Just got back from rather a long night in the Board with Niall. We couldn't play pool - there was a tournament on - so we fell instead to discussing his life. He had spent the day on a Disability Awareness training course, courtesy of Darlington College.

Niall lives a life that swings wildly and randomly between extremes of comedy and tragedy, never seeming to settle for more than a few moments on the middle ground where most of us spend most of our lives. Rather, he exists in a wholly Manichean universe. On the dark side are the benefits bureaucrats who don't give a shit and the smiley, friendly bank managers who keep lending him money to feed his gambling addiction. The good guys - most of them - don't give a shit either, but seem to vaguely think they're making the world a better place by explaining that disabled people are disabled "by society", and not, for instance, by the fact they've got no fucking legs or the sort of fucked-up brain chemistry that would do a reasonable job as the active component in bleach.

The problem is that too much goodness is coordinated not by good people, but by do-gooders; drones who think that by reclassifying people with "special needs" as people with "specific needs" they're somehow doing something great. I'm not taking a Thatcherite line here, because I think it's the job of a just society to support those who struggle. But in supporting them we have to treat them as people who are different from us in mind or body but identical in spirit: not as pawns in the utilitarian struggle for some woolly idea of a better world.

(I suppose some goon with a social work degree is going to mail me now, explaining that of course he cares about real people, and of course it's all about helping those disabled by society to help themselves. But to talk about "special needs" really does ostracize and objectify, don't you think...? No I don't - so you can fuck off right now. Go on, fuck off and get a proper qualification.)

So we were looking at jobs that Niall could do that make use of his talents. Because he does have talents: he's got a poor memory, and he struggles to add up. But his reading's fine and his writing's not too bad. He's a good communicator, and, once you've got over the fact that he seems a bit weird, quite easy to get on with. He wants to work with other disabled people, helping them integrate into everyday life.

A wholly admirable aim, and one that I'm sure the do-gooder brigade will be quick to crush. They wouldn't want a weirdo like that working with them.

He also had a date with this lass (Rebecca?) from Ken Warne last night. She's only 17, and he's 38. She was kind to him, and they played pool. But she wouldn't give him her phone number and told him that her dad wasn't happy that she was out with him. Niall smiled as he told me this: he understands. But the DNA's crashing around inside, breaking things.