I am sad to report that eyesight is now fading at such an alarming rate that I am now at the point that I wear glasses for both distance and for reading. However, anyone who knows my habit for misplacing items will understand that the stress of having two pairs of glasses to accompany my wallet, keys and mobile phone on every trip out of my front door is too much to take. I tried getting myself a man bag, but it resulted in me either losing it at regular opportunities or enduring merciless piss taking from my alleged friends. If you are a man and you are thinking about taking a man bag to a football match, don’t do it……there is something about the heady mix of alcohol and testosterone that will leave you exposed to a savage attack on your character. You may as well turn up in a pink ballet dress with Dale Winton on your arm.

I finally succumbed to a pair of Sainsbury’s reading glasses about a year ago when my arm could no longer extend far enough to allow me to read a book or the cooking instructions on packets and tins of food but the deterioration continued to the point where I could no longer look at my lap top computer without resembling someone impersonating a Japanese man in a high profile masturbating competition. I have now bought a desktop computer with a screen nearly as big as my house, so at least that problem has been temporarily resolved, though reading, watching television and driving, remains a constant source of chopping and changing that is littered with danger; accidentally putting on a pair of reading glasses as I entered the M3 was not my finest moment.

This leaves me with no choice to enter two market places, the first being contact lenses, the second bi-focals, a certain way of making me look like a serial sex offender. You only have to look art Reading manager Brian McDermott to see the unfortunate complexities of having a bald head and glasses. The other problem with being a certain age and having a bald head is that everyone says that you look like every other person in your age bracket without hair…..if I stick on a pair of glasses just you watch the Harry Hill lookalike jokes coming in, something which I could cope with a bit more if he wasn’t someone I switched off as soon as he appeared on my TV screen. I can’t stand the fucker.

Me and contact lenses would, without a shadow of any doubt, be a match made in Hell, but they have to be worth a crack, if only to avoid a barrage of Harry Hill quips and having to walk around the schools I work in with a CRB form pinned to my forehead in a bid to stop the children running to the hills. I don’t really know how it works yet with contact lenses but I have friends who wear them, so I think I will need to have some frank discussions about the pros and cons and what my chances are of losing them within five minutes are. Pretty high I guess, but worth it if it means avoiding being labelled Harry Hill every time I walk in to a pub.

It’s either that or grow the sides and do a Bobby Charlton brush over…………….