Open Discussion – EP1

Hello, welcome to the Three J's. I'm Julia. I'm Judith. And I'm Joy. And we're going to talk about a number of topics that we've made a list of and hopefully we may talk on some of them. We may diverge from some of them. The first one we thought we'd talk about is getting older and the ramifications that we've noticed in our own lives. Well, I'm nearly 64 years old and I don't feel 64 years old. I feel about probably 24 years old. And so it's quite shock to notice that other people don't see me as a, obviously a young woman. But it's like I do feel sort of invisible. And how do I notice that? It's just that I feel sometimes I may say something and people won't actually listen to me. They'll move on to someone else who's probably younger. I think when the hair goes grey you start becoming invisible. Do you think what about all the young women who are wearing grey hair at the moment? Yes, well, they're young, aren't they? It's very different. The skin is completely different, the colour of their complexions. Grey hair on a 24 year old looks very different to grey hair on a 60 plus. But there is hair dye, Julia. We don't need to be grey. No, no, I'm not grey. I'm not great. I hasten to add, I'm blonde. But I'm thinking I should, maybe I should just give in and just go grey. I mean, I've got a few friends who do acting and they've got far more roles actually giving up their hair dye and accepting their age. And you know, one of my friends, as she moved from being an amateur actress to professional, I see her all the time on TV adverts, poster adverts and she looks fine. You know, she's got nice short gray hair. She's got probably the right features for. Because all the old grey hairs are going after the grey pound now, aren't they? They're realizing that there's some money there to be harvested. Well, I think there's a division in older people that there are these baby boomers with their final salary, pensions that did very well, thank you. But I think at the other end there are people who are not doing well that are having a hard time because I think of myself who spent all my life being an artist and going from one job to another with not a proper pension and getting by and the government is making us Wait to get our pensions longer and longer. And what I've actually found out recently, where I really see discrimination is that after I got made redundant from my last big day job, I found it seriously hard to get interviews in a way that I've never done before in my life. So I think there is a real kind of discrimination about people not wanting to work with old people. And I think younger people don't like managing older people, which is part of the problem. And, you know, I found myself trying to kind of cleverly adapt my CV in order to get interviews in the fact that I've eliminated all the dates of my education from it, I've changed O levels to GCSE and I, under advice, I've cut down my employment. So I only actually show the last 10 years of my employment. To not show my employment history has been too long. And I'm cutting out a lot of things that are quite interesting about me. And so I think not all old people are the same. We're kind of very varied. But it is really strange for when people start looking at you as an older person, you actually don't feel well, you don't feel old and then you look in the mirror and you think, well, yeah, maybe, yeah, I think I'm sort of wearing quite well, but it's still showing. Obviously I am old and why shouldn't I accept it and why shouldn't other people accept it without making me feel, you know, maybe not second class citizen but sort of overlooked citizen. And I'm sure a lot of old people do feel like that. I mean, older people, I hate saying that. Old people, yeah, I certainly started to have empathy about for older people. I mean, really sort of, you know, people into their 80s and 90s and you realize how people are treated. I mean, one of the best things that I did for myself in this period of unemployment was that I did a career, I did a course in stand up comedy and I just did it for the fun of it. I had no intention of ever doing comedy live, but actually I have been for the last year and at the age of 62 I started a new career as a stand up comedian. And I'm doing okay. I don't think I'm ever going to be famous or on the, you know, Hammersmith Apollo or anything, but, you know, I've done it and it's been fun and I've actually been young. Comics have been really good to me. They haven't treated me as any different. So I think there are ways encouraging. Yeah, there are ways around these things. I think it's. Sometimes it can be how you perceive yourself or how you behave or what you do can actually influence people. Well, I think, you know, the sketch shows I've been involved with, we do try and sort of explore what older women experience, whether that is going to be enough of an interest. I think people have found it funny, but that's only because we've used other. We brought politics into it quite a lot, you know, Trump, Theresa May. So we haven't just commented on being older women. No. Because we have the same issues other people have. Everybody's concerned about Donald Trump. He's quite a unifying character in that way, isn't he? Unifying the fear. Yeah. Yeah. We're all going to be nuked, whatever age we are. But, you know, it's not, you know, the job applications I was making last year, most of them were online applications. So they always ask for your dates, so you can't get out of it because, you know, if you're not doing a cv, application is an application online and you've got to put the right words in that you think are going to, you know, get you chosen for a short list. Yeah. It's interesting that the equal opportunities form, actually, I think, does the opposite when it comes to age, because you have to put your date of birth that forces you to put all the dates up. It's asked for on everything now, the date of birth, isn't it? And I guess a part of that is because everything is, you know, the data is all trawled. It means that they know the advertisers that are going to be on these sites then know what they want to pitch to you, what adverts, they want to sort of shoot your way without you asking for them. So I think, you know, a lot of conceptions are already made about what you think, what you are, what you like, what you don't like when you're in a certain age bracket. But on my Facebook account, I mean, I put my birth year as 1901. I don't want people to sort of categorize me is, you know, my actual age. And I don't want them to sort of do what you just said. Yeah, but, I mean, but that's. I'm sure that's what's happening a lot of the time and I'm sure that's why the. The date of birth is asked for a lot in. In places that it's just not relevant at all. It's just the fact that all companies want to Collect our data these days because it's really valuable and then they sell it on. Absolutely. And every. So everything about us is. Is known. But actually using this data doesn't necessarily come up with the right solutions. They're not necessarily targeting you with the right products. It's still very crude. Absolutely. One of my students yesterday really got the frighteners. He said that Facebook came up with an advert of something I was just thinking about. He said. I felt as I was beginning to read my mind but. But you know, you do find that as soon as you look at something, the next minute there's an advert of something related to that and I just feel like sort of shoving them out the door and saying just go away. Yeah. It is so intrusive. It is like that. But then it's quite stupid because if it's like something like you go online and buy a lawnmower and then you get all these adverts for lawnmowers coming afterwards. How stupid is that? How many lawnmowers are you sending one person going to buy? Oh, they want to tempt you with some other things that they sell besides lawn mow you gardens. You know, I can see the logic of it and it probably works with some people but it really feels very intrusive and I get quite irritated by it. So how many more years have we all got to. You've now got your pension. Yes, I was lucky. I was one of the ones that actually just did. Did get it at 60. So I got my. I've got a few more years to wait. All right, so we can all hate Joy and look at her as one of those wealthy baby boomer pensions that has everything. Well, no, I don't because I'm like, you have been self employed. That's why I'm still working now because I can't afford to retire. Yeah, I don't particularly want to retire. I've got the energy to keep on working. I don't mind if I work, if I can get a job. One of the things I have found with being of a becoming older is that you don't necessarily want to work a five day week and with the pension age being stretched, it's in. It's insisting on people working a five day week in order to get their pension and then if you have more medical appointments etc. Then you get demonised again. Well, we'll have to wait and see what happens because maybe they will change the pension age. It's likely to go up further. I would think. Not back 90. Thank you for listening. Hi, I'm Michelle Bartlett, the founder of Live Laugh Love Ladies Club. 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Come to our events to meet other members and learn something new. Book now for our London workshop on 10 May, helping you prepare for and manage the menopause. Membership is free. Join now by visiting really Helpful Club. Please also find us on thewomensradio station.com Anna Kennedy Online is a national charity made up of charity champions and role models. We are forging a path to autism awareness and acceptance. We are dedicated to promoting the inclusion and equality of autistic children and adults throughout society. We provide training, legal advice and a helpline if you need a listening ear. Contact www.annakenline.com Adam and Alice London are a British luxury fashion label offering timeless collections for bold and beautiful women at affordable prices. Enter the giveaway lucky draw for a chance to win a fabulous silk dress made from pure silk crepe, fully lined with digital printed silk and handcrafted details. Worth 475 pound. 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That's letter B number 2B@the soapcode.org. hi, my name is Gary Parker and my company is called CNT Associates. We provide fundraising, business support and training services for small businesses, charities and non profit making organizations. We've raised over £20 million since 2003 and we'd like to help you. Visit us at cntassociates.com or on Twitter ntassociates. Hello everyone, we are the three Js. Julia, Judith and Joy. And following on from our earlier discussion about growing old, we are now moving to fresh pastures. I think we're going to talk about possibly the Windrush incident fiasco, scandal, crisis situation. Yes. And possibly link it with a commonwealth thing that's happening this week with the Queen, Charles and Harry and Meghan. Okay. But I must admit I assumed wrongly that the Windrush, when that happened, everyone would have been given passports or some sort of documentation. And I just cannot understand how this has happened. It is, it's like what's happened in the last 50 years where people haven't been given a letter saying, you came over on the Windrush with your children. Because I know it's affected the children more than the actual people. You know, the, I was reading one article and it said there's a whole load of documentation that was destroyed. Yes, the landing cards were all destroyed and the government made a decision to do that. And they were warned by civil servants that this crisis could because that would have registered the children that they brought with them. So when did they give the landing cards back? They didn't. They didn't. They kept them. The government kept them. And it was the only record they would have, you know, on, on entry to the country. They would have actually said, okay, here's your landing card back, please keep this as. No, no, they didn't. No, no, they, they don't have any record. The people, people who actually arrived. But the government had the only records on national insurance numbers and how that and when it happened, when the actual number was given, there would have been children where they wouldn't have had national insurance. All children get national insurance. No, not until they're 15 or 16. So I think the thing is, even though these people are trying to, been trying to put together cases to show that they have been working in this country and have been here legally for a long time, there's no one way that they can prove that they've been trying to get together their school records, their employment contributions and people are still losing their jobs. I heard something on the radio today and I thought, yes, this is true common sense. You are the son, daughter of the couple who came over on the Windrush. Can you just fill in this form? You know, we're not going to, you know how many people from the Windrush are. There's about 200 plus people that have got question marks over their permission to stay, you know, be generous. And they're losing their jobs because their employers don't want to be caught employing someone that's illegal. One man's actually committed suicide. A 57 year old man's committed suicide because he was so afraid losing his. He lost his job and he was afraid of losing his. But I'm saying from the officialdom point of view, you know, stop putting all these barriers up. Just say, look, we've made a mistake, we didn't get the documentation right. Please fill in all these forms who you're related to, who came over on the Windrush with you and end of story. I think that they now it's become such a scandal that this is what Theresa May is doing and has started up a task force. But it Seems that this whole scandal could have originated in the first place, that because the original documents were deliberately destroyed at the same time that tougher immigration laws were introduced. And it does seem very bad that this happened. They are trying to rectify it. And I know, certainly in my local paper I read of a man who'd been refused cancer treatment because he couldn't prove he was British and he'd lived here since he was brought over as a child. And I think there's some. The Home Office being tighter on immigrants coming into this country or trying to look tough on immigration to get votes have actually caused. This happened a few years ago now, didn't it? With this change of. Theresa May was head of the Home Office. Apparently she was the one that was setting the tone. So do you think. Are you thinking that she set this in motion and it just had a life of its own? So the people down the line, did you change the immigration wording, the rules for immigration, two years ago? Yeah, they changed them in the fact that you couldn't actually rent a property or get a job or do anything unless you take your passport these days. So those people who have been employed for. For years in places got the sack because when their employers were told, oh, you can't. You've got to prove that the people you are employing are legally in this country. And these people couldn't because they just had an old Jamaican passport that they brought in. That's a good point. Last year, when I was going through all these job interviews, I, you know, I had to take my passport with me to every one of them to show. Yes, you do these days. Because the employer or even a landlord can be prosecuted if they're found out that they're dealing with somebody who's an illegal immigrant. But I feel very sorry for these people because I feel they're the same kind of age group as me. And to suddenly, if somebody suddenly told me now, you've got no right to live in this country, you've got no right to live in your house or get a job or get a pension or a benefits, and we're going to send you to a country that you've actually never lived in. I mean, it's a terrible thing to happen, especially. They've probably got no relations there either. No, it would be like sending them to a completely foreign country. Yeah, I mean, it's a. It's human, you know, it's really inhumane thing that's been set up by people who are campaigning against immigration. They've just been pandering to racists in order to get more votes. And they've created this human tragedy. Yes. I think that what happens quite often is that it's unforeseen consequences. They sort of set these things in motion without having a clue where they're going to go. You know, they're not proper. The concept. They need to be better chess players, don't they? So they can sort of see, well, if I do this, this is going to happen tomorrow. And, you know, I hate to say this, but when I saw Theresa May apologizing on television, I felt so annoyed because she. Apologies actually aren't. Doesn't mean a thing, does this. Not enough. There's no way an apology is enough. It's like putting it right immediately to stop these people worrying about their futures and what's going to happen to them. It's. Yeah. And it's happened, of course, in the week where the Commonwealth meetings are happening. So it couldn't be bad. Worse timing than it is. Yeah. I mean, I think with the. The Queen has obviously suggested that Prince Charles should follow her as head of the Commonwealth when she dies and he becomes King. But with this scandal, I don't see why they should allow the British monarch to be head of the Commonwealth. I think in this day and age, it'd be much more sensible to have it rotated between different Commonwealth countries. It's much more appropriate by a lot of people that it shouldn't just be sort of British royalty that had this position because it sort of smacks too much of the old colonialism. Yes. Yeah. Because this situation that has occurred with the Windrush generation, this could also happen with immigrants from other Commonwealth countries, such as India and Pakistan, and they could all be vulnerable to the same kind of thing. Unless you've actually, when they've been here, they've applied for a British passport and traveled on that, established some kind of identity, they could be facing the same sort of problems. Well, I was listening in the week to the Queen's canopy. Have you heard about it? Oh, yes. So the Queen is trying to encourage her Commonwealth countries to grow more trees, and they call it the Queen's canopy. And Prince Harry's been traveling around the Commonwealth very enthusiastically planting trees. And that was rather a nice program. I mean, it was with not Richard Attenborough, who's the other David Attenborough, talking to the Queen about it. But I think Harry, rather than Charles, would be a better head of the Commonwealth if it were to go forward to a Royal. Charles does seem quite, you know, through no fault of his own. He does seem to have been sidelined a bit. I think the poor man's been waiting a long time to start his job. But he'll have more than enough, you know, his work will be cut out for him. He doesn't need to have the Commonwealth as well. Give it to someone else or Harry. I got the impression that they were saying for him to take it over now, not for when she dies. I thought that so that he would be. Because she doesn't travel around anymore now and he would be the one going around the corner. Well, they're already. I might be wrong. The Queen is already sending members of the royal family around anyway, so I don't think it's. Well, he's already. He's just been. Is it Australia he's just been to with Camila. Well, now we have to wrap up again. We have to. It's gone by so quickly and I'd like to say thank you for listening and if you'd like to give us any feedback about our open discussions and contact us with your thoughts, we'd really like to hear them. Thanks again. Bye. That was an episode of Open Discussion. If you want to join the panel and be on Open discussion, write into presenterswomensradiostation.com and we look forward to seeing you soon. Bye for now. Hi, I'm Sarah Austin and I'm the founder of the really Helpful Club, an online and offline community that helps supports and connects thousands of women in our personal and business lives. We are buzzing. Join us to share and discover your best ideas. Come to our events to meet other members and learn something new book now for our London workshop on 10 May, helping you prepare for and manage the menopause. Membership is free. Join now by visiting reallyhelpfulclub.com Please also find us on the Women's Radio station. 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