How We Humanise Human Eyes

Dear Mr. Alien

Cataracts are a kindness to shroud reality in a mist, to protect your eyes from seeing things by far better missed.

To soften the sight of advancing years of hard wear and tear, to calm and alleviate the onset of seeing old age getting near.

Cataracts are a blessing and sometimes they are a curse. They can help to stop you from seeing how things are getting worse.

That sprinkle of a wrinkle in your weather-worn face, do you really want to see it when the mirror you grace?

But I like to read and think and write and cataracts are the start of a long, slow death by a premature loss of sight. It gave me such an awesome fright, that in less than a minute....

..........I was well and truly in it, a taxi ride to a hospital, San Juan Grande in Jerez. I was touched by the hand of an angel, Dr. Sandra, I could feel her breath blow softly across my nose. She smelt like a beautiful rose. There are some compensations, I like to think, I do suppose.

Laid back with a mask over my left eye, it teared up and I began to cry. Then Sandra wheeled up a machine with a laser, more precise and faster than a cut-throat razor.

It sounded like R2-D2 from the blockbuster film Star Wars. Whirring, warbling, and trilling, though it wasn’t quite as thrilling as a break in the Azores.

In less than minutes five, still kicking and full of glee, they wheeled me out to Maria who slowly took me home. And I could see a bright new day with the eyes of a teenage me, in full-panoramic, technicolor de-luxe, 3D, not chrome.