Plus Gerard Rochford’s
poem of the month
Recently, when I thought I was going blind, I went to see someone who specialises in this condition. ‘See’ is the first badly chosen word.
He gave me a card of printed material. I discerned enough to realise that it wasn’t Chekhov, though Beckett remained a possibility. The letters were arranged in lines, from extra-large to tiny. I was able to recite most of them on demand, until it came to the last line which I couldn’t manage.
The exercise was pointless. Without the last line, the exit, there is no meaning. Chekhov was a master of the farewell. We cry because we have been exposed to the truth in the closing line. Anton sensed this and played on it, but the closing line was beyond me. I am no Chekhov.
The man, an optometrist, nodded non-judgmentally on the completion of the test and we moved on. As we must. We journalists demand no less, our caravan of grief being restless. I then looked (by invitation) through a glass at a collection of shapes and was asked to say which of two opposing shapes was clearer. I loved that. When there was not much difference, I proclaimed it a goal-less draw. It is often the best result.
Next, he squirted stuff in my eyes. He had warned me that it might be an unpleasant experience, but not at all. I felt cleansed.
‘You have two cataracts,’ he declared on a faint note of triumph.
‘That’s nice,’ I said. ‘They’ll be company for each other.’
He switched on a video recording and left the room. I was abandoned to a bland, irritating American who explained the many virtues of cataract surgery. I heard only that in one in a million cases this improving operation results in total blindness. ‘Well,’ I muttered, ‘that’ll be me, then.’
He returned with encouraging news.
‘You can drive,’ he announced.
‘Borderline, but yes.’
‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘Where would you like to go?’
What a question. I said after some reflection that I would like to go to Low Moral Tone. He hadn’t heard of it. He asked me what went on there and I told him that the inhabitants of Low Moral Tone were a badly behaved lot, that their dogs shat on the pavement, that the people went to bed with each other’s partners, and that everyone trooped dutifully off to church on a Sunday. They were complete hypocrites who had no sound views on anything.
‘Why,’ he asked reasonably enough, ‘would you want to go to Low Moral Tone?’.
‘Because,’ I said, ‘I’m sick to the back teeth of the neighbouring burgh of High Moral Tone.’
At this point he asked me what I did for a living. I told him that I edited a sort of magazine. He seemed intrigued. He asked what it was called, this sort of magazine. I told him. He noted down the words ‘Scottish Review’ with suspicious deliberation.
‘That sounds fascinating,’ he said finally. ‘You must enjoy that.’
‘Good days and bad,’ I answered honestly. ‘I’m going through a bad patch at the moment.’
‘What’s the problem?’
I explained that, since my eyesight had deteriorated, I had had to have articles in the press – ‘pieces’ as we call them – enlarged and that I had found this unexpectedly frightening.
‘Frightening?’ For the first time in our conversation, he sounded genuinely perplexed.
‘I am developing,’ I said, ‘a problem with opinions. Not all opinions. I love the gentle sceptical voices. Witty polemic too. But opinions that shout at me have become a strain. When they were printed in decently small type, I could take them or leave them. But it’s harder now. I have a phobia about the comma.’
‘The comma?’ he inquired anxiously.
I confided in him that commas can be a prelude to yet another shrill opinion; that semi-colons, often poorly positioned, are typically followed by a more emphatic opinion still; and that full stops tend to be a nightmare, a watering hole before another onslought of utter certainty.
He asked me if I had any confidence in my own opinions. ‘Surprisingly little,’ I replied. ‘When the word count on my computer reaches 900, I stop. Sometimes I am dismayed by the result and realise that I could have argued the opposite case with equal conviction.’
He wanted to know if it was any better for me in the glare of the outside world.
‘Worse, if anything,’ I admitted. ‘Only today I dimly perceived a threatening shape advancing towards me. At first I assumed it was another full-frontal attack on the cardinal person. Before it was too late I jumped out of its path. It turned out to be the double-decker to Glasgow.’
The optometrist advised me that he was not qualified in this unusual field and that he would refer me to a specialist in Harley Street who had made a study of opinion phobia. I said that this would be a waste of time.
‘But he might be able to help you.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘he would merely give me an opinion. There are too many opinions already.’
We parted amicably enough. I held in my hand a quote for £4,000, which I could just about read unaided. Where would I go next? I was borderline. Though the streets were full of uncollected self-righteous garbage and stinking with sanctimony, I saw the world in a new light. I longed to explore it. Then I remembered that, although I was allowed to drive, I had never learned how.
