The 15 films in the "Young at Heart" screenings look great - big stars from Judi Dench down in what the promo blurb calls "a specially curated cinema program for film lovers 60 and up".

The participating Palace cinemas are my favourite - excellent ice-cream and you can take wine in. I go to the one in Canberra virtually every week.

But I won't be going to the oldies' festival. I will not.

Nor will I be celebrating Seniors' Week.

Firstly, I find the very idea of special events for older people patronising, as though our tastes are somehow different, outside the mainstream. They aren't. We're the same. Prick us, do we not bleed? Tickle us, do we not laugh?

There's an old adage about the arrogance of youth, perhaps from Mark Twain, along the lines of, “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

Older people do know stuff that might surprise worshippers from the Cult of Youth. Sex, for example, wasn't invented in the 1960s - even your parents and grandparents indulged at least once. And it does continue through our lives into our 60s and I hope and pray into our 70s and 80s. Charlie Chaplin would agree.

Wisdom and curiosity and enthusiasm defy age. A sense of humour matures with age. Silliness fades. The old know this.

I have known fogeyish men in their 20s who are older mentally than men three times their age. It is not true that you are as old as you feel - worn knees and hips say differently - but you can choose how fast you age mentally. Curiosity and enthusiasm are not functions of age. They are choices. The young can lack them and the old can have them in spades.

There have been many studies supporting the idea that older workers can be more reliable and more productive than younger ones. We don't charge every gate. We are bulls who know how best to use our effort - and how not to waste it.

“On balance, older employees’ productivity and reliability is higher than that of their younger colleagues,” said Axel Börsch-Supan of the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy. So there.

“Older employees soundly thrash their younger colleagues. Every aspect of job performance gets better as we age,” said Peter Cappelli, a management professor at the Wharton School of Business. So there, again.

One piece of research which resonates was about a call centre in a big company making copying machines. The place was reconfigured so that young workers found themselves clustered together and older workers found themselves out of the picture.

Complaints went up. The managers racked their brains to work what was going on and concluded that in the previous, mixed configuration the young and inexperienced would just call out to their older neighbour about a problem - and get the experienced answer: "Just tell them to switch buttons A and B off and then back on" - that kind of thing.

The older worker had experienced the problem before and could pass on the knowledge to the inexperienced.

That is the way in a diverse workforce.

And that's the important word: "diversity". Any employer which ignores the skills of a group - whether of women or those with different coloured skins or older people - ignores skill, full-stop. It makes a stupid choice to ignore creativity and imagination in a world where creativity and imagination are the truly scarce and profitable assets.

I've been fortunate to work for employers who recognise that truth, right up to the present. A newsroom (or, say, a lawyer's office or a doctor's surgery or a taxi service or virtually any other workplace) which had only young, white, male thrusters would be a worse place, not just in its pleasantness but in its effectiveness. It would literally miss the story.

We who do not worship in the Temple of Youth have our heroes.

The Italian composer, Giuseppe Verdi, is one. At the age of 79, he wrote the great opera Falstaff about an ageing and vigorous lothario. Shakespeare made Falstaff seem seedy. Verdi took Shakespeare's play and, to my mind, makes the main character seem vibrant and attractive. The old composer created an old character who defied age.

And Ronald Reagan.

At the age of 73, he stood for the Presidency of the United States against Walter Mondale who was then merely in his youthful late 50s.

Reagan's age might have become an election issue until he said with a mastery of comic timing, "I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience."

Shrewd employers exploit the experience of older people. Shrewd people of all ages enjoy their wit and wisdom.

My Seniors Card has on it the slogan: "The holder is a valued member of the community. Please extend every courtesy and assistance".

Please don't extend any special courtesy. Treat me like anyone else. And I don't need your assistance, thank you. Offer it, and I won't be responsible for my grump.

The cheap bus fares are nice, though.