Embarrassing Myself In Public #002

When the Hayward Gallery had their optical illusions exhibition on Jonathan and I decided to pay it a visit. They'd put on a good show (although perhaps not quite good enough for the money) and we enjoyed the various magic lanterns, the sculptures that look like different things from different angles, and the smatterings of porn creeping in at the edges. Best of all was a device I'd been wanting to try out for years, a set of glasses that use prisms to switch what your left and right eyes see, which had the effect of inverting objects (imagine a concave object with the outer surface on the inside). In one of the cabinets there was a telescope resting on a shelf at an angle. At the end of the telescope was a tilted mirror. I wondered what it did, so bent my head in to look through the eyepiece, resoundingly headbutting the glass front of the cabinet (they keep it so clean, these days!). I shocked a pair of viewers stood next to me and, perhaps in a concussed state, sad to them "there's glass there". They said they knew, in strong English accents. Somehow I could have coped better with the ensuing embarrassment had they been foreign tourists, but it was not to be.