We learnt recently that despite the best efforts of Herr Pope and Jude Law, there are now more old age pensioners in Britain than children under the age of 16.

Many people have many theories on why this is happening: better medical care, better crumple zones in your car, less plague, fewer man-eating tigers, the invention of the high-visibility jacket and, of course, the increasingly zealous Health and Safety Executive with its bold remit that no one should die, ever.

There is, however, another, rather more serious reason for the general wrinkling of the general public that no one is talking about. It’s this. These days, few people have the time or the money to rear a child because they spend all their free time and all their spare cash buying hearing aids and mashing food for the toothless old crone that used to be their mum.

My mother has made it very plain that at the first sign of incontinence my sister and I are to wheel her over Beachy Head. Other mums — and dads, for that matter — are less considerate, and continue to sit about in their expensive inconti-panties, dribbling and insisting that the Antiques Roadshow is played at full volume, for probably 20 or 30 years.

I should imagine it’s jolly hard to make a baby with your husband if you spent the first half of the evening looking for your mum’s teeth and the second half trying to pluck them from the puddle of her wee.

And what for? At least, with a child, you are able to see the fruits of your labours grow into adulthood and become self- dependent. You lavish all that care and cash on a parent and all that happens is they get worse and worse until one day, when they are nothing but a bag of skin and methane, they keel over and you have to fork out for a funeral.

It’s also a huge problem for the state because in Britain there are now more than 2.7m people over 80, and all of them have to be kept alive and fed using taxes from a working population that is shrinking.

However, there is a business opportunity here. Some people say that, right now, property is a good investment. Others say it’s zinc or farmland. But they’re all wrong. The absolute best, most watertight investment is an old people’s home.

You need only look at the numbers to see this makes sense. Because now that there are more people over 65 than there are under 16, it stands to reason that there should be more care homes for the elderly than schools. And I bet there aren’t. Not by a long way.

Demand, then, is bound to be strong, and what’s more, running an old people’s home must surely be the easiest thing in the world. It’s not like a school, where you have to have teachers and all your guests are either lippy or armed with a knife, or both. And it’s not like running a hotel, where people want food at all hours of the day and hot and cold running satellite television.

All you need in an old people’s home is a pack of cards, a telly with big speakers, some Gracie Fields records and a bit of cabbage for the old dears to eat. They won’t mind. They like cabbage. They think it’s exotic.

The other great thing about old people is they don’t complain. If you accidentally forget to change their nappies for a few weeks, they will tell you cheerfully that things were much worse during the blitz. And you needn’t worry about their families getting angry, because the selfish bastards only come round at Christmas. And they’re usually too busy making up excuses for leaving to notice the sheets are a bit crusty.

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