LUV & HAT

LUV - Being a short-sighted child is no fun. Ask anyone. They’ll tell you that, like me, their first memory was of some blurry arsehole barking “Well YOU’LL never be a fighter pilot!” right into their face. And after that, it’s all downhill. When you’re short-sighted, your life becomes defined by its limitations.

But that’s nothing compared with having to wear glasses to school. It’s not like wearing glasses as an adult, where you can offset them with a tiny hat and an asymmetrical haircut and a 10p Oxfam cardigan in the desperate hope that you’ll be mistaken for an obnoxious Shoreditch fuckpipe. No, when you’re a child your glasses are your worst enemy.

They’re the things that get you called things like ‘Double Glazing’ and ‘Milky Bar Kid’. They’re the things that break when you play football, that steam up when you walk into a warm room in winter, that reduce swimming to a process of blindly flailing around inside a giant wet smudge. And then you get older, and glasses become the things that get caked with foundation on the rare occasion that you’re actually allowed to kiss a girl. And people constantly ask if they can try them on. But they don’t ask toothless people if they can try on their dentures, do they? Oh no. It’s discrimination, plain and simple.

But contact lenses? Contact lenses set you free. True, you might not think that the first time you try them on, after spending half an hour gingerly jabbing at your eyeball until it turns into a livid red jelly of tears and nerve endings, but they do. Slide in a pair of contact lenses and the world suddenly transforms. Strangers start noticing you. Watching a 3D movie no longer involves basically stacking things onto the end of your nose. Best of all, people stop immediately assuming that short-sightedness is your biggest flaw - they’ll have to take time to discover that it’s actually your horrible breath or innate mistrust of women, just like they have to do with normal people.

It doesn’t stop there. You can head footballs without worrying that you’ll have to spend the next fortnight picking shards of metal and glass out of your face. You can wear actual sunglasses, and not those enormous sunglasses that fit over your normal glasses and make you look like a cross between the Terminator and a pensioner with exploding cataracts. You can go swimming. OK, technically you can’t go swimming because there’s a good chance that you’ll spend the next few days so squinty and red-eyed that most people will automatically think you’re a crack addict but, you know, don’t tell anyone.

Best of all, wearing contact lenses is basically a license to regularly spend several hours at a time on your hands and knees, combing through carpets with your fingers and muttering “Oh for fuck’s sake, it must be around here somewhere.” And how many people with 20/20 vision get to do that, huh? None of them. That’s why contact lenses - and the people who wear them - wonderful.
- Stuart Heritage

HAT - Unlike Stuart Heritage, I haven’t been blind since birth – my eyesight started deteriorating in my twenties. Apparently this is quite common, so I think people should warn you about this shit, just the way they should warn you that one morning you may peel back your duvet to find - not a stomach exactly - but a sort of fleshy bunched-up bumbag with a long hair sticking out of it; and that, if you’re female and manage get to 27 without kerflumping a series of sprogs out of your vajayay, anyone older than you is legally obliged to say “tick tick tick” whenever they see you.

Having your eyesight suddenly fail you is very unsettling. One minute you’re all THAT HADRON’S OUT OF PLACE MUM, I CAN SEE IT A MILE OFF LOL and the next you’re blundering through Sainsbury’s wondering how long they’ve had a ‘Breasts’ aisle and why they’ve made all the checkouts smudge together. At which point you’ll have three choices:

1. LASER EYE SURGERY – paying a Bond villain to clamp your eyes open and fire up a WMD while you wonder who the hell is barbecueing pork around here because something smells delicious.
   
   
2. GLASSES – which make you look like your own grandmother or a member of the Gestapo.
   
   
3. CONTACT LENSES.

Obviously you choose contact lenses, because they snap the fuzzy, indistinct world into whining, crystal HD clarity with lines and edges and depth, give you your peripheral vision back and – unless someone examines you very closely – you don’t look like a massive specker. 

Unfortunately, contact lenses are bastards, which is why I hate them.  

PUTTING THEM IN
They’re so FUCKING FIDDLY. You have to balance a lens on your fingertip, pinion your eyelashes open, then sort of lob the lens hopefully at your eyeball, praying that it doesn’t a) have grit in it, otherwise you’ll have to walk around with a sore eye all day, involuntarily winking at probably some very unattractive people, and b) fall on the floor – because if it does, you’re fucked. 

I mean, I don’t know if you’ve ever TRIED to find a tiny transparent nothing on a tiled surface when your eyesight is so bad that you genuinely can’t distinguish between a departing bus and a fat woman in a red coat, but it is JOLLY HARD. Never mind the fact that your contact lens might not even be lost - it might be, as I discovered three days after losing one, folded up behind your eyeball.  

TAKING THEM OUT
Having to remove your contacts at night is a pain in the arse. It means that, if you bring a young man home and slip into the bathroom before bed, he’ll expect to see you emerge resplendent in four-inch spike heels and an Agent Provocateur basque. So imagine his confusion when you plod out in your glasses and he doesn’t know whether you’re going to wipe his face with a spitty tissue or reenact several key scenes from ‘Allo ‘Allo at him.

Which is why contact lenses - even though I’m wearing some right fucking now - can SUCK IT.
- Robyn Wilder