F
resh back from their travels to Australia, Kevin and his wife Margaret invite me into their beautiful home. It is full of hand- crafted tapestries, shapely sculptures and tactile fabrics – a haptic record representing their life. “Australia was lovely; it was over 25 degrees every day,” Kevin chuckles, amused that while England was tackling the snow, he and Margaret were enjoying a well- deserved break over 10,000 miles away. “It wasn’t all relaxing though. I met up with Vision Australia to share ideas on how blind and visually impaired people can participate fully in everyday life,” he adds. Kevin is blind. But instead of treating his blindness as a disability he has embraced it and used it to fire his passion to improve the world. Now aged 59, Kevin was born nine
weeks prematurely at home. Cold and blue, he was rushed to hospital where he was put in an incubator and suffered from oxygen toxicity causing retinopathy of prematurity and blindness. “Although I lost all the vision in my right eye and most of the sight in my left, I am very lucky,” Kevin says sincerely. “A lot of babies suffered brain damage too, so I have a lot to be thankful for,” he adds, putting much of us to shame for the eyesight we take for granted.
After being sent to a boarding school for blind children, run by nuns, at the age of two, Kevin was integrated into mainstream secondary school in Liverpool. He went on to study History at Cambridge University, becoming President of the Union and Editor of the University newspaper Varsity. After being turned down for
“Despite editing the student newspaper at Cambridge, when I applied to the BBC for a journalism position I got turned down because I was blind.”
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“If I can’t give something my all then I don’t do it.”
12 SUSSEX LIVING FOR MID SUSSEX April 2011
www.sussexliving.com
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