Cathy Birchall - Touching The World: A Blind Woman, Two Wheels, 25,000 Miles

Being blind means you see the world in a different way.

Wandering through the everyday things of life you may well cross paths with a person using a long white cane or a lovely bundle of fur called a guide dog. If this happens you will probably step to one side to let them pass before thinking, I wonder how they?

This story, in many ways, reflects on such things as throughout our long miles together on a motorcycle people would stand shaking their heads on realising Cathy was blind. You see, she belongs to the 5% of visually impaired people who have no useful vision. In Cathys case I do mean nada, zip, nothing. Across time life robbed her of what once was, leaving only recollections of a visual existence in her memory. Now she lives in a continuous rolling grey cloud that drifts across her vision swamping all before it.

With this answer, this description, this scary thought for most of us, you may well be formulating your next question:

But if she cant see how can she come to know and write about the world?

A fair question to pose but we might also ask why blind people watch television, go to the cinema, or sit in theatres? Moreover, when they do, does this lack of sight mean they gain little or no understanding of what transpires before them? Our answer to this is contained throughout the pages of our meandering journey through this chaotic, scary, wonderful, exhilarating, delightful world.

Its important to understand that each one of us constructs a different world, despite having the same things in front of our very eyes. How is this possible? I will leave that philosophical curiosity for you to ponder, but in truth, Cathy experienced so much more of the world than just a film or a stage production as she physically and emotionally lived and breathed the story in its entirety.

With that in mind we would like to say that we never actually set out to write a book about her blindness as such. Blindness is only one aspect of Cathys life, not the totality of it; it is not who she is. The title of this book was chosen long ago because we wanted to encompass her blindness as one of the THREE very different aspects to the story. To do anything else, for us, would have been to miss an important panoply of experiences and memories written deeply into us, in both similar and different ways. If we had done anything else it would have weakened the very true tale that these pages will tell.

For now, I would like to add my own thanks concerning the communication system provided by Autocom. Without their support, I would have been seriously compromised in my ability to translate vision into words, conditions into emotions, and the world into shades of everything else in oh so many different ways. Try to imagine a year of describing the world so that you can share it in a meaningful way with another person as it sits before your eyes in ways youve never before thought of recounting. Now you are me.

Because of this experience I became a better person in fundamentally different ways. No greater thing could I have asked for. Now, before we go on:

You are standing alone on an empty beach. The sky above you is the brightest blue

Bernard Smith