I started a great many of the best years of my life by ramming shallow little bowls of glass into my eyes, most of which refused to come out at night – unless, of course, I didn’t want them to.  Gas Permeable Lenses – invented, I believe, by the Marquis de Sade for when his nipple-clamps were on the blink – were what enabled me to do my job during the short periods when my eyes were not watering.

Despite the discomfort, there were a number of benefits to wearing these little saucers of glass rather than spectacles: I could walk into a swimming baths without actually falling into the pool (One of the worst aspects of having two daughters is that they, and their mother, always entered the baths through a different door and at a different time to me.  Until the dawn of contact lenses, I could never see them.  I had to stand near the hell-hole changing room exit, breathing in the heady aroma of sweat, Brut33 and footbath, watching the fuzzy animate mosaic of unfocused flesh and lycra costume swimming around until, eventually, one of them came to collect me.)  I could play sport and, best of all, I could walk in the rain without viewing the world through a rain-splattered windscreen.

I’m very happy to say that vanity never played a part in the decision to start wearing contacts: in fact, when I look at photographs, I always appear more human in my specs.  They add a little space between my piggy little eyes and distract attention, just a little, from a nose that belongs on a face that is quite a lot larger than my own.  I started to wear lenses because my job required me to use an eyeglass for much of the time and the constant on-off of spectacles usually left them with arms that were more outstretched than Australia in the 1970’s (as long as you were white, of course).  Besides, I’ve never laboured under the misapprehension that I was ‘owt to look at’.  Taking glasses on or off of this face is never going to give George Clooney sleepless nights.  I have great ‘friend’ potential: nobody really cares what I look like.

I have the kind of face that, for whatever reason, people tend to remember.  Other people have, however, the dreadful habit of being totally unrecognisable to me.  I wish they’d sort it out.  I spend huge chunks of my life trying to work out who I have just bumped into: who it is that obviously recognises me.  My facial recognition software (at best even less reliable than that of the Metropolitan Police) whirrs uselessly in the background, taking me back as far as schooldays without ever once alerting me to the fact that the other person is a) asking questions about my wife, b) wearing a Tesco’s name badge and c) my mother-in-law.  I adopt the kind of vague approach to conversation that I realise makes me sound disinterested, simply because the only alternative I have is downright rude.  The option of asking “I’m sorry, who are you?” is ever-present, but one I never take.  I would prefer to be seen as socially inept (which I am) than bad-mannered, so the initial part of every conversation I ever have features me blindly groping around for some clue as to who I am talking to (or, should they be a former English Master, “to whom I am talking”.)

Unfortunately, ‘dawn’ usually breaks only after I have said something either horribly crass or downright insensitive, more often than not confusing my companion with someone that neither of us likes.  I try so hard to maintain a checklist in my head – like a game of ‘Guess Who?’ – “does he have dark hair, does he wear glasses, does he have a moustache, is he more full of shit  than Beckton*… is he Piers Morgan?”, that kind of thing, but it never works.  Somehow I cannot recognise faces until long after I have grown to know the people behind them.  And no amount of glass in the eye seems to alter that…

*The largest sewage farm in Europe.