We were standing together on a stage rehearsing our lines for an awards ceremony. I was struggling to read the autocue, which was at the back of a cavernous hall. 

“I’m half blind,” I explained. “Not as blind as me, I bet,” Claudia replied, beginning a game well-known to the myopically challenged – “Who’s got the stronger prescription?” 

Over 50 years it’s a game I had only lost once. Until that conversation. “Get your eyes done” she implored and started to list all the benefits of not having to wear lumps of glass or plastic on your face or, worse still, insert them in your eyes – something I could never get used to.

As Claudia spoke I thought of all the irritations of being a glasses wearer. Waking up unable to see well enough to find the very things that will make you see well enough. Each day for me has begun with the Great Glasses Hunt – patting the bedside table and sometimes scouring the floor on hands and knees to find the bloody things. 

Brushing the rain off one lens then the other before having to start the whole damned ritual again. Hanging on to the walls at the swimming baths, unable to find your way to the water, let alone actually see any of the children who’d run off without you. And that steam – the endless sodding steam – that clouds your vision when your face is covered by a mask.

I thought back to my school days and being dubbed, inevitably, ‘Speccy four-eyes’. Might I have been a better rugby player if I’d been able to see the ball when it was being thrown to me? 

Might I have been a bit tougher if I hadn’t prepared for my trips to the Stretford End at Old Trafford by tying my glasses to my head, anxious that they’d get knocked off as the crowd surged towards the pitch after a goal? 

Might that girl I loved from afar have reciprocated my passion? No, almost certainly not, but I took the number of Claudia’s surgeon.

It took something more than petty frustrations and childish insecurities to finally convince me to call him three or so years later. We myopics get cataracts sooner and quicker than everyone else. It was time for surgery.

Those who are not short-sighted find it very hard to understand. Even sophisticated adults I know sometimes hold up their hand and ask: “How many fingers can you see?” 

The non-myopically challenged seem to think there’s a wall beyond which there’s blindness for us folk with specs. The truth is much more mundane. What we see is all a great big blur. There are no crisp lines, clear shapes or distinct faces. It’s like looking at yourself in a steamed-up mirror.