IN THE INTEREST OF SCIENCE

It turns out I can see better through the lower half of my glasses. I wandered along the high street, trying to tell whether that might be why I can look at my shoes, but not at the Christmas lights.

I booked an eye test too, while I was walking - just in case my prescription might be part of the problem. I actually think this might be multi-layered; not every problem has one single, detectable cause, after all.

It’s not advisable to attempt walking along the pavement with one eye closed.

In the interest of science, I was trying to find out if the visual jumpiness was happening in just one eye, or both of them trying to resolve the picture. Right eye closed, left eye open - I could roughly walk in a straight line. Left eye closed, right eye open felt really weird, as though I’d just stepped off a roller coaster and didn’t know where the ground was. I kept switching between the two along the street.

I sometimes think I have no self-awareness of what I look like. I’ve always been like that; I used to wander home from primary school looking at the Victorian facades above the shops, thinking about the clouds, or trying to work out how planes fly, or whether any Dodos could have survived extinction. My Mum used to wonder why it took me half an hour to walk ten minutes.

By the way, it’s funny how I sound, saying I used to walk home from primary school. That must sound as old-fashioned now as people saying they used to jump onto the horse-drawn milk cart. I guess most kids get picked up these days, rather than day-dreaming their way up the road.

“Are you alright?” asked a lady at the bus stop. It suddenly struck me that I must have looked a bit like a drunken weirdo, winking, and wobbling down the high street, one eye closed. There was no way to explain it, so I just smiled and said, "Fine thanks."

Einstein once said he had not talents outside his 'passionate curiosity' - I doubt that's strictly true somehow. And I suspect if he'd tried to cross the A4 and walk down a village high street with one eye closed, looking like he's about to fall over 'in the interest of science'... I reckon the world might have let him off.