My day job involves staring at screens and I was under the illusion that my choice of spectacles was doing their job, enabling me to spot double spaces, commas that should have been semi colons etc... Similarly, in my other life as a musician, my spectacles actually enabled me to see what notes I should be playing; curtailing my usual excuse that the dots hadn’t been written properly.
This delusion was shattered when I tried out a friend’s rather snazzy reading glasses that seemed to be scattering shards of blue every time he turned. The difference was huge; such clarity, I was seeing everything on screen bigger and better than ever before. I knew I had to get my own pair.
For some people, must-haves include Apple watches, Gucci frames and holidays in Hawaii. For me, I was on a mission to buy blue-light filtering lenses made to my prescription. I headed off to my local practice, the busy-but-friendly Clearvision in Brixton, found my vision had got a bit worse (now +1.50), picked up some lightweight blank frames made by Gaastra, and chose lenses from Waterside Laboratories which reflect some blue light and offer a level of clarity that I hadn’t found whatsoever with my previous supermarket readers.
In my day job I still, after a couple of months, relish putting my spectacles on and enjoy the superb vision they give me of the reading material I have to plough through. No more shifting and squinting for me. I’ve also used them for several gigs now and realised that the music copyists hadn’t done such a bad job after all – the notes are clear, to the last demi semiquaver, and my sight reading has definitely improved as a result.
I actually forgot to bring them to my last big band concert, however. All I’m prepared to say is that I hope the audience didn’t notice. I did.