Glasses

Like a lot of things in my life, chocolate was the catalyst. That was the way that I found out I wasn’t the same as everybody else. I must have been about five years old, in a newsagent with my mother, and because I’d been good I was allowed a chocolate bar as a treat. That in itself would make the story noteworthy, as I was a troublesome child in general: always asking questions, full of opinions, horribly precocious. When I see children like that, chirping away on tube trains or acting up in restaurants, half of me finds them appalling and half of me feels oddly tender. I hope they have an easier journey to being a grown up than I have. I hope they know better than to read fantasy novels in a caravan on holiday rather than going out and exploring. I hope they make friends, talk to girls and don’t show off quite so much because really, nobody is impressed and one day they won’t be either.

“What bar would you like?” said my mother.

“That one.” I said, pointing in the direction of one of the packets on the counter, a paper wrapping in a primary colour with a cheerful explosion of letters on it. My mother wasn’t happy with that answer though, and this was back in the days when if my mother wasn’t happy there was probably a valid reason for it. Childhood is much more simple like that.

“What’s the name?”

I peered into the distance – except it really wasn’t much of a distance – and tried to make it out. I was a keen reader already by then, even if I hadn’t made huge inroads into the copy of The Odyssey I had won at chess club, and this shouldn’t have been difficult.

“I don’t know. I can’t tell.”

So it was very early in my life that I realised I was destined to spend it behind a pair of screens. My first glasses were the only sort of glasses you got back in the late seventies, aviator style with a thick plastic nosepiece. This was before fancy ultra-thin lenses, too, which is part of the reason why being bespectacled was such an awful tyranny in those days. It was all functional, and about as fashionable as a hearing aid or a leg brace. The exception – tragically – were the heavy tortoiseshell framed glasses you got free with the National Health Service. I wish I’d kept mine; they’d be all the rage today.

For better and for worse, glasses changed my life. I’ve often wondered about the link between needing glasses and your personality. Why are there so few nerds with twenty-twenty vision? Why so few shortsighted sports legends? Do we turn out that way because we wear glasses, or are the two things just an unhappy coincidence? Is there something about myopia we don’t yet completely understand that naturally draws the eyes to comics, liner notes on obscure records or the delights of the Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook? Or is it, like so many things in my life, just a convenient excuse for choices I made that didn’t work out quite how I wanted them to?

It certainly felt, at school at least, like the glasses wearers were the victims of natural deselection, especially during what were cruelly described as physical education lessons. They were an education for me, in that I learned that I didn’t want to do anything physical if I could possibly avoid it. The worst thing was that I could completely understand being so far down the picking order when the captains were choosing sides; after all, who would want to get into a scrum with somebody who can’t really see anything? During football lessons as the popular kids picked their friends I would stand there on the centre circle with the dwindling band of rejects until there were only about half a dozen of us left, human lost property nobody wanted to claim. Do I belong with this lot? I would think in horror, looking around me, Is this my tribe? Of course, they thought exactly the same thing. Why wouldn’t they? It's like the myth that ugly people are attracted to other ugly people, and nobody believes that.

As it happens, I was never picked last for football, which means that I was usually on the winning side. The last person to get picked was Matthew Smith, a puny kid who made me look like a beefcake. He didn’t wear glasses, but from his coordination you would have guessed that he used to own a very thick pair before losing them in a playground scuffle with somebody stronger than him. A paraplegic or somebody with ME, perhaps. He was always picked last and always given the least glamorous job of all, stuck in goal. The popular kids didn’t really care who won, as long as they got to score plenty of goals and play the hero, so it was an arrangement that suited everyone. My misfit friends and I were put in defence, where our job was to part like the Red Sea every time a specimen of physical perfection bore down on us. It played to our strengths and anyway, half the time we weren’t even paying attention.

Our school playing fields were right next to the train line, running from Paddington into Reading. At school we were taught about the feats of Brunel and his army of navvies, hacking huge passages through the hills to open up his great network, and we were taken to see Sonning Cutting and the nearby station at Twyford in a desperate attempt to bring the past to life. The train line ran along the very edge of our suburban town, its main contribution to modern life being that the bridge furthest from the tracks below was known as “Suicide Bridge”. One time as a kid my brother and I wandered over the fence by Suicide Bridge and picked our way delicately down the slope to the side of the rails, led astray by my grandfather. On his command we tossed a two pence piece onto the tracks as an express train zoomed past, and when we picked it up it was warped, smooth and flattened like a Dali creation. It’s one of the only times I remember having fun with my grandfather, and when we got home my mother told us all off.

The reason why playing on the opposite team to Matthew Smith was a ticket to victory had nothing to do with his slight stature, but something even more surreal. He was a keen trainspotter. And so every time a train approached, on its way into town or off to the capital, he would run - at a speed he could never even approach when it was strictly necessary, during athletics for example - out of the goalmouth and to the wire fence at the edge of the playing fields. Once there, he would watch bug-eyed as the carriages clattered by, desperately trying to memorise the number of the train for later on, when it could be deposited in the notebook that saw more attention than his homework. As a goalkeeper he was a liability, but as a performance artist he couldn’t be faulted, and it was an early reminder that there are worse handicaps in life than being shortsighted.

In any case, the glasses seemed to be the perfect accessory to round off some of those awful childhood photos. There I am in my cub scout uniform, holding a trophy and gurning with something that might be pride. In another one I am scowling over a chessboard, hair combed brutally into meek submission. I was a very serious child; kids with glasses often are. My theory is that the pressure of keeping those heavy frames and thick glass lenses perched on your face makes it much easier to frown than to relax. If you could reach into those photographs and take the glasses off the picture would no longer make sense, because nobody with twenty-twenty vision would be caught dead doing those things. It’s a bit like covering the cigarette in the picture of the Hollywood idol and spotting what difference it makes.

It's taken me many years to be at peace with having four eyes. Some of it is about the way glasses have changed - from the popularity of tiny John Lennon spectacles in the sixth form to the kind of rimless frames I wear now, which would have been unimaginable then. There have been some missteps along the way - the rectangular television-shaped lenses I wore when I first went to university, or a rather natty set of plastic frames my friend Dave told me "make you look like a hairdresser". Thinner lenses have helped, too, so I don't have to peer through fishbowls at the end of my nose.

But really I think what changed is more about being comfortable in my own skin now and recognising that there's no longer any shame in it. Oddly enough, the best way of summing it up that I ever heard came from my friend Daniel. He was an inveterate spectacles wearer, the sort that gave us all a bad name, and many years later he grew a beard (he looked a bit like Gerry Adams, which is not a look anyone aims for) and gave all beard wearers a bad name too. He probably even gave people called Daniel a bad name, and a lot of them don’t need any help with that. But he said something about glasses that has always stuck with me. “It’s great being shortsighted. Because any time I like I can take my glasses off and the world looks just like an Impressionist painting.” I like that, but not because it sums up what needing glasses is like, or because only somebody who wears glasses would say it. That last one is just stating the obvious. No, I think like it because I have a sneaking feeling that only somebody who needs glasses would think that way at all.