The dog's

I've just taken delivery of a pair of Aqua Sphere Eagle prescription swimming goggles, a snip at only £31.50 including postage!

I could have gone for cheaper ones, but they mostly had the same prescription in both eyes, and these ones looked good when I read the spec.

Now that they've arrived they do seem to be the complete dog's bollocks, but I wish on the Website they had made it clear that what I was being sent was a normal non-prescription pair of goggles, with two replacement lenses which I had to change myself. The goggles are made in Italy, and the instructions for changing lenses are printed on the outside of the small box containing the new lens in 6 different languages (all translations I guess, apart from the Italian one) so concise and slightly strangely worded is perhaps the politest way of describing them.

It is not easy to remove and replace the lenses, and I have a scraped knuckle to prove it! For obvious reasons, the silicon rubber surround has to be pretty tight to ensure watertightness, and you have to pull it apart to release the lens, then put the new one in, and pull it apart again to seal it in place. I managed it after about 15 minutes of trying, and despite the instructions it was pretty much trial and error.

They're done now though, and I'm looking forward to trying them out, probably later today.

And I should mention too that the service I got from the supplier was damned good (apart from not mentioning on their Website the bit about self-assembly!). When placing the order I was trying to work out from my prescription what combination of Sphere and Cylinder readings (short sightedness and astigmatism) to add or subtract from each other to get the right strength. A quick call to the supplier, Butterflies Healthcare, and five minutes later the optician, James Sutton, (in fact, I suspect he's the owner of the company) called me back and worked it out for me, explaining what he was doing as he went along. That was three days ago, 12th January, and they arrived this morning. Well done them.