In which I enumerate several of my most endearing flaws.

The Haggunennons of Azizatus Three have the most impatient chromosomes of any life-forms in the galaxy. Whereas most races are content to evolve slowly and carefully over thousands of generations – discarding a prehensile toe here, nervously hazarding another nostril there, the Haggunennons would do for Charles Darwin what a squadron of Arcturan Stunt-Apples would have done for Sir Isaac Newton. Their genetic structure, based on the quadruple-striated octo-helix, is so chronically unstable, that far from passing their basic shape onto their children, they will quite frequently evolve several times over lunch. But they do this with such reckless abandon that if, sitting at table, they are unable to reach a coffee spoon, they are liable without a moment’s consideration to mutate into something with far longer arms – but which is probably quite incapable of drinking the coffee. – Douglas Adams: The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Fit the Sixth

I told the graphic designer for our Open Minds Erasmus+ project that we should make the title of this section of the web page the same font as the yellow text in the previous section.

“That text is orange,” he said, with the kind of flat, matter-of-fact tone reserved for people who are clearly being bafflingly stupid, but also pay invoices on time.

“Ah, “ I explain, feeling the need to state the obvious: “I’m actually a bit colourblind.”

“Oh – sorry! I had no idea…”

Not his fault in the least, of course. It’s not like I wear a badge.

And nor, if I’m totally honest, is it even in the top five idiosyncrasies that people might need to accommodate when working with me. It’s a “disability” in more or less the same way that the fact I cook poached eggs quite consistently well is a superpower.

Honestly, daltonism (as I’ve discovered it’s called) is not even the worst of my visual issues, though I imagine it likely contributes to things like poor night vision, failing to see small pieces of broken glassware on polished concrete kitchen floors and not always being able to tell when my iPad screen is smudgy.

And yet, on paper, I have pretty good eyesight. I mean, I wear glasses – but the correction level on them, while necessary for critical tasks like driving or identifying small letters on optometry charts, is pretty slight as these things go.

The fact that the text on my iPhone is now set to a chunky font size and that I use varifocals on a day to day basis is simply a testament to the fact that I am 55 years old, and with that comes a degree of expected wear and tear. Broadly speaking, I function ‘properly’ in most physical respects.

Basically, what I’m saying is that my eyes are (relatively) fine, but that isn’t always enough. The main problem with my vision lies not with my eyes, but behind them.

I’m okay at seeing, not so great at looking and pretty terrible at picturing.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

Example 1: Let’s say you and I are face to face in the same room chatting for a couple of hours. Perhaps over a coffee. Then you get up and go to the bathroom. Once you are out of sight, another person joins me and asks who was just here. I tell them the correct answer.

“Oh, what do they look like?”

Not a clue. I could easily recognise you of course, but I can’t “see” you if you’re not there and I think, as a result, I don’t really have any language to usefully describe you.

“Tall? Short? Blonde? Dark? Glasses? Beard?”

I have hunches that feel intuitively correct, but I certainly wouldn’t put money on them.

“Okay, but so what were they wearing?”

I try to imagine clothes. Some sort of shirt I guess. It has a colour, though I couldn’t really tell you which. Wasn’t there a hat of some sort? I’m not 100%.

And back you come from the bathroom looking exactly as you did before you left. The sight of you is not new information exactly, but it’s not information I can retrieve without having it in front of me.

Example 2: Putting information into a graphical format prevents me from understanding it.

The kinds of diagrams, infographics, pictorial layouts and charts that most people use to present complex information in an easily digestible form might as well be hieroglyphics.

I don’t think this is just my inability to process visual data. I believe that most infographics, when interrogated with rigour, do actually turn out to have been obscuring and, more often than not, misinterpreting meaning.

I think it’s just that other people are satisfied by an image. Which is not to say they merely pretend to understand, but that their understanding is impressionistic rather than logical or sequential.

It’s that impressionistic understanding I don’t have access to.

So even when the size, shape, colour or direction of the elements within a graphic make no literal sense and fail to map in any coherent way onto the thing that they purport to represent, people will still collectively“get” it. Other people, that is. There will be a shared, unspoken, agreed interpretation of that pretty but ultimately (to me) informationless cryptogram.

Tell me something, and I’ll usually understand. Draw me a diagram, and you might as well have done an interpretive dance while juggling bees. In a completely different building.

I have similar issues with hearing, but in many ways, my auditory world is both infinitely better and also very much worse.

So, I have no deafness or hearing loss to speak of. Things are just as loud as they have always been, and, if anything, my high frequency hearing is at the upper end of the bell curve for people my age. Given the tens of thousands of hours I have spent around musicians, in recording studios, at concerts, in clubs and wearing headphones, I seem to have come away relatively unscathed so far.

Which is, of course, a good thing, because pretty much my favourite of all the pastimes is to listen to music.

Also, throughout my life, my ears have been an immense asset, both personally and professionally. But they have also been quite possibly my greatest sensory impediment.

It comes down to both biology and physics: my ears stick out. Not just a little bit, but substantially more than most people.

Apart from the aesthetics of this, something I long since came to terms with (this is just what I look like and as long as you don’t spend too much time pointing and laughing, I’m happy enough with that outcome), it means that my hearing is very directional. Useful, right?

I have two finely-tuned parabolic dishes, positioned precisely head-width apart, that collect and funnel sound into the space between with great accuracy and in very high quality.

This means that I can locate the point source of a sound’s origin, orientate myself in a reverberant space and, I imagine, enjoy the spatial and textural dimensions of stereo recordings and live acoustic music at a level beyond the grasp of most conventionally-eared humans.

However, directional is not omnidirectional. It’s not a 360° deal. In fact, if you’re behind me, I can’t hear you. The noise rejection at the back of my ears is almost as good as the signal collection at the front.

Now, that used to be my most consequential auditory quirk. But it scarcely registers in comparison to what has now become the real issue.

How my brain processes sound – and, in particular, speech – has changed. Over the last five years, the problem has been getting noticeably more pronounced year on year.

I have some difficulty distinguishing and sorting out simultaneous auditory signals, regardless of their spatial positioning. I lack the ability to focus in on just one sound rather than another, or separate foreground signal from background noise. This is especially the case when competing sounds inhabit similar frequency ranges.

This is pretty common, I understand. It’s why I can tell when someone under 30 has mixed the sound on a video or, say, radio commercial. Older people need more headroom between the voice and the music so they can hear the dialogue properly, and younger people can’t even begin to fathom that.

Perhaps as the result of my long career in audio, I am more sensitive to the phenomenon and its effects. Perhaps I have it worse than other people. But the upshot of this is that two or more people speaking at once just becomes sonic soup.

To explain: If you’re talking to me and another person also starts speaking, I can’t hear either of you. This isn’t just an irritation. I find it quite stressful, and simply trying harder to follow what’s being said just increases the stress without improving the result.

Worst of all for me are cocktail parties, after-work drinks or pretty much any ‘gathering’ at all. Put 100 people in a room with terrible acoustics and give them all champagne and canapés and the first thing I’ll do is make it 99 people. I can’t deal with it at all.

Not that it was ever in my top one thousand favourite activities, but I’ve now lost whatever ability I may once have had to mingle. When you consider that my main job is putting (admittedly brilliant) people in a room together for whole weeks at a time, you have to wonder about some of my choices.

And while it’s obviously about sound, it’s really not about hearing. This is very clearly a psychological phenomenon. I know this because as the experience intensifies, I become more overwhelmed, then fairly quickly distressed.

I enjoy a room full of people networking about as much as I would enjoy that same number of people simultaneously shouting at me for ruining their Christmas. Inevitably, I have to leave, go sit somewhere quietly and just breathe.

Okay, so before you attempt to diagnose this as some sort of condition or disorder, or place me on a spectrum of some kind so as to name and therefore helpfully address and assist in mitigating the issue, consider the following: it’s entirely possible that a) I may have done this to myself, and b) that it is merely the unfortunate but ultimately minor negative side effect of a different and otherwise wholly positive psychological adaptation.

Which is that I’ve become good (or at least much better than I was) at listening.

I feel I need to qualify that somehow. It has to do with a combination of things, some of which I’ve worked on deliberately, others are by-products of what I’ve spent the last 40 years (and especially the last 10) focusing on.

For instance, I often notice that I’m using interviewing techniques in conversations. I’ve long been interested in what makes a good interview anyway and I used to teach the skill, both at university and at radio stations. But now I appear to have adopted the practice in everyday conversation – and I have much better conversations as a result. Interviewing is often less about asking questions than it is about listening to the answers.

Generally speaking, unless your role is to give instruction or provide a briefing, the aim would be to speak for less than half the duration of the conversation.

Also, I quite often find that I’m the only person in the room who followed the dialogue in a tv show or film where it appears to have washed over other people. This is particularly true when strong accents are at play. Others might pick up gist but not detail. I can usually tell you what was said – and I expect that has something to do with years of dialogue editing, which, of all the things I could be said to have some skill at, is probably my strongest suit.

It also might come from 10 years in Birmingham – which not only has a characteristic regional accent that some find difficult to decipher, but is also home to many other accents that your typical South Birmingham resident will encounter daily. And also, now that I think of it – my family tree has roots in Glasgow, notoriously one of the more impenetrable accents in the English language and adjacent dialects.

But perhaps most significant is the fact that speech is now the main way in which I consume information. A few podcasts, of course. But far more narrated long form articles, audiobooks and AI text-to-speech readings of pretty much any document that comes my way. Hours of listening, every day, at every spare moment.

We’re not talking about the Stephen Hawking style text-to-speech you might be thinking of either. AI narration has come a very long way in the past couple of years. Check out Speechify, for instance. Other than the fact that nobody ever seems to take a breath and there are some odd inflections, strangely-placed pauses and unusual emphasis choices, it’s often quite hard to distinguish some of the AI voices from real people.

But all this is just to say: I listen deliberately. I focus. I value and process what is being said. I don’t always remember everything and that’s a whole other thing, but generally, I am a listener.

What I can’t do is just sort of dip in and out – or skim as you might do with printed text. I can’t have speech radio on in the background. I need to take in every word like beads on a string. And I certainly can’t multitask, I can’t listen to a podcast and read email at the same time. I would suspect anyone who said they could of being a liar (and quite possibly a murderer).

There is nothing impressionistic or secondary about it for me. If I’m listening, I am LISTENING. And if there’s interruption, cross-talk or competing sound, my brain interprets it as static. Interference. As a threat.

So, speaking while I’m listening to something or someone is a little like dancing in front of the TV while I’m trying to watch a film. The problem is not that I ‘fail’ to simultaneously process the dancing as well as the movie – or, indeed, that I’m “bad at watching”. It’s just that I can no longer sufficiently appreciate either the film or the dance – either of which I may well have enjoyed properly if presented separately.

This is fine. I’m certainly not getting the sense that I’m missing out. I don’t particularly wish that I could tolerate noisy social gatherings any more than I wish I could eat more avocados (I happen not to like avocados very much and so not eating them is no hardship… though guacamole is a different story, where the avocado is a perfect vehicle for other, much more interesting flavours – I digress).

In other words, to draw a parallel with the Haggunennons of Azizatus Three: I may not be able to drink the coffee, but I have at least developed far longer arms.

We see things differently. We hear things differently. We think differently and move about differently.

Sometimes the context or environment makes that a problem. But it’s generally the environment that is the source of the problem. At the very least – it certainly seems like a much simpler task to try to address the problem at the level of the environment than it might be to try and standardise the person.

Because these minor non-disability disabilities that I experience from time to time – misidentifying orange text or having to excuse myself when a conference coffee break becomes intolerable – they help me understand a little better the need for radically-inclusive design.

Which is handy, because that’s actually what I’m working on. It’s what that Open Minds Erasmus+ project I mentioned up top is all about.

We all have physical and psychological differences. Cultural and historical ones too. Most technologies, buildings, systems, practices and environments are constructed as if we don’t. Or as if the people that they happen to exclude don’t particularly matter. But we can build all of these things differently if we choose to. Hence the project.

It’s not my experience of the world that led to Open Minds (at least not consciously), but more that my involvement in Open Minds has helped me better understand and contextualise both my experience of the world and the ways in which other people’s may reveal our inherent differences in different contexts and in sometimes non-obvious ways.

That said, there’s certainly no need to go around changing the built environment for my specific benefit – and there are presumably some things that I could actually improve through effort. If there was a ‘cure’ for mild colourblindness or auditory overwhelm, I’d probably consider it – though I’d far rather you spent your research funding on cancer or ALS or something. 

I’m not demanding that the universe be customised to my needs. But as a general rule of thumb, it seems far better to standardise the accommodation of differences in all contexts than it might be to try and fix the faults you might encounter in people like me.

I raise them here not to make you aware of my own idiosyncracies and foibles, but perhaps as a reminder that this is absolutely the least of it, and we never have any idea what things other people might be having difficulty with – physically, emotionally, psychologically or otherwise.

So, I don’t know – be kind, I guess?