Eye Spy

My last post was about my eyes, or more accurately my appalling eyesight. For this post I want to talk about the problem I have with eyes.

I hate them.

Perhaps that’s too strong a word.

I love gazing into Mrs PM’s eyes and I have no problem looking at a person’s eyes when I’m talking to them. In fact, it is sometimes difficult to drag my eyes away from the other person’s eyes, particularly if they are female. I try not to look men in the eye because, typically, it is a sign of aggression. I only do so when I’m trying to make a point.

But I love looking at women’s eyes. They are fascinating.

So why did I say that I hate eyes? Allow me to explain.

In my opinion eyes belong in eye sockets and nowhere else. That’s where they live. That is their accommodation and it is permanent accommodation. They have no business trying to escape from their prisons. Moreover, I should only be able to see that fraction of the eyeball that protrudes from the eye socket.

Furthermore, eyes should not be touched by anything but the inside of an eyelid. And I mean anything. I don’t want to see fingers near eyes and definitely not anything sharp. I can watch horror films but the moment anything like a needle goes anywhere near an eye I’m afraid I have to vomit.

Finally, eyes should be appreciated from a distance. I don’t want to get up close and personal with anybody’s eye – not even my own. I do not want to see bloodshot eyes or weird eyes.

You may have guessed something about me but if you are still puzzled then allow me to make my position clear.

I AM VERY, VERY, VERY, VERY, VERY, VERY, VERY SQUEAMISH ABOUT EYES.

Allow me to take you on a journey through my life in order to explain how this weird fear of eyes has hindered me.

I used to love playing football but my appalling short-sightedness was a major problem. In the early days, when I first acquired glasses, I used to play wearing them. You can imagine what happened. I destroyed several pairs and totally annoyed my parents. Balls have hit me in the face, I’ve suffered cuts and glasses have flown off my head only to be stamped on accidentally by myself and others in an attempt to find them.

At junior school I was told in no uncertain terms that I was not allowed to play football in my spectacles. And this left me with several grave problems; I couldn’t see my team mates; I couldn’t see the ball; I was hopeless as a result.

So I suffered until I left school and went to university. My mother wasn’t well off and I was left to fend for myself on a paltry student grant. The subject of contact lenses came up and some of my friends were starting to invest in them (or more accurately their parents were).

I couldn’t afford them so I didn’t bother – that is until I started playing football at work.

All of a sudden I had the cash to be able to afford them. I played football several times a week in a brightly lit enclosed gym and I could cope with the difficulty of not seeing because everybody wore bright clothes; I just passed to a distant red blob for example.

And then we started playing 11-a-side outside and I simply couldn’t see. The goalkeeper hoofed the ball up the field in my direction and all of my teams mates yelled “Dave! Dave! DAVE!!!!” as I ran blindly up the wing. I turned around and simply could not see the ball until it was two inches from my face, giving me approximately one nanosecond to move my head out of the way. Of course I failed, got the ball square on the nose and fell over in a heap with all players laughing at my blind stupidity including my own team mates.

I played with my spare glasses on one occasion and the ball smacked me square in the face, causing the frames to dig in and cut my just above my eye, wrecking yet another pair of glasses.

I had to get contact lenses.

My optician was offering a “contact lens” trial for the princely sum of £15. The idea behind it was that I would allow a man to put a pair of contact lenses in my eyes to see how they felt and whether they were suitable.

And it was a trial and the biggest waste of £15 in my life.

Each time he approached my eye, I flinched and pulled my head back. Deep down in my mind, my fear of eyes was kicking in. My brain screamed at me:

DON’T LET HIM NEAR YOUR EYES.

After ten minutes of frustration, he started to get annoyed.

“LOOK – I HAVE TO DO THIS!” he said, trying his best to be friendly with his patience at snapping point.

“OK, I’m sorry,” I said.

He tried once more and this time I forced myself to comply.

“That’s better,” he said as he gently approached my eye.

And then I flinched again. I thought he was going to punch me.

At that point, something happened within. My brain had been screaming at me not to allow this man to touch my eyeball or even get within an inch of it. The effort and the fear combined to create a tsunami of nausea within.

“I feel sick,” I declared.

The optician almost fell off his chair. Panicking, he rushed out of the little room, while I sat there like a complete lemon, clutching my head and trying to surf the wave of queasiness threatening to engulf me.

He returned with a glass of water and said “I don’t think contact lenses are suitable for you.”

No shit, Sherlock!

Suffice it to say my brush with contact lenses failed. Who was I kidding anyway? There was no way I would have found the courage to put them in and take them off. Shortly afterwards I gave up football.

I was quite pleased to have failed because a friend told me a horror story about his experience with contact lenses. He had wobbled home drunk one night and collapsed onto his settee where he fell asleep. He woke up at three in the morning and decided to find his bed. However, he was convinced that he still had his contact lenses in and spent a good ten minutes pinching his eyeball trying to extract them, only to discover that he had taken them out earlier.

I think I threw up at this point in the story.

Mrs PM used to wear contact lenses and glasses occasionally too.

She has no qualms about touching her eye or doing anything else with them. It was no surprise to me when she announced a few years ago that she was going to have laser eye surgery.

As is usual with Mrs PM, she doesn’t do things by halves; she goes in stampeding like a crazed animal.

“I’m going to have both eyes done at once,” she declared. “I need you to come with me.”

At the time I didn’t know anything about laser eye surgery. I am a curious soul so I did a little research. I wish I hadn’t.

Naively, I assumed that the laser altered the shape of you lens, thus correcting the focal length.

What I discovered chilled me to the very marrow of my bones, so much so that I can barely bring myself to type the words that describe the procedures available. Suffice it to say it involves cutting and burning the eyeball.

On the day of the surgery, I escorted Mrs PM to the clinic in the centre of Manchester, like the devoted partner I am. Mrs PM was calm and assured, if not a little nervous; I was a total wreck.

Mrs PM was offered valium; I demanded some but was refused.

As we waited, I noticed three other people, one of whom had one eye bandaged. Mrs PM, succumbing to the effects of the valium, was called in.

The guy with the bandage started a conversation with me.

Mr Bandage: Are you having your eyes done?

PM: No! I’m too squeamish.

Mr Bandage: You should you know – it’s fabulous.

PM: Why is your eye bandaged?

Mr Bandage: Oh they got it wrong and are doing it again.

AGAIN????? So this man’s eye had been butchered, they had messed up and now his eye was going to be butchered again?

Mrs PM went in for her “treatment”. At this point I noticed a funny smell pervading through the waiting room.

PM: I wonder what that funny smell is.

Mr Bandage: That’s the laser burning her eyes.

PM: You mean that the smell is burning eyeball?

Mr Bandage: Yes – that’s a good way of putting it.

He watched in amusement as I rushed to the bathroom to do battle with yet another eye-related tsunami of nausea. I just got out in time to see a valium-drugged Mrs PM wobbling out of the eyeball burning room.

Thankfully, Mrs PM’s laser treatment worked a treat and she now has perfect eyesight.

I, on the other hand, have the same poor short-sightedness coupled with long-sightedness.

How the hell can I have BOTH???

To cure this new problem with my pathetic eyes, I have just acquired a pair of varifocals. I am just getting used to the concept of having to adjust my eyes to look through the correct part of the lens - and I haven't fallen over once.

I suffered headaches for the first day, coupled with a “swimming sensation” and a total fear of walking downstairs – it was as if I looking at stuff through drunk eyes.

Thankfully I am used to them now and don’t wobble around like a crazed drunkard.

It does mean that I can see distance and read without having to take off my glasses.

Well, that’s enough about my eyes. I’ve suffered name calling, humiliation and nausea. I’ve suffered pain, torment and heartache.

The one good thing about this modern world is that wearing glasses is now considered “cool” so I look like a fashion icon.

My new glasses, selected by Mrs PM, are trendy and make me look, in her words, “sexy”. Other ladies have said that I look "intelligent".

Take that Joe 90! Take that Milky Bar kid! Take that skinheads who took the piss out of me in the pub. Take that kid whose nose I bloodied for calling me "four eyes".

I love my glasses.

Blind As A Bat

Somebody told me that newborn babies can’t see and that their eyesight dramatically improves. I still have the vision of a newborn baby – without my glasses I can barely see past the end of my nose.

My glasses are my best friend. Without them I am a shadow of myself; I am incomplete; I am Mr Magoo.



This is the story of how we met.

When I was a young child, my blurred vision seemed perfectly normal to me; it must have done. I must have adapted to the fact that I couldn’t see a bloody thing. To me it seemed perfectly natural to sit in front of our black and white television watching Thunderbirds. When I say “in front”, I mean with my nose pressed firmly against the tube.

My parents used to scold me and drag me back from the TV saying things like “if you sit too close to the TV you’ll go blind”. I must have stared at their blurred outlines and thought “Crikey! You mean my eyesight can get WORSE???”

Until I started school, I would sit on the settee watching television, staring at the box in the corner of the room unable to get a clear image of what was going on.

“This is the most stupid invention ever,” I thought. “All I can see is a bunch of wiggly blurred outlines.”

I had nothing to compare the images with. It was perfectly normal to me.

I started school aged five and nothing changed. I was handed books to read and, being short-sighted, I could read totally clearly. I couldn’t see what the teacher wrote on the blackboard but I didn’t actually need to – because I was clever and it was all in the book right in front of my eyes. Nobody was any the wiser, including me.

Eventually, when I turned seven, the teaching methods changed and we had to pay more attention to the drivel that teachers wrote on the blackboard; we were expected to copy it down. Having no idea that I was half blind, I assumed that there was a kind of ripple effect from the blackboard. The teacher wrote down a sentence for the kids in the front row; the kids in the second row copied the sentence from the kids in the front row and so on until it reached me. The problem was that the kid I copied from was as thick as an elephant sandwich so I simply copied down the gibberish that he wrote.

He couldn’t spell and his writing was appalling; I thought he was insane.

It was only when the teacher looked at my work that he put two and two together; I was either short-sighted or totally weird I’m both of course, but he didn’t know that at the time; he had a foolproof plan to work out which.

“Read what’s on the blackboard,” he bawled at me.

“I can’t,” I replied. “You write too small.”

The teacher decided that I was not weird but short-sighted. He told my mother and she dragged me off to my first optician appointment. I sat down in a scary chair in a small room and a scary old man put a contraption on my head that vaguely looked like a pair of glasses. He didn’t put any lenses into this contraption.



“Read those letters to me,” he barked.

“What letters?” I replied.

“Oh dear,” he sighed.

And then my life changed.

First of all, he put a black lens in the left socket of the device and a clear lens in the other side.

“Read those letters to me,” he repeated.

“AAAAAARRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!” I screamed. “I CAN SEE!!!! I AM BIONIC!!!!!! I CAN SEE!!!!!!!”

And I could. I could see everything. It was as if somebody had wiped my eyeballs with a rag. Everything became crystal clear. Not only could I see the letters, I could also see a spider crapping a web in the corner of the room.

“I CAN SEE A SPIDER CRAPPING A WEB!! This room’s filthy you know.”

“Just read the letters,” he snarled.

“Q I R T Y B P” I said triumphantly before adding a few more with a giggle:

“P O O”

“W I L L Y”

“F A R T”

After a few more lenses, and a couple of cracks around the bonce for being cheeky, the optician homed in on my prescription. Finally, he took off the contraption and told me to go.

“Can’t I take it with me?” I asked. “I can’t see properly now.”

He laughed and told me that my glasses would arrive in a couple of weeks and I would be able to see clearly for ever.

I was overjoyed and I couldn’t wait to get them. Two weeks later I sat on the sofa and suddenly realised what the point of the TV was.

Sadly, acquiring my first pair of glasses was a bittersweet experience. I could see great distances and was therefore deliriously happy, running around like a demented imbecile with my new found vision. Unfortunately, in my school year, nobody else wore glasses except me.

I was mocked – mercilessly.

Within two minutes of arriving at school on that first day with by glasses, kids who I thought were my friends, were calling me “Four eyes” and “Specky” and other derogatory names. In fact, my first altercation with a teacher happened on that very day. I remember it well and it is probably one of the reasons why I have a problem with authority today.

It was the teacher who had noticed my poor eyesight so, looking back, I should really have shaken the man’s hand and given him all of my worldly possessions (a toy robot, a football and my bogey collection); I should have been forever in his debt. However, on that first day, I grew to hate him.

“Specky four eyes,” I was called over and over again and something had to give. The anger built up and up and up and up until finally I broke.

I forget the name of the poor kid who pushed me into the abyss of wrath but I bet he remembers me.

“What’s it like to look like a specky four-eyed girl?” he said.

“What’s it like to be in pain, you BUGGER!!!” I screamed as I hit him square on the nose with all my might, actually giving him a nose bleed.

The teacher saw it all, grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and dragged me into the library, which was a room that we dubbed “the naughty room”; people waited there to receive the cane in those days of corporal punishment.

“Sit down!” shouted the teacher. “How DARE you hit another child; AND use language like that.”

I was still enraged and, without thinking of the consequences, I turned on him. I couldn't believe that I was being punished after the ruthless name calling that had driven me to violence. And now the teacher was my target; this man who had helped me see; this man who was my hero; this responsible human being who now turned out to be a complete arse. I lost any respect for him.

“THAT BUGGER HAS BEEN CALLING ME FOUR EYES ALL DAY! WHY AM I IN TROUBLE?” I screamed exploding in a blend of tears, snot and spit. I might also have wet my pants – I’m not sure. I simply couln't believe what was happening.

I forget the events after that, such was my trauma, but I do know that I soon realised my predicament and may suffer the wrath of the headmaster, resulting in six hefty whacks across the arse with his cane. After all this was a strict catholic school and using foul language and violence was regarded as a pretty bad sin. Furthermore, I feared that I might end up in hell with Satan himself calling me “Four Eyes” for eternity while punching me on the nose.

I do know that the headmaster got involved and when I explained, through floods of tears, snot and spit, about the persecution I had received from my so-called friends, it must have turned the tide somewhat.

In the end I had to suffer punishment but the teacher and headmaster were lenient.

The kid I had smacked on the nose was also punished and ended up sitting next to me in the library for an hour. Our punishment was missing the PE lesson, which we both loved, and hundreds of lines. We had to write sheets and sheets of lines: mine were meant to drill into me that I should never use the foul language I had used and I had to write out repeatedly the line:

“Let me no wrong or idle word unthinking say. Set thou thy seal upon my lips just for today”

from the old hymn “Just For Today”

I think my tormentor and victim of my violence had to write some crap about being nice to unfortunate people.

After that, certain kids thought twice about calling me “Four Eyes” at school, for a while at least. It wasn’t long before I was called names again but by then I was hardened to it. “Four eyes” and other derogatory terms stuck with me throughout my early childhood and youth and I still wince when I hear similar phrases now (though thankfully I haven’t heard it for quite a few years now).

As you can imagine, though, “Four Eyes” and “Specky” weren’t the only insults that were hurled my way.

It was typical that I was born and grew up at a time when there were not one but TWO of my nemeses on the TV.

The first was “The Milky Bar Kid”, a boy about my age with blond hair and glasses, just like me, who dressed up as a cowboy and ate white chocolate bars called Milky Bars. I hated the kid and I hated Milky Bars, not only because of the torment that came my way but also the taste.

White chocolate? What crazy mutant dreamed that up?

Here is my first nemesis:



With my wild blond hair and glasses I looked like a crazed version of the Milky Bar Kid who had been assaulted with a particularly potent ugly stick.

My second nemesis was “Joe 90” and in many ways this was even worse because the name “Joe 90” stuck for years and years. Who is "Joe 90"? In case you don’t know, here he is:



One of the last times I remember having “Joe 90” trauma was when I was nineteen. I was about to leave a pub in Walsall town centre with a couple of friends when I noticed a bunch of skinheads. As we walked past, the skinheads, in a coordinated harmonious manner that belied their Neanderthal stupidity, gave a rendition of the “Joe 90” theme tune.

“JOE 90 – DA DA DA DAH DADA DADA DADA DA DAH!”

and bellowed with laughter. We all walked out and I told my mates to run to the next pub.

“Why?” asked one. “They were just taking the piss. They’re not coming after us.”

“Just run,” I said. “Because they will be coming after us.”

They walked, thinking I had had a pint too many. When I went back into the pub, however, they changed their mind and set off for the next pub at a trot.

Inside the pub, I walked up to the skinheads as they laughed, amused by their piss-taking. Years of being called “Joe 90” had finally got to me and having had a pint or two of lager and lime I felt it was time to tell them what I thought. And I did. I can’t recall exactly what I said but I think I accused them of having dog-shit for brains and the intellectual capacity of a particularly stupid dung beetle.

Thankfully, at the time, I was fit and fast and was out of the pub before they could react. Whether they chased me or not, I don’t know. But I felt better for telling them what I thought, that’s for sure.

Of course, I wouldn’t do anything that stupid now; I’d probably join in their laughter and chat to them.

That’s not the end of my story about my relationship with my glasses. There is much more to come.

What do you mean “Oh no!!!”??????

By the way, the picture at the start of the post is me aged twelve. See what I mean about being a mad-haired version of “The Milky Bar Kid”?