spastic fantastic

If there is anything more novel than a nine-year-old with cerebral palsy scooting off ahead down the cul de sac to demonstrate the moves of his Friend Who Runs Weird (and who doesn't have C.P), I haven't seen it today.

Zig has been walking to and from school for, oh, two months - three? As well as building stamina and teaching Dog Poo 101, it allows for greater, um, freedom of expression than the chair. A passing driver, startled by seeing someone who moves differently and whose mum is looking right at her, presses her lips down into the familiar startled Isn't He Doing Well smile. Yes, he is, and he's also being a little sod. Does she realise, I wonder, that my wonky boy is wonkier because he's taking the piss out of his absent FWRW?

He does it all the time. The outward jerk of his arms as he lines up for assembly isn't so involuntarily – he's thinking about the size of the universe. Those unformed yodels that made the man in the Asda queue jump? He was the Undead.

But oh, the prize must go to his performance in one end of year play. He and his mates were just edging out of Year 3 and some genius had decided they would make perfect Von Trapp children. Their turn arrived, onto the church stage they clambered, Zig getting a hand up:

There's a sad sort of clanging from the clock in the hall
And the bells in the steeple too

Aww, look at them all, the audience sighed, aren't they lovely, those satin frocks, the bow ties, the shorts ...

And up in the nursery an absurd little bird,
Is popping out to say

... and isn't that disabled one doing well! Look at him trying so hard, those stiff legs, those clenched fists ...

Cuckoo.

The disabled one's mum peers through a one-finger gap, shoulders shaking, eyes running.

Cuckoo!

The disabled one's dad points his camera and wishes for video.

Cuckoo!

Those stiff legs? Those clenched fists?

He's being a fucking cyberman.