Outlook 33
Autumn 2016
Remember a Charity in your Will week
12-18 September - Special Edition
News
RNIB Connect
Highlights from the first 6 months of our new community
A Gift Passed On
An exclusive short story, by award winning author Horatio Clare.
Interview with Horatio Clare
Words of Wisdom
You told us what words of wisdom you would pass on.
Eye Health
Find out the facts about Diabetic Retinopathy.
Welcome to your latest edition of Outlook.
This is a special edition of the new Outlook newsletter to coincide with Remember a Charity in your Will week, which is held from 12th to 18th of September. As well as letting people know they can support their favourite charity in this way, the campaign also asks the question “What words of wisdom would you pass on?”
Tying into this theme we have an exclusive short story from author Horatio Clare, written especially for Outlook, and an update on what’s been happening in the new community RNIB Connect. As well as this we’ll have the usual mix of news and features.
Finally, I want to thank you for your support of RNIB. We really couldn’t keep making everyday better for everyone affected by sight loss without you!
I really hope you enjoy reading this special edition.
Matt Smith
Editor
News
Remember A Charity In Your Will Week
Every year, more and more people leave a gift to charity in their Will. With a third of our voluntary income coming from gifts given in this way,we really wouldn’t be able to continue our vital work without them. The problem is that manypeople don’t know they can help us by doing this.
That’s why we’re taking part in RememberA Charity In Your Will Week. Between 12-18 September over 150 charities will come together to spread the message of how you can do something legendary by remembering your favourite charity in your Will.
During the week, as well as asking people to think about this, we’ll also be asking them to tell us what legendary words of wisdom that they would pass on. They can be practical, profound, witty or wise, such as:
“Don’t wait for Sunday to wear your Sunday best”
or
“Life is not a rehearsal. Live it!”
You can get involved by sharing your own words of wisdom on twitter and facebook using #mywisdomand#rnib.
Alternatively become a living legend by leaving a gift to RNIB. Please visit rnib.org.uk/legend for your free guide to Wills and legacies or call us on 0845 600 0313.
***
Wear dots ... raise lots!
This October is once again the month where RNIB asks it’s supporters to Wear dots ... raise lots!
By wearing dots you’ll be highlighting the impact of braille, raising funds and helping us be there for those who need us most.
Whether at a social club, work, at school or with a group of friends, get together and rock the dots with dotty clothes, dotty cakes or dotty nails.
Last year the children and staff at Bilsthorpe Flying High Academy raised money for RNIB by holding a dotty bonanza.
Roman Baker, aged seven, is a pupil at the school. He is partially sighted and inspired his fellow pupils and teachers to go dotty! He and his brother Isaac wore t-shirts spelling out their names in dots.
He says “RNIB need money and then they can buy and make things for partially sighted people like me. I don’t let it stop me; I’m quite good at running around the playground!”
Taking part in Wear dots is easy and fun. Just register to receive a free Wear dots ... raise lots fundraising pack at or call 0345 345 0054 (Monday-Friday 9 am to 5 pm).
RNIB Connect
We’re now 6 months young with so many great stories to share...
As readers of the last issue of Outlook will know, we launched RNIB Connect in February this year. RNIB Connect brings together everyone affected by sight loss - those are blind and partially sighted, family, friends and supporters. The last six months have seen some real highlights.
We’ve collected the best for you here in Outlook magazine:
RNIB Connect welcome events
In March we launched the community with RNIB Connect welcome events across the nations. These social events brought together blind and partially sighted members with the wider community affected by sight loss. The events were received well and events included local societies, family and friends.
“It’s a growing community, where people have got life and hope again. People are doing gardening, bungee-jumping, bowling, swimming – there’s nothing that you can’t do.”
Shadeen - Connect community member from London on the great ways to be involved locally in RNIB Connect
RNIB Connect Welcome telephone groups
In March we ran 10 RNIB Connect welcome meetings as telephone groups for members to find out more. Over 60 people took part and shared their views about how they would like to connect together with others by telephone, face to face or online, through RNIB Connect.
"I'm a computer user and find Skype very useful, I have friends on Skype. I'm housebound but have several interests including natural history - I used to be a keen organic gardener and involved in wildlife recordings - I would like to connect with others over the phone to share these interests.
Roy, Brighton
The groups shared lots of ideas and options about how they would like to get involved in the RNIB Connect community.
Communications panel formed to steer Connect communications
RNIB Connect’s Communications Panel formed early in 2016 to help steer our communications, particularly in the magazine, radio and online. Our first meeting was held in April, with a great start on the roadmap for what communications and stories are important to the community.
“I’m a member of the Connect Communications Panel. This shapes Connect magazine and other communications, and helps us to share our voices across the community.”
Hussein, Aberdeen, RNIB Connect Communications panel member
Community email group for East Midlands members
RNIB Connect community members have set up their own community email group in the East Midlands to help share local news and events. This pioneer activity is being piloted and it is hoped we can roll out across the community and help bring other members together.
Art and music telephone groups
Telephone discussion groups are facilitated by RNIB. With the wealth of creativity in the Connect community, several new arts-based groups were started including choir and visual art groups.
One choir discussion group participant, Nicki, shared advice from her experience of running a local choir. Her tips included advice on picking a venue, circulating recordings ahead to help members prepare and practical tips on funding local choir groups.
These are just a few of the highlights from the first 6 months of RNIB Connect. If you or a loved one is affected by sight loss, you’re welcome to join up. You’ll have opportunities to connect with other community members locally, on the phone and online.
Joining RNIB Connect is completely free. Speak to the Connect team, phone 0303 1234 555 or visit rnib.org.uk/connect
The following story was specially commissioned for this edition of Outlook. It is written by author and journalist Horatio Clare.
Winner of the Somerset Maughan award for his first novel “Running for the Hills” an account of his childhood in Wales, he has published several books including an acclaimed Children’s story “Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot” which won the Branford Boase award for best Children’s book 2016. His best selling travelogue “Down to the Sea in Ships” was winner of the Dolman Travel Book of the Year, and his writings have also regularly appeared in the national press and on BBC radio.
Horatio has written this exclusive story to tie in with the themes of this year’s Remember a Charity in your Will week campaign, of legendry words being passed on. We really hope you like it.
A Gift Passed On
Daniel was a tall boy, 22 years old, not yet a man, with red hair, porcelain pale and skinny as a fish with large brown eyes. We loved him as someone who was clever and kind, sensitive, a bit of a wispy boy but passionate about things that mattered. Books, ideas, university tutors, the course, the news, his family, especially his sister, and his few close friends were very important to him. He could get very excited and agitated when politics and the ways of the world came up.
Daniel on unfairness, Daniel on exploitation, and Daniel on violence were the big ones; he would raise his voice, wave his arms about and flush pink when he got going. In particular he was appalled and terrified by violence.
We were at uni in a little city where fights and small horrors of all kinds were frequent. Daniel did not like going out to the seething squares and hollering streets when all the crowds were drinking. He avoided any rowdy place with a shudder. When the rest of us went out after boys and women and dancing, Daniel stayed in, reading. His grades were the best. He would be an academic, we thought, or go into a think-tank or something; a Masters in London or Cambridge, then further study here or abroad - his brain and his reading were going to give him the world, we believed.
It was a wild Friday night towards the end of the summer term when the incident occurred which is the subject of this story. It was only a small thing but I will never forget it.
I had not been a good girl for a lot of my time at uni. The end of second year, we told each other, was when you had to start pulling things together if you were going to get a good degree at the end of the third, and so I told my boyfriend and another friend with whom I had been whiling away many happy hours that I needed space and time to myself, and I found a desk in the library I liked, and there I lived for a couple of weeks, catching up like mad.
That Friday I was leaving the library at closing time when I saw Daniel. He was talking to one of the librarians, collecting books and discussing others he needed from another library. I waited.
"Hey Ellie!" he said when he saw me. "Alright? How's scholarship?"
"So so," I said, "Derrida!"
"I love Derrida," he said.
"You would," I retorted, "I drank a lot of gin on Monday night and understood him but he's buggered off again. What are you up to?"
"Romantics," he said. "Absolutely wonderful."
"Who's your favourite? Byron?"
"Coleridge. Of course. But I love Keats. And Shelley. Been reading Hogg today."
"Who's Hogg?"
"One of Shelley's mates at Oxford. Wrote a biography of him that got slaughtered when it came out, full of evasions, but it's lovely, so funny."
We walked up Thief Street talking like this and came to the junction where Paternoster Square spreads off to the right and Budd Street goes up the hill. Paternoster was already crammed, the music from the Australian place thudding at the crowds. Everyone was rushing their first and second pints and shouting.
"I go this way," Daniel said, nodding up the hill. We both lived in Hawthorne Hall, over by the station.
"But that's quicker."
"I prefer this way," Daniel said.
I put caught his arm with mine and pulled it close.
"Walk me home," I said, "I'll look after you."
He laughed and gave in. We crossed the square, arm in arm. I got the usual looks and one of the usual whistles. I glanced up at Daniel.
"Are you blushing for me Danny?"
"I don't know how you stand it," he muttered. He was.
"It's nothing," I said. "Funny thing is they don't whistle when I dress up for going out, only when I'm dressed like a student."
"Their saliva dries in their mouths," he said, "They can't breathe properly. I've seen you dress up."
I laughed. I felt very happy and I squeezed his arm in mine.
As we turned up into Railton Road I was actually thinking about kissing Daniel. He had had a girlfriend at home when we first came to Uni but I hadn't heard anything about her for a long time. My boyfriend was boring me with all his messages, and my other friend had gone silent. I was wondering how his body would look and feel, how he joined up, if all that passion would come out straight away, or slowly, from shyness. It was one of those strange dreamy moments when you realise you have liked somebody for a long time but never told yourself. His arm felt good, stronger than he looked.
That was when the lads spotted us. Five of them in a pack, suited and booted, they would have said, and on something, definitely peaking early. They came up to us in a tight bit of pavement, squeezed between parked cars and walls.
"Oh, what?" the leader shouted at Daniel, "How does a fuglyging-er get to ride something like that?"
"We're just friends," Daniel said, quietly but clearly. I winced. You never answer, and you never stop walking, but Daniel had done both.
"Wanna scratch my back sweetheart?" said another, to me.
"Excuse us," Daniel said, and he tried to get by them, aiming for a tiny gap between the leader and the wall.
"Did you just push me mate?" said the leader, instantly.
Daniel stopped dead. He looked at the leader. Daniel was the taller but this lad was a fighter, if nothing else. I put my hands in my pockets, gripped a pen in my left hand and my keys in my right.
Now Daniel spoke. He spoke slowly and clearly and this is what he said:
"I have put my hand into the hamper; I have looked upon the sacred barley; I have eaten out of the drum! I have drunk and was well pleased! I have said KonxOmpax, and it is finished!”
Everyone seemed to freeze. The leader said - "What? KonxOmpax what?"
His sidekick, who I thought was the really nasty one, said, "The barley is finished?"
Two or three of the others burst out laughing. Daniel grinned. I couldn't help smiling.
"What's that about?" the leader cried, to his troops. "I must be off my face - are you on drugs?" he asked Daniel. Daniel shook his head.
"Look after him love, he's a keeper," said the leader to me. He banged Daniel on the arm, "Nice one!" and they all went past us, the sidekick shouting "KonxOmpax!" and doing Karate moves down the street.
"What just happened?" I asked Daniel.
"Hogg and Shelley," he said. "Hogg was in London, a drunk was going to beat him up, but Hogg had been reading about Orpheus who supposedly wrote it. It's one of the Eleusinian mysteries. If you say it right anyone who hears it is compelled to ask questions. He said it to the drunk and the same thing happened. He told Shelley, and Shelley loved it. He went around saying KonxOmpax and it is finished. Just like that chap!"
Reader, I took Daniel home. You are more than welcome to the Eleusinian mystery of Orpheus; I give it to you as a gift, as it was given to me. Daniel, I am afraid, you cannot have. He is a keeper and I am keeping him.
**
The narrator in the story kept hold of Daniel, something she loved, and passed on those special words, that Eleusinian mystery that had been given to her.
You too can do something legendary this September by passing on your words of wisdom (see the next feature for more details). You can also help us hold onto our much loved services such as Talking Books, Emotional Support and Sight Loss Advisers, vital services that make such a difference to the lives of people who are blind and partially sighted by leaving a gift in your Will to RNIB.
For more information on how you can do something amazing and help us continue to be there for everyone living with sight loss, now and in the future, call 0845 600 0313 or visit rnib.org.uk/gift for your free guide to Wills and legacies.
Interview with Horatio Clare
Outlook talked to Horatio about the story A Gift Passed On, having his books made into talking books, the importance of accessible reading and his inspirations.
What was your inspiration for writing A Gift Passed On?
Well you gave me the title and the theme of passing on advice or words. So I started thinking about legacy in a wider sense. I wanted to tell that story about Shelley, or his friend Hogg, using that spell that might still work today so really it was a combination of having a little story that I’d longed to tell and the theme of the campaign.
What books have inspired you and what does reading mean to you?
What books have inspired me? Well it changes all the time but I guess it was mostly children’s books that started me reading. I remember “The turbulent term of Tyke Tiler” which was read to us in school that was an auditory experience. Then adventure stories like Chas McGill - The Machine Gunners and Fathom Five. I loved Fathom Five! Those kind of books because there was no more electrifying experience that you could havereally. That was where it started, definitely.