Ol' red Eyes is BACK

Okay - I photoshopped it - but it's a very realistic impression of my current red eye thing.  It looks like I have done something horrible to my eye. 

And people do say 'What have you done to your eye?'

And I say 'Um ... nothing at all. It just happens. It's not serious.  And it's a sign of high virility and - hey! what about them All Blacks?'

In truth - I have done nothing to my eye.  My eye has done something to me. It pisses me off.  It means that as a 'dealing with the public' person I have to look like a half-done Vampire. Possibly some kind of trauma victim.  Or, being in the wine business, I fear that people assume it is some kind of alcoholic symptom.

But you may ask - What causes a subconjunctival haemorrhage?  According to the experts :

"In the vast majority of cases there is no apparent cause. It just occurs 'out of the blue' and the reason is unclear. Older people tend to have them most."

Older people.  Me?  OK 54 years on planet Earth and - planning to leave at some stage.  But ...Older??

Yeah OK.  I went to a tourism function tonight, hosted by an Australian inbound tour operator (ITO in tourspeak), where there were lots of young female Australian travel agents.  I was kind of obliged to go, given that about 80% of my inbound AUS business is through them.  So I showed up, but severely self-conscious about the gruesome eye thing.  I figured if I kept them to my left side, then my red eye would sort of laterally rotate so they only saw the white bit. Plus I wore my crappy old OPSM GraduTint bifocals in the hope that I wouldn't freak out the Aussie chicks too much. 

Anyhoo - seemed to go okay.  The lighting was dim and I got two glasses of wine, two mini burgers and schmoozed four travel agents, plus gave them all a copy of my wine guide to NZ book.