The Ear Of The Beholder

One of the great things about living in the middle of nowhere is that we get a lot of free visiting medical services. Sure, a lot of the time it's a gaggle of nervous students whose hands shake with performance anxiety as they try to read the instruction manual and perform delicate surgical repairs on your exposed nerve endings at the same time, standing on a stool because they're only 12 years old or something and can't reach the operating table yet, but it's a step up from the home first aid kit (a machete and a gun).

This month's visiting specialist was the optometrist, which was exciting because Gaz and I are slowly going blind from living with dim 12-volt lighting and our reading glasses are scratched and filthy from the ravages of outback dust and heat. The optical team were the Maharishis or something, a very nice Indian couple from Perth with very fancy Oxford accents (they were probably practising in the car on the way up). They set up in the town hall, on the dance floor. They were amazingly quick, skilled and extraordinarily patient & polite despite dealing with us outback savages, who suffer from not being able to speak coherently, communicate without swearing, and have a combination of other ailments such as deafness, drooling, rotten teeth and body odours that would choke a monkey.

Gary and I had our appointments fifteen minutes apart, with an alcoholic aboriginal woman ahead of us and some more aboriginal women with feral small children like that stump-devil thing in Rupert The Bear, who immediately began kicking their chairs over while the mothers beat them with handbags.The Majohngaramas will be reincarnated as gods in their next life, because this is what they had to deal with:

Mr. M:    If you could kindly look at the chart now Mrs. Barkhumpoo, and read what you can see.
AAW:     I no gotim chart bugga.
Mr. M:    Over there. The large piece of paper with letters on it.
AAW:    Fuckin bulala bindijama no readim fuck.
Mr. M:   That's all right Mrs. Barkhumpoo, how many fingers am I holding up?

Meanwhile, Gary turns up as I'm trying to fill in my form in the gloom, and he decides to put his teeth in to look respectable.

Gary:      Dush thesshe look shtrigit?
Me:         What?
Gary:       Deef! Deef shtrigit!
Me:         They look great, just don't talk.
Mrs. M    Anna, if you could take a seat now the doctor will see you.
Me:          Sorry, what was that?
Mrs. M    IF YOU TAKE A SEAT NOW THE DOCTOR WILL SEE YOU PLEASE.
Gary:       Shegh's uhg bit deaguf!
Mrs. M    I beg your pardon?
Me:         What?

Anyway, we managed to get through it, popping Gary's teeth back into their plastic takeaway container in my handbag where they belong and heading back out into the rain as the Mahalkormas were being eaten alive by the ringworm-ridden children. We are still recovering from the credit-card ravaging effects of Bandit's leg surgery, so the glasses prescriptions are nailed to the wall in the shed for later, by which time our eyesight will be so poor that we won't be able to SEE the prescriptions anymore and will have to hope that the dogs can lead us to safety, or the fridge.