What price sight!

It all depends on choice.

            When you are not only short sighted, but also long sighted, you are presented with a number of way of responding to your blurred needs:

1               Do nothing and enjoy the blurred world that only really comes into focus when you are up close and personal with what you are looking at.  This approach makes driving, um, challenging and deeply illegal.  It also forces you to be clear about identifying people from shaky outlines, otherwise you are soon tagged as arrogant as you ignore people, or as I prefer to say ‘cut’ them – not through choice but because you have not worked out that they are there in front of you!

2               Use glasses.  This option gives you further levels of choice:

a.     Two pairs of glasses, one for shortsightedness and the other for long distances.

b.     Bi focal glasses that; with a tilt of the head give you (in theory) the best of both worlds in one pair of glasses.

Neither gets away from the fact that you have to wear glasses to achieve some semblance of sighted normality.  Which I hate, have hated and will always hate.

3               Use contact lenses – which also give you a couple of options:

a.     Bi focal contact lenses.  I put these in the same mythical category as Conservatives for Social Justice and Equality and Trumpist Feminism – they exist but they have no absolute reality.  I have tried these lenses and they did not work in a spectacular way.

b.     Lenses for each eye doing a different thing.  In this use of contact lenses you have one lens for reading and the lens in the other eye for distance.  Apparently ‘the brain sorts it out’.  Or not in my case.  In my case I had poor sight in both forms.

c.      Have lenses for short sight or lenses for long sight and use glasses for the one which is not catered for.

I have decided to go with the last option.  I now have lenses to give me good distance vision and I use glasses to read and for close work.

From my consumerist perspective I have been able to indulge my love of spending by buying various forms of reading glasses.  The ones provided by my optician are of the broken-magnetic type which snap together when needed and otherwise life in their dependant parts around my neck.  This is a good gimmick but they are still glasses and I dislike wearing them, but on balance they are some sort of solution.

And as for laser treatment?  I would have to have my eyes sculpted for distance and always have to wear glasses for reading, whereas now, if I choose not to wear lenses or glasses I can always read close up!

And, as I have said before, one set of my reading glasses has little lights built in on both lens frames!  

When the fury about Brexit and the current political situation in Spain gets too much, I can think about the gadgets attached to the next pair of reading glasses to keep me calm.  Or something.