Showing posts with label Contact Lenses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Contact Lenses. Show all posts

Friday 3 December 2021

Unsighted

Today I woke up with a bloodshot sore left eye. If I wear my twenty year old glasses all day get a bad headache , they are fine for a couple of hours, but I was going out to Northallerton for the day. So decided I would have to go with glasses as there was no way a contact lens was going in that left eye.

On the bus going round a corner I heard a noise, as though something had dropped and hit the floor but couldn't see a thing , but noticed the name of a local chip shop as we drove past, looked ahead and thought it looked a bit blurry. I then realised that my glasses had dropped off , and that was the noise I had heard. I looked again and found them under the seat but thought, I wonder if I can get through the dau =y with no glasses or contact lenses.

It turned out I could , and my sore eye feels great , fully recovered. The only slight issues were having to get closer to signs to read them and being more careful crossing the road, but I know what I can do if this happens again. 

We'll go with Eric Clapton's take on Sonny Boy Williamson's "Eyesight To The Blind" from Ken Russell's film of the Who's "Tommy". Clapton didn't want to finish the take so shaved his beard off. Ken Russell's make up crew restored it in no time.

I am not sure if you are aware of my writing on Vocal but these are a few of my stories if you would like to sample them:

  1. The Never Ending Story - My Directory
  2. The Never Ending Music - My Music Directory
  3. The Never Ending Poetry - My Poetry Directory
  4. An Owl In A Towel - A Beautiful Book by Lesley and Cheryl
  5. Three Reasons Why I Love Settle - Scaleber Force, The Hoffman Kiln and Castlebergh Crag



Sunday 8 August 2021

More Dreams and The Accidental Button Press


Yesterday I got my new contact lenses and there was a letter saying which lens went in which eye, which I duly followed. After giving my eyes hydration via and eye bath I put the lens in my left eye and it was very blurry but thought it will settle down. I prepared the right eye one but the left eye was still blurry , it wasn't going to settle down. Then I swapped the lens in my left eye to my right eye and I could see perfectly immediately. The letter had got the lenses the wrong way round , so now my sight is perfect.

I had a really odd dream , our work team were having a meeting in a classroom on the corner of the West Road and Clayton Street (it's a cake shop in reality so that might say something). There was my team and a Facebook friend Les who shares a love of Greek Mythology as demonstrated by this story

Ola by boss was writing in chalk on a blackboard and I was having real difficulty seeing , took my glasses off , no difference , but still had contact lenses in. Then walked out and visited a couple of record shops with another friend Sarah , who's birthday party I attended a couple of weeks back. Now there's only one record shop in that direction , Beyond Vinyl , although Vinyl Guru is the other direction  but there are the Amnesty Bookshop and Kazbats Den. I didn't buy anything and told Sarah that I needed to get back to work.

I then woke, washed , showered , and when I picked up my phone , the Marvin Gaye song "We Can Make It Baby" came on via YouTube. I have never heard before , it is quite good , but a sort of end to the dream sequence.

Nigel Blackwell of Half Man Half Biscuit in one of his songs wrote that and unusual thing in a dream would be going for a loaf of bread. in the song "San Antonio Foam Party" but all the lyrics are here and they are a literary treasure trove.


Wednesday 31 March 2021

The Loquacious Calvinist

I haven't a clue why that phrase was in my mind on this last day of March , the last day of the financial year , on this sunny morning. It is probably that the last two things that I have picked up to watch have religious overtones.

"Apostle" on Netflix featured Dan Stevens and Michael Sheen and is a very claustrophobic kidnap tale based at an isolated Highland Island community  reminiscent of "The Wicker Man". It also disturbing and in parts gory and in my opinion spoilt by the vague mystical / science fiction unexplanations of what is going on. Reminding me of the finale of "Night of the Demon" a great , worrying horror film , spoilt by the studio insisting on the appearance of a rubbish monster at the end. I can't find any way of watching it except on Netflix but here is the IMDB link.

"Apparitions" is a six episode BBC series from 2008 that I found on Amazon Prime, from an idea by Martin Shaw and features him as an exorcist , so comparisons with the film there, but it's extremely good and certainly blurs the lines between good and evil including potential possession of a serial rapist by a saint and a lot of police involvement. Again there is a high gore content and don't get too attached to anyone but I am finding it gripping and Martin Shaw is always watchable and the appearance of Neil Pearson and a Prison governor is also a plus, but I always think he's not totally serious because of the "Drop The Dead Donkey" connection.  You can always find fault with anything, byt this is a fr=great series.

This morning I link I have lost a contact lens in my left eye, I can feel it there as I write, so I have to just wait until it works it's way round to the front and then I can see properly. It is annoying typing with one eye blurred but this is only the second time in twenty years of soft contact lens wearing that this has happened , so nothing major.

When I started this I pulled out a random cd "Triologie" a best of Trio. I believe that "Da Da Da" was made as a bet with their students and became a worldwide hit, so I am going to share this minimalist anthem with you. The Wiki page is here.

"Trio was part of the Neue Deutsche Welle (or NDW); however, the band preferred the name "Neue Deutsche Fröhlichkeit", which means "New German Cheerfulness", to describe their music."


Thursday 10 December 2020

Observations on a Piece of Clear Plastic

 A Contact Lens

Sticks to the Eye

Comes To Terms With The Eye

To Focus

And Make Your Sight Good

It is not Mechanical

It Is Not Alive

But It Works

Human Invention

Never Fails to Amaze

So Many Things

But

This Piece of Clear Plastic

Makes My Life

So Convenient

It doesn't Steam Up

And works 99% Of The Time


Yeah m this is a sort of Dylan like Tarantula stream of consciousness thoughts about wearing contact lenses. Is it a poem. You decide that because it has little structure , doesn't rhyme or conform to anything apart for using words you will find in a dictionary, much like me, but I felt I had to write it down. 

I reckon really it's a non-poem , it looks like a poem, but it isn't. I have actually used that term before. If you follow the Non-Poem link I've actually written about ten of these pieces and that surprised me, it's almost like I consider myself a writer.

Maybe "Blind Vision" by Blancmange will be a suitable accompaniment.

Friday 24 July 2020

A Box of Pearls and Earth, Wind and Fire


Yesterday I put my contact lens in and one popped out onto the floor. I spent an age to no avail looking for it. I then looked at something and realised that the vision in the eye where I thought I'd lost the lens was fine, the lens obviously hadn't dropped out although I thought it had.

Today is very grey and quiet and I feel I am getting hit with SAD but that will pass , though it does make me worry for people who feel like this all the time. I am glad that the first link that came up was an NHS one rather than Wikipedia.

Anyway to the point of the post, since my return to listening CDs I have been working my way through various box set and yesterday I finished Janis Joplin's (with Big Brother & The Holding Company) set "Box of Pearls" which is 5CDs but are quite short , from 20 minutes for the five song rarities to sixty minutes for the "Kozmic Blues" album. All high quality blues and soul with some extras. Some of the brass arrangements are really good , and Janis' voice , is well , you know what it is. we will use "Piece of My Heart" as the song for this post , but there could have been so many more.

The next box was "The Eternal Dance" by Earth, Wind and Fire , which is , like the "Box of Pearls" , a beautiful Sony Legacy box set , and while Earth, Wind and Fire are great musicians and very impressive on stage, most of the music is bland faceless soul in my book , with the odd decent song , but the live cuts get an amazing response. It may be a while before I hit this three disc set again, but for fans it should be a must have.

Today I dug out "Irish Ways" by Ron Kavana , and this is the first time I have listened to this , and it is an eductional history of Ireland with dialogue , song , poetry and music, almost a five hour documentary to listen to while I work. I would highly recommend it to anyone if you have the time to take it all in. I discovered a hell of a lot I didn't know about Ireland.

I still have many boxes to go through so expect more similar posts while I am working from home.

Saturday 20 June 2020

The Insidious Evil of Contact Lenses


This morning I lost a contact lens trying to put it in my left eye. Usually if I drop them I eventually find it but to today absolutely no sign. Looked round the sink , on the bathroom cabinet and floor, it does amaze me that when you drop something it can go absolutely anywhere.

Given that my right and left are out of sync I decided to ditch the right one as well well and open new ones but was worried that maybe the left one was actually in my eye but had slipped behind it.

That has happened to me once before and I didn't realise until it reappeared on a hospital visit. I tried inserting the left one but it felt that there was already something there, although this was probably psychosomatic  caused by by attempts to take out a contact lens that wasn't there..

Decided to go with my glasses then checked my phone and noticed an odd reflection. It turned out the lost contact lens was stuck above my palm at the bottom of my index finger, and there is apparently no name for that bit of the hand, like as Vivian Stanshall said in "Sir Henry At Rawlinson End" - "There ids no name for the back of the knees".

So that's my start to this beautiful Saturday morning when the 2019/20 football season restarts in empty stadia , but it is a good sight to see even if it's just on TV.

Chris Hawkins on 6Music is playing a Rolling Stones cover of Solomon Burke's "Everybody Needs Somebody To Love" . I was one of the backing singers and in the Gospel Choir support when Solomon Burke played The Sage ten years ago, see here .

This weekend will see lawn mowing , Roman Temple visiting and football watching and we need a song to go with that don't we. For some reason Johnny Clarke's "Rockers Time Now" was in my head yesterday,  it's an absolutely great song , perfect for today, so we'll go with that.

Monday 4 May 2020

May The Force ...


.. be with you , those memes will be all over social media today and that's a good thing as it will bring smiles to some people and good natured groans to others. This is my fourth (I always wonder whether it's forth or fourth but it is fourth) day of joining in with #maywriteabit and I didn't think I would even get this far with it, but I have,

I'm thinking that my blog looks very untidy so may change the layout  this week, but my inherent laziness means I probably won't . I had tried Wordpress but that seemed very inflexible for me , but lots of people use it so I am in a tiny minority with that which my usual position.

On Friday morning I forgot to change my Contact Lenses (they are monthly ones) , on Saturday I forgot to put out my daily tablets (but did take my Insulin) , and the latter was because I got distracted by something else though just ended up sorting them an hour later.

On Saturday , thanks to this computer I didn't get to bed until two o'clock Sunday morning thanks to doing my first Sunday blog post and sending birthday greetings to four people on Facebook.

I listened to some records on Sunday Morning, Bob Marley and The Strawbs (who's name is apparently a contraction of The Strawberry Hill Boys) "Grave New World" (you can see my Instagram post here and the vinyl original has one of the most impressive covers you will ever see) and will choose one of my favourite Marley cuts (and there are a lot of those) "Small Axe" which is not one that's often played (or I don't hear it on the radio) so I will share it with you.

Wednesday 12 February 2020

Kontakt


I said I write about anything , and I have no writing targets, but this morning as I put in my contact lenses I was still amazed how they actually work. Today was almost seamless lenses in , one perfect vision,  in slight irritation , so took it out and put it back in. I started on contact lenses thirty years back with hard lenses, I have never felt more uncomfortable and at the same time euphoric that I could walk round and see without glasses.

Someone once said to me that I wore contact lenses out of vanity. I told them it wasn't. I have 20/20 vision with them in, they don't get wet when it rains, and don't steam up when you go from cold to warm environments.

When I moved to soft lenses (I had considered laser surgery but they told me once it was done I would have to wear glasses for reading and it would cost me two grand, slightly pointless as I didn't want to wear glasses permanently and pay for the privilege), I heard stories about people who lose them in their eyes, get them stuck to their eyes and can't get them out etc. I lost one and it reappeared about three days later and I didn't feel any irritation.

It just amazes me that I put them in and then I can see. It amazes me that they adjust to my eye and that I can then see. Who thought that instead of glasses you could stick something on your eye (a horrible thought until you actually do it and get used to it) . Apparently the idea was first mooted by Leonardo Da Vinci in 1580, but there's a fair bit about on Wikipedia here.

Also why does bad weather seem worse at night. Last night was rainy and windy but this morning seems to have quietened down. Monday night I was walking home and got hit by rain and stinging hailstones and when I looked at what was playing when I got on it was "Stormy Weather" by Echo and The Bunnymen. Last night it started snowing when I was walking back though I am now listening to the free CD that came with "Follow The Music" with 26 early Elektra folk and blues tracks some taken from vinyl. Some are embarrassingly trite but some are very good like Judy Collins cover of Bob Dylan's "Masters of War" and Phil Ochs "I Ain't Marching Anymore" which what will go with this morning , an excellent anti war anthem.


Sunday 15 December 2019

On The Tip Of My Finger


I wear contact lenses and quite often when putting them it, I drop them or cant find them in their container or hit other problems. Sometimes I think I have dropped one in the solution filled receptacle and come the following morning see that I messed and it's dried out next to the sink. Usually a dip into the solution revives them. Sometimes I find them on the floor, but if you drop them they can go anywhere, down the plughole, stick to your clothes or the side of the cabinet. Today I lost the contact lense for my right eye, I could find it anywhere, and eventually gave up then I got mt left eye lens and noticed the end of my finger was very shiny, the right lens had stuck to it so well that I couldn't see it at first.

Any non contact lens wearer, if you wear glasses or have good eyesight you never hit this problem, but as a contact lense wearer it's one of the many inconvenienced you experience , however these are worth the hassle as the benefits of wearing them against glasses are huge not least of which is they don't steam up when you come from the cold outside into a warm house (ship shops are terrible for that).

Anyway at the beginning of the month, to hit 366 posts for the year I calculated I needed to post 13 posts every 11 days. Actually it's 13 posts every ten days which is roughly four every three days and and today is the fifteenth and this is the twentieth post this month so I am just on track so can actually do it.

Continuing on with "On Some Faraway Beach" it put forward the premise that if a record label had a following, that following would investigate and maybe buy anything that that label produced, this had been true of Atlantic, and was true in the seventies of Island and Brian Eno's Obscure imprint. The only records I have on this are Gavin Bryars "Sinking of the Titanic" and "Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet", which was based on a homeless man's singing but features Tom Waits as well.

I also have Brian Eno's "Discreet Music" which features deconstructions of Pachelbel's "Canon" which I will share with you for this post, it's strangely relaxing and relaxingly strange, familiar but alien.

Tuesday 3 December 2019

The Eyes Have It

For some reason this song title has mean going through my mind.As far as I know it's a one hit wonder (actually it's not Karel Fialka had another hit with "Hey Matthew" which my mum loved because it reminded her of my nephew) and while it is a decent pop song, very rooted in the eighties (not necessarily a bad thing) , and I probably have a copy of it.

The thing is the title got me thinking of how impressed I am with how contact lenses work, they're flexible plastic , stick to your eye (sounds horrible when you have never had to do it but becomes very easy and natural once you get the hang of it) and sometimes they don't go on properly but then slide round until your vision becomes perfect. How amazing is that,it does amaze me every day.

So this post gets this out of my head, and allows me to share this song with you,I know it's fairly short, but that's the nature of a diary you write what you need to.

I said that I had to do 46 posts to hit 366 for this year but this is post 331 so I only have 35 more to do, so that's probably about nine thousand words which is less than I expected.

So I'll leave you with "The Eyes Have It" by Karel Fialka which is almost impossible to track down is physical or digital form these days.



Monday 18 November 2019

Dry Your Eyes


Over the last two day I noticed the contact lens for my left eye  seemed a bit ruffled round part of the edge and slightly stung when I put them in. Yesterday when I took it out my eye was hurting as though it was was either scratched or there was something under the eyelid scratching it that was moving about.

Also when I was trying to read the eye was was blurry , not looking good.

After much bathing with a warm cloth the eye has calmed down but still seems very dry. On Saturday I would have tried to get my contact lenses in, but even though it's a work day I am going with glasses even though they give me a slight headache if I wear them for more than a few hours, but it will give my left eye a rest.

So really this is an excuse to play another of my favourite songs which I have shared before, but it is worth hearing again, The Streets (Mike Skinner) and "Dry Your Eyes"

Wednesday 31 January 2018

Did I Really See This?


I don't know if it's just age or what, but I often think I see things, then look again and realise it's just a trick of the light, and arrangement of shadows or something else. I remember seeing a program about a guy who had seen a ghost at work and when he looked into it (he was a scientist) he actually replicated and showed that it was some device that caused air oscillations at a certain frequency that caused the "ghost" to appear. A couple of months back I saw this "flying saucer as I walked out of my front door. It was a cloud formation and a couple of seconds later it was gone. However there are a lot of people who would say that this WAS a flying saucer, and I suppose it could have been, but the probability to me is that it was just an unusual cloud formation.

Flying Saucer
The thing is that we should always question things and demand proof, even if we have to get that proof ourselves. Although we can assume that some things are true because we trust the framework that helps reinforce our belief. I  believe that my keyboard and wires are working because I can see the words appearing in front of me on the screen. That reminds me I had dream that I got a computer last night but it had a CRT screen, that just got dredged up from my mind because of the analogy I was using.

So my lost contact lens has not appeared although my left eye is a bit irritated, but is that because I have two contact lenses in there or is it just psychosomatic. I don't know but I will keep you posted.

So next in the artists who have covered The Rolling Stones' "Happy" is Nils Lofgren and wile my favourite Nils Lofgren song might be "No Mercy", I've gone for "Secrets In The Street", cheesy eighties video with a great sequencer intro and outro used  as a backdrop to an excellent song with some brilliant guitar lines.

Have a great Wednesday