I loved Greece.. I really, really did. Only there was one ineey meeny mini bikini moment where it could all have gone a bit well ..I believe the expression is ‘tits up’. We go on this boat to see turtles. We see a turtle. We pootle a bit further around the coast past beautiful coves and cliffs like this. A couple of times the boat stops and everyone jumps off to swim and snorkel. I don’t snorkel anymore but I […]
Vision Slip
A few years ago…well maybe more than a few…I was on a train at some daft time in the morning on my way to San Francisco. I hadn’t slept much the night before anxious about the trip and was a bit woozy. The carriage was almost empty and I thought no one would mind me snoring so leant down to pull out the foot rest. Whumph! Something seemed to both punch me in the arm and
Phone In Freak Shows on the BBC.
Dear All – Dad has taken a bad turn and I will be flying over to be with him at the weekend. I don’t want to write about it this time. Instead I have distracted myself by doing a piece on the BBC Late night radio show I ended up doing a cameo on. T x Disclaimer: This is my recollection of the show last Friday. It is written without recourse to transcripts or copies and has been flamboyantly reworked. […]
Drip Feeding in February
It’s a funny thing but this time last week I was in South Africa in Pretoria East Hospital sitting with my Dad who was attached to a remarkably noisy array of machines some of which blinked, some gurgled and some which went ‘ding’ like the number 57 bus to Highbury circa 1970. I suppose ‘funny’ isn’t the right word. There is nothing funny about a father who has VERY nearly died from complications arising from serious infection and multiple myeloma […]
Hedging Bets
‘Well, YOU’RE obviously not blind,’ grins the woman at the end of the bench. We are at the vet and Grace is still in her harness. I am not sure quite how to respond. It always surprises me how the assumption on seeing a person whose eyes are apparently undamaged, who is without a helper and who isn’t actually feeling their way along a wall is that the person albeit with cane or guide dog, is fully sighted ‘Actually I […]
Flying High
Okay, it wasn’t ‘crack. It was acid. And the thing is that we had just been talking about Mandrax … I best be a little bit clearer. Last weekend my friend and I were yakking away. She turns 90 in September and wants to go white water rafting. (She also wouldn’t mind going for a spin in a race car at Silverstone if you’re offering… she was one speedy driver pre the whole bindness/ageness malarkey.) She was annoyed that now […]
Bum’s Rush
Grace and I are in the eye clinic waiting room. Here is a picture of my knees. Its already been an hour which is nothing. Time is not paid enough on the NHS to bother to do its job properly. It crawls and meanders, idles by the water cooler, plays endless games on its mobile. The bearded man opposite me is trying to distract his hyper-active six year old. She is wriggling on her seat, threatening to escape and run […]
Hot Cross Buns
Easter weekend: part one: I can see the pavement at my feet in a clear oval of sight, pale, yellow, paving stones, some cracked and dirty, some shifted and sticking out of alignment. My oval of sight is about ten inches across right in front of my nose. Like all tunnels it expands outwards and by the time it has extended to the pavement it is about five to ten feet across. That’s enough to see paving […]
Battling Genghis Khan
It’s been a funny old week. That bloody lorry I talked about in my last post was still deafeningly loud behind me and making things a little sticky. I’ve been a little….self obsessed. A little elbows and angst. A little more irritable then, say, Genghis Khan. To distract myself I try to be useful. I volunteer to help a PhD student with his research on the correlation between visual impairment and depression. He is a gangly, morose young man dressed […]