Patrick Leigh-Pemberton: On Sunglasses

I like sunglasses as much as the next person. In fact, I like sunglasses considerably more than the next person, if we are to assume that the next person is what is considered “normal”. I think that they are very useful things, somehow marrying my need to look stylish with that Friday morning urge to prevent the harrowing and harsh light of day inflicting even more damage on my vulnerable mind. So, every now and then, I will buy a pair of sunglasses. I usually buy a pair of sunglasses as soon as a friend or a pet of mine has broken the last pair. Or when I’m drunk in an airport departure lounge. This cycle sees me buy a pair of nice sunnys once every year and a half or so, and this, I am assured, is an irregularly high frequency for the purchase of “premium” (if exclusive is a bad and addictive word, I think premium might be the gateway drug) eyewear. To be fair, I am assured this by the next person, and what do they know?

In St. Andrews, evidently, I am not alone. RayBans, Persols, Oliver Peoples and Cutler and Gross are constant companions to a large cohort of our colleagues, and whilst I often wonder why it is necessary to wear sunglasses in this town, the fact of the matter is that I am overall a supporter of this device. I even think the wearing of sunglasses inside, at night, is really quite amusing. I am not writing these things just to get you to hate me, but really to try and show that I am about as pro-sunglasses as a man can be. And yet, this support notwithstanding, I do not understand how, in this town where shops come in and go out like children in their first ever revolving door, there are three perfectly healthy seeming opticians that specialise in discount RayBans. Who is buying all of these sunglasses? Who are you? And why do you need to keep buying them off three different shops. I do not understand it. I mean, for a town this large to have an optician is a perfectly normal thing, and I can see how, what with us all being intellectuals, there might in fact be a call for two opticians. But three is really overegging the pudding. And that’s just the ones that I have seen. There are probably more, sneaking about in back alleys, offering you Cutler & Gross brown turtleshells for less than the price of a sandwich at Mitchell’s.

As I say, I like sunglasses, they are a good thing. But in a town as helio-deprived as ours, what must it say about us to all of those who come to visit that there are these shops offering such life essentials? I would like to think that visitors who have noticed it leave thinking something like “what a stylish bunch of people they must be, and it is impressive how much they care about their eyes”, but I fear that in fact their impression probably involves more asterisks.