The Blind Truth

There is a fine line between fame and infamy and oh how easy it is to cross that line and achieve infamy by mistake.

It was with a bit of trepidation that I approached the idea of speaking to the nation, or at least the part of it that listens to radio four and has not tuned out for an evening of Netflix. Who wouldn’t tune out given the choice, when the viewing is as tempting as some of the steamy period drama that have graced our screens over recent weeks.

“The Duck is delicious,” the BF reported in a well-appointed slip of the finger in a recent text, as she commented on the delights of Regé-Jean Pages’ performance in Bridgerton. “Yum”.

Undaunted by the competition I pressed on. I have the looks for radio and in this regard no one could fault my less than steamy contribution.

I knew I would be nervous. The last time I “bumped into” #Peter White, he offered me a lift home. This time I wasn’t expecting any favours and I didn’t get any. It wasn’t the fastest 19 minutes of my life.

It’s an odd thing that however well prepared you are for a grilling, few of us don’t have moments of panic as we burn in public. Level one panic sounds like this in my head; “Oh how I wish I had memorised what came after the decimal point and given a better reply.” Level two goes a bit like this: “Did I say what I meant to say?” Out of control panic is a car crash. “Will anyone in the office ever speak to me again?”

I was lurking somewhere between level one and level two when the line went dead. I waited. I waited some more, then a voice in my ear said, “this is the operator at Broadcasting House Mr Benn. We’re going live in…”
“I’m not Mr Benn, “ I blurted out as I thought about that cartoon character from the seventies. The possibility of popping into a nearby changing room and altering my appearance before disappearing off for an adventure was not without its appeal. If someone somewhere was addressing #Hilary Benn as me, I wonder what he was thinking about. Not much I imagine.

“You’re not Mr Benn,” the voice said. “Then I’ll drop the call.”
“Don’t do that,” I protested. “I’m half way through an interview with #Peter White in Salford.”
“You’re supposed to be Hilary Benn,” he said betraying his irritation.
Hungry for the resumption of my torture I begged for reconnection. “You’re supposed to be Hilary Benn.”
“can you reconnect me?” I asked. The line went dead.

It’s not that hard to stand your ground when no one is listening to you. I planned to hang about just long enough to be able to truthfully say that I’d tried. The best laid plans and all that.
“Just top and tail it,” I heard Peter say. “I think we’ve got what we need.”
“Peter,” I burbled, wondering if I was now betraying the first signs of some kind of media based Stockholm syndrome.
He only had one more question, so I needn’t have worried.

Amazingly enough, not everyone was drooling over the Duke of Hastings. Someone on my WhatsApp lockdown group heard the interview. A couple of colleagues sent texts to say it had gone alright. I confided my discomfort to the Sister who said “it was pretty bad,” and offered a bit of feedback as part of my learning. I’ve had enough feedback to last a lifetime.

The BF didn’t declare my performance delicious but then again, she never said it was a duck. I’ll settle for that.

END

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Image is Siobhain Santry's drawing of a duck dress up as a duke, top hat and monocle included. 

Famous for our love of animals, the Brits have been busy filling up refuges for unwanted pets for decades. It’s an improvement on drowning or leaving the runt of the litter on the side of the road to be squashed or taken home by some unsuspecting driver who, having felt compelled to give their break pad a good work out, cannot help themselves. We’re full of contradictions.

I’m a fan of the dachshund, but when it comes to sharing my home with animals, I’ve often plumped not just for the short-legged hound but for the baby cries of the Siamese cat. I’ve had five of them.

Having lived without their cries for some years now, I’ve been hankering after a mog. I’ve been searching the ads for unwanted female adult felines and that’s how it came to pass that Bob and Clive moved in. they’re kittens.

They arrived with a free selection of fleas, ticks and worms which is no small achievement for the middle of winter. To add to the intrigue, they came with a packet of cat biscuits, of a type I would consider better suited to cavity wall insulation. They also arrived with a bottle of cat shampoo.

Cats are fastidiously clean. Unless you are compelled to home treat a bad dose of ringworm, there can be no reason to shampoo a cat. It’s a brave person who would attempt to give a cat a shampoo and set, so I popped the shampoo in the bin, along with the cavity wall insulation, before investing in food for growing boys.

After an initial terror that cats who prove resistant to potty training could not expect a long residency, all was going well. A week in the kitchen and Bob and Clive were ready to venture forth to the grand savannas of the hall, stairs and landing. Matters were progressing a pace.

What I had not considered was the invisibility of the mackerel faced tabby against the old Persian rugs that litter my house. An initial choice of floor covering that would not show the dirt left by teenagers, also failed to yield up slumbering cats, who had quickly established the precise location of the heating pipes and were not to be dislodged

As the weeks have passed and Bob and Clive and I have put on weight on our kitten diets, we are progressing to a level of intimacy that everyone who has been looked down on, by a cat, can only dream of. Bob and Clive are now on THE bed. It happened like this: I opened my door and put my cup of tea down on the table, closed the door and got back into bed. This was a maneuverer that took all of five seconds. As I sat back there was the squeak of an unoiled hinged, which is the sound of Clive’s Meow. The fireguard fell over. Then Clive fell out of the chimney and hopped up on my clean white linen and settled in for a well-earned rest.

I’ve blocked up the chimney and have taken to leaving the bedroom door open. I doubt my linen, or my paintwork will ever be the same again.

Those boys are growing in confidence every day and have taken to lying about on the stairs. This will surely end badly for one of us. Collars with bells were made short shrift of and this morning I had a chat with a cousin thinking it was Bob.

The feline soundtrack is what I’ve come to depend on. It’s a cat guzzling urgently as if life depended on it, followed by cries of, “Clive, if you don’t want to die, stop eating the cables.”

END

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Image is Siobhain Santry's drawing of Clive the tabby comically falling out of the chimney with a look of utter surprise on his feline face. 

The subject of blood pressure is enough to give you hypotension. In the quest to stave of hypertension, the GP now commands that all her patients over 50 have regular blood pressure checks.

The annual summons arrived in a text message that demanded that I attend the surgery and use the blood pressure pod in the waiting area to ensure an accurate measurement. A phone call was in order, to check whether this was the kind of thing I might be able to see to do.

I was fifth in the phone queue and used my waiting time to walk up a hill so that by the time a person who introduced herself as a “Care Navigator” answered the phone, I was a bit on the puffing side of fit. Between gasps I set out my question. Was this the kind of thing that had been designed with accessibility in mind?

“Ahhhh…I…am…just…trying…to…remember,” She said. “Yes, it is. It’s in the waiting room.”
My expert communication skills had let me down. I tried again. “Yes, I’ve got that, but is it the sort of thing you could do for yourself if you can’t see?”
“Well, you sit on a chair and its right in front of you.”
“Has it got a screen?”
“Ahhh…yes. It’s got a screen.”
“And how big is the screen?” I was struggling for breath now.
“Well…I…should…say…from…memory, it’s about the size of my telly.”
“How big is your telly?”
The sound of a horse exhaling let rip in my ear. “From memory, about 24 inches.”
“24 inches?” I checked.
“Maybe 34,” she said. “I can’t remember.”
As my Care Navigator plunged the depths of her memory I began to speculate about her viewing habits. Would she need a large screen to make the most of Strictly? Could a small screen satisfy?
“So, you need to be able to read the monitor?”
“I think so,” she stumbled.
“And how big is the font?”
“It’s big. Definitely big.”
“More than 18 point?” I thought I had better check before I trudged up the next hill.
“From memory…I don’t know.”
I made enquiry as to whether help would be at hand in the event I couldn’t find the pod or missed the chair or mistook the cuff for a coffee cup holder.
“Just ask a Care Navigator for help,” she said.
I couldn’t resist. “Oh, like you. Wonderful. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” she said and suggested I went straight away. I said I would but not because she was having a CRAFT moment, but because all those hills had taken the wind out of me and it seemed easier than keeping the conversation going.

It was only after I had ended the call that it dawned on me my Care Navigator may have been slightly misled by the tone of my request. Questions of accessibility around this do-it-yourself test may not have been uppermost in her mind as I desperately tried to keep up the pace on a particularly nasty gradient.
Three hills and two flights of stairs, taken at pace, later, I found myself in the throng of a late Friday afternoon rush. “Next,’ bellowed a voice from the middle distance.
“Do you mean me?”
“I’m coming to get you.”

This Care Navigators was on it. She knew the way to the pod, the chair, the monitor and the cuff and a quick check brought total recall on how to use it. Then she shared my date of birth, my name and my blood pressure reading with a man struggling to observe the two-meter guidance, gently swaying from side the side as he reflected out loud on his own CRAFT moment and wondered why he was there.

Results show I am the wrong side of hypertensive.

Note: CRAFT is a term my friend Radiator overheard being used by an Aristocratic looking shopper in Fortnum and Masons. “I’m having a CRAFT moment,” she complained. When her companion asked what that was, she announced, in an upper-class drawl, “can’t remember a f…… thing.”

END

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Image shows multiple red squares with 'The Blind Truth' written inside them. 

Having an IT upgrade is not that exciting to me. I know there are some people who are in heaven at the prospect of a five-point switch box. I’m more of a shoe girl myself.

I accidentally pressed “command y” instead of the “t”. I never knew that this is the shortcut to checking out browsing history. I’ve never felt the need to have a shortcut function to look at what I was looking at yesterday, but there it was: shoes, shoes, shoes and shoes. So, when the IT upgrade came I logged on to office 365 and put my username and password in. Three times I tried and was declined access.

All my bad habits conspired to be revealed as I called the helpline. I wasn’t’ on the office 365 site at all. I was on a well-known shoe shop site of similar name. The dear old search engine was only trying to be helpful in taking me to where it thought I wanted to go. I was only being lazy in my use of my zoom function, which reveals but a fraction of the screen, at any point in time. Oh well, while I was there, surely there was no harm in looking, so I did.

If you use screen magnification it’s probably a good idea to get a bit of IT training to orientate you to the new IT environment in which you find yourself, the majority of which you cannot see. I know this now. Knowing it then would have saved a bit of humiliation. It would have saved me having to ring a colleague to ask what the blob on the bottom right of the screen was. “the calendar,” she said. Then for good measure she added, “the blob on the left is mail.”
I probably should have felt a greater sense of shame at the revelation that I am quite such a tech deficient, but I was grateful.

In my upgraded world, I have had a rude awakening. There are a lot of blobs in life that I am clueless about and it seems to me that now is the moment to throw myself on the mercy of my colleagues and hope I am not mocked for these shortcomings. I had also better get on with upgrading my skills.

A long time ago I realised that relying on the Son as the fount of all knowledge was only going to bring misery for us both. Thank goodness he managed to do the basics and I know what a browser is. I’ve also got green and red stickers strategically positioned all over my keyboard, so I know where the shortcut keys are. I just don’t seem to be able to remember what they do.

Upgrading my skills had better be framed as “when it comes to tech I’m an idiot” on the basis it was better to get this observation in before someone else did.
“I doubt that very much,” was the optimistic response.

As the training session got underway, it became painfully clear, painfully quickly, that it could be some time before I could expect to become an alumni. In my defence I have progressed beyond Dropbox. It’s not just my head that is in the clouds. There’s now an unmitigated stream of consciousness that I have committed to the written format.

I am rather enjoying the potential that my new found skills have to offer. There is just one thing bothering me about all of this. If I ever get to a point where I know what I am doing, what do I have to fall back on when it comes to playing the get out of jail free card?

END

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Image is Siobhain Santry's sketch of Anna. 

In the holiday between Christmas and New Year the stillness of short dreary days is punctuated with bracing walks and meals. Perhaps its more accurate to say that this is the time to run down the contents of the freezer and eat the left over Brussel Sprouts between strolls. At what point though, are leftovers beyond consumption?

I usually palm off my leftovers on the Right Hand Neighbours. They aren’t squeamish but this year, they’ve declined. Could they be approaching their sell by date or have I approached mine?

The sell by date seems to be fast on the way to expiring. The notion of “best before” is under threat as mountains of perfectly good food ends up in the bin. This is where I like to think I’m ahead of the curve. Only in my late twenties did I realise that “best before” dates on jars or tins existed. Since they are invisible to me I ignore them. I applied common sense in the form of the sniff test. If it smelt OK and it tasted OK, then it probably was OK.

The BF did not share my world view on expiry dates. In 1997 she went through my cupboards and threw out a perfectly good jar of Worcester sauce which declared itself best before November 1986. Since the premise of Worcester sauce is that it is rotten in the first place, I suggest that this bottle was well on it’s way to Christies. The BF has never made recompense for her actions although she has come round to my way of thinking, which is that if it’s growing penicillin its for the bin, but otherwise you’ll probably get another serving out of it.

Herbs and spices are exempt from this rule. They simply turn to dust. You may as well hang on to them. You’ve got nothing to lose.

The Christmas pudding that didn’t get eaten this year has been in my cupboard for years. It’s now in the fridge and will be served up to resistant friends for weeks to come. There are tins of sardines in the larder that have been there before the Son left home. Only opening them will reveal whether or not they may prove terminal. The Best before date has long since passed.

Generally speaking, anything that comes wrapped in plastic which has ballooned to bursting point probably deserves determined inhalation before tasting. I don’t worry about spores. That generally comes after its begun to stink. Its that whiff of “offness” I’m looking for.

One proviso is worth a mention. If you, (that is I who cannot see these things), happen to serve strawberries nestling in a coat of mouldy fur, someone is bound to mention it. Be prepared for criticism. I can evidence this.

Anything that comes unwrapped can probably be turned into soup once it’s past its best. I plan to apply this approach to myself. Once I am past my own sell by date, I can be turned into soup in the hope of providing a nourishing aid to the vegetables that feeds the nation. Woe betide anyone who does not apply the rules of blind food management and doesn’t ignore the “best before” date on the broccoli that I will grow when I’m soup. It won’t be an upset stomach, that comes back to haunt you.

When it comes to food waste, the blind amongst us have led the way. While the sighted majority have worried that “best before” dates are yet another way in which we cannot safely manage life, we know they are talking nonsense. Being blind to the “best before” date, and applying blind sense is where the future lies.

END

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Image shows multiple grey squares with 'The Blind Truth' written inside them. 

Some of my relationships have brought great joy. Some have been transitory. Some have been long lasting and deep. None has been quite as shattering as my relationship with glass.

Glass is the unseen menace in my world. Its attentions are largely unwanted and unwelcome. Just when you think you are over it, there it is again, making its presence felt.

An early encounter with toughened glass left me bruised. It was the seventies and I doubt that smearing butter on the resulting lump on my forehead had any medicinal use. The lie down in a darkened room was probably more useful.

Teenage folly meant that I needed more than butter to sooth the lacerations of my next encounter with glass. The resulting lump on the inside of my lip, born of over enthusiastic stitching, has served me well in moment of stress, giving me something else to chew on.

A lucky escape came in trying to put my head through the invisible sash window of an upstairs bedroom in order to shout a fond farewell. At the point of contact, the window fell out. Building maintenance has come a long way since then and I doubt I’d be so lucky now.

My relationship with glass has not always been a happy one, but still I persist. I absolutely adore a really good wine glass. Better still I enjoy having the right glass to drink for the right drink. Wine cannot be drunk out of plastic, as water cannot be drunk out of china.

This purist approach has got me into all sorts of bother. I’ve swooshed glasses off the table resulting in spectacular explosions and tiny slithers of glass everywhere. Two Christmas’s ago I wrecked a carefully constructed table decoration by putting my red wine glass on the step change on the table that I didn’t know was there. I don’t imagine anyone expected to be picking glass out of their Christmas lunch.

I once listened to long account of how the precious glasses from which we were drinking came into the ownership of my host. Then I smashed one. I have carefully carried hand blown liqueur glasses back on a bucket flight only to sweep them up with the rubbish and hurl them out for the bin me.

The depleted state of my glassware, which has happened for reasons now known to just about everyone I know, has led me to think again how to address its shortcomings, and I have concluded that the Champagne coupe must surely be making a comeback. Mine are long since smashed, but in the spirit of having suitable glasses for all eventualities and not finding myself having to drink the Christmas fizz out of a mug, I have been on a mission to buy more glass.

So successful has this mission been that I am now the proud owner of three beautifully proportioned baccarat champagne coups that I found in a charity shop. Buying glass in a charity shops is the best way of managing the sense of waste when you (by which I mean me) inevitably smash a glass.

I could not be more thrilled at the handling of my coupes. They are impeccably balanced with a low enough centre of gravity to offer easy handling. It is this proportion and weighting that offer the best chance of any glass making it through first use in this house. The fizz will definitely taste the better for it.

I hope my new relationship with my champagne coupes will turn out to be long lasting and rewarding (no cracks or chips). If it turns out to be short lived, at least I will have had a smashing time.

END

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Image is Siobhain Santry's sketch of Anna. 

The Artist, the one who drives the Rollscanardly, told me that her family played a lot of parlour games when she was growing up. Her siblings were keen on the Name Game. That’s the one where someone writes the name of a famous person on a post it note and sticks this to your forehead. By asking lots of questions you have to figure out who it is. It might have been Mary Queen of Scots or Florence Nightingale. She got the Fat Slag.

In my family we used to play Charades when Fierce Granny came to tea. This was largely because it gave us all something to do to take our mind off Fierce Granny and put her at a disadvantage if she got landed with “Wacky Races”, which she invariably did.

We were more Lionel Blair than Marcel Marceau with our brash, exaggerated and unrelenting house style. We were encouraged to make large gestures for the benefit of the “gozzy” one (that would be me) amongst us. Often this would be accompanied by a murmured narration of what was going on, as well as a lot of guess work and shouting. It never networked.

Other people’s family gaming traditions can be equally eccentric, but not as eccentric as their approach to involving a player who can’t see to play the game.

There was the board game where one player rolled the dice on my behalf and another one moved my counter up and down the board. Someone else read out my forfeits, but needless to say, it was me that had to do them. Once I had to stand outside and shout “Fish frying tonight”. Worse was to follow.

There are practically no good party games, with the exception of the Hat Game, which is played sitting down, requires no leaping about after too much turkey or rum butter, and allows all players free reign when it comes to describing the famous, as well as the next door neighbour, and best of all; you don’t need to be able to see to be good at it.

At the second of this years’ family Christmas lunches, held in shifts to accommodate the completing needs of in-laws and out-laws, parlour games raised their ugly head. A palpable wave of horror ran through me. This was compounded by the discovery that not only were we all going to play games but, we were going to log on to the internet and suffer a small fee what you have always been able to suffer for free.

Using our phones and tablets “as controllers” we were going to play “the wildest” “the weirdest” comedy contest game with up to ten logged on players and an audience of thousands. I was about to demonstrate that a winning quip requires accuracy in its execution. When you only have seconds, not even the Zoom function on an iPad is enough.

Like the public humiliation of having your blind bowling score illuminated for the world to see, or being asked to take part in a karaoke contest in which you know you can only mouth the song, I had my answers and comic reposts laid out before an unsuspecting audience. Or at least, I had half of them laid out and not one in it’s finished form.

As the answers flashed up on the TV screen on the other side of the room, everyone laughed and pointed at I know not what. I was not amongst the top scorers. It was all lost on me.

I put down my iPad and harrumphed a fast quip. There is nothing like throwing a tantrum to win in the game of family life. Harrumph is always Top Trumph.

END

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Image is Siobhain Santry's drawing of a grey ribbon with The Blind Truth written on it.

My friend, Septic Tank, likes to watch films with the audio description on. It saves her husband the bother of having to listen out for that often asked question “What’s happening now?” There will be no snoozing in the cinema for him without the sought after audio description.

She and I had a concerted effort to see more theatre and despite our distain for the musical, we couldn’t resist #Fiddler on the Roof. We’re soppy like that. There were a couple of audio described performances, one of which happened before it officially opened and one soon after that. Perhaps management was worried about my critical eye. Nobody told us that out of a total run of months we had a choice of two. Blink and you’ve missed it.

“Thank you for helping us identify a training issue,” the shift supervisor at #The Vue said after the latest audio description failure. “The Manager will be in touch with you within two weeks.” She gave me two more free tickets which I’ve lost. I never heard from them again. Needless to say, they heard from me. One more crack pot blinky with too much time on their hands and nothing better to do couldn’t move them to break their silence.

No matter how many times I say “don’t”, even the best of friends can’t help but interpret rather than describe the action, and often predict what is going to happen next. They can no more resist a helpful “told you so” than chocolate. Art reflect life.

Audio description is proving illusive. Friends are good humoured about it, but its hard to follow the audio description rules and I don’t always end up sitting next to the perfect commentator. Professional audio description is the best. It’s the difference between “they kiss with increasing passion…he pulls her towards him…he gently lowers her to the ground…..light fades” being piped privately through headphones in to your ears, or the person next to you leaning in and, to the annoyance of everyone around you, saying in an audible whisper “They’re shagging.”

The flatmate has a predisposition to fall asleep at the cinema. How soon she falls asleep and how loudly she snores is directly inverse to the price of the ticket. The more expensive the ticket the sooner she slumps and starts to snort. Asking for regular updates is a public service that saves my fellow film goers from unnecessary auditory distractions because it keeps her awake. She usually responds to the “what’s happening now?” question, even if her head is down and her eyes closed. I’ve only had to slap her once.

I took number two God daughter and her brother to see #Warhorse. It wasn’t audio described and no one attempted to tell me what was going on until a small child leant in and whispered very slowly in my ear, “They’re speaking German now so you won’t be able to understand what’s going on. I’ll translate if you like.”
“That’s alright,” I said, not wanting to be outwitted by a seven-year old. “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Hoisted by my own petard, he helpfully provided a description in German. Afterwards he said that he had never known I spoke German. “Let’s go for a pizza,” I said, but only if we speak English or French.”
“Merci,” he said.

I went with The Dynamo to watch #1917 (one hell of a film). The cinema was half empty and everyone had decided to sit in the middle, so we were completely surrounded, which made me think twice before asking “what’s happening now?”
“I’m not really sure,” she said. “Hard to describe.”

Cinema is definitely better with a professional whisper in the ear.

Image shows multiple red squares with 'The Blind Truth' written inside them. 

“The moment has come. Centuries from now almost all human beings have lost the ability to see.” So says the trailer for #Apple TV’s new series “See”.

To set the scene, “Some say that sight was taken from them by God.”
“No kidding,” I say.
“But something’s different. After so many years. The children. They have the ability to see.”
“Whoopee do,” I marvel.
No. The power of sight is what you might describe as “magical” or “evil”.
“Not that old chestnut”. I thought it was the other way round. On one hand a punishment from God. On the other hand, damned if you can see. All this helpfully provided with subtitles.

There are armies of blind people galloping about on horses, wielding swords and spoiling for a good dust up. Blindness does not seem to get in the way of a really good fight. “See” it would seem, is doing for war what #”Scent of a Woman” did for pheromones.

I know a few people that I wouldn’t want to cross for fear of a poke in the eye with a white stick, but honestly and truly, I’m not losing any sleep about the possibility of visually impaired folk raising an army to take on the rest of humanity, not even to save the planet.

It’s not a spoiler to say, that of course, its not all fighting and reproducing. Hundreds of blind people crossing a knackered suspension bridge do plunge to their death in a moment of blind madness. Is that supposed to be funny or tragic? I’m not sure. If I say what I thought, I’m bound to offend someone.

This might all turn out to be a bit of good old fashioned knock about fun but the cast seem to be treating it pretty seriously. They had a coach called Paradox Pollock teaching them how blind people move. Wonderful. They wore black out masks to get them into the groove of what it’s like to be blind. The story of playing blind is nearly as gripping as the trailer. https://www.radiotimes.com/news/on-demand/2019-11-01/see-cast-act-blind-apple-tv/ . Me thinks they do over egg the experience of stumbling about in the dark for a bit, then hey presto, off with the blackout mask before the drive home. Try catching a bus you can’t see. It’s not a paradox. It’s pollocks with a capital “B”.

In the depths of my memory is a conversation between a blind and sighted man in which the sighted man explains that when he closes his eyes, or lies in bed in the dark, he gets a really good sense of what it’s like to be blind. “So what happens when you open your eyes or switch the light on?” asked the blind man.
“I can see again,” says the sighted man.
“Then you have absolutely no idea of what it’s like to be blind.”

There is a redeeming feature to all this blood lust. It has provided employment opportunities to a couple of partially sighted actors. Good for them and how very broad minded of #Apple TV. That must have put them into a health and safety spin. I wonder if they let them carry a sword and drink a hot cup of tea at the same time. Alfre Woodard, who plays Paris, thinks that if the show continues they might even have a blind person playing a blind person. How enlightened. A blind person doing blindness.

The truth should never get in the way of a good story. After all, I confess, I’m looking forward to series three of #”The Crown”. I might even watch #”See”. It could be big on laughs.

Image is Siobhain Santry's drawing of Anna. 

“Where’s the exit?’ I asked, trying to beat a retreat from Café Nero Piccadilly.
“First door,” my tea drinking companion replied.

If you have ever been curious about what lives in the cupboards of cafes, I can put you out of your misery: There are more loo rolls than have ever been gathered together in one place. There are buckets, industrial quantities of cleaning material to deal with dirt and spilt urine. Then there are wet mops. I’m not talking damp. I’m talking “open the doors and in your face wet”. Any thoughts, about the union of mop, water, bodily fluids and face are best put aside at the moment of impact.

As I beat off the onslaught of tumbling loo rolls and wet stinking mop, I could hear the rise of an ovation from the room. It was more of a sit down outpouring of nervous amusement and relief, that “it was me not me” followed by an applause of pity.

“Not the first door then,” I mumbled.
“I am leaving now,” said my companion, and departed.

I have investigated more cupboards than most people can shake a duster at. If you tell me it’s the first door on the left, that is the door I will open. All other doors are invisible to me.

In a late night triste with a lock and key in Sofia, I spent so long trying to getting to get into the wrong door of my new building, for the residents to become alert to the possibilities of burglary. Rescued by a friend, I was contrite. She was indulgent. When I repeated this performance the following evening, she was less sympathetic. “What door number are you at?”
“No idea,” I said, as I formulated a plan to try my key in all available doors and hope no one called the Police.

Since the day I tried to get into the hot food cupboard on an aircraft, I prefer to take advise, on all possible other types of doors. One twist of the wrong handle may cause a chill wind for all my fellow travellers.

“Can you tell me the way to the ladies,” I asked security as I was leaving number 10 Downing street. “First door on the left Madam.” That’s what I opened. There was the red smiling face of Henry Hoover staring back at me. That’s the vacuum cleaner, not the person. I find it hard to conceive of Henry gliding through the halls of power in much the same way as he glides across the floors of Acacia Avenue.

I have begun to suspect, that what is obviously not the exit door or the way to the lav, for most people, may be a blind spot for me. I’ve developed door rules of thumb.

If the door is not as tall as me, or seems impossibly narrow, I shut it again. These doors carry the threat of a mop in the face. Hot doors should be avoided at all costs. The continental habit of leaving glass doors open to the street, may be one that should be up for review. I haven’t met one yet that didn’t come off worse than me. If there is the slightest risk of having to enter a door code, make someone else do it. If I feel I may be at risk of prising anything open with my fingernails, my guess is that this is a wall masquerading as a door, and not in the consciousness of my advisors.

The point of advisors is to advise on the unseen as well as the obvious. It’s easier to change advisors than to change doors.

Image shows multiple grey squares with 'The Blind Truth' written inside them.