I’ve been a four-eyes since time immemorial. Well, not time immemorial really, but since fourth grade when one of my teachers caught me squinting at the blackboard and, rather than minding her own business, decided to call my mother. I was dreading this as I knew this would mean a trip to the ophthalmologist – and it did. The ophthalmologist basically told me that my eyesight went out to buy a packet of cigarettes and was unlikely to ever come back.

A visit to the opticians was duly scheduled… kind of. My family is typically Mediterranean and was not exactly what you’d call well-to-do, so an opticians wasn’t actually an opticians. As a young man my father had held a job as a postman for all of three months, but every single contact in life for whatever we needed – from school books to the many replacement parts for our very cantankerous Skoda Rapid (which was anything but) – was carefully combed through this minutely researched network of contacts.

Homer Simpson. Wearing glasses. Enough said...

Several ghastly and not-so-ghastly glasses down the line, I’ve got used to being a four-eyes and I’ve noticed the way I’m treated is different when I’m not wearing them (fret not – I’ll be wearing contact lenses).

But my mission here today is another one. I’ve got a secret to reveal to you two-eyes. Our biggest secret. I’m sorry my bespectacled brethren, but I’ve got to tell them.

Here it goes – we’re not clever or wise, just partially blind. There. I said it.

Yes, I know that every single Hollywood film has portrayed us as ubergenuises, evil scientists, bookish nerdy types who snort when they laugh or guys in white lab coats armed with clipboards taking meticulous notes on the blinking lights of some dastardly machine in some evil madman’s lair.

But we’re not. We don’t know what the square root of 267 is, where Bikya is spoken or what the capital of Tuvalu is. Really. We don’t. It’s futile signing us up as contestants on one of these genius-remembers-and-recites-a-telephone-directory-by-heart-style shows. We can barely remember our own home number… and the reasons why restarting a misbehaving computer should magically fix most issues remains a mystery to us too.

The terrible truth is our poor vision is more the result of wonky eyesight genes than superhuman intelligence.

I promise we’re as dumb as you are… only we can’t even read the questions.