“Put your chin on the rest and your head against that
bar.” I did as I was told. The medieval torture implement was necessary
because I was at the optician’s for the first time in four years. I had noticed a slight deterioration in my
eyesight, brought about, I thought, by constantly peering at computers in
dimly-lit rooms and offices. The
optician had sent a pleasant letter offering all kinds of discounts if I needed
new spectacles and the lure of a free eye-test, this being Scotland , was a powerful motivating
force.
“Just look at that green light. No, don’t swivel your head.”
As a punishment for head-swivelling, the optician poured
some drops in my eyes. “These are going
to smart a bit,” she said. She was not wrong.
“You won’t be able to drive for three hours.”
She was a slim and attractive Indian woman of about
twenty-five. I was pleased to note that she had myopia herself and was wearing
horn-rimmed spectacles of a type that might be described as ‘designer.’ It was
a comfort to know that she had gone through all this herself at some time. No-one likes to be attended by a dentist with
no teeth.
I was treated to the full range of tests from a blast of air
in each eye to check for glaucoma to the full gamut of lenses in those joke spectacles
that even Groucho Marx wouldn’t have been seen dead in.
The Indian optician ended every sentence with one of two
superlatives, either ‘fantastic’ or ‘brilliant’. My reading of the middle ‘V’
on the lower line was ‘fantastic’, and the fact I didn’t seem to have glaucoma
was ‘brilliant.’
There was one examination I’d never had before. This was to test my peripheral vision. I had to go through the torture instrument
routine again, but this time I was peering down the wrong end of a telescope at
an orange light in what seemed to be an empty firmament. The optician pushed a computer mouse into my
hand.
“When you see a white light flash on and off, press the
clicker. Fantastic.”
I didn’t tell her of a particular difficulty I have, which is
the tendency for white lights to flash on and off in my eyes most of the
time. However I battled gamely on. I was reminded of an episode of ‘The
Prisoner’, in which Number Six was trying to catch a deranged lunatic
lighthouse-keeper’s daughter who was trying to kill him. He was foraging through a village street
trying to find her, and fake targets kept popping up for him to shoot at. The optician’s face was growing longer by the
second.
“We didn’t do very well with that test, did we? You’ll have to come back another day and try
it again, without the drops. Sometimes
they make you see flashes where there aren’t any, and fail to see flashes when
there are. Brilliant.”
For this last test, we sat in an ante-room the size of a
boot-locker. We went back to the main room.
“I’ve got good news and bad,” she said. “Your left eye, the
one for distance, is better than last time, fantastic, but your right eye, the
reading one, is worse, brilliant. Here’s your prescription. I’ll hand you over to the sales lady now. Come
back in two years. Goodbye.”
The sales lady was a cheery Scots girl with red hair and a
nice face. She took one look at me and
said “You’ll be wanting the discount range specs on that stand over there. I’m afraid there isn’t a great deal of
choice.” There wasn’t. I got a free second pair from the obsolescent
stand right at the back, which gave me the choice of Mrs Doubtfire or Magnus
Pyke. My first choice was pure Foggy
Dewhirst.
The sales lady asked me to wear each in turn and look fully
into her eyes.
“Eyes wide open” she said.
“They are.” I have small eyes. She painted a spot on each of the lenses and
held out a hand for £212.
“25% off because you’re over sixty. Come back in three weeks and we’ll have them
ready for you. Goodbye.”
I wandered out into the street. The sun was beating down and its light seemed
to penetrate right to the back of my eyeballs.
For a spell, I couldn’t see anything at all. This was the effect of the drops. I had to catch a bus back to the office
because the searing, slashing light completely disoriented me and I could judge
neither shape nor distance. Luckily, the
effect wore off fairly quickly and, three hours later, just as the optician had
said, I was able to drive safely home. Fantastic.
