Dear LPG,

At about six o’clock on a recent December evening while I was waiting for my clothes to dry at the laundry, I found myself with not a lot to do.   I don’t visit that often but as the nights draw in and it gets colder and wetter, it is the quickest way to get the bed linen dry.  The problem is that once you have put the clothes in the dryer there is not a lot to do but sit and wait, and when there is nothing else to do you either think or sleep.

I left it till the evening so that I could drive rather than carry all those wet clothes round the corner but it might as well have been ten at night and as I sat there.  My first thought was surprise at just how many people still use these shops in the evenings, and how few of them ever say more than hello,  but luckily another lady came in with the same idea and we got talking (through our masks).  

Isn’t it funny how, in the UK, when you are a lady of a certain age with little else to think of, you mention the weather first but then your aches and pains come to the fore.  The thing that was really worrying me as I sat there was how cold my replaced knee was feeling and after a minute or two I mentioned it and my companion told me that she was about to undergo her own knee replacement operation.  She was a bit worried about it so I told her about the more positive bits of my experiences and we acted just like a couple of youngsters as we got our mobile phones out to see what we could find on the subject.  That lead us on to find quite a bit of information about one of my other little problems; how having a bit of metal in my knee made it harder to get it out of bed in the mornings. 

Between us, we found some helpful tips and I have asked LPG to post them just in case another reader might benefit from having a bit more information than the doctors  usually have the time to give, and I wish    any LPG reader who is about to have it done, including my laundry drying friend, good luck and a note that, in my experience, it really is worth it.

RH, Southwark

RH shares the very information that formed the basis of that laundry conversation…

(►►►)     (►►►)    (►►►)