Recently in New kid on the block Category

I read with some interest today of the England cricket team's 3-0 destruction of Australia in the Ashes. I can assure you that this was not an archive article or Kevin Pietersen's discarded plan of action before his messy exit last week.

Instead, it was the story of the England blind cricket team beating their Australian counterparts in the Blind Ashes in Australia late last month.

Blind cricket has been played in England and Wales since the 1940s and requires all players to be registered as blind or partially sighted, with at least four players totally blind - but don't let that fool you about the determination of these players.

English all-rounder Nathan Hoy scored 100 runs in the 2nd test, and this score was doubled  because of the severity of his visual impairment. England went on to win the test and the series.

Australia spat out claims of cheating, insisting that Hoy had better vision than he had admitted. The Australian Blind Cricket Council is considering a complaint and Sydney magistrate Christine Haskett joined in with a cry of foul play.

However, don't get your hopes up for the full English team later this year. Despite a recent defeat to South Africa and with an average team age of 110, the Aussies must be consoling themselves with England's current crisis - no coach and an AWOL star batsman.

Doug

(The Ashes-winning England squad 2008) 

....and I'm here on work experience at Optician for one week in an attempt to kick-start a career in journalism by picking up a few hints and tips that could help me to a long and successful career (I'm trying to be optimistic!)

I am currently studying magazine journalism in Portsmouth after two years as an optical assistant in Specsavers, Camberley where I learnt a lot about an industry that If I am honest, is far more interesting and challenging than I thought it would be. The company was great for staff training and I passed an Ophthalmic Dispensing Assistant diploma through Anglia Ruskin University.

I've now decided to give a profession a go that I've always wanted to do but if anyone sees a young looking blonde kid back at the Camberley branch you'll know things haven't gone quite the way I planned.

(below: I'm third on the right at the Specsavers Camberley & Farnham Christmas party with staff of both stores including directors Lateef Iqbal and Stuart Olley. Social events played a big part in team building and motivation during my time there.)

Having recently enjoyed reading Portuguese author José Saramago's novel Blindness, I thought it worth a post as not only does it deal with a epidemic of ocular disorder on a grand scale but has also been made into a film that features Mark Ruffalo as a ophthalmologist.

The film version is directed by Fernando Meirelles, whose previous credits include City of God and The Constant Gardener, and also stars Julianne Moore as the only person left with sight after a wave of blindness and attendant chaos sweeps across a unspecified city.

Despite a lukewarm critical reception at the Cannes Film Festival earlier in the year, this is surely a must-see for optical folk?

Rock'n'roll legend Lou Reed has been forced to ditch his ever-present sunglasses in favour of regular specs after repeatedly tripping up on stage.

Shades have played a key role in Reed's iconic look, from his inception as the Velvet Underground's frontman and through his long and varied solo career.

But is the idea of glasses being uncool outdated? A recent news story suggested cries of "Hey four-eyes!" have ceased to ring around playgrounds as children with glasses are no longer bullied for their ocular deficiency. So is there a pair of frames out there that could actually enhance Reed's image?

The marine biology community has been awash with excitement this week as some lucky representatives of it took apart a colossal squid. Caught last year in the Ross Sea off Antarctica, the specimen is only the 10th of its kind unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of scalpel-wielding scientists. The creature’s eyes have been widely acclaimed as the largest to be found in nature – an impressive 30cm in diameter. Sizable as they are, Optician’s Clinical Editor assures me the squid has relatively poor vision due to their unsophisticated nature. A case of size not being everything…

Readers of Optician will no doubt appreciate the careful blend of features published each issue; a delicate balance of the clinical and the topical, the far-reaching and the fashionable. Such perfection does not come easily and the consistently high standard achieved over the past year or two can be credited to one woman: Shannon McKenzie.

Unfortunately for you, the reader, Shannon has returned to the sunny land down-under, where she is no doubt throwing another shrimp on the barbie, drinking Fosters, wrestling crocs and participating in untold other activities that we insist on stereotyping our antipodeans cousins with. So you are now stuck with me, Mike Hale, the new Features Editor.

Seriously though, I would like to wish Shannon well with her continuing career as a journalist and thank her for leaving the features list packed with interesting and informative pieces for the coming months. I’ll be doing my very best to continue her good work.

Over the next couple of months I’ll be blogging on my thoughts and first impressions of the optical industry, hopefully with the sort of insight exclusive to the naïve and innocent.

At the awards last week I was impressed by the glamorous representatives of the trade (confounding mine and host Ardal O'Hanlon’s preconceptions) and was pleased many of the people I spoke to expressed a genuine affection for my new publication.

If any one has any thoughts or suggestions on the features in the magazine please get in touch via mike.hale@rbi.co.uk and anyone who still misses Shannon may well get the chance to move to Australia in the near future with Specsaver’s planned expansion - more on that in the magazine soon.