Glasses

It comes to something when I can say, without a hint of irony, that I lose track of the number of times I've lost track of my glasses. They seem to be perpetually in a place I'm not. If I am in the house, my glasses are in the car. If I am in the car, the glasses are in the shed. Or on the mantelpiece, down the side of the sofa, underneath a pile of newspapers, or beside my toothbrush in the bathroom.

Bizarrely, my glasses seem not only to be in places I'm not but, sometimes, in places I have no recollection of ever being. Or in places where I can think of no rational explanation as to how they came to be there. I can just about explain how they could have found their way into the refrigerator - until recently when they changed the formulation, I kept my Neupro patches in the salad crisper. In an improbable act of tidiness, I could just possibly have put my glasses there while putting the Neupro box back.

You're right. I don't really believe that explanation myself.

And how they found their way into the big 25 kg bag of dog food I shall never know, although alien abduction increasingly looks favourite.

It also seems to be a ground rule that the implausibility of locating the glasses is directly proportional to the necessity of finding them. If you don't need the glasses until next Tuesday, there they are on the cocktail cabinet. If you have five minutes before leaving to take the mother-in-law to Wednesday afternoon bridge, you can be sure that the glasses have inadvertently been left in a pair of khaki shorts you lent to the next-door neighbour to use while trekking in Nepal. You get my drift.

There has to be a better way. Some way of ensuring I don't find myself optically challenged. Alex's suggestion of attaching them to my head with a staple gun, whilst certainly a sort of solution, is probably not one I shall be taking up any time soon. Moreover, it suggests he spends too much time playing video games. We really should hide the Xbox.

So when Alice told me the other day that contact lenses worked for her, my reaction was pretty much "Bingo!" Actually my first reaction was "I didn't know you wore contacts".

"Dad, until last weekend, you didn't realise I wore glasses" she said "for the last four years".

"I've been busy" was the best I could muster in reply.

"And you wonder why I have middle child syndrome" she said, eyebrow arched.

Note to self -- must try harder. No, really must try harder.

I picked up the phone. It was a toss up between the opticians or the Samaritans.

"Hello" I said "can I make an appointment to be fitted for contact lenses please".

[To be continued]