I WEAR two pairs of glasses. One is for reading and doing cryptic crosswords, the other is for driving not so badly and going to the cinema – on Sundays, when it is quiet and there is nobody crackling sweet papers or coughing in an intermittent and irritating manner.
I lose both pairs of glasses continually and stand hunched on street corners riffling through my bag like an old bag lady.
It is why there is a drawer full of old outdated spectacles in our house. They are 'just in casers'. They really should be doing people good in the Third World, but I’m too scared to let them go.
What if I wake up some morning, clutch blindly at the side of the bed and do not land the glasses? What if I do once too often that of which I am guilty – put the glasses on a cushion, forget, flop down and hear that crunch that augurs the death of the only decent pair.
I could stick the broken glasses together with an old sticking plaster – a retro 60s look. After all, the antique NHS frames are all the rage. But I’ve stopped short of that.
The long dangling glasses chains beloved of 1960s librarians sing to me from the shelves in Boots – my fingers are itching for them, but something deep down says it’s all downhill from then and I’ll be into the Saga catalogue ordering supersize mobile phones and plastic gadgets for catching spiders before you know it.
I never thought it would come to this.
“I never thought it would come to this,” I tell my husband. (Repeating yourself goes with the territory).
My really funny story is not so funny to the person who has heard it before. Sometimes he cannot help himself.
“You told me that this morning,” he sighs.
And all this is leading up to the fact that my old phone has given up the ghost and the Ulster Museum is begging to have it for a special history display. It almost dates to the time of the big brick mobiles – the BBC reporters had them: no stopping at the side of the road and banging on someone’s front door to use their home phone and file red-hot copy for them.
But sometimes you just have to go with the flow. The phone company sent me a new phone. How the tables have turned.
“I never thought it would come to this,” I tell my son, leaning my head against his shoulder because he’s much higher up than me now.
“No worries, Ma," he says, we’ll set up the Sim and the phone and export the contacts together.
But then I kick myself in my still middle-aged ass and sit down and get on with it. Isn’t that what it’s about?
Let others go gently and meekly, raise their shoulders in a shrug and say they can’t. I will survive.
On the hunt for a birthday card the other week, I found one with two women chatting.
“I went to a 70s disco the other night,” says one.
“What was it like,” asks the other.
“At first I was afraid, I was petrified,” she replies.
It’s an age-related joke, a disco music joke, I suppose. But surviving is about getting up and doing what’s new, like that sky-diving mammy on the TV. Apparently the first time you sky dive, you get pushed out of the plane – nobody in their right mind really wants to jump.
Back on the subject of the mobile phone, I did what another birthday card advised. It showed two backpackers approaching a large and serene Buddha in a clearing in a wood in the middle of nowhere.
“What is the secret of the universe?” asks one backpacker.
A large speech bubble coming out of the statue’s mouth has a sound bit of advice: “Google it.”
And that’s what I did with the phone dilemma. You google and you find a video that tells you how to do it yourself.
The phone and my contacts are all officially sorted. Last year, we fitted a whole new keyboard to this very laptop and this year, I set up my new phone and imported all my contacts.
It was “all by myself,” as the little princess in the story book boasted after using her potty.
Life hurtles by like lightning and, like a granny on a skateboard, you have to keep up with the pace.
The new mobile phone was a slight challenge – but the word is slight. I’m setting up the smart TV next and learning to replace the washer on the bathroom tap with my old mate Google.
As Gloria sang, back in the day, I will survive.
