The Big Optometry Blog

Yesterday marked the passing of cycling legend Laurent Fignon from cancer. He sprang to prominence in the early 1980s as one of the youngest winners of the Tour de France and went on to become famous for losing the three week-long, 3,000km+ event by just 8 seconds to Gred Lemond in 1989.

He was a private person who wore glasses and this may well have helped him win the nickname of the professor " Le prof". However this was at odds with his less than glittering academic career.

The quiet Frenchman was a superb cyclist and perhaps one of the very few internationally-renowned sportsmen to wear glasses. This not only brought a new level of cool to spec wearers around the globe but gave TV commentators something to mention when filling in the long spells during the classic races. This affectation  also  made him instantly recognisable to millions of fans.

It's amazing what you find out if you talk to your children. I was chatting to my son recently about school when the subject of teachers cropped up, not liking them mainly. He then proceeded to tell me a story about the day everyone took a magazine into school to discuss."I don't remember that", I said. He went on to tell me that he hadn't taken one in, " err forgot".nPresumably that is why the teacher was on his case. But what he did say was that the girl who sat next to him had taken in a copy of Optician and he had taken great delight in pointing out to the class the fact that  his dad (me) was the editor. I naturally quewstioned if anyone believed him at which he said my picture was in there (above the comment) and enough of his friewnds recognised me. It was such a momentus occasion that he hadn't bothered telling me!

Let's hope so.

It has been eerily quiet of late and realising times would be quiet in the office I thought it would be good to get a few visits in the diary. While that can be nice for a while we all need some commercial activity to get the business juices flowing.

Talking of things flowing I have been out and about in Devon recently. This week I was in Exeter vsiting the Boots practice to interview the Optician Dispensing Optician of the Year. I'm a Devon boy myself but I had forgotten how hard it can rain. It was wet.

The week before that I was in Babbacombe meeting up with Riviera Rimless a specialist glazing business which is based just down the road from the model village. And, you've geussed it, it was wet then too. I passed the lines of grokels queing up to get in and remembered the many times I didn't go in because ' of all them grokels and emmets cluttering the place up,' never realised I'd be one of them. When I was living in Devon I can't say I had much sympathy. These days having kids and being an old hand at queing up outside tourists attractions you have to feel sorry for anyone who chose the last two week to go on holiday anywhere in the UK.

Perhaps being at work does have its upside.

Optician is always keen to try out the latest gizmos and so we signed up to one of the latest iPhone apps designed to measure your PD. While this might look like someone playing Botticelli or doing a very poor Adolf Hitler impression it is in fact the way the app works.

What the person being measured has to do is hold a credit card, with the black strip outermost and under their nose, in front of the iPhone being held by the measurer. The measurer has to hold the iPhone exactly 30cms from the face of the person being measured press the button and and hey presto, you get a PD of 86mm! I think not. The last time the clinical editor was let loose with a ruler the same PD was measured as 65mm.

An thinking of that, what's wrong with a ruler?

When I first saw this story about a young man being shot for a pair of Cartier sunglasses I thought it had to be a one off. Think again.

 This story about a lad shot for rusfusing to hand over his sunglasses while leaving a night club is truly shocking, unless you live in Detroit where between 15 and 20 people have been shot for their sunglasses in the last year alone.

My first week back from the Alpe d'Huez triathlon was a bit of a blur. Everyone seems to be on hopliday at the moment ( as was I) which  makes life harder for those of us left at home. 

As my second week started I had a few of interesting telephone calls.

The first was Radio Scotland asking for Optician to field someone to be interviewed about the phenomenon of Lady Gaga contact lenses. Youngsters are buying oversized lenses online and wearing them without any aftercare advice apparently. The other call was to alerted Optician to a radio Four You and Yours piece on more transparency for the eye test. We also had news that over the weekend the Eyecare Trust had appeared to say that buying online could be an OK thing to do if you have a simple prescription.

I wonder if any of the above could be connected?

Hot on the heels of the news that burglars are using social media networking site like Facebook and Twitter to target housholds.

It seems that posting the wrong thing online could also hamper your chances of landing a job. A report from the US found that a massive seven out of ten employers had rejected candidates on the strength of something a candidate had posted online.

Be warned. LOL

I've nearly always worked on weekly magazines so publishing a book is a bit of a culture shock.

But that is excatly what Optician has done. I now have in my hand a lovely little book on Glaucoma based on the recent series and featuring all of the latest advice from NICE.

As a weekly journalist the lead times do take a bit of getting used to. The book has been over a year in the making. Even the foreword took about a month to secure.

Seeing it in the flesh, so to speak, is still satisfying.

All I need to do now is decide on the topic for the next one.

Copies are available for £30 + £3.95 P&P from Optician.

Now you expect it from the Daily Mail but not the Torygraph.There again perhaps it is a sign of the times but on Tuesday the Telegraph published  5 ways to...Save money on your eye care.

Cue the top 40 hit parade music.

Coming in at number one  is get a free or cheap eye test.

Number two is get a takeaway prescription. The Telepgraphs tells its readers that by law an optician has to provide a prescription and this will enable a third party to make your lenses without measuring your eyes. Make sure you can read it though becuase you might have to input the data yourself.

Number three..cheap glasses sites. You can buy glasses online for as little as £4.99, Tesco do it for £10 for designer frames go to BudgetSpex or Next. Cue plug for Glasses Direct

Number four is cheap contact lenses. The article says 30 pairs of Focus Dailies All day Comfort will cost you £18 at Boots but from Getlenses it's £8.46.

Number five is cheap laser surgery. Optimax sells left over capacity on ebay and you can use Tesco Clubcard points, you can also go for cashback or phone around for last minute cancellations --nice one, not 'arf.

I wonder if Rodenstock will be so keen to use the Telegraph for its full page ads and Wimbledon campaigns in the future?

And the author of this piece,Rosie Murray-West. Sounds eerily close to Murray-Wells doesn't it.

I used to know a really good European joke about what if the French cooked and made love like they drive. It ran through all the nationalities and as ever the UK was the butt of the joke.

These days of course we  are all European so it's only fitting that the heads of all of the European optical manufacturers' trade bodies met in Brussels for lunch recently to discuss. Driving and eye sight.

The Italians revealed that 59% of road accidents have a visual causal link while of France's 40 million drivers 8 million have a under or uncorrected visual problem. With eyesight like that I don't think either nationality could find the kitchen or the bedroom for that matter.