Gary O'Donoghue
speaker
1,144 appearances
20 recordings
4 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 7 Sep
Gary O'Donoghue’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 14 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
And there was a sort of quiet support that I got from my college, which was Christchurch.
You know, I remember in the very early days saying to someone just randomly, the Braille books are a different size to ordinary books.
They don't fit on the shelf in my room.
And like two days later, there's a sort of knock on the door and the college carpenter is there saying, we've come to build some shelves for you to fit the books.
So they would do quiet, simple things like that and made it very clear that if I needed anything, I was to talk to them.
But it was a shock in the sense that, you know, I kind of thought of myself as completely... Well, obviously I knew I couldn't see, but I thought of myself as normal.
I thought, well, the world's just going to be fine.
Why would the world be...
and these are all clever people, why would they be strange?
And some of them were lovely and some of them were strange and didn't really know how to relate or talk to you.
And I do remember, you know, overhearing a conversation at dinner one night, a few seats down, where someone said, oh, yeah, I went to knock on his door, but the lights were out, so I wasn't sure whether he was in or not.
And I remember thinking, God, you know, you do need to turn the lights on, Gazza, but otherwise people are not going to know you're in your room.
So it was...
You know, as I say, there were lots of people who were lovely, but it took some and some never, you know, some people never get used to it.
I mean, I remember in the first term going to the university's counselling service and talking to someone there and they sort of explained what I was sort of feeling, not really understanding it.
And this woman gave me this book.
I never forget it.
It was a book called Stigma by a psychologist called Irving Goffman.
It was an anatomy of difference and how difference is dealt with by the world and how people react and all different, not just blindness, but all different contexts of difference.
I remember thinking at the time, someone's thought about this before.
Showing 581–600 of 1,144 · page 30 of 58
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