If you are short sighted then, without glasses, the world is a very different place from the world that the sharp sighted see. You learn to recognise people by their fuzzy shapes and small, characteristic movements you also find out that you have, to use a good, old fashioned term “cut” lots of people too. Not intentionally, but if you can’t see them you can’t be expected to acknowledge them. You have to learn to live with your reputation for arrogance however ill deserved it is.
You also have to learn to live with a certain feeling of inferiority, especially if you swim. Let me explain. Before I had contact lenses, and long before optically corrected swimming goggles were within the price range of ordinary middle class people, I had to swim myopically. This is not really much of a problem if you are an up-and-down swimmer, after all, what’s to see in the millisecond when your face is turned for a gasp of air? But when you stop and start to get out and look around you that is when your lack of definition begins to tell.
For years I never saw with any clarity when I was inside a swimming pool. Everyone was a blur, and, in my mind everyone looked good. I assumed that the indistinct figures wandering, with confidence, around the pool were elegant, handsome and beautiful; that’s why I kept my head down and kept on swimming! My first use of contact lenses (with goggles) was a revelation: a whole crowd of ugly, unfit, overweight people seemed to have body snatched the previous beautiful inhabitants of the pool!
The one thing that myopic swimming does allow you to achieve is a sense of isolation, it’s a time to think, a time to consider things. My telephone conversation with the art historian Peter Lord today, gave me pause for thought and filled the watery metres of my swimming this evening. If you’ve been reading the previous posts, then you know that I had the idea of a radio programme about the Welsh painter Archie Rhys Griffiths. Time for a re-evaluation I thought, this will make good radio I thought. Well, for the last ten or so years Peter Lord has been collecting art by Griffiths has letters, documents and has made a film to be broadcast on S4C in November. He is also writing a book to be published next year and there will be exhibitions: a fairly comprehensive ‘I got there first’ scenario! I only hope that there may be legs in a radio programme which can link in to the rising interest in this neglected artist. If my telephone conversation is anything to go by then Peter Lord has much more material than can be compressed into a 30 minute broadcast. His enthusiasm was infectious and the snippets of the life which he gave me were enough to make me want to hear more. I will keep my fingers crossed that something will come of this.
Meanwhile, the government has decreed that the regulations for what you can take into a cabin on an aircraft will change from tomorrow. We still can’t take toothpaste, shampoo, soap, aftershave, water etc, but we will have more room in which not to take things. Such luxury! I only hope that there is a lake night Boots to stock up with essentials when we get to Dublin. We will see, and so will you, though I think that there will be a three day gap until I can get back to my computer.
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