Do you know what a fortnight is? It is not, as you might think, a night of sleeping in the living room with blankets covering suspended from the furniture. A fortnight is a two-week period. I know even less than you do about how it got this name, but now that it has it, we get to use it every four years when the Olympic Games come around. This year, I have been called up by Jon Reid of the Race to the Bottom Radio Programme to provide on-site coverage of the games of the XXX Olympiad. (extra EXTRA large!)
The one thing Mr. Reid and RTTB have not provided me with is a housing voucher, which is necessary in this socialist country, so I had spent two nights sleeping on the Tube (or “subway” as you call your sandwich shops) until I had a fortuitous encounter. Race to the Bottom listeners know that Jon gets occasional calls from his English friend Googly Eyed Jamie. Believe it or not, I ran in to Googly Eyed Jamie on the streets of Soho in the rain. Actually, he ran into me because I looked the wrong way at a cross-walk (or I looked the correct way, but these English drive the wrong way on the streets.) Lacking the depth perception to judge his stop, Jamie did not bring the car to a halt before it knocked me over. Fortunately, he almost stopped, so the damage was slight.
As he lifted me from the pavement, Jamie recognized that I too had GES. We got to talking and I mentioned (not knowing who I was talking to) how much it had meant for me to hear a person from “across the pond” sharing his struggles with this affliction. Jamie looked at me funny and asked what programme I had been listening to, and when I told him, he embraced me as a brother and brought me home. I’ve been sleeping on his couch ever since, and we watch a number of events on the telly because the BBC has excellent coverage of the games. Some of the wrestling events have been truly extraordinary.
It has come to my attention, however, that perhaps you are not seeing as many of these events in the States as we are over here. It seems that NBC has chosen to show events that require much more depth perception and hand-eye coordination than an event like wrestling. Gymnastics, for instance, or volleyball. I’ll admit that I have ventured into these arenas a bit myself, lured by the titillation of well trained athletes wearing little or no corrective lenses. Eventually I felt dirty and had to go to the other extreme, trap shooting, where the protective eye wear is almost burka-like. That didn’t help because all I could think about was exceptional binocular vision which lay underneath all those layers.
So, back I came to Jamie’s apartment, comfortable again with a bowl of spotted dick and judo on the BBC. I feel for all of you in America who must constantly put up with the exploits of synchronized divers wearing contact lenses, if even those. Doesn’t it just become too much after a while? I guess the vast majority who have never questioned their stereoptic abilities are pretty much immune to this kind of stuff at this point. For me and Jamie, though, its a two week reminder that we will never, ever be proctologists, no matter how hard we try.