Author Archives: Red Szell
Taking the Lead
I don’t like dogs, never have done, at least not since next door’s Alsatian jumped up and bit me on the face when I was three years old.
They smell, foul the pavement, cruise the park looking for things (and people) to chase; and the little mutt over the road yaps incessantly.
No, I really don’t like dogs. So why am I thinking of getting one?
Well, in the past year my vision has gone from bad but enough to get around with a white stick and only the odd accident, to agoraphobic – not wanting to leave the house alone for fear of getting lost or damaged.
Two incidents in particular brought this home to me; first, getting lost in my local park and ending up in the lake; then, just a week later, being saved as I was about to wander off the platform edge into the path of an oncoming Tube train.
Going blind is a hazardous business and minding the increasingly large gaps it leaves is hard work. No matter how good the tactile paving or the smartphone app sometimes I just zone out for a moment – and that’s when accidents happen.
But the more my sight deteriorates the more I need to leave the house. I want to swim and go climbing and visit friends and not feel intimidated.
I used to say that the worst part of losing my sight was losing the ability to read. Talking Books have gone a long way to filling that void. It’s not the same totally immersive experience but I get through many more books because it’s hands-free and makes doing the cooking and ironing more fun.
But I came late to Talking Books. I let my unwillingness to accept any loss of independence trump my need for an alternative.
So what do I like less, dogs or agoraphobia?
Fortunately guide dogs are not ‘click and collect’ items. Having contacted the association in January, it was reassuring to find myself at the start of a process that will take at least a year and that I can opt out at any time. I’m also happy to report that not being a dog-lover did not count against me. A guide dog, I was told, is a working dog, not a pet.
My climbing partner Matthew, (who promises not to delegate the job of leading me up rock faces to a hound in harness) assures me that being a dog-owner is great; not least because it means a member of the household regards you as god! I doubt my cat will see it that way.
Out In Force (Hampstead Village Voice, Issue 25)
It was my daughter who pointed it out.
“Dad, all these cars on Fitzjohn’s. All these people marching along in uniform, hundreds of them – it’s creepy.”
We were on our way to school, they were all on their way to school. And it’s not just Fitzjohn’s Avenue. It’s Willow Road, New End, Heath Street, Belsize – pretty much every road in NW3, twice daily – a show of strength in the belief in the power of education.
Which is generally a good thing. It’s right to educate our children. As Nelson Mandela said “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” And Hampstead has a proud tradition as a centre for nursery, primary and secondary schooling.
But Mandela’s militarist metaphor can feel all too apt when the area gets over-run by the school run.
With my daughter’s words ringing in my ears I turned from participant to observer in the week before half term.
I watched the slow procession of military-style 4x4s roll in to dominate the roads and pavements, their stony-faced parent-pilots circling, hovering, waiting their opportunity to swoop into the drop-zone and release their little trooper for the perilous 10-metre dash across enemy territory to the school compound. The tension was palpable; no one was smiling.
At first glance those who were walking to school seemed a happier, chattier bunch. Little wonder maybe, a slew of surveys indicate that those who trot to school on shanks’ pony arrive in better shape for the school day. Indeed a recent experiment at a local junior school found that in a one-mile race there was an average fitness gap of one minute between those who walked and those who were chauffeured, despite the best efforts of the latter group’s parents to poison the pedestrians with particulates.
But earwigging on the conversations of those on foot revealed a more sinister truth. Those parents who were talking to their children were usually interrogating them; either grilling them on what they would be or had been doing at school, or drilling them on their spellings and times tables. Little wonder then that so many kids chose to hurtle ahead mounted on Razor scooters, delighting in their freedom to spread shock and awe across the pavement.
Their anxious adults pursued at a distance, happy to deny knowledge in the event of collateral damage but quick to apportion blame elsewhere when their child incurred an injury – woe betide you if you are a third party who fails to leap out to the way!
Those parents who preferred the conversation of another adult to that of their children, and weren’t using a mobile phone, were invariably discussing school. If their children attended the same one they’d be bemoaning its imperfections. But were they to encounter a parent of a child from a rival school all imperfections were instantly forgotten and a game of one-upmanship ensued. I remain flabbergasted by a voluble disagreement between two mums as to whose Year 1 daughter was receiving the superior developmental boost, the one whose school offered free violin lessons or the one offering flute!
Apart from a few poor unfortunates possessed of helicopter parents, the older children were adult free. But no doubt having learned from the behaviour of their primary carers during the primary school run years they behaved much the same.
There were the Cyberkids marching down the street on stony-faced autopilot, oblivious to anything not displayed on their tablet or played through its headphones. Like the car-encased parents who yell at them to pay attention to where they are going they are aggressively defensive of their right to proceed unimpeded.
Giving both groups a wide berth I boarded the bus and found it packed with kids from a dozen different educational establishments. Their voluble chatter centred on the iniquities of the classroom with a fair amount of dissing of each others’ schools – all to the backbeat of a babel of mobile phones. The tinny music and the strident statements of this uniformed cohort made the bus feel like a barracks.
Outside the low autumn sun glinted off the blacked-out windows of a regiment of SUVs while more uniformed boys and girls marched stolidly up and down the hill. Outriders flew by on scooters and dark-clad adults muttered into mobiles and kept a wary eye on proceedings.
And all of a sudden I knew my daughter was right. There was something creepy about this mass mobilisation of the reluctant to march in devotion to an absolutist drum; something reminiscent of a North Korean military parade.
BBC Radio 4 In Touch – Red on The Perils of Shopping (3rd November 2015)
Game Boy
Bananas, eggs, milk and trout.
Time was I didn’t need an excuse to leave the house and stroll up to The High Street, but just now I find myself dreading the prospect and putting it off for another day or until I have someone to walk with.
Why the sense of dread?
Well partly it’s the time of year; shortening days, the clocks going back and the low Autumnal sun that shines like an anglepoise lamp in the eyes.
But for the most part I’ve learned to live with these factors. No it’s a profusion of newer perils that make the 800-metre journey to the community market and back feel increasingly like a real-life game of Donkey Kong.
In general I wait for the school run traffic to clear. It’s not so much the procession of fat four-wheel drives blocking roads and walkways but the stream of wobbly toddlers on scooters hurtling down the pavements, distantly pursued by parents who will blame anyone but themselves for the inevitable accidents. It’s just too nerve-racking to contemplate.
And though the daylight is ticking away I’ll wait another hour for the dog-walkers to disperse into the nearby park. Better the occasional turd underfoot than being snapped at by Fido for carrying a stick I won’t throw.
So now the coast is clear….ish. I tap my way along my street alert for lamp-posts, which have the courtesy not to reposition themselves overnight and recycling bins, which, like Daleks, are evilly mobile and designed to cause maximum impediment to the human race. Talk about street litter!
At some point I’ll have to cross the road. Here the game changes and the stakes are higher. Electric cars – or silent death as I prefer to think of them – are an increasing feature of our streets and I know that my green heart should rejoice. But in a noisy urban environment they are inaudible, a fact their drivers all-too-often forget.
If I don’t get squashed and have counted my steps correctly I will have avoided the worst of the clutter on the High Street. If not I’ll have the tables and chairs of half a dozen pavement cafes to negotiate. Like the now ubiquitous sandwich boards outside practically every shop, this is a sign of how our pavements are being co-opted into retail space.
But there’s no time to worry about that now, I’m on the alert for Cybermen (and women). Those zombified individuals so hooked into their devices that they march down the street oblivious to anything not displayed on its screen or played through its headphones. That anyone should choose deliberately to blind and deafen themselves to the world around them amazes me. That, like some car drivers, this insulation often leaves them aggressively defensive of their right to proceed unimpeded, scares me.
Fortunately, today my Donkey Kong adventure has left me unscathed. At home, as I open the milk for a well-earned cup of tea, my heart sinks – I forgot to buy bananas.
BBC Radio 4 In Touch – Red on Risk-Taking (11th August 2015)
Red’s TED Talk ‘A Story Worth Telling’ at TEDxASL
Splash Down
It’s been a month of ups and downs. At the start of June I headed up to the far North West corner of Scotland to tackle Am Buachaille – the third and ‘most serious of the big three British sea stacks’.
Lying 100m offshore it involves a bit of swim before you can start climbing. I’d always wondered how nearby Cape Wrath got its name; a few minutes exposure to horizontal rain and gravity-challenging wind gave me the answer.
A noise like a daemonic dishwasher turned out to be metre-high waves crashing through the channel we’d need to swim. We backed off.
For consolation we climbed a couple of 35m cliffs further round the beautiful, sandy crescent of Sandwood Bay – Am Buachaille sticking its finger up behind our backs as we did so. A far-from-wasted trip but one that left me feeling a little cheated.
40 hours later I was at the opposite end of the British Isles climbing onto the rear saddle of a mountain bike tandem, at the start of The South Downs Way. A 100 mile bridleway that runs from Winchester to Eastbourne over 11,000 feet of ascents and descents.
My two companions Simon and Mark took it in turns to pilot the bike and act as out-riders clearing the path ahead. Like jumbo jets tandems are most likely to crash on take off and landing.
The pay-off for all those hill climbs is the downhill sections on which we hit speeds of up to 40mph. Simon and Mark both confessed to moments of envy for my inability to see the precipitous path ahead. After two days hard pedalling and only a couple of minor tumbles the finish line at the end of a glorious hurtle down the track from Beachy Head came almost as a disappointment, we were having such fun!
So I returned to London feeling pretty good. Despite my sight loss I’d taken on the great outdoors and conquered bits of it. My remaining challenge, to swim The Henley Mile, is still a few weeks off but what better way to sooth my aching muscles and keep the ball rolling than a nice swim round Highgate Men’s Pond?
It’s only a mile away, across Hampstead Heath, along a well-trodden track I’ve used regularly for the past twenty years.
That said, as my remaining photoreceptors fizzle out, I do sometimes find myself marooned in places I know must be familiar but can’t recognise. I wonder, is this how encroaching Alzheimer’s feels?
The secret is not to let your concentration wander. I need to head straight till I reach The Model Boat Pond, then first right to avoid the unfenced path along the water’s edge.
It’s all going swimmingly till I find my way blocked by a construction site. This must be The Corporation of London’s bizarre project to build a dam against a 1 in 400,000 year biblical flood event.
Whatever, it and a monosyllabic workman-cum-sentry force me left, down an unfamiliar path; which disgorges me into a line of anglers.
At least, I reason, I must be close to a pond.
Closer than I think. My attempt to navigate the cast rods of these taciturn fisher-folk results in my taking an earlier plunge than I’d anticipated.
As I squelch home I reflect on the irony of being defeated by the tamed outdoors in my local park. Of how visual impairment magnifies small changes into major obstacles. And how much I have come to rely on other people to help me express my independence.