‘I’m totally with you,’ said
Lenny.’ I hate the winter too. It’s cold and unforgiving - a bit like my
ex-wife.’
Lenny is a friend and an
optician. We’d got to know each other as members of the same quiz team.
Lenny was dropping off Maude’s
new ‘geek chic’ glasses as a favour and the clocks had just gone back.
Shortly after he left, Lenny
thoughtfully texted to me the details of a SAD lamp he’d seen in the Maplin’s
brochure.
The lamp arrived within a couple
of days. With a cupboard full of immune boosting vitamins, St
John’s Wort and a
fruit bowl full of bananas, we are truly winter-ready.
This evening felt pretty wintry
and we remembered the lamp. The family gathered for the big ‘switch on’.
The lamp is VERY BRIGHT.
The kids disappeared behind the
sofa. I thought of switching the hoover on to chivvy them all the way up the
stairs for the night.
‘It’s scary Daddy. I can’t see
Mummy.’
‘Don’t worry poppet. It’s meant
to be a bit like sunlight, when there isn’t enough sunlight.’
The device illuminated the room
with something close to the strength of the floodlights at a minor league
football stadium.
‘Is Mummy on fire?’
‘I’m getting quite a headache,’
said Maude. ‘Beginning…… to feel……quite.... cross. I thought you’d read the
manual’
‘Not yet, darling, and no,
darling, Mummy isn’t on fire.’
‘For instance, how close should I
be?’ asked Maude, as she persevered on the sofa, wincing a little.
Maude’s headache was worsening
and I was feeling quite stressed as I rifled through the desk drawers for the
instruction manual. It didn’t feel as though we were getting the optimum results
from a device designed to create a sense of well-being.
The girls had disappeared
momentarily and I could hear the familiar sound of one of their rooms being
ransacked.
I found the booklet. I read the ‘quickstart’ guide in the glare of
the lamp. The guide was imprecise about recommended distance and I began to
feel a dryness in my mouth and the onset of a stress-induced headache. For a
moment it felt like the light was drawing me towards it – I thought I was having
a near death experience.
Maude spoke and distracted me.
‘I think, perhaps, I should wear
my prescription sunglasses.’
‘It does warn, darling, that
headaches are possible during the first couple of sessions.’
The girls reappeared and joined
Maude on the sofa. The girls were wearing their sunglasses.
No comments:
Post a Comment