Rose-coloured or not, I hate spectacles

I MUST have been seven or eight years old when it dawned on somebody that maybe I wasn't stupid; maybe I just couldn't read the blackboard. And so it turned out. Given my first eye test, I proved unable to read the top letter on the chart. I still can't. This exceptionally short sight (both eyes are worse than -7) resulted in my wearing glasses from the moment my poor vision was diagnosed.

I suppose children still tease those who wear glasses. They certainly did then, and the National Health spectacles I wore, with fat pink rims (there being no other choice of model) didn't help. 'Goggles', 'Four-eyes', 'Blindy' . . . these, and others too humiliating to reveal, were the nicknames that pursued me through school life. I loathed my glasses, loathed my appearance, cultivated a long fringe and a lowered forehead - usually buried in a book. (There's a plus side to everything.)

When contact lenses came along, I asked for a pair for my 21st birthday. In those days they were large discs made of hard glass, and so great was the discomfort they caused that even I admitted that my scrunched- up, red-rimmed, weeping eyes looked better behind spectacles.

The advent of soft lenses in the early Seventies was my salvation. With one bound, I was free] From my early thirties until now - for two decades - I have faced the world with head held high, through wide green eyes. I had little doubt that contact lenses were the miracle of the 20th century.

But now it's back to the misery of spectacles. I will not dwell on the ophthalmological details; but, in brief, I gather that my cornea is now oxygen- starved in some mysterious way, and can no longer tolerate even the softest, cleanest contact lenses. It's back to specs.

I am astonished and even slightly ashamed to find just how much I care. Heaven knows, mine has never been a face to launch a thousand ships, or even a couple of dinghies. Men have not gasped and covered their eyes at my passing, clutched their temples and slid down lamp-posts . . . at least, not unless they were very drunk. Even when I was young and easy, I never relied on looks to make my way in the world. Mine has been (without glasses) a serviceable sort of face, neither repellent nor magnetic, but good enough to be going on with.

Now that I am 53 and happily and forever partnered, my appearance should be neither here nor there. I don't need it biologically, to attract a mate, nor professionally, to find a job. (Let no one think a woman's career is not helped by being passably good-looking.)

Yet I feel utterly diminished by having to revert to spectacles. I slink into the office apologising. I can't meet people's eyes in public. I bore my friends with the reasons and diagnosis for this newly bespectacled me. I feel like abandoning make-up, letting the hair go hang, and closing my Harvey Nichols account. I feel like giving in to gravity and dressing in beige.

I am aware that bespectacled readers may be getting annoyed by now. If they're men, I have no sympathy. Men look fine in glasses. Glasses don't detract from their looks one iota. If they're women, and they can say truthfully that wearing glasses doesn't bother them in the least, I should be interested to hear how they have overcome the psychological stigma of bespectacle-isation.

For stigma it is: at least to me. I don't need to be told that it all harks back to my feeling of helplessness when I couldn't read the blackboard, or to the pain and humiliation of being teased by my classmates, or the rejections experienced when callow youths said: 'You know, if you didn't wear glasses, you might not be bad-looking' (the implication being, 'but since you do, you're hideous').

All I know is that over the past three weeks, as all hope that the situation might be temporary has faded, I have resented every moment of my new four-eyed state. No matter that opticians now have walls lined with attractive spectacle frames in every conceivable shape and colour. No matter that, thanks to research by the inestimable firm of Zeiss, it is now possible to manufacture lenses that, instead of being a third of an inch thick, are measured in millimetres and weigh next to nothing.

I am told that I may be able to wear contact lenses briefly, to parties and other 'special occasions'. But I want to return to the airy freedom of a face seen full-frontally, without glasses. I want to show my unencumbered appearance, such as it is, to a largely indifferent world. I don't want to return to the slipping-down-the-nose, needing-polishing, finding, checking, changing, strengthening, altogether tedious palaver of glasses. I want my contact lenses back]