What’s wrong with sunglasses

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[/audioplayer]A question to ask yourself on sunny days: are you, as you conduct your conversations with people, trying to convince them that you are Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix? You’re not? Then will you please take off your sunglasses?

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Rod Liddle

Sack the judges

Hardly anyone does these days. For whatever reason, it seems to have become acceptable over the past couple of years to engage in social intercourse with the upper half of your face entirely concealed behind several hundred quid’s worth of metal and glass. No matter that the poor person you’re talking to hasn’t got a clue what your eyes are doing, has not a single indication from the windows to your soul of how you’re reacting to their comments. It’s very off-putting, trying to gauge whether or not observations are hitting the mark solely from the twitching of someone’s mouth. (And given the amount of Botox sloshing around society these days, sometimes you haven’t even got that.) Sunglasses are the equivalent of a beard, a barrier enabling you to hide. For that very reason men with beards are mistrusted. So why is it suddenly OK for shades to perform the same function above the nose?

You’d have thought that given the existence of Bono, no sensible person would ever wear sunglasses again. But for every gnome with a God complex there’s another celebrity who suits the look. Jack Nicholson, for instance. ‘With my sunglasses on,’ he says, ‘I’m Jack Nicholson. Without them, I’m fat and 70.’ Fine, it works for him. The trouble is, plenty of plebs for whom it doesn’t work start kidding themselves. Well I hate to break it to you, Gavin from Accounts, but a pair of Ray-Bans does not a film star make.