Dear LPG,

I have been looking around the internet and a little research has taught me that I am not a very average person because I have only ever lived in four homes all my life.  I have lived in the present one for the longest and leaving it is something that I hope I never have to do.

I mentioned not being average because apparently, the average person moves house eight times during a lifetime, but while I was allowing Google to help me work all that out I began to wonder why our homes are so important to us. 

I think that for most people home is the one place where they can kick their shoes off and walk around half dressed without having to worry about the consequences.  Having a place where you can do exactly what you want to is perhaps the most significant thing.  Over the years we fill it with exactly what we want even though our changing preferences often make for a really mixed up overall style, but that is what makes our homes individual I suppose. 

I think it is also my favourite place to be because of all the memories it holds.  I remember things that my children did and, like most people, the house bears the odd scar that makes that memory even more real; I still have a little dent in the back door where my son crashed his first bicycle and there are many unmarked scars, but I know what happened and where.  As we and our homes become more acquainted, work, friends, family and so many other variables often take over when it comes to keeping order.  The truth is that, while I am still happy to receive visitors after a quick tidy up, forty years of bringing up children who have now left and also left many of their belongings behind, buying all sorts of odd things, acquiring annual Christmas and birthday presents, all those odd objects we brought back from one holiday or another and all the new-fangled things that we just had to buy at the time but never ever used, have left our homes looking pretty chaotic.

I wonder if, like many of the friends I spent time on the phone to during our first brush with lockdown, you promised yourself that you were going to use that time to sort out every room.   Well it looks like we are all going to get another opportunity to do just that now that the government has locked us down again. 

This time I am going to try harder to make it count.  I am going for a pre-Christmas winter spring-clean just in case we are allowed a normal Christmas and, just in case we don’t, I am going to start with the room that provides the background when I am video calling my friends so that even if it only means that the backdrop looks better, I will have actually achieved something this time round.

  How about you…

ND, Mottingham.