We’ll have to stop Adrian reading the papers so much.  He turned up with an article from the Daily Telegraph on tests that show if you’re at risk from an early death.  With the average age of the group already 70 I asked for a definition of early.  The tests led to one of the funniest sessions we’ve had for months. 

    The balance test is a gem.  The aim is to stand on one leg with your eyes closed.  In the research, I believe the writer used the term research with tongue firmly in cheek, the least risk group managed 10 seconds or more, the worst only 3 seconds.  It seemed like a pretty straightforward test.  We left Ben out because he’s still waiting for his hip. He can’t stand upright on two legs with his eyes open for 10 seconds at the moment.  That made Ben the timekeeper, not that we needed one.  The other five of us took it in turns and didn’t manage 3 seconds in total.  We decided we may have misunderstood the instructions and went back to the article.  We hadn’t.

    We thought it might be easier to stand on one leg and then close your eyes.  That was when we found out that most of us couldn’t stand on one leg for 10 seconds with our eyes open. By now some of the kids in the bar, our terminology for those around sixty had begun to barrack us, water off a duck’s back at our age. Undeterred we switched to the next test.

    That involved standing upright from a sitting position in a normal straight backed chair.  “No problem,” Sam said, until he found out you had to repeat it as many times as possible for one minute.  We had to leave Ben out of that test as well.  At least he can count so remained useful.  Jez led off with lots of encouragement from all over the bar.  Ben stopped him at ten because he’d read the instructions again.  It had to be a chair without arms and the low risk group averaged 39 in the tests.  All the chairs in the bar have arms so we ruled out the test.  Richie chimed in from behind the bar, suggested we use the bench seat in the window.  Adrian suggested he got on with his work.  

    That only left the grip test but we hadn’t got any kit to measure that.  The researchers used something like a bicycle brake lever that measured the squeeze power.  After a bit of discussion, Richie gave us an unopened bottle of tomato relish from the kitchen.  Since Ben hadn’t been able to do any of the other tests, he led off.  To be fair, we let him try both hands several times before we sent the bottle back to the kitchen.  The obvious conclusion was that Ben had already died but no-one had told him.

    Adrian finally told us the tests had been applied to groups with an average age of 53, with low scorers more likely to die in the following thirteen years during which the tests were used.  Once we had the full picture we were in high spirits and Paddy summed it up with what he calls logic.

    “It’s pretty obvious from our age’s lads.  We’d have sailed through these tests at 53.” 

    The tests led naturally, naturally for us anyway, onto the ages when our fathers died.  Three didn’t make sixty, two made late seventies and Jez was a ‘don’t know’.  We didn’t explore that.  Billy Connolly has just produced a brilliant television series about the final journey so we had another straw poll.  Cremation won hands down with one ‘don’t know’.  I’ll leave you to guess who that was!  Paddy wanted a pint poured on the ground where his ashes were scattered.  Any of us who survive him offered to do just that provided it went via our kidneys.