Eye test

I had an eye test on Thursday, my first for seven years, and because I am over 60 it was free.

According to the optician, my right eye hasn’t changed but I am slightly less short-sighted in my left eye than I was.

That’s the good news. The mildly annoying discovery is that I am developing cataracts in both eyes which is ironic because my mother recently had cataract surgery on her eyes, but she’s 94 not 66!

Cataracts usually develop quite slowly so, fingers crossed, I won’t need surgery any time soon. However, when I asked the optician if ten years might be a reasonable prognosis, he suggested five but recommended that I have another eye test in two or three years.

Anyway, following the eye test I chose two new pairs of glasses and surprised the optical assistant by taking less than two minutes to decide on the frames and lenses. (Apparently, most customers take much longer, and still struggle to choose.)

To be honest, I just wanted like for like replacements for my old glasses (varifocal and occupational) which I’ve had for seven and twelve years respectively. They didn’t have an exact match but the frames I selected were fairly close, which was good enough for me.

It’s a far cry from the Seventies when I wore glasses (or specs, as we called them) for the first time. As a teenager it wasn’t ’cool’ to wear spectacles. It was partly due to the dreadful NHS glasses that many children were forced to wear, but anyone who wore glasses could be singled out for derision (“speccy four eyes”, for example) or worse.

I avoided that because, by the time I started wearing glasses at the age of 14 or 15, I wasn’t alone and there was safety in numbers. In fact, it was a bit of a relief to be diagnosed as short-sighted because I had been struggling to read the blackboard in the classroom for two years at least, but I was probably in denial.

The tipping point was being unable to read the football results on Grandstand on Saturday afternoon. That was when the penny dropped and I accepted that something had to be done and I’ve worn glasses ever since. Framed, tinted, rimless. Single lens, varifocal, occupational. I even had prescription sunglasses at one point. I think they were on a special offer but I rarely wore them so I’ve never purchased another pair.

Tinted glasses were far more common in the Seventies and Eighties than they are now. At least that’s my impression. For several years I wore blue tinted glasses but they almost tripped me up when I travelled to Moscow as a courier in 1981 because I was supposed to blend in with the locals by wearing Russian style clothing including a thick winter overcoat and fur hat.

No-one, however (not even my Frankfurt-based Russian ‘handler’), thought to mention that tinted glasses were a Western affectation and extremely rare in Russia at that time, so I might as well have been walking around with a neon sign above my head, alerting the KGB to my presence.

Today I wear varifocals when I need to see short and long distances (walking, driving etc). My occupational glasses are worn to read, work at my computer etc. Quite often though I take them off and read by holding my iPad inches from my face. (I’ve stopped reading paperbacks because the type is normally too small to read comfortably. With a Kindle edition you can increase the size of the text to whatever suits you best.)

But the big difference from when I started wearing glasses and today is this: it’s completely normal and no-one cares. Hallelujah!