The Older We Get...

"...The further we see" - or so said the Hothouse Flowers, anyway. Not a good idea to take them too literally, of course, because that would be flying in the face of the (slightly worrying) evidence:

"The light adapted eye of a 20 year old receives six times more light than that of an 80 year old. In dark adapted conditions, the 20 year old eye receives about 16 times more light. In comparison to younger people, it is as though older persons were wearing medium-density sunglasses in bright light and extremely dark glasses in dim light." (The Eye Digest, University of Illinois)

I'm not even going to think about "vitreous gel liquefaction"...there ought to be a law to prevent that sort of thing. Really, there should. Complain to your MP. It'll give them something other than their expense accounts, questionable sources of campaign contributions, and how many more members of their immediate family they can get on the payroll to think about.

Still, at least the dimming vision business means that sometime soon Bono will have to stop wearing those ridiculous sunglasses, or else risk walking into things. Which is never 'cool' for famous pop personages, whether or not pharmaceutical ingestion has occurred.

Anyhow, my personal experiences of getting older have generally involved various parts of me working rather less efficiently, effectively, or indeed, not at all - and don't bother asking whether I've learned from these experiences. I'm far too ruined and knackered by childcare duties to have significant cognitive functioning any more - hence I'm very fortunate to be having my left knee hacked open tomorrow (or today, or last week, or a completely unrelated time-frame, depending on how you came to be staring at this page, if you suffer from chronic unpunctuality to the same extent as me, etc) after only three months on the waiting list.

All being well, the surgeon will have a good guddle around inside the joint, tear out some of the stuff that's too frayed at the edges, pack the rest back into the space where it's meant to be, pluck a merry little tune on my cruciate ligaments (using knee angle to change the tension/note pitch), and sew it all up without leaving any surgical equipment, lunch leftovers or loose change behind.

I'm sure it'll all be fine, but as ever with such things, if the bizarrely-improbable, freakish-chain-of-coincidences worst should happen...well, huge thanks to all the special folks (you know who you are), it's been quite a ride.

Cheers.