The rubbery boy with the gun giggles incredulously as I tell him I’ve never had an eye examination before. It’s a curious reaction, one would have thought a bit of reassurance would be more appropriate, but this shop, like so many others, appears to be run by kids under the jurisdiction of one or two backroom adults who only appear when there’s a problem. He appears to be having some trouble lining me up and as my left eye begins to water uncontrollably he switches his aim to my right.
“Nobody likes this test,” he says, smiling wanly.
“Why’s that?” I ask, as he casually shoots me in the eye with a jet of compressed air.
Although my first reaction is to give him a right hook and remonstrate wildly with him for being so careless, “that went right in my eye, you idiot, I want to speak to your mother, I mean manager...etc” Instead, I meekly offer my watery left for more of the same.
I’m here because in the past few months I’ve caught myself holding things at arm’s length and zooming them back and forth to find a point of focus, muttering to myself like some daft old man. It’s not a huge step to deduce that this will be the first of many incremental defeats for my previously resilient youth.
The next test is of peripheral vision. I tell myself it’s not a competition but it’s hard not to treat the outcome of an exam as anything other than success or failure. My attendant assasin slopes off as I stick my head in a box to follow a red dot around, clicking a button on sight of any green ones. But the machine breaks down and the lights come up, and for a moment it’s a minimalist puppet theatre with a giant audience of one. Someone swishes past and I jerk my head out of the box, finger in the air, but they’re gone. No one else around so I wander through to the shop where the team are gassing over by the till.
“Machine’s stopped.” I say, in answer to their raised ‘who let you out of the box?’ eyebrows. For a second time I’m ushered into the waiting area, to flick through their sales bumf while they sort it out. One leaflet extols the virtues of getting the most from your contact lenses, another urges me to consider a new look. It reminds me of the dentist where, thankfully, everyone has the right to smile with confidence.
We are lucky to have easy access to professional health services, so it doesn’t do to be too critical. I take a deep breath which nonetheless sounds like a sigh, as I’m taken to another room for the actual sight test. My foppish new Jewish-looking inquisitor runs through some banal patter - just like the dentist, and the hairdresser too - as he pfaffs about setting a pair of ridiculous looking Star Wars anti-blast glasses on my nose.
“How are you?“
“Yeah, good thanks...and you?”
“Fine, thank you. When was your last eye test..?”
“I’ve never had one.”
“...and has your eyesight changed significantly since then?”
“Well, I’ve started holding things at arm’s length...”
“How often do you have to wear your glasses?”
“I haven’t got any.”
“Oh...no glasses,” now he’s actually looking at me. “So what brings you in here today?”
Well, you know, I was walking past and I looked in and thought 'they look like erudite, well-travelled people with an insightful world view'. Only kidding, my eyesight isn’t what it was.
I decide for the dubious pleasure of being subjected to such impersonal questioning to pursue my own, without this pointless politeness. It turns out his family are from Pakistan and so I ask him about the Pakistani government. He blinks myopically as he registers the shift in the balance of power in our brief relationship. Then he looks a bit irritated and says he’s actually from Slough, so we talk a bit about Slough but pretty soon it turns out he does have something to say about Pakistan, which is more interesting.
“The president is a superstar-thief,” he says flatly. “He has castles in France and the UK, a mansion in the centre of London and billions of dollars he doesn’t know what to do with.”
It's a recurring and topical theme. People have no right to prosperity but I do worry about power and the inordinate localised wealth that seems to come with it. And, crucially, whether this has a deliterious effect on the wider spread of opportunity? Does the man who has more necessarily deprive his fellows, or is he the very source of opportunity? It's hard to see things in a positive light in the case of the Pakistani president, or Gaddaffi, Mugabe, Mubarak and so on. But I have to ask myself what do I really know about these people, other than what I'm told by the likes of my optician?
I should have asked him if he was really helping me to see straight.
