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Today was World Malaria Day. But when will there be a day for people who, like me, don’t have malaria? Political correctness gone mad.
OK, I can’t kid myself any more. I am definitely a middle-aged man. I went to get my eyes tested today and it turns out I need reading glasses. Obviously for the rest of you my birth certificate would be enough to let you know that I am not a young man any more, but in spite of my body hurting so much that I can’t sleep if I lie on a hard floor for an hour and me not being able to thread a needle, it took a trained optician telling me that my eyes didn’t work properly any more for me to get the hint. On the plus side everyone seemed impressed with how healthy my eyes were for a man of my age, so I am still a winner. I forgot to tell them that one of them was squeaky though. I am sure that can’t be right.
Getting your eyes tested was nothing like a Two Ronnies sketch and I thought for some time they weren’t even going to ask me to read some letters off a chart on the wall. In the end I had to read some off a screen, but it didn’t look anything like the chart in the comedy sketches. And unless they deliberately make the screen blurry in order to sell more glasses (it’s what I would do) I had to accept that my eye sight wasn’t really good enough. My right eye was worse. It’s my left eye that squeaks. So I can only presume the squeak is what gives my left eye the advantage.
Most of the tests were very futuristic, involving peering into devices and having lights flashed at me and having to count dots in my periphery. And the joke was on Boots because they’d sent me a voucher so I was getting all this for free. Suckers! I might come in every day. It was like a free video arcade, where some things were a bit blurry, but even then they put on some magic spectacles like a Robin Williams character would wear, where you moved lenses around until things sharpened up a bit. Admittedly having then told me I was old (or unable to read things close up properly) Ian Boots then did sell me some expensive reading glasses that probably offset the free eye test (and which I will definitely sit on or lose within the first week). But I wasn’t paying for my eye test like all the other blind idiots (I assume only I got the offer).
So not sure how long it will take to get used to being a glasses wearer. And I won’t be one for a while as they have to make my stupidly complicated glasses for me. But on the plus side it will turn me into a partial robot (according to Meaning of Life guest Aleks Krotoski) and so when I have sex with myself I can be sort of having sex with a robot. Though don’t know if I will need to wear reading glasses when I am doing that. It’s all a bit of a blur down there anyway. And no glasses can solve that.
Any suggestion that’s why I’ve gone blind in the first place is clearly idiotic. Or I wouldn’t have seen anything since 1981.
