Middle aged in your 70s?

OLD age has been postponed. Several of the London newspapers used the term "middle-aged" to describe the men chucked out of the Cabinet in Tuesday's reshuffle, so you can bet your life this expression was used by the nameless official or politician who was briefing them. But the axed ministers included Ken Clarke who is 74. So is 74 now regarded as middle-aged in Whitehall? It seems preposterous until you find another Whitehall report, on the same day, about the health watchdog, NICE offering advice on alcohol. This, we are told, is aimed at "the middle-aged" - and special check-ups are being offered to people aged 40-74.

WHY should the Government be interested in raising the bar for middle-age? I can see a situation a few years from now when, in order to balance the books, the state-pension age is raised to 70 and beyond. If you can convince the citizenry that they are still middle-aged at 70 it might just keep the rioters off the streets.

INCIDENTALLY, when Roger Daltrey raged: "Hope I die before I get old" (My Generation, The Who, 1965), we kids all thought "old" meant about 30. I don't think any of us expected to be alive in 2014, let alone queuing up for tickets for The Who's 50th anniversary tour, at £80 a time.

I LIKE to think I may have played a part in Wonga's decision to drop those irritating puppets from its adverts. I wrote some time ago that the old biddies reminded me of the female guards at Auschwitz. But waste not, want not. Perhaps the Wonga puppets can be recycled to promote that excellent series The Nazis: A Warning from History.

WASN'T it pitiful, hearing the independence tendency on Any Questions (Radio 4) trying to convince Scots that if they voted to leave the UK, Whitehall would carry on awarding Royal Navy contracts to shipyards in Scotland, which would then be a foreign country? Can you really see any English politician campaigning under the banner "British jobs for Scottish workers"?

I HATE to be a party-pooper amid all the champagne corks popping and tears of joy over the vote to appoint women bishops. But, seriously, does anyone believe that men would have surrendered the Church of England to women so feebly if it were worth holding on to? Throughout history men have loved power. That is why the institutions that really matter and have real power, Parliament, the law, the armed forces, the City and most professions, are still firmly in male control. The Church has been handed over to women because in a Godless age it is dying on its feet, utterly irrelevant and has about as much power and influence on society as Jackanory. The ordaining of women bishops is the last dying gasp of a clapped-out organisation that has only a few years left. They know it. We know it.

BUT has anyone told the Devil? The General Synod has adopted a new form of baptism which makes no mention of him. This is frankly ungrateful. For centuries, the Devil was the Church's biggest fundraiser. Generations of our ancestors, frightened out of their skins, handed a tenth of their income over to the Church to save them from the Devil and his fiery domain. Now that the Church is admitting in effect that he never existed, can we have our money back? That's a few million groats and sovereigns, plus compound interest for, say, 1,000 years. A million quid for every citizen should just about cover it.