No. I'm talking about age. And as people reach their late nineties, the promise of a telegram from the Queen often gives them an added incentive to celebrate their 100th birthday. My nan is 98 and as a staunch royalist she's very much hoping to get her signed card come October 2012.
You can bet that there is always space in the local paper for a picture and blurb where you get to read those that claim to have smoked 40 a day and necked two tumblers of whisky every evening since they were 16. Only last week I read of the oldest golfer in Britain, who still enters up to 20 competitions a year at his golf club in Ormskirk, Lancashire.
Yet by all accounts, local rags may soon have to devote an entire page to people living to 100 because we are living much longer.
It would have lightened many moods last week to learn that nearly a fifth of people living in the UK are expected to celebrate their 100th birthday.
To put that into numbers, that's around 10 million people. Three million of these are currently aged under 16, while 5.5 million are between 16 and 50, and 1.3 million are between 51 and 65. A further 875,000 of the projected centenarians are aged over 65 and already retired.
The figure is well up on the 11,800 people in the UK who are currently at least 100, while there are fewer than 100 people who are aged more than 110.
But of course, people living longer will have an impact on our pensions system, and it is not a good one.
The longer we live, the bigger the strain on insurers who pay our pension income in the form of annuities. Insurers employ experts to analyse trends in longevity and set annuity rates to ensure that the companies won't make a loss when they pay customers' pensions until they die. If life expectancy increases as dramatically as the new figures suggest, annuity rates are almost certain to fall.
A man buying an annuity at the age of 65 would currently receive an income of 7pc, but this would fall to 5.5pc if a fifth of the population lived to be 100, according to Stuart Bayliss, an annuity expert. This is a fall of about 21pc.
Women would fare even worse, he said. A 65 year-old buying an annuity now would receive 6.65pc, but this would fall to 5pc under the expected increase in longevity – a decline of almost 25pc.
As we have reported over the past few weeks, we are going to have to change our attitude to saving and working. In short, we are going to have to save more and work more, even when we reach our sixties and beyond.
Besides, what else are you going to do for the best of 30‑odd years after you retire? Play golf all day before putting your feet up with a drink or two, perhaps. Why on earth would anyone want to do that?
ROSE-TINTED OUTLOOK
My email in-box has been bombarded with predictions from fund managers for the new year, but you wonder whether you should take many of them with a pinch of salt. My favourite is from Ignis Asset Management, which, it is fair to say, is in a bullish mood on pretty much everything.
It expects "corporate bonds to continue to outperform", while as for the UK market, it predicts that "the economy will be much stronger and resilient than forecast". Meanwhile, US shares "will move higher in 2011" and "bold investors will get good returns from Europe". Even commercial property will deliver returns of 8pc next year, it says.
Unfortunately, too much optimism makes me wary.
