Time to buy a new pair of glasses (and contact lenses, but they’re a relatively simple matter). I decided to finally abandon David Clulow, which is no longer the optician it used to be when I first went there. It used to be cheap and slightly tacky. To begin with it was also entirely contained in one big building in Earl’s Court. In my final year before graduating, everyone seemed to be going there because they made the lenses on the premises, and that apparently meant they cost less.
Over the years I kept going back to them, but eventually to my surprise the big place in Earl’s Court closed and I followed Clulow’s through a series of much smaller and more conventional shops which gradually but definitely became less cheap and more upmarket. The peak was probably their branch on Wigmore Street (Wigmore Street is to opticians more or less what Harley Street is to doctors, or Savile Row to tailors). Last time round it finally occurred to me to wonder why I was still patronising a business I had picked because of its cheapness when it was now definitely at the premium end.
So, with slight reservations, I went to SpecSavers instead. It wasn’t really all that different, to be honest; more crowded, fewer designer names and the frames all displayed in sections with the price clearly shown in big letters. David Clulow tended more towards the principle that the customer didn’t need to be bothered with a trivial detail like price. The other thing, of course, is that SpecSavers does two-for-one, or bogof as we have come to know it.
I actually hate bogofs, don’t you? In the supermarket, I often pick up a bag of seedless satsumas and then notice to my horror that they’re on bogof. That means I have to take another bag. Have to. Even if I could put up with the idea of failing to pick up something effectively free, the partially suppressed incredulity of the cashier when I get to the till is too much of a disincentive (‘did you know these were two for one?”). But I don’t want two bags. We won’t be able to eat two bags before they go off – not unless I make a point of eating two a day, and I don’t really see why I should alter my actual eating habits just in order to avoid seeming ungrateful towards Mr Tesco, or Mr Sainsbury as it may be. In the end, I generally put them back and buy the full-price navel oranges instead, or something. When it comes to glasses, you haven’t really got that option. You’re just in for two pairs, matey.
With the first pair, it wasn’t too bad. A young assistant took me over to look at the frames on the wall. I tried a pair at random.
“Crikey, no – these make me look like Billy Bunter,” I said, “Of course that’s not really the fault of the glasses, is it?”
She smiled indulgently – you have to be patient with old gits who think they’re funny – and I grabbed a second pair. Perfect.
“Got some nice ones over here?” she said.
“No, I think I’ll go with these,” I said.
I had thought I was familiar with suppressed incredulity, but now I realised I had never seen it done really properly, with skill and brio. Buy the second pair of frames you try on, just like that? Faugh!
I was not, of course, allowed to choose the second pair at the same time. It was made clear to me that it would suit me better to wait and see whether the first pair matched my lifestyle before coming back some other time for the second pair. I went back on Friday.
Choosing a second pair is trickier than the first – if you’re like me, you only have so many views about what glasses should look like, and they were all used up in choosing the first pair. You can’t buy an identical pair, so you have to try to come up with some alternative kind of attitude or aesthetic point of view. Let’s buy some glasses for sports use, perhaps… or glasses for shopping… or glasses that are very big and brightly coloured so I won’t lose them?
Moreover, this time I was in the hands of the assistant manager, and she wasn’t going to accept any of this taking-the-second-ones-you-look-at nonsense.
So I had looked at a dozen before I decided the time had come to plump.
“These look OK.” I said,
“Oh, we do those in black,” she said. I shrugged in a way meant to indicate that the news, though of mild interest – nil humanum me alienum puto and all that – was not really relevant.
“Here,” she said, picking another pair off the shelves, and comparing them minutely. “Oh no. These are not the ones. They’re similar. Just slightly broader here. But they are black.” Again I shrugged, though with diminishing confidence.
“I know we do do them in black though,” she said, “Here, we’ve been reorganising the stock.” She pulled out a large drawer arrangement filled with frames, and we tried out half a dozen which were black, but not the same as the chosen frames.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ll check out in the store room. Won’t be a minute”
“Brown is fine actually…” but she had gone.
There were no black ones in the back, nor even in the catalogue.
“They must have stopped doing them.” she said, “I’m really sorry.”
“These are fine.”
“You’ll settle for the brown ones?” she said, with mingled gratitude and suppressed incredulity.
Next time I think I really am going to try to get up the nerve to insist that I only want one pair of glasses.
Elizabeth decided she wanted to do something a bit different for her birthday this year. At one stage she was thinking seriously about a place where you can drive tanks and other military vehicles (‘Yeah, yeah, that would be OK. That would be fine.”)
Phew. So I thought I would mark the successful transfer of files and domain to a new host by updating the look of this blog too. I haven’t quite had the energy to chase up everything, so there may be the odd glitch.
