Appearances

There's a woman in the office where I work who's almost completely deaf.  She's very friendly, always has a lovely smile for you when you come in, and can just about get by with lip reading - but when she speaks, her voice is very slurred and can be hard to understand.

I've never really had a lot to do with her (we're in completely different departments) but recently she had a problem with her computer and I had a look and fixed it.  She sent me several files by email, and re-reading them now, I'm struck by how differently she sounds in the email and in person.  Her emails almost sound as if they could have come from my mum, but talking in person it's such a job for her to understand me and for me to understand her that any sort of additional content is dropped.

I know I shouldn't find it surprising, but it just really struck me that an awful lot of the time we define people by the things that make them different and don't look through to the things that make them the same as us, or those we love.

In an attempt to keep this vaguely related to the normal topics of the blog (such as they are), I was wondering how this could be applied to politics, but it didn't work so well:

Don't view Labour as statist control-freaks, rather see them as the folks who introduced FOI (and now regret it), and who were at least partly in favour of AV...

Hmmm - not sure that really works...