Could be worse

I started coming home from school at around age 16 complaining almost every day that I couldn't read the board in physics class.

It was a combination of factors, really. There were only four girls in the class, so we sat together near the back of a long classroom. Secondly, the physics teacher's handwriting was absolutely appalling. So for a long time I just assumed that nobody could read the board.

My Dad suspected that there might be a problem, and he was right. It turned out that I was a little short-sighted, and everybody else actually could read the board. That's when I got my first pair of glasses.

It's a good thing I have them too, because I'm sure I would have poked out one or the other of my eyes a dozen times since then. Not only do they help me see distant things in focus, they act a little like safety glasses too.

But every now and again, something gets past them.

Several months back I was in the kitchen crushing some garlic. I was using a garlic crusher that I wasn't entirely familiar with, so I leaned down to see what I was doing, squeezed the crusher, and filled my right eye with garlic juice.

How it got past my glasses I will never know, but I can tell you from experience that garlic juice in the eye, although not as bad as onion, is still pretty bad.

But the one time when my glasses really let me down was over breakfast one day. I was enjoying what's called an EBC muffin at our local cafe. It's an English muffin packed with egg, bacon and cheese and it's what we have for breakfast on Fridays.

I'm not entirely sure what happened, but there was this stretchy bit of bacon that kind of gave way at the worst possible second and I... well... I managed to flick myself in the eye with bacon.

It's very hard to get bacon grease off an eyeball.

To add insult to injury, about twenty seconds later a toddler at the next table threw a bit of his blueberry muffin at me and it landed in my hair.

Supernerd tried not to laugh. He failed.

So now what has happened to immortalise this epic effort is that a kind of adage has come into local use. It's the kind of thing you tell someone to make them feel better when something goes wrong.

Things could be worse. You could have flicked yourself in the eye with bacon.