Sunday 3 January 2010

Trailer Trash

I accumulate nutters like Ari. Since opposites attract, this shows how balanced, sane and reasonable, I am. Ari had Polio as a kid and just wanted to be able to muck around with a pony. Having just broken her good leg, riding wasn't an option, and she had seen the saddlechariot on the net and liked the concept, (not such a nutter then) and asked me to build a vehicle she could drive on her own, in safety, and drive onto with an electric wheelchair.
Ari mentioned this on a forum and got the usual negative stuff and one bet of a £1000 that she couldn't find anyone to build the vehicle before the New Year. On December the 31st, she put a link to photos of herself driving Obama from the Quay in Exeter down to the Double Locks Pub. http://www.facebook.com/photo_search.php?oid=231098602725&view=user#/group.php?gid=231098602725


Two subsequent comments on the forum caught my eye.
"It looks like someone took tin shears to a golf cart. Notice there's no close up pics or specs. I'd expect to see something like this in the yard of a scary trailer park, next to the station wagon with the roof cut off."
From trailertrash
Now that is pretty perceptive, I'm living in a trailer next to a chopped up transit that I'll take an angle grinder to some day soon and get it out of my way.  To look at a vehicle and work out where the builder lives is cool. But the next comment is sick.
Ari, as I have said suffers from Polio, or to be pedantic Post Polio syndrome. She is in an electric wheelchair, and she is the OP (original poster) referred to in the next comment.
"I think the OP correctly surmises that this post should be in the "rider's with disabilities" forum. Ari, if you kindly alert your own post and ask the mods to move it so none of us has to make an "alert"?
In photos, one hopes that turnout is suitable for public presentation."


Is it just me, or is this totally sick. This is a carriage driving forum and therefore a person with disabilities is inappropriate, and the comment should be removed so normal people don't have to read about disabilities. The snotty comment about "public presentation" is the icing on the cake.

I know that the vehicles I build cause a lot of problems to the traditonal horse world, and their attacks on me have always had a scatter gun approach, ie collateral damage is OK. I have seriously contemplated giving up because I don't want to see those near or dear to me getting hurt. But short of committing suicide and putting Obama down, I'm going to be me, and I am, like it or not, a contentious figure.
I have developed a vehicle that allows the disabled to drive on their own in safety, that a number of disabled people have tested and enjoyed. Should I let prejudice and bigotry destroy something I believe is good?
I hope and pray that by making this public, those who don't like what I do, will attack me, the trailer trash, not the disabled. I'll even tell you which trailer park to find me at, it's Middle Tree, Haldon Hill, just south of Exeter between the A38 and the A380, opposite the racecourse. And my trailer is the one next to the sawn up white transit. And I'm the guy trailing around behind a moustache.

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