My inspiration was always there

Our lives were naturally loving and re-assuring; the fact that mum read us stories from her braille book and dad tipped around in his own darkness didn't touch us at all then.

Lying on my bed sobbing, until my stomach ached and eyes were sore, I'd tried to absorb the fact our lovely father wouldn't be coming home anymore.
I can still visualise Nana Nesbitt sitting brushing her hair as she stared in the mirror and I looked across at her from my soft sqidgy pillow wondering if I should ask her the question that sat in my head. House-sparrow's sang in the eaves as the ebb and flow of that ordinary life swung away in that terribly ordinary moment of enormous change.
Our Harold Hill, Essex home was packed with winter scents which permeated every corner of the home where once our dad had played his accordian or fiddled with his tape-recorder. It had always felt that those comfortable times would continue and not stop as violently as they then did.

We ate cornflakes in our small kitchen,cleaned our teeth,flicked our faces with the corner of a cold flannel then started the ritual searching for plimsol bags,books and coats whilst knowing, but quiet adults, interwove our small worlds with few words being said; but many tears shed!

Even to this day I have never seen so many beautiful floral tributes spread across a bed-spread. Perhaps those tributes flowed in our house that day were in recognition of this special man who hadn't allowed blindness to beat him.

I recall, not so long ago, spending a week-end in a hotel where I'd not had the chance to locate where all the light switches were in the bathroom.
I'd been a bit too self assured by getting to this small room in the dark, as my blind parents always had to do, but got disorientated when I got to the bathroom and the door slammed being me.
I remember, in my blind panic, knocking my hand against the edge of the sink and then slamming my head on a cupboard. I got down on my hands and knees and then reached out to identify my exit.
I think that was the first time in my life I realised, in only a few moments of course, the challenges my parents faced throughout their lives.

It astonishes me how dad tapped his way around Swan Gardens in Coventry, shortly after the loss of his sight, going out in the dark as he didn't want people to feel sorry for him.

I wish I had known my dad as I grew and I wish he could have walked me aisle when I married in my early twenties as I wish he'd had the chance to see his grand-children, scattered around the world, grown into people we can all be proud of.

I'm glad that mum found the courage to elope from Northamptonshire to marry my dad in London but sad that she had to elope in the first place.

I used to have crazy dreams about how one day they would both have eye's and see the world that we saw; but perhaps-in a funny way they did.

I have raised money for Orbis , which gives sight back to people in poorer countries and so in a distant way others see because of them...my beautiful and special parents wherever they might now be!