My wife and I recently went to see some dinosaurs at a local show - about 50 of them - and we wanted to go back again with our grandchildren. My wife was a little confused when I first suggested buying tickets to see "life-size" dinosaurs. She thought I'd said "real live" dinosaurs!
Real live dinosaurs would be fun, too, as long as they were all herbivores. From time to time, there's renewed talk of bringing them back from extinction, after 65 million years.
That's unlikely to happen soon, but a company called Colossal is already working hard to bring back woolly mammoths. They hope this will help to improve the environment in Siberia. Some scientists think they may have discovered cells in dinosaur fossils, and possibly even DNA.
Are we really on the road towards the world of Jurassic Park? It's hard to believe it's 30 years since that iconic film came out. What an impact it had! Unlike the sixth in the Jurassic series - Jurassic World Dominion, from 2022 - which some people hope will also be the last. The series is facing extinction just as scientists are working on the possible de-extinction of the animals seen in the films.
What made tickets for the dinosaurs in the park especially interesting was the discount for senior citizens. When I was young - back in the Cretaceous period - they were called OAPs (old-age pensioners). People spoke about "poor old pensioners". We now know that this might hurt their feelings, but calling them dinosaurs would surely be even worse.
Britain's OAPs really were poor back then, so in 2010, the government created the triple lock pension - to guarantee that state pensions keep up with inflation or average earnings, or increase by a minimum of 2.5 per cent.
An exception was needed when lockdown ended and earnings jumped. Now it's inflation that's jumped, and the government wants workers to accept pay rises below inflation to stop it getting out of control. So is it fair for seniors to have bigger rises than workers, as well as the discounts they get for museums, shows and so on?
And what about bus passes? Since 2007, there has been free off-peak travel on the buses. In a film from 2021 called The Last Bus, an old man takes his dead wife's ashes from John o' Groats in Scotland to Land's End in Cornwall. For free! You can see why his wife didn't need a ticket - but was it fair that he didn't need one either?
Tickets for the dinosaur show were cheaper for children and anyone aged 65 or over. I imagine that those aged 65 million years or over didn't have to pay at all.
The show was fun, and I hope the life-size dinosaurs enjoyed being watched by real-live dinosaurs with bus passes.