We’ve had a trip to the opticians.

As far as the family goes, we’re fairly crap, eyesight-wise. My wife wears glasses or contacts. My wife’s parents wear glasses. My parents wear glasses or contacts. I was prescribed glasses at around 14, but never wear them because I am only short-sighted (admittedly very short sighted) in one eye, and the other compensates.

But my wife had noticed once or twice that when BTP was tired, his eyes didn’t always seem to focus properly. More specifically, his left eye wasn’t tracking quite as well as his right eye seemed to be. Not being experts, we thought the most sensible thing to do was to take him for an eye test (God bless the NHS that makes all this stuff free for under 16s).

So we took him for an eye test. Now it’s easy to understand how an eye test works in adults. You read the letters on the chart… and the opticians have to hope you’re not just saying words that coincidentally match those letters.

“Aye. Eh? Oh ‘ell… why?”

But for a five year old, just learning letters, this becomes a more difficult proposition. You are not only asking can he see the letters, but you have to judge whether or not him getting them wrong means that he can’t see them, or that he doesn’t know what they are. (Image by Jeff Dahl from Wikipedia: Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike License)

So instead, they use little picture type icons. There’s a stylised image of an aeroplane, a flower, a fish and so on. The only problem with these is that at smaller sizes, unless you know what it is, it’s entirely possible to come up with a different explanation as to what it is that makes perfect sense… for example, the smallest flower (big round head, stalk underneath) “looks a bit like a 9″ and the stylised aeroplane “looks like a curly x on its side”.

Again therefore the optician needs to draw the distinction between can you see it, and are you able to interpret it.

And then there’s the various shine light in your eyes while asking you to look in different directions; there’s the colour blindness testing, there’s the strange glasses that they put onto you and slide all sorts of different lenses in…

…and there’s you sitting next to it all as a Dad, wanting to help (“it’s a plane, look, son, it’s a plane, not a curly x”) but realising that to do so would kind of miss the whole point of an eye test, so you sit there with your gob shut (or at least relatively shut, by my standards).

And then eventually they come back and say that his vision is good — maybe a smidge long-sighted, but that’s common in children — but that his left eye does seem to not be following quite as well as his right. They say that it’s nothing to worry about: he might grow out of it anyway, as if it only happens when he’s tired, it’ll happen less as he gets older, and besides if we give him some glasses for it, it will make it easier on that eye, which will make it better, and so maybe if we come back in another three or six months we might find he doesn’t need them any more, but for now if we get him some glasses and make sure he wears them for any close-up work (reading, writing, drawing etc).

Actually choosing the glasses then proves difficult. BTP finds a pair that he decides he likes, even though they are clearly far too big for his face and would make him look a bit like Trevor Horn from The Buggles. But he likes them, because they are blue.

So armed with only two parents, and a certain amount of learned misdirection (you try having kids — you’ll learn it too), we get him to look at other pairs of glasses meanwhile swapping the enormous comedy glasses for some smaller blue-framed glasses and then pretending that they were the ones he was looking at earlier. I tell you: if you want to become a master spy and need to learn deception skills, have children. It’s a marvellous training course.

Anyway, BTP ends up with some blue glasses, which I think look rather smart. It makes him look kind of like a mini-professor.