Remember

Around this time of year, a lot of years ago, a murky curtain started to obscure the sight of my right eye. After a frightening few hours involving getting myself to an optician, struggling over reading a cab phone number, getting lost in the huge hospital trying to find eye casualty, being examined in a dark room, all with baby son in tow, I was told I needed an emergency operation for a retinal detachment. It was only one eye but I remember lying in the hospital bed wondering what it must be like to lose sight completely. I remember closing my eyes and examining each of my senses in turn, listening to low chatter and footsteps on the ward and the movements of my son in the cot next to me, feeling the warp and weft of the sheet underneath me, smelling the clean sheets in the clean room.

As I came round from the anaesthetic I saw daffodils at the end of my bed - with both eyes. Now I have miniature daffodils outside the kitchen window and I love them, even when they are just bulbs beneath the soil.

On the news today I heard a recording of David Rathband - the police officer blinded by Raoul Moat - saying, "Everybody tells me you've got 10 years before you realise you can deal with being blind. At the moment I can't even see the next 12 months but I'm taking each day as it comes, I'm trying my best, it's tough... I'm not in a place where I've evolved to enjoy being blind and having a fulfilled life and that's the bit I'm struggling with."

The news today was that he has killed himself.

Of course he had to deal with very much more than 'just' blindness but I especially noticed the daffodils today.

Isn't taking photos an amazing thing to be able to do!

(Later: I have just discovered that this week's blip blog is on blindness and photography. An inspiration.)