Have this week's events brought good news or bad for older
people?
By James Holloway, Research and Policy Officer
It's been an exciting week for adventurous pensioners (and by that
we mean in a good and a bad way) with history (medieval and
ancient) being the predominant theme. It was a good
week for one inquisitive older gardener. No inappropriate
age-related Jurassic Park jokes here please, but a rather
large fossil submitted to a museum by a gardening pensioner from
Sunderland, turned out to be a 115 million year-old-dinosaur tail
bone!
The man who wishes to remain anonymous took the bone to his local
museum after unearthing the find in his garden and believing it
could be of interest. Scientists are baffled how the
fossilised bone could have ended up in Sunderland, ironically
because the rocks upon which the region rests are older than the
fossil itself! The museum said they were very grateful to the
anonymous donor, who they said had kindly agreed to loan the
unusual find to the museum so that the people of the region can
enjoy it. This story appeared in The Daily Mail this week,
which you can read in full
here.
It was a bad week however for 68-year-old
Stuart Hill, the eccentric Shetland independence campaigner.
Mr Hill, who earned the nickname 'Captain Calamity' after his
ill-fated attempt to circumnavigate the British Isles in 2001 in a
converted rowing boat, was sentenced to 100 hours community service
for driving on fake number plates without insurance. While
this may be seen as rather a mundane crime, Mr Hill had argued that
his white van was in fact a 'consular vehicle for the sovereign
state of Forvik', a breakaway nation that he himself had
established on a remote island in the Shetlands. Mr Hill
established the Republic of Forvik in 2008 after a history of
campaigning against British rule having deemed that the Shetland
Isles are in fact owned by Norway and were illegally sold to
Scotland in 1469.
Mr Hill was originally fined £1,400, but this was amended to 100
hours community service on a plea that he could not afford to pay
the fine on his £500 a month pension. After the verdict Mr
Hill said 'I'm disappointed with the verdict but, as I said in the
court yesterday, I'm faced with an occupying power that simply will
not produce any proof of its authority but continues to exercise
it.' Read the full story, which appeared in The Guardian
here.
