Dear LPG,

Today I would like to talk about something so many younger people never appear to have enough of, yet which so many of the older people in this world might agree that they need more of.

I am talking about that age old commodity time.  As we get older, when the youngsters come to visit, they are often talking about what they are going to do after they leave you, and it is included in the sentence they deliver your way, while they are still taking off their coat.

 I don’t know about anyone else but everything I do these days seems to take longer, and I have to wonder how I fitted everything in when I had a young family. 

When I was a mum with small children, doing the washing was a case of spending at least three hours on a Saturday afternoon standing over a twin tub, transferring the washing from the washer to the spin dryer, adding the rinse-water to each and every spin-cycle before putting the clothes on the line; and in those days having a twin tub was tantamount to having a seriously ‘mod-con’. So many more clothes had to be ironed too, drip dry shirts were a bit of a fallacy and there were no’ iron it while It is on a hanger’ gismos back then.   There were not so many cars and people shopped each evening on the way home from work instead of once a week or once a month.  We really cooked dinner every night without it being delivered ready-made, take-away style or ready to cook.  We wrote letters and posted them, and expected more in the post than the odd bill.

 Having a computer in your home was practically unheard of.    There would be the weekly or monthly visits to pay the Gas, Electricity and phone bills because ‘direct debit and forget It’ was not so available and there were no electricity keys in those days, and the phone box at the end of the street was well used with a queue of people often waiting outside.  Sundays were also a day to catch up and, without all the grocery shops open, we spent more time talking to the other members of our families, visiting them and sharing dinner at the dining table.  Surely I cannot be the only lady of that era who remembers life that way.

 I think that it is interesting to note that, with all the wonderful inventions that have come into our lives specifically to save time through the years, the young mums and dads of the 21^st century seem to have less time than ever when they come to visit us older people. 

AK, Bellingham

For those who need a memory jogger AK has found a video which shows how one used a twin tub to give those who don’t remember or have never had the pleasure an extremely quick version of how long it all took…

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