Spectacular Spectacular

There’s a picture of me somewhere on this blog. You can see me, holding a stack of pizza boxes and looking unreasonably happy. You can also see that I wear glasses. Some glasses-wearers hate theirs with a passion and are willing to stick fingers and plastic plates into their eyes in order to avoid them. Not me. I’m spectacular and proud of it.

When I was about four, I had an operation to get rid of my squint. I remember snippets of those few days spent in Temple Street hospital, but what stands out is the time I realised the button at my elbow could summon a nurse who, within reason, had to attend to my every whim. Being a small boy in dashing pyjamas, I had very few material desires, but had already developed a trait I still have today – the Midnight Hunger. Thus, I have since associated illness and hospitals with nice ladies bringing me Coco Pops. This was not a good concept of suffering to grow up with, and has perhaps left me more callous than I might otherwise have turned out.

In primary school, I had huge glasses, the kind that people wear nowadays in order to be cool by looking square but knowing it. Unfortunately, my senior infants’ class had not yet been introduced to irony, so I was just the chap with the spéaclaí mór. I was also a beneficiary of that quantum leap in ophthalmology, the patch. For anyone who didn’t have one of these as a child, the patch was basically a really big sticking plaster that was put over your good eye every day for hours on end in an attempt to persuade your lazy eye to cop the fuck on and start perceiving stuff like a real sense organ. The idea of the ‘lazy eye’ was just that – one of your eyes was basically the slow kid at the back of the class, who just needed a special teacher and an exemption from Irish to sort himself out.

This tendency to take optical conditions very literally is one my mother has too. I am longsighted. This does not mean what she thinks it means. Since I was diagnosed as longsighted, my mother has been convinced that I have some kind of superpower – prodigious, almost telescopic eyesight – which allows me to perceive the tiniest objects at enormous distances. For example, she could spot a car some eight hundred metres up the motorway and ask me what county it’s from. If I’ve lost my glasses, she might suggest that I prop up my book on a table and read it from across the room. Every time I try to explain that I’m not longsighted in that way, to her I become nothing more than that ungrateful child, unable to use his powers for good, all the while leeching off the parents who pay for glasses to allow him to perceive all those unimportant things going on right in front of his face.