As you get older, your eyesight weakens and your focal point lengthens, meaning you need glasses to see the detail.

For many people, this means a short trip to the local pharmacist to pick up a standard strength of reading glasses for a few bucks.

Unfortunately, I use my eyes for close up work a lot. I’m in front of my computer most of the day so I need decent glasses to protect my eyesight for the long term. I started out with some prescription reading glasses, and that was all I needed them for; reading a book and working on the computer. Two years later I needed stronger reading glasses and started to have to bring them with me wherever I went, or face squinting at menus, price tags and parking meters like an octogenarian.

Pretty soon they were not sufficient either. Believe it or not, I now use 3 separate pairs of glasses, each costing a few hundred bucks, to get by:

  • A pair of ‘professional’ tinted lenses that have 3 distances, to take the glare off close-up screen work, mid-range stuff and 3-metre range for watching the TV
  • A pair of varifocals for driving and general inside wandering around stuff. The professional lenses don’t have the long range view for driving – and you can’t fit them in the lens since it already has 3 ranges – and I can no longer read the dashboard numbers unaided
  • A pair of varifocal sunglasses for driving and general outside wandering around stuff

It’s an expensive business. I hope I get some longevity out of them, otherwise I’m looking at 3 replacements.