Dear LPG,

I am wondering if I am the only pensioner, or indeed person in the UK, who feels this way…

It has been over a year now since we first learned the true meaning of the word ‘lockdown’.  When it all started I think that the country was more worried about the pandemic and keeping safe, and most people felt that a few weeks at home would not be that bad.

Even though I am a pensioner and not tied down with work every weekday, I thought it would be refreshing to have a bit of an ‘at-home’ holiday.  One of the two major messages that our government offered us via our televisions and radios was that we should do all those jobs around the house that get forgotten because of the need that so many of us social animals have to get out and about every day, and I for one had plans to go through the whole house, but after a couple of weeks I know that the pandemic statistics and solitude began to dampen enthusiasm for the lockdown that I thought would be positive in some ways.

I know that I am not the only pensioner to have felt this way and I suspect that many people found themselves not doing all the things that they thought that all that time at home would leave them the opportunity to achieve. 

I don’t think I am alone in thinking that the novelty for sorting things out and spring cleaning wore off quite quickly and, although we are in our third UK lockdown now they all seem to have merged into a one-year long period of house arrest from my point of view.

The government and the vaccination programme have us all believing that we will all be allowed out again soon, but the goalposts keep changing and I think that this is what is getting to most of us.

We are now being told that, by the end of June this year we should all be set free, but after all the times the promise of freedom has been officially hinted at before, I think that we have all become sceptics.

The scary thing for me is that while nearly all of us now feel either depressed, worried or just bored with the way we are living on so many levels, being at home for all this time has been hard but the hardest thing is not knowing when we will all be set free.

LS, Hither Green