TELESCOPES AND CLOCKS

Birthday week was a rousing success. Though I did have to get my eyes tested - all in all, a peculiar experience. Plus, now I’m getting adverts for Stannah stairlifts.

“When it's time for a stairlift, don't put it off,” say the manufacturers. They do look convenient.

No Matt. Stop it. You’re 47.

“So, 47?” asked the optometrist. I nodded silently.

The eye test’s odd though, isn’t it? For some reason they spray you in the eyes, blind you with a bright flash, and then ask you whether you can see. The optometrist however, was kind enough to tell me I was ‘doing great’, even though I knew for a fact I’d read some of the Bs as E, F, and even S on the Snelling Chart.

After examining two pictures of Mars on her computer screens, a short discussion of transition lenses and varifocals (I am 47), I was led back to the light to choose my frames, alongside a person I’d never met who didn’t really have any opinions about what looked good on my face. I needed Sammy. I was suddenly wondering how I’d ever done this without her.

The problem is that you can’t really see yourself. There’s a blurry image of you in some far away mirror, wearing a selection of swanky frames, but without your glasses on… it’s an impressionist painting and a game of guess who. Thankfully, Sammy turned up at just the right moment.

Several hours later (okay maybe not, but certainly after the assistant’s shift ended and she’d grown bored of carrying a tray of spectacles around) we’d settled on specs that don’t make my face too long, that aren’t too nerdy, and that don’t make me look ancient. So it was with relief that I sat down, ready to pay and go home.

Now. Here’s where my audience splits neatly into two. For the glasses wearers, you know exactly what’s coming next. Oh you know precisely the twinge of fear and disbelief, followed by the nonchalant response to your gulping. For the non-glasses-wearers, those unspectacled twenty-twentiers who can somehow read small print from half a mile away like a bunch of sparrow hawks or helicopter pilots… you lot should count yourself lucky; the rest of us will tell you that our corrective lenses (and accompanying framework by which we enjoy the privilege of being able to see) costs about the same as two short holidays. So, people. Look after your eyes.

I pick them up this week.

If you really need the loo and you’re downstairs and the loo is upstairs, would a stairlift get you there in time? That would seem like a down-side. You’d have to manage your water intake carefully I suppose. Or. Well, I don’t want to think about it. We’d have to clear out our downstairs bathroom.

Why am I getting adverts for these things? What’s next: walk-in baths as endorsed by Tony Blackburn? Come on world, I’m 47.

Well. We had great birthdays. Sammy was particularly celebrated, which I was most pleased about. Meanwhile I had a day out at the Royal Observatory where I ended up wandering through rooms of old telescopes and clocks.

Old telescopes and clocks. How very apt.