It was as I was reaching for the family Optivisor, a device hitherto used only for checking the kids’ hair for lice, merely to verify if I had put a jeweller’s saw blade in the right way around that I finally conceded defeat. It was time to finally admit the termination of youth.
There was a time when I could see the threads on an HO-scale truss rod from across the room, and it bugged me if the ones on the left were right-handed. There was a time, when I cared about the colour of a fly’s back in an N-scale rendition of a cow pie. I once railed against the missing nose hairs on an O-scale figure.
Suddenly, I can no longer quite make them out. They could be there, or accurate, or not. I cannot see them.
So, today was the day when I stood beside the rotating display at Save-on-Foods and bought my first pair of readers. +1.25 is you must know, because I find they have a wider depth of field than the more aggressive varieties.
They are not flattering.
They are not wanted.
But if I want to do good work, then they are needed.
Pembroke:87 
One advantage of being short sighted, and wearing spectacles since about 8 years old is that no one noticed when I switched to varifocals, but nonetheless *I* knew. But hey, if we didn’t get older we wouldn’t be able to learn from our own experiences, would we?
Cheers Simon,
Of course now the whole world knows!
However, I’d like to add that we must remember as we get older that there are many people who never get the opportunity to grow older. Age is a gift.
Welcome to the Over the Hill Gang! Been a member for a few years, myself. Good to see you are an optimist, you’ll have need of that trait.
Noticed in my early 40’s; in denial for a couple of years until I couldn’t do my job. Could read neither text nor blueprint. Now I carry a folding pair of specs, and every year, as they say, ‘the light gets darker and the print gets smaller.’