An old English proverb says that ‘The eyes are the window to the soul'. So — depending on whether you want anyone peeking into your soul — it's a good idea to take care of your eyes.
I only needed to start wearing spectacles (much to my disgust) at the age of 18. I was studying for an English Literature degree, and the optician blamed my need for reading glasses on too much reading and writing.
"That's like saying it's from too much looking," one of my friends scoffed.
Every year when I went back to the opticians for an eye test, my results became worse and worse.
That's it, I thought, I'm slowly but surely going blind. Just really slowly. At the age of 25 I was worried — my spectacles were getting thicker. Eventually, my eyesight became bad enough to necessitate wearing glasses all the time.
"It's such a shame," my sister said to me, "you've got pretty eyes, it's a shame to cover them up".
So, I decided contact lenses were the way forward. My first experiment with the tiny pieces of bendy plastic wasn't a massive success — yes, if you drop them, you can't actually find them again most of the time.
Unnerving sensation
The optician put luminous dye into the eye to see where the contact lens is sitting the first time the lenses are fitted — and so I returned home looking like I'd been too near a nuclear reactor.
Drying out is also a problem for the tiny internal spectacles. Blink and it's gone, particularly when in a fierce southern English coastal wind. It's a very strange, unnerving, seasick-like sensation to be able to see perfectly out of one eye and see a blur of shapes out of the other. That was the first time I actively looked for a pirate's eye patch.
Glasses always had a stigma attached to them when I was young. ‘Four eyes', ‘speccy' and other ridiculous insults were the norm. When you're older that disappears somewhat; but not entirely. And then, a fashion revolution.
Thank goodness for the catwalk.
Wearing glasses actually became fashionable, and what were once ‘geeky' specs, became high-fashion, must-have accessories, donned by the rich and famous on the cover of glossy magazines.
They weren't the thick-rimmed, brown, plastic type you got free on the NHS either; they were sleek, small, sophisticated, smart.
It was a spectacles spectacle.
Then, a revelation. Celebrities and posers that didn't wear or need to wear glasses started wearing frames with clear glass lenses in them. These are ‘fashion-only' or ‘non-prescription' frames.
It was big business, and it still is, as opticians are still cashing-in on the frame fashion-craze — even for those whose eyes are fine. There are other options now for those who do actually need to wear glasses. The dreaded ‘s' word: surgery.
Now that it's been around for more than a couple of years, corrective laser eye surgery is becoming more affordable. One of the selling points for companies offering this, is that it only takes five minutes.
Well, I don't know about anybody else, but one look at a more popular laser eye surgery website was plenty to put me off for life. Anything with ‘surgery', ‘blade', ‘flap cutting' and ‘laser' in the same sentence as ‘your eye' just isn't for me.
No-one's going near my eyes with a laser if I can help it — that's James Bond's domain.
This month I bought two new pairs of spectacles, after having put off going to the optician for a number of years. Just as the first optician told me when I was 18, my eyes have stopped adjusting, and my prescription is the same in the right eye as it was four years ago.
So they were right and eye was wrong.
