Andrew Sheldrake, writing in optician, March 12, asks what the NHS sight test fee was when 'The Scheme', as it was called then, first began in 1948. It was 15 shillings and sixpence, now &\#163;0.775. I amused myself, a couple of years ago, with the same question as the one he asks: if the fee had risen with inflation, what would it be now? I did not have access to the inflation tables when I did my calculation, but I had the price of the Ford Fiesta and its antecedents, which happened also to give average annual salaries. In 1948, the average annual salary could have purchased 513.55 eye tests. Dividing the average annual salary in 1996 by that factor, produced a fee for the eye test then of &\#163;35.61. I was convinced, beyond all doubt, that I was being paid a fraction of what my father was paid to do the same job in 1948 and that we had been sold down the river. But, moreover, I was convinced that my protestations would, as ever, fall on deaf ears, whether at Whitley or Blackfriars or anywhere else my subscriptions go to. Bill Carlyle Corby, Northants