... Who needs him when I have an excellent online computer store and a Visa card?

Ladeez and gennulmen, I give you the present that I gave to myself in general and my appalling eyesight in particular... the ASUS PA279Q 27in AH-IPS Widescreen LED Monitor. Pre-calibrated not merely for sRGB but which can display 99% of the Adobe RGB gamut. Yes, I could have gone larger. Yes, I could have gone faster (IPS's aren't known for speed, this one being 6ms GTG), but in the end I decided that the colour accuracy of this one for photographic work outweighed the need for speed when gaming (which in my case consists only of the occasional round of Rome Total War (the original, not the unbridled abomination that Creative Assembly foisted on us in 2013) anyway, and of course things like SQL Server or Excel or Word don't really care one way or the other.

It even has a hood to make it feel real profeshunal and stuff.

Thus far it's been an excellent monitor, and my eyes feel much better already.

Mind you, since this was Christmas Eve there was bupkis in the way of parking in the shopping centre near the post office. Not that it mattered as the post office had forgotten to put the collection form in my box. Thankfully I asked them whether they had received it (as the tracking report indicated that they had). Then when I got it I had to haul it about a kilometre to where I was able to park, and this is not a light monitor. Still, it was worth it in the end.

The only down side is that I was so busy installing it that I forgot to pick up some dry cleaning that was due back that afternoon. Oh well, maybe I'll just spend the Christmas break playing Rome Total War dressed in a bedsheet toga. There are worse fates.