Rab reckons remedying his less-than-perfect eyesight with a pair of specs is a must, especially if he’s to read ingredients on tins and avoid culinary catastrophes in eateries. But first he has to find his glasses...

I have just this moment taken delivery of yet another pair of chic, executive-style reading glasses. The parcel arrived from Amazon and so it took a wee while for the lorry to unload the skip in which the specs were packaged.

What a palaver. I have touched, I am sure, upon this matter of reading glasses before. They dominate my life. And where are they? I don’t know. I put them down just a minute ago and I haven’t moved from the room.

There must be 30 pairs of these contrivances skulking aboot the hoose in nooks and possibly even crannies. If they’re not getting lost, they’re breaking.

Usually, one of the arms – or is it legs? – comes off or a lens falls out. Gamely, I try gluing them together or even binding them with paper clips. Sometimes, I manage with just one arm. This is fine in the privacy of one’s own home but, in the supermarket and other glittering social hubs, out of the corner of my bandaged lens I indistinctly catch people tittering.

Again, as with stalling the car or having my card turned down at the checkout, I’m the only person ever in this position nowadays. When I was young, schoolchildren often had patchedup glasses. True, they were mocked mercilessly, but at least there were a few of them around.

Now it’s just me, with one lens up at my eyebrow and the other down at my cheek, making a spectacle of myself with my one good leg as I blunder down the aisles in a blur.

Of course, I can see the shelves but, these days, I like to check ingredients on tins and packets to make sure I’m not being poisoned. I also have to read newspapers – tremendously irritating part of a journalist’s job – and, very occasionally, have to peruse restaurant menus.

Indeed, it was with these that I first discovered I needed reading glasses. Unable to read them, and quite stupidly (even for me), I’d conceived the idea that restaurants had adopted a new trend of using tiny print on their menus.

At first, I used to ask waiters to bring me a new menu as this one was all blurry. When the new one was blurry too, I’d just point at things on it and say: “I’ll have one of those and a side-dish of that, please.”

“An apple tart with chips, sir?”

“Er, yes, that’s the thing. And, hmm, could I have a sausage roll with the apple tart, and custard for the chips? Thank you.”

As indicated above, I buy the specs online now. I used to have a terrible time finding the right shape for my face and, standing in a pound shop trying on them, was worse than road-testing hats in a department store.

Getting them on and off the display pegs was also a trial, made more difficult by the fact that I couldn’t see a thing and would usually end up mangling two or three pairs in the process.

Today’s new ones are just a reordering of the last pair bought a couple of months ago. But, guaranteed, as soon as I take them off when I get up to make a cup of tea, they’ll scarper to join their buddies among the nooks – and doubtless even the crannies.