‘What on earth do you look like?’ he asked in hushed tones.
‘With that suntan of yours you look like a superannuated Greek shipping tycoon, but not one successful enough to have pulled Jackie. What’s your game you old fool?’
He is a long-standing friend of mine who maintains a jaundiced study of my life and times in order to provide himself with a kind of sideshow to enliven his own lacklustre existence.
If anyone was going to take issue with the fact that I was wearing dark glasses it was him.
‘I wear them,’ I told him, ‘only when I am driving my car with the hood down. I do not wear them at any other time. It has never been my practice to wear dark glasses. I am not, let me tell you, a poseur.’
‘You look,’ he said, ‘more like a seedy purveyor of dirty postcards in Port Said. All you need is a fez and a nightshirt.’
He went on his way, chuckling to himself.
I have never worn dark glasses because I like the sun too much.
But the onset of what we have had in the Isle of Man so far this summer has made me take down the hood on the car at every opportunity and, at the same time, my eyes have become inflamed and watery which has convinced a kindly and thoughtful lady I know that this is the result of dust and grit in the open air.
She bought me the dark glasses.
‘Your eyes were all right when you were younger,’ she told me severely. ‘But you’re not any more. Get used to it.’
I was first dissuaded from wearing dark glasses as a fashion accessory by the example of a journalist I knew in London who worked for one of the more frantic tabloids as a social columnist rejoicing in the byline ‘Mr Midnight’.
This involved him frequenting night clubs wearing dark glasses while in search of juicy material.
As the clubs were dark themselves this involved him walking into furniture, spilling people’s drinks, stumbling down staircases and going to the ladies by mistake.
In time he went to Ibiza to write novels, where dark glasses made some sense.
I have been wearing mine for a couple of weeks now.
I have also taken the precaution of getting some eyedrops. The pharmacist told me I might have hay fever. I have no more ever had hay fever than I have ever worn dark glasses.
Life doesn’t get any easier.
l My granddaughter Grace in London, who is eight years old, has sent me an email for the first time with the added words ‘Sent from my iPod.’
This is often how people do it. The e-mails are ‘Sent from my Blackberry’ and ‘Sent from my Nokia phone.’
Gracie is right up to speed.
I wonder if, when Robin Hood sent a written message to the Sheriff of Nottingham, by way of an arrow fired into his castle door, it ended: ‘Sent from my trusty longbow.’
l This week’s Manx crossword clue from Karl Campbell is: Mans Key? (4) – ISLE (Times Jumbo Cryptic).