I'm on my way to do my keep fit. The wind is blowing hard - very hard. I lean into it, but simply moving forward feels like exercise enough!

Those words could be anyone's making that same journey at the traditionally leonine beginning or end of March. For me, however, there's more.

My white stick is wrenched petulantly (as it feels) out of my proper control and from its purpose of letting me know whether my way is clear or not.

It's a good job I know this route well enough to recognise what I can still discern from my stick's wayward, wind-blown swing, because there's also the lion's roar!

The noise of the wind is deafening - in the sense that it blots out what I call the "ambient soundscape" of my surroundings. It's the importance of this "ambient soundscape" in orienting ourselves, as blind people, that lurks behind all those questions about us hearing better than sighted people.

As a generalisation we can't. But we have to call on ambient soundscape simply because the breadth and precision of information afforded by seeing your surroundings just isn't available to us. But it isn't a substitute for seeing.

Ambient soundscape comprises all the sounds you can hear (or could, if it weren't for some of what's coming up next), plus how they're all reflected, absorbed or blocked from your standpoint by buildings, trees, mountains, different ground surfaces.

Although it may not serve sighted people in quite the same vital way it does blind people, I'd suggest that ambient soundscape still makes its presence felt, when even sighted people talk about the 'feel' of a place.

And it's this all-important (if vague) ability to hear my surroundings and place myself in relation to them, that the blustering and bellowing of the wind all round me and into my very eardrums simply swamps.

Even the noise of the traffic sounds curiously distant.

At worst then, windy weather (not restricted to March, of course), can be quite scary, especially if I'm on unfamiliar ground where I don't know what to expect, or on more open ground where there aren't enough guiding features to go by.

But it doesn't have to be at full blast for the wind to affect my getting about. It need only be gusting fitfully to make the sound of, say, approaching footsteps or machinery at work, more difficult to place.

And, perhaps less obviously, by casting an extra film of sound over everything, rain too also means I must listen and concentrate harder to identify sounds whereabouts.

With any luck all prospect of snow, ice and fog should soon be behind us until late autumn (or beyond). So I'll look forward to summer sunshine.

Unfortunately though, for some registered blind people with a little sight the sun can be just too bright and dazzling. It often was for me when I still had some sight.

So I wore those green eyeshades, always (for some reason) associated with journalists, but now with columnists!