Eye deficit

It's my birthday today, I was born in 1954, so I'll be . . . 62. Two years ago I was 60 and my body was holding up pretty well.  We had Exam Boards last week when we decide on a final grade for each student for their year's work: taking into account any sick-notes, bereavements, compensation and plain transcriptional errors. Three years ago, when this was all new to me I wrote about several obvious problems / inefficiencies in the way the process works.  Desperately small fonts of marks on a screen at one side of the room having to be reconciled with marks on a sheet of paper in front of you. Three years ago, I might complain about how hard it was to read small letters at a distance; but I could read them. Since that time, I've been delivered to the optician for a sight-check-up and told that I now need glasses for driving because I almost cannot read a number-plate at the required distance. Those 'driving glasses' are dead handy for viewing power-point presentations and I try to remember to bring the out of the car when I know I'm going to need them for this ancillary purpose.

What I find is that I now have effectively zero accommodation in the focus muscles of my eyes. I can squint up like I used to, but it really doesn't do much good. With the long-sight deficit to complement the increasing myopia I've been suffering since my late 40s there are some circumstances when I need two pairs of glasses at the same time. The Exam Boards was such a case and I found that I could do pretty well if I had installed my reading-glasses down my nose and overlapped them with the driving glasses above. I got some strange looks from my colleagues but I explained why I needed both pairs of glasses.  I have invented a moderately inconvenient set of bifocals.  I hope it will see me through to retirement from Exam Boards and All That in 3 years time.  I have no desire to buy an actual pair of bifocals for the one day a year when I need them because the optician will charge fashion-accessory, rather than Lidl, prices.  As it happens, Dau.I sent me a spectacle repair kit with some mini screw-drivers and a magnifying glass. Now I might get round to repairing and bricolaging the huge collection of broken glasses lying around the house. Cannibalising things so that a pair with a broken left arm can fix a pair with a missing right arm, that sort of thing.

The Boy, who is currently in foreign, sent me a case of Beer from The Beer Club.  No warning.  I got a call from Fastway Couriers to say that they had "a parcel" to deliver. I was off-site on my way to work, and we live impossibly remote up a bohereen, off a lane, off a rural road, so I asked the driver to deliver it to O'Shea's of Borris, the pub hub around which the parish circles.  I picked it up the following day.  Case of beer is a rather good blokey to bloke present, no? ANNyway, it was easy to carry it across the road to the boot of my car.  A few years ago ?when I was 50?, a palomino sent us a case of wine.  I was at home when the courier called, so I arranged to pick up "a parcel" from The Cross - the T-junction which sports a 1798 monument between Borris CW and Kiltealy WX.  To save Ye Planett, I put on some shoes and trotted down our lane [300m] and along the county road [550m] to await delivery.  I signed the docket while the driver heaved out "a parcel". A case of wine weighs heavier than 18kg and is a lot more awkward to carry than a sack of sheep-feed of the same weight. The journey back, and my arms, were a lot longer than the joyful anticipatory trot down the hill.  I deserved a dhrink!