I'll be seeing you...

I am slowly but surely falling apart...

Once I reached my half century some years ago, everyone warned me what was in store with ominous warnings of  'it's all downhill from here', and my own personal favourite, 'what doesn't wear out or drop off will simply stop working'.  

And they were right.

The last five years have been spent trying to hold back the tide of the now called 'upper' middle age.  Imagine if you will, King Canute standing resolutely in the sea trying to stop the tide of old age as it runs faster and faster towards me, a maniacal grin on its face as it gets closer and closer.  

So I eventually made an appointment to go to the opticians, having bought the equivalent of around fifty pairs of 'ready readers' from Boots over the past few years.  My opening comment to the lovely optician was that I 'wanted something a little more grown up' now I was fifty five. Now if she'd had any sense, she might have made some comment about how I definitely didn't look that age, bearing in mind that money had to change hands, but no, what she said was, 'Do you have your current spectacles with you?,

Fishing around in my cavernous handbag, I felt my way past a glove (I wondered where that was), two hair scrunchies, a purse, my car keys, two pens, a 50p piece, three Ventolin inhalers (can't be too careful), my Binland security pass and a voucher from work offering 'Free Eye Test and Glasses', before finally finding the glasses which I laid on the desk.

Well I might as well have laid a piece of fresh roadkill on her desk the way she looked at them, and I almost expected her to don a pair of surgical gloves before she picked them up.  

So explain this to me.  My 'Free Eye Test and Glasses' cost me £69.  Apparently, if you want a pair of glasses which doesn't make you look like Cosmo Smallpiece or Eric Morecambe, then money has to change hands.

I pick them up in two weeks' time.  But there's just one problem.  I will now be able to see every wrinkle and stray grey hair and will no longer be able to live in my rose tinted, slightly blurry world.

But at least I'll be able to thread a needle without looking like Fu Manchu..