Did you know that people are allowed to print slogans next to the roadside, advising people to buy things? Underneath those big pictures you see sometimes, there are alluring sentences, telling us that various products will improve our life in some way.
I also discovered last week that foreign films are not really so difficult to follow. At the bottom of the screen, all the dialogue is printed in English so that you can understand what's happening.
Other startling new facts include: my ceiling needs repainting, my car has a dent in it and Henry VIII (as played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers in The Tudors) is all thin, with no beard!
It has taken me a while to get glasses. I've suspected that I needed them for about 10 years. Finally, last weekend, I took a deep breath and strode in for an eye test. The fishmonger kindly explained that the optician's was next door. So I went there and bought a pair of glasses. Hello, world!
My timing was, I thought, perfectly logical. We were on the brink of a hugely significant period in British poker. Last week began with the World Series in central London. It continued with the London leg of the European Poker Tour; that concludes today, on the eve of a new £20,000 'High Roller' tournament. I am supposed to be a serious, professional player. I was the 2006 European Champion. I am meant to be highly skilled at 'reading' my opponents. But if I'm sitting more than two seats away from my opponents, I can't actually see them.
I have kept this quiet for a long time. From the outside, I appear free from handicap, a vision of control and certainty. Inside, it's bafflement and blind panic. Like the Bradford & Bingley. And, like the Bradford & Bingley, it was time to admit defeat. I decided to buy glasses, at last, purely to have my best chance in this vital series of tournaments.
Or so I thought. As I took out the new spectacles, shyly, over coffee with a friend, she said: 'Oh. You've succumbed to the Palin Effect.'
Somewhere, I heard a gong of doom. I rushed home and googled. Everyone is getting glasses! And they're getting them because they want to look like Sarah Palin! The crazed 'pro-life' Alaskan redneck who campaigns for more oil drilling and gets up at 5am to shoot moose!
And why has Sarah Palin made glasses sexy? It must be, surely, because she is such an idiot. Women worry that spectacles will make them look learned, blue-stocking, sexless or intimidatingly smart. In a trice, Palin whipped that stigma away. This is the woman who believes that God made dinosaurs 4,000 years ago, a theory now known as Palintology.
What reassurance for women everywhere. You too can correct your astigmatism while still coming across as a halfwit! Men will have nothing to fear! Hillary Clinton in glasses, now that's intimidating. Sarah Palin just looks like a librarian in a porn film.
Had this affected my decision? I have been playing big poker tournaments for years, after all. Had something Palinesque crept into my subconscious, rendering specs suddenly acceptable? I hope not, obviously. I don't think I want to come across as a charming moron. And I don't think I am affected by fashion trends; God knows my wardrobe isn't.
I think I am 'my own person'. But I have to wonder why I never got glasses before. The answer is vanity. I'm already a bit chubby; I didn't think I could get away with being a four-eyes as well. And that means, whatever I try to tell myself, that I am affected by peer pressure, media images, 'body fascism' and an unhealthy fear of looking flawed.
Most people are, that's why glasses have been such a modern rarity. We have to ask ourselves why they all but disappeared as soon as options became available. Contact lenses are fiddly and awkward. Laser eye correction is risky and frightening. These developments weren't actually an improvement on the simple, clever, easy choice of carrying a pair of specs.
But we've been spending the money and suffering the trauma, in our desperation to avoid that most fatal of images: the doomed, swottish combination of mental strength and physical weakness. Short-sighted indeed.
I couldn't have contacts or laser anyway; I am horribly squeamish about all things eye-related. If I see someone touching their eyes, I feel sick. This is especially embarrassing since my mother is an anaesthetist who specialises in ophthalmology. When I was a child, whenever she wasn't at home, I knew that she was off assisting in a vital and delicate piece of eye surgery. Happy Christmas, amateur psychologists!
But I think we can expect to see glasses rise again: in fashion magazines, on catwalks, on Kate Moss. Mid-crunch, there is a mood of sobriety in the air, of slower living, gentler ambitions and more straightforward dealings. I bet we are due an 'honest' fashion trend: glasses instead of contacts, cold cream instead of Botox, patched skirts instead of new. We will wear our flaws on our faces, like Gawain wore the green sash: 'Mea culpa. We have been too vain. We have aimed too high. See how I am newly sincere, earthy and realistic. [Lunettes, £185, Paul Smith].'
There: those are the brash topical and zeitgeist points that every traditional newspaper column must contain. And now, in keeping with the new, small, sober, serious mood, here is my small, sober, serious point: if you've always been scared to wear glasses too, get over it. Buy a pair. You don't realise how blind you were until you do that, and suddenly you see trees, birds, faces, subtleties, cards; it's absolutely mind-blowing. The world is a beautiful place. Get some glasses. It's simple, safe, important and changes your life.
Not that I'll actually be wearing mine. Are you kidding? They make me look like Miss Havisham.
