life tips for my children by Roger Frost

Thoughts of an old git recorded here to get them off my OCD kind of mind. I find many of them useful and hope you do too. I think they are mostly mine, as they were curated from my head, but that’s not the point anyway. Enjoy. Use.

1. To buy one tube of toothpaste is to be pessimistic about one’s own shelf life. Buy one or two extra items of toothpaste; longlife milk, bake-yourself ciabatta and other items on your shopping list.
2. Sorry about leaving my remaining money to erectile dysfunction research. That wasn’t a particular issue for me and your mum, but some charities I had a soft spot for.
3. Get a professional-quality portrait photo taken in your 20s,30s or 40s and use these hereon forever.
4. Write your obituary – firstly because you probably have the most information, secondly because it’ll encourage you to do life better than you might.
5. Don’t be the first person to join a social network. Don’t be the first to have an email address (I was and waited years for email to be useful).
6. When you renew your 10-year passport, aim to look as old as possible on your photo. For example, if hair loss is ongoing, shave your head for the photo. This will minimise how much you’ve changed.
7. When you show your passport to officials as you travel, don’t expect them to be impressed with your collection of stamps. Saying “Loook!” fails and a Hawaii stamp or one from Jamaica doesn’t work here. To raise an eyebrow you’d need stamps from Syria or Afghanistan or Kurdistan.
8. Don’t wonder as I do why receptionists have no sense of your humour. For example, the NHS dental receptionist said “I’m sorry the earliest appointment I can offer is three months away” so I said, “Thank you, it’s OK … that’s better than a kick in the teeth.”
9. If you want success with IT, use more than one platform. When you’ve a gadget that works with an app, try it with both IOS and Android as one of these will work better. Likewise use the gadget with Windows and OSX versions and you’ll be surprised.
10. If you think online banking, shopping and registration is not for you reflect on how many years you’ve left to live. If that’s less than say 5 years carry-on ignoring it as you’ll have few issues coping with life. Beyond that time, I doubt that.
11. When you get a new computer, pause before stuffing it with software. Consider using a new machine for most used apps and your old machine for less used apps.
12. Use the same password pattern for your various online accounts: eg 666Banana^^^ and 555Apple%%%. Notice the choice of symbol and number key and the character count of the fruit. You can write shopping passwords in a book; email passwords under the desk and banking passwords on the top of a door.
13. Don’t carry a gun or knife or baseball bat or chair-leg, however harmless it may be. Don’t wear a backpack and appear to be fleeing or jumping over underground station turnstiles. Also know that security people have heard every joke ever made: don’t ever joke with them.
14. If you find yourself short of cash and need work beyond the age of 86 apply for work in asbestos removal as the odds on it affecting you are trivial.
15. Aim to meet all your friends often to stop them noticing that you’re getting on a bit.
16. If you’re over 60 and you’re asked your age, tell them you’re ten years older than you are. If someone questions whether you’re actually that age, point to your hair or feign back pain or ask them if you can use their loo urgently.
17. Apologies for these: You’re getting old when you find that lollipop ladies make you cross or your chairlift drives you up the wall. Remember that people who steal your antidepressant pills aren’t happy people.
18. It’s upsetting when people steal your stuff so make that hard to do or erase your misfortunes from memory.
19. Take a photo of the box, the serial number panel and power rating sticker on home appliances. Keep them in a photo album for when you need to buy spares or report a loss.
20. Google knows: search for photos by their content not their filename. There’s no need to change the filenames of photos from say IMGxxx.jpg – instead put them into folders or albums. Label your folders or albums so “2020 – Italy – “. Putting the year at the start helps get a sense of where and when you’ve been.
21. Measure every room and alcove and floor area in the house in case you’re browsing a junk shop or IKEA or both. As I write this, the app Magicplan and the web app Sketchup are useful destinations for this information. Make photos, floor plans and accurate measurements for reference.
22. Prior to death, write an estate agent’s brochure as well as a service manual for your home
23. When you buy socks, buy a dozen pairs of the same kind as one sock will wear faster than the other one. When you buy gloves, buy two or more identical pairs to cope with an imminent lost glove.
24. Paint every room the same colour and use the same curtains in each. If you paint some other colours, write this on the tin or take a photo of it or write it somewhere permanent in the room (eg on a tag on a radiator).
25. If you like a crockery set, buy a spare set before the manufacture makes their design obsolete. (If you buy two sets, decide on whether you’re being optimistic or pessimistic. If you buy one set ask yourself why you don’t like the set enough to buy two).
26. Clean the house with microfibre cloths – they’re effective and even environmentally friendly with just spit on them. Use something disposable for the bathroom.
27. Floor cleaner and carpet cleaner liquids are the most powerful cleaners. Use them to clean a greasy cooker and items that get really messy. Thin or any liquid bleach is excellent for whitening coffee cups, enamel saucepans, black grout in the shower, black silicone round the bath and the loo pan. Bleach is only 1% to 5% bleach – you can buy 20% which works when 5% does not.
28. Don’t add water to whisky. Ask yourself what’s the point of distilling it. Ask also whether distilling and thus boiling it would have damaged its flavour.
29. Yellowed white plastic items can be restored to white in a polythene bag – covered with strong liquid hydrogen peroxide and sunlight or a bright LED light.
30. Descaling liquid works when it’s hot and hardly at all when it’s not. But it ruins chrome plated items with excessive contact. Formic acid and hydrochloric acids work best.
31. Don’t run with scissors. Don’t walk with a knife or sharp item and especially don’t have them on you when you’re up a ladder. Put knives in a dishwasher pointing downwards.
32. If you really care for manufacturer’s lifetime guarantees, keep them with your will and personal effects.
33. Don’t buy a second hand vacuum cleaner from a car boot sale. You should wonder about the reason someone would sell such a thing. Equally, don’t be the first to buy an electric car or any innovation.
34. Do waste the time of cold calling scammers by pressing button ‘one’ to speak to an agent. Later in the call you might give them tips on how to make their scam story more convincing. Don’t swear at them in case they really are the police station phoning about your car seen speeding. Feign being a dithering old person and give the caller a different card number each time you repeat it. Do ask a spam caller if their mother knows what job they do.
35. Never wear a hat or carry an umbrella unless you don’t intend to leave it somewhere.
36. When you buy a printer, old or new, choose a model that has a huge market for sale on ebay. The price of consumables and the availability of third-party refills is a sign of a good value printer. That said I’m impressed with my HP Instant ink subscription.
37. If you have a phD, don’t use the ‘Dr’ prefix in your email signature else you’ll get more contempt and pity than jealousy. Do ensure that ‘Dr’ is used on your Costa card, Nandos card; library ticket, travelcard and passport. Don’t use the prefix ‘Dr’ when you reach the age when your memory fails you – it as totally devalues the thing.
38. If you can’t cook, do maths or use a computer program well, don’t claim the status of being ‘xyz-illiterate’. You wouldn’t boast about being unable to read would you? If you think you’re clever, teach yourself what you don’t know.
39. Get a battery-tester – you’ll save loads of easily-wasted batteries. Don’t use rechargeable batteries in things you come to need in a hurry.
40. There are now 50 weeks in a year. I discovered that when I found myself in the East without food during Chinese new year and nothing was open. Depending on where you live, the missing two weeks are due to Xmas or Chinese new year.
41. Don’t discuss your health for more than five minutes. One exception is if you only have minutes to live and need to say what led to this.
42. To cook porridge or Indian-style rice you need to know that 1 cup of rice (or porridge) absorbs 2 cups of hot water. Heat this in a bowl to microwave till it boils and then leave it. The rice will be ready in 12 minutes, the porridge in 3 minutes. Brown rice doesn’t work here – I don’t even think it’s nice. If you’re wanting rice colours, add two drops of yellow and red colouring to the cooked rice, leave for a few moments and then fold the colours in with the white rice.
43. Microwave quickies: freshen up one day old bread roll – 10 seconds in the microwave. Soften ice cream or butter – 10 seconds. Warm up a cold coffee – 60 seconds. Melt chocolate – 30 seconds at a time with stirring.
44. I claim exclusive rights to the following discoveries, made long before anyone I knew at the time. a) Ciabatta – a tooth breaking form of bread (1989 – Hackney M&S); b) Madonna – pop star (1986 – on The Tube, Channel 4) c) Turkish Delight – a not covered in chocolate sweet (1983 – North Cyprus). I made no further discoveries from the 1990’s onwards.
45. We must live in the world as it is. Do limit the number of times you use ‘WTF’ to 20 per day. And do sometimes compliment the capable but less gifted others. Share the love not the arrogance or just remember that less-gifted others have made your career easier.
46. Learn how to make greek yoghurt, feta, halloumi and mozzarella cheeses and realise how un-special these products are. Also learn the difference between sour cream, creme fraiche and fromage frais and you’ll know more about these than most people on this planet.