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the North, relieved to be leaving the Quaker club where I had been staying in a bed off whose end I hung. In the night I had met polite dressing-gowned ghosts of either sex in the corridors, between fire doors, up in Town for a play or to clock the City churches. In each room at the club is a list of local things worth visiting which reads like a list of my great-aunts’ enthusiasms, those penurious educated lonely accomplished women. I could feel the fulcrum tipping as I passed into my own past and with some relief felt young no more.

LENS I: Chapter 2
    I n Edinburgh, as always happens, I took a lease of life and shared it with my younger son. We had a happy few days listening to authors, a really peculiar thing to enjoy doing, but we do. I continued to see jokes and architectural detail, two things that keep me going, though only as it were in stroboscopic clatters of vision.
    My son returned to school and autumn was upon us.
    Opposite me in Oxford lived two neurologists. The wife was slight, pretty, part-Chinese. By now, if I did have friends to visit, I was experimenting with wearing a green hat indoors to see whether this soothed my sight. I had accommodated to the difficulty of combining walking with seeing by capping the reclusion I had been working on for a decade with completely hermetic habits. I had stopped attending all meetings, including AA, save those for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2006.
    I visited the GP once more and met a new doctor, young, surrounded by books; on his wall–I saw!–was my favourite New Yorker cartoon, showing a snail in love with a Sellotape dispenser. I told him what had happened, that my world had narrowed quite and that I found it difficult to open my eyes.
    He used a word that made complete sense, a direct lift from the Greek. It was very rare, he said, but it did exist. The word was blepharospasm. Blepharon comes up a lot in Homer, and is the Greek for eyelid. Spasm was it.
    I was relieved that I had not been making all this up.
    My neighbour the pretty part-Chinese neurologist knocked at my door one dusk in September. I wasn’t actually wearing my green hat, as I had been alone. Nor was I wearing sunglasses. I could manage by, as I had come to think of it, ‘striving’ with my neck and chin, to focus a bit and gather from her outline who she might be, and I could smell that she had quinces about her person.
    â€˜Can you not see me?’ she asked.
    â€˜No, not really very well.’
    â€˜I’ve got some quinces from our tree,’ she said, ‘and you have blepharospasm.’
    And so I do. My eyes are fine, my vision acute, but my eyelids will not open.
    In order to gain sight, I grimace, stretch, peer and above all hold taut and high my already rather camel-like head with the result that I look, if I do go out, like the caricature of a snob. Mainly I take steps so as not to emerge from my tall thin house whose many and irregular stairs fill me with a reinforcement of the dread of falling to my death downstairs that I have had all my life; my parents’ house in Edinburgh had sustained such a death down its stone stairs, I had always gathered self-propelled; that was part of the reason they could afford it, I think.
    I now have the elastic-braced white stick with which I hope to dispel the impression of a monstrous dowager with Tourettian facial tics and the creep-and-lurch gait of a not sufficiently surreptitious drunk. Also, of course, I don’t want to embarrass people, or to oblige them to ask if it is getting better. It doesn’t.
    In some cases it can be alleviated by the injection of botulinum toxin, which hauls me up for my ugly pride in declaring that I’d never have facial ‘work’, as puritanical fans of plastic surgery call it. I clamoured for the injections now. In Scotland we call them jags and I had four jags in each eye, always praying while the needle goes in that I am somehow buying off Fate for my