Dr Wamuwi Mbao: Four your eyes only

I recently — far too belatedly — got my first pair of sunglasses. There are reasons for this. As a poorly sighted person of many years’ standing, I’ve always felt it was my duty to see as much as my shortsighted eyes would permit me. Every casual pair of sunglasses I tried on made it feel as though I was deliberately subjecting myself to a total eclipse. I hate stumbling, and I stumble when I wear dark glasses, so I’d written them off as an impractical vanity, the sort of thing that would see me unwittingly plunging down an open manhole. Because my eyesight is quite terrible, and because I grew up in a distant time when shame was still a social force, I’ve always regarded my seeing implements as equipment for living first and aesthetics a distant second.

Obviously, I was missing a trick. One of the easiest ways to accessorise your face is to bedeck it in an interesting pair of glasses. If you’re not a terminally shy person, glasses are an indispensable tab in the personal-identity browser. Of course, historically, the coolest people have worn spectacles: Michael Caine, Nana Mouskouri, the much-missed Archbishop Desmond Tutu. But, if you’re like me, you’ve never quite managed to shake off the association between your spectacles and a deeply uncool strain of geekery.

I blame my childhood. In Enid Blyton’s books, people who wear glasses to see are feeble, peevish types. On the screen, every action hero wears shades. What distinguishes Superman’s disguise, other than his having his underwear on the inside? Spectacles. The apex of “mild-mannered” Clark Kent’s disguise is his eyewear. Tom Ripley — the Patricia Highsmith original, not the Andrew Scott version — wears glasses too, solidifying that feeling that bad people in glasses are somehow more evil than bad people without them.

In any event, because I like to walk around but I don’t see very well, I’ve learned to method-act the part of the confident strider in adulthood. When I’m on foot, I move through the world in a state of constant concern. I’m scared of missing friends waving from across the street. I’m scared of putting a foot in a bear trap (it only has to happen once), and I’m scared I’ll miss some key or fascinating detail that might later be handy to salvage or extricate or redirect a desperately dull dinner conversation. Being short-sighted is like seeing everything through one of those ancient digital cameras. The details are all indistinct, which is no good if you’re a professional noticer.

This new pair of sunnies — prescription, of course — are a revelation. Suddenly, I’ve gained admission to that select club of tinted traversers. I feel more confident when I’m wearing them. Partly it’s because I can actually see, but it’s also because people can no longer see what I’m looking at. As a result, I’m no longer self-conscious about people seeing me ponder where my feet are about to go as I walk towards them. But one problem has surfaced very quickly: because nobody can see my eyes, they can’t see that little glancing flick that tells them which side I’m going to pass on. It’s been three weeks and I’ve had to do the sidewalk tango with far too many strangers for my liking.

A sense of mystique is glamorous if you’re James Baldwin or Jackie Onassis. Mystique is rapidly depleted when you have to telegraph your intentions with a visible head tilt like you’re an insouciant model on an all-too-public runway. And then there’s the problem of where to put the blasted things once you arrive at your destination. Wearing sunglasses indoors is a risible faux pas and pausing on the threshold to swap from the tints to the clears feels like you’re doing your bit to halt societal collapse. But now you’re transformed once more into a diminished version of yourself, blinking pitifully under the fluorescent lights of your destination.

Wiser to stick to the glorious outdoors, where you can covertly judge the poor parking, sartorial carelessness, and banal conversations of those around you. Sunglasses don’t simply filter out the light: they provide a filter between you and the world, allowing you to take in more of it without that fear of being scrutinised in return. If that feels like indulgent selfishness, I’m going to ignore my conscience for now, because it’s fun.

From the April edition of Wanted, 2025