I WENT to Specsavers to have my eyes tested this week. Hasn’t technology moved on? I first decided I needed glasses about 18 years ago when my arms became too short to read a newspaper. Even when squinting.

After testing I got a pair of bifocals, something with which I was never happy. As I only needed glasses for reading or sitting before a computer screen, I thereafter bought reading specs without a prescription. I mean, you can get them in the Pound Shop.

These may come in easy abundance and affordability but they leave room for improvement.

They are not exactly fashionable and the arms tend to break off quite easily which recently left me balancing them from one ear while negotiating passport control at an airport like a demented barnpot with a twitch and a strange tilt to my head.

I was amazed they let me on the plane.

I finally decided I needed proper glasses because my near distance vision was also deteriorating and I realised that it wasn’t really foggy every time I watched Manchester United on television. It was my fuzzy eyesight.

By heck, they do the job right these, don’t they?

They blew air in my eyes and photographed them and that was before I saw a very nice gentleman optician who was extremely thorough.

He put these strange frames on me which allowed him to switch heavy duty lenses and blank out one eye and then the other as I read a chart.

Which reminded me of the simple country lad (no, he wasn’t from Barnsley) who went for his eyes testing in a less technological age.

The optician told him to close his right eye and read the chart with his left but, try as he might, he was unable to do so. Eventually, the frustrated professional got a corn flake box and cut an opening for just the left eye and fitted the box over the head of the lad who then started crying.

"What’s wrong?" said the optician. "Why are you crying?"

"Well," sniffed the lad. "I wanted some tortoiseshell ones, like my brother."

As it happens, I controlled my mirth and didn’t tell the joke to the gentleman conducting my examination.

Today I collect my two pairs of spectacles. Tortoiseshell, of course.