University life is to blame for foisting upon me one of those addictions that has cost much expense ever since, while also inflicting a fair degree of pain and discomfort.
Then again, it did get me just at my most vulnerable, as an all-too-fresh Fresher. I saw other people doing it - people who looked instantly cooler, more confident, more attractive to the opposite sex. Knowing one of the secret foundations of their apparent assurance didn't lessen its appeal, only made those expensive accoutrements all the more inviting, all the more exciting.
So, one day, after much hovering and havering, I finally plucked up my courage and indulged. Finally, I became one of those really adult adults who were actually doing it, from the first glimmering snap of dawn to the last shrug of nightfall, youthfully reckless of the consequences either later in life or the sticky sensations of the next morning...
Yes, I became one of them. I, too, started... wearing contact lenses.
Okay, it took a little while to get the knack of transporting contact lens from point A, the tip of my index finger, to point B, my actual eye.
The optician below stairs in the Guild building certainly had his patience sorely tried, as he repeatedly insisted he couldn't let me toddle off without having managed the transaction at least once, but each and every time, as my eyes slapped shut at the last split-second as that fragile little bowl of transparent gloop approached a little too close, he let slip the merest of sighs before gently encouraging me to try again...
... only to eventually, eyes on the end-of-the-working-day clockface, encourage me: "Well, keep practicing at home, good luck..." and ushering me out, a pack of several months' and bottle of lotion clutched proudly in hand...
And I did, a whole Saturday and most of Sunday screwing up my face in my 15h floor mirror and those of my contact-lens tutors on the sixth floor - failing all too many times, until finally - Eureka! - finding myself with perfect vision through my right eye, and after that magical moment, managing to slip them in and out and in and out with arrogant ease.
And I could see again. No need to squint quite so often at the lecture-room overhead projections, nor whip out a glasses case quite so guiltily and surreptitiously between car door and steering wheel...
Of course, they sometimes go astray. Several times a too-energetic rub of my bleary eyes has resulted in that little soft-plastic disc taking a detour up into my forehead, only making its way back home at great, frustrating length.
Catherine was once delayed in making her way downstairs for the trek into campus, having inexplicably stabbed a contact lense into the eye into which she'd only just prodded the other.
And then, after veering between daily, fortnightly and monthly treatments, I was abruptly told by an optician I needed to stop wearing contacts "like, yesterday". At which point - probably the stolid airless, garish-lighted ambience of the consulting room was to blame - I must admit taking a bit of a totter, the once-a-year-or-so flash of blue and black lights smudging across my sights and leaving me with nothing in mind but the overwhelming desire to collapse and lie sprawled across the floor (a tip: try to avoid such sensations occurring when doorstepping people you want to interview, and who really don't want to be interviewed by you, on a rather sensitive but newsworthy subject... A tale for another day, maybe...)
Still, despite the red blood cells apparently too quick to rise too close to the surface of my eyes, and the thinly-rimmed, top-half-slightly-blackened specs I've been forced to wear much of the time, I stick in a couple of contacts for as many social occasions as I can, out of a useless and in-vain vanity that refuses to see the bespectacled me as the real me, somehow...
The bloodshot eyes have been a little more in evidence recently, since I'm down to my last pair of emergency contacts while waiting for the latest batch of refresheners due in September, and on complaint, the substitute batch apparently posted out last week. No, no sign...
Maybe it's for the best. I just dislike shaving with these restricted-vision-scan glasses on, I always miss a bit...
Still, at least I have my eyes still. I've been starting to think about investing in laser surgery, once seeming a too-distant too-extravagant dream, but now apparently down to about £400 per eye. A colleague had both his done for free, on the promise of writing a puff piece about the procedure at some later date. Huh. I could do that job...
But still, £800 doesn't sound too exorbitant, for all the hassle and cost it might magically wipe out for, well, a little while. One to look into (arf) in the New Year, perhaps...
Ah, but. I was wincing tears this evening when stopping home to see my mum, who in the midst of perhaps the worst week of our lives for other reasons, today had to have several injections and then stitches in and around her left eye for the removal of a skin cancer tumour. And now lies, understandably woebegone, on the living-room sofa, squinting at EastEnders through an angry-blood-streaked slash, a bludgeon of purple bruises.
As the necessary eyedrops were administered, her's weren't the only ones welling up...
But I had it lucky, I know.
Lasers, lenses - luxury...
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