GrumbleSmiles

“Cheylesmore Good Neighbours – overcoming barriers”

Posted on January 27, 2015 by john graham

This blog follows on from the Cheylesmore Good Neighbours 2014 Review which was published on the 21st January 2015.

In the last 12 months in the small Cheylesmore Good Neighbours group that we have established, we have overcome some of the natural barriers that occur when a group of strangers meet for the first time. Nonetheless there are still some practical hurdles we have to overcome.

The most obvious issue is dealing with hearing loss for some of the members. Although we have purchased a sound system and microphones, these are not natural things for the group to use – so we have complaints from people who can hear that we don’t need the sound system and silence from the people who can’t hear, often because people don’t want to admit to their failing hearing. The church hall that we are using doesn’t help this because it has bare walls on a solid floor. The church is endeavouring to put quilted wall hangings up, but they make little difference to the long reverberation times.

Lack of transport is a problem for some people, though people seem to make it for most meetings. Luckily we have been blessed with fairly good weather in the last 12 months. Generally members don’t have cars so it’s not easy to set up a collection system for people with mobility difficulties.

This brings me onto the third hurdle which is lack of volunteers. In the first year most of the set up work has been done by the steering group. Fortunatly we do have volunteer members to run the signing in process, set up and sell tickets for the raffles and put away chairs at the end of the meetings. A number of people bring in cakes and one lady regularly donates fresh vegetables from her allotment during the summer months. These are all small signs of the group coming together.

During the year, Coventry City Council decided to promote itself as an Age Friendly City, and towards the end of the year appointed Kam Kaur as the Project Manager. She came and did a talk about her early thoughts and we have now agreed to make this subject a key theme in the next 12 months, which hopefully will enable the group to better inform Kam’s work and take part in any future initiatives the City wishes to pursue.

Our biggest challenge in 2015 will be to increase the membership significantly in order to make the group more self-sustaining. Greater membership should give us a larger pool of volunteers as well as a stronger financial resources from the membership fees. The current group would, I am sure, be quite happy to keep coming in the next 12 months if we continue to provide a programme like we did in the previous year. In practice we are not doing anything significantly different to many other groups who run social clubs for older people, both in Coventry and elsewhere.

To do things differently and appeal to a wider group we have to answer a key question :- “what makes people expand their horizons ?” I think the answer lies in fulfilling individual interest and enabling people to help each other. Both of these things are what members of the Steering Group already do, so perhaps we need to expand the Steering Group.

My next blog will say more about our next steps in this direction.

Posted in Cheylesmore Good Neighbours | Tagged Cheylesmore Good Neighbours | 2 Comments

“Elderly Person Having Fun”

Posted on January 25, 2015 by john graham

Two completely unrelated photographs in The Times, 31 October 2014, caught my eye. So much so that I kept the paper in a pile for a while, until I could get around to writing this blog.

The first photograph was of a young girl jumping in a puddle of mud in the Wicksteed Park 2014 Puddle Jumping Contest. She just had the biggest smile!!

The second photo was a man in spring loaded boots which enabled him to run at 25 miles an hour!!

Now put these two ideas together and apply them to the lives of the elderly.

Bionic boots on the NHS or even from Boots the Chemist, will enable older people to get around much more easily. No more waiting for buses that never come. No more zimmer frames or mobility scooters that immediately brand your as “old”.

Link that to the first photo and run back into childhood to have great fun in your Nike senior trainers. They could soon become latest pensioner fashion accessory complete with speed stripes and a Government health warning to younger pedestrians to get out of the way .

Elderly people in bionic boots could become the new craze :- jumping out of residential care homes; no more sitting around in a stinky lounge all day; out and about in the fresh air. Look out you trendy young free runners, we won’t bother jumping over walls, we will jump generations.

Smiles on faces
Obstacle races
Skipping contests
Giant hop scotch
Bionic crowd walking

Coming home after a hard day’s puddle jumping, covered in mud and no-one to tell you off !

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Cheylesmore Good Neighbours —-2014 Review

Posted on January 21, 2015 by john graham

Cheylesmore is a neighbourhood in Coventry of about 6000 households. The Good Neighbours Group is aimed at providing social opportunity and support for retired people living in the area. It was started with the help of a grant from the GrumbleSmiles Trust and began in January 2014 with a survey of needs.

(The full details of the set up of the Group and the initial survey we carried out can be found in the Archive on blogs dated 16th and 18th March 2014.)

2014 ACHIEVEMENTS

From a standing start the group has established itself very well. To the point where there are now between 20 and 30 regular attendees at the group every fortnight. The group meets in the Quinton Park Baptist Church Hall which is a location very central to the Cheylesmore area. It is walking distance for most of the attendees, although it is also on a bus route and a few come by car.

During the year we have held a series of talks on everything from Coventry’s history, to war time experiences in Changi Prison, to genealogy to Coventry’s Transport Museum. We also provided a lot of practical advice about smoke alarms and fire prevention by the Fire Service; home safety from the Community Police; and voluntary groups talking about hearing impairment, support for carers, Age UK support services and Health Watch. More related to the immediate neighbourhood we had a talk from the manager of a new Asda store and from the family running a local Indian restaurant who provided an excellent buffet as well as talking about Indian culture.

Interspersed with all of this we held a series of entertainment events which included Male Voice Choir concerts, Sing-along sessions and quizzes, which are always popular.

As a spin off of our fortnightly meetings, we have held regular pub lunches, set up a sewing group and some of the group have been on theatre visits together.

All of this has built up a lively group who enjoy the social gatherings and have gradually developed levels of trust and friendship with members and the steering group.

It’s been a very interesting year and there’s no doubt we have provided an opportunity for the local residents who come along to increase their social contacts in the Cheylesmore community.

The organisation of the year has fallen on five people in the Steering Group, who are themselves all volunteers and have given at least a day a week of their time for the whole year. I am immensely grateful to Frances, Yvonne, Alex, Julia and Alan. We have also enjoyed the support of two local councillors, one of whom – Hazel Noonan, is now the Lord Mayor of Coventry.

There are challenges in the year ahead in terms of increasing the membership, widening the range of services and finding continued funding. But this small group has the potential to do much more to deal with the issue of loneliness and isolation amongst older people, not just in Cheylesmore but as a model in Coventry and elsewhere.

I’ll write about this in my next blogs on this subject.

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“Protesting Generation 2”

Posted on January 18, 2015 by john graham

This is a continuation of the previous blog, but I was also writing about bus passes four years ago when the Department of Transport were sounding out the possibility of removing free bus passes for elderly people. It now looks as though the Government has quietly passed the buck of making the cuts to local transport companies. You can find the first blog by clicking on July 2010 in the Archive and finding “BUS PASS BUST UP”.

In Sheffield, a group of older people gathered at the railway station to protest against cuts to free bus and rail passes for older people.

Revolutionary baby boomers, obviously a real threat to society, although there were no burned flags or petrol bombs, nor any upturned buses:-

A school teacher
A former health service manager
A blind elderly lady
A man in his wheelchair
And many other older people

The railway police clearly learning nothing from the past 50 years about how to defuse protests set about “containing” the action:-

They arrested the 65 year old protest leader;

Two people with sticks, presumably for walking not clubbing, were taken to hospital;
The man in the wheelchair was “almost” knocked over;
A man collapsed with breathing problems;
The blind lady was pushed over a wheelchair.

Then to guarantee the oxygen of national publicity, the police threatened a journalist who was filming the demonstration, that he could be arrested under the Terrorism Act.

P.S. Fortunately the images above don’t reflect the way older people think of the police and they still command considerable respect from the elderly. Nonetheless there is plenty for older people to protest about and I will write about this more in future blogs.

Posted in ELDERLY UK POLICY, GRUMBLES | Tagged bus pass | 5 Comments

“Protesting Generation”

Posted on January 11, 2015 by john graham

Could this new year be ushering in a new generation of protestors? Goodness knows this age of austerity looks set to continue for several years ahead and the growth in numbers of the older generation are increasingly being seen as a drain on the nation’s resources. No political party will directly attack the older generation because of the fear they have of losing the grey vote. But in silently squeezing the older generation, do the politicians realise quite what they are dealing with in the upcoming group of new pensioners?

The Baby Boomers grew up through an era of protest.

Demonstrations against the Vietnam War, were perhaps the first thing to capture the world’s attention, although this mainly focussed on American students’ opposition to the draft in the 1960’s. In the days long before the internet mass protest was an effective way of getting media coverage.

Having learned that lesson, the Baby Boomers went on to protest about other noble issues like banning the bomb, civil rights in America, apartheid in South Africa, almost anything in France.

In the UK we also had more parochial issues – ending capital punishment, the miners’ strike, closing local hospitals, the poll tax, fox hunting, student fees, immigration, climate change, human rights.

There were many other issues and many other protests – lock-outs and lock-ins; free concerts for feeding the world; breaking down the Berlin wall; the war in Iraq.

We all learned to demonstrate because the vote alone was not enough to make the politicians reflect the views of the public.

Now the Baby Boomers are coming of age will they be the generation to take to the streets to speak up for the elderly?

Posted in ELDERLY UK POLICY, GRUMBLES | 3 Comments

“A Glimmer of Dementia Hope”

Posted on January 8, 2015 by john graham

Once again the Journal of Gerontology has published some interesting research on ageing.

The researchers studied 6,500 British people aged between 50 and 90 and examined their cognitive decline over 8 years. To check their mental ability, they used word recall tests and found that users of the internet in the group studied were 3% better at recalling words than non-users.

This is interesting, although pretty slim evidence, but the impact could be much greater as internet use increases amongst the elderly. Currently only 56% of people in the UK between 65 and 74 have internet access. That translates to a much smaller percentage among the older population as a whole.

Using the internet is a powerful way of exercising the brain and has the potential to dramatically enhance the connections older people can make way beyond word recall.

Since social isolation is also a significant factor in developing dementia, this study could have far wider implications for older people.

Posted in Dementia | Tagged Age UK, research | 1 Comment

ExtraCare Traditions 8 – Calvert Trust

Posted on January 4, 2015 by john graham

THIS IS THE LAST OF A SERIES OF BLOGS DESCRIBING SOME OF THE HISTORY AND CULTURE OF THE EXTRACARE CHARITABLE TRUST. THIS WAS THE ORGANISATION I FOUNDED AND WORKED FOR FROM 1987 THROUGH TO THE TIME I RETIRED IN 2010. I HOPE IT WILL INSPIRE OTHERS TO LOOK AT NEW WAYS OF LIVING IN LATER LIFE.

For other blogs in this series, click on “ExtraCare Traditions” in the TAG CLOUD.

In the mid 1990’s our programme of activities was already well established in all our nursing homes and extracare housing schemes. Some of our managers and residents wanted to be more ambitious and we tentatively sent a first group of people to the Calvert Trust in Devon, which is an outward bound centre. Given the level of frailty of many of our residents, we weren’t sure how much they would be able to accomplish but the centre is staffed by some excellent instructors and all of our first group rose to all of our challenges – climbing, sailing, canoeing, riding, abseiling, swimming and zip line. All came away with a great sense of achievement having done things they would never have imagined they could do. This is very much thanks to the brilliant instructors and the great ExtraCare staff teams.

This first group gave us the confidence to take over the whole of the centre for several weeks of every year and send 50 people at a time to Calvert Trust. Over the years several thousand people of all ages and abilities followed in the footsteps of this first group. It was an inspirational place to visit and a very emotional experience to see the smiles and tears on residents’ faces.

When residents came back from Calvert Trust, they couldn’t stop talking about the experience and influenced many of their friends to believe they could try out new ideas and face new challenges with confidence.

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The photographs in the above gallery show some of the things people accomplished. The weeks were challenging but also great fun and included many more things than just the outward bound physical activities:-

Camping out on Exmoor, sketching at Sir Francis Chichester’s House, driving shire horse driven wagons, orienteering in a forest, ghost hunting in the dead of the night, following nature trails.

Entertainment included barn dancing, professional singers, operatic performances and Christmas concerts.

Over the years a number of celebrities came along to support what we were doing. Geoff Capes, the Olympic Shot Putter and World’s Strongest Man, was a great supporter of our work. At the time of the TV Gladiators programme, we managed to get Gladiator Scorpio to come and challenge one of our residents – Wicked Wilf – to abseiling and climbing. Wilf was nearly 90 at the time and had great fun dressing up in a Lycra superman outfit.

Many of our residents ended up being interviewed on local TV and radio when they returned home.

These were truly life changing experiences and opened the door to a much more positive outlook on later life.

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“Sign of the Times”

Posted on January 2, 2015 by john graham

A belated observation on the media and how it portrays older people. Let hope for a New years’ resolution of more positive images in the year ahead.

The Times is a big political issue of the day, head down, serious newspaper. Recently was no different – 3 November 2014 – front page headlines about “immigration. Page 2 was given over to knocking the BBC, migrants and the EU.

Page 3 had no bare breasted women, only a spectacular half page Picture of Sir Robin Knox-Johnson, sextant in hand, on the deck of his yacht “Grey Power” about to set sail across the Atlantic single handed at the tender age of 75! It is 45 years since he broke records sailing around the world and he still hasn’t found his carpet slippers!

However, what caught my eye today in The Times was page 4:-

A “Burden” Story – the concern was for the 45% of people in their 50’s who have to look after older parents of in laws.
A “Neglect” story – concern for the 90% of nurses who don’t feel able to give the right care to dying patients.
A “Loneliness” story – half a million older people will spend Christmas alone.

The good news on the top of the page was a really happy picture of two very happy older gentlemen riding a topless car over Westminster Bridge in the London to Brighton Vintage Car Run.

The moral is ——– don’t read the stories of misery ……………..

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ExtraCare Traditions 7 – Awards

Posted on December 28, 2014 by john graham

THIS IS ONE OF A SERIES OF BLOGS OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS DESCRIBING SOME OF THE HISTORY AND CULTURE OF THE EXTRACARE CHARITABLE TRUST. THIS WAS THE ORGANISATION I FOUNDED AND WORKED FOR FROM 1987 THROUGH TO THE TIME I RETIRED IN 2010. I HOPE IT WILL INSPIRE OTHERS TO LOOK AT NEW WAYS OF LIVING IN LATER LIFE.

For other blogs in this series, click on “ExtraCare Traditions” in the TAG CLOUD

For as long as ExtraCare has been in existence, we have always given out awards. Cups, medals, ribbons, certificates, plaques and eventually ExtraCare “OBE’s” which, in our case, stands for the Order of the Best of ExtraCare. These were given to residents, volunteers and staff and our view was that everyone deserves recognition for their skills and talents. Our job was to create as many opportunities as possible for people to demonstrate them positively.

The photograph above is one such awards event held at Turners Music Hall in Northampton. Representatives of staff and residents from all over the ExtraCare empire came dressed up for a spectacular day out. The awards were presented by many of the organisations who had donated funds to us over the years and also by many of the local authorities and health authorities that we worked with. As well as being very enjoyable for the residents, awards ceremonies proved to be a great showcase for our work.

Turners was a great venue run by a former fairground showman with a great collection of vintage cars but also a centre piece of a working carousel which was great fun for the residents.

We went on to win many national awards for our work and this continues to this day.

The award ceremonies were usually held in posh London hotels and many residents and staff used it as an opportunity to also do some shopping or go to the theatre.

The awards we won included Housing Design Awards, The Elderly Accommodation Council Awards and the National Housing Federation Awards.

At the time I was writing this blog the December issue of the ExtraCare magazine – “Extralife” was published. The front and centre pages reported that SIX of EatraCare Charitable Trusts projects have won this years Elderly Accommodation Council “Housing for Older People Awards”. These awards are all the more special because they are judged on the residents own assessment of their schemes.

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Old Geek with MP3 Player

Posted on December 26, 2014 by john graham

It was just over a year ago that I was contemplating getting an MP3 player and I certainly would have got one except I didn’t know what one was 🙂 (See my earlier blog by clicking on “Old Geek ” 3 in the tag cloud)

Luckily for me Santa Claus spends a lot of time in the clouds at this time of year and must have been reading my blog. So in my 2014 Christmas stocking I found a little black plastic thingy which my son Tom told me was an MP3 player. He had kindly uploaded 34 CD’s on to it — about 1500 tracks !

Now all I have to do is get into “Sky Ferreira”, “Smog”, “Wannadies “, “Warpaint”, “Screaming Trees”,”Mazzy Star”, “Meat Puppets” and “Half man half biscuit”. Obviously Tom doesn’t listen to Frank Sinatra or even the Rolling Stones.

Still it will be good for my musical education and a whole lot easier than dragging that record player around. A pity that I forgot to ask Santa for a baseball hat, dark glasses and some Converse trainers !

Posted in SMILES | Tagged "Old Geek" | 2 Comments