Warning, using Amazon may cause blindness
August 2010 |
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Now, I never believed any of these little white lies my mum used to tell me, especially because I had perfect eyesight throughout my teens. If what she has said was true I guarantee I would have spent my youth with a golden retriever as my best friend and I’d be able to read Braille. However, when I was in my early twenties I suddenly went blind. I’m not exaggerating when I say my eyesight literally vanished overnight.
Since then I’ve had to put up with wearing horrible bits of Perspex on my face. My prescription changed about 4 times in one year, which needless to say worried me. It also infuriated me somewhat.
Glasses are an annoyance, especially when your vision is as bad as mine. For example, if I take my glasses off and put them down somewhere, I often can’t find them again because I can’t see a thing without them. I then have to look like a complete idiot while I wonder around the room aimlessly, patting all the furniture and being careful where I step.
I can no longer enjoy swimming or scuba diving because I can’t see where the hell I’m going and I might drown. Playing sports is difficult because I have the constant worry of being hit in the face and breaking the damn things.
In my capacity as a tame racing driver they are an even bigger burden. Firstly there is the issue of squeezing them in between my face and the padding inside the crash helmet. Not only is this uncomfortable but I have to make sure I nest them perfectly otherwise the vibrations make them bounce up and down on my face or slip down my nose.
Racing in the wet is an even bigger nightmare. Because it gets quite hot under a crash helmet even with vents, the problem of visors steaming up is a common one. This is why I usually leave a gap of a couple of millimetres when I close the visor. Unfortunately in the wet this causes water from the vehicles in front and puddles on the track to spray through the gap. If I close my visor I can’t see where I’m going because it will steam up. If I open my visor the spray will cover my glasses and I can’t see either. Basically I’m buggered either way.
I have considered laser eye surgery. Certainly the few people I know who’ve had it maintain it’s the best thing they’ve ever done. For me, the thought of paying someone a thousand quid to point lasers into my retina and melt my cornea seems a bit scary. Forgetting the fact that my eyes will continue to deteriorate and I may end up needing glasses again anyway, it’s very possible that my vision is too far gone for the surgery.
I put the rapid deterioration in my eyesight down to the fact that I started working in the internet business around the same time. I figured that sitting in front of a computer screen for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week just put too much strain on my eyes.
This is something that concerns me about these new Kindle things. For those of you who don’t know, the Kindle is a new device that has been developed by Amazon to display e-books and other forms of digital media. They are basically another invention stolen from the Science Fiction worlds of Star Wars and Star Trek and brought to life.
They are already being touted as a replacement for the traditional paperback. Fundamentally they are a good idea for a number of reasons. Firstly it will save a hell of a lot of shelf space. Like the iPod has done with music, you will also be able to store all your favourite books on one single device and easily be able to select the thing you want to look at. You will no longer need to search high and low in your living room for an old faded and dust infested paperback.
With WiFi connectivity it will be easy to purchase books on the go. The whole concept of waiting several days for a delivery by the useless imbeciles at the Royal Mail will be gone. You will be able to download a book immediately from Amazon and start reading it straight away.
But will the Kindle catch on? Well I have my reservations. Firstly there is the inevitable question mark over eye strain. As someone who has ruined his eyes, I personally find it difficult to read too much on a computer because the glare from the screen makes me go cross-eyed. Then there is the problem about power. Assuming they use rechargeable batteries, it is going to be a pain the backside if you are half way through reading an exciting chapter and the batteries die on you.
Given that everything is going down the electronic route now and more and more data is being stored using cloud computing I guess it is inevitable that the Kindle will soon replace books completely. Still, there is something inexplicably comfortable about holding a big fat paperback. This will be lost with any digital equivalent. Plus I find the old traditional ink on paper much easier on my eyes.
Of course the loss of my eyesight could equally be as a result of reading the old fashioned books. It was around the same time I started working in the web industry that I started reading novels – several a week in fact. This would make my argument about screen glare null and void.
This leaves just one plausible explanation as to why I lost my perfect vision. Maybe they aren’t white lies after all. Perhaps my mum was right all along.
