Contact! The prodigal returns.

If I had discovered my erring tortoise before six pm on that fateful Sunday then my life would have been, if not necessarily different, then at least differently paced.

As my mother and I (not my father, never my father) got ready for evensong I discovered the devastating truth that Timmy, my beloved tortoise, was missing: he had made a bid for freedom, escaping from the back yard of 25, Dogfield Street into the scary veldt of endless Cathays. My take on the situation was simple: no tortoise – no God; therefore no church. I refused to move from my prone, weeping position on my bed and my mother had to trudge to the evening service alone.

Search parties were dispatched to Malefant Street, Twkesbury Road, and Monthermer Road and even towards Whitchurch Road. For Timmy to have made it anywhere near some of these locations he would have to have had some form of motorized personal transportation a damn sight quicker than the scaly legs which he sometimes deigned to move, sluggishly, when whipped up into a frenzy by a succulent piece of greenery wafted directly in his eye line.

Eventually my father interrupted my wailing misery and told me that Timmy had been found. My take on the situation was simple: Timmy found – God exists; therefore to evensong!

I arrived in the middle of a hymn and, fully (and enthusiastically a member of the congregation now that Timmy was restored) asked my singing mum for the hymn number. She did not stop singing, but gestured to the front with her right hand. I asked her again for the hymn number. Rather irritated my mother told me that the hymn numbers were listed on the column by the pulpit as usual and couldn’t I see them? No, I couldn’t. I asked again for the hymn number. My mother’s reaction to my lack of vision was so strong that we almost left the church immediately.

I realise now, of course, that my mother’s mind must have gone into a series of flip flaps of the “if he can’t see the numbers, his sight must be faulty; how bad is it; how long has he been short sighted; how does he see in school; o god how have I missed this?” sort of thing.

For me of course this was nothing out of the ordinary. I sat towards the back of the class and assumed that it was just a normal part of school life that you had to ask the kid next to you to show you the sums you were supposed to be copying into your book. Some things you could see, others you couldn’t. Wasn’t it always like this for everyone?

No it wasn’t, and within days I was in an optician and tested for my first pair of National Health glasses which, as my father delighted in recounting, made me look like ‘the owl of the remove.’

And the world sharpened up: gravel was made of small stones; houses had roofs made of individual slates and trees had lots of separate leaves. Only the short sighted with progressive sight loss know the wonder of having the world and the artefacts in it suddenly crisp out of their blur status with each new prescription for lenses!

I wore glasses until I was eighteen, when with money that I’d saved and with generous grant aid from the parents my first pair of contact lenses was bought. They were the old fashioned hard type lenses; ones you had to take treat carefully and handle with fastidious hygienic attention. No, of course I didn’t. Neither did anyone else I knew who wore them. One other thing I can guarantee is that every contact lens wearer will have an ‘impossible’ coincidence story to tell about the loss and subsequent finding of a rogue lens. Everyone, without exception!

Until, that was, the advent of the ‘single use’ lens: the daily disposable. The lenses designed for real people in the real world. In the disposable world, coincidence is irrelevant; you can always break out another one. And another source of myth is lost.

I’ve always hated wearing glasses and contact lenses; they served a purpose but perfect sight was something which I would have paid a fortune to have restored - and before you ask, laser treatment was not a possibility for my type of sight.

My contact lens wearing was a compromise between long and short sightedness with one eye dedicated to reading and the other eye dedicated to distance and the brain being asked to order the information to make it work. It was never quite satisfactory and therefore, when work slipped away, so did the use of contact lenses and a greater reliance on glasses. Rejection of the lenses that I had sworn by for years. An apostate falling away from the True Faith of the lightweight plastic circle!

Today: a reassessment.

Eyes tested, new prescription and another step to senility: contacts for distance and a pair of old man’s glasses for reading.

I am a living Dickens illustration!