Dear LPG,

I just wanted to send a message to all readers who have lost someone over the past couple of weeks. 

When all this started the overlying thing that everyone heard on the news was the statistics.  We are all so used to listening to the news and hearing numbers which don’t really mean a lot to us.  Invariably such numbers refer to things that are going on in other countries and other parts of the world.  The numbers are so large that they don’t really mean a lot to many of us.  Money and how many billions are being spent is usually the subject of such numbers and we listen as we get on with our daily lives, but this time it was different.

We listened and watched as we first heard about how many Chinese people were being killed by this virus, and then we started to hear about fatalities in other parts of the world, but there must have been many, like me who, only saw and heard lists of statistics which were still just numbers. 

At the time of writing this we are starting to hear of celebrities and public figures who are ill or who have died.  We hear about the numbers of people affected from our own neighbourhoods, and our own home towns, and it is getting a bit more real.  The news of the converted East London hospital and the key workers who have died trying to help have made it even more real for me, but it does not get any more real than when you learn of the person up the road or the friend of a friend who has gone.

Those phone calls that we were all told to make at the beginning of lock-down; the ones designed to keep us from getting depressed and keep us connected, are now beginning to be tinged with news of people we knew and thought would always be there.  People, friends and family members who are just gone and who, because of lock down, we can’t even pay respects to.  We thought that they would all be the pensioners and those at ‘high risk’ but no one knows who or when. 

In reality, for us older ones, losing friends is nothing new.  People leave us all the time, but just not in such large quantities as we are getting more and more used to these days.  We hear the news over the phone and can do nothing whatsoever about it.

So, I would like to remember all those statistics who have always been more than just numbers to us and hope that this little acknowledgement of their existence might help in some small way. 

FB, Honor Oak