Always learning!

Never too old to learn.

A lesson which is ever tripping off tongues which are too old or too young and which have not been asked to learn too much too soon. Learning is actually very hard. Especially learning those things which others find important or culturally significant. What is this all amounting to? What learning is bugging me now? Not the Spanish today. That is not just a language more a whole culture: you are allowed to find the acquisition of that a tad difficult.

The real learning difficulty I am encountering is to do with my eyes. This is not a John Berger way-of-seeing sort of looking but something much more practical; seeing the world in something approaching focus.

As my optician tries for the umpteenth time to find the right prescription for my eyes by varying the strength of the contact lenses to compensate for my long and short sightedness, I have now, graciously, decided that I can live with contact lenses and glasses for reading.

To optimise the level of sight my poor old brain is expected to learn how to see using the differentiated strengths of lens allocated to each eye which, by their combination, should allow greater flexibility in my sight. Does that actually make sense? I hope it does to my brain, because I am wearing the contact lenses to drive and to complete various other important tasks.

The addition of reading glasses to the contact lenses is another level of brain decoding expectation. It is too wearing for me to work out how my actual sight, compensated by contact lenses, modified by glasses moderated by a confused brain is all supposed to work. I look on it like those wonderful pictures which were so popular a while ago which looked completely non specific but, when viewed in a certain way, lo and behold! a three dimensional image would loom out of the multicoloured surface.

I remember these pictures because, after the initial phase of asking why a jumbled mass of markings was called ‘Elephants in the Serengeti,’ the images would snap into focus almost immediately for me.

There was a glorious incident in an arty shop in Albany Road where there was a whole series of these pictures. One customer was flicking through them and asked the sales assistant what they were. The assistant replied that they were those digital pictures with hidden images. When the customer asked where the images were, the assistant replied that he had no idea and he had never been able to see them. At this point I butted in and said that I could usually see them.

There then followed a bizarre period when image after image was shown to me and I told the pair of them what they were supposed to see. I can remember one of them was an eagle returning to its nest on a mountain side and I even tried to point out to them where the shape of the image was with a vague finger pointing.

This was not as easy as you might think because to see the image it was important not to use both eyes to focus, so it was in fact impossible to point to one specific point in the picture as it was composed of two areas of the surface for it to work.

I think that the reason that I found it easy was that the focus of my eyes normally was not exact and it was easy for me to slip out of focus and find the image.

This is one of the few times that faulty eyesight has been an advantage, and even that has been limited as the magic of those digital 3D images has faded into obscurity.

I have conducted a search for these magic 3D images and have managed to find some which I will scatter through this blog. I wonder how many people will be able to see the images hidden in the pictures. I hope that I can spread a little frustration and, just as you gnash your teeth, I might point out that I have not lost the old skill and the images popped out straight away for me!

Take credit where you can find it, I say!

If you get really desperate, you can always ask me what images are hidden (not for me!) in these pictures.

Happy looking!