Len is feeling all confessional today and I thought I would join in too… others are fessing up and it is making for some pretty entertaining reading.

Here is just one of my many guilty secrets…

As a child, I was fascinated when my uncle, who had been a diabetic for years, started going blind.  By the time I was 11 he was completely blind in both eyes, but I found it very hard to comprehend that he could not see when his eyes were open in a fully lit room. 

One day, our families got together at his house.  During the course of the day my grandmother telephoned and while my aunt talked on the phone in the kitchen, my uncle retired to the bedroom to join the conversation on the other phone.

I was alone in the adjoining room, listening to music when it struck me that now was my chance to conduct an experiment to prove whether or not my uncle could really see or not. 

Picking up a stick of burning incense from my cousins dresser, I (in stealth mode) crept into the bedroom where my uncle sat chatting on the phone… He didn’t see me… I inched closer… he still did not see… I was only three feet away now… His eyes were wide open but he seemed to look straight through me… Surely he could hear my heart pounding?  Then, I saw him sniff… and again *sniff sniff*!!  Now was my only chance!  I took another silent step closer, extended the smouldering stick to just below his nose and gave it a little wave. I held my breath… He paused mid-sentence… He jumped up, we were face to face ~ he was looking me in the eye… AHHA! I knew he could see!!!!  I stood looking at him and he looking at me… I had found him out and he was giving me direct eye contact… And then… he began to scream!!  “FIRE!! FIRE!!”

How I managed to make it back around the bed and escape into the bathroom to hide behind the door undetected I will never know.  I had the presence of mind to extinguish the incense stick in a plant and I hid there for at least 20 minutes waiting for the excitement to die down. 

I was a believer in his blindness from that day forward, but nothing has been able to cleanse me of my guilt I feel for playing what I realised later was a mean trick on a blind man… But, I needed to know!!

Well, don’t judge me too harshly.  I’m sure you have a few guilty secrects of your own!