The Joys Of...

I sometimes wonder if people think being blind is all doom & gloom but it’s not at all. Don’t get me wrong, my blindness at times can be very frustrating but can also bring a lot of laughs. Let me share some funny stories from over the years…

Being a member of a very large family where seven of you are registered blind wasn't easy but when one of us did a “dumb blindy” thing it caused a lot of laughter. I remember one of my brothers was on his way home from a pub with a blind friend of his. It was December and had been snowing and was freezing cold. My brother had this mad idea that if they cut across this field that he knew was there, it would save time on their journey home. What he didn’t know was that the canal ran through the field and walked straight into the freezing water! And his mate followed him in!! Luckily they managed to get out but both lost their white sticks in the process!

I was once eating a nougat bar I’d pinched off my Grandson, I needed to close the kitchen window, so put the nougat down on the unit. After closing the window I picked it back up and took a bite! Whoops! It was a washing tablet I'd picked up and bitten by mistake! Ewww! When I told my daughter we cried laughing! We still have fits of giggles talking about it now, many years later.

When I was a child, we used to live in two houses that had connecting doors; because I have 12 siblings so one house wasn’t big enough. I remember one evening we decided to move the furniture around, you know for the sake of it. Later one of my brothers went to the pub and when he came home with his supper of chips, peas and gravy he forgot we had moved things around and sat on the settee that wasn't there! His food was in a carton and went splat in his face! Oh that was funny!

The same brother went to the pub with odd shoes on one night. They were the same style but different colours and all his mates thought it really funny. What was even funnier though, was my fully sighted sister at the hospital visiting my Mum and she suddenly burst out laughing. When we asked what she was laughing at she said she had suddenly realised that she had odd boots on! When I looked at them they were as odd as you could get! One had a pointed toe and a stiletto heel whilst the other had a square heel with a square toe! In fact the only thing they had in common was that they were black so you see it's not just us blindys that do dumb things.

I will just explain here that when I say look at things I mean with my hands. I watch TV and listen to the radio. I use the words see and saw because I just see things in a different way to people with sight.

When I'm with my friends and family we laugh a lot and often at each other's expense but as I always say a good laugh is a better tonic than anything the doctor can give us, so I hope some of these stories have at least put a smile on your face. I have a lot more funny stories to tell but I’ll save them for another day.

B x