Tunnel Vision, a Dusty Spectacle and First Blood

Yesterday I was polishing my spectacles. For those of you with less than pure minds this does not mean I was risking blindness not does it refer to the old joke about the man in the unisex hairdressers shop. I am awash with spectacles and their cases. Regular readers will know that I am a "just in case" man. I carry on an inherited trait of my fathers by keeping things "just in case"


From time to time I make an effort to downsize my hoards of this ,that and the other and in this instance, if you will pardon the pun, my eye was drawn to my spectacles.  I am rather short-sighted, in other words, blind as a bat without them so I have always kept a spare pair in case of accidents. I say always, but this really had it's seeds in an incident near Rugby involving a canal tunnel and a sack of potatoes. Dear reader, ready yourself for another one of my long digressions  but it is essential to the tale. Those familiar with narrowboats and canals will know that on the outskirts of Rugby there is a canal tunnel famed for being a mile long and where the water is unusually deep, about 8ft. When I mention that I am 5ft 9ins tall you will begin to catch the drift of my tale. For many years a group of friends and I used to enjoy a weeks holiday on the English canals aboard a narrowboat. As befits todays society of equality all tasks aboard were shared equally between the sexes. This included cooking. Indeed I can say that in our "crew" the men outperformed the fairer sex in the culinary arts. And so it was that in the middle of this dark, deep tunnel I emerged onto the stern of the narrowboat to obtain some potatoes from the sack that we kept there. Now there was not much room on the stern and steering in a canal tunnel requires great precision and an uninterrupted view as there are usually only a few inches to spare at either side. One moment I was crouching in front of the helmsman holding a bicycle lamp in one hand and a King Edward in the other and the next I was in the canal, weighed down by layers of sweaters and derriboots. By some miracle I had managed to hold onto the bicycle lamp and by a fortuitous stroke of luck it was still working. Those on the barge anxiously looking back saw an unearthly underwater glow and then, rising from the depths, not Excalibur but Kojak doing an impression of the Statue of Liberty. The torch, my derriboots and myself were fished from the water but my spectacles remain to this day, half a mile into the Blisworth tunnel under 8 feet of water. One of the ladies kindly lent me her reading specs which gave me some semblance of vision but the styles of that time, the early 1980s, led the more unkind members of the crew to liken me to Marjory Proops. I recall the incident as Kojak's tunnel vision.


Since that day I have always ensured that whenever I got a new pair of spectacles I have relegated the previous ones to the position of backup. In theory, older pairs should have been discarded but I am, of course, a "just in case" man. On a previous visit to my local doctors surgery I espied a notice stating that the local Lions Club needed old pairs of specs which would be graded and used to provide charitable eyesight to third world persons. Scrabbling in the "just in case" drawer I unearthed a sizeable cache of old pairs which needed not only dusting off but rather embarrassingly, a good scrub prior to donation.

Yesterday I had to return to the surgery for one of those cholesterol tests which required a blood sample. Now Kojak's arteries are not heavily clogged but on my last yearly test the level was slightly high. Nothing to worry about but as part of the NHS preventative mission they slapped me on Statins so this latest test was to see if I was behaving myself and if the Statins were working. Irritatingly this was a fasting blood test which meant I was nil by mouth from the previous evening. H2o was allowed but nothing else until after the 9.30 am blood was drawn. Now I like a decent meal and, as an ex-civil servant I am more than partial to a nice cup of tea so I ate later than usual and as the 10pm deadline approached I was furiously swigging tea. Being a gentleman of a certain age this naturally resulted in more than the usual nocturnal visits to the bathroom. It was a rather sleepy Kojak who arrived at the surgery for his appointment with Dana, the nurse who was to extract my lifeblood. Fortunately she did not regale me with a rendition of the winning Eurovision Song Contest entry from Ireland but instead complimented me on my "nice visible veins".  Having been a blood donor since pre-history I've always been grateful for my visible veins as they have, with one or two exceptions, saved me from repeated stabbings and nasty bruises up my arm. One never knows whether they are joking so I refrained from commenting on the murmered "just a small prick" - as indeed it was. It was only afterwards when I praised her for the ease of the procedure that she admitted to being very nervous as it was the first time she had taken blood...