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.