In my (largely subconscious) narcissism I may have imagined the two events (one enabling the 67 million Britons to decide their political fate, the other re-enabling me to see properly and recognise my wife when I meet her around the house and to stop mistaking her for Greta Thunberg, for a sunbeam, for a large soft toy) to be of equal consequence.

I would have liked to have not cared about the UK election but, 74 now, must face the fact that in spite of having migrated from England 50 years ago there are still cupboards of my mind full of English cultural luggage I brought with me.

That luggage, now, will never be unpacked and given away to Vinnies. I give in to the truth that the UK's politics matter to me. The Brexit referendum result broke my transported heart, shivering my pommy timbers.

Readers, promise me never to migrate and to always try to talk your children out of it! Being bi-national sets up too many confusions, too many tugs of love.

Ushered into the operating theatre and then mildly anaesthetised I lay back and thought of England (and of all of the UK) my fears for the Boris-mongered Brexit-bruised land of my birth helping to put my own fears (of surgery) into perspective.

And uncannily, after all the trouble I have gone to in avoiding shopping malls so as not to have to listen to the piped muzak of Bing Crosby crooning Christmas songs, what should be piped into the operating theatre for the duration of my procedure but, yes, dear Bing, that decomposing crooner, crooning Christmas songs.

As a captive audience (no one is more captive than a patient lying anaesthetised on a table), I lay there through Bing's long, long repertoire of ditties full of unAustralian snow and sleigh bells. And yet, for anaesthesia plays tricks with the critical faculties, I found myself enjoying some of the worst of the deeply awful songs for the first time and even singing along, albeit in mute karaoke so as not to distract the surgeon in his handiwork.

If only, I thought, one could be given a little of this same magic potion every morning for the duration of the Morrison government, for the duration of the looming Scomo-Boris bromance, artificially enabled to overlook the horror of it. As it is, how is one to endure it?

In the following days, my eyesight restored now, the once ubiquitous Greta Thunberg, this column's Person of the Year (my choice shamelessly imitated by Time magazine) was nowhere to be seen around the house.

Reading with both eyes all I could about the election in the online UK magazine The Spectator I discovered that the magazine's Word of the Month is "self-partnered".

It emerges that in an interview with Vogue, actor Emma Watson, a feminist, has just declared that she is not "single" but instead is "self-partnered". The commentariat is abuzz with chatter, a lot of it derisory, about Watson's invention. Her intention seems to have been to declare how very comfortable she is about not being in a romantic relationship.

Scoffers are having a field day with her notion of self-partnering, alleging it is a further sign of the very narcissistic zeitgeist of the moment, that from the many alternatives available to her - including "other people" - Emma has selected herself as her preferred partner.

But my own view as someone who all his life has revelled in his own company (generally preferring other people in matters of romance but otherwise always preferring to take no one but myself on long country walks, on visits to the opera and to art galleries) is that Emma Watson's invention is a semantic ripper.

It bristles with long-overdue usefulness for those of us often dismissed as sad "loners" but who in fact are cheerfully, blissfully self-accompanied. So for examples, an authority on lawn tennis, I am very much looking forward to taking my knowledgeable self to the Australian Open in Melbourne in January. What well-informed fun we will have together, we partners!

One's own company is so therapeutically free of irritations and best of all, for those of us who love to talk to ourselves, the stimulating one-on-one conversation is always with an intellectual equal.

Intellectual equals are very hard for someone so learned as myself to find but I am blessed to have married one. She is my Person of a Lifetime and I am grateful that since my eye operation I am able to tell her apart from the also wonderful Greta Thunberg, the indisputable Person of the Year.