I was born a myope, that is someone suffering from myopia or as this is more commonly called,short-sightedness.
This condition is exactly that, an ability to read and to see things perfectly at close range, the problem starts (for me anyway) at about three feet from my eyes and gets successively worse after that.
I am being precise about this because I lived through the aggravation all through my life of people saying to me “You don’t need glasses at all, I’ve seen you take them off to read” as if their continued presence on my nose was a sort of fashion statement.

Because we cannot see as others see we don’t know that we are short-sighted when we are young.
My problems started when I started to get the bus home from school.
I couldn’t read the number and often ended getting on the wrong one and ending up at the wrong destination.
My mother was endlessly sympathetic of this and used to organise someone to meet me after school and put me on the correct route home.
I think they assumed that I was just particularly stupid.

My older brother David, who is four years older than me, was diagnosed as myopic when he was twelve and got a pair of glasses.
On a day which is forever engraved in my memory I was standing in the upstairs nursery of our house in Cork.
I tried on my brothers new glasses and then looked out the window at the grass below.
To my amazement the green blur suddenly became a precise lawn of grass. To my amazement I could make out each individual blade, and from upstairs! To get that sharpness of vision previously I would have to be down on all fours!

So, I was duly tested , found wanting, and got my own glasses.
Life changed immediately for the better after that, buses were catchable,
the blackboard was visible, people were recognisable at further than three paces.

Portrait of the writer as a young myope

The trouble was that as soon as I was diagnosed my myopia began to accelerate rapidly and by two years my glasses had become quite strong.
The specialist decided on a dramatic course of action to arrest this.
He decided that I was to rest my eyes for a year.
I was at this stage twelve years old and in my final year in primary school. This was considered an important year as there were two big exams at the end of the year, the Primary which was a state recognised qualification and at that time a basic one for all jobs, and the secondary school entrance exam.
For this entire year I was to attend school but was forbidden to read or write, to watch television or films or to strain my eyes in any way.
This meant no homework in school and consequently no punishment unless I misbehaved.
I was of course the envy of my classmates.
It had its downside too.
The no television didn’t matter a whit, we hadn’t even a set, the no films wasn’t much of a blow but the no books was a bit of a disaster.
I was a total bookworm and without books used to prowl fretfully about the house complaining about being bored.
My mother tried to teach me to knit, a disaster. I would start off with ten stitches and end up with fifty, or six.
All was resolved when I discovered the radio.
I remember particularly falling in love with the Archers which I used to listen to each day and then to the omnibus addition on Sunday morning.

The year passed very pleasantly.
For some strange reason the staff teacher decided that since I was having troubles I could be excused compulsary games so for a blissful year I was spared the horrors of school rugby.
Because I was not doing any reading I used to listen attentively in class and actually found the whole busisness of reading writing and arithmetic interesting.

In fact the most interesting thing to emerge from that year of forced idleness is that up to this year I had been an indifferent student, sitting somewhere near the middle of the class in grading.

After my year of no reading I sat the Primary certificate along with eighty others in my year and to the astonishment of all, including myself, got the highest marks in the whole school.
I remember being given I special certificate at a general assembly in the school hall the following year.

It begs a question doesn’t it about the benefits of homework.

I have worn glasses happily since that day, nowadays I also have glasses for reading and my normal lenses are varifocal to compensate for my old eyes being both short and long sighted.
Not for me the temptation of fixing the problem with laser surgery.
I have got so used to the glasses now that as would as soon do without my nose as do without them.