When every time you make eye-contact with someone, they offer you their seat.
When you celebrate every birthday with another tablet.
When you eat less but put on weight. Like the 70’s rock band who decided to reform, looking like they’d just walked off a building site.
Things to Do When you are getting old.
Make a will. It goes without saying.
Make that extra effort to keep in touch with friends and family – especially the younger generation.
Make a Living Will or Advance Direction, so you are in control of your own destiny, when it’s time to say goodbye.
Things not to do.
If you love your job and are at the top of your game, whatever you do, don’t retire, even if you’ve reached state pension age. Yes – take your company pension. You’ve worked for it and paid in to it. But don’t let it stop you working. And you don’t have to. Go freelance if you need to. You may also discover that your earning potential has never been higher. Because you will be getting your pension – PLUS – what you get working. And if you are past state retirement age, you won’t be paying any NI. What a great tax-break that is! So let someone else walk up and down a golf-course or kill time on a bowling green.
One of the things I’ve noticed in the past couple of years is the appearance of cans of Carlsberg; Guinness and some other beers and lagers, which have been repackaged in larger pint-sized containers. So when you pour it out, it will reach the top of your glass. Just as if you were buying it draught.
What makes it legal in the UK to sell beer in pint-size cans is the fact that the 568ml equivalent is also displayed on the can. Just as a McDonalds quarter pounder doesn’t define its weight but is a trademark. A McDonalds quarter pounder’s actual legal weight in the UK is a minimum of 113.4 grammes uncooked. But for me, it will always be quarter pounder.
So why is it that when I buy a 454 gramme jar of strawberry jam, I am not allowed to call it a pound of jam? It is never labelled as such, even though for all practical purposes, 454 grammes is a pound of jam The welcome exception is MacKay’s 12-ounce (340 gramme) jars of jam and marmalade, which are labelled in this way. So why can’t other manufacturers label in the same way? Selling items in imperial units is not illegal provided that you label the stuff correctly.
The fact Is, that pint cans have never been part of the British tradition because, before metrication, off-sales of beer were in brown pint or quart bottles. The only notable canned beer which existed before metrication was the Watney’s Party 7 (and the smaller Party 4), which was sold in large cans which you could never open. And when you did manage to pierce the heavy-duty aluminium, the gaseous contents sprayed everywhere. From the 1970s onwards, most canned beers were sold in the horrible 440ml size, which doesn’t appear to convert to anything and which continues to be the standard size for most canned beers sold in the UK. Why 440 ml?
Currently, it is only the British Weights and Measures Association (which appears closely aligned to Brexit and Farage’s Reform Party) which is fighting to preserve use of imperial units and which is fighting a rearguard action against mandated metrication. But you don’t have to be an ardent Brexiteer or Faragist to regret the erasure of 1000 years of history. And there is nothing anti-Europe about wanting to preserve our industrial heritage. And the problem with rearguard actions is that they always fail, unless they buy time for something else to intervene.
Where imperial measurements still reign supreme, are in those parts of the world economy which have been traditionally dominated by the United States. And no mandated-metrication is ever going to change that. Which is why we buy 15-inch pizzas and eat 15-ounce steaks. Why we buy our McDonalds Quarter Pounders. Why we fly at 30,000 feet. Why heavyweight boxers still weigh themselves in pounds. And why you might buy a 56-inch TV for your living room.
So good to see Harry and Megan together, as a couple, enjoying themselves at the Invictus Games in Nigeria. Even if they have been frozen out of the British establishment, this shows that there are plenty of places in the world where they will be made welcome. So much more exciting and colourful to watch than the other drab royals. And how petty of Charles to say that he was too busy to meet his son and daughter in law on their brief visit to London. Purely out of curiosity, I also watched Megan as the research-paralegal on Suits in last night’s double-bill. Though I didn’t stay to the end.
And by the way, I won’t be watching tonight’s Eurovision song contest. Never watched it for years. Nothing personal. It’s just that I can’t stand watching mediocre talent prancing around in stupid costumes to the sound of boom bang a bang. Why is it always the wackiest act that wins? United Kingdom-nil points.
Ever since the first words were written many thousands of years ago, writing for publication has been about knowing the secrets of selling. It’s about knowing how to grab a reader’s attention in the first line. How to interest your reader in what you are about to say. How to keep them reading. And to provide your reader with a call to action. In other words, something for the reader to take away. Being a successful freelance writer is also about studying changes in the editorial markets and adapting to those changes by changing your own business model.
30 years ago there were always opportunities for someone who knew their subject and could write to a publishable standard, to earn a good second income writing for professional and trade journals. There was also the excitement of receiving money through your letter-box. But no-one writes cheques any more. And editors no longer have to pay freelancers to fill their pages, because they receive so much quality material free of charge from businesses wishing to promote their goods and services. But even promotional material has to be professionally written. And someone has to be paid to write it. Why not you?
Forget expensive newspaper and TV advertising. The most cost effective way to promote the sale of goods and services is on the Internet. It’s about drawing the casual Internet browser to your website and to the goods and services you are offering. Today, the ‘keyword’ is king. It is about trying to anticipate the words and phrases which your prospective customer is going to type into their search engine, when they are looking for the type of goods and services which you are offering. It is those critical keywords which must be incorporated within your promotional material to draw those prospective customers to your website.
So what about artificial intelligence (AI)? Is that going to make freelance writers redundant? If your computer can write your promotional material, why do you need to pay a copywriter?
They said the same thing about secretaries when word processing was invented at the end of the 1970s. But it didn’t happen. Instead, the amount of paperwork ballooned. The issue with any piece of written work generated entirely by a computer is that it lacks originality. I learned that when I asked my computer to generate some promotional material for a book I had written. Instead, it repeated back to me the promotional material which I had already written. I’m sure that if I asked my computer to compose my next Eurovision hit, it would come back to me with a mishmash of every successful Eurovision entry which had ever been written, including words and music from ABBA’s ‘Waterloo’. Is that going to convince anyone? I don’t think so. ‘United Kingdom – Nil points.’
Just to show you how modern marketing works, I have included at the end of this article, a link to my book, ‘Write Quick. Get published.’ I’m not asking you to buy it. Just to notice it. And if you do notice it, please take a moment to look inside. If you then decide to buy a copy, I’ll be raising a glass. Cheers!
Haven’t we learned anything from 1920s prohibition? That if you ban something, you immediately create a black market. Imagine how happy the world would be if there was no drug crime. And have you noticed that the medical advisers supporting banning the sale of tobacco to young people are the same scientists who destroyed their educations through successive covid lockdowns, which also destroyed livelihoods and brought the UK economy to bankruptcy. We are still paying for it.
I speak as someone who gave up smoking back in the 1970s, when smoking was still the cool thing to do. I gave it up because I am asthmatic. And because I was never a heavy smoker, giving up was not too difficult for me to do. For me, was just about breaking a habit. But is not for me to tell you what to do with your own bodies. Since then, there have been occasions when I have tried the occasional cigarette or cigar.  Just to get in the party spirit. But I’ve never enjoyed it. The last time I smoked was 10 years ago on a baking hot summer’s day, when I shared a shisha pipe in someone’s back garden, whilst children were having a birthday party inside the house. It took me another two days to get my lungs back.
Going to the pub has never been the same since the government banned smoking back in the 1990s. The ambience has gone. They also say that people who don’t smoke, don’t drink. So no wonder so many pubs have gone to the wall. But isn’t there another reason why the government have chosen this election year to get us talking about smoking bans for young people?
Wouldn’t the government rather have us talking about smoking bans than its own economic failures? The fact that there is a housing crisis? That for the first time in 100 years, people are having to use food banks? That we can’t even walk down the high street without tripping over a sleeping bag?Â
BRUCE AND HOLLY 