This probably won’t be a very popular thing to say, but I think that the idea of removing the compulsary retirement age (the age at which an employer can make an employee resign) is wrong. At least, it’s wrong right now.
At a time when there are nearly a million under-24s out of work – a fifth of them – we should be encouraging and enabling them to get jobs. Otherwise we’re going to end up with a massive part of a generation with no experience of work, no skills, and …

Apparently, we should never stop working. We should never retire, and never enjoy the fruits of our labour. Instead, we should just work, work, and work – then use equity release schemes to raise money from our homes to pay for care.
As it is, we work for at least 40 years before retiring. With the way it’s going, I don’t expect to retire until I’m pretty much 70. It simply won’t be affordable until then. And by then, I’ll have been working for nearly 50 years. Only about 49 to …

Apparently our road sign depicting the elderly is “insulting ” because it “doesn’t represent older people as they are today”.
So what?
It is a stereotype. It is a image that can be instantly recognised by a motorist. It doesn’t mean or even suggest that all elderly people are hunched over and walk with a stick, in the same way that cars, buses, lorries and motorbikes etc don’t look like their pictorial representations.
There is simply no point wasting effort and money re-designing this sign. Age Concern and Help the Aged will just …

Long term readers of The ThunderDragon will know that the Dragon is a volunteer with St John Ambulance. And, if you’ve got a particularly good memory, you’ll remember that I’ve been on several duties with the man himself.
I’m still hard at work volunteering, including my latest role doing Patient Transport work – mainly inter-hospital transfers and discharges. Sometimes, it’s great fun – a talkative old lady who needs a lift home. Sometimes, with High Dependency work, it’s particularly sad.
Of note was one job a few weeks ago.
We went to the …

Your granny has gone missing. Where’s the last place you’d look for her? In the public toilets…
Police started a missing person alert for a great-grandmother – only for her to turn up 12 hours later having been locked in a public loo overnight.Gwyneth Coles, 77, of Pickering, North Yorkshire, got locked in the town’s toilets after nipping in following a bus journey on Monday evening.Although an attendant locking up shouted to check the building was empty, he failed to hear her answer. (BBC)
Can’t have been fun night!

The world’s oldest blogger blobber?
At 107 she is probably the world’s older blogger and cyber granny Olive Riley may also lay claim to being the oldest YouTube user.From her home on the Central Coast, the great-grandmother of seven files her The Life of Riley blog (or blob as she calls it), which has won her thousands of fans across the world…She survived two World Wars and the Great Depression, witnessed the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, raised three children and worked any number of weird and wonderful jobs, including …

Old people still have sex! I’m shocked. I thought they stopped as soon as they got their free bus pass? But apparently not:
Old age is not preventing people from enjoying active sex lives, researchers in the US have discovered.A survey of 3,005 Americans aged 57 to 85 revealed that people often remain sexually active into their eighties.Health problems or lack of a partner, rather than lack of desire, were the most common barriers to having sex…About half of the men and a quarter of the women said they masturbated, regardless …

“The Elders” are here to save the world – or so they say:
“Nelson Mandela and five other senior statesmen will today form themselves into a team of international troubleshooters called “The Elders”.The initiative, funded by Sir Richard Branson, will be launched in Johannesburg during celebrations marking Mr Mandela’s 89th birthday…The idea is that he will team up with Jimmy Carter, the former US president, Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary-general, Mary Robinson, the former Irish president, Desmond Tutu, the Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town and Mohammed Yunus, the Nobel …

The European Union certainly can’t claim to be a benevolent supranational institution after this latest imposed tax – focusing as it is on the most vulnerable in society, no less.
“The popular mobility scooter, which has given many elderly and disabled people a new lease of life, has fallen prey to an EU-imposed tax…Costing £2,500 on average and mostly imported from Taiwan and China, they are exempt from VAT for disabled purchasers and until recently, were also free of customs duty.But now a decision by the European Union has led to …