This is the Long Room at Lords. The most famous room in, errr, in the cricketing world. Its not the best picture because my phone has limitations and the photographer has even more. Especially after a couple of pints of some deviously delicious bitter that they serve from pumps pulled by cricket stumps. All the beer pumps are cricket stumps. A good way to recycle.

Last night was a ‘supper night’ and I was the welcome and freeloading guest of Spurs Paul, who is a fully-fledged, bacon-and-egg-tie-wearing member of the MCC, the Marylebone Cricket Club, celebrating its 200th anniversary this year. And although I’ve been to Lords before, mainly to see (and sleep through) cricket, I’ve never previously entered the hallowed ‘Pavillion’, which belongs to the players and the members. And quite frankly its wonderful. I’d join tomorrow if they let people like me join. Which they do, but the waiting list for membership is generally measured in decades, and my offer of a tenner to the doorman to push me up the list was met with derision.

The Pavillion is like a cross between a gentleman’s club and a stately home. But a stately home dedicated to the consumption of alcohol. Instead of ‘this the dressing room, and this is the parlour, the card room, etc, etc’, at Lords Pavillion you just move from one bar to the next. This is the Members’ Bar, then on the next floor you have the members bar, and over there is the members bar. Every terrace has a bar, every bar has another bar. And all the portraits are, oddly, of men in white holding cricket bats.

The food was simple but fantastic and the place was filled with, generally, old people. Old white people. And the Long Room itself is beautiful. The room through which every player who ever hit or bowled a ball at Lords has walked through on his way to the wicket. Tears of nostalgia fell onto my steak pie crust as I considered all those who’d made that walk right past my seat over the years. Then I drank more beer and forgot all about them. Beefy Botham and Viv Richards and Graham Gooch and WG Grace and WC Fields and Geoffrey Boycott and boycott South Africa and all the history of the place.

I had to wear a tie. For the first time in a year. Had to borrow one. A sign of the times.

Another sign of the times is the aging population. Not just at Lords, where it is very apparent, but in the nation as a whole. By 2020 we’ll need to find an extra £20 billion to fund all those free-loading old people. Although by then I’ll count myself among them and will eagerly await my billion quid from the government. The number of pensioners will increase by a fifth between now and then. So we really need to get rid of some. And quickly. They’re after my money. And many people are wealthier in retirement than they ever were in their working days. Yet they also become a bigger drain on NHS resources as they get ill more often than the young.

We need to start eating old people. Its the only answer.

Happy tuesday

A xxxx