Membership is now open, and applications are invited, for a new club of which I am the founding member and life president (this latter office is, by its nature, one of diminishing returns). I thought I'd call it the Long-Handled Shoehorn Club, and it's for people who have reached the age threshold at which this household implement has become an indispensable aid to living, writes Godfrey Fitzsimons.
The trigger for this initiative was a recent programme on Channel Four called Grumpy Old Men. Nice idea, I thought, elevating myself on my bath-lift out of the suds, going down the stairs on the Stannah GTX, settling my feet into that big, heated mono-slipper that takes both at once and reaching for my glass of Wincarnis.
The dog switched on the TV. I've trained him to do that because he can work the remote thing better than my arthritic old fingers can, and it's too hard for me to get out of the armchair. (I don't let him watch Animal Hospital, though, because it would be too depressing for him. Rolf and all those pets that might not make it through the night.) But who are these people on the screen, grumping? Bob Geldof? I know his older sister, for goodness sake, a very nice young person. John Peel, still rabbiting on about punk as a pivotal social phenomenon? A dissipated-looking man called Wakeman with long, blond tresses who was some kind of popular musician as recently as, what, the 1970s? These aren't grumpy old men; these are grumpy late adolescents! Whatever about real men not eating quiche, real grumpy old men get heartburn from Complan.
I think I might ask Denis Healey to become a patron (I beg his pardon - Lord Healey). He once posited that you knew you were getting old when you could no longer put your socks on while standing up, a dilemma not dissimilar from the founding principles of the Long-Handled Shoehorn Club. Or possibly I could approach Prince Charles, who is so infirm that a flunkey has to squeeze the toothpaste on to the brush for him, and hold a regal bottle for him as he delivers a regal urine sample.
Though I myself still boast a fine mane, baldness in an applicant will be looked on with saintly tolerance. Unless, of course, it is wilful baldness, baldness with malice aforethought, because that is a dead giveaway that you are far too young and probably studying to enter the geekhood. Nobody over 45 is deliberately bald.
A good pointer to eligibility is if most of the artists represented in your CD collection are dead (mine certainly are). This is a particularly gratifying discovery as it completely flummoxes young people, who speak quite unconsciously of "watching rock bands". It's no good pointing out to them that music and concerts are supposed to be an aural experience, not a visual one. They know different. Dead is uncool.
In the same cultural area, give yourself a brownie point if you can admit without embarrassment that you never really understood the lyrics of Simon and Garfunkel songs. (And the sign said the words of the prophet were written on the subway wall What's that all about? It certainly doesn't bear comparison with Naga-Nagasaki where the fellas chew tobaccy, and the women wicky-wacky-woo.)
And this will separate the hipsters from the hip-hopsters. Bonus marks to those for whom the term "drum-and-bass" conjures up, not whatever it conjures up for today's yoof (I can't help you there - see The Ticket every Thursday), but rather Bob Haggart and Ray Bauduc from the Bob Crosby Band, doing Big Noise From Winnetka.
Rules of behaviour will be strict, but fair. For example, any member found playing thumb hockey on a mobile phone while walking along the street or sitting in a public conveyance will be immediately blackballed.
Dress will be smart casual. Grown-ups' shoes, please, not trainers or runners or whatever they're called. Footwear should have leather uppers and ideally leather soles. Slip-ons will be tolerated, but lace-ups are preferred. No "tracksuit bottoms". No clothing you can read.
And blue jeans are out, out, out. LHSC members are proudly mutton; we do not dress as lamb. I confess that I once owned a pair of grey drainpipe jeans, but that was back in the Pleistocene era of the late 1950s. Denim has never sullied my limbs since.
The subscription fee is modest, but it is payable in old money, not this new-fangled stuff. Only paper with the likeness of Lady Lavery, or coin bearing the image of a hen or a horse, will be accepted. Applications for membership should be handwritten in large, easy-to-read letters on white bond paper, because I shall probably have lost my reading-glasses again. They should be delivered by the postman only. There is positively no online facility. Terms and conditions apply.