APPOINTMENTS AND ARTWORK

Last week, things got gradually back to normal after the festive season. Even the weather seemed to return to its damp dull usual for a Shetland winter, at least until Thursday, when the snow returned to plague us once more.

My work is not greatly affected by either festivities or weather, except in so far as light is concerned. Progress has been slow and steady on both my commissions, and I hope to have at least one of these ready to illustrate next week's contribution to this blog. I even got a little done on the Gourdon Harbour stock work which, however, is still a long way from completion.

I attended an appointment with the optician on Wednesday afternoon. My eyesight is very important to me, as you may well imagine, and I was alarmed, one evening just before Christmas, when my eyes refused to refocus straight away when I averted them from the Radio Times crossword, on which I had been concentrating, to a more distant object. This gave me a fright, and precipitated the making of the appointment. Meanwhile, I mentioned the problem to my sister Thelma, who is a church organist. Apparently she suffers the same condition, which can make things awkward when she has to play off sheet music and keep an eye on other things happening around her at the same time. The optician was reassuring, giving me a good eye test and finding nothing wrong with my deadlights that can't be attributable to the march of time.

My next appointment will have to be with a hairdresser, but I am reluctant to have my scalp denuded in this cold weather. Many of my fellow-Shetlanders are currently cultivating fine sets of long hair and whiskers for the forthcoming fire festivals. However, I'm not involved in any of them so, devoid of that excuse for hirsuteness, I'll just have to bite the cliched bullet, get shorn and buy a beanie! Yuk! Have a nice week!