a trip to a supermarket became an unspoken war of stares, where the rude gaze of shoppers was returned in silence by a glowering father, threatening, brooding  making it very clear that use of the word would not be met by reasoned argument or the indignance of the politically correct but by the rage of a man who is no longer willing to tolerate the personal, institutional and cultural oppression of a community and of a son.

It was also a week of relative silence. There were more blogs last week, more articles about the importance of carers and remarkable statistics about how much we save the government. But this week there have been few and those were mainly about the casual abuse of learning disabled people by those who don't understand that the way that we think about a person can hurt and sometimes kill them. So, in memory of all the people with learning difficulties who have died when they didn't need to; from Gerhard Kretschmer to Fiona Pilkington and an awful lot of others whose early deaths were not from hate but from indifference. For all the people whose voice remains unheard and whose community is still institutionally oppressed - happy learning difficulty week- we're off to take a photograph of a cow sign at Rickney.