PHIL FRIEND

Rail access has got so much better. So why do I get nervous before a half-hour trip into London? Trains, ramps, and a very small invention. I was about three when I fell in love with trains. I'd just got polio, and I was lying in an iron lung. Those machines had an angled mirror fixed above your head, so you could see a little of the world behind you. In my mirror was a viaduct. And across that viaduct went the steam trains. I couldn't hear them. I just watched the carriages

In 1946, the British government decided which jobs were suitable for disabled people. Lift attendant. Car park attendant. That was broadly it. Under the Disabled Persons (Employment) Act 1944, these roles were formally designated — reserved exclusively for registered disabled workers. It was actually an offence to give the job to someone without a disability without a special permit. By the 1960s, almost every lift attendant and car park attendant in Britain carried the green

Let me start with Mark Mardell. Mark is a former BBC journalist — World Affairs Editor, North America Editor. He has Parkinson’s disease. Last October, he arrived at Istanbul airport to catch a Turkish Airlines flight home to London. He’d checked in. He was at the gate. And then he was told he couldn’t board. Turkish Airlines had a policy buried in their small print: Parkinson’s was the one condition — just Parkinson’s, not heart disease, not diabetes — requiring passengers t