This all truck a bit of a chord with me, my auntie on my mums side suffered brain damage a birth, basically they thought she was still born but svereal minutes later she started breathing but the time lag starved her brain of oxygen and left her quite severely handicapped ( I still use that terminology as a grew up with it ).
At the age of 14 she moved into a local hostel for mentally and physically handicapped people of varying abilities, it ws local to us so even as a baby I have memories of the place, a lady called Janet was almost a second mother to me, we loved each other so much, shame as she will no longer accept who I am as she is unable to reconcile the baby to the adult, I still love her though .
Over the years there were so many great characters there, Tommy who used to work on the coal lorries back in the day used to love going to bus stops and telling everyone the buses where all cancelled, he was always in a suit and most of the time people fell for it a walked away.
On e of my favourites was a man called Densil, he was a large bloke, about 6' 4" who had come into care late on in life when his parent has passed away, his speech was not that great mainly due to the many involuntary whooping and other odd noises he made. If you spent time with him you realised he was in fcat very capable and articulate as well as being a real gentlemen.
He used to go up into town on his own a fair bit bit and both one of the local cafes as well as a burger place would always give him free tea and chips, I witnessed this numerous times and it just showed how switch on he was. He would go in the the pretence of saying hello, lay on the wooping etc with a trowel and they would give him the free stuff as a means of getting him out of the shop, he's take his freebies and go sit on the bench outside to post office and watch the word go by, I'd see him there are stop for a chat...top bloke. He's dead now, he got mugged up outside some local shops and pushed over, he broke his hip and never recoverd.
I consider myself very lucky to have been brought up with these people in my life, I don't have the built in pre-conceptions so many people do, IME such people have great insight into the world and are almost always up for a laugh, I spend a good hour once trying to tell my auntie a knock knock joke, every time I said knock knock she would just say knock knock back, doesn't sound funny but it kept the 2 of us laughing for most of the afternoon:D
