Meet a dark and handsome stranger. ☜ ☝ ☞ ☟♫

How on earth do people do this?


The wearing of dark glasses in conditions other than bright sunshine is extremely counter-intuitive. It's hard to pull off when indoors, makes one very self-conscious, not to mention a danger to oneself and passers by at night, and looks incongruous when it's grey and overcast.

However, somewhere hovering around its edges is the idea that it’s also glamorous and enigmatic, and not a little film-starrish. One can't quite help but to stride around confidently yet warily, as if the paparazzi were lurking behind every bush and bollard. But like smoking it’s a faux-allure: neither smoking nor sunglasses effects a Hollywood transformation, it merely makes one faintly ridiculous.

Anyway, my sunglasses aren't welded to my head because I'm trying to develop a mystique. Nor have I become an overnight sensation. I'm merely trying to disguise the grimness of my appearance so I don't frighten small children, perfect strangers, colleagues, clients, or indeeed horses. For the last three weeks, I’ve suffered from a skin allergy afftecting the area of the eyes. I have unimaginable rococo flourishes in the form of monstrous swellings. Huge sunglasses only can disguise the ghastly disfiguring redness and swelling.

Eventually, I ended up at the optician, thinking of making an eccentric virtue out of the wearing of dark glasses forever more. But no, fears were groundless; I have merely to devote myself with vigor to a course of antibiotics until all symptoms have disappeared.

However, as a side story to all of this, the visit to the opticians has yielded quite a different return: having had perfect eyesight all my life, I discover I need reading glasses. And worse, the Optician says cheerily 'Don't worry Ms. Edna, it happens to everyone - it's just to do with getting older'. I restrain myself from clobbering him with something hard and heavy. Reader, you can inject industrial amounts of botox into your forehead, but once reading glasses are prescribed, there’s no disguising your real age.

Someone once remarked that Los Angeles was full of women who’d been 35 for years, and I’ve been inclined to agree. Yet with my fabulous new frames parked on my face as I stare at this screen - delighted to be able to see what I'm typing - appearances are giving the lie to my lies. Ah well.