Lost in Translation

I got a cab back from the station today because I was bit knackered and it was raining ..anyway I knew I was in for a long ride home when the driver sweetly asked me to join him in the front. I sighed as I clambered in knowing that this was going to be a man who liked to talk and indeed he did but not in English. No indeed, like many cabbies around the world he spoke that strange language ‘football’. I don’t speak football but I have picked up the basics and all I had to do was respond with the occasional ‘yeah…hopeless left foot’ and ‘Jose’s definitely a possibility’’, and the chap was happy. There was one sticky moment when, during a pause,I realised he had actually asked a question, but, and this is for any of you out there who don’t speak football, I remembered the one line that always gets a gentle sigh of appreciation. It is, and I have NO idea what it means, ‘well whatever they say, they don’t make ‘em like Arson anymore….’ . I like saying ‘Arson’ in public and it sends football speakers off into a dreamlike state and that lovely thing longed for in a taxi…silence.

I had come back from being interviewed at the BBC's Broadcasting House…oooooeeer…get her! It was in reference to the photographic exhibition and will be part of a programme being put out on Radio 4’s ‘In Touch’ (Tuesday evenings at 20:40.) The producer is also visually impaired and she showed me around some of her audio editing and enlargement software which was most groovy. Over a coffee we compared horror stories about various ophthalmologists and their inability to be either compassionate or clear when giving a life changing and traumatic diagnosis. I hear these stories over and over again which is depressing in the extreme. All ophthalmologists should be forced to spend 28 days in simulation specs…these are glasses which mimic a condition like retinitus pigmentosa or macular degeneration. They should not be allowed to take them off to eat, to pee, to read their emails or to do their research. Just 28 days. It might be the making of them.