When I was a boy, glasses were a source of shame that ruined my self-esteem. Now that contact lenses have failed me too, all that’s left is to embrace the blurriness

I hate my glasses. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Not just these I’m wearing now, but whichever spectacles I’ve been cursed to wear since, to my horror, I was first told to at the age of 14. At that point, my hatred of them was general, unspecific. They were a source of shame as well as inconvenience. The football field was a blur. Girls, who admittedly had never been much attracted to me in the first place, now lost interest completely.

I developed more specific dislikes, for example the way they steamed up (the glasses, not the girls) when I walked into pubs in winter, still further diminishing my chances of getting served underage. They were always getting bent out of shape, and this bugged me tremendously. The left side was higher than the right, or the right higher than the left, and I could never figure out why this was. I pulled and bent and stretched them this way and that, and only ever made matters worse. Were the arms not straight? Or was the problem the ear thingies? Don’t start me on the nose thingies, which have never, for me anyway, successfully discharged their primary task of stopping the bastards from slipping down my nose.

There was a time when nobody picked up after their dogs – and it would have been considered disgusting to do so. What caused the change in attitude?

A PE teacher from Cardiff called Tony is frozen solid after being caught in an avalanche in 1979. There he remains until global heating sees to his thawing and he pops up in the present day, exactly as he was back then. Comedy ensues. This is make-believe, by the way; it’s the premise of Mike Bubbins’ BBC series Mammoth. In the masterful opening scenes, to the sound of Gerry Rafferty’s Get It Right Next Time, we see Tony being scornful, angry, frightened and disgusted by four things that didn’t happen before his big freeze.

He scoffs at a bloke carrying a baby in a sling, gives a charity chugger very short shrift, and jumps out of his skin when a youth on a hoverboard zips past him. But it was Tony’s disgust at a woman picking up her German shepherd’s poo that got me thinking. When did picking up dog poo become the thing to do? Or, put another way, when did just leaving it there become the thing not to do? When did we start becoming disgusted at those who didn’t pick it up rather than those who did? This is a pretty seismic cultural shift, I’m sure you’ll agree.