I was sitting on the sofa, minding my own business, when something slid down the back of my neck, making me jump.
“Why are you jumping about?” My wife asked.
“Something just went down my neck, and…” I paused to take my glasses off, “now my glasses feel strange.”
Removing my glasses revealed the problem - the hook that goes behind my left ear had, unaccountably, fallen off, and slid down my neck. I extracted the offending article from it’s new hiding place and examined it.
‘Superglue should do it,” I thought, and set off to do a repair job. Meanwhile I put on my ‘downstairs glasses’ - the ones I keep by my desk in case I get up early and leave my normal spectacles in their case beside the bed. Which is exactly what happens most mornings.
The downstairs glasses have a slightly older prescription than the ones which I was fixing with superglue, but they’re still good enough for most things.
“I think I should probably get some new glasses,” I said to my wife, examining the ones I’ve just fixed.
“Upstairs or downstairs ones?” She asked, in what seemed like a mocking tone. My glasses situation is one of the things that my family seems to find funny. So far as I can see, there’s nothing funny about it.
I already knew which glasses I wanted to get, I take spectacle succession planning quite seriously. For the first time in my life, though, this would involve ordering online, rather than going into a shop, a prospect which seemed fraught with risk.
‘I’m not sure I should be doing this,’ I thought, as I stood in front of a mirror with a ruler, measuring the distance between my pupils. ‘This doesn’t seem like the sort of thing I’m good at.’ The website I wanted to order from from recommends a mobile phone app which, apparently, does the measuring for you, but I couldn’t make it work - not at all. So instead I got out a ruler, and stared into a mirror.
Eventually I felt reassured that I had the right pupil distance, and was ready to make the order. I had already decided which frames I wanted.
“What are you getting?” A friend asked when I told them about my ordering experience.
“Just boring ‘media bloke’ frames,” I said. I don’t have the chutzpah to carry off colourful or exciting glasses. “Slate grey, which is basically black,” I explained.
It took at least a fortnight for the new glasses to arrive, in the meantime I experimented with different ways of measuring the distance between my pupils - always relieved when the result confirmed my original measurements.
When, eventually, they arrived I opened the packet eagerly, and then looked at them with surprise. They were a lot greyer than I expected, and less black..
“I see you’ve gone for ‘millennial grey,’” said the youngest. “What?” I said.
“I see you’ve gone for millennial grey, very fashionable, among millennials…” I stared at the new frames.
“I’m not a millennial,” I said. Then, “I thought they were blacker than this.”
I put them on.
“It’s ok, they make your hair look darker,” the youngest said. “What?” I said. Then I realised that there was something more important to be concerned with - I looked up and down, and to either side, and felt a surge of relief.
“At least I managed to measure my pupil distance ok,” I said.
“Why didn’t you get me to do that?” My wife asked.
“Yeah,” the youngest said, “that doesn’t seem like the sort of thing you’re good at.”
“Turns out I can do that ok,” I said. “But I can’t tell the difference between grey and black.”
“It’s ok,” said my wife, “I bet nobody will even notice you’ve got new glasses.”
“I will find a way of telling people,” I said.
This is my new ‘Saturday column’ - stories of mundanity and mishaps from my life. There’s not supposed to be any point to them. But they might make you smile. Bear with me if I don’t manage every Saturday straight away, I’m working on it.