Gargle The Peepers

So Scratchwood decides I’m straining too greatly when painting his lead and being as there’s a passing Oculist it’s there for I, Mrs Q and the girls. I come from a long line of spectacle wearers and before them no doubt a longer line of squinters. Mind you at a sprightly 5’9” I tower over the same which goes some way to showing how I am not as my forebears. So my eyesight has become at times blurry, though I’ve never needed glasses.

It’s a fine day though not close to ice cream. In the shed being used by the Oculist we have to give our names and much to the wife’s displeasure who preferring simply ‘Q’ has to confess to Quimbalina. Likewise the sprouts, my daughters, Catnip and Bosswell. Q is in first and taken aside leaving me with said sprouts but in moments I too am called – there are two Oculists! So there with sprouts one and two, upon lap for one and for the other investigating whatever is not nailed, and unscrewing what is.

There are lenses. There is a certain amount of the Question. I am shown colours that I being so blind I cannot tell apart. There is lemon juice and salt paper. There is of course Beethoven’s Five because our Oculist whilst a fiend is also a fiend that knows that expected. I am purged and scrubbed and gleaned and preened and scraped with a tool designed more for teeth. And I am, it seems, a little long sighted.

So in one, maybe three – there will be spectacles. For reading. And with my ever lengthening beard then people will think me a wizard, and I will think them fools.