_It has often been the case that people have seen getting financial advice or having a financial adviser as an extravagance that they cannot afford. People have perhaps felt that why should they spend money on getting someone to tell them how best to look after their money and make more money. Maybe the general feeling has been not to spend money on a financial adviser for a start. This might have been the case when the economy was doing well. Back then house prices were rising strongly, and so you pretty much knew that you money was a safe as houses if you invested in bricks and mortar. However, since the market collapsed 3 or 4 years ago, the housing market hasn’t really recovered, and has instead been flat lining. This leaves you with a decision – should you invest in property now when it is still a relatively low price, or should you rent for now. Is now a good time to get a mortgage?

Stocks and shares were always also seen as another sound investment, but the FTSE-100 has been particularly unstable in the last couple of years, reaching unparalleled lows, and for anybody who doesn’t know what they are doing then they are a bit of a minefield. You don’t want to enter at the wrong time and suddenly find yourself in deep financial trouble. Similarly, government bonds were always seen as the closest thing you could get to a safe investment, but even those aren’t looking that great any more.

That of course leaves the option of just putting your cash in the bank, but any saver will know that this is not a great option at the moment.  With interest rates at an all time low, savers get very little return on their cash in the bank, and whatever interest they do get is pitiful compared to the high rate of inflation, meaning that your money will be worth less money when you take it out of the bank than when you put it in.

An example of what can go horribly wrong with your finances was the Icelandic banks investments of a few years ago, where people rushed to invest their money in Icelandic banks, only for them to go bust and for the British government to use terrorism laws to try to recover the money. With the Eurozone going through an incredibly unstable time, and Ireland, Portugal, Greece and now Italy having gone through incredibly choppy waters, it is hard to know where best to invest your money. If the Euro goes down, it will have grave repercussions on the rest of the world, and most of all on the UK.

The way the UK and global economy is at the moment, making large and long term investments without a good financial adviser would be like jumping out of a plane without a parachute. All the signs are that the UK is about to go back into recession, if it hasn’t already done so. Now is not the time to leave your financial affairs to chance, but instead leave it to the professionals.

_2012 is going to be a fantastic year for Great Britain, a chance to really appreciate our fantastic country and to celebrate all things British. Two major landmark events will make this the case. The first will be the 2012 London Olympics, the first Olympic Games to be hosted in Britain since the post-Second World War 1948 games. The opening and closing ceremonies will be a fantastic chance for countries around the world to see the best of what Britain has to offer, for the thousands of people coming around the world to experience a British holiday, and for British people themselves to take great pride in our nation, as hopefully we perform as well in London as we did in Beijing in 2008.

The second, perhaps less talked about but in historical terms far more important, event will be the Diamond Jubilee of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. On February 6th, she will have been Queen for 60 years, an event which will be celebrated with an extra Bank Holiday in June. What is so special about this event is that she will only be the second monarch in British history to have been on the throne for 60 years. The only other monarch also happened to be female, and was of course Queen Victoria who reigned from 1837 until 1901, a total of 63 years. At the moment Queen Elizabeth looks to be in very good health, and so the chances are very high that not only will she reach the 60 year milestone, but that she will overtake Queen Victoria to become Britain’s longest monarch ever.

2012 will therefore be a year of celebrating Britishness, and what better way to do so than by buying a used caravan and instead of going abroad for your holidays, spending some time exploring the great British countryside. There are plenty of used caravans for sale available all over the country at extremely low prices, which are ideal for hitching up to the back of your car and getting out there and see what the country has to offer.

There is nothing more British than a caravan holiday in the British countryside. It gives you the freedom to go where you want, when you want, for as long as you want. It means you can change your plans at the last minute, drive all through the night if you want to, and if you’re tired sleep during the day. It means that your holiday is entirely in your hands. And there is so much to see. From the beauty of Scotland to the incredible scenery in North Wales, and from the idyllic setting of the Lake District to the rugged natural coastline of Cornwall. You don’t have to go far to find a beautiful part of the UK just on your doorstep. And, if you have the time, why not go the whole hog and celebrate 2012 by taking your caravan from one end of the country to the other, to truly appreciate the range of different cultures and places within our own borders. As long as the Mayan prophecy about the world ending at the end of 2012 doesn’t come true then it should be a fantastic year!

_When we’re young, we don’t really appreciate the importance of oral hygiene. Perhaps not until we reach teenage years and start noticing that members of the opposite sex won’t go near us because we have bad breath, or that we start wearing mouthguards whilst playing sports do we first start to understand the importance of looking after our mouths!

However, taking good care of our teeth and mouths is something that needs to be ingrained in our conscience from a very young age. Parents need to bring their children up so that brushing their teeth twice a day, once in the morning before going to school and once at night before going to bed, is as normal as walking, breathing, eating etc. They then need to be encouraged to use dental floss regularly, to use mouth wash after brushing, and to make regular visits to the dentist.

Why? Well regular teeth cleaning removes plaque and tartar from teeth, which helps to prevent gum disease which causes at least one-third of tooth loss in adults. We all know people with either false teeth or no teeth at all, which makes them look far older than they actually are.

Plaque is a yellow sticky film on teeth and gums. The bacteria in it changes carbohydrates in the food you eat into acid which erodes your teeth and leads to you having cavities and thus fillings. It irritates gums, making them bleed easily and pull away from the teeth, which creates cavities for bacteria to fill. This in term causes the bones around the teeth to be eroded, causing gum disease. Eating the right food and not eating snacks helps to combat this, as does making sure you brush your gums as well as your teeth.

Whilst the message about brushing twice daily seems to be getting through, flossing probably hasn’t as much. Yet flossing is vital, as it removes the decaying food and the plaque from between the teeth, which brushing often doesn’t do as the gap between teeth is so tight. It is recommended that you floss once a day BEFORE brushing to allow fluoride toothpaste better access between teeth.

It is also extremely important to clean your tongue – again, something that isn’t as often thought about as tooth cleaning. This removes the coating of bacteria from your tongue which causes bad breath, tooth decay and gum disease.

The key aim is to make sure demineralisation of the teeth doesn’t exceed remineralisation. Plaque and tartar increases demineralisation, so the above steps are essential to combat it, but eating the right foods is also important. Whilst fluoride in toothpaste helps, milk and cheese are rich in calcium to strengthen your teeth, and fibre rich foods and sugar free gum increase the flow of saliva for remineralisation. Green tea, fruit and veg and sesame seeds are also good. Crisps and chips, sugar, fruit juice, vinegar and sweets are all bad for oral hygiene. Smoking is also bad for teeth.

An argument often heard is that oral hygiene is some sort of new phenomenon, and that it is all a money making scam from dentists and oral hygiene companies. The truth is that oral hygiene goes back beyond the beginning of recorded history, with excavations all over the world showing that sticks, twigs, bird feathers, animal bones and porcupine quills have been used as prototype toothbrushes, and looking after your mouth from a young age is far more cost effective than having to deal with gum disease and other oral problems when you’re older.

_Normally in a recession or in tough economic circumstances like the ones we are currently in, one of the first things to go out the window are our environmentally friendly, eco-friendly, green credentials. In normal times, people are prepared to pay that bit extra because it is for the environment and will factor in how environmentally friendly a company is when choosing whether or not to use it. Then, when a recession comes along, all of that is abandoned, and the cheapest, most cost effective company is used instead. People suddenly forget about doing their bit for the environment and only care about making sure the pennies can be stretched as far as possible. 

However, in this recession and in the subsequent tough economic times, the environment does indeed still seem to be up there. Maybe it’s because people have grasped just how serious the environmental situation is. Maybe the last two winters being extremely harsh, with snow and ice not seen in the UK for many years, brought it home to people. It is worth noting that there were major fuel protests in the year 2000 over the price of fuel, and petrol then was around 75p per litre. It is now around £1.30 per litre, and despite the recent debate in Parliament on the price of fuel, and despite the occasional grumblings and mutterings, people seem to have got on with it, tolerated it and accepted it. Despite people being out of work, unable to get around, there hasn’t been that major outcry over fuel, and it hasn’t been brought down, partly because the tax is needed to bring some much needed cash into the treasury’s coffers, and partly because the government knows that the environmental lobby would be up in arms. At one point the government wouldn’t have worried too much about upsetting the environmental lobby. But they recognise the strength of the green movement now. It might have taken 21 years since the 1989 European elections for the Green Party to make a break through, but last year, 2010, despite the economic conditions which dominated the General Election, the Green Party won their first seat at Westminster with Caroline Lucas becoming an MP.

A quick browse of Google shows that many companies, including ones that perhaps you wouldn’t expect, are parading their environmentally friendly credentials to the UK. Put recycling Leicester into Google and you get a skip hire company coming up on page 1 beneath the local government sites. They say they are committed to recycling everything possible from their skips o reduce landfill waste, whereas normally you would just expect a skip hire company to send the waste in their skips straight to landfill. If the recession carries on it is hard to say how long being green will remain a priority, but at the moment it still seems to be very much in people’s mind. How the winter effects this one way or another will be very interesting.

One brilliant site that we found the other day was a telecoms site offering virtual telephone numbers. These are brilliant because they are virtual telephone numbers which are forwarded to your existing landline or mobile phone number. This company have virtual phone numbers for 479 different area codes across the UK, including London 0203, 0207 & 0208 phone numbers, which are obviously the most popular phone numbers, but they also offer a wide range of other numbers for all across the country. This means that if you are based in Birmingham, but want an Edinburgh area code pointing to your phone, then you can have one. Why would you want such a thing? Well, many companies operate all across the UK now, but don’t have business premises in every location they want to do business in. However, many people when phoning for a service still prefer to phone a number with an area code they recognise, so these virtual local numbers are an ideal tool. Most towns and cities in the UK are covered by these numbers, but below are links to their 10 most popular telephone number area codes, apart from London:

Birmingham 0121 phone numbers

Liverpool 0151 phone numbers

Manchester 0161 phone numbers

Bristol 0117 phone numbers

Glasgow 0141 phone numbers

Leeds 0113 phone numbers

Cardiff 029 phone numbers

Edinburgh 0131 phone numbers

Nottingham 0115 phone numbers

Aberdeen 01224 phone numbers

These are also great if you are on the move a lot, because you can get one or more of these virtual phone numbers pointed to your mobile phone, so it looks a lot more professional than if you just give out your mobile number. There are probably 1000 different great uses for these numbers, which we thought were pretty nifty.  

I listen to the news every morning on the way to work, and most of the time the interviews tend to go in one ear and out the other. But one news story which made me pay attention this morning was the news that a 61 year old man from Torquay has become the first person to be mummified in about 3000 years.

At the time of listening to this I was walking past the local funeral director in Epsom and nearly popped in to see if this was a new service that they were offering. Standing there I noticed all the usual things you would expect to see at a funeral directors in Surrey, including cremations and burials, plus extra services like repatriation, monumental masonry, flowers and catering. But there was no mention of mummification.  When I heard the initial news story it was announced as a headline or a still to come, so for a while I was left completely puzzled, wondering if I was hearing things, if I was going mad, or if funeral directors around the country were really about to announce a return to something last practiced by the ancient Egyptians.

All became clear when the item finally appeared. A taxi driver from Torquay called Alan Billis decided to donate his body to a Channel 4 mummification project which he read about. Mr Billis died in January after contracting lung cancer. Volunteers were being sought back in January, and there was a bit of a media storm about it at the time, which I had forgotten all about.

Apparently he said that the main motivation behind doing it was his grandchildren, saying “Perhaps this would give them an insight into what their granddad was like, I don’t know. They’ll most probably tell somebody at school that my granddad’s a pharaoh. That’s my legacy I suppose”. His wife added that she was the only woman in the country who had a mummy for a husband.

The project is designed to test the method used by those who did the embalming and mummification in ancient Egypt and to test methods of preservation on the body. I have to say I don’t usually like the sort of shows that follow someone dying, but in this case it is not the process of dying that is the focus, but what happens after death, and sounds quite fascinating, in a strange sort of way. It certainly isn’t your usual funeral!

Maybe I’m turning into a bit of a Grinch, but is it just me, or does “Christmas” seem to be getting earlier and earlier each year now? I say “Christmas” because I am referring to the period whereby shops start selling items for Christmas. I was utterly astounded to walk into the supermarket over a fortnight ago to find that a whole aisle was now set out and dedicated to Christmas chocolates, advent calendars, Christmas presents, Christmas snacks, decorations, etc. I actually just stopped and stood still in the middle of the supermarket with my mouth wide open, and it takes a lot to get such a reaction out of me. It was, after all, still late September, with 3 months, or to put it another way, a quarter of the year, still to go until Christmas Day.

Thinking about it, I am sure that there are some very good reasons for the festive period, or at least the festive shopping period, coming early. For a start, the UK, European and world economy is still in dire straits. Today’s announcement that inflation has risen to 5.2%, last week’s announcement that unemployment was at its highest level in 17 years, the Euro still teetering on the brink because of the debt crisis in Greece and other countries, all helps to spread a feeling of gloom and doom. Add that to the fact that it is forecast to be a hard winter, and you can understand why companies might want to try to inject a bit of happiness, Christmas spirit and joy in an otherwise gloomy and depressed nation.

With the economy in such a state, it is understandable that companies might want to try to make some money from Christmas to give a stay of execution to their increasingly falling profit margins. The longer companies have out there to sell their products, the more products they are likely to sell. This just doesn’t benefit the supermarket, but everyone in the chain, from the packing companies that wrap the chocolates through to the injection moulding companies that help to create the toys for the children. The more money spent, the better these firms do, the better they do the more jobs are created, the more jobs that are created the more money there is to spend, and so the cycle continues.

So, the Christmas shopping period starting early gives people a longer opportunity to spend money, and cheers them up a bit as we head into the winter. It might also be fair to say that last year a lot of people didn’t get their Christmas presents on time because they ordered online, and then lost out because of the snow in December. With everything you need for Christmas already on sale by October, even if there is a hard winter, then people will have no excuse for not having done their shopping on time.

The weather forecasters are saying it, the news presenters are saying it, and in fact the presenters of lots of TV and radio programs are now saying those dreaded words: it is going to be a hard winter.

Even before they started saying it, I felt that it was going to be a hard winter. The cold days we have had so far have been bitterly cold, and already I have to light roaring fires in the evening. Strange little heat waves, including last weekend and a few weekends ago, have just added to the feeling that the climate is becoming increasingly unstable.

Last year I was snowed in for a good week, but for many weeks before and after that the snow and ice was very bad, and made getting around very hard if not impossible at times. There has already been talk of some snow at the end of October, so it seems wise to start thinking about taking precautions.

One non-life threatening issue that many people got caught out on last year was using the internet to buy Christmas presents. I ordered a large amount of Christmas presents via one well known online retailer within the first couple days of December and did not receive them until the day before Christmas Eve, having left me with around 20 days of panic. Snow made it impossible for the delivery companies to get through around much of the country, so start ordering your Christmas presents now. Better to be safe than sorry.

Insulate your pipes if you can, get protective covering for them. And keep an eye on them to make sure you don’t get any burst pipes. Keep a shovel handy to clear your drive way, but don’t pour hot water to melt it, as it will freeze again and create ice, meaning despite your best intentions, you could be in trouble with the police. Take care of your car. You don’t know when you might need it, so in the run up to winter, keep your fuel tank regularly topped up in case there comes a point when you can’t get to the garage and the tanks can’t get to the garage either. Increase the concentration of screen wash to water in your tank to stop it freezing up. Make sure you switch your back and front windscreen wipers off every time you stop your car, otherwise you may find that ice has formed around it or snow has fallen on it when you go to start it next, and it burns out the motor trying to move. Be aware of what car battery you need in case you need to order one – there are now sites where you can order car batteries online and have them sent to you. Keep plenty of blankets and warm clothing in your car just in case you break down or get stuck and need them.

In terms of food, people were getting injured trying to walk to the supermarket, and ended up slipping on the ice and being in hospital over Christmas. Get in food in advance which will last. Stock up the freezer with meat, fish, frozen veg, ready meals if necessary, frozen desserts, etc. Get in plenty of dried and canned food which will last, like tinned potatoes, peas, baked beans, tomatoes, sweetcorn etc. Consider buying in some long life milk or some powder milk. Keep in plenty of bags of pasta and rice, sacks of potatoes and sacks of onions. Tins of soup are always needed in the cold weather, tins of rice pudding are also good, and porridge oats for making hot breakfasts, tea bags, instant coffee and hot chocolate. If the weather gets bad, at least you won’t starve or go cold.

Much of this may sound like common sense, but sometimes we just don’t think about the obvious until after the event has happened.

“Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”

It was of course Dr Samuel Johnson, the creator of the first English dictionary, who uttered those famous words about London in 1777, and it is still often quoted now when people talk about London. 

For a brief period when I was younger I worked in the City of London. I only stayed there for about six months or so. I didn’t like London, and so I left. I consider myself to be at least slightly intellectual. And I was not tired of life.

Which makes me wonder if Dr Johnson would utter the same words about London today as he did over 230 years ago? I admit I had never before lived in a city like London. I had grown up in a village in the rural countryside, and had attended university in a city, albeit a smallish city surrounded by beautiful areas. But when I got there, I found it so polluted, so claustrophobic, so busy that it wore me down, and within six months made me feel quite physically ill. I would get off of the overcrowded tube in the morning, where I had been squashed in, hardly able to breathe let alone sit down, for three quarters of an hour, feeling exhausted before I had even started work. By the time I had walked from the tube station to my office, I felt incredibly short of breath, not because I am unfit, but because of the pollution. I remember the times I used to escape to the country for the weekend, and as I would drive south west down the A3 through Surrey, with the density of buildings get less and less whilst the green spaces increased, it felt like a weight off my mind, back, and lungs. My stress levels must have been sky high, as trying to get anywhere on train, tube or foot was stressful enough at rush hour, getting pushed, squashed and mashed. Driving anywhere in the car was a complete nightmare.

I lived in a relatively nice area of London, in the northwest, and yet I still was a victim of crime. Relatively minor crime I admit, but it was still upsetting none the less. I had parked my car in the usual place, the back road behind the flat I lived in. It had streetlights. The critical mistake I had made was to leave a plastic supermarket bag of clothes on the back seat from when I went to the gym. I had forgotten to take them inside with me, and when I came out in the morning, the back windows of my car had been completely smashed and the bag of clothes stolen. There was broken glass everywhere. I was pretty new to London and so was fairly naive. I did not realise that leaving a Tesco bag on the back seat of the car meant that I had put up a flag to people to smash my window and steal it, but that was basically what the police told me.

I phoned the police, to be more or less laughed at. A robbery and damage to my car was such a minor crime that they did not have time to deal with it. It was my own stupid fault for leaving property where people could see it. They did not have the time and resources to be dealing with such an insignificant incident. A few days later a letter arrived telling me that despite ongoing investigations into the crime, the Metropolitan Police had been unsuccessful in their attempts to bring the perpetrators to justice. The official response said one thing, the real response told the truth.

As London prepares host the 2012 Olympic Games, I hope the police will be more helpful than they were in this instance, but presuming they are not, all I can say is that I urge anyone travelling to London for the games to be incredibly vigilant. Of course we cannot each expect our own personal security guard London, but what the police did in my case was to effectively say people in London steal and smash up property all the time. It is happening so much that we cannot do anything about it, and therefore will not even try to do anything about it. So don’t expect the police to protect you. Look after yourselves, always think, and be extremely careful. Thieves are going to be out in force for such a major event.

I often go back to London, and really enjoy it when I do. There are so many wonderful things to do and see there, that in a sense I do agree with Dr Johnson that you could not grow tired of it. There is enough to do there to last a lifetime, if you are a person of leisure who can enjoy it. I wouldn’t want to live and work there again, I am glad to be away from the rat race, the pollution and the crime.  They would not say it officially, but unofficially that police response said to me that the police admit that they have lost the fight against crime in London, which is incredibly sad.

Anyone who has worked in a dark, dreary office knows how depressing it can be. I once worked in an underground office, with one tiny window at the top of the wall which looked out onto the wall of a yard, so that the only way you could tell what the day was like outside was by how dark or light the bricks were. We went underground like moles before 9am and surfaced around 6pm, meaning that in the winter, we saw very little daylight! The window was so narrow that we had to work by electric lights even at the height of summer, and after a while this became incredibly depressing.

Other offices I’ve worked in have been extremely cramped, and felt very claustrophobic. Others have been extremely disorganised and messy, making work unnecessarily inefficient and time consuming. Sometimes we think of the office as just the place we go to work in, but it is far more important than just that. We often arrive at the office around 8.30am, and don’t leave the office until around 6pm, meaning we spend around 9 hours or more at the office. If we spend on average 8 hours per night sleeping, that means we spend 16 hours per day awake, and therefore more than half of our waking work day is spent at the office. So, if the office is dark, or untidy, or cramped, or not set out well, then it is going to be incredibly depressing for the workforce who are spending half their waking week there.

Having a nice office for your employees is therefore as important for them as having a nice home. It will boost their morale, leave them feeling happier about coming to work, and make them more productive and positive about their job. However, think of it from the other side too. It will also have a positive effect on your customers, clients and business partners. Even if you’re not a business that has customers coming in to your office or on to your premises frequently, you are still bound to have visitors of some description on occasions. If you have wobbly shelves holding disorganised files, boxes piled up, workers in cramped conditions, outdated furniture and a dark and dingy area to meet and greet people, it is going to give them a very bad impression of your company. It will make your company look disorganised, not very profitable and therefore not very successful, and generally just leave a bad taste in the mouth.

Businesses often put off sorting out their offices, primarily because they think they haven’t got the time. The working day and working week is hectic enough without all the upheaval associated with office refurbishments. They also worry about the costs involved as well as the stress involved in trying to sort everything out, and so just don’t bother. However, this is false economy. Firstly, an office refurbishment and reorganization is far cheaper than an office move. Many companies often just give up on what they’ve got and move to different or larger premises, when they actually don’t need to, they just need to be more efficient and streamlined with what they’ve got. Also, there are firms out there that specialize in office refurbishment, and so know that businesses want the makeover to be fast and with the minimum amount of disruption. They can use specialist computer programs to show you what can be done with the space you have, and how your office will look, within a set budget. Finally, whatever the cost of improving your office, you are going to make it back by the increase in productivity from your staff, and the increase in business by customers not turning away from your business because they think it looks awful.