The Blind Truth

A long long time ago when God was a boy and before I had teeth, I can remember sitting on the counter in the green grocers while he weighed out sugar to be bagged up in a heavy duty blue bag sealed shut with tape. Now that I have teeth and want to preserve them, I have stopped buying sugar. The flatmate and I have been the proud owners of the same bag of sugar for five years.

In the intervening years, not only has dentistry come a long way but shopping has progressed too. Or has it?

The advent of self service has meant that I have accidentally invested in more tins of red pepper than anyone could reasonably be expected to eat in a lifetime. Its always in the mistaken belief they are tomatoes. While the words “pepper” and “tomato” may have obvious differences to those who can see a reasonable amount, it all looks the same to me.

With the rise of the superstore comes super confusion. No good relying on being able to read the signs about what lurks in each isle if you can’t see where the signs are in the first place. The number of miles travelled in search of the dried chick peas has served me well. Other people have the fit bit. I have the quest for marmite. When the search for oats ends with dog food, (some may say that comes to the same thing in the end), the best laid of culinary plans are abandoned.

One thing you can depend upon in the mega store, is that there are always crisps and chocolate at the end of the slog up and down rows of mysterious assorted coloured blobs. While I can resist the sugar, the salt is seductive and pairs oh so well with the wine on the sideboard in my kitchen. This too turned out to be a disappointment as I poured myself a glass of olive oil.

In the supermarket game of blind It’s A Knock Out, the arrival of the self service till has created a opportunity for me to stand about looking gormlus while an invisible youth waves at me as if directing the idiot driver of a large car into a small parking space. “Next Customer,” he bellows. I’ve got so good at recognising this tone of exasperation that I now know it’s my cue to step forward and find someone to help. I’ve long since given up worrying that I’m in a queue for something that I cannot do.

On the signal of infuriated shouting, I step forward and head for the voice. Then, I say “Please could you help me as I can’t see to operate the machine?” they usually say “No Problem, ” and regardless of whether or not my cane is in my hand, “just follow the instructions on the screen”. Then I explain myself again and sometimes help is delivered with great good grace and sometimes its delivered with contempt.

I have to confess that without the benefit of knowing what each stage of paying by this method looks like, I cannot help but wonder about some of the commands shoppers are instructed to abide by. I thought a “bagging area” was the slump in the fabric on the backside of a much loved pair of trousers. I cannot help but fantasise that this reference is an instruction to stuff your shopping down your trousers and leg it.

The self service till has tripled the number of times I need to give an account of my inability to do something while out shopping. It is one of the means by which my shopping experience is hobbled.

This is why I buy my fruit and veg from a nice man called Bill with a pair of lungs like bellows. His come hither cries always lure me to spend more on celeriac than I intended and if I pile the cash in my hand he works it out for me and calls me “Darling” into the bargain. He’s also been known to instruct me to “Open your gob,” so he can pop a grape inside. I know I could do it for myself but life cannot get much better than being fed grapes in public by a nice man.

A nice woman came to my house to begin the process of long cane training. I was tense. She introduced herself with a name that sounded just like the Bulgarian word for “it’s not important.”. The flatmate and I would have thrown each other a look. We both thought the same thing. “Kak?” which means something altogether different in English than Bulgarian and it’s not “What?”.

My nice mobility trainer and I set off down the road. The purpose of this jaunt was for her to observe me, out and about, so that we could make a plan of action, if action were needed.

I consider my pavement technique to be pretty good but would you believe it, no sooner was I out of the front door than me, an extendable dog lead, a Chihuahua and a very angry neighbour got into a tangle. The angry neighbour started shouting and I apologised. My nice trainer whispered in my ear “don’t be sorry.” I realised that it was easier to be sorry than to explain. How confusing is that?

Dusting ourselves down, we set off again. Some of the things that I thought were one thing turned out to be another. The wheelchair kerb access that I thought had been lovingly dolloped out, with a trowel, up and down the High Street, often don’t follow the guidance, and are just as likely to tip a wheelchair user out as they are to trip me up. The exit point from Sainsbury’s car park is in fact the entry point. The top speed for a mobility scooter on a pavement is 4mph and not “get out of my way I’m on my scooter”. Pressing buttons at traffic lights is largely pointless as most work on a cycle that pedestrians are powerless to influence. If you gag on an overhanging branch that ends up in your mouth, which it is likely in my case because I’m prone to having my mouth open a lot as I like talking, it’s acceptable to spit.

My nice trainer taught me that having a cane in my bag is a start. Just because I don’t use it all the time, does not mean I am a fake. Sometimes it’s useful and sometimes it’s not. Sometime I can’t face the prospect of the cane in my hand, sometimes I crave it. Lots of people who can’t see much swither in their use of the cane. I find that the comfort of knowing its in my bag means I never leave home without it.

The cane does not make everything clear. It brings it’s own confusions. A distant cry, from the far end of a tube carriage of “Do you want to sit here?” could be directed at anyone. I usually ignore this because who knows where “here” is and who knows who the question is directed at. What if you get mistaken for a terrorist and get tazered because some trigger happy policeman thought it was a gun? Confusing but true.

See: Blind man Tasered by armed police who thought his walking stick was …

After an hour my nice trainer and I stopped for a coffee. She suggested I take my cane out of my bag and leave it on the counter in front of me. “You’ll see why,” she said. When the bill came the man behind the counter talked me through the card payment. I didn’t need to explain or apologise. It was all encoded on that folded up cane on the counter.

The woman who said she was of no importance, turned out to be a rather important person in my life. She helped me understand I can be full of inconsistencies and contradictions in the way I navigate the world, and a pair of secateurs in the handbag can deal with overhanging hazards and leave me free to keep jabbering. I need never apologise for it.

The Blood Bank, where I bank, is keen on inviting people in to meet their Relationship Manager. These are nearly always people who are in training and supervised by those who are licenced to advice on products that they can not advise on. These supervisors work like close protection officers.

The Blood Bank brings out the worst in me. The twenty or so Relationship Managers, I have had over the years, activate a desire in me to give oxygen to the worst excesses of my imagination. No matter how provoked I am by compulsory videos on what the consequences will be if I commit fraud, during a conversation I never wanted, I have to remember that reducing the youth before me to tears, will make matters worse for everyone.

Clare was my favourite Relationship Manager. She was tenacious. After many phone calls I succumbed and agreed to meet her to review my banking needs, but on the strict proviso she would not try to sell me anything. Her opening salvo was to read from a prepared script about the product range she would now set out for me. My protests were met with a demand that I listen. She moved on to home insurance.

Set out on the screen were the options which she now needed me to look at. I explained that I could not see the screen. “Well how was I to know?” she said. “I mean, what exactly can you see?”

“I’m registered blind. It says that on your system,” I spat.

“Yeah, well, that could mean anything. I don’t know. I’m not an optician. I need you to look at the screen.”

“Well, I’m not going to,” I said. “There’s no point.” I could feel myself flushing pink and seething.

There was a moments silence and then she spoke very slowly, supporting what she said with exaggerated gestures towards herself, me and the computer so that the half wit in front of her would be left in no doubt. “I need you to read the information that I am telling you yeah.”

“No,” I said and got up and left.

The Blood Bank allegedly wrote to me to say that overdraft charges were going up. They can’t tell me when as its not on their system. It might have been one of those occasions they wrote to me in braille or small print, neither of which I read. This was a job for the Relationship Manager.

Rebecca explained the product range she would talk to me about and I said I just wanted to deal with bank charges. She said she couldn’t do anything about that but had to play me a video. I said I wouldn’t be able to watch it. She said that I should listen. She said this was about the regulatory framework. It was actually about how the bank would use my information. The regulator was never mentioned. She moved on to credit cards. I threw up my hands and felt myself turn pink and start seething again.

We finally settled on a savings account upgrade that would give me an extra 0.15% a year. I estimate this was probably the best mornings suffering I have ever been through for an £3.50. Although this might turn out to be more “because some people think it is,” according to Rebecca.

After 25 years of banking with The Blood Bank; they still can’t get my name right, seem to think sight impairment is a matter of stupidity to the point that they once suggested I ask a grown up to help me operate the cash machine, and continue to fox me with communications I cannot read.

My Relationship Managers always says how pleased they are to meet me and how they can “only apologise” for any misunderstanding. I always end up apologising for my fury and they always forgive me. Funnily enough, I never meet them twice.

Each time I’ve gone to vote, I ask where the large print ballot paper is that every polling station is obliged to display by law. It’s usually pinned on a wall which means that just about anyone who needs to read large print won’t be able to get near enough to read it. Polling station staff are obliging and generally proffer a close up look. I have no qualms about disconnecting the large ballot paper from the wall.

All blind and partially sighted people are supposed to be able to exercise their right to vote in private, polling station staff are not backward in coming forward to make this happen. I’ve been repeatedly invited to make use of the publicly available magnifying glass that is next to useless for anyone with a severe sight impairment.

“Off the shelf” magnifiers are designed for the majority of people who aren’t blind or partially sighted. I know this because my optician told me so. I also know this because every time one of friends finds themselves bereaved by the loss of a parent, I am bequeathed the magnification detritus of the much loved dead relative who proudly managed to maintain a driving licence until the bitter end.

Every polling station is also supposed to have a tactile overlay that goes over the ballot paper so that blind people can put their “X” in the right spot. It’s supposed to enable privacy in the polling booth. One blind voter reported the polling station officer being so close to him that he could feel her breath. It’s also notoriously prone to fail and likely to lead to a spoiled ballot. There’s a cracking film about how this doesn’t work. It’s right up there with the Cheap Flights. Here’s the Link

If you are blind you can vote by proxy. I can’t think of anything worse than giving my vote to someone else to cast for me. What if they made a mistake?

I tried the postal vote. Free to use my own made to measure magnification it worked at a functional level. I cast my vote in the European election by post and then spent the day fretting that it might have got lost in the post.

There is no getting away from it. I like the ritual of the polling station and seeing all those nice, and not so nice, folk sitting on picnic chairs in the car park asking me if I would mind telling them how I voted. I don’t mind a bit because by that point anyone who happened to be milling around the voting booth knows how I voted because I have already told the polling station staff who I wanted to vote for because that’s the surest way to make sure I’ve put my “X” in the right place.

When I go to cast my vote, I never bother with the privacy of drawing the miserable curtain so that I can confer with staff in a whisper. It seems unnatural to have four legs poking out from behind the curtain. I’m not a bashful type but who knows what people might think.

Why not have telephone voting or voting on line? While I would miss the rituals of the polling station there are plenty who wouldn’t. It’s controversial I know. With many Brits choosing not to vote, embracing the tools that so many of us use every day has got to be worth a try if voting is not to become a die hard activity. After all, the ballot was once a controversial innovation.

Blind and partially sighted people are less likely to vote than their sighted peers. Like so many things that might have had their origins in solutions for people who can’t see, I bet telephone and on line voting would go a fair way to getting the voter numbers up amongst the population in general, let alone for those of us who find it a challenge to vote.

A friend of mine called me up at 8.30 in a Sunday morning. He said that he was parked outside my house and would like to invite himself to breakfast. His car was packed to the gunnels with old garden machinery he had hoped to car boot. It was raining and blowing a gale so he gave up and opted for my house.

Together with his hairy retriever puppy and not so hairy son, we ate breakfast, and spent the rest of the morning chatting. Finally, they stood up to leave because they now needed to go home to unpack the enormous quantity of old tools from his car and put them back in the shed. My friends’ son asked me, “Hey, would you like a chain saw or a band saw?” I said it was a kind offer but declined. “There’s nothing wrong with them and you could cut your own wood.” My friend just laughed.

I gave up any garden implement, sharper that a trowel, some time ago. For years I chopped my own wood with a small axe purchased especially for the purpose. Then came the fated day that the son came home and spotted me in the act with the axe.

He thought, that considering my poor track record with kitchen knives, an axe was an amputation waiting to happen. He pointed out that he had never seen anyone chop wood by calculating each swing by touch. He did not consider this a reliable method of ensuring that the next blow was not likely to sever a limb. I thought this approach was a perfectly rationale adaptation. I had no intention of chopping off my left hand.

The upshot of this was that the son took over wood responsibilities and I have never managed to find that axe, even though I suspect he did not take it with him when he left home.

For years I pruned my hedge with an electric hedge trimmer. I did this by measuring the amount of hedge I wanted to lose and then giving it my best guess. I only ever had two mishaps, slicing through the cable, but that’s what the safety mechanism is for.

I have to say that I felt rather proud of the results. The hedge looked just fine to me, but after many years of this routine, my neighbour came home to find me up a step ladder hard at work with the hedge trimmer. He made no bones about my lack of fitness to handle heavy machinery.

I confess outrage at such forthright criticism and complained to my other neighbour about this unjustified assault on my handy work. She was far from sympathetic. “Alleluia. Finally, you wont’ have a hedge that looks like bad topiary.” I pulled a face. “It’s completely wonky.” She said. Obviously I disagree.

So, to be offered a band saw and and chain saw all in one morning was tempting. I had a fleeting vision: I am revving up the chain saw and lowering my visor in preparation for chopping up a large tree trunk that I heroically dragged home and that I will be burning before the day is out. Instead, I am resigned to paying my ninety pounds for a load of winter logs that are delivered and neatly stacked.

The urge for machinery has not quite subsided and I have been on line looking at log splitters. This seems to offer the optimum outcome in helping to support a myth of heavy endeavour, I feel, is required in making a fire. It has the added advantage of being a near silent vice that I can exercise in the privacy of my garden without alerting the neighbours.

Last Saturday I got home to find the milk was off and the cheese I thought might last the course of my absence, was now cultivating penicillin. There was nothing for it but to head to the market on a dreary afternoon when I’d much prefer to have been listening to my book in front of the fire.

Luck, it seemed, was on my side. Just as I reached the bus stop I heard the bus creeping up behind me so I took advantage of its comforts and climbed aboard. As soon as I got off the bus I went to buy tea. Then my luck turned.

As I came out of the tea shop I was conscious of a small woman in an oversized khaki coat with a woolly hat pulled down low. I went to the next shop and bought Easter eggs. There she was again, silently watching as the contents of my purse exploded onto the unsuspecting cashier.

Next I went to the charity shop because I have a sort of professional addiction to charity shops. I made my slow progression round the shop, nose to label so to speak and went to leave. There she was again. This time I had to squeeze past her. She made room for me, lifting the handbag she was looking at, oh so considerately to her shoulder, so that I could squeeze past.

I have to give her points for her artistry: Her distraction technique was simple and kept my focus on the shoulder height bag action she was putting on for my benefit. I never felt a thing. She relieved me of my credit cards and cash with style, bowed and smiled as she did so. I actually thanked her. Then she evaporated into thin air.

It was all so obvious but I hadn’t wanted to believe it as it was happening. Instinct is a powerful thing. Sight is not the only tool at your disposal. Just because you are paranoid that you are being followed, doesn’t mean that you are not. I’m kicking myself.

What I should have done was to stand in the street and yell as loudly as possible that a small woman in an oversized khaki coat (all the better to dress in layers of stolen clothes), had just robbed me. I was so surprised at what had just happened that at the moment a really good bellow was called for, I was rendered silent.

The shop manager told me that street gangs of thieves love charity shops. She said that they target and follow older and vulnerable people, (these are her words not mine). The blind truth is that I probably was targeted because of the advantage steeling from someone who can’t see much gives a thief.

The Police were sympathetic enough, but within minutes of filing the report and being issued a crime number, I received an email to say that they would not be investigating. I wrote to them to say that I believe I was targeted because I have a sight impairment and that I would ask them to reconsider their decision. A day elapsed. Silence. So, I sought out the local Police senior who agreed it’s worth looking at the evidence.

It turns out there is quite a bit of evidence. I know this because it is me that has gathered some of it. It is spread out across hundreds of miles. That means different Police forces co-ordinating their efforts which is a challenge. The clock ticks. CCTV evidence is lost. The trail goes cold. Case closed.

Arrest rates for crimes against disabled people don’t reflect peoples experience. There are no extra Police resources and the cycle continues.

If you are blind or partially sighted you are more likely to be a victim of crime. That might be opportunistic crime and it might be hate fuelled crime. Sorry to say, I know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of both of these.

If you believe you have been on the wrong end of a crime because of a disability, the Police have a duty to investigate. They know this. It’s their job. It shouldn’t be my job to point this out to them.

When I first started travelling to Sofia I used to fly Air Bulgaria from Gatwick. Once, having answered the call for those needing assistance to come forward now, I stepped forward and did not get quite the help I expected. What I got was a good telling off because the Air Bulgaria official thought “You are a liar. There is nothing wrong with you. Sit down immediately”. Passengers were boarded. The gate was closed and the official departed. I was abandoned, so I made the walk of shame to find the plane alone, being rescued by a man in ear muffs who, spotting the cane, got the general idea that all was not well on the old eyesight front.

Many years ago I realised that, if I was to live into old age, the white cane, was essential in airports. It came about because a tried and tested technique of shoulder serving a likely looking passenger failed me. I found myself running from the terminal to the plane, in heavy rain late at night at Belfast airport. I was effectively running freestyle towards the runway. A man with ping pong bats intercepted me and shouted “Are you blind?” As he marched me back towards the terminal, I heard myself say, “No, I just can’t see the plane.”

I was in Heathrow not so long ago. My British trained escort came to collect me and I said I’d like to swing by the ladies loo en route to the gate. Well that did it. “Oh My God,” he yelled. “She gotta go toilet.” I scratched my head.

“I should say that a bit louder if I were you,” I said. “ I don’t think everyone quite heard you.”

He heaved in his breath and stuck out his chest. “She gotta go toilet.” He really gave it some welly.

“It’s Ok. I can manage to pass water unaided and I can wipe my own bottom.”

Up went the shoulder and out came the bellowing sound of relief. “It’s OK. She can do toilet on her own,” and off we set.

Luton’s not much better. Airlines run up penalties there because they spend so long on the tarmac waiting for passenger assistance. It makes no odds when or how assistance is booked, a culture of “blame the passenger” prevails. Bus loads of cross travellers have twitched in passive aggression as security demands no one can board until I have been removed from the plane. That can regularly take up to and hour and a half.

On a blistering summer day, after a very tedious wait and plane crew change at Luton, assistance arrived and demanded to know,” Yeah, you got a Romeo?”

“Do you mean this nice lady sitting here?”

“Walker? Non walker?”

I couldn’t help myself. “it might be easier if you talked to me since I’m right here.”

“I’ll talk to you if I need to,” was the surly reply.

I was once instructed to get into a wheelchair. “It’ll be easier,”

“For whom” I asked?

These days Bulgarian Airport assistance is the best I have encountered. It far outstrips the British experience. I am treated with courtesy and respect. I am not kept waiting and everyone is polite. No one shouts at me or about me. Varna airport gets my vote for disabled traveller assistance. I love it.

We hear so much criticism about all those nasty foreigners importing their nasty foreign ways, but British airports could learn a thing or two from our Bulgarian cousins, about how to treat blind and disabled travellers.

Everyone should clear out things they have not worn or read or paid any heed to for more than a decade. It’s oh so easy to hang on to things because they evoke the feelings of another time or an event. There comes a point though, when the original moment has long passed and the feelings they evoke are the feelings you had last time you considered showing them the door.

There is no particular reason why I should have hung on to my O’Level biology notes for more than thirty years. They evoke no other feelings beyond the embaressment I felt, as me and the remaining members of my all male year group, learnt about reproduction. This may have possibly been surpassed by the terror of a bucket full of earth worms being handed round for dissection. The chief architect of the worm terror incident knows who he is. The notes were for the bin.

Along with yellowing biology notes were a large pile of books on British birds, a legacy from my Uncle who was a keen twitcher. I kept them in a vain attempt to teach myself a bit about birds because I have never seen a bird and have always been curious. It never happened.

The limit of my bird knowledge is culinary. I know how to take a chicken apart and where bones and fat are located. Pheasants on the other hand are a little bit more complicated. My Father used to kill them, gut them and put them in the post to me. This came to an abrupt end when I went to collect my pheasant from the post office. There was a small mishap as the package was handed across the counter. A trail of blood was left in its wake. Her Majesty’s Royal Mail takes a dim view on packages that leak blood and gave me a stiff talking to about sending body parts through the post.

I doubt that gutting a pheasant is something that I could achieve without the gift of rather more visual acuity than I have, so I limit myself to the breast meat. To remove this, sight is not required, merely a sharp knife. My experience is that you need a feel for what you are doing. What goes on in the privacy of my kitchen though, has not always resulted in the best of outcomes in public.

Outside the pheasant enclosure at London Zoo, the son, who was strapped into his pram at the time, leant forward and pointed and exclaimed loudly, “Oh look Mummy, Pheasant. Delicious.” I couldn’t tell you where the gaze of the surrounding public fell next or whether looks could have killed, but we beat a hasty retreat.

I once had a cat who was afraid of a huge pigeon that lived in a tree at the end of the garden. She would stand at the kitchen door and mew her despair. I never did see that bird but the cat never failed to signal its presence.

On a trip to Scotland, I spent a day sitting in a hide, from where it was possible to see all kinds of wildlife if you had the sight for it. I have no idea why I agreed to go. My companion and I spent a miserably cold day, sipping bottled water and whispering, while flocks of birds descended and ascended before us. I never saw a single one of them. In an effort not to embarrass either one of us, because I was in too deep now, I echoed his appreciation of the drama he observed and the blank canvas I was facing.

Who knows why it is that I agreed to such a ridiculous notion as bird watching for blind people. Perhaps we were both complicit. My friends wanted to go bird watching so just put the obvious impediment to this out of his mind. I thought that being generous would make us both happy. So we went bird watching. It did not make me happy and my misery leaked out to fill the atmosphere.
Other than the ones I have eaten and the odd blob passing by, I never have seen a bird, but I get the general idea. One last look at “Birds of the British Isles” reminds me that I’ve lived my entire life without birds. It’s not a space that needs filling with old books.

These days I’d scoff at such a ridiculous idea as bird watching, but there are probably all kind of other things that I’d agree to do, if I thought it might make someone I care about happy. I once went star gazing because I knew it would bring pleasure to the person I went with. Stars are definitely beyond the final frontier and remain a mystery.

I love trying new things but I’m better in setting my boundaries. I definitely draw the line at pigeon and Opera, both of which are best avoided however much I may want to please others.

The snow this week prompted the son and I to remember a freezing February when he lent out of his bedroom window and broke stalagmites off the edge of the roof to suck on like lollies. We remembered building igloos and snowmen, and lying in the snow at dusk, flapping our arms and legs to see if our bodies could make the shape of angels. We could not. We generated a nondescript imprint that looked more like an accident than divine intervention.

This isn’t my only brush with the white stuff.

When I was six my parents introduced me to the ski slopes. We went to Klosters and stayed at the Wynegg Hotel where I met the legendary Ruth Guler. It was the sixties and everyone was glamorous. That is to say everyone except me. I was wearing a sort of baby pink bonnet affair and a pair of huge yellow goggles. My ski gloves hung out of the cuffs of my ski jacket on a bit of elastic. While others stood around on their ski poles looking relaxed, I mustered all the grace of a new born giraffe.

My parents were un-phased at the prospect of my learning to ski even though snow transformed every lump and bump and mountain into one huge flat white blanket. It was literally snow blindness. This was the moment I was introduced to sighted guiding. It happened by accident.

Ski classes were a no no. They were too tricky to follow and no one wanted to teach me so I had one to one lessons with Emma, who got increasingly frustrated at my inability to do what she demonstrated. In desperation she hit on the idea of describing what she was doing. She taught me how to position my body for the most basic of manoeuvres and off we went. Emma skied in front of me, shouting directions and descriptions over her shoulder.

The thrill of a perfect descent and Emma’s assumption that I’d know that I needed to stop before I hit the restaurant turned out to be my undoing. I hit the resteraunt. My humiliation was surpassed by a friends fully sighted son who skied off the slopes in Italy, into a car park where he landed on the bonnet of a Mercedes. It can happen to anyone.

I love the thrill of moving at speed on skies but it’s hard work. You have to concentrate and you need to have absolute trust in your guide. Without that rapport the experience can be a trial. I’ve skied in Switzerland, Italy and France with guides. I’ve never progressed beyond a blue run and a bit of cross country but that’s ok by me. So long as I can burn off enough to justify the chips at lunch time I’m content.

Let’s be honest. I’m no Olympian and I think my skiing days are behind me, but my parents did something wonderful for me. They set no limits. My choices need not be limited by my horizons. Much like everything else to do with sight loss, it’s not the sight loss that’s the problem but other people’s limited vision.

I once skied with a really grumpy guide in France. On the last hour before lunch we ran into a friend of his so they stopped for a chat. “What are you up to?” asked the friend in French.

“Oh I got lumbered with this. She can’t see so she can’t do much. It f…ing boring’.

He said that we’d better get going as the sooner we left the sooner his agony would be over. I said my goodbye’s in French.

I was asked by one of my fellow skiers if I’d enjoyed myself. I said that I’d found the guiding tough going so might look into going on a ski trip arranged through the Guide Dog Association. I thought the guiding might be better geared to people with sight loss. There was a slight pause and she asked the inevitable; “Do the guide dogs actually go down the hill?”

Viva the blind Olympic skiers. In 2014 Kelly Gallagher won gold for Britain. We have the same eye condition.

I could have been a contender!

I was riding high and in a hurry to get to an appointment, but drearily cruising Bank Station.

Bank Station always has spawned all kinds of interesting interactions that I would never have had if I had the wit and sight to work it out for myself.

It’s proving to be a rich seam for unintended

adventure.

In the hunt for help I stumbled across, well let’s call him Brendon. Brendon was what you might describe as ‘high viz’. High viz is what gets me through Bank Station and on to the train. He works for London Underground and he was super helpful in his high viz jacket.

I gave my usual explanation about not being able to see and he said “No problem. I’ll take you there myself”, and off we set.

“That’s a very striking hat you’re wearing”, he said.

“It’s an Ushanka”.

“I thought you were a Grenadier guardsman”, says Brendon and so we fell into a conversation about how my enormous Russian fur hat came to be mine.

“They used to sell them in C&A,” Brendon said. “No one wears hats anymore, not a hat to really protect you against the cold. In the countryside, in the days before central heating, everyone wore a hat, even inside. I wasn’t always a city boy. I’m from a farming community in Ireland”.

“Colraine?” I venture.

I’ve got a pretty good ear for accents. A long time ago, when I lived in Ireland, I could tell an accent to within a few miles. This was a bit of a guess though. Brendon stopped dead in his tracks. “Now how would a nice English Lady like you know a thing like that?”

“Actually, I’m Irish.”

“Are you what they call a plastic Paddy?” he asks, and I confess that I am and I’m proud of my Irish heritage.

Brendon wonders if my good ear for accents has developed because of my terrible sight. This is a myth of course, or is it?

A 2004 study reported that blind and sight impaired people do have better skills at discerning pitch, but only if they lost their sight early on in life or are born blind. In early life the centres for vision, hearing and other senses are all connected but this naturally diminishes over time. So if you are born with little or no sight then you are far more likely to develop and preserve these connections. It doesn’t always follow that people do though.

I’ve also got excellent directional hearing. If I drop something on my kitchen floor I can usually pick it up at the first go, even if I can’t see it. That includes crisps where the three second rule is strictly applied. We all have directional hearing but I’ve been using my hearing since the day dot to help me navigate the world. I do it very consciously as well as unconsciously. I like to think of it as a sort of sonar system.

My family think I have selective hearing. Requests for kitchen bin emptying often pass me by. I’m also prone to auditory confusion in crowds. “Pass the butter,” can easily turn into “pasta button” or worse. I plead my age. I can’t help it. They just find me annoying.

When we arrived at our destination Brendon said, “Well I enjoyed our conversation. I can’t believe I’ve just spent fifteen minutes talking to a Catholic.” He was pitch perfect. We both threw back our heads and roared with laughter. He knows he could throw out a bit of old style Northern Irish humour and I’ll pick it up no trouble. It didn’t take me three seconds.

“Lucky you” I say.

“Lucky me indeed” he says.

I’m not even going to try to explain how we got from Ushanka to C&A to Colraine to crisps to Catholicism, but he and I knew how we got there. We didn’t just hear one another, we took the trouble to listen. We pitched it just right.