A vision of what it means to be blind

To give us a sense of precisely how blind Selina Mills is she asks us to cover our right eye completely with our right hand and put a fist up in front of our left eye, so it blocks our central sight. ‘Now imagine the remaining sight is murky and blurry, as if covered in Vaseline or clingfilm.’

That really is quite blind. Born completely blind in one eye (a hand-painted glass eye was fitted when she was ten), Mills has been gradually losing sight in the other. Now, with just 15 per cent of her sight left, she is ‘legally blind’ and has had a social services person round to her house to give her ‘cane-training’, including a choice of cane tips (‘pencil’, ‘marshmallow’, or ‘rolling marshmallow’), and lessons on how to swish efficiently. What she most misses, she tells us, is the colour blue, which she now sees as ‘a sort of dirty-elephant-grey’.

Happily married to an ‘eccentric Oxford academic’, as she fondly describes her husband, who is also her ‘guide dog’, Mills, who has worked as a senior reporter for Reuters and the Daily Telegraph, sets about in this spirited book – part memoir and manifesto, part history of blindness from Neanderthals to Helen Keller – to get this message across to the sighted population: not all blind people are (a) saintly, like St Lucy, (b) visionary, like the mythical Greek seer Tiresias, (c) pitiful and helpless, like John Everett Millais’s ‘Blind Girl’ or (d) tragic, like Oedipus or Mr Rochester.

Of the 350,000 blind people in Britain, the 12 million in the USA and the 250 million in the world with serious visual impairment, the vast majority, she reminds us, are normal people who tread in dog poo (hence, partly, Mills’s own unwillingness to have a genuine guide dog in the house) and live ordinary, non-tragic lives, not existing in ‘blackness’ or ‘darkness’, just not-seeing, which is different.