Can I be like this too?

Are all old people this stupid I wondered to myself last Sunday? Actually I didn't. I nearly peed my knickers at the opinions of the Certified Old Duck who was regaling her dining companions and everyone else in the dining room of the Stockpot last Sunday. The Stockpot is the joint we had lunch in on the way back from collecting the Offspring from Victoria Coach Station.

She was there with a couple of equally decrepit blokes and another woman who was sitting with her back to me and whose age I cannot comment on.

There she sat, all garish and highly improbably red hair and absurd face paint. And the only two English cricketers she rates highly, she informs the entire world, are Freddy (that's Andrew) Flintoff. Fat, indisciplined Freddy. And Marcus Trescothick, the Somerset batsman who has a head so all over the place he can't play international cricket.

Hmm.

A few years ago an Australian captain was asked to comment on the England team and whether any of them would make the Australian team and he observed that Darren Gough would be useful ... to carry the drinks.

I ask myself if an Australian captain asked today whether he'd accept any of this lot and I have to conclude that the answer on this occasion would be an emphatic Fuck Off, Mate.

That was wonderful enough but then there was an old duffer bringing up the rear of a parade of old duffers out for a constitutional at the same time as us earlier this week. We were down on the river front at the far end of town where the clubs and pubs are clustered. In their midst there's one shop targeted at yachties.

The shop occupies several several shops knocked together. It sells nasty little nick-nacky (sorry, I have absolutely no idea how to spell that, and the Blogger spell checker has no idea how to spell) things from one window and clothing from the window at the other end of the shop.

I was standing on the step in front of the clothing window to keep out of the way of the parade and I heard him say, as he approached the shop from the clothing end: "Ah, the first chandlers ... well not so much a chandlers as a clothing shop..." Except that from the three shop fronts in between the trinkets and the deck shoes there's acres of charts, winding gear, cooking and lighting equipment, anti-fouling paint and so on and so forth. Everything a boat owner might need in fact. It is indeed a chandlers in the fullest sense.

So when I'm that old, never mind the purple dress or hat or whatever it is I am supposed to want to wear: can I be that bonkers and premature too?