Shouldn't Have Gone to SpecSavers

I have used Glasses Direct varifocals for decades without a hiccup. They arrived by post, I put them on, and the world behaved itself. No drama. No geometry experiments. No unexpected gradients. The only real drawback was the obvious one. Being a postal service, there is no fitting phase. No nudging frames. No marking pupil height. No making sure the lenses sit where your eyes expect them to be. Eventually that small irritation persuaded me to switch to SpecSavers for a proper fitting and what I assumed would be an upgrade.

What I received was not an upgrade. It was an adventure.

From the moment I put the new glasses on, the ground appeared so close that I wondered whether someone had lowered the entire village by a couple of feet while I was in the shop. Visually, the world now rises to meet me. Every corridor seems to slope upwards. Every pavement feels like a gentle incline. Even my kitchen floor appears to have taken early retirement and moved to the Lake District.

But then come the legs. Because the ground looks nearer, my stride adjusts. My balance recalibrates. My body tries to compensate for the imaginary hill my eyes insist is there. And suddenly the tactile feedback is the polar opposite of the visual cue. My legs have decided I am walking downhill. Not slightly. Properly downhill. As if gravity has chosen a new direction to amuse itself.

So here I am. A man both climbing and descending at the same time. Schrödinger on a stroll. My eyes shout uphill. My legs shout downhill. My brain stands in the middle trying to negotiate a ceasefire while I wobble across the room like a tourist three pints into their first cider festival.

This is the inevitable outcome when the corridor height in a varifocal lens is a few millimetres north of correct. Instead of looking through the distance zone when I walk, I plunge straight into the intermediate zone. The world tilts up. My legs stick to the truth and insist there is no hill at all. My senses, usually such cooperative creatures, are now engaged in a daily turf war.

I shall return to SpecSavers and explain all this calmly. What I need is not a topographical reinterpretation of Old Sodbury. I need lenses that permit eyes, legs and gravity to agree on the general layout of the landscape.

Until the correction is made, I remain a walking optical paradox. A man traversing a perfectly flat floor while simultaneously going uphill and downhill. Proof that even a tiny measurement error can turn a simple stroll into a philosophical problem.