Rob Walls
Stop it! You are going blind …
Forget global warming and climate change. There is now real evidence that human eyesight is in serious decline. That’s right! We, in western society at least, are rapidly going blind.
Whether this is a result of becoming a screen-based computing society or the outcome of watching too much reality television has yet to be determined. The overwhelming evidence though points to it only being a matter of time before we are all walking around clutching white sticks and bumping into each other.
So what’s the evidence? Well, there was a time when the only people who drove with their car lights on in the day were those annoying Volvo drivers. Sick of other drivers continually flashing to let them know their lights were on, many Volvo owners resorted to having their daytime driving lights disconnected. These days though, it seems that at the slightest overcast, or light drizzle, hundreds of drivers now switch on their headlights. Why do they do this? Is it because they know that the majority of drivers are half blind and will, given half a chance, collide with them?
Bicyclists are also aware of this phenomenon. Finding ordinary lighting, an orange flag on a 3 metre wavy pole, and a reflective jacket totally inadequate to alert the driving public to their perspiring presence, they have now taken to flashing and strobing like a mobile discotheque.
The strongest evidence of our declining eyesight is most keenly observed (by those of you who can still see) in the viral spread of those ugly, ill-fitting, day-glo yellow and orange waistcoats. Twenty years ago any licensed driver could spot a road-worker wearing khaki King Gees or a dark blue singlet and shorts at several hundred metres. At night! Nowadays our highways and byways are strewn with canary-clad navvies.
The worst part of this shapeless glaring waistcoat phenomenon is that it is highly infectious. It has now been transmitted to the civilian population. Not content with making every tourist visiting a cheese factory or food processing plant look like a village idiot in a paper “hair-net”, the authorities now issue a baggy day-glo jacket to everyone who comes within the slightest proximity to a manufacturing process or moving vehicle.
A good place to observe this is in South Hobart, up near the brewery. Every day a bunch of “day-glos”, as I call them, is ushered across Cascade Road, looking, for all the world, like a family of ducklings. I’m still not sure whether Cascade do this so motorists can avoid them, or just to make it easier to find and fish them out, should one of them fall into a vat of brew.
These acid-yellow parades remind me of the time we had a superfluity of Indian Runner ducklings messing up the vegetable garden. When they first arrived we thought, “How cute!” and were solicitous of their health and wellbeing…and we didn’t have to issue them with yellow waistcoats. But then the gaggle grew to a mob and by late spring, there were twenty seven of them. By then we cheered as the currawongs swooped and carried off another in an explosion of floating yellow feathers.
But back to deteriorating eyesight. Just lately I’ve been ex-thinking of arranging tour groups to gather by the brewery, to watch the little darlings being ushered across the road. It’s a very funny sight. We could sit in bus shelter 18 with a can of Cascade in hand and as with the ducklings, we could cheer whenever a careering Corolla, driven by some half-blind greenie from up Ferntree way, took out a bunch of them. It would be a lot like ten-pin bowling, but with bright yellow pins. A highly convivial pastime.
While pondering that joyful image, perhaps you might consider investing in a white-stick manufacturing factory, or a guide-dog training facility? >From what I can still see there’s every indication these are going to be growth industries.
Postscript: When I asked the editor Of Tasmanian Times if perhaps he would post this piece in Large Print for those of you whose solitary sex-life may have placed at a disadvantage. But in typical Tuffin style, he said, “Bugger the wankers”.
Rob Walls
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Stock photography by Rob Walls at Alamy
Stock photography by Rob Walls at Acclaim Images: www.robwalls.net
