The 5th Sense Annual Lecture ‘An adventure of the senses’ Tuesday 15th November 2011, Institute of Physics Speaker key GM Gill Morbey, Sense CEO SA Samira Ahmed BA Benedict Allen JG Joe Gibson JC John Crabtree, Sense Chairman MA Member of audience GM Good evening. My name is Gill Morbey, I’m the Chief Exec of Sense. The Sense annual lectures are aimed at making us think. They are there to provoke discussion, and this is the fifth annual lecture. Last year we had Brian Lamb and Heather Murdoch, very much around policy and practice, and this year I think the lecture will be just as challenging and probably challenge some of our own assumptions. A little bit about our world of deaf blindness. The world of deaf blindness, and indeed the wider disability world, tends to be risk averse. Even when we are brave enough to allow and support deaf blind people to take risks, we do all the risk assessments, for working with deaf blind people we are the people still with the power, and a deaf blind person’s achievements are somehow still our achievements. We describe deaf blind people’s experiences as inspiring and it kind of has a patronising feel about it, and so I know the lectures tonight are going to make us think about risk, think about the experiences and opportunities that we all take, perhaps, but also particularly that our deaf blind colleagues and friends are allowed to take and actually are supported to take. I’m absolutely delighted tonight to welcome back as our Chair this evening, Samira Ahmed. You’ll recognise Samira from her work on BBC and Channel 4 news. She currently presents PM and the World Tonight on Radio 4, and writes on culture, politics for the Guardian, Independent, and Spectator newspapers. Samira’s now a long-standing friend of ours, a much sought after chair and public speaker, and we are delighted that she’s joined us again. Samira, can I ask you to guide us through our evening of An Adventure of the Senses, thank you. SA Gill, thank you very much. For me it’s always a privilege to come to this lecture so I was delighted to be asked back. I feel I’m learning something every time, and I was particularly interested that the topic is about risk, and my story of the night, as such, is that I have a son who has a very severe stammer, and one of the things I hadn’t realised was how often I want to take the risk out of the situation when we’re in public. And we recently went to the Michael Palin centre course, which you may have seen in the documentary that was on BBC One last month, and one of the things I realised I had to let go was wanting to make sure he wasn’t in situations where people might be rude to him, or it might be difficult. And I think there are so many lessons for all of us in our lives about how we look at risk and how we think about it when we’re trying to do the best for our families. I’m delighted that the speakers we have tonight bring a very different range of experiences to discussing that subject. So, we’re going to hear the first speaker, there’ll be a chance for questions, a very brief communication break for our wonderful interpreters, not a chance to go off and get a big drink, and then our second speaker and more questions then, and that’s the plan for the evening. Our second speaker is going to be Dr Joe Gibson, from Sense Scotland, where he has been the man who has pioneered doing the whole outdoor activities programme, he’s been the co-ordinator there and was just saying to me there was no outdoor activity work for deaf blind people, really, until he started looking into doing there. And our first speaker though is Benedict Allen who, I’m sure, many of you will recognise, you will have seen him on television or read his books. He’s an adventurer, and I think that is your job description if you had it on your passport, who defies conventional ways of doing travel, and I think, really importantly, has gone into places without a camera crew, without the props that people often take, which take the risk out of a situation, and has gone into environments where he’s faced great risk and has, I think crucially, brought that experience back and shares it regularly with schools, with all kinds of organisations like ourselves, and has taken risk as far as it will go, and, over to you. BA Thank you. Yes, good evening, I’m very pleased, honoured in fact, to be here talking at the fifth Sense lecture. Yes, my name’s Benedict Allen. I think I ought to just explain before I get properly underway why I go alone, maybe that should be where I begin, because well, there’s risk and risk, why go alone if you can take companions? So, I ought to say a bit of a word of explanation. My very first expedition, when I was 22, I didn’t go alone, I took a dog, I went to the Amazon, and unfortunately ended up eating him to survive. We’ve all done it, come on, we’ve all done it. No, do you know what, this was something I was trying to explain the other day in Shepherds Bush. I came from Shepherds Bush and I was asked to go and give a talk the other day at this local primary school. For those who don’t know Shepherds Bush is a bit of a dodgy area, it’s a bit rough around the edges, but I was asked to go along to the primary school and raise morale and talk about my life as an adventurer and how you can embrace challenges. So, I went along to this school and started telling the story of how I had to eat this dog to survive, and I was saying how I was attacked by gold miners. These people chased me with knives, and you know what, I’ve discovered this in my career, if people chase you with knives you can’t stop and ask why are you chasing me? So, I still don’t know why I was being chased by knives, by these two gold miners, but I ran away from these two people, jumped into my canoe, the canoe capsized and I lost all my possessions down the river. And there I was on the edge of the Amazon, on the Amazon river bank and I began walking out, I got one sort of malaria, then another sort of malaria, and, essentially, I was dying of starvation as well, which didn’t help. But, I had my dog with me and I told this story at the primary school and this little boy stood up at the back of the class, and he was a shaven headed brute, really, to be absolutely honest, and he said, oy, mister, I don’t want to know why you had to eat your dog to survive, I wanted to just know what it tasted like. I thought, ah, right, I’d forgotten what Shepherds Bush was like. And, anyway, I couldn’t really think of the answer but I thought I’ve got to come up with something. So, I said to this boy, do you know what it tastes almost exactly like cat, and this boy burst into tears, and I’m still waiting for a thank you letter from this school. Anyway, that’s not what we’re meant to be talking about. Ladies and gentlemen if you were ever the sort of child who went walking along a rocky beach and you found yourself keeping going, wondering what was around the next corner, then you are an explorer. You’re the sort of person who wants to find out, to keep on going, and I was just that sort of child, the sort of child who kept on going, and, maybe, just like you, I used to put all sorts of exciting things I found in my bedroom shelves, fossils, and birds’ nests, and stamps. And, I had an uncle who sat me down on his knee and told me exciting stories of places like the Amazon, and Borneo, and I thought, one day when I’m grown up I’m going to be some sort of explorer. And I clung on to that dream of being an explorer but with increasing desperation because I realised I didn’t have the one thing you really needed in order to be an explorer – money. I didn’t have any money, and then I thought, hold on, there are people who live in the Amazon and Borneo and New Guinea, they don’t have any money either, so I could go and learn and live with them. So, that’s what I did, I worked in a warehouse and I got myself a little bit of money, and then I bought a little machete and off I went to the Amazon, and there, I don’t know, I think I’ve lost my first picture. Is it going to – oh dear – this is what happens whenever I go near technology. This is the other reason why I don’t take companions on my expeditions because they’re doomed without technology. So, we’re just going to wait for my first picture, and in fact all the pictures. Do you know what, while this is going on I’m going to just break away and tell you about a terrible thing that happened to me. Lots of terrible things happened to me in the jungle but I’m just going to tell you a story. On my second ever expedition I was in the jungles of New Guinea and I’d seen this wonderful David Attenborough programme about the jungles of New Guinea, and David Attenborough talked on this programme about how amazing were the berries in this particular jungle. He said they were full of nutrition, and David Attenborough was always a bit of a hero of mine and, as I say, I was new to the jungle, I didn’t know it very well, I was very excited to be there and I thought, berries, David Attenborough talked about this very forest and how it had all these amazing nutritious berries. So, I said to my two guides, any chance you could rustle up something to eat, and my two guides sat down and said, oh, for heaven’s sake, we’ve got ourselves another amateur with us, and then they got up and said, okay, we’ll go and get you something to eat. But, these two men came back and they were really excited, they’d found something absolutely wonderful, and they had their hands closed, like that. I thought what is in these two people’s hands it must be David Attenborough’s berries, and they opened up their hands, there were no berries there, instead there were 12 sago grubs. Sago grubs are maggots, effectively, they’re nasty little crawly things about the size of my little finger, and I thought, oh dear, what are we going to do with these? And, the two men said, well, there’s no time to cook them, you made us go and get some food, we just eat them, and they were very kind these two men they gave the biggest sago grub, and I looked at it and it looked back at me, I thought, oh no. Anyway, I put it into my mouth and this sago grub was like one of you lot. It was one of life’s winners. It was not going to be defeated by this experience. It certainly wasn’t going to die as a result of this experience and it managed to stop itself in my throat. I thought, oh no, what’s happening now, and then gradually it turned around and it began walking out, and I was going [swallows], and the sago grub was going, yes. Well, to be honest, it wasn’t actually talking, this sago grub, but, nonetheless, it crawled out. It could see the daylight up there and it jumped out of my mouth, and, well, I could have sworn these two guides saluted the sago grub as it wandered off. Anyway, that was my second ever expedition. That was just as an aside, I’m going to get on with the talk sooner or later. Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, I was explaining how, on my very first expedition, at last here I was in the place I’d dreamt of ever since a little boy. The Amazon, this forest that was so full of life, there I was at last, and it was absolutely horrible. Insects screaming in your ears, 100% humidity, and I discovered, I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience, you couldn’t wear the same pair of underpants for more than, say, two weeks, otherwise fungi would start to grow in all the crevices, if you know what I mean - terrible isn’t it – and there I was amongst all this foliage, amongst all this humidity. And it wasn’t just the wildlife trying to get to me, it was the local people, I found myself being shot at. That was disappointing because it was just like Shepherds Bush, and I thought, no, can’t it be different. Anyway, I was paddling along with my canoe and these bullets were going past my head. I was paddling, obviously, being British I didn’t want to panic, so paddling quite gently. No, I’m joking. This was really quite a bad experience and these bullets were missing me only just. I knew these people were behind me in their canoes shooting at me. I now know I’d stumbled across the territory of somebody called Pablo Escobar, do you remember his name? He was the most wanted man in the world at this stage and he was the biggest cocaine baron in the world. Amazing profit margin, by the way, this is something that Sense could aim for. No, that’s a joke, obviously, in poor taste, but a three thousand million dollar turnover. Anyway, he was wanted and this was six months before he was actually shot dead. He was hiding out in the lowlands on the border between Peru, Brazil and somewhere else, Columbia, and he eventually retreated up into the highlands and actually was tracked down there, but I had passed his camp and he sent two assassins to kill me. So, there I was paddling along and these bullets kept on missing, and I thought, why are they missing? And after a while I’ve got quite curious as you would do, and I looked over my shoulder and discovered that these, well, professional assassins, because that’s what they were, they come in every different standard. You get your first rate assassin, like every other profession, really good assassins who always get the job done first time, and then you get the second rate assassins, who more or less get it right, and then you get the third rate hit men, who always make a total mess of it. And that’s what I had, I had two people who couldn’t paddle a canoe and kill someone at the same time, and the ladies here will say all men are like this, they can’t multitask, and, actually, that perhaps was the problem, because every time the man in front picked up his lovely, shiny rifle and tried to shoot me, the canoe would swing round to the side, and he’d have to have a think about it, and he’d put down his paddle and then he’d pick up the rifle again and then the canoe would swing the other way. I got away with it. I jumped from my canoe into the forest and, suddenly, I found myself safe. This place that had been so frightening to me, that had been so scary because of the wildlife that’s trying to get to me, suddenly was my home, because since I jumped into all those leaves I was hidden away. This place could be a shelter for me, it could give me my food, my medicine and everything else that I needed, because, of course, it did that to the local people, and I realised how important it was going to be for me to get this place, the forest, on my side, so it could provide for me because it’s too big to fight. So, that became a central point of my experience and also a philosophy that I kept with me through different expeditions - learn from the local people, you see these places not as a threat but as a home, and that’s what I did. I settled down in the forest of the Amazon, and then realised what I needed above all was a good preparation for the biggest challenge I could give myself, and that was to try and cross the whole of the Amazon Basin, 5,600 kilometres, a huge area. And I thought, if I can ever do that then I’ll know I really understand this place, or at least I see it in a different way, no longer as an outsider, as a threat, but as somewhere that can provide for me. So, I thought, okay, one day I’m going to come back and fulfil my childhood dream and I’m going to cross the Amazon Basin, but, first of all, that preparation. I went to New Guinea, north of Australia, and settled down with the local people who turned out to be head hunters. You see in this photo, there’s a man here, actually a fairly friendly man he’s holding a head. I said to him, whose head is that? He said, oh, don’t worry it’s my dad. I thought, oh dear, that doesn’t sound right, call yourself a head hunter, shouldn’t you kill your neighbour or something. He said, no, no, don’t worry, we stopped head hunting 35 years ago really. I said, mm, are you sure, because I thought, it’s probably like smoking, people say they’ve given up but you never know when they’re going to lapse, and so I thought, maybe he’ll start doing that. But then, on the other hand, who was I to judge, I was an outsider. I was someone who didn’t understand his world, and his world was something that he understood. He knew what it took to cope in this highly competitive world, and he was the one, actually, that I should learn from. So, I suspended my judgement, began learning the language of these people, the Niowra, and after a couple of months I got to know a little bit more about their culture. I understood, after a while, that these people went through some sort of ceremony to make them a man as strong as a crocodile. I thought, what is this ceremony? It was a secret, sacred ceremony, something that kept them going, something that every young man went through, and I said to this young man one day, what is this ceremony all about? What does it take to be a man as strong as a crocodile? Because I couldn’t help noticing that he had hundreds of scars running all the way down his chest, and all the way down his back, permanent initiation marks that marked him out almost like a crocodile man. He said, yes, I can’t tell you anything more about these permanent marks but that’s what happens during the secret crocodile initiation ceremony. I thought, wow. He said to me, do you know what, you call yourself an explorer you should have the courage to do whatever it takes. I said, oh yes, I suppose so. He said, well, actually, what it takes us is to go through the crocodile initiation ceremony, and that’s what you should do. I thought, oh dear, I don’t know if that’s quite me, and I didn’t think I’d fit in anymore to Shepherds Bush or anywhere else. But then I realised, he was absolutely right, that’s what I should do, and anyway it was too late the whole village was excited, bouncing up and down. I said, what are you excited about, they said, we’ve persuaded the first ever outsider to go through our crocodile initiation ceremony, and it’s you. I said, oh no, and I began counting out my aspirins wondering what was going to happen in this ceremony. A big fence was erected around the spirit house, this is the place where I and the other initiates would be led, we’d be kept there for as long as it took for us to become men as strong as crocodiles, and an old man wondered out as I was taking a photo of this crocodile nest, this big arena fence, and he said, psst, do you realise the last crocodile initiation ceremony overran by a year. I thought, no, a year, it’s just beyond my abilities, but essentially it was too late and the young men began calling out to the crocodile ancestor to help make this new generation strong. And also, by the way, calling out to the mothers because it turns out they were hiding a whole lot of boys in the forest who didn’t want to go through the ceremony. And our heads were shaven and we were given little grass skirts, and we were lined up on the edge of the crocodile nest and now the time had come for us to be made into men as strong as crocodiles. And, to be honest, I was absolutely dreading it as we were all, and we were led now to upside down turned canoes, laid on our backs, and as you can see in this picture, it wasn’t very nice. We were cut repeatedly with bamboo blades, you can see a man doing the operation there, and I really was trying to look the other way to be honest. I was just standing about, all this blood was flowing, I could see that everyone lost about two pints of blood each as a result of this. And, I discovered something really terrible, really bad moment to make this discovery, I had a phobia, and it was a phobia about being cut repeatedly with bamboo blades, I just thought, this is not me at all. So, I was trying to put off the moment when my turn came but of course everyone wanted to initiate their son first, so I was reduced to taking some holiday photos at this stage, and then I realised something else. The local people are about five feet tall and I’m actually almost two metres tall, six foot four, which means there are far more cuts per unit initiate on me than the locals, which I thought was really unfair. But, a great thing about this bit of the ceremony was, and you’ll understand this yourselves in your own lives, when you’ve been through a crisis at least you know you’re through the worst, at least you know it’s going to get better, tomorrow’s going to be another day, and that thought was sustaining us, we were thinking, this is probably the worst moment of our lives and we’re through the worst, except, this was only the beginning, because it turned out to be a better day. Because, we were now told to dance and sing happy little songs while all the old men came out and beat us with sticks, and that was going to happen every day, four times a day, until we’d learnt to be men as strong as crocodiles, and it seemed to be taking us quite a long time. This is a photo of me, it’s actually taken after a month, there I am, I’m actually covered in grey clay, my hair’s starting to grow back after a month or so. We’re covered in grey clay, or I am, just like all the others because this was our uniform. The ceremony was all about forgetting your differences and combining together because, of course, I could never be a Niowra, I could never be a crocodile man, never be someone who really belonged to New Guinea, because I came from Shepherds Bush. And I knew I could never adopt another culture but actually the ceremonies about forgetting your differences. It’s all about combining together, looking for strength that you might have inside you, and we realised, me and the other initiates that only once we had learned to think together would we be allowed out of the ceremony. It was all about bonding, all about, as I say, forgetting your differences. So, this grey clay that I’ve got on my face is actually part of a uniform, we’re now learning to work together, because in the forest you have to work together, highly competitive and dangerous world where you work as one and that way achieve things, and, of course, that way you survive. And a young man, one day, said to me, come on, what can you do to raise morale, because you all know how important it is to keep your spirits up when you’re in a crisis, and this ceremony was just one big crisis. So, that’s what it was every day, we’d been given a crisis to deal with, and they said, what are you going to do to cheer us up? Because they were singing happy songs and so on, I thought, ooh, what can I do. I tried my moon walking, which to be honest never goes down particularly well in Shepherds Bush, and they thought that was really weird in New Guinea, and then someone said, what about My Way, and I thought, okay, I’ll sing My Way, because it always go down well, but, no, they said, that’s what all the missionaries sing. And then someone said, you’re British aren’t you, sing your national anthem, we all love your national anthem; you’re British, that’s great. I thought, ooh, is it, God Save our Gracious Queen, I don’t know about that, it’s not all that good. I mean, I’m quite patriotic but God Save our Gracious Queen, and then I thought, oh well, I’ll give it a go if they love God Save our Gracious Queen. I just wish I was Australian, they’ve got a great national anthem, the Americans, the Marseillais, the French have got a lovely, can you imagine being beaten to the Marseillais, or you can imagine the French being beaten to it at least. And I thought, oh well, they want God Save our Gracious Queen, I’d better not cheat I’ll give it to them and I began singing, God Save our Gracious Queen, and they said, no, not that, your national anthem, Old Macdonald had a Farm. And, so I thought, right, change of plan, Old Macdonald had a Farm, and so that’s what I now began to sing, and it was the surprise hit of ceremony. I don’t know if any of you, secretly, are feeling tempted to go through the ceremony yourself, but actually this was brilliant you could bring in all the local wildlife, crocodile here, crocodile there, so it was absolutely great. Anyway, time went by and, well months I suppose, after about six weeks I remember a particular moment when someone said to me, you’re not going to forget us are you? I thought, forget you, I thought, I’m psychologically damaged, I’m physically scarred, it looks like I’ve been run over by a tractor with all these scars up and down my chest and back, and they said, oh no, that’s great because we’d love you do something for us, and I said, oh well, I’d love to help if I can. They said, well, that’s great, we’d love you to marry someone for us. I thought, oh, I don’t know about that. I don’t know about you, ladies and gentlemen, I’m quite choosy, you know I’d like to choose my wife and she might want to choose me, and they said, no, no, it’s absolutely great we’ve chosen her already and she’s lovely. She’s called Unga, although her nickname is The Gorilla. I said, now that is both sexist and racist and they said, no, no, only joking, just trying to scare you, she’s absolutely delightful, and, do you want to meet her? I said, well, perhaps one day if we ever get out of here, and they said, no, you can just shake her hand through the fence, we all do that secretly, shake your wife’s hand through the fence. I thought, oh, anyway, I thought I’d meet Unga, she sounded a nice person. I put my hand out through the fence, the big arena fence of the crocodile nest, and it was duly crushed by Unga. I thought, oh dear, it’s not going very well, and then she began to speak and I can’t really imitate her voice because it was too deep, but this voice said, don’t worry I’ll be looking after you after the ceremony. And the funny thing was, from then on, I didn’t really want the ceremony to end, sorry, it’s a really unfortunate joke really at Unga’s expense, who actually was a very nice person but I didn’t actually marry her. After six weeks or so we started to feel like we were getting somewhere. After another couple of weeks, eight weeks, we really through we were working together, we’d learnt that you’re really only as strong as the weakest member of your group. We’d looked after the younger members of our initiation group and protected them with our own backs, and realised that each beating session was actually an opportunity to show our commitment to each other, because that’s also what it was all about, showing that we were prepared to do anything for those who would do anything for us. And, at last, we were led out of the crocodile nest and given our freedom, this wonderful moment of privilege when we were united with our family and felt that we’d been through the training programme and now we were going to be looking after the community as the next generation of young men. So, a great moment for me, and it was, all joking aside, a huge privilege. I’ve been allowed to go through a ceremony which was central to these people’s lives, and record it for posterity because it wasn’t going to happen many more times. But also, at a personal level, it was a chance to understand myself. I knew my strengths, I knew my weaknesses now, and I realised I should raise my game and think about what I really wanted to do after this training period, because now was the time to put my ideas into action. I thought, what I’ll do is return to the Amazon and see if I can cross the whole of the Amazon Basin. As I said, 5,600 kilometres across, a huge area, I’d be heading from the North West in Peru down through the Andes and heading to the South East, through Columbia a bit of Peru and coming out in Brazil. And the worst part of the journey, the last part of the journey was the most difficult, and that’s what I had in my mind the last 300 miles or so, I thought, will I be able to pull of this challenge, because the first part of the journey, crossing the Amazon Basin is not too difficult, to be absolutely honest, although for some reason no-one had done this before, and I did begin to realise why as I undertook the journey. But, basically you’re flowing with the tributaries of the Amazon, but the last bit, the last 300 miles you’re walking through fairly uninhabited jungle, and you’re going against the water. So, in other words, you’re going to be walking alone for 300 miles, and did I have the ability to do that, that was my big challenge. But there were people who lived at the beginning of this 300 mile stretch called, the Matsés. I had heard about the Matsés, I was very fascinated by them, because they didn’t emulate the crocodile, the top predator of New Guinea; they emulated the jaguar, the top animal of the Amazon. The jaguar was obviously intelligent, stealthy, agile, and the Matsés Indians tried to take on some of these qualities for themselves. And, I thought these were the perfect people to learn from, and so I headed towards the Matsés. You can see this man, Pablito , he was one of the Matsés; he’s got paint across his face, bright paint, reflecting, perhaps, the colour of the jaguar. He’s got spines in his lips that represent the whiskers of the jaguar, and he’s got tattoos across his face that represents the jaguar patterns. So, he’s trying to take on something of this powerful animal. I thought, what a person to learn from. And this man, Pablito, said that he would take me on, and the frontiersman, who had helped me find the Matsés, retreated, and now my life was in his hands, and in the hands of his community, as I began my preparation for this march out of the forest. And it didn’t quite go according to plan, because I thought I’d be learning from Pablito with, well, rather romantically, actually, standing beside him with his big bow and arrow, and I’d be rather, as I imagined, as a child I’d be learning from him, but unfortunately it didn’t work out like that. Pablito had a lot of children to feed. I asked him how many children he had, and he said 30, but it always sounded like an estimate, so I don’t really know the full number. But I was trying to learn from him, beside him with his bow and arrow, and he realised I was scaring away all the wildlife. I had these big boots, I was scaring away the animals, all the pigs and the deer and so, and he got fed up with not being able to feed his children. So, he passed me on to his younger brother, and his younger brother got fed up with me scaring the wildlife away, and he passed me on to his children, and it was starting to get really quite embarrassing. This little ten year old boy decided he’d make a man of me, and he marched me out in front of his friends – big mistake – and walked off into the forest, hoping I’d at least catch some of the animals that he’d lined up for me in the forest. And he came back half an hour later, totally humiliated in front of all his pals because I’d failed again, and he passed me on to his younger brother. And his younger brother was only five years old; he wasn’t even allowed an adult bow and arrow, he was just allowed a toy bow and arrow, and worse than that, he decided, this little five year old boy, that far more exciting than hunting with me, was simply hunting me, and that’s what he did. He got his toy bow and arrow and he’d sneak off through the forest and he’d zap me in the bum, and then he got fed up with that, and he’d try and manoeuvre me towards little booby traps that he’d set up in the forest, and I’d end up staggering into one of the holes he’d made in the forest floor. And in the end I had to be rescued by his older sister. His older sister was called Lucy, and Lucy was only eight years old, but I began to realise the extraordinary knowledge that these children had, the little boy, five years old, who knew how to hunt, albeit with a toy bow and arrow. The girl, Lucy, eight years old, she knew 20 species that acted simply as disinfectant. So, she knew 20 sorts of plants that acted something like TCP, so you can imagine the depth of knowledge that this little girl had. She began teaching me things that would keep me alive out there, how to eat the tips of ferns, how to eat the hearts of palms – simple little things. But, simple little things that I now realised would keep me alive out there, because I was getting increasingly worried, because I realised that what I was doing was actually going against the entire lesson of the crocodile initiation ceremony. That lesson had been all about working together, and my expedition was all about going alone. So, I had this arrogant outsider’s view of what I would do with the terrain; that I would walk somehow across the Amazon. But it certainly wasn’t what the crocodile people, the Nyara would do, and it wasn’t what the jaguar people would do. They would never do this alone; why did I think I could somehow accomplish this? So, I was beginning to think, how am I going to do it, how am I going to keep myself going out here, and what was my strategy going to be; should I copy what the girls do, and be a gatherer, or, should I be more like one of the boys and be a hunter? How on earth was I going to accomplish 300 miles? So, I was getting actually quite scared about how I was going to do this journey, but also realising that actually, it was quite exciting, because you all have had projects of your own, and you know what it’s like, once you have your own project, whether you fail or succeed, it’s actually wonderful, in a way, to be given the chance to achieve something on your own terms. And this, really, was my chance, to see whether I could do something not supported by someone who knew better, but whether I could actually come up with the goods myself. So, I gathered myself together, after quite a while, I think three months with the Matsés, and launched out by myself. And this is a photo of myself sitting in the forest, gathering myself together. It’s, well, it’s just a photo of me looking at a map, but to me, personally, it’s actually incredibly important, this moment, because when my support has gone, the Matsés now actually disappeared, and by the way, they didn’t say goodbye or anything, they just said, as they cried, and no one is going to be here to bury you – which is not quite the phrase I was looking for. You know, I was hoping for a rousing ending, you know, good luck out there old chap, something like that, but they were really just desperately sad because I was taking on something that they felt I just couldn’t accomplish, and they thought I was just going to die a lonely death. And I was a little bit worried about dying a lonely death, to be absolutely honest, but also, as I said, I was quite excited, and I say myself down, and I tried to assess my strategy. Now, I always have a plan A, and my plan A, obviously, was to get through the forest to the southeast for 300 miles; and I have a plan B, which is obviously when you adapt to whatever circumstances come along. A plan C, that’s my exit strategy, and now I was thinking, okay, what will I do at any one point, if I want to try and get out of here, how will I get out of this place. I was planning my bags now, I have two bags, and that’s in case one bag falls into a ravine or gets stolen or something, so everything was shared out, distributed between those two bags. The top bag would have my medical kit, so, thinking about to mitigate risk in every circumstance. Earlier, we were talking a little bit about risk and risk evasion; actually, this is something I spend a huge amount of my time thinking about, because I’m seen as a risk taker, I don’t know why quite, but I’m always seen as a risk taker. Actually, I am a challenge taker; I’m always spending time mitigating risk, and that’s now what I had to do as I filled out my strategy and headed off by myself. As I said, I was very excited at first, but after a couple of weeks walking through the forest, I was finding it actually very difficult to hunt and do. This is a photo of a spider monkey up there in the trees; I used to hunt spider monkeys like anything when I was with the Matsés, but now that I was alone I was finding it incredibly difficult, because, of course, monkey is right up there in the trees, or maybe 100 metres up there, so very, very difficult, actually, to catch a spider monkey. For the Matsés, it wasn’t so difficult, because if they failed to catch a monkey that day, well, of course, they just walk back to the village and they shared something from the garden, or perhaps they ate some fish, so they always had that retreat. I had no retreat. I was alone out there, and I realised I was in trouble one day when I was no longer standing at the bottom of a tree like this, trying to zap a monkey. I’d long ago given up trying to hunt monkeys. I was actually simply standing at the bottom of a tree hoping I’d get a handout from a monkey – because monkeys will do this. If you bounce up and down, you might have noticed in the zoo or something, monkeys will actually start chucking things down at you, perhaps just to get rid of you. I was actually hoping to upset the monkeys so they’d chuck things down at me, because I now realised I was someone in need. I was no longer in control of my destiny; I was reliant on luck, and effectively I was scavenging. I was looking at fruit trees, not because I might find monkeys up there, but because I might find fallen fruit, or fruit that had been discarded by monkeys. So, I was now going to monkey tree to monkey tree as best I could, and trying to keep going – and not doing very well indeed. After a while I began to weaken, and weakened further by making mistakes. I would come across snakes and almost be bitten by them. Snakes aren’t normally a problem in the jungle, but if you’re not concentrating, if you’re weak, you start having problems. You know what it’s like in a crisis; things start to spiral out of control, and effectively I was reliant on luck being on my side, and you can’t rely on luck being on your side. Sooner or later that luck will run out. And I now knew, this was after three or four weeks alone, that I needed a miracle in order to survive. And, I got one. Amazingly, one day I stumbled into this logger’s camp, there was this man with his gun standing there, and I thought, oh, no, just when I thought I was saved, but I was so excited, I thought, he’s still a fellow human. And, I walked up to this man, there he is standing there in front of his logging camp, and I was jubilant. I took this photo and then realised he had this gun and he raised the gun at me and said, get lost. I said to him, I am lost already and he said, what, you’re lost already? Where’s the rest of you? I said, no, there’s no one else, it’s just me, and he said, you’ve got to be joking, you must be British, you must be mad. I said, well, yes, it just is me. He said, look, you know and I know that this is an illegal logging camp, we’re not meant to be here, but, actually, I feel a little bit sorry for you. Why don’t you come in and eat something? And so we had this extraordinary bond. He shouldn’t have been there, he knew I might report him to the police but on the other hand we were fellow humans and there was this wonderful bond between us. We sat down together, we began joking, and I stayed for two weeks with these people and they fed me up and made me feel better about myself again. And the man said, look, you come… you head off through the forest with two of my men, they’ll look after you, they’ll carry your bags and help you on your way. I thought, oh, okay, that would be really, really lovely. And so I set off with these two men and we walked through the forest for a couple of days, came to a river, and we did what you have to do when you come to a river, you cut down a tree and you make a bridge to get across the river. And these two loggers kindly took my two bags, they walked across this tree that we’d made into a bridge, and I was just about to get on the tree myself when the two men turned around and kicked the tree away and they walked off into the forest having robbed me and left me to die, which was incredibly irritating. I can’t tell you how irritating it was. But, you know what; I’ve been through a lot of traumas, all self-inflicted, I suppose, in my life, different problems I’ve had. I’ve even had to stitch myself up with my boot mending kit on one occasion, but this beat them all because it was absolutely terrible. It’s like a slap in the face. These people who I trusted, who I thought were my friends, had turned round and now robbed me, just for a bit of petty cash or maybe a camera and left me to die. And I was devastated. I’d love to stand here and say I was a hero that day and everything, my backup plan smoothly went into action, but it simply didn’t. I was just absolutely shattered, absolutely horrified, shocked, by this experience and sat down on the forest floor. I’m afraid I just felt very sorry for myself. I was pathetic because I’d lost my belief in myself, I’d let down my mum, my girlfriend, all these people that I had told I’d be okay. I’ve told them all I was going to be fine, I reassured them, promised them, in fact. I’d let down them, all my loved ones, I’d let down the jaguar people, the crocodile people, these people who trusted me to make a go of this. I’d made a total mess of everything. And if you don’t have any belief it eats away at you. You don’t have any ability to commit yourself to anything, to achieve anything. I had absolutely no belief. I couldn’t believe in God, I couldn’t believe in myself. I sat there feeling sorry for myself but after a while, because you know what, it takes quite a long time to die in the jungle. I was sort of sitting there feeling sorry for myself, twiddling my thumbs and I still hadn’t died and I thought, well, I suppose I’d better make an effort, you know. I know what, I can walk for a few days and one day maybe I’ll come across a track and then I could lie down on the track and my mum would hear about what happened to me. My body would be found and my mum would have a body to bury, which is better than nothing. I thought maybe that’s what I should do. And then I had a better idea. I thought, well, I’m going to die anyway so I can start taking a few risks because it doesn’t really matter any more. I thought, what a relief, that’s rather nice. What I decided to do was walk down the river and find a way across it but I didn’t have any baggage to worry about. So I jumped into the river, got my way across, walked up the other side of the river, and I began tracking these two men and I walked, at last, into their temporary little camp and I robbed back one bag. I thought now I stand a fighting chance. This is wonderful, and I began walking, and I still couldn’t believe I could walk 100 miles, that’s now how far I had to get to the outside world, 100 miles to go. You might think, well, anyone can walk 100 miles. It’s actually quite hard to walk 100 miles through uninhabited jungle. I only had a little compass from my survival kit so I couldn’t believe in walking 100 miles. Can you imagine tree after tree and every single species out there adapted under the conditions of sort of survival of the fittest. I knew how weak I was, how would I do 100 miles? As I say, I couldn’t believe 100 miles but I could believe I could walk 100 metres because you can almost see 100 metres through the forest, through the trees, 100 metres, that’s 100 paces. I thought I can get over there. So I thought what I’ll do is walk along the line in my compass and every pace I’ll count and every 100 paces I’ll notch up on a little stick. I’ll make a mark in a stick and that’ll give me an idea of my progress. And after a day, I’d filled my little stick. It looked quite good actually, and I thought this is not so bad; you’ve done quite well, Benedict. All these little notches marking your progress. So the next day I got a bigger stick, really nice long stick and now I could see the end of my journey. That was the end of the stick. I could visualise, once more, where I was going. It wasn’t just the forest, it wasn’t just the species all out there to get me. I could see the end of my journey, the end of the forest. And now I began to believe in myself a lot more and I could see my progress as gradually, day after day, I made notch after notch after notch and I could see my progress towards the end of that stick and I began to believe in myself again and I began to picture, the man says, that little girl, Lucy. I thought if a child can survive out here, an eight year old, then maybe even I can. And with that belief coming back, I began to accomplish much more and I began to realise I’m not really alone out here because I’ve got so many friends around me in my head. All those amazing people like Pableto, the father of Lucy, the crocodile people. I pictured all these people in my head informing me, as I went along this lonely journey, and it was no longer a lonely journey. I began to feel I’m with friends, I’m with companions, they’re all in my head and they’re all on my side. And, gradually, I made my way to the outside world and started to think about new journeys. This is obviously not the same journey. I came out of the forest. I started planning new expeditions, new ideas. I’d achieved my childhood dream in the jungle and now started to think of new adventures because that’s what it’s all about for me. It’s about new challenges, new ideas and new problems. Trying to find a way to solve them and trying to find a way to see places like the jungle, like the desert, not as a threat but as a home. It might out here, it might be a different challenge like this. This is something I like doing, wrestling with alligators, I don’t know if you like doing this. This is a particularly tricky alligator, I ought to say. And you might say to yourself, I just don’t like wrestling alligators, you know, it’s not my thing. I don’t like jungles, I don’t like desert, I don’t like the Arctic, but, as I said, this is what excites me. This is what it’s all about, for me, and the lows are terrible. You have terrible disappointments, terrible, horrible things happen but the highs are out of this world and that’s why I do it. And, as I say, you might think I just don’t like this sort of thing. I can’t imagine being an explorer, but, for me, this, in the end, is our common ground, the jungle. It may not be the jungle that you’re in. It may not be the Amazon, it may not be the Borneo jungle, but I believe that, actually, this is our common ground. We all have challenges to face. We all have a frightening environment to cope with at times and who are your friends? Who are your enemies in this environment? I’m sure that your world isn’t so very different from mine this regard at least. I’d like to conclude by saying that I’m someone who’s said to have almost died nine times. Well, actually, I haven’t, in the end, died, and maybe that is the point, and the reason why I haven’t died is because perhaps of two things. One, belief, I’ve mentioned it time and time again, belief is incredibly important. The belief to get yourself out of a problem; the belief that tomorrow somehow will be a better day; the belief in God; the belief in your friends; your belief in yourself. That’s one thing that has got me through challenges. The second thing is preparation. I made sure I had some of the best preparation in the world, from the crocodile people who taught me the importance of working together, the jaguar people who taught me the importance of looking to resources that are all around you. And with those two things, I believe you can accomplish, you take on the greatest jungles in the world whether it’s out there in the Amazon or Borneo or anywhere else in our world back here at home. But, to conclude, as I said, I’m someone who’s said to have almost died nine times but maybe that’s entirely the wrong way to think about it. It’s not about how many times you almost died, it’s about how much you fulfill your potential and, in fact, how much you live. Thank you very much. SA Could I just say, next year I’d like to hear a presentation from your mum and your partner. You said it, it’s the living, and I find it fascinating. Let’s take some questions, if you’ve got one, I’ve got loads otherwise. SA I can give you one to start off which is, actually, you know when you were talking about the crocodile man, sort of a ritual in Papua New Guinea, you mentioned there were the mothers who’d hidden with their sons in the jungle and I thought, yes, because that’s what you would do. And I just wondered what you made of the fact that, you know, even though it was their culture, actually, they were quite protective, they were trying to protect their sons from that risk. BA Yes, it was a very interesting thing, the way mothers, I imagine you all heard that question, and I’m just trying to work out what the propaganda was in the village and what was actually the truth because it’s a very male dominated culture, as you can imagine. Quite a macho culture, all these young men going out there and being told they should be even more tough and aggressive and a lot of other qualities of the crocodile are brought out. You’ve got to be territorial, and resilient and so on, but what fascinated me was that after the initiation ceremony and even during it, I began to see another side to the culture. A famous anthropologist wrote that amongst the Atmel, that’s the bigger group of these people, aggression is seen as good. But, actually, there was this softer other side. The men were almost pathetic when it came to looking after themselves and, actually, it turns out that the main impetus for the ceremony was not the men, it was the young ladies because they wouldn’t look at a single man who hadn’t been through the ceremony and didn’t have all these scars up and down his chest and back. So the women were saying you’re pathetic if you’re not a proper man and had gone through the initiation ceremony. So there’s a lot of female pressure there. And the other side, which I found rather fascinating from this other point of view of the initiate, was that the old ladies had seen it all before and all these secrets that were actually kept from the women were known by the old ladies. So the old ladies used to look out and look after us young men at night. So they saw us, they could see all the sacred objects that I haven’t mentioned, flutes and so on. They knew every little bit of the ceremony, they didn’t tell anyone about it but the knowledge of the culture was actually carried more in the minds of the women who outlive the men by a considerable lot of time there and the impetus for the ceremony often seemed to be from the young ladies. So it’s very interesting to see there was actually quite a balance there, there was more female power than you’d imagine in this community. SA Interesting. BA Yes. SA Oh, hang on, f you want to wait a sec, we’ll get a microphone, then we can all hear your question. Thank you. The lady with the red, down the end. MF Sorry, I’m interested to know what happened to, was it Unger? BA What happened to Unger? The question on everyone’s lips. You know what, I felt mean mentioning her and it is a real person, a real name, and I sort of wanted to, I wasn’t just trying to make light of the ceremony but I was trying to, obviously it is a light side to that. I ought to say I’ve been back to this community three or four times, lived there for perhaps a year in different occasions because I felt I had commitment, sorry, I thought I had commitment to this culture. I didn’t believe I should just dip into a remote culture and just dip out again. I don’t think that’s right. So, I went back and having had this privilege of going through the ceremony at other stages of their journey into old age, and I’d say she has settled down. She’s actually the first wife of three wives of her husband. It’s a very, very complicated culture the Nyara have, perhaps all cultures are complicated. They have, in the village, just to give you an idea of how complex the culture is because I hate the sort of stereotyping of so-called tribal people, there are seven different clan groups in the village. You’re meant to marry, if possible, to help strengthen your clan. I was allocated the Smark [?] clan, so they wanted me to marry Unger because she would form a good alliance for the Smark clan. Within the village there’s also Amoyatee which means that the village is separated into two parts, you’re meant to marry into the other half of the village. There’s a moon half and a sun half. If you’re on the sun half you should marry into the other half. So this is a way of keeping the genetic pool as diverse, a way of diversifying the genetic pool. I mention all this because you hear these travellers’ tales of sleeping with this and that woman, or this and that man. In remote cultures, marriage is everything. It’s part of keeping your family alive. These communities have infant mortality rate of one in five. It’s a very dangerous place to live effectively. There’s also a warring culture and so on. So marriage is not about love usually, it’s about strength and it’s about keeping your family going. There are romantic liaisons, definitely, but, for me, an outsider, that would be out of the question. There were other females who were sort of proffered but there was always a catch and it was all about I was seen as a good catch because I was a white person who was wealthy and could help the village and there was no more to it than that. So although it’s an amusing story, in fact, you’ve got to be very, very careful if you’re living in a community like that and aren’t prepared to commit yourself to a culture, and I felt I didn’t really belong amongst those people and the longer I stayed with the Nyara on different occasions, the more I felt I shouldn’t do that because psychologically I thought I can never be one of the Nyara and I can never really be back here in the west. It’s quite difficult to immerse yourself in two cultures, so I had to start going around the world to different cultures. SA One last one, briefly, you have, take the gentleman in the back there. MA Okay, thank you. I’ve also explored in Papua New Guinea and it’s a wonderful area and I congratulate you on all your adventures, but it’s a very virulent malarial area so that it’s very, very dangerous from either malaria or dengu [?] of this kind. So how do you cope with going back on regular trips? Do you take inoculations or do you just go with the flow, just try to avoid getting bitten, so to speak? BA Right. You’re Neville, aren’t you? MF Neville Shulman, yes. BA Sorry, a very distinguished guest here, we have Neville Shulman, a very great traveller indeed. And, well, malaria, yes, I’ve had malaria five times. It’s not my favourite disease. I don’t know how you fared. In that area, this was amongst the Yat the middle Seepik, and in the old days it used to be called blackwater fever. And there I picked up, I’m trying to think, it was volciperum V-vax, I think, it’s an easy sort of malaria to get, it’s a very common malaria. It’s also not so easy to get rid of it but the symptoms are fairly moderate. In the Amazon, the very first time I got malaria, when I had to eat the dog, and maybe I should stop talking about the dog as a sort of like a joke. It was actually a very, very serious thing for me, clearly. But the sort of malaria I had there, I had again V-vax, which is known as the tertiary malaria, the fever comes and goes. So I knew I had that sort of malaria which didn’t worry me too much but I also had valciferen which is a much more dangerous malaria that can lead to cerebral malaria and you can die in 24 hours from that. I knew the clock was ticking and that I might be dead very, very quickly. So there’s part of the urgency for having to kill the dog. I should say this dog was not a pet. Maybe I didn’t mention that. It wasn’t a bouncy Labrador or Dulux dog or anything like that. It was an Indian dog whose life I’d saved because it was injured, its paws were injured and I was trying to find a home for this dog. So don’t worry too much about the dog, please. But, yes, I think probably time has run out on that unhappy note, but thank you for being such a patient audience and good luck with your own jungles. Thank you. SA Benedict, thank you so much. We’re going to take a very brief break now just for our interpreters to have a little. SA We’re going to start in just a minute or so if you want to settle down. Thank you. Well, thanks everyone for taking your brief comfort break. It feels really guilty just going off and going to the loo when you’ve just heard what you’ve been through over the last 20 years. Our second speaker, I think, is just brilliant pairing because it brings us back to what sense is all about, which is making a real difference to people living with deaf-blindness and I’m sure in many ways Dr Joe Gibson needs no introduction. He’s the coordinator of outdoor activities at Sense Scotland and actually started working there in 1997 as a night shift worker when he was doing his PhD and has been doing the outdoors activity coordination there since 2005. He has this experience then first hand of actually pioneering a lot of the work around getting people to experience outdoor activities and take risks because no one had really thought what would work and what they should be doing before. So, over to you... JG Thank you. I’m delighted and not just a little bit nervous to have been asked to speak here this evening and especially alongside Benedict, and after that talk, I’ve got nothing really to follow. I’d much rather be out in the woods, in the rain and the mud, and doing the job rather than standing here talking about and especially dressed up like this. I do not feel comfortable at the moment, but hopefully it will go as I start to talk to you. I also felt like I was taking a bit of a risk in such a tenuous tight lap. I hope some people recognise the reference to the 80s movie and maybe it will become a bit clear why a bit later on. As Samira said, I’ve worked for 11 years now for Sense, starting as a night shift worker and a support work and a team leader in a house before having my current job as the outdoor activities coordinator, and I began to work for Sense Scotland just as a way to pay for my living expenses. I got no funding while I was doing my PhD and I did some shifts through an agency, working for the Family Centre in Glasgow, the Children’s Respite House, and it certainly beat working night shifts in a nursing home and when there was an opportunity of a job I thought, I’ll take it. And this pragmatic decision at the start changed my life, it changed my research and I hope it had an impact on some of the people I work with. I’ve decided not to base this presentation upon some of the theories that I’ve developed and some of the models, some of the things to talk about, about the benefits of outdoor activities or as to how we can use the outdoor activities to develop communication or even why taking risks can sometimes be a benefit. Instead I thought I’d like to tell you some stories and hopefully through the course of the stories, some of these themes will come out. The stories, like my research, are going to focus on just two men who in all the papers and articles and everything I’ve written are Bill and Fred, thus the title. And that’s how I will refer to them this evening, although I apologise if I call them anything else, because I also work with them still every day – well, not every day, but I still work with them – and I get mixed up when I work with them and I call them Bill and Fred. So sometimes in presentations I call them by their real names. They’re both congenitally deaf-blind. Fred is profoundly deaf-blind and there are some images of him here. We’ll see lots more pictures of them later on. So he’s profoundly deaf-blind, in his mid 40s now, and Bill is profoundly deaf with some useful vision and he’s now just 40 last year. I’m also going to tell stories... I use that approach because when I was writing my research I used a narrative approach, partly because what I was doing didn’t feel much like science. I was in an office full of sport scientists and they thought I was just making it up, I think. I certainly wasn’t taking any muscle biopsies or blood samples. I didn’t collect any physiological data and I didn’t even wear a white coat, so they thought I was just making it up – playing outside and then telling stories. But also I was trying to follow an anthropological approach. I didn’t immerse myself quite as much as Benedict in the culture I was studying. I didn’t go and live with the people I was interested in, although at times when I was working night shifts forever, it felt like I was living with them! However, I did want to try and understand something about their culture and something about the way they understood things that I was interested in, and I wanted to understand what they were interested in. And I wanted to give a voice to people who so often have had their voice denied. I also took a longitudinal approach in my research which is really just a posh way of saying, it took eight years for me to finish and write up my PhD. My first experiences of outdoor activities in any sort of meaningful way with Sense was some outdoor holidays that we went to Bendrigg Lodge which is an adventure for all centre in the Lake District and during these holidays we were able to go canoeing and caving and climbing and sailing and everyone, the service users and staff, all had a fantastic time and it was as a result of these holidays that I changed the focus of my research from being on special needs schools, or additional support needs as they are now, to the deaf-blind. And again this was partly a practical pragmatic decision on my part. When I looked through the literature on the outdoor education, there was nothing written about deaf-blindness and for a PhD you have to find someone new, you have to add to the body of knowledge, and I thought, well, if nobody’s found anything, anything I find will be new! So during these holidays there were lots and lots of things that came up and the first thing that the support workers and I, as one of the support workers, noticed was about the relationships. During the holidays we tended to share rooms. There tended to be two rooms that we had in the centre and there were all the male staff and male service users, and all the female service users and female staff in rooms together. That, in itself, I could talk for hours about and the things that occurred because of that and it certainly gave a sense of equality. We were sharing the same rooms, we were doing the same activities, we were wearing the same things – for that week we were the same. There was also a big impact on the staff who came to the later holidays, the second and third holidays, when some of the service users, and Bill in particular, had been on the earlier holidays and he was able to show the staff where to go, he was able to show the staff how to put the climbing harness on and, for him, that was a really powerful experience. But there were two incidents involving Bill and another service user that were of most interest. The first was after a meal and we’d gone up to the centre, me and Bill and another service user, Roddy, and we were walking back down to the annexe, the rooms where we were, and it was down a steep zigzag path, and Bill likes to be at the back of the group, and still does. Now they’d both been on this path quite often and walked down to our accommodation, so I felt comfortable about walking ahead and leaving them. And I should say at this point as well that Bill doesn’t take much interest in the people that he lives with. He’ll come and sit with the staff and he will avoid the other service users that he lives with, the other people that he lives with. So I was walking down the path ahead of them and I looked at one point and I was directly below on the zigzag where they were, and Roddy, the other service user, had seen me on the lower slope and had turned to come straight down the slope and walk directly towards me and not for the first time, my heart was in my mouth. The first time working for Sense Scotland, I thought, here we go! P45, roulette, roulette. All of a sudden Bill came up behind him and grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him back onto the path and pushed him in the right direction and kept hold of his shoulder until they got down to me, and I started to think, right, so he’s seen something’s wrong, he has noticed the other service user, and he’s done something about it. This is a big step from what my impression of what his perception was. I might need to reconsider. The second incident was on the same holiday. We were doing a river crossing, so we’d gone in the evening, we’d got wetsuits on and helmets and buoyancy aids, and we’d set a rope up across the river, and Bill is not a big fan of water. But he got in, one of the first ones, and he went in and he about a third of the way along the rope and then he pointed back to the bank where we’d come from and he made his way back out and scrambled out. And then he sat on the bank and he watched as all the other service users, one by one, went across the other side of the river, and in particular he noticed Roddy going right the way across. And we thought, everybody’s across, we finished and Bill started pointing again at the rope, and he climbed back in the river and he walked to about the same place, about a third of the way across, and then he looked around almost as if to make sure everybody was looking and he ducked his head right under the water so he was completely submerged and then came back out, and he stood in front of Roddy and just burst out laughing. And I thought, he does notice these people obviously that he’s living with and maybe there’s a sense of competition there. He’s not going to be outdone and he didn’t want to go all the way across the river, but he’s now wet from head to toe. He might have been across the river, but I’m wet all the way out. There were two more activities in this holiday that raised quite big things for me and led me to think certainly about doing outdoor activities with people who are congenitally deaf-blind. The first was a zip wire, or the death slide as it used to be called, and this was doing it with Fred. And I tried to explain as best as possible what we were going to do, but my signing is bad at the best of times, and then we stood on the edge of the platform and he was quite relaxed. I was standing there at the edge and I thought, right, for a sighted person, this is the big moment when you’re standing on the edge. You’ve got your harness on and you’re attached, but this is the moment that you’re going to step off into nothingness. Well, Fred can’t see this. He couldn’t see. That’s not a powerful moment for him to be standing on the edge. There’s no moment of commitment. But he felt calm and he’s only a wee man and he felt quite relaxed, so I put one arm round him and one arm holding onto the rope and stepped off and immediately we stepped off he went tense, and then suddenly relaxed, and on reflection I think the immediate tension was, where’s the ground gone? There’s nothing anymore and then, well, Joe’s here, so it can’t be that bad. And then we went down faster and faster and faster until we hit the end and hit the brake and went, ooh, and flew up in the air, and suddenly he went tense again, and then as we were bouncing around and came to a stop and we were waiting for us to be lowered down to the ground, and he just burst out laughing. So it really made me think about what are the moments for people like Fred and Bill in these activities. They might be quite different from the way we perceive the activities. They might be experiencing the activities in a different way. And this is when I really started to change my research. The second activity I want to talk about with Fred is the one that had the biggest impact and it’s climbing, and we’ve got some video that I’m sure some of you have seen, but we’ll look at it again in a minute. We were initially really worried how Fred might react to the climbing, particularly wearing the harness and the helmet because he had a history when he was in the hospital of bearing restrained in a jacket and the harness that he was wearing because he was so small was a full body harness rather than just round your waist. So we weren’t sure how he was going to react to have this thing going over his shoulders and arms because of his previous experiences. Well, we put it on and he moved his arms and legs, sort of testing, and then burst out laughing as if to say, this is rubbish! I’ve been tied up much better than this before! So we spent an evening clambering up grassy slopes and scrambling over rocky bits, just trying to get the idea of climbing and of using your hands and feet to move over more and more challenging ground and then we went into the centre where they had a ladder and we put the harness on and we tried a rope on it and we climbed up a ladder to get the feeling of the rope pulling you tight as you went up. And then we lowered back down the ladder just to try and get an idea of how the harness system works. The next day we went along to the crag to climb. Now it was a really easy climb, but I have never been more scared before climbing. It’s the sort of thing I would do normally without a rope – it was that sort of level of climb – but for me this was the big risk. This was the first time I felt I was really taking a risk. So we can have a look just now at this footage and I’ll talk through it a bit. As I said, this holiday was before my research was in this area, so this was taken just as a holiday video. It wasn’t set up as any sort of research type thing and it was also in the days before digital, so it was on an analogue video, so it’s not great quality. [Video plays] So you can see in the beginning we’re quite close together and you can see that I’m quite nervous. And I’m ignoring all the times that Fred keeps investigating his helmet. It would have been a fantastic opportunity to stop and say, let’s have a discussion about the helmet. Do you want to talk about the helmet? And I’m saying, no, this is how you climb. You hold onto the rock like this. [Video plays] And then suddenly he gets it. And then you can see something happens and he gets a bit distressed and [unclear] his hands and I come back in close, and at this moment I’m really scared because he keeps pushing back, but actually I think it was maybe the distance between us. I’ll just stop if there. So, as you can see, we were both a lot younger then. You can age me by the length of the hair and a lot of people think maybe that’s the only time I’ve ever done it with anyone deaf-blind because I show it so many times at conferences and presentations, but it’s really because there’s so much I’m still learning from it. At the moment I’m looking with somebody... we’re tracking the distance between us and how that changes throughout the climb. At the start, I’m very controlling and telling him what to do, you know put your hands here, and then when I think he gets is, I let go a bit. And then he comes back to me once something happens, and I’m trying to work out what it was that happened, was it the rope going across his face, was it the fact that I wasn’t there when he turned round and the thing happened, the rope on his face? But nevertheless at the time it really strengthened the relationship between me and Fred and built up a really strong bond between us. As I said, this was the point that I changed my research to what I was interested in which was trying to understand how Bill and Fred experienced these activities, but for that to happen they had to be able to explain what they were feeling, and I’m sure they were able to explain what they were feeling or express what they were feeling. The difficulty was that I didn’t always understand when they were expressing those things. They had limited signs and not the formal language for us to have a conversation and we couldn’t sit and discuss after that, how did you feel and what was it that made you get upset at that point? So I began trying it with Fred, having conversation sessions. I don’t really like the term, because it made it sound like the only time he could talk was when we had the video camera set up in his room, but we would go back to his room after these outdoor sessions, the climbing sessions, and set with his helmet and his harness and the ropes and play and talk and try to talk about things to see how he reacted and what he signed and what he was interested in. And the first one of these sessions lasted 30 minutes of quite intense interaction which for Fred was a huge amount of time, although I think in retrospect and looking at the video, most of those 30 minutes was for me to get that it was the helmet that he wanted to talk about. He even went as far at one point of picking up the harness and putting it on his head as if to say, come on! Nevertheless I eventually got it that it was the helmet and we talked about the helmet and he kept putting the helmet on and doing the buckle up, but not letting go of my hands and then getting me to unbuckle it and then putting it on and letting go of my hands, but then grabbing them straight away to unbuckle it, and it began to be as if he was trying to make sure that he could take the helmet off any time he wanted. And I think this was maybe linked back to the hospital where, as well as the restraining jacket, he had a padded helmet and it was maybe a reassurance thing – this isn’t a bad helmet, this isn’t the same thing, I can have the control. This helmet can come off any time I like and, in the end, we developed his taking my hands to the buckle wherever we were when we climbing, we would finish the climb, we would come down and we would finish. So it developed into a sign for him as a way of finishing the climb and I was quite keen, whatever happened, that he maintained that control over the activity. So after the success of these first holidays, we were looking at ways that we carry on activities back in their daily life and the first of these was to start to go to the climbing wall and also interested in then starting to make more systematic observations and take more structured video. So we began to use the local climbing wall which, while it isn’t outside, it’s a way that you can go regularly, it’s close to the house, it doesn’t matter what the weather’s like, so it seemed like a good way to start. And here we can see Bill quite high up on the wall. As it happened, Bill was very successful at climbing at the wall and he learnt a lot of things. He learnt how to wait for routes and he had his set routine of routes and he knew what to do if there were other people on the route – he couldn’t just go and start. And this was one of the big advantages of the climbing wall and, whilst not being outside, being in a place like that, there were other members of the public there and they were exposed to the norms of public behaviour, but also the public was exposed to Bill and Fred and they started to see people with quite obviously complex disabilities doing activities that are quite challenging and then sometimes with more success. Certainly one time that Bill climbed up and there was a young boy with a school group that was stuck half way up the wall and frozen, as kids sometimes do. They freeze on the wall. And Bill climbed up, looked at him, burst out laughing, climbed to the top and then as he lowered back down, looked at him again and laughed! So Bill for self esteem, I think this was fantastic. I’m sure this young boy is now psychologically scarred for life! But I’m not interested in him! And here he is again on quite a hard route. The problem with him having his set routine, they would quite often change the routes at the wall and this used to be a route that he liked doing and then they made it a really hard route and he would still go, and he never got to the top. But he would still keep going back to the same rope and the same panel. Another aspect to the climbing wall was Bill’s relationship to the instructors. Because he could interact with them a bit more than Fred, and he would start to go off independently with them, I taught them a few signs and it was fantastic, and his relationship and his communication with them formed a bit part of my research. Indeed there was one time when I was working with Fred quite a lot and I looked around and I couldn’t find Bill anywhere, and the second time my heart was in my mouth since working with Sense, until I went out and found him sitting on the step outside with one of the instructors with a cup of tea and a climbing magazine. He’d managed to befriend this instructor and get him to make a cup of tea and they were sitting leafing through the climbing magazine together. So, again, that was fantastic; a relationship he would never have had the opportunity to build up, but just be doing these activities and going regularly he was being seen as a climber. He also started to tease the instructors. I think he realised they only knew when he’d finished and [unclear] which, which, which and he would take them to the next climb and then after a couple of months of this, suddenly he came back and he’s signing all these things – bath and toast and biscuit. I’m not sure quite what his reasoning was. It was either showing off, I know more signs than you, or he’s thinking, well I know Joe’s not going to give me a biscuit or toast, but maybe you will. However, it was the first visit to the climbing wall that had the biggest impact with regard to mixing with the public. I was on a very easy simple slab climb with Fred and we were climbing up the slab together. On the other side of the slab, on the overhang side, was a young Scottish climber called Malcolm Smith who just that summer before had just climbed the hardest route in the world at the time. So there in the same building, doing the same activity, were a profoundly deaf-blind man, climbing inside for the first time, and at the time the world’s best climber doing exactly the same activity, and there’s not many times that you can a situation like that. Now, Bill is an artist. Now, for those of you who know me, I consider that to be more of a disability that his deaf-blindness, but he is an artist, and he’s not just somebody who goes to art classes, he’s an artist. He’s had prizes for his art, he’s presented, he’s won parts of the Helen Keller award, and he’s had his own exhibitions. So, the way that I have tried to understand the way he perceived the activities would be, he’d take his sketch pad to the wall and he would draw at the wall, and in the evenings when I was doing night shifts with him I would ask him if he wanted to draw, and quite often he would draw similar pictures to the ones he’d done during the day, like memory pictures, and there was a lot of interesting things that I had to talk to even more artists to get them to help me to analyse these pictures, but that was my way in with him, was through his art. We’ll see a bit more of that in action in a bit. In about 2003, Bill moved out of the house from Glasgow, and I think he left not only as an artist, which he’d always been, but as a climber, and he certainly has carried on climbing at the local wall where he now lives. And then last year, in 2010, along with another Sense Scotland service user, they entered the British Engineering Council’s inaugural disability climbing competition, which was really interesting. It brought up even more learning for me and also for the organisers. There he is at the top of the first route. Now, the first thing it brought up was Bill liked to choose what route he would do next. In a climbing competition you set three different routes to do, so he climbed this first route and there was a big queue by route number two that he had to do, and he wanted to go and climb the route next to it because nobody was climbing on that, and he couldn’t understand why he had to stand in the queue when there was all these other routes free. They also had to do some climbs where they, bouldering, where there’s no rope. Now, we’d never climbed without a rope, we’d always top roped. Now, the bouldering was over these big, thick mats but it was a new thing for him to climb without the rope being tight, and it was something I’d always worked on with him, that you only start climbing when the person’s got you on belay. And, most interestingly, one of the bouldering routes, you can just make out here these bouldering… And he’s very close to the ground, he’s about six inches off the ground, and you had two big start holds and then you moved maybe ten holds along to two big finish holds. Now, at first he just kept holding the start holds because he knew the holds that were covered with round tape were the start holds, and then he would step down and he would walk along to the end holds and put his hands on them. Why make it difficult for yourself when the ground’s only there? Nevertheless, despite these issues, which probably were down to my explanation again, Bill came third, and the other Sense Scotland service user came second in the sensory impairment category. But that wasn’t the end of the learning because, Bill, when it came to the prize giving was more interested in the fact that the man giving the prizes was Jamie Andrew, who is a Scottish climber who lost both his hands and both feet in a climbing accident in the Alps, due to frostbite. And Bill wasn’t interested in the certificate or the bag of goodies, he was more interested in this man with no hands, how does he talk? This man’s got no hands, has nobody seen. And then he was more interested, you can just see there’s a red BMC banner and he was more interested in the material of that when he got up onto the stage. So, he stood for a very short while up on the podium but I haven’t actually got a picture with all three, first, second, and third on the podium because Bill was off, once he’d got his bag and he actually took the banner with him when he walked off. Another one of the activities that we introduced after the original Bendrick holidays that we could do on a weekly basis, that everybody could do, was environmental sessions, and these, really, were just a walk in the park. We never went very far from home but for someone like Fred stepping off the path, we could have been in the wilderness, we could have been in Borneo, anywhere outside his familiar house and his familiar garden, was the wilderness. We didn’t have to go to Greenland or Papua New Guinea; we could just go to Pollock Park. In this park we set up a route that we would do every time, and we always started at this big horse chestnut tree, which had two big branches that drooped into the ground, and here we are sitting at the base of it. And, what we would do, we would climb over the first branch and then under the second branch and that was a very big marker as where we were, and then when we’d do our loop and we’d look at the old tree with masks, and we’d look at the fallen down tree, and the tree with feet, the roots, and we would talk about the fact that trees drink through their feet, and the tree with loose skin and we’d collect a bit of bark, and we’d do this circle then we’d come back to the over under tree and we’d sit and talk about what we’d found. And I would try to find things of interest on the way, but we had this set route so we could talk about big trees and small trees and get across some of these difficult concepts that are, without something tangible, quite hard to get across, and we could talk about old and young and even death when the trees fell down. So, I’ve got a small bit of video of one of these sessions just to give you an idea. This was also, obviously being videoed, that the video man was there and I tried to explain and I spent a long time thinking of how to explain the fact that we were being videoed to Fred, and you’ll see my feeble attempts in a minute, but I called it the remember box because it helped me remember what we talked about. So, the man was here with the remember box to help me, that was the plan anyway. You can also see when the video plays what it actually is that Fred was interested in as we go through the over under tree – if it ever advances – and I run through it. And now we’re going to look for these different things and come back for a coffee, and he starts to grin when he knows that we’re going to come back and sit and have a cup of coffee. So, here we go. So, this is just walking up towards the over under tree. [Plays video] So, you can see it has a very, it was a very obvious place, very tactile experience for us to know, for him to know where we were each time. [Video] This is where I try and explain about the video man. [Video] I think as well as being able to see what it is that he’s actually interested in, it shows how familiar he’s become with the activities because he’s anticipating that he knows what’s coming with regard to coming back for coffee. I think for Fred, on the one hand Bill loves the activities and will follow anywhere, for Fred, I think he knows he has to go through some of this weird stuff, he has to put on this weird harness thing and crawl around the woods to get a cup of tea and a chat with me. [Video] There was one occasion on these trips that Bill’s shoe came off in the mud and I didn’t realise until I noticed him limping halfway round the walk, which was actually great, not great in that I thought he’d lost his shoe and he was living at the house where I used to be a team leader, I thought, I can’t take him back with one shoe, and we crawled back and there was a big drama, oh, we’ve lost your shoe. And, what was good about it, it was authentic, I didn’t have to make up any of the emotion and pretend that something had happened to make a big drama, it actually happened, and I was feeling it and he was certainly feeling it because he only had one shoe on. And it was another, one of the other times that I’d linked with the arts team that we’ve got in Scotland, and I was telling the woodwork tutor, and a few weeks after he said, come and see this, come and see this, and they’d started to make, with Fred, this big clay model, and because it was in the muddy area where there was a mountain bike track, I’d brought a mountain bike wheel in and we’d made some tracks, they made some footprints with his shoe, they made a bare footprint with him in the mud, and it ended up what’s called mud, with a wooden shoe, now this is one of the areas where I have issues with the art team – I have lots of issues with the arts team – but it doesn’t look accurate, it’s not right as far as I’m concerned but I don’t think that matters. It was the way that Fred was sharing the story with other people; the woodwork tutor and his staff all new very much now about this story and they could all talk to him about that story of his shoe coming off in the mud. And, more to the point, lots of other people, when they came and saw this, would know about the story and they could talk to him so, instead of in the past, only if I remembered or I told people about this particular incident, now there were lots of people who would know about this story and this thing that had happened with Fred. There was something else that started to happen in these sessions. I wanted us to have a way when we were going to new places to tell Fred how far we had to go and how far the walk was and I'd started to think of it when Benedict was talking about his stick being marked, because the way I came up, I'd done with some people, I'd made big 3D maps. Now that's not practical to walk around the woods with this big wooden map but I came up with the idea of a stick that had a tactile marker on one end and a different tactile marker on the other end and something in the middle, and every walk was the length of this stick. And every time we stopped for lunch or for coffee in the middle was the bit in the middle so he would always know when we were halfway along the walk and when we were near the end and they could let him feel along this stick as to how far along; and there is the journey stick. So we would use that and we called it a journey stick. So we would clip it on his belt and we would take it and we would feel and we could always be somewhere on there and it didn't matter how long the walk was we would always use that stick and halfway would always be halfway in the walk. And it struck a chord when you were marking up on your stick. Since Bill moved away from Glasgow and I began my new job in 2005 as the Outdoor Activities Co-ordinator I was able to start working with all the service users across Scotland and also to do some more international work. And in 2005 there was a Danish man, Claus Wilhelmsen, who suggested we set up an outdoor group and in 2005 some staff met and in 2006 I went with Fred to Norway and we had a week in Norway. And Fred and I spent five days up in the Norwegian mountains and we didn't go inside for the middle three days; we stayed outside the whole time. In fact, Fred and I were the only two that slept out next to the fire the first night. All these weak Norwegians slept in the lava in the tent. That pile of reindeer skins that we slept on and under was, the first night, actually was Fred. Waking up, we'd sat in the evening, we'd had our evening meal and our cup of tea, and we sat next to the fire and then he fell asleep and I wrapped him up in a sleeping bag and the reindeer skins and I slept next to him. And it was only in the morning when he woke up and he sat up and then he put his hands down as if to say, where have you taken me, what have you left me? This was a fantastic experience, this week; we were able to sleep next to the fire, see reindeer skins for the first time, they were a fantastic tactile experience, the reindeer skins. We cooked over the fire, everything, like I say, we were outside for three days, he had to have his morning medication next to the fire. Everything was outside. We went fishing and we had to look for food; it was just amazing. We made a toilet in the woods which was very interesting; there's the toilet in the woods which everybody used. And I was trying to explain to some of the staff, instead of just a hole it needs to be something that feels like a toilet. It doesn't matter what it looks like as long as it feels like a toilet for Fred to go and feel and then he'll sit down and use it, which he did. The only time he got grumpy was at the end of the three days when we went back into the hotel and I think there were two reasons for that. I think it was the first time in three days that he'd put his shoes on; he was quite happy for me to carry him up to the toilet into the woods and that was a risk as well because I kept getting told off for carrying him on my back. But also when we were up in the mountains and around the fire I wasn't too worried about spilling the food down him. When we went back to the hotel for this final meal, we did a lot of lying down as well, when we went back to the hotel, you can see there the food all down his tee-shirt, when we went back to the hotel I was very concerned about spilling food, as you are when you go out. And I think he'd had enough of that and was quite liking the fact of feeding himself and food going everywhere and not caring. These trips to Norway it brought to mind a concept that I'd only read about before; in fact, it's not really a concept of the Scandinavian type it's part of their culture, called friluftsliv, which is outdoor living, nature living. And we were able to discuss it and compare it to the British approach to outdoor education and the British approach is often quite contrived, like climbing walls, climb up and come back down again. We'll often drive to a crag and climb up and come back down again. I'm sure that any of you that have been to an outdoor centre you will have done a raft building where you are given certain things to make a raft and then go a bit down the river where the minibus will pick you up, and ropes courses. So we talked about it and in the next year when we came to Scotland we purposely did some of the ropes courses just to see how it worked and see whether it worked. We did particularly an activity called the pamper pole which is a big telegraph pole with a small platform on the top. It had big holes so you climb up the telegraph pole and then you're supposed to try and stand up on the little platform at the top, wearing a harness, obviously, and then jumping off. Everybody did this and it was great fun but it was really difficult to explain to do this; explain climb to the top of this 30 metre pole and then stand on the platform at the top and then jump off. That in itself is difficult to explain and then why? What is the point of It's not the fault of the activities, it's more the way we frame them for the people we work with. So this was another thing I started to think about, for the people that I'm working with how can I frame the activities in the best way for them to understand. This similar situation came across in a situation with Bill where we did another river crossing with [unclear] where the rope's above the river not in the river and we spent about two hours getting everybody across this rope, pulling themselves in their harness across the river and then we walked back round over the bridge, back round to the minibus. And Bill looked at me as if to say why have we just spent two hours fanning [?] about with the ropes, we could have been… And, again, there's nothing wrong with the activity, we could have just parked the bus a bit further down the road and not come back across the bridge. It is how we frame the activities I think that's important. In fact, things like that, crossing the river can become part of a walk and that becomes the big, dramatic moment that you tell the story about afterwards. It is the big thing, oh how are we doing to get across the river, and you make a big story about this river crossing. So, in the light of this, I've tried to arrange the activities more in a journey or a story to explain what we're doing and also to work in a more project style. So, with Bill I've done some sessions last year where we mapped an area of the coast near where he lives; it's a fantastic area of woods and sand dunes and then beach. So there was the element of the physicalness of the activity; we spent every week for about 15 weeks going round every part of this wood. He became very confident walking with his poles and walking independently, even on quite challenging terrain. This is part of the sand dunes in the winter so it was all uneven sand that then froze in the winter; it was really uneven and he was still able to walk, once he'd got used to walking with his poles, by himself. I also got him to video things that were interesting to him using this little handheld video camera. Now this was really interesting We would set a shelter up at lunchtime in some fantastic locations. Here we are just under a wee tarpaulin on the beach. Quite often there were seals on this beach as well so they were fantastic places to be. When we stopped for lunch and after our lunch I would take Bill's sketchpad with him, or he would pack it in his bag, and he was able to draw then and, again, draw the things that were interesting to him. Here are a couple of pictures of him drawing away. I also blew up some maps to a really big size and then used plasticine models to show where we were on the map because I was trying to get across, I'd done some work with him about maps and the idea of maps and the concept of pictures from above, and we used these models to show where we were on the map each time. Then, when we came back to his house, we'd use Google Earth and satellite pictures to look at the actual images from above and put the pictures that we'd taken onto Google Earth; you can do that as well tag them on, so he was adding pictures to the Google Earth image. And I also used a big board the same dimensions as the map we were using and he would draw pictures and we would stick some of the photos onto this board into the right square and we'd talk about where we had been. And then I handed everything, all the pictures and all the maps and the board and all the things we'd collected all the pine cones and different things, over to his art tutor and she carried on. So when I finished my block of sessions with him he was able to carry on this work in the same vein. And he spent weeks and weeks sorting through all the things and cutting up, we even had to collect, the art tutor wanted me to collect all the lunch wrappers, so we collected everything and he would sort through everything. And, in the end, both the working board and then the tactile map that he made got hung in an exhibition so this was another fantastic way of carrying this on beyond just my sessions; that the other people in the house could do that and the art tutors, they all got involved. Recently I've started to use, in a similar way, the John Muir Awards. John Muir was born in Dunbar in the 19th Century and he was a botanist and a conservationist and a naturist. He moved to America and he was integral in setting up the national park system and we now have this John Muir Award set up that's encouraging people to engage with wild places. And to do that you have to go through four challenges; you have to discover, explore, conserve and share a wild place. What I like about the John Muir Awards over things like the Duke of Edinburgh is they're very flexible; the wild place can be your garden or it can be Greenland or Noida or Papua New Guinea or anywhere in between. So it's great in a way that I can do sessions with people outside and do the explore and the discover bit, but also the staff, the support workers can carry on and help get ready the share bit; how to tell other people this. And we do things like collecting rubbish or making insect-type houses for the conserve and we've just recently had another three people get their certificates in Glasgow and they had a mini exhibition in Touchbase of their share bit. And one of the things we came up with that I thought this time was quite good and it was new for this time was we'd collected loads of stuff in all these different parks around Glasgow and we were trying to find a way that they could sort through that was meaningful for the guys, not just for us as the staff, and we came up with the two tree classification system. There is now two sets of trees; there are trees with needles and trees with leaves and this is John Muir and there are our two trees. So we cut out these two different shapes of trees with needles and trees with leaves and everybody could sort through quite tactilely and quite easily, we could talk about the different trees they experienced, the type of trees they were collecting them from. They were already aware of these different things that came from the trees and they were able to sort through them and stick them onto the different boards and it was really interesting to see how they really bought into it. And particularly how the staff, for me, it was how the support workers bought into it and I would find them in the art room doing these things when it was nothing to do with my sessions; they'd carried it on out with my bit. Last year, as a result of some of these outdoor groups… I'll just finish off then by talking about we've just set up, last year and it's just been officially recognised this year, the Deafblind International have set up an outdoor network and I'll just slip through these couple of slides here from different international trips. We're hoping that next year in Scotland that we have a trip similar to these trips with the Scandinavians that we've had in Norway, but not just having Denmark, Norway and Scotland there but opening it up to everybody in the world. I'm certainly keen that, while it's useful to talk about all these different benefits and the therapeutic and the educational things of the outdoors, the main reason I am keen to keep taking the people that I work with out and letting them experience the outdoor activities, is they enjoy them because it's fun. I think we should all have the opportunity to do these activities, not just because there's some other benefit but if it's something you enjoy I think it's something that everybody should have a chance to experience. Thank you. SA You may have thought you couldn't top Benedict but it was just so amazing and to have the video. You didn't have any video clips to show us did you; no. BA What a lovely parallel with sticks I thought it was absolutely fascinating. SA Really, really interesting those parallels and just how amazing the simplicity of people having fun and being out in nature and actually it was that simple in a way and testament to your amazing work. Do we have some questions? MA Thank you both. I think we have spent a lot of time in Sense, because we have a duty of care, in conducting risk assessments with the focus on looking at the risks and the mitigation of those risks. It's really a comment rather than a question. I think you've actually shown us that we should look at risk opportunity because I think you've shown a variety of opportunities that you've both experienced by taking those risks. And I also liked your idea, Joe, of framing something; giving a reason. Because I think if we involve, particularly congenitally deaf/blind people in their risk assessments, if we read through that risk assessment I think they'd probably be saying, why; because we're detailing the risks and all the dangers but not explaining the opportunity. By putting the risk opportunity in there we explain the purpose for it; what the benefits of taking those risks might be. So thank you for highlighting that. UF Certainly the one thing I wrote down was framing activities so they're not so contrived and I wondered if there was any more you could say about you obviously thought about it, is there more that activity centres could do to avoid the two hours crossing the river to get on a minibus, scenario? JG Yes I certainly think any way that the activities can be made into a journey makes a big difference and that helps with making it a story. And it's if you can make it a story when you get back. And it's no story to say, drove to the crag, climbed up, lowered back down, drove home again; that's no story. So even if you walk, get dropped off a bit before and you walk to the crag and then you have lunch at the top and you don't lower back down. I think there're ways that you can turn the activity or the trip into a story and make it a journey rather than just a thing that you are going to do. And on the risk analysis I'd just like to say that in the outdoor world now they're starting to talk about risk benefit analysis; so not just looking at the risk but looking at what's the benefit. The riskiest bit of any of my activities that I ever do is the drive to and from wherever we are going to do it. But the benefit is we get where we're going. So the benefit of being on the road with all the other nutters that are on the road is getting there as opposed to the risk of the chance of having an accident. MA Oliver Walder, you've mentioned these two particular gentlemen in your presentation, do other service users also benefit from these things but you have just not spoken about those because you're concentrating on one story line as it were? JG Yes I overran with just the two of them and I still had a lot to say. I now work with all the service users across Scotland and I just thought because they were the two that I started my research with that it would be good to show the journey of them; of their journey through the activities. GM I just wondered, Joe, if you could comment on how you are communicating with the deafblind guys while you're doing these activities; it's a bit of a challenge isn't it? JG Yes, particularly as I'm not a very good signer. Certainly, it's interesting with Fred, he likes you to be behind him which I know is not the conventional way of signing with a deafblind person and I think for him it's the contact; he likes to feel your body around him as you're signing. So I try and base things on signs as much as I can but also then things like the trees I'll try and make it as relevant to them. So instead of trying to talk about roots of trees which is going to have no meaning and I don't know how I would explain that, I'll talk about the feet of the trees and try, again, frame things in a way that, from what I know of their experiences and their understanding, will fit into their view as well as trying to widen their view. So the maps being pictures from above and being able to start with a map on the table and then go to the room before we go outside; we certainly do that progression and scaffold up into activities. Like with the climbing; starting on a grassy slope and moving up and up and up. So it's not straight into climbing up a big scary rock face. SA I just wondered, Benedict, if you had any thoughts on Joe's presentation? BA I'm full of admiration and I think it's a big reminder for me of how inspiration needn't be at the other end of the world. I think that's so important. When I was a little boy I was told I could not be an explorer because the world has been explored and then I wasn't actually particularly good at sport or a lot of things you expect explorers to be. But it's so true that humans are explorers by nature; you don't have to be in the middle of nowhere we are all curious about the world as we are as children and, in fact, as adults as well, of course. We are all curious about the world. We all want to try and untangle it and understand it. I think it's a great reminder that you can, and you've said it in your excellent presentation, about how we don't understand the world around us and that goes for all of us actually. I think it's very reassuring and very exciting and also humbling to realise what we can all achieve, even within this room, to understand the world. SA Thank you both, Benedict and Joe, for incredibly complementary presentations. I've learnt a lot and I expect to go to Norway now to see all the stuff that you do. I'm going to hand over John Crabtree. JC Ladies and gentlemen, I can say with absolute certainty that I'm not Scottish and also I don't come from Shepherds Bush. Actually, I can also say, I know with absolute certainty within about ten, 15 minutes, I'll get into my car to go back up the Midlands and I'll have exactly the same thought that I had last year, I remember having it and I expect last year I was thinking I had it the year before and the year before that. Which is, every year we come to this lecture it's always a fantastic evening and I get in the car afterwards and think that and I think how on earth are the team going to beat that next year? And tonight, of course, you have; you've been humbling, for me anyhow, humbling and inspirational. Humbling because, well we all have our adventures, we all have the things we do, all our own challenges and we all know our own limitations and you listen to that and you realise actually we need to push our limitations out a bit. For me, I take people trekking for Sense every year, all able-bodied, I'm able-bodied and I can only get round by moaning and whinging and complaining the whole way round; that's my personal way of doing it. And I realise, listening to both of you, Benedict and Joe, I need to be a bit braver and a bit tougher about it and inspirational. Of course that goes without saying, doesn't it; these evenings are always inspirational and I've made notes sitting down there and I come away with little bits I've picked up, little things I've heard and I go out to my other life, my nasty commercial world, and I find myself doing a bit of business or talk to people in that environment on bits of what I've picked up at a Sense Annual Lecture, comes trotting out and I use it a lot. Truly both of you have been absolutely fantastic, truly inspirational. So if anybody is inspired by that please come on a trek with me because I'm always looking to sign up a few extra people and raise more money for Sense. I'm looking around the room and I can see lots of enthusiastic hands shooting up in the air. I'd like to say thank you on all our behalves; Samira, as last year, fantastic Chair getting everybody together and getting everyone talking together and I know I've got somebody down here who is going to give me something to hand to you. Here we are; Samira, thank you very much. [Gifts presented to Benedict Allen, Joe Gibson and Samira Ahmed] So the most dangerous thing they're going to do tonight is go home in your cars or on the tube; I hope you manage that safely. Thank all of you for coming. We were completely packed out tonight; we had people who wanted to come who we turned away and I'm sure it will be the same next year. Thank you very much indeed.