Sarah Burnett-Moore

Do you remember those ads that said “Give the gift of sight this Christmas”? Some may have viewed that as the beginning of the slippery slope of the ghastly festive charity present, imagine granny’s joy when she’s expecting an M&S gift card, and she gets a picture of a goat she’s fostered in Ghana.  But I digress.

To be fair, I could hardly have viewed it at all, and for a radiologist that’s a pretty poor state of affairs. So last week I took myself off to my local branch of a well known 2 for 1 high street opticians, for a new prescription for my reading glasses. For years I’d coped without, but my eyesight deteriorated quite rapidly after chemotherapy, so I’ve been a four eyes for the last five and a half years or so.

They were very thorough in their assessment - pressures (family history of glaucoma), retinal photography, and seemingly hours with those Steampunk-style glasses on my nose exchanging lenses.  In fact, I spent so long with those on I was toying with the idea of having them as my permanent frames. Eventually, I emerged, blinking like a nocturnal creature, into the brightly lit green-branded retail space. I was asked to choose my frames. I have always favoured the advertising exec style colourful rectangular frames, but this year I chose a rather sober black and mother of pearl. The girl behind the desk looked a little perplexed (oh how I wanted to make a joke about perspex, or per specs there, but frankly it’s too early), and asked about the other frames.

Others??? Apparently I now need three different sets of glasses.

I need one pair for close work, i.e. knitting, reading the paper, making jewellery and so forth, one pair for intermediate work, computer, cooking and eating - how could I not have realised how blurry my food has been for the last two years? - and glasses for driving and stuff like going to Wembley. In fact the latter is two pairs, as I need one with tint as well as a prescription for driving in sunshine. So I’ve had to go to the expense of ordering four new pairs of glasses. Thank goodness I went to Specsavers, one friend of mine has just paid £600 for her latest solitary pair of specs.

So I am very excited that on Christmas Eve I will be heading to the opticians, to collect my three gifts of sight for Christmas, and for the first time in a couple of years, I will enjoy my turkey even more, as it will be in focus.

Today I am deeply disappointed.

It’s the first of those seminal parental days, when the exam results that start to count come in. We are in Crete so Perry’s GCSE results were a little late. By 11.10am I had established by text that Perry’s best friend, James, got a B in Art, five As, and four A*s. By half past I was a deeply disappointed mother.

I wasn’t disappointed by the A in Biology, or the C in French - frankly the latter was a miracle - but by the slew of Bs in between. I wasn’t disappointed that I would only have to buy him one genuine Ralph Lauren Polo shirt, the likes of which you can’t buy in Crete. I wasn’t disappointed that he won’t get in to his posh boarding school, because he has.

I was a bit disappointed that by nearly one o’clock, he hadn’t surfaced to share my disappointment. I wasn’t disappointed that somehow my mother is going to make this all my fault. I don’t know whether to be disappointed that on the way to the beach to write this I got asked if I was Norwegian.

What really, really does disappoint me is that in the eyes of bourgeois intelligentsia he will be viewed as a failure. He doesn’t want to be a doctor, or a dentist, or a vet or go into one of the tiny minority of jobs where academic qualifications actually matter. Yet the pushy mummies around me will look askance when I shamefacedly have to fess up his results.

In fact my son is brilliantly clever, just not in the way that tends to show up in exams. He’s got more smarts than his full house A* mates. He could have someone’s eye out with his wit. He’s a blond model and actor starring in music videos and Nintendo ads (my daughter is currently in a Tesco car insurance advert, you can’t have it all). He can charm the scanties off any woman he’s not related to, and he’s even clever enough to have convinced an educational psychologist that he’s dyslexic when he patently isn’t.

He has both an inquisitive and acquisitive mind. He’s brilliant at pub quizzes - in fact he’s just come over to inform me that the world’s tallest dwarf (medically) at six foot eight, is also the world’s shortest giant. Timing. The problem is that an admissions tutor is going to look at his results and think he’s thick.

Then the horror started, a text from pushy mummy numero uno: “How did perry do? (sic)” Perry asked me to lie. “Not very well,” I replied. “All Bs apart from one A and a C.” Response: “I would be pleased, george got all b’s (sic).”

Maybe I don’t feel so disappointed after all.

It is with regret that I have to announce the death of Robert Ettinger. “Who?” I hear you cry. The man who invented cryonics.

As a child I was obsessed with his particularly bonkers field of research, freezing the rich, so that they can be re-animated in the future. His corpse has now joined the 200 or so, predominantly stored in either the US or Russia.

Some of those wanting cryostasis, could only afford to have their heads saved - think Nixon in Futurama. These bodies are preserved at around minus 200 degrees celcius, in giant thermos flasks. Maybe I’m being unfair to imply that this is just for the rich, but how many of us would waste over $200,000 on a bet with extremely long odds on winning?

With his ‘never say death, say cryostasis’ optimism, Ettinger created a not so hi-tech facility for storing his collection of corpses. You can see some photos here. My particular favourite is perfusion-kit-in-a-suitcase, sitting in front of the fire and the telly.

Even when I was 14, and read his original work, The Prospect Of Immortality, I could see that Ettinger was, how can I put it nicely, a NUTJOB. Bizarrely, one of the highest concentrations of takers for the scheme is in Peacehaven, hordes of men and women running from the bowling green, asking where to sign for this complete nonscience.

Here are the fundamental flaws…

Surely for cryonics to work you would have to have your cellular fluid replaced antemortem, so you would have to murder your clients.

Why bother resurrecting a decrepit 92-year-old, who is just going to peg it immediately?

If you’ve just had your head frozen with the hope of uploading your personality to a future body donor, wouldn’t you wait until the technology was ready for you to download it first.

Come to mention it, whose body would you be planning on snatching?

Surely in 2011 the technology to clone you would be a better investment. Why would we want to wake up to a world filled with Sussex blue rinses? And most importantly - how long can you leave a leg of lamb in the freezer before it gets freezer burn?

The first ‘client’ of Ettinger’s was his mother, followed by his two wives. Both wives??? I hope for his sake the technology doesn’t work, it could get very messy.

It’s late in the year for an Alpine blog. So late, in fact, that I arrived at Les Arcs 2000 in flip flops, and although there is a smattering of snow currently descending, much of the week has been spent sunbathing.

It’s a great opportunity to sit on a lounger and watch the walking wounded go past. Outside the crèperie I can spot a fractured scaphoid here, the unmistakeable gait of a ruptured cruciate ligament over there…

You may be wondering what I am doing on the slopes: A. with flip flops, B. with a swimming costume, and C. lounging about in the sun, instead of hurtling down the mountain on the small patches of icy snow that remain. This is because, as one of my colleagues put it: I am “one of the sensible ones”. In other words I have decided to stop pretending that I enjoy skiing. I think I only skied because it’s what middle class people are supposed to do with their holidays at this time of year. Why any musculoskeletal radiologist, or worse still, orthopaedic surgeon, still skis is totally beyond me.

Not skiing has several advantages. I don’t have to drag myself out of bed ridiculously early when I am supposed to be on holiday. I don’t have to spend hundreds of euros on a ski pass, then feel guilty if I’m not on the slopes the whole time. I don’t have to spend hundreds of euros on heavy bits of metal with sharp edges, poles, and boots that must have been designed by a Conquistador. I don’t have to sit on a wobbly contraption purporting to be a ‘chair’ dozens of metres above exposed rocky outcrops. I don’t have to brag about my spectacular wipe-outs. I don’t have to view falling over and breaking bits of myself as the height of macho bravery.

I can swim. I can sunbathe. I can go in the steam room and the sauna. I can sit around in my dressing gown at - checks watch - 1.56pm while my husband pops back for a change of hat and goggle lenses. I can write my blog while the smattering picks up to be a blizzard (hence the brief spousal visit). The only ‘drawback’ is that the husband has had too invite two good-looking 25-year-old blokes from his football team to keep him company on the slopes…

Finally, after all these years, I have figured out how to enjoy a ski holiday. Perhaps you’ll join me for a glass of vin chaud later…