THE other day I walked up Wombwell (always up Wombwell, always down Darfield, obviously) to get some new glasses at the optician’s.

I’ve been wearing glasses for decades and I was becoming used to wearing them for ever, but when I went to have my eye test recently the optician told me that, in case I hadn’t noticed, I’d been getting the same prescription for the last four years and that in fact my eyes were getting better and in his opinion, which I believed because he’s the expert and I’m not, I didn’t need my glasses any more because my eyes were getting better.

This went against all the things I thought I knew about eyes because I always reckoned, and indeed I’d been told, that they got worse as you got older; it turns out they don’t.

Or maybe they do because there was a sting in the tail: I didn’t need glasses for distance but I was going to need them for reading, something I never had before.

I always prided myself on being able to get down to the tiny letters on the bottom row of the chart without getting any wrong, but now I was going to need glasses for my hours with print.

It made sense, to be honest. I spend lots of time reading, trying to tackle my ever-growing pile of unread books and I was finding that I had to sit in direct light or sometimes under a reading lamp so that I could make the words out.

So that’s why I was walking up Wombwell, without my glasses on, to get fitted for some new glasses so that I could sit and read. When you’ve worn glasses for ages it’s very odd to walk along without them on.

You think you’ve forgotten something. Did I come out with a hat on? Did I have a backpack? Ah, no: it’s the missing glasses. It’s like a house that seems to have had scaffolding on it for years suddenly, one morning, having no scaffolding.

Walking up Wombwell without my glasses on made me feel like someone who had had the blindfold taken away from their eyes; everything felt bright and new, everything felt full of detail and a kind of narrative that I’d never noticed before.

Let’s face it, I’ve been walking from Darfield to Wombwell and back for six decades and when you’ve been walking the same route for all those years you stop noticing things, you cease to spot how some bits of the landscape have changed and some, probably, have hardly changed at all.

I don’t want to say ‘it used to be all fields round here’ but actually it did, or quite a lot of it did; as I walk down Roundwood Way towards the bottom of Snape Hill I recall that the estate that the elders (as we call ourselves) still call The Ideal Homes because that was the name of the long-lost building firm that built the streets with the Italian names that the young ‘uns call The Italian Estate was built on empty fields at the back of Upperwood Hall at about the time I was starting to walk from Barnsley Road to Low Valley Juniors. It was all fields round here, tha knows.

I walked through Low Valley towards Wombwell, my fresh face glasses-free and shining in the morning sun.

I walk past the new houses where the New Station Inn used to be, the New Station Inn that became, for reasons nobody could ever work out, The Wat Tyler and then The Low Valley Arms until it was knocked down and became a building site.

These days grooms-to-be go on stag weekends to Newcastle or Prague or Finland but I and my motley gang of mates went to The New Station and glugged beer and ate crisps and eventually staggered out into the night and wandered towards Darfield Main Pit because one of the lads erroneously thought that there was an all-night pea and pie van halfway down Pitt Street.

It’s okay this, not needing glasses for distance; it means you can see all the way to the past without squinting. And my reading glasses will make me look intellectual, and that’s a result. Maybe if I look hard enough I can see the pithead gear at Darfield Main…