‘I spent 18 months of my childhood in NHS specials topped with a green patch’

I NOW have three pairs of glasses. Four if you count the emergency pair in the metal tube bought in a panic from the chemist. All have different functions. The only way I could feel more middle aged would be if I piled them all on at once: one pair on the nose, one on the top of the head, the others hanging on a chain. Never a good look.

As I type, I am wearing the latest arrivals, my computer specs. The optician refers to these as “intermediates”. It seems that my reading glasses are too strong for working on a laptop. To compensate for this, I was pushing my head forward. This severely strained the small muscles in my neck, giving me black cloud headaches and a painful frozen shoulder.

The intermediates are designed to return my poor neck to a happy equilibrium. They had better.

The reading glasses I could live with. There is something pleasingly Bloomsbury group about slipping on a pair of batty specs and powering through the Orange shortlist.

Their weakness, however, was soon exposed: they are too strong for anything more than sitting still and absorbing artful sentences about one woman’s mysterious obsession with owls. Reading a text message involved stopping whatever else I was doing, hunting through my handbag and putting on my specs. I fumed and raged at the young people in the Apple shop. Why could I not enlarge the type size on my iPhone?

They adjusted their ear tunnels nervously, while summoning security to remove this mad old person. Shopping was another problem. The labels on clothes, the ingredients on mayonnaise, the country of origin of bottles of wine all became a blur. Hair products were particularly impenetrable. Whole sections of Boots danced in front of my eyes.

Time for varifocals. (Young people, these are bi-focals but even more mouth-dryingly expensive.) The optician, unfeasibly young and handsome, explained that just about everyone’s eyes deteriorate when they are, err, ahh, there comes an age when, um, you see… Then looked at the floor.

There is history there. I have various exciting (if you’re an ophthalmologist) and unusual things wrong with my eyes and spent 18 months of my childhood in NHS specials topped with a patch. A green one to match my school uniform, a spotty one to match my favourite summer dress. I endured hours upon hours of eye exercises, mostly involving putting tigers into cages.

All the glasses I wore throughout my speccy youth were a hideous affront to my sense of personal style. It evolved, the eyewear didn’t.

There were no cool glasses in Glasgow in the 1970s. Did the Bay City Rollers wear specs? Did Siouxsie Sioux? I wept and pleaded with my long-suffering optician to bring on the tartan trimmed, then subterranean black, styles. To no avail. Each pair was torture with legs.

At least now I can have three pairs of glasses with frames that are groovy without being alarming to small children. They allow me to type with my head in the approved position, drive the car safely, buy the correct hair serum and read the New York Times on my phone.

All terrifyingly middle-aged preoccupations. At least I have resisted the dangly chain. So far.