Unaccountably, I woke up early the other morning with the song China in Your Hand by T’Pau ringing in my ears. Odd that. Not heard or thought about it for years. I put it on.
“Don’t push too far, your dreams are china in your hand,” Carol Decker advises, adding, “Don’t wish too hard because they may come true.” She sings the truth.
Only last month, you Guardian readers made a dream of mine come true. Very decent of you, but I wish you hadn’t. I’d written a moving, heartfelt, anguished piece about my lifelong struggle to stop my spectacles continually slipping down my nose. This elicited a variety of responses, some of which weren’t ungenerous. Advice, if not sympathy, came my way. One suggestion was to buy these little thingies you attach to the end of the arms of the glasses to keep them in solid position behind your ears.
They worked. Oh joy. I walked to the shops and the specs stayed in place. On the way home I broke into a run. They didn’t move. Even a quick pogo around didn’t shift them. My life had changed. But within a week a sharp pain developed around the bridge of my nose. Before long a dramatic kind of sore had developed. Oh no – I knew it was all going too well.
This, it turned out, was an acanthoma fissuratum. According to DermNet, this is “an uncommon condition that occurs in people who wear glasses”, presenting as “a firm flesh-coloured papule, nodule or plaque that has a central furrow dividing the lesion in half”. Luckily, there is a cure: not wearing your specs for a while. At least I don’t need a prescription for that. When I go back to glasses, it will have to be without the little thingies. It’s a shame – we were good together.
Adrian Chiles is a writer, broadcaster and a Guardian columnist
