Now I can see properly I wonder if I really should have gone to Specsavers
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Ever since discovering I was vain, aged five, I’ve had a complicated relationship with my sight.
It started in the first year of primary school when I was prescribed glasses and instinctively vowed there and then never to wear them in public.
My vanity meant that at school anything on the black/white board, and in most text books, was a blur.
During one memorable parents’ evening, my mum asked how I was getting on with my glasses.
“Glasses?”, my teacher quizzically responded. “Fiona doesn’t wear glasses.” A habit I’ve continued to practise.
It means that over the years I’ve ignored countless people who’ve apparently waved to me from across the street, I’ve missed spectacular goals at my boys’ football matches, not to mention Premier League games.
Ridiculously, I read papers – on the tube, train, in cafes etc – in which I can only make out headlines and pictures.
(Image: Getty)
My husband has to read out the menu in restaurants and decipher small-print in the supermarket. Who said romance was dead?
Career-wise I’ve survived by winging most speeches at conferences, charity galas, award ceremonies etc, as well as making my TV day job a lot more precarious than it should be.
Especially the years of ‘live’ breakfast TV, when I’d often have key interview questions, written while wearing my glasses, that I couldn’t make out once I was on the sofa without them.
‘Winging it’ is the story of my blurred-vision life so far. Luckily for my husband, family and friends, though, there are some advantages – my poorly peepers have always, for example, presented them in a very attractive light.
On Monday that all changed when I nipped off to Specsavers and skipped home with soft, monthly, disposable contact lenses, which previously, because of my prescription, hadn’t been available to me.
It’s like a whole new world. I’m writing this without the aid of my glasses, for instance. It’s a world of wonder and delight. Apart from the horrific realisation that I have a face I don’t recognise any more.
In my previous, cosy, blurry world I was ageless. Now, I’m confronted with a woman who’s clearly had one hell of a life and buckets of red wine.
I thought I still ‘had it’. It turns out I’ve had it.
And, following a recent perusal, it seems my husband has too.
What’s the old saying? ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’? I’m thinking I’d rather the version I once beheld, rather than the one I now behold.
Now, where did I put those glasses?