Dear LPG,

I bet that something similar to this experience has happened to all of us, young and old, while living through these times we are all a part of at the moment, but it got me thinking about a story with a moral that I started to write down ages ago and recently found.

Please don’t ask how many years ago, but I decided to write something that I felt LPG readers needed to hear at one point, and I was quite impressed with myself when I had finished the message.   Then I was distracted by a telephone call.    I feel that I have learned enough about how computers work to know that they have fail-safe mechanisms in place to deal with the things that we sometimes forget to do in the heat of the odd situation and, in spite of what they can do, I am sure that I did press the ‘save’ icon at the top of the screen before getting into a rather lengthy conversation with an old friend.

By the time we had finished our chat the computer's screen saver was the only thing to be seen but I knew, being computer savvy, that all I had to do is touch the mouse pad to get all my writings to reappear on the screen.

I remember moving on as I decided to work on a bit of maths which involved my getting into a spread-sheet and I was soon involved with that.

Later in the day I decided to send my LPG message but when I went to the computer and tried to find it, it was nowhere to be seen and I was heartbroken.   For those who don’t use their computers to write documents, it is rather like discovering that you dropped a stitch ten rows ago when knitting, or that you have forgotten to add the salt after you have finished boiling the potatoes.

I spent lots of time trying to find my work without success, but while I found the prospect of starting again really upsetting.  I had a bit of a think about it…

It was not vital to send it; I could have put it down to experience and got on with my life, but I had put so much effort into it that it really upset me to have lost all that work. 

I finally decided to start again, and once I had lost all the anguish at the prospect, starting again was easier than I thought It would be because, once I got back into it the ideas came back to me almost immediately.

We all know that modern computers save your work automatically now but in spite of that I was so sure that I had saved my letter. 

In the light of all that the world has experienced in the past few months, and that all we people of the world have yet to experience, I can now see the similarities between my computer and the state that this virus has left us in.

I think that my little story offers a variation on the theme of so many lives and the experiences of so many people in this world at this time.

The really fundamental moral is: -no matter what we were doing when we were first interrupted by coronavirus, and how detailed the project we were working on, we will all be lamenting that lost part of our lives, but even though we may have lost the bit we have done so far, the seed is still there and, while there is no rush, the sooner we get started again, the sooner we will finish again.

RM, Greenwich