My Mum has got a blurred photograph of me crying. I’m 13 years old and wearing an England tracksuit of the Ron Greenwood at the 1982 World Cup in Spain vintage. I am crying because I have just been told that I am going to have to wear glasses. The photo was taken by my little brother, because he found my distress amusing and wanted to savour it for ever.
It had been a long road to this point. A couple of years earlier we had gone to see the World Table Tennis championships at the brand new National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham. I was mesmerised by the sight of the young Chinese chaps slugging it out miles away from the table, stringing out incredibly long rallies. But when I looked at the score being flipped over next to the referee, I realised to my horror I couldn’t read it. I squinted until my eyeballs ached. I looked around to see if anyone else was squinting; they weren’t. With surprising resourcefulness I found that if I looked through a little pinhole I made by putting my thumbs and forefingers together, I could read the numbers quite nicely. “What on earth are you doing?” asked Dad.
“Nothing,” I said.
Eventually, I was rumbled. Off I was carted to an optician in Stourbridge, specs were supplied and my teenage years were in tatters. I was no good at girls or football as it was. Having four eyes instead of two plainly wasn’t going to help.
Before long I was trying to get served in pubs. Sporting only bum fluff and a marked lack of bluster, it was something else I was rubbish at. And in the winter months, with specs steaming up on entry, I was doomed.
Things didn’t improve until I was 17, when contact lenses came to my rescue. Though my confidence re girls and football had been damaged beyond repair, things looked up. I didn’t need glasses any more and shortsightedness no longer blighted my life.
But now longsightedness has been visited upon me, and it is worse. It joins the long list of things that lots of people seem to deal with – raising daughters, driving at night, ageing and death – that I can’t fathom. I resisted getting reading glasses to the extent that in order to read in poor light I bought myself a head torch to brighten the pages up. I would recommend this bit of kit, by the way, for reading restaurant menus that, invariably, have to be read in the gloaming, by middle-aged people, yet are always in stupidly small print.
Eventually, I got some reading glasses. These I actually managed to lose on the way back from the opticians. I bought some more, but I simply can’t get organised to have them when I need them. And then there is all the taking them on and off hundreds of times a day. What’s that about? I am writing this on a flight to Belfast on a laptop. I am wearing my ordinary glasses, which means I have to lean right back. If I take them off, I have to lean right in. If I put my contact lenses in, I have to lean right back, but if my reading glasses go on, my nose has to be almost pressed to the screen again. I want to cry. If my brother were with me, he would take another picture.
