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Hello.

Now last Saturday I was traveling back to London from Marseille on this new all the way Eurostar train.

It had been fine going out and no interruptions at all to the seven hour journey, but I hadn't

realized that on the way back we were all required to disembark at Leal, a miserable station at the best of times,

and haul our cases upstairs to the baggage and passport check. Well it meant spending the best

part of an hour and a quarter in a miserable holding zone and when we were finally

allowed to re-board our original train there was an escalator fault which led to a solidly wedged crowd at the exit door.

Well that was the moment when a rather grand-looking white-haired lady who was almost

next to me raised her walking stick high in the air and shouted,

Make way for the disabled!

Well, the Red Sea couldn't have parted with more alacrity.

Well, I thought of that woman's self-assurance,

her firm sense of entitlement to special treatment

was I was reading a new paper in the journal Sociology of Health and Illness.

Now the subjects in this study were also less than able. They'd all been diagnosed with cancer

and were undergoing treatment. But they all had what you might call another disability. They were

also economically disadvantaged from a deprived area of the northeast.

And that meant that although they had to give up their day job as a result of their condition,

they did not enjoy the type of financial provision from their previous workplace that would be available

to those from more secure forms of employment.

...