Dear LPG,

We all have our treasured possessions.  Even my great granddaughter has a little stuffed teddy bear that she will cry for if her mother does not tuck it in beside her at bedtime, and she has only had eight months to decide that it has become intrinsic; although that eight months represents more than half of her little life so far. 

Most of the people who are likely to read messages left on this website have had at least sixty times as long to work out what they would not part with until they absolutely had to, and the western world’s section of the human race tend to do a lot of collecting during that time.

I recently was asked, if I had to emigrate tomorrow and could only keep one thing I owned, what I would take with me.  I found that to be a really hard question to answer.  I have a favourite dress that I would miss and then there is my favourite perfume (although I suppose that I could buy that when I arrived wherever I was off to).  I also have a doll that I bought when I went on holiday a long time ago and I would miss all the secrets that my mobile phone holds. 

I finally came to the decision that my mobile would be the best thing to keep, having got lost one afternoon not so long ago the collection of pictures and videos that it holds of my friends and family members, some of which are no longer with us here on earth.  The people are important but what they were wearing and the background reminds me of so much too.  The way our houses change over time, the outrageous outfit that someone was wearing during a particular event, what we were doing on the day (and saying, even if there is no video of the actual words) and how the people featured have change visually over the years are all contained in a snapshot or a few seconds of video taken on the day.  When I had the time to really consider, I have to say that if you know how to do more than just make a call with a mobile phone, and you could guarantee that you could still text, make calls and use the internet, and have unlimited memory so that it would never get too full of photographs, I think that this modern device would be chosen by many younger pensioners as well as most of the other people in the western world.

So, for me, I would choose my mobile phone now that I have had the time to really think about my answer, but all the thinking I had to do reminded me about just how lucky we all are that we have so many things to choose from in comparison with people in so many other parts of the world.  It also occurred to me that providence has given us the best part of a year to spend time with those things that we so often take for granted because under the ‘Old Normal’ rules, our goings and comings left us little time to really think about that question. 

But the ‘New Normal’ is coming and, regardless, we older people still make up the section of nearly every community which is least likely to be able to take such pictures on a mobile phone, let alone be able to find them when we want to look at them, so I would like to pose that same question to all readers in the hope that LPG might get a few more answers to post.   If you were asked what one thing you would take with you if you were emigrating never to return to your home, what would you choose?

Perhaps it is something to consider while the pandemic forces us to continue to be stuck at home…

LB, New Cross