The pub was warm with humanity, filled with writers enjoying the high jinks of a festival in a remote corner of Ireland. These writers had gathered in the pub to restore their souls and enjoy a meeting of minds. I was among them, enjoying the feeling of being amongst my own kind.

While we listened to a singer in the corner of the pub, I felt a tap on the shoulder. It was a poet; I had heard her reciting her poetry earlier. In a voice laden with concern, she asked me if it was true that I was going blind. I casually replied that I was just a teeny bit visually impaired. Now emboldened, she persisted with her line of questioning, asking me if I had an eye condition "as well." She had seen my eyes do their Formula One routine, racing frantically around my head in their attempts to focus. I explained that this was indeed caused by an eye condition: nystagmus Just then, the song finished. She clutched my sleeve and said. "I was about to say that he played a blinder, but that would be terrible."

At the time I cringed, looking for a convenient hole to swallow me up, but later, I used her as fodder for vicious slagging with my friends. We could imagine her telling people what a "great little fighter" I was, and wasn't it great that I could even get out at all, let alone hold my glass of cider to my lips.

Because, though my visual impairment can be inconvenient, or annoying, it also provides a rich vein of humour for me to milk. I find myself in situations I wouldn't otherwise be in, and I also have ample opportunity to laugh at myself.

I wasn't always this way. During my youth I found my visual impairment a burden, and was frustrated by my limitations. I was a bit like a swamp creature, wallowing in a sludge of self-pity.

Then when I was seventeen, I met a feisty girl with a fund of jokes and funny stories starring herself, and a zest for finding the humour in every situation. She was also visually impaired, considerably more so than I was.

 

I soon followed her example, and roped my family into my act. They responded with gusto, and now avail themselves of every opportunity to crack a joke. When my eyes take on their fluttering motions, they stand in front of me and click their fingers, shouting at me to "come back," from whatever place they imagined I'd gone to.

My brother, in particular, relishes turning my visual impairment into a comedy skit. He enjoys uttering: "I'm blind," in a sorrowful voice. Last year, when I went on a waterskiing weekend, he wanted to come along and pretend to be blind, bumping into things and wearing dark glasses.

Simply living from day to day can make me giggle. For example, meeting people on the street can be a bit of a minefield. I have the opposite problem to most people, who say they can't put a name to a face. I can't put a face to a name.

The result is that I greet strangers with enthusiasm, and sometimes even get into strange cars. But I avoid waving at friends for fear that I'm waving at a homicidal maniac.

As I bumble my way through life, I get embroiled in all sorts of adventures which wouldn't otherwise happen. I find myself in such odd places as store cupboards, and that classic visually impaired mistake, the men's toilets. For me, getting lost is a fact of life.

And of course, I can dip into an endless store of quips and puns. I regularly offer to drive people where they want to go, and I moan helplessly that I'm too blind to perform the simplest of tasks - no one ever believes me. I'm known to get "blind drunk," and claim that I don't need a blindfold to play blind man's buff.

I enjoy people's reactions when I make jokes like this. There's a short intake of breath, then they burst into loud laughter. They don't expect me to make jokes, but I can feel myself rising up in their estimation because I do it. There's no room for being politically correct in my world; humour is a fresher and more honest coping mechanism.

My visual impairment has caused me to look at things a little differently, and my limitations are a source of amusement rather than constraint. Humour acts as a buffer, diffusing my own and other people's embarrassment and misplaced sympathy.

I've quite enjoyed compiling this catalogue of anecdotes, with me as the hapless heroine. They say the pen is mightier than the sword. That's a relief. I wouldn't like to think of the consequences if I were to wield a sword.