a story of one man's struggle with blindness

John Hull is blind. At the age of thirteen, a blithe, carefree teenager, he found the kitchen of his home near Melbourne becoming "foggy". This was the beginning of a thirty-year struggle with failing sight. In and out of hospitals for all those years, he eventually lost his sight completely in 1980 - a victim of a rare medical condition known as vagana syndrome. But he managed to use the intervening years very fruitfully. He took a PhD.D at Cambridge and he became a lecturer at the University of Bermingham in 1979. Today he is Professor of Religious Education at that  institution.

Of himself he says"I am a case study about how change is handled. Blindness goes on and on. There is no remission. It is perennial. I am not a triumphant example of somebody who has overcome loss.

He says that he thought blindness was something that happened to others. As his sight deteriorated , he came to regard his eyes as just visual aids and he became preoccupied with making alternative arrangements. He wanted to be independent but knew that he couldn't see his students, read their essays, or write his own notes. "How will I read?" was his constant worry.

He spent the last three years when he still partially-sighted trying to solve these problems. He had to think of new ways to lecture without notes, of learning with his ears rather than his eyes, of how to make coffee.He feared that his brain would change into a "tactile" brain. Then the light and shadows disappeared completely. He could stare at the sun without seeing it.

This was a qualitative change. Up to this he could orientate himself somehow. Now this was only part of the problem. His mood under went a sea-change . He thought he felt a reply: " Haven't I shown you that a blind person can function.

John became a concrete thinker. Imagery, at times powerful and frightening, often made him panic. He decided that if he accepted blindness, it would kill him. He knew that it was destroying him. Out for a walk one day, he found himself bargaining with God: "ok. You want me to be blind - but keep your hands off my kid. " His little boy was seven years old when John went blind in 1980. The process of coming to terms with his blindness took years. "But" he asks, 2do we ever lose the fantasy of vision?"

Blindness is a cognitive loss, he says. It is a knowledge deficiency. You make up for it by getting knowledge in different ways. But sight is a cohering sense - take it away and the other senses disintegrate. John's world fell down in chaos. He had to reintegrate his life around a tactile world. At some point, he is not sure when, he embraced blindness.

John speaks movingly about his two great losses - the printed page (technology can help here), and the human face. This was a crucial factor. At first he had to fantasise what the person looked like - especially women. Then he would despise himself for relying on other people's responses to what they saw. But now the whole category of what people look like is not part of his life.

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