Glen – Page 37 – Well Eye Never

Virgin Media Installation

I’ve been in London for just over a month now, and so far things are going well. As anticipated and hoped, it’s been a much needed and refreshing change of routine, and the last few weeks have been pretty busy as you can imagine. I’ll write about the many things I’ve been up to soon.

The one thing we have had trouble with, however, is getting the internet set up, which is why I’ve been so quiet here. We had been assured by BT that they could transfer our broadband account to our new property without any problems, which we were glad to hear. But unfortunately, as I explained in detail in my Christmas journal, their system got completely confused by the additional homeworking line my employer had installed. So the transfer kept failing, and after spending ages on the phone we cancelled our account.

We then signed up to Virgin Media instead, taking advantage of a generous offer via my employer’s benefits scheme, whereby I got free installation and a £10 per month discount for the first year. Since then I’m happy to say that the switch to Virgin has been successful so far. They’re not perfect – who is? – but on the whole we’re very happy with what we’ve got. So I thought I’d do a review of their service to give my first impressions.

Journal – Christmas 2016 (Moving To London)

Finally, after nearly 120 journal posts – and thank you so much for reading if you’ve gone through some or all of them – my mother and I have now moved away from Devon into my Nan’s house in London, which we inherited when she passed away.

So in this post you’ll find out how we’ve settled in over the festive period, sorting through various bits and pieces, having problems with BT, going shopping and taking some nice walks. I also got to see my best mate and his wife who were visiting the city, signed up for some social events in January, watched a lot of TV, and was shocked to hear about the deaths of 3 very popular entertainers.

Going forward, I’ll be sharing my (hopefully many) adventures in London in a monthly roundup format, as I’ll explain at the end. But for now, I hope you enjoy this bumper post about my long-awaited arrival in the capital!

Journal – December 2016 (Moving Preparations)

Welcome back. We’re literally on the home straight now with these journal posts, as Mum and I have been getting ready to make the move to London at long last, and arrangements are being made for me to start homeworking. So I hope you enjoy reading about our final preparations.

Sight Village 2016

Last week I had to go up to London for a couple of days, so I took the opportunity to spend a long afternoon exploring Sight Village, an exhibition showcasing products, services and organisations for visually impaired people. Their main show each year is in Birmingham, but they also have roadshows in Leeds, Edinburgh, Glasgow and, in this case, London. So I thought I’d do a write-up bout my visit. Which, fair warning, is quite long! But I’ve added headings throughout to split it up, in case you want to jump to any part in particular. So I hope you find it interesting. 🙂

Journal – October-November 2016 (London Visit)

Welcome back to my latest journal posts. There wasn’t anything worth writing about in September, but recent weeks have been pretty eventful.

Down in Devon I’ve been to a stand-up comedy show with some work colleagues, and there are updates on our house sale too. I’ve also paid another visit to our new place in London, where my Aunt gave me a little tour of the local area, I went to the Sight Village exhibition and an aniridia meetup, I oversaw the installation of a broadband line for homeworking, and I made contact with a fellow blogger I’ve been following for a while. So I hope you enjoy it all!

Guide Dogs

In this post and video I want to talk about guide dogs and assistance dogs, in support of Guide Dogs Week (1st-9th October). They are amazing and beautiful animals who make such a huge difference to their owners, and they should be treated with the utmost respect, without any discrimination. I’ve also published an extended cut of the guide dog footage I’ve used in the video if you want to check that out too.

Getting A Job

As a follow-up to my School Days video last month, I thought I’d also write about how I got a job after graduating from university.

My degree was in accounting and finance (in which I got a 2:1), so naturally I was looking for work in that field. It was the area that interested me most, and my degree would allow me to skip some of the exams of the official accounting bodies, which would be a great help.

My graduation photo. I'm wearing a dark navy suit and tie, with light blue strap around the neck, and a mortar board on my head. I'm smiling while holding a rolled up certificate tied with a red ribbon.

But I was also open to other ideas and possibilities as well, if any came up. I knew that just having a degree in itself would be useful, even if it wasn’t directly related to the job I eventually went for. So I didn’t feel I wanted to restrict myself too much, just in case.

Thank You Rio – Paralympics Review

If you’ve seen my School Days video, you’ll know I used to be a member of a local sports club for disabled people when I was a kid. So, as well as doing sports at school, I would also take part in lots of swimming galas around England, from Darlington in the north, to Plymouth in the south, and lots of other places in between.

There were people with lots of different disabilities at those events, so to try and make things as equal as possible, they would either try and group people with similar conditions together in each event, or the competitors in each race would start at different times (from slowest first, to fastest last), based on their personal best times. The theory being that the finish of each race would be quite close, although often that never really held true.

In any case, I won a lot of medals and a few trophies over those years. And it got to a point where I was offered the chance to train for the national disabled swimming team. But I decided not to take it any further. I wasn’t sufficiently interested or motivated to take it to a more professional level, instead having my sights on things like my exams, university and my career beyond that.

I didn’t even know about the Paralympics back then. If I had been aware of it, and if it had been as widely covered as it is now, and if the right support, coaching and funding had been available, maybe I’d have thought differently, who knows? But at the time, I was more interested in other things. And I don’t regret my decision at all, I’ve been very successful on the route I did take through life. But when you watch the kind of performances that we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks, it’s impossible not to wonder how things could have been, potentially, with the right drive and determination.

So with all that said, I hope you enjoy this review of the Rio Paralympics, and I’ve created a Youtube playlist of highlights from Channel 4 as well.

Audio Description On Youtube

In this post and video I want to describe what audio description is, how it is useful for the blind and visually impaired, and why it’s high time we should be able to add it to Youtube videos. This is in support of the #AudioDescribeYT campaign, launched by James Rath.

Journal – August 2016

Hello again. We’re still edging towards our hopeful move to London, as we’ve had more viewings of our house in Devon this month and I’ve been doing some research into socialising in the capital, plus I’ve celebrated my birthday of course. So I hope you enjoy these journal posts as always!

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