Recently a new floater has entered my life. It is a dark spot in my right eye that is very obvious when I am looking at something white – a blank Word document, for example, or a sheet of paper, or this empty blog post that fills the screen. It hovers a bit below the thing I’m looking at and is only sometimes visible.
There it is. Little bastard. Go away, floater.
Generally speaking anything that has the title “floater” is something I disapprove of. I like floats perfectly well, of course – there are three that spring to mind:
- Vehicles moving in a carnival, carrying people who wear bright costumes and wave a lot. I like waving. These floats are good.
- A glass of coke with a block of vanilla ice cream in it, forming a weird foamy top and offering the pinnacle of hot day refreshment from the 1980s. Coke floats are delicious and I haven’t had one for ages but I might now have to go make one.
- The small amount of cash put into a shop’s till at the start of the day. I don’t have any strong feelings about this but I certainly don’t disapprove of it.
Floaters though? No. Nothing good comes with that name. The lavatorial variety need no discussion. The eyeball kind haven’t bothered me much until now but they are not welcome here.
I’ve always had a couple of little floaters in my eye, of course – virtually transparent ones only occasionally visible when I look at a bright clear sky and focus my eye a certain way, or something. But now this little dark bastard is here, uninvited. He will probably be a feature of my vision for the rest of my life, and is visible proof – highly visible proof, since he’s literally everywhere I look – that I am growing older and my eyes are only going to get worse.
Last year I went to the optician for the first eye test I’ve ever done. I have been lucky with my eyes until now. I’d noticed that reading anything with small writing now involved moving that thing slightly further away from my face. The optician said no, my eyes were great, nothing needed, thank you. Excellent, I said. Come back in two years, he said. You’ll need glasses then. My face dropped. Is there anything I can do, I asked? No, he said. You’re just getting old.
Now my glasses deadline is just 12 months away and, as if I wanted or needed a reminder of my gathering years, in what is likely to be my last year of unfiltered ocular excellence, my floater has arrived to remind me of my mortality.
Floaty little bastard.
I’m off for a Coke float.