The time inevitably seems to have come around again, seemingly alarmingly quickly given that it had been two years, when I needed my eyes torturing for a few moments before being told that, once again, and because I am growing weak and feeble with age, and my disability is increasing, my prescription has changed, and a brand new set of spectacles would be necessary.
This, of course, always means two sets, because I also need my prescription sunglasses for those rare occasions when I want to venture to sunnier climes, or when I want to keep a vague air of anonymity as I walk the mean streets of Coldsville…
So I went through the usual half-hearted routine of picking and choosing the new frames, knowing that anything too significantly different would feel like I'd had plastic surgery or something, at least for a few days, as it presents such a different aspect to the world whenever you put such masks on.
Eventually, I went for something not entirely dissimilar to the ones I was already using, because they seemed to have gone down reasonably well during the last couple of years and didn't look too much like "old man specs" (or so I thought…)
Three weeks after ordering them, having endured the usual torturing by the optician, and following an apologetic phone call explaining the delay, they were ready, just about in time, I feared, for the next check up telling me that they'd changed again.
I took the phone call telling me that they were ready at work, but didn't have a convenient moment to go and pick them up, but listened dutifully (if not attentively) as I was given a list of the times that the dispensing optician would be available to, er, dispense them.
A couple of days later, when I did have a convenient moment, I left the office a few minutes early in order to do so, only to find that it was early closing day, and the vague reference to "Wednesday" that the receptionist had mentioned in her call, was, quite obviously (it seemed then) referring to when he wouldn't be available.
Everything's a bloody saga, isn't it…?
Still, a couple of evenings later, I was sable to slope off a few minutes early again and made it to their Emporium before closing time and got myself properly fitted to my new prostheses, whilst listening to the gabble of the optician who has obviously been on a customer care course in encouragement recently, such were the "smashings" and "brilliants" he was throwing my way for being able to look at the correct eye at the correct moment, and, more pleasingly, not nipping off to throw up in a bucket at the sight of my hideous countenance.
I tried my best to guilt-trip him about my Wednesday experiences, but such was his enthusiasm, that I even failed at that, and so resigned myself to remaining a grumpy bespectacled potato instead of one who had managed to pass on the grumps to another.
So, now here I find myself presenting yet another new face to the world, albeit one which feels fatter, grumpier, sterner and hairier than the one I previously remember having. This is because, despite accusations of being rather "budgie-like" in my relationship with mirrors, I don't often spend much time actually looking at myself, so that when I do, it always comes as rather a nasty shock when I really don't recognise the man in the mirror, and am surprised when he really doesn't at all resemble the image of myself that I have in my mind.
Perhaps I should have got chunkier spectacles after all, and hidden more of this monstrosity from the world in general…?
Or perhaps the time has come to go the John Merrick route and put the potato back into a potato sack...
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