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”!

FOUR LEGS GOOD – ONE TIP BAD.

I have now been in Epsom since May. I have learned parts of the area – Those I need to know – With a white cane and from an experience mobility instructor from SAVI (Surrey Association for Visual Impairment for which I now do voluntary work when they want me to). I go out alone now and that’s the point – Alone without the four legs and two eyes I used to have.

I shall never see Esme again now and never a day goes by without I either think of or wish I still had her. I have tried to enjoy the clean flat without Labrador sick; slobber; dog hair and the requirement that I leave it and brave the cold which will come when winter does and for a while I loved it but the truth is I love my cane much less than the cold; dog sick; hair and emptiness in this flat and I love dogs more – Especially the freedom they give one when one is blind. I thought of the reading I have done over the years, including “Animal Farm” by George Orwell. In it the pigs (I think) chanted: “Four legs good, two legs bad”. How I agree with the pigs only instead of legs, I substitute the word “tip” – That which you find on the end of white canes. Now a roller, when it’s a car driven by a guy who is loaded or at least wealthy enough to keep it may be rather nice but I bet I’d even tire of that eventually. What I can’t seem to have enough of is a wagging tail and loopy old Labrador such as Esme – The faithful pair of trusted, borrowed eyes I had for so many years and so I rang up the Surrey Guide Dogs team today and applied for guide dog number four.

I worried myself to death about moving in May: “Who will help in the absence of family”? “How will I find a trustworthy cleaner to take the place of Sue”? “How will I manage to get out of the flat in a strange and unfamiliar area”? I felt the fear and did it anyway. Now what I have found to worry about is: “Who will hoover up the hair when my trustworthy home help is away”? “How will I cope when I will have to manage taking the new dog out when I need to sleep in the afternoon”? The shops are so near I can’t possibly go out just once a day as I did in London. These are real problems especially the very real and significant impact my irregular and disorganised circadian rhythms have on my body when they get out of synch with the rest of the country and my future dog’s routine which can’t be played with and made to fit into my altered rhythms. However, lack of exercise and the strain of using a cane is so significant and my love of dogs so strong and the longing I have for a fresh pair of eyes at the opposite end of a wagging old tail is so persistent that I can no longer ignore it so once more it’s feel the fear and do it anyway.

Who knows? There may even be the reinstatement of “waggy games” and the return of a disgusting old bundle of wool at each end of a slobbered-on length of rope! Ugh! Not just after tea please! Do you know something? I’m even missing that I’m so desperate! Now that filthy old toy which Esme had is still a vivid memory, along with its disgusting smell but even that is not enough to make me say: “Four legs bad, one tip good”. A cane can never match up to the loveliness and loyalty of a dog and maybe I’ll lose some of the weight I have put on since moving to Epsom. One thing’s for sure, I will definitely lose some of the fear I feel when going out with a dead bit of metal and rubber once the new dog (if I qualify and it’s always an if) knows the way so let’s be positive and go for it! Wish me luck folks! I’m going to need it.

MY NAME IS LINDA.

I’ve just come in. All these faces look so ordinary – Are so ordinary. Everyone looks nervous. I see there’s an empty chair over there, by the thin woman with the glasses and the sallow complexion. She looks old but I bet she isn’t. I’ve not dared to look in a mirror recently. Still looks aren’t important really are they? In the grand scheme of things they are like passing trains or buses – Here one minute and gone the next.

I’ve just heard the front door close. I keep telling myself he’ll be back. He loves me. He won’t walk out – Not after twenty years. I can’t believe he won’t miss me and then there’s the kids, Laura and Sam. They’re on the verge of adulthood now. They took their exams only last week. Both of them are so talented and so funny. I look at them and think to myself:

“How did someone like you produce two such wonderful examples of humanity”?

I know Grant will be back. I get out of bed – My head thumping and look at the peeling wall paper. I’ve not noticed it till now. I suppose I ought to see that the bedroom gets decorated soon but there never seems to be enough money. My mouth is dry as usual. I stagger downstairs and see the pile of broken china in the hall and the kitchen and then it begins to come back to me. We had a row. I don’t remember throwing anything at anyone. Sam is preparing breakfast. No he isn’t. He’s cleaning up the kitchen. He never complains – Just gets on with it. He’s a quiet boy. He tells me Laura’s gone to a friend’s again. I expect she went to Trisha’s. They’ve been friends since they were toddlers.

“Is there any tea in the pot, Sam”?

“No Mum. Not yet there isn’t. First I had to clear up this mess. Remember! Last night’s frenzy of violence and mayhem. You really do go in for it in a big way once you get started don’t you”?

“Don’t you get started! I have enough to do now that your dad’s gone”.

“Yeah and that’s another thing. How long do you think he’s going to put up with this”?

“He’ll be back. A spell of time at his mother’s while he cools down and he’ll be back”.

Something in Sam’s eyes tells me that this time that’s not so. Maybe I’m seeing the reflected knowledge in my own eyes rather than in his. I rush out. Good job there’s a downstairs loo. I only just get there in time. Retching on an empty stomach is so horrible but I’ve got that I can’t eat much nowadays.

“Put your case down here, love”,

Maisie urges. Grant sits wearily down on his mother’s old familiar settee. He looks careworn and old – Nearly as old as I do but for different reasons and both of us are only in our early forties. Maisie brings him the cup that cheers. He no longer cries like he used to do when he walks out. Instead he sits quiet and sullen like a sulky child who has been sent to bed before he wants to go. He stares unseeingly at the wall. Maisie’s paper needs replacing too but for different reasons. She is now too old to do her own decorating. He promises to do it for her now he has moved back into her spare room and she once more thankfully whispers her gladness to the god that she believes in that he has come home to that room at last and is glad she never sold her house.

“You must stay this time Grant. You can’t keep going back to her. You do realise that now don’t you”?

He nods. While she makes his tea he sits and wonders how you rid yourself of all the accumulated memories and emotions of twenty years. He knows he must start again and so do I.

The room has filled up now. I look at my watch and see everyone turning off their mobile phones. I sold mine. I needed the money. I spent the money as quickly as I had it in my hand. Money’s like water in a sieve to me. I look at the floor. I can’t focus properly on any of these people or this room. I want to get out. I can’t seem to breathe properly but I’m nowhere near the door. My hands are shaking again and I’m sweating all over. I’m sure I smell. I must do.

Grant lies looking at the moon after his mother’s tea. He thinks how nice it is to go to bed in a peaceful house for a change, knowing that he won’t be woken any moment by screaming and shouting; banging about and smashing crockery; knowing he won’t have his face clawed and his hair pulled out for no reason. Bone tired and free at last, sleep eludes him. He stares and stares blindly at the shining moon through the curtains. Soon it will be morning. He’ll have to stagger off to work having had little sleep. He may as well come home, that’s what he tells himself. If there’s to be no difference ‘twixt his mother’s bedroom and ours, he may as well come home but he doesn’t. He holds out. He fights the urge to come back to the painfully familiar. There’s security in the familiar and change is scary even if it is change for the better.

Laura and Sam come home after a night out. They almost trip over me, lying on the stairs. The hallway smells of urine. I’ve been sick. They step over me and carry on up to bed. Each has obtained a place at university. They’re now adults. Grant sends them money but I don’t get any now they’re grown. I’m not entitled to maintenance. They’ll be off in September. It’s August now. I daresay they’ll be glad to go.

There are five minutes to go till the session begins. I feel my throat close up. I know I won’t get a word out. I want to just sit here, anonymous in my drab clothes, obtained from the charity shop nearby. I could have got better ones but don’t think I’m worth it and anyway what’s the good? Nice clothes are for nice people – People who go out with friends and have dinner parties – People who can afford holidays and decent homes – People who have families and children at home.

Grant is cutting his mother’s lawn. That’s what made me fall in love with him – The way he cares for and about his mother. I’ve always maintained that if a son treats his mother properly he will do likewise with his wife. I can’t complain about the way I was treated. Maybe I had too much. It has never struck me that I had any more than other people. He’s finished her bedroom now.

I spent the money which should have been used for the mortgage. I have to be out tomorrow. I expect Sam and Laura will go to their grandmother’s for their holidays. I know they are in touch with their father. I haven’t seen them for weeks. They did come round only there was no food in the house which hadn’t been cleaned for weeks. They look shocked. There’s a momentary expression of disgust on Laura’s face which she can’t hide. Even when they lived here they stopped bringing their friends home.

The woman sitting next to me pats my arm. She gives me a look of reassurance and I feel tears welling up in my eyes. The man on the other side offers me a tissue. It’s a huge one, just right for men but not for the ocean of misery I have inside me which wouldn’t be held in check by one tissue. There’s only two minutes to go now.

It’s cold out here. Winter has come early and with a vengeance. I prefer to walk. I sat in the library this morning but was turned out. I was in a hostel but couldn’t settle there either and besides that I couldn’t quite do as I wanted to there. It was run by the Salvation Army and I’m not religious and they have too many rules. I’ve got this cough. I’ve been counting passing cars instead of imaginary sheep. I wonder where the people are off to and how many are going home to happy marriages and loving children. Probably not as many as I imagine. Lots of our friends used to think we were happy. Grant would explain the scratches on his face by saying he’d cut himself shaving and sometimes, when I was still alert enough, I’d see the knowing looks in the eyes of our dwindling number of guests. I’d almost hear them thinking:

“And the band played ‘believe it if you like’”.

A blind man gave me fifty pence today. I was ashamed. I used to give to Guide Dogs and now, here I am, reduced to begging off the blind. All I’ve had to eat today is a sausage roll and that was out of a litter bin. I thought of Scrap, our Labrador. He used to scavenge in litter bins. He was well fed but then again so was I, once.

Maisie is quiet tonight. She sits thinking of something which she doesn’t discuss with Grant. She’d seen me, you see, when travelling past Park Road. She stared and stared as if she couldn’t believe her eyes. I was transformed from the person she knew, you see. I’ve lost all the weight my doctor once told me to shed. Well you do when you don’t eat. Eating is no longer an activity indulged in at will or when the brain tells the body it needs to. I’m not hungry nowadays but even when I am I can’t stomach much. I’ve just smashed a shop window with a hammer which I found in someone’s garden shed. Not noticing the cuts because of the jagged glass, I push my arm through, grasp the object of my desire and withdraw my hand. The alarm goes off but I’m not bothered – Not now I have what I need.

I’m lying in hospital. They’ve just done my obs again. They offer me tea but I don’t want it. There are visitors for everyone else but not for me even though I’ve been deloused and have had a bath. I’m cleaner than I’ve been for years. The doctor’s just been and given me the once-over. He read me the riot act but didn’t tell me anything I don’t know already.

The letter has just fallen out of my hand for the third time. It’s the shakes. I slopped soup all over the place – Half of it ending up on my table or down my front. It’s unopened as yet but the handwriting looks familiar.

“Dear Linda, Mum saw you the other day and was shocked. I have never stopped loving you – Never will – But I don’t think you love yourself very much. Either that’s because of what you have become or you’ve become what you are because you don’t love yourself. Either way the result is the same. I want us to keep in touch – No promises mind – I’m not saying I’ll come back to you – Nothing like that and if I do it is conditional. You really have got to try this time. This time! There’s never been a previous time has there? All you’ve done is given your word which you have broken. Mother says you can come to us to convalesce when you get out of hospital but any repeat behaviour will mean you will be back where you started. It’s tough love. We want evidence that you really will try this time as I say”.

So the letter went on and I am now staying at Grant’s mother’s. She’s a good woman – Better than I thought actually. Although his letter sounded pompous; priggish and sanctimonious; it wasn’t meant to. He didn’t mean it that way. I don’t know what the future holds but neither do you – Neither does anyone. There are always sharks, swimming near the water’s edge, hoping for suckers to fall in so they can grab their ankles and pull them under so they will drown in the ocean of addiction. I know that now. The funny thing is though, I don’t need Grant’s support – Well of course I do – But not half as much as I need that of those like me – Fellow addicts who have fallen prey to their demons. Grant is out tonight, too. So is Maisie. Like an odd couple they have gone out together but not to a film or for a meal. Oh I see the man who is going to chair the meeting is now on his feet. He is welcoming everyone and telling them that there’s a new person here tonight. Oh god! I feel like a very old person but I’m new to this of course. This is my cue to go on. Here I go, then. Wish me luck.

“My name is Linda. I am an alcoholic”.

(The end).

THE EPSOM CONQUEST.

It’s now thirteen weeks since I moved to Epsom in Surrey. Without my lovely guide dog Esme and back on my feet after plantar fasciitis which believe it or not has still not gone though is much better, I have had to begin learning a new area with a cane as well as learning my way round my new home and remembering where everything is within it.

Because of staff efficiency which far exceeds that of the staff in my last appalling place where I used to live (I now live in supported housing run by Action for Blind People) it wasn’t long before mobility training began. Within three weeks of my arrival in Epsom, I was able to go unaided to Waitrose in order to get my shopping. However it isn’t as easy as it sounds. Though the route is short and relatively uncomplicated, to learn it as someone without sight is hell especially with a cane, having had a dog for almost eight years. Every time the cane hit something I was startled out of my wits and jumped. Also learning has to be done in a completely different way and I hope that the route to Waitrose may be posted on the site, with this article, to show how it’s done. If the road name where I live is blocked out then this may be possible. I’ll leave it to the powers that be to decide.

A route has to be practised and gone through many times before it can be walked without mistakes. The number of times depends on the individual’s ability to learn and willingness to write things down and practise when not with the instructor and the instructor will not sanction doing it alone until (in this case she) is confident it can be done in safety.

Before going, I felt sick and very apprehensive. This, though, is something not to be given into as to do so would result in becoming or remaining housebound.

Before getting another dog it is necessary to learn the area so the dog, which is a pilot, has to be told the way you want to go. If I pass the training again the dog won’t come complete with full knowledge of Epsom and if I want to go to the shopping centre or the bank, the dog won’t know which way I want it to go once I cross the road unless I can direct her.

Now, thirteen weeks on, I am able to get to the post office; Marks and Spencer; bank; HMV store (they don’t call me music lover June for nothing) and Thornton’s; though I’ve resisted the temptation to go in for chocolates.

My mobility instructor refers to me as her star pupil and actually I feel quite proud of myself because for ten months before my move I was housebound because of my feet and the hilly area in which I lived and because I lost my beloved Esme last August. As said before, I “dogged” before coming to Epsom and hadn’t used a cane for eight years and so felt that I was without eyes again once I started to out of necessity.

The local people of Epsom are fabulous. It’s much better than living in London and where I live is lovely too. I’m the nearest I’ve been to amenities and the happiest I’ve been for years.

On Sunday just gone, the wonderful lady who boarded my lovely Esme, brought with her an adorable Labrador Retriever which she is boarding at present and we all went to my local park. Unlike Esme, he stood still long enough for a really long cuddle and scratch behind the ears. Esme would start dancing round and round in circles, wagging and biting her tail and finally bringing her disgusting old toy with her to shove into my face whenever I tried cuddling her. We had a lovely day and I once more had dog hair on my clothes but who cares?

Maybe one day in the not-too-distant future, I’ll have another dog all of my own who will fill the gap in my heart and home, which Esme has left – Another trusted pair of eyes to walk silently at my side and through my altered world and if I do, my “tail” of life in Epsom will end happily and I can put my cane away for another eight years. Whatever the future holds, I know I can go out in safety once more and that’s thanks to the “square” of success I talk of on my blog – Ability, determination, luck and help – All of which must be present for achievement to be realised whether one is blind or sighted.