Second Sight

So as I wrote in last week’s blog, I needed some new glasses. The nice lady at the opticians explained that because I write a lot and I’m getting old I should get varifocal lenses. I wasn’t happy at that, and especially not happy when she told me the price but I guess it comes to us all. I dug in to the rapidly shrinking savings pot and paid up.

‘They’ll take around ten to fourteen days,’ she told me, ‘but we’ll text you to let you know when they’re here’.

Fair enough. So I waited patiently like a good little Briton. On day fifteen I gave them a ring, just to see if there was any news.

‘Oh yes sir, they’ve been here a few days. Did nobody let you know?’

*sigh*

It’s not just me, is it? Is it too much to ask for people, especially in a business environment, to do what they say they’ll do, at the time that they’ve promised to do it? Or is honesty too much to expect?

Anyway, I finally got my new ‘ryans’ and I have to say that they’re seriously weird. For those (like me until a couple of weeks ago) who don’t know how varifocals work, it’s like this; instead of like in a pair of single vision glasses where the entire lens is ground to the same prescription, a varifocal lens has three entirely different areas ground into different parts of the same lens through which you can focus on different distances. So I look through the top part of my glasses to see things over a metre or so away, the  centre to see things like my computer screen and a small spot just above my nose if I want to read something close up. I know that it sounds really complex and as though it might take a lot of getting used to, but that’s only because it is and it does.

My Beloved has been suppressing chuckles ever since I first put them on. Not because I look stupid in them (on the contrary – the designer frames make me look sooo cool, don’t you know) but because I’m constantly bobbing and weaving my head like a falcon trying to get the perfect focus on its prey. In the most recent case the falcon was me and the prey was a Mexican meal that I’d cooked. The constant switching from looking down at my hand (close-up) to make sure I wasn’t slopping salsa everywhere to looking up at her across the table was almost nauseating. Nothing to do with her beautiful face of course, just the unusual struggle of getting used to looking out of the correct part of the lens. I almost became the first man ever to become seasick in landlocked Barnsley.

And as for peripheral vision, forget it. I can focus on whatever my nose is pointing at and that’s all. If I move my eyes while keeping my head still the world goes swooshing about like that famous “dolly zoom” shot in ‘Jaws’ where the seated Roy Sheider appears to move towards the camera while the background behind him recedes.

I keep telling myself that varifocals are a good thing...