It’s time to raise our glasses

There’s a revolution happening. It may not be quite the revolution Russell Brand is after, but there’s a revolution happening alright. Let’s call it the revolution of the four-eyes. Move over contact lenses, the glasses are coming out.

I used to belong to what you could call ‘the cult of the reluctant four-eyes’. Stumbling out of bed, we’d instinctively fumble around for the scrawny, wire-rimmed glasses that were our friend and foe. They helped us see, but here ended their advantages. Putting them on, we’d feel as if our faces had been hijacked. But we’d also feel exposed; exposed as the unfortunate, deficient and pitiable swots that, deep-down, we feared we were. We’d feel betrayed; betrayed by the thing on which we depended most in the world.

It didn’t help that the most famous proponent of the bespectacled cause was Harry Potter. Swooshing around in a cloak on a broomstick, prone to shouting out such obscenities as ‘Expelliarmus’ and looking suspiciously like Daniel Radcliffe, he didn’t exactly help us win over the cool kids.

But what could we do? Faced with a depressingly limited choice of glasses that cramped our face, let alone our style, an increasing number of people turned to contact lenses. The traitors. As the patron saint of the bespectacled, poet John Hegley, affirmed: ‘contact lenses are a hiding of the fault / they pretend the self-sufficiency of the individual / and minister unto the cult of stultifying normality’. No. If we were to retain any sense of moral propriety, contact lenses just wouldn’t do.

Imagine my joy, then, on discovering a booming glasses industry on the other side of the Channel. The Parisian metro is like a catwalk for the four-eyed. Red glasses, wooden glasses, tortoiseshell and horn-rimmed glasses, circular, angular, polka dots and stripes. Like a hairstyle or outfit choice, Parisians prove that glasses can help project a personal image. By revolutionising their glasses market, the French have turned poor vision into an advantage. No longer just practical, glasses have become desirable. Hurrah! Myopia is fashionable at last!

And it would seem that the French attitude is making its long-overdue journey across the Channel; if the glasses being worn on Warwick campus are representative of those being worn all over Great Britain, well then there’s reason to be hopeful, my bespectacled friend.

Allow me to defer one last time to the wisdom of John Hegley: ‘As well as providing open acknowledgement / of the imperfection in my eyesight / my glasses are a symbolic celebration / of the wider imperfection that is the human condition.’

Now there’s a man with vision.