Now I can see the benefits of my glasses
‘Even Santa looks stern when he is looking over a half-pair of glasses’
THE glasses are becoming an issue. They are welded to my face these days. I have actually become convinced that what they assured me wouldn’t happen has happened. Using the glasses as a crutch has made the eyes get lazier. And now they just refuse to read anything on their own. And things the eyes and me might have made an effort with before, we don’t bother now, we just get the glasses out. I have become dependent. They have got their claws into me. If the end of the world happens now, even if I survive, I’ll be useless. Because I won’t have my glasses. And there won’t be any Dealz or Tiger shops to buy glasses in.
I was treating the glasses as a bit of a lark originally. They were a novelty. I looked like a Morrissey-style figure, or a David Hockney type. And I only needed them for specific things. I told myself that I wasn’t changing. Nothing was deteriorating. I just slightly needed glasses now and again for very small writing. And it would stay at that level.
But as I say, since I started using them, my eyesight seems to be deteriorating further. And I am blaming the glasses, and thinking I should never have given in to the bloody things. I should have kept working the eyes. God knows what’s ahead of me now. I’m already becoming one of those guys who feels around for his glasses now and then. And I panic a bit if I don’t have any. Of course I keep them in all the regular places. Some next to the bed, some on my desk at work, some next to my chair in the living room (Yes. I have a specific chair. Dad’s chair. I know. That’s more ageing than the bloody glasses). I even have a glasses drawer, with a big bag of cheap glasses in it.
I’ve had to branch out too. I started with big plastic frames. But they don’t work with the headphones on the radio, so I had to buy thin half ones that hang at the end of my nose. They’re handy yokes in fairness. They fold up tiny, as in the arms fold in half and the glasses fold in half, so the whole thing collapses in on itself to the size of one eyeglass. They are one euro more than the plastic ones, weighing in at a cheeky four euro, but you get a case included as well.
I need the glasses on the radio for reading newspapers. But I worry that it is breaking the connection between me and the people in front of me. They’re like a barrier. The half ones are handy from that point of view, because you can look at people over the glasses. I think that adds an air of authority and maturity. Shows them who’s boss. Who isn’t slightly put in their place by being looked at over a pair of glasses? It’s like a Jungian archetype. It’s there in our subconscious. Even Santa looks stern when he is looking over a half-pair of glasses.
The question now is where I go from here. I have to accept on some level, that I am an occasional glasses wearer. I can’t just tell myself that they are something I pull out for a laugh now and then. There is indeed a danger that they will become part of me. So maybe I need to commit. Given that they are something I will be wearing a lot, and that I will have to wear in public, maybe I need to consider spending more than four euro on a pair, and maybe I need to get a pair that says something about who I am. The thing is, I don’t mind spending money on certain things. My mother always drummed it into me that sometimes you should splash out to get ‘the good thing’. But I have these blockages about some things. I hate paying a fortune for a cup of tea out when I know it’s free at home. And I think glasses might be one of these things. Technically, a pair of glasses should be one of those things you splash out on, because they’re worth it. But because a) they haven’t been part of my outlay up to now and b) I’ll lose them, I can’t bring myself to splash out. This makes even less sense when you consider that I have bought some expensive sunglasses down the years, and they don’t perform any function for me, and I’ve never lost them
So if you see a guy letting himself down with cheap glasses, that’ll be me. And you can nod silently to yourself and think, “The poor fellah. He hasn’t accepted it yet”.