Monkey had an email in his inbox this morning from an organisation wanting us to nominate people for their 'Achievement through Adversity' award. Monkey didn't nominate anyone. Monkey thought it was a weeny bit patronising.

But anyhoo, it got me thinking about adversity and that phrase 'despite his disability' and 'despite her disability' that disabled people loathe so much. To my mind it's only one short skip or jump away from 'despite being alive', and to disabled people a similar concept, though no one would ever use that phrase.

At these times of deep thought I like to turn to Google. As an interesting exercise I tapped in 'despite his disability', and got 2,150,000 results. 'Despite her disability' got me 1,720,000 results. Girls, you win. You're better. Or maybe this means that there simply aren't many pages about girls on the internet.

Interestingly, when you tap 'despite being alive' into Google you get 5,800,000 results. This could be seen as undermining my above argument, but I'm not gonna let that get me down, despite, um, everything.

Take a look at the Google result pages though, they're worth reading.