4 hours ago
6
I hate my glasses. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Not just these I’m wearing now, but whichever spectacles I’ve been cursed to wear since, to my horror, I was first told to at the age of 14. At that point, my hatred of them was general, unspecific. They were a source of shame as well as inconvenience. The football field was a blur. Girls, who admittedly had never been much attracted to me in the first place, now lost interest completely.
I developed more specific dislikes, for example the way they steamed up (the glasses, not the girls) when I walked into pubs in winter, still further diminishing my chances of getting served underage. They were always getting bent out of shape, and this bugged me tremendously. The left side was higher than the right, or the right higher than the left, and I could never figure out why this was. I pulled and bent and stretched them this way and that, and only ever made matters worse. Were the arms not straight? Or was the problem the ear thingies? Don’t start me on the nose thingies, which have never, for me anyway, successfully discharged their primary task of stopping the bastards from slipping down my nose.
Contact lenses came riding in like knights in shining armour. Still not much luck with the girls – the damage specs had done to my self-esteem was too great to be undone – but at least I could see where the ball was on the pitch. Freedom at last. And the specs fell still further in my estimation, being now only used on those desperate, desperate days when I’d lost a lens or got an eye infection.
Then came the bifocal years when the contact lenses became less up to the task, so it was back to the hated glasses. And as my needs have become more complex, so have the optical remedies. More and more I have to move my head up and down and from side to side, searching out the sweet spot to see whatever I’m looking at in acceptable focus. In this endeavour I increasingly find my head moving in a circular or even figure-of-eight pattern. But I have so many nervous tics, what’s another one?
Sometimes, shortsighted as I am, I go for a walk by the sea and dispense with all correction, trying to embrace the blurriness as my authentic self. It works for a while, until it doesn’t, and then back on go the specs and I’m almost grateful. But I can’t help hating them all the same.
Adrian Chiles is a writer, broadcaster and a Guardian columnist
