This Is Guernsey

THE lasses and me were at Les Bourgs Hospice Shop a couple of Saturdays ago (you’re right, I do spoil those kids).

They love rooting through the books and the knick-knacks while I try to find another suit for work.

There wasn’t much in but I did find something just lying on the shelf. So I quickly grabbed, paid for and ran outside with it before anyone else could get a look-see.

Princess C and Little Red thought I was absolutely insane.

And looking back, I am embarrassed to admit that perhaps I was a tad premature.

‘What is it dad?’

I showed them.

‘What’s so good about that?’

It was a Joe 90 Special Agent Kit.

Don’t laugh. It was all in good nick and in its original packaging.

I’ve heard of people paying an absolute fortune for stuff like that on eBay – and when was Joe 90 last on TV? The 70s?

Once home, I discovered it was made in 1994 (there must have been an ill-starred revival of the programme in the 90s, prompting a rushed released of loads of toys. Thousands must remain unopened).

The Special Agent Kit wasn’t that special really.

It consisted of a plastic World Intelligence Network badge, a rather badly printed Joe 90 ID card and best of all, a pair of Joe 90 spectacles.

When I was a kid I longed to wear glasses. I don’t mean when I was a little kid because when I was a little kid all little kids who wore glasses and had blond hair were haunted by the phrase, ‘The Milky Bars are on you’.

Not even Joe 90 could make wearing glasses popular or cool because, inevitably, in real life, kids who wore glasses didn’t belong to WIN, get to drive jet cars, shoot silenced pistols and boost their intellectual powers through a quick spin in a giant spherical cage.

Real kids in specs got Indian burns and dead arms in draughty slot-machine arcades on Saturday afternoons, were picked last for games teams and never copped off at school discos.

I was long-sighted as a child and the eye doctor said that by the age of 13 I’d be wearing specs.

Byozza, beauty, kesher and pearler – and all the other words of the day that denoted pleasure.

Thirteen. That crucial age heard about in biology, the age when things called hormones pinged through your body like ball bearings in a pinball machine.

Where your complexion became an alpine range of mini Mount Vesuviuses and parts of your body you previously thought of as smoother than Tupperware suddenly sprouted hair thicker than coconut matting.

Could I cope with all that and be a speccy four-eyes as well?

You betcha, I could. In for a penny…

Specs were strangely cool. They weren’t obvious like a hairstyle or as self-conscious as clothes.

Mavericks wore glasses.

In literature it was Richard Brautigan, Harold Pinter and Allen Ginsberg (who managed a spectacle/beard combo not bettered until the Kings of Leon’s Nathan Followill).

In music it was Buddy Holly, John Lennon, Elvis Costello, Ray Manzarek, Ian Paice and Morrissey.

Film? Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer and Peter Sellers in Dr Strangelove.

In comedy there was Harold Lloyd, Groucho Marx and the mighty Eric Morecambe.

Yes, all those were males. They were role models. A measure of what I could be once I was tested and fitted up for my tortoiseshell-framed National Health specials.

Lasses in glasses were a completely different matter.

Ever since some chance-seen, late night showing of Nana Mouskouri singing live in a floodlit Greek ampitheatre, I have been in love with lasses in glasses.

Even if every song she sang was about a young goat herder called Pieter, Nana’s stern black frames were an erotic cypher that both hid and illuminated her angelic features.

She was clever but saucy. Intelligent but coquettish. Brainy but hot.

Same with Wonder Woman. I always preferred her when she was in her reporter’s outfit of suit, hair bun and bins rather than ricking about in hot pants being all Amazonian.

Or what about Felicity Kendall in The Good Life, when she settled down at the kitchen table of an evening to go through the accounts, specs perched on the end of her turned-up nose?

She soon made old Tom forget his potato blight and millions of working men across Britain their three-day week.

‘Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses’ went the old Dorothy Parker saying.

The mad fools.

What about Deidre in Corrie before she became Aladdin Sane with the voice of Louis Armstrong, Faye Dunaway in The Thomas Crown Affair, Sophia Loren in the 70s, singer Lisa Loeb, Velma from Scooby Doo, even that strange posh woman in 10 Years Younger?

All fantastically and optically double-glazed.

The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about. Contact lenses.

Those things make me shudder. It’s not just the fact that when someone who wears contacts comes to stay at your place they turn your bathroom into a science lab, it’s the absolute horror of watching them put them in.

It must be like whacking your eyeballs with dustbin lids.

Not only that, but they sometimes work their way round the eyeball. I’ve seen it in real life. The lens can disappear halfway round. So what’s to stop it working its way all around to the pipes and tubes and wires round the back and severing them?

Ugh.

But anyway, back to glasses.

Well, the age of 13 came and went and the specs thing never happened. I was destined to go through hair, zits and growing pains without a rakish pair of horn rims or even rimless hook-ons dangling from my greasy chops.

I would never take off and fold my Lennons, then lay them on a Bull’s-Blood-and-crumpet-butter-stained volume of Ford Maddox Ford as a prelude to a kiss.

And I would never take off my Harry Palmers, wipe them on my shirt, put them on again and say, ‘Because we’re in Pittsburgh, baby, and you know what they say about Pittsburgh?’, before the credits rolled and Ry Cooder’s slide guitar wailed forlornly.

Tell you summat, though. Thirty years later, baby Jesus and all the orphans, I need them now.

If you want me, I’ll be in the large print section of the Guilles-Alles Library.