£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”.

 

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£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.

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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.

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£ 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 ……….
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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.

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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.

 

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Pangolin Dangling

Posted on December 25, 2019 by john graham

When they are not eating ants

And there is not much to do,

Pangolins are just like

me and you.

 

They have no thumbs

to twiddle.

They can’t  think up

a riddle like “Hey diddle diddle”.

 

So Pangolins just hang about

and that’s why you often see,

if you look very carefully,

high up in every tree,

Pangolins dangling.

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Clutter Creative Solutions.

Posted on December 22, 2019 by john graham

Another rainy day.

A day indoors with nothing to do.

An opportunity for de-cluttering ?

But you have to be in the right frame of mind.

 

If the rain was torrential and flooded your home,

you would move the valued things upstairs.

The rest left downstairs would instantly

be redefined as clutter.

 

If a house fire,

was your heart’s desire,

then all your clutter would go up in smoke.

But that’s no joke.

 

Or if there was a plague of mice.

They would eat you out of house and home.

All your clutter problems solved,

with just one infestation.

 

Perhaps you could profit from your surplus stuff.

Ebay everything in a one day sale.

Price it at a pound

and wait for the bids to roll in.

 

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The Great Escape !

Posted on December 18, 2019 by john graham

This is the tail and trial of my annual Christmas shopping adventure.   Not my most popular thing to do, so I set out to get it over with as quickly as possible.   I left home at 11 o’clock to go to  Milton Keynes where the shopping centre is an enclosed mall with plenty of car parking.   A one stop shop, hopefully!

My first task when I arrive is to find a space in the usual outdoor location, which is nearest to the entrance to Debenhams.    The car park is full, but after only a few laps around, I find someone pulling out and in I go.     Now I need to locate a Pay and Display meter.     Where on earth could they have put them ?     There is a sign with an arrow, but I still can’t see a meter.     All I can find are a lot of strange red poles with  nowhere to put your money.    It just says cashless parking, pay by phone, which is all very well if you have brought your phone with you 😤

Looks like my shopping expedition is over before it’s started.   There are cameras everywhere to stop people escaping without paying, so I will probably get a fine for not managing to park there.

So I am back on the cris-cross grid of duel carriageways around the Shopping Centre, which is now full of cars, doing a few more laps, when I spot a multi-story car park at the Debenhams shop.   Only problem is I am just beyond the entrance …. so I do a few more laps to get back to the entrance again.   Finally, a friendly lady in a high-vis jacket, who is guarding the entrance, tells my I can pay cash once I am inside.

I drive up to the first floor entrance barrier, but it won’t give me a ticket, so I figure I must have to put some money in.  Only problem is there is nowhere to put your cash and I drop my pound coin trying to put it in any kind of slot that will take cash.   Then a ticket pops out and the barrier lifts up, so I realise you have to pay on the way out !!!

So I have broken into the first floor car park, only problem is that after a few more laps I discover they are all reserved for disabled people.    I consider breaking an arm or a leg, but decide that’s a bit drastic just to get a car park space😀

S I venture up to the second floor.   At first all the spaces appear to be taken.  I do a few more laps and low and behold I find six empty spaces all together.  Magic!    I pull in, turn off the car and then just as I am ready to go shopping,  a man in a high-vis jacket knocks on my window and asks if I want my car washed.    I explained I was only going shopping and he explained “You can’t park here it is reserved for car washing”.

So now I am off to the roof top car park.   It is pretty full with all the people who are not disabled and don’t want their car washed, but eventually after a few more laps,  I find an empty space.     After all this circling around, I have completely lost my sense of direction, so I wander through the car park looking for an exit to the shops, carefully leaving a paper trail behind me so I can find my way back to my car.

Eventually I find a secret door which leads via a host of escalators down to the shops.    PHEW !

SHOPPING OVER IN MINUTES I RETRACE MY STEPS BACK UP TWENTY ESCALATORS.

At the top of the escalators there is the cash machine, that takes real cash.  I put in my ticket and it says I have been there for over an hour, which I can hardly believe, so I have to pay £2.90 for two hours.    Since you can’t argue with a machine I reluctantly cough up the dough.     Having paid the machine it tells me I have ten minutes to get out.

I follow my paper trail and discover my car, now all I have to do is find my way out.   It should be no problem, there are signs everywhere.    Arrows on the floor,  signs to the left, signs to the right, in fact far too many signs !    I set off following the arrows on the floor, then after one complete circuit, I am back where I started.   I decide to follow the arrows on the signs saying exit and do a few more laps, but I am still on the roof!    They obviously don’t want you to get out.

I try a new escape plan and follow some arrows with a picture of a car and after a few twists and turns I come to the EXIT BARRIER.  Just one problem…… there’s a car in front of me and he appears to be parked at the barrier ?     I wait for a while as other escapee cars queue up behind me.    The man in the car in front seems to be having an argument with the machine.   After a further five minutes or so another driver goes over and asks what’s happening only to be told “ the barrier won’t operate and they are re-setting the system”.    This might take a while, apparently it happens quite often.

At last a man in a high-vis jacket comes to the rescue, no red cross parcels, but he does know another way out 😀    He puts a big red cone in front of my car, which is a bit annoying, then he helps the car in front to back up and squeeze though a gap between a lamppost and a parked car.    Then he tells me to “ follow that car down the tunnel to the second floor” .    That would’ve been fine if I didn’t have such a big car with sticky out wing mirrors, but by the time I manoeuvred past the lamppost the car in front was long gone and the escape tunnel was nowhere to be seen.

So I did a few more laps of the rooftop car park, only to find myself at the back of the slow-moving queue that I had just come out of.   After just another twenty minutes I get back to the exit barrier.   This time I am at the front, so I put my ticket in and the machine says ….  “timed out”.     There is nowhere to put extra money in, so I wait and eventually the man in the high-vis jacket reappears and tells me “ the system is broken and I will have to go down to the second floor.    He directs the car behind me to go through the narrow gap beside the lamppost, puts the big red traffic cone in front  of the car two cars behind me and backs me up so I can follow the other car.    This time I take off like Lewis Hamilton on the Monaco starting grid.  I am not going to lose that car in front, he obviously knows the way to the secret tunnel out.    After only a few more laps around the second floor we reach the alternative exit barrier and there is the helpful lady in another high-vis jacket, who I met at the start of my car park adventure.     She lets me escape without paying anymore cash for over staying my time in their lovely car park by just another hour or so.

What a great experience Christmas shopping in Milton Keynes is and now for another year I am ……

FREE AT LAST.

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Pangolin Wrangling

Posted on December 11, 2019 by john graham

Pangolin wrangling is not with cattle,

that would be too much of a battle.

Pangolins prefer to wrangle with ants,

rather than have them in your pants.

 

They round them up

with their flapping tail

and huddle them into a wooden pail.

 

Sometimes Pangolins can spend all day,

chasing the ants that get away.

They see it as a matter of pride,

to find the ants wherever they hide.

 

Then they can eat them

at their leisure,

which gives them hours and hours of pleasure.

 

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