I WAS chatting away to one councillor the other day and the issue of age came up.
They were bemoaning the fact that hardly anyone in the Council Chamber is under the age of 50 and that younger people were becoming increasingly hard to recruit.
I think it was prompted by an article we had in the Advertiser few weeks ago about how the Labour group wanted to raise the level of expenses paid to councillors so it would attract new blood.
Now, councillors have always been a bit prickly when discussing how much they receive from the public purse because, I suspect, that as a nation, talking about money is considered vulgar .
So couple that with talking about people's ages and politics in general (more subjects on the taboo list), I wondered whether we were about to start some kind of mini-revelution!
Off-hand, I can only think of of few councillors who were clearly the youngest out of the current crop; Steve Hanlon (Labour, Moorside), Adrian Owens (Conservative, Derby Ward), Jane Roberts (Labour, Birch Green), Paul Greenall (Conservative, Derby Ward) and David Griffiths (Conservative, Burscough West).
Both Cllrs Hanlon and Owens are widely seen as potential future leaders of their respective groups, especially as they've both got finance portfolio experience. But out of 54 councillors, being able to find just five who are under 50 doesn't bode well for the future.
This is in sharp contrast to when I was a reporter in Southport and covered its thriving political scene. Over there, both the Tories and Lib Dems (the two main parties) were fairly well catered for when it came to young whipper-snappers. Some of them were barely out of their teens and clearly itching to become 21 so they could stand.
But in West Lancashire, there doesn't appear to be the same culture and that is something that concerns both the Conservatives and Labour.
When I first started out in journalism, I was taken to one side by and veteran political hack who gave me this advice: "There's only three types of people who become councillors; the oldies who've got time on their hands, the young upstarts who want their names in lights and those who were last in the room when the nominations were being handed out."
I wonder if I'll be passing on the same advice when I come to hang up my notebook...
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