The Blind Truth

I have had a glimpse of Hell. I have swum the waters of the Styx and crawled up the bank on the far side. I did it all in the hunt for the single stem garden plant support.

When I say I swam, it might be nearer the truth to say that I sweated my way up the hill in a waterproof in more humidity than I anticipated. Having spent half an hour in this endeavour, I arrived at the gates of hell to be met by a stout woman in a green apron and fetching matching blue face mask and rubber gloves.

“May I go straight in?” I asked, pointing at the gaping jaws that opened and closed as they spewed out shoppers and ingested the unsuspecting.

“Get away from me she commanded.” Her large blue hand extending towards my face Lord Kitchener style. “Move,” she barked. I took a step back. “You’ll have to queue.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realise there was a queue,” I said, vaguely wafting the all purpose cane about in front of me.

“Well there is.” She turned away.

“Where do I need to go? ” I asked.

She didn’t answer but started a conversation with someone else. I blundered about a bit and took out a couple of posts that were strung together with invisible cord to denote the place we had to queue to pass through gates of Hell.

As we snaked our way forward, our instructor said to the man in front of me. “it’s so nice when people think about others and OBSERVE the social distancing rules. Thank you. It’s lovely when people are considerate, unlike SOME people.”

“Take a trolley and you can go in.”

“I don’t need a trolley,” I said, doing a bit more cane jiggling.

“It’s the rule. If you don’t take a trolley you can’t go in.” I took the trolley and wobbled towards the entrance.

There must have been a roaring trade in hazard tape because they seem to have completely sold out, and had resorted to, giving us poor sinners, mere clues. We navigated our way through the circles of damnation; through lighting, bathroom fixtures, all the way to paint and garden accessories with the merest hint of a clue provided by grey arrows on a grey floor, which everyone largely ignored. There was not a blue fingered angel in sight to guide us on our way.

Magically, help was at hand. The single stem plant support was in stock and could be found in one of three places.  Disappointingly, that particular bit of magic was a mere illusion. None of the three places yielded it up. All was not lost though, because they were definitely in stock. It was just that nobody knew where they were.

I didn’t know where I was either.

Having spent an afternoon crashing about in #Homebase, in a state of infernal damnation, in search of enlightenment, I now found myself at that special place in Hell, reserved for Brexiteers and hapless shoppers like me. I was in the final circle of damnation, where the chill winds, of having to pay for the privilege, now penetrated my bones, to the cry of “cards only”. This too, was a commandment that had passed me by.

Having breached the first blind commandment of Covid, “though shalt not go shopping,” I had looked the dangers of disobedience in the face and survived. With a scaled back bus timetable, I had met and surpassed my daily exercise ambitions and managed a couple of grumpy exchanges with real people in real time. Then I did what anyone else would have done. I went on line. Delivery is tomorrow.

Image is Siobhain Santry's drawing of Lord Kitchener wearing a face mask and blue latex gloves pointing. 

What Covid 19 has given me is sleep. I’m touching wood. I don’t want to speak too soon. I’ve got my fingers crossed, which is not an easy thing to do when typing. I can’t remember when I slept like this. I’m hoping that the long deep sleeps of the past few weeks are a permanent legacy of this killer cough.

The daily routines that have taken over my world don’t mean that I am stuck in a rut or feeling constrained. My mind is free to wander from the comfortable confines of home. My imagination is enjoying the freedom that being at home has given me.

It was all going so well until GP and I had an altercation on the phone, before a compromise was reached. It necessitated an early morning trudge up the hill for a blood test. It meant going to hospital, a place I had intended to avoid, a place where you had better stick to the rules on social distancing.

The white stick is a simple aid to enabling others to stick to the rules. They can see me looming towards them and have time to get out of the way, which is not a core skill I am going to develop, let alone stick to.

After the argy bargy about getting directions I pitched up in phlebotomy. I could have said blood testing, but phlebotomy sounds better. The phlebotomist, said she was expecting me.  “Come this way Susan.”

“I’m not Susan.”

“Date of birth?” she asked without flinching.

“Did you say you were born in fifty-two or sixty-two?”

“Sixty-two.”

“Are you not Susan?”

This begs an important question. Is make-up an essential purchase during lockdown?

As the phlebotomist tightened the rubber band round my arm something went twang in my head. This was the first time in weeks that anyone had touched me. “just a little prick” she said. The blood did not flow. “Maybe try the other arm,” she said.

Two goes. My luck was in. “A little prick,” followed by a short silence. Nothing, not a drop.

“I’ll try a different needle.”

Two phlebotomists, five rubber band snapping, finger tapping, needle jiggling, one artery spewing later, the blood was taken. “There you go Susan. All done.”

“I’m not Susan.”

You never know. She might have come back for another go.

It might not have been the touch of bonne amie, or a guiding hand, or love in the afternoon. It was only the professional touch of surgical gloves, but it was touch. It was all I could do not to break the rules and put my hands on my face with the wonder of it. So when the phone rang and and a strangled voice wanted to know if I was “Mrs Taylor,” I said I was even though I’m not. “This is the surgery,” she said.  ” Nothing to worry about. I’m ringing with a bit of good news. You qualify for a free pneumonia vaccination.”

My interest was peaked. “What’s exactly is that?” I asked.

“It’s an injection.”

“But what is it?” I persisted.

“An injection? Well it’s a little prick in the arm.”

“That’s the means of delivery. I’d like to understand what it is and why I qualify.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It wont’ be today, but shall I get the doctor to call you? “

“That’s a good idea,” I agreed as I felt my chances of another good touching session slipping away.

A week elapsed and the GP’s PA called to say I didn’t need a pneumonia vaccination after all. “Why is that?” I asked.

“I don’t know Mrs Taylor.”

“I’m not Mrs Taylor.”

I think I might have snarled.

Image is Siobhain Santry's drawing inspired by the hands reaching out to touch in the famous Michelangelo painting: 'Creation of Adam'. The hand on the left is a delicate one, with some bright red nail polish. 

After weeks of being at home, I’ve got used to dressing down. I’m not so feral as to sit at my computer in my best blouse with only my underwear and a pair of Disney themed slippers, but I’m beginning to hanker after the idea of dressing up.  

The draw of an opportunity for a big night out in the company of three chickens and five friends, under a gazebo, was the thrill of the week.  What should you wear to dinner when you are no longer used to dressing up and the chicken is not on the table but under it?

There is an argument for rubber boots. The chickens do not have the social graces of the friends, who generally speaking, are able to exercise self control and don’t necessitate the need for waterproof footwear. The argument in favour of protective footwear may be well made but after weeks of living in trainers and padding about in bare feet, I have been feeling the urge to exercise my personal fetish and put on proper grown up shoes.

Some people can carry off blue nubuck footwear and a pair of tired old jeans, but I am not one of them. I would need to find something to wear with “THE SHOES”, and began to regret the amount of ruthless wardrobe clearing that has gone on over lockdown. In the history of blue dresses, I have reached a low point, because the multiples of blue are now history

Without the benefit of the Flatmate’s critical eye, and with a seriously reduced number of blue dresses that could be relied upon, even if the blind truth of the matter was that most of them were long past being reliable, I was on my own. For the first time in a while, a critical assessment of what I looked like was down to me. Just to add a little spice into proceedings, the well ordered content of my wardrobe was now strewn across the room.

Oh how I regret the impatience of my choices in not adding some kind of tactile marker that would help sort out the navy from the black. The long suffering neighbour might be good with boilers and exploding microwaves but when it comes to sorting through hosiery, it’s probably fairly safe to assume this may not be his forte. Who was I to put this to the test?

 It was time to do something different, but what?

In a serious departure from “blue”, I might have to go “red”. I would rely on my own sense of “how it felt” to me, and not worry about what anyone else thought about the hem line or the neckline or whether this was suitable attire for the company of chickens.

I went for the #Bombshell dress. If it’s good enough for #Nigella, who famously cooked her way to fame in a #Bombshell, it’s good enough for me. Mine is red tartan and I feel fabulous wearing that dress. Perhaps dressing for a feeling is better than depending on what other people see and say. What other people said about this departure to “red” only added to the feeling of joy in my #Bombshell dress.

What about the chickens? I thought they were colour blind. I was wrong. They are #tetrachromatic and have a superior colour range that even takes in ultraviolet light. This might be the only advantage that a chicken has over me.

By the time I tucked myself in under the gazebo it was dark and a bit on the chilly side. All gratitude goes to the coverall coat, but if you cut me in half, the blues are gone. I’m red tartan through and through.

Image is Siobhain Santry's drawing of Anna in a bright dress and striking that famous Marilyn Monroe pose from 'The Seven Year Itch'.

The BF has taken up jigsaw puzzles. She’s currently doing a one thousand piecer of the 99 most beautiful places she won’t be going to any time soon.

My neighbours have got cupboards full of jigsaw puzzles. They have even got up to the moment puzzles that their grown up children have given them for their Birthdays, so they wont get bored during lockdown.

There has been a lot of WhatsApp action about jigsaw puzzles on The Road WhatsApp group. I can’t say I’m up for jigsaws even though I once enjoyed doing them. Pleading failing sight doesn’t disqualify me since you can get jigsaws in braille and in large pieces and all VAT exempt. I’ve checked. Most of them represent landscapes that I won’t be visiting any time soon and it doesn’t look as if any one else has either, at least, not since Queen Elizabeth’s been on the throne.

The Road WhatsApp group is facilitating a roaring trade in buttons and old duvet covers as sewing machines swing into action to boost reserves of scrubs and masks. It’s keeping us all in sourdough and ant killer. We shop for each other. It’s generous and Its brought neighbours together. As more than one or two people have observed, it’s made us all “vigilant” as we look out for one another.

The WhatsApp group is not the only way that “vigilance” is exercised. A colleague of mine was telling me that his brother dropped his dog off for a day of doggy sitting. My colleague, who was sitting in his garden, heard a curiously whispered exchange between his neighbours. “He had someone in there this morning.”

“Yeah. Now he’s got another dog in there.”

“Do you think we should call the police?”

My colleague didn’t say a word but he could have. “What about all those times you smoked drugs in the garden? Should I call the police?”

I don’t know what my neighbours get up to in their gardens unless I can smell it or hear it. I suspect its sausage and ping pong. While I can’t see the neighbours, and I’m oblivious to the gaze of others as I go about my garden business, that’s not the same as feeling I have privacy. I don’t.

Observation comes in many forms. The Road WhatsApp group has served as a useful reminder of the power of knowing that you are being observed during lockdown.

We are reminded to clap for carers on the WhatsApp group. Those with hedges, come out from behind them. Clapping is not enough. We have to be seen to be clapping. Who gives what to the food bank does the rounds on the WhatsApp group. Giving is not enough. We have to be seen to be giving. The Road WhatsApp group is proving a valuable aid to vigilance and leaves us in no doubt about who is a good neighbour and who is not.

I do not know the faces of the people in the Road WhatsApp group.  Some of them have voices I would recognise if they said hello. Yet, I feel observed and after the observation comes judgement. Is this vigilance?

In my small world in which I do not see the people who are exercising vigilance on my behalf, I remind myself, that most people won’t take as much interest in me as I take in myself.

Now that the evenings are getting longer, we are all out in our gardens. The ping pong is in full swing. People are starting to entertain. My own vigilance is paying off. I’m enjoying the soundtrack. Last nights choral impersonation of howling dogs was movingly performed. Should I call the Police?

Image is Siobhain Santry's drawing of two people looking out through the slits in their window blinds.

This is the Blind Truth with Anna Tylor. Anna is the chair of RNIB and in her personal blog she takes a wry look at living a colourful life with limited sight.

This week's episode is titled:  'Blot On The Landscape'.

This is the Blind Truth with Anna Tylor. Anna is the chair of RNIB and in her personal blog she takes a wry look at living a colourful life with limited sight.

This week's episode is titled: 'Etiquette For A New Age'.

This is the Blind Truth with Anna Tylor. Anna is the chair of RNIB and in her personal blog she takes a wry look at living a colourful life with limited sight.

This week's episode is titled: 'Lockdown, Lies and Revelations'. 

No one’s going to be leaning over the pub bar any time soon and ordering a pint of Corona. Time, it seems, has been called on all our social lives for the foreseeable future. The help lines have stopped answering. Even Wayne in Mumbai, who regularly calls, offering to fix my infected computer for a small fee and access to my bank account, has stopped ringing.  I hope he’s not coughing.

Social contact has a whole new form.

Mine happened on the phone to #Sainsbury. After half an hour on hold, I spoke to a nice woman who asked me if I was vulnerable. I asked her if there was a blinky category. She said there wasn’t and so I had to settle for vulnerable. Once my profile was altered to reflect my new status, I’d be able to get on line shopping. On Monday I filled up my virtual shopping basket and went to the checkout. I’ve been deleted from the vulnerable shopper list and now I can’t get on line shopping at all. There are no delivery slots.

The Right Hand Neighbour text to say she was off to the supermarket and what did I want. I’m past caring what she thinks as we have lived through our children’s’ teenage years together. Even Victorian built houses leave little to the imagination once a teenager is in full throttle. We’ve been privy to all the outbursts and forced apologies. I didn’t think twice as I added the bottle of sherry to the list. The packet of cheese and onion crisps, I concede, has slightly less cache. She left the bill in the bag and I made a bank transfer.

Coronavirus has turned my usual shopping routines into a dependency on the kindness of others. If you don’t look like your actual swivel eyed cartoon character you don’t make the list and you won’t get past the gauleiter at the supermarket. Then there’s the problem of how to follow the tape marking on the floor. Bumping into people these days gives a whole new meaning to getting up people’s noses. I doubt that if my fellow shoppers see me with my face pressed to the label they will offer me their specs and that well worn joke, “forgot your glasses”. They’re more likely to call for my eviction from a public space.

If you can’t see, being stuck at home isn’t all exchanging WhatsApp messages, about risotto rice stocks, with the neighbours. Poverty and isolation are often natural companions of blindness.  For those blind people who have no slack in their resources for a bag of crisps or a bottle of sherry, and who can’t make it round the supermarket, life has just got grimmer. Many of them are dependant on local sight loss organisations for food and social contact. A lot of these services have been withdrawn. They’re not considered key workers and blind people aren’t vulnerable in a lockdown.

Many older blind people have no WI-FI so they can’t activate Alexa with a voice command. They have to do it the old fashioned way. One accidental knock of the radio and it can be silence until the next time someone comes round to visit and can do a re-tune. That might not be for months now. Don’t get me going on medicines.

Every time I hear the WhatsApp pinging a post alert I heave a sigh. How much worse it would be to know that the struggle for food was equally matched by a struggle with silence stretching out before me.

The Right Hand Neighbour, turns a blind eye to my vices and I concede that in the new order I don’t shop.

I have been to the moon and back, plumbed in bathrooms and more besides, and all in my sleep. I normally undertake these activities in an orderly fashion in the seconds before I wake up. These days, my adventures have become more numerous because I am no longer a spring chicken and prone to waking up a lot, which involves dreaming a lot.

Just before the light came up and I woke up this morning, I had cause to telephone John. John is an upholsterer I haven’t seen for more than twenty years. He hadn’t changed a bit. After having patiently listened to my plea for a 65cm blue velvet cousin cover and new upholstery on an old button back nursing chair, he asked me if there was anything else I needed. I said that what I was really after was a set of casters and a gun. He seemed a bit surprised. “I thought you were practically blind.”

“I used to shoot an air rifle,” I said. This was an exaggeration. As a child my brother and I had unfettered access to a lead pellet air rifle that we were pretty free with. In the interests of sibling longevity, I gave it up.

“I’m thinking of taking up target shooting,” I explained.

I noticed he was nodding thoughtfully on the other end of a large Bakelite phone with a long curly cord, before agreeing to supply several meters of upholstery fabric, casters and, of course, a gun.

Having put in my order, I woke up and drank a pot of tea. Then I went on line and to my joy, I have discovered that there is an aspiration to make acoustic shooting for blind people a Paralympic sport. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apzctZml7Js.

The public went wild for the 2012 Paralympics. If the question is disability the answer is sport. “Gone blind. Never mind. You could become a Paralympian.”

It might be a bit late in the day, but I could conceivably be on track to be a gun shooting Olympian, assuming my hearing holds up until then. If that fails I can always turn myself into a geriatric #Violet-Elizabeth Bott and “thcream and thcream, at the injustice of it, till I’m sick”. Imagine that as an Olympic sport.

I am not an Olympian. I have never been in the park, let alone on the track or on the plinth. I did come third in an egg and spoon relay race in 1974, though the fact of my performance is lost to history. It might never have happened. No shield was ever engraved or presented. I’ve made my peace with that.

Elite sports are not for everyone. It’s enough to compete for a seat on the bus if you are unsure where the seat is, and you are doing it blind because it’s rush hour, and a tremendous hush has descended on the #159. Come to think of it, navigating your way to work blind would be an excellent competitive sport. It would turn notions of what it is to be an Olympian on its head.

Being gloriously average has its advantages. I’m free to go back to bed for a good snooze and further adventures in upholstery or space travel. If sleep were an Olympian sport I’d be the last person to get picked for my team, On the up side, there is always hope of improvement without having to stand up. No ear guards are required and it’s rich in experiences from driving ice trucks to making bolognese. Being a dreamer has never left me in any doubt that being gloriously average has got its advantages. You might say it’s something to aspire to.

The oven packed up. Why does this always happen when you have chopped up enough vegetables to sustain an anaerobic digester for a week? That’s what happened. At the point of realisation, I switched the top oven on, but that didn’t work either. Vegetables cooked in the microwave. I said to the assembled hungry hordes known as Angela, “I’ll just dish up over the bin.”

The Flatmate had no trouble getting the oven to work. She turned the knob. The oven got hot. I turned the knob. Nothing. I went on-line, found a cooker repair man, bit the bullet and booked a call out for “an intermittent fault.” I never liked that cooker. It’s like an unreliable boyfriend who swears he’s hot but isn’t. I’m eight years into the relationship now so I’m what you might call “invested”.

Enter Vic. That’s not his real name. I’m sparing all our blushes.

“It’s working fine,” he said. “getting hotter by the minute.”

“Then why won’t it work for me?” I whined.

“Show me what you’re doing?”

I turned the cooker knob, explaining that my system was fool proof because I had stuck raised dots on all the dials, on the settings I use, because I can’t see the symbols.

“That’s the plate warmer setting,” he said.

“It can’t be, ” I protested.

“And that one’s off,” he said, pointing at the top oven.

He pressed his nose against the cooker in an act of forensic inspection.  “Ah. I see what’s happened. I can see where the stickers used to be. Looks to me as if they’ve got knocked off and someone has stuck them back in the wrong place.”

“The Cleaning Genie,” I thought. I bet that’s what happened. I bared my teeth.

“Soooo,” Vic said as he scratched the back of his neck, “What’s up with your eyes then?”

“It’s just the way I’m made,” I said. “No big deal.”

“I’ve got floaters” he blurted out.

“What do you mean when you say ‘floaters’?”

He got out a piece of paper and started drawing wiggly lines that move across his field of vision. “Then there are the wobbly bits,” he said, and then there are the black holes. “I can’t see nothing in the black holes.”

Have you seen an ophthalmologist?” I asked.

“I’ve been to #Vision Express.”

“What did they say?”

“Nothing.” He shrugged his shoulders.

“You should probably go and get that checked out,” I ventured. Then we had a chat about the difference between an optician and an ophthalmologist. After that I stuck my foot in it. “None of us are getting any younger,” I said. “Things can go wrong as we get older.”

“How old do you think I am?”

“Forties,” I said conservatively.

“I’m thirty-seven. You’re frightening me.” Ooops.

“Go and get it checked out and put your mind at rest.”

“I’m not bad looking.”

“You could go today.” He didn’t look happy.

“That’ll be £65,” he said. “Cash.”

I had to scrabble about to break a £10 note. He wasn’t settling for sixty.

“Have you got my phone number in case you need a repair doing in the future.”

I started to enter the number on my phone. “Oh give it here. I’ll do it. You on Facebook?’

Before I had a chance to answer, he handed me the phone. “There you go. We’re friends on Facebook now and I’ve liked myself.” I don’t know how to operate the oven let alone Facebook.

The Cleaning Genie is history. She left white vinegar spray on the sofa last week. I sat on it. Watching TV is like being in a chip shop. She might want to think about an eye test too.