When I look at a huge book full of clever words I think to myself ‘That is closed to me’, not because I won’t understand it, but because I simply wouldn’t have the time or patience to read it. When I hear a concert pianist or a Jazz musician I admire and fear them for their commitment and skill. In some small way Albert’s Band has it’s own allure, we’re a band, gigging in London, that sets us apart, it makes us part of a select group of people who take the time to get up there under the hot lights and sing about things we care about. Showing he world what we’ve rehearsed and put together and reveling in that marvelous discordant cheer that follows each song. I love it, we all do, and we’ll keep doing it.

So the website is another way of saying, we’re still here, we’re still playing. Being in a Rock band isn’t about glory, it’s about being in a rock band with your friends.

There are dating agencies and there are Bespoke matchmaking agencies but if you’re one of the beautiful people then you’re going to need something a bit special, a Luxury Introduction Agency or (and this sounds awful) a  Partner Headhunting Agency!

Up until a few weeks ago I’d never even heard of Professional Introduction Organizations, I thought that rich people just found it easy to find partners because, well they’re rich! But it seems that people are so busy earning the money to buy their luxurious lives that they don’t actually have time to live them, let alone share them with someone else. And there is the fact of course that introduction agencies find the right kind of person. I don’t mean blue-bloods necessarily but people who are also wealthy and therefore not spongers one might hope. Finding out about this subject I spoke the manager of one such agency: The Vida Consultancy and discovered that there is more to this business than meets the eye.

Running a Luxury Introduction Company is Hard Work!

Have you ever been to a party knowing that you can’t have fun because you’re driving home, or you don’t know anybody, maybe it’s a work function and you can’t relax? Well for Professional Matchmakers that’s an everyday occurrence it seems. You go to the parties in order to find new clients, either to use your agency or join the pool of immortals from which your clients can select a mate.

What do Bespoke Dating Services Provide?

Again, this is is a bit of a mystery and not something that was revealed to me by the people I spoke to. It’s nothing sinister of course, just very private and confidential. If you’re very wealthy, famous or press shy, you need to keep your love life under wraps as much as possible. The service you require has to be discrete and yet make you feel special. People who use a luxury dating service are often shy or perhaps a little embarrassed that their life and status has made this a necessity. So this is what they get. A secret service with a good chance of success because the profiling is done very carefully.

Psychological Matchmaking and Dating

Believe it or not these organizations use very modern thinking, they psychologically profile their clients and potential partners very carefully leaving as little as possible to chance. If you’re paying a lot of money for a service you don’t want to find yourself having dinner with an ugly psychotic with whom you don’t have a thing in common. It’s not like speed dating or internet dating, or even the personal ads in the Guardian, it’s scientific pairing.

Where do you Find Luxury Matchmaking Services?

Word of mouth, or the internet. They’re not going to be advertising on billboards or yellow pages that’s for sure. This is the reason that many people including myself hadn’t even heard of Exclusive Introduction Agencies until now, we sort of knew they existed but didn’t really think we’d ever encounter one unless we won the lottery.

The Riverhill Yeti

Riverhill Himalayan Gardens my absolute Favorite Place to Visit in Sevenoaks

If you thought you’ve tried all the best days out in Kent think again and try Riverhill Himalayan Gardens  near Sevenoaks. It is a fantastic place for a family day out. Riverhill Gardens and house has been home to the Rogers Family for over 160 years and boasts some of the best views and most beautiful flowers and plants in Kent. The house itself is not open to the public as it is still a family home but that is not the main attraction of this charming day out. Riverhill, as the name suggests follows the side of a steep wooded valley which has been planted with Himalayan plants and trees giving it a trully unique feel. Wonderful blooms of rhododendrons in pinks and whites light up the garden in spring together with imposing trees such as cedars and a magnificent Wellingtonia. In spring the woods are carpetted in spectacular bluebells which take your breath away as they light up the forest floor amongst the young saplings.  However, even this spectacular display is the true magic of the place, that lies in the attitude of its owners. Riverhill is a very laid back attraction. When I first visited the site three or four years ago very little had been done to make it into an attraction. The gardens were largely as they would have been for the family to enjoy and the house was only open for a few months in the summer. Recently the project has been transformed thanks to the work of Sarah Rogers and her husband. There is now a fully functioning coffee shop which is easily as good as any high street chain, a wonderful children’s playground with a treehouse set amongst  chestnuts, a maze designed by an award-winning team and best of all a Yeti! The Riverhill team have let loose a Yeti in their garden providing a magical encounter for any children who see it. My kids have met the Yeti on several occasions and he always gives them a wave and even allowed my daughter to present him with a bluebell.

I was born in the seventies and one of my key occupations as a child was den-building. At riverhill they have set aside part of the woods for exactly this activity. Whilst you’re waiting for the Yeti to appear you can show your kids just how good you were at den building. Lots of sticks have been left ar0und and you’ll already see the efforts of other parents who have been trying to out do eachother. This is a simply unmissable family day out in Sevenoaks, my family and I go at least once a month and sometimes once a week! There are no queues, no over the top attractions and plastic dinosaurs, it’s just good old fashioned fun. Many activities take place at the gardens including treasure hunts, craft workshops, art exhibitions, face painting, scavenger hunts and much more. Riverhill is number one amongst my places to visit in Sevenoaks and indeed Kent because it’s affordable, easy, fun and allows me to spend time with the family without pressure.

Riverhill Flowers

I grew up in the 1970′s and 80′s, well actually that’s not true.  It would be more accurate to say that I did not grow up during that time, I had a very long and very childish childhood and I’m a great deal better for it. When did childhood change? Where did it go? Has it changed so much or are we merely more aware of the world than we were back then and seeing all the bad stuff we lose sight of the good things about children in the UK? I enjoyed being silly, climbing trees, bike rides, Bagpuss, catapults, mud fights, dens, top trumps and matchbox cars among other things.  Yes I hated school, yes I wanted to be a grown up but the big difference between me at that age and a child today is that I knew I was a child and that children and adults were separate entities. Today the line is so blurred it’s hard to tell which is which once a child gets past about twelve years old in terms of attitude and attire that is. Kids want to grow up because everything they do is grown up. The video games they play are grown up, all the other characters are grown ups, the books are grown up and deal with angst and pain and loss, even the attitudes to sex are so liberal that they lose their mystery and wonder.

I played at being grown up but I knew I wasn’t one!

We played batman and robin, cowboys and Indians, Star Wars and so on but we played as a group and although the characters were adults we made them childish.  In a video game the characters are not childish, they’re grown up, they say grown up things and they look grown up … they’re not your peers, even if your peers are controlling them.

Childhood has not been lost to Video Games

Despite what I’ve said it would be very naive to blame video games for destroying childhood. That’s just scapegoating something and missing the point. It is parents who shape children and parents these days are controlled by the media more than ever before.  Instead of guardians, parents are now super-competitive, pedophile hunting machines that have often given up a cut-throat career to bring up children and therefore do so using the same skills. Children are watched constantly, pampered and protected like little glass figurines with no independent capabilities of their own because the Daily Mail has told them that every stranger is a child molester and failure at school means failure as a parent.  So these mini-humans are turned out into the world with no legacy of a proper childhood, instead they have a memory of extra tuition, playing six different instruments and french lessons aged six.

Should we Blame Celebrity Culture for the loss of Childhood?

It might even be that in this world where everyone thinks they’ll be a millionaire next year or that anyone be a celebrity, the average parent feels like a failure and must therefore turn their children into little Justin Biebers or Donald Trumps. The media has made most of us feel very  inadequate and insecure. As a result we’re trying to make the most of our lives, to enjoy ourselves, be ambitious and often this happens at the expense of our children who are shacked up with daycare or babysitters whilst we strive for self worth and self improvement.

There is no answer, just a hope for balance

It is all very well for me to say this. My mother was a full time mum and didn’t work which meant that I was lucky enough to have plenty of attention, probably too much. Also, being the youngest of five, my mother was too busy to be paranoid, in fact she was pretty laid back and I had a lot of freedom. But even when I was a boy there were child molesters, and unemployment and the world was just as horrible as it is now,  I guess the monsters didn’t get me and I fell off things, into rivers, got cut, bruised, bashed, broken and even smacked but I came out the other side with a healthy respect for life, a broad imagination and left behind a childhood which I now sorely miss. Ultimately the most important thing was that I respected my elders, I gave em hell but I knew they were in charge and that they were cleverer than me. They had money and cars and houses, I needed them. They also dished out discipline and when I was bad I was punished. Now I know the difference between right and wrong.  A lot of children today are so protected by the weakening of the education system and their own self-empowerment through the American obsession with suing everybody and everything instead of working for money that they will think they’re already grown ups because nobody can control them without being accused of cruelty and Victorian values! To my mind the only way to have a proper childhood is to realise that you are ‘a child’ and not an adult!

Sevenoaks Hairdressers proliferate like no other business in the town. The population of Sevenoaks is roughly 18,500 people. It is a safe bet that most of those people have hair (apologies to those who do not) and of those people most are likely to want it cut from time to time, probably by someone else namely a hairdresser or barber. Let us say for the sake of argument that the average price of a haircut is around £25, taking into account that female haircutting is vastly more expensive than its male equivalent. Allowing for the fact that, being so close to London, many of the Sevenoaks residents will get their hair cut elswhere or in the capital, there are also those who have a home visit from a haidresser we’re left with a significantly diminished figure for people who actually use local hairdressers. Being very generous with the numbers, let us say that 15,000 Sevenoaks residents have their hair cut in the town and that on average they require is service once every two months. Six haicuts per year £150 x 15000 that’s £2,225,000 worth of haircuts. A fair chunk of cash you might think? Well think again. To rent a shop Sevenoaks high street you’ll be expected to pay somewhere in the region of £30 000 per year, less if you’re elsewhere in the town but it’s still going to cost a few thousand. Here’s the crazy part; in Sevenoaks today there are over twenty hairdressers! Twenty hairdressers for 15,000 people! If the money were evenly spread, which it is not, each salon would recieve around £111,250 each per annum, still quite a lot of money. However if you consider that a hairdressing salon has a number of employees, often independent contractors who pay for a chair and take their money out of the business that money goes down again.  It seems to me that these figures just don’t add up and that this is an excessive number of shops for such a small population.

How does a Sevenoaks Hairdresser Cut it?

The simple answer is, I don’t know! It seems incredible that so many survive and yet they do, in fact they are multiplying. In the last six months two more at least have appeared and maybe more that I haven’t seen. It is not as if there is nowhere to get your hair cut for miles around, as many of the surrounding villages all have their fair share of salons and barbers. So what’s going on? In these times of recession you would expect to see a luxury outfit like a hair salon take a hit, but it seems not. Walking down the high street I see many shops have closed or changed hands in the last two years but somehow hairdressers are surving. Good on them I say! Sevenoaks Hairdressers, prove that style is still more important than economics!

It occurred to me on the way home from work that I’m one of those people who finds money. I spend it much faster of course but there you go. I’m not talking about the odd fifty pence either, I once found close to eighty pounds in four or five locations on a night out in London.  But I wonder how much of the world’s GDP is lost every day? Down the back of the sofa, on the beach, in the gutter or the back of a taxi and in addition to that, how much of  it is found by other people?  Who cares? You’d be surprised who does. I can feel my own blood getting up just thinking about it.

How about a ‘Did You Find Some Money?’ Website?

So, as I walked along I turned this thought over in my mind. What if you built a website and invited people who found money to anonymously put in the amounts they found. Then have a separate total for people who lost money too. The two numbers would be interesting don’t you think? What’s the betting that the ‘Found’ Column is bigger than the ‘Lost’ column? I’d say that it is more likely because people who’ve found money are more likely to talk about it than those who’ve lost it. If it’s only a small amount they may not even know they lost it. However as the values change I’ll bet you’d see the opposite. Someone’s lost a large amount of money, they’re going to be all over that site to see if  someone’s found it. How infuriating if they see the amount but have no info about where it was found or who found it! Suddenly you’ve got animosity, curiosity and envy, swirling around over these seemingly meaningless events. Then you’ll get people lying, saying they found a million, or someone desperate for cash pretending they lost some. I’d bet a site like this would reveal some interesting insights into human behavior.

You Found Some Money, and I Made Some! 

Finally I wondered if you could monetize this idea. After all  site hits, page views, unique visitors, it’s all valuable stuff. I wonder what sort of adverts you’d get from Adsense on a site like that?  Think about the demographic or geographic information you could gather. Perhaps you could ask the visitors a very broad geographical question like what their nearest city is, or how far they live from a certain place or whatever. Before long you’ve got the ‘Found Some Money’ hot-spots and the Holy Grail would be the place where statistically you’re most likely to find some cash. What happens next? A new gold rush? Settlers moving in? People lining the streets waiting for the local losers to drop their cash. But wait! If this is the place where you’re most likely to find money, then conversely it must be the place where you’re most likely to lose it! A neutral zone where fate keeps you just ticking over!

Where would the ‘Find Some Money’ Capital be?

Theoretically it could be anywhere … but my guess is that if you find some money, and indeed if you lost some, you’re most likely to be in Vegas.

Welcome to Tom-Radford.com.  This is the first blog of my new site and I’m writing it by way of an introduction to myself and everything I do.

A Country Lad

I was born in the New Forest where I grew up. I went to school in Southampton in Hampshire, attended Brockenhurst College and then later went onto the University of Glasgow where I achieved a BSC(hons) in Geography.

Creative? IT? Why not do Both?

Since then I’ve been working in London as an IT support engineer and trying my hand at any number of creative projects from film making to writing books to poems, songs, illustration, photography and much more.  On this site I will display examples of my work and updates about my new Web Analysis and Search Marketing Company ‘Market Words’.

Right then… we’re off!