Britain Today

Discounts for dinosaurs. 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 life 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 wooly 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 O A P S, 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 O A P S 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%. 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 from 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 lands 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.