Monday 4 October 2010

Monday 4th October 2010

I went for a walk with a blind friend of mine at the weekend.
It was one of these 'Orienteering' things, where you are dropped off in the middle of no-where with a map and a compass and you have to find your own way back.

I bet you are thinking to yourself, "dropped off in the middle of no-where with a map, a compass and a blind man? What a twat!!"

But it was no ordinary map we had.
It was a braile map, a map for blind people.
A map so that even when blind people cannot see where they are going and don't know where they are, they can still find their way home.

So the plan was, I would do the compass thing and my blind friend would read the map.

All was going well and we seemed to be making real progress, save for the countless times the blind man fell over stuff.
Some of the time I could have warned him, but it seemed more fun at the time just to let him trip.
But then disaster struck.
And disaster came in the form of lunch.

We had been orienteering for a couple of hours and were certain that it wouldn't be long before we would see civilisation again (well I would, obviously he wouldn't) so we decided to stop for a bite to eat.

I had some very nice Tuna mayonaise with sweetcorn and just the smallest dash of chilli sauce to give it a nice kick, and I had it in a crusty cob which was fresh that morning.
The daft blind one had crackers, cheese and crisps.
He had a peculiar appetite this one, but I thought it couldn't hurt.

Once we finished our respective meals and washed them down our drinks of choice, we set off again.

It wasn't long before I realised that instead of getting closer to the end of the trek, we appeared to be returning to our starting point, but in a very roundabout sort of way.

"Are we following that map?" I kept asking.
"To the step." came the reply, everytime.

After walking for a further six hours, but getting nowhere, I grabbed the map of the stupid blind man only to realise that all the crackers and crisps consumed earlier had resulted in crumbs being dropped on the braile map thus confusing the man's fingers into thinking we were going the right way whilst being led on a merry dance through the forest.

Gawd knows how these blind people ever get round to reading a book.
Without eating I would guess...............

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