Science fails again!

Friday is the worst day to have snow. For a teacher. Why? Because the best you can do is one day off and then there is the weekend for this fickle climate of ours to do its thing and probably get rid of all the white stuff by Monday, so that lessons can be resumed as normal. I suppose that given the totally unexpected weather today, giving teachers a bonus day, they shouldn’t complain!

After my strictures yesterday, there was a sort of ironic justness to the sudden whitening of the City of Cardiff. After the protestations of the weather men that the city was over and done with this wintry interlude, there was a sort of poetic justice in the morning bringing further heavy snow showers. As someone remarked to me, “I don’t know what all the fuss is about, they did, after all, give a ‘Severe Weather Warning’ at 4.30 in the morning.” So all those fools who went in to work in schools and then found that they were sent home again had only themselves to blame that they didn’t tune in to the radio in the wee hours to find out that the weather men were wrong again.

And, as the ‘disgraced’ weatherman from BBC Wales plaintively bleated, “It’s the fault of the French!” It turns out that a ridge of high or low or, as the railway companies always say, the ‘wrong type’ of pressure drifted further north from the mainland of France and deposited its ‘wrong type’ of air on our good Welsh air and produced entirely unforeseen snow. How extraordinary; and in February too!

It’s easy to take a distanced, magisterial stance to the weather when it doesn’t really impinge on your daily life. My only concern was to get Toni to work on time, and the manic desperation that I always displayed in getting myself to work on time does not transfer to others and their places of employment. I’m sure that it is that distance which ensures that my blood pressure remains at a level where the doctor says, “I can live with that,” whenever he takes my reading. I’ve often pondered on his use of the personal pronoun in his statement, but always translated it into the first person plural and rather liked his association of his own well being with my health: a very good stance for a doctor I think!

On a more serious note the ironing situation is now rapidly approaching the critical. It is a well known fact that I do not iron. Because of various traumatic experiences including the time when I ironed a pair of trousers and it ended up with more creases than a pleated skirt, I scorn the use of the hissing monster of heated metal as I would the use of a Ford car. I have never understood how it is physically possible to iron a shirt, given the vicious turns and twists in the material to produce the finished garment.

Why is it not possible to manufacture garments which utilize the principle of the Möbius strip so that one continuous ironing plane, so to speak, results in the whole garment being suitably smoothed? I leave the practicalities to clothing manufacturers, but I understand that the idea is quite simple and you do not have to indulge in the belief in further dimensions than the ones readily to hand to produce results. For goodness sake, the ingenuity of man can invent the paperclip which is clever, simple and understandable and useful, so roll on Single Plane Ironing. I await with some impatience, as the gathering mounds of ironing are getting difficult and embarrassing to explain away.

Another thing awaiting explanation is the phantom house agent telephone call: no word from Peter Allan, I think, as my Aunt Bet might say, a letter is called for!

Dickens and ‘Barnaby Rudge’ are fading into the background. The saga of my contact lenses and the different prescriptions continues. I am now sticking with a prescription which gives me less distance and a little more close up, which means that virtually everything is slightly out of focus, but I’ve always been good at guessing given a vague outline!

The ‘off the peg’ glasses that I have to read are only really effective with the previous prescription and their use with the present selection of plastic on the eye means that reading is something of a labour of love.

The frameless micro lenses that I am wearing at the moment perch on my nose and allow me to peer over the top at distant objects. Unfortunately as they are slightly ‘out’ in their corrective strength it means that the rims of the lens and the arms and the point at which the arms attach to the lens are all clearly visible as irritating blurs on the periphery of my vision and vie for attention with the printed word. I know that my brain is supposed to filter out the minor irritations of blurred dead spots, but it doesn’t, and it never has. I can see that I am going to be suckered into the usual opticians’ trap of having to pay for vastly expensive prescription lenses for a pair of reading glasses, which I will be constantly searching for so that I can read.

If you have perfect sight then give thanks constantly that you don’t have to tolerate a whole life of irritation that constantly catches you out when you least expect it to. Just think about what happens to your sun glasses during the few brief weeks that we in Wales enjoy when there is some justification in the wearing of them: they get lost, sat on, scratched, stolen, broken, dirty etc. Imagine what it must be like to have the same frustrations all the year round. And don’t get me started on contact lenses!

The only positive thing that I can foresee in the near future is the excitement of bargaining with the optician concerning the worth of all the contact lenses that I have not used for the past year and which I have returned for some sort of monetary consideration from the optician. I am sure that all the money that I could gain will be hoovered by the opticians as they offer me a cut price pair of glasses which actually turns out to be hundred of pounds in good folding stuff. Ask anyone who has ever had a pair of glasses made and, by the time that you have said that you don’t want to look like the scientist in The Simpsons, you find that the cost of the processes which are used to make your prescription look less like two milk bottle bottoms held together with coat hangar wire and more like an ordinary pair of spectacles will empty your bank account. I think it is a technique which is taught to opticians during their first, second and third years of training, for most of the time of their training. Or am I just being bitter?

It’s obviously time for my sweet, sweet cough mixture which I am now drinking from the bottle.

Was there ever such dissipation?