You want WHAT for a pair of glasses?
I broke my spectacles one week before going on holiday.
I was due my annual checkup anyway, so I went to have my eyes tested - for free now, because my mother has a glaucoma, my father had diabetes, and I am over forty. Let's say that I'd rather pay and not have a genetic timebomb in me.
Anyway, the old peepers are very well. Still shortsighted, but no change in prescription for five years now. A lovely optician at Boots showed me photos of the back of my eyes, and explained every single line and dot and how neat and crisp they are.
They had a 99 pounds offer for frames including lenses. I tried some, sent a picture to Dr B., then found out they would not be ready in time before my trip.
I also saw exactly the same frame as the one I broke, and they said they could try and fit my old lenses into it, saving me 55 pounds. But again, they'd have to send them off and it would take a while.
So I went to Vision Express, well known for putting together your glasses on site in one hour. Lots of lovely frames, a very cute (and flirting!) assistant. But of course the frames I liked were 149 pounds. Plus lenses (can't remember now, but I think around 60 pounds for both). Plus, they'd have to make special thinner lenses because the ordinary cheap ones are too thick for that frame. Add 40 pounds on top of that. Per lens? For both? Honestly, I can't remember, for at that stage I'd stopped hearing - I have this ability to blank out prices over one hundred pounds: one hundred and two pounds? One million and two pounds? The same to me.
I sighed, I looked up into the salesman piercing blue eyes and said I'd come back. Then I went round the corner and bought a tube of superglue.
Thursday 3 January 2008 at 7:54 pm
[...] not that I can't afford new glasses, but I simply refuse to spend hundred of pounds for something I wear around twenty minutes a day. The broken ones were free from the NHS when I was [...]