For the best part of 10 years, this column has been spouting words of wisdom on the peculiar situation that we will all, if we are lucky, eventually find ourselves in, which goes by the name of middle age.

I don’t often get angry about it. I usually laugh it off, I’m kind enough to spare you its gory details, and sometimes the whole thing is simply an excuse for me to claim my ever-growing life experience counts as wisdom, and use that as an excuse to get things off my chest.

At the end of the day, though, I mostly just point out the peculiarities of life at this funny age, in the hope that some readers will be able to relate to it.

After all, we all have a lot in common.

And then – as we found out last week – there are some things that people of my age simply don’t have in common.

I don’t think there is any need for me to tell you just how offensive and insensitive that remark was that finally cost Nick Martin his job as mayor last week, after months of shilly-shallying.

Enough people who are better qualified to speak about it than me have already spoken, particularly the disabled writer who, in a national newspaper, pointed out that even more offensive than the words themselves was the way they were used.

He objected to its “them and us” sentiment, which clearly relegated people with learning difficulties to being “them”.

But (as if there wasn’t enough offence in the original statement) the councillor’s excuse for uttering it carried a kind of secondary offence for people like me.

“It was a word I used,” said the councillor, “when I was growing up.”

The implication was that people of his age should be excused for not being so knowledgeable about what’s politically correct these days, perhaps in the same way that we are not so au-fait with the pop charts nowadays, either. There is also the suggestion that people of a certain age have a different vocabulary, and that is supposed to make it OK too.

Well, I am of that certain age – I’m only 10 years younger than the former mayor – and I object to being tarred with that brush.

Because most of us are better than that.

You might assume, from the councillor’s excuse, that it’s normal behaviour for people of my generation to bandy words such as the one he used, and in the way he used it. But while I admit we did use some words that now make me blush, that was back in the playground. We were children then, not mature adults.

What’s more, in my experience – although there will always be exceptions – I don’t believe the younger generation generally think in such condescending, discriminatory, ignorant ways, either, and that’s probably because of the way we brought them up. There is no place for these things in the 21st century.

I’m quite proud to be from my generation. I think we’ve made gigantic strides from the bad old intolerant ways of the 20th century, and as we get older, we’ll become even wiser.

So while you can try to use your age as an excuse for being out of touch, I think getting older actually gives you an even better understanding of the foolishness of singling out minorities and dividing “them” from “us”.

So please don’t cast aspersions on your peers. Not only do most oldies like me never say things like that, but – even more importantly – we don’t think them, either.