Dear LPG,

I know that it is all still a bit premature at the moment, but I just want to appeal to those readers who are also members of our local clubs, day centres, swimming groups, exercise classes, Churches and all the other institutions which ceased during this pandemic of ours. 

I started attending one of the clubs that I have visited every week since I discovered it and got involved some four years ago when my then new state of retirement was getting me down. I found a local lunch club and I can remember the first day I attended.  As I suspect most people do, I found walking in for the first time really daunting but, after a few months of weekly visits, I made some really important new friends and learned a bit about the administrators that keep the whole operation going.  As with every club the, administrators have their ups and downs while running it and some of what happened between them filtered down to the members that just visit each week; some finding it something to gossip about while others accept it as one of the more disappointing aspects of attending such a club.

Then came Coronavirus and the total and sudden shut down of many companies, shops and every social club or group on the planet, and while we all learned a lot about keeping in touch with our friends with the help of the telephone and Zoom if we were lucky, all those administration problems stopped being a talking point.

Now, if you can read between the lines of the Government’s ever-changing mixed messages about what we are and are not allowed to do, we are being told that, with restrictions in place, it won’t be long before we can get together again, but our club’s drop in numbers are going to be the first thing that we notice.

I suppose some members will still have worries about getting back out there, and some will be quite comfortable catching up with their friends on the phone and computers while avoiding the advancing winter weather, but when we do manage to get out there again, I wonder just how many of those clubs will join the statistics of establishments that have closed down for good.

I am writing my message in late October when we are all getting used to the three-tier geography of our country and, in the second and third wave society we find ourselves in, everything is, yet again, up in the air for so many shops, business and social groups, Churches and charities and it occurs to me that the people who visit lunch clubs and social clubs think of themselves as not vital, but the number of people that attend such clubs are the statistics that make them work and financially possible.  I suppose that I am talking about the ones that are not run by the local authority; the ones that have been set up by small groups of people who have often spent years getting them established.

I am pretty sure that, when referring to a life without Covid-19 knocking at the front door, I am talking about a time, months into the future, when everyone will have forgotten what life used to be like, but as boring and unmissed as conversations about the politics and administration of such clubs are, it will be very easy to not bother to go back. 

So, when we do finally get the go ahead and the powers that be allow us to get back to our long-forgotten daily routines, can I make an appeal to all the members of such clubs not to decide not to go back.  They are going to need their members all the more if only to make up the numbers because without members there will not be a club.

QV, Forest Hill.