Downloaded from www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. IN TOUCH Richard in Bergerac TX: 17.04.2018 2040-2100 PRESENTER: PRODUCER: PETER WHITE CHERYL GABRIEL I first met Richard 25 years ago, just after he lost his sight. Since then he s appeared regularly on In Touch, he s hosted a series on cooking without sight, he s reviewed audio books, he s charted the improvement in the accessibility of newspapers. So, what s he doing now living in deepest rural Southwest France miles from most of the things many blind people think are essential to living in independently? And I do mean miles from anywhere. Well, it s partly about trying to live the good life but is there more to it than that? I m here to spend a day with Richard trying to find out. Just gathering the wood now but I ll light the fire later. Once I ve done this we ll just go in and get started with a coffee. And here s your coffee Pete. Thanks Richard. That s lovely. Simple question to start with I think: Why are you here? That s a reasonable question to ask. Here in what they call La France profonde.
Yes, but what are you doing here in this very quiet place, what made you come? Well, just the opportunity for Liz, my wife, Topper and myself to have a year out. But really the motivation from a personal point of view for me was bit of a symmetry thing going on with numbers, just past 50 years of age, it s a quarter of a century, perhaps a touch more, since I lost my sight and to have time out out of Farnham and out of London, where I work, to come to something completely different and you cannot get more different than rural France where it is so quiet and so different, to kind of reassess, recalibrate, maybe re-energise a bit possibly. And particularly as now my blind life is becoming the larger part of my existence, I ve now been blind longer just than I have been sighted, haven t come here to France just to reflect on that but it s something that one can reflect on, but also to get closer to nature, which is why we re in rural France, to have to time to practise my violin and commit pieces to memory because as you get older, as we all know, it gets harder to memorise things and I have to learn my violin pieces by heart, from memory. So, I ve got time to do that. Music violin playing But you did suggest to me that there were things about your blindness that you thought you hadn t really quite got clear in your mind. Yeah, I mean, to be honest, I still don t feel particularly good at being blind, if one has to be good at being blind or some days I don t feel as though I ve got the hang of it. I mean mobility is a key thing and I ve had three wonderful guide dogs and Topper, who is with us now, is about to retire. But I m going to go back and I m not going to have a working guide dog for a good few months, so actually having the time and this rural idyll that we re in gives me a chance to practise using my cane, to feel confident with mobility but to do it in a beautiful surrounding where there s birdsong and there s country noises and things, not in a busy town or heaven forbid practising my long cane technique at Waterloo Station I wouldn t get on very well. But you have talked already about work, about the fact that you perhaps you would regard yourself as one of the lucky visually impaired people who has been in work but I think also the suggestion that the extent to which you ve worked and the intensity with which you ve worked has been something of a cover for you for not thinking about the extent to which you have had to adjust and maybe whether you ve adjusted enough. Yeah, I think that s a reasonable point. I mean I think work, which as we all know, frankly, it s appalling how few blind people work and that s still terrible and I m very conscious of the fact I m very lucky in that I have always worked. And that s great, of course. If I didn t work, and this is one of the challenges I think possibly coming here for the year was to suddenly not have work, not have the kind of deadlines that I m used to back at home, that has been different. And initially I found that a little bit tricky because I suddenly did find myself reflecting a little bit about well, how am I going to occupy my time and my thoughts and is the fact that I m blind is that suddenly going to get me down, is my blindness going to
suddenly creep out of me and suffocate or swallow me up a bit. It didn t but it certainly has reinforced, in my mind, just how valuable work is, not as a cover up but just as a professional thing to do, to have your brain stimulated, curiosity, working with people, teamwork all that stuff is really, really important. You suggested to me I think when we were talking about this programme that maybe for some blind people, maybe for you, work was a way of keeping those sort of demons away. Yeah and I think it has been sometimes because I still have days where I m very unhappy about being blind Really? Absolutely. Even 25 years on? Absolutely. They are infrequent and I ve certainly had a couple of moments here, in France, in the past six months, and there s no obvious cause, it s just sometimes this almost visceral feeling of hopelessness because one is blind and possibly the rural setting almost sort of exaggerated the feeling of difficulty because the countryside is not an easy place to knock around when you can t see, particularly if you re not used to it. I ve been here a few months now and I feel much more positive about that. So, it s been a bit of a voyage of discovery really. Unhappy about what aspects of being blind? However far in the past now my sight is I still have a very strong sense of what the world looks like, of what my family and some of my friends, obviously not friends I ve met recently, or Liz of course, whom I ve never seen, but I still have very strong visual reference points and they re very helpful. But also, I still have from time to time a sense of loss because of course those memories are getting further and further away. And that on a bad on a negative day that saddens me. On most of the other days I m thinking I m so glad I ve got those reference points and they contribute to my feeling of whole, of my existence, which for 25 years was a sighted young man. But that does bring us back to why here, because you could I mean it s a lovely spot, I ve been enjoying the silences but I ve also been thinking, as a blind person, it s not where I d want to stay, not even for a year, let alone for the rest of my life because you re away from public transport, you re quite a long way from shops, you re away from the things which
make it easier for a blind person to operate independently, so you ve put yourself deliberately in that position. Absolutely right and when Liz and I were deciding where we were going to be in France we did not want to replicate Farnham or London in France, absolutely not. We wanted to get out of our comfort zones and that was the point because it s not as risky as it sounds, we re only here for a year, we re going back home, we haven t sold our house, we haven t moved to France. I mean that would be a completely different proposition and I d be getting a bit worried now, if we had done that. I wasn t thinking of it as risky, I was thinking more of the fact that you have put yourself in a situation where you are more dependent on Liz than you would have been in those places. And I m wondering why you thought you needed to do that. Because I m a great believer that life has got to be stimulating and life has got to be different. And a year a year in the country could have been in the UK but okay it s in France. A year in rural France to me is a chapter of my life, of our lives, that we are never going to forget. And ultimately that s what it s about because the older we get we acquire more memories, don t we, because more of our lives are in the past. But you mention the fact that you re in France, that s another element that s made it potentially difficult for you. I know you do speak a little French but I mean the thing that equals life up for blind people is language, it is the ability to ask, to engage, we can t do as much with gestures and eye movements and all that stuff, we use language you ve taken away another element really where you re not quite on the equal terms you would have been in the UK. Yeah, you re spot on, of course, but again that s the thrill of it, you see. So, you re a masochist? Well, maybe slightly. But I m just intrigued life has got to have colour, sorry all these colour analogies and sighted analogies, but life for me has to be interesting and stimulating. And even if it s frustrating from time to time, bimbling around rural France with my wooden stick, not sticking French terribly well, being misunderstood by someone in the shop, you know, yeah sometimes you bang your head but actually it s life enhancing as well, it s enriching. Actuality Richard and Liz cooking Of course, there was a period, wasn t there, when Liz wasn t here because she went off to New Zealand, so you then did have to cope in this environment that you ve explained why
you chose it, but that would have opened up to you what life would be like, for example, if you lived here on your own. That s right and I was very lucky I did have a couple of friends, at different times, who came out to stay and to help me but I also had a few days by myself. We have terrific neighbours, very close by, so if I ever get stuck Joan and Sam are at hand. But actually I loved it too and again I was beginning to discover parts of myself that I didn t really know existed because I m a sociable creature and I love having my friends to stay but actually to have downtime where I was on my own in the house with Topper for three days, it s like wow, right, I m going to go and light the stove now by myself and do some cooking and do my reading and play my violin. And do you know for a few days that was just terrific. But I bet when Liz is here if you want to do something you just do it and I m sure you jump in the car and off you go. What about when that thought came upon you and there wasn t a car and a Liz? It s a great question and I remember chatting to my two very close blind friends and they were semi-appalled that I was going to live in the country where I couldn t, with Topper or even with a cane, walk, tap, my way down a pavement to a café or a village or do something independently. And the thought of giving up independence like that, both when Liz is here, because you have to have a car where we are, and when Liz isn t here, yeah, it was a worry and that was a massive adjustment to make. Weren t your blind friends right? I mean how do you make an adjustment to not being able to go where you want to go when you want to go there? You just have to say I can t have my own way, I can t just do I m out of my comfort zone. I suppose that goes back to the point about coming here in the first place. But there are enough restrictions in being blind in the first place, why impose a few more? Yeah, because I think by closing off a few more avenues it then gives you more of an opportunity to focus on the things that you can do. Less sometimes is more. I m just trying to compute these two things together with the sense you said you had days of and a period of depression because you were thinking about these aspects but you ve also described it as a time you enjoyed. Can you put those two things together for me? Yeah, because the moments of what I call it really is I mean the depression thing, it is erratic, it s very occasional and it s happened over 25 years, it hasn t increased since I ve been in France, it s just part of my experience of being blind, having been sighted and lost
my sight. I call it part of my territory, of my experience of blindness. Just because you have the odd moment where you re feeling a bit depressed doesn t mean you re not around that still having a stimulating and interesting time. And that s more life goes on in my blind life the more I believe that s just part and parcel of being blind. Just remind us a bit about the circumstances of losing your sight because you did lose it at a time which I mean there s not, probably everyone would say, there s not a great time to lose your sight but you were a young man, you were at the beginning of life, you were beginning to do all the things that excite people, like driving and stuff. Yeah, and you know I d just moved to London, I d just started my career, I was living with my mates in a flat in South London, the world was my oyster, except I became blind. And when I think back on it now I always struggle to believe that it was me experiencing that. I feel as though I m talking about or describing someone else who went through that. But of course, for everything that s bad there are I have been lucky always worked, as I said, terrific friends and family and I ve never felt I ve always had help. Whilst the blindness could make me feel very lonely I ve never been alone, there s always been people around and I think that made a great difference. How well were you prepared for it? I don t mean psychologically yourself I mean how much were the facilities there to help you understand what you were going to have to do? I got some brilliant help. I remember getting help from RNIB at their employment rehabilitation place down in Torquay, no longer exists. I learnt long cane training. The rudiments of braille, touch typing pretty quickly, so I could get back to work and do that stuff. So that stuff was good. What was awful at the time social services were just more than useless, I ended up telling them more than they could tell me and that was before we even had the internet, I couldn t even look it up, it was ridiculous. That was pretty poor. I remember contacting RNIB, I was desperate for counselling, for some emotional support and again in those days the RNIB would just give you the telephone number of the British Association of Counselling in Warwickshire and you would then give them a ring and they d say sorry, I don t know much about visual impairment. And so, I ended up getting some private counselling for a little bit. And clearly things have improved in that area now I know. So, yeah, it was I was just puzzled really with it all. I mean I was lucky that the practical help I got was good and that got me back up and going. So, what s the significance of walking along here, as you are doing, with your stick? Well I just sort of started doing it without even thinking about it. Bought a walking stick, because I just always wanted a walking stick, never had one, got one from the village shop it s called a champignon, because the top of it s shaped like a mushroom. And gradually as we walk out onto this very quiet road that leads to our local village called Saint-Avit you hardly see a car, I mean you might get a tractor, you might get one car in 20 minutes or something. It suddenly dawned on me and actually I m using my stick, I m not holding on to
Liz s arm, then it dawned on me that s actually quite useful because when I get back home in September Topper will be fully retired and I then go on the waiting list for a new guide dog, which could take six to 12 months. Richard, I can imagine some people saying having heard all the things that you ve been saying and your story well that s all very well, I m living in a council flat, they re arguing about whether I m going to get Personal Independence Payments or not, my social worker never turns up. What do you think what you ve been saying says to someone like that? Well you know I can only give you my personal account of my journey from sight into blindness and the blind life I ve had. And I realise everyone s different and not everyone can just come and swan off to the Perigord for a year and all the rest of it. But I think any blind person who s getting frustrated or thinking of ways to approach their life with blindness, whatever their situation, wherever they re living, surely we can generalise a little bit from some of the stuff we ve been talking about, which is about focusing on what you can do, don t spend all your time being miserable about the things you cannot do, develop some interests passions. There s so much out there and it s so much easier to access stuff now than it was 25 years ago. Look at books and stuff we can put on smart phones and the way we read and access information and stuff, it s just unbelievable. So, in my quarter century of blindness I would say life has got easier in many, many ways. I just think we ve got to try and focus on the positives. You can still have a very enriching, stimulating life without sight, it s not the end of the road. Music violin playing