This morning I did something I've been meaning to do for a while - try and draw my room without my glasses on. I knew this wouldn't be a great idea, as I have no artistic talent whatsoever, but the idea was to try and give you an impression of what it's like to open your eyes every morning and see the world as a giant fuzz. For those of you acquainted with the linguistics of optometry, my eyes score -4.5 and -5.5 respectively. 0 means perfect sight, -20 is no sight on the short-sighted scale, and +20 is (I presume) no sight on the long sighted scale. Basically, my eyes can't focus on objects further away from my face. It's a very common problem: I reckon, although I have no statistics, that more of us wear glasses than not. Thinking about it, I suppose in numerical terms, this means I've lost a quarter of my sight... Being short-sighted though, without any other medical conditions, isn't necessarily permanent. As the shape of your skull changes, your sight fluctuates; apparently it can improve in middle age. It can also be cured by laser eye surgery, although I believe you have to have -8.0 in each eye to have this done on the NHS. (Don't quote me - I'm speculating here!)
Since I started wearing specs just after my ninth birthday, I've become rather fond of them. I have a particularly lovely pair at the moment with green stripy sides, although the glass is beginning to look depressingly thick. People often ask me to remove my glasses and then exclaim that I look different, and stare at my face as if my nose has suddenly turned green or something equally disturbing; most of my friends have only ever known me with glasses these days. I think I look smarter in glasses, personally, although I wouldn't mind trying contacts. There are, of course, disadvantages to glasses. I have to take them off to go on rollercoasters, so I can never see the big dips coming.They fall off and break at the worst moments. They slide down your nose when you're sweaty (ew!) and you can see the rim of the glasses constantly, although after a while you become blind to this. Glasses don't cover your peripheral vision and nice frames are really expensive. All this aside, I think they're fantastic. If I'd been born in the days before glasses I wouldn't have been able to read or sew or enjoy the theatre or any of the hobbies I suppose they had in those days... It's a scary thought! Yet glasses are just one of those tiny alterations you make to your life these days, imperceptible changes for the majority of us. In all seriousness, thank God for opticians!
As promised, the picture of my bedroom without glasses:
I think it looks a little bit like impressionism. Naturally, this is because of my gift for drawing, not because the impressionist were short sighted.
The blue blob on the wall should have been a calender. On top of my wardrobe there are two framed paintings, a Van Gogh and a Salvador Dali, a photo frame, several souvenir glass bottles of sand from the Isle of Wight, a Venetian carnival mask (Not even drawn - it's white so I couldn't see it), a glass coke bottle wearing an innocent smoothies hat, and a red table decoration from my 18th with little multicoloured 18's spilling out of it. The piles of oddments on my desk are completely obscured, the jacket on my chair vanished into it, and the pattern on my bedspread is gone. Drawing with the paper on my lap, I couldn't even see properly what I was drawing, doubling the inaccuracy of my sketch. Even so, this is in as much detail as I could see. For perspective, my room is about 4m long, and my focal point is about 15cm away from my nose...
Drawing this was an interesting experiment, although I'm not sure it's one I'll repeat, if for nothing else than for fear of boring you all to death.
Prizes for anyone who can guess what the other unidentifiable blobs in the picture are!
God bless
JR x
