Dear LPG,

I am sure that most pensioners don’t get to have lived well over 60 years without meeting many people and doing many things that are left to fade into oblivion just because, it is inevitable that friends get pulled apart geographically or historically,  driving other people and friends to replace their importance in our lives.   This is not a bad thing; it is the natural way that we augment our friend base over the years. 

The other day I got an unexpected telephone call from a friend that I knew years ago.  We used to work together for a while but he left the job before me.   We had a long conversation which consisted of a bit of reminiscing and a lot of catching up with what work we went on to do, what happened to our then co-workers  and how our family lives had changed.  We were on the telephone for well over an hour and discovered that, after all that time, all the places we had been and all the things that we had experienced, neither of us had really moved very far away from the area where we both spent that time working. 

I am lucky I suppose because although I am considered elderly and live on my own I feel contented with my life. I spend quite a lot of my time out of the house still and am involved with volunteering in my attempt to make a difference, but for all that I got a real lift from that telephone call.  We have decided to make the time to meet up and my old workmate and I have embarked on a project to find another colleague from those days. 

It occurred to me that I would have missed out on all this nostalgic excitement had it not been for my friend’s forage into his old address book. 

In the recent past I have been in the same situation but I just put it back in the box after finding a scribbled name and telephone number on a scrap of paper.  Had my workmate done that we would have both missed out on so much reminiscing and our aim to find the third member of our group would have never got off the ground.

So, if you find yourself in a similar situation, wherever and wherever you find such a scrap of information; take the time to make the call.  Perhaps it will make no difference to your life at all but just think what could come out of it!

DL, Beckenham