'Age' cards - good or bad?

I don't like them either. They were a bit of a novelty when they first started to appear I suppose but they've been done to death for 30 odd years. I think you need to know the person really well to send one and also be of a similar age with a similar sense of humour (if you can call it that). I don't buy them but if I did I wouldn't send one to someone in ill health or who wasn't ageing well for whatever reason. I don't think you could make age a protected characteristic in this context though unless (perhaps?) you could prove that the card was sent maliciously or as a deliberate act of discrimination, such as an obvious ageist campaign by your works manager. There are cards with all sorts of things on them, such as taking the micky out of someone's ability at golf or bad cooking or alcohol consumption. Do you view these as discriminatory? Because in a way they are too. Where do we draw the line?

Just wondering if you would feel completely deflated and upset if someone sent you an 'age' card pointing out how old / decrepit / incapable in body and mind you now are, or if you'd fall about laughing???

Neither. I’m not so sensitive that a mass produced sentiment on a birthday card has the power to upset me, and you’d have to have a low bar for humour to fall about laughing. I’d just be happy that someone had taken the time to sort me out a card.

And I don’t think that you can compare cancer, a bastard of a disease that affects all ages, to old age; something that lots of us would be happy to reach. I think that’s actually quite a shitty comparison to make.