By Ian Hutton

Minor mistakes

My aim is to tip the contents of this bottle in my hand neatly down that plug-hole there. The trouble is, the bottle contains some kind of sulphuric acid and I, am blind. 

But, blocked drains come to us all and as someone once said, “Blindness is not for sissies.” 

So, I place my fingertips at the plug-hole edge and, using my thumb as a guide, carefully line the bottle up in the hope that, when I tip it, the mouth will meet the offending orifice. Then I withdraw my hand, remind myself not to jerk the bottle away too suddenly when the lethal concoction hits the trapped water, take a deep breath and pour.
 
Spot on! I wait for the roar and stench of the chemical reaction. Nothing yet. I keep pouring. “Any minute now,” I think. Still nothing. I have now tipped the entire contents of the bottle into the drain and am standing back, ready for the inevitable explosion. My reward?  Silence. A quick sniff at the empty container explains it all. Turpentine. 

I vaguely consider the option of tossing a match at the confounded plug-hole but decide instead to limit my mistakes to small ones. 

Not so the Pakistani judge who was presiding in a recent terrorism case. One of the exhibits was a hand-grenade that had been found in the possession of the accused. He, the accused, claimed that it was a dummy grenade and challenged the judge to test his assertion by pulling the pin. The judge took up the challenge, pulled the pin and, to his eternal surprise, found the accused's claim to be totally false. 

Errors of judgement of that magnitude are, I'd venture to say, relatively uncommon among blindies. Perhaps that's because we are more in the habit than most of fixing our minds on the task to hand. We are, after all, in more danger than most of making a fatal mistake, creating a misunderstanding, committing an oversight or even generating suppressed mirth. 

For instance, one seldom hears of a blind person catching the wrong bus, let alone being run over by one. I must admit though to once having slipped up on the first count and ending up on a two-hour tour of the Durban Bluff which culminated at a bus depot in an industrial area somewhere south of the city. 

Sometimes, of course, avoiding such unnecessary errors means being methodical. Take changing a light-bulb for instance. We blindies would never try and do it alone. It would need three of us. One to hold the ladder, one to find the socket and one to sweep up the ash.
 
There are, however, some slip-ups that are not that easy to avoid. 
I called a taxi once and was waiting for it outside the driveway gate. A car pulled up in the neighbouring entrance just to the right of me. In a flash, I was round the back of it and whipping open the passenger door. The startled couple inside, evidenced by their frightened gasps, convinced me that this was not my cab. 

I suspect that my deft apology was all that stood between me and being summarily blown away that day. 

And so it was, as I was sitting and thinking about this subject the other night that I decided, as a small treat, to pour myself a shot of Jack Daniels. I like it on the rocks. So I felt about in the freezer and discovered inside one of the frosted-over packets with its frosted-over contents, some left-over ice from a long-ago party and popped a couple of lumps into my glass. I sat back and, sipping at my tipple, recalled a nice little gaffe that a veteran blindy told me he'd once made. 

He was a dashing young varsity student then. One morning, he dashed out of his residence to get to a lecture, only to find that it was raining. So, he dashed back in, donned his raincoat and dashed back out again. 

Head down and hunched against the deluge, he tapped his way down the path to the gate. When he got there, he realised that the rain had suddenly and mysteriously ceased. It took a few moments for the truth to dawn. The downpour he'd been in had come, not from the heavens above, but from a giant garden sprinkler!

So, there I sit, sipping away at my Tennessee treat and making my usual mistake of staying up way too late. 
But what's this!? There's something in my drink. It feels like a soggy moth. And there's another one! Gingerly, I extract the squishy items.

Then I realise what this is and yes. It's true…
Jack Daniels and frozen cauliflower do not go well together.