Advent Thought 11

It's taken me a while to come to terms with being a glasses wearer. The first signs of deterioration came when, aged about 45, it was commented that if I held the newspaper any further away it would be in the next room.

Off I went to Specsavers, returning with a prescription for reading glasses. From then on, every couple of years, I had to remember that if I was finding it hard to concentrate on reading it was probably because I needed an eye test. Cheaper than an arm extension.

Wind forward to about 2007 and I had become the sort of person who put their glasses on and off a lot, or kept them on the end of my nose and looked over them. My Dad wore his glasses on a chain round his neck. Never liked that look.

And so it was back to Specsavers again to embrace varifocals. It was, as many have said, weird at first. My peripheral vision was full of kaleidoscopic fault-lines for a couple of days. It takes longer for others but your brain soon works out how to interpret the images.

I became a permanent glasses wearer and now I can't do without them. That said, many years of being comfortable walking around the house in the dark have meant I don't need to put them on to pop downstairs in the night for whatever you need to pop downstairs in the night for. But otherwise I wear them all the time.

I have a terrific advantage over many generations of ancestors for whom the end of eyesight would have meant the end of close-quarters work.

Advent. A time for seeing things as they really are. What do you take for granted? Devote a moment or two to gratitude.