Belated Merry Christmas! You made it through, and it’s now the post-Christmas slump period, where we don’t quite know what to do with ourselves between now and New Year. Allow me to help, by sending you off to Instagram to find the delightful Nina Tame.
Nina, ‘The Wheel Housewife of Essex’, is a sexy, sassy, funny disabled wheelchair user who takes precisely no crap, advocates strongly for the social model of disability (we’ll come back to that), and tells everyone loudly all the time that using a wheelchair makes her a woman using a wheelchair, not a pity case, not someone in need of help, thoughts or prayers (or at least not without being asked first), and essentially just a glorious, gorgeous human being (she really is) who happens to be sitting down most of the time. On wheels.
That social model thing. The Mirror’s disabled writers and columnists do bring this up every now and then, but we seem to have a real problem getting through to wider society about what it actually means. Here’s a light refresher.
