It was a disclaimer dinner. The term in our household for a meal that required some ingenuity to pull together from limited available ingredients. If you call “disclaimer meal” it means that any criticism of the chef doesn’t count. In fact it’s a mute point. The chef wasn’t working with the ingredients of their choice.

This was my disclaimer meal and it wasn’t just bad, it was bland, so I added some Tobasco (Hot sauce). The mild to mine, the stronger one to Hunnys. We ate. Then I rubbed my eye. With Tobasco on my finger. Dear mother it hurt.

Lots of flushing with saline later, I went to bed.

The next morning, just before I dashed out of the house for work, I took a quick look in the mirror and spotted one normal and one rather red eyeball staring back at me. So I reached into the cabinet for the eye drops. Not the soothing ones, the ones that are like bleach for your eyeballs. The ones that give you a nice healthy looking white eyeball in exchange for a few moments of discomfort. A critical item in the bathroom cabinet of a working mom of a one year old.

I started with the Tobasco eyeball. One teeny drop. And Oh my dear sweet feet it hurt. Tobasco eyeball screws shut like a like a child proof medicine bottle. The other eyeball slams shut in sympathy. I stumble blindly towards the toilet in search of some toilet paper to stop my freshly applied eye liner and mascara – violet, to bring out the green in my eyes – from streaming down my face. I am thinking: ‘What the …? Some messed up reaction between the Tobasco and the eye bleach maybe?’

Slowly the non-Tobasco eyeball gathers the courage to check out its surroundings, make sure the same onslaught isn’t headed its way. Looking down it spies the discarded eye drop bottle on the floor. The red eye drop bottle. But the eye drop bottle isn’t red. The Innoxa Young Solution (I like to kid myself) Wipe Out Spot Drops bottle is red.

Yup, the Innoxa Young Solution (Still kidding myself) Wipe Out Spot Drops with the ingredients list of Alcohol Denat., Aqua, Hamamelis Virginiana, Salicylic Acid, Panthenol, Hydroxypropylcellulose, Phenoxyethanol, Farnesol, Glyceryl Laurate, Parfum, Peg-40 Hydrogenated Castor Oil, Allantoin and Xanthan Gum. The only spot control I own because it’s the only one I have found that works. This means that it burns like the midday desert sun on a pimple. It burns like acid (what a coincidence, it as acid!) on an eye ball.

I don’t believe my non-Tobasco eyeball. I walk one-eyed back to the bathroom cabinet. Tobasco eye is still cowering behind it’s lid. I open the cabinet. There on the bottom shelf are the eye drops.

I close the cabinet. Tobasco eye has emerged from its hiding place and stares back at me in the mirror. The white of my eye isn’t. It’s blood red. By contrast its iris is the most brilliant green.