Dépistage

We get screened for all kinds of things, sometimes annually, sometimes less frequently, and yesterday  we got screened for age-related hearing and visual problems. To do this we had to go quite early to the Beaulieu centre, one of the diocesan centres of the Roman Catholic Church (or as we say in France, "the church"), quite near Gwilym and Catrin's lycées just inside the boulevards.

The Beaulieu Centre looks like a renovated urban monastery, with a small cloisters and a little fountain in the middle, surrounded by rooms of various sizes, one of which is used as a restaurant and cafeteria. Another was used for a waiting room and still others for eye and hearing tests.

The hearing test involved listening to imaginary sounds via headphones and pressing the button when you think a tone might reasonably be expected to have begun.

The eye test checked peripheral vision, reactivity to light, near and far adjustment, all that kind of thing. 

Mrs Davey is very excited because she has less high frequency age-related hearing-loss than I do in her left ear. Yes, maybe, but she doesn't have a dodgy left ear from being clouted by an irascible history teacher in 1974.

I was impressed to be screened just before the Cardinal Archbishop of Bordeaux, who I would happily have greeted if I could have remembered how one is meant to greet Cardinal Archbishops in French. Another thing they didn't teach us at the language school!