I’ve worn glasses since I was two years old, so I like to think I know what works for me and what doesn’t. What I don’t need is someone following me round the shelves making me try on pairs and pairs of random and bizarre frames straight from a nine-year-old’s dressing up box. I don’t mind my husband doing this, or my son or a good friend, but I do mind YOU, Mr Total Stranger Shopowner, giving me your utterly useless tuppence ha’penny.

This was my first experience of spec-shopping since leaving England, a place where you often get the opposite – no service at all, big chunks of your lunch hour spent quietly queuing until someone is free to get THAT pair down to try on. On the flipside I’m also familiar with having a broad range of shapes and styles from which I can make a well-balanced choice; these blasted specs are welded to my persona so I have to get it right. Sadly, due to a recent age-related change in prescription meaning that I can no longer read without actually taking my specs off (a novel thing for me), I can’t have what I want any more and I need new ones and they can’t be any old shape because they need to work in more ways than just one. When SmallMonkey updated his prescription recently, Mr PC nagged me to get a new pair, too, and so it was that we spent the best part of half an hour today having a good laugh at my expense (that’s OK, I’m used to it from those two).

An ordeal, to be frank. It’s been a long time since someone asked me to (no, insisted that I) put on a pair of bright purple frames, then some pink ones with orange sparkle, then a mad Gucci pair with fat gold logo all down the sides. Really? My friend’s family had a charity fancy dress party in the 1990s in a rented out Oxfam shop. Huge fun, I have the dusty pics somewhere. I think I tried on some crazy specs on that day – twenty years ago. For sunglasses I think a bit of show is OK, but when I mentioned to The Two Ronnies that I had to wear these things all day (like, when I’m eating my Cheerios, when I’m waiting with the other mums for the school bus, when I’m pretending to be a tour guide in front of total strangers) it fell on deaf ears. Or blind eyes. Whatever.

The biggest laugh came from a pair that made me look just like Grandpa Bryan. I loved Grandpa Bryan so very much, and in fact he looked alright, you know, quite handsome in his younger years, but that doesn’t mean I want to actually look like him. What I wear on my face, absolutely all of the day, defines me and gives people an impression of who I am straight away, no second chances. Later they can find out who I am, and might realise that the first impression was not what they thought. But it has to fit, to be innocuous, that first time. So it really pays, spec-shop-owners, to put yourselves in the customer’s shoes when forcing random frames on a punter – would YOU want to wear the bright orange ones or the Mister Magoo specials? Then why would I?

Sale lost.