The Mirror - My Day of Blindness

IT WAS the moment the normally irrepressible Gall Porter was totally lost for words. The TV prosenter broke down in tears as she tried to express her feelings about the handicap that affects one million people in Britain.

Gail was one of three celebrities who volunteered to experience what it is like to be blind. She says: "I was absolutely knackered at the end of it and I've never cried so much in my life ."

Gail, Birds Of A Feather star Llnda Robson and comic Seas Hughes were challenged to make separate journeys from Blackpool to London. For 30 hours, they wore special glasses which imitate a blind person's ability to see shadows but nothing else. The three not only had to make the 280-mile trek but were set extra tasks too. For their own safety, they were accompanied by helpers who work with the blind.

Equipped with white sticks, they had to change transport at least five times, go into a shop and buy a new set of clothes and stay overnight in a hotel. Their obstacle-filled journey radically changed their understanding of blindness and what it entails. The journey is captured in Blind Man's Buff on Channel 4. Read on to see how Gail fared during her 30 hours of almost total darkness.

GAlL PORTER Challenge: To get from Blackpool to Liverpool, stay overnight in Shrewsbury, then go to Coventry and on to London.

Gail thinks it's a clever idea to get the man in the ticket office to speak all the train times into her Dictaphone. But this takes so long she misses her direct Blackpool to Liverpool train and has to change at Birmingham.

After just two hours, she has already bumped into someone and is longing to take the blind glasses off. "I move my head in a way I don't normally," says Gail. "I keep turning it sideways to use my ears when I talk to people." Gail's natural confidence means she's not afraid to ask the carriage full of people to tell her when the train reaches Liverpool.

It is in Liverpool that Gail suffers her worst moment of the trip. A girl she has asked to lead her along the pavement lets her crash into a bollard. Gail is in pain and badly shaken. Worse, as she hears the girl laughing, Gail is not sure if she has been the victim of a sick joke.

"I'm in agony," she tells one of the film crew. "I trusted that girl and I shouldn't have. Now I know.not to trust anyone." She begs anyone who is listening: "Please don't leave me."

Eating with her fingers is a hit-and-miss affair but cutlery is even womse, Gail discovers, as her salad lunch falls off her fork. In a clothes shop, she relies completely on the taste of a male sales assistant who recommends a black, patterned T-shirt. Her shopping challenge complete, she gets a cab to the ferry terminal to Cross the Mersey. She gives the cabbie a £5 note for the £3 fare and is speechless when he offers no change and speeds off.

Her train journey to Shrewsbury goes without a hitch and Gail is relieved to meet a member of railway staff who is trained to assist the blind. In her B&B room, she is allowed to take her glasses off for the first time in 10 hours. Looking at her reflection in the mirror, she is moved by the whole experience. "What strikes me most is that I can take these glasses off and see. Blind people can't," she says, close to tears.

The next morning, the kindly B&B owner drives Gail to the station to get her train to Coventry: The presenter wonders out loud why station announcers don't give blind people enough time to gather their belongings and get off at their stop. She buys a souvenir at Coventry Cathedral to prove she visited, then decides to head back to the station. By the time she reaches the taxi rank, she is ready to give up.

"My emotional state is in your hands," she tells Dave, a genuinely blind man who is accompanying her on the train to London with his guide dog, Ruebens.

Gail is the first of the three to arrive at the final destination, appropriately, the London Eye. But far from being overjoyed to win and take off her glasses, she's overwhelmed.

"People like us who can see don't know how lucky we are," she says. "I was constantly standing in the street asking for help and I didn't mind because I'm a confident person. But it did mean I had to trust people. "I cried when that girl and her friends led me into a bollaxd and left me. It was really traumatic, horrible. They were all giggling so I thought something funny was happening. When I had the horrible bump, I just wondered why they had done it.

'Then my fiance (Dave Hipgrave of Toploader) called me and told me to pull myself together. But why are people like that?" Other difficult moments were taking the bus and Underground. 'The train was a little easier because I always arranged for someone to meet me." says Gail. "But people assume things. They assume you want their help when you don't, necessarily. "Like when I was in Coventry Cathe­dral and just wanted to find the souvenir shop, but a man insisted on guiding me round the whole place telling me he'd had a lot of experience with blind people.

"At the same time, some people axe frightened to help. The best way is for people to ask, rather than forcibly help. "Also, it's the little things that are difficult, like people leaving rubbish out in the street or bicycles coming up the inside ."

Gail considered pulling out of the experiment when she tried on the special blind glasses for the first time. "I thought: 'What have I let myself in for?' But it was a really interesting experiment. I was probably the most emotional about it. I was quite affected by the realisation of how lucky we are."