Strangers on a train: part one
Thanks for the amazing and uplifting response to my last blog. It has provoked me to blog further about the people I met on my return journey from Coventry.
The weather had culled the service to London, so that the trains that were running were heaving with people. As luck would have it I found a table with one seat left. I sat down and opened my MacBook Air – no wi-fi for some reason.
I began to become aware of the couple sitting opposite each other against the window at my table. Perhaps 60 years old, man and wife, I guessed. They were gesticulating to each other – about me. The man used his two forefingers to describe a TV screen, saw me looking, and offered me four fingers. I realised he was deaf and mute, and that he was telling me he recognised me from Channel 4.
The woman was also deaf but had speech. She told me they had both had meningitis as children – he, when he was five, had lost both hearing and speech. She had lost her hearing at 12. She was disappointed I didn’t know sign language. So was I.
Then I realised I could use my Mac screen. So I pumped it into 23pt lettering and started to write furiously. I told them how good it was to meet them, that I’d never had a proper conversation with deaf people. They wanted to know if I would be mentioning them on the news. I told them I would blog about them.
They told me they were on their way to Gillingham for a “knees-up” with friends. They were clearly excited about it. They seemed wonderfully outgoing and optimistic. The man had been reading the Daily Mirror. I thought about the world we inhabit together and what little effort we make to include them.
Then the man thanked me for the subtitles on Channel 4, and, in truth, I have always known that the subtitling is incredibly good on the channel – fast and accurate. When you sit there doing your job, you never think that some people are absorbing what you say by reading it off the bottom of the screen. Although I am aware of it because occasionally “subtitling” contact us and ask if we can give them an advance copy of the news script so that they can get to work on it.