Dear LPG,

We all know that things can only get better but for now most of us older members of society continue to conduct our friendships over the phone for the most part.

I am a pensioner who lives with her pensioner mum and, in the knowledge that we older people are more susceptible to what is going on beyond our front gates, I try my best to make sure that we go no further than for a walk in the park down the road a couple of times a week.

If nothing else, the pandemic which we still find ourselves in the middle of after nearly a year, has shown us that the people we have elected to keep us on track have not done the best job in advising us, but they did get one thing right.  The advice to keep talking to our friends via the telephone and the internet that we have been, and continue to be offered by the government and all the televisions stations since the beginning of the whole episode has made a serious difference to the people who have taken it on board.

My mother is getting better at video calling, and she does have me to help but, for so many of her friends who are managing alone, the telephone has been the mainstay of everyday life for the best part of the last year.   I don’t think that our telephones have seen as much action as during the last months and it is a really good thing that most people pay for all their telephone calls in advance because, even though we also have the internet if we have mastered using it, I suspect that the vast majority of pensioners will have kept connected via all the telephone calls that being stuck at home for so long has forced us to make. 

It did occur to me though, that many of my mum’s friends who have only started really using their landlines more since the start of our need to talk that way, may still be paying for each call individually rather than paying for a ‘package’ which includes all the calls you make in advance, and it may well be worth having a word with your telephone service provider to make sure that you are not paying more than you need to.  Having talked to some of my mother’s friends about it there have been a couple who have found that they could be paying a bit less.  I found some internet information which is quite complicated but a telephone call to the company that you pay your bill to might make all the difference.  They will know how many calls you have made, if you could have paid less and if it is worth changing your package until the pandemic stops forcing us to keep in touch this way.

So I would like to suggest that those readers who have started to use the phone more during recent months’ bear this in mind.

I suspect that the telephones of the older citizens of the world have never worked quite so hard as they have over the past year.

HS, Southwark

HS shares the information she has found on the subject…

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