seen from Germany
seen from Malaysia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Malaysia
seen from China
seen from United Kingdom
seen from China
seen from Australia
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from Estonia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Italy
seen from Ukraine
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
Trish Vickers, a blind author who wrote 26 pages of her first novel without realizing her pen had run out of ink. The local police force used their forensic lab to find the missing words, and the book was published on the day of her death. Photo : John Gurd/BNPS via metro.co.uk
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
The Case of a Blind Woman and Her Invisible Manuscript
By John F. Burns, NY Times, April 14, 2012 LONDON--When she went blind as a result of diabetes, Trish Vickers set out to fill the void in her life by writing poetry. Then she turned to writing a novel, her pen guided by a system of elastic bands stretched across the paper. With 26 pages written, and a plot that turned on a woman whose life implodes, she began to dream of finding a publisher.
Then the dream imploded, too. When her son Simon visited her at her home, near the town of Lyme Regis in the Thomas Hardy country of Dorset, she showed him what she had written, and he gave her the bad news: Every page was blank. Her pen had run out of ink before she began, and what remained was an empty manuscript.
Then came a twist in the story of a kind that would serve in one of the detective stories that have entertained mystery buffs for generations: Mrs. Vickers, 59, and her son turned to the forensic service of the Dorset County police.
After five months' work, done on her lunch breaks, one of the experts there, a woman usually set to helping solve cases of murder, arson and fraud, cracked the case, delivering a typescript of all the missing pages to the bereft author.
"I am so happy, pleased and grateful," Mrs. Vickers said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph. "The police also said they enjoyed the bit they read and can't wait for the rest."
A spokesman for the Dorset police said that the recovery of the text had been accomplished with a police technique that involves shining light from various angles on the indentations made in the paper by the pen--the sort of thing in detective stories that ends up sending the perpetrator to the high court, or the gallows.
"It was nice to do something for somebody, and it was nice to read the book as well," said Kerry Savage, the forensic specialist. "Fortunately, apart from one line, we managed to retrieve the whole lot."
A volunteer now visits once a week to type up new passages of the work, and Mrs. Vickers says she plans to send the finished novel to a publisher.
In the meantime, she has learned a lesson about her penmanship, and her memory. "I could remember the gist of what I'd written, but there was no way I could have written exactly the same way again," she said.
