£Trillion Dogs

Posted on February 9, 2020 by john graham

I’ve already come up with several ideas of how the £Trillion locked up in older peoples’ assets could be better used to more fully appreciate and integrate older people into society.

So here’s a big idea from Coco🐶

What about if every older person had a dog to look after🐕

Then they would have to go dog walking every day and the older people would get a lot more exercise and be healthier 🐕‍🦺

Most dogs are automatically friendly with other dogs and while they are sniffing around, their owners have to talk to each other, so this is a great way for isolated and lonely people to get out and about and become more a part of their community 🦮

Keeping their dog owners healthy will save the NHS millions of pounds, so the least that GPs should do is offer dogs on prescription 🐩

A vast increase in the number of dogs would be good overall for the economy.  Creating new jobs for adults as dog trainers, walkers, groomers and shampoo & setters.  Then there would have to be a lot more vets and pet shops in every town.

Most of all this would be great fun for both dogs and older people.  Every town, village and city could have an annual dog show.  Then there would be the biggest Crufts Dog Show ever!

🐶  🐕  🐕‍🦺  🦮  🐩

 

Posted in SMILES | Tagged | 4 Comments

£Trillion Zimmers

Posted on February 5, 2020 by john graham

This post follows on from my initial idea of what older people could do collectively with their £4.7 trillions of savings currently locked in their houses.  I’ve put forward several ideas already but this one reflects the stereo typical view that most people have of elderly people.   So here’s a humurous and inexpensive way of changing that perception.

What if we buy every older person a Zimmer frame?   Even if they don’t need it.   Then they can all walk slowly around holding up the traffic and getting in the way of young people rushing along with their heads down texting on their mobile phones.
Zimmers could be fitted with headlights and horns.   Most importantly a space could be included on the front of the Zimmer frame for sponsored advertising.

This quiet demonstration could be held in every town, every Friday, henceforth to be known as “Zimmer Fridays”.  Eventually the politicians, both local and national, would realise that it is in their interest to make towns and cities and all their public spaces, much more age friendly.

BETTER TO HAVE OLDER PEOPLE BLOCKING THE PAVEMENTS WHILST EXERCISING, RATHER THAN LANGUISHING IN HOSPITAL BEDS, OR LOUNGING AT HOME ON THE SOFA IN FRONT OF DAYTIME TV.

 

 

Posted in SMILES | Tagged | 3 Comments

Film Watching Exercise

Posted on February 2, 2020 by john graham

Research certainly gets into some unusual areas these days and reaches some interesting conclusions !

Scientists at University College London did some research recently into how films can increase you heart rate.     That must have been a very popular subject for the students who offered to assist with the research.   They monitored 51 cinema goers as they watched “Aladdin” and found that compared to people reading books, viewing  films increased your heart rate by between 40 and 60%.   Equivalent to light cardiovascular exercise.

You have to wonder how much better the results would have been if they had watched Mad Max 3 or Dirty Dancing or Grease or Chariots of Fire.  All of those have more than enough exercise and excitement and probably raise your heart rate even more.  So as long as you don’t have a heart attack during the movie, this could be a really good way of exercising.  Perhaps a precaution though, the cinema manager should at least have a defribulator readily available and for particularly exciting films, maybe St John’s Ambulance should be parked outside the cinema.

Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Joseph Devlin, said  the results were in no way influenced by the fact that his research project was commissioned by Vue Cinemas.

Next term his students are already signing up to do research when the new Star Wars movie is released 😀

The latest  Government Health Minister, whoever that is this week, is expected to announce that cinema tickets will soon be issued to patients with high blood pressure as part of his new initiative on social prescribing .

Posted in SMILES | Tagged , | 1 Comment

£Trillion Young Helpers

Posted on January 31, 2020 by john graham

With older people’s new found wealth, the most obvious thing to do is to offer them  a little help whenever they need it.   So how about a scheme to employ young people to help older people to forge greater understanding and empathy between generations.

Not altogether unlike conscription used to be years ago,   Two years of service to the Country.    The £ Trillion Helpers would be paid £10 / hour which is higher than the minimum wage for people under 25 to recognise the valuable community work they will be doing.    It would either be 20 hours a week for two years or it could be fast-tracked to one year if they helped two different householders.

This would ultimately be paid for by the older people by increased inheritance tax, so the scheme would cost the Government nothing in the long term.      Indeed it will probably save the Country money by having happier and healthier older people,

Effectively this would provide a significant transfer of wealth between generations. If every young person gave 1,000 hours of assistance a year for two years at £10/hour, that could go towards paying off £20,000 their student debt.    Twelve million older people would be contributing £240 million to the economy every year.   Only young people entering the armed forces would be exempt.    Young people in full-time education should do their assistance period before going into university so that they could learn something about life first.

  • Gardens would be tidier and young people could learn how to grow vegetables.
  • Young people could up-skill their older companions on using computers and any other gadgets they can’t use,
  • The young assistants would be taught all the basic household skills including cooking, cleaning, washing and ironing clothes.
  • Together they could build a “ Book of Life” charting the lifetime of experience of the older person.
Posted in SMILES | Tagged | 2 Comments

£Trillion Ideas

Posted on January 26, 2020 by john graham

Here’s the first idea for spending  our new found wealth and having fun, by showing how important older people are in society.     As a result of our politicians being so ineffective in the last ten years, older people need to make their voices heard much more loudly in future.  The next decade is going to be the era of public demonstrations about anything and everything.

Look what a difference a young child -Greta Thurnberg – made to raising the profile of climate change around the world.

Older people can learn from young people and do the same for social change and the ageing of society.

Greta and a bunch of young people just skipped school one day and picked up a load of placards and took to the streets.  When it went viral with lots  of media attention children were attracted to the idea of a day off school👬

So how would you get thousands of older people protesting and what about ?

Here’s an idea for the first few demonstrations about the things older people have been complaining about for years.

You can find earlier posts on this by clicking on the archive for August 2017 and finding my blog entitled “LLLP Brexit Negotiations on Gadgets”.

If you don’t want older people to read or understand things, for instance legal terms and conditions, the frequently used approach is to write it in small, unreadable print, like this is!

But don’t do it!  It’s not age friendly.

You can find earlier posts on this by clicking on the archive for July 2017 and finding my blog entitled “LLLP Brexit Packaging Negotiations”.

 

Posted in SMILES | Tagged | 7 Comments

£Trillion Mattress

Posted on January 19, 2020 by john graham

The elderly are literally sleeping on a pile of money !!!!!!     As I said in my post last week it is estimated to be trillions of pounds.   But, there is a problem, how do you get your hands on it because for most people it is tied up in the value of their house.    The mortgage may be paid off and the house will almost certainly have increased significantly  in value, but, you will never see any of your increased wealth unless you can cash it in ☹️  There’s the catch 22, your asset rich, but income poor.

You could do a deal with a sharp-suited, fast-talking equity release adviser.   They are probably going to get much more money out of your house than you will.

Your relatives may be anticipating a happy send off  and the tax man will be holding out for his share.  Smiles all round when your finally in the ground 😀

So don’t delay, liquidate your assets and make a dash for the cash.

Your next issue will be what to do with the dosh ?     No point in putting
cash in bank they pay next to no interest and pretty soon they will charge you for looking after it.
Nobody else wants cash either in this new cashless society.      Even burglars don’t want it, it’s to heavy to carry away.   They only accept credit cards these days 😎

One bold option would be to go live in a 5 star hotel and at least go out in style —— for a while.     Use up all your cash, max out all you credit cards and then pop your clogs.

Burglars, bank managers, the tax man and equity release salesmen will all be gravely disappointed, but at least your relatives will know you had a happy send off.

Posted in SMILES | Tagged | 3 Comments

Social Care Wrong-Footed.

Posted on January 15, 2020 by john graham

Prime Minister Bodj has pledged to sort out social care funding in his first 100 days in office   The trouble is that he has started out on the wrong foot by promising that ”older people can keep their own homes.”   It is the very opposite of what should happen, even though older people would not agree.

I have long argued this.   I even went to 10 Downing Street and presented the case to one of Tony Blair’s advisers.   Needless to say it fell on deaf ears.  My argument was repeated in a watered down way in Andrew Dillnot’s report several years later, but, it too was never implemented by successive Conservative governments. So thousands of older people languish in poor quality, poorly staffed residential homes and many more frail older people and their carers are left at home with equally poor domiciliary care if they get any support at all.

Bodj wants an all party consensus on the future of social care because he knows that a great many the older people who voted him in would not agree to a solution which requires them to sell their own home to pay for their care.    The hard reality is that as a society we have not saved enough for later life care and using the equity accumulated in property inflation in the last fifty years is the only way we can afford a better solution.

But first we have to solve the political conundrum of an all party consensus.    I think there is no chance of this happening.     The minute one party proposes using people’s homes to pay for care the other parties see an advantage in opposing it.     So we end up in the limbo we have been in for almost the last twenty years.

So don’t wait on politicians  of any shade, to all of them older people are in the “too difficult” red box to be left for another day.     The solution if you can afford it is to sell up and downsize.

Posted in Care Funding | 3 Comments

£ 4.7 TRILLION !

Posted on January 12, 2020 by john graham
That’s an eye-catching, mind-boggling number.  I read it in The Times just a few days ago, so it must be true.   It is the amount of wealth owned by older people in the UK.

£ 4, 700, ooo, ooo, ooo.

I can’t quite believe it.  It’s a heck of a lot of noughts.  So where is it all ?     I guess the Queen has a fair bit of it stashed away in the crown estates.  Then there are all the billionaires that Mr Corbyn keeps banging on about, although their’s is probably hidden away in tax havens around the world.  Then finally you come to  Mr and Mrs Average Older Person whose hard earned wealth has been accumulated over a lifetime of graft. There are estimated to be 12 million pensioners in the UK, so what if we ring-fenced all this elderly wealth and shared it out equally between all of them ? Thats £4.7 trillion divided by 12 million, which works out at about £ 4 million each 😀. That doesn’t sound right, but hey ho, it better than the State Pension. What would we do if we spent all that money on ourselves ????  It is a bit too much to keep under the mattress 🤡
My next few blogs will explore different ideas ……….
Posted in SMILES | Tagged | 4 Comments

NEW YEAR REVOLUTION

Posted on January 5, 2020 by john graham

The Last Laugh Looney Party has decided to continue with holding Prime Minister Bodj to account throughout 2020 to make sure he keeps his promises.  Otherwise there could be a French style revolution, complete with chopping off politicians heads 🤡

Bodj’s pledges in his election manifesto were typically not very specific.  Like all politicians, their promises always have enough wriggle room for them to be broken.  This is called Plausible Deniability, although you could call them downright lies.

These are some of the things that I intend to write about in this coming year in relation to holding Bodj to his promises :-

FUN

  • One of the things you can say about Prime Minister Bodj is that he certainly has a great sense of humour and I think this should be a theme for his term in office.  Bodj stuck on a zip line should set the tone for the new parliament and MPs should be given cream buns to throw at each other across the Houses of Parliament.   This should certainly be more interesting than many of the speeches they make.
  • BREXIT.   Former Prime Minister, Mrs Maybe-Maybe Not, famously coined the phrase “Brexit means Brexit”.  Except of course for her it didn’t.  Prime Minister Bodj added a deadline date to his Brexit, except it kept changing.  The latest deadline is 31st January 2020, but even if he keeps to that, nothing will change until the details are sorted out, supposedly towards the end of the year.  So expect Brexit to appear in this blog regularly in the coming months.
  • SOCIAL CARE.  This is the subject which is probably the most important to older people.  Sadly it’s the issue that politicians of all parties have failed to get to grips with for decades.  Its history is littered with Parliamentary Commissions, Green Papers, research reports, committee reports and reports on reports.  Proposals have been labelled as a “death tax” and/or a “dementia tax” and that guarantees that nothing will happen.  Now Bodj has called for an all party consesus, but there’s absolutely no chance of that happening.   So my recommendation is that older people forget about the Government helping them and sort out Social Care for themselves.

PACKAGING 

  • I don’t remember the word “packaging” figuring very largely in Bodj’s election manifesto, but he did refer to ridding the world of plastic which would be a jolly good start.  If we can get Bodj to wear gloves for the next year, no doubt he will come to realise that there is lots of other packaging that needs to be gotten rid of.

SMALL  PRINT

  • Unfortunately, small print didn’t figure highly in Bodj’s promises.  But I’m sure his advisors and civil servants will try and add as much of it as they can to Bodj’s “one line promises”.   As most old people don’t read small print, I will hold Bodj to the “one line promise”, without qualification.  So we expect to have “20,000 more police”, “40 new hospitals”, “instant GP appointments”, “a teacher for every child”, “prison sentences that last a lifetime” and finally “only a trickle of immigrants who will all have to be Nobel prize winners”.
  • MUMBLING.  This is a subject which I haven’t talked about before, but it’s one which excludes more and more older people from society.  Initially, I put it down to more and more older people being hard of hearing, but now I’ve concluded it’s not that, it’s the fact that young people talk too quickly.  And that people talk over each other on TV programmes.   And that background music is often louder than people talking.   And that rapping is completely incomprehensible.   And that people use more and more jargon words which are only understood by young people.   ALL OF THIS DISINFRANCHISES OLDER PEOPLE AND NEEDS TO BE STOPPED.   So I propose that the BBC loses £1 million of their Government grant for every 1000 complaints it gets about mumbling.   And ITV loses the same for each advert that older people can’t understand, which is probably most of them.
  • CLIMATE CHANGE.   This would seem to be one of the biggest issues the world has to face in the next decade.   Older people, with notable exception of Sir David Attenborough, seem relatively silent on the subject, presumably because they think they aren’t going to be around that long.   I think if they more clearly understood the subject, they would certainly be concerned for their children and grandchildren.   I will write more about this subject in the year ahead.

CLUTTER

  • This has been a big subject in my blog for the last few years and it isn’t going to go away in a hurry.   However much I try to dispose of clutter, more steps up to replace it.   So I need a radical solution and here it is :-

      Pile it all up outside parliament or politicians houses and gardens.  That            will give them something to do rather than endlessly debating issues                    where nothing changes afterwards.   

DOG FRIENDLY

  •  More and more old people have dogs as pets and they are definitely a             socialising influence as well as a guard against loneliness.   So expect             Coco to feature in my 2020 blogs.
  • SOMETHING ELSE ?   This is a space for the unexpected, because one thing you can be sure of is that something will crop up this year which forecasters didn’t forecast and the politicians didn’t pontificate about.  Nor did Google or YouTube or Twitter predict this the very beginning of the new decade.

Posted in SMILES | Tagged | 4 Comments

Pangolin Tangling

Posted on December 29, 2019 by john graham

When a Pangolin gets frightened,

he rolls up in a ball.

He’s round and sound

and ever so tightly bound.

That’s all.

 

Tagged , | 5 Comments