THE SYMPHONY OF LIFE.

“So here I am with it all before me. Screeching like a discordant cello in my own symphony. I took my cue too soon, making my entrance in a fumbled, flailing flurry which meant I lost the picture which now is not my privilege to reclaim.

‘Cindy oh Cindy’ Shane Fenton sang and so did I. By then I knew that I was different but not how or why. I liked the name so much that I got everyone to call me it and then, just like Mary Mary, quite contrary, insisted that my own name be used by all again. I was a pain!

School started to ‘Jailhouse Rock’. How apt for I felt I was in prison. The food was bad but discipline was good. ‘Johnnie Remember me’. I bet he doesn’t. We used to call him ‘melon’. We were cruel. One decade and three years had been lived by the time Radio1 replaced the pirate ships in the North Sea. I’d screamed to the Beatles. Ah! But that was ‘Yesterday’ and I still could not go out alone. I was getting the ‘Moody Blues’ and had met them too.

My college days were spent with Elton and not Elvis. I never thought for one second that mine were the sweetest eyes he’d ever seen or that ‘Your Song’ was or would ever be meant for me. I wanted to be Free – Free and ‘’All Right Now’ – To walk with both hands empty – Unencumbered. I didn’t want to be someone else’s ‘Stairway to heaven’ or their good deed for the day.

Work and widowhood came very close together and there were indeed Tears for Fears and tears and fears that I would be alone. Even the Police couldn’t rescue me and ‘Every Breath you take’ was one more than I wanted to back then. However, like bread, I was, with Gabrielle to ‘Rise Again’ and dance in my clumsy, maladroit fashion with all my dogs – Two Labradors and a Retriever, to Ce Ce Peniston and others who have almost made me feel as if I’m the ‘Lark Ascending’ instead of being in my own personal Spandau. I’d learned to do my very own Spandau Ballet and not to bump against the bars.

Now the fifties are back! That’s not quite ‘True’. That’s just where I’ve got to in my symphony of life. A fan of Coldplay and the Fray; modern jazz and folk, I now walk with “Nimrod” and find that life is indeed an enigma with many variations. My Nimrod – My metal rod that’s bound with rubber – Is painted white. Will another Labrador help me dance to the music of time?

And ‘Finally’ as Cece sang, when my ‘Surrey with the fringe on top’ has thinned (it is already grey you know) and my steps have slowed right down, I shall walk sedately to Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings but until then, I hope I will still have enough optimism and hope to say to the someone who may be special and whom I could be special too, ‘I just haven’t met you yet’ and hope that I am in the hands of Michael who is gentle as he rows my boat ashore.

They have been choppy seas. I’ve been disorientated and lost in turbulent waters but still have enjoyed my symphony of life. ‘Me and my Shadows’ were my dogs who stopped me falling from life’s Cliff. They say the pictures were good and are better on radio. Although I’m sure that’s true, and although I cannot play a note, ‘music is my first love’ if you discount my friends, writing and dogs ‘and it will be my last’. What a shame I won’t get to do an encore! Or will I”?

THE COLOUR PROBLEM.

I could wade in up to my neck about the rightness of the leader of the BNP’s appearance on Question Time. I could but I won’t – Well not now anyway. Instead I want to draw your attention to another colour problem. I, as a blind person, do not understand the confusion surrounding colours. For one thing they obviously blend into one-another so that on each colour’s border, they become or are seen to become another one. Baige being referred to as “off-white” or even biscuit coloured.

I have reached the grand old age of fifty-five and until the other week I did not know that bluetits are not blue! They may have bits of blue in their feathers or even they may be half blue. If so I don’t know what other colour is mixed in with the blue. I found out about this because of my SAVI volunteer who has a blind boyfriend who asked her once: “Are bluetits blue”? She replied: “No” and I once more opened my blind eyes wide and said: “Oh god no! Don’t tell me there are yet more things in the visual world I still don’t get”! I’m afraid that there are. Long ago I learned that black people aren’t black, white people are pink, I’ve not yet dared asked about those with almond-shaped eyes. Are the Chinese yellow and was Esme really yellow with a pink nose or was she really green with an indigo hooter! More pressing now is this question: Will my washing come out of the machine the same colour as it went in? Unless I go and do it I’ll never know and it’ll be a very long time till I find out afterwards anyway. What is for certain is that I’d much rather stay and chat to you via my blog. However, needs must and I don’t want to go about in smelly clothes and sleep in smelly sheets so the colour problem will have to wait. If you leave a comment in the comment’s section, you can ask me if I knew about some other weird and wonderful aspect of the visual world of which I remain blissfully ignorant and painfully curious and you know something? I won’t mind if you’re black, brown, pink, yellow or opaque. It’s all the same to me and so are you which makes my excuse for prejudice absolutely invalid as it ought to yours for at the end of the day, we’re all the same under the skin so there.

A DOG IN THE DISTANCE?

This will be my one-hundredth piece for the blog. A lot has happened since I started it. I’ve retired my lovely old Esme; had physio for plantar fasciitis which has all but gone; I’ve moved home (thank goodness for that); learned my way in a new area (but not the whole area just where I’ll need to go); started giving talks on behalf of the Surrey Association for Visual Impairment (SA-vi); got a short story regarding the help I’ve had to find my way without a dog placed on the BBC website; lost the ability to access the music site where I started to correspond with my friend in the States who puts up these blog entries for me and who told me that ninety-nine were now up; taken photos with her camera, which she sent me and now there’s the possibility of having a new guide dog. Someone from Guide Dogs for the Blind in England, will come and see me this coming Friday.

The change in the last five months has been phenomenal and all for the good. I’ve made new friends and new contacts and somehow I still find the time to write. Soon we’ll be at the end of another year and I don’t know where the time has gone. I’ve also written for the Guide Dogs extranet volunteer site: http://www.guidedogsvolunteers.org.uk though they still have a lot of pieces to put up there, which I sent them.

My old dog, Esme, is still enjoying her retirement with her new owners, Dennis and Val, in the New Forest. I’ve rung them to check and all without tears though I’m not sure what it would have been like if I’d heard her bark or shake her collar. She will be eleven on 20th December and is still fit and walking approximately three miles a day. She knows now that she is no longer required to work and has settled down well, ignoring the ponies and traffic in the Forest.

Last Wednesday I gave my first talk for SA-vi and loved every minute of it – Well you do if you’re a bit of a poser! I went to a church in Guildford and found the audience warm and interested in all I said about how blindness affects me and how SA-vi has helped me. I’m so glad now that I went on living after Andrew, my husband died after only five years married to me, in 1986. There were times when I desperately wanted to join him and thought seriously about helping myself on the way to the oblivion of death in order to free myself of the burden of blindness which is very tedious if it is carried alone. One day, after a talk with a Samaritan (I was so desperate I rang them just for someone to talk to) I was asked: “Do you feel like committing suicide”? I said: “Yes often but if I did that I wouldn’t be able to come back to see if things would get better if I had stayed”. “What a lovely outlook”, he said. At the time (1986/7 and for many almost intolerable years since) they didn’t get better but now, mercifully, they have. Of course they’re not perfect and there’s a lot I’d like to see change. I am still on my own and though I’d not particularly like to marry again I wouldn’t mind a few friends to go out with who can see because I feel that we could all enhance each others’ lives but things are much, much better than they were and better than I ever hoped for or could have imagined them to get. Each day I spare a thought for the people who feel as hopeless, unhappy and despairing as I did and wonder how many of them will take the decision to end their unhappiness by ending their lives. I know nothing lasts and my present period of happiness will not go on indefinitely. At some time I will be overtaken by greater disability or old age and finally the death for which I once longed. I can only hope that, as I have spent so long in misery, I’ll be allowed to spend a fair amount of time in the happiness which is now mine and I hope the same for those I don’t know and those I do, some of whom are blind and engaged in destructive practices like self harm, that they will find the determination, courage and help they need to make them want to go on living.

I forgot one final thing which I have managed to do since I started this blog. I’ve put on a bit of weight through not exercising without my wonderful Esme. Well perhaps the dog which may be in the distance and which I may be destined to meet soon, will alter that state of affairs. I do hope so or my new doctor will be telling me a story of her own – “These are the consequences of becoming overweight”! Personally I think the consequences of deep unhappiness and blindness endured without support are far more destructive than a few extra pounds but funnily enough, nobody wants to discuss those, choosing to close their eyes to them and wanting only to hear the good things. That’s precisely why I’ve told you about all the good things that have happened to me since I started this blog. I hope they happen to you too. Here’s to the next hundred pieces and I shall ask my friend to put the link to those photos either on the blog itself somewhere or in this piece so you can see them.

INDEPENDENT LIVING?

I made what I thought is an interesting observation today when talking to someone connected with Social Services: “Blind people are told, when living in supported housing, that it’s independent living and yet sighted people are becoming ever increasingly dependent on technology; often have friends and family to call upon for help and grown sighted children are often still living at home well into their twenties while their blind counterparts are housed in flats, having been given inadequate preparation in mainstream schools and special schools in order to face life outside them”.

Of course I am not suggesting that either position is one of choice for either group. Sighted adults who are still living at home with parents can be the victims of unforeseen circumstances which include crippling debts incurred as students and inability to get onto the housing ladder or to find somewhere to rent at a price they can afford. Like their visually impaired peers they may also find enormous difficulty getting jobs but even in these days the chances of them finding work as compared with blind youngsters of a similar age are greater not only because of the scope being wider for the sighted but also because of the real prejudice which still exists about employing someone blind.

There is, however, something really irritating to me about the phrase: “It’s independent living” which makes me want to wallop the person uttering it. I hear it regularly where I live which is in my supported housing scheme where the staff are efficient and kind. Of course I know why it’s said. The fact that there are staff would encourage those who either think they are helpless because they now face severe or total sight loss to needlessly turn to them for the least little thing which they could and should be taught to do for themselves. Also it is said to stop the lazy from using the staff as servants or entering into a competition with other tenants to see who can get the most attention from them. However, it can have a counterproductive effect by discouraging those in real need asking for the help they require. Many sighted people do things in pairs especially if they have partners. Hubby gets the car out and helps load the shopping (no not every hubby does nor does every partner. This I know and accept); a wife or husband who works may well have the dinner ready for the other when they come home. My support worker’s partner has hers ready sometimes. One Sunday she told me she was going home to a meal he was cooking – Lamb I think. Of course she’d been doing the nightshift here on Saturday and Saturday afternoon too, plus Sunday morning so deserved it and anyway I accept it’s none of my business what people do. I only mean to make the point that sighted people are often in a state of dependence, one upon another, where as we carry our burdens, both emotional and those imposed by sensory loss without the support of someone exclusively of our own. Instead we share too few overworked staff with too many others and we’re the lucky ones! Plenty of blind people are living unsupported lives in isolation without the help they need to cope or are struggling in appallingly run housing schemes like the last one I was in and this makes that phrase: “It’s independent living” all the more irritating than it may otherwise be.

The fact that blind youngsters today do not have adequate social, life skills or in some instances even an adequate education because they have been put in a class at school either with those with whom they can’t keep up if in mainstream or with others with an assortment of learning difficulties as well means that they will be in a state of dependence and totally unable to maximise their own potential or reach it. For them, this phrase has an especially hollow ring.

When I think about it, I get my own shopping, do my own cooking and washing, organise my own finances and manage with just one hour’s help in the flat, all that with a back problem and with me not seeing a hand in front of me, then I think how dependent all the sighted people are that I know – One upon another and upon technology in the form of satnav; calculators; spell checkers; the last thing I want to be told is that: “It’s independent living”. There’s no greater example of independent living than I am. “Rubbish”! I hear you cry. “Hypocrisy”! I hear you shout and all because I am living in supported housing for the blind. Now that I know the way to the shops; how to use the washing machine; (I knew how to use others in other places incidentally just in case you think I’m a late developer); have a scanner to read my mail and know how to operate my cooker, I rarely need the help of the staff. I do have the security of knowing they are here and would probably not be eligible for council accommodation anyway since I’ve not lived in the county long enough and am adequately housed so there’s your reason why I’m here apart from being so near to the shops, which helps me maintain this independence everyone goes on at such length about. Of course I too have a reliance on technology but it helps me do what, had I not lost my sight, my eyes would help me do. Those with their eyes have substituted their faculties which they could train and with which they were well endowed with a technology which makes them lazy; spoon feeds them and makes them as helpless without it as we are without the training we need to cope in a world not geared to our needs. Then, whereas they take their dependence on others and technology for granted, we on the other hand are repeatedly told how independent we must be – Every day; all the time and often while having to emotionally support and nurture ourselves too.

There are those who say we’re at least not lumbered with the problems of partners and children if we’re on our own and of course many blind people are in relationships where there is the mutual dependence, one upon another, that I have mentioned. We are not insulated or isolated from the problems of others. Who do the weaker and more helpless, sadder and lonelier blind people come to for help? Of course they come to the more able for emotional support; advice and encouragement. Here, unlike the last dump I lived in, the staff encourage us to get those people to turn to them since they are efficient and don’t use those of us who are better able to cope as avenues of escape from their professional obligations. That’s what makes this place so lovely to live in. However, because they’re so few in number and overworked, I want to assist other tenants where I can. I have great difficulty in restraining that urge partly because of the way I am but also because for the sixteen years in which I lived in South-west London, I could see that people needed help and didn’t feel I could walk away knowing they’d have a poor deal if someone – Either another more able person or I didn’t do something. I just long for the abolition of the phrase: “It’s independent living” for none of us can claim to be truly independent. Is the above sour grapes just because I don’t have someone to warm my slippers for me and put the kettle on when I feel irritable; lazy; hacked off by blindness and sick of an aching back? Course it is! Well folks, watch this space. I may soon have a stinking wet Labrador to be responsible for as well! Can’t wait! I’ll moan to her and oh blimey! I’ll have to take her out on a cold wet day in Paul Simon’s famous deep and dark December. Why? Because ‘’’’’’Altogether now! “It’s independent living”!