Transcript for Vision 75 podcast, December/January 2016
[RNIB audio logo: RNIB – supporting people with sight loss]
NICKY: Hello and welcome to the December 2015 podcast for
Vision, the magazine for members of RNIB. My name is Nicky
Barranger, and I present the audio version of the magazine. This
is just a taster of Vision, which is produced as a 78 minute long
radio-style programme on CD. Vision includes news, features,
competitions and letters from members of RNIB.
In this podcast, we hear from award-winning travel writer Robert
Macfarlane, who is one of the judges for our writing competition.
We hear from one of our members about how RNIB helped her to
get her back online after losing her sight. And we have an
interview with Minister for Disabled People, Justin Tomlinson.
JONATHAN: Interview with Minister for Disabled People.
NICKY: In May this year, MP Justin Tomlinson was appointed
Minister for Disabled People at the Department for Work and
Pensions. When RNIB was given the opportunity to interview the
Minister, we asked our members to send in questions. Helen
Dearman from our campaigns team put them to Justin Tomlinson
on your behalf.
HELEN: The first question is from Patrick, and he would like to
know – now that you’ve been in your role for a few months, what
are your top priorities, and what are your priorities for improving life
for blind and partially sighted young people?
JUSTIN TOMLINSON: The number one priority is halving the
disability employment gap. The Prime Minister personally has
committed this Government. In the last year alone, we’ve seen
226,000 more people with disabilities get into work. To halve the
disability employment gap, it’s about just over 1 million more – it’s
a big challenge, but it doesn’t half make it easier when the Prime
Minister has made that personal commitment, because it opens
door for me, both to lobby other government departments, to lobby
businesses, the public sector, working with different organisations,
about how we can do that.
And then finally, specifically on Patrick’s point, it’s predominantly
work with Lord Holmes in the House of Lords. He’s done a huge
amount of work to produce some really well-respected reports, and
then working with him to go and meet with the relevant ministers,
particularly on transport issues and the challenge of shared
spaces, which society thought was a really good thing, but
actually, listening to the feedback of people, it is a disaster, and a
lot of local authorities are now realising that spending a huge
amount of money, then retrospectively digging them back in to put
in the safety measures that we need, and so we’re going and
trying to make sure people realise before they make those
mistakes. So he’s been absolutely key to the work I’ve been
doing.
HELEN: Geoff has said that it’s very hard to find a job when
you’re blind. He says he thinks that one of the main problems is
that employers just don’t think that blind and partially sighted
people can do a job as well as others. Do you agree that this is a
problem?
JUSTIN TOMLINSON: I think that’s a really important point that
Geoff has raised, and I know from talking to individuals –
particularly when I talk to younger people, where their friends are
beginning to embark on their career progressions and they want to
be able to do exactly the same. And part of the way that we’re
doing this is through our Disability Confident campaign.
Again, the Prime Minister launched this just over two years ago,
and that is about busting myths, sharing best practice, signposting
businesses to where they can get support and help – whether
that’s advice, whether that is to the Access to Work scheme, which
provides funding either for the employee or the employer to
remove the physical barriers that might prevent somebody from
having work. I mean, I went on amazing visit recently – Wiltshire
Police Headquarters – and almost by accident, they employed
somebody with a disability, and they were so good, they said to the
individual – ‘If only we had found you sooner.’ And they said –
‘Well, I’ve got lots of colleagues who go through an organisation
called Plus – they’re a charitable organisation that help people with
disabilities get into work.’
So they meet with them and they discovered there was a huge
pool of people with brilliant skills but had been overlooked in terms
of being given an opportunity. Now they had a recruitment
challenge – that there was a shortage of people who were willing
to do the ‘999’ call operations. So they then had further
conversations, realised using the Access to Work scheme, they
could get suitable equipment, and suddenly they were able to fill all
these areas up.
These were talented people who sailed through the tough training
and are now doing – not only are they doing a really good job, but
as a first port of call, Wiltshire Police now go to Plus and say –
‘Right – we’ve got two more vacancies. Can your members fill
that?’ And what we have to do is we have to share this information
predominantly now with smaller businesses, because these are
talented people but they need that opportunity to have an
interview, give them a chance.
Often with just small changes, there will be a brilliant benefit to
their organisation and it will make a huge difference to the
individual with a disability. So it’s a real priority for us.
HELEN: You’ve talked about the importance of Access to Work,
and many of RNIB’s members appreciate the scheme and have
benefited from it.
One of our members in such a position is Hugh, and he’s
concerned that Government plans to extend Access to Work to
more people, without increasing funding, will lead to a reduction in
the level of support to individuals, and he asks whether you can
reassure him that if he were to change job, will he continue to
receive the level of support that he currently does and the level of
support that he needs.
JUSTIN TOMLINSON: Well, it’s a really, really important scheme.
It’s probably the single biggest tangible lever that I’ve got as a
Minister to help people with disabilities get into work. And I
understand Hugh’s point – that he is worried that if we keep
increasing numbers, how will that money be shared out?
But actually, we’ve made some significant changes in our terms of
procurement. So for example, 30% of the money that we spend
goes on travel, where actually, back in the real world, what would
happen is if you were working at the same place very day for a
year, you would say to a local taxi company – ‘I’m going to be
going at 8 o’clock every morning to the same place – what deal will
you do for me for a 12-month contract?’ Of course they then give
discounts – it’s in the taxi company’s interest – it’s guaranteed
regular work. And we’ve done that – it’s made a huge saving, and
then there’s more money that’s in the pot. I’m a real passionate
supporter of Access to Work, because it removes those physical
costs that could lead to a barrier to prevent somebody with a
disability get into work.
HELEN: So moving on to some of the Government’s proposed
changes around welfare reform, Mohammed contacted us. He’s in
the employment support and allowance work-related activity group,
and won’t currently be affected by the Government’s plans to cut
support for future claimants in that group by nearly £30 a week.
However, Mohammed is concerned that if he seeks work and then
finds himself unemployed, he’ll be £29 per week worse off, and for
someone surviving on benefits, that’s a lot of money. Mohammed
thinks that rather than encouraging people to seek work, this might
be something of a disincentive.
JUSTIN TOMLINSON: I very much welcome Mohammed’s
comments here, because he’s raised the points at the very heart of
why we’re looking to reform this. When you take a job, there is
always a gamble that it doesn’t quite work, either for the employer
or the employee, and he is worried that he would go into work, for
whatever reason that didn’t work, and that he’d miss out.
And so we are introducing Universal Credit, that will work in real
time, week by week, that will guarantee a minimum income that an
individual will earn, and as they then increase their hours or get
work opportunities, they will increase their money. So they’ll
always be better off in work, which is what we want as a society.
And this is incredibly important, particularly for people with
fluctuating health conditions.
You might work full-time for months on end, and then there might
be an issue for a couple of weeks, and then Universal Credit would
then kick in, guaranteeing that minimum income, and then as you
start to return to work, it would then gradually – your income would
increase and there would be no cliff edges. So really important
points by Mohammed, and we’re doing this reform to give him the
best possible opportunity to get into work.
HELEN: A few years ago, the higher rate mobility component of
DLA was amended, to allow people with severe sight impairment
to receive the same level of financial support that wheelchair users
did, for example – so recognising that they had similar levels of
mobility difficulty. And the additional money that they receive goes
towards transport. Brian has picked up on this issue, and I’m sure
he won’t mind me telling you that he’s 83 years old – so this is an
issue that certainly applies to Brian. He would like to know why
people in receipt of DLA under 65 benefited from the extension of
the scheme a few years ago, and why people who were over 65
didn’t.
JUSTIN TOMLINSON: First of all, I want to pay tribute you as an
organisation for the work that you did to help change that policy a
few years ago, and that was an example of where the work you’ve
done has made a tangible difference. Now, the reality is, DLA –
Disability Living Allowance – and the new system which is PIP –
Personal Independence Payment – it is prioritised at working age
people, because it reflects the fact that the challenges that the
individual faces will limit their ability to have career progression,
earnings, and the ability to save. So it is society’s contribution
towards what they are missing out on.
It’s not an exact science, but the whole heart of the benefits
system is it recognises it’s for working age people, and then once
we get to the age where sometimes we don’t quite keep up, our
bodies, with what we would like to be doing, but then there are the
other benefits – whether that’s the Attendance Allowance, pension
and other things like that.
HELEN: A number of RNIB members and campaigners have
invited their MPs or local councillors to join them on a blindfold
walk, and this is a great opportunity for people to learn more about
some of the barriers and issues that people with sight loss face
every day. And Pete has actually contacted us to extend an
invitation to you. He wonders whether you would like to join him
on a blindfold walk.
JUSTIN TOMLINSON: Well, what a challenge! I have actually
had a go before – I was a local councillor for ten years, before I
became the Member of Parliament. However, that was a journey I
had done countless times, and I don’t think it was really that testing
in a sense, because I could imagine where I was going. So what I
would like to do is I’ve done a huge amount of work on making
venues more accessible, particularly sports venues, and we had
some success recently with the Premier League agreeing finally –
it only took about 20 years of pushing – that they would make their
stadiums more disability-friendly. So I think we’ll combine the two
– we will do a challenge, but we’ll put it in a sporting arena, and I
want to go and see how difficult it is, and I suspect it’s going to be
very difficult, and I shall probably make quite a fool of myself when
I fall over on a number of occasions. And perhaps I’ll invite my
good friend, Lord Holmes, to come along and pass his judgement.
NICKY: Thanks to the Minister for Disabled People, Justin
Tomlinson, and to Helen Dearman for that interview, and to all of
you who supplied the questions.
JONATHAN: Your letters and tips.
NICKY: In Vision, one of our highlights is hearing letters from our
readers. Our star letter for this edition comes from June Burman,
who lives in Colchester in Essex. June wrote in to tell us about a
good experience she had with Online Today, RNIB’s free service
for members who want help to get online. June is in her 80s and
lost much of her sight following an operation, but a technology
course at a local college helped her get back online and onto the
computer. All was going very well, until she changed her Internet
provider, and found that instead of getting a better service, she
and her husband couldn’t get online at all.
JUNE: When we discovered that the broadband had not been
correctly installed and I was not able to use the computer the way I
normally do, it totally cut off my little bit of independence that I
have, because I found that I couldn’t get the normal access to my
groceries line on the computer, I couldn’t do my banking, I couldn’t
order books which I am able to read on my Kindle, and I couldn’t
make medical appointments. So this was very difficult, and I
needed some help.
However, the RNIB came to the rescue and the Vision magazine
suddenly arrived in the post – it was amazing how it came, just
when I desperately needed it and felt so much in despair. And I’d
changed to a printed copy fortunately, because I found that it was
quite easy to read and it was good to hold an ordinary magazine.
When I got to page 14, it was plugging the fact that the computer is
so useful, especially if they’ve not tried it. So I read the article and
found that, free of charge, members could ring the number and get
help on all kinds of matters appertaining to the computer.
So I made a phone call and along came Bryn, an RNIB volunteer,
and Bryn, bless him, made several visits, got it all sorted out for
me, and once again I felt more normal. And I just couldn’t find
words to express my appreciation.
I am an old lady – I’m nearly 82 now – but I’m so grateful that I’ve
still got access to the world at large.
NICKY: Thanks for that, June. And great to hear from a happy
customer. For her star letter prize, June wins a £50 voucher to
spend in the RNIB shop. So do send your letters in.
JONATHAN: Author interview – Robert Macfarlane.
NICKY: Robert Macfarlane is one of the judges for Vision’s writing
competition. Robert is fascinated by the natural world, and has
written a series of book about landscape, travel and the
imagination. As we go to press, his book ‘Landmarks’ has been
shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. Vision editor Clare
Conley asked Robert when he started writing.
ROBERT: I wrote my first book in a basement flat in Cambridge –
so I was underground in the flattest county in England, and I was
writing a book about mountains, which seemed like the right place
to be doing that, and I was in my very early 20s then, and I just
wanted to solve a puzzle for myself, really, which was – Why might
people climb mountains? And I’d been doing that for years myself
without questioning it, but then friends had died and I’d seen more
evidence of people dying for their love of mountains, and it came
to seem such a strange, counterintuitive thing, and I wanted to
explain that, so I wrote a book that tried to explore my own
fascination, but also our cultural fascination with high places.
CLARE: So for our listeners who may not have read any of your
books yet, can you just explain about your style of travel writing,
because it’s not just talking about visiting a place, is it? There’s a
lot more to it than that.
ROBERT: That’s right, yes. I’m fascinated by all the things that
go up into making our movement across countries, through
landscapes, through places – memories, sights, smells, sounds,
associations, moods – the ways places shape the people we are,
the thoughts we have and the language we use. And all of that is
a very complicated and layered business, so my books tend to be
made up of lots of different kinds of writing and kinds of language.
CLARE: So this series is a trilogy – could you just describe the
trilogy? And did you come up with the idea for the whole trilogy at
once?
ROBERT: No. Well, I wrote them over ten years, really – 2002 to
2012 – and they’re three books, and I say they’re about landscape
and the human heart, so this idea of imagination and emotion and
place that has fascinated me and probably will always fascinate
me. The first was about mountains, the second was called ‘The
Wild Places’, about wilderness and its draw and where we might
still find it, and then ‘The Old Ways’, about walking. And each sort
of grew out of the other, as it were.
I’m slowly writing a book about underworlds and subterranean
spaces, which actually is in part about being partially sighted,
because I’ve written three books really about sunlit landscapes,
uplands, vision, and now I’m writing about darkness and I’ve been
down some extraordinary cave systems, tunnel systems. I’ve
been under Budapest, Prague, Paris, and I’m learning about what
it means to see in the dark and to navigate by touch and sound
much more, although of course I’m fortunate enough to, in the end,
be able to come back up to the light again.
CLARE: And what would you say are some of the challenges
when you’re writing about and describing landscape?
ROBERT: Yeah, this is a really good question and I’ve spent
years working at it. The big challenge is cliché – so many people
have written so much about landscape, that when we look at a
landscape, cliché leaps to our lips. We see crashing waterfalls, we
see florid sunsets, we see sublime mountains, and that’s fine – but
as a writer, your job is to kind of spring amazement into the mind’s
eye of the reader, and you can’t do that with cliché. Cliché is kind
of soggy old mattress language, but good writing has that power to
startle – it has a kind of magnesium flash to it.
CLARE: Do you actually take notes on the spot, if you see an
amazing thing?
ROBERT: Another really good question! I get asked that quite a
lot. I have a really bad memory for language, and I have a
reasonably good memory for visuals, as it were, and I’m lucky
enough to be fully sighted, and so a lot of my writing is about what
you can see and what remains in the mind’s eye when you’ve left a
place. But it is true – I do carry a notebook in the back pocket, and
if something leaps into my mind, I try and flip it back onto the
notebook page.
CLARE: And do you take photos as well?
ROBERT: I didn’t. I do occasionally now, because we all travel
with phones and phones all have cameras these days. But on the
whole, not, and in fact my books – they do have a few photographs
in them, but very few, and the reason is that I think language
should do what photography can, and if it’s failing – if language is
failing to be visual, if language is failing to set the imagination
alight and alive of its readers, then it’s kind of failing at its job. If it
needs photography to help it, it’s probably not visual enough, as it
were.
CLARE: I wondered if part of trying to capture that moment when
you’re there – it was something almost like a memory jog for you.
ROBERT: It’s funny – I don’t know if this makes sense, but to be
in a place is to be both assailed by immediacies, but also assailed
by memories. Whenever we’re in a place, we’re in that place,
astonishingly in the moment, but we’re also partly in the past – it’s
reminding us of somewhere we’ve been – a birdsong is recalling a
bird that we heard elsewhere – and realising about the complexity
of what it means to be in a place, and how you might represent
that in language, is a challenge that I haven’t solved, but I kind of –
that fascinates me.
CLARE: And is that something that you’re always really looking for
ways to do, to bring in the whole senses to the experience? And
how do you go about that?
ROBERT: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, when we’re in a landscape,
we have sound coming at us from the back of our heads, we have
scents, we have the feel of wind or air – if we’re in a pine forest, it’ll
be, there’ll be a resin-y scent; we’ll be able to hear bird calls that
we might or might not be able to identify; there’ll be voices,
conversations.
All of this is part of a place, and language is both really good and
really bad at capturing all that, because words come in a row, they
come in a line, they come in a sequence – they can’t really be
simultaneous. But I got fascinated by the ways in which you can
use sound in language – almost – in prose, almost as in a poem –
set up patterns and echoes that might catch some of those
aspects of sound.
CLARE: And then also – I mean, because one of the titles comes
from a line from a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem – and so is that
another thing that you’re drawing from your literary, academic life?
ROBERT: Yes, absolutely. ‘Mountains of the Mind’ is part of one
of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s actually very dark sonnets. But yeah,
I mean Hopkins – if you’ve read any Hopkins, you’ll know that his –
wow – his language flashes and flames and flickers and fires. He
did things to the English language that I’ve never seen anyone
else do, and if you haven’t read him, just find his poem ‘Inversnaid’
or his poem ‘The Windhover’, which is probably his most famous,
and listen to them if you can, read out loud, or read them out loud
yourself. They are incredible, and what they do to the tongue and
the mouth and the brain is a form of magic.
So I love poets like Seamus Heaney, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ted
Hughes, for whom language has a kind of – the power of pebbles
or stones or fire or water.
CLARE: Just thinking about our members who may be thinking at
the moment of entering our competition. What sort of things were
you looking for on the Man Booker judging panel?
ROBERT: Well, the first thing I’d say is – please do enter. I love
judging, I love reading the work of others. The second thing I’d
say is – read. In reading, you learn what cliché is, what’s familiar
to you. When we were judging the Man Booker Prize, in an odd
way the best books, the very best books announced themselves to
us within two pages, three pages. You would often know if you
were in a novel that was going to be very predictable, but the
astonishing novels had a voice and a freshness and a set of
preoccupations that were utterly unique to them.
CLARE: You very kindly agreed to be a judge of our writing
competition this year, which is great. And the theme is ‘journeys’.
Do you have any thoughts and tips for our members who may be
thinking of entering the competition?
ROBERT: Yeah. Three tips: one I’ve touched on – avoid cliché,
fight it at all costs.
The second is: rhythm. A journey is all about rhythm – it’s about
the way the foot falls, it’s about the time you take getting from
place to place. Again, try and vary your rhythms – whether that’s
your sentence rhythms or your paragraph rhythms or your
narrative rhythms. No journey takes place in a single rhythm, and
if you can find a way to write quickly and briefly and then longer
and more reflectively, that I think will be truer to the nature of the
journey.
And the third, I suppose, is this, which is: the challenge of a
journey is getting past A to B. Try writing it straight through and
then try scissoring up the paragraphs into individual paragraphs
and swapping them around, seeing what happens when you
change the order, or even write two versions of the same journey
or a memory version of the journey and the actual journey.
Scissor the paragraphs up and start moving them around,
interleaving them. If you do that, strange things start to happen,
and the journey comes to life.
NICKY: Thanks to Clare Conley and to Robert Macfarlane for that
interview.
JONATHAN: And if you’ve been inspired by Robert Macfarlane,
why not enter our annual writing competition? This year’s theme is
‘journeys’ – whether you want to take us on a trip through time or
talk about your own recent travels, why not give it a go?
The deadline is 15 January 2016 at 4:00pm sharp. Entries should
be a maximum of 1,000 words for prose or 500 words for poetry.
Members of RNIB can enter and submit one entry. Entries should
be sent preferably by email to writingcomp@rnib.org.uk or you can
send them on audio CD, tape, printed A4 paper or in Braille to
RNIB Members Writing Competition, Talk and Support, 105 Judd
Street, London, WC1H 9NE.
For more information, please contact Talk and Support on 0845
330 3723 or email writingcomp@rnib.org.uk.
NICKY: Well, that’s it for this edition of the Vision podcast. We
hope you enjoyed this taster of Vision magazine.
If you’d like to join RNIB as a member and get the full 78-minute
magazine on CD or perhaps in another format six times a year,
plus a range of other benefits, please visit rnib.org.uk/membership
or call the membership team on 0303 123 4555.
The managing editor of Vision is Clare Conley, the audio producer
is Kim Normanton and the sound engineer is Richard Armstrong.
Copyright RNIB December 2015. Registered Charity No 226227.
VO: RNIB – supporting people with sight loss.
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