I don't know if you remember what I was telling you about earlier, but I'd started tweeting the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to let him know how my wife's health was affecting her ability to work. This is unquestionably the way you would summarise the plot development of a US cop drama you were trying to dissuade people from watching. Now that you've been brought up to date you're presumably eager to find out what's going to happen next. Even if you don't care, I'm keen to find out, because my strategy so far has been to start typing and then go back and painstakingly correct when I accidentally hit the CAPS LOCK key. That being the case, why don't we crack in to a new paragraph together and see what happens? Can't wait.

There are two key problems with Twitter for this purpose. One of those problems is that it is currently owned and entirely dominated by Elon Musk. I would say that the easiest way to describe Elon Musk is that if someone asked you explain the phrase 'divorced dad energy' you would say 'You know, like Elon Musk' and they would understand what you meant. He's not coping well after his wife left and the kids won't talk to him but he's ridiculously wealthy so he's channelling his inability to express his feelings in to buying a social media platform and building a load of inadequate rockets and calling them both 'X' in the way that makes you assume he's the sort of 12-year-old who puts a 'no entry' sign on their bedroom door. But I can't do anything about him.

The other key problem is brevity. You only have 240 characters a tweet, unless you're prepared to pay extra. To put this into context, I just used up nearly 600 characters mocking Elon Musk, a subject on which you are quite likely to have pre-existing opinion. This, to be fair, is Twitter's selling point. It was a launched as a 'microblogging' site and it means you can get points across to busy world leaders who aren't going to read them in a relatively punchy fashion. What it lacks is nuance. It's difficult to express complex ideas or develop lengthy arguments in a short space, and people aren't reading lengthy twitter threads even though they would read articles or entire books, because that's not what they came to twitter for. In the same way a people are prepared to make long journeys if necessary but wouldn't, from choice, do so on a pogo stick. So my rule has been to try and keep it to one tweet per point, so if I wanted to expand on any of those points, I would have to do so elsewhere. So that's where you come in. Hi.

So that was our first tweet. We hit on a system where Raven would tell me she had something she wanted to say and describe it to me, I would turn it into a tweet and run it by her for approval, and then off it would go into the universe. This first one kick starts what already seems to be a running theme for our exploration of her disability – unpredictability. A key feature of my morning on a workday is routine. I get up at the same with a timetable in my head to get washed, dressed, fed and out of the door in time to catch my train. I freely concede that some this precision is my autism – I'm still learning how it plays out in my case. But most people who work still have to be at a place for a certain time and have to catch a bus or train, miss the traffic or even just time a walk.

Even if you're someone who's job enables them to work from home, the knowledge that you're really annoying Elon Musk won't compensate you if you're struck down with an out-of-the-blue symptom that wasn't there when you when to bed. You might wake up tomorrow knowing that even now your old office is in an area of central London largely owned by a billionaire seething over the fact that your selfish interest in your mental health and work-life balance is affecting the value of his portfolio. That knowledge won't help you, though, if you wake up in so much pain that you can barely move. It will take you fifteen minutes just to get to the bathroom, half an hour longer to get dressed, and you simply don't have time to get to work, even if you leave right now in your pyjamas. If you were an able-bodied person experiencing this once in a blue moon you would just cut your losses, call in sick and go back to bed. People with disabilities can't take a day off every time they wake up unable to move because it rained last night or vomiting whenever they move because they somehow contracted an ear infection normally only seen in cows.

This kind of problem does mean you get some good days to go with your bad days, but it makes it hard to plan when you don't know how your body is going to react from one day to the next. The rhetoric of the last few years in this country has been one of suspicion for people with disabilities – among others – and none of this is helped by a condition that fluctuates in its severity. So if Keir has seen my tweets and decided to click on a link (which I will remember to post) and had a read of this article all I really need him to understand that he needs to do a lot of listening because disability can affect people in ways he perhaps doesn't yet understand. That, and the fact that I really dislike Elon Musk.

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