Dear LPG, 

Most pensioners spent some forty of their pre-sixty-years working and that does mean that there must be many lifetimes of memories to be offered by us pensioners while we leave the youngsters to work out what they plan to do with their working lives.

Now that we can get out a bit more, I have been taking the odd excursion and happened to take a ride through Lewisham shopping centre recently.  I have not been there for a while now and no one can help but notice that Lewisham library is not open as often as it used to be.  I mention it because there are two aspects of that building that provoke many different work-related memories for me.  

Just looking at it as the bus goes round the roundabout that the road planners did leave in peace at the other end of the precinct, allows me a reminiscent look at the building, and the other thing that has not changed is the lift. The last time I used it, I realised that it is the only part of the interior not changed in all that time.   Only one thing is different once the doors are closed and it starts its journey upwards with me inside, and that is the reflection of myself that the mirrored interior offers because, when I used to use it regularly, I was some thirty years younger than I am now.     

I have not been there for some time because of the pandemic, but as recently as a couple of years ago, every time I took a ride, and the doors opened I needed to remind myself that I will not be walking from that little mechanical box to the place that I worked in all that time ago.  

The last time I stepped into it to get to the reference library on the 3rd floor, I was transported back to the days when the building was a telephone exchange, and I was a British Telecom telephone operator.  I worked nights and weekends with a band of wonderful colleagues and can tell many stories about things that happened in the switch room which was once the entire 1st floor of the building while the ground floor was full of the mechanics that got us all in touch with one another. 

In the last 20 years or so, so many of us have got used to finding everything online or reading our novels electronically while mobile phones, texting and emails really limited the need for telephone operators.  Progress has been given a bit of a boot forwards by the pandemic and our need to stay home, although I think that we all know the pandemic just managed to give progress yet another kick forward as it has helped change to happen even more rapidly. 

But for all that, the memories remain.  

AJ, Lewisham