Free Slowing Down by George Melly

view at a gathering of eye doctors and surgeons at the Royal Medical Association building, I told this tale. Their laughter was a sign that they too had encountered misunderstanding resulting from the limited English of nurses from the Philippines, a considerablenumber, as it happens. Still, without them, without Africans, West Indians and other non-British nursing staff – and doctors, come to that – where would our hospitals be?
    The operation was successful, only the two eyes didn’t quite work together. Especially when tired, I can see double, not unpleasant in the case of beautiful twins but on balance inconvenient. I therefore tend to sport an eye-patch, especially on stage or TV. This is not entirely necessary but looks, I believe, rather piratical, and as I now sing sitting down, allows me to introduce a joke about a retired pirate king. He had a wooden leg, a hook instead of a hand, and one eye. He spent every night drinking rum at a bar on the Bristol docks. A young seaman approached him one evening and said how much he admired what he had heard of his piratical past, but how, he asked, did he come to lose a hand, a leg and an eye?
    ‘Ar!’ said the old salt. ‘It were this way, lad. I were boarding a Spanish merchant ship loaded with gold in the Caribbean, when one of they Spaniards brought ’is cutlass down, cuts off my ’and and I falls backwards into the sea.’ He took a deep gulp of rum and allowed his young admirer to replenish it. ‘Yes, I falls in the sea and a shark ’as me leg.’
    ‘And the eye?’ asked his young interrogator.
    ‘Aarr,’ said the old man, ‘that were different. Some weeks later I were on the poop practising with me wooden leg. I looked up at the sky, a beautiful blue wi’out a cloud in it.’ He took another mouthful of rum. ‘When a bloody great shite-hawk [naval slang for seagull] did a squit in me eye.’ He paused for dramatic effect and then added, ‘And I forgets I ’ad a hook!’
    Freud thought jokes were to conceal anxieties, and dreamslikewise – he may well have been right. It’s odd though that most men like to tell jokes, whereas most women detest them and often don’t get them.
    Other current failings: going to look for something and forgetting in crossing the room what it was, or, even if I remember it, not seeing it right under my nose. Here, though, there is an odd compensation. Looking for something else I later find, under a chair or on a shelf, glasses, a pen, a book I need that I’d mislaid some time before. I grin with happy relief.
    Otherwise I’ve become clumsy and drop things, breaking them (my mother, who in old age did the same, called it ‘the drops’). Like her too, I fart involuntarily. (‘Scentless’, she’d cry, not always accurately.) Getting out of taxis is especially hazardous. I find it hard, although just possible, to thread a cast or leader through the eye of a fly and to tie the subsequent quite elaborate knot that secures it. And much more.
    To return to my eyes, I didn’t let drop that my other retina had broken loose some time earlier and been sewn on with immediate success. The second rogue retina came some time later. It was complicated by Mr Schonberg’s discovery that I had a ‘maculate hole’ in the back of the eyeball. Strangely enough my sister Andrée had one of these earlier and came over from France to have it dealt with. I suggested therefore it could be genetic. Impossible, they told me: the chances of developing a maculate hole at all, they said, were very slight. That my sister and I had both contracted them was as likely as winning the lottery. Millions to one!
    Mr Schonberg cured mine by replacing the eye’s water with oil and draining it off later. It worked but during thetreatment the other retina followed the example of its fellow and that needed sewing on again, but why and how had this happened?
    I have a possible explanation. Some time earlier I had taken to fainting without warning. I had