We need new carers for the summer. We have direct payments and we don’t use agencies, so this means doing it all ourselves – advertising, interviewing and training. We live in a university town. We are lucky therefore because we have a regular stream of lovely young people training to be nurses and teachers [...]
Regular columnist Jane Muir invites her son Alistair to reflect on his last days at college and moving on. At college they leave me to it. I have to cope. I have to get the bus every morning and it’s so noisy. I don’t understand why they can’t turn the radio down a bit. It’s [...]
As this year’s cold and flu season takes hold it is easy to wake up each morning counting how many hours before you can go back to bed again. Alistair came home from college for a weekend – within half an hour he had developed a fever and was ill for the whole of the [...]
Jane Muir shares her ongoing experiences of life with – and without – her disabled son. Labels limit the way society sees and treats you. I feel that I’m betraying my son every time I let professionals tick ‘mild or moderate learning disability,’ just because he has moments in which he exhibits a learning disability [...]
Jane Muir shares her ongoing experiences of life with – and without – her disabled son. Labels limit the way society sees and treats you. I feel that I’m betraying my son every time I let professionals tick ‘mild or moderate learning disability,’ just because he has moments in which he exhibits a learning disability [...]
In her regular column for Able, Jane Muir shares her ongoing experiences of life with – and without – her disabled son. Alistair has been back from college for the summer and, reverting to my role as mother/carer, one of the things I have to get used to all over again is being out and [...]
In her regular column for Able magazine, Jane Muir shares her ongoing experiences of life with – and without – her disabled son. I may be a literacy teacher with a degree in modern languages, but the letters I receive from the benefits agencies leave me struggling. Possibly they constitute some kind of arcane computerised [...]
In her regular column for Able magazine, Jane Muir shares her ongoing experiences of life with – and without – her disabled son. 2010 started out with the week’s dance course we had fundraised for Alistair to go to at the Orpheus Centre in Surrey, which runs short and long courses in the performing arts [...]
In her regular column for Able magazine, Jane Muir shares her ongoing experiences of life with – and without – her disabled son. Well, my son has gone back to residential college. While part of him wanted to stay at home, he was also ‘excited’ and, while part of me would miss him, I was [...]
I had planned so meticulously for the eight weeks’ summer holiday after my son Alistair’s first year at college. I spent the first week training our two new carers, Katy and Jacques, the idea being that, by week two, they would be confident enough to be left on their own. I’ll never know whether it [...]
