Struggles with the small print
It’s harder to read, but bifocals are a step too far, says Felicity Price, who is definitely not getting old.
Fine print? No problem. I can read that 6-point type, I’d boast, as much younger colleagues fumbled around for their reading glasses.
Reading glasses were for old people. Not me. Not in my fifties. Not even when I turned 60.
My eyesight had actually improved. The optometrist said it was something to do with long distance vision improving with age. Second sight, she called it. But make the most of it while you can, she warned, because it quickly deteriorates soon afterwards. She was right.
Time was I could read an orange or grey Penguin without blinking, without squinting even. But in the last few years, the small print on an old Penguin book has somehow shrunk to the extent that reading Crime and Punishment is cruel and unusual punishment indeed, and Ulyssess would simply be unthinkable. (Even with reading glasses, Ulysses is still pretty unthinkable.)
As an aside, my Boomer generation is probably the only one to know what an orange or grey Penguin was and the status they had if you wanted to look intelligent. Simply waving a grey Penguin (they’re the intellectual ones) around casually over sticky buns and foul coffee in the uni cafe was sure to impress.
Admittedly, I only skim-read most of them in those days. Now, I’d be hard pressed to read them at all, so small is the print and so yellowed the pages.
Someone at Penguin must have realised microscopic font sizes, while saving paper, were very user unfriendly, because the Popular Penguins issued this century have a slightly bigger font and more spacing. This would have passed me by a couple of years ago. But not any more.
My long distance vision is still fine, but I’ve had to trot down to the mall and buy a cheap pair of reading glasses after all. Magnified enough to read the paper in the morning – that’s all I’m currently admitting to. Only my nearest and dearest know.
It’s been a step too far to take them out of the house and put them on at work, or in a restaurant to read the menu. Squinting is pretty commonplace in restaurants anyway, the lighting is so dim people flick on their phone torches in case they confuse their chevre with cheval, or boeuf with an oeuf.
Reduced near vision usually starts around 40 and is known medically as presbyopia, from the Greek meaning ‘‘old eyes’’. In the UK, 96 per cent of people over the age of 55 wear glasses, and about a third of people between 40 and 75 have some level of presbyopia. Women are slightly more affected than men.
Most of my friends have reading glasses. A large proportion of them have – horror –bifocals. Or, as they’re more gently referred to these days: graduated lenses.
Needless to say, they cost a small fortune. That’s the trouble with ageing – as our bodies begin the slow and painful journey towards wearing out, the medical, ophthalmological, orthopaedic, appearance medicine and hairdressing professions have all worked out there’s a lot of money to be made from the Baby Boomer generation that will spend more than they can afford to hold onto lost youth.
Bifocals, graduated lenses – whatever you want to call them – are a step too far for me. That would mean acknowledging I’m getting old and my body parts are showing it. It would also mean, after studying my Third-age buddy’s behaviour now he has graduated lenses, stumbling and tripping a fair bit, and that’s without drinking. Imagine how much worse I’d be, a couple of drinks on board, and bifocals tricking me into thinking the floor has risen to meet me.
At least it would give me a pretty good excuse.
I’m perfectly happy with my two-dollar shop reading glasses that I can hide away in the bedroom and never publicly admit to. And, as I’ve discovered, I can always surreptitiously borrow someone else’s if I need to check the fine print.
It’s surprising, when you’re affected yourself, just how many of your friends are also peering at the tiny fonts and have the same magnification of cheap plastic reading specs.
Some even buy six pairs so they can have them at the ready, wherever they are. Which is tremendously handy for cowards like me who aren’t quite ready yet to admit to presbyopic ‘‘old eyes’’.