Girton

I had an eye test, which was long overdue. My vision has improved in one eye by 0.75 points, which apparently isn't unusual, yet seems significant to me, especially as I'm often falling asleep with my contact lenses in during a night flight or putting them in with dirty hands in a remote part of the world.

In general I'm a terrible customer at the opticians. I don't know the type of contact lenses I wear or solution I use. I wear my lenses for much longer each day than is advised and I caused much despair by saying I have a three-year backlog of lenses, which means I really haven't changed them often enough. It seems I don't treat contact lens management as priority information to retain in the brain.

I was invited by Heidi, a fellow trustee of the charity we volunteer for, to the dinner at Girton College where she is a fellow, as once per semester guests can be invited. Ten minutes before she picked me up I panicked as I don't own a tuxedo and didn't want her to be shown up with a guest openly defying the dress code. In the end it didn't matter too much as Girton is one of the more progressive colleges and is possibly more relaxed than others that may still enforce the rule that going to the bog during dinner means that you are not allowed re-entry to the hall. Girton is known for championing women's education and was founded as an all-female college. At the post-dinner dessert, cheese and port stage I was seated next to a retired professor of classics, Dorothy, who started lecturing at Girton in 1965 and said at the time the entire teaching staff was female.

Very interesting characters are met at such dinners even if you doubt you'll have much in common at the start of the night. I was seated next to Clare, a vet, who coincidentally has family from Stoke-on-Trent. We enjoyed putting the world to rights. Ann, a retired anaesthesiologist who lives in Broadstairs, was promoting the turnaround in fortunes of Kent's seaside towns. The most hilarious chat of the night was with a woman called Michelle, who was born in Todmorden ('Tod' to the locals) in the Pennines, where I spent the first two years of my life. She trained as a nurse in the mental health hospital in the small community of Mankinholes outside of Tod. This is the estate where we lived and my mum used to tell me of times when the day patients from the hospital would appear at the back door for a natter. For anyone who's not from Mankinholes, it's not a made up name.

In well to do circles, I don't understand the word 'repair', in the context of 'repairing' to the fellows' room for claret. When it was announced I kept thinking something was broken and needed fixing.