Happy lightness
A very good evening to all my followers! As winter draws (and drawers) ever nearer, I felt you might need some help and encouragement in seeing your way through these cold, dark nights. I have previously written about looking at the positive side of things, but I now have some further support to offer, having had some experience this week of looking on the bright side of life (hmm, that could be good title for a song…). Much of this advice is particularly pertinent to those of you who wear glasses or contact lenses – and for those of you who don’t, believe me – it will happen at some point!
sun glasses
You will need to visit your local, friendly optician for an eye test (free for those of us over a certain age) and casually drop into the conversation that you will be going to Africa in the near future so you wonder if you should get a pair of varifocals with light-reactive lenses, because it’s bound to be sunny and at the moment you only have a pair of boring, non-light-reactive bifocals (again, age will bring these delights for those of you who don’t need them just yet) which you wear as little as possible.
You think this might be a sensible (but expensive) idea in case you get some grit in your eye whilst on safari or lying on a sandy beach on Zanzibar (your local, friendly optician may start to look annoyed at this point) and have to remove your lenses and wear glasses instead. You explain that a few weeks ago you had to wear your glasses for longer than usual AND out in public (a rare occurrence) and it happened to be a sunny day (you may recall that day – August 17th, if my memory serves me well), so the only solution was to wear a pair of plain sunglasses on top of the ‘ordinary’ glasses. Now, while the Lifestyle Support Guru can get away with such a look, it is not something that ordinary mortals should cultivate because people will look at you in an odd fashion.
old shoe
Your local, friendly optician, realising that you have already spent a fortune on the forthcoming trip to Africa (threadbare clothes, shoes with no soles, that sort of thing), will suggest a much cheaper option of daily contact lenses to take with you (I think he was still trying to picture the LSG driving around wearing sunglasses on top of ordinary glasses), which you agree sounds much more acceptable – and probably less frightening for those one might meet on one’s travels!
Your local, friendly optician then asks if you have any other questions and you mention that you have seen a product which might relieve your ‘dry eye’ problem (which is a bit misleading because ‘dry eye’ actually makes your eyes water!), which is an eye mask that is heated in the microwave before placing it over the eyes for 5-10 minutes. He agrees that this might be helpful and this is where the ‘looking on the bright side’ comes in – instead of feeling sad that you are getting older and things are starting to fall apart, you can feel happy because you now have an excuse to go back to bed for 10 minutes because you need to lie down in a darkened room twice a day!
Lying down for 10 minutes
And the other experiences of looking on the positive side? An acquaintance offers earlier in the week to come round on Saturday morning to discuss possible plans for your garden (I use that term loosely), but you realise that you’d rather go and see ‘Spectre’ on Saturday, so you seek him out in the pub (where I meet most of my acquaintances) to offer your apologies and arrange another date. However, before you can say, ‘I’m really sorry, but something really urgent has come up tomorrow morning, so could we postpone the garden inspection?’, the acquaintance apologises profusely for not coming around THIS morning! ‘No problem!’ you reply sweetly, ‘We’ll rearrange it for another time. I can’t do tomorrow, though.’
And, finally, that ‘bright side’ moment when you realise you are up there with the ‘big players’. You have finally filled in your Tax Return (this is not a BIG Tax Return, believe me) after putting it off for months and you give details of the interest earned on your current account – a MASSIVE 13 pence! I think that’s probably more than Starbucks, Amazon and Google have paid put together, so I think George Osborne should be really grateful!
Always look on the bright side of life, dadah, dadadadadadah…
Enjoy your weekend, devoted acolytes!