Here's looking at you

Today

It's no good; I've reached that point where I need spectacles to look for my spectacles. The other day I'd put them down while applying my makeup and was actually driving up the Close before I realised I hadn't got them. And it was quite a job searching for them among my makeup brushes and other debris.

I wear varifocals which are great for almost everything except walking downstairs. Then the focal lengths are the wrong way round so I either walk down peering at my feet like an old lady (which I guess I am) or I take them off, which necessitates another search for them.

I'm not a candidate for varifocal contact lenses (apparently one lens is close and one distance) because my two eyes are so different.

Paul surprised an old friend of ours the other day by telling him that I barely see out of the left eye. I suppose I have to be glad that it isn't obvious.

In My Day

I have what is known as a "lazy eye". I'm not certain that I like this morally-laden way of describing it as though it could see better if only it just stopped lazing around, sipping margaritas. It affects my left eye only. Mamma always thought that it was as a result of my having an infection in my eyelashes on that side when I was very little, although various ophthalmic experts have disagreed with this.

What it means is that my brain simply doesn't respond to signals from the eye, which is quite OK in itself.

When I was little the first solution suggested by the NHS was that I wear an eye patch over the good eye and a very smart pair of pink wire-framed glasses (I've an idea they eventually became considered quite cool by certain people during the sartorially challenged '70s). The plan was that this therapy would force the only available eye to get off its backside and do some work.

Perhaps this might have worked if I hadn't pulled the eyepatch off whenever no-one was looking and succeeded in "accidentally" breaking those oh-so-cool glasses at an early stage. Somehow Mamma, who was fairly laissez-faire in some matters, never took me back to be prescribed more. (What would be the point? I'd only lose them again.)

What was curable, suggested the medics, was my squint. It was actually only a slight cast to the left, but we were all agreed that it detracted from my undeniable beauty. The cause, we were told, was a tightening of the muscle to the left of the eye. Cut that and give it a chance to grow back straight and all would be well.

So, when I was ten, I was booked into King's College Hospital in Camberwell for the operation. I remember being on a normal surgical ward and being rather a mascot among the other, adult patients. I remember coming round after the op and being very sick, bringing up some orange juice. Mamma came to visit and brought me a new and cute nightie which had a pattern of alarm clocks on it. My eye felt very sore and I was taught how to make and given the responsibility for administering a saline solution.

The eye soon recovered, as did the squint,and those that love me even today know when I'm feeling tired or stressed as my eye wanders off portside.

At one time Beatrice and I performed a folk-song together _ "The Drummer and the One-eyed Cook". Strange that it was Beatrice who played the cook!

Anyway, I hate wearing specs and not even the classiest fashion mags in the world will ever convince me that glasses look stylish.