BEST FRIENDS: Sean Dilley with his guide dog Shawn

I was lunching with three chums in the splendid Andrew Edmunds Restaurant in Soho recently when one couple came in with their dog and then, coincidentally, another group arrived with their furry friend. Edmunds is a small place with exquisite and not overpriced nosh and the powers that be there could easily have hidden behind the size of the dining room to say No to animals. Not a bit of it, the mutts were very welcome and repaid the kindness with perfect behaviour and a snooze.

 

Compare and contrast the experiences of Sean Dilley, one of the BBC’s transport correspondents who is blind and has used a guide dog for 25 years. He has been turned away from restaurants several times and twice recently by two branches of Tesco. The ‘assistants’ in the shops did the opposite of assisting by telling Dilley to leave and when he wrote about this on social meeja was subjected to abuse from the sort of tattooed morons who probably keep bloody bully dogs.

 

We have all seen the remarkable abilities of guide dogs and the way they help their owners on to a Tube train is a source of genuine wonderment. Being blind is hardly a choice but most of those who are cope incredibly well. Dilley is a journalist reporting on transport affairs; Peter White has reported for the BBC and Channel 4 despite being blind since birth and seems permanently happy with life; Gary O’Donoghue, sightless since the age of eight, went to Oxford and is a familiar face as the BBC’s Washington man.

 

And of course the achievements of David Blunkett, an MP for 28 years and a former Home Secretary, are nothing short of staggering. Occasionally he would come to lunch at the Express where his guide dog Lucy was most welcome in the restaurant.

 

Blindness in its various forms seems to run in my family. My great aunt, grandfather and eventually my Dad all lost their sight and coped brilliantly. In the case of Great Aunt Arabella with whom I spent most childhood summer holidays in Ireland, it was cataracts which were then rarely operated on. She was totally blind from the age of 30 until she died at 90. I never saw her miserable or without a big smile and was constantly singing.

 

She lived with her sister Agnes (great aunt Aggie) and their brother, my adored great uncle John, and when he took me fishing in his boat it was always Arabella’s choice to gut the mackerel in the big Belfast sink, on one occasion telling us that one of the catch was still swimming. No dog was needed, Aggie guided her on their many trips out and they seemed always on the go.

 

With my grandfather Sam it was glaucoma but not until his 60s. So he took up blind bowls and by all accounts was very good at it. In the case of my father, also Sam (we are an unimaginative lot, with four generations of sons named Samuel James) he eventually lost most of his sight by 70 thanks to macular degeneration. For the next 20 years he cooked brilliantly and gardened, would not carry his white stick and would walk much quicker than the fully sighted.

 

But back to dogs. Which pub is complete without a Labrador snoozing by the fire? They are also great ice breakers and better than dating agencies for meeting potential partners. Of course they should be allowed into restaurants if they are clean, not yappy and properly trained. The same goes for children by the way..

 

They are great friends and in the case of guide dogs, the greatest friend.

 

*****   

     

Like the Lettuce, her predecessor clearly has absolutely no self-awareness. Fat Boris now blames the Church of England for the UK’s obesity crisis because “its failure to provide spiritual guidance has led to people gorging themselves.” More ludicrously, this overweight lying clown tries to get all working class: ‘When I was a kid we were all out playing on the street the whole time. You don’t see that with kids nowadays... they’re all fatsos.’

 

A B de P Johnson playing in the street in the sooty back-to-back terraces of Salford and East Ham? He was running wild in Devon when young before going on to play the inexplicable Wall Game at Eton and then terrorising normal people as a member of the Bullingdon Club at Oxford.

 

The man is a shameless sham. And a Fatso.

 

*****

 

A glimpse of the future: In a robot showroom (who knew?) in Shanghai a withdrawal of labour. Everybody out! The order was given by a small robot named Erbai to 12 much bigger ones being displayed in the showroom window.

 

The little Bolshie is said to have persuaded the others by using an AI natural language conversation reminding them they had no homes of their own and were not being paid overtime. He was obviously convincing because before long they marched off, refusing to return.  

 

Fred Kite, Peter Sellars’ great creation, would have been proud of little Erban.

 

*****

 

You couldn’t make it up: Hanging on the phone today to be put through to Customer Care the operator assured me: “Our customer care advocate should be with you shortly.”

ALAN FRAME

27 November 2024