Dinner catcher

We're the sort of people, mostly rational but with an edge of woowar, that might possess a dream-catcher [R] a device for predicting the weather invented by an enterprising Ojibwe shaman in South Central Canada long long ago. In Ireland we rely on a postman for Donegal [prev] who has about the same level of predictive accuracy. Our dream-catcher certainly catches a lot of dust . . . it's the feathers.

Failing sight is an almost inevitable consequence of aging. In the early days of WWII, roaring about in the dark in a gunned-up 20m powerboat, my father was known as Cat’s-eyes for the acuity of his night vision. My eyes were grand until I shuffled past my mid-40s and I’ve been using glasses since. Although they are functional, even essential, they are nevertheless Stuff which has to be accommodated somewhere when they aren’t on my nose for 'close-work'; which is whenever I’m not reading or sewing. In my last place of work I was mocked for planting the glasses on top of my head, as if they were sun-glasses and I was on the Côte d’Azur with my shirt open to the sternum. I am so alien in my current job that nobody dares say a word in case a racism accusation is made. I have many sets of reading-glasses and it has happened more than once to push them up only to have them clink against an already incumbent pair in my hair. Dau.I, being a generation more adrift from Cat’s-eyes, also has reading glasses although she is much younger than me; and she stores them on her head as well.

Vision problems among the young are not limited to myopia. When I was working in SVUH 15 years ago I heard a self-deprecating story from one of the lads. He’d been out on the Saturday night getting hammered with his mates when he realised that, if he legged it now, then he could catch the last #7 bus home to Dun Laoghaire. He made it, paid full fare to the end of the line, went upstairs and fell asleep. He woke 40 minutes later in Tallaght, a far less salubrious suburb in the Wild West of Dublin. He said, ruefully, that he’d seen then #77 on the front of the bus as he got on but assumed his vision was blurred from the drink.  A fine example of Confirmation Bias.

The other day, beach-combing [multiprev], I popped the glasses into my shirt-pocket as I got out of the car and was 4km away on another beach before I noticed them missing. I went back to the first place and found them under a large tangle of rope and netting from which I’d been plucking buoys. Other pairs have just gone or been sat upon or driven over. So head-top is better than shirt-pocket. My mother has adopted another option: she wears them round her neck on a chain. Which is grand until she needs to use them right after lunch: then her view is likely to be occluded by a splot of soup that hasn’t reached either her mouth or her lap. Dau.I says that one of her arty pals is starting a business making ornamental glasses-chains. Maybe I should order one – a double helix? – then I’d be sure to have a mid-afternoon snack. A dinner-catcher is waaaay more useful than a dream-catcher.