Tuesday 24 March 2026: New eyes

The poet worked from home on Friday, which meant a bit of a lie in for all of us after the previous few days of him having to get up early. I had my dirty cuppa half hour first followed by my reading half hour. Then I did my morning pages, finally working on the character study I’ve been thinking about all week. I wrote just under 400 words in the 15 minutes and this time I did stop instead of carry on going.

We didn’t take the dog for a walk because we had a house inspection. This was booked a few weeks before the landlords served us notice to vacate, but I think it was still a good idea as now they can’t accuse us of not looking after the place. If she thought there were any red flags, she would have mentioned them, so we should get a good wedge of our deposit back.

Agents are usually notorious for encouraging landlords to claim against the deposit, and often the landlords are too, and those who aren’t don’t all argue. We’ve had our full deposit back just once, and that was only because the agent and the landlord failed to respond to any maintenance requests I was sure to keep an audit trail of.

This agent and one agent previously have both specifically said we’re good tenants as we look after the houses as though they’re our own. This agent said everyone always enjoyed chatting to us whenever we called and she hoped we find something soon. We do have somewhere, we’re just waiting for all the Is to be dotted and the Ts to be crossed, and for our solicitor to be convinced we’re not laundering money. But until it’s all done and dusted, I’m not making any formal announcements. At the very least, I don’t want to jinx it.

Before she came we did have a bit of a clear up, tidying up stuff that just gets left lying around, dusting counter tops, vacuuming the floors, that kind of thing, and the only real work I was able to do before she arrived was Friday’s blog post, which just needed finalising, illustrating and posting everywhere.

I’d just started the blog patrol when she arrived. The poet stayed with the dog, who wanted to jump all over her and play with her, while I escorted the agent around. As soon as she’d gone, we had our midday breakfast, and then we all headed out to collect our new eyes, those raving expensive glasses we ordered just under 2 weeks ago.

We had to take the dog with us as he’s still not been left on his own yet, and we had to take it in turns to go in and be fitted while the other one stayed outside. The poet went in first while I waited, then he took the dog for a walk around town while I went in. It’s time we started to leave him on his own for a few minutes at a time. He was used to having Hawley with him and since Hawley went, he’s had a bit of separation anxiety. He likes us both to be in the same room at the same time where he can keep his eye on us without moving from one room to another.

When we got to town there was a massive road block due to a major emergency incident, we thought someone may have been hit by a vehicle. We had to go all the way around and the traffic was horrendous. On our way back, the road was open again, a major dual carriageway. And someone stepped out into the road in front of an oncoming vehicle that was travelling around a corner at speed. The poet said, that’s probably what had happened earlier…

When we got home, we found out a teenager had been rushed to hospital following a collision with a car on that exact same stretch of road…People never learn. We almost witnessed a near identical incident less than minutes after the road was reopened.

I had to leave my new glasses on as I’m supposed to be wearing them all the time now. My near vision has always been quite good, but just lately I’ve been wearing my (prescription) reading glasses occasionally. If I have my distance glasses on, I have to take them off, or lift them up, or peer beneath them to see my phone, or what I’m eating, or that sat-nav in the car. So we plumped for varifocals this time. I tried varifocals a long time ago and had to take them back because they made me dizzy. But the optician and the poet convinced me to try them again this time.

Immediately, I could see an improvement in my near vision, but my distance vision was very blurred. Apparently I have to get used to moving my head instead of my eyes and looking through the centre of them to see ahead and through the bottom of them to read. The blurred vision improved if I tipped my head back slightly and looked through the top, and the poet said it’s because I push them right up to the top of my nose. So now I have to get used to the varifocals and the discomfort of wearing them a bit further down my nose.

I did keep them on, though, standing still or refocusing if I felt a bit dizzy. It was at my desk I had to do the most experimenting, though. The difference between looking at the vdu and down at the keyboard. I’m a touch-typist, so I don’t look down very often, only for non-standard keys like punctuation and special characters. But it took a few goes to get the vdu in the right place and my glasses in the right place before I even attempted today’s blog post. But the more I tried, the easier it became. And if I don’t have to keep taking my glasses off every time I use my phone or my tablet, there’s less chance of the dog jumping on them and breaking them.

Because I’d already lost a lot of time last week doing one thing or another, the poet offered to go and do the shopping while I caught up on some work. One of us has to stay with the dog still, and I went the last 2 times. So he went this time, after he’d finished work, while I stayed with the dog. But I conceded defeat on some of my work and moved it to this week. Then I turned to today’s blog post.

It was good practice in my new glasses, with the vdu pushed a bit further away from me. I had to stop myself automatically drawing closer to the screen and hunching over the keyboard and remind myself to just sit back and read the screen while I touch-typed. My posture will surely thank me for this later and so, said she hopefully, will my eye sight. I have to persevere with these new glasses and I have 30 days to do so, after which I won’t be able to take them back and change them.

While I sat at my desk, marvelling at how well I could see the screen without peering at it, I also noticed how much prettier the garden birds were through the office window. I could see the vivid colours of the goldfinches, the greenfinches and the chaffinches. I could see very clearly the beaks on the wood pigeons and the collared doves. And we have 2 new visitors to the garden this year – just as we’re preparing to leave! – a pair of pied wagtails. They are so pretty, and their white bits are very white.

I did keep missing the letters off the end of words, though, with my typing. So if there are any I didn’t notice and correct, please accept my apologies. Also, while the typing area gradually became more clear, smaller fonts, like word-counts at the bottom of the page were more difficult and I did have to move closer to see those.

I think I will get used to the new eyes at some point, but I also thought I’d need to take them off and have a rest every so often. So I didn’t plan on spending too many hours at my desk.

I turned to the plotting with depth workshop, for which I should have started Week 5. However, we had a book to read the first 20 chapters of for the Week 4 assignment and as it was a book I already had, I was happy to look it out and do the work. But oh, once I started to read it I didn’t want to stop, and I hadn’t managed the full 20 chapters overnight anyway. So I pushed Week 5 along as well and called the reading time my study time.

Finally, I worked on this week’s diary and schedule, rather than leave that to yesterday. It’s usually a Monday morning job, but I still had a little time to kill, just not long enough to settle down into something big or requiring a lot of concentration.

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