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(British Food Fortnight runs from 23rd September – 8th October)
Vicky: One of our favourite subjects. But recently Dave was asked the question do you taste things differently because you are blind? We started to discuss this but couldn’t get beyond the question ‘How do we know how anyone tastes things?’… Whilst we don’t want to start a philosophical debate (that would be too high brow for us :-)) it is worth thinking about whether people with a vision impairment do have a different relationship with food. It’s something that John Hull mentions on pages 37 & 38 in his book ‘Touching the Rock’, sharing his thoughts about whether the sight of food is the motivator to eat, distinguishing between ‘I feel hungry’ and ‘I want to eat that food which I see there’ going on later to say ‘I am often bored by food, feel that I am losing interest in it or cannot be bothered eating…the visual clues which exercise the actual desire and turn it towards the object are lacking’. In reading this, though, I was reminded of times when I have felt quite low and have been unmotivated to eat, even when food was in front of me and knowing that I should eat it. This may or may not be related to how John was feeling when he wrote that part of his diary. We were also talking to someone who has been visually impaired since birth and wouldn’t eat sandwiches as a child – maybe because the sandwiches had no smell or at least not as much as cooked food. Having said that my son’s friend, who doesn’t have a vision impairment, also didn’t like sandwiches and we have no idea why! On a practical note, it is something to bear in mind though if maybe you’re working in a residential home with elderly people with sight impairments – how to make food appealing when people can’t see it. As for eating out, cooking etc. – we’ll save those for future posts… Dave: Did someone mention food? I’m not even going to attempt to answer the question as to whether I have a different relationship to food as sighted people… there just isn’t the time right now and I wouldn’t really know where to start… It probably comes back to personality and our make up – food for some people is really important, for others it’s just a means to stay alive. What I will add, just to throw something else in to the mix (ing bowl) is that, as I don’t see food (and I’m talking about those visual clues or prompts that it’s there), I don’t get the urge to snack. For example, there might be a bar of chocolate in the fridge (yes, chocolate must be served cold). I might go to the fridge 20 times a day and, because I’m not going for chocolate, forget about it, whereas a sighted person will see the chocolate each time they open the fridge door and get the temptation just to have 1 little piece… Eating out and buffets are just a whole new post!! Vicky: Interesting thought about the chocolate – my sister in law (who is sighted) says that if there is chocolate in the house she can hear it calling her!! And talking of chocolate – we decided to do a bit of taste testing of our own - watch our video to see if not being able to see enabled us to focus more on the flavours… Join in and do your own taste testing, let us know how you get on or just share your own thoughts and experiences with us by commenting… Interested to learn more about VIDA Training? Read about our Training and Consultancy packages, specialising in Vision Impairment and Disability Awareness, Communication and Team Building or contact us for further information.
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 (National Eye Health Week runs from 18/09 – 24/09/2017. Find out more on the Vision Matters website http://www.visionmatters.org.uk/).
Dave: ‘What can you see?’ is one of the most common questions that I’m asked. Often it’s asked when talking to someone about my sight or by people that are interested to learn more about sight loss. I’ve accepted that this is a question that sighted people are likely to ask so it no longer bothers me, however, for someone new to sight loss, this could be a kick in the stomach. It is, and continues to be, a tough question to answer. I can see the sun and the moon and they are both a long way away…I get asked things like “can you see that tree?” knowing that the person asking the question is unhelpfully pointing to a particular tree, get people waving their hands in front of my face to see if I react, and I have even had people put their face right in front of mine as if they are looking into my soul via my eyes. The fact is I find it really hard to answer so often answer “what can you see?” To which people also find it hard to answer. Following this controversial answer, I do my best to explain that I only have light perception in my right eye and very blurry tunnel vision in my left but this doesn’t really answer the question. I see flashes, swirls, dots and flickering all the time. I get that after burn when looking at something for a long time – if I look at a window and then look away, I still have a bright light in my eyes as if I’m still looking at the window and this can last for many minutes. My sight changes depending on how tired I am or where I am and how bright or contrasting the surroundings are. Sometimes I can see people (the shape not the detail) but, more often than not, I can’t see them or haven’t worked out that it’s a person and walk straight in to them. I do this lots when I’m queuing in a shop – it’s not that I’m necessarily unaware of their presence, more that I can’t judge the distance and therefore bump in to them. The other factor that makes this question so difficult to answer is what I’m comparing this to. I used to have sight but I don’t know how good it ever was and whether I could see the same as someone else. What does surprise me (and you’ll be amazed how often this happens), is when someone says “I know how you feel because I can’t see when I take my glasses off”… If only it were that simple! Vicky: Not much to add here, except, I guess, the plea to think before you speak and act!! I’m amazed that people think it’s okay to ask quite personal questions both to Dave and our colleagues who are wheelchair users when they hardly know them. We do make a point on our training of explaining that Dave is quite open to questions about his sight loss, hence why we do the training and encourage people to take the opportunity to ask, but we also point out that not everyone will be that relaxed. I would also assume that, when out socially, it’s not the thing that Dave wants to chat all night about to someone! :-) However, when assisting someone, it is useful to ask them how much info they would like and what assistance they require (so whether they would like to take your arm, how much they want to know about their surroundings; an item they are buying etc.,) and to remember that this may differ from day to day and throughout the day. We’re always interested to know about other people’s experiences and thoughts. Please share these by commenting… Interested to learn more about VIDA Training? Read about our Training and Consultancy packages, specialising in Vision Impairment and Disability Awareness, Communication and Team Building or contact us for further information.  Vicky: The 18th September is National Respect Day which seemed a fitting theme for a VIDA Insight.
Equal – different – respect – being aware of people’s needs are all terms that we use but what do they mean to us? For example, I might be aware that Dave has certain ways of working because of his sight loss (for example, we discussed how best to save these VIDA Insights in a word document so that the order of them made sense to Dave) but that some ways of working might also be due to his personality (we have debated as to whether his personality/character has changed in any way since his more significant sight deterioration but I think that will have to be a separate post!). But, I also have certain ways of working (yes, Dave takes the mickey out of me for my spreadsheets!) and I am aware that when I’ve written something personal I can be over sensitive at times to comments (I usually warn Dave in advance that he’s free to comment and change but not to laugh out loud!!) – so I guess the key for working well with anyone is down to respecting each other and being aware but also needing to have some give and take?? For us, communication is really important so that we don’t misinterpret each other’s actions or allow for frustrations to build up but so is sometimes having a slightly more light hearted approach to the less important things… Dave: I think Vicky has summed it up very well. Whether you can see or not, the trick is to communicate and agree on actions. Vicky and I have a great working relationship and (I think) communicate well. Due to my sight loss, Vicky has naturally taken on the tasks that I can’t do or would find hard to do (such as update the website for example) and I have picked up some of the tasks that I can do (such as remind Vicky to update her many thousands of spreadsheets). Seriously though, our partnership with VIDA would quickly break down if we didn’t communicate and respect each other’s thoughts and decisions and this has nothing to do with my sight loss. We’re always interested to know about other people’s experiences and thoughts. Please share these by commenting… Interested to learn more about VIDA Training? Read about our Training and Consultancy packages, specialising in Vision Impairment and Disability Awareness, Communication and Team Building or contact us for further information.  Vicky: Today is #NationalReadaBookDay so we thought we’d do a brief run down on some of the books we’ve read and also ask if there are any others out there that people can recommend with a link to blindness/sight loss or disability in general. We are interested in both autobiographies and fiction novels. Whilst VIDA Training is not a book club, we read books to widen our own knowledge base and talk about books we’ve read in our training if we feel they could enhance people’s understanding or provide an easy way to add insight to living with sight loss.
So in order to extend our reading references, a while ago Dave and I sat down and went through a list of books available to me through Surrey Libraries (https://www.facebook.com/surreylibrariesonline/) and for him through RNIB’s Talking Books service (https://www.facebook.com/rnibuk/). They didn’t always match but then good old Amazon and Ebay came in handy for some of the paperbacks and Surrey Libraries went to an extra effort to locate Touching the World for me from Sussex – thank you! The latter is such a great book by the way that I’ve just purchased it from their website (http://worldtour.org.uk/) – we’ll review it properly once Dave has read it too (come on Dave 😊) We’ve already reviewed Touching the Rock by John M Hull and Blind Trust by Red Szell on our blog page (VIDA Insight numbers 3 and 15 - www.vidatraining.weebly.com/blog). Recently we have also read – Bleed Out by Joan Brady; Stargazing by Linda Gillard; Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood and Out of the Darkness by Tina Nash. Some quotes that we think illustrate elements of living with sight loss well from these books are below: From Bleed Out by Joan Brady - “I reached instinctively to put my hand on her shoulder. But a simple, physical reaching out like that – the only meaningful communication at times like this when no words will serve – is the privilege of a sighted person. … if I wanted to put my hand on it, I had to find it first.” “‘I’m usually kind of good with dogs’ he said unhappily ‘This one sure don’t like me much’ ‘It’s not you Mr Doe. She is a professional on duty. Rather like a Secret Service Agent. You must meet her in her free time one day’” “Within a month, she was installed in the office across the fire escape from me, and I was aware almost at once that my judgement about her had been correct. She is one of the few people I have known – who has an instinctive sensitively about the blind. I do not believe she had ever known anybody in my condition before, and yet she knew without being told to identify herself when she entered a room so I knew who she was and to notify me when she was leaving the room so that I did not end up talking into thin air. She used words like ‘look’, ‘see’, ‘blind’ as though I were perfectly normal, and she did so as she cautioned me about stairs, kerbs or obstacles in my path. She knew to look directly at me when we spoke so that I could follow her voice with my eyes and face and she even seemed to take pleasure in the delicate social nicety of placing my hand on the door knob or the arm of a chair so I could orientate myself.” From Stargazing by Linda Gillard “The blind are as fetishistic about voices as the sighted are about appearances, so allow me if you will to describe this man’s voice as chocolate. Serious chocolate. Green and Black’s, not Cadbury’s.” “ ‘Jesus! Didn’t you see me coming? Are you blind or what?’ Shaken, the woman turns to face the cyclist. As she adjusts her hat, knocked askew, her hands are unsteady but her voice is firm. ‘Yes. As a matter of fact I am.’ Marianne – That’s right, I’m blind. I’ll give you a moment or two to adjust your prejudices. But, I hear you ask, shouldn’t I have been escorted by a Golden Labrador? Or waving a white stick? At the very least, shouldn’t I have been wearing enormous dark glasses, as favoured by Roy Orbison and Ray Charles? I know, I know – it was really my own stupid fault for wandering round looking normal. (Well, I’m told I do. How would I know?)” "Has it ever struck you how language favours the sighted? (Of course not, because you can see.) I don't just have a problem seeing, I have a problem talking, trying to find words and phrases appropriate to my experience. Just listen to how people go on: Oh I see what you mean...Now look here...The way I see it...Reading between the lines...I didn't see that coming...It depends on your point of view...You get the picture? I, of course, don't" “Harvey was dead. Long dead. I hardly even thought about him anymore, perhaps because I’d never had any visual memories of him – no photographs, no wedding video to watch to keep the memories alive, no children to remind me of him” Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood – “She’d rather see for herself, she doesn’t trust Tobias to interpret, she suspects him of holding things back. Protecting her he’d call it. But she doesn’t want to be protected in that way” “Next morning Tobias is late for breakfast. She senses this lateness, then confirms it with the talking clock in the kitchen, another gift from Alyson: you hit the button – if you can find the button - and it tells you the time in the voice of a condescending grade two arithmetic teacher ‘It is eight thirty-two. Eight thirty-two’” Dave: Reading was never my thing when I was young and I found reading quite hard work. I wonder now if it is because of my sight condition and that reading was difficult because I couldn’t see as well as everyone thought or whether I just didn’t like reading! Since losing my sight and this making what I can do rather more limiting, I have started to listen to audio books. Crime detective is my preferred genre but I’m up for reading anything. I’m doing my best to keep up with Vicky but I just can’t read as quickly as her. Vicky informed me that she had read 8(?) books whilst on her 12 day holiday this year when I struggled to get through 1 book with a reading time of just over 8 hours! (Vicky: not listening again Dave – it was only 6 books over a 13 day holiday 😊) The problem I have is that I fall asleep when listening so have to retrack the audio until I find a bit that I know I’ve heard before… at least if you fall asleep when reading a paper book you know what page you got to as it’s staring at you when you wake up with it on your face!. (Vicky: not true when it hits the floor, but I accept it’s easier to visually scan to refind your place - but away with the excuses and get reading Dave!!) Regarding the above mentioned books, I have been able to relate to all of them in some way. Some passages (not the ones we’ve quoted above) have made me cringe a bit and others have made me smile with the understanding that the blind person is having the same hurdles as me or has a similar thought process when doing things. Books on our list still to read are: All the light we cannot see by Anthony Doerr, Death from the Woods by Brigitte Aubert, The Blind Man of Hoy by Rod Szell, The Windhorse by Elaine Brook and Julie Donnelly. If you have comments to make on any of the books we have mentioned, or are aware of any other books that are a must read then please do let us know by commenting… Interested to learn more about VIDA Training? Read about our Training and Consultancy packages, specialising in Vision Impairment and Disability Awareness, Communication and Team Building or contact us for further information. |
Our VIDA Insights...Following our experiences from delivering our Vision Impairment Awareness training days over the past couple of years, we know that there’s loads more that we could talk about and examples we could have shared. Whilst these won’t be a substitute for our training, they will give you an insight (hence the name!) into our thoughts, observations and experiences from each of our perspectives - Dave’s living with sight loss and Vicky’s from being a sighted person and working alongside and supporting people who have sight loss. Archives
September 2021
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