When I saw this lady on the news last week I was full of admiration for her. She is a 75 year old granny from England who retired to Spain with her husband. He died from leukaemia and she decided that she must find an interest so she took up Salsa dancing  and was so successful that it became her main interest. 

After the first feeling of admiration other feelings kicked in. First came shame, because she is five years older than me and so much more energetic and nimble, then came envy and finally came determination!

I had already decided that one of my resolutions this year would be to take regular exercise and seeing this has reinforced that resolve. If I lose some weight and an inch or two around the hips so much the better, but my main aim is to get fitter and increase my stamina, so thank you “Salsa Granny”  for giving me the spur.

A year ago, when the Chancellor announced that he was reducing VAT by 2.5% for a year in order to stimulate the economy, the financial media decried the measure as useless saying that it would not make any difference to the shopping habits of most people.

I remember doing a post which pointed out that everyone would gain a small amount every time they did their weekly shopping as VAT is levied on many everyday items e.g. confectionery, cleaning materials, sanitary goods, clothes etc. Some shops give itemised bills which show which goods, have VAT added and it can be surprising how those pennies add up over time.

The media reporters were concentrating on cars, electrical goods and luxury items and forgetting the added cost of things like meals out and services used when moving house (solicitors, moving firms, estate agents, building work)

Maybe I was more aware than some younger people because I remember when the Thatcher government doubled VAT soon after it came to power in the eighties. They even applied it to the power companies until public opinion forced the “Iron lady” to make one of her rare U turns!

In a TV interview recently the conservative member of parliament would not rule out raising the level to 20% or more….draw your own conclusions!

Now the same financial reporters who decried the cut last year,  are predicting dire results in the retail trade when the VAT rate is restored to 17.5% on January the 1st.  As I said, what a difference a year makes.

First, to my faithful readers, sorry I haven’t posted for a few weeks. I have had a “technology block”, but am hoping it has gone now!

I think it was started by the frustration caused by the “blips” in our broadband connection. When we moved here (two years ago today), we signed on with Orange for broadband and telephone. When it was  working it was very good, but it was very frustrating when it went down. It was usually only for a few minutes at a time, but it seemed to be happening with increasing frequency and always  at the most inconvenient time, ( in the middle of posting, during a commercial transaction or during a telephone call etc.)  I don’t know whether it was the fault of Orange or BT, but we had been disussing changing to a cable service, and when it was disconnected for 24 hours recently it was the final straw. The call centre were very helpful guiding us through the reconnection procedure, but when JW asked whether there was anything we could do to stop the breakdowns, all he was told was that it shouldn’t happen again!

The next phone call was to the cancellation department, where surprise,  surprise, they tried to get us to stay by offering a more efficient “Orange box” and a reduced tariff !

We arranged to transfer to Virgin, a cable service, and this was duly completed last Friday. Thanks to the invaluable assistance of our personal Systems Manager, our talented son- in- law GG, we are now connected to a much faster broadband, so I am hoping this has vanquished my technology block!.

For twenty years we lived on the west coast of Wales in a country bungalow. One of the things I missed most when we moved to the city was the wide variety of wildlife, which entertained us in our large garden.

There were many different birds, from the tiny wren living in the rockery, to the red kites who gave us a daily aerobatic show as they whirled, dived and glided over the field next door.

JW  bought sacks of wild bird food every Autumn and made feeding tables complete with food hoppers, which he fixed in the trees around the house. The birds were used to him refilling these every morning and waited around quite patiently for him to go out. We were amused to see where the saying “pecking order” came from, as they waited patiently for their turns to visit the tables.

Inevitably some of the food fell off the tables and we did get a few strange crops under them! After a short time the pheasants from a neighbouring farmer found the food and eventually they became regular visitors and some even started roosting in our trees, and as soon as JW went into the barn to get their food, they would come running from all corners of the garden.

Of course we don’t see such a large variety of birds now, but a week or two ago we noticed that we had not seen any birds, so he went off and bought bird food and filled the hopper on our one table. Still no birds, so JW tweeted about it and within an hour a bluetit and a robin had arrived and started feeding, so that is why I asked “Do birds tweet?”

JW  and I had been talking about having cavity wall insulation installed for some time, but had not got around to doing anything about it. We had had it done in our previous house, which was a long bungalow so had had lots of exposed exterior walls, and it made quite a difference to both our comfort and our fuel bills.

On Tuesday afternoon last week we were contacted by RIS Cardiff who offered to do the insulation on behalf of Warm Front Wales.

On Wednesday morning the surveyor came round to assess the suitability of the building. It was suitable, so they made an appointment to come round next day to do the installation.

By Thursday lunchtime the job was done, less than 48 hours after the first contact!

There is no visible sign (all the small holes were filled in with matching render) and it had cost us nothing. It is all covered by a government grant available to any house owner over 70, so there are advantages to being of advanced years

Last week the Mail on Sunday published an extract from Tamsin Day Lewis’s account  of the last days of her mother’s life, which were spent in the Petersfield Community Hospital, which is an NHS GP run hospital.

After all the negative reports I have read in the media, and on blogs, it was heartwarming to read that some hospitals still manage to give the kind of service for which we were all trained. I had become so disheartened by the brainwashing we are subjected to about the failures of the service.

I am sure there must be many more such hospitals  around the country, (some of them are mentioned in the comments about this article)  but of course they never make it into the headlines.

Why should some hospitals be able to maintain high standards whilst others fail so abysmally? Could the answer be hidden in the name of the hospital? The Community hospital run by GPs and nurses. Do they have fewer bureacrats interfering in the running? Have their LHA realised that those on the front line, who have been trained to give the best care, know better than accountants and career civil servants. Doctors and nurses do not regard patients as “units” to be dealt with in the most economical fashion, but to receive the best treatment they can give.

When Mrs Thatcher decreed that hospitals should be governed by “market forces”, she did not know what a can of worms she was opening. Of course they have to be run without unnecessary waste, but some economies are very short sighted. Putting the cleaning out to the cheapest tender opened the way for commercial firms to provide a sometimes slipshod  service, where cleaners no longer felt responsible for any particular ward, and were no longer accountable to any one person. This led to the rise of hospital acquired infection and huge bills for “deep cleaning”.

I am old fashioned so I still think that there is a place for nurses to receive the same kind of training we had, i.e. an apprentice style where we combined academic training with hands on learning. I realise that nurses now have to use far more  computerised machinery and a greater variety of drugs and they have also taken over many of the tasks which were done by doctors in my training days, but could they not have two types of  nurse. One which had the traditional training and others who do the “technician nurses” training at university?

If they had this two stream training  students could choose which path to follow, they would need fewer technically minded nurses and there would be student nurses learning  (as we did) from those who are fully trained in bedside nursing and have years of experience, rather than from tutors who have been away from the bedside for (sometimes) many years.

If they had more community hospitals it would free up beds for the acute cases in the big hospitals.

I worked in small hospitals a few times during my nursing days and my mother ended her days in the excellent cottage hospital in Aberaeron. All these were friendly caring places but, sadly, many of them have been closed in the name of economy. How many years before a “think tank” will (at great expense in time and money) pronounce that patients get better treatment in these small units?

This week I have heard several programmes on TV and radio giving tips on how to spend/save money wisely. The trouble is they are all so time consuming.

When did we become so obsessed with money? Was it when the “clever” marketing people started developing ever more complicated ways of extricating as much money as possible from the financially naive?

Once, you decided what to spend your money on and went to the appropriate place to spend it.  

When we wanted to buy a train ticket, we went to the station or the travel agent and bought a single, a day return or period return (returns were always cheaper than two singles, which is logical),  first or third class, and that was that. Now we have to work out whether we save money by buying two singles or one return or even splitting the journey. Is it cheaper to buy months in advance or last minute on a standby!

We bought electricity from the Electric board and gas from the Gas board. Now we are supposed to choose between various tariffs, fixed or floating prices, etc. etc.

We usually banked with either the nearest branch, or the bank our families used. These were run by a Captain Mainwaring type manager, who knew us and the neighbourhood and gave us guidance on decisions. They didn’t try to sell us insurance or other financial products. Unless we were wealthy we usually had a current account and a savings account, which gave us a modest rate of interest, and didn’t vary greatly from one bank to  another and stayed fairly constant.

When we left school we  lived at home with our parents until we  left home,either  to work away or got married. If we went away for further training, we usually lived in accomodation  provided by the training establishment, or in “lodgings”.  I can’t remember any of my year who bought houses or flats before they were in a permanent relationship.

When we went to buy a house we knew that we had to save, at least 10% deposit plus legal fees etc. This was usually done at the Building society from which we hoped to obtain the mortgage. This presumably showed them that we could afford the repayments. It was easier to save the deposit because rents were more reasonable. All the property I rented was owned by the landlord, who did not have to factor in the mortgage repayments into it, just maintenance and a modest return on his investment, after all he still had the increasing value of the property. Now,  since they brought in “buy to let” mortgages, the new breed of landlords expect their tenants to pay their mortgage for them in addition to  the increased value of the property. ( Seems like you can have your cake and eat it too)

 Since I don’t have a degree in accountancy or law, I have to decide whether to spend half my life on the internet searching for the best deals before buying any goods or service, reading every inch of small print, switching banks, fuel suppliers etc. every month, or just being as careful as I can and know that I will probably pay more than I need to and spend my time doing the things I want to do.

I have decided… so I will never be rich in money terms, but I’m sure I will enjoy life more.

This morning a letter dropped through our letterbox. It was from the Reader’s Digest Association and the envelope was marked “Financial Services”   “Time sensitive information enclosed”  Important!

Had I at last won one of the prizes they had been offering me? They are constantly telling me that they would really like to announce me as a winner, so maybe my day had come.

I wouldn’t have to choose the next cruise, we could go on all of them and take the family. We’d be secure for life! We could put money into trust for the boys’ education, we could…….

Sadly no. When I opened it, it was to invite me to buy one of their funeral plans! 

Do they know something I don’t know since they marked it  “time sensitive”  or have they just worked out that I have passed my three score and ten?

I was feeling quite well when I got up this morning.

When we moved to Cardiff (nearly 2 years ago) we decided that we would need a new three piece suite, as the one which had fitted into our large sitting room in the previous house, now dwarfed the much smaller sitting room here.

As we are not the sort of people who follow fashion and change furniture frequently, ( in fact we have changed our furniture very infrequently in our 36 years together) so,on the law of averages,  the next suite needed to be one which would fit our needs for the forseeable future and accomodate our increasing age!

Twenty-five years ago, when my mother was becoming increasingly disabled, we bought her a couple of armchairs from the High Seat Chair company. We had had to do this by mail order as there was nothing suitable on the high street. Things haven’t changed much, as we had scoured the shops in town and found nothing suitable. The seats were  too low, they went back too  far to support the back, and the coverings were too limited.

Mostly when I stopped a salesperson and explained what we were looking for, they pointed vaguely into a distant corner and suggested, “Try over there. If you find anything come back to me!” One exception was the very helpful lady at SCS who did her best to find us something, but unfortunately there wasn’t anything we both liked.

When  we got home I looked on the internet and found the HSL chairs. They have a branch in Bristol, and not only did I find some that we both liked the look of,  but they even had some special offers!

 We decided to drive over on Thursday morning. It was the first warm, sunny day of the week, so that seemed a good omen. We followed the clear instructions to find the store and rather nervously entered. I had mentally filed the special offers, ready to produce the numbers if we found anything we liked after trying them.

We were met with a friendly greeting and offered a cup of tea!  I explained what I was looking for and he took us straight to the drop end sofa and the chairs I liked. Without any prompting, he told me about the special offers, showed us how the sofa worked and invited us to look around at the other styles and swatches of fabric at our leisure.

JW  was immediately impressed when he sat on the chair, which was so much more comfortable than our present ones, however the salesman asked him to try one with a slightly higher seat, which he found even better. ( We don’t loll, we like to sit up with our backs  and heads supported, (and, for me, to have my feet able to reach the floor ) 

The only thing left was to choose the covering. There was a good choice of colours and fabrics and the salesman worked out the prices of our short list, we made our choice and paid.

It was so pleasant to find a salesman who knew his stock, was helpful and gave his advice without being pushy and was courteous throughout . I felt as though we had stepped back a few decades. If only all shopping expeditions could be this satisfying maybe I would not dread it so much!

Wow what a year this has been! In the last twelve months I have been to more places and events than I have in the previous 20 years.

We started with the trip to London to see Hamlet, then we have seen several West End productions here in Cardiff, several visits to the cinema, my first holiday by air for 25  years, to Malta, the recent cruise and now my first ever pop concert!

Most of these (except the cruise) are down to my daughter’s  determination to prove that 70 is not old.

Last year when we first saw that Cliff and the Shadows were doing a reunion tour, and that they were coming to Cardiff, we could not resist, especially as JW  offered to pay for the tickets.

Jennie booked the tickets on the day the booking office opened, (a few minutes after it opened actually) which was just as well as it was rapidly a complete sell out.

The year has flown by and October 6th was soon upon us. When we arrived at the Cardiff International Arena, the pavements were thronged with people, many with grey or white hair, predominantly female. Coaches were disgorging more  from all parts of Wales and the West country, but all were very orderly and friendly.

Jennie had chosen the seats well and we had a splendid view. The performance started with a filmed bit and then the stage was lit up and Cliff, Hank and Bruce were waving and grinning at the audience. They have all aged very well, and there was an excited roar of welcome from the audience and then we settled down to listen to the music, contented to sway and sing along. As the evening wore on the swaying became more pronounced, the applause louder and you could see us all shedding years until we back to our teens again!

Just before the interval the Shadows did a set on their own of their number one hits, which was rapturously received.

During the interval, all inhibitions had gone and we were chattering away as though we really were teenagers again. Even the men accompanying their partners had lost their resigned “I’m only here to indulge the wife,” look, and admitted they were enjoying it.

After the interval Cliff came back on for about 40 minutes and then Hank and Bruce took over, exchanged good humoured badinage, and then,together with their excellent drummer, Brian Bennet, bass guitarist, Mark Griffiths and keyboard player, Warren Bennet, played the penultimate set. By the time Cliff came back on the audience were all standing and shouting for more. We weren’t exactly dancing in the aisles, but close to dancing in our seats! ( I did wonder what all our grandchildren would have thought had they seen us!)

At the end of the evening everyone filed out, We didn’t smash anything, I didn’t catch a whiff of any wacky baccy, or see anyone popping pills, but there was such a feeling of happiness  and friendship around that I wish I could have bottled it to sprinkle around!

We arrived home still up on cloud nine, so thank you  JW for indulging your wife and daughter and thank you Jennie for refusing to let me feel old.