Also, I love braille. I love the essential underground secrecy of braille. I love the reading in bed in the dark; the fact that you can send a note to your lover and their partner or mother or father won't know what it says; the fact that noone knows what you're reading in your lunch hour at work, or even not in your lunch hour. When I think of all this, It amazes me that more people don't yearn to know our secret code.

But increasingly, I'm becoming less enamoured with braille books. New braille books smell of cheap plastic, sound like flimsy paper, and feel eminently short-term. New braille books are simply transcriptions of their print counterparts. They have print page numbers, plastic binders or paper covers. They're pale imitations of books.

There was what you might call a golden age. A time when braille books had hard covers and smelt of the thick dark paper and glue they were made of. A time when you could run your hands over a braille bookshelf without the books flopping over at the merest touch. A time when books were made for readers, not computers. I feel expected to settle for less.

While people wail about the problem of lowering numbers of braille readers, we go on making braille books less and less attractive. Surely it wouldn't take that much imagination to design a book that could be easily produced and attractive at the same time?