Face Blindness

When you read a book, can you see the characters in your mind? Do you know what Jennifer Aldridge looks like and if Kylie changes her hair will you still pick her out in a crowd? For me - no, no and no.

If you have prosopagnosia you are face-blind. Those who have it really intensely may not recognise their own family or friends; they need clues and signals to identify them. But it seems there are a lot of us out there who have it less dramatically and it can take decades to identify and it colours your life in so many ways.

Attaching a label to a puzzle helps in many ways. It makes sense of your confusion and nowadays it gives you a search tag and a route to find others who deal with the world as you do. I'm not the only one! I'm not weird; I'm wired differently.

I'm not the only one who spends conversations distracted by the need to work hard memorising a face, looking for an unchanging identifying feature. One woman I read on a website told how she can memorise shoes and identify her colleagues even from their style of shoes. For others it's jewellery. Me, I get thrown badly when people change their hair, and children who grow are way beyond my skill to keep up.

I first knew I had a problem when I was working. I would go into offices, meet a bunch of new people and never know who I was supposed to nod and smile at when I passed them in a corridor. I once went to a training session and on my return from lunch shared a lift with another woman; she chatted away so I responded in kind. Of course, she walked along the same corridor, into the same room, and sat down ... next to me. She hadn't been opposite me so I hadn't been able to study her face closely and I had no idea I had been sitting by her for three hours that morning.

My defence mechanism is a happy puppy approach - smile at everyone. Living in a small village you're meant to do that anyway. It can cause problems in a big city. I'm expert at maintaining conversations when I have no idea who I am talking to and even my children are learning to cover for me.

Social situations are scary. You see a Royal Wedding Street Party; I see a bewildering group of half-familiar faces and - worse yet - they will all expect me to remember them later in the street. I stayed indoors and let my husband do the socialising for our household.

Most embarrassing moment? When going round a small museum. A volunteer guide upstairs was unable to answer a question and suggested I ask the woman at the door. I did so - but it was the same woman, as she had moved positions by the time I got there. My son, who can picture faces he has seen only for seconds and identify them years later, was awestruck with horrified laughter. I was utterly embarrassed. People take it personally - that you are saying they are not valuable enough for you to remember; that you are rude and self-obsessed.

Now armed with my label, sometimes, with new acquaintances that I feel I can trust, I apologise in advance. 'Please say hello if I don't recognise you next time ...'

My label also explained another huge puzzle for me. Why, as an avid reader and writer, could I never picture faces? At school we would study descriptive passages and they were a blank to me. I can dissect a character and its motives but why could I never see a face in my mind? Why could I never describe a face other than by cliches and specifics - dark eyes, dimples, blonde hair? My characters have no image in my mind; I cannot see them.

I have thought of putting up a photograph of someone suitable, clipped from a magazine, but that might confuse my imagination. And I would still be unable to describe them, even staring at that frozen face; the longer I stare, the more the features puzzle me.

When I went on holiday alone once, long ago, for three weeks, I took a photo of my husband with me, saying I would need it to recognise him at the airport on my return. I wasn't entirely joking. My children ask me to shut my eyes and picture faces - a teacher, a neighbour, themselves. I see frozen images from photographs if I'm lucky.

But I can hear a voice - is this why I love radio? - and I can remember the feel of my children, the smell of them, the sense of them. I can understand them and love them. They are the faces I know best, blurred though they may be.

But today my character, here on my screen, is getting to know another character, who is important to him. He's going to see her, he's going to react to her. I am struggling to see her through his eyes and show her to my reader. I am learning how she moves, how she talks, how she feels. But I cannot see her face. No labels help me there.