It seems to me that physical challenges, mini adventures and acts of ‘derring do’ are no longer solely in the domain of young 20-somethings. My daughter’s reaction when I mentioned recently that I was looking for an opportunity to experience my first abseil was one of incredulity – why would her 60+ year old mother want to do such a thing when she could be relaxing in the garden with glass of wine!

Well, I have news for my daughter, and most other 20-40 year old ‘youngsters’ – I am by no means in the minority of over 50s who would rather be in the action than watching it.

According to some recent research, carried out by YouGov and Alliance & Leicester, the over 50s have activities like skydiving and mountain climbing on their to-do lists together with flying helicopters, scuba diving, 4 x 4 off-roading and performing on stage in front of a large audience.

And if, like me, you watched the London Marathon recently you will have seen a significant number of oldies taking up the endurance challenge. Apparently, almost half a million people of 50 or over have already crossed the finishing line of a marathon and another 1.6 million have run a long distance race.

By comparison, I have led a comparatively ‘safe’ existence. Although, since turning 50, I have experienced a couple of rather dramatic flights and landings in a hot air balloon, spent a few hours ‘hands on’ flying a glider and enjoyed a trip on a life boat in seas so rough that the life saving exercise had to be called off.

Anyone know of any good outside abseiling locations in or around London?

I guess we are all sick and tired of spam e mails - how do they know about my bodily deficiencies, lack of libido and need for a loan?

Over zealous filters are a problem. It is becoming increasingly difficult to communicate with large organisations, because their firewalls object to words in common useage; for example we can''t offer a free advert to an employer on our Over 50''s jobsite, because free is now considered a spam word. ''Without charge'' isn''t anywhere near as sexy - oops, can''t say that any more, can I ?

Those of us who have our filters fine tuned, to block everyone we don''t know from spamming our home PCs, are almost certainly missing out on some important e mails.

Anyway, I have found the answer - send people a letter. They get so few these days, they invariably respond. In fact, tell them you will accept an e mail response and Bingo! you are in their address book for future e mails.

"Look Dad, you may be over 50, but if you are going to run a web site you must have a Blog."
"What on earth is a Blog?" I asked.
"Mmmm, well, it''’ a sort of diary where you just jot down your thoughts and other people can read them."
"I see, a bit like Alastair Campbell - does that mean that I will make millions?"
"Er, no, we doubt it, he’s got interesting things to say, you’re just a boring Dad!"
Ouch! But that has to be a challenge, so the Old Codger''’s Blog is born!
Let''s start with this website. A lot of people have asked me why we called it Skilled People.com. Well it certainly wasn’t our first choice of name. "Not over the hill" sounded good, but we decided that it had the wrong connotations for Employers.
We then settled on Mature Skills, only to find that Mature is now considered a discriminatory word by the PC Brigade - what is the English language coming to?
Worse still, the spam filters were picking out mature as a porn word! If you don''t believe this, pop the word into a search engine, and be amazed at what some grannies get up to!