● Notices identify the aisle contents in the supermarket: Pasta/Cooking Sauces, Eggs/Canned fruit. Just beyond the focus of my glasses. Now I can read them bare-eyed and have fallen in love with the typeface used. Curvaceous and clear, reminiscent of the moment in 1959 when I said: I'm going to marry her. And did.
● Stark naked on the weighing scale I was unable to read the digits, unaware of my diet's progress, now in its fifteenth month. Glasses? Nah, they'd have added weight. Had to call in VR. Yesterday, for the first time I saw the total unaided. I'd lost three more pounds.
● Women 10 m away no longer merge into the background: their contours may be measured, their faces scanned for beauty. All are beautiful.
● No advertising poster is wholly dull, no municipal announcement menacing, no planning notice obscure - they are there to be read. My bowels turn to water as I revel in info seizure.
● Now I can scrutinise his every discouraging detail (especially the snarl that forms on the left-hand side of his mouth), BBC news presenter Huw Edwards is frequently absent from the 10 pm bulletin. His defences are down.
● Helen, a member of VR's painting class recently had the cataract op. I compliment her on her vestigial glasses. She hands them to me to try. They're as light as a butterfly on my nose. Less likely to slip. Expensive, but what the hell?
● French class resumes since I am now driving again. My eyesight slides over the words of Rien ne s'oppose à la Nuit (a novel) and I'm able to scan ahead. And thus elide words. Elision is vital in spoken French.
Congratulations on your visual acuity, friend. Wishing you many more clear days, so that you may see forever.
ReplyDeleteBlimey! You'll be watching the TV ads. next.
ReplyDeleteProst to you, dear Robbie! Beauty to the left and excitement to the right. You've got me looking forward to when my leg works again. Will I also fall in love with the world around me all over again?
ReplyDeleteHave you sensed that I have landed on British soil? Will be seeking out the despicable Huw. First thing we discovered is that our 50 pound notes (leftover from the last UK trip, and the bulk of our cash) are obsolete. Fortunately I had some 20's or we'd be on a chain gang trying to rais e enoigh to pay the cabbie. Have to attend at Threadneedle Street at the B of E to trade them in. Glad you are enjoying second sight.
ReplyDeleteCrow: It's the tiny revelations that sneak up on me and remind me what I've been missing these last ten or twenty years. Like the label on a Lea & Perrins bottle.
ReplyDeleteSir Hugh: If the commercials have text in them I may well do just that. Soundlessly of course.
Rouchswalve: The key is not to go out expecting to find beauty, otherwise it will turn out humdrum. Open your front door in a neutral state of mind.
Stella: Dear, dear Stella - you mustn't take this personally but just as you arrive, I depart. Tomorrow we leave bright and early for a midday flight to Stuttgart. There I will see the Christmas market. There they (VR and daughter OS) will see the Porsche museum. I am heart-slufted not to be sharing this tiny patch of the Earth's surface with you for a little longer. You're ahead of me with Threadneedle Street.
I remember hearing Jack Ashley talking about getting some measure of his hearing back again, and how the world was full of interesting noises he didn't know were there, like the windscreen wipers left on too long on a dry windscreen. Though he said that was usually only when his wife was driving.
ReplyDeleteI truly love the synaesthetic connection between the supermarket typeface and your 1959 moment.
Have a wonderful Stuttgart trip, it sounds as if you will.
Lucy: Didn't know synaesthetic, thought you'd made it up, regarded you as very clever. Decided to check it and found it exists; regarded you as equally clever for knowing it.
ReplyDeleteThe perception of fine detail in a previously blurred world does remind me of the time six months ago when they finally gave in to my pleas to have my ears syringed and the flushing of the loo suddenly sounded like an avalanche.
ReplyDeleteRR - in the immortal words of Joni Mitchell ("Big Yellow Taxi"):
ReplyDelete"you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone"
(or until you get it back again.)
I wish you well.
Lucas: I'm going deaf too. So perhaps there's a further treat in store.
ReplyDeleteAvus: Most of all I re-discovered that the world includes well-delineated straight lines. Unromantic, perhaps, but reassuring.