About retirement – dispatches from the front line – Part 9

So I tend to like dishes the tastes of which are fairly close together, none of this experimental stuff you get in restaurants these days with sweet and savoury chucked on the same plate. I am unwilling to cook any food that I am not personally likely to enjoy. In short I am a pie and casserole man. I am no Nijinski at the hob, but I am reliable.

Yours magazine recommends The Future Perfect Company

Today’s edition of Yours magazine recommends readers visit www.thefutureperfectcompany.com for “a geat selection of gifts or more practical items” aimed at the over 50s.

There is also a nice photo of the Doctor Cook award winning ergonomic saucepan set designed by Celia Gates which the Yours experts think would make a “great gift”.

We are really chuffed. As a new business, it is always heartening when people like what you are doing!

Never mind the granny annexe – how about an annexe for the children?

According to The Times this week, families who build flats for their grandparents could get tax breaks of up to £20,000 under proposals being considered by a centre-right think-tank closely linked to David Cameron.

Iain Duncan Smith, who is lined up to head a new Department for Children and Social Justice under a Conservative Government, is about to announce an inquiry into caring for the growing elderly population.

One proposal being examined is for families who build annexes on to their homes for their grandparents to be exempt from capital gains tax when the house is sold. Duncan Smith is also considering VAT exemptions for extensions. In addition, flats built specifically for elderly or disabled relatives would not be liable for additional council tax.

All of this thinking is predicated on the assumption that it is the grandparents rather than the families who are dependent (and also the assumption, which deserves another discussion entirely, about whether people can be incentivized with tax breaks to look after their older relatives – in many families the relationships are much more complicated than that).

Increasingly, however it is the families who are to varying degrees dependent on the older generation either financially or practically, in terms of providing child care. In those circumstances, should the grandparents not be extending their often larger homes to accommodate children and grandchildren? And should there not be the same tax breaks available if they choose to do this? That would be radical thinking indeed.

Loving those gardening gloves!

The time is coming to venture out into that garden again. Yes, really. Sorting out the havoc caused by a cold and snowy winter is going to take stamina and determination but some of you have started already. My sister in law, Elizabeth emailed me a couple of weeks ago to say: ” Just got a phone call from my mum – she’s delighted with the gardening gloves, she’s been out in the cold clearing wet vegetation (putting the rest of us to shame, as she’s nearly 75) and they were really excellent”.

If you want to follow Elizabeth’s Mum’s stoic example, the gloves to buy are these from Bionic :

http://thefutureperfectcompany.com/shop/items/131/womens_gardening_gloves_by_bionic__brown_medium

Happy gardening!

If you would like to submit a review of any of our products, contact us at : contact@thefutureperfectcompany.com

A model for intergenerational living?

There has been much discussion in the press recently about how the challenge of caring for an increasingly ageing population might mean a return to intergenerational living. This project in the US is remarkable for both its vision and its ambition.

While at the University of Illinois, Brenda Krause Eheart spent a decade researching what happened to “unadoptable” children who spend their entire youth being bounced from one foster home to another. She found that the adoptive parents were often not equipped to deal with such deeply troubled or chronically ill young people not because these families didn’t want to do the right thing, but they lacked the necessary knowledge and support to succeed.

Eheart and a group of like-minded friends developed a vision for an entire community built around these children. Their dream was to create a place where “unadoptable” children would be adopted by caring parents who would themselves be supported by one another, a small staff, as well as backup adult “guardians”.

Generations of Hope is a unique programme that changes the lives of foster children, retirees, and families by enabling them to create their own neighbourhood and forge their own network of caring relationships. At Hope Meadows, children, who might otherwise spend most of their childhoods in foster care, are adopted; retirees maintain a meaningful, productive life by helping younger generations, as well as one another; and families adopt children whose birth parents can no longer adequately care for them.

Integral to Hope Meadows is the Intergenerational Center which houses a children’s library, a computer room, several rooms for individual tutoring, a kitchen and a large multi-purpose space. At the IGC, older people help the children with homework or conduct more formal tutoring sessions, read aloud to children or help them to read, play cards or board games, help them with computers or gather a group to go outside for soccer or basketball.

At the heart of Hope Meadows is Hope House, a cluster of one and 2 bedroom technologically enhanced dwellings where the eldest in the community live in their own homes rather than in an assisted living facility or nursing home. Most significantly, Hope House ensures that older people are both givers and recipients of care. It is easy to envision how the frail elderly are recipients of care but at Hope Meadows they continue to give back to the community through positive interaction with the children,.

Is this something which would work in the UK?

For more information : http://www.generationsofhope.org/

About retirement – dispatches from the front line – Part 8

Last Saturday evening I was a guest at the 90th birthday celebration of my mother-in-law, Dr Margaret O’Flynn a retired gynaecologist of some distinction, and quite an event it turned out to be. All her four children were there, her seven grandchildren, and her four stepdaughters, together with a miscellany of spouses. All the men wore black tie, the grandsons enterprisingly having acquired theirs for thirty quid a pop from Primark, guaranteed machine washable. The ladies showed up in a variety of elegant dresses – gowns is a better word. My sister-in-law Jane wore a particularly colourful number, a sort of frock coat really, the word is she had bought from a Turkish goatherd for a good deal less than thirty quid. This may not be true; it had more of a Taliban feel to it I thought.

Designs on a Bigger Market – BT makes the business case for inclusive design

Did you know that by 2020 more than half the population will be over the age of 65? This was one of the most striking statistics to come out of a seminar hosted by BT this week in the iconic BT Tower in central London.

Not only is the UK getting older, the present cohort of baby boomers are demanding and sophisticated consumers who are less likely than previous generations to put up with poorly designed products which are difficult to use. The speakers who included charities, designers and academics laid down the challenge to businesses to wake up to this huge demographic change, cautioning that companies who did not respond adequately would see their profits fall. Strong stuff.

BT has not been sitting on its laurels in this respect either and has been working on a (free) toolkit to help organisations grapple with the challenges of inclusive design. This includes impairment simulators which demonstrate how people with say, glaucoma or even varying degress of long and short sightedness see the world.

Worth a visit at http://www.inclusivedesigntoolkit.com/betterdesign/