LOOK INTO MY EYES

With the same regularity of the seasons, i.e. precious little regularity at all, the time had come around again for yet another appointment with the optician to see just what wear and tear these battered old organic optical devices have suffered as they laboured through yet another year of spending far too long looking at screens of all shapes and sizes.

For once I had responded with surprising speed to the “reminder” letter when it popped through the letterbox, instead of just waiting for the third or even fourth one to arrive. This is presumably because, in the past, I used to think of them as merely a marketing device from the optician intended purely to sell more spectacles than was strictly necessary, and so I used to “put off” my visit until I felt properly shamed enough into not ignoring the need to go any longer and, happily, for many years, the prescription remained much the same and so buying new glasses wasn’t strictly necessary and a fiscal bullet was dodged for another couple of years…

Not that it’s really something you should scrimp on. After all, these things get parked on top of your nose and play a large part in how you are looked at by the world as it passes you by. If you are prepared to look at the world through a rancid, filthy old bit of twisted wire that is the optical equivalent of a lop-sided dustbin, then you shouldn’t be surprised to find that people are looking at you a bit “funny” although you will probably find out later that it’s because it is actually you that is looking a bit funny…

But the deterioration of my own fetid specs wasn’t the reason I responded with what seemed to be unseemly haste (or as close as I ever get to it anyway) to the letter. No, it was more because I was actually rather concerned for once about my one and only set of eyeballs and how much I’d been struggling with them recently, especially when it comes to reading a page, or looking at a screen.

There have been days lately which I have spent in utter agony as I’ve been working on that - now stolen – computer screen in that office of ours. Somehow its bright new high-resolution screen managed to be positioned at the exact distance to make my eyes feel like I imagine Malcolm McDowell’s did when he was filming that scene in “A Clockwork Orange” (only without the moisture).

There is, of course, an inherent fear involved with eyesight which is basically that you might lose it. I think that it’s probably a universal fear for anyone whose life is essentially “visual” like me of course, but also for anyone who drives or has relatives or… Well, basically, it’s everyone who possesses eyesight really, isn’t it?

I first started “needing” to wear glasses at secondary school, sometime around the time between “O” and “A” levels when, ironically, despite the fact that the classrooms got smaller, the blackboard got fuzzier to look at, and so it was decreed that I would become one of the “four-eyed” ones, and, on reflection, my chrome “pilot” style spectacles of choice were not the wisest option, even though I pursued that style through a number of incarnations (once that I discovered that you could get them in black) for a few years after that.

So anyway, I toddled along on that Saturday morning and spent half an hour in a dark room with a professional woman whom I barely knew in very close proximity to me, and then paid her for the privilege as she tested the latest downgrade of my eyesight and put it on the record.

I went through the usual routine of reading things clearly off the illuminated letters board, blinking, and then finding that they were less distinct, whilst I had that ridiculous device parked on my nose (thankfully the mirrors were out of my line of sight) and various lenses were placed inside the contraption that made my vision better or worse, and various glass lollipops were held in front of me as I declared them to be “better” or “worse” or “much the same”…

I always think that, like with marketing polls on the telephone, there are “trick questions” being slipped in there, just to see if I am lying, and the occasional “tut” when I seemed to get the answer “wrong” or, at least didn’t give the one which was expected, seemed to confirm this suspicion.

Then I looked up and down and left and right (where I had to try very hard not to look straight into the optician’s mouth) as she shone her examination light into my eyes and I had that rare experience of being able to see the veins on my own retinas, which is something you don’t get to see all that often. In fact, I would go as far as to say that it’s only during eye examinations that I ever get to see that, which is probably just as well…

And I looked at the red and green lights and read the test page in tiny 5-point type and after that there was the dubious delight of the “pressure test”, a relatively recent torture that opticians seem to have developed to put the anticipation of visits to go and see them up on level par with a trip to see a dentist, when a blast of air is shot at your eyeballs one at a time just to prove that they’ve not yet turned to mush, or something.

Anyway, after all that, it was suggested that I had reached that great age where I might want to consider crossing the rubicon into the strange new world of “varifocals” which will, apparently lead to some very peculiar sensations for a while after I get them, might make me fall downstairs, and delayed my simultaneous order of prescription sunglasses (like I need those any more anyway with the summer we’re having…) just long enough that I believe that the “free” part will get forgotten about when I actually get around to requesting them.

So, with all that in mind, I ordered up some new specs and had to go through the whole torturous process of choosing new frames for the mask I will be wearing to face the world through for the next couple of years of my life. This is never a great moment in my life as it involves looking at my big fat head in a mirror for far longer than I think is reasonably tolerable, and involves making a decision that is usually a “wrong” one whilst looking through plain glass lenses that don’t let me see my big fat head with all that much clarity anyway. This was also when I discovered that the beloved had never much liked the glasses that I had been wearing for the past few years either…

In the end, wisdom prevailed, and I allowed her to decide, and so, in a couple of weeks, a bright shiny new me will be stepping out into the world, twitching my head as I try to work out my focal centres and no doubt plummeting headfirst down a flight of stone steps shortly afterwards.