At the supermarket

Going round Tescos. In the wine section, Assistant said: “Oh, you like a drink do you?” Strange how I Don’t get the same response (“Oh, you like a shit do you?”) when looking for toilet rolls!

One bus stop episode

“Excuse me, would you tell me when you see the 48 or 49 coming please?”
“Do you know where you’re going?”
“Yes, I need the 48 or 49”
“Where are you going?
“Easton”
“Now, you need the 48 or 49. You stay there and I’ll tell you when I see it
..Are you going to be alright?
..Stay there, it’s not coming yet…
..It’s alright, don’t panic, I’m not going anywhere..
..Don’t worry, I’ll tell you when it comes…
..Oh, my bus is here now… you’ll have to ask someone else..I’ll tell this lady..
Excuse me, this blind man doesn’t know where he’s going, he needs a 48 or 49, could you look after him, make sure the driver knows about him”

Get off the pavement!

The radical cycling lobby group – Bike First - are in the news today claiming their first victories in their “Off the pavements” campaign as two major cities bar pedestrians from certain sections of pavement.

Their spokesperson, Debbie River, said “Yeah, this has been a long and planned campaign to force pedestrians off the pavement and onto the road where they belong. They’ve cluttered up our rightful cycleways for too long, so our campaign has been to slowly and deliberately force them off. Our policy has been to ride straight at them, or to catch them as we speed past. We just tried to scare them for years, but recently realised that it was getting us nowhere, so we upped the anti and have had some very successful injuries and one fatal heart attack”

The local councils though, in the two cities that have closed some of their pavements to pedestrians claim that the group’s campaign has had no influence over their decisions. “We’ve purely based our new policy on a mixture of natural selection and new environmental theory. “So called pedestrians make a choice to walk and we view their apparent problem with doing it at the side of the road as rather exaggerated.”

Then 3 come along at once...

Busses-1
It strikes me as bizarre that, so often you stand at a bus stop with a white stick, assuming that if a bus comes, the driver might make the connection between what he can see you’re holding and the probability of the holder of the stick having something slightly amiss in the sight department.

But no, so often they just drive on by. Occasionally you might spot the bus at the last minute, stick your hand out, bus irritatedly screeches to a halt. And you walk 20 yards up the road, get on and say to the driver:
“You weren’t going to stop for me were you?”
“It’s a request stop, you should stick your bloody hand out shouldn’t you”
“I’m blind, can’t see you till you’re nearly past”
“I can’t help that; you still need to stick your hand out”

Busses-2
Conversely, the bus does stop and your life goes into slow motion for a couple of minutes:
“Careful now, there’s a step, you be careful”
“What number are you please?”
“Do you know where you’re going?”
“Yes, What number are you?”
“Where are you going?”
“Easton”
“You’re on the wrong bus, you don’t want this one, you want a 48 or 49”
“I know I do, so which bus are you then?”
“No,it’s alright, you’re on the wrong bus” (turns round to other passengers) “He’s on the wrong bus”

Words

How bizarre it seems that he would catch the word "blind" appearing to slip and tumble out of conversations in public places. Would this happen were he not there? His mere presence seems to trigger something, to connect with so many berried and unexplored feelings that, given just the slightest prompt, could not but emerge and do so without self-consciousness or even attempts at restraint.

Difference

He knew that, wherever he went, he would attract stares, interest, intrigue. He would always be noticed, how difficult it was to ever be blind and anonymous, to merely be a part of the crowd. 'The blind man' seemed to connect with a collection of disparate stereotypes and archetypes. If his appearance - his demeanour, his dress - didn't match up to expectations of the blind man, they would be confused, put out even. He smiled at the realisation that he could also stare: he stared with his ears - as invisible to them as theirs were to him.

Strangers' rights

"I hope you don't mind me asking, but...What's the stick for?...Are you blind? How many fingers am I holding up? how much can you see? Have you got a dog? I had an Aunt who went blind (died eventually)... I think you people are marvellous... I expect your other senses are so much better developed though - I bet you can hear everything... What am I thinking? "I think I could do without anything else but my eyesight, I don't know how you manage... have you always been like that? Its nice for you to have somewhere to come isn't it..." and so it goes on.

These uninvited pryings were at best tiresome and at worst invasive. As if they believed themselves to have the right to bypass a stage in the process of getting to know him, as if his lack of sight meant that he had no right to expect to play by the same set of rules as them. He wondered if this 'right' was something that they thought they possessed or the lack of such a necessary part of social engagement that they thought he carried purely because of his blindness. He dreaded these kinds of encounters, not least because seemingly no matter how he replied or avoided providing responses to the predictable flow of questions, no matter how obtuse or deliberately surreal his answers, the interrogation would inevitably continue undeterred. Common to all such approaches was an unashamed lack of interest in any aspect of him save his blindness: no questions about what he was doing there, what the food was like - the fact that he was there at all, was something of a miracle and only to be partially believed- neither would they give anything of themselves. It was as if he was merely a two-dimensional pair of poorly functioning eyes sitting at the table whose sole reason for being there was to obediently answer every question posed of them.

And why should he own a dog? He hated dogs, and shuddered at the thought of their smell, the paws, the breath and being licked in the face and not being able to escape - perhaps dogs are merely with us in order to provide a constant reminder of what it must be like to be subject to eternal damnation in Hades. He mused about how much more potential for excitement and unpredictability there would be if there were guide cats instead: one minute you'd be on somebody's lap and the next, you'd be up a tree.

Voices

How much he relied upon voices to tell him what he wanted to know about somebody, to create an impression, a picture of them. Wasn't it remarkable how many kinds there were and how much they could suggest: how they could trick him too. He sat back and listened. He heard vacuous piercing outbursts of laughter, people who spoke much louder than they needed to, he could hear arrogant, stiff, smooth and prickly voices, alluring, miserable, embittered, confident, understated and dynamic ones too. He frowned to himself, it quickly turning to a coy smile of acknowledgement that, just as most people make judgements about others purely based upon their appearance - making connections or avoiding them upon this basis - he did exactly the same with voices. how a voice could seduce or turn him off, how a voice could convey beauty or disgust to him, how he could fall in love with a voice and imagine flying away together with its owner for ever. A voice could elicit his interest, excitement, suggest a possible connection, irritation - even the chance of an argument. There were some voices though that he found so unattractive, so grating, unpleasant even, that he would never want to get beyond to meet their unfortunate owner. He noticed how accents and dialects contributed to the enchantment of a voice - he preferred northern accents to southern. god, how terribly dismissive he could be of people with particular regional dialects and forgiving of others.
He recalled with some detachment the wisdom that "a picture saves a thousand words", was it not his own truth though that a word saves a thousand pictures. Surely, the mere utterance of a phrase invites attention, an interpretation, almost as though the voice were a window, behind which innocently lies that raw personality - gaping there yet unselfconscious in its nakedness for all to see.
His attention shifted again from his internal musings - those constant questions in his head - to the backdrop, the wash of sound that was the cafe's own collective voice. As it began to fill up and become more frantic, he wondered for a moment whether the cafe could eventually drown in its own noise, and if it could, whether he would drown along with it. He wondered what drowning in voices might be like, how those last moments would sound and if his final desperate gasps for silence would be heard, ignored or met with oblivious disinterest.
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