My name is John Hamilton Shortt (with two tts), but all my life I've been known as Jack or Shorty. I've been blind since I was 11 nearly 12. My family was living at Foxton Beach where my father was a builder/fisherman. One day myself and my four friends went into the sand dunes. The army territorials used the dunes as a firing range and on this day, 6 November 1927, we found an army shell and, when it was accidentally dropped, it exploded. I lost my sight and suffered other life-threatening burns and injuries. My friends used some brackish water on my burns to cool me down, but the burns became septic and I was in hospital for five months.

When I came out of hospital my family wanted me to have every opportunity to get a good education so they enrolled me in the Jubilee Institute for the Blind in Auckland. This organisation has had a number of name changes but it is now known as the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind.

I boarded at that school for five years. We had the most marvellous teacher, Miss Mary Blithe Law, who worked there for 42 years. She was our teacher and mentor and taught us the full school curriculum in Braille. We had a metal Braille frame to do lessons. She was also our mobility instructor and she gave us the confidence to move around independently. There were no white canes in those days, they were not introduced until 1934.

When I was 17 I left school and moved into the single men's accommodation and went to work in the Jubilee Institute workshops. I worked in the cane department for the next 19 years.

During these years I took part in two main leisure activities. I took up rowing and was a member of the Jubilee Rowing Club which had been set up by the Institute. We rowed in many regattas competing against sighted crews and won quite a few medals. Rowing is a great sport for blind and visually impaired people.

From 1929 until 1947 I played the cornet in the 'Blind Band' (mainly brass, but we did have clarinets as well so we could not be called a brass band). The band made two tours, the first in 1935 for eight weeks in the South Island and then again in 1936 for a similar period in the North Island. On both occasions we were privately billeted, and during these tours I made many long and lasting friends within the families who put us up.

The summer of 1938 I was with friends on Foxton beach. I heard a chap playing the piano accordion and got into conversation, and I told him I played the cornet. He played a few of my favourite tunes and very soon we had a big crowd and were having a community singsong. I had my German shepherd dog Rinty with me and, when an idiot let some firecrackers off and frightened him, he ran through the crowd to find me and knocked one of two girls who was standing next to me. We started chatting and that is how my dog introduced me to my wife Netta. We were married in 1940 and were married for 56 years. She was a wonderful woman. She was from Timaru, so early on we were corresponding by mail and she learned Braille so we could have private correspondence without anyone having to read the letters to me. Her mother was deaf and Netta could lip-read fluently so she was comfortable with people with disabilities.

Later in her life Netta became a Justice of the Peace, which was really useful for me in my welfare work as so often you need to get things witnessed etc.

We had three great children, two girls and a boy. To them I've always been just Dad and now I am not only a grandfather, but also a great-grand-dad.

In 1947 I was asked to join the Institute's welfare team as a social worker. We moved to Palmerston North into the then state house, which I now own and still live in. The area is a historical precinct because they were some of the first state houses in the country. I was the social worker for the central North Island from 1947 to when I was compulsorily retired at 65 in 1981.

My role was to interview new members to the Foundation and help them work out what they needed. It might have been schooling needs for children, homes for older people or enrolling them at the rehabilitation centre. It was about talking with people and working out what to do to help.

There is no comparison between being born blind and going blind later in life. If you are born blind you live blind and build a lifestyle all of your own, and you develop your ability to use your senses and ways to relate with the world from birth.

If you become blind, especially when you are over 40, it can be a real hurdle. Firstly there is a lot of grief over losing your sight, then there is rehabilitation and a need to relearn how to cope, and the new experience of a visually changed environment and world. For the newly blind it was about taking small steps to build confidence - to get back on the road.

"For me there is no such word as 'can't' and being a blind social worker moving around independently helped others see what they could achieve."

When people become blind they often think they will have to change everything in their lives. My work was about exploring people's interests and previous work and building on what they could do. For example, people said they would have to give up gardening - rubbish, I'm a keen gardener so I showed them my garden or explained it to them, how I did things and encouraged them to keep gardening as a hobby.

For me the expression 'I can't see' is no excuse for anything. You might just have to find different ways to do things. When you are blind you rely on different senses - a lot on hearing, but feeling things like the direction of the wind or sun is also important. People say to me 'you have a great memory', but we have just had to train and use our memory in a different way. For example, we learn to remember spatial locations, location of objects in rooms, how to get to places. With my work I could find my way around a number of towns without asking for assistance. It's funny when you do ask for directions - most people give you visual clues, especially 'over there' or 'just past the yellow building'. When people are giving directions to blind people they need to be very clear and specific like, 'you cross the next two streets and turn left at the third street'.

"I encourage all blind people to be active in their community as a way of educating sighted people, to help them realise we are just ordinary people who sometimes have to do things in a different way."

Often I was taking people out and giving them confidence to move in their own neighbourhood, teaching them to recognise their own home by, say, the feel of their fence or the neighbour's fence, or how many paces it was from the corner or to the road. Once they were confident in their immediate neighbourhood they had some independence and could build on that as they got more confident.

I got inspiration from the people I worked with. The first time I met an 80-year-old man called Mark who had recently gone blind he said 'I want to learn Braille', and a month later I went back and he could read and write it. The couple were originally from Belgium and his wife told me he could speak eight languages and had been in military intelligence in World War 1.

However, sometimes families could be overprotective of their blind children. This one young lad I've known over the years, his Dad was very protective of him, and I used to challenge him and say, 'you are stopping Louie from taking risks and having learning experiences - you are stopping him reaching his full potential.' His Dad has since died and Louie is living in a flat attached to a residential home and is living a much more independent life.

I used to travel a lot with commercial travellers. They took me around the country with them and I loved to socialise with them. We stayed in pubs and played cards in the evenings. The cards we used look like normal playing cards but have Braille markings at the top and bottom corners. Seeing a blind man in a card game with the travellers was a real learning curve for some people who had limited ideas of what blind people could do.

I'm still very active. I live alone, but my daughter and her husband live just down the road, and I join them for my evening meal. Lesley, my daughter, helps me with my mail by reading correspondence, writing letters for me and paying accounts etc. Apart from that I can manage for myself, do the washing, use the microwave etc, look after my glasshouse - I grow tomatoes every year in my garden. I am still interested in cane work, my house is full of it and I teach a craft class in cane at our local blind social group every Wednesday. Every Thursday a near-lifetime friend Jack (86 years old) picks me and another Jack (93) up to do our weekly supermarket shopping, and we have a quick visit to the RSA on our way home. They call us 'the three Jackateers!'

I've been to the National Blind Indoor Bowls Championships every year for the 52 years they have been run and this Labour weekend I was lucky enough to be in the team that won the national fours championship title. I've had my fair share of winning, but for me it's mostly about the companionship, meeting old and new friends once the game is over. This year was my last, the 89-year-old knees are just too stiff for three days of competition. I've always been a sports fan. I listen to sport, especially cricket, on the radio. I had a relative who bred horses so I've an interest in racing, mostly in the breeding or bloodlines.

"The more we are out in the community communicating with people the easier it is for them to see we are just ordinary people. It becomes easier for them to say 'what can you do for yourself, what help do you need?' "

I've been a radio ham since 1947. About eight years ago I realised the cable tying my aerial to a steel tower in the garden had come loose.

I climbed nearly to the top of the 50-foot tower to fix it. When my neighbours came home they made such a fuss, saying I shouldn't be up the tower when I couldn't see, that I came down without fixing it. I just waited until it was dark and then climbed up and fixed it. I've made contact and had chats with people in 240 countries and I talk with Carl, a ham mate in North California, about twice a week.

I can't say I think most people are getting better at relating to blind people. Mostly it's about people not knowing what to say or do. My hearing is good and I can often hear people say to their companions 'I wonder if he needs any help'.

I've always been a fisherman. I go out with friends and my daughter. They know I can keep myself safe on the boat and don't worry about my moving about on it. As one of my best fishing mates says, 'if the silly beggar falls off it's his fault'. Weather permitting, my summer is going to be full of deep sea fishing and boating in Tauranga with my other daughter Heather and her husband or at Rotorua with my son Ian, out on the lake.