Big Mistake!

 

 

I knew I’d dropped the lens from my glasses somewhere outside the school. I retraced my steps over tussocky grass, broken glass and litter strewn paths, but could not find it.

I get a sixth sense about things that I lose. Sometimes I know that things are lost forever, but at other times I know that they will turn up again; and that was how I felt this time.

About a month later one of the teachers walked into the classroom holding up the lens she had found.

‘Is this anybody’s,’ she asked.

‘It’s mine,” I replied delighted.

It took a while before the lens travelled from the desk drawer to my bag. It then travelled to and fro in the bag until released into the well of the car and travelled further miles until it somehow was taken back home to be fixed. By this time the broken frame I’d put in a safe place was lost.

Two years later the frame turned up, but where had I placed the lens?

Another year passed, and it was only when cleaning out a drawer last week that I found the lens again.

This weekend all the pieces were sitting together waiting to be fixed.

I slipped the lens into place and it fitted perfectly. A dab of super glue I thought would hold the whole ensemble together.

Big mistake!

The lens that had so easily slotted into place would no longer slide effortlessly into place. Superglue was on my fingers as I struggled. Superglue was now on both the front and the back of the lens. Superglue had fixed both my glasses frame and the lens to various digits.

In a panic I raced to the sink and managed to free myself from both the frame and the lens. Then I looked at the lens. The once clear transparent lens now had a cloud of Superglue over it.

I wasn’t too worried at first. I thought I would be able to peel it off.

Big mistake!

I tried everything: I abraded, brushed, buffed and burnished. I rubbed, scrubbed, flushed and washed. When all that failed, and an hour had passed, in defeat I picked up the pan scouring pad.

Big mistake!

The glass of the lens now had fine scratches but the Superglue remained firmly intact.

I turned to what all people now turn to in times of trouble: the internet.

‘Try nail varnish remover,’ one site suggested. There was a codicil which added, ‘But only try this on a glass lens and not a plastic one.’

Was the lens made of glass or plastic? I had no way of knowing for sure. I placed it in an eggcup poured over the nail varnish remover, left a warning sign explaining my experimentation and left the house.

There were odd purple bubbles above the lens when I returned hours later. Some of the Superglue could now be removed, but not all.

Despondently I slipped the lens into position and wore these ruinous glasses to watch the latest episode of Big Brother, the white splodgy dots on the lens helping to make the programme even more interesting.

Long, long ago I remember an optician looking at me in horror when I suggested that perhaps a lens could be held in place with Superglue. At the time I had been mystified by the expression on her face. I wonder if she too had once made the ‘Big Mistake!’