Touch Me Please

Michael Gerwat grew up in the East End of London. Born blind, he was educated at schools for the blind in the south east. After gaining his piano tuning qualification he moved to Leeds to marry his girl friend. He and Lin had three daughters. Mick gained a fine reputation tuning for famous rock bands during the seventies and eighties. After the break up of his first marriage he met Pat who had three children of her own. She had been a teacher and retrained as a software technical author in the early eighties. They married in 1988, and Mick began to lose his hearing in 1989. Soon Mick was totally deaf, depending on the deaf-blind manual for communication. Eventually he was given a cochlear implant which gave him limited communication and environmental sounds, but no music. From the depths of despair he had to build a new life and seek for fulfilment without music.