You can forget bird ‘flu. And AIDS? That’s nothing. Global warming? Tish and pish, according to Britain’s Health Minister, Ivan Lewis. 

No, no. nuclear Armageddon is so last season. The new black, he says, the new threat to the human race, is old people. 

Those people who rub their chins and say how the world’s changed a bit since their day? Yup – them.

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Ivan Lewis: He's a funny looking chap.

 

The ones who scratch theirs heads and wonder what the world’s coming to? Uh-huh – it’s those ones that’ll be causing the trouble. The people with big ears and rheumy eyes that see through the present and forward… forward… into the past. 

So beware that endearing octogenarian who tells you every time you see her about how life’s not been the same since Auntie Margaret died.

Steer clear of that antique relative who gave up tea after nurse broke his [Victorian] Coronation tea-pot.

That charming widow who walks slower than a clock’s hour hand to the postbox every morning?

The old-timer who smokes Cutters Choice outside the Royal British Legion and tells anyone who’ll listen that he lost a good many friends when Mr Hitler got above himself. He’s worse for the planet than a 747 spraying agent Orange over a refugee camp. 

In a speech which was, at least to its audience, immediately forgettable, Mr Lewis yesterday told the Alzheimers Society that ‘demographic change is every bit as much of a challenge as climate change’. And ‘challenge’, for those of you who don’t speak Newspeak (or NASA, but that’s a cheap shot), means ‘disaster’. 

According to Department of Health figures, one in every four British adults will, in twenty years’ time, be a pensioner. That means less tax revenue.

More coffin-dodgers sucking in the increasingly scarce oxygen of the future. More inconvenience for everybody. Lots of these so-called ‘pensioners’, or ‘feeble-minded wastrels’ as the newest directive refers to them, will get what the caring professions call ‘confused’.

Or what pensioners’ children call ‘endearingly forgetful’. Or what their daughters-in-law call ‘annoyingly vague’. Or what their grandchildren call ‘Mummy Mummy Mummy make that thing go away!’ 

So as to demonstrate his powers of empathy with his audience, Mr Lewis then skipped blithely from one mind-bendingly boring topic to another seemingly at random, muttering about his gammy knee, how one in three sufferers of dementia go undiagnosed, how he and his sister – or was it his cousin? he can’t be sure, it was so long ago - used to gather Ox Slips for Mama’s bedside table. Not that he supposes there are any Ox-Slips left nowadays.

He remembers that big old kettle that used to whistle whilst the gardener –Geoffrey? No, no, he’ll remember in a minute… yes! George! That was his name. He knows it was his name because he was named after the King! Now then, which king was it? Willy, Willy, Harry, Steve… 

Anyway, as he was saying. Where was he? Ah yes. Dementia. In the next generation, ‘elderly care will be the next child care. Some people are discovering their partner has got dementia but still [the connection is tenuous] have to be at the school gates every afternoon’.

Quite why these incontinent, mumbling imbeciles are obliged to go and hang around the school gates isn’t clear, but what it clear, as clear as crystal, that is, very clear, is that, um. 

The Department of Health is investing £500 million in leaflets, to be made available at GPs’ surgeries, scaring middle-aged people about whether their everyday memory loss could be dementia, and whether they shouldn’t just have themselves put do- I mean destroye- I mean euthanised before they start smearing shit all over the walls and scaring their grandchildren by coughing out their false teeth. 

The Health Minster rounded off his talk with six key pointers to ward off dementia: 

1. Watch Dawn of the Dead.
2. Watch I am Legend.
3. Watch The Lost Boys
4. Always carry wooden stakes when going to Post Offices, garden centres, or past bowling greens.
5. Never go near sea-side towns after sunset without six box-mags of 7.62 full silver jacket rounds and your piece off safety.
6. Get your five-a-day and plenty of exercise.