Moving on through the darkness

SIGHT is perhaps our most valuable sense and this was dramatically brought home to me during a recent visit to my optician.

I’d already had to cope with my glasses being taken away for cleaning ahead of my sight test, so navigating to the examination room was slightly awkward.

Everything was out of focus... then suddenly everything was pitch black!

Apparently a rarely used piece of equipment had been plugged in and it had promptly cut electricity to the entire premises.

If I was a bit taken aback to be plunged suddenly into total darkness then so was my optician who rapidly found himself exploring the world of DIY as he fumbled for a torch and scrabbled around in a cupboard behind me until he was able to locate the master switch and restore the lights.

Just goes to show how much people take their sight for granted until suddenly they have to cope without it and it also shows how much optical technology has advanced.

My first sight test more than 40 years ago consisted of a series of boards about the size of a paperback book each covered in spots. Within those spots was concealed a number. How many of them you could see apparently determined how your eyes were. We’ve come a long way.

Hope yet, for the rest of us

PEOPLE find themselves having to do a lot of home maintenance during their lives, so it can be reassuring to get advice from the experts.

It is their example we try to follow, whether our efforts are good, bad or indifferent, and it might be anything from repairs, to electrics, plumbing, carpentry or simply buying the right tool for the job.

So I have to say that I found it difficult not to laugh during a recent visit to B&Q in Weymouth, surely one of jewels in the DIY crown and the sort of place you’d expect to be on top of its game.

But I spotted a horrible mistake they’d made almost immediately. That doesn’t make me a super expert or some genius at DIY. Anyone could have spotted it.

The embarrassing fact was that part of the store sign had gone missing and staff must have been too busy to replace it, that or the relevant letter hadn’t been delivered yet, so it was quite amusing to see a national DIY chain seemingly unable to practice its own philosophy. There’s hope yet for the rest of us!

No more mutant zombie snowmen

CHRISTMAS is getting closer and closer and panic buying is starting to set in.

Electrical goods, clothes, cosmetics, DVDs and CDs are really starting to move, but the items which are the current red hot buys are candied peel and cherries for Christmas cakes.

I had a hugely successful stab at this last year, getting ten out of ten for my cake and nought out of ten for my artistic snowmen which some members of the family thought looked like mutant zombies.

This year I just haven’t had the time and so we’ve bought a lovely home-made iced Christmas cake from a local bazaar.

It’s perhaps just as well really because you have to be ruthless to go out and get cake ingredients because that sort of shopping is not for the faint hearted and you need a sharp elbow and a long reach if you are not to be trampled underfoot in the rush for sought after fruit.

My family said there was another advantage to buying a cake this year. There was no chance of my mutant zombies putting them off what they were trying to eat.

Sat nav consigned to the bin!

A WEYMOUTH man found himself caught between a rock and a hard place when he went on a shopping trip which took him into the countryside just outside Yeovil.

Road signs in that rural location were rare to non-existent and, keen to get home without being marooned, he turned to modern technology and the satellite navigation facility on his mobile phone.

His trip then began to introduce him to parts of this country he had never seen before culminating in a roundabout.

A sign on it indicated one exit for Dorchester but his sat nav indicated a different exit for the way home.

Indecision was solved by the weight of traffic behind him and he decided to follow his sat nav’s advice - only to end up some time later on the road to Sherborne!

This did not amuse the driver who had to hack his way home as best he could and considerably later than he’d planned.

I understand that the sat nav had been violently switched off some miles from home and the fuming driver has no plans to use it again any time soon!

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