On the Prospect of Global Elders

Sir Richard! Peter! I appreciate a good laugh as much as the next person, but this is a bit much, don't you think? I mean, making fun of the elderly? Now really.

I'll admit that the idea of twelve once-vital statesmen and stateswomen all fussing over a .8% increase in the inflation rate on the international bran market--sorting the difference out from their brass-clasped, mothball-smelling change purses, each shaking their fuzzy blue heads at one another in incomprehension because they can't get close enough to hear without all their hearing-aids creating a fatal feedback loop ... I'll admit, I say, that this has the potential to be very funny. But it's just too cruel.

Of course, yes, it's difficult to put a price on this sort of senility addled gobbledygook:

Archbishop Tutu emphasised that much of their work is likely to take place behind closed doors. "There may be things we can accomplish because people have been able to use their persuasive abilities in confidence. One of the ways to be effective is that no one gets to know precisely what we have done," he said.

Particularly when one considers that what'll be going on behind these closed doors will be a lot of impromptu napping with half-clutched cups of exceptionally milky tea dribbling into so many prosthetically reinforced laps. But let Li Zhaoxing recite just one more Shakespearean sonnet to another slack-jawed, watery-eyed retiree of the same gender and I think you'll find that the laughter will give way to epidemics of despair and a sky-rocketing suicide rate amongst the 70 pluses.