Dear LPG,

I think that I can’t be the only person in the world who finds themselves caught in a bit of a philosophical thought bubble from time to time. I think that we all have those moments when we become a philosopher and we so easily dismiss those thoughts rather than write them down and make sure that they are not completely wasted.

I am also sure that, like many others I am not the only person who gets upset with someone around them from time to time, but my moment of philosophy was born out of one of many mini differences of opinion that I recently had with one of my favourite nephews. We were talking about how safe it is for him to visit me in the light of the pandemic, and he told me that he thought we should all get on with our lives. His opinion is that you could just as easily catch ‘flu’ as catch the virus and when he came to visit, and I would not let him into my house he was obviously unhappy.

In the following days, I found myself, on the phone, talking to a few other family members about what I did and, after they all agreed that I did the right thing, many of those conversations ended up turning into discussions about the boy’s attitude and not the action.

We were all in agreement with my thought that he was young and not taking the whole thing seriously enough, but it got me thinking about two issues…

The first is how easy it is to keep relatively important issues to yourself just to keep the peace. My nephew is somewhat upset with me because of my action, but no one else in the family has told him that they feel he needs to reassess the seriousness of what is happening. They are all a lot older than him and all the members of the family that I talked to agree. The irony is that not one of them was willing to rock the boat by letting him know something that might get him thinking a little more responsibly, and being a bit safer, in case he got upset about it.

I secondly thought about the times when two or three of my friends and family have separately hinted at something they think I could have done differently or should apologise for because they don’t want to cause any unpleasantness.

Perhaps during these continued times of lockdown, and during an era when we have more time than ever to really talk to our friends; a continued age of telephone calls where you have the time to chat beyond the pre-coronavirus superficial niceties that were usually said when your first sentence is, ‘Hello, I can’t stay on the phone long - I am just on my way out to…’, we need to listen to those hints more closely and work out that sometimes the people around us might have a point when more than one of them mentions some situation that you could have handled better, or one of your possible character flaws. 

If they are all saying the same thing, could it be that they have a point, and you are possibly wrong this time?

MN, Bellingham.