Like most great revelations, it occurred
late at night on a street corner. I was walking home - sober, I should
add – with my fiancée down Seven Sisters Road, the busy London
thoroughfare near to where we live. As we approached our turning, I saw,
no more than a few feet away, what I thought to be an urban fox.
“Look, it’s just sitting there looking at us,” I shouted. She followed
my gaze to what turned out to be, in fact, a large upturned brown paper
KFC bag squatting on the pavement. I was booked in for an eye test the
very next morning. Yesterday, I was presented with my first pair of
glasses.
I say revelation, but deep
down I had seen this coming – albeit through rather blurred eyes. I had
noticed I was going home with headaches following a day’s tapping away
at my computer keyboard; the various names of worldwide cities on the
clocks suspended above the Telegraph newsroom had long stopped making
sense. New Delhi looked like New York. If you’d asked me to point
towards Moscow I could very easily have sent you in the direction of
Sydney.
Yet I had suffered in
silence, reluctant to confess my ailment. Glasses have, of course,
nowadays been reborn as a fashion essential – watch Johnny Depp and Robert Downey Junior swanning around in theirs. But I am a child of the Eighties and Nineties where glasses were most certainly not cool.
Arnie and Bruce Willis were shades or nothing type of guys. Hulk Hogan would most likely snatch them off and kick sand in your face.
Later in life I never bothered with Harry Potter and his thick round
specs held together with scotch tape. Give me Lord of the Rings every
time, and Legolas’s elven acuity.
Our eyes are fading and nobody quite knows why
Perhaps part of the reason glasses are now so resolutely back in style, is that ever more of us need them. A report published in the respected science journal Nature a
few weeks ago claimed short-sightedness is now reaching epidemic
proportions. This so-called “myopia boom” is most pronounced in East
Asia: 90 per cent of teenagers and young adults in China are
short-sighted; in Seoul, 96.5 per cent of 19-year-old men suffer the
same affliction.
By some estimates, one-third of the world's
population — 2.5 billion people — could be affected by short-sightedness
at the end of this decade and Europe has also witnessed a dramatic
increase in the condition. In Britain, two million people experience
sight loss of some sort or another – a number that by 2050 will double.
Partly this is down to an an ageing population where ever more
pensioners are busy assuring worried relatives that their eyes have
never been better – even as they reach for a toffee in the pot pourri.
But problems are particularly pronounced among the young, with up to one
million children presumed to currently have undiagnosed vision
problems.
The reasons for this boom are varied, but it is increasingly thought
that – as the Nature study points out - a lifestyle largely spent
indoors staring at computer screens is exacerbating the issue. Fresh air
is now seen by researchers as crucial to preserving our eyesight. It
was not for nothing that renowned British eye surgeon Henry Edward Juler
wrote in A Handbook of Ophthalmic Science and Practice in 1904 that when “the myopia had become stationary, change of air — a sea voyage if possible — should be prescribed”.
And then there are the genes. Research has identified 26 genes linked to short-sightedness.
Children with one short-sighted parent have a one in three risk of
developing myopia, if both parents are short-sighted, that risk
increases to one in two.
A quick scan of family photographs told
me – as with hair loss – I didn’t come from particularly good stock
with regard to poor sight. But even in my mid 20s my vision seemed
perfectly fine so I thought I had escaped. While presbyopia –
age-related long-sightedness – sets in for many around the age of 40;
for some, eyesight can continue to improve until then.
Orlando Bloom as the keen-eyed Legolas in Lord of the Rings
As Karen Sparrow, head of professional development at the Association of Optometrists,
explains, your eyes continue to develop in adulthood. “Generally people
don’t realise your eyes are changing and growing well into your
twenties. Some people think they have got to 16 and 17 and that is
that.”
In my case, I was told I have developed an astigmatism in
each eye (the term for an irregular shaped cornea or lens). This
distortion exacerbates my prescription of -075 – a minor one, I know, in
the competitive game of who is the blindest which I now realise takes
place between spectacle wearers.
But what a difference my new
glasses have made. As soon as I slipped them on the world burst into
extraordinary clarity and has remained so ever since. I have realised I
had previously been reading newspapers at a distance of about two inches
from my face, where now I can hold them aloft to peruse like a
gentleman of leisure at a country club. I no longer hunch in quite such
wizened fashion over my computer screen. Occasionally, I look down just
below the lens and see my old world swirling nauseously out of focus.
Michael Caine shows how to wear a pair in the 1965 film The Ipcress File
As for getting used to actually now being a four eyes at the age of 30,
well, that will take a little longer. As I walked out of the opticians
and caught a glimpse of my reflection in a shop window, there was a part
of me that thought of the scorn my younger self would no doubt pour.
This was not helped by stumbling twice on the pavement on the way to the
tube as I got used to my new eyes.
But a blow to one’s ego is a
small price to pay for the gift of knowing the difference between a KFC
wrapper and a fox. And the present time in Moscow, since you ask, is
17:38.
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