Care Costs and the Number of Elderly People Who Need Care

Interesting story in The Herald about a rethink on how councils assess assets when estimating liability for care costs: Care cost left pensioner on the brink of bankruptcy. Apart from the story itself which is relevant to many people, the item contained the following observations:

The local authority went on to argue that, as he was 79 when the home changed hands, he was at an age when future care cost becomes an issue for most people. But Professor Alice Brown, the ombudsman, argued only 4% of the population are in care homes or long-stay hospitals at that age. When the man needed to go into a home aged 88 the ombudsman argued only 19% of over-85s live in a care home.

However, despite all the negative publicity about the state of care in the UK, I find the estimates of how few elderly people are in residential care to be quite cheering and much less than the typical media comments imply.

Start Thinking About Your New Year's Resolutions

It is easy to come up with the same-old, same-old flagellating New Year's Resolutions. Bypass all those pious intentions to go to the gym, follow a seaweed diet and learn a new language.

You form resolutions because you want to make yourself a better person or because you believe that the end state of these resolutions (being fitter or thinner) will make you happy. Stop setting yourself up for failure, head straight for the main goal of making yourself happier.

Decide right now, that you will count your blessings and cultivate gratitude for what is in your life, not what might be in your life if only...Instead of those gruelling fitness tests, examine your character strengths and virtues (take the tests at Authentic Happiness) and decided how you can use them more regularly. You can investigate whether you can enjoy your pleasures rather than take them sadly.

There are many benefits to enjoying your pleasures, appreciation and counting blessings and cultivating your personal strengths. The first three can take as little as a minute at a time. The last needs more planning and reminders to use your strengths but it is equally pleasurable.

The Commercialism of Stress and Christmas

Calgon's now-legendary "Calgon...take me away" campaign tapped into anxiety --
stemming from situations such as having dirty dishes, which represented life's mundane stressors. In the television ad, dirty dishes, portrayed as a source of "social disapproval" among one's peers, created intolerable stress for one woman... bathing with Calgon bath gel provided a release from the anxiety. ...(T)he product provided a possible solution to the problem. "The product relieves the stress." That's the key to a successful fear appeal.

The Times is offering a Quiz: testing for festive stress. The quiz has the explanatory preamble:

Christmas has the potential to be one of the most stressful events in the calendar. According toa recent survey, the average preparation time is 13 full days. This involves 288 hours of shopping, four hours wrapping parcels, three hours decorating the house, nine hours cooking and 11 hours cleaning up the mess. And then there’s the sums of money you feel you have to spend. But whether you are time-rich and cash-poor or cash-rich and time-poor, there are ways of minimising the pain with good management.

'Tis the season for tension and re-hashing old scores

There are lots of kill-joy stories circulating about elderly people being upbraided for asking about the switching-on of the Christmas Lights rather than Winter Lights. And stories about singing services being cancelled for being insufficiently multi-denominational. In the US, some groups have brought successful law suits against towns whose public displays are reportedly too secular. In contrast to these stories, the Guardian has a thoughtful piece that suggests that many of these Grinch stories have little or no basis in fact: The phoney war on Christmas.

Rather than the usual, “the personal is the political”, it seems as if the personal experience is spreading to the political. If your family’s version of holiday spirit has usually been interpreted rather too literally (and liberally), leading to family tension and the annual re-hashing of old scores, then this is your kind of public holiday season. And, by and large, no alcohol has been required, just plain mean-spiritedness.

A friend works for a dictionary publishers and is the go-to person in many circles for linguistic niceties. She and her siblings now have their own families and gather together at her mother’s on set-piece days. A while ago, her mother was watching a reality programme and asked her, “What’s a dysfunctional family?”. In an admirable economy of words, my friend replied, “You know the way we all get on Boxing Day”; her mother nodded, “Well, dysfunctional families are like that the whole year round”.

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Answering "How are you?": counting blessings

Apparently, in Latin, you can ask a question that anticipates the answer. So, you use some grammatical forms if you expect the answer ‘No’, and others (presumably), if you expect the answer ‘Yes’. It sounds like an ancient form of mind-games and casts a new light on the art of conversation. But so often, our conversations can be formulaic, and this is especially true when it comes to social comments.

When I worked in Loughborough I was initially taken aback when the response to my polite enquiry, “How are you?”, was met with, “Fair to middling”. I was so accustomed to, “Fine”, that I didn’t know if the correct social action was to overlook it, or to enquire further and run the risk of learning more about IBS or the agonies of an enlarged prostate than I cared to know.

Throughout the UK there are local customs that dictate the answer to the question “How are you?”. I came across an item on blessings and the tricky task of navigating the appropriate answer to this question.

When someone asks me: How are you? 99% of the time I will answer “fine”. In Hebrew, you say, beseder, literally, in order, ok. It’s, “thanks for asking but I don’t need any special consideration right now, I’m ready to proceed”.

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