You can buy specs appeal, Mr Howard

Archives Admin · #1 (**permalink**) 06-20-2005, 05:27 PM

As party political slogans go, the current Conservative legend Are You Thinking What We’re Thinking? falls some way short of such classics as Labour’s Not Working or even Votes for Oysters!, the rallying cry of Bertrand Russell’s imaginary animal rights lobby. It did, however, find an echo in the heart of at least one floating voter, namely me.
Not necessarily on the matters of asylum seekers or immigration but in the more controversial realm of eyewear. When it comes to ocular impedimenta, the Conservative party leader and myself are clearly thinking along similar lines, very similar lines indeed. Typical; you wait 25 years for a decent pair of glasses then the one you pick is deemed to possess enough of the night to suit Michael Howard too.

If eyes are the windows of the soul, then mine are boarded up and covered in fly-posters. Severe myopia is merely one of the shocks to which my flesh is heir. But short sight is Mother Nature’s way of thinning the population. In caveman days, I would have been picked off swiftly by any wolf I’d mistaken for a friendly German shepherd. Ocular adjustment, the process of refracting light until it hits the retina at the optimum spot, was one of civilisation’s greatest evolutionary leaps.

There are some of us, however, willing to forsake the miracle of optic correction by paying heed to the altogether more vain reality that Glasses Make You Look Old. Or like Ronnie Corbett.

None of this was ever helped by the awesome strength of the lenses required to keep me from walking into lampposts, lenses of a thickness redolent of those dimpled beer-mugs you find in country pubs.

A reluctance to wear glasses, though, took me into another realm, that of contact lenses, which was almost as tricky. Contact lenses occasion in those who don’t wear them a very particular type of disgust, connected to the deep-seated instinctual horror at watching people lever their eyelids apart and have a good root around. As contact lenses have the very determined habit of falling out, or of migrating up the nasal passages into the frontal lobes, this scenario repeats itself frequently, and extremely tiresomely.

This left only laser eye surgery, quickly discounted on the grounds that only the clinically certifiable agree to pay £500 to have sizzling beams of light trained on the most delicate part of their anatomy, with only the promise of having the other eye done for free if the first goes horribly wrong.

Bespoke glasses promised a possible solution. These, it seems, are now the preferred choice of celebrities and captains of industry and other folk who can afford to pay to have a designer create glasses suited specifically to their face. Working in collaboration with the optician Robert Callander in Linlithgow, designer Tom Davies has led the way in bespoke glasses, creating frames for the top-floors of Morgan Stanley, Goldman-Sachs and Samsung, for European royalty and Rowan Atkinson.

The problem with having glasses designed for your face is that it necessitates looking at your face and having it discussed in complex detail. Davies has decided that rimless glasses are the thing for me. He produces several terrifying implements intended to measure microscopic distances between nose and brow; photographs are taken; discussions commence on shape prejudices and style preferences.

“The idea,” says Davies, “is to remove the guesswork from buying glasses and create a pair that nobody else could wear, that suit your face and your face alone. It sounds ridiculous but two millimetres’ difference can change entirely the way a pair of glasses frame the features. Comfort is also an important consideration; you have to be able to forget you’re wearing them.”

In the following weeks, various brochures arrive showing my face with putative designs laid electronically on top. One problem will be creating lenses strong enough to allow me to see but light enough not to buckle the frame, a problem solved with recourse to a laboratory in Japan. The legs of the glasses will be fashioned from beta titanium. The cost, therefore, is from £900 for a basic custom pair to £5,000 for the complete soup-to-nuts bespoke creation: “Glasses aren ’t just things you stick on your face,” says Davies “they’re complex bits of engineering designed to aid probably your most important sense. The cost isn’t that extreme for something so crucial.”

The finished glasses prove to be masterworks of minimalism, virtually invisible and, if the breathless swoons of all who behold them are to be believed, singularly effective in their purpose of enhancing the rattlebag of features on which they sit.

All of which was fine, until Michael Howard turned up in an almost-identical pair. Conservative Central Office approached Davies several months back to help in a Howardian makeover, only to be rebuffed when it became clear Mr Howard didn’t expect to receive a bill. “Well, they’re pretty similar,” says Davies “but I didn’t make them. Howard’s look like they’re off the shelf. Mind you, Tony Blair wears an even cheaper version.”

Thread Tools
Show Printable Version Email this Page
Display Modes
Linear Mode Switch to Hybrid Mode Switch to Threaded Mode

Currently Active Users Viewing This Thread: 1 (0 members and 1 guests)

You can buy specs appeal, Mr Howard

Contact Lenses