How many shades of green are there? Whatever the answer may be, I soon ran out of words to describe them. I was walking north along the Grand Union canal, trying and failing to adequately describe what I could see, to a friend who couldn’t. This was Dave Heeley, ultra-runner, who in 2008 became the first blind person to run seven marathons on seven continents in seven days. Today we were walking rather than running – which, with me guiding him, was just as well.
I had guided a blind adventurer once before when I took part in the television series Pilgrimage. One of my fellow pilgrims was the remarkable Amar Latif. We were high up on the side of a deep, lush valley in eastern Serbia. I was focused on the trickiness of the path itself, but Amar kept asking me to describe the vista. I looked down that valley at the mountains in the distance and simply didn’t know how or where to start. I had a bash, as there was plainly plenty of material to work with, but didn’t feel I had done justice to the richness of that scene.
On the face of it, a canal towpath just south of Leighton Buzzard wasn’t of the same order of magnificence. Yet, when you looked – really looked, as you obviously must if you’re being someone else’s eyes – you saw things with a different kind of intensity. Under what felt like the first blue skies of spring, the greens were simply extraordinary. The RAL colour standard, used to maintain consistency in plastics, varnishes and the like, lists 40 shades of green. I think RAL might need to go back to the drawing board and identify a few more. Dave, as big an enthusiast for life and the world as you’re ever likely to meet, listened to me wax lyrical, and appeared to mind not a jot when I showed signs of forgetting my main task, which nearly allowed him an insight into the taste as well as the sight of a canal in the spring.
We were here because we support the same football team and our club’s charitable arm, the Albion Foundation, is paying tribute to Dave and all his fundraising work by walking from Wembley to West Bromwich. Among the group are people who are blind, partially sighted and sighted, some of whom are walking blindfolded, not least Rob Lake, the foundation’s inestimable director. I walked a stretch blindfolded too, guided by Mike, a retired insurance company executive. Such was Mike’s expertise that I’m not so sure I gained much appreciation into what it is to be blind. Boggy and lumpy though the path was in parts, he had such a gift for guiding that we barely broke step. The sounds of nature were more enchanting than ever; human-made noises of boat engines and the odd car were more discordant than usual. Other than that, I was free to be absorbed in the conversation.
I felt as if I had rather missed the point of the exercise, in that I had learned more about what I hadn’t been seeing properly than about what Dave isn’t able to see at all. I asked him if he was aware of any charity organisation that paired blind people with those who would like to walk with them. He said he didn’t, and we agreed that neither of us knew what to Google to find out. Try “taking a blind bloke for a walk”, he suggested. I tried something less blunt than that and came up with not very much. There are plenty of groups doing vital work assisting with doing the shopping and so on, and at the other end of the spectrum there are opportunities to take part in sport and even extreme adventuring. I hope no blind person is missing out on the simple joys of a good walk for the want of guides who may themselves be missing out on the chance to see the world better.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist