As you know if you’re a long-time blog friend of mine, I am a Lady Who Lunches, albeit only once a month.  Usually, I take a couple of friends with me, two sisters in their late 80s who don’t have a car and, in one case, can’t walk well because she hasn’t got good balance, so a lift is a big help, saving them two bus rides and a walk each way.  But they’ve got a friend coming for Easter who was arriving today, so I was on my own and arrived slightly early – only five minutes or so.  But I was still surprised to see only one person there.  Marian, our 96-year-old Leaderene, hadn’t arrived.  Doreen was a bit anxious, but I noted that none of the other early arrivers were there either, so maybe the traffic was bad on the ring road.

Indeed, it turned out that there had been an accident and the road was closed, and up to an hour had been added to people’s journeys.  So it was the main topic of conversation with everyone who’d been stuck, until Marian asked Doreen for the get-well card for Ann … which Doreen had forgotten.

Darlings, I went straight into rescue mode and sped across the road and puffed up the hill to Asda.  Actually, this is sounding less dramatic by the moment – anyway, I ran, some of the way at any rate, which is fairly unusual for me.  My hip surgeon permits me to run up to 30 yards occasionally, and that’s about all I can do without wheezing to a halt in any case.  It was – ooh, several hundred yards, it must have amused the passing drivers, watching an old dear scurrying along anxiously like a geriatric White Rabbit.  I needn’t have worried, I arrived back just as they were starting to serve lunch, so hadn’t missed a thing.

Later, I had my eyes tested – not that there’s any connection, it’s just the way it was.  I feel so inept when I have my eyes tested and the optician asks my opinion on two lenses, when I can never decide – I explained that I’m pretty easy-going and not very observant, even when I’m trying very hard.  But we came to a consensus.  And I told him about my contact lens slipping to the back of my eye, and he had a good delve and says there’s no physical cause and gave some advice about getting it out (which was what I’ve tried without success, but I didn’t say that because it would have sounded whiny).

The result is that my sight has improved slightly, in that I’m less short-sighted.  The only effect of that is that I’ll have to have new lenses in both pairs of glasses, probably at considerable expense.  He mentioned my slight astigmatism, which I knew about, and told me what reading glasses I’d need if I wanted reading glasses.  I admitted that reading in bed isn’t the easy matter it used to be, but otherwise I can read the smallest print on his board without difficulty, so I think that three totally different glasses are one too many (no, I don’t want varifocals, I mostly wear a contact lens).  But he explained everything and assumed I followed the technical bits, which I mostly did, and very much appreciated.  I am having different contact lenses too, not just for the different prescription but also to correct the astigmatism for distance – it makes little difference and it was my choice whether to opt for it or not, but I think it’s worth a try.  They’re toric lenses rather than spherical ones – that is, the latter are exactly the same all over, whilst toric ones have a vertical and a horizontal – I suppose they’re a bit thicker at the bottom so that they settle into the right position.

At least I’m now of an age for a free eye test.