Square eyes and mist in a drought

Design work today interrupted by a visit into Cambridge, to pursue the purchase of new spectacles. Unfortunately, this appears to be a time where the mode for eye-wear is square or rectangular. Rows of rectilinear frames, posters of masterful men and women, strangely unaffected by the modern affliction of obesity, wearing the parallelograms of power. I am an antediluvian relic of more curvaceous period.

Three optician stores later and I had retrieved a frame design with a slight hint of roundness, located towards the more pecuniary challenging end of the spectrum. Maintaining the momentum, I was able to secure a sight test within the hour.

I derive a perverse sense of enjoyment from eye tests and the intervening years since my last one had introduced some new delights; the device that puffs into your eye to measure pressure in the eye, the randomly appearing spot testing for peripheral vision and, for a mere ten pounds extra, the retinal photograph! The latter evincing a distinct impression of what the unsuspecting audience would see when  Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones in The Men in Black flashed them to erase their memories.

Thence to the comfort of the opticians chair, the reassurance of the red and green lights, the accumulation of lenses, twisted this way and that as the optician honed in on his or her prescription and of course, The Chart. The last line always eludes me, those tiny letters surely beyond the reading skill of any but a superhuman. I had to stand up and go closer just to satisfy my curiosity of what I should have seen.

Thereafter, I was given my results and passed into the hands of the establishment's priestess who, with the guidance of her computer, performed the equivalent of reading the runes to finally establish what my donation to the establishment would be this time. Surprisingly, it was about £100 less than when I had last been to purchase spectacles as I became the beneficiary of the Two for One offer.

The local news, dissatisfied with the run of current good weather, had grabbed hold of the fact that we were now in the grip of an impending drought. The water companies were  beginning the dirge of the need to conserve water just as the nation's gardeners were about to leap into action over Easter.

So it was with some surprise that I found myself driving through low lying shrouds of mist across the fields to Cottenham, to pick up Miss T. Having investigated the matter, I can confirm that this was mist as the visibility was still more than a kilometre.  Had visibility been less then this would have been fog.

The mist was a direct consequence of the hot yet still day generating prolific transpiration by the vernal foliage of plants in fields and hedges. With a cloudless sky, the daytime temperature plummeted from 23 degrees Celsius to a night-time low of 10 degrees Celsius or less. At some point the temperature fell below the dew-point for the airborne humidity, causing it to condense into fine droplets and create the mist. Yet the balance between temperature and humidity was in the balance as, on the return journey, the mist had again dissipated.