Dear LPG,

I was googling recently and found a website which made me realise just how much we let our lives be ruled by numbers.    When really young it falls to your mother or father figure to teach you the basics.  I vaguely remember using those ten little digits to count stairs, fingers, toes, chips on my dinner plate, eyes, members of the family and lots more until I had them permanently planted in my head.  At school I think that from a ‘number’ point of view, and ignoring all the other many aspects of life you learn about just for a moment, most of us become good at one subject or another but each of us gravitates towards being able to use either language or numbers with more ease than the alternative.

I always worked with numbers, let’s be honest, there are only ten to learn as opposed to the 26 letters of the alphabet and I found it easier to either get a right or wrong answer once I had learned the basic four principles and my times tables.  I felt that there was always an element of discrepancy mixed up with an English mark, which depended on how the teacher felt on the day of marking (once spelling was mastered) when it came to English Homework and exams.

Then when we get to dealing with the realities of adulthood we spend our time remembering numbers; or at least having them written down and having to quote them to prove our identity.  There is our national insurance number, passport number, work staff number, Bank account number, telephone number, house number, driving licence number, pin numbers and many others, some of which have letters all mixed in.

Then there are the numbers which dictate our age and the year that we were born, and limit our ability to do things like vote and drive.  Did you ever get to the front of a night club, or cinema queue where being a certain age was used as the measure to work out if you could enter, and like me, bump the number up a bit without being able to work out the corresponding year of birth to give?

Back then there were so many things that I was too young to do but gradually, and before you know it, you become too old if you let public opinion get to you.

Please remember that when you get to this side of the age-limit dictate your opinion has to be more important than that of your children, although perhaps it might be worth listening to the odd professional as long as you are satisfied that the advice they are giving makes sense.

I have written so much and strayed from where I started this message; the website which measurers the average amount of time the average man, or lady, in the UK spends on those activities in which we all indulge, measured in days.  It makes interesting reading…

   OH, Honor Oak

OH left the following link…

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LPG found an American equivalent…

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