Choosing frames for my new varifocal lenses was like choosing a new personality. Each pair I tried on projected something slightly different. What kind of person should I pretend to be from now on? Philosophical? Whacky? Left-leaning? Post post-modernist? It was an unexpectedly exciting moment.
The young assistant stood with me at the display and offered her professional opinion. In quick succession I popped on a couple of dozen different frames and looked into her eyes and tried to be serious. She knew immediately whether or not a particular pair of frames suited my face. If they did, and she liked them, she shook her fingers as though she’d just burnt them on a hotplate. Presumably this meant they were ‘hot’ or, perish the thought, that they made me look ‘hot’. If she thought the frames suited but were boring, she let her eyelids droop, as if she were about to fall asleep on the spot. If she didn’t like them, or they suited me not at all, she pretended to have a mouthful of vomit and to be frantically casting about for somewhere to throw up.
Only one pair left her in a quandary: the ones I kept returning to, the heavy black retro frames. I’d seen them in newspaper obituary photographs taken in the 1950s of the faces of colonial administrators. The disgraced Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer Reginald Maudling wore something very similar. And Ronald Kray wore a pair when he was allowed out for the day from Broadmoor to attend his mum’s funeral at Chingford cemetery. The designer frames were theatrical without being ridiculous, but only just. The personality projected was one of assiduous depravity. In a British film, they’d be the kind of glasses worn by a sadistic paedophile.
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