‘Cancer on Board’ sounds more like the name of a band than ‘Baby on Board’ so whenever I’ve worn my badge on busy trains I haven’t been offered a seat.
But I was once asked to give up my priority seat when I was on a tram on the way to hospital.
A mother explained that her son liked to sit on that chair because it was “his favourite”. I had a chemotherapy pump attached to a vein in my arm and it was slowly dripping cancer killing medicine into my body, just millimetres away from my heart.
Sadly the woman didn’t seem to think this was a reasonable excuse for me to stay sitting there and was angry when I suggested her son could sit on one of the hundred or so vacant seats.
I can appreciate that not all disabilities are visible so when she originally asked me she might not have been aware I had incurable cancer.
But surely after I told her she should have been happy that her son was being taught the important lesson that not everything in life can go your way.
So when I saw that television’s second favourite judge (after Judge Judy), Rob Rinder, had posted on X about his experience on a train from Plymouth to London I could appreciate both sides of the argument.
With services disrupted due to Storm Darragh his train was much busier than it would normally have been on a Sunday afternoon, leading to him reporting that elderly people were having to stand for the four hour journey.
He said he gave up his seat but most people didn’t.
Lots of people asked whether he was aware that most disabilities are invisible so the passengers probably didn’t give up their seats because of they were disabled.
There are a lot of hidden disabilities but I’d wager that the most common hidden disability train passengers have these days is rudeness.
Most people on that train were probably well enough to stand for four hours (though obviously they shouldn’t have had to and the train conductor should have done their best to ensure everyone had a seat and given a refund to anyone who was standing) but put themselves before others.
And then they probably put their bag second – by putting it on the seat next to them instead of letting a stranger sit down.
I experienced something similar when I was on a train from Crewe to London the other week.
The journey was fine until our service developed a fault and we all had to get off at Rugby and get on an already busy service to continue to the capital.
I got myself a place to sit by announcing to a man, who didn’t have the forethought to take his bag off the seat, that he was going to move his suitcase because I have cancer and I needed to sit down.
But a couple in their 60s struggled to find anywhere to sit down as a woman in her 20s was pretending to sleep while her massive bag occupied lots of space. I tweeted about the issue in the hope that the conductor would tell her to stop being an idiot and realise that her bag could fit overhead but he just walked past three times and didn’t say anything.
And this is another part of the problem – there’s a stalemate on public transport between people who are too impolite to move their bags and give up their seats and those that are too polite to ask.
On days when I’m battling chemotherapy side effects and I feel like I’ll collapse if I don’t sit down, I’m not too polite to ask.
But on days when I’m feeling well I’m more of a Rob Rinder character, albeit without his TV career, where instead of saying something directly I shout into the void that is X and hope someone pays attention.
