2005-05-31 - 3:36 p.m.

If you're going to be back in town for two nights only, it's imperative you spend the day in between well. Relaxation, complete comfort and mental calm. These are just a few of the things denied me on my one full day back, spending it as I did down at the Eyes-R-Us branch of the National Health Service.

As you may know, the intra-cranial lubrication workings of my head are right up the swanny. My salivary gland packed up and was yanked out, rehabilitated and it now has its own successful career as an understudy for Hugh Grant.

Lately the moisture issue has been concentrating its efforts on my eyes, in that they have been completely arid for about four months now, and feeling less than dewey-fresh and sparkling.

This morning, then, I wended my dry-eyed way to the hospital to see the specialist. This of course involved the obligatory one hour wait with the other patients, all in there for similar ailments. Yes, there wasn't a wet eye in the house.

The doctor was a mole-like woman who sang to herself and kept saying things like "We musn't blame the contact lenses!" as if it was me who was pointing some kind of accusatory finger. Which it wasn't. Mostly, though, she just farmed me out to the nurse, who performed the necessary tests. These predominantly included flashing lights with the intensity of small nuclear explosion about a millimetre from my retina, which certainly diluted the jetlag effectively.

The last one, though, was much more entertaining. At least for her. I had to have long paper strips inserted under my bottom eyelids to test tear production. Thankfully they weren't showing any scenes of Dead Poets Society in the background or it could have really skewed the results. Anyway, it's less than relaxing, let me tell you. It lasted five long minutes, and any minute involuntary movement scratches the paper across the bare skin of your eyeball, which has at the same time had its minor tear production workings paralysed by the strip.

Luckily there weren't many distractions, apart from the nurse's friends, who she called in to laugh at me. She apparantly hadn't performed the test before, and neither had her colleagues, and the fact I looked like an amateur dramatics production of A Clockwork Orange was a source of great hilarity. I tried to give them evil stares, but its hard when your eyeballs are attached to great, backwards papery stalks. Not to mention painful as all holy hell.

Anyway, she took them out about a decade later, which also hurt like all holy hell as the paper had stuck to my eyeballs. She put them against the measuring scale to check moisture levels. 20 would be about normal. My right eye showed up a plucky 5, which is commendable if totally pathetic. My left, though, showed up NOTHING AT ALL, which means she did the test wrong or I'm clinically dead and just haven't stopped paying rent yet.

"Your left eye..." she said. "Yes?" I said. "It's very dry," she said. You may as well be saying "It's very dry," to a dryness scientist who had just spent the last ten years in the driest desert in the world testing dryness, and was showing you his dryness results. Yeah, I'm down with the dryness thing, OK? That's kind of why I'm here, though it's heartening to discover that I'm not even slightly damp or even remotely moist, let alone gushing with healthy eye juice.

Anyway, the upshot is that they now move me from Primary Eye Care to the reassuringly-named Department for External Eye Diseases, which I will look forward to attending in several millenia, or however long the NHS appointment system takes these days. I can almost hear their diagnosis now: "Yeah, it's a disease, but it's a DRY disease..."