I needed to speak, briefly, to my car insurer regarding breakdown cover. After undergoing the usual roster of DNA testing, fingerprinting, recitation of ‘familiar names’, the woman on the other end of the phone said this to me: ‘I need to ask this as well. Are you vulnerable?’ It is now six hours later and I’m still not sure what she meant. I suppose I assume it was a euphemism for: ‘Are you either mental or too thick to tie your own shoelaces?’
But it is difficult to know for sure, largely because of the shape-shifting ‘vulnerable’ has performed in recent years. When news reports, or the police, identify someone as being ‘vulnerable’, it usually means they are pig-thick or doolally. On the other hand, when it is used about whole communities it usually just means that they are not white. Sometimes it is a stand-in for ‘female’. Children are always vulnerable, of course. In short, because we are unable to articulate the truth these days, vulnerable has been forced to step up to the plate and cover a multitude of sins.
Anyway, I told the woman that I wasn’t, at that moment, terribly vulnerable. But there was soupcon of doubt in her voice when she said ‘OK, Mr Liddle.’
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