Dear LPG,

I recently found an article that my uncle wrote down in 2006.  He never really got computer savvy and always preferred pen and paper, but he wrote quite a lot.  Like many he was interested in so many aspects of life and always had something to say on the subject, but saying was not enough for him and a diary was not his way, he preferred to write notes and lists.

It occurs to me that people write things down so often in their lives and so many of those writings get put in boxes to be discovered years later, while so few of us remember to put the date somewhere on what we write. 

I ended up with a lot of my Uncle’s writings and I suppose that I am the kind of person who wants to check through everything before deciding whether it really needs to be thrown away or kept.  He wrote quite a bit, and everything from notes and shopping lists, to unsent letters and articles.  It all got packed away and I acquired the box and put it in my spare room for a short while. 

It is surprising just how quickly time passes though, and it was not until finding myself with time on my hands and unable to get out of the house, that I decided to make going through that box one of my projects.  As you can imagine, there were a lot of memories and paragraphs that slowed my progress down as I stopped to smile at some of his ideas, notions and old photographs.   The really important thing is, though, that he never put pen to paper without scribbling the date somewhere on the document. He even adopted the habit of scribbling the date on the back of pictures.

I am a computer user, and I write quite a bit I suppose, but unlike my uncle I have not cultivated the habit of putting the date on what I type.  But then I realised that computers keep records.  Have you noticed that emails are always dated and, dates can be found on many of the webpages that we visit?  I also spend quite a lot of time writing letters and taking pictures, and I now realise that even pictures taken with a modern camera or a mobile phone have the date recorded on them.  I have to say that I was quite surprised to find that if you set your mobile phone up to do so, you can even keep a record of where your pictures were taken as well as when. 

There is also the advantage that writing the date down a few times a day keeps us aware of it in a world when the recent lock down and lack of routine forced many to lose track of it

So I would just like to say that putting the date on any piece of paper you take a pen to is not a bad thing.

DC, Bromley.