The Spectacle of the Monster with Four Eyes (who was incidentally looking the wrong way)

I have never had good eye sight; in fact at -7.5 I am reliably informed by optometrists that if my eyesight would get worse then I could be officially registered as blind. For the reader being this blind has its uses such as making you virtually useless in the morning and therefore removed from having to answer the door to the postman at 8am wearing your dubious spare pair of “sleeping” boxer shorts that has an opening at the front big enough to fit an elephants trunk, a fireman’s house and the branch of an oak tree simultaneously (trust me I have tried). Of course this ultimately leads to the insecurity and age old image that your girlfriend, fiancée or lover is instead having to answer the door, dressed in their finest lingerie, outrageously flirts with the postman and eventually leaving you for a uniformed man named Nigel, Alan or Mike whose main topic of conversation is that he gets a good amount of exercise every day and is back at home with a cuppa by 3pm.

The optometrists news actually pleased me, with the primary knowledge I could lay blame at the door of my employers for forcing me to stare at a computer screen for too long (proving my point that work will eventually be the ruin of me) and secondly because I would, with my new rating of severely visually impaired, be able to get the odd behemoth pair of brown rimmed specs for free (sellotaped hinge, additional).

So for many years before the joy of contact lenses became widespread, I and thousands of hapless souls like me were forced into hours of humiliation, torture and sporadic bouts of pain. As any scientist will tell you there are certain things in this universe that under any circumstances should not be mixed, these are toasters and baths, chilli powder and foreplay and of course the most dangerous – glasses and sport.

Schools the world over are attended by genetically impaired children who left to Darwin’s survival of the fittest would last about an hour before some grotesque twist of fate would have them blindly walking into an industrial sized blancmange maker or falling into a fiery pit of the damned. Before I was placed into the educational system I was reliably informed that having to wear a block of metal and plastic on your face is considered so cool, the other kids will immediately stop and compare you to the other cool metal and plastic block wearers such as Bill Gates, Elton John and that politician in the brown suit of the TV last night that nobody can remember the name of. These to a five year old are as cool as rambling.

In schools sports me and my spectacled brethren were given two choices: you play with four eyes or with none. Playing with four eyes meant having a football hoofed in your face was not just humiliating but also carried a certain kind of danger, akin to running around a field with a time bomb strapped to your head, ready to drop its load of shattered glass and twisted metal straight into your retina (at least you could see it coming). The other choice was worse, playing blind. The usual scenario involved me frantically chasing the ‘white blob’, only to find out I’d been chasing a plastic bag for over an hour. I often wondered why the other kids had plastic bags stuffed in their short pockets.

School trips were also complicated. One school project focused on the butterfly, its life cycle and how something fairly ugly can blossom into an object of beauty (ahhh what a metaphor for a adolescent glasses wearer), the project ended with a trip to large plastic bubble, pumped up with hot air and stuffed with plants and butterflies, also traditionally known as a butterfly farm. I had never really been out of Europe (or actually past Jersey at this point) so the idea of being immersed in a tropical (albeit fake) world delighted me. There a few moments in life that you can mark as the birth of a personality trait, good and bad and I think this was the proud moment of birth of cynicism and as every British person knows an invaluable commodity when dealing with day to day life in the UK, or speaking to banks or broadband providers