Following my earlier post, I realised that I hadn’t fully made my point and wanted to finish it. Sight, with its ability to see faces, might provide ways in to a more connected experience of neighbourhood and community than blindness. As people walk about the streets, nodding or smiling in acknowledgement of each other as they pass. Without being able to see people’s faces, to see them making such non-verbal acknowledgement of my existence, I find walking around the streets of my neighbourhood an isolating experience, passing countless people in complete silence and at most moving out of each other’s way (other than those who know me). This is far more so for me in the city where there are people who won’t speak to each other, than in the countryside where I might encounter nobody. I noticed people actually speaking to each other on the streets during lockdown – just saying ‘HI/Alright’ and hoped that the pr...
I can’t say how irritating, embarrassing and patronising it feels to hear the phrase: “are you causing trouble again?” used as a greeting to me in a kind of over-familiar, knowing, slightly too loud, falsely aspirant voice, intended more to be heard by others than for me. It’s happened so many times over the years - in cafes, when I’ve been queuing at the counter, conferences when I’ve been trying to find somewhere to sit, arriving at a meeting and finding a seat or a cup of tea… It often happens when I am in a less than familiar or uncomfortable situation , and never said by people who are close to me, but by people who don’t know how to be around me, people who perhaps have a view of me, their way of matching me with some stereotype of blind people that I can be slotted into. I’m not a natural ‘trouble-causer’ )whatever that may be) or at least I don’t carry any trouble-causing that I might ex...
I’m struck by how much the lockdown and social distancing is impacting on me and like most people, it’s become a bit of a preoccupation. An earlier post, which started to raise the question of how important it is to be able to see people in order to have an authentic conversation with them , triggered some interesting conversations. The post related specifically to the current use of video conferencing/’chat’ platforms for meetings and social gatherings, but it has raised important questions (for me at least) about the apparent general acceptance of the supremacy of video over audio. It feels a bit strange hearing these arguments for video when it was only until relatively recently that we managed perfectly well conducting (or supporting) everything from our friendships and closest relationships, to highly detailed work, to crisis interventions and suicide prevention on the (audio only) phone. The writer and journalist Malcolm Gla...
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