I have never worn bifocals, but I’m beginning to wish I had. In my youth, you see, I noticed how bifocals could – conveniently – be blamed for nearly everything. “Damn these bifocals!” men would exclaim, as they knocked over other people’s pints in the pub when reaching for a pork scratching. “It’s these wretched bifocals! I’ll never get used to them!” women would yell, hopping about in pain, having burned themselves getting things out of the oven. “It was the bifocals what done it, your honour,” defendants in court would say. “It is true that I was found red-handed wiv the bag of loot, but I only knocked the loot into the bag because my spatial judgment was impaired by the small field of view offered by the reading segment of my spectacles.” Why didn’t Vicky Pryce cite her bifocals as the reason she ticked the wrong box on the form where it said, “Was it you that was speeding? YES or NO”? What a world of grief she could have been spared if she’d made bifocals her defence. Absolutely everyone would have sympathised and said, “Me too! I do it all the time! Why do they even still make glasses like these?” And right now, she would be walking free.
As you can probably tell from this, I have started knocking things over and burning myself on the oven – and while I am quite happy to say, “No! Not again! Grrr, bifocals!” I am fooling no one, because I don’t often even wear glasses. The truth is, I have managed to lose all my spatial judgment and manual dexterity without any help at all from Dollond & Aitchison. And it makes me very sad. All my life, I’ve always been able to carry, with confidence, a full cup of hot tea, an open umbrella, an ice-cream cone and a tray of sharp knives – and have thought nothing of it. But now I’ve lost the knack, and I mourn its passing. Unclipping the dog’s lead is not the simple one-two opposable-thumb operation that it ought to be; it involves fumbling and swearing, and finally giving up and using both hands while holding my gloves between my teeth. Meanwhile, every time I try to pull a single tissue from a box (using a co-ordinated hand-wrist technique acquired over decades), a great stream of unwanted tissues comes out as well, and I’m so infuriated I burst into tears. “What has happened to my knacks?” I sob. “It is so unfair of life to let you acquire knacks and then take all your knacks away again!”
I wonder if anyone will ever remake that great horror movie The Hands of Orlac? If so, I’d be more than happy to work on it. You may remember the excellent premise of the original film: a concert pianist loses his hands in a train accident, but wakes to find he’s been given two new ones which are (oh no!) hands taken from a freshly hanged murderer. I can’t remember how much of his predicament the pianist is consciously acquainted with. I’m sure there are big giveaway scars around his wrists; also, I do seem to remember him holding up his hands in confusion, and pronouncing the deathless line, “They don’t look like mine.” But, of course, the interesting stuff is when he tries to play the piano with the new hands, and it’s as if they are covered in blue labels with “Fyffes” written on them – they are just bunches of bananas, bouncing off the keys and making no noise that Rachmaninov would care to call his own. Meanwhile, of course, the plot thickens when people realise that the hands themselves have other, autonomous skills. Someone says to the concert pianist, “Could you open this marmalade, darling?” and he says “Right ho!”, and then his big hands grip the jar so tightly (and murderously) that they break and crush it to highly alarming palmfuls of jammy, glassy splinters.
This is my theory: that the person who first wrote The Hands of Orlac was about the same age as me, and was continually staring at his own hands in disbelief. Why don’t they work properly? Why do they drop things? Why can’t I play the piano? Hey, this might be a bit far-fetched, but are these hands possibly someone else’s? Again, here is an excellent line of defence that Vicky Pryce’s lawyers failed to seize. But it’s so easy to be wise after the event, of course.
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