Reference photos taken in Specsavers.
As you may have noticed but been too polite to say anything, my glasses were getting to be a bit fucked. Getting on for nine years old the lenses were scratched, the arms were padded with duct tape and they had a tendency to sit wonky. But then four years of farming, decorating, refuse collection, gardening and misc manual labouring will do that. So it was time to bite the bullet and go get some new ones. Andy and Alex were on hand to help with the trauma of deciding, helped by the realisation that there aren’t a lot of hidden costs in your modern optician these days (unlike dentists) and I now have two new pairs.
Interesting to note that the style I would previously have jokingly called “new media wanker glasses” (thick black rectangular) is now the norm. In fact I now have a pair (not pictured), which is fair as I’m pretty much a new media wanker these days. The other is a rather distinguished pair of wire-frames (bottom row, 2nd) that compliment my balding head in an Uncle Pete kind of way. Both are thin rectangles which is messing with my head as I adjust to the different field of vision The top bit has vanished while the sides are all wide-angle. Also of note is that my prescription had barely changed in the last decade.
Getting new glasses has a strange psychological aspect. I’ve now changed my face is a subtle but definite way. And thanks to the 2 for 1 offer I can switch faces at whim. I’m not sure I welcome this new daily choice in my life, but I’m sure I’ll deal with it.
New glasses!
What I’m more interested in is the way that different colour and lighting states alter appearance. There are various different Petes there, all related (probably siblings), but definitely not the same person.
dear pete
thank you for generating a good 5 minutes mirth for Louise & I (tears in eye & spontaneous giggles still errupting at random intervals)
we especially liked the ‘yellow pete with the one red eye’ & the comedy red block through the head on the last one was class.
on the boring side – I had to get a new pair from … vision exporess, I think I ended up with.
walking to work in the rain (dark winter’s morning) I knocked my spare glasses off with an umbrella (Esme having already karate chopped the others in 2 some months earlier). It being dark & wet the street flowered into the a bloom of blurred lights – each lump of tarmac reflecting forth. I searched a good long while patiently passing the umbrella back & forth along the road, moving gently but the buggers eluded me ages – I was quite stumped, they’d just vanished into thin air – completely weird, until I stepped back & ‘crunch’
…bugger
Great set of pics! Love the first one!
We have an optician who seems to believe that his role is to support his customers through this potentially life-changing experience of putting a new image on one’s face. It’s serious business! There is a little truth in this, ( I for one still have an aversion to putting anything between my eyes and those of another person, and am still pretty much in denial about the need to wear specs.at all) . I listened to all he had to say, but noted that whatever step I might be wanting to take with my external persona, it was governed entirely by what frames are currently in fashion…so not mine, but someone else’s expression of my outer self!
Top left makes you look like Hester Blumenthal. That is all.
Whenever I’m trying on new specs, I always take the opportunity to blag a free sample pack of contacts at the same time (always handy for swimming). The excuse that I can’t actually see my own face in the mirror without prescription lenses helps.
Sue – I feel the exact opposite, removing my glasses makes me feel curiously exposed for some time…psychologically I’d rather have the barrier there.
Who knew reading a post about selecting glasses could be so suspenseful? As I read, I kept thinking, ” I hope he didn’t go for either of the last two on the bottom row”. The black ones make you look like Truman Capote, and the last wire ones, like Moby. Whew. That was close.
Blimey, 11 baldy 4-eyed men of comics…
I’ve been putting off getting new spectacles for some time but following a blow to my (8 years old? Somewhere around there) frames on the squash court last night I fear that it can’t be avoided for much longer. I thought at first that the ball hitting my head had given me double vision but in fact it had just knocked my glasses badly enough out of shape to fuck up my vision. Twisted them back as best I could but it’s still a tad off. Or else my head genuinely is damaged…
What you refer to as media wanker glasses my ex used to call cartoonist’s glasses so I fear I may be predestined to get some of those. The problem is, as I’m sure you’ve rediscovered for yourself just recently, that after so many years in the same frames anything else at all looks weird.