BLINDSIMMING LADY

LATER BLINDSIMMING

As I said, my brother and I were fairly introspective and isolated children, living as we did on the very edge of a small market town and dappling in this sort of thing. However, in time we eventually became more involved in the usual normal social matters and we both eventually got married, both of us to extrovert types. We had anyway already agreed that we had grown out of what we thought to be an adolescent quirk, albeit rather a late adolescence, since these blindsimming outings ran on into our mid-twenties. My husband, for instance, gathered that I found being blindfolded relaxing, but never understood that there was more to it than that. My brother, I gather, never had occasion to raise it with his wife, and our respective spouses, who incidentally didn’t get on with each other, gave no indications of having had any interests even remotely like ours. I did sometimes, on rare occasions, when left alone in the house, blindfold myself and wander around doing small household tasks. However, I usually finished up bruised through falling over the children’s toys. My brother and I, however, more or less lost any real close contact over the next twenty years or so whilst we both had families and had all the day-to-day worries of children growing up, schooling and finally universities. We did all meet from time to time, of course, and then a strange thing happened. Just into our fifties, I happened to arrange a trip to a National Trust property with my brother and our spouses. Out of the hearing of the others, he suddenly said to me that he and I had visited this particular place in our youth. I thought back but couldn’t remember having been there at all. No, he said, you wouldn’t remember, but I bet you do remember the times you were blindfolded in my car for trips out. This is just one of the places we visited that you never saw at all. Whether that was true or he had made it up as some sort of subterfuge, I didn’t know but I found myself replying, without thinking, that I quite missed those trips. Well, to cut a long story a little shorter, we started blindfold walking again, under the pretext of going bird watching. This is a pastime in which neither of our spouses is the least interested yet which they readily accepted that Chris and I had shared since our youth, as indeed we had. After a few trips with our spouses trying politely to hide their complete boredom in bird watching, we tried a few tentative trips out by ourselves and then found our old fixation re-aroused. So for the some years now and hopefully for some time to come, on a weekday, usually once a month, Chris picks me up at nine in the morning, well after my husband has left for work and we spend a day ‘in the field’ as the bird watchers say. I’m blindfolded for the whole day whilst out with him, at first with patches under large wrap-around sunglasses. Ironically of course, we had to buy binoculars, which are quite expensive, to hang round our necks. One of us, more often me, certainly doesn’t use them! During this time when we went bird-watching, I learnt all the normal bird calls and songs from recordings which one could buy from the RSPB. I knew a lot of them from my young days, but now I could hear and identify birds before Chris could see them. It made the blindfold walks even more interesting for me. There were occasions when I could identify a bird before Chris, and even sometimes others standing around, could see the bird at all.

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