I didn't want bifocals. I didn't want a line across my vision. I was put off by stories from friends, relatives and mere acquaintances who Didn't Get On With Them. I darkly imagined a stiff neck from having to look up or down in an artificial and arbitrary fashion, headaches, and visual confusion. As for varifocals, they sounded way too complicated, bifocals on steroids. For several years I insisted I was happy with two pairs of glasses. It was very mindful, deciding whether you were seeing or reading, and then concentrating on one or the other.
For many years before that I was fine with just one set of glasses. The first intimation of difficulties ahead came in my mid forties, when I found I could no longer see to read my London A to Z by the light of a tube platform. At my next eye test, the optician explained kindly that I would be just about all right with one prescription for now, but that as we aged our lenses became less elastic, and that I was heading towards the point at which I would need reading glasses. I cracked and ordered some fairly soon after, when I discovered I could not properly see an exhibition of Mughal art, with all its tiny details, in the amount of light which the British Museum judged appropriate for displaying such treasures.
Once that point was reached, I was fine for a couple more years with the reading glasses. Reading or seeing, mindful all the way. I gradually started putting the reading glasses on to cook, sitting at the kitchen table cutting up vegetables or apples. I wore them to inspect the bees, so that I'd be able to see eggs, picking my way happily through the fuzzy view of the garden on the way to the apiary because it was all familiar. Then it reached the point where I couldn't read through my seeing glasses, and adopted that middle aged trick of peering over the top of them to read menus and maps, or write things down.
My near distance vision went as well, so that I had to bend my face close to the till and credit card machine at work. At supper I had a choice between wearing my reading glasses, and being able to see the food on my plate clearly, but the Systems Administrator's face only indistinctly, or wearing my seeing glasses, to give me a perfect view of my companion but a fuzzy one of what I was eating. Putting out serving dishes on a crowded table became an exercise in concentration, in case I misjudged the position of my hands and knocked over a glass. Walking round art galleries, I now habitually carried both pairs of glasses, putting the seeing glasses on when I wanted to step three paces back from the canvas to look at the whole painting, and swapping back to the reading glasses to decipher the caption, or when I came to an etching.
It was getting silly. Peering over your glasses to read the menu, then being OK for the rest of the meal, is one thing, but needing to change your glasses every other minute is ridiculous. There had to be a better solution. After all, the Tate is full of middle aged people who are apparently able to see the exhibits, and are not visibly juggling two sets of glasses simultaneously. It was time for varifocals.
They are wonderful. I have been told to get properly used to them, and give it a couple of weeks before driving in them, and to be very careful the first time I do. I will be extremely careful, but I feel as if I could drive in them already. Look straight ahead and you are looking through the upper part of the lens, which is calibrated for distance. Drop your gaze a little, and you see through the middle of the lens, which is set to correct near distance vision. Bingo, I have just chopped up a saucepan of apples using that bit of the lens, and been able to see what was on my plate at supper. Look down a little further, and you have a reading glasses strength lens. I am looking through it as I type this. There are no hard lines between them, the only effect is that if you don't look through the appropriate section, the world appears fuzzy. Juggling between two sets of glasses and none, the world looked fuzzy quite a lot of the time anyway, so that is no hardship
If you want to glance to the side, you do need to turn your head a little, since peripheral vision through the edges of the lens is not clear, but mine never was anyway, being quite short sighted and astigmatic, so that the outer portions of my glasses have always been distorting (and, until the advent of thin glass technology, protruded beyond the frames, as thick as milk bottles). I just need to learn to curb the habit of peering over the top of the frames for close work, and remember to drop my gaze because the right prescription is now in front of my face.
Truly, technology is amazing. That, and the plasticity of the human brain.
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