Carol’s Column

Sea creature now sports a funky pair of spectacles

There is a large barracuda swimming around off the tiny island of Moyenne in the Seychelles wearing a pair of funky shocking purple Calvin Klein multifocal spectacles.

A few years ago my eyesight began to deteriorate so I took my eyes to a specialist because I was concerned I might have contracted an obscure eye disease.

He diagnosed old age. It seems as eyeballs get older the muscles surrounding them become less elastic and cannot pull the eye every which way. So I joined the hundreds of thousands of shoppers standing three metres from an item trying to decipher the prices printed in small print.

I too became a conference delegate stumbling around in ignorance because I could not read the names printed on the tabs.

Like countless others, I began placing food in my nostrils instead of my mouth, that's when I was lucky enough to spike something on the end of the fork which I couldn't see.

Eventually I invested in a pair of spectacles which magnified and clarified the world around me. Arbitrary, they were sufficient for my needs and enabled me to see again.

Until last month when I almost received a ticket for turning down a one-way street because I didn't see the road sign.

“Get yourself a new pair of glasses,” said the traffic officer when I explained my predicament. So I did.

A visit to the optician revealed that I now needed a pair of spectacles for distance and for reading.

“I am going to change your life,” said the optician. “I am going to make you see.”

I've always been a vain person, so I didn't just buy a pair of glasses, I made an investment and chose a pair of funky shocking purple Calvin Klein frames in which the new multifocal lenses were installed.

They were wickedly expensive so I mortgaged my husband and took out an overdraft because life's short and self-indulgence is good for the liver.

These were the Rolls Royce of spectacles and, to tell the truth, they did look spectacular.

What's more, besides the fact that I could suddenly see, I looked glamorous, a sort of dazzling female Woody Allen with hair.

Then I visited my kids in the Seychelles and went snorkelling forgetting the Rolls Royces were perched on top of my head.

They momentarily flashed in the sunlight as they fell into the blue and I swam down furiously after them. Fruitlessly.

For a week, I circled the coral reef like a shark searching for the specs and on the last day, I swear I glimpsed a dratted barracuda swimming past wearing funky shocking pink Calvin Klein multifocal glasses.

But it might have been fantasy born out of wishful thinking.

On my return I revisited the optician.

“I'll change your life,” he said. Again.

He suggested a pair of contact lenses.

“The left one for reading, the right one for far sight. Amazingly enough, your eyes will adjust and you'll be able to see perfectly. What's more, you can't lose them.”

He's right. But I can't find them either. They seem to have got lost somewhere in my eyes, I can't extricate them and meanwhile, my eyesight is less than perfect.

I know, because yesterday a young man approached me at a stop street and because I felt happy I opened the window, smiled, handed him R2 then drove off.

“Carol, I'm sure that man had a gun. He wanted your car, not R2,” said my mother when she recovered her breath.

Which just goes to show. You win some and lose some.

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