A Day in the Life: Sarah's Journey

After a number of life-changing experiences, I was given a new outlook on life. Life is for living so make the most of it whilst you've got it. So over the years that followed that is how I have tried to live my life. One aspect of this was taking up a new hobby, I had wanted to try Scuba Diving for several years after a try dive on a holiday in Tenerife. Little did I know at the time that the experience I had was nothing compared to the experience I was going to have.  During the year where my life changed forever, I stayed with friends for a while, they themselves have disabilities and they introduced me to the Scuba Trust. This is a charity focussed on providing support and instruction to individuals who want to learn to dive but have a disability. I soon got hooked and decided that I was going to work towards my PADI Open Water qualification. For anyone unfamiliar with this, there are certain skills that you have to practice and achieve in the pool before even being allowed in...

The issue of Access is often a contentious one, if you talk to someone with a disability then there is always problems with not enough being done, yet if you talk to people in authority there are always excuses as to why more can not be done. I appreciate that there are times when it is not possible for there to be access to something be it the physical limitations of the person themselves (e.g. rock climbing) or through buildings being so old that they can't be adjusted enough to be fully accessible. Although this is the case, organisations will often hide behind 'reasonable adjustment', expecting disabled people to just accept that as much is being done as possible. As mentioned above, I appreciate there are some limitations with buildings that are really old and that I will not be able to get everywhere that I may want to, but I still feel that often more can be done than is currently being done so. Companies should want to do as much as they can to include everyone (at ...

I am currently in Torquay with my husband who is a teacher for the annual conference for the National Union of Teachers. Although everything seems calmer now that is not how my experience of this weekend started. It started before the weekend when I did some research into the hotel we were staying at (the room was through a block booking and so did not have the same control). I decided to look into it for my own peace of mind and glad I did. The hotel we are staying at is the Rainbow International and all information I found on-line did not fill me with confidence that it would be suitable. As a result my husband contacted the hotel for me on my behalf to ensure that it was suitable for my needs. When he rang up, he was reassured that we were to get the fully accessible room and that we would not be moved. This room was designed around a specific person and although this is the case we were guaranteed to be getting this room due to my specific needs and being more physically impaired ...

Welcome to my new followers, I am looking forward to some interaction from my followers as some already have. I have had an interesting weekend and some things I have heard through twitter has made me feel the need for another blog post. Some of the main topics being discussed include how disabled people are seen as 'benefit scroungers' and that of the experiences of disabled people and transport. I have spent time in previous posts speaking about how the media shows disabled people as benefit scroungers and so am not going to try and reinvent the wheel with that one. Instead I am going to discuss my experiences of public transport. I have mentioned this topic but not at great length and so feel it is appropriate to focus a whole post to this topic. As previously mentioned I have been disabled from birth and so have experienced public transport in many different circumstances. When I was younger I was very reliant on being driven everywhere that I went. Many of the buses were...