I like to make passes to girls who wear glasses.

There’s something about girls in glasses that I find incredibly appealing. We’ve all seen old moves where the hero is with a librarian or academic, serious, bespectacled and hair in a bun, totally unaware of anything remotely attractive in her. At an appropriate moment in the plot, off come the glasses, her hair is shaken out in a tumble of silk, and suddenly we’re hit with the oldest cliché in cinema, “Why Miss Jones, but you’re beautiful!”

I have to say from the girl’s point of view that if the man is so aesthetically unaware that he hadn’t been able to see that straight away, he can’t be worth the effort, but despite that, there’s a degree of truth in the concept. In a world full of screaming hen-night totty, out on the pull and dressed like Soho sex dolls, there’s something very appealing about the quite girl who keeps herself to herself and who lets her own simple self shine through. Not only is there a lot of truth in the idea that the quiet ones are the worst, when the moment of truth arrives and all clothing is discarded along with the glasses, it’s like discovering your own secret garden, a private haven of erotic pleasure that only you were discerning enough to appreciate was there all the time.

In Educating Anna, Anna wears heavy rimmed glasses on a couple of occasions when she doesn’t want to be bothered by the male of the species, a device I’ve used myself when appropriate with some success. If only all those men dismissing us as swots with no bedroom potential knew what they were missing!