Our April round-up!

With May kicking off tomorrow, it’s time to reflect on another busy month for the Limping Chicken. Here’s a round up of some of April’s biggest hits!

One of my personal favourites, and one that’s been rapidly clocking up views on the site, is Asher Woodman-Worrell’s story about how his friend Ben Thomson conquered university. It was an incredibly positive story to begin with, and it’s gone on to get a number of positive comments. Congratulations to Asher and of course, to Ben!

It was great to have Ni Gallant back to tell us about pimping her hearing aids, while Anna Hughes asked whether she should declare ‘special requirements’ in a job interview, and Jane Cordell gave us an insightful article about understanding deaf voices!

Kate Rowley made a thought-provoking debut on the site with her story about a visit to her doctors – “I’m alright and my son’s alright.” Meanwhile, Andrew Hearn wrote his second brilliant piece for us about how hearing people won’t touch him. (nothing dodgy about this one, I promise!)

We’ve had several parents tell us about their experiences, with Tobie Fysh writing about having a deaf son, Maggie Summerhill telling us about being shot by her kids, and Alison Leach telling us her story about the birth of her first child – not forgetting Deaf Dad’s account of an ‘ill day’!

The Secret Deafie continues to be busy this month. As well as bringing us the rude text relay operator, anonymous columns have told us about being sworn at without knowing it, and how a train delay was made even worse because of a passenger who didn’t want to speak to a deaf person. (send your contributions to thelimpingchicken@gmail.com!)

Our most dedicated contributor this month was Deaf author Nick Sturley, who not only told us about phoning the DSS then visiting them, but also about writing his latest novel. Good luck to Nick as publication draws near!

We’ve also asked some big questions. Such as whether the word ‘deaf’ really does need to be redefined, what kind of deaf person you are (thanks to Joanna Wootten) and if social networking can beat Deaf apathy (thanks to Rob Wilks for that fantastic piece!).

We’ve published Matt Daigle’s phenomenal comic strip That Deaf Guy, and pieces about music by Lizzie Ward and Sencity, by Katrina Jones.

In mid-April we brought you Natalie Portman and Johnny Depp’s attempts at signing in Paul McCartney’s video for his new single, My Valentine. This one clocked up the second highest number of views of the month, with the video going on to get a lot of criticism online, mainly from people who don’t understand that ASL and BSL are different, and think that Portman signed “tampon.” (!)

Let’s have a *drumroll* for the most-viewed article of the month, which was the first post from our resident Deaf Sex Guru, ‘Do deaf people wear hearing aids in bed?’. You’ll be pleased to know his next article is coming up soon…

Finally, we’re very pleased, ten weeks after we started, to be on the verge of 100,000 views, and to report that we’ve just added our third sponsor, Deaf Umbrella, to our existing supporters, Deafworks and Remark!

We’re also working with a graphic design company about making some tweaks to the site. Thanks for reading, and watch this space!

Best,

Charlie Swinbourne, Editor