The Bluestocking Women's Pub, where brains can exist in a single state

[Magpiecomplex]

Welcome all. The booze here is minimally intoxicating, the food is calorie free and the staff are warm and cuddly. And if the thread title sounds nonsensical, blame the guy Myrtle was listening to this evening!

Thank you @FlowerUser. I fear I was doomed from an early age anyway, Irish names no-one could spell or pronounce, and glasses from the age of 8 - in a Junior School with 1000 pupils - when I think of our poor teacher with a class of 40, long before teaching assistants had been invented.

It toughened us up. Which may not have been a good thing.

Beat you...glasses from age 3, and 46 in my primary class!
( I know, this is nothing to be proud of)

But a perfectly plain English name in a class where a lot of my classmates were Polish, so had very exotic surnames!

No wonder we didn't have time to develop identities, all our efforts had to go into surviving. NB, apart from school I had a happy childhood, and on the whole I think it is good to learn early that the establishment, however it manifests, can be a dangerous thing.

Glasses from age 3, neurodiverse, though no one knew what that was, catholic in an area where they revelled in kicking the catholics out, four of us a year apart and looked very different from the locals because of Irish colouring (but FU mean schoolgirls, I now have an Irish passport and can go anywhere in the EU), very poor so all clothes were hand me downs and jumble sales, apart from the Clarks shoes.

Glasses from age 5 for me, and one of those "strong but classic" girls names which Mumsnet is so fond of, but meant I couldn't hide amongst the more popular names.
I suspect several of us on here have hidden trauma from the awful NHS specs frames.

Oh horrors, the NHS specs ! Yes. I had those.

@FlowerUser I feel your pain. sadly I’m not Irish enough to have the wonderful Irish passport now but I was Irish enough for the kids on the school bus to laugh at how hilarious it was to see a Fenian with orange hair. Childhood Trauma indeed! It’s not easy to be different for sure.

Actual image from my childhood.

My first name was OK, but my surname rhymed with Spewitt, and that’s what I was called all through school.

I didn’t wear glasses. But I remember the NHS glasses came in pink or blue (there may have been a grey option but nobody wore those).

And I was struck by the observation that the straws we used to drink the milk with came in boxes of pink or blue in exactly the same shades. How excited we were when we got a new box in a different colour!

I chose the clear ones - I wanted to be Non-Binary, clearly! Pink or Blue indeed. Pah!

I think that was a good choice @ShockedandStunnedRepeatedly

A very unique look at the time.

I cycled between clear, pink and blue because I didn't like any of them enough to want the same colour twice in a row!

Looking back, it feels so Soviet Union to have had such limited choices…

There were also light and dark tortoiseshell and plain black, but in my opticians those were strictly for the boys.

My NHS glasses were faux tortoiseshell. So nyah!

Hot weather things to remember tomorrow. Ice pack from the freezer to go under the laptop in the afternoon. Jug of proper rehydration stuff to drink, plain water isn't enough to stop my fluid balance going out of whack. If I can get tomato juice, make cold soup. If not not have a banana whizzed up with milk for lunch. See fluid balance.

Well jell….

Think of me five hours in the blistering heat gardening tomorrow, factor 60 does not stop me looking as brown as a leather handbag

These would suit me, I reckon. Perhaps I should get a pair made up and rock them! blow that trauma right out of the window … www.deadmensspex.com/product/vintage-autumn-leaf-nhs-524-spectacles-11/

Also had glasses at 3. I know I was in hospital about that age, and I've a funny feeling they gave me an eye test because I'd had every other test. Or maybe not - it was a long time ago - and I'm remembering a more entertaining reality.

My primary school teachers thought I was clever, but maybe I was just the only one who could see.

Whilst I couldn't recite all the writers names I know when I spot one in the wild!

So, older, greyer and with glasses.

I've shrunk somewhat!

I wore pink until I asked if I could have tortoiseshell or black like my brothers and was told yes! Revolutionary!

I had a lens correction operation when I was 5. Kids at school said they take your eyeball out and rest it on your cheek. Believed it too. But they were just repeating an urban myth. The eye doesn’t reach that far. And also no need!

My wonderful BFF who I’d known since birth moved away when we were 6. I found her again four years ago, after more than four decades, and she told me that she had to have glasses when she was seven. And she said, “just like Myrtle Flower!” and wanted the pink ones. I felt seen.

I had those round, pink specs. With a huge eye patch of sticking plaster glued to my face. And endless, endless visits to the eye hospital.
No wonder I turned out like this!

I'm sorry so many of you had such a traumatic time with spectacles when you were little, it sounds awful I was lucky in that respect.

I was born with a squint, in the sixties so three corrective eye surgeries before i was five. That did not work.

i do not have binocular vision, so do not see in 3D. (But i do not understand perceptually what that even means)

I was terrible at ball sports as a consequence of no depth perception, and suffered teasing as a result.

And also because my eyes were not straight, and wearing glasses

It took me much longer to learn to drive.

However i learnt to shoot pool as an adult and became very good at it. Which improved my confidence.

life gives us challenges which it is best to find ways to overcome.

Thank you Boiled! 🪲