There are many rubbish things about getting older.

I keep reading about these people who feel “more comfortable in their skin”, who care less about what people think, and who are actually happier than they have ever been upon reaching middle age.

I am not one of them.

I had a happy childhood. I was generally pretty happy as a youth (when I wasn’t at school). And there were many great and joyful things about my thirties – finally buying a house and motherhood, to mention but two.

But middle age is, in my opinion, frankly a bit pants.

As well as hitting menopause and getting creaky joints, I have arrived at the point in life at which, like many people, my eyesight has begun to deteriorate. Specifically, I am becoming long-sighted, which plays havoc with reading and sewing.

Both of my parents wore glasses; my dad from childhood and my mum from her mid-forties onwards. I never felt any particular desire to follow in their footsteps.

Just before Christmas I was hanging about in an optician’s whilst my partner picked up a new case for his glasses (he having already succumbed to the creeping sight-decline of middle age).

I tried on some frames, ostensibly just for fun, but knowing on some deeper level that it was only a matter of time before necessity overcame vanity and I, too, became bespectacled.

And when I looked in the mirror I was shocked – because there was my mum, peering myopically back at me.

Needless to say, I put those glasses straight back where they came from.

However, after weeks of minimal daylight in the gloom of winter, and with the prospect of lots of hand-stitching to complete, I finally caved.

I picked up this pair of cheap reading glasses from, of all places, Tiger. Along with a string to hang them round my neck, so that they don’t join my scissors, needles and threads as one more thing for me to constantly misplace.

And whilst I wouldn’t want to wear my new specs to a party or anything, rather than looking like my elderly mother I find that I don’t entirely object to glimpsing myself looking like a middle-aged geek.

I would rather not have to bother with specs, not least because they represent one more step along the inevitable journey towards old age and decrepitude.

And you probably won’t be able to discern any difference in the neatness of my stitching as a result of my enspectacle-ification.

But… and this is not to be underestimated, it is lovely to be able, for a change, to actually see what I’m doing. ♥