AS I head deeper into my seventh decade, I feel the need to focus on something that’s become an increasingly important feature of my life: reading glasses.
Lose them, and I turn into a myopic, grumpy old git, ransacking the house, while blaming anyone in sight for moving them. Forget to take them with me when I go out, and I’m beset by blind panic.
I confess to the time when an ill-tempered hunt for my reading glasses ended with my wife pointing out that they were on top of my head. She could easily have accused me of making a spectacle of myself.
I’m guilty of losing my reading glasses with embarrassing frequency, and it’s reached the point at which my mother has assumed the responsibility of buying me spare pairs from The Pound Shop during her weekly shopping trips.
It’s kind of her to help, especially since she’s 93, but her involvement comes with two main problems.
The first is that cheap glasses don’t last five minutes. One of the arms inevitably falls off and you lose the screw that’s so tiny, you’d need 20-20 vision to find it.
In desperate times, when my stock of spares has run out, I’ve had to work at my computer while keeping perfectly still to balance a one-armed pair of reading glasses on a single ear.
The second problem with my mum acting as my supplier is that she has worse eyesight than me. This generally means she buys the wrong strength. My prescription is +2 but I’ve currently got six spare pairs ranging between +1 and +4. There isn’t a +2 amongst them.
To be fair, I’m my own worst enemy at times. Just before Christmas, I was hosting a prestigious awards event and, despite printing the script in big, bold type, I still required my reading glasses.
All went fine during rehearsals, without any problem following the script. However, when I went on stage for real, I suddenly found the words were blurry.
I came out in a cold sweat, wondering why I suddenly couldn’t see properly. It even crossed my mind that I might be having a stroke in front of hundreds of people. But, somehow, I managed to retain my outward composure and blag my way through the mercifully brief pre-dinner introduction.
“I’m going to need more light when I go back on after dinner – I couldn’t see a bloody thing,” I remonstrated back-stage.
“It’s exactly the same level as at rehearsal,” the stagemanager insisted, leading to me walking off in frustration.
It was only when I got back to my table that I realised I’d accidentally picked up a pair of reading glasses belonging to the bloke next to me. They were +3.5 and my pair of +2s were in my jacket pocket when I’d taken to the stage for part one of the ceremony.
Anyway, having recovered from that stressful episode, I was out for a curry with three ageing, short-sighted friends a few nights ago. Yet again, I’d forgotten my reading glasses, so I was struggling with the menu – holding it at arm's length while squinting – until John, a fellow Grandad, came to the rescue.
He’d come up with an ingenious solution. By simply focusing his camera phone on the menu, he was able to magnify the text by sliding his thumb and forefinger apart.
“That’s utterly brilliant,” I sighed, in grateful admiration, as the other two members of our party nodded, sagely, and whipped out their phones to test the solution.
Grandads of the world fear not. Hope is in sight.
