REASONS TO BE SOMETHING (PART THREE)

It has not gone unnoticed, at least by me if nobody else, that the activity in this particular Dark Corner of Lesser Blogfordshire has been less active lately, although, perversely, because it seems to have turned out that I am a bit of an old word-natterer after all, this has meant that my chatting in the strange world of FizzBok has been more so…

Not that I'm any good at that… The wry, sarcastic aside doesn't seem to work very well in cold hard type and without context, and I seem to keep on getting myself into all sorts of trouble [WINK, SMILEY FACE].

Still, with one spectre from my darkest past having briefly reappeared upon my shoulder before flittering away, requiring me to at least appear to be having more fun than I really am, and other, perhaps more vocal and friendlier voices finally appearing there, it's been an entertaining summer, mostly involving, on my part at least, an excessive amount of cloud-spotting, about which there will probably be more if I ever get around to writing about it.

Meanwhile, the reasons for a diminishment of the Lesser Blogfordshire experience have been many and varied (I nearly said "manifold" there, but I didn't want to exhaust you with hyperbole…) not least because I have been struggling with my own relevance lately as I have come to feel ever more invisible as I vanish into that decade of invisibility known as "my fifties", and, after a pause such as this one, I had also begun to seriously doubt if I even knew how to write a blog posting that was at least vaguely diverting any more (or, indeed, if I ever did).

And, of course, sometimes there's really just not much going on.

I mean, I know that this didn't used to stop me, but lately it has given me pause for thought. After all, if you have nothing to say, perhaps it is better to say nothing, not least because at least you're only going to be boring yourself to death.

Perhaps interestingly (or perhaps not), engaging with FizzBok might have revealed more about how my blog writing process actually works as various thoughts hop across my mind as I work it through, and this is usually how these pieces come to be formed, albeit usually in a more "private" space.

But then...

"Oh yes!" they say. "Write your blog!" they say. But when I eventually do, still no bugger comes along and bothers to take the time to read it… (if they ever did…)

Not, of course, that this should bother me, as I've frequently been told.

These things are done for their own sake, and not for any other… although it is nice to occasionally discover that they do actually serve some purpose other than merely keeping me entertained and occupied by a bit typing to pass the time, because even an infinite monkey could do that eventually.

But these words can come from many places, or, more often than not nowadays, they fail to come at all, which leads us to the state I was explaining during our opening dilemma today.

Of course, when you find yourself wide awake at three o'clock in the morning, nursing the last vestiges of the migraine that knocked you out eight or nine hours earlier, you do find yourself either pondering upon the many things that, once again, you have failed to do, or, if you are me (which, be grateful you are not), you start mentally composing words that you will have then forgotten by the time you actually get up, but which remain distracting enough to prevent you from getting back to sleep.

So, in the end, it's the words that win, and once the words start doing that, then I've little choice other than to start to feed the monster again, even if the meals become a little less regular, and the words that were dancing around the lightning in my mind have already vanished forever to be replaced with duller, more mundane ones.

Migraines, eh...? I never know what triggers 'em. Could have been the weather, or that piece of chocolate I nibbled mid-afternoon. Perhaps it was from spending far too much time staring at a little, tiny screen annoying the world (or the bit of it I engage with anyway), or maybe it was all just a reaction to my disappointment at losing my day out.

Whatever it was, it came out of nowhere and hit me hard, and I headed in to another working week already feeling dazed and confused, and in need of a lie down. You see, the old migraine does tend to do something chemically weird to my brain leaving me feeling fatigued, more than a little woozy, still nursing a nagging (but slight) headache, and, ultimately, feeling stupendously melancholic.

All-in-all, not the most promising start for this faltering and spluttering return to Blogfordshire, is it…?

YOU SPIN ME RIGHT ROUND

One of the reasons I reduced my comments in the world of FizzBok is because it's better, I find, than revealing my ignorance to everyone I know.

Take a friend of mine who, at least until I removed - like I eventually seem to do with everyone - the appearance of their descriptions of their every waking moment from my "news feed", used to regularly inform me that they'd just been "spinning" at the gym. Now, given my immediate thoughts upon such things, my initial response, if I was the kind of person who needed to comment continually, would most likely to have been to say something like "I hope that you didn't get dizzy!" and they might have thought that I was trying to appear "clever" or "witty" when I would merely be revealing my own ignorance to the world in general and my (admittedly limited) "friends" list in particular.

You see, until I found out much later on, and through another, unconnected source, (i.e. something like a news report on the telly) that spinning was actually something to do with riding a static bicycle, I genuinely thought that "spinning" must be an exercise using an action not unlike the movements of a "Whirling Dervish" or a ballet dancer doing a pirouette, where you stood upon your toes and whizzed around and around whilst trying to keep your eyes on a particular spot on the horizon so that you didn't fall over.

That, I thought, sounded a very peculiar way to keep healthy, but, well… I suppose that it's a case of whatever floats your boat.

Mind you, the actual exercise of spinning, I'm reliably informed, is a pretty dull way of getting some exercise. I'm told that some of the devices include a TV monitor so that you can take your long ride to nowhere whilst watching an episode of your favourite television series or some "pop videos" (as I believe "da kids" refer to such things) which is probably better for you than my own preferred option of sitting on the couch and doing precisely the same thing.

That said, most forms of exercise look fairly tedious to me. God knows why anyone would want to run twenty-six miles or more surrounded by the sweaty mass of humanity when they could curl up with a good book and sip at a glass of something pleasant instead, but some people seem to enjoy doing so and, as long as they don't insist on making me join them in doing it, I'm perfectly happy to let them get on with it whilst I slowly rot and transform into a decaying, pulsing mass of blubber.

Ah well, probably best just to let them get on with it, not ask too many questions, and presume that eventually, as it indeed did, something will pop up and explain precisely what it is without me having to ask any questions and reveal another vast chasm in my knowledge about the goings-on of this modern world.

After all, for people of my generation, "spin" was one of the darker arts performed by politicians and marketing executives, or a skill developed by slow bowlers to bamboozle the opposition's batsmen, whilst to my mother's generation, it might have had something to do with knitting or weaving, and if I'd made some pithy comment along those lines, who knows what responses I may have got…?

NIL BY MOUTH

In certain universes, I'll admit that it might sound a bit "dodgy" but, before we proceed any further, you have to realise that it is, in fact, ME, we're talking about here, and therefore any potential "dodginess" in this situation is entirely down to your own imaginations... Although how the neighbours will have perceived these goings on is anybody's guess.

Anyway, last Thursday morning, I dropped the Beloved off to catch her train and then went home again to wait for a nurse to arrive... and, three-quarters of an hour later, she duly did knock upon our door and was allowed to enter, with suitable apologies being mumbled for the chaos within.

This was, of course, the assessment medical for my recent Life Insurance application which required me to have an "independent assessment" by a "qualified health professional" because, as all insurance companies seem to know, your own doctor is simply not to be trusted.

The allocated nurse was required to come to my home, check my height, weight, and blood pressure, and take specimens of  blood, urine and perform a cholesterol test, and that was a process that would take "about fifteen minutes" if the telephone call making the arrangements was to be believed.

The most difficult part was that last one, the cholesterol test, because it required me to be "nil by mouth" for eight hours beforehand. Now, that ought to have been straightforward enough, given that, for an eight o'clock appointment, for most of the hours leading up to it I'd have been asleep anyway (or as close as I ever get to sleep, that is...) but I do tend to run on autopilot when I get up in the morning during those wee small hours - these daily word outpourings are probably some testament to that - and so I had to stick a great big "Post-It" Note (other self-adhesive notelets are available) to the kettle bearing the legend "NO!" just to remind me to only take my tablets with water when I got up and not to brew up my usual reviving cuppa...

This was, of course, a direct steal from the movie "Apollo 13" where Kevin Bacon's character, Jack Swigert, does much the same thing with the "LEM Release" switch to stop himself from accidentally hitting it and accidentally killing them all, a part of the story which the real Jack Swigert admits to having done in reality, although the consequences of me accidentally boiling a kettle would have been far less dire.

Mind you, if it had meant a second visit, I might not have been all that popular.

Anyway, when she arrived, the nurse was pleasant enough, and chatty enough, and I probably burbled out way too much information than was good for me, but still... My height has been measured and I'm still as tall as I thought I was, and my weight was recorded and found to be less heavy than I thought I was, given that we don't actually have any scales in the place because they were getting far too depressing.

My blood was taken and my urine sampled, dipped and, happily not tasted, despite he little cup basically screaming "Drink Me!" at me, and off she jolly well went, looking not at all judgingly at the cluttered state of our home and, happily, not resembling the kind of “X-Certificate” caricature of a nurse doing house calls which I had feared she might, and which might have made the neighbour's curtains twitch.

Mind you, I'm not exactly sure how "good for me" being "Nil By Mouth" had been to be perfectly frank with you because, not to put too fine a point on it, my stomach was in an absolute state afterwards. The could be because of the general air of anxiety any of these kinds of thing always instill in me, or it could just be because a "water and pills" breakfast means that the medication doesn't get absorbed by the usual bowl of "Fruit'n'Fibre" and so the unpleasant side-effects might be more prevalent than they ought to be.

Whichever it was, I found myself really craving coffee and pie afterwards, although I resisted for a while, because I really wouldn't want to worry my insurers now, would I?

KALEIDOSCOPE EYES

Picture yourself in a box by a sewage works
Drawing fake people
To print on glass [Sighs]

Suddenly your fingers
Feel like someone else's
And you're a bloke with kaleidoscope eyes...

Yes, boys and girls, after a relatively long period without them, suddenly, whilst sitting at my desk a few days ago, I was struck down once again with a    m i g  r   a   i     n        e      .

T   h    i      s       m     e     a    n     t       t    h    a   t a   f     t    e    r        a       p    e  r  i  o  d            o  f f  e  e  l  i   n  g      "w    o    o   z   y"   ,    n   a   u   se   o u  s       a  n  d      s  i  c    k    l   y   -   e   v   e    n    t    h  o   u g  h     I      h   a   d,     i n     f  a  c  t    w o   k e n    u  p    f  e  e   l  i  n  g    a    l  i   t t  l  e          w o  o  z  y     a  n y  w  a  y - m  y   h  a  n  d  s   s  u  d  d  e  n  l  y    f  e  l  t    a  s    i f    t  h  e  y    w  e  r  e  n  '  t    q  u  i  t  e    t  h  e  r  e    a  n  d    t  h  e    s  c  r  e  e  n    s  t  a  r  t  e  d    g  e  t  t  i  n  g    b  l  u  r  r  e  d  .  .  .

T  h  i  s    w  a  s    t  h  e    m   o  m  e  n  t    t  h  a  t    I    t  h  o  u  g  h  t    t  h  i  n  g  s    w  e  r  e    n  o  t    g  o  i  n  g    w  e  l  l … a  f  t  e  r    a  l  l,    i  t    c  o  u  l  d  n  '  t    b  e    a    m  i  g  r  a  i  n  e    b  e  c  a  u  s  e    I  '  d    n  o  t    h  a  d    t  h  e     k   a l  e i  d o  s c  o  p i  c    z  i g  z a  g s    i  n m   y     v i  s  i o  n,    h a  d   I       …      ?

N  a   t     u   r   a   l   l   y       I         d   i   d   n   '   t         h     a   v     e         a   n   y         h   e   a     d     a   c     h   e        p   i   l   l   s       w i t h    m e ,    b u  t    l u c k i l y    I    w   a  s    a  b l  e    t o     "b o r r  o  w  "    s  o  m  e     c  o  l  d      a n  d     f l u   m e d i c a t i o n   o f f   a   c   o   l   l   e   a   g   u   e    a n d    w       o       l       f       e       d               d       o       w       n       a       d   o   s   e    o f   p       a     r   a   c   e   t   a   m   o   l       i    n        o     r       d     e   r    t  o     h e a d     t h i s   p   a   r   t   i   c   u   l   a   r     a   t   t   a   c   k        o   f   f     a   t   t h e   p  a   s   s       b   e   f   o   r   e    i t   g   o   t       a       c   h   a   n   c e       t   o       s   e   i   z e   a   s t r o n g e r   g   r   i   p    u p o n   m e   a n d   w r i n g m y   b   r   a   i   n     t  o     a   p u l p...

T  h   e   n   ,      o   f       c   o u r s e ,   a l m o s t   i  n   e   v   i   t   a   b   l   y    t h e   z i g   z a g s   a c t u a l l y   D   I   D       a    r   r i v e   a   n   d  ,   f o r   t h e         n   e   x   t       h   o  u   r     o r   s o ,   I   w a s   e   f   f   e   c   t   i   v   e   l   y       b   l   i   n   d   ,       a   n d   h   a   d       t   o       s   i   t       t   h   e   r   e       s   u   f   f   e   r  i   n   g     w   h   i   l   s   t    w e a r i n g   m y   s   u   n   g   l   a   s   s   e   s   i  n   d   o   o   r   s    w i t h   t h a t   " l o o k   a t   m e "   a i r   w h i c h   i s   s o   m u c h   f a v  o u r e d   b y   t h e   c e l e b r it y . . . 

B u t ,   a  f   t   e   r       a       w   h   i   l   e   ,        t h e   w o r s t  o f   i t   p a s s e d   a n d,  w h i ls t   I   s t i l  l  f e l t   r a t h e r   d   e   t   a   c   h   e   d     f o r     m u    c  h   o f   t h e   d a y ,   I   w a s   a b l e   t   o       m   u   d   d   l   e       t     h      r   o   u   g       h               a   n   d       f i n i s h     t   h   e     w   o   r k   a n d   f o l l o w  i t  w i t h   t h e   p  l a n n e d   d r iv e   to  a n   a p p  o i n t m e n t     f   o   r       m y     B   e   l   o   v     e d      o v e r   a t   t h e   o s t  e o   p   a   t   h   s     w a y   b e y o n d   t h e   o   t   h   e   r       s   i d   e       o   f     t o w n ,   b e f o r e   h e a d i n g   h o m e   a n d   p r e t t y   m  u   c   h       h  e   a   d   i   n   g    s t r a i g h t  t o   b e d   i n   t h e   v a  i n   h o p e   o f   a   g o o d   n i g h t ' s   s l e e p . 

  

I   a  m ,  o   f       c   o   u   r   s   e   ,       w   o   n   d   e   r   i   n   g     w h e t h e r   I   o n l y   g o t   t h i s   u n e x p e c t e d   a t t a c k   b e c a   u   s   e    I   h a v e   b e en  s l e e p i n  g       s   o       p   o o   r   l   y       r e   c e   n   t l y,   b u t   i t   c o u l d,   o f   c o  u   r s     e   ,       b   e       d   o   w   n   t o   a n y   n u m b e r   o f   f a c t o r s . .. 

I  s t i l l   f e l t   f a i r l y   f l a k e d    o   u   t       t   h   e       n   e   x   t      d   a   y   ,       t   o      b   e       h   o   n e s t   b u t   t h e   n       m i   g   r a i n   e s   a   l w   a   y   s     d   o       t   h   a   t     t o   m e . . .  

SUDDEN ONSET AGEING

This year has been brutal. I've now spent more than eight months of it trudging backwards and forwards between work, the hospital and home since the beginning of the second week of January and here we find ourselves already cutting deeply into October and still it goes on like a never-ending torment in my own particular circle of hell.

Reluctantly spending so much time in my mother's company has hardly been a joy, either, as I've never been a fan of being around decaying, failing bodies at the best of times, not least because it serves as a terrible reminder of my own mortality, but also because my mother's own raging against the dying of the light appears to involve lashing out at everyone else as if, just by being alive and comparatively healthy, somehow it must be their fault that she continues to suffer such indignities.

Which in some way it probably is.

If only I hadn't followed my artistic instincts but had instead gone into the world of high finance, or some other profession where gaining as much personal wealth as possible was the prime motivation, maybe I'd now have enough hard-leeched cash to let her see out the rest of her days in the luxurious, pampered surroundings that she so obviously believes that she ought to be living in.

Meanwhile, having been in so many of those Wards full of elderly people, I'm becoming utterly convinced that old age is catching.

It's an infection.

It's a disease.

Spend too much time in its company and it will seek you out and then it simply seeps into you, and gnaws away at you, chomping away at whatever youth and vitality that you've managed to hang on to and spitting it out, raw and festering and ghastly in its arbitrary, callous disregard for whatever you might have thought you had planned for yourself and your future.

Until this year, I thought that I'd been weathering rather well for a man of my great age. There was still a relatively full head of hair on the top of my head and the vast majority of it was still in the original specified colour. Any narcissistic moments spent in budgie-like perusal of my own face in the mirror would, occasionally, make me feel as if the ravages so far hadn't been too bad, and whilst the number of days when my self-confidence escapes me and I feel that I'm looking at a particularly unpleasing potato is still relatively high, the days when I felt good about my appearance did, at least, still occur every once in a while.

The fatigue I've been feeling seems only natural given the levels of depression and anxiety I've been suffering from recently as I've juggled this and that and tried to keep things going in the face of chaos and adversity.

But when ageing starts to happen, it happens really fast.

First the teeth started to ache more often than seemed usual, and the bleeding returned, possibly because I was grinding my teeth in the night, or perhaps because my diet of hastily grabbed pseudo-meals was not as healthy as once it was, or maybe it is just gum disease and the glass jar of acrylic molars is mere weeks away from me now.

Then, one morning, I had a tremendously painful back spasm which sent secondary pain shooting up and down my leg as if all the little demons which had been whispering in my mind had suddenly decided to have a "sexy-party" in my nervous system and start poking everything they could with their tiny tridents. This floored me for a day or two, only to ease off before returning with increasing frequency ever since. Usually, incidentally, whenever I go for a bit of a lie down...

As growing levels of exhaustion overwhelm me, I find that, more and more, I just want to walk away from it, wash my hands of it and for it to be done with.

To be over.

THE THROBBING BRAIN

Migraines do tend to do funny things to the brain. Mine felt as if it had been bleached for a couple of days afterwards, and yet I found myself writing the oddest things in response to the oddest thoughts, little of which made much actual sense at all…

Even when I was supposedly feeling “better” (or as close as I ever get to such a happy state…) the letters would dance in front of my eyes and it took an almost monumental effort to focus on anything, perhaps to the detriment of other things which I ought to have been focusing upon.

The difficulty, of course, is that you forget that these “events” are really quite invasive and whilst the vision can clear and the banging in your head can ease, the strange sense of detachment and feeling that you might have snapped some synapses does tend to hang around for a couple of days alongside the fatigue and lethargy that such an attack leaves behind in its wake.

Of course we all have busy lives and are far too eager to get back into the fray to allow ourselves the luxury of lurking under a duvet and recuperating. This is not the “modern” way when struck down by le grand mal, and we knuckle down and muddle though instead of taking to our beds like a consumptive poet and sipping upon cups of sweet tea served in bone china cups.

Pauses to savour that particular thought for a sweet moment…

As to whether a migraine is the price I have to pay for the small matter of daring to enjoy a couple of glasses of a rather fine red wine on Friday evening, remains a matter for some conjecture. After all, there was a certain amount of “cause and effect” of that nature once upon a long ago before they stabilised my blood pressure but those days were, I believed, far behind me now.

There is also the “relaxation theory” of migraine production, in that you will only get one when you finally relax, which might be a fair point given the circumstances of Saturday morning, even though the immediate discovery was that the time to relax was still a far way off in the distant future.

I really should’ve known that one was coming, of course, given the fact that my taste buds were all askew on Friday and the usual “barely bloody drinkable” was causing me to gag and retch and have the most unfortunate reaction to the workplace cups of joe…

I had, of course, just put it down to the brand switch, although our budgets have demanded that we’ve had Tesco’s “own brand” coffee several times before and it’s always proved perfectly adequate to the task…

Perhaps they’re adding horseflesh to that these days too…?

Once upon a time, you see, I got these things so regularly that the symptoms and the pre-symptoms were blindingly obvious and I could leap upon the preventative medicine before the world went mad, but recently, because I’ve not been getting them quite so often, I forget the tiny signals my mind is giving out, and the whole tsunami of nastiness will overwhelm me before I’ve had a chance to even notice it coming.

Still, whatever was going on, my brain remained scrambled for several days afterwards, and I would find myself doing odd things like reaching for a cereal bowl but actually picking up a cup, and forgetting things which I otherwise would never have done…

It’s a strange life, that of the migraine sufferer, and one which is difficult to get across to those fortunate souls who’ve never been stricken, so I hope these few paragraphs, ripped out of the burning heart of adversity, might go some way towards helping you to understand these things a little more…

LOOK INTO MY EYES

With the same regularity of the seasons, i.e. precious little regularity at all, the time had come around again for yet another appointment with the optician to see just what wear and tear these battered old organic optical devices have suffered as they laboured through yet another year of spending far too long looking at screens of all shapes and sizes.

For once I had responded with surprising speed to the “reminder” letter when it popped through the letterbox, instead of just waiting for the third or even fourth one to arrive. This is presumably because, in the past, I used to think of them as merely a marketing device from the optician intended purely to sell more spectacles than was strictly necessary, and so I used to “put off” my visit until I felt properly shamed enough into not ignoring the need to go any longer and, happily, for many years, the prescription remained much the same and so buying new glasses wasn’t strictly necessary and a fiscal bullet was dodged for another couple of years…

Not that it’s really something you should scrimp on. After all, these things get parked on top of your nose and play a large part in how you are looked at by the world as it passes you by. If you are prepared to look at the world through a rancid, filthy old bit of twisted wire that is the optical equivalent of a lop-sided dustbin, then you shouldn’t be surprised to find that people are looking at you a bit “funny” although you will probably find out later that it’s because it is actually you that is looking a bit funny…

But the deterioration of my own fetid specs wasn’t the reason I responded with what seemed to be unseemly haste (or as close as I ever get to it anyway) to the letter. No, it was more because I was actually rather concerned for once about my one and only set of eyeballs and how much I’d been struggling with them recently, especially when it comes to reading a page, or looking at a screen.

There have been days lately which I have spent in utter agony as I’ve been working on that - now stolen – computer screen in that office of ours. Somehow its bright new high-resolution screen managed to be positioned at the exact distance to make my eyes feel like I imagine Malcolm McDowell’s did when he was filming that scene in “A Clockwork Orange” (only without the moisture).

There is, of course, an inherent fear involved with eyesight which is basically that you might lose it. I think that it’s probably a universal fear for anyone whose life is essentially “visual” like me of course, but also for anyone who drives or has relatives or… Well, basically, it’s everyone who possesses eyesight really, isn’t it?

I first started “needing” to wear glasses at secondary school, sometime around the time between “O” and “A” levels when, ironically, despite the fact that the classrooms got smaller, the blackboard got fuzzier to look at, and so it was decreed that I would become one of the “four-eyed” ones, and, on reflection, my chrome “pilot” style spectacles of choice were not the wisest option, even though I pursued that style through a number of incarnations (once that I discovered that you could get them in black) for a few years after that.

So anyway, I toddled along on that Saturday morning and spent half an hour in a dark room with a professional woman whom I barely knew in very close proximity to me, and then paid her for the privilege as she tested the latest downgrade of my eyesight and put it on the record.

I went through the usual routine of reading things clearly off the illuminated letters board, blinking, and then finding that they were less distinct, whilst I had that ridiculous device parked on my nose (thankfully the mirrors were out of my line of sight) and various lenses were placed inside the contraption that made my vision better or worse, and various glass lollipops were held in front of me as I declared them to be “better” or “worse” or “much the same”…

I always think that, like with marketing polls on the telephone, there are “trick questions” being slipped in there, just to see if I am lying, and the occasional “tut” when I seemed to get the answer “wrong” or, at least didn’t give the one which was expected, seemed to confirm this suspicion.

Then I looked up and down and left and right (where I had to try very hard not to look straight into the optician’s mouth) as she shone her examination light into my eyes and I had that rare experience of being able to see the veins on my own retinas, which is something you don’t get to see all that often. In fact, I would go as far as to say that it’s only during eye examinations that I ever get to see that, which is probably just as well…

And I looked at the red and green lights and read the test page in tiny 5-point type and after that there was the dubious delight of the “pressure test”, a relatively recent torture that opticians seem to have developed to put the anticipation of visits to go and see them up on level par with a trip to see a dentist, when a blast of air is shot at your eyeballs one at a time just to prove that they’ve not yet turned to mush, or something.

Anyway, after all that, it was suggested that I had reached that great age where I might want to consider crossing the rubicon into the strange new world of “varifocals” which will, apparently lead to some very peculiar sensations for a while after I get them, might make me fall downstairs, and delayed my simultaneous order of prescription sunglasses (like I need those any more anyway with the summer we’re having…) just long enough that I believe that the “free” part will get forgotten about when I actually get around to requesting them.

So, with all that in mind, I ordered up some new specs and had to go through the whole torturous process of choosing new frames for the mask I will be wearing to face the world through for the next couple of years of my life. This is never a great moment in my life as it involves looking at my big fat head in a mirror for far longer than I think is reasonably tolerable, and involves making a decision that is usually a “wrong” one whilst looking through plain glass lenses that don’t let me see my big fat head with all that much clarity anyway. This was also when I discovered that the beloved had never much liked the glasses that I had been wearing for the past few years either…

In the end, wisdom prevailed, and I allowed her to decide, and so, in a couple of weeks, a bright shiny new me will be stepping out into the world, twitching my head as I try to work out my focal centres and no doubt plummeting headfirst down a flight of stone steps shortly afterwards.

I’m so looking forward to it… but at least I am still capable of looking…

(First published in “The Lesser Blogfordshire Alternative” July 15th 2012)