Dear readers,

I am not sure when LPG will get round to printing my message if at all, but it occurs to me that I, like nearly every pensioner in the country, and in fact in the world, am one of the people who have been forced to spend the best part of the last year at home with so much extra time on our hands that we should now all have homes which are in perfect order. 

There was no shortage of information suggesting ways to spend our enforced lack of mobility and, at the beginning of the experience, one of the things that made the news apart from the statistics surrounding the political, financial and physical state of the nation, were the many suggestions offered as to what we should do with all the spare time we had on our hands. 

Pretty close to the top of nearly all the lists I read online, or saw on the television, was the opportunity that we all had to give our homes a little love and a bit of a spring clean and, with the best of intentions, I woke up every day deciding to get started on a sorting and cleaning session, but ended each of them dusting a bit but putting the serious stuff off until tomorrow.  Then after about three months of sitting around, the news came that we had to be careful but being stuck at home was all over.   At that point I took a good look at my house and I have to admit that very little had changed.

I have to say that I, after some 4 months of having nothing better to do, was truly ashamed of my lack of achievement and I know that I am not alone but I have a new strategy which I would like to share.  Someone told me that the problem is the size of the task and breaking it down is the secret. 

I know that for some this will be old news but for so many of us the procrastination was twofold…

Firstly, there was the feeling that lockdown was never going to end, so there was no real rush to get started, and there has always been the problem that it is such a mammoth task that we often just did not know where to begin

But, with the hint that this will go on well into the New Year for many of us,  I really want to share my where to begin idea today.

Someone told me that the first thing to do is make a list of all the drawers, cupboards, nooks and crannies in your home, room by room, and find one hour of your daily, weekly or even monthly routine to tackle just one draw at a time. I have now got into the swing of it and each Sunday afternoon I go down the list and take a look behind one place which contains some of my history.

I can’t say that the contents of even one of my home’s hiding places gets completely overhauled each week, and I have worked out that ‘lockdown or not’, I will have to treat this habit in the same way as the workers that paint Edinburgh’s Forth Bridge treat that job, but there is something quite uplifting about being able to put a tick in each drawer’s corresponding ‘DONE’ column and seeing the line of ticks grow as the weeks go by…

 OL, Sydenham