The carpeting was thick and the hand of his late wife could be seen in the velvet drapes of

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The carpeting was thick, and the hand of his late wife could be seen in the velvet drapes of the sitting room and the floral designs of the couches and armchairs. It was comfortable in an old-fashioned way, and in a place of honour at the centre of the mantelpiece was a portrait of Gracie. The woman in the photo was in her fifties with a bouffant hairdo; it had been taken on their wedding day more than 22 years before.Ron was a distinguished-looking man, with a neat moustache and large brown eyes. For the past two months, since soon after Gracie died, these eyes had been giving him trouble When he went outside the light blinded him He would try to cross the road and not see cars coming. When he tried to read the papers the letters and images blurred.

When you added to this his angina and his bad hearing, Ron had every reason to feel vulnerable when he walked down the Caledonian Road. He was afraid of the traffic, afraid of strangers, afraid of the gangs who might see an elderly man stumbling home with his pension as an easy target "Oh, drug gangs There's lots of gangs around here," he said. "Do you know there was even a couple of gun battles down the road? I don't go out now much. I suppose you'd call me a bit of a recluse."When Ron went to see his doctor, she told him that he had cataracts and a damaged retina and referred him to a specialist at the Middlesex Hospital The specialist examined him and said he needed an operation. The problem was that with delays on the NHS it could take weeks if not months before the consultant could attend to him as a public patient. However, if he had the money to go private, then the same consultant could do the operation within a week Ron asked how much it would cost.

The consultant told him he would need more than £2,000 to pay for the treatment It was everything he had in the bank, his life savings. But he was too scared to wait for the NHS to take care of him. The prospect of going to the shops or the post office and not being able to see where he was walking terrified him When I met him it was just a week after the operation. The cataracts had been removed but the eye surgeon hadn't been able to do anything about the retina.