I went for an eye test today. Difficult to believe that two years had gone by since the last one, but they had. I made the switch then to varifocals, and loved them instantly, so much that I wished I'd taken the plunge five years before I did. No more walking around art galleries holding my reading glasses, ready to swap them over to read the caption to a painting or decipher a faint drawing or engraving. An end to digging around in my handbag to see if I'd remembered to bring my reading glasses so that I could read the menu in a restaurant. And an end to people commenting as I peered over the top of my distance glasses with the menu held eight inches from the end of my nose, because I'd forgotten my reading glasses.
I'm not sure I made the best choice of frames last time round. I like the 1950s revival, vaguely unisex heavy horn rimmed Clark Kent meets Mad Men look, and went for solid frames in a mottled dark grey, with a nod to the cat's eye shape and not entirely rectangular, but still chunky. It's certainly a look. I was hailed in Waitrose the other day by a beekeeping acquaintance with the words I'd know those glasses anywhere.
The only trouble is that I don't seem to have a very Clark Kent, Mad Men sort of nose. An optician once described the bridge as petite, and the grey horn rims start off in the right place but are halfway down my nose after ten minutes. Indeed, once during a bee inspection as I was looking downwards they fell off inside my veil. After two years of pushing them back up my nose by reflex action they have got badly scratched. The fact I'm wearing filthy gardening gloves half the time can't have helped. So I thought I would lash out, and get some new unscratched glasses for mingling with polite society, and driving, and continue to wear the scratched ones for gardening, then I could push them up my face with impunity.
Routine medical check ups acquire a new frisson in middle age. In your twenties you blithely assume that everything is fine, but thirty years on when your optician starts routine testing for glaucoma you realise that this is because you might actually have glaucoma, especially once you have read in the newspapers that badly short sighted people are more at risk. It was a gentle relief to discover that I did not have glaucoma, and that the backs of my eyes looked entirely normal. Opticians can tell a great deal about your general health from the state of your eyes. A friend who survived a serious brain injury still showed visible signs of inflammation six months later, causing great alarm to her optician who wanted her to seek urgent medical help until my friend explained that she'd already done that bit, and this was just the after effects.
My prescription had changed a little, but not so much that the optician was going to tell me to get new glasses if I didn't want to. Or at least I think it's changed. He kept asking me whether the small black circle looked more or less circular with this lens or that, and I kept telling him that the edges were so fuzzy with both that it was impossible to say how circular it was. We'll find out when I get the new glasses, but I've got sixty days from collecting them to take them back if the prescription isn't right.
I wasn't going to be caught out a second time by choosing overly heavy frames, and stuck to trying on the lightest, wire rimmed range, which were also the cheapest. The more designer your spectacle the more gigantic, so by the time you are up to Versace the lenses are the size of saucers. The assistant who took over from the optician said that from a practical point of view I was better off sticking to smaller glasses anyway, because my prescription was so thick that if I chose large ones the edges of the lens would probably be thicker than the frame. They always used to be in the 1970s and 80s whatever I chose, and it's a bad look, especially once dirt and grease get down into the narrow gap between the frame and the glass. but lens technology has come on since then.
On this basis she did not approve of my first choice, explaining to me that they were too wide, and I was going to end up with a lot of thick and unnecessary glass in the corners. Warming to her theme, she said that part of the issue was that I had a small face, and telling me to wait there, she hurried away and returned carrying a different pair of metal frames. Come with me, she said. I went with her and found myself in the children's section. Ah, I said, these are children's glasses. Well yes, she said, they have smaller faces.
They do indeed, and children's glasses are a lot nicer than they used to be when I first needed them. Just like slightly miniaturised adult's glasses, in fact, and after some dithering I went for black coated steel, not too savagely rectangular but preserving a little of the 1950s geek aesthetic. I have a dark suspicion that they were designed for a fifteen year old boy, but never mind.
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