Puffbox

You may well have missed the UK’s first Day For Older People – called, extraordinarily, ‘generationXperience’ – on Monday just past. Could they possibly have come up with a less appropriate label?

I initially thought it was a reference to ‘generation X’ – normally taken to be people born in the late 60s or 70s. (Unless we’re officially considered ‘older people’ these days? I ran in a 10k at the weekend where the ‘veterans’ category began at age 35.) Then I thought it might be a Microsoft promotional campaign, accepting that many people are still choosing XP over Vista on new machines.

Turns out it’s actually a government campaign led by DWP, with a few pages on Directgov and a blog at wordpress.com, hiding behind its own domain. When I first picked up on it, the site was down, making me wonder if it had been deleted the day after the event… thankfully they aren’t that stupid. But if we’re all supposed to be marking a national day for this, shouldn’t there be more than two items, one of which is a ‘hello world’ effort? If the big day didn’t even set DWP’s Older People and Ageing Society Division’s creative juices flowing, how could it possibly have stirred the rest of us?

On the bright side – the two-way communication sentiments are encouraging, it’s good to put a human face on it all, and it’s intriguing to see it hosted (for free) at wordpress.com when DWP had its own WordPress installation(s) in-house pre-reshuffle. I guess we have to give it time.