We work on three conventions at a time - last year's this year's and the one for next year

We work on three conventions at a time - last year's, this year's and the one for next year. At the moment, about half my time is spent organising conventions. The facilities have to be really good - it's a bad idea to start with a miserable press corps.What is a typical day like?I arrive at the office at 8.15am and spend an hour doing errands and working on my in-tray. With outside venues, you need to have a back-up plan in case it rains Finally, you must provide for about 50 journalists. The host country must also be able to organise things and understand the convention's aims and objectives Weather is another big factor. I also have to find out how to get the delegates there and back quickly.

Again this year I wanted it to be somewhere on the tourist map.What are the challenges of your job?Getting the destination right. We start looking for a venue three years before a convention - it needs to have exhibition space to seat up to 18,000 people and be close enough to hotels and other facilities Last year, it was Playa de Las Americas in Tenerife. How long have you been doing your job? Eight years but I have been in PR for about 13 years and have worked as a convention organiser for 30. What does being a convention organiser involve?Recently, I've been organising this week's Abta convention in Cairns. After the poor showing in the last European elections, long gilt yields rose as buyers saw the result as reducing the chance of Emu membership but it was not enough to make much of a difference to annuities.Even though the Minimum Funding Requirement for pension funds is likely to keep demand for long gilts high, yields as low as this do not look attractive.For now, I would avoid Government stocks altogether and look elsewhere for the generation of income.Brian Tora is the Chairman of the Greig Middleton Investment Strategy Committee.

Pension funds - or the actuaries who govern them - are reluctant to purchase higher-yielding European government paper because of the currency risk If we were part of Emu they may take a different view The uncertainty is not helping gilts either. But there's no guarantee it will be adopted and it will be of little comfort to those who have to buy an annuity.Will this improve? It might if we enter the single European currency. These days, if you reach 75 you can expect a good decade of spending your pension. But if you are forced into buying an annuity at a time when yields are low your quality of life will be hit.An amendment to the Welfare Reform and Pensions Bill, currently inching through Parliament, aims to abandon the age limit. However, like the original retirement age of 65, age 75 was fixed when life expectancy was a good deal less than now. Indeed you have to purchase one with your present pension when you reach 75.

Such disparities are pretty well unheard of.The trouble is that many people buy an annuity once they retire. At the very long end, the yield to redemption is now only 4.1 per cent, fully two percentage points lower than the equivalent US bond and around 150 basis points less than 30-year German government paper. Governments are not keen to issue new debt, so there's an imbalance in supply and demand.The effect has been to push long yields lower. Insurance companies and pension funds like to tuck these long bonds away to ensure that their assets match their liabilities And this is where the problem arises. Good news for depositors but not necessarily for those who have to buy an annuity. The level of annuity rates is largely determined by yields at the longer end of the Government securities market. Certainly Stir, the Short Term Interest Rate future, is suggesting that the hawks are in control and short-term rates will be marching progressively higher in the next few months.