The restaurant recently hosted a wake for a friend of the owner. Personally I have never understood how one can eat when one is grieving but then I suppose it depends on the depth of one’s grief.

A least 45 minutes before the morbid festivities were to commence an elderly lady tottered in.

“I couldn’t go to the funeral,’ she explained. ‘I had to have emergency dental work done. Which is the best table in the house? I want to sit down and get me some water so that I can take my medication.”

So getting old means you take, you count your pills and drink them with water instead of tossing them down with a shot of tequila as it is said Ozzy Osbourne used to do.

Perhaps that’s merely a rumour, but what is not is that Ozzy has claimed that

“I never took two (pills) of anything in me life.”

Most of the guests at the post-funeral gathering were in the metallic age -silver hair and gold teeth.

There were traffic jams of wheelchairs and an a veritable catalogue of walking aids on display.

What a valiant crowd they were. Obviously decrepit but not decrepit enough to turn down a chance to drink a thimble of Pinot Griggio (pee not griggiow as they like to pronounce it here) to their departed chum.

One of the guests had parked their old car outside the restaurant.

“Look!” the young Mexican dishwasher said to me. “That car is old. Like you!”

“Actually she’s probably older than that.” said a co-worker known to have attended the Goebbels school of charm. I thought the comment rather spiteful. When I am 100 he will be 90.

I felt a surge of compassion for the wrinklies in the restaurant.

Everyone knows that growing older is like being fined for something you didn’t mean to do.

My inspiration is Hokusai, the Japanese artist who died at 89 but didn’t start work on his masterpiece, ”Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji” until 1826 when he was in his late sixties.

Age shouldn’t matter unless you are cheese or wine.