THIEVING pensioners are a new social phenomenon, apparently.

Home Office figures show that the number of jailed senior citizens has risen by 50 per cent since 1997 to more than 1,000. This means that the Prison Service, which has already adapted a wing at Portsmouth's Kingston jail for elderly inmates, now intends to unveil a second "grey block" in Norwich complete with stairlifts, adapted bathrooms and cells with alarm buttons.

Heavens.

Many of those who have swapped heists for hoists turned to crime in order to make ends meet after finding they did not have enough money set aside for retirement, it is alleged.

Gloomy predictions about the long-term viability of the pension system conjure up a vision of a future world in which baby boomers run riot to feed an addiction for slippers and cocoa. Just watch. They will soon be congregating on street corners in their Saga-branded baseball caps, clearly up to no good.

Middle-aged people, already in a state of despair about the fecklessness of the young, will find the activities of the grey and toothless equally distressing. Some folk will go smoothly from paying off their children's university debts to standing the restitution for elaborate frauds and the smashing of any bus shelters which teenagers, inexplicably, leave untouched.

And popular fiction is probably waiting for a 70-year-old Robin Hood figure who will become a hero by stealing bus passes from the rich in order to distribute them -- with suitable forgeries -- to the deserving poor. But this is in the future.

For the moment we have to contemplate the fact that the new wing at HMP Norwich will specialise in accommodating prisoners who have Alzheimer's disease. You would think that people with this distressing condition should not be in jail at all. But perhaps cunning relatives have worked out that bed and board is cheaper under these circumstances than it is in old folks' homes.

You hope that policemen will be sufficiently suspicious if they find an unusual number of confused, pyjama-clad octagenarians locked inside banks and offices while the alarm trills merrily outside.

Joking aside, I do worry about the next generation of honest old people. As I understand it, councils find it hard to find the necessary cash to meet demonstrable need and not all private operators are able to earn enough money to make "granny farming" a viable business proposition. I sincerely hope that somebody has some answers before I reach my dotage.

Changing the subject dramatically, it tickled me to see that St Peter's Way in Bolton -- the A 666 -- shares its numbers with Highway 666 in New Mexico. It is called this because it was the sixth major road to branch off the famous Route 66, the one where music fans know kicks are to be obtained.

People in both countries have called the 666 "the Devil's highway," but locals in New Mexico seem to have considerably more imagination. "Beelzebub Boulevard" and "Pointy Tail's Parkway to Perdition" seem devilishly clever to me.