The world through your eyes

The moment she put them on, her head reeled like a carousel out of control. She herself ceased being a 'senior' of 90-some years. Why, she could just be the golden-haired little girl on that very same spinning carousel, sitting bouncingly astride the gleaming brown horse with the wild black mane, clutching on for dear life while faces flashed and everything - even the smiles of her parents - were distorted, resembling grimaces.

Now, as then, she tries to focus through the blur on the face of Margaret, in the bed beside her. But Margaret's just a mixture of pink nightdress and white bed sheet. She could be a giant fairy floss, or a strawberry and cream sorbet.

Sweet, sweet Margaret, her dear 'nursing home' friend for the last eight years. Very gently, she turns her 90-some head and the kaleidoscope of images shifts dizzyingly so that she has to grasp the side of her own bed to stay upright. What terrific magic, she thinks, as she gazes at the corner where Flo, her other friend, reclines.

Through her new-found vision, all she sees is this endless carpet of yellow, a field of daffodils possibly, or barley, or golden wheat, sloping upward at a gentle angle. How marvellous, she thinks.

Flo must surely be happy in that field of gold. Naturally, Flo must be somewhere among the daffodils which explains why her face is not clearly defined. Like Margaret, Flo, too, is a beautiful blur.

"Good morning, Mrs Jenkins," she hears, and turns swiftly to reply, nearly toppling over in the process as the images race like sprinters past her retina. "And how are you today? I've brought you your cereal. Muesli with just the right amount of milk."

"Thank you, nurse Walker," she replies. "You look like the sea today, beautiful and blue with those little white crested waves inviting anyone in for a swim."

It's amazing, she thinks, how the usually pretty nurse Walker looks even prettier in this blurred, unfocused way. Soon, her head gets used to the incessant whirl of the landscape and she begins to enjoy this abstraction of features from everything, blanking out the defining principles of profile line and chin line, eye colour and hairstyle, clothing and fashion, footwear and makeup, until everything is reduced to a delicious combination of natural, aesthetic colours. That's what everybody is like, she thinks, in her 90-some wisdom.

Beautiful mixture

Beneath all the individuality, personality, uniqueness, everyone's a beautiful mixture of tones and hues. A wondrous generality. And so she sets off, with tottering steps, to check out other aspects of her amazingly blurry world.

She is very curious to see what Maureen, the receptionist, looks like when abstracted from that stern matronly gaze etched irremovably into her stony forbidding features.

She is nearing the reception door, moving with caution. Would Maureen, dissolved into colour and de-focused, be more approachable, she wonders. Or would she still press ceaselessly on the silver alarm bell by her side and urgently summon a nurse to escort her back to her bed from whence she has orders not to leave unescorted? Would Maureen, dissolved and de-focused, be a spoilsport? She feels for the reception doorknob, which is also naturally a blur, opens the door a crack.

As usual, Maureen is chatting in her typical one-sided manner with a visitor. The visitor sounds a tad distraught. The visitor's voice has a familiar ring to it despite the distress. It sounds like her own niece, Jill Simmons.

"We've searched for it everywhere without success so I'm just wondering if I may have left them here. Without them, as you can see, I may as well be blind," she hears Jill telling Maureen. And then Maureen, the fount of all knowledge, replying, "Why Mrs Simmons, your aunt's been wearing those spectacles for the last two days. She reckoned they were a gift left by a well-meaning visitor. We wondered why she looked so chic." Based loosely on an actual incident.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.