Dining out with the Ladies Who Lunch is at once therapeutic and inspirational.
Conversation-wise, no turn is left unstoned. But by the pudding course (and despite cholesterol and carbohydrate phobics, dieters and Lent, we all chow down with gasps of orgasmic delight over the creme brulee) we settle to general topics.
Business suits bolt their coffee and flee back to the task of making a living, leaving us to the luxury of a long afternoon.
One of us poses the question: "Which generation is having the best time now?" Consensus is - we are. We postwar
baby boomers are on a roll. But then we had it good from the start. In an era of relative political stability, we had a secure childhood in safe streets, free to roam and play. We came home to plain but wholesome fare and evenings filled with books, games, rationed radio listening and conversation. Our innocence was protected so we weren't forced to grow up before our time.
We were obedient, well-disciplined and our few treats were appreciated. We knew intuitively not to ask for things our parents couldn't afford. The late 1940s Education Act had opened the doors to further education, an opportunity of which we took grateful advantage, graduating mid-sixties into a new meritocracy and the first rumblings of a social revolution.
After that, in Northern Ireland, it all went pear-shaped but we'd had the privilege of an untainted childhood and a carefree adolescence - a basic human right denied to anyone born here post 1969.
We reared our own children in a new and inimical climate doing our best to protect them from the poison of sectarianism and violence and the corrupt and corrupting values of a television age. Had we been totally successful, we mightn't be languishing today in a polarised political limbo, beset by insoluble social problems.
Through it all we strove to preserve in schools and workplaces Christian decency, quality of life and a sense of normality in the midst of madness.
There's a new generation of movers and shakers now, most of them looking not old enough to be milk monitors. They're not a patch on us of course but we're inured to the fact that experience counts for nothing these days. It's not that they've usurped us exactly. We've chosen to move on - to the sunlit uplands of pleasing ourselves at least.
It's one of life's little ironies that when you have the energy and interest for leisure pursuits, you've neither the time nor the means to indulge in them. The young and hardy backpack the world on tuppence and a filled baguette but not for us travel on a shoestring, concussing ourselves on a youth hostel's top bunk and enduring the purgatory of primitive sanitation. We want clean sheets and room service.
We're the age-band on which tourism at home and abroad depends for its viability, not to mention its profit. The bottom would fall out of the ethnic crafts market if we weren't purchasing leather goods, indigenous pottery, folk art and hauling home hefty pieces of tribal carving that don't fit in the plane's overhead locker. Today the world trembles before the power of the grey pound. We have money, leisure and time and need nobody's permission to do our own thing.
I always considered 'Saga Holidays' an unfortunately droopy name for over-fifties vacations. True, by the time you qualify for one most of what you've got has sagged anyway and the cloak of sexual invisibility vis-a-vis male interest has already fallen on our hapless shoulders.
Indisputable too, in order to enjoy yourself, you need to take the glucosamine tablets before you go, though when they break into Abba's Dancing Queen you discover you've no longer the knees for it.
Still, better the baby on a Saga tour than the cardiganed menopausal matron on a coach-load of half-dressed twenty-somethings.
Such is our discourse as we scoff the free mints that accompany the lunch bill and divvy up, taking account of those who had a starter but no wine, wine but no starter - and whose was the gin?
The Ladies Who Lunch exit at three-forty in search of a little retail therapy. "Yes, thank you, the meal was lovely - but there's no toilet-paper in the ladies' loo and your music is too loud."
That's us. Baby boomers with attitude!
:: This column, which first appeared in March 2006, is reprinted in memory of our much-loved columnist Anita Robinson, who sadly passed away on February 1. From next week, Nuala McCann's regular column will be moving from Monday Life to this space on Tuesdays.
