Eyeglasses

These glasses of mine torment me by obstructing what I wish to do (read small text and detailed maps), so that I have to ask the kids to read the small print on supermarket labels. This partial blindness is not supportable, because being compromised in reading is worse than any other singular sensory disability I can imagine. I'm already half deaf, but do pretty good by partial lip-reading. I hate it when decent pre-watershed
invective beeps out not only the sound but the oral shape of the expletive.

I've fallen back on a previous pair, 'Eliza', whose prescription aids reading, but which continually slide inexorably down the nose, having no nose-pads, in a most distracting manner. At least they serve well for downward viewing, in a professorial, ivory-tower manner, but the slippage is driving me crazy. I need new specs to help me read properly and view the world head-on instead down my nose, but this is by no means an easy task. My prescription requires prisms built into the upper L and lower R lenses, as well as hefty corrections for myopia, astigmatism and now presbyopia, falling just short of the NHS threshold for benefits for 'complex lenses'. That prescription makes for heavy lenses even in small frames.

I need new frames and my requirements are quite specific and frankly picky. Full-frame models alone (not half-rimmed or rimless) in order to camouflage the thick rims of the lenses which show even when ground from high-index materials. And they have to be as shallow horizontally as possible to minimise the lens' thickness ai its perimeter. A thinly-framed catseye shape is the preferred model type, but finding frames small enough in lateral width has always been a challenge. Lafont probably has the best colours and sizes in this spec, including my favourite, the Euphorie frame above, with a rare and valued frame width of only 112 mm.

Don't think this is vanity- if that was so I'd do without specs or contacts, but can't. Contacts popped out all the time when a blink caught the lens' lip on one of my invisible but topographic corneal scars on either orbit. Plus, without a refractive correction for the longitudinal mismatch in L and R perceptions, stamina to maintain a single, accomodated image is limited, and the intrusion of fatigue, low blood sugar or a half-pint of lager all result in a collapse into double vision.

Sound & Vision quotations

The eye is the window of the human body through which it feels its way and enjoys the beauty of the world. - Leonardo Da Vinci
I shut my eyes in order to see. - Paul Gauguin
One eye sees, the other feels. - Paul Klee
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. - George Orwell
Vision is the art of seeing things invisible. - Jonathan Swift
Love comes in at the eye. - W.B. Yeats
What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the words I have read in my life. - Walt Whitman