The Blind Truth

When Grace Jones slapped Russell Harty she created one of TVs' iconic moments. Whatever you think of her response to her host turning his back on her, she did it with a very good hair cut. I know this because Trevor Sorbi cut her hair. It’s not that I know Trevor, but I know a man who does. He’s the man who cuts my hair.  For fifty years I’d been buying bad hair cuts from hairdressers the length a...

In my favourite shop the retail assistants wear luminous yellow jackets which makes them easy to spot as they weave their way in and out of piles of brown furniture. Over the years I have bought wardrobes, bellows, semi precious bunches of stone grapes, lead glasses and assorted cutlery. I am able to exercise little self control except in the matter of retail assistant number one who recently aske...

Middle age can be a productive time in a woman’s life. Who knows what the meaning of productive is. Is being productive the same as being busy? No. Is being creative the same as being productive? I hope so. I feel in a creative phase. Doing new things mean learning new skills, so I’ve been scouring the internet to see what learning opportunities there might be for me to develop some of those skill...

“Coleette” was showing at the flicks, so a couple of friends and I found ourselves navigating our way around an enormous windswept rooftop car park in a tiny car. The cinemas beckoned. At the ticket office an adolescent made me an offer like no offer I have ever been made before. “Would you like to make use of the audio description facility that is free?” I don’t know why it has never occurred to...

The Sceptic Tank, (slang for Yank, as in a person who hails from North America) told me that on a recent taxi journey her driver asked her about her blindness.  Her philosophy is to always engage as she’s educating the world about living with sight loss, one taxi driver at a time.  She set out the situation of the genetic time bomb, programmed to go off and trigger blindness just when you’ve bough...

I met the Builder coming up the road with his dog. He was chuckling to himself and told me that he had just seen a very funny incident. He said he wasn’t sure if it was politically correct to laugh at something to do with blindness but he couldn’t help himself. I asked him if it was a blind person or a sighted person who came off worst out of this story. “The sighted one,” he said. “Go for it,” I...

Only very recently did I take my first tentative steps into the world of social media. It’s a mine field. It’s like the girl with the curl. When it’s good it’s very very good and when it’s bad it’s horrid. I know plenty of people with no sight who navigate the digital world with aplomb. I am not one of them.  I considered going on a course in order to develop my skills to a level of #Twitter and #...

His suspicions aroused by the large quantity of bleach nestled behind my loo, my friend Dan asked me if I was planning to make a bomb.  I was not, but it got me thinking about the reason why and how I approach my rare trips to the supermarket. The thing about shopping, if you can’t see, is that nothing is done on spec (excuse the word play) because you are going to have to carry it home. A Buy One...

My neighbour was kind enough to drive me to #Heathrow terminal five. It rose out of the Hounslow ground like the architectural jewel of an emerging state, and proved equally hard to navigate our way into. Once there, it gleamed even brighter than the orange façade of #Luton airport departure terminal. The unprepared traveller could be blinded in the reflection of all that glass and chrome. You nee...

The God Daughter, has the most phenomenal finger nails I have ever seen. They are long and polished and sometimes bejewelled. I wonder how it is possible to be a working Mother with these finger nails. The God Daughter is a tour de force and has probably taught her children the importance of being able to deliver a good manicure as part of their preparation for pre-school. I confess that I am jeal...

Everyone has a drawer of dud gifts for recycling. Don’t they? In my drawer are quite a few crystal angels with the power to heal – allegedly.  These were given by people who like to knit their own mung beans.  There is a selection of magnifying glasses I don’t know what to do with.  Some nice people thought of me, while rummaging through the 50% off section, and assumed that another magnifier woul...

I have an inherent fear of snakes. Even the most innocuous of grass snakes assumes the status of an anaconda in my imagination. As a child, I sought out the privacy of a large bush, only to discover that I had picked the very spot favoured by adders. I don’t know who was more surprised, the adders or me. It’s a testament to youthful speed and agility that I lived to tell the tale. As a student I w...

A conversation about unemployment rates amongst disabled people of working age reminded me, not only how lucky I have been, but of the sheer lunacy of prejudice. If it weren’t quite so serious it would be funny. My teenage ambition was to be a criminal defence barrister. I was not an idiot. I’d seen #Crown Court and what’s more I came from a family of lawyers and already had the wig. My aspiration...

Weirdly, I quite like walking uphill. There is no denying that age, expanding girth and lack of fitness make this more of a challenge than for the younger, thinner and fitter, but as my friend, The Big Cheese, would say, “none of us are getting any younger or any thinner”. Downhill walking has had its day. After the rib cracking incident I’m for the climb up and working up a good sweat. There is n...

My hosts were in their usual good form. The food was excellent. The wine was flowing and the slow gin homemade. The conversation was about the local fishmonger and the aspirations of young adult children, holidays taken and the long awaited driverless car. How the world has changed since we were young. As a slave to pubic transport timetables and as someone who never goes anywhere without a pack o...

I like to think I am a woman in my prime. The evidence does not necessarily support this position. There are those that think I have the technology skills of an Edwardian, retaining something of a fondness for pen and paper. I hanker after #Basildon Bond and the letter. That makes me very old and not at all in my prime. Technology is supposed to be a liberation; enabling my computer to speak text...

I was in a pizza restaurant dithering over what to chose. “My God,” said my newest colleague. “Your eye sight is terrible. You should go to Pakistan and get that fixed. My wife had terrible sight. Not that bad, but she really did have trouble. She went to Pakistan and got it sorted. She can see fine now.” I said that it wasn’t an operable thing and that I had made my peace with it a long time ago....

There are lots of apples falling off the tree in next doors garden. There is an abundance of windfalls, in my garden, that the local wildlife like to avail themselves of. In my efforts to deter the marauding intruders with fur, tails and long yellow teeth, I have just been out to pick up the rotten fruit and put them out for tomorrows compost collection. I have a little trick to keep the side gate...

Being a fugitive from justice is a stressful experience. I know, because I experienced this. I experienced it briefly, just for a nano-second, in the REM dream state that most of us experience just before we wake up. My crime? I was caught on camera driving down a North American highway. I was over the speed limit by one mile an hour and caught without a licence. For this, I now faced extradition...

I love technology: I love the oven, the kettle, the toaster. I loved the TV I grew up with. That’s the one that had an enormous “V” shaped areal that extended out of the top and sat on four screw in legs. It had a button for turning it on and off and a dial that could be set to three locations: BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. The only time we ever spoke to it, (and here I use the term loosely) was when the tu...

I set off from Clapham to catch the train to Lancaster where my friend, the Author, would meet me. She would then drive to her house in Clapham. That’s Clapham Yorkshire, from where we would stride out for some good bracing walks, a thing we both love to do. Turns out that I’d been sold the wrong tickets again, and the train that I’d asked for, and confirmed, my seats reservations on, was not the...

My picky friends have pointed out that this blog is full of idiosyncratic spelling mistakes. I plead visual impairment! Early attempts at reading were centred around the adventures of Peter and Jane who rolled around in the front seat of the family car, chased moving buses and took to an inflatable raft in only their pants. The more I read the better it got. By the time I was becoming an independe...

An old family friend left a message on my answer machine that went something along the lines of; ” I’ve been to look at your old school…it really is a super retirement complex now … they have everything there…you wouldn’t have to worry about not being able to see….they’ll look after you….I’ve given your number to the sales office and Vicki is going to call you…I’ve told her you can’t see much…ther...

Sometimes I feel like a dysfunctional travel correspondent. My tales always seem to involve the extraordinary. I’ve been abandoned on aeroplanes, been refused assistance at train stations and once threatened with arrest for trying to buy a ticket at journeys end because I couldn’t operate the ticket machine at the start of my journey. My reply: “Fine, while you’re calling the police I’ll call the...

There is something cringingly uncomfortable about making your mistakes in public: I have a long and distinguished experience of being the subject of public amusement. It’s not a comfortable place to be. Not looking or behaving like other people’s assumptions, of how I should look or behave, has landed me in some testing situations. Getting off a bus one day, the door opened next to a concrete boll...