Eating Soup

I spend a lot of time thinking.   This is not necessarily a bad thing as it's both free and does not get you too many strange looks on the tram.   Recently I was thinking about the pursuit of happiness and why it seems to be so difficult to get the age-old balance of money, time and health to balance?    This is not a new thought for me, or indeed anyone else, but life does seem to get in the way of actually actioning anything specific.   During this use of tram time, I remembered I had once started a blog on this subject, or at least I thought I had.   It's odd when you are not entirely sure if you are recalling something you actually got round to doing or if you just thought really hard about the idea but never did anything about it in the end.   So today, a quiet Sunday morning where Dear Wife has gone to the gym, I thought I would see if I had indeed started a blog or whether my memory was just playing tricks on me.   Eventually, after m...

I have just finished one of the most relaxing vacations I have ever had. The only downside of the well needed break was to highlight to me the gap between it and my 'normal' life. I feel so much better for a week of fresh air and either walking or doing nothing...neither of which are exactly expensive activities. So why don't I do more of this? Simply the lack of time! Working harder and harder to earn money which if I am not careful will simply go to buy a temporary feeling of worth or status. In a car park I use often, the open roof on the top floor has been meshed over to stop the pigeons getting in and doing what they do best. Occasionally one does get in and finds it impossible to get out..they keep flying up but can't get past the mesh. What has always struck me as odd about this is the fact that all they have to do to escape is fly down one level where they would find a huge entry and exit..but they never do. They are, I guess, programmed to fly i...

Recently a major corporation has kicked it's employees in the pension pot by winding up it's final salary pension scheme. The rights and wrongs of doing this are not the central issue, it is the effect on the people who are on the ground rolling in agony. One of the less publicised issues was that the company is changing the level of pension you get if you retire early - from 3% a year to 6 or 7% a year.  There are two issues that are faced for these particular employees;  1) That their pension pot will be smaller than expected  2) That their ability to retire early has been affected These points may not sound devastating , but the reality is with the pressures on jobs, there is a now a risk gap between when people are likely to have a job until and when they can afford to retire. In may industries finding a job when you are 50 is tough, really tough. Not an issue if you have factored that into your pension planning and worked out you can afford to live wi...

There are some things the really used to be a lot better than they are now. Summers were hotter, winters did have more snow, Mars bars were a LOT bigger and pensions used to allow people to actually retire. I mention this last point because although I am quite a few years off retirement yet, it is clear to me that by the time I get there I will not be able to enjoy my retirement in the way the brochures advertise it. And the reason is simple. In days gone by, people worked until they were 65, transitioned from 'work' to 'not-work' overnight and after a year or so of discovering that work had been a useful distraction from the rest of their lives, promptly stopped living. Today, and looking forward, the chance of a full time job until 55, let alone 65 is pretty remote and with modern health benefits, we (touch wood) will be outlooking 90+ not 70+. Twenty more years retirement from ten less years less time to save for it. Hmm, do the 'math' as our f...

In case you had not read your Daily Mail recently, we are in a recession...or is it a depression? No, wait...there are “green shoots” and the worst is over because house prices have bottomed, Woo Hoo. Actually run that past me again, why are rising house prices good? The Myth of Rising House Prices;  During times of property booms, as typified by the never ending stream of TV property shows in the mid-naughties (“Changing locations in the sun" and the like), there was a perception that the rising value of houses was being manifested in the appearance of piles of cash in the understairs cupboard. This money, presumably brought by some kind of House Fairy could be spent on huge televisions, Pine clad hot tubs and exotic holidays with her blessing and meanwhile the world would be just lovely. There are two things wrong with this (and I'm not including the Fairy bit); House price rises assumed that you could sell your house at it's nominal higher value, a value which mo...

Just a quickie...I found this link today http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/05/7_ways_to_be_happier_at_work.html It's an American article and I guess the UK summary of it would be "don't let the buggers grind you down". So today I am going to smile and be happy throughout all the conference calls, meetings and water-cooler moments and (although I'm not sure how I do it) I'm going to smile in my e-mails too. And when my face aches so much from smiling I'm going to walk into town and buy some more anti-wrinkle cream because smiling does really bring out the worst of those lines. DOH, supposed to be POSITIVE.... "Smile at a complete stranger, it confuses the hell out of them".