Gricel - if you're glad to be gray

The people who gave me a lift home from Gricel asked me how I liked it.

‘A lot. It’s a nice-looking venue, it’s always buzzing and there are quite a few good dancers, there.’

‘Yes,’ she said, in her forties, ‘but it’s an old crowd, don’t you think?’

‘It’s not a young crowd, but there is a mix. I had three guys your age this evening I’ll be dancing with again and again.’

I get bored with people whingeing on about age. It’s a denial of possibility. It writes off a large proportion of the human race. Like it or not, the average age of the population is on the rise. Get over it! My grown-up daughter has got the hang of my thinking. When I challenge her about some things, she says, ‘Come on, Mummy, not everyone’s twenty-five, like you!’ But I have a friend, Christine, who assures me I’m ten. And we’ve all met middle-aged twenty-somethings. Age is clearly a matter of interpretation. It’s not about how many years there are in you, but how much life there is in you. Put that in the next dictionary of modern quotations. You saw it here first.