After all these years, I still hate wearing specs | Adrian Chiles

When I was a boy, glasses were a source of shame that ruined my self-esteem. Now that contact lenses have failed me too, all that’s left is to embrace the blurriness

I hate my glasses. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Not just these I’m wearing now, but whichever spectacles I’ve been cursed to wear since, to my horror, I was first told to at the age of 14. At that point, my hatred of them was general, unspecific. They were a source of shame as well as inconvenience. The football field was a blur. Girls, who admittedly had never been much attracted to me in the first place, now lost interest completely.

I developed more specific dislikes, for example the way they steamed up (the glasses, not the girls) when I walked into pubs in winter, still further diminishing my chances of getting served underage. They were always getting bent out of shape, and this bugged me tremendously. The left side was higher than the right, or the right higher than the left, and I could never figure out why this was. I pulled and bent and stretched them this way and that, and only ever made matters worse. Were the arms not straight? Or was the problem the ear thingies? Don’t start me on the nose thingies, which have never, for me anyway, successfully discharged their primary task of stopping the bastards from slipping down my nose.