"I can see clearly now, the rain has gone, I can see all obstacles in my way".
Johnny Nash and Jimmy Cliff sang that song, but for me, propelled as I always am by a profound sense of irony, the version by Ray Charles has always been the one.
It's been a week since I had the cataract operation on my one good eye, and I have miraculously evolved from a state of near-Ray Charles blindness into one of staggeringly sharp vision.
The all obstacles in my way which I have been banging into - debris around the house, supermarket trolleys and small children - I can now see very clearly indeed.
My legs are damn near bruiseless.
The miracle of the surgery was that the lens they whanged into the cataract-vacuumed eye has also immeasurably improved the severe myopia I have suffered from since birth.
I am now seeing stuff I have never seen in my life.
On a walk along John Wilson Ocean Dr, I saw waves, properly, for the first time, not the mixture of white foam and blue I had always seen, but water with beautiful textures and shades of colour.
I am going to have to go back to the Louvre and Musee d'Orsay.
So the bluffing is over; my pretence at possessing reasonable sight, when I couldn't see the wood or the trees, will no longer bow beneath a primary-school-playground desire for peer-group acceptance.
I can now come clean to my accountant friend with whom I discussed the ball that removed Brendon McCullum at the University Oval Pakistan test earlier this year.
I could only see shapes and shadows, but on the stroke of lunch, a clattering of stumps told me the little dasher had been bowled.
What a magnificent ball, my accountant friend remarked as he walked past.
That was indeed a monster ball, I replied.
My life has been a long succession of claiming to have seen monster balls.
Back in that primary school playground, I saw very little, and avoided visually dependent activities accordingly.
I never saw anything on the classroom blackboard, I just remembered everything the teacher said.
In my fifth year, a woman in a brown uniform came to school to test our eyes, and told me to tell my parents I needed glasses.
Of course, in the late 1950s, Buddy Holly notwithstanding, glasses were for sissies, so I kept schtumm.
The following year she came back and was very cross.
My mother was summoned, and a week later, I became a sissy.
But at least I could see now, albeit not as well as my friends.
Then at 30, I lost the sight in my right eye through diabetic complications, and was left with a diminishing pinprick of vision in the left.
The cataract over the past year simply finished me off.
But I can see clearly now.
I can recognise people as they walk towards me, this after years of earning a reputation as a sociopath, worse than that, an utter bastard, someone who only acknowledges you when he feels like it, which is hardly ever.
Now, possibly fuelled by alcohol before I leave the house in the morning, I will be embracing humanity at will, festooning kisses and squeals like a French sissy.
Colbert, after all, is a French name.
I can now read all those books I bought at Regent Theatre book sales; I will be trusted by my wife at supermarkets again; and I will resume amok-running in Two Dollar Stores buying useless plastic objects.
I noted on YouTube that Ray Charles bobbed his head about something terrible when he sang I Can See Clearly Now.
They told me at the hospital not to do that kind of thing.
But I have been singing the song quietly to myself when there's nobody around.
Life is suddenly amazing.
It's taking all my willpower not to bob my head.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
