Welcome to Geezer Nation, where life is pretty carefree and everyone has plenty of time to have fun. Where your biggest worry of the day is whether you’ll get a parking space close to the door of the gym so you don’t have to walk far to your fitness class. Where even the Scottie dogs have a look of senility when they refuse to leave your lawn after leaving a deposit on it. Where women outnumber men to such a degree that there’s a tacit understanding the married ones will share their husbands. Where those oft-fantasized threesomes are a common occurrence: GBG coffee dates. 

Anxiety is not unknown, however. After all, at 60-plus you are a lot closer to certain death than you were thirty years ago. But in Geezer Nation, you don’t have to look far to ease your aching mind. Drugs – the prescription as well as the recreational variety – abound. A sure sign that geezers rule is the popularity of workshops on raising medicinal herbs. Geezers can’t afford to buy all those anti-depressants, laxatives, anti-anxiety pills and hormone replacement drugs the doctors are always prescribing for us.

Here in Victoria, a special principality of the old, isolated far from the full Canadian demographic on Vancouver Island, you’re a geezer if you’re over 60, but up to 75, you’re considered a young person. Only at 90 do you start to utter the word “old”. Victoria is not just for geezers, of course – it’s a haven for the homeless of all ages and a site for monster homes of the rich and faintly famous who touch down for a couple of months of the year. But as the capital of memory, the balmiest location north of the border and the garden city (no idle boast), this Geezer mecca has no equal.

Today’s Geezer consumer tip: Lionel Richie has released a new album, Tuskegee, featuring duets with some youngsters such as Shania Twain and fellow geezer Willie Nelson, recording some Richie hits such including “Say You, Say Me” and “All Night Long”.