My relationship with glasses

My relationship with glasses can be summed up in three words. I hate them. 

I cannot now remember when I first required them, it is a good few years ago, but I recall my arms gradually getting shorter and shorter to the extent I couldn't hold my phone far enough away to read it. A heavy squint and I could maybe get there, but it was time. Possibly I was in my late forties. I went for an eye test.

It turns out that visual acuity and eyesight are two different things. My prescription came back as +0.25 in one eye and precisely zero in the other. Naturally the optician tried to sell me a pair of glasses for around £300. Fortunately I was still somewhat in disbelief, sceptical that a young man such as myself could actually need glasses, and I decided to sleep on it. 

In the morning I ordered the specified presription from SpecSavers. Buy one get one free. I went through the rigmarole of measuring my nose with a credit card and choosing a "style" to suit my face. Absurd, nothing suits my face. Anyway, I eventually chose a regular pair and then as the free option, some sunglasses, both with 2x reading magnification built in. They were a revelation. All of a sudden I could read again, see a computer screen again using a normal font size, hold a phone closer than a metre from my face. 

About two months later I left both in a hire car in Mexico. Back to SpecSavers I went, this time going for just a single pair that looked approximately like the last ones. I can't recall how long these lasted but something happened and one of the arms bent such that the glasses sat at a jaunty angle on my face for a while, and then one day snapped off altogether. For a while I survied on gaffer tape, then just the one arm, but ultimately it wasn't a good look at work and I returned to SpecSavers for the third time in just over a year. I cannot begin to describe how pissed off I was when these then vanished into the ether one day, never to be seen again. What do I need to do, glue them to my ears?

Fed up with spending £65 a pop I went to Boots, and forgoing the 0.25x prescription in my left eye bought a pair of off the shelf reading glasses for just £15. They were great, indistinguishable from the prescription pair as far as I could tell, and lasted a suprisingly long time. Eventually of course the arm fell off and I was back where I started, but it was easy enough to go back to Boots. At one stage I even had two pairs as one day I arrived in the office without them and had to make an emergency shopping trip in order to be able to actually do any work. I sat on these ones I think, bent beyond repair, and the other pair lasted approximately four months before they fell off my forehead whereupon I immediately trod on them. The final pair from this era are somewhere in the garden. They also fell off my head, but I couldn't retreive them as I was in transit through a flowerbed with both hands otherwise occupied. I'll pick those up on my way back I thought to myself. Could I find them?

I don't know how many pairs this is, I may have missed some off. Suffice to say it is incredibly annoying each and every time. The solution however has turned out to be much simpler than I had envisaged - I buy them in bulk, five packs from Amazon are so cheap that I can toss them into corners of the garden at will. And as soon as I owned five pairs of reading glasses I never lost another pair. I have two on the go at the moment, one on the bedside table for doom-scrolling in the evening, and then another on my desk which come with me to work and that I am wearing now as I type this. Three pairs, each with a different colour frame, wait patiently in reserve - though it has been so long I no longer know exactly where - for the day when the next accident befalls me. This may never now happen.

So, with the problem of actually keeping hold of a pair of glasses seemingly now solved, is the annoyance behind me? No. Far from it. The list of grievances is long and varied. Where did I put them? Are they on my forehead? Are they in my patch pocket? Are they hanging on my shirt? My life revolves to the contant beat of gentle pats as I try and work out where they are. And can I keep them clean? Can I hell. I remember now with quite some guilt the hard time I gave Henry as a little boy, amazed that his glasses could constantly be so smeared as to be virtually opaque. How on earth could he possibly get them so dirty all the time? I still don't know the answer to this but it happens to me too and it is infuriating. Finger prints without touching them? You betcha. Smears, spots, grease, you name it. I have discovered how to clean them though - forget expensive sprays, wipes, technically advanced microfibre cloths. Washing up liquid and a bit of hot water work every time. A quick squeeze of Fairy on each lens, rub between forefinger and thumb, rinse and done. When each pair costs just £3.40 (no, really) you don't need to give it much thought.

What about usage though? Well this is the most annoying part. For a birder a constant tangle of binocular straps and sometimes camera stuff. For the regular person (which birders are too, mostly), seat belts, pens, layers of clothes. Everything gets in the way, everything requires this extra step. See bird through bins. Record bird on e.g. eBird, pat pat pat, glasses out. Someone shows you a photo. Oh, hang on. Two secs, pat pat pat, ah here we are. Yes? Oh your screensaver has now come on. On. Off. On. Off. Five times in a minute is perfectly normal when it comes to needing to look through your glasses simply to be able to function like a regular human being. The squint is the shortcut, but check those bird lists carefully. Wanstead has had Black Tern and Capercaillie before now...

Driving? Yep I can see the road and the other cars fine. How fast am I going, what time is it? No idea. Need the glasses for that. Oh, where's the road? Varifocals are apparently the answer, and if my sympathetic children are any guide, a chain around my neck for my specs. I am 51 years old, a chain is simply not happening. But the sad fact is that without my glasses I am lost. They are required every minute of every day, I literally cannot now contemplate life without them. The time I waste. Everythings takes 5-10 seconds longer than it used to, than it ought to. I must lose hours and hours over the course of a year. The temptation of course is to keep them on, to push them down your nose and look over them like an aged uncle. Or simply to keep them on as you walk around. I do this in the office quite a lot. Yes everything is a bit indistinct, but the corridors are quite wide and I can generally avoid the walls if I am careful. 

There is no going back of course, they are here to stay. Probably to get thicker and thicker, more and more corrective, beyond he range of Amazon or Boots and back into expensive territory. At which point they will jump off my face and into the lawnmower or something...