lose a small object = sent away from your friends.

In the latest tabloid racist crackdown on our European friends, anounced today, for other EU citizens begging is going to become a deporting offence.

I see an autism discrimination in this, related to travel documents and their losability. The danger we are all in from having to carry travel documents, tickets or passports, which are capable of getting lost by human error, and the sudden enormous effects if they do get lost far from home. Still not yet taken up publicly by the big charities, I have long made a case that all travel documents' losability and stealability is a discriminatory extra endangerment of everyone with autism related conditions, and this makes a disability discrimination case against their existence.

This is because of "fine motor clumsiness", having an impaired physical skill at handling objects, especially small objects and small details. Arises in dyspraxia, attention deficit, Irlen's syndrome, and simply in autistic sensory overload.

So it occurs to me, for aspies who are other EU citizens. What if you lose your ticket because of autistic issues with motor skills, you are stranded in trouble up against transport systems being totally noncommittal and unhelpful to you, you are not going to get out of trouble quickly unless you can raise money for a new fare, so you beg? Sometimes I have been begged to in Edinburgh by folks with a story of needing to finance a journey home, and can't be sure they are making it up. In a desperate situation not your fault and whose capability to happen is utterly unjust, suddenly you can be sent back to your other EU country for it and not allowed back here for a year.

Exactly the type of serious emergency possibility that is why ordinary aspies need our direct voice, like through ANS, to force the big charities' and professionals' hands to take a position on it.

Maurice Frank

Rare piece of insurance common sense

Travel Guard, answering a travel insurance enquiry for a company their claims line serves, said something worth hearing concerning a topic that no travel insurance policy is satisfactory on: lost or stolen travel documents including passports. To my enquiry as to what happens if you can't get a written police report, they say you can now give them a note explaining the circumstances that you could not get one.

The rule they always have in travel insurance, that you must obtain a written report to base your claim on, conflicts with the whole nature of travel risk. How can they possibly know that the police or other officials will be willing to provide the written report? What if they won't, and in a foreign country, how are you supposed to make them? Even in a European democracy, let alone in totally corrupt countries?

To a common sense enquiry as a buyer, for once I have got a better answer than I expected to get. It is some progress on the issue that concerns me so intensely, of losable travel documents and your safety when having to use them: particularly for spectrumites because of dexterity issues dyspraxia and attention deficit that make small objects easier to lose. Of course, given the complex trickiness of insurance and all the unpredictable details of a loss situation that you can not know what they will be until it happens, the value of this consumer victory remains small compared to the safety need that folks' safety when travelling should not depend on carried physical documents at all, and the safety victory if this 200 year old practice that big business interests have habituated our culture to accept was actually stopped.

Maurice Frank