Friday 7.8.09

Partly in an attempt to limit my spending, I've had a quiet week (nothing happened yesterday but housework). All attempts at economy failed today in the face of er...Specsavers.

Nick goes in for no extreme sports other than myopia. He has an extreme prescription, each year's numbers exceeding his personal best, with extra points for astigmatism and an unacknowledged need for varifocals. New glasses were always going to be a costly purchase and to be fair, Nick was very modest and went for the mid-range frames which looked nice. He needed sunglasses and everyday ones, both of which had to have the lenses thinned down. Resulting bill: £310 and change. Once more unto the credit card.

Whilst waiting for him, I was listening in to a conversation. I tried to tune it out, but given the volume, tone, and intermittent nature of it, my brain was penetrated against my will. They were a family: a boy of eight or ten waiting for his glasses reading a comic, his mother, and a young woman who might have been his older sister or his aunt.

The young woman asked, "So can't he see now then?", the older replied "Well not properly, he needs glasses". A pause, then to the older woman: "So can't he see, what's it like?" A shrug. "He doesn't wear glasses". The older woman, "Not now, but he will." The younger, loud but emotionless, "He won't wear'em" .A longer, foot shuffling pause and the younger woman again, "So for an eye test, you just read ABC off the thing isn't it?" No comment "Or it's letters and numbers". The older woman tried to explain about the other tests and was interrupted, "Urgh, so they like poke you in the eye with the thing. What's it for?"

She went on in a virtual monologue of rhetorical question and answer, both ignorant and opinionated, never once speaking to the boy who would have been best able to answer her questions. I was struck by the patience of the older woman and the boy. It seemed a little surreal, like a pastiche of a Vicki Pollard sketch from Little Britain, or perhaps the caricaturing of Charles Dickens. A young woman lacking in education and social skills, existing, all unknowing under a bleak kind of sufferance. It was a little sample of an unusual dynamic.

Nick was meantime having an unusual dynamic of his own. He had, like a small boy sought reassurance from me before ordering the glasses. There came the time for the young female salesperson to measure the frames against his eyes. "Relax and look straight ahead at me", she smiled. Nick hunched up and failed to maintain the necessary eye contact. Frustrated in the end, she gave up and measured the original glasses. My poor husband, mid forties, competent, assertive, professional, and too shy to look a young woman in the eye.