I had an interesting start to the day.
I am going to have an operation.
This is going to be very exciting, even though as operations go it is on the duller side. It is not open-heart surgery or having a leg sawn off, which is a Good Thing.
I am going to have some bits cut off my face.
Not my nose or anything important. My eyelids have become very saggy as I have got older, and are sagging more and more, which is why I always look as though my eyes are shut whenever anybody takes a photograph of me.
I have never minded this in the least. I do not have the smallest problem with being wrinkly, it is only to be expected when one reaches a certain age, about thirty five in my case, but a while ago the wrinkly bit of skin started to rest on my eyelashes, and is slowly closing my eye. It is beginning, unless I shove it out of the way, which I do, regularly, to obstruct my vision.
Being able to see where you are going is quite an important talent if you are a taxi driver, and if you can’t then sooner or later the council takes your licence away from you and insists that you become unemployed. I did not at all like this prospect, it might be a rubbish sort of job on the grand scale of desirable careers, but it is my career, and I rather like it, so some time ago I asked our GP about it. She made me have all sorts of checks first, in case having a determinedly closing eye meant that my nervous system was starting to devour itself from the inside, which it wasn’t, and then referred me to what is called the Maxillo-Facial Department of the hospital, called internally, the nurse told me, Max Fax.
This morning I had to get up early and go and see a Max Fax surgeon chappie, who was very lovely, in a suave and charming sort of way, and who agreed immediately that my eyelid was far too saggy and offered to fix it.
I was relieved about this. I had half-expected him to tell me that I was making a fuss about nothing and to go away and stop wasting the NHS’s very precious time, but he did not. He said that it would be best done by a specialist ophthalmic surgeon and that he would drop a line to the chap he knew and get it sorted out right away.
I was quite excited when he said Opthalmic Surgeon, because I have a friend who is one of those, but it wasn’t the same one, I suppose there are quite a few. The one I know writes poems as well and is pretty good at those, so I wouldn’t have minded him
This one works for the NHS sometimes and privately to make his own fortune for the rest of the time, which sounds very promising, presumably if people will actually pay him to cut bits off their faces then he must be pretty good, not just some optimist with a sharp knife and access to drugs.
He is going to chop a bit of skin out of my eyelid and then stitch the two left-behind bits together. He is going to do both eyes so I don’t finish up looking too weird.
Apparently for a couple of weeks afterwards I will look as though I have been in a fist fight with somebody who was both bigger than me and who had a very good aim.
It is all very exciting, imagine that. I will be joining all the celebrities and being the sort of person who gets plastic surgery, as if I was Elizabeth Taylor or somebody.
I do not know when it will happen, probably in about fifteen years if everything that you read about the NHS in the august Daily Telegraph is true, but it is going to happen, and one of these days I will have two round bright eyes.
I am feeling very cheery about it tonight.
I am going to be able to see where I am going for the rest of my life.
