new glasses

I finally went for my eye test that's been due since last December.  The good news was that my eyes were pronounced healthy.  As I was discussing with a friend the other day, and the unwelcome reading for my cholesterol demonstrated, one of the drawbacks of being middle aged is that you can no longer waltz into health checks blithely assuming that everything will be fine, because it quite possibly won't be.

The bad news was that my prescription had changed enough for me to need new glasses.  I'd rather thought they might have, since I've had the old glasses over two years, and my eyes have never been stable for longer than that in the past.  It was not just the optician trying to sell me stuff, since when she covered over my right eye I could see her chart of letters go fuzzy before my left one.

I didn't even bother browsing the racks of frames until the salesman had finished serving his previous customer.  I'd already clocked them on the way in, in a general way, and they were all huge, in line with the prevailing fashion.  I don't know why the design of spectacles is quite so heavily fashion led.  True, you wear them on your face and so they are up front and central in terms of your appearance, but they are also functional medical appliances.  If you try to wear huge glasses when you are as short sighted as I am the lenses will be so thick around the edges that you will end up looking as though you had the bottoms of a couple of jam jars stuck into your frames.

Once the assistant was free I told him that we'd better start with the children's frames like I had last time, since the adult ones were all going to be too big given how strong my lenses had to be and how small my face was.  In fact, I would like new glasses as close as possible identical to my existing ones.  Once he'd looked at the prescription and the size of my face he agreed, and we picked out frames for new varifocals and reading glasses in what might be a record time.  We were shadowed by a young work experience person with pink hair, whose previous job had been in Marks and Spencer and who cheerfully admitted that she knew very little about glasses.  The salesman explained to her how lenses were cut out of a bigger piece of glass to fit the frame, and the importance of centreing the lens over the pupil, and I waxed so lyrical on the problems of large frames when you were very short sighted that he asked if I were looking for a job.

One of the advantages of children's frames is that they are relatively cheap.  I suppose you are not paying for any glamour conferred by association with a fashion brand.  Nobody bothers advertising kids' glasses in Vogue.  I did change my mind half way through the consultation, though, and trade up to the top grade of varifocal lens.  Now that I know I get on with them it seemed worthwhile having as small an area of fuzz as possible in my peripheral vision, and I worked out that the extra fifty pounds came to about fifty pence per week if the new glasses followed past form and lasted two years.  The salesman was mildly amazed that I did the arithmetic in my head.  There are fifty two weeks in the year, I pointed out, so fifty quid comes to roughly a pound a week over one year so fifty pence over two.  Fifty pence per month to see better sounded like quite good value.