Dining blindfolded is an insightful experience

The first thing that goes when you are suddenly blind is your depth perception. The distance between your body on a bench and the table at which you are meant to eat your dinner feels like a mammoth chasm.

The people seated around the table sound like they have been set afloat on a raft that is drifting rapidly away. Their voices strangely distorted by the darkness that surrounds you.

It's worse if they surreptitiously leave the table. You discover a vacuum next to you that is eerily vacant, like a black hole. Like a suction pipe whisked them away into the ether and you were oblivious to these developments in your suddenly restricted universe.

If you put down your glass of wine, will you find it again? If you manage to manoeuvre a bite of food onto a fork and into your mouth, a task so complex as to become almost ridiculous, you are then plagued by the troubling question: what is it that you are actually eating? Do I trust this kitchen not to surprise me with bat wings, or fried termites? One sensory experiment at a time please.

It does not help if the waiters are extremely efficient at clearing the plates and the glasses. Just as you have relearnt how to eat and drink like a toddler, smooshing the food with your fingers and into your chin where you hoped your mouth was - your dinner is whisked away.

More troublingly your half-drunk glass of champagne is removed along with your sense of self and your security bubbles.

The very waiters that were all up in your personal space a minute ago are now absent. Lost in space. Your hand flaps in the air, desperate for someone to notice your champagne-free state.

Around you people who would normally chat effusively fall silent. There is only so much you can natter on about to a complete stranger without the cues that usually inform the conversation. Widening eyes, nodding heads, smiling dispositions.

It is damn hard not to invade their person with your hand, unwanted stroking is not a thing. Neither is going to the loo with a stranger. Just saying.

And so over the course of a rather stressful dinner in the dark, blindfolded and bewildered (also trying hard not to cheat), I learnt some lessons for World Sight Day, courtesy of L'Occitane.

The cosmetics company, which gives generously to NGOs that help the blind, organised the dinner to draw attention to the plight of the more than 280 million blind people in the world who are disproportionately from disadvantaged communities and often suffer from avoidable conditions.

"Blindness is a private matter between a person and the eyes with which he or she was born," writes José Saramago in his novel Blindness. I understand so much better now.